It’s limited so it’s not a huge tax on corporations, just on the billionaires but I think it would be good to see. There are other states so if we’re wrong America won’t suffer.
Personally I’d like to see the tax set at a million dollars and include all unrealized gains including being the beneficiary of a trust or owning land and so on. But this prop will be a good start.
What if the tax could be paid with assets instead of currency? And the assets went into some kind of sovereign wealth fund?
By contrast, AVs are in production on the streets of SF despite local opposition because we decided these decisions are made at the state level.
I’m looking for a legislative mechanism that moves things from the former to the latter.
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
One can calculate how much area and thus passengers the stop covers and calculate walking times.
It's not completely trivial (with longer distance people chose alternatives), but can be done similar to the way the whole study was done with similar accuracy.
And that doesn't even consider that a faster bus route means you need fewer buses to run the same number of trips, so you can either run more trips (and save even more time for riders waiting for their bus) or cut down costs for the transit operator.
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.
Bus users can compensate for extra walking time by leaving earlier, provided the bus is on time. Good bus services can estimate arrivals in realtime, and show it to users on websites, apps, etc. as well as at the bus stop.
Bus punctuality is affected by a number of factors (e.g. traffic congestion, temporary and dedicated bus lanes), including number of stops.
The faster a bus can complete its route, the higher the route frequency can be with the same number of buses+drivers, which means buses pick up passengers more often, which means fewer passengers per stop (because less time between pickups), which means faster boarding, which in turn allows for a higher reliable route frequency. Having payment schemes like tap on/tap off, and having multiple entry doors also improves boarding times.
Demonstrably untrue, if you were to look at taxis, ubers, lyfts, and ... small vans that operate exactly as you describe, in many large cities. (In NYC, I know there exists such a van network in Brooklyn, and near the George Washington Bridge running across the river.)
And besides, buses have advantages that "intelligent routing"-based vans - predictability and reliability. If I need to get somewhere by bus, I know exactly which stop I need to go to, and usually when the bus is scheduled to arrive to pick me up, and also to drop me off.
(Granted, sometimes those times aren't right, but they usually are, most of the time.)
Where I live the busses are quite useful and get used by a lot of people.
Smaller vans, transporting several people at once, are also busses. Any and all private competition offering to transport several people at once, would also use vehicles colloquially called busses.
Furthermore has public transport historically never been for the convenience of the people. Instead it provides jobs, increases the flow of money, provides income for The State.
You can read more about the beginnings of public transportation here:
https://www.perplexity.ai/search/hey-hey-can-you-tell-me-who...
Furthermore signal priority and own lanes are almost always beaten by good circulation planning, reducing the number of traffic lights and cars on the route of the bus.
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 suffer from crawling buses.
Maybe this should say New York City needs fewer bus stops? I'd like to see you try.
My point is that you're totally disregarding everything a bus does to stop apart from waiting for passengers to board and de-board. At the very least it has to slow down, then accelerate. Half the time it has to swing the ramp out, which takes forever. Maybe someone has to load or unload a bike. Then it has to re-merge with traffic, and maybe every 10th car will let it in, so that can take a long time too. I don't even know if waiting for passengers is _half_ the time spent, let alone all of it.
I'd like to see your math, as it isn't just the loading of passengers that takes time. It would seem that slowing down, completely stopping, lowering the bus, opening the doors, and then closing the doors takes up at least some of the time at each bus stop.
This is even worse than the usual slight of hand wherein one takes a widely diffuse hard to quantify cost and rounds it to zero and then dishonestly acts as though that justifies implementing their pet policy that has some small upside because in this case the downside is known and the upside is less defined.
I'm open to the idea that we could improve the system by deleting stops, but in light of a quantifiable downside I don't see a convincing argument without having some quantification on what the upside looks like.
True I've seen that first hand.
The real killer for bus travel times is not getting up to speed, and the delay from finding a break in traffic when pulling out of a stop.
[1] https://wmata.com/initiatives/plans/Better-Bus/upload/Bus-St...
This:
> I suspect that removing half of the bus stops in a city will piss people off and cause even less ridership.
is thrown out but how do we know it's true? That commenter throws it out as their opinion but my opinion is the opposite -- the stated preference will be that people think it's bad but the revealed preference will show even more ridership as travel times improve.
