Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Bus stop balancing is fast, cheap, and effective

worksinprogress.co

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

481–490 of 656 posts

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

#481

Post by cleandreams »

wsatb wrote: post #354
LucasBrandt wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But lots of people _do_ already ride buses! There are already current riders, and potential riders who are making these marginal decisions. Occasional riders will decide between transport modes based on the trip - making marginal improvements (or regressions) would change the rate at which they choose to ride the bus. Even if every current person's mind has been completely made up based on past experience, there are…

I also live in Chicago and wouldn’t mind walking extra to another stop, but Chicago also has a massive traffic problem, particularly post pandemic. During rush hour, the bus is stop and go already. I’m really curious how this would pan out here, but it can’t be the only solution.

San Francisco put in some bus only lanes and those routes have greatly improved bus speed and ontime performance.

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

#482

Post by cleandreams »

philwelch wrote: post #435
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.…

Private car ownership is a better everyday solution for almost anyone who can afford it, which includes the vast majority of Americans. If buses tried to compete with cars, they would lose. The only remaining niche for the bus is as a public accommodation for the poor, disabled, and elderly, or occasionally in dense city centers. At least that’s what I think. But if you’re right, and there’s a version of bus transpor…

Private car ownership is better everyday for suburbs and rural areas but in cities that is not true. Public transit can improve downtown access and reduce congestion. You need some density for transit.

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

#483

Post by AnthonyMouse »

closeparen wrote: post #472
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #417

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

That's assuming you're only going a short distance. The average commute is around 15 miles. That's something like a five hour walk.

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

#484

Post by rsynnott »

unyttigfjelltol wrote: post #47
Bluecobra wrote: post #22

I'm for all for less bus stops, but how do you make it equitable for people who can't walk longer distances if they are disabled or have an underlying health condition? Run a separate paratransit line?

The answer is to keep the same number of stops but run two or more vehicles simultaneously. Or open more doors. Or expedite fares. The authors get mixed up equating count of marked stops with dwell time. Running leapfrogging vehicles , or numerous other strategies, reduces dwell time because one boards passengers and the other disembarks at any given stop or vice versa. In fact, I’d argue bus fare gates, steps, 1-doo…

> The answer is to keep the same number of stops but run two or more vehicles simultaneously

Then you end up with buses piling up at stops, which slows everything down even more.

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

#485

Post by adrianN »

SoftTalker wrote: post #339
angmarsbane wrote: post #301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I was in Mexico City I was blown away and inspired that their bus lanes were actually physically separate from car traffic, sometimes they were even elevated a foot or so alongside car traffic. It made the buses so much faster! I wish bus and bike lanes in the USA were equally separated from car traffic. Different color paint and intermittent bollards don't cut it. If something is worth doing, it's worth doing r…

Nice idea but it quickly runs up against budget realities.

Bus lanes are usually not a budget problem. The problem is car centric laws and regulations that make it hard to impossible to take space away from cars.

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

#486

Post by cyberax »

yunwal wrote: post #480
cyberax wrote: post #461

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 t…

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

See the word "effective". Think about the road space that a bus requires but doesn't use if it is just once per 10 minutes.

> 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.

Yes, I'm talking about the drivers that are needed for a reasonable 16-hour bus service. And the typical ratio is actually a bit more than 3 drivers per 1 bus.

> If you're saying the average bus route serves 15 people per day, you are certainly mistaken.

No. I'm saying that on _average_ there are 15 people in a bus. More during the rush hour, fewer during the off-hours.

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

#487

Post by rickydroll »

Detrytus wrote: post #394
rickydroll wrote: post #175

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…

1: This "ADHD" issue is because you've never seen properly ran bus system. I used to live in big European city, riding bus to work everyday, and I never even knew the bus schedule. I did not have to. They would come every 15 minutes, or every 7-8 minutes during the rush hour. So I could just show up at the stop anytime and be sure that a bus will appear quite soon. Zero advance planning required.

The ADHD issue is because I always think I can get more done in the time before I need to leave, and I end up hyper-focusing and missing the leave time. Another ADHD factor is that if I don't sit and watch every stop go by, I am likely to miss it because I'm reading and not paying attention. This is not a problem when driving.

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

#488

Post by closeparen »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #483
closeparen wrote: post #472

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's assuming you're only going a short distance. The average commute is around 15 miles. That's something like a five hour walk.

And the average commute duration is around 27 minutes. If you happened to live in one of the very few places in America where there even are 15 urban miles to cross, doing it at city bus speeds of under 10mph would be a catastrophic collapse in your standard of living.

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

#489

Post by TulliusCicero »

closetohome wrote: post #193
paxys wrote: post #57

Something the article completely skips over is that European cities have significantly better and safer pedestrian infrastructure than their US counterparts. American streets are built to prioritize cars and cars alone. Sidewalks are often unmaintained, bumpy, and sometimes missing altogether. Crossings are often unmarked and dangerous. Stop signs and signals are routinely ignored, especially when turning. This is wh…

Similarly, the article also glosses over the issue of disability. Perhaps because the US tends to treat its bus system as welfare, it is adapted heavily to people with disabilities and limited mobility. I'm sure there are solutions to this, but at the moment removing bus stops tends to disenfranchise people who can't walk longer distances.

> but at the moment removing bus stops tends to disenfranchise people who can't walk longer distances.

So those categories of people just can't use public transit in places where public transit is more popular?

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

#490

Post by TulliusCicero »

pavel_lishin wrote: post #90
stetrain wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are two groups of people that you can optimize for. One is the group of people who already rides the bus. In most US cities this is a small group of people who have no real alternative. The other is the group of people who might ride the bus if it were convenient. Not just in terms of accessibility to a stop, but also accounting for the journey time. If someone tries riding the bus and finds that a 20 minute dr…

There are very, very few people in America who - when given a choice between driving and taking public transit - will take public transit, no matter how convenient the public transit is. And in this example, how many stops would you have to cut to turn an hour-long bus ride into a 20 minute one, to compete with the car? You're effectively cutting it down to two stops - where you board, and where you disembark. That's…

> There are very, very few people in America who - when given a choice between driving and taking public transit - will take public transit, no matter how convenient the public transit is.

Yeah, no, this simply isn't true.

People don't take transit in America because largely that transit is sparse, infrequent, unreliable, and slow. When a twenty minute drive becomes a hour and a half of buses and walking, virtually nobody rational will willingly choose that.

Post reply on HN