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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

#611

Post by hardolaf »

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.…

Heavy rail and light rail costs are very comparable unless you want to bury them. But it doesn't matter which you bury, they still cost about the same.

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

#612

Post by Moldoteck »

derriz wrote: post #362
miki123211 wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Trams have the same problem trains have. If something happens on a tram line (and these are a lot more integrated with roads than train lines, so things do happen), a big segment of the network comes to a standstill. They're not like buses or cars that can drive around a major accident in an emergency, even if that meanns they'll skip a stop or two.

My experience of public transport modes in various cities is at odds with this. Trams and trains generally offer far more reliable schedules, frequencies and journey times than busses because they either have completely dedicated alignments or have priority where there is any interface with normal traffic. Most buses inevitably bunch (see https://setosa.io/bus/ for a nice simulation) and/or get stuck in traffic as a…

lol i was recently in such a situation - tram collision with a car. I got off and decided to walk to the central station... to find out that the tram was near me since they probably recorded everything they needed and it went to the depo...

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

#613

Post by femiagbabiaka »

coryrc wrote: post #600
femiagbabiaka wrote: post #553

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Chicago has already done all of those things unfortunately (or fortunately).

If they have bus-only lanes then they won't be stuck in traffic, so I don't think they have.

Bus only lanes exist, but not everywhere (some streets are not wide enough). Additionally, at the moment (and really always) there's a ton of construction on the bridges going in and out of the city, causing buses to miss out on the bus-only lanes for years or more at a time. Bus systems are a complicated beast.

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

#614

Post by coryrc »

Retric wrote: post #609
coryrc wrote: post #608

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Roads still need maintenance even if nobody uses them, so a significant portion is split evenly across all traffic. Your former doesn't imply the latter. Here in Seattle we even still have cobblestone roads without heavy traffic and they spend very little money on them. We have extensive rutting damage on the lanes use by busses and requires more expensive, deeper road base when they get replaced. This cost is due…

22 tons are huge busses and overkill unless you actually need that much space, and tend to have 4 axles. ((22 / 4)/(3/2)) ~= 13.5x a heavy SUV but could be replacing 30+ vehicles. Also that visible ware is noticeable because it hasn’t been replaced. Looking worse when you resurface on the same schedule isn’t an actual cost.

But those are what we have and they have 3 axles, not 4.

We also have many concrete roads and closely-spaced axles, if they had them, would not help.

> Looking worse when you resurface on the same schedule isn’t an actual cost.

I addressed this: they have to dig much deeper and replace with much thicker road. Much more expensive. It's not "looking worse", it's actively dangerous to cyclists and other road users, so the surface must be replaced more often too.

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

#615

Post by coryrc »

femiagbabiaka wrote: post #613
coryrc wrote: post #600

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If they have bus-only lanes then they won't be stuck in traffic, so I don't think they have.

Bus only lanes exist, but not everywhere (some streets are not wide enough). Additionally, at the moment (and really always) there's a ton of construction on the bridges going in and out of the city, causing buses to miss out on the bus-only lanes for years or more at a time. Bus systems are a complicated beast.

You don't have to allow cars on every single paved surface. Cars aren't supposed to be on wide sidewalks, you don't have to allow them on every single road either.

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

#616

Post by m3047 »

amiga386 wrote: post #108
pavel_lishin wrote: post #4

> Bus stop balancing saves riders’ time. Riders save between 12 and 24 seconds per stop removed. I wonder if this savings includes the additional time to walk further to a stop. Especially in light of this quote: > In England, where 28 percent of all bus passengers are on concessionary fares for age or disability

Most bus users I know don't mind how far away the stop is, within a certain time. They really care about waiting long times at the stop because the bus is infrequent or unreliable. Humans walk at roughly 2.1-3.0mph. "European cities" are listed as having bus stops 984-1476 ft apart, which would imply you'd typically walk half that to reach the nearest one (492-738 ft), which for a fit 3.0mph person is 2-3 minutes, an…

An analysis based on linear distance fails the essential geometric test:

> Humans walk at roughly 2.1-3.0mph. "European cities" are listed as having bus stops 984-1476 ft apart, which would imply you'd typically walk half that to reach the nearest one (492-738 ft), which for a fit 3.0mph person is 2-3 minutes, and for a frail old 2.1mph person is 3-4 minutes.