As a religious belief it would be inappropriate for me to report stats from my local cities bus service. First of all they didn't get into a religious opinion logically and rationally, so spouting numbers and facts at them will not make them change their mind. Secondly my local city has multiple simultaneous impacts so its almost impossible to estimate how their experiments with stop removal has affected ridership. The article falsely claims the only variable in the system is stop spacing whereas bus service is in extreme turmoil in most communities.
Pre-covid vs Post-covid is wildly different, there has been massive inflation in operating expenses, there's a long term decline in my area WRT passenger-miles before covid which seems to be increasing post-covid, fares have increased by a factor of a little over 4x since 1990 while incomes have roughly stagnated. The article claims the opex of stops is "high" but our city invested $0 (this is a low crime suburb LOL). We got rid of 1/4 of our routes (and drivers) and increased the standard of stop spacing from never more than 950 feet to an average of about 1100 feet now. The elderly and infirm were very mad and very loud about that and they are the most reliable voters out there but halving the fare quieted them down. We lose so much money on the bus service that giving it away for free wouldn't impact the budget very much.
Currently our opex per passenger mile is about $4.50. Fare for adults is $2. We lose about $7 per ride. The loss per rider would pay for two extra people to take an uber on the same route, so there are continual demands to scrap the entire system to save money. Empty buses driving around is causing more, not less, road congestion, and more, not less, environmental damage. Our "Unlinked Passenger Trip per Vehicle Revenue Mile" is about 0.6, which boils down to on average every mile traveled by a bus driver results in 0.6 passengers stepping aboard. Our routes are about 4 miles long and run about once an hour, so on average a driver picks up about three passengers per 4 mile trip. Our drivers are usually alone in the bus. Another way of looking at it, is on average we pay our bus drivers $23/hr, so an hourly route costs $23 in labor, and they pick up less than $6 in fares during each work hour... The ratios are better during rush hour... but worse outside of rush hour.
(edited: I don't understand some of the numbers on the report, if it costs $23 to pay the driver to run a route that picks up three people the fares can't be more than $6 so even if diesel and maint were free we lose $17 per hour per route, so why does the annual report claim opex per passenger mile traveled is only $4.50? After federal subsidies or similar?)
In the long run, an unusable bus service is simply too expensive of a luxury to fund and we'll end up eliminating it. I don't think changing distance between stops matters if the stops, and the bus, are empty, other than it makes sick and old people very angry. If almost no one uses it, it doesn't cost any extra to stop quite literally on every street corner or even stop at every driveway, so increasing stop distance merely makes people suffer needlessly, which seems unusually evil.
time is important to bus riders, speeding up the buses helps them. It also attracts others. Only a few are harmed more than helped - but they tend to complain the most even though they are a minority
That’s not how bus routes in NYC are organized at all.
Only if your trip is to Manhattan or along the line. Otherwise, in Brooklyn and queens, North-south subway service is almost non-existent. I live in South Queens a block from the A train. However, If I wanted to go shopping at Queenscenter Mall or along Queens Blvd, I have to take a bus up Woodhaven Blvd.
But that only works because density is low and there's only one plausible destination.
Oh do you now? Where do these suspicions come from? How much time do you spend on city busses? Do you have any idea how absolutely infuriating it is to be sitting on a bus while it makes stop, after stop, after stop, after stop, every single one a block or two apart, crawling down the road at a walking pace? All the while backing up traffic behind it and eroding whatever support the transit system had with the majority of the tax-paying public that never uses it.
I suspect that people find a destination on Google Maps, click the navigate button, see that the bus takes 3x as long as driving, and take their car or an Uber.
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 drive becomes an hour with stops every single block, they might never ride it again.
In most US cities (outside of the few big ones with decent transit), public transit is basically treated as a welfare service for those who cannot get around by any other means. Not saying that this service doesn't have value, but making all decisions in that mindset isn't going to attract more ridership from those who could choose to drive instead.
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 just not a plausible way to organize a bus route, aiming it at one person with a car.
But I don’t want to drive three miles to park in a sketchy lot to hop on a train that will drop me off a mile from the venue.
I find this very unlikely to be true for people who have spent any amount of time driving in a city.
