I 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. 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.
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 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!
Marginal changes cut in both directions. The transport duration between A and B is only one part of the calculation. A rider also needs to get from their starting point to A, and from B to their destination.
Decreasing the number of As and Bs by half might reduce that 20% start/stop time by half, shaving 10% off the total time. (This is ignoring the fact that more people will need to board and leave at each stop, which might mean in reality you’re saving like 8%.)
But you will also increase the distance walked to the bus stop. That means battling cars and weather.
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.
> I'm personally able to walk a block or two further
“A block or 2” each way at the start and destination is a significant difference (4-8 blocks) 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 as critical vs coverage here.
> as primary means of transportation and arguably more importantly as a backup means of transportation
One bus route can't wear two hats. Faster, sparser routes are typically complemented by slow, meandering collector routes which provide the kind of backstop you describe. Moreover, elderly and disabled people can use paratransit [1], which exists precisely to serve people with mobility issues too severe for regular transit.
Anyway, I reject the notion of buses as a second-tier transit option reserved for poor and disabled people. The only way poor people ever get decent service is when they use the same infrastructure that affluent people do. A bus system that doesn't serve the middle class is a system that will quickly lose its funding and become inadequate for anyone to use.
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. There's a stigma to using it. You end up with long, slow bus lines because this allows as many of the current demographic (elderly, poor) to take the bus. And there are always bailouts or brutal cuts on the horizon. You end up at a sort-of local maxima of inadequacy.
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.
This alternate universe is a city like London. Transport for London has a balanced budget, and despite what grumpy Brits like to say, quality of service is on an ever-upwards trajectory.
In my opinion, operating transport as transportation programme, not a social programme, is how you get more adoption in the long term. You make public transport attractive to more demographics.
> 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 latter is the thing which is going to create the most opposition, because you're essentially screwing people over during the transition period -- which would take years if not decades.
In the meantime people still can't take the bus because the higher density housing that makes mass transit viable where they live hasn't been built yet etc., and as long as they're stuck in a car they're going to fight you hard if you try to make being stuck in a car even worse.
Meanwhile, cars are expensive. ~$500/mo for a typical car payment, another $100+ for insurance, another $100+ for gas, you're already at $8400+/year per vehicle before adding repairs and maintenance etc. For a two-car household that's more than 20% of the median household income. Make mass transit completely free and people start preferring the housing where mass transit is viable, which means more of it gets built, which is the thing you need to actually make it work.
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 also view the bus as a social program. Even if you get the political capital to push a bus only lane, traffic enforcement will routinely ignore bus lane violations. LA is making waves on the latter problem by attaching cameras to buses which automatically write tickets for cars blocking the bus lane.
Ultimately it's a politics problem. If nobody wants to spend political capital on running a bus system as a transport program, it ends up as a social program.
Spot-on analysis. I agree that transport should operate on a basically break-even basis, but offset in two ways:
1. Where the Government wants to subsidize some group (e.g. help the disadvantaged by giving them discounts) they should pay the fair price to the transit agency out of the budget of Welfare, not drag on the financials of the transport agency. In other words, it shouldn't be possible that the transport agency is insolvent only because most of their customers are paying next to nothing. Discussions about whether we should spend a certain sum on subsidizing the poor to ride the bus/train/etc are purely welfare budget discussions.
2. The Government should move additional money into the system when they realize an expansion of transport helps further societal goals: e.g. congestion pricing funds should help to expand transit, or the government pays part of the cost to build new rail service to reduce congestion on the roads.
Incidentally, London has a "Freedom Pass" (free transport for retirees), which is funded in the way you describe.
Instead of TfL being forced to take the loss, they are reimbursed by local government cost of the transport.
As an aside, I also take some issue with this pass being completely free to use. In my experience, people end up using it to go a single stop just because it's free, so why not -- which slows bus service for everyone else. I think it should be 20p per journey or something like that.
This idea occurred to me while I was traveling in Europe. Many of their trains have two classes of cars, where the first class is just slightly nicer. This could be done with buses too. Just alternate buses on the same route, that are expensive and free. The poor can take the free bus, and those who want a more exclusive social experience can pay for the expensive bus.
I can't make any excuses for the social and class implications, but if it got more people on the bus, it might only need to be a temporary measure.
It’s a large percentage of total bus revenue by design, and a significant expense for some local governments. But the number only look large because of how we split the vast majority of government spending into federal and state budgets with local budgets being relatively anemic by comparison.
Sure, lets have the minority of the population force us into design choices that are detrimental to the majority of bus users.
When living in many a European city, I have chosen to walk instead of using a bus route due to the frequent stops making the bus trip a lot more expensive and marginally quicker. I have also lived in places where the eldery get a separate service, tailored to them, if they need it. Works a lot better IMO.
Having lived in SF I've seen many cycles where the SFMTA says "We'd like to make (insert any changes)..." and the 'advocates' immediately come out of the woodwork to make the argument you're making, about how walking another block or two is impossible for some constituents.
Fundamentally as another commenter here said, a bus "can't wear two hats." In most large US cities, the bus, and sometimes the subway (if one exists), is mostly a welfare program, and its target demographic is the elderly, the poor, and the homeless. Two of those groups are rarely in any hurry.
The fact that urban professionals also rely on transit to actually get to work is not very much considered in the decisions ultimately made. This is why any changes to it are so fraught.
To actually serve both populations, you'd need to have two independent systems, but that would represent a tremendous amount of incremental cost. That's why they used to have (do they still? I'd guess not, post-pandemic) buses paid for by Apple, Google, Facebook etc. to shuttle people to work -- it's something the city government could never accomplish because the choices that make transit useful to those with jobs make it problematic for the other group.
The US already has a completely separate model where we send yellow busses to pick up and drop off school kids which involve buses going to a large fraction of US homes 4 times a day 180 days a year for minimal expenses that’s free at the point of use.
Nothing stops you have adding express bus routes, thus allowing busses to work for yet another population. Further, bus networks are inherently cheap as long as they see reasonable ridership numbers it’s more economically efficient than cars.
In Seattle large employers still run their own private busses. This has been going on since long before the pandemic. These busses often tie in to existing transit options. They take you from the office to a neighborhood transit hub.
> 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.
It's not feasible to have a bus stop right in front of every house. It's unavoidable that most people are going to have to walk a bit. How far is reasonable, is a matter of trade-offs. It also depends on how fine grained the network is. If there are buslines every block, it's annoying if they don't stop there. But you have to walk a block or two to get to a bus line anyway, walking that bit more to get to the stop itself, matters a lot less.
> It's not feasible to have a bus stop right in front of every house.
And this is why point-to-point transportation is almost always faster and more convenient, if you can afford to use it. (That load-bearing "if" is important, though.)
> And this is why point-to-point transportation is almost always faster and more convenient
Point-to-point transportation is faster and more convenient because:
1. we don't have bus lanes so buses are forced to sit in the same traffic as cars and
2. buses are often underfunded so have slow/infrequent service.
Point to point transportation is often slower and less convenient if buses and public transit is done right. I can count on my fingers the number of times I used an Uber or drove a car in the 1 month that I stayed in Europe - this was going out every day, in multiple cities, rural and urban, and across different countries.
This is a good thing! If more people use public transit when it's possible, it opens up the roads for the handful of people who actually NEED to use a car.
Self driving cars for hire (Waymo, Tesla, others) can be that point-to-point system that is affordable. We will just have to build tunnels to deal with the increase in traffic. Hopefully the Boring Company or someone else can get tunneling costs way down.
Hopefully someone else, so it actually happens and isn't overpromised and underdelivered.
(Also, tunnels are useful not just for the increase in traffic, but for moving car traffic away from non-car traffic, which makes both kinds of traffic safer, faster, and more efficient.)
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're talking about cities, of course; in rural areas, nothing beats cars.
Does Chicago not mandate people shovel their drives ways? In most towns/cities in upstate new york you can get a fine if you don't shovel your sidewalk.
I'm not in Chicago but where I am you have 24 hours after the snow stops to shovel your sidewalk. And realistically, they don't start handing out fines until at least a few days after that, if at all.
that's right, the best solution is probably something like every other bus (excepting very low frequency buses that have fewer than 5-6 buses per hour) to only stop at every other stop (of course always including interchange points).
As an European I don't mind buses at all. I neither feel unsafe nor I find them dirty.
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.
Maybe it goes without saying, but the reason you don’t mind the bus in Europe is not because you are European but because the European buses are nicer.
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.
Honestly, there aren't that many crazy people on the SF Muni/busses. The detractor for taking these services is speed and frequency.
Even factoring in parking, traffic, and bus lanes, it's much faster to drive within SF than take the bus. Stopping every 2 blocks and missing every other green light kills throughput.
My local bus stop to connect to BART supposedly had service every 20 mins, but often a bus would be out of service and the wait would be 30-40 minutes. Unless a bus was right there, it was faster to walk.
The crazy people depend a lot on routes, the part of the city, and the time of day. E.g. the 1 (Sacramento St/California St) is basically fine all the time. The 38 (Geary) and 14 (Mission) are OK during the commute rush since they are packed full of commuters, but outside of those times, you will eventually see all kinds of unsocial behavior (shouting, fights, defecation, etc.), especially closer to civic center/tenderloin/mission.
>> Maybe it goes without saying, but the reason you don’t mind the bus in Europe is not because you are European but because the European buses are nicer.
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.
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 time schedules and find it confusing and overwhelming and often have a low tolerance for the embarrassment that can come with publicly learning something.
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 customers who make up 99% of their passengers, but everyone has to be a first-timer before they can be a long-timer. It's not just UX papercuts, the experience seems designed to be maximally hostile. Is it because one more marginal person is a little more delay, a little more crowding, etc? It feels like there are perverse incentives at work.
It's the same in Europe. There are many car drivers who would never admit that, but they just don't want to leave their comfort zone and learn how to use public transport. But when asked they will say stuff like "well, we live a bit outside the city", or "now with kids you basically need a car".
Do you have any sources on that? In basically any European country the car dominates and is used far more than public transport. Even in cycle-friendly Netherlands the majority of people go to work by car.
That's not majority of trips, it's by distance travelled.
Basically in the Netherlands, if you're within 5-10km, you go by bike. If public transport is reasonable, which it mostly is in urban areas, you take it. You'd almost never choose car within a major city, unless it's on the outskirts.
Make it legal for kids to move around on their own and take transit to school, just like they do in most of Europe and beyond. Parents are lazy, so many kids will. That's a lesson in public transportation use right there.
> Make it legal for kids to move around on their own and take transit to school
... it is legal though? But if you live in the typical US suburb then good luck with that. You'll catch a district provided bus to school and if your parents don't want to drive you somewhere you'll ride a bike or just not go.
Taking the bus in the suburbs often means walking 15 minutes, waiting on 45+ minute service, and switching routes at a transfer station. It's an ordeal to say the least.
Yeah suburban bus service really just doesn't work. Not enough density. I live in a small town and they try but it's the same issue. Most buses drive around nearly empty and just slow down the cars that are following.
Rush hour CTA in Chicago is packed like that at least on some routes in and out of downtown. Or rather it used to be, I have not lived there in quite some time so not sure about today.
There is also the monetary angle. How many european households can afford a car for both parents and a car each for two kids, registered, insured, paid for to park wherever they go?
Even if you are poor in the US cars are remarkably accessible. You can finance a used car with no credit and a couple dozen dollars a month.
always seemed obvious to me that the reason for the disparity is that european buses are a way to get around dense cities and US buses are a welfare program for residents of sparser cities who can't afford cars. the bus lines don't actually go anywhere people care about, they're their just to provide the bare minimum ability to go somewhere.
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.
Which of the cities used as examples in the articles are "sparse"? LA? Pittsburgh is one of the smaller ones listed and while the bus network there is very hub and spoke, it's also still semi usable.
But to call NYC, LA, Philly, Chicago, Minneapolis, Houston, etc sparse doesn't seem very accurate. Yes, LA is vast, but I wouldn't call it sparse.
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 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.
Half of all dutch people own cars (10,062,194 cars / 17,904,421 people). The majority of people still ride bikes or take public transport to move around except when they need to take their car. For comparison, a majority of americans have a car (259,238,294 cars / 333,287,557 people). Note that the denominator includes children in both cases.
You're not asked to give up going to the wilderness.
Regarding scheduling, in my eyes public transport where the mean time between busses is not under 15 minutes is not public transport. Running after a bus is a signal that the frequency is too low. "I need to leave five minutes ago to take the bus I intended" should be followed by "if I leave now I'll be a few minutes early for the next one".
You are right, I was not asked to give up going to the wilderness; I just want to go to the wilderness of my choosing and not be constrained by someone else's transportation.
Funny thing about scheduling. I have to plan to leave an hour earlier than I need to, and even then, I'm frequently late. Yet, my hyperfocus kicks in when I sit in the car and go through the rituals of "I'm driving now." The vigilance can be exhausting, but usually only bothers me when I'm leaving an observing site at 3 o'clock in the morning or I'm driving at twilight in deer country.
2. This is why non-car-centric countries don't ban cars. If you're that kind of person (and not everybody is), you buy a car. You may not use it beyond these wilderness activities though.
Good points. A few years ago, I visited a friend in Estonia, and even though he was in Tartu proper, they still drove almost everywhere. Essentials were only available by car.
Trains are an interesting subject. For them to be useful, you would need to have rails covering the same destinations and paths as the highway system. One should also be aware of network effects when adding another layer of transportation services, including how they affect the distribution of services and residences. From experience, we know that roadways encourage spread because they allow you to cover a greater area with little time cost. Rail will likely encourage denser development and a higher cost of living due to a greater influence of rent-seeking entities.
One of the tensions one would need to explore is the tension between the need/desire of a chunk of the population to keep their distance, keep their living space separate from others, and be acoustically and physically isolated from them, while still needing services a 30-minute drive away.
Living with ADHD also increases your chances of getting into a car accident substantially. I can't find the numbers now, but the increase is non-trivial and there are some clear mechanisms (inattention, impulsivity and risk-seeking behaviors).
ADHD is a big part of the reason I don't drive. I'm lucky enough to live in Berkeley which is very walkable with decent transit, and I would hesitate to move anywhere more car-oriented exactly because I have ADHD.
Yeah, ADHD does affect one's ability to drive safely. On the other hand, I've been driving for over 50 years. I've had one accident that I was responsible for. Various other vehicles have been involved in five other accidents where the other driver backed into my parked car.
I think the reason I've been hypervigilant about safe driving practices is that my father owned a rigging company, and I was driving forklifts and stake trucks in the yard from about 13. I understood the impact a vehicle could have on other things, people included. Living in that world from about age nine on teaches you to be obsessive about properly securing a load (Molding machines, air handling units, lathes, etc.).
I've often thought people would be better drivers if they started their driving experience with the motorcycle safety training course curriculum and drove for a year on motorized two wheels, taking up the lane and keeping up with traffic.
When I was younger I was lucky enough to live somewhere rural where I got into a couple of single car accidents that I walked away from. Now my ADHD hyper focus is super attentive when driving.
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.
COTA provides decent service to get around in the downtown and directly adjacent neighborhoods, but it drops off sharply as soon as you get outside of that area.
I live just outside the beltway. Driving to the OSU stadium just north of downtown would take me about 25 minutes. According to Google maps, the nearest COTA stop is a 20 minute walk away, then it's an hour and ten minutes to get to the stadium.
Agreed it would be lovely to be able to hop on a bus or train and get somewhere within a reasonable amount of time.
I live in Berlin and strongly prefer the bike over the bus because buses are slow and unreliable. I wish we had a lot more bus lanes and aggressively towed cars blocking them. More subways would be even better though.
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 right and physically separate bus lanes is doing it right.
I'm not a fan of busses and use em only by necessity. Otherwise I prefer trams and bicycles much more. Trams are more chill due to less hard turns and more space, bicycles are a beast for fast arrival if infra is ok. In Zurich trams are very nice, but bike infra comsi comsa up to bad depending on area.
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 matter of routine. The inconvenience may be less per delay but busses are delayed far more frequently than trams and trains on most of the public transport systems I've used. So for regular users, the cumulative inconvenience is much worse on busses than on trains/trams. Which is why people flock to trains and trams when available as an alternative to busses.
Specifically with regard to the parent, the frequency at which unplanned outages happens with tram services in Zurich is extremely low in my experience - certainly planned changes to schedules or routes (for maintenance, upgrades, etc.) are far more frequent. And when "something happens" (i.e. a traffic accident), the path for trams is cleared as quickly as possible - often in 30 minutes or less - so you'd really have to be unlucky to be inconvenienced by such an occurrence.
In most situations you want trams to have own lanes and semaphore priority which reduces collision chances to a minimum. Worst case you can have some spare busses to provide temporary replacement services for such situations or you can divert some buses from other lines to provide services in problematic sector till situation isn't resolved.
I sometimes take a peak into European busses but I don't see 25-30 people sitting in there on average. That is a lot of people.
Busses, at least the one where I live in Europe, are very loud, noisy and smelly. I'd rather have 20 cars pass my home than one bus. I don't hear or feel those cars but once that bus passes my coffee cup visibly shakes. I also don't mind cycling behind most cars but cycling behind a bus is a terrible experience. You feel the heat blasting out of the rear-right side and the diesel smoke is terrible.
As an European I really _do_ mind buses. I try to avoid riding them as much as possible. They are dirty, smelly, and really cramped with little legroom. I would really hate living somewhere where I was forced to use them, and would rather move elsewhere.
> 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).
Some animated GIFs illustrating how much space automobiles take up compared to alternatives:
> Two, removing stops will likely not make the remaining stops nicer. Cities aren’t thinking about how to allocate a fixed bus budget.
But that’s not at all what the article is about?
The thesis is not that having bus stops with music and heating and free drinks will make more people take the bus, it’s that in the U.S., the slowness of buses is making them an unattractive option. And stopping too often is a major reason.
As someone living in SF I 100% agree. The bus stops all the time. The muni is also crazy slow on the west side because it has to mark every single stop at every block just like any car instead of just having priority.
It does that, but the parent means stop signs. San Francisco where there aren't traffic lights mostly blankets every intersection with 4 way stop signs. The parent is likely referring to The Sunset district, which looks like this: https://www.google.com/maps/@37.7569397,-122.5007035,3a,75y,...
There is technology at least with traffic lights so that buses get priority by detecting an oncoming bus and either extending the green or shortening the red.
There is weird stigma in the US about buses but not trains (entirely). If you ride the bus you’re assumed poor or pathetic. I was in Colorado for work, they had me stay in Boulder and I would take the bus in the morning to Lafayette. A few people were on the bus in the morning when I got on and by the time we left Boulder city limits I had the bus to myself. Pretty fast, smooth, and cheap. I would then explain to my coworkers how I arrived that day; they were confused why I wouldn’t take an expensive Uber or rent a car and demanded that I accept a ride back to the hotel from them instead. Some even offering to drive 40minutes round trip since they didn’t live in Boulder. They said the “buses weren’t good” with no explainer as to why. I personally think they just wanted to show-off their cars. Just bizarre.
I took a Greyhound a couple of times when I was in the US, and the experience immediately showed me why Americans hate buses and coaches.
My first transfer was in Sacramento. The entire bus got held up for over an hour because someone saw a man with a knife and security had to search absolutely everyone to try to find it.
Half the stations were literally crumbling, as in the ceilings were falling down and covered in water stains and flecks of black mould. The drivers often turned up hours late, which is apparently expected and normal. The stations tended to be in exciting hotspots such as Skid Row, to cater for the desperate clientele who had no choice but to run the gauntlet.
Also, after the first time I rode it and told everyone about the knife that nobody ever found, people started showing me news stories about the man who got beheaded on a Greyhound in Canada.
Overall I think they have very patchy bus and coach systems and over-index on the worst examples.
Just want to mention that the type of bus I'm referring to is the local municipal bus system in Colorado not Greyhound-type national bus lines. The national bus lines like Greyhound are indeed in disrepair, even in Nyc the bus stop is essentially the parking lot you leave from. It can be 100F or 0F and if you get a delay it's miserable. The main difference being the local municipal system is under utilized and the private corporation system is probably squeezing pennies for service.
I live in a relatively large Canadian city. Not as a suburbanite, but right in the heart of the city.
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.
At risk of sounding like a mindless futurist, I will say that the Transit App has considerably improved my experience of public transit in the US, because it doesn't tell me when the next scheduled ride is, but instead when the next actual bus is, based on realtime data provided by other Transit users onboard the vehicle.
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.
