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Bus stop balancing is fast, cheap, and effective

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Re: Bus stop balancing is fast, cheap, and effective

#251

Post by ecshafer »

miltonlost wrote: post #196
LucasBrandt wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But lots of people _do_ already ride buses! There are already current riders, and potential riders who are making these marginal decisions. Occasional riders will decide between transport modes based on the trip - making marginal improvements (or regressions) would change the rate at which they choose to ride the bus. Even if every current person's mind has been completely made up based on past experience, there are…

> I live in Chicago with the third-closest stop spacing per the article. I'm personally able to walk a block or two further to a bus stop no problem. Bus stop consolidation would save me a lot of time over the course of a year! Until there' a snowstorm, and no one shovels. And you have a broken leg, or are elderly, or disabled. Sure, it might save you personally some time, but we live in a society and should try to h…

Does Chicago not mandate people shovel their drives ways? In most towns/cities in upstate new york you can get a fine if you don't shovel your sidewalk.

Re: Bus stop balancing is fast, cheap, and effective

#252

Post by krab »

oblio wrote: post #170
krab wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Taxis/Ubers/... can and do stop in the middle of a street. Why would that be different for a bus picking up a single person?

What if it's 5 people? 10? What if instead of many huge buses like today it's 5x as many smaller buses? You can't just have buses stopping randomly everywhere, it doesn't scale.

The assumption is that a "waymo bus" would be hailed by an app and the service would plan routes on demand. In such case, bus stops would be needed only in busy areas or in places where it would be dangerous to stop.

This is based on the observation that people, including police, tolerate taxi drivers stopping at places where it's technically illegal.

Re: Bus stop balancing is fast, cheap, and effective

#253

Post by lysace »

paxys wrote: post #57

Something the article completely skips over is that European cities have significantly better and safer pedestrian infrastructure than their US counterparts. American streets are built to prioritize cars and cars alone. Sidewalks are often unmaintained, bumpy, and sometimes missing altogether. Crossings are often unmarked and dangerous. Stop signs and signals are routinely ignored, especially when turning. This is wh…

So..fix that?

Re: Bus stop balancing is fast, cheap, and effective

#254

Post by rsynnott »

skipants wrote: post #51
bpodgursky wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't wanna be rude but when someone spends months researching an issue, which systems work and which don't, you should probably give some level of grace and understand how they came to those numbers rather than spit out your first mindless critique.

I agree. This: > I suspect that removing half of the bus stops in a city will piss people off and cause even less ridership. is thrown out but how do we know it's true? That commenter throws it out as their opinion but my opinion is the opposite -- the stated preference will be that people think it's bad but the revealed preference will show even more ridership as travel times improve.

I suspect the evidence here would fall mostly on the side of "it increases ridership", though it's probably hard to study, as it's rarely done in isolation, but more commonly as part of route redesign.

Re: Bus stop balancing is fast, cheap, and effective

#255

Post by estebank »

A lot of people arguing that these changes wouldn't bring benefits, or that the increased walk distance would crater ridership. I can provide some context from the SF 38 Geary[1] (often claimed to have the highest public transit ridership west of the Mississippi). Some time before COVID, there were 4 variants: 38, 38R which stops every three regular stops, and the 38AX and 38BX which would follow the outer route and then skip most of the stops in the middle(the former was explicitly meant to take commuters from the west side of SF to downtown). A dedicated bus line was added to Geary (with some resistance from some locals as in some areas it required removal of some parking spots[2]).

I have experience with the first three variants before and after the dedicated bus lane. 38AX only ran a couple of times in the morning, always packed and would reliably take 30mins from 25th street (it's last stop before downtown) to Market street. Before the dedicated bus lane, the 38R would take about 40 to 45 minutes from 25th street to Market street, after the bus lane it now takes 30 minutes (making the 38AX redundant). Before the bus lane, the regular 38 would take about 50 minutes from 25th to Market. Google maps now says it takes about 40 minutes.[3] So a dedicated bus lane made as much of a difference as removing every stops in between, while stopping every three stops satill yields about 1/4th of time savings even with the dedicated bus lane (and none of these lines start at 25th, used that because it was the final stop before downtown for the 38AX, riders coming from the start in 48th would see additional savings).

When looking at the ridership, the 38AX was always packed (as it came only a handful of times in the morning no one wanted to miss the last one and then have to take the 38R instead losing 10/15 minutes in their commute), the 38R is consistently more used than the 38. Right now the 38R comes every 6 minutes and the 38 every 15, so whether the ridership is impacted by travel time or frequency, I can't say. At night, only the 38 runs.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/38_Geary

[2]: https://sfstandard.com/2023/08/15/despite-protests-sfs-geary...