Safety is only one of the issues. Convenience and comfort are others. Basically a city needs to decide whether it wants people to use the bus, and then act like it.
The bus might come 2x per hour. Maybe 2:18 and 2:48. But it might come at 2:15 or 2:25. So you need to arrive at 2:13 and possibly wait 12 minutes. Or if you arrive late you might be waiting 30+ minutes.
Make the buses fast and safe.
1. Dedicated bus lanes (speed, predictability).
2. Traffic light priority ( speed, predictability).
How many US cities implement even one of those?
I don't care how long it takes to get off the bus nearly as much as I care how long it takes to get on.
It was unreal.
In my city bus stops have 1km between them (sometimes it is 700m sometimes 1.3km) so about 3200 feet.
It is about 15min walk between each bus stop, so when I need to wait for bit longer I prefer to walk to the next bus stop, just to have something to do.
Huh... How is it set up where you live? I've ridden buses in Europe and I remember them having cables, or at least buttons.
To European eyes they seem old fashioned, untidy, and possibly dirty.
Crawling busses are an issue all over the place. The easy way to spot it is when noticing stacked busses during peak periods.
These issues are really hard because they are fundamentally local and change is difficult and fraught with NIMBY bullshit. There is a strong inertia. My small city has a pretty good bus service that winnowed out surplus stops and added BRT. In the public hearing, one of the loud objectors to moving a bus stop 1000ft was that it would encourage inner-city youth to "rape and pillage" in the "good" neighborhood. We're literally talking two blocks away.
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-door loading and traffic signal/stop interactions are far more significant than stop count.
How exactly does that help? If you’re suggesting every bus go to alternate stops leapfrogging each one in the middle then that will cause a lot of confusion especially for tourist heavy cities.
So if we had a bus stop every 800 feet, on average half the stops would be empty and passed by. If that high level of use is causing too much congestion and slow down at stops, if we had two buses running out of phase, pax arrive at the same rate, so we'd pick up a pax every 3000+ feet driven. So if we had bus stops every 500 feet to keep people happy, on average the bus would drive right by about 5 out of 6 empty stops, which seems reasonable and would not result in unusual delays or congestion. Also the bus would pass by every half hour not every hour, which would probably increase ridership a lot.
So if the only labor expense were the $23/hr driver, and we pay 10 drivers on 10 routes, to drive twelve times, thats $23/hr * 10 routes * 12 hours if everything except driver labor were free that means we spend $2760 per day to transport 1556 people, or about $1.77 per trip (assuming diesel is free, buses never wear out, etc). If we doubled the number of bus that would be $5520 of driver labor to move 1556 people per day or $3.55 cost per pax trip. On one hand the actual annual total "OE per UPT" counting weekends and maint and office people and dispatchers etc, according to the annual report is $13.94, so an extra $1.77 would seem cheap, but the bus does not run for free and the total expense of doubling the runs might cost as much as an extra $14 per pax trip.
The costs don't really matter, if the taxpayers want it as a luxury bragging feature of the city. Everyone wants everyone else to use it even though no one would be caught dead actually using it. My point being that adult fare is $2 but adults don't ride its mostly elderly and disabled at the $1 fare, so a profit (loss) ratio of (28 - 1)/28 with two buses per route isn't much worse than (14 - 1)/14 with one bus per route.
Maybe another way to look at the analysis is in my city if the stops are more than 1600 feet apart there will be multiple people per stop and that would "slow things down" whereas a small fraction like 400 feet would mean the bus mostly just speeds by.
No one can seem to explain why we can't have infinite bus stops. How about every stop sign is a bus stop? The bus has to stop anyway. Artificial scarcity to drive down ridership, I suppose.
This article feels like he's picking the one lever he can when it's a bad lever. He created a new kind of ethical trolley problem by making it less accessible vs more efficient
Over here in my European town this isn't an issue as we have a "trust based system" where tickets are only checked infrequently by spot inspections on the running bus and most people have a monthly pass. So it's just hop on and off.
We could offer free ridership but still use orca cards and ban people who misbehave or befoul the place. Whether we keep problem children off appears to be wholly orthogonal.