Another failure mode I've seen is a tourist with their phone set to their home timezone having their Google Maps mentioning bus lines I wasn't familiar with (which were the late night service that wouldn't go by any time soon). This seems like a weird failure mode for the app to have, as it clearly had network connectivity and should have noticed the discrepancy (or at least provide a notice).
Appreciate the recc but what I'm trying to get at in the parent comment is that by that time you've picked X without having an overall picture of the transit story, you've often already lost. Basically, current route planning works well when you already know where you're going, but is much more limited when you're exploring the problem space that is where could I be going.
My internal thought process as a tourist is that I have a starting point and end point in a city, and some number of hours in between. I want to do some touristy things in that time, and I don't want to waste it all waiting for transfers. I'm not asking Google Maps to be a tour operator for me, but it also can't even help when I have a specific thing I need of which there are many instances, and I'm like... I don't care which electronics store I go to, I just need an electronics store and would like one that's convenient to where I am by transit. Or like, there are four Apple Stores in this city, which one is fastest to get to by transit?
Another recent example was having a seven hour layover in Tokyo where I had to do the Narita -> Haneda shuffle, and wanted to eat something not-airport-food during that time. I really struggled with getting Google Maps to show me where would be a good point to aim for a stop that was convenient by train to both airports; in the end I asked ChatGPT which suggested Ueno Station and I ate monjayaki which was delicious.
The problem with buses is always not enough buses. If a bus came every 5 minutes you wouldn't need to spread out the stops as they would naturally spread out with fewer people getting on/off due to more busses. It would make transfers more tolerable, missing a bus wouldn't matter, buses wouldn't get packed around rush-hour, etc. Buses could be a great public transportation system but I don't think any city cares enough about public transportation to properly fund it. It's easier to pass single, large funding bill for some light-rail boondoggle than it is to continuously fund a working solution.
> 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.
n = 1 but this is precisely why I seldom rode the bus in college. Except for going clear across campus in the evening to apartment complexes that were a semi-substantial trek down the highway it was always quicker to walk. Walking 1.5 miles in 25 minutes was faster than a bus that made 14 stops before it got to where you were going.
I like light rail. It has the advantages of cutting through traffic and being more efficient to boot. I'd say we should adapt buses to a similar modality but anecdotally bus-only lanes don't work as well as they ought to because, as a surprise to nobody, people are bad drivers and interfere with their operation.
>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.
With all due respect, I feel the one asserting things without argument might be you. The whole article is about how number of stops is too high and so drives low ridership.
I am incapable of even trying to provide quotes from the text, as that would mean simply restating the text in its entirety.
I will say in my city I tried the bus twice and the number one reason I never used more is that it was incredibly slow. And the frequent stops were absolutely a contributing factor. People could pull the chord to get off nearly anywhere and did. And a trip that might take 15 minutes by char could take 45 minutes to an hour and fifteen.
That said, I do agree that this being the number one issue everywhere or even where I live is far from certain.
As a driver, the number one thing I hate are bus stops near intersections without dedicated bus lanes.
did we not read the same article? i saw three main claims in the article:
- removing stops makes the bus faster: obviously true.
- bus stops in america are closer together than bus stops in other places: backed up by data in the article.
- making the bus faster makes it better for riders. subjective, but as a bus rider i very much agree.
i don't understand how you can read this article and come to the conclusion that it's about making bus stops "nicer". that's just a little tangent it mentions. it'd be nice if bus stops were nicer.
You've got a point, but the article's thesis is still correct.
The article points to case studies where reducing stops increased ridership: clearly this does make a difference
But I agree that truly good bus service requires commitment and budget. A city that only improves its transit in fast, cheap ways is doomed to bad transit.
At least in Melbourne, the tram network genuinely does have too many stops. Stops which are only a few minutes walk from each other.
Which results in the trams being incredibly slow compared to driving even if they are frequent, clean, and generally nice. Since the network already needs total overhaul to be wheelchair accessible, there has been a plan to combine 3 stops in to two wheelchair accessible ones. Which will also speed up the trams since they don’t have to stop as often.
The number of stops inversely affects speed, and the bus is really slow compared to driving in pretty much all of the US. A 15 minute car drive is a no brainer compared to a one or two hour bus.
It is possible to have faster buses, even time competitive ones. Though stop spacing is only one component of such a system, the other being dedicated infrastructure and traffic priority.
Having lived in Vancouver and NYC and now LA I think I’ve seen both sides of things, and I don’t think these things are quite as insurmountable as you think.
I don’t think public transit is ever that pleasant, but I rarely felt unsafe in Vancouver or even NYC compared to LA.
One thing that I disagree with is the timing. In a lot of cases I’d rather spend 20 minutes more on the bus than driving. It’s much easier to hop on a bus, listen to music and walk to my destination than deal with traffic or parking. Also, in cities that have properly invested in transit, there are things to do around the transit points. Grocery stores, coffee shops, general stores etc, so I’m often doing 2-3 things in a single trip. Whereas in LA, each of those things is a separate car journey away for me, so overall things are less efficient.
I'm from the East Coast. I lived a bit in Vancouver. The bus is the place to be. Everybody from all walks of life is on the bus.
I went to Seattle for one weekend and experienced the sad view of only the poorest people taking the bus. It was enlightening and changed my outlook on life.
> In my experience, the bus is not a nice experience. The bus feels dirty, unsafe and hostile.
This depends very much on where you are in the world.
Full disclosure: I have visited a lot of cities/countries, approx 70k flown miles last year. I almost always try to use public transport where possible.
The last "not nice" experience in a bus was in SFO, travelling back to my hotel from the Cathedral of Saint Mary of the Assumption. Make of that what you will.
> One, the article asserts that too many stops is the main cause of low ridership in the US.
That's not what I read. The article is saying that you can get meaningful service improvements via what is essentially a free measure: cutting the number of stops. I personally regularly take a route in San Francisco that would unquestionably be better off by cutting a swathe of stops through the Mission, where it stops every two blocks on a street with painful light cycles and tons of pedestrian traffic.
The result is that by the afternoon, two or three buses on this route have piled up, one right behind the other, and passengers have to wait 45 minutes for the next one if they miss one of those.
Marginal improvements do matter, because any improvement in usage you get from slightly improved service gets more people invested in making the bigger, more important changes done.
I used buses most of my life before remote work, even having a car, because I lived in place were this is feasible, and for me it is a no-brainer that more stops means a slower trip. It does makes a huge difference.
Buses running between full on stations are faster than buses that comprise the network edges. Because the core of the network is focused on capacity. Buses that meander around to provide coverage, minimize walking, and stop every other block are really slow. Like 6 MPH end to end, no faster than riding a bicycle! Do we want a bus network to compete with walking/biking or with driving downtown?
Low ridership actually makes public transit feel even worse. Encourages loitering and restricts ridership to only the most desperate people. In NYC at least the buses tend to be pretty heavily utilized and I've personally never felt unsafe or put off by the condition of a bus. It's marginally more pleasant than riding the subway.
Stop frequency is too high on most of my trips. I might have 60 stops in front of me for certain trips I make on bus. It contributes to a ton of time all that dwell time adding up. Where there are express routings offered on top of local routes with maybe 1/4 the stop frequency, time savings are like 1.5x by my estimate.
> I believe the central thesis of this article is unsupported
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.
The buses in SLC are clean and friendly. The only buses I have experienced hostility with are Greyhound, and that hostility came exclusively from the workers. What's the difference between my city and yours? Budget? Population? Probably a mix of both.
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 number of bus stops might matter at the margins, we’re not talking about a system where marginal improvements will matter
The central argument of reducing stops is increasing bus speed, not reducing margins, It's in the second paragraph.
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Top comment is a straw man, attempt to correct course downvoted... I'm not sure how much value HN has left for useful discourse, who the fuck are you people, if you even are people.
You're being downvoted because you misunderstood the post you're replying to. They aren't referring to profit margins, but marginal utility—i.e. incremental improvements to stop spacing (purportedly) would not be enough to fix a fundamentally broken system.
funnily enough, buses in philadelphia are IMO pretty nice. Especially the current fleet. No more hiking up narrow stairs. They sit low to the curb, easy on and off, go to a lot of locations, and they're clean inside and out.
Compare that to the subway which several stories below city hall, nasty, dirty, filthy, stinking air, human excrement, rats, etc... I love the bus
In my experience buses are safe and clean, despite what people say and assume in my city both online and in real life. However they are not on time or predictable and that is a huge problem.
They're no dirtier than subways, which people don't mind. People have a very negative association with buses though. The streetcar experience for example is pretty much identical minus the bumps, but they're perceived much more positively. The timing and routes are indeed brutal though. If I wanted to ride the bus to my work the best route is 20 minutes of walking, 10 minutes of riding on a bus that runs every half hour, then another 20 minutes of walking. This is definitely not a rural area or anything either.
What I find interesting is that people have a negative relationship with buses but not with trolley cars, like the old SF trolley cars where you could almost hang off them. If we injected some fun or joy into busses like trolley cars would that improve people's relationships or perspective of them too?
> I believe the central thesis of this article is unsupported, and other assertions are false.
...but then your "In my experience..." section repeats the article's assertions? As in, everything you list as a drawback of riding the bus is exactly what the article claims can be improved by intelligently cutting out some percentage of stops.
Also, I didn't see the claim that "too many stops is the main cause of low ridership." That would be an overreach. The central claim that I see is that optimizing the number of stops, which turns out to result in a net reduction in pretty much all major American cities, is a relatively easy way to marginally improve many aspects of bus systems.
I think your counterarguments are valid, but they're just fleshing out the article's thesis. Simply reducing bus stops and holding everything else constant would not magically improve ridership and the overall experience. And as you say, reducing bus stops and removing money supporting the system will definitely not result in improvements. (And I agree that it is the likely way it would transpire politically.)
You would need to reduce stops and direct the savings into improving the remaining stops. You would need to convert the change into more reliable schedules. To make sense, that would need to increase ridership, and adjust the demographics of riders to include people who don't have to accept "dirty, unsafe and hostile" because they have no other choice. There's little incentive to improve things when the audience is captive and powerless. Also, increased ridership leads to more resources to accomplish the rest.
Of course, the dependencies between all these changes make the improvements more speculative and harder to achieve politically, so I do agree that you can't "just" reduce the number of stops and improve everything. As you said, that would more likely just drain more blood from an already anemic system. But the article is talking about a relatively cheap and easy way to improve things; everything else transit agencies can do is harder and/or more expensive.
> 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.
That first sentence says marginal improvements won't matter. The second sentence says that marginal improvements ("an attractive option for more people") are what are needed. Maybe you're saying that marginal improvements have to reach a threshold in order to be worth doing or achieve any noticeable gains?
I think you missed the core arguments of the article. Fewer stops mean faster bus and faster bus helps with regularity and wait time. It also means you can do more loops with the same number of buses and drivers so it reduces cost per trip.
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.
Why have bus stops at all, waymo should build a transit bus or large van and run them autonomously. Then they could optimize the fleet as they please. Bus stops were a solution to a lack of connectivity and demand.
Demand-responsive transport (DRT) has been tried a bunch of times in all sorts of different environments and pretty much never lives up to the promise. Predictability is really important and ridership drops as soon as users start having to plan too far ahead, which in the past has been essential to DRT routing.
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.
I've seen it work pretty well in a number of places in the form of privately owned minibuses/vans that can rapidly go where the demand is needed.
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.
It's really not ideal. Similar systems are common in Central Asia. They make it difficult for travelers to predict journey times, it's unfriendly to tourists, and it's much less accessible to other populations (e.g. the disabled). They also don't scale well to large urban environments or out of the way journeys in my experience.
Yes, like all systems, it has tradeoffs. Although I would argue that some of the downsides you highlight are worse with traditional bus systems (e.g. the Caribbean bus conductors will happily guide tourists, and I have seen them go off-route frequently to drop off someone with limited mobility. Large cities in other parts of the world have managed to scale the system out to fill in gaps with other forms of transit like Lima, Peru)
The GP was arguing that it NEVER works out, and I'm just pointing out that it does work in many places.
I would much rather rely on the Caribbean minibus systems than try to rely on transit in cities like Phoenix.
> has been tried a bunch of times in all sorts of different environments
Has it? When, where and with what technology?
> Predictability is really important and ridership drops as soon as users start having to plan too far ahead
Uber etc have proven this to be patently false. Existing buses are experiencing dropping ridership - Uber is not.
> won't be able to take advantage of things proven to make buses faster and more consistent
You're replacing buses with auto-shuttles. Just let the shuttles use the bus lanes.
> bus lanes, reducing stop count, transit priority signals
All of these are usable if you widen the scope to include auto-shuttles.
> consistency and response times gained by dynamic routing can easily be overshadowed by increased variability
What is the difference between Busing and Shuttles here? A bus user can keep yanking the stop cord, there can be 1 or 2 disabled passengers who take several minutes to board, there can be 50 children getting on / off. These issues are constants and all are improved with demand based shuttles.
Indeed. And if you want a lot of people to board the bus efficiently at the same time, you need them to agree to congregate somewhere before the bus arrives. One might call such a meeting point a “bus stop” :)
> 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.
yes, and it keeps blocking my bus. Fortunately it is now legal in Chicago for drivers to get fined for stopping in bus stops/bus lanes automatically via cameras on the buses. Not sure if it is actually happening though..
The assumption is that a "waymo bus" would be hailed by an app and the service would plan routes on demand. In such case, bus stops would be needed only in busy areas or in places where it would be dangerous to stop.
This is based on the observation that people, including police, tolerate taxi drivers stopping at places where it's technically illegal.
Autonomy isn’t necessary, but aside from cost there’s nothing stopping a city from operating a bus more like a shared Uber ride. Having fixed stops at fixed times is fairly primitive. They would be smaller shuttles.
At some level this is driven by street design. The reason bus stops are so close in Philadelphia is because they stop every block, and there's a stop sign every block. The blocks are very small.
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.
Removing the stops helps a lot. As an example on SEPTA, the 124/125 [1][2] to Wissahickon T.C. takes 10+ minutes longer than taking the 27 [3] when starting at J.F.K. & 15th.
(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.
> Making these extra stops causes the bus to 'miss' the light cycle at almost every stop.
This would be a much bigger change, but it's also possible for the lights to give priority to buses. When a bus approaches a light, that should trigger the lights to advance to the part of the cycle that gives the bus the green light. That way, you prioritize the 20 people in the bus rather than the 10 people each in their own car.
This happens with trams in the German city I live in. The other advantage is energy efficiency, apparently - if you can keep them traveling at a consistent speed, then they can maintain momentum, as opposed to if they're constantly stopping and starting and need to spend more energy getting up to speed.
It's slightly irritating as a pedestrian when you're waiting to cross the road to get to a tram stop, and you see that the tram is coming in less than a minute, and you know you're not going to be able to cross in time. But that's the sort of slight irritation I'm okay with for better fuel efficiency and faster trams.
> 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.
> I have a map from the 50s on my wall and the bus routes are the same, including numbers, as they are today
A surprising number of bus routes in Dublin still follow, to a large extent, tram routes laid out in the 1870s. And use the same numbers. This stuff is _sticky_ (partly because significantly redesigning an existing route tends to annoy people; there's a fairly strong tendency to just make a new one and leave the existing one running in some capacity).
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 why in countries like Germany pedestrian deaths per mile walked is 8 times lower than the USA (and these numbers continue to move in opposite directions year after year).
Unless you can address this fundamental problem "just walk more" isn't a viable option for transit users.
The bus lines in the US tend to be spread out enough that riders often have to walk a long distance anyway as many/most destinations are far away from the route itself and would require substantial non-bus travel even with infinite bus stops along the route. Given that reality, the density of bus stops along routes seem inefficient for a very small real world improvement.
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).
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.
This is true for everywhere tbh, and thr solution is to make the last mile walkable by people with disabilities.
I see a lot of idolization of NW Europe from the US, but this is still a problem in Europe too. True, it's better than most of the world, but not every NW European city is as walkable or as accessible as people think it is.
I might have missed it (tbh I started skimming at a certain point) but I was disappointed to not see any counter arguments or even downsides addressed.
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. :/
>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 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.
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.
A large chunk of problems faced by regular Americans can be solved by money equivalent to a rounding error compared to how much we spend on military, private health subsidies, interest payments, corporate benefits. Yet the "who will pay for it??" narrative never comes up when talking about any of these, only school lunches and buses.
> 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 suffer from crawling buses.
Maybe this should say New York City needs fewer bus stops? I'd like to see you try.
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 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.
In my experience, the problem was long wait times between buses and unreliable pickup times. That meant you realistically had to add buffer at each end of your trip: in case the bus was early and in case the bus was late. Not only was that more than 20% of my trip time, it was also mental overhead of worrying whether you already missed the bus.
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.
There already are “express” buses that don’t stop at every stop. They don’t solve the issues I described above. Cutting the time between bus arrivals would be a much more effective solution.
For fixed route transit, speed is latency. The faster the bus can make the average trip, the tighter the timetable can be given the same number of buses. Fewer stops also improves consistency which means you can plan to arrive at the stop closer to the scheduled time, and timetables can be tightened even more by reducing the layover times that keep the bus synchronized with the time table.
Separately, the variability problem can be somewhat solved with the real-time location updates that many agencies provide. You'll still have to wait the same amount of time, but some of it can be done comfortably in your house when the bus is running late.
It helps with latency too or schedule padding. Bus schedules are unreliable because of all the stops which slow them down and encourage bunching of busses on a route with a lot of service.
Bus bunching is often blamed on traffic or scheduling, but in my experience in NYC, a lack of enforcement and/or accountability plays a role too. I live near one end of a bus line and commute to the other end 5 days day a week. On a daily basis, there are large gaps where buses miss their scheduled times. Then, as they approach the end of the line, they arrive and depart in groups of three or four, which only worsens the problem.
I reliably pickup times are amplified by the number of stops that are made. The stop and go time is fixed. The amount of time it takes 2 people to exit a bus versus four is lot linear. It depends on how full the bus is. But it definitely does slow down when people are getting off and on at every single stop.
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.
The public services death spiral is real. Services get defunded -> they get worse -> reduced user base -> more cuts. The only way to break the cycle is to improve the services.
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.
I was in SF middle of last year and was on the BART a good bit, and it was... fine? It remains the most objectionably noisy mode of transport I've ever been on, but it didn't feel any less safe than when I've been there previously.
BART is full of white-collar people who use it to commute and to travel around the area (alongside all sorts of other kinds of people, as you would expect for a broadly used service).
Ridership collapsed in 2020 because of the pandemic, for obvious reasons, but it's hard to really blame that on the service itself, or the riders.
Ridership has been gradually recovering since then. Total trips are now up to something like 70% of 2019 levels, and continuing to rise. Number of unique riders is actually above the 2019 level now.
Maybe you haven't tried riding BART again within the past several years?
I left SF ~2021, but even in 2019 it was kind of in a death spiral. Hopefully it's better now, loved it back when I lived there. But still hear mixed reports from friends.
Mass transit systems generally reduce anti-social behavior with either fare gates or heavy policing. For whatever reason, when you crack down on fare evasion you filter out a lot of troublemakers.
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 just not a plausible way to organize a bus route, aiming it at one person with a car.
> 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.
I find this very unlikely to be true for people who have spent any amount of time driving in a city.
They don't own cars because owning a car in the city sucks in a lot of ways, more so than in rural areas.
So yeah, if your point is that if you take away all the bad parts of using a car, and leave public transit as is, then using a car comes out ahead. Splendid.
That feels like you've made a tautology here. In places where public transit is more convenient than driving (and parking), many people choose not to own and drive a car.
Counterpoint: many people are driving cars they cannot afford and car loan delinquencies are at record highs. People would take public transit if it were an option.
If public transit was super convenient I think way more people would take it. There are things and places I don’t frequent purely because of parking and public transit isn’t convenient.
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.
When I was in SF, my European mind was astonished why bus stops are so often (and why there is a cable to pull, but that's a different thing). Considering that the area was less populated than my city. And we also have speedbuses that stop every second or third bus stop.
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.
It's usually buttons in Europe. The cord things always make me think of train emergency stop cords (though these days those are usually "break glass" buttons).
Can you clarify what you mean by dirty? Or why that would be any more dirty than anything else in public? European buses frequently have stop buttons, not sure how those would be any cleaner than a plastic covered cord.
Also not sure what is old-fashioned about a pull cord compared to a bunch of buttons. Just a different way of activating an electrical circuit.
You need to clarify what you mean by "here" and what part of the US you are talking about. The US and Europe are big places and the transit systems are as different inter as they are intra.
