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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

#261

Post by VLM »

pkulak wrote: post #79
petcat wrote: post #19

> 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…

> I suspect that removing half of the bus stops in a city will piss people off and cause even less ridership. Oh do you now? Where do these suspicions come from? How much time do you spend on city busses? Do you have any idea how absolutely infuriating it is to be sitting on a bus while it makes stop, after stop, after stop, after stop, every single one a block or two apart, crawling down the road at a walking pace?…

You're making suspicions about suspicions without numerical data.

According to my cities 2022 annual report (where are 2023-2025?) they provided precisely 464344 unlinked pax trips (UPT) so someone stepped aboard a bus and threw money in the real or virtual fare box 464344 times that year. "Sources of operating funds expended directly generated" which I read as annual fare revenue was $660748.

We have a very simple two tier system $2 for adults and $1 for seniors and disabled. 2(464344-x)+1x=660748 x=267940

So we only had 196404 healthy young adult bus riders that year vs 267940 senior citizens. Your experience is not unusual but also is by far not the majority; a SUBSTANTIAL majority of the people on the bus in my city are too old or too sick or too blind to take long walks in the rain, snow, ice, heat, cold, etc.

Honestly the bus is so slow, if they could walk, they'd probably just walk. So it should not be overly surprising that most on the bus quite literally can't walk, and really need bus stops close together for disability reasons.

So all of this theoretical "well it would be so much faster if there were fewer stops" is irrelevant if the served population is primarily physically disabled, and the system can't survive. And we'd be talking about excluding one of the most powerful voting blocks in the city, that being old people. Eliminating stops would eliminate or reduce 58% of the current riders which would shut the system down, I don't think it could politically survive a hit like that.

Ironically that shutdown might be good as everyone would be better off both financially and environmentally in cars than in buses. Bus exhaust is not exactly perfume to mother nature LOL, and essentially our bus program is not a transit system, its a corrupt jobs program for drivers, mechanics, and especially for highly paid administrators.

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

#263

Post by notatoad »

janalsncm wrote: post #118

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…

did we not read the same article? i saw three main claims in the article:

- removing stops makes the bus faster: obviously true.

- bus stops in america are closer together than bus stops in other places: backed up by data in the article.

- making the bus faster makes it better for riders. subjective, but as a bus rider i very much agree.

i don't understand how you can read this article and come to the conclusion that it's about making bus stops "nicer". that's just a little tangent it mentions. it'd be nice if bus stops were nicer.

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

#264

Post by rsynnott »

moralestapia wrote: post #2

Very detailed analysis. I agree with the claim that "fewer stops, faster service" on the surface. However we'd have to see if that's truly the case, as cities have red lights and traffic, so the bus stops anyway ... I believe, taking this into account, the difference might not be that significant.

There are simulators for this, and of course there's data from places that have actually done it.

In Dublin we have a bit of a mixture of newish bus routes which largely have a sensible number of stops, and ancient routes (the oldest evolved out of tram routes laid out in the 1870s), which tend to have a stupidly high number of stops, because once you put one in it's very contentious to remove it. The super-regular stop routes are _so slow_.

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

#265

Post by rsynnott »

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…

One compromise is to tap inside; some systems do this.

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

#266

Post by bccdee »

tomxor wrote: post #214
janalsncm wrote: post #118

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 number of bus stops might matter at the margins, we’re not talking about a system where marginal improvements will matter The central argument of reducing stops is increasing bus speed , not reducing margins, It's in the second paragraph. [edit] Top comment is a straw man, attempt to correct course downvoted... I'm not sure how much value HN has left for useful discourse, who the fuck are you people, if you eve…

You're being downvoted because you misunderstood the post you're replying to. They aren't referring to profit margins, but marginal utility—i.e. incremental improvements to stop spacing (purportedly) would not be enough to fix a fundamentally broken system.

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

#267

Post by miki123211 »

enraged_camel wrote: post #192
janalsncm wrote: post #158

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.

>> 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. Actually I think it is both. Car culture in Europe is nowhere as dominant as it is in the US. Many Europeans grow up with public transportation as the default mode of getting around. So they are more likely to be accustomed to things that become grievances for Amer…

And this starts in primary school.

Make it legal for kids to move around on their own and take transit to school, just like they do in most of Europe and beyond. Parents are lazy, so many kids will. That's a lesson in public transportation use right there.

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

#268

Post by alexjplant »

janalsncm wrote: post #118

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…

> 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.

n = 1 but this is precisely why I seldom rode the bus in college. Except for going clear across campus in the evening to apartment complexes that were a semi-substantial trek down the highway it was always quicker to walk. Walking 1.5 miles in 25 minutes was faster than a bus that made 14 stops before it got to where you were going.

I like light rail. It has the advantages of cutting through traffic and being more efficient to boot. I'd say we should adapt buses to a similar modality but anecdotally bus-only lanes don't work as well as they ought to because, as a surprise to nobody, people are bad drivers and interfere with their operation.

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

#269

Post by rangestransform »

janalsncm wrote: post #171
the_sleaze_ wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why have bus stops at all, waymo should build a transit bus or large van and run them autonomously. Then they could optimize the fleet as they please. Bus stops were a solution to a lack of connectivity and demand.

Autonomy isn’t necessary, but aside from cost there’s nothing stopping a city from operating a bus more like a shared Uber ride. Having fixed stops at fixed times is fairly primitive. They would be smaller shuttles.

Autonomy is necessary to get the unionized bus drivers out of the way, the cost of running a bus is dominated by staffing costs.

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

#270

Post by miki123211 »

kjkjadksj wrote: post #217
enraged_camel wrote: post #192

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. Actually I think it is both. Car culture in Europe is nowhere as dominant as it is in the US. Many Europeans grow up with public transportation as the default mode of getting around. So they are more likely to be accustomed to things that become grievances for Amer…

There is also the monetary angle. How many european households can afford a car for both parents and a car each for two kids, registered, insured, paid for to park wherever they go? Even if you are poor in the US cars are remarkably accessible. You can finance a used car with no credit and a couple dozen dollars a month.

And the parking angle.

Europe builds apartment complexes which are ~3 to ~10 stories tall, the US builds sprawling suburbs, zoned so that there's no grocery store in sight.

If you're packed 3 to an apartment in a 10-story complex, it's unlikely there's enough parking for all of you.

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