To me, this exemplifies a type of thinking that is endemic to policymakers in the US. We can tinker at the edges, we can use computers to optimize what we have, but the idea of using money and political will to change anything at all in a meaningful way is anathema, beyond the pale. Giving up before even getting started. Sure, optimize away, but don't expect me to be inspired by pushing papers around.
I’m sure bus stop distance optimization is a good thing to do at the margins, but this article is not convincing that it’s the biggest problem with US bus service.
Bus stops at the margins are actually cheapest because it often consists of a pole which is skipped 90% of the time. At the margin you already have fewer stops further apart and there is basically nothing to trim. If nobody is at the stop 90% of the time does it mean we don't need it? No. Your riders in that area may largely not be commuters and grandma needs to get out of the house and go to the store periodically.
You are paying near zero for 10 stops over 5 miles so that each run the bus can stop at a different 2 at a cost of 30 seconds per run.
I don't know that 'removing' these as bus-stops would actually change anything. I think a larger question is whether route changes should occur.
There was a large effort in Philly called the 'Bus Revolution' [1] that aimed to re-balance routes (I have a map from the 50s on my wall and the bus routes are the same, including numbers, as they are today). The problem there was that there was a funding crisis that massively delayed the implementation [2]. These services are massively under-funded, and that's the primary issue; implementing the article's suggestions are not free.
[1] https://wwww.septa.org/initiatives/bus/ [2] https://www.nbcphiladelphia.com/news/transportation-and-tran...
(for context: the 124/5 operate locally west through center city before getting on the highway while the 27 only makes 1-2 more stops in center city before getting on the highway)
Making these extra stops causes the bus to 'miss' the light cycle at almost every stop.
[1] https://www.septa.org/schedules/124?startStop=17842&endStop=...
[2] https://www.septa.org/schedules/125?startStop=17842&endStop=...
[3] https://www.septa.org/schedules/27?startStop=17842&endStop=3...
Many of these people have no other options: If you are elderly or physically limited when you are younger, there's a good chance that wealth is limited, rideshares and taxis are not an option, and if you can't take public transit, you are stuck at home.
Don't think about it as 'today I can't take the bus'. Think about it as, 'for the most part, I can't leave my home/block anymore'.
Unless you can address this fundamental problem "just walk more" isn't a viable option for transit users.
Just one thoughtless example: Austin TX downtown is actively hazardous to non-motor vehicle users. One example is worn down and effectively camouflaged pucks the same color as the roadway about 10 cm wide by 6 cm high sticking out the middle of the road randomly that once represented bike lane merge path markers. Ask me how I know. :/
You can maybe frame it as this story does that it is the time cost of the stops. This somewhat completely ignores the extra time people would have to walk between the stops, though?
It also completely ignores that Atlanta's metro does target about this distance for bus stops? Which would be a compelling argument against it driving adoption, to be honest.
Bringing up accessibility concerns for people who can't walk as far is well-meant, but seems contrived. There's no guarantee that accessible housing is available near the existing stops anyway, and with the cost savings from having fewer stops (and windfall from increased ridership due to the bus becoming a faster option), bus lines could even be expanded, allowing more people to live near a bus line in general. Perhaps it would balance out?
Many transit services also offer smaller shuttles that can go directly to the homes of people with disabilities, so putting that responsibility on buses alone seems ineffective. I think the author is on to something here.
But those 37mm in Phoenix are probably going faster than 8mph.
It's MUCH faster than the train, because once it hits the highway, it doesn't stop till it gets downtown.
Dont get me wrong I love the train, but the red line suffers from the same too-many-stops problem.
Express buses thread the needle imo precisely because they hook into existing infrastructure (highways) and still move masses of people
If you look at a high resolution density map of the world, you'll find great public transport in places that have at least 70K people in the square km around stops. At that density, you can often support subways profitably too. Then a mesh of subways and buses will get you to places quite efficiently. But then you look in the US, and the vast majority of our large metros have very few areas reaching those densities (Manhattan excluded). So you end up in situations where a bus or a light rail can neither be efficient nor cheap, no matter what you do with the bus stops. There's just not enough things near each stop, and even when they are close, it might not be even all that safe to cross the streets to reach your destination.