The Paris Metro is an absolute run-down antique compared to the trains in Seattle. It would be silly for me to declare that all European metro systems are therefore run down and tatty. If I compare the Barcelona metro to New York, it makes Europe look great. Meanwhile the London Tube is cramped, frequently dilapidated and has its own species of mosquito.
As someone on the great, late 8 (https://fixthel8.com/) in Seattle, I'd happily give up my stop to help it be on time more often. I have three other stops I can walk to within ten minutes of me.
SF is another good example of too many stops. It's honestly comical and I stopped riding the bus in SF at times because the stop count was painful.
Imagine the delays are so prominent, someone decides to make a website for CTA (call-to-action) and semi-regularly shares updates on it...
I've been to Seattle once, (ex-Amazon here) where the DevCon was held in the town while my team was located in Bellevue. I took initiative to rent a bike for a day (60$ for drop-bar gravel bike) I must say although I did not beat the time between Day-1 (Office across spheres) and Bingo (Bellevue office), it was not far off. Even comparing the "Shuttles" Amazon operated, shuttle took about 1h while ride takes around 1h15m. (Plus sweat)
> P.S: I would say I am in a "fair" shape as I ride quite a lot throughout the year.
Nyc has a subway for longer trips. So shorter stops make sense as anyone with a longer trip should be on the subway. However most cities (in the world) are not dense enough to support almost redundant system and in those I believe the speed optimizationis correct.
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
To further elaborate — NYC subway routing is not effective for some kinds of trips
(notoriously: moving north-south through brooklyn/queens, east-west across much of manhattan, etc)
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.
We can also make the bus smaller. And to give the passengers more agency, we can let them drive it. Instead of paying bus fare every time they board, they can pay a larger up-front cost for this bus, and of course, ongoing gas & maintenance. To make sure they don't pose a danger to others, they can also purchase insurance, and of course have some sort of license to operate it.
Not to mention we need places to park these buses. We should require every commercial location to have multi-level parking decks so that there is ample parking.
That's ludicrous. Think of the property values that would be decreased by thusly besmirching the precious skyline! Instead, we should mandate that people build out, wider & longer, rather than taller. Commercial locations should have parking lots for these microbuses (should really come up with a better name for them, too.)
Where I live, the bus line that serves me only has maybe one marked stop. There's a bus depot at the ferry; every where else, you can just stand on the side of the road and wave your hand when the bus comes by and it'll stop for you; when you want to get off on your way home from the ferry, you push the button and let the driver know where to stop.
But that only works because density is low and there's only one plausible destination.
Most optimization is a curve. Arguing for moving closer to the top of the curve is not the same as arguing for moving all the way to the minima on the other side. But why do I have to say that?
NYC is interesting as it has examples of everything. Dense urban, inner suburb-like service and a huge core.
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.
I don't wanna be rude but when someone spends months researching an issue, which systems work and which don't, you should probably give some level of grace and understand how they came to those numbers rather than spit out your first mindless critique.
Whenever I see an article, and the top comment is StudMan69 saying "Uh, no, the article's conclusions are all wrong!" I think to myself: "Gosh! If only the article's author had consulted StudMan69 before writing the article, he could have avoided making such a grave mistake!
I ride the bus and I can tell you right now that I would be pissed if this guy took away my bus stop. That's my critique. I think it's perfectly valid.
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.
I've watched 30 kids get off at their school in the morning. It takes 15 seconds. By your logic, 30 stops adds 15 seconds to a bus's schedule, which is pants-on-head crazy.
Emptying a school bus completely is a lot faster than a city bus stop where people are simultaneously trying to get off the bus and then the new people are also trying to get on the bus and jockey for position and for a seat before the bus can start moving again
So this used to happen on Dublin Bus, but a while back they solved it with an astonishing innovation... a second door! You get on at the front and off at the back. Given that this has been common elsewhere forever, it's unclear why it took them so long, but...
(Bafflingly, they went through a transition period where ~all of the buses had two doors, but the driver rarely opened the back door. It wasn't really until covid that using the back door became standard. Improved things greatly.)
> and jockey for position and for a seat before the bus can start moving again
Do urban buses where you are require people to be seated? Didn't realise that was a thing anywhere. Any (urban, non-intercity) bus I've ever been on takes off as soon as the last person gets in.
A second door is good. Make it even better by people getting on and off from either - those getting off should be first. Many systems work this way and it works great. Trains oten have even more doors, but for a but that often isn't possible.
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've never been on a city bus where the driver waits for people to be seated. Hell, when I lived in Vancouver, they would start moving before everyone had even paid their fare, basically as soon as the door was closed.
That would be true if busses didn't have to accelerate, decelerate, open doors, kneel and go through the many parts of stopping that aren't strictly people getting on or off.
The counterpoint is any bus route that has an express option that runs in parallel. Every time I have taken the express route, the bus can be full to the gills, but is always faster than the non-express bus.
that's simply not how it works, and quite obviously so. the stop time is absolutely not linear in the number of people who board the bus. just think about all the time it takes to slow down, possibly make the whole bus kneel, and then sit up again. by your argument, there should be infinity bus stops, each of which only allowing one single person to load. like, what? surely we can think more critically than this...
So 1/Nth of the ridership is gonna have their stop deleted at a sum total of X man years. But it's all gonna be worth it based on a projected possible upside that may not materialize dependent upon many factors?
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.
You would be pissed that you have to walk for an extra 2 minutes? I wouldn't, but sure. Would you also be pissed about overall bus travel time decreasing by a generous amount?
Doors open time is actually possible to optimize and speed up; with modern tap to pay systems, you can have all door boarding where even at the busiest stops dwells are measured in seconds.
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.
Sections of lines that already have meaningful congestion at adjacent stops wouldn't be a good target for balancing. WMATA in D.C. recently eliminated about 5% of bus stops as part of their overhauled bus network, this is how they described their strategy[1]: "We thought carefully about each stop, looking at things like how many people use it, how far away it is from the next stops, and whether it's safe to walk there. We also listened to feedback from thousands of bus riders."
Additionally, many stops with a lot of people loading and unloading are hubs which would never be balanced away, and often are designated timing points where the bus will wait to get back on schedule, so loading/unloading time is often irrelevant because predictability is being prioritized over speed. Improving speed and consistency with techniques like removing unnecessary stops increases predictability and allows for tightening up timetables and minimizing average hold times.
what if they removed only 33% of the stops?
so per 3 stops, one is removed and the remaining were rearranged.
it might even happen that the new bus stop is closer to your house.
i agree, for the average person, the distance to the stop increases though.
> 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.
I suspect the evidence here would fall mostly on the side of "it increases ridership", though it's probably hard to study, as it's rarely done in isolation, but more commonly as part of route redesign.
Its a statement of religious belief, so other opinions are no less relevant that some "authority"
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.
> I suspect that removing half of the bus stops in a city will piss people off and cause even less ridership.
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.
You're making suspicions about suspicions without numerical data.
According to my cities 2022 annual report (where are 2023-2025?) they provided precisely 464344 unlinked pax trips (UPT) so someone stepped aboard a bus and threw money in the real or virtual fare box 464344 times that year. "Sources of operating funds expended directly generated" which I read as annual fare revenue was $660748.
We have a very simple two tier system $2 for adults and $1 for seniors and disabled. 2(464344-x)+1x=660748 x=267940
So we only had 196404 healthy young adult bus riders that year vs 267940 senior citizens. Your experience is not unusual but also is by far not the majority; a SUBSTANTIAL majority of the people on the bus in my city are too old or too sick or too blind to take long walks in the rain, snow, ice, heat, cold, etc.
Honestly the bus is so slow, if they could walk, they'd probably just walk. So it should not be overly surprising that most on the bus quite literally can't walk, and really need bus stops close together for disability reasons.
So all of this theoretical "well it would be so much faster if there were fewer stops" is irrelevant if the served population is primarily physically disabled, and the system can't survive. And we'd be talking about excluding one of the most powerful voting blocks in the city, that being old people. Eliminating stops would eliminate or reduce 58% of the current riders which would shut the system down, I don't think it could politically survive a hit like that.
Ironically that shutdown might be good as everyone would be better off both financially and environmentally in cars than in buses. Bus exhaust is not exactly perfume to mother nature LOL, and essentially our bus program is not a transit system, its a corrupt jobs program for drivers, mechanics, and especially for highly paid administrators.
> a SUBSTANTIAL majority of the people on the bus in my city are too old or too sick or too blind to take long walks in the rain, snow, ice, heat, cold, etc.
Maybe my city is different, but in every city I've spent substantial time in, there are little tiny busses for those who are not able to walk or roll the average distance between a stop and their home or destination. They are direct, point to point shuttles. If no bus is available, they will send a cab. Those buses and cabs are exactly why you don't have to run a bus up and down every road, with a stop in front of every house, and a driver who can escort passengers to their door. They are astronomically expensive to operate, but the only way to make a transit system that serves everyone.
But in my city, we pay a small fortune to run these little busses, and then _also_, for some reason, assume that no one riding the main system has any mobility.
Also, I'd argue that the reason a "substantial majority" of your transit population is "old, sick, or blind" is because it's such an unattractive option for anyone who has a choice. When the bus is slower than riding your bike, you're not getting Olympic athletes on that thing.
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, 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.
Easily. Going from 700 -> 1000 ft spacing adds 150 feet of walking (x2 for both sides of the trip). That's about 1 minute. Over a mile you'd reduce the number of stops by 2.2. So above 2 miles it's faster even for the lower end of that range of savings.
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.
It depends on how long you are on the bus. It cost a few minutes, but a couple miles on the but makes up for the lost time. So for short trips where healty people should walk or bike it slows things down but for longer trips it is faster.
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.
Meanwhile here in central Austin, it's a 0.9 mile walk from my door to the nearest bus stop that I can use to commute, walking along major stroads some of which don't even have sidewalks, much of the year in Texan heat with no scrap of shade. Then it's up to a 30 minute wait for the delayed or canceled bus, then almost exactly a 1-hour ride on the express 801 to go 7 miles to work downtown.
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.
Give buses signal priority and their own lanes. This would dramatically speed up bus service. However, nobody wants to slow down cars, hence buses will always be a worse option.
Signal Priority only works well if the arrival time of the bus can be predicted some time before arrival at the signal (~30 seconds is a number I've heard a few times). As bus stopping times are highly unpredictable, a lower number of bus stops makes signal priority work much better (and far-side bus stops).
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.
This is how it works in NL, separate lanes with separate signals that may be used only by buses (and other public transportation, including taxis). Works great!
As a Pittsburgh resident who exclusively used bus for 5 years, this certainly seems like a reasonable take. In Oakland and Squirrel Hill the bus almost stops every single block - which always seemed kind of crazy. It's a _very_ common sight to see a beleaguered student miss their bus and successfully chase it down across multiple city blocks.
I will give the PRT (formerly Port Authority) a shout out though:
1. Bikes are quick and convenient to bring along
2. The numbering system is intuitive enough that you can almost guess how to get to new neighborhoods
3. Accessibility is clearly a priority, and they successfully serve many disabled people
This is very true (that re-balancing will help ridership/operations), but politically it's hard to do. Everyone wants better buses, but nobody wants to lose the stop right next to their house/apartment (even if the nearest stop is only a block or two away).
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.
YES! I moved to SF from Paris (where I spent my whole life before that) a year ago. I exclusively use lime instead of public transit because of how slow it is! Going from Folsom&8th to Mason&Girard takes 50 minutes! And you spend most of the time stopped! With a lime I can usually get there in 20 to 25 minutes. I would use my own bike that I use to commute to work if you could lock a bike without getting it stolen almost immediately.
Folding bikes are the answer there IMO. You can just bring it into the office. You can get pretty good electric ones too now (probably a requirement for SF).
I can already bring my regular bike in the office. The problem is when you're meeting with friends, going to a restaurant, well anything that's not commuting to work...
I always bemoan the extra stops when I'm on the bus but I love always being near a bus stop; I do think the limited/skip stop bus idea is good though, as long as theres ones that alternate, though I do also like frequency, so hopefully service remains the same. I think though, more frequency beats speed though
As always, it's a careful balance. And specific to every bus route/stop combination, not to mention it can change over time. Routes should always be evaluated based on ridership data, where people are getting on & off, how long each stop actually delays the overall journey, and more.
Yep this is a "problem" with buses in London. They stop all the time so you never get beyond about 15mph before you start slowing down again for the next stop. The 100% EV buses are better as they accelerate faster, but not by much.
They are starting to introduce "superloop" buses that interlink the more suburban "spokes" for tube & train so you can go "across" London without having to go to the centre and then back out again. I.e. basically express buses that only stop at tube & train stations and other major interchanges.
It is a great idea, but it has been done for political and ideological reasons. They have not introduced express buses for people who work in central London for example (so instead to get to central London on a bus from a suburb means stopping every hundred meters or so, so even with bus lanes progress is brutally slow). These buses going "across" are not actually that useful for most people I expect because people using transport for high-paying central London jobs will be going "in" not "across". It is the "working class" lower paying jobs that might benefit from sideways interconnects between the suburbs - this is the ideological/vote-buying reason they've introduced them.
So removing the bus stops costs you 2 1/2 minutes of walking (150 seconds). And gains you 20 seconds per stop removed that you pass. Therefore you need to pass 8 removed stops to break even. Which seems like quite a commute to me.
I agree that low-stopping services are a good idea. Particularly in the suburbs. Use the high-stopping services to get people to the low-stopping services - and let them change buses for free/cheap. But I think that you still need regular stops, particularly if you are dealing with elderly people. And that in the middle of cities it's totally worth having a lot of stops, so that people can easily find one.
I live on the north side of Chicago and, to be honest, one of my favorite modes of public transit is the express buses that go from Edgewater/Uptown to downtown.
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
Good point but the solution you are describing is having a tiny minority of busses that move quickly between centers of activity faster rather than decreasing the stops on the vast majority of the line.
I think this kind of thing is a bigger problem than people realize. I take a regional commuter bus to and from my local international airport when I fly. The huge bus has to slowly and carefully enter my local universities 'bus loop', making several tight turns through traffic lights to get to the bus stop, and then make the journey out again. It takes 10-15 minutes in traffic to move the bus ~200feet from the boulevard to the bus stop and back to the boulevard again.
Yep, this is a good example of the stops that really slow down bus routes. You have situations where you have to make a stop, like for a big university, but it's not feasible to simply drop people off on the side of a busy/high speed road.
I mean yes. But it has more to do with the design and attitude of bus route planning than whether or not a single stop is mis-designed, or whether there are too many stops overall. A rail line wouldn't have this problem because its clearly ridiculous and impossible to route tracks into a tight loop - the built environment in that case would accommodate the limitations of the rail, and the station would be built 200 feet away from the door. Since busses have the freedom to loop around mindlessly, the built environment refuses to accommodate them.
(Anecdotally) reliability is a huge factor for me — living in NYC, there are a few neighborhoods that would be much easier to reach by bus, but arrival times can vary by more than the length of the entire trip. Easier to just take a subway, even if it means an extra ten minutes of walking on each end.
I’m surprised at the chilly reception to this article.
I ride bus and MAX (light rail) in Portland and despite not being the worst offender, too frequent stops is quite noticeable. When the bus stops every two blocks to let one person on or off each time, it really slows things down.
You can also notice when playing Cities Skylines. It is quite intuitive that making your transit stop constantly is not efficient.
On the rail system, the system has been closing redundant stations and it has made it feel much faster. Small adjustments can make a big difference.
Sure I’d like more transit investment, but that can be paired with using resources well.
The article says, "This pattern, of only those without good alternative options riding the bus, is especially pronounced in the US. But close stop spacing creates problems." But it does not address the point. The bus in the US is aimed at poor, elderly, and disabled people. Elderly and disabled people want stops closer to their homes, especially given the low overall density of bus lines.
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.)
It's probably right, but it's not going to be a panacea: Outside of very few areas in US cities, a key limitation to bus ridership is few trips generated by the catchment areas: How many people would conceivably be served by each stop?
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
The most important factors for public transport usage is reliability (it comes on time) speed and frequency(under 5-10 min wait time depending on area). For high demand areas- trams, for lower demand - trolleys or busses.
To achieve reliability speed and frequency transport needs own lanes and semaphore priority. If there are too few lanes - make one lane dedicated to pub transport and another - single direction for cars. Voila. You can start at worst with 15-20 min wait time, but reliable, and increase nr or units where demand is higher up to using a tram
Everything else has secondary priority. Even the mentioned safety aspect - it'll matter much less if the next bus will come in 5-10 mins and you can skip the current one because of some drunk ppl.
I’m a bit confused why so many people are commenting as if bus stop balancing doesn’t work or that transit riders won’t accept it. From 2010s and 2020s plenty of transit agencies across America have been implementing bus stop rebalancing in Los Angeles, San Francisco, dc, Seattle etc and generally it’s been successful with speeding up buses.
Of course there most of the low hanging fruit with notorious like bus stops every 200/300feet are a lot fewer and the remaining ones to rebalance are a lot harder
Work in the industry: way too many planners and transit consultants are fixating on too many stops as being a problem, likely since it's the one piece of infrastructure they can control when roads and traffic lights are designed for cars not people.
Depending on the road network and land-uses, removing stops only 200-metres apart to make them 400-metres apart (the industry standard) could decrease access to transit within a 5-minute walk by anywhere from 10-50%+, so it's limited to where you can actually apply it without penalizing (ie. putting them outside of a 7-10-minute walk) so many customers that they look for alternatives.
In Europe stop spacings are much longer even for local routes (over 400-800-metres), but this is because everyone generally lives within walking distance for their errands, so transit is used only for longer, more commute-like trips, where a longer walk for faster travel times makes sense. Accessibility is also less of a priority there so they're less sensitive to requests from seniors and those with disabilities, with many buses not being wheelchair accessible. In US/Canada, a lot of transit riders live over a 20-30-minute (often with hostile walking conditions like crossing highway ramps) walk from the nearest grocery store, school, pharmacy, etc., so they'd oppose adding 2-3-minutes of walking to shorten a 10-minute bus ride.
Moreover, closely spaced stops are really only an issue in older (pre-war) downtowns where frequent stops are the result of decades of requests from residents (especially seniors) and from schools/churches/grocery stores/retirement homes/medical clinics. Out in the suburbs, buses usually bypass most stops, and schedules take that into account. And in places with amazing land-use like Pheonix and Vegas, you have long stretches of nothing so of course there'll be higher average stop spacings.
Lastly, much of the time-savings from express routes (that skip stops) and bus stop consolidation/balancing, is from being more in sync with the lights, which are usually designed for through traffic (ie. a green wave). Transit Signal Priority can help achieve significant savings (over 10-30%+) without removing any stops, though moving stops to after the light makes it more effective (and even that can be politically difficult).
Isn't the solution to this to implement bus lanes + express busses on rush hour instead of removing half of the bus stops. Every bus stop is amazingly valuable as it's the gateway to the public transit system. This doesn't mean every bus needs to stop at every stop along its route. This is not a magical European invention even, any busy Asian city will have sth like this.
Bus lanes are much more effective than the express busses to increase ridership by the way. Busses avoiding the traffic jams while the cars getting stuck in them changes the mind of even the most hardcore petrolhead.
Just because bus lanes are beneficial where feasible doesn't mean optimizing the number of bus stops isn't also beneficial.
Clearly it's possible for there to be too many bus stops. You wouldn't put a bus stop every 30 ft. So it's also possible that some existing bus routes have too many stops, and spacing them out more would help.
Back when I lived in SF, there was one bus route (the 6, I believe) that I could use to get to work. The bus was so slow due to frequent, long stops and traffic lights that I could keep up with it on foot by walking briskly. I only bothered taking it when it was raining because it didn't get me to work any faster than walking.
Public transport has an identity problem in the US. Trying to serve 100% of your market will result in a worse service for everyone. It needs to decide if it is for the handicap, the people that don't drive, the people that want to commute, etc.
Making fewer stops helps the commute people and those that are able bodied. It doesn't help serve the people that are handicap.
I'm in Europe and haven't experienced the US public transportation system, so I can't offer an opinion, but in my country the number of stops seem to have a negligible effect on the average speed.
Most of the slowness comes from traffic. Where there are bus lanes, the bus can even be as fast or faster than a car. Some of our trams stop every 300 meters or so, but since they have dedicated lanes, they are pretty quick. Some of the stops are at intersections where a car would also wait. When the timing is right, and most often it is, the trams don't waste more time than would've been wasted just waiting for you turn at the intersection.