> Of course, people can be further away than that (they live orthagonally to the bus route), but you get the point. If you doubled bus stop distances to 1476ft apart, it would not add many walking minutes for the users.

Given four "bus stops" spaced at the corners of a square of dimension d, and a linear relationship of distance and time such that d == t, the distance to a stop along the edges of the square is at most d/2 == 0.5d. As the crow flies (straight line) the distance from the center of the square to any of the corners is sqrt(2*(d^2)) / 2 or (approximately) 0.71d.

But people don't fly, rather geometric physical reality is something sometimes called "manhattan distance" which essentially means that they need to walk to the edge and then along the edge (or zig-zag block by block, which amounts to the same thing just repeated at smaller scale). In this case the distance walked to any of the corners from the center is exactly d. Unless you live in the middle of a park (with stops at the corners) d is the best outcome. In a physical environment other obstacles may present which require backtracking; indeed, the bus routes (and hence stops) are likely optimized to avoid backtracking, acknowledging this physical reality.

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

#617

Post by JoshTriplett »

xmprt wrote: post #599
JoshTriplett wrote: post #443

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Point to point transportation is often slower and less convenient if buses and public transit is done right. Only if you're also intentionally making point-to-point worse. Note that I'm not comparing to "get in your own car and drive", which has the disadvantage of having to park. I'm comparing the ideal taxi-shaped thing to the ideal bus-and-tram-and-train-shaped thing.

> Only if you're also intentionally making point-to-point worse I feel like you missed my last paragraph. If public transit is better then more people would use it and there would be fewer cars on the road. Can you imagine how terrible point-to-point traffic in SF would be if everyone was driving to work instead of relying on Caltrain or BART?

No, I didn't miss it. I'm saying that public transit can be better than it currently is, but it would take much more to make it better than point-to-point transit.

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

#618

Post by Retric »

coryrc wrote: post #614
Retric wrote: post #609

Earlier quoted context omitted.

22 tons are huge busses and overkill unless you actually need that much space, and tend to have 4 axles. ((22 / 4)/(3/2)) ~= 13.5x a heavy SUV but could be replacing 30+ vehicles. Also that visible ware is noticeable because it hasn’t been replaced. Looking worse when you resurface on the same schedule isn’t an actual cost.

But those are what we have and they have 3 axles, not 4. We also have many concrete roads and closely-spaced axles, if they had them, would not help. > Looking worse when you resurface on the same schedule isn’t an actual cost. I addressed this: they have to dig much deeper and replace with much thicker road. Much more expensive. It's not "looking worse", it's actively dangerous to cyclists and other road users, so t…

Closely space axels work fine for road surfaces they don’t help on bridges but that’s a separate concern. You can see a plethora of heavy military vehicles etc which use extra axles to avoid getting stuck in the mud due to plastic deformation IE rutting. EX: The 22 ton KTO drives has to deal with rutting on vastly worse road surfaces like mud. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KTO_Rosomak

But this is where you need to do a deeper analysis than just a simple rule of thumb. Even adding extra wheels to the same axle makes a big difference to road surfaces.

> so the surface must be replaced more often too.

Level of ruts you see are considered acceptable or they would be replaced.

However, ultimately the same entity is paying for the busses and road maintenance. If lighter busses saved taxpayers money that’s what they would use which is a major sign your analysis is inherently flawed.

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

#619

Post by jjk166 »

JBorrow wrote: post #459
jjk166 wrote: post #309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The reason bus stops are so close in Philadelphia is because they stop every block Which is the issue. Philadelphia's blocks were sized in the 1600s, they weren't designed to be the optimal spacing for bus stops. Given how tiny the blocks are, there is no need to stop at every block.

My point was that there’s a stop sign every block, so they need to stop anyway.

Quite a big difference between stopping at a stop sign and a bus stop. Also there isn't a stop sign every block, on the larger streets that most of the busses run on there are lights at the intersections. While Philly does a pretty poor job coordinating its traffic lights, that's a separate issue.

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

#620

Post by jjk166 »

maldev wrote: post #110
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…

I would ride the bus if it wasn't filled with crackheads. Stopped Bart when it went downhill and all the white collar people stopped riding it and it just became desperate people, homeless, or crackheads.

Crackheads are what's left after everyone who demands more convenience leaves. The more convenient you make public transit, the more non-crackheads will be on the bus with you.
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