So while this might be a good optimization for places where we are close to good systems, I suspect that ultimately most cities need far more expensive changes to even consider having good transit
I’d rather get to work half as quickly if it means I don’t have to listen to a druggie issue schizophrenic violent threats towards random women throughout my journey (occurred just last week on a tram in Melbourne). Other cities I’ve been to and used public transport in (NYC, Portland, San Francisco, Dallas, Sydney) have been just as awful.
All these public policy wonks really do seem to forget that most of us want to get as far away as possible from the psychos that seem to make up an increasing share of society, time and cost be damned.
Most stops should in fact be a pole where the bus stops frequently enough that you don't care about other amenities.
Furthermore it is deeply ironic that it suggests that we invest in fewer stops further away with more niceties for the elderly and disabled whilst suggesting they walk further because these folks often have more trouble getting up and down and walking longer distances than they do standing 3 minutes until the next bus.
May I also suggest that any study that compares prospective travel times before and after stop balancing especially if it be especially aggressive consider whether the actual decrease in time is just not having to stop because ridership actually decreased. See
> San Francisco saw a 4.4 to 14 percent increase in travel speeds (depending on the trip) by decreasing spacing from six stops per mile to two and a half.
If you had to walk half a mile on each end of your bus ride and possibly some more when you change busses you might reconsider the utility of public transit.
Whereas routes are often going to deliberately intersect to facility changing busses efficiently and this is trivial in small suburban areas in cities with a tangle of routes I've often found many practical routes suggested by google maps to involve getting off at a random midpoint of a route and crossing the street and getting on another even when traveling to fairly central locations. These fortuitous connections would certainly be decreased if stops were aggressively trimmed.
I also question that virtue of real time arrival information which is very expensive per installation and trivially delivered to the phone in everyone's pocket anywhere and everywhere for almost nothing if you are already collecting positioning info on the busses. I use one bus away for this. Put a QR code on the stop on the pole.
> 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.
The solution is to do the things that are actually required. Not one weird trick to fix the bus system.
The reason 'Race the 8' is an event isn't because there are too many bus stops on Denny, it's because all the cars cause traffic to slow to a crawl for 6 hours of the day.
You already know what the conclusion is going to be, the interesting part is how the author gets there.
Somehow we combine inaccessibly rare bus stops with speed barely over walking.
The solution, I imagine, requires many changes that are politically infeasible. First, double the number of buses to reduce the wait between them. Second, add neighborhood circulator buses to get people from the neighborhoods to the express buses. Third, either add dedicated bus lanes in congested areas or, in an ideal world, make all congested inner-city roads toll roads, and use the tolls to subsidize buses.
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. Cities aren’t thinking about how to allocate a fixed bus budget. They’re asking themselves how much they have to spend on buses. This is the core of the problem: low cost services are in a death spiral in the US. Budget cuts -> services get worse -> reduced users -> more cuts.
In my experience, the bus is not a nice experience. The bus feels dirty, unsafe and hostile. Further, the arrival times are not reliable and are often a long time apart. This means you need to arrive ~10 minutes early and time your bus so that you also arrive at your destination early. You will be wasting possibly 20+ minutes each way. Of course you are also standing in the sun or the cold or the rain while you wait, and probably walking on a hostile stroad and across several lanes of traffic before that point.
So while the number of bus stops might matter at the margins, we’re not talking about a system where marginal improvements will matter. If you want to improve ridership, you need to make the bus an attractive option for more people.
You can't just have buses stopping randomly everywhere, it doesn't scale.
Autonomy could improve responsiveness to demand but you still run into other issues. DRT usually won't be able to take advantage of things proven to make buses faster and more consistent (bus lanes, reducing stop count, transit priority signals). Futher, consistency and response times gained by dynamic routing can easily be overshadowed by increased variability in trip time as the route adjusts to add new passengers or make out of the way drop-offs.
As an example, all throughout the Eastern Caribbean this system works really well (in my experience better than most centrally planned bus systems in large cities). On any given island you can go to any main road and within a few minutes a minibus will come along. Most of the time if your aren't familiar with the geography, you just tell the conductor where you are trying to get to, and they will make sure that you get off in the right spot to get where you are going or connect to another minibus. Typical cost was ~$2.
Predictability was pretty low, but because of the small size of busses, there were a lot of them roaming around, I don't think I ever waited more than 15 minutes, and that was in very out of the way places.