Where there is a bike lane parallel to the cars, busses and trams, an electric bike with 35-40 km/h will usually be the the fastest method of transportation, especially if you cross on reds when there's 0% chance of a car hitting you. I'm talking about a busy main street with lots of lights and traffic, not a highway, of course.
Busses with no dedicated bus lanes are slower than cars, because cars are quicker to maneuver and accelerate when needed. I think if out city made the busses (and trams, and trolleys) 2-3 times more frequent, most people would use them. It would be a difference of driving in traffic for 1 hour vs sitting in a bus reading something (or doom scrolling) for 1 hour and 10 minutes. Shorter stops means less walking, so it would incentivize people to use the public transportation more. The benefits are obvious - less traffic overall, less pollution, less energy used, less road rage, more time to chill, and so on.
A really stupid thing in the world of bus stops is the bus stop that is placed immediately before an intersection with a traffic light. The light is green, but someone wants to get on or off, so the bus has to stop at that stop. Then just as it is about to pull out, the light goes yellow.
"Cheap" how? I have a friend who works on Seattle's bus planning. Removing a stop is a _lot_ of political work. When an elderly person depends on that bus stop being within a block so they can get to their doctor, and you're proposing to move it six blocks further away, that's essentially a _political_ cost.
It 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.
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.
We're talking about the US here; they're very good at ignoring solutions to solved problems. See city planning, traffic design, healthcare, zoning, etc. If it's not invented in the US, it can't possibly work there, they claim.
Checking how long would it be for me to get to work in Google maps
Car 25min
Bus 1h.50min
It's so crazy the difference, in other countries it only doubles but in the us is 4x the time.
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?
In European cities this is mitigated by having low-floor buses and stops with level boarding to support mobility scooters and wheelchairs. There are also dedicated taxis available for people with disabilities (possibly subsidised). Over a long term this is also a self-regulating problem. Elderly people and services/businesses for them take into account availability of public transit when choosing properties.
Buses are mass transit. The real goal isn't serving poor people, but moving people with higher throughput than it's possible by cars individually (a single bus fits ~50 people). If you make bus lines slow and fail to attract significant numbers of passengers by forcing buses to serve every whatabout case, you're making them fail at their primary goal.
You can't make half-pregnant public transit. If you have a congested city, and just add nearly empty buses sitting in traffic and blocking lanes at every intersection, it will be strictly worse for everyone. OTOH if you can make buses an attractive option, then each bus can take 30+ cars off the road, leaving room for dedicated bus lanes, more buses, resulting in faster and more regular service.
I would agree with and extend your remarks that we also have problems where traffic patterns and geography don't match political boundaries and transit is traditionally locally run and locally budgeted.
So in the USA you end in scenarios where it takes 20 minutes to drive 20 miles but a bus would take four legs with three transfers across three separate city bus companies, figure at least three hours each way. And again, as per your "mass transit" you can't expect taxpayers in my city to provide a special bus run into my neighboring adjacent city much less the city next to that one.
This results in people being very happy indeed to pay the financial and environmental costs of car ownership to avoid sitting in a bus for six hours of daily commute.
There are also interesting social issues; if you're late its a personal failing, even if you take mass transit. I recall a friend at work getting fired because the bus was late too many times. Oh well, should have bought a car. The feeling of not being in control is further worse due to crime rates. No one will sneak up on my wife and stab her in the neck in her car, but it certainly happens on buses and no one cares if it happens depending on local race relations. None of the other passengers on the bus even cared, for racial reasons. Its pretty messed up here.
Its easy for the public in general to advise others to do inconvenient or career ending or life threatening activities, to "save the planet" or whatever, but I wouldn't do it, and I'd certainly never let my wife or kids do it, so we own cars and avoid public transit at all costs. Not taking that advice as been pretty nice so far.
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-door loading and traffic signal/stop interactions are far more significant than stop count.
> The answer is to keep the same number of stops but run two or more vehicles simultaneously.
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.
In 2022 according to the transit system annual report, the suburban quarter million person city I live in has ten routes and operates about 12 hours per day and per the annual report average weekday service consumed is 1556 UPT, so 1556 people step aboard the system and toss coins in the fare jar or pay with the app. UPT means they're not tracking transfers and essentially 100% of trips require a transfer so the real number of people served daily is closer to 775 than to 1550, but we'll run the optimistic numbers. Each of the ten hourly routes is about 4 miles long. So the overall system drives 12 hours * 10 routes * 4 miles * 5280 feet/mile = 2.5 million feet per day and divide that by 1556 passengers per day that's a pax every 1628 feet driven on an average day.
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 resonates with me. I used to live in a medium-sized US city which prided itself on its public transit. The buses were SO slow, and it's because they would sometimes literally stop every two blocks on a major through street. (This particular city has the smallest "block size" in the US, so it was extra ridiculous). It was infuriating. I would gladly walk twice as far to find the first stop if it meant the bus stopped half as much once I'm on it.
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.
I feel like the gist here is that "faster, better, cheaper: pick two" doesn't apply to sub-optimally-spaced bus stops. You really can have all three, at the cost of some political blowback from the people who used to have a shorter walk.
When I rode the city bus as a teen in South Bend, IN, in the 80s, there were some designated bus stops. But buses worked on a hail model anyway. You could be on any corner on the route, and as the bus approached, you'd just stick up your arm and it would stop. It was really efficient. But I suppose that works best in a small city like South Bend.
Waiting for the umpteenth bus stop when I used to commute by them, I kept thinking how much earlier I would get to work if we had bus lines that stopped every other bus stop with strategically placed transfer stations, where you could switch between them or catch a bus going perpendicular to the first route.
Although long ago now, When I moved from Denmark to Seattle and tried to use the bus, it was immediately apparent that there’s at least double, maybe triple, the number of stops in Seattle’s Metro as there are in the same distance in Copenhagen. At the time I remember thinking that the average Seattle trip would be SO much faster if the number of stops were dramatically reduced.
The average Seattle trip would be so much faster if bus coverage and frequency were increased, and they got dedicated travel lanes.
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.
My observation at the time was mostly in Magnolia to the Belltown area and the place I thought had way too many stops was in the Magnolia neighborhood, almost per block and it seemed a terrible waste. Plus the buses themselves seemed to resent being stopped and started so much—they rattled and groaned and squeaked.
Some areas around Amsterdam have a two-tier bus system, with regular buses with regularly spaced stops, and a network of fast long-distance buses with far less stops and dedicated lanes over their entire trip. They have proven to be incredibly reliable; during the occasional day of terrible weather when trains leave people stranded, these buses still manage to get everybody home in a reasonable time.
> Nithin Vejendla is a transit planner in Philadelphia.
I feel sorry for Philadelphia transit future, this article is totally delulu. Go to any major European city and look how the public transport works, and you won’t have to reinvent the wheel
express buses that go straight from say point A (home) location e.g from a central point e.g Mall to central point B (downtown) can work wonders - if they're given highway access and bus only lanes, automatic green light access etc
then smaller buses etc that run in a loop to serve the frequent stops
but of course - you need cities that are designed better
with electric buses - this is all achievable and economic
Any article about public transit in the US needs to discuss the opioid epidemic and mental health crisis. Otherwise, it's like claiming that bicycles work great for the Netherlands, so people should ride them in the Himalayas.
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.
We need smarter dynamic fares, it shouldn't be a $6 flat tax on all destinations. I think this hurts local businesses, or all local (non business) residents should automatically get half fare.
The opposite actually tends to increase ridership; complex fare systems put people off and tend to make getting on the bus more time consuming (may require each passenger to interact with the driver).
Skeptical notes based on my own experiences in Seattle (≈1148ft average per article - which might be considered high enough that the article already considers the mission for fewer bus stops a success?):
Some of the routes I've taken had "express" variants that skipped many stops, yet still stopped at my usual start and exit. I never bothered waiting for them - the savings were marginal, and taking the first bus was typically fastest, express or not. Time variation due to traffic etc. meant you couldn't really plan around which one you wanted to take either.
The buses already skip stops where they don't see anyone waiting for the bus, and nobody pulls the coord to request an exit, and said skipping tends to happen even during the dense rush hour. Additionally, stop time seems to be dominated by passenger load/unload. Clustering at fewer bus stops doesn't significantly change how much time that takes much, it just bunches it together in longer chunks. The routes where this happens a lot also tend to be the routes where they're going to be starting and stopping frequently for traffic lights anyways - often stopping before a light for shorter than the red, or after a light and then catching up to the next red.
What makes a significant difference in bus speed is the route.
If the bus takes a route where a highway is taken - up/down I-5 or I-405, or crossing Lake Washington, there are significant time savings. This isn't "having less/fewer bus stops", this is "having some long distance routes that bypass entire metro areas".
Alternatively, buses that manage to take low density routes - not highways per se, but places where there are still few if any traffic lights, and minimal traffic - tend to manage a lot better speed, compared to routes going through city centers. They may have plenty of bus stops, but again skip many of them due to lower density also resulting in lower passenger numbers, and when they do stop it's for less time than a typical traffic light cycle. A passenger might pull the coord, get up to exit, stand while the bus comes to a stop, hop off, and watch the bus pull off, delaying the bus by what... 10 seconds pessimistically for the stop itself, and another 10 seconds for deacceleration and then acceleration back to the speed limit?
Finally, there's also grade separated light rail, grade seperated bus lanes, and bus tunnels through downtown Seattle, that significantly help mass transit flow smoothly even in rush hour, for when you do have to go through a dense metro area. While these are far from fast or cheap to implement, axing a few bus stops isn't going to make other routes competitive when these are an option.
One big dream I have is to have some kind of free of cost at the point of service micro transit -- my dream is basically uber pool without the uber. Vans about the size of a Ford Transit or even a fuller size bus up to 40 passengers that picks up and drops passengers where they are or where they want to go to all with the push of a button on their smart phone and lots of patience. The idea is to have a huge number of government owned public transit vehicles that don't follow any published route but dynamically change their routes almost like some kind of Google Maps or Uber Pool but all the data about where people take rides at what time of the day and where they go and where the hot spots we have are now fully available to the government to improve the fixed route scheduled public transit.
Much of the world has a primitive version of this but unionized bus drivers prevent this from being economical in the west. It’s absolute comedy that NYC has a full fleet of 40 foot buses operating on its narrow streets, obstructing traffic, and forcing drivers to reverse to make turns. I hope they go the way of the buggy whip maker when autonomy is good enough for NYC, they’ve been holding us back from having so many nice things including smaller and more frequent buses.
> Nithin Vejendla is a transit planner in Philadelphia.
I feel sorry for Philadelphia transit future, this article is totally delulu. Go to any major European city and look how the proper public transport works, and you won’t have to reinvent the wheel
It only mentions in passing the success of express buses, which stop at e.g. one-tenth the stops. Like the SBS buses in New York City. On busy routes, these are already the main solution, because they stop at the main transit intersections where most people need to transfer.
Reducing the number of stops for local buses doesn't seem like it will make much difference, for the simple fact that buses don't even always stop at them. If nobody is getting off and nobody is waiting at the stop, which is frequently the case, they don't stop, at least nowhere I've ever lived.
Plus, the main problem isn't even the stop itself -- it's the red light you get stuck at afterwards. But the article doesn't even mention the solution to this -- TSP, or transit signal priority, which helps give more green lights to buses.
If you're going a long distance, hopefully there's an express bus. If you're going a short distance, bus stop spacing seems fine.
Also, what a weasel name, bus stop "balancing". It's not balancing, it's reduction. When the name itself is already dishonest, it's hard for me not to suspect that the real motive behind this is just cutting bus budgets.
"Bus stop reduction" makes it sound like it will make it harder to take the bus. But the point of the article is that's compensated by the buses being more useful because they get where they're going more quickly. So "balancing" seems apt to me.
But it does make it harder to take the bus. That's the point.
And as I pointed out, there are two proven ways of making buses actually much faster. This seems exceedingly unlikely to help, since buses already often skip stops.
Please no. The only place I have extensively taken the bus is Philadelphia, which is listed as the shortest distance between stops, and I wish there were more stops. It gets very cold, and very hot here, no one wants to walk farther.
If you want to increase ridership, make the seats wider and run more often.
Counterpoint: The US needs infinite bus stops served by self-driving "buses". The fixed-route mode of transit planning became a dinosaur with the advent of the smart phone.
A lot of people arguing that these changes wouldn't bring benefits, or that the increased walk distance would crater ridership. I can provide some context from the SF 38 Geary[1] (often claimed to have the highest public transit ridership west of the Mississippi). Some time before COVID, there were 4 variants: 38, 38R which stops every three regular stops, and the 38AX and 38BX which would follow the outer route and then skip most of the stops in the middle(the former was explicitly meant to take commuters from the west side of SF to downtown). A dedicated bus line was added to Geary (with some resistance from some locals as in some areas it required removal of some parking spots[2]).
I have experience with the first three variants before and after the dedicated bus lane. 38AX only ran a couple of times in the morning, always packed and would reliably take 30mins from 25th street (it's last stop before downtown) to Market street. Before the dedicated bus lane, the 38R would take about 40 to 45 minutes from 25th street to Market street, after the bus lane it now takes 30 minutes (making the 38AX redundant). Before the bus lane, the regular 38 would take about 50 minutes from 25th to Market. Google maps now says it takes about 40 minutes.[3] So a dedicated bus lane made as much of a difference as removing every stops in between, while stopping every three stops satill yields about 1/4th of time savings even with the dedicated bus lane (and none of these lines start at 25th, used that because it was the final stop before downtown for the 38AX, riders coming from the start in 48th would see additional savings).
When looking at the ridership, the 38AX was always packed (as it came only a handful of times in the morning no one wanted to miss the last one and then have to take the 38R instead losing 10/15 minutes in their commute), the 38R is consistently more used than the 38. Right now the 38R comes every 6 minutes and the 38 every 15, so whether the ridership is impacted by travel time or frequency, I can't say. At night, only the 38 runs.
The dilemma. Bus takes me about the same time where I want to go if I was just walking, assuming the bus spawns at the bus stop as soon as I get there. Last time I had to take a bus from place of work to home and took about 3 hours. Most of the time sitting in traffic and bus stops. I made the same journey with a cab in less than an hour.
I think bus in busy town is only useful if you have mobility issues, carry a lot of shopping and have no funds for other means of transport.
In my city also buses are typically occupied by feral youth, covered in dirt and smell of weed.
You have to always check if the seat doesn't have fresh bubble gum on it or worse.
Joys of London.
This seems way too tightly focused on this one issue. If it were the case that longer distances between stops alone would result in increased ridership, then Las Vegas ought to have better ridership than most European cities by this article’s stats. Does it? Well, those stats aren’t mentioned in the article, but I’d be surprised, given that for the US cities for which I am familiar with their bus service, the average distance between stops is actually inversely correlated with the quality of the service. Hmmm.
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.
It's arguments is that all the better things are impossible to do without political will and money and therefore we should implement their bad idea.
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.
Ah, a direct pull from the Fascist Manifesto. Bold attempt. I think it’s probably good for some state to actually put this into play so that we can see whether it is indeed broad benefit with specific losers. I’m rooting for California’s proposition just to see what happens, actually.
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.
Yeah, I think so too. But if we’re going to tax them I think setting the limit to 5x median American wealth is fine. That way it impacts a broad enough base that it’s not two wolves and a sheep sitting down to dinner.
That's arbitrary and would still cause issues. You'd cause a mass liquidation event and discourage investing or create a bunch of winners in the tax accounting industry. Unrealized capital gains tax is very unserious and IMO just populist drivel.
Yep. I think the common thread between NIMBY success, bus stops everywhere, and an 8 hour planning meeting to decide if there are too many ice cream shops in the Mission are that we need unanimity to get going.
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.
> lacking basic amenities like shelters, benches, or real-time arrival information. Uneven and cracked sidewalks and a lack of shelter or seating present a particular challenge for elderly and disabled riders.
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.
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.
There are simulators for this, and of course there's data from places that have actually done it.
In Dublin we have a bit of a mixture of newish bus routes which largely have a sensible number of stops, and ancient routes (the oldest evolved out of tram routes laid out in the 1870s), which tend to have a stupidly high number of stops, because once you put one in it's very contentious to remove it. The super-regular stop routes are _so slow_.
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.
The way it is done her ein my European city is that the bus stop is move behind the traffic lights. The bus and the system are in radio contact, thus the position is known. The time the bus needs from current location to the traffic lights on green light can be predicted, thus the system can calculate whether to keep the green light till the bus arrives or turn red, let the crossing traffic go and then turn green for the bus again. The less predictable time of passenger getting off and on (takes time when crowded, wheelchair takes time, but can be fast when nobody requires that stop) is behind the traffic lights, thus doesn't have to go into the calculation.
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.
> However we'd have to see if that's truly the case, as cities have red lights and traffic, so the bus stops anyway.
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.
I'm guessing you don't live in a city. They plan bus stops at lights, so that doesn't really happen - just sometimes there's an extra-long bus pause for mount/dismount.
Yes I am not a bus passenger. I have used buses in some US cities over a decade back, and from those rare trips my memories are not aligned with yours. Alright ...
It ignores the problem of people with difficulty walking, for whom 400 yards is a serious burden, and significantly limits their access to buses. And then think about bad weather, slippery ground, etc.
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'.
As someone who rides the bus: it's payment that causes slowdowns. Waiting for everyone to get on the front of the bus and tap often takes multiple traffic cycles. If we wanted to treat public transit as a true public good (as it ought to be), it should be funded from taxes and free at point of service, and then front and back can be used. But that'd be too much efficiency and cost the rich too much.
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
There is a downside of making buses free, similar to the experience of cities which stopped enforcing "turnstile hopping" for trains, which is that it attracts a small number of hostile and malicious riders. An advantage of treating transit as a public good means this downside becomes an empirical question, not a moral one: Which approach leads to more ridership? In some cases, enforcing fares leads to more ridership by increasing safety and decreasing the amount of time spent cleaning up befouled surfaces.
Let's use Seattle as an example. We tap orca cards to pay to get on and recently debit cards. This doesn't in fact keep the crazy people from getting on without paying at all. Only cops/security actually prevent this and most of the time we do a whole lot of nothing.
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.
That's the argument Mamdani makes to argue to make busses free. Taking the payment away would produce a lot more of reliability.
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.
That is an accepted issue among bus planners. One solution, I think used at least in part of NYC is to pay at the bus stop, before you board. Related is enforcing boarding and paying in front and leaving via the back door, so the leavers don't delay the boarders.
> enforcing boarding and paying in front and leaving via the back door, so the leavers don't delay the boarders.
In my experience, being able to pay at any of the doors increases throughput because people are not bunched up in a single door, neither to get on or off, Parallelizing (and load balancing!) the movement of people. Not having to tap to pay (either because it is free, because monthly passes don't require it or because you can pre-pay at a machine or online) would have some additional time gains at rush hour on popular lines.
This sounds exactly like one of those birds-eye technocratic moves which inevitably destroys the system it tries to fix because of a failure to properly understand it, which nobody really can since it grew organically for actual reasons. Classic nerd overconfidence.
Read differently, the United States needs more of a forcing function to get people to take the bus and less focus on convenience.
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.
People don’t use public transport for many reasons other than this, personal safety and comfort being two big ones that no amount of optimisation can fix.
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.
United states does not need buses ! What might benefit is smaller vans that do more intelligent routing than fixed bus routes. Unfortunately city admins run bus services as jobs programs for adults and not for the convenience of the people. Buses get funded by taxes and not fare collection and as a result even private competition can not emerge.
> and as a result even private competition can not emerge.
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.)
Confirmed: the van network in Brooklyn exists, a ride still costs $2 (compared to $3 on an MTA bus), the vans / minibuses largely follow popular bus routes, and stop basically anywhere along the route where it is safe, including on a red light.
I've ridden collectivo type vans in a number of latin america countries (Philippines has same although sometimes in form of jeepnee), they work quite well, you shout 'para' or some such where you need to stop and wave boldly when you need to get on. Much prefer it to a bus, and also since they are privately owned it is very easy to kick assholes off which is one of my biggest gripes with dealing with public transit.
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:
City buses aren't profitable. There's no fare that would cover costs. Your choices aren't to have a subsidized government bus service or have competitive private bus services, your choices are to have a subsidized government bus service or have no bus service.
Don't discount the ability of political extremists to discount even the evidence they see themselves (or reframe it massively), if it conflicts with their agenda.
I 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. 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.
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 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!
Marginal changes cut in both directions. The transport duration between A and B is only one part of the calculation. A rider also needs to get from their starting point to A, and from B to their destination.
