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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

#471

Post by xnyan »

philwelch wrote: post #441
Retric wrote: post #429

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 damag…

> Busses are light compared to 18 wheelers and other heavy equipment, they also replace many cars and SUV’s which keep getting heavier. They don’t replace nearly enough cars and SUV’s to make up for the difference in fourth power of axle weight. But yes, 18 wheelers are worse.

>They don’t replace nearly enough cars and SUV’s to make up for the difference in fourth power of axle weight

A modest bus holds 40-50 people. Most commuter traffic is single driver, single vehicle. I don't know to which power the difference in axle weight would have to be to surpass the efficiency gains of replacing 40 to 50 American sized SUVs with a city bus, but I suspect it's more than four.

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

#472

Post by closeparen »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #417
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.…

> In an alternate universe, public transport is run to compete with the car, and attracts all demographics. Day-to-day operations are un-subsidised, and therefore relatively expensive. It competes on value. People use it because it's a better experience than driving. The problem with this in the US is that it's nearly impossible for the bus to be faster than a car without making the car slower on purpose, and the lat…

Even in a dense city with no parking, it takes an unusually fast and frequent bus to compete with a brisk walk, and a heavy-rail subway to beat a fit or electric-assisted cyclist.

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

#473

Post by harrall »

unglaublich wrote: post #355
dghlsakjg wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In many places, yes, US pedestrian infrastructure is worse. In other ways - wheelchair accessibility for example - the US is miles better than many European cities.

Wheelchair users are a subset of pedestrians. If your pedestrian infra is shit, your wheelchain infra can't be much better. (Sure, only if you count whatever remains of pedestrians infra, it might look acceptable).

Sort of but not entirely. While bad pedestrian infrastructure sucks, usually I can get around it.

But I’ve been in crutches and a wheelchair many times in a life —- if the actual place is not wheelchair friendly, it is much harder to get around.

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

#474

Post by cyberax »

sensanaty wrote: post #467
cyberax wrote: post #465

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What people really misunderstand in these discussions is that no one is talking about completely killing off driving as an option I find this statement utterly hypocritical. Sure, we're not killing off driving. We are just choking off the roads with bike lanes, forcing extra-high density ("just build more"), removing parking, forcing the drivers to pay for transit that they don't use, and just to pay in general. Bu…

You call it "choking off" roads; I call it basic geometry. Reallocating a lane of traffic to bikes or transit moves exponentially more human beings through the exact same amount of physical space. But sure, pretend that a single occupant dragging around a 4 ton metal box to buy groceries is the absolute pinnacle of spatial efficiency. And the fact that you're complaining about "removing parking" is hilarious. Street…

> Reallocating a lane of traffic to bikes or transit moves exponentially more human beings through the exact same amount of physical space.

Except that bike lanes in the US, on average, carry fewer people than car lanes that they replaced. So yes, it's indeed "choking off". It's done to force the density increases. After all, if you can't commute anymore (roads are sabotaged and transit is slooooowwww), you'll have an option to live closer to the workplace. In a new expensive apartment in a high-rise.

Bike lanes also kill businesses. There were studies showing otherwise, so I replicated them, and they now show the opposite. Places in Seattle and Portland with bike lanes that displaced traffic lanes are declining faster than areas around them. The previous positive results were caused by spurious correlations during the general upswing in the urban economy after the 2008 crisis.

> Then you complain about non-drivers "forcing" you to pay for transit, while everyone else's taxes are literally subsidizing the free public storage of your personal property.

There is no free parking around me anywhere. And I'm also paying around $2000 a year in car tab and property taxes for transit that I don't use. And before you ask, in my state user fees pay for 90%+ of the total road maintenance expenses.

> We are talking about dense cities.

Yeah. They need to be _de_-densified in the longer term. But even dense cities will benefit from removing bike lanes and adding self-driving taxis.

> I live in the Netherlands. Millions of people here take transit and ride bikes every single day. And guess what? Nobody banned cars.

I got my driving license at the age of almost 30, and I lived in several large cities. And I _also_ lived in Amsterdam. People ride bikes in Amsterdam because there usually are no other comparable options. Transit typically takes ages longer, and car parking is non-existant. Of course, people justify that by telling themselves how they love to ride bikes even in cold wind and rain.

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

#475

Post by the_sleaze_ »

amluto wrote: post #349
the_sleaze_ wrote: post #332

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> you need them to agree The app would say - meet here. > One might call such a meeting point a “bus stop” :) Call it what you want, it could be in a strip mall parking lot, a convenient corner or just in front of the apartment building. Optimized for traveling distance between the passengers.

