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Bus stop balancing is fast, cheap, and effective

worksinprogress.co

281–290 of 656 posts

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

#281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Removing unnecessary bus stops is a prerequisite to making busses fast. You can't run a fast bus service if the bus is stopping every single block.

That optimizes speed, not latency. I don't care how long it takes to get off the bus nearly as much as I care how long it takes to get on .

It helps with latency too or schedule padding. Bus schedules are unreliable because of all the stops which slow them down and encourage bunching of busses on a route with a lot of service.

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

#283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As an European I don't mind buses at all. I neither feel unsafe nor I find them dirty. A single bus carries on average 20 times the people cars occupying the same space would (as you rarely get more than 1 person per car in peak hours). I'd rather take buses than the car in any city. Cars make cities dangerous, noisy, polluted, congestions make people nervous behind the wheel, fights are far from uncommon. Finding pa…

I know I'm a corner case on this, but there are two cases where our car life significantly improves your quality of life. 1: you live with ADHD: "Oh my God, I need to leave five minutes ago" scheduling method. To anyone who says, "You just need to be more disciplined about time," I refer you to the part about ADHD. 2: If your quality of life depends on activities that are more wilderness/far away from cities, such as…

Living with ADHD also increases your chances of getting into a car accident substantially. I can't find the numbers now, but the increase is non-trivial and there are some clear mechanisms (inattention, impulsivity and risk-seeking behaviors).

ADHD is a big part of the reason I don't drive. I'm lucky enough to live in Berkeley which is very walkable with decent transit, and I would hesitate to move anywhere more car-oriented exactly because I have ADHD.

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

#284

YES! I moved to SF from Paris (where I spent my whole life before that) a year ago. I exclusively use lime instead of public transit because of how slow it is! Going from Folsom&8th to Mason&Girard takes 50 minutes! And you spend most of the time stopped! With a lime I can usually get there in 20 to 25 minutes. I would use my own bike that I use to commute to work if you could lock a bike without getting it stolen al…

Folding bikes are the answer there IMO. You can just bring it into the office. You can get pretty good electric ones too now (probably a requirement for SF).

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

#285

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…

> Two, removing stops will likely not make the remaining stops nicer. Cities aren’t thinking about how to allocate a fixed bus budget. But that’s not at all what the article is about? The thesis is not that having bus stops with music and heating and free drinks will make more people take the bus, it’s that in the U.S., the slowness of buses is making them an unattractive option. And stopping too often is a major rea…

I'm confused, do you mean the bus stops at stops where no one is waiting to get on AND no one has asked to get off the bus?

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

#286
What a strange article.

It only mentions in passing the success of express buses, which stop at e.g. one-tenth the stops. Like the SBS buses in New York City. On busy routes, these are already the main solution, because they stop at the main transit intersections where most people need to transfer.

Reducing the number of stops for local buses doesn't seem like it will make much difference, for the simple fact that buses don't even always stop at them. If nobody is getting off and nobody is waiting at the stop, which is frequently the case, they don't stop, at least nowhere I've ever lived.

Plus, the main problem isn't even the stop itself -- it's the red light you get stuck at afterwards. But the article doesn't even mention the solution to this -- TSP, or transit signal priority, which helps give more green lights to buses.

If you're going a long distance, hopefully there's an express bus. If you're going a short distance, bus stop spacing seems fine.

Also, what a weasel name, bus stop "balancing". It's not balancing, it's reduction. When the name itself is already dishonest, it's hard for me not to suspect that the real motive behind this is just cutting bus budgets.

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

#287

What a strange article. It only mentions in passing the success of express buses , which stop at e.g. one-tenth the stops. Like the SBS buses in New York City. On busy routes, these are already the main solution, because they stop at the main transit intersections where most people need to transfer. Reducing the number of stops for local buses doesn't seem like it will make much difference, for the simple fact that b…

"Bus stop reduction" makes it sound like it will make it harder to take the bus. But the point of the article is that's compensated by the buses being more useful because they get where they're going more quickly. So "balancing" seems apt to me.

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

#288
post #250
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…

As someone on the great, late 8 ( https://fixthel8.com/ ) in Seattle, I'd happily give up my stop to help it be on time more often. I have three other stops I can walk to within ten minutes of me. 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.

Imagine the delays are so prominent, someone decides to make a website for CTA (call-to-action) and semi-regularly shares updates on it...

I've been to Seattle once, (ex-Amazon here) where the DevCon was held in the town while my team was located in Bellevue. I took initiative to rent a bike for a day (60$ for drop-bar gravel bike) I must say although I did not beat the time between Day-1 (Office across spheres) and Bingo (Bellevue office), it was not far off. Even comparing the "Shuttles" Amazon operated, shuttle took about 1h while ride takes around 1h15m. (Plus sweat)

> P.S: I would say I am in a "fair" shape as I ride quite a lot throughout the year.

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

#289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As an European I don't mind buses at all. I neither feel unsafe nor I find them dirty. A single bus carries on average 20 times the people cars occupying the same space would (as you rarely get more than 1 person per car in peak hours). I'd rather take buses than the car in any city. Cars make cities dangerous, noisy, polluted, congestions make people nervous behind the wheel, fights are far from uncommon. Finding pa…

I know I'm a corner case on this, but there are two cases where our car life significantly improves your quality of life. 1: you live with ADHD: "Oh my God, I need to leave five minutes ago" scheduling method. To anyone who says, "You just need to be more disciplined about time," I refer you to the part about ADHD. 2: If your quality of life depends on activities that are more wilderness/far away from cities, such as…

Half of all dutch people own cars (10,062,194 cars / 17,904,421 people). The majority of people still ride bikes or take public transport to move around except when they need to take their car. For comparison, a majority of americans have a car (259,238,294 cars / 333,287,557 people). Note that the denominator includes children in both cases.

You're not asked to give up going to the wilderness.

Regarding scheduling, in my eyes public transport where the mean time between busses is not under 15 minutes is not public transport. Running after a bus is a signal that the frequency is too low. "I need to leave five minutes ago to take the bus I intended" should be followed by "if I leave now I'll be a few minutes early for the next one".

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

#290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know I'm a corner case on this, but there are two cases where our car life significantly improves your quality of life. 1: you live with ADHD: "Oh my God, I need to leave five minutes ago" scheduling method. To anyone who says, "You just need to be more disciplined about time," I refer you to the part about ADHD. 2: If your quality of life depends on activities that are more wilderness/far away from cities, such as…

Living with ADHD also increases your chances of getting into a car accident substantially. I can't find the numbers now, but the increase is non-trivial and there are some clear mechanisms (inattention, impulsivity and risk-seeking behaviors). ADHD is a big part of the reason I don't drive. I'm lucky enough to live in Berkeley which is very walkable with decent transit, and I would hesitate to move anywhere more car-…

When I was younger I was lucky enough to live somewhere rural where I got into a couple of single car accidents that I walked away from. Now my ADHD hyper focus is super attentive when driving.
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