Decreasing the number of As and Bs by half might reduce that 20% start/stop time by half, shaving 10% off the total time. (This is ignoring the fact that more people will need to board and leave at each stop, which might mean in reality you’re saving like 8%.)
But you will also increase the distance walked to the bus stop. That means battling cars and weather.
You could just have two bus stops. People who live and work at both ends will be very happy. But everyone else gets thrown under the bus.
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.
The traffic downtown is really nuts now that the bridges are all shut down.
> I'm personally able to walk a block or two further
“A block or 2” each way at the start and destination is a significant difference (4-8 blocks) 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 as critical vs coverage here.
> as primary means of transportation and arguably more importantly as a backup means of transportation
One bus route can't wear two hats. Faster, sparser routes are typically complemented by slow, meandering collector routes which provide the kind of backstop you describe. Moreover, elderly and disabled people can use paratransit [1], which exists precisely to serve people with mobility issues too severe for regular transit.
Anyway, I reject the notion of buses as a second-tier transit option reserved for poor and disabled people. The only way poor people ever get decent service is when they use the same infrastructure that affluent people do. A bus system that doesn't serve the middle class is a system that will quickly lose its funding and become inadequate for anyone to use.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paratransit
Around 1/5 of the US population is elderly ~1/4 by 2050, add in moderately disabled people and this isn’t a small population we are talking about.
Paratransit is for a far smaller percentage of the population due to the significant expense.
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. There's a stigma to using it. You end up with long, slow bus lines because this allows as many of the current demographic (elderly, poor) to take the bus. And there are always bailouts or brutal cuts on the horizon. You end up at a sort-of local maxima of inadequacy.
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.
This alternate universe is a city like London. Transport for London has a balanced budget, and despite what grumpy Brits like to say, quality of service is on an ever-upwards trajectory.
In my opinion, operating transport as transportation programme, not a social programme, is how you get more adoption in the long term. You make public transport attractive to more demographics.
> 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 latter is the thing which is going to create the most opposition, because you're essentially screwing people over during the transition period -- which would take years if not decades.
In the meantime people still can't take the bus because the higher density housing that makes mass transit viable where they live hasn't been built yet etc., and as long as they're stuck in a car they're going to fight you hard if you try to make being stuck in a car even worse.
Meanwhile, cars are expensive. ~$500/mo for a typical car payment, another $100+ for insurance, another $100+ for gas, you're already at $8400+/year per vehicle before adding repairs and maintenance etc. For a two-car household that's more than 20% of the median household income. Make mass transit completely free and people start preferring the housing where mass transit is viable, which means more of it gets built, which is the thing you need to actually make it work.
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 also view the bus as a social program. Even if you get the political capital to push a bus only lane, traffic enforcement will routinely ignore bus lane violations. LA is making waves on the latter problem by attaching cameras to buses which automatically write tickets for cars blocking the bus lane.
Ultimately it's a politics problem. If nobody wants to spend political capital on running a bus system as a transport program, it ends up as a social program.
Spot-on analysis. I agree that transport should operate on a basically break-even basis, but offset in two ways:
1. Where the Government wants to subsidize some group (e.g. help the disadvantaged by giving them discounts) they should pay the fair price to the transit agency out of the budget of Welfare, not drag on the financials of the transport agency. In other words, it shouldn't be possible that the transport agency is insolvent only because most of their customers are paying next to nothing. Discussions about whether we should spend a certain sum on subsidizing the poor to ride the bus/train/etc are purely welfare budget discussions.
2. The Government should move additional money into the system when they realize an expansion of transport helps further societal goals: e.g. congestion pricing funds should help to expand transit, or the government pays part of the cost to build new rail service to reduce congestion on the roads.
Incidentally, London has a "Freedom Pass" (free transport for retirees), which is funded in the way you describe.
Instead of TfL being forced to take the loss, they are reimbursed by local government cost of the transport.
As an aside, I also take some issue with this pass being completely free to use. In my experience, people end up using it to go a single stop just because it's free, so why not -- which slows bus service for everyone else. I think it should be 20p per journey or something like that.
This idea occurred to me while I was traveling in Europe. Many of their trains have two classes of cars, where the first class is just slightly nicer. This could be done with buses too. Just alternate buses on the same route, that are expensive and free. The poor can take the free bus, and those who want a more exclusive social experience can pay for the expensive bus.
I can't make any excuses for the social and class implications, but if it got more people on the bus, it might only need to be a temporary measure.
Busses get tiny subsides in the US.
It’s a large percentage of total bus revenue by design, and a significant expense for some local governments. But the number only look large because of how we split the vast majority of government spending into federal and state budgets with local budgets being relatively anemic by comparison.
The farebox recovery ratio in the US is awful. Most cities are somewhere between 5-25% of operating expenses coming from fares.
Perhaps the tiny subsidies (in absolute terms) are because the bus systems are just so small?
SFMTA's farebox recovery is around 25%. London Underground is about 130%. Osaka Subway is 209%.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farebox_recovery_ratio
Sure, lets have the minority of the population force us into design choices that are detrimental to the majority of bus users.
When living in many a European city, I have chosen to walk instead of using a bus route due to the frequent stops making the bus trip a lot more expensive and marginally quicker. I have also lived in places where the eldery get a separate service, tailored to them, if they need it. Works a lot better IMO.
How about a compromise:
Alternate buses stop on the one-mile points only.
Having lived in SF I've seen many cycles where the SFMTA says "We'd like to make (insert any changes)..." and the 'advocates' immediately come out of the woodwork to make the argument you're making, about how walking another block or two is impossible for some constituents.
Fundamentally as another commenter here said, a bus "can't wear two hats." In most large US cities, the bus, and sometimes the subway (if one exists), is mostly a welfare program, and its target demographic is the elderly, the poor, and the homeless. Two of those groups are rarely in any hurry.
The fact that urban professionals also rely on transit to actually get to work is not very much considered in the decisions ultimately made. This is why any changes to it are so fraught.
To actually serve both populations, you'd need to have two independent systems, but that would represent a tremendous amount of incremental cost. That's why they used to have (do they still? I'd guess not, post-pandemic) buses paid for by Apple, Google, Facebook etc. to shuttle people to work -- it's something the city government could never accomplish because the choices that make transit useful to those with jobs make it problematic for the other group.
The US already has a completely separate model where we send yellow busses to pick up and drop off school kids which involve buses going to a large fraction of US homes 4 times a day 180 days a year for minimal expenses that’s free at the point of use.
Nothing stops you have adding express bus routes, thus allowing busses to work for yet another population. Further, bus networks are inherently cheap as long as they see reasonable ridership numbers it’s more economically efficient than cars.
In Seattle large employers still run their own private busses. This has been going on since long before the pandemic. These busses often tie in to existing transit options. They take you from the office to a neighborhood transit hub.
> 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.
It's not feasible to have a bus stop right in front of every house. It's unavoidable that most people are going to have to walk a bit. How far is reasonable, is a matter of trade-offs. It also depends on how fine grained the network is. If there are buslines every block, it's annoying if they don't stop there. But you have to walk a block or two to get to a bus line anyway, walking that bit more to get to the stop itself, matters a lot less.
> It's not feasible to have a bus stop right in front of every house.
And this is why point-to-point transportation is almost always faster and more convenient, if you can afford to use it. (That load-bearing "if" is important, though.)
> And this is why point-to-point transportation is almost always faster and more convenient
Point-to-point transportation is faster and more convenient because:
1. we don't have bus lanes so buses are forced to sit in the same traffic as cars and 2. buses are often underfunded so have slow/infrequent service.
Point to point transportation is often slower and less convenient if buses and public transit is done right. I can count on my fingers the number of times I used an Uber or drove a car in the 1 month that I stayed in Europe - this was going out every day, in multiple cities, rural and urban, and across different countries.
This is a good thing! If more people use public transit when it's possible, it opens up the roads for the handful of people who actually NEED to use a car.
Self driving cars for hire (Waymo, Tesla, others) can be that point-to-point system that is affordable. We will just have to build tunnels to deal with the increase in traffic. Hopefully the Boring Company or someone else can get tunneling costs way down.
If you are not being facetious, what you are describing is closer to a subway system, which has the disadvantage of being very expensive.
As long as one of those points is a transit stop then yeah, robotaxis make sense. In that model you don’t need the tunnels.
They make even more sense if they are a bit larger and can accommodate multiple people at once. Something like a large van or small bus.
Hopefully someone else, so it actually happens and isn't overpromised and underdelivered.
(Also, tunnels are useful not just for the increase in traffic, but for moving car traffic away from non-car traffic, which makes both kinds of traffic safer, faster, and more efficient.)
No, it's not unavoidable. Just ditch the buses and switch to cars, soon to be self-driving.
Even the rush hour traffic is trivially solved by mild carpooling (small vans for 4-6 people).
Not Just Bikes makes a compelling argument that self driving cars are not the answer, and will almost certainly make things worse
Would you care to summarize their argument?
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're talking about cities, of course; in rural areas, nothing beats cars.
So... Should the bus stops be even closer together?
Does Chicago not mandate people shovel their drives ways? In most towns/cities in upstate new york you can get a fine if you don't shovel your sidewalk.
I'm not in Chicago but where I am you have 24 hours after the snow stops to shovel your sidewalk. And realistically, they don't start handing out fines until at least a few days after that, if at all.
What? Why do they care whether people shovel their driveway?
The solution for that is offering express routes not forcing everyone onto a slow frequently stopping local bus and making everyone worse off for it.
that's right, the best solution is probably something like every other bus (excepting very low frequency buses that have fewer than 5-6 buses per hour) to only stop at every other stop (of course always including interchange points).
As an European I don't mind buses at all. I neither feel unsafe nor I find them dirty.
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.
Maybe it goes without saying, but the reason you don’t mind the bus in Europe is not because you are European but because the European buses are nicer.
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.
But also too, packed with junkies who, at best, behave erratically and at worse assault randoms.
Taking the bus around sf makes it immediately clear why (not all, but most) people who have options choose them.
Honestly, there aren't that many crazy people on the SF Muni/busses. The detractor for taking these services is speed and frequency.
Even factoring in parking, traffic, and bus lanes, it's much faster to drive within SF than take the bus. Stopping every 2 blocks and missing every other green light kills throughput.
My local bus stop to connect to BART supposedly had service every 20 mins, but often a bus would be out of service and the wait would be 30-40 minutes. Unless a bus was right there, it was faster to walk.
The crazy people depend a lot on routes, the part of the city, and the time of day. E.g. the 1 (Sacramento St/California St) is basically fine all the time. The 38 (Geary) and 14 (Mission) are OK during the commute rush since they are packed full of commuters, but outside of those times, you will eventually see all kinds of unsocial behavior (shouting, fights, defecation, etc.), especially closer to civic center/tenderloin/mission.
You don't need that many crazy people on SF Muni/buses for it to cause a problem for everyone else who might want to take a bus.
But yeah the fact that it's often faster to walk (and definitely faster to take a bike/scooter) is also an issue.
>> Maybe it goes without saying, but the reason you don’t mind the bus in Europe is not because you are European but because the European buses are nicer.
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.
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 time schedules and find it confusing and overwhelming and often have a low tolerance for the embarrassment that can come with publicly learning something.
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 customers who make up 99% of their passengers, but everyone has to be a first-timer before they can be a long-timer. It's not just UX papercuts, the experience seems designed to be maximally hostile. Is it because one more marginal person is a little more delay, a little more crowding, etc? It feels like there are perverse incentives at work.
It's the same in Europe. There are many car drivers who would never admit that, but they just don't want to leave their comfort zone and learn how to use public transport. But when asked they will say stuff like "well, we live a bit outside the city", or "now with kids you basically need a car".
> public transportation as the default mode
Do you have any sources on that? In basically any European country the car dominates and is used far more than public transport. Even in cycle-friendly Netherlands the majority of people go to work by car.
https://www.cbs.nl/nl-nl/visualisaties/verkeer-en-vervoer/pe...
That's not majority of trips, it's by distance travelled.
Basically in the Netherlands, if you're within 5-10km, you go by bike. If public transport is reasonable, which it mostly is in urban areas, you take it. You'd almost never choose car within a major city, unless it's on the outskirts.
And this starts in primary school.
Make it legal for kids to move around on their own and take transit to school, just like they do in most of Europe and beyond. Parents are lazy, so many kids will. That's a lesson in public transportation use right there.
> Make it legal for kids to move around on their own and take transit to school
... it is legal though? But if you live in the typical US suburb then good luck with that. You'll catch a district provided bus to school and if your parents don't want to drive you somewhere you'll ride a bike or just not go.
Taking the bus in the suburbs often means walking 15 minutes, waiting on 45+ minute service, and switching routes at a transfer station. It's an ordeal to say the least.
Yeah suburban bus service really just doesn't work. Not enough density. I live in a small town and they try but it's the same issue. Most buses drive around nearly empty and just slow down the cars that are following.
Rush hour CTA in Chicago is packed like that at least on some routes in and out of downtown. Or rather it used to be, I have not lived there in quite some time so not sure about today.
There is also the monetary angle. How many european households can afford a car for both parents and a car each for two kids, registered, insured, paid for to park wherever they go?
Even if you are poor in the US cars are remarkably accessible. You can finance a used car with no credit and a couple dozen dollars a month.
And the parking angle.
Europe builds apartment complexes which are ~3 to ~10 stories tall, the US builds sprawling suburbs, zoned so that there's no grocery store in sight.
If you're packed 3 to an apartment in a 10-story complex, it's unlikely there's enough parking for all of you.
You are stating unequivocally that every bus in every European country is nicer than the average bus in the US?
Mexican third tier town bus beats Atlanta airport shuttle.
Yes!
always seemed obvious to me that the reason for the disparity is that european buses are a way to get around dense cities and US buses are a welfare program for residents of sparser cities who can't afford cars. the bus lines don't actually go anywhere people care about, they're their just to provide the bare minimum ability to go somewhere.
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.
Which of the cities used as examples in the articles are "sparse"? LA? Pittsburgh is one of the smaller ones listed and while the bus network there is very hub and spoke, it's also still semi usable.
But to call NYC, LA, Philly, Chicago, Minneapolis, Houston, etc sparse doesn't seem very accurate. Yes, LA is vast, but I wouldn't call it sparse.
LA is sparse by European standards, or rural by Asian standards.
http://www.demographia.com/db-worldua.pdf CTRL+F for "BUILT-UP URBAN AREAS BY URBAN POPULATION DENSITY: 2025"
America is the exception for population density in general.
This argument doesn’t mesh with what I experience in my daily life.
Busses go places I care about: two blocks from my work, and to the airport.
My US city is dense. Not like Europe, but unless the argument is that major metropolitan areas in the US are not dense enough (LA?), I don’t buy it.
Bus transit has problems, but I don’t think it’s as simple as the parent is asserting.
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 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.
Half of all dutch people own cars (10,062,194 cars / 17,904,421 people). The majority of people still ride bikes or take public transport to move around except when they need to take their car. For comparison, a majority of americans have a car (259,238,294 cars / 333,287,557 people). Note that the denominator includes children in both cases.
You're not asked to give up going to the wilderness.
Regarding scheduling, in my eyes public transport where the mean time between busses is not under 15 minutes is not public transport. Running after a bus is a signal that the frequency is too low. "I need to leave five minutes ago to take the bus I intended" should be followed by "if I leave now I'll be a few minutes early for the next one".
You are right, I was not asked to give up going to the wilderness; I just want to go to the wilderness of my choosing and not be constrained by someone else's transportation.
Funny thing about scheduling. I have to plan to leave an hour earlier than I need to, and even then, I'm frequently late. Yet, my hyperfocus kicks in when I sit in the car and go through the rituals of "I'm driving now." The vigilance can be exhausting, but usually only bothers me when I'm leaving an observing site at 3 o'clock in the morning or I'm driving at twilight in deer country.
1. Makes sense.
2. This is why non-car-centric countries don't ban cars. If you're that kind of person (and not everybody is), you buy a car. You may not use it beyond these wilderness activities though.
3. Trains.
Good points. A few years ago, I visited a friend in Estonia, and even though he was in Tartu proper, they still drove almost everywhere. Essentials were only available by car.
Trains are an interesting subject. For them to be useful, you would need to have rails covering the same destinations and paths as the highway system. One should also be aware of network effects when adding another layer of transportation services, including how they affect the distribution of services and residences. From experience, we know that roadways encourage spread because they allow you to cover a greater area with little time cost. Rail will likely encourage denser development and a higher cost of living due to a greater influence of rent-seeking entities.
One of the tensions one would need to explore is the tension between the need/desire of a chunk of the population to keep their distance, keep their living space separate from others, and be acoustically and physically isolated from them, while still needing services a 30-minute drive away.
Living with ADHD also increases your chances of getting into a car accident substantially. I can't find the numbers now, but the increase is non-trivial and there are some clear mechanisms (inattention, impulsivity and risk-seeking behaviors).
ADHD is a big part of the reason I don't drive. I'm lucky enough to live in Berkeley which is very walkable with decent transit, and I would hesitate to move anywhere more car-oriented exactly because I have ADHD.
Yeah, ADHD does affect one's ability to drive safely. On the other hand, I've been driving for over 50 years. I've had one accident that I was responsible for. Various other vehicles have been involved in five other accidents where the other driver backed into my parked car.
I think the reason I've been hypervigilant about safe driving practices is that my father owned a rigging company, and I was driving forklifts and stake trucks in the yard from about 13. I understood the impact a vehicle could have on other things, people included. Living in that world from about age nine on teaches you to be obsessive about properly securing a load (Molding machines, air handling units, lathes, etc.).
I've often thought people would be better drivers if they started their driving experience with the motorcycle safety training course curriculum and drove for a year on motorized two wheels, taking up the lane and keeping up with traffic.
When I was younger I was lucky enough to live somewhere rural where I got into a couple of single car accidents that I walked away from. Now my ADHD hyper focus is super attentive when driving.
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.
This is highly location dependent with how unequal the US transit infrastructure is. It'd help to add your city for anecdotes to mean much.
I lived in Columbus Ohio as an exchange student and I really disliked the car-centric nature of...everything.
I wish it had better public transport in general but I honestly wish that about pretty much any place.
Typing this from a suburb of Columbus now.
COTA provides decent service to get around in the downtown and directly adjacent neighborhoods, but it drops off sharply as soon as you get outside of that area.
Part of the problem is the typical US sprawl of the place. The area inside the beltway is ~200 square miles - https://urbandecisiongroup.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/fc...
I live just outside the beltway. Driving to the OSU stadium just north of downtown would take me about 25 minutes. According to Google maps, the nearest COTA stop is a 20 minute walk away, then it's an hour and ten minutes to get to the stadium.
Agreed it would be lovely to be able to hop on a bus or train and get somewhere within a reasonable amount of time.
I live in Berlin and strongly prefer the bike over the bus because buses are slow and unreliable. I wish we had a lot more bus lanes and aggressively towed cars blocking them. More subways would be even better though.
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 right and physically separate bus lanes is doing it right.
Nice idea but it quickly runs up against budget realities.
I'm not a fan of busses and use em only by necessity. Otherwise I prefer trams and bicycles much more. Trams are more chill due to less hard turns and more space, bicycles are a beast for fast arrival if infra is ok. In Zurich trams are very nice, but bike infra comsi comsa up to bad depending on area.
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 matter of routine. The inconvenience may be less per delay but busses are delayed far more frequently than trams and trains on most of the public transport systems I've used. So for regular users, the cumulative inconvenience is much worse on busses than on trains/trams. Which is why people flock to trains and trams when available as an alternative to busses.
Specifically with regard to the parent, the frequency at which unplanned outages happens with tram services in Zurich is extremely low in my experience - certainly planned changes to schedules or routes (for maintenance, upgrades, etc.) are far more frequent. And when "something happens" (i.e. a traffic accident), the path for trams is cleared as quickly as possible - often in 30 minutes or less - so you'd really have to be unlucky to be inconvenienced by such an occurrence.
In most situations you want trams to have own lanes and semaphore priority which reduces collision chances to a minimum. Worst case you can have some spare busses to provide temporary replacement services for such situations or you can divert some buses from other lines to provide services in problematic sector till situation isn't resolved.
I sometimes take a peak into European busses but I don't see 25-30 people sitting in there on average. That is a lot of people.
Busses, at least the one where I live in Europe, are very loud, noisy and smelly. I'd rather have 20 cars pass my home than one bus. I don't hear or feel those cars but once that bus passes my coffee cup visibly shakes. I also don't mind cycling behind most cars but cycling behind a bus is a terrible experience. You feel the heat blasting out of the rear-right side and the diesel smoke is terrible.
