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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

#321

Post by tartoran »

paddy_m wrote: post #281
thomastjeffery wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Bus bunching is often blamed on traffic or scheduling, but in my experience in NYC, a lack of enforcement and/or accountability plays a role too. I live near one end of a bus line and commute to the other end 5 days day a week. On a daily basis, there are large gaps where buses miss their scheduled times. Then, as they approach the end of the line, they arrive and depart in groups of three or four, which only worsens the problem.

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

#324

Post by deliciousturkey »

epolanski wrote: post #128
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…

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…

As an European I really _do_ mind buses. I try to avoid riding them as much as possible. They are dirty, smelly, and really cramped with little legroom. I would really hate living somewhere where I was forced to use them, and would rather move elsewhere.

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

#325

Post by the_sleaze_ »

enragedcacti wrote: post #162
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.

Demand-responsive transport (DRT) has been tried a bunch of times in all sorts of different environments and pretty much never lives up to the promise. Predictability is really important and ridership drops as soon as users start having to plan too far ahead, which in the past has been essential to DRT routing. Autonomy could improve responsiveness to demand but you still run into other issues. DRT usually won't be a…

> has been tried a bunch of times in all sorts of different environments

Has it? When, where and with what technology?

> Predictability is really important and ridership drops as soon as users start having to plan too far ahead

Uber etc have proven this to be patently false. Existing buses are experiencing dropping ridership - Uber is not.

> won't be able to take advantage of things proven to make buses faster and more consistent

You're replacing buses with auto-shuttles. Just let the shuttles use the bus lanes.

> bus lanes, reducing stop count, transit priority signals

All of these are usable if you widen the scope to include auto-shuttles.

> consistency and response times gained by dynamic routing can easily be overshadowed by increased variability

What is the difference between Busing and Shuttles here? A bus user can keep yanking the stop cord, there can be 1 or 2 disabled passengers who take several minutes to board, there can be 50 children getting on / off. These issues are constants and all are improved with demand based shuttles.

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

#326

Post by the_sleaze_ »

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.

> They make it difficult for travelers to predict journey times

How do scheduled bus routes standardize a journey time vs a demand shuttle?

> out of the way journeys in my experience.

How do buses fair in this regard?

> It's really not ideal

Are buses?

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

#327

Post by bobthepanda »

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 stops inversely affects speed, and the bus is really slow compared to driving in pretty much all of the US. A 15 minute car drive is a no brainer compared to a one or two hour bus.

It is possible to have faster buses, even time competitive ones. Though stop spacing is only one component of such a system, the other being dedicated infrastructure and traffic priority.

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

#328

Post by bobthepanda »

mikestew wrote: post #306
sailingparrot wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

The muni…because it has to mark every single stop at every block just like any car instead of just having priority. What? I see English words, but it’s still not parseable.

There is technology at least with traffic lights so that buses get priority by detecting an oncoming bus and either extending the green or shortening the red.

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

#329

Post by dzonga »

express buses that go straight from say point A (home) location e.g from a central point e.g Mall to central point B (downtown) can work wonders - if they're given highway access and bus only lanes, automatic green light access etc

then smaller buses etc that run in a loop to serve the frequent stops

but of course - you need cities that are designed better

with electric buses - this is all achievable and economic

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

#330

Post by SoftTalker »

ecshafer wrote: post #251
miltonlost wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I'm not in Chicago but where I am you have 24 hours after the snow stops to shovel your sidewalk. And realistically, they don't start handing out fines until at least a few days after that, if at all.
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