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.

> people are out, having fun, and not buried in their phones and where the city isn’t full of strip malls and parking lots.

Are we still talking about how to optimize public transportation on city streets?

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

#476

Post by closeparen »

Karrot_Kream wrote: post #405
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.…

It's a chicken and egg problem. The way to make buses competitive is to build bus only lanes. But to do that you end up removing a lane for drivers and dedicating enforcement resources to keeping bus lanes free of private vehicle traffic. The usual pattern is when a bus only lane is proposed, drivers complain because they view the bus as a social program. Local legislators often take the drivers' side because they al…

Bus lanes solve for variability during peak traffic, but speeds even in free-flowing traffic are far from good enough.

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

#477

Post by AnthonyMouse »

jltsiren wrote: post #457
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #425

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 justify a bus lane, you have enough density to justify a subway. That assumes a linear city, where everyone lives within a short walking distance of the same street. In actual cities, bus lines from different neighborhoods converge on main streets. While individual lines may have 10–15 minute intervals, bus traffic on the main streets may be high enough to justify dedicated bus lanes.…

> That assumes a linear city, where everyone lives within a short walking distance of the same street.

Isn't that the assumption you're making? That there is a single primary street that everything converges and then diverges from which is common to every bus route? Meanwhile in practice any given person standing on the You Are Here dot could want to go in any of the eight directions from where they currently are.

A route that goes east-west isn't going to have much in the way of shared route with one that goes northeast-southwest except for the one point where they intersect, and isn't it better to have multiple routes intersecting in multiple places in terms of minimizing trip latency and maximizing coverage?

> Which should be cheap, as a dedicated lane is usually the most expensive part in building light rail.

But that's the thing that makes the bus lane so expensive!

By the time you have an area with enough congestion to be considering a bus lane, the problem is generally that you can't add a lane because the land adjacent to the existing road is already developed and not available, otherwise you would just add an ordinary lane that buses could use too. But converting one of the existing lanes in an area which is already congested makes the traffic exponentially worse than putting the new thing underground.

Essentially, if you can add a lane then you add an ordinary lane and if you can't add a lane but need one then it's time to dig.

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

#478

Post by dhosek »

I double checked because I was confused and nowhere in the article is “stop balancing defined”. I think it means reducing stops, but I couldn’t say with certainty.

I will say that a simple measure like moving bus stops to the corner after the intersection can improve transit times. My uncle used to work for the Chicago Transit Authority and worked on a project to try to implement this, although it would appear from my own travels in the city that it was far from universally implemented.

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

#479

Post by nobrains »

knuckleheads wrote: post #131
InitialLastName wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That level of risk aversion has been burned into policymakers, especially at the local level. Wasting taxpayer money by letting an inefficient system continue to degrade makes less news than doing so by investing in a risk that failed, and gets a lot fewer people screaming at you in public and sending you death threats.

Yes! "We tried nothing and we're all out of ideas" is not inspiring! Mamdani threw cash at the problem of snow on the streets and now, huh, suddenly there's not so much snow on the streets of NYC compared to previous blizzards, who would have thought.

The issue is that all money-throwing needs to be balanced by careful thought. This cycle the money-throwing at snow plowing worked. Next cycle, it will not be as effective, as more people who want to "game" the rewards will enter the equation. So every cycle, along with money, some thought will need to go into improving the system or coming up with alternate solutions.

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

#480

Post by yunwal »

cyberax wrote: post #461
mcv wrote: post #415

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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'…

> Self-driving cars still take up space on the road This is a false argument. Think about this: a bus every 10 minutes is effectively 500-900 meters long! It easily "takes" as much space as 100+ cars. In other words, nothing would change from the traffic perspective if instead of 1 bus every 5 minutes, you had 100 individual cars. The "people in the shape of a bus" argument makes sense only when you're talking about…

> a bus every 10 minutes is effectively 500-900 meters long!

uhhhhhh what. What does every 10 minutes have to do with this at all

> It easily "takes" as much space as 100+ cars.

are you ok??? have you seen a bus before??

> A single bus needs about 3 drivers to be effective

I have never ever seen a bus with 3 drivers in it. If you're talking about 3 drivers over the course of 24h, those drivers are not in the bus at the same time, and therefore don't make up 20% of the passengers on the bus. If you're saying the average bus route serves 15 people per day, you are certainly mistaken.

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