Europe is made up of a lot of different countries, even in the UK there's a big difference in bus provision depending on where you are.
As an European I really _do_ mind buses. I try to avoid riding them as much as possible. They are dirty, smelly, and really cramped with little legroom. I would really hate living somewhere where I was forced to use them, and would rather move elsewhere.
> 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).
Some animated GIFs illustrating how much space automobiles take up compared to alternatives:
* https://old.reddit.com/r/Damnthatsinteresting/comments/9ft67...
* https://torontolife.com/city/transit-versus-cars-gif/
> Two, removing stops will likely not make the remaining stops nicer. Cities aren’t thinking about how to allocate a fixed bus budget.
But that’s not at all what the article is about? The thesis is not that having bus stops with music and heating and free drinks will make more people take the bus, it’s that in the U.S., the slowness of buses is making them an unattractive option. And stopping too often is a major reason.
As someone living in SF I 100% agree. The bus stops all the time. The muni is also crazy slow on the west side because it has to mark every single stop at every block just like any car instead of just having priority.
I'm confused, do you mean the bus stops at stops where no one is waiting to get on AND no one has asked to get off the bus?
It does that, but the parent means stop signs. San Francisco where there aren't traffic lights mostly blankets every intersection with 4 way stop signs. The parent is likely referring to The Sunset district, which looks like this: https://www.google.com/maps/@37.7569397,-122.5007035,3a,75y,...
The muni…because it has to mark every single stop at every block just like any car instead of just having priority.
What? I see English words, but it’s still not parseable.
There is technology at least with traffic lights so that buses get priority by detecting an oncoming bus and either extending the green or shortening the red.
Much more clear, thanks.
There is weird stigma in the US about buses but not trains (entirely). If you ride the bus you’re assumed poor or pathetic. I was in Colorado for work, they had me stay in Boulder and I would take the bus in the morning to Lafayette. A few people were on the bus in the morning when I got on and by the time we left Boulder city limits I had the bus to myself. Pretty fast, smooth, and cheap. I would then explain to my coworkers how I arrived that day; they were confused why I wouldn’t take an expensive Uber or rent a car and demanded that I accept a ride back to the hotel from them instead. Some even offering to drive 40minutes round trip since they didn’t live in Boulder. They said the “buses weren’t good” with no explainer as to why. I personally think they just wanted to show-off their cars. Just bizarre.
I took a Greyhound a couple of times when I was in the US, and the experience immediately showed me why Americans hate buses and coaches.
My first transfer was in Sacramento. The entire bus got held up for over an hour because someone saw a man with a knife and security had to search absolutely everyone to try to find it.
Half the stations were literally crumbling, as in the ceilings were falling down and covered in water stains and flecks of black mould. The drivers often turned up hours late, which is apparently expected and normal. The stations tended to be in exciting hotspots such as Skid Row, to cater for the desperate clientele who had no choice but to run the gauntlet.
Also, after the first time I rode it and told everyone about the knife that nobody ever found, people started showing me news stories about the man who got beheaded on a Greyhound in Canada.
Overall I think they have very patchy bus and coach systems and over-index on the worst examples.
Just want to mention that the type of bus I'm referring to is the local municipal bus system in Colorado not Greyhound-type national bus lines. The national bus lines like Greyhound are indeed in disrepair, even in Nyc the bus stop is essentially the parking lot you leave from. It can be 100F or 0F and if you get a delay it's miserable. The main difference being the local municipal system is under utilized and the private corporation system is probably squeezing pennies for service.
I live in a relatively large Canadian city. Not as a suburbanite, but right in the heart of the city.
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.
Predictability and reliability is as important, perhaps more important than security.
One reason that trains "work" is that the rails on the ground is a promise that a train is coming.
At risk of sounding like a mindless futurist, I will say that the Transit App has considerably improved my experience of public transit in the US, because it doesn't tell me when the next scheduled ride is, but instead when the next actual bus is, based on realtime data provided by other Transit users onboard the vehicle.
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.
Another failure mode I've seen is a tourist with their phone set to their home timezone having their Google Maps mentioning bus lines I wasn't familiar with (which were the late night service that wouldn't go by any time soon). This seems like a weird failure mode for the app to have, as it clearly had network connectivity and should have noticed the discrepancy (or at least provide a notice).
>"how to get to X by <mode>"
I would recommend Citymapper (https://citymapper.com/) in such a situation.
Appreciate the recc but what I'm trying to get at in the parent comment is that by that time you've picked X without having an overall picture of the transit story, you've often already lost. Basically, current route planning works well when you already know where you're going, but is much more limited when you're exploring the problem space that is where could I be going.
My internal thought process as a tourist is that I have a starting point and end point in a city, and some number of hours in between. I want to do some touristy things in that time, and I don't want to waste it all waiting for transfers. I'm not asking Google Maps to be a tour operator for me, but it also can't even help when I have a specific thing I need of which there are many instances, and I'm like... I don't care which electronics store I go to, I just need an electronics store and would like one that's convenient to where I am by transit. Or like, there are four Apple Stores in this city, which one is fastest to get to by transit?
Another recent example was having a seven hour layover in Tokyo where I had to do the Narita -> Haneda shuffle, and wanted to eat something not-airport-food during that time. I really struggled with getting Google Maps to show me where would be a good point to aim for a stop that was convenient by train to both airports; in the end I asked ChatGPT which suggested Ueno Station and I ate monjayaki which was delicious.
The problem with buses is always not enough buses. If a bus came every 5 minutes you wouldn't need to spread out the stops as they would naturally spread out with fewer people getting on/off due to more busses. It would make transfers more tolerable, missing a bus wouldn't matter, buses wouldn't get packed around rush-hour, etc. Buses could be a great public transportation system but I don't think any city cares enough about public transportation to properly fund it. It's easier to pass single, large funding bill for some light-rail boondoggle than it is to continuously fund a working solution.
> 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.
n = 1 but this is precisely why I seldom rode the bus in college. Except for going clear across campus in the evening to apartment complexes that were a semi-substantial trek down the highway it was always quicker to walk. Walking 1.5 miles in 25 minutes was faster than a bus that made 14 stops before it got to where you were going.
I like light rail. It has the advantages of cutting through traffic and being more efficient to boot. I'd say we should adapt buses to a similar modality but anecdotally bus-only lanes don't work as well as they ought to because, as a surprise to nobody, people are bad drivers and interfere with their operation.
>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.
With all due respect, I feel the one asserting things without argument might be you. The whole article is about how number of stops is too high and so drives low ridership.
I am incapable of even trying to provide quotes from the text, as that would mean simply restating the text in its entirety.
I will say in my city I tried the bus twice and the number one reason I never used more is that it was incredibly slow. And the frequent stops were absolutely a contributing factor. People could pull the chord to get off nearly anywhere and did. And a trip that might take 15 minutes by char could take 45 minutes to an hour and fifteen.
That said, I do agree that this being the number one issue everywhere or even where I live is far from certain.
As a driver, the number one thing I hate are bus stops near intersections without dedicated bus lanes.
did we not read the same article? i saw three main claims in the article:
- removing stops makes the bus faster: obviously true.
- bus stops in america are closer together than bus stops in other places: backed up by data in the article.
- making the bus faster makes it better for riders. subjective, but as a bus rider i very much agree.
i don't understand how you can read this article and come to the conclusion that it's about making bus stops "nicer". that's just a little tangent it mentions. it'd be nice if bus stops were nicer.
You've got a point, but the article's thesis is still correct.
The article points to case studies where reducing stops increased ridership: clearly this does make a difference
But I agree that truly good bus service requires commitment and budget. A city that only improves its transit in fast, cheap ways is doomed to bad transit.
At least in Melbourne, the tram network genuinely does have too many stops. Stops which are only a few minutes walk from each other.
Which results in the trams being incredibly slow compared to driving even if they are frequent, clean, and generally nice. Since the network already needs total overhaul to be wheelchair accessible, there has been a plan to combine 3 stops in to two wheelchair accessible ones. Which will also speed up the trams since they don’t have to stop as often.
The number of stops inversely affects speed, and the bus is really slow compared to driving in pretty much all of the US. A 15 minute car drive is a no brainer compared to a one or two hour bus.
It is possible to have faster buses, even time competitive ones. Though stop spacing is only one component of such a system, the other being dedicated infrastructure and traffic priority.
Having lived in Vancouver and NYC and now LA I think I’ve seen both sides of things, and I don’t think these things are quite as insurmountable as you think.
I don’t think public transit is ever that pleasant, but I rarely felt unsafe in Vancouver or even NYC compared to LA.
One thing that I disagree with is the timing. In a lot of cases I’d rather spend 20 minutes more on the bus than driving. It’s much easier to hop on a bus, listen to music and walk to my destination than deal with traffic or parking. Also, in cities that have properly invested in transit, there are things to do around the transit points. Grocery stores, coffee shops, general stores etc, so I’m often doing 2-3 things in a single trip. Whereas in LA, each of those things is a separate car journey away for me, so overall things are less efficient.
I'm from the East Coast. I lived a bit in Vancouver. The bus is the place to be. Everybody from all walks of life is on the bus.
I went to Seattle for one weekend and experienced the sad view of only the poorest people taking the bus. It was enlightening and changed my outlook on life.
> In my experience, the bus is not a nice experience. The bus feels dirty, unsafe and hostile.
This depends very much on where you are in the world.
Full disclosure: I have visited a lot of cities/countries, approx 70k flown miles last year. I almost always try to use public transport where possible.
The last "not nice" experience in a bus was in SFO, travelling back to my hotel from the Cathedral of Saint Mary of the Assumption. Make of that what you will.
> One, the article asserts that too many stops is the main cause of low ridership in the US.
That's not what I read. The article is saying that you can get meaningful service improvements via what is essentially a free measure: cutting the number of stops. I personally regularly take a route in San Francisco that would unquestionably be better off by cutting a swathe of stops through the Mission, where it stops every two blocks on a street with painful light cycles and tons of pedestrian traffic.
The result is that by the afternoon, two or three buses on this route have piled up, one right behind the other, and passengers have to wait 45 minutes for the next one if they miss one of those.
Marginal improvements do matter, because any improvement in usage you get from slightly improved service gets more people invested in making the bigger, more important changes done.
I used buses most of my life before remote work, even having a car, because I lived in place were this is feasible, and for me it is a no-brainer that more stops means a slower trip. It does makes a huge difference.
In other countries there is like the main bus system you take and there is another that take you to the main stops
This is the coverage vs. capacity trade-off.
Buses running between full on stations are faster than buses that comprise the network edges. Because the core of the network is focused on capacity. Buses that meander around to provide coverage, minimize walking, and stop every other block are really slow. Like 6 MPH end to end, no faster than riding a bicycle! Do we want a bus network to compete with walking/biking or with driving downtown?
These buses are for the disablities elderly problem, regular people prefer to walk a little than wait for those buses.
> The bus feels dirty, unsafe and hostile
Low ridership actually makes public transit feel even worse. Encourages loitering and restricts ridership to only the most desperate people. In NYC at least the buses tend to be pretty heavily utilized and I've personally never felt unsafe or put off by the condition of a bus. It's marginally more pleasant than riding the subway.
Stop frequency is too high on most of my trips. I might have 60 stops in front of me for certain trips I make on bus. It contributes to a ton of time all that dwell time adding up. Where there are express routings offered on top of local routes with maybe 1/4 the stop frequency, time savings are like 1.5x by my estimate.
> I believe the central thesis of this article is unsupported
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.
The buses in SLC are clean and friendly. The only buses I have experienced hostility with are Greyhound, and that hostility came exclusively from the workers. What's the difference between my city and yours? Budget? Population? Probably a mix of both.
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 number of bus stops might matter at the margins, we’re not talking about a system where marginal improvements will matter
The central argument of reducing stops is increasing bus speed, not reducing margins, It's in the second paragraph.
[edit]
Top comment is a straw man, attempt to correct course downvoted... I'm not sure how much value HN has left for useful discourse, who the fuck are you people, if you even are people.
You're being downvoted because you misunderstood the post you're replying to. They aren't referring to profit margins, but marginal utility—i.e. incremental improvements to stop spacing (purportedly) would not be enough to fix a fundamentally broken system.
funnily enough, buses in philadelphia are IMO pretty nice. Especially the current fleet. No more hiking up narrow stairs. They sit low to the curb, easy on and off, go to a lot of locations, and they're clean inside and out.
Compare that to the subway which several stories below city hall, nasty, dirty, filthy, stinking air, human excrement, rats, etc... I love the bus
In my experience buses are safe and clean, despite what people say and assume in my city both online and in real life. However they are not on time or predictable and that is a huge problem.
They're no dirtier than subways, which people don't mind. People have a very negative association with buses though. The streetcar experience for example is pretty much identical minus the bumps, but they're perceived much more positively. The timing and routes are indeed brutal though. If I wanted to ride the bus to my work the best route is 20 minutes of walking, 10 minutes of riding on a bus that runs every half hour, then another 20 minutes of walking. This is definitely not a rural area or anything either.
What I find interesting is that people have a negative relationship with buses but not with trolley cars, like the old SF trolley cars where you could almost hang off them. If we injected some fun or joy into busses like trolley cars would that improve people's relationships or perspective of them too?
> I believe the central thesis of this article is unsupported, and other assertions are false.
...but then your "In my experience..." section repeats the article's assertions? As in, everything you list as a drawback of riding the bus is exactly what the article claims can be improved by intelligently cutting out some percentage of stops.
Also, I didn't see the claim that "too many stops is the main cause of low ridership." That would be an overreach. The central claim that I see is that optimizing the number of stops, which turns out to result in a net reduction in pretty much all major American cities, is a relatively easy way to marginally improve many aspects of bus systems.
I think your counterarguments are valid, but they're just fleshing out the article's thesis. Simply reducing bus stops and holding everything else constant would not magically improve ridership and the overall experience. And as you say, reducing bus stops and removing money supporting the system will definitely not result in improvements. (And I agree that it is the likely way it would transpire politically.)
You would need to reduce stops and direct the savings into improving the remaining stops. You would need to convert the change into more reliable schedules. To make sense, that would need to increase ridership, and adjust the demographics of riders to include people who don't have to accept "dirty, unsafe and hostile" because they have no other choice. There's little incentive to improve things when the audience is captive and powerless. Also, increased ridership leads to more resources to accomplish the rest.
Of course, the dependencies between all these changes make the improvements more speculative and harder to achieve politically, so I do agree that you can't "just" reduce the number of stops and improve everything. As you said, that would more likely just drain more blood from an already anemic system. But the article is talking about a relatively cheap and easy way to improve things; everything else transit agencies can do is harder and/or more expensive.
> 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.
That first sentence says marginal improvements won't matter. The second sentence says that marginal improvements ("an attractive option for more people") are what are needed. Maybe you're saying that marginal improvements have to reach a threshold in order to be worth doing or achieve any noticeable gains?
I think you missed the core arguments of the article. Fewer stops mean faster bus and faster bus helps with regularity and wait time. It also means you can do more loops with the same number of buses and drivers so it reduces cost per trip.
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.
Why have bus stops at all, waymo should build a transit bus or large van and run them autonomously. Then they could optimize the fleet as they please. Bus stops were a solution to a lack of connectivity and demand.
Demand-responsive transport (DRT) has been tried a bunch of times in all sorts of different environments and pretty much never lives up to the promise. Predictability is really important and ridership drops as soon as users start having to plan too far ahead, which in the past has been essential to DRT routing.
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.
I've seen it work pretty well in a number of places in the form of privately owned minibuses/vans that can rapidly go where the demand is needed.
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.
It's really not ideal. Similar systems are common in Central Asia. They make it difficult for travelers to predict journey times, it's unfriendly to tourists, and it's much less accessible to other populations (e.g. the disabled). They also don't scale well to large urban environments or out of the way journeys in my experience.
Yes, like all systems, it has tradeoffs. Although I would argue that some of the downsides you highlight are worse with traditional bus systems (e.g. the Caribbean bus conductors will happily guide tourists, and I have seen them go off-route frequently to drop off someone with limited mobility. Large cities in other parts of the world have managed to scale the system out to fill in gaps with other forms of transit like Lima, Peru)
The GP was arguing that it NEVER works out, and I'm just pointing out that it does work in many places.
I would much rather rely on the Caribbean minibus systems than try to rely on transit in cities like Phoenix.
> They make it difficult for travelers to predict journey times
How do scheduled bus routes standardize a journey time vs a demand shuttle?
> out of the way journeys in my experience.
How do buses fair in this regard?
> It's really not ideal
Are buses?
I believe this is also how it works in many Mexican cities.
> has been tried a bunch of times in all sorts of different environments
Has it? When, where and with what technology?
> Predictability is really important and ridership drops as soon as users start having to plan too far ahead
Uber etc have proven this to be patently false. Existing buses are experiencing dropping ridership - Uber is not.
> won't be able to take advantage of things proven to make buses faster and more consistent
You're replacing buses with auto-shuttles. Just let the shuttles use the bus lanes.
> bus lanes, reducing stop count, transit priority signals
All of these are usable if you widen the scope to include auto-shuttles.
> consistency and response times gained by dynamic routing can easily be overshadowed by increased variability
What is the difference between Busing and Shuttles here? A bus user can keep yanking the stop cord, there can be 1 or 2 disabled passengers who take several minutes to board, there can be 50 children getting on / off. These issues are constants and all are improved with demand based shuttles.
Those busses still need designated spots to stop at. They can't be stopping in the middle of a street
Indeed. And if you want a lot of people to board the bus efficiently at the same time, you need them to agree to congregate somewhere before the bus arrives. One might call such a meeting point a “bus stop” :)
> 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.
I think a bus could stop in the middle of the street, but a bus stop still removes dependence on a smartphone and protects from the weather.
No it couldn't, for legal liability reasons, usability for the travellers, etc...
Taxis/Ubers/... can and do stop in the middle of a street. Why would that be different for a bus picking up a single person?
yes, and it keeps blocking my bus. Fortunately it is now legal in Chicago for drivers to get fined for stopping in bus stops/bus lanes automatically via cameras on the buses. Not sure if it is actually happening though..
What if it's 5 people? 10? What if instead of many huge buses like today it's 5x as many smaller buses?
You can't just have buses stopping randomly everywhere, it doesn't scale.
The assumption is that a "waymo bus" would be hailed by an app and the service would plan routes on demand. In such case, bus stops would be needed only in busy areas or in places where it would be dangerous to stop.
This is based on the observation that people, including police, tolerate taxi drivers stopping at places where it's technically illegal.
funnily enough, they get designated spots and they still just stop in the middle of the street
If you keep asking self driving bros questions you can get them to eventually reinvent buses and trains. It’s fun!
Autonomy isn’t necessary, but aside from cost there’s nothing stopping a city from operating a bus more like a shared Uber ride. Having fixed stops at fixed times is fairly primitive. They would be smaller shuttles.
Autonomy is necessary to get the unionized bus drivers out of the way, the cost of running a bus is dominated by staffing costs.
Waymo is worth nothing if there’s congestion. That’s the problem public transportation solves, not lack of connectivity
Wait until you're waiting in the wind and snow with a toddler, and you'll prefer a bus shelter.
At some level this is driven by street design. The reason bus stops are so close in Philadelphia is because they stop every block, and there's a stop sign every block. The blocks are very small.
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...
Removing the stops helps a lot. As an example on SEPTA, the 124/125 [1][2] to Wissahickon T.C. takes 10+ minutes longer than taking the 27 [3] when starting at J.F.K. & 15th.
(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...
> Making these extra stops causes the bus to 'miss' the light cycle at almost every stop.
This would be a much bigger change, but it's also possible for the lights to give priority to buses. When a bus approaches a light, that should trigger the lights to advance to the part of the cycle that gives the bus the green light. That way, you prioritize the 20 people in the bus rather than the 10 people each in their own car.
This happens with trams in the German city I live in. The other advantage is energy efficiency, apparently - if you can keep them traveling at a consistent speed, then they can maintain momentum, as opposed to if they're constantly stopping and starting and need to spend more energy getting up to speed.
It's slightly irritating as a pedestrian when you're waiting to cross the road to get to a tram stop, and you see that the tram is coming in less than a minute, and you know you're not going to be able to cross in time. But that's the sort of slight irritation I'm okay with for better fuel efficiency and faster trams.
> 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.
