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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

#421

Post by philwelch »

Retric wrote: post #384
iamcalledrob wrote: post #359

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this is a US-centric perspective. In the US, buses (and public transport in general), are thought of as social programmes. Anyone can use them, but they are really for people who can't drive or are too poor to own a car. The rider makeup then looks like that. The elderly and the poor, sadly. Services run at a huge loss and are dependent on massive and unpopular government subsidies. Quality of service is bad.…

Busses get tiny subsides in the US. It’s a large percentage of total bus revenue by design, and a significant expense for some local governments. But the number only look large because of how we split the vast majority of government spending into federal and state budgets with local budgets being relatively anemic by comparison.

Buses are implicitly subsidized by road maintenance spending. Road wear and tear occurs according to the fourth power of axle weight, which effectively means almost all of the wear and tear is incurred by the heaviest vehicles, which include buses.

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

#422

Post by janalsncm »

iamcalledrob wrote: post #367
x0x0 wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But also too, packed with junkies who, at best, behave erratically and at worse assault randoms. Taking the bus around sf makes it immediately clear why (not all, but most) people who have options choose them.

Honestly, there aren't that many crazy people on the SF Muni/busses. The detractor for taking these services is speed and frequency. Even factoring in parking, traffic, and bus lanes, it's much faster to drive within SF than take the bus. Stopping every 2 blocks and missing every other green light kills throughput. My local bus stop to connect to BART supposedly had service every 20 mins, but often a bus would be out…

> Honestly, there aren't that many crazy people on the SF Muni/busses. The detractor for taking these services is speed and frequency.

Everyone can form their own opinion on the acceptable number of visibly intoxicated people they’d like to encounter. That said, my understanding of the law is that the correct number is zero. So seeing more than zero is an indication that laws are not being enforced.

People can debate whether particular laws regarding drug use are justified. However, if enforcement itself is optional, one might reasonably question whether that applies to other, less controversial laws as well.

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

#423

Post by collabs »

selimthegrim wrote: post #234
collabs wrote: post #184

One big dream I have is to have some kind of free of cost at the point of service micro transit -- my dream is basically uber pool without the uber. Vans about the size of a Ford Transit or even a fuller size bus up to 40 passengers that picks up and drops passengers where they are or where they want to go to all with the push of a button on their smart phone and lots of patience. The idea is to have a huge number of…

Doesn’t LA have these?

As far as I know, the whole combination of:

1. free at the point of service 2. door to door service 3. reasonable wait time 4. not a pilot project with half a dozen buses or a limited time

has been done anywhere. I would love to be proven wrong.

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

#424

Post by epolanski »

rickydroll wrote: post #175
epolanski wrote: post #128

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…

Why are you assuming that it's a binary A or B?

I want good public transport in urban areas as I don't want to take the car, but I still own one for many uses.

I hate it to be mandatory to live.

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

#425

Post by AnthonyMouse »

xmprt wrote: post #365
JoshTriplett wrote: post #302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's not feasible to have a bus stop right in front of every house. And this is why point-to-point transportation is almost always faster and more convenient, if you can afford to use it. (That load-bearing "if" is important, though.)

> And this is why point-to-point transportation is almost always faster and more convenient Point-to-point transportation is faster and more convenient because: 1. we don't have bus lanes so buses are forced to sit in the same traffic as cars and 2. buses are often underfunded so have slow/infrequent service. Point to point transportation is often slower and less convenient if buses and public transit is done right.…

Bus lanes still seem like the thing people who hate cars propose to intentionally screw over the people who have them. "Hey, we have this road with two or three lanes in each direction but it's fairly congested. Each of the lanes is carrying something like 50 cars per minute during the day! Why don't we impound one of them so we can have a bus carrying 40 people drive on it once every 15 minutes?"

If you have enough density to justify a bus lane, you have enough density to justify a subway.

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

#426

Post by ErroneousBosh »

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 bus feels dirty, unsafe and hostile.

Americans think everything is unsafe, except for things that actually are unsafe.