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 parking, paying for it is another issue, common in Europe where (luckily) city centers are often millenia older than cars.
At no point of me living in the US I found the car-centric model anywhere better.
I wish it had better public transport in general but I honestly wish that about pretty much any place.
The things you say about noise and pollution are also true in the US, and American drivers are acutely aware of them. But the alternative is not a European bus, so people drive.
Actually I think it is both. Car culture in Europe is nowhere as dominant as it is in the US. Many Europeans grow up with public transportation as the default mode of getting around. So they are more likely to be accustomed to things that become grievances for Americans.
I was born and raised in Turkey, and now live in the US. In Turkey when you take a bus or train during rush hour you’re often packed like sardines. No concept of personal space. Same with many cities in Europe. That type of thing wouldn’t fly anywhere in the US, except maybe NYC. Even then though New Yorkers tend to dislike it.
Taking the bus around sf makes it immediately clear why (not all, but most) people who can get around without using a bus immediately do so.
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 hiking, astronomy, camping, bird watching, and don't include (actively exclude?) urban experiences that require amenities.
3: Friends and family live 30 minutes to 6 hours away.
I have no problem with improving bus service for people and getting them out of cars because that means there'll be more room for me to go to where I want to go when I want to go.
the top comment is right and this article is a good exmaple of what transit people do. they get so excited about transit and how awesome it is that they forget about some of the more fundamental issues.
I have a car, which I use when the weather is not nice, or when it would be inconvenient to take public transportation.
Otherwise, on sunny week-ends i often chose public transports. Here they are efficient , clean, secure and most importantly predictable. We have apps for payment and bus status that show us , on the phone, exactly where every bus is at any moment.
You know your bus will be there for you in exactly 2 minutes. Like a Uber, but much much cheaper.
Predictability is a game changer.
Works very well.
One reason that trains "work" is that the rails on the ground is a promise that a train is coming.
Compare that to the subway which several stories below city hall, nasty, dirty, filthy, stinking air, human excrement, rats, etc... I love the bus
Even if every current person's mind has been completely made up based on past experience, there are always "new adults" learning to get around and forming opinions.
So I strongly disagree: marginal improvements DO matter. And I agree with the author that this would be a relatively easy improvement to deliver for many cities.
I live in Chicago with the third-closest stop spacing per the article. I'm personally able to walk a block or two further to a bus stop no problem. Bus stop consolidation would save me a lot of time over the course of a year!
Until there' a snowstorm, and no one shovels. And you have a broken leg, or are elderly, or disabled. Sure, it might save you personally some time, but we live in a society and should try to help out the one's who need help.
A block or 2 is a significant difference for most elderly people.
Busses fill two different roles, as primary means of transportation and arguably more importantly as a backup means of transportation. They can serve a vital role for cities without the kind of investment it would take to make most typical HN reader consider them as a primary means of transportation.
As such latency isn’t necessarily that critical here.
It's not marginal at all. Stops rebalancing actually address your core issues. Less stops also mean more money per stop to provide nice shelters which solves your second issue.
You believe wrong. The article gives examples of cities that have already done that, and have seen average speeds go up and total ridership go up as well.
> Cities aren’t thinking about how to allocate a fixed bus budget.
Lol, dude.
It's incredibly unlikely that there is one coherent cause for low or high ridership. All we can do is improve the utility of the service. That means improving comfort (keeping it clean), reliability (running on time with minimal detours), throughput (carrying enough people), speed (minimizing the number of stops on the route), latency (minimizing the wait until the next bus), availability (more stops that service potential destinations), and coherence (more routes that take you directly from A to B, minimizing transfers).
Personally, I feel most undeserved by latency: the routes that are convenient to me run every 30min, and the routes that run most often run every 15min. I would ride the bus way more often if routes ran every 10min. I would ride them all the time if they ran more often than that. This seems like a pretty obvious opportunity that will never happen so long as prospective budget is determined by current ridership.
The only time in recent memory that this screwed me was in SF trying to get a Muni that I thought was a surface route and was in fact underground. So I was standing at a trollybus stop directly over top of the station where I was missing my train.
