Bus stop balancing is fast, cheap, and effective

> I believe the central thesis of this article is unsupported, and other assertions are false.

...but then your "In my experience..." section repeats the article's assertions? As in, everything you list as a drawback of riding the bus is exactly what the article claims can be improved by intelligently cutting out some percentage of stops.

Also, I didn't see the claim that "too many stops is the main cause of low ridership." That would be an overreach. The central claim that I see is that optimizing the number of stops, which turns out to result in a net reduction in pretty much all major American cities, is a relatively easy way to marginally improve many aspects of bus systems.

I think your counterarguments are valid, but they're just fleshing out the article's thesis. Simply reducing bus stops and holding everything else constant would not magically improve ridership and the overall experience. And as you say, reducing bus stops and removing money supporting the system will definitely not result in improvements. (And I agree that it is the likely way it would transpire politically.)

You would need to reduce stops and direct the savings into improving the remaining stops. You would need to convert the change into more reliable schedules. To make sense, that would need to increase ridership, and adjust the demographics of riders to include people who don't have to accept "dirty, unsafe and hostile" because they have no other choice. There's little incentive to improve things when the audience is captive and powerless. Also, increased ridership leads to more resources to accomplish the rest.

Of course, the dependencies between all these changes make the improvements more speculative and harder to achieve politically, so I do agree that you can't "just" reduce the number of stops and improve everything. As you said, that would more likely just drain more blood from an already anemic system. But the article is talking about a relatively cheap and easy way to improve things; everything else transit agencies can do is harder and/or more expensive.

> So while the number of bus stops might matter at the margins, we’re not talking about a system where marginal improvements will matter. If you want to improve ridership, you need to make the bus an attractive option for more people.

That first sentence says marginal improvements won't matter. The second sentence says that marginal improvements ("an attractive option for more people") are what are needed. Maybe you're saying that marginal improvements have to reach a threshold in order to be worth doing or achieve any noticeable gains?

> 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.

Maybe my city is different, but in every city I've spent substantial time in, there are little tiny busses for those who are not able to walk or roll the average distance between a stop and their home or destination. They are direct, point to point shuttles. If no bus is available, they will send a cab. Those buses and cabs are exactly why you don't have to run a bus up and down every road, with a stop in front of every house, and a driver who can escort passengers to their door. They are astronomically expensive to operate, but the only way to make a transit system that serves everyone.

But in my city, we pay a small fortune to run these little busses, and then _also_, for some reason, assume that no one riding the main system has any mobility.

Also, I'd argue that the reason a "substantial majority" of your transit population is "old, sick, or blind" is because it's such an unattractive option for anyone who has a choice. When the bus is slower than riding your bike, you're not getting Olympic athletes on that thing.

And now most (all?) busses have a fare tap at the back door, so you can board anywhere. Vancouver transit is absolutely top tier, at least for NA.

Yes. As long as we're looking for relatively easy or cheap improvements, I believe that UX is a huge one. Buses have a long tradition of user-hostile design. "Exact change only", unhelpful and condescending and impatient drivers, unwritten etiquette rules, and everything else you listed.

It has always baffled me why they make it so hard for first-time users in particular. Sure, they mostly care about the regular customers who make up 99% of their passengers, but everyone has to be a first-timer before they can be a long-timer. It's not just UX papercuts, the experience seems designed to be maximally hostile. Is it because one more marginal person is a little more delay, a little more crowding, etc? It feels like there are perverse incentives at work.

What’s the point of making this dynamic? Go find a city where people are out, having fun, and not buried in their phones, and where the city isn’t full of strip malls and parking lots. There will be people who want to be picked up during busy hours, and having a shelter from the sun or rain is nice, and having a place where there isn’t a parked car or an uber in the way is nice. Lots of Asian capitals are like this.