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

#427

Post by Karrot_Kream »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #425
xmprt wrote: post #365

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And this is why point-to-point transportation is almost always faster and more convenient Point-to-point transportation is faster and more convenient because: 1. we don't have bus lanes so buses are forced to sit in the same traffic as cars and 2. buses are often underfunded so have slow/infrequent service. Point to point transportation is often slower and less convenient if buses and public transit is done right.…

Bus lanes still seem like the thing people who hate cars propose to intentionally screw over the people who have them. "Hey, we have this road with two or three lanes in each direction but it's fairly congested. Each of the lanes is carrying something like 50 cars per minute during the day! Why don't we impound one of them so we can have a bus carrying 40 people drive on it once every 15 minutes?" If you have enough…

> If you have enough density to support a bus lane, you have enough density to support a subway.

Not at all. Building a subway in most US cities right now is very expensive. Raising the tax revenue alone is probably a non-starter.

Moreover you're going to have to close the road down anyway to do any form of cut-and-cover or even deep bore construction, which means every business on the corridor and every person who lives on it is going to get angry for as long as the subway is being built.

There's no painless way to do infill public transport. The problem is that nobody in the US is willing to compromise.

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

#428

Post by sailingparrot »

angmarsbane wrote: post #285
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…

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?

Sorry, in the case of the bus there are too many bus stops (although there are more express lines now), so the bus stops a lot instead of having less stops where more people get off and walk one more block (what the article talks about).

The muni (tram), stops at stop signs at every block on the west side like the N line, so it’s extreeeemly slow. A system where the tram has priority over cars and does not need to stop at every single block would be life changing.

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

#429

Post by Retric »

philwelch wrote: post #421
Retric wrote: post #384

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Busses get tiny subsides in the US. It’s a large percentage of total bus revenue by design, and a significant expense for some local governments. But the number only look large because of how we split the vast majority of government spending into federal and state budgets with local budgets being relatively anemic by comparison.

Buses are implicitly subsidized by road maintenance spending. Road wear and tear occurs according to the fourth power of axle weight, which effectively means almost all of the wear and tear is incurred by the heaviest vehicles, which include buses.

Roads still need maintenance even if nobody uses them, so a significant portion is split evenly across all traffic.

Busses are light compared to 18 wheelers and other heavy equipment, they also replace many cars and SUV’s which keep getting heavier.

Finally that rule of thumb isn’t really that accurate, “A 1988 report by the Australian Road Research Board stated that the rule is a good approximation for rutting damage, but an exponent of 2 (rather than 4) is more appropriate to estimate fatigue cracking.” Rutting really isn’t that significant in most cases, but can instantly destroy road surfaces when fully loaded construction vehicles etc drive over something once.

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

#430

Post by ErroneousBosh »

mcv wrote: post #415
jacobgkau wrote: post #402

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would you care to summarize their argument?

Self-driving cars still take up space on the road. Even more than human-driven cars, because now there will also be cars transporting 0 people. It's going to make congestion worse. Public transit is the solution to congestion. Well, one of the solutions, because bikes are probably a better solution for most people: they do start in front of your home, can park anywhere, and don't cause congestion the way cars do. We'…

> We're talking about cities, of course; in rural areas, nothing beats cars.

Where I grew up in NW Scotland, it's a five hour round trip to go to the supermarket. You pretty much need a car for that.

Where I live right now it's a five minute walk to the supermarket, but I still need a car because the things I work on are a long way from where I live, often up steep muddy mountain tracks.

When I lived in the middle of Glasgow people used to come up and have a go at me about driving a massive V8 4x4 in the middle of a city. What am I supposed to do with it? Bike to the suburbs and then go and drive up a mountain?

"But why not get a job where you don't need to drive hundreds of miles in a massive 4x4?"

Because then the things on the tops of mountains don't get fixed when they break, and the radios don't work properly, and then people like you die in a fire.

Sometimes it's hard for people to grasp that just because their not-really-a-job tapping numbers into an Excel spreadsheet all day can be done from home or from an easily walkable city centre location, it doesn't mean that everyone's job looks like that.

I do wish I could usefully use a cargo bike. Those things are awesome.

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