The one major gap I still feel a lot as a visitor is wanting a transit-aware business search. In Google Maps the "search for X in this area" is a completely distinct workflow from "how to get to X by <mode>", and implicit in the first workflow is that you can infer how long it will take based on the crow-flies distance. And that assumption is very much not true if you are using transit. For example, I would love to be able to be like "show me three-star hotels ordered by transit convenience to X airport and Y event venue" and have it figure out both rides, and call out which ones will have what service level in the evening, overnight, etc.
Unfortunately, the naysayers usually get their way as changing the status quo like this is hard to do. Transit Authorities need to be given more leeway to operate how they want w/ less political involvement.
Countries that are less NIMBY/lawsuit/etc happy have vastly better public transit b/c of this.
Philadelphia City Council (which actually doesn't have any direct oversight of SEPTA) pretty much killed SEPTA's attempt at this.
The situation is just so different in many cities in the US compared to Europe in ways that drastically affect public transit.
> By contrast, a bus stop in a French city like Marseille will have shelters and seating by default.
The bus stop I use regularly has seating and shelter. That's great because I currently have severe post-traumatic osteoarthritis in my ankle and it's painful to stand for several minutes while I wait for a bus.
One day, a homeless guy was sitting on the bench when I got there. A few minutes later, he stood up, walked to the bushes, pulled down his pants, squatted, and unleashed a liquified horror from his ass. He pulled his pants up, and sat back down on the bench.
I don't sit on that bench anymore.
Nearly everyone I know who rides the bus has a story of being harassed by a mentally ill person. Most women I know either refuse to take the bus, or only take it in very careful situations where the odds of being accosted are lower.
We can't have nice things as a public without figuring out a way to help the people in crisis who end up making it worse for everyone.
The US has a lot of competing problems, and underinvestment in poor people and health support is one that collides with public transit.
One thing I've realized in the US is that because of our inequality, people strive hard to earn and buy their way out of misery in a way that is not necessary in large parts of Europe. So in the US we work very hard to earn money to pay for big cars to drive through the suburbs so that we don't have to see homeless people sleeping on the bus when it's cold, and once we've invested in our suburban cars & houses we have personal assets we need to defend (at the expense of communal infrastructure in some cases).
I take the bus regularly in my city, often with a child. janalsncm has legit criticisms of many US public bus systems. I take the bus with the kid so I can avoid driving/parking and go to a few spots that are convenient unencumbered by a vehicle. We tend to take a rapid line that has fewer stops -- and the speed makes it convenient. So the article isn't all wrong. The rapid transit line does earn my business. But at the same time, we don't take the bus everywhere because it is not convenient for long trips with transfers, and I likely have a higher threshold for explaining, "Honey don't stare at that guy with the foil and the lighter" than most well-off US parents. (In Europe we take transit all over.)
I'd assume people managing routes do this sort of analysis already. If they don't then sure give this a go in a few places and measure the results. Sounds like its worth a short if we're so off from EU.
It's might better in the system throughput, and those benefits may even outweigh the misery put on that one person. But in the US, we largely sort that out by using cool-down times, hearings, and "community input."
Net result, according to my friend at least, is that bus stops feel _very_ sticky and hard to change.
Though, as you mention it's a big political ask (which is unfortunate).
moralestapia•1h ago
I agree with the claim that "fewer stops, faster service" on the surface.
However we'd have to see if that's truly the case, as cities have red lights and traffic, so the bus stops anyway ... I believe, taking this into account, the difference might not be that significant.
mschuster91•1h ago
Two problems - for one, riders entering and exiting takes time, especially if the public transit scheme says you can only enter at the front and have to show/buy tickets at the driver, and the other problem is that in most areas, buses cannot request a green light, so with a loop time of 1-2 minutes (quite common in German cities on busy roads) you may easily lose 2-3 minutes in the worst case just from a mismatch of departure with the light being green.
And over the course of a few stops, that lost time can add up quickly.
kshacker•1h ago
IAmBroom•1h ago
piinbinary•1h ago
I'm also curious how bus stops interact with timed lights. Presumably each time the bus stops, it gets kicked back to the next cycle of green lights (which might be a low-single-digit minute delay).
Hopefully there's a traffic engineer in the audience who can give the real answers.
johannes1234321•1h ago
Of course this has limits on density of traffic lights and traffic isn't fully predictable either, but overall this works quite well, giving busses mostly a green wave.