241–250 of 656 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Maybe it goes without saying, but the reason you don’t mind the bus in Europe is not because you are European but because the European buses are nicer. The things you say about noise and pollution are also true in the US, and American drivers are acutely aware of them. But the alternative is not a European bus, so people drive.
You are stating unequivocally that every bus in every European country is nicer than the average bus in the US?
I believe the central thesis of this article is unsupported, and other assertions are false. One, the article asserts that too many stops is the main cause of low ridership in the US. I didn’t even see a correlation (which would still not prove one causes the other) between number of stops and ridership. This is the central thesis of the article. Two, removing stops will likely not make the remaining stops nicer. Cit…
This depends very much on where you are in the world.
Full disclosure: I have visited a lot of cities/countries, approx 70k flown miles last year. I almost always try to use public transport where possible.
The last "not nice" experience in a bus was in SFO, travelling back to my hotel from the Cathedral of Saint Mary of the Assumption. Make of that what you will.
I believe the central thesis of this article is unsupported, and other assertions are false. One, the article asserts that too many stops is the main cause of low ridership in the US. I didn’t even see a correlation (which would still not prove one causes the other) between number of stops and ridership. This is the central thesis of the article. Two, removing stops will likely not make the remaining stops nicer. Cit…
The article points to case studies where reducing stops increased ridership: clearly this does make a difference
But I agree that truly good bus service requires commitment and budget. A city that only improves its transit in fast, cheap ways is doomed to bad transit.
> increasing the distance between stops from 700–800 feet [...] to 1,300 feet I suspect that removing half of the bus stops in a city will piss people off and cause even less ridership. This feels like it's optimizing for the wrong thing. Also, the example given cites New York City buses. But New York City is always the worst example because it's the most extreme of everything. The vast majority of US cities do not s…
We can optimize this further and remove all of the stops between the buses first and last stops. Drive time would be so much faster.
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Only because you know your loss but cannot imagine your gains in time.
The gains just mean that I sit on the bus while twice as many people are trying to board at every stop. The bus is stopped for twice as long.
The counterpoint is any bus route that has an express option that runs in parallel. Every time I have taken the express route, the bus can be full to the gills, but is always faster than the non-express bus.
I believe the central thesis of this article is unsupported, and other assertions are false. One, the article asserts that too many stops is the main cause of low ridership in the US. I didn’t even see a correlation (which would still not prove one causes the other) between number of stops and ridership. This is the central thesis of the article. Two, removing stops will likely not make the remaining stops nicer. Cit…
Low ridership actually makes public transit feel even worse. Encourages loitering and restricts ridership to only the most desperate people. In NYC at least the buses tend to be pretty heavily utilized and I've personally never felt unsafe or put off by the condition of a bus. It's marginally more pleasant than riding the subway.
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There are two groups of people that you can optimize for. One is the group of people who already rides the bus. In most US cities this is a small group of people who have no real alternative. The other is the group of people who might ride the bus if it were convenient. Not just in terms of accessibility to a stop, but also accounting for the journey time. If someone tries riding the bus and finds that a 20 minute dr…
I would ride the bus if it wasn't filled with crackheads. Stopped Bart when it went downhill and all the white collar people stopped riding it and it just became desperate people, homeless, or crackheads.
Ridership collapsed in 2020 because of the pandemic, for obvious reasons, but it's hard to really blame that on the service itself, or the riders.
Ridership has been gradually recovering since then. Total trips are now up to something like 70% of 2019 levels, and continuing to rise. Number of unique riders is actually above the 2019 level now.
Maybe you haven't tried riding BART again within the past several years?
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I've watched 30 kids get off at their school in the morning. It takes 15 seconds. By your logic, 30 stops adds 15 seconds to a bus's schedule, which is pants-on-head crazy.
Emptying a school bus completely is a lot faster than a city bus stop where people are simultaneously trying to get off the bus and then the new people are also trying to get on the bus and jockey for position and for a seat before the bus can start moving again
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've watched 30 kids get off at their school in the morning. It takes 15 seconds. By your logic, 30 stops adds 15 seconds to a bus's schedule, which is pants-on-head crazy.
Emptying a school bus completely is a lot faster than a city bus stop where people are simultaneously trying to get off the bus and then the new people are also trying to get on the bus and jockey for position and for a seat before the bus can start moving again
(Bafflingly, they went through a transition period where ~all of the buses had two doors, but the driver rarely opened the back door. It wasn't really until covid that using the back door became standard. Improved things greatly.)
> and jockey for position and for a seat before the bus can start moving again
Do urban buses where you are require people to be seated? Didn't realise that was a thing anywhere. Any (urban, non-intercity) bus I've ever been on takes off as soon as the last person gets in.
> increasing the distance between stops from 700–800 feet [...] to 1,300 feet I suspect that removing half of the bus stops in a city will piss people off and cause even less ridership. This feels like it's optimizing for the wrong thing. Also, the example given cites New York City buses. But New York City is always the worst example because it's the most extreme of everything. The vast majority of US cities do not s…
SF is another good example of too many stops. It's honestly comical and I stopped riding the bus in SF at times because the stop count was painful.