> I have a map from the 50s on my wall and the bus routes are the same, including numbers, as they are today
A surprising number of bus routes in Dublin still follow, to a large extent, tram routes laid out in the 1870s. And use the same numbers. This stuff is _sticky_ (partly because significantly redesigning an existing route tends to annoy people; there's a fairly strong tendency to just make a new one and leave the existing one running in some capacity).
we'll see how cutting stops works out: that's part of what they're planning to rework the trolleys.
https://wwww.septa.org/trolley-modernization/
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 why in countries like Germany pedestrian deaths per mile walked is 8 times lower than the USA (and these numbers continue to move in opposite directions year after year).
Unless you can address this fundamental problem "just walk more" isn't a viable option for transit users.
The bus lines in the US tend to be spread out enough that riders often have to walk a long distance anyway as many/most destinations are far away from the route itself and would require substantial non-bus travel even with infinite bus stops along the route. Given that reality, the density of bus stops along routes seem inefficient for a very small real world improvement.
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).
So..fix that?
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.
This is true for everywhere tbh, and thr solution is to make the last mile walkable by people with disabilities.
I see a lot of idolization of NW Europe from the US, but this is still a problem in Europe too. True, it's better than most of the world, but not every NW European city is as walkable or as accessible as people think it is.
I might have missed it (tbh I started skimming at a certain point) but I was disappointed to not see any counter arguments or even downsides addressed.
Yep.
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. :/
>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 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.
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.
A large chunk of problems faced by regular Americans can be solved by money equivalent to a rounding error compared to how much we spend on military, private health subsidies, interest payments, corporate benefits. Yet the "who will pay for it??" narrative never comes up when talking about any of these, only school lunches and buses.
> 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 suffer from crawling buses.
Maybe this should say New York City needs fewer bus stops? I'd like to see you try.
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 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.
In my experience, the problem was long wait times between buses and unreliable pickup times. That meant you realistically had to add buffer at each end of your trip: in case the bus was early and in case the bus was late. Not only was that more than 20% of my trip time, it was also mental overhead of worrying whether you already missed the bus.
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.
Removing unnecessary bus stops is a prerequisite to making busses fast. You can't run a fast bus service if the bus is stopping every single block.
There already are “express” buses that don’t stop at every stop. They don’t solve the issues I described above. Cutting the time between bus arrivals would be a much more effective solution.
There are 2 big prerequisites for fast bus service :
1. Dedicated bus lanes (speed, predictability).
2. Traffic light priority ( speed, predictability).
How many US cities implement even one of those?
Dedicated bus lanes that are physically separated from car traffic specifically, like the BRT system in Mexico City.
Not nearly enough
That optimizes speed, not latency.
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.
For fixed route transit, speed is latency. The faster the bus can make the average trip, the tighter the timetable can be given the same number of buses. Fewer stops also improves consistency which means you can plan to arrive at the stop closer to the scheduled time, and timetables can be tightened even more by reducing the layover times that keep the bus synchronized with the time table.
Separately, the variability problem can be somewhat solved with the real-time location updates that many agencies provide. You'll still have to wait the same amount of time, but some of it can be done comfortably in your house when the bus is running late.
It helps with latency too or schedule padding. Bus schedules are unreliable because of all the stops which slow them down and encourage bunching of busses on a route with a lot of service.
Bus bunching is often blamed on traffic or scheduling, but in my experience in NYC, a lack of enforcement and/or accountability plays a role too. I live near one end of a bus line and commute to the other end 5 days day a week. On a daily basis, there are large gaps where buses miss their scheduled times. Then, as they approach the end of the line, they arrive and depart in groups of three or four, which only worsens the problem.
For a fixed number of busses, the faster the busses are traveling the less time there is between busses.
I reliably pickup times are amplified by the number of stops that are made. The stop and go time is fixed. The amount of time it takes 2 people to exit a bus versus four is lot linear. It depends on how full the bus is. But it definitely does slow down when people are getting off and on at every single stop.
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.
The public services death spiral is real. Services get defunded -> they get worse -> reduced user base -> more cuts. The only way to break the cycle is to improve the services.
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.
I was in SF middle of last year and was on the BART a good bit, and it was... fine? It remains the most objectionably noisy mode of transport I've ever been on, but it didn't feel any less safe than when I've been there previously.
BART is full of white-collar people who use it to commute and to travel around the area (alongside all sorts of other kinds of people, as you would expect for a broadly used service).
Ridership collapsed in 2020 because of the pandemic, for obvious reasons, but it's hard to really blame that on the service itself, or the riders.
Ridership has been gradually recovering since then. Total trips are now up to something like 70% of 2019 levels, and continuing to rise. Number of unique riders is actually above the 2019 level now.
Maybe you haven't tried riding BART again within the past several years?
I left SF ~2021, but even in 2019 it was kind of in a death spiral. Hopefully it's better now, loved it back when I lived there. But still hear mixed reports from friends.
Mass transit systems generally reduce anti-social behavior with either fare gates or heavy policing. For whatever reason, when you crack down on fare evasion you filter out a lot of troublemakers.
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 just not a plausible way to organize a bus route, aiming it at one person with a car.
> 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.
I find this very unlikely to be true for people who have spent any amount of time driving in a city.
I think the majority of city residents tend not to own cars, but I could be wrong about that.
They don't own cars because owning a car in the city sucks in a lot of ways, more so than in rural areas.
So yeah, if your point is that if you take away all the bad parts of using a car, and leave public transit as is, then using a car comes out ahead. Splendid.
That feels like you've made a tautology here. In places where public transit is more convenient than driving (and parking), many people choose not to own and drive a car.
Owning a car is not mutually exclusive with commuting via transit.
> I think the majority of city residents tend not to own cars
This depends a HUGE amount on the city. NYC/London/Paris probably true. LA? It is not uncommon for a household to have more cars than drivers
Counterpoint: many people are driving cars they cannot afford and car loan delinquencies are at record highs. People would take public transit if it were an option.
If public transit was super convenient I think way more people would take it. There are things and places I don’t frequent purely because of parking and public transit isn’t convenient.
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.
You’re assuming parking is free. Donald Shoup’s shade is shaking its head at you
When I was in SF, my European mind was astonished why bus stops are so often (and why there is a cable to pull, but that's a different thing). Considering that the area was less populated than my city. And we also have speedbuses that stop every second or third bus stop.
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.
> and why there is a cable to pull, but that's a different thing
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.
It's usually buttons in Europe. The cord things always make me think of train emergency stop cords (though these days those are usually "break glass" buttons).
I've never seen the pull-cord things in Europe, but they seem to be common in the US.
To European eyes they seem old fashioned, untidy, and possibly dirty.
Can you clarify what you mean by dirty? Or why that would be any more dirty than anything else in public? European buses frequently have stop buttons, not sure how those would be any cleaner than a plastic covered cord.
Also not sure what is old-fashioned about a pull cord compared to a bunch of buttons. Just a different way of activating an electrical circuit.
It's just the impression I get. Buses I've used in the USA are usually older and tattier than here, and the cord is part of that.
You need to clarify what you mean by "here" and what part of the US you are talking about. The US and Europe are big places and the transit systems are as different inter as they are intra.
The Paris Metro is an absolute run-down antique compared to the trains in Seattle. It would be silly for me to declare that all European metro systems are therefore run down and tatty. If I compare the Barcelona metro to New York, it makes Europe look great. Meanwhile the London Tube is cramped, frequently dilapidated and has its own species of mosquito.
It's different per country, and even per city within the country. As a rule of thumb, big cities don't have buttons/cords, smaller ones do.
I've never seen cords in Europe, neither in a big city nor little towns.
As someone on the great, late 8 (https://fixthel8.com/) in Seattle, I'd happily give up my stop to help it be on time more often. I have three other stops I can walk to within ten minutes of me.
SF is another good example of too many stops. It's honestly comical and I stopped riding the bus in SF at times because the stop count was painful.
Imagine the delays are so prominent, someone decides to make a website for CTA (call-to-action) and semi-regularly shares updates on it...
I've been to Seattle once, (ex-Amazon here) where the DevCon was held in the town while my team was located in Bellevue. I took initiative to rent a bike for a day (60$ for drop-bar gravel bike) I must say although I did not beat the time between Day-1 (Office across spheres) and Bingo (Bellevue office), it was not far off. Even comparing the "Shuttles" Amazon operated, shuttle took about 1h while ride takes around 1h15m. (Plus sweat)
> P.S: I would say I am in a "fair" shape as I ride quite a lot throughout the year.
Nyc has a subway for longer trips. So shorter stops make sense as anyone with a longer trip should be on the subway. However most cities (in the world) are not dense enough to support almost redundant system and in those I believe the speed optimizationis correct.
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
> Nyc has a subway for longer trips. So shorter stops make sense as anyone with a longer trip should be on the subway.
That’s not how bus routes in NYC are organized at all.
There are very busy bus routes organized like this. Though I will agree it is a minority. Where not organized like this the article applies.
To further elaborate — NYC subway routing is not effective for some kinds of trips (notoriously: moving north-south through brooklyn/queens, east-west across much of manhattan, etc)
> Nyc has a subway for longer trips.
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.
We can optimize this further and remove all of the stops between the buses first and last stops. Drive time would be so much faster.
We can also make the bus smaller. And to give the passengers more agency, we can let them drive it. Instead of paying bus fare every time they board, they can pay a larger up-front cost for this bus, and of course, ongoing gas & maintenance. To make sure they don't pose a danger to others, they can also purchase insurance, and of course have some sort of license to operate it.
We can't forget to add more lanes to support all of these new buses on the road, we need to keep our drive time low!
Not to mention we need places to park these buses. We should require every commercial location to have multi-level parking decks so that there is ample parking.
That's ludicrous. Think of the property values that would be decreased by thusly besmirching the precious skyline! Instead, we should mandate that people build out, wider & longer, rather than taller. Commercial locations should have parking lots for these microbuses (should really come up with a better name for them, too.)
We should also quadruple the road space, so that these buses don't just sit in gridlock all day.
Where I live, the bus line that serves me only has maybe one marked stop. There's a bus depot at the ferry; every where else, you can just stand on the side of the road and wave your hand when the bus comes by and it'll stop for you; when you want to get off on your way home from the ferry, you push the button and let the driver know where to stop.
But that only works because density is low and there's only one plausible destination.
Most optimization is a curve. Arguing for moving closer to the top of the curve is not the same as arguing for moving all the way to the minima on the other side. But why do I have to say that?
Some bus systems actually essentially do this for a fraction of buses.
New York City already has fewer bus stops, or rather it has express buses that stop at fewer stops: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Select_Bus_Service
NYC is interesting as it has examples of everything. Dense urban, inner suburb-like service and a huge core.
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.
I don't wanna be rude but when someone spends months researching an issue, which systems work and which don't, you should probably give some level of grace and understand how they came to those numbers rather than spit out your first mindless critique.
Whenever I see an article, and the top comment is StudMan69 saying "Uh, no, the article's conclusions are all wrong!" I think to myself: "Gosh! If only the article's author had consulted StudMan69 before writing the article, he could have avoided making such a grave mistake!
When the article is by StudMan420 I don't feel that way.
I ride the bus and I can tell you right now that I would be pissed if this guy took away my bus stop. That's my critique. I think it's perfectly valid.
Only because you know your loss but cannot imagine your gains in time.
The gains just mean that I sit on the bus while twice as many people are trying to board at every stop. The bus is stopped for twice as long.
> The bus is stopped for twice as long.
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.
I've watched 30 kids get off at their school in the morning. It takes 15 seconds. By your logic, 30 stops adds 15 seconds to a bus's schedule, which is pants-on-head crazy.
Emptying a school bus completely is a lot faster than a city bus stop where people are simultaneously trying to get off the bus and then the new people are also trying to get on the bus and jockey for position and for a seat before the bus can start moving again
So this used to happen on Dublin Bus, but a while back they solved it with an astonishing innovation... a second door! You get on at the front and off at the back. Given that this has been common elsewhere forever, it's unclear why it took them so long, but...
(Bafflingly, they went through a transition period where ~all of the buses had two doors, but the driver rarely opened the back door. It wasn't really until covid that using the back door became standard. Improved things greatly.)
> and jockey for position and for a seat before the bus can start moving again
Do urban buses where you are require people to be seated? Didn't realise that was a thing anywhere. Any (urban, non-intercity) bus I've ever been on takes off as soon as the last person gets in.
A second door is good. Make it even better by people getting on and off from either - those getting off should be first. Many systems work this way and it works great. Trains oten have even more doors, but for a but that often isn't possible.
The experience I shared was on a city bus.
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've never been on a city bus where the driver waits for people to be seated. Hell, when I lived in Vancouver, they would start moving before everyone had even paid their fare, basically as soon as the door was closed.
And now most (all?) busses have a fare tap at the back door, so you can board anywhere. Vancouver transit is absolutely top tier, at least for NA.
That would be true if busses didn't have to accelerate, decelerate, open doors, kneel and go through the many parts of stopping that aren't strictly people getting on or off.
The counterpoint is any bus route that has an express option that runs in parallel. Every time I have taken the express route, the bus can be full to the gills, but is always faster than the non-express bus.
that's simply not how it works, and quite obviously so. the stop time is absolutely not linear in the number of people who board the bus. just think about all the time it takes to slow down, possibly make the whole bus kneel, and then sit up again. by your argument, there should be infinity bus stops, each of which only allowing one single person to load. like, what? surely we can think more critically than this...
So your counter argument is that we should actually only have two bus stops. One at the start of the route, and one at the end?
surely we can think more critically than this...
No, we said less stops, not zero. you cannot take this to extreems and prove anything. Stops are a compromise and most of the US has too many.
So 1/Nth of the ridership is gonna have their stop deleted at a sum total of X man years. But it's all gonna be worth it based on a projected possible upside that may not materialize dependent upon many factors?
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.
You would be pissed that you have to walk for an extra 2 minutes? I wouldn't, but sure. Would you also be pissed about overall bus travel time decreasing by a generous amount?
How far do you walk to your bus stop? How far would you have to walk to the next-closest bus stop?
Would it outweigh you having to stop half as often?
All that means is longer lines and congestion of people waiting to board. So the bus is stopped for longer. This seems like a net nothing to me.
Doors open time is actually possible to optimize and speed up; with modern tap to pay systems, you can have all door boarding where even at the busiest stops dwells are measured in seconds.
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.
Sections of lines that already have meaningful congestion at adjacent stops wouldn't be a good target for balancing. WMATA in D.C. recently eliminated about 5% of bus stops as part of their overhauled bus network, this is how they described their strategy[1]: "We thought carefully about each stop, looking at things like how many people use it, how far away it is from the next stops, and whether it's safe to walk there. We also listened to feedback from thousands of bus riders."
Additionally, many stops with a lot of people loading and unloading are hubs which would never be balanced away, and often are designated timing points where the bus will wait to get back on schedule, so loading/unloading time is often irrelevant because predictability is being prioritized over speed. Improving speed and consistency with techniques like removing unnecessary stops increases predictability and allows for tightening up timetables and minimizing average hold times.
[1] https://www.wmata.com/initiatives/plans/Better-Bus/frequentl...
> longer lines and congestion of people waiting to board
True I've seen that first hand.
what if they removed only 33% of the stops? so per 3 stops, one is removed and the remaining were rearranged. it might even happen that the new bus stop is closer to your house. i agree, for the average person, the distance to the stop increases though.
I agree.
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.
I suspect the evidence here would fall mostly on the side of "it increases ridership", though it's probably hard to study, as it's rarely done in isolation, but more commonly as part of route redesign.
Its a statement of religious belief, so other opinions are no less relevant that some "authority"
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.
> I suspect that removing half of the bus stops in a city will piss people off and cause even less ridership.
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.
You're making suspicions about suspicions without numerical data.
According to my cities 2022 annual report (where are 2023-2025?) they provided precisely 464344 unlinked pax trips (UPT) so someone stepped aboard a bus and threw money in the real or virtual fare box 464344 times that year. "Sources of operating funds expended directly generated" which I read as annual fare revenue was $660748.
We have a very simple two tier system $2 for adults and $1 for seniors and disabled. 2(464344-x)+1x=660748 x=267940
So we only had 196404 healthy young adult bus riders that year vs 267940 senior citizens. Your experience is not unusual but also is by far not the majority; a SUBSTANTIAL majority of the people on the bus in my city are too old or too sick or too blind to take long walks in the rain, snow, ice, heat, cold, etc.
Honestly the bus is so slow, if they could walk, they'd probably just walk. So it should not be overly surprising that most on the bus quite literally can't walk, and really need bus stops close together for disability reasons.
So all of this theoretical "well it would be so much faster if there were fewer stops" is irrelevant if the served population is primarily physically disabled, and the system can't survive. And we'd be talking about excluding one of the most powerful voting blocks in the city, that being old people. Eliminating stops would eliminate or reduce 58% of the current riders which would shut the system down, I don't think it could politically survive a hit like that.
Ironically that shutdown might be good as everyone would be better off both financially and environmentally in cars than in buses. Bus exhaust is not exactly perfume to mother nature LOL, and essentially our bus program is not a transit system, its a corrupt jobs program for drivers, mechanics, and especially for highly paid administrators.
> a SUBSTANTIAL majority of the people on the bus in my city are too old or too sick or too blind to take long walks in the rain, snow, ice, heat, cold, etc.
Maybe my city is different, but in every city I've spent substantial time in, there are little tiny busses for those who are not able to walk or roll the average distance between a stop and their home or destination. They are direct, point to point shuttles. If no bus is available, they will send a cab. Those buses and cabs are exactly why you don't have to run a bus up and down every road, with a stop in front of every house, and a driver who can escort passengers to their door. They are astronomically expensive to operate, but the only way to make a transit system that serves everyone.
But in my city, we pay a small fortune to run these little busses, and then _also_, for some reason, assume that no one riding the main system has any mobility.
Also, I'd argue that the reason a "substantial majority" of your transit population is "old, sick, or blind" is because it's such an unattractive option for anyone who has a choice. When the bus is slower than riding your bike, you're not getting Olympic athletes on that thing.
> 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, 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.
Easily. Going from 700 -> 1000 ft spacing adds 150 feet of walking (x2 for both sides of the trip). That's about 1 minute. Over a mile you'd reduce the number of stops by 2.2. So above 2 miles it's faster even for the lower end of that range of savings.
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.
It depends on how long you are on the bus. It cost a few minutes, but a couple miles on the but makes up for the lost time. So for short trips where healty people should walk or bike it slows things down but for longer trips it is faster.
Both NYC and London have express buses that skip stops.
That is a good option if the density supports it with good service
By doubling the walk, increasing the trip time for riders by 5 minutes and potentially making bus untenable in bad weather.
I doubt they’d be able to measure that with any accuracy.
The wonders of statistics!
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.
Meanwhile here in central Austin, it's a 0.9 mile walk from my door to the nearest bus stop that I can use to commute, walking along major stroads some of which don't even have sidewalks, much of the year in Texan heat with no scrap of shade. Then it's up to a 30 minute wait for the delayed or canceled bus, then almost exactly a 1-hour ride on the express 801 to go 7 miles to work downtown.
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.
Give buses signal priority and their own lanes. This would dramatically speed up bus service. However, nobody wants to slow down cars, hence buses will always be a worse option.
Signal Priority only works well if the arrival time of the bus can be predicted some time before arrival at the signal (~30 seconds is a number I've heard a few times). As bus stopping times are highly unpredictable, a lower number of bus stops makes signal priority work much better (and far-side bus stops).
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.
This is how it works in NL, separate lanes with separate signals that may be used only by buses (and other public transportation, including taxis). Works great!
As a Pittsburgh resident who exclusively used bus for 5 years, this certainly seems like a reasonable take. In Oakland and Squirrel Hill the bus almost stops every single block - which always seemed kind of crazy. It's a _very_ common sight to see a beleaguered student miss their bus and successfully chase it down across multiple city blocks.
I will give the PRT (formerly Port Authority) a shout out though:
1. Bikes are quick and convenient to bring along
2. The numbering system is intuitive enough that you can almost guess how to get to new neighborhoods
3. Accessibility is clearly a priority, and they successfully serve many disabled people
This is very true (that re-balancing will help ridership/operations), but politically it's hard to do. Everyone wants better buses, but nobody wants to lose the stop right next to their house/apartment (even if the nearest stop is only a block or two away).
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.
YES! I moved to SF from Paris (where I spent my whole life before that) a year ago. I exclusively use lime instead of public transit because of how slow it is! Going from Folsom&8th to Mason&Girard takes 50 minutes! And you spend most of the time stopped! With a lime I can usually get there in 20 to 25 minutes. I would use my own bike that I use to commute to work if you could lock a bike without getting it stolen almost immediately.
