How much transit performance is constrained by operational details rather than megaprojects
Bus stop balancing is fast, cheap, and effective
561–570 of 656 posts
Re: Bus stop balancing is fast, cheap, and effective
#562I 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…
It seems like stop balancing is best understood less as a silver bullet and more as one of the prerequisites for making buses fast and frequent enough to actually compete with driving
Re: Bus stop balancing is fast, cheap, and effective
#563Something 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…
There's also a feedback loop here: if stops are too close, buses are slow and unreliable, which reduces ridership, which makes it harder to justify investing in either the stops or the surrounding pedestrian environment
Re: Bus stop balancing is fast, cheap, and effective
#564Earlier quoted context omitted.
There's an intimidation factor that a lot of Americans won't quickly admit to when it comes to taking the bus. They don't know if they can tap with their phone to pay, if they need cash, if they can use change, if they need exact cash/change, if they need a specific transit card etc. They don't know the etiquette for asking to get off the bus and sometimes it varies by bus design. They don't know the routes or the ti…
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 cust…
> Buses have a long tradition of user-hostile design. "Exact change only"...
On every pay-in-cabin bus I've ever ridden, this is synonymous with "No change given". The machines are quite happy to accept more money than is needed for a single ticket, and the reason for that is pretty obvious.
> It has always baffled me why they make it so hard for first-time users in particular.
The SFMTA (the San Francisco bus/train operator) provides a document that addresses almost everything you brought up. [0] The "unhelpful and condescending and impatient drivers" thing isn't addressed, but I've never run into a Muni driver that was anything but helpful. [3] As an added bonus, the most useful information about fares is posted on the paybox inside the bus.
[0] https://www.sfmta.com/getting-around/muni/how-ride-muni-quic...> (via [1])
[1] https://www.sfmta.com/visitors> (via [2])
[2] https://www.sfmta.com>
[3] Granted, sometimes that help is "I don't know where that is, but I know you can't get to it on this line.".
Re: Bus stop balancing is fast, cheap, and effective
#565>Many of the solutions to these problems require money – running more buses, improving stop amenities, or upgrading signals – or the political will to take away street space for busways and transit lanes. But stop balancing can have a meaningful impact on these issues for a fraction of the price. To me, this exemplifies a type of thinking that is endemic to policymakers in the US. We can tinker at the edges, we can u…
I get the frustration, but I don't think it's necessarily "giving up" so much as working within the constraints that actually exist
Re: Bus stop balancing is fast, cheap, and effective
#566Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
But when you drive you can't read. Thus you get more done when using public transport. Nowadays with phones and portables you can even read your email and work rather than justb read the newspaper as commuterts did 20 years ago.
Yes, and that's a good thing. Because if I'm on transit and I read, I miss stops, sometimes as many as four or five. Then my day is really fucked. I literally have to sit there and count off every single stop. With driving, I don't have that problem. I have internal mapping and external GPS to remind me what I need to do next.
As for getting work done, back when I was an employee and using transit, two factors kept me from doing work on the transit system. First, my employer already got enough uncompensated labor from me. I wasn't going to give them any more. Second, I use speech recognition, and dictating company confidential information in a public setting is unwise at best.
Re: Bus stop balancing is fast, cheap, and effective
#567> increasing the distance between stops from 700–800 feet [...] to 1,300 feet I suspect that removing half of the bus stops in a city will piss people off and cause even less ridership. This feels like it's optimizing for the wrong thing. Also, the example given cites New York City buses. But New York City is always the worst example because it's the most extreme of everything. The vast majority of US cities do not s…
I don't think the goal is "fewer stops" in isolation, it's more about finding the spacing where the system functions more like transit and less like a hail-anywhere shuttle
Re: Bus stop balancing is fast, cheap, and effective
#568Earlier quoted context omitted.
>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.
At the heavy end, SUVs weigh about 3 tonnes, while at the light end buses weigh about 12, a 4x difference. 4^4 = 256. So if the claim about the fourth power is true, you'd need to replace 256 SUVs to break even on wear, which is obviously impossible. (I don't really understand how the fourth power of axel weight thing can possibly be true, though. Why would joining two vehicles together into a mega vehicle with doubl…
Plus the SUV is usually point-to-point, leave home, go to work, come back. Whereas the bus is going back and forth ten times per day.
In Europe, the numbers differ even more. Lighter weight cars typically 1.5-2 tons, a new London bus can be upto 18 tons when loaded - that's ~5-16 units of wear for the car to 104,976 units for the bus...
But this is all supposing we're optimising for road wear, which isn't really the point of a bus system.
Re: Bus stop balancing is fast, cheap, and effective
#569Earlier 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…
If you actually had to pay a proper price for your parking space, which is currently heavily subsidized, you would suddenly consider taking public transit instead, even if that were priced at actual cost.
In what way is a piece of ground I own "heavily subsidised"?
Re: Bus stop balancing is fast, cheap, and effective
#570Earlier 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…
If people without cars could stop subsidizing those with one i would agree (and include the lost land to mandatory parking places in your account). Car driver should pay a specific tax for that. A bus just need a lane on every road direction and no parking (and use it less than hundred of cars).