[3]: https://www.google.com/maps/dir/37.7799217,-122.4846478/37.7...

Re: Bus stop balancing is fast, cheap, and effective

#256

Post by bccdee »

Retric wrote: post #205
LucasBrandt wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But lots of people _do_ already ride buses! There are already current riders, and potential riders who are making these marginal decisions. Occasional riders will decide between transport modes based on the trip - making marginal improvements (or regressions) would change the rate at which they choose to ride the bus. Even if every current person's mind has been completely made up based on past experience, there are…

> I'm personally able to walk a block or two further “A block or 2” each way at the start and destination is a significant difference (4-8 blocks) for most elderly people. Busses fill two different roles, as primary means of transportation and arguably more importantly as a backup means of transportation. They can serve a vital role for cities without the kind of investment it would take to make most typical HN reade…

> as primary means of transportation and arguably more importantly as a backup means of transportation

One bus route can't wear two hats. Faster, sparser routes are typically complemented by slow, meandering collector routes which provide the kind of backstop you describe. Moreover, elderly and disabled people can use paratransit [1], which exists precisely to serve people with mobility issues too severe for regular transit.

Anyway, I reject the notion of buses as a second-tier transit option reserved for poor and disabled people. The only way poor people ever get decent service is when they use the same infrastructure that affluent people do. A bus system that doesn't serve the middle class is a system that will quickly lose its funding and become inadequate for anyone to use.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paratransit

Re: Bus stop balancing is fast, cheap, and effective

#257

Post by miltonlost »

lavelganzu wrote: post #94
miltonlost wrote: post #33

As someone who rides the bus: it's payment that causes slowdowns. Waiting for everyone to get on the front of the bus and tap often takes multiple traffic cycles. If we wanted to treat public transit as a true public good (as it ought to be), it should be funded from taxes and free at point of service, and then front and back can be used. But that'd be too much efficiency and cost the rich too much. This article feel…

There is a downside of making buses free, similar to the experience of cities which stopped enforcing "turnstile hopping" for trains, which is that it attracts a small number of hostile and malicious riders. An advantage of treating transit as a public good means this downside becomes an empirical question, not a moral one: Which approach leads to more ridership? In some cases, enforcing fares leads to more ridership…

Sorry, I don't believe you that what would stop those "hostile and malicious riders" is the $2 fare to hop on.

Re: Bus stop balancing is fast, cheap, and effective

#258

Post by keeganpoppen »

petcat wrote: post #70
bluGill wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

that's simply not how it works, and quite obviously so. the stop time is absolutely not linear in the number of people who board the bus. just think about all the time it takes to slow down, possibly make the whole bus kneel, and then sit up again. by your argument, there should be infinity bus stops, each of which only allowing one single person to load. like, what? surely we can think more critically than this...

Re: Bus stop balancing is fast, cheap, and effective

#259

Post by dghlsakjg »

AlotOfReading wrote: post #223
dghlsakjg wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've seen it work pretty well in a number of places in the form of privately owned minibuses/vans that can rapidly go where the demand is needed. As an example, all throughout the Eastern Caribbean this system works really well (in my experience better than most centrally planned bus systems in large cities). On any given island you can go to any main road and within a few minutes a minibus will come along. Most of t…

It's really not ideal. Similar systems are common in Central Asia. They make it difficult for travelers to predict journey times, it's unfriendly to tourists, and it's much less accessible to other populations (e.g. the disabled). They also don't scale well to large urban environments or out of the way journeys in my experience.

Yes, like all systems, it has tradeoffs. Although I would argue that some of the downsides you highlight are worse with traditional bus systems (e.g. the Caribbean bus conductors will happily guide tourists, and I have seen them go off-route frequently to drop off someone with limited mobility. Large cities in other parts of the world have managed to scale the system out to fill in gaps with other forms of transit like Lima, Peru)

The GP was arguing that it NEVER works out, and I'm just pointing out that it does work in many places.

I would much rather rely on the Caribbean minibus systems than try to rely on transit in cities like Phoenix.

Re: Bus stop balancing is fast, cheap, and effective

#260

Post by rsynnott »

jonbaer wrote: post #68

We need smarter dynamic fares, it shouldn't be a $6 flat tax on all destinations. I think this hurts local businesses, or all local (non business) residents should automatically get half fare.

The opposite actually tends to increase ridership; complex fare systems put people off and tend to make getting on the bus more time consuming (may require each passenger to interact with the driver).
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