Folding bikes are the answer there IMO. You can just bring it into the office. You can get pretty good electric ones too now (probably a requirement for SF).
I can already bring my regular bike in the office. The problem is when you're meeting with friends, going to a restaurant, well anything that's not commuting to work...
I always bemoan the extra stops when I'm on the bus but I love always being near a bus stop; I do think the limited/skip stop bus idea is good though, as long as theres ones that alternate, though I do also like frequency, so hopefully service remains the same. I think though, more frequency beats speed though
As always, it's a careful balance. And specific to every bus route/stop combination, not to mention it can change over time. Routes should always be evaluated based on ridership data, where people are getting on & off, how long each stop actually delays the overall journey, and more.
Yep this is a "problem" with buses in London. They stop all the time so you never get beyond about 15mph before you start slowing down again for the next stop. The 100% EV buses are better as they accelerate faster, but not by much.
They are starting to introduce "superloop" buses that interlink the more suburban "spokes" for tube & train so you can go "across" London without having to go to the centre and then back out again. I.e. basically express buses that only stop at tube & train stations and other major interchanges.
It is a great idea, but it has been done for political and ideological reasons. They have not introduced express buses for people who work in central London for example (so instead to get to central London on a bus from a suburb means stopping every hundred meters or so, so even with bus lanes progress is brutally slow). These buses going "across" are not actually that useful for most people I expect because people using transport for high-paying central London jobs will be going "in" not "across". It is the "working class" lower paying jobs that might benefit from sideways interconnects between the suburbs - this is the ideological/vote-buying reason they've introduced them.
We are on the edge of ai on wheels , fully private , autonomous, electric transportation. I hope buses will be re routed to the museum :)
So removing the bus stops costs you 2 1/2 minutes of walking (150 seconds). And gains you 20 seconds per stop removed that you pass. Therefore you need to pass 8 removed stops to break even. Which seems like quite a commute to me.
I agree that low-stopping services are a good idea. Particularly in the suburbs. Use the high-stopping services to get people to the low-stopping services - and let them change buses for free/cheap. But I think that you still need regular stops, particularly if you are dealing with elderly people. And that in the middle of cities it's totally worth having a lot of stops, so that people can easily find one.
I live on the north side of Chicago and, to be honest, one of my favorite modes of public transit is the express buses that go from Edgewater/Uptown to downtown.
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
Good point but the solution you are describing is having a tiny minority of busses that move quickly between centers of activity faster rather than decreasing the stops on the vast majority of the line.
I think this kind of thing is a bigger problem than people realize. I take a regional commuter bus to and from my local international airport when I fly. The huge bus has to slowly and carefully enter my local universities 'bus loop', making several tight turns through traffic lights to get to the bus stop, and then make the journey out again. It takes 10-15 minutes in traffic to move the bus ~200feet from the boulevard to the bus stop and back to the boulevard again.
Yep, this is a good example of the stops that really slow down bus routes. You have situations where you have to make a stop, like for a big university, but it's not feasible to simply drop people off on the side of a busy/high speed road.
This sounds more like that the stop is just very poorly designed than that there need to be fewer stops.
I mean yes. But it has more to do with the design and attitude of bus route planning than whether or not a single stop is mis-designed, or whether there are too many stops overall. A rail line wouldn't have this problem because its clearly ridiculous and impossible to route tracks into a tight loop - the built environment in that case would accommodate the limitations of the rail, and the station would be built 200 feet away from the door. Since busses have the freedom to loop around mindlessly, the built environment refuses to accommodate them.
(Anecdotally) reliability is a huge factor for me — living in NYC, there are a few neighborhoods that would be much easier to reach by bus, but arrival times can vary by more than the length of the entire trip. Easier to just take a subway, even if it means an extra ten minutes of walking on each end.
I’m surprised at the chilly reception to this article.
I ride bus and MAX (light rail) in Portland and despite not being the worst offender, too frequent stops is quite noticeable. When the bus stops every two blocks to let one person on or off each time, it really slows things down.
You can also notice when playing Cities Skylines. It is quite intuitive that making your transit stop constantly is not efficient.
On the rail system, the system has been closing redundant stations and it has made it feel much faster. Small adjustments can make a big difference.
Sure I’d like more transit investment, but that can be paired with using resources well.
The article says, "This pattern, of only those without good alternative options riding the bus, is especially pronounced in the US. But close stop spacing creates problems." But it does not address the point. The bus in the US is aimed at poor, elderly, and disabled people. Elderly and disabled people want stops closer to their homes, especially given the low overall density of bus lines.
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.)
It's probably right, but it's not going to be a panacea: Outside of very few areas in US cities, a key limitation to bus ridership is few trips generated by the catchment areas: How many people would conceivably be served by each stop?
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
The most important factors for public transport usage is reliability (it comes on time) speed and frequency(under 5-10 min wait time depending on area). For high demand areas- trams, for lower demand - trolleys or busses.
To achieve reliability speed and frequency transport needs own lanes and semaphore priority. If there are too few lanes - make one lane dedicated to pub transport and another - single direction for cars. Voila. You can start at worst with 15-20 min wait time, but reliable, and increase nr or units where demand is higher up to using a tram
Everything else has secondary priority. Even the mentioned safety aspect - it'll matter much less if the next bus will come in 5-10 mins and you can skip the current one because of some drunk ppl.
I’m a bit confused why so many people are commenting as if bus stop balancing doesn’t work or that transit riders won’t accept it. From 2010s and 2020s plenty of transit agencies across America have been implementing bus stop rebalancing in Los Angeles, San Francisco, dc, Seattle etc and generally it’s been successful with speeding up buses.
Of course there most of the low hanging fruit with notorious like bus stops every 200/300feet are a lot fewer and the remaining ones to rebalance are a lot harder
Work in the industry: way too many planners and transit consultants are fixating on too many stops as being a problem, likely since it's the one piece of infrastructure they can control when roads and traffic lights are designed for cars not people.
Depending on the road network and land-uses, removing stops only 200-metres apart to make them 400-metres apart (the industry standard) could decrease access to transit within a 5-minute walk by anywhere from 10-50%+, so it's limited to where you can actually apply it without penalizing (ie. putting them outside of a 7-10-minute walk) so many customers that they look for alternatives.
In Europe stop spacings are much longer even for local routes (over 400-800-metres), but this is because everyone generally lives within walking distance for their errands, so transit is used only for longer, more commute-like trips, where a longer walk for faster travel times makes sense. Accessibility is also less of a priority there so they're less sensitive to requests from seniors and those with disabilities, with many buses not being wheelchair accessible. In US/Canada, a lot of transit riders live over a 20-30-minute (often with hostile walking conditions like crossing highway ramps) walk from the nearest grocery store, school, pharmacy, etc., so they'd oppose adding 2-3-minutes of walking to shorten a 10-minute bus ride.
Moreover, closely spaced stops are really only an issue in older (pre-war) downtowns where frequent stops are the result of decades of requests from residents (especially seniors) and from schools/churches/grocery stores/retirement homes/medical clinics. Out in the suburbs, buses usually bypass most stops, and schedules take that into account. And in places with amazing land-use like Pheonix and Vegas, you have long stretches of nothing so of course there'll be higher average stop spacings.
Lastly, much of the time-savings from express routes (that skip stops) and bus stop consolidation/balancing, is from being more in sync with the lights, which are usually designed for through traffic (ie. a green wave). Transit Signal Priority can help achieve significant savings (over 10-30%+) without removing any stops, though moving stops to after the light makes it more effective (and even that can be politically difficult).
Isn't the solution to this to implement bus lanes + express busses on rush hour instead of removing half of the bus stops. Every bus stop is amazingly valuable as it's the gateway to the public transit system. This doesn't mean every bus needs to stop at every stop along its route. This is not a magical European invention even, any busy Asian city will have sth like this.
Bus lanes are much more effective than the express busses to increase ridership by the way. Busses avoiding the traffic jams while the cars getting stuck in them changes the mind of even the most hardcore petrolhead.
Just because bus lanes are beneficial where feasible doesn't mean optimizing the number of bus stops isn't also beneficial.
Clearly it's possible for there to be too many bus stops. You wouldn't put a bus stop every 30 ft. So it's also possible that some existing bus routes have too many stops, and spacing them out more would help.
Back when I lived in SF, there was one bus route (the 6, I believe) that I could use to get to work. The bus was so slow due to frequent, long stops and traffic lights that I could keep up with it on foot by walking briskly. I only bothered taking it when it was raining because it didn't get me to work any faster than walking.
Public transport has an identity problem in the US. Trying to serve 100% of your market will result in a worse service for everyone. It needs to decide if it is for the handicap, the people that don't drive, the people that want to commute, etc.
Making fewer stops helps the commute people and those that are able bodied. It doesn't help serve the people that are handicap.
London has the new SuperLoop buses, with fewer stops, maybe this article and the SuperLoop are born out of the same idea.
I'm in Europe and haven't experienced the US public transportation system, so I can't offer an opinion, but in my country the number of stops seem to have a negligible effect on the average speed.
Most of the slowness comes from traffic. Where there are bus lanes, the bus can even be as fast or faster than a car. Some of our trams stop every 300 meters or so, but since they have dedicated lanes, they are pretty quick. Some of the stops are at intersections where a car would also wait. When the timing is right, and most often it is, the trams don't waste more time than would've been wasted just waiting for you turn at the intersection.
Where there is a bike lane parallel to the cars, busses and trams, an electric bike with 35-40 km/h will usually be the the fastest method of transportation, especially if you cross on reds when there's 0% chance of a car hitting you. I'm talking about a busy main street with lots of lights and traffic, not a highway, of course.
Busses with no dedicated bus lanes are slower than cars, because cars are quicker to maneuver and accelerate when needed. I think if out city made the busses (and trams, and trolleys) 2-3 times more frequent, most people would use them. It would be a difference of driving in traffic for 1 hour vs sitting in a bus reading something (or doom scrolling) for 1 hour and 10 minutes. Shorter stops means less walking, so it would incentivize people to use the public transportation more. The benefits are obvious - less traffic overall, less pollution, less energy used, less road rage, more time to chill, and so on.
A really stupid thing in the world of bus stops is the bus stop that is placed immediately before an intersection with a traffic light. The light is green, but someone wants to get on or off, so the bus has to stop at that stop. Then just as it is about to pull out, the light goes yellow.
I think the main idea behind it is that it allows buses to queue up if many arrive at once without blocking the intersection
"Cheap" how? I have a friend who works on Seattle's bus planning. Removing a stop is a _lot_ of political work. When an elderly person depends on that bus stop being within a block so they can get to their doctor, and you're proposing to move it six blocks further away, that's essentially a _political_ cost.
It 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.
I think the article means 'cheap' as in it doesn't really require any new/expensive infrastructure and could theoretically be done overnight.
Though, as you mention it's a big political ask (which is unfortunate).
How is this not a solved problem already?
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.
People complain to their local governments + sue transit authorities that try to do this because they like having a stop right outside their house
We're talking about the US here; they're very good at ignoring solutions to solved problems. See city planning, traffic design, healthcare, zoning, etc. If it's not invented in the US, it can't possibly work there, they claim.
Checking how long would it be for me to get to work in Google maps Car 25min Bus 1h.50min It's so crazy the difference, in other countries it only doubles but in the us is 4x the time.
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?
In European cities this is mitigated by having low-floor buses and stops with level boarding to support mobility scooters and wheelchairs. There are also dedicated taxis available for people with disabilities (possibly subsidised). Over a long term this is also a self-regulating problem. Elderly people and services/businesses for them take into account availability of public transit when choosing properties.
Buses are mass transit. The real goal isn't serving poor people, but moving people with higher throughput than it's possible by cars individually (a single bus fits ~50 people). If you make bus lines slow and fail to attract significant numbers of passengers by forcing buses to serve every whatabout case, you're making them fail at their primary goal.
You can't make half-pregnant public transit. If you have a congested city, and just add nearly empty buses sitting in traffic and blocking lanes at every intersection, it will be strictly worse for everyone. OTOH if you can make buses an attractive option, then each bus can take 30+ cars off the road, leaving room for dedicated bus lanes, more buses, resulting in faster and more regular service.
"If you have a congested city"
I would agree with and extend your remarks that we also have problems where traffic patterns and geography don't match political boundaries and transit is traditionally locally run and locally budgeted.
So in the USA you end in scenarios where it takes 20 minutes to drive 20 miles but a bus would take four legs with three transfers across three separate city bus companies, figure at least three hours each way. And again, as per your "mass transit" you can't expect taxpayers in my city to provide a special bus run into my neighboring adjacent city much less the city next to that one.
This results in people being very happy indeed to pay the financial and environmental costs of car ownership to avoid sitting in a bus for six hours of daily commute.
There are also interesting social issues; if you're late its a personal failing, even if you take mass transit. I recall a friend at work getting fired because the bus was late too many times. Oh well, should have bought a car. The feeling of not being in control is further worse due to crime rates. No one will sneak up on my wife and stab her in the neck in her car, but it certainly happens on buses and no one cares if it happens depending on local race relations. None of the other passengers on the bus even cared, for racial reasons. Its pretty messed up here.
Its easy for the public in general to advise others to do inconvenient or career ending or life threatening activities, to "save the planet" or whatever, but I wouldn't do it, and I'd certainly never let my wife or kids do it, so we own cars and avoid public transit at all costs. Not taking that advice as been pretty nice so far.
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-door loading and traffic signal/stop interactions are far more significant than stop count.
> The answer is to keep the same number of stops but run two or more vehicles simultaneously.
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.
In 2022 according to the transit system annual report, the suburban quarter million person city I live in has ten routes and operates about 12 hours per day and per the annual report average weekday service consumed is 1556 UPT, so 1556 people step aboard the system and toss coins in the fare jar or pay with the app. UPT means they're not tracking transfers and essentially 100% of trips require a transfer so the real number of people served daily is closer to 775 than to 1550, but we'll run the optimistic numbers. Each of the ten hourly routes is about 4 miles long. So the overall system drives 12 hours * 10 routes * 4 miles * 5280 feet/mile = 2.5 million feet per day and divide that by 1556 passengers per day that's a pax every 1628 feet driven on an average day.
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 resonates with me. I used to live in a medium-sized US city which prided itself on its public transit. The buses were SO slow, and it's because they would sometimes literally stop every two blocks on a major through street. (This particular city has the smallest "block size" in the US, so it was extra ridiculous). It was infuriating. I would gladly walk twice as far to find the first stop if it meant the bus stopped half as much once I'm on it.
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.
I feel like the gist here is that "faster, better, cheaper: pick two" doesn't apply to sub-optimally-spaced bus stops. You really can have all three, at the cost of some political blowback from the people who used to have a shorter walk.
When I rode the city bus as a teen in South Bend, IN, in the 80s, there were some designated bus stops. But buses worked on a hail model anyway. You could be on any corner on the route, and as the bus approached, you'd just stick up your arm and it would stop. It was really efficient. But I suppose that works best in a small city like South Bend.
Waiting for the umpteenth bus stop when I used to commute by them, I kept thinking how much earlier I would get to work if we had bus lines that stopped every other bus stop with strategically placed transfer stations, where you could switch between them or catch a bus going perpendicular to the first route.
Although long ago now, When I moved from Denmark to Seattle and tried to use the bus, it was immediately apparent that there’s at least double, maybe triple, the number of stops in Seattle’s Metro as there are in the same distance in Copenhagen. At the time I remember thinking that the average Seattle trip would be SO much faster if the number of stops were dramatically reduced.
The average Seattle trip would be so much faster if bus coverage and frequency were increased, and they got dedicated travel lanes.
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.
My observation at the time was mostly in Magnolia to the Belltown area and the place I thought had way too many stops was in the Magnolia neighborhood, almost per block and it seemed a terrible waste. Plus the buses themselves seemed to resent being stopped and started so much—they rattled and groaned and squeaked.
Some areas around Amsterdam have a two-tier bus system, with regular buses with regularly spaced stops, and a network of fast long-distance buses with far less stops and dedicated lanes over their entire trip. They have proven to be incredibly reliable; during the occasional day of terrible weather when trains leave people stranded, these buses still manage to get everybody home in a reasonable time.
So, given that Phoenix, Denver, and Vegas already have spacing similar to European nations do they see the benefits that the author is suggesting?
Phoenix metro has 5mm people and does 37mm bus rides. NYC has 8.5mm people and does 400+mm bus rides. London has 9mm and does 1.8 billion bus rides.
But those 37mm in Phoenix are probably going faster than 8mph.
> Nithin Vejendla is a transit planner in Philadelphia.
I feel sorry for Philadelphia transit future, this article is totally delulu. Go to any major European city and look how the public transport works, and you won’t have to reinvent the wheel
express buses that go straight from say point A (home) location e.g from a central point e.g Mall to central point B (downtown) can work wonders - if they're given highway access and bus only lanes, automatic green light access etc
then smaller buses etc that run in a loop to serve the frequent stops
but of course - you need cities that are designed better
with electric buses - this is all achievable and economic
I live in a European city and I just used Google Maps to roughly measure the distance between the bus stops on the two lines I often use:
350, 350, 300, 250
650, 250, 300, 300, 350
It's fine. But we do have proper sidewalks between those.
Where I'm at, busy corridors have a bus that has fewer stops (https://www.cdta.org/brt).
Any article about public transit in the US needs to discuss the opioid epidemic and mental health crisis. Otherwise, it's like claiming that bicycles work great for the Netherlands, so people should ride them in the Himalayas.
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.
Founding editor of this magazine works for Mercatus Center which is a F.A. Hayek fan club. You know, the Pinochet guy.
You already know what the conclusion is going to be, the interesting part is how the author gets there.
We need smarter dynamic fares, it shouldn't be a $6 flat tax on all destinations. I think this hurts local businesses, or all local (non business) residents should automatically get half fare.
The opposite actually tends to increase ridership; complex fare systems put people off and tend to make getting on the bus more time consuming (may require each passenger to interact with the driver).
Since it is already mostly paid for by taxes why not just make it free.
Didn't realize some cities had voted it in post-COVID, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_public_transport
Skeptical notes based on my own experiences in Seattle (≈1148ft average per article - which might be considered high enough that the article already considers the mission for fewer bus stops a success?):
Some of the routes I've taken had "express" variants that skipped many stops, yet still stopped at my usual start and exit. I never bothered waiting for them - the savings were marginal, and taking the first bus was typically fastest, express or not. Time variation due to traffic etc. meant you couldn't really plan around which one you wanted to take either.
The buses already skip stops where they don't see anyone waiting for the bus, and nobody pulls the coord to request an exit, and said skipping tends to happen even during the dense rush hour. Additionally, stop time seems to be dominated by passenger load/unload. Clustering at fewer bus stops doesn't significantly change how much time that takes much, it just bunches it together in longer chunks. The routes where this happens a lot also tend to be the routes where they're going to be starting and stopping frequently for traffic lights anyways - often stopping before a light for shorter than the red, or after a light and then catching up to the next red.
What makes a significant difference in bus speed is the route.
If the bus takes a route where a highway is taken - up/down I-5 or I-405, or crossing Lake Washington, there are significant time savings. This isn't "having less/fewer bus stops", this is "having some long distance routes that bypass entire metro areas".
Alternatively, buses that manage to take low density routes - not highways per se, but places where there are still few if any traffic lights, and minimal traffic - tend to manage a lot better speed, compared to routes going through city centers. They may have plenty of bus stops, but again skip many of them due to lower density also resulting in lower passenger numbers, and when they do stop it's for less time than a typical traffic light cycle. A passenger might pull the coord, get up to exit, stand while the bus comes to a stop, hop off, and watch the bus pull off, delaying the bus by what... 10 seconds pessimistically for the stop itself, and another 10 seconds for deacceleration and then acceleration back to the speed limit?
Finally, there's also grade separated light rail, grade seperated bus lanes, and bus tunnels through downtown Seattle, that significantly help mass transit flow smoothly even in rush hour, for when you do have to go through a dense metro area. While these are far from fast or cheap to implement, axing a few bus stops isn't going to make other routes competitive when these are an option.
This looks a lot one of those lobbied fake science articles
One big dream I have is to have some kind of free of cost at the point of service micro transit -- my dream is basically uber pool without the uber. Vans about the size of a Ford Transit or even a fuller size bus up to 40 passengers that picks up and drops passengers where they are or where they want to go to all with the push of a button on their smart phone and lots of patience. The idea is to have a huge number of government owned public transit vehicles that don't follow any published route but dynamically change their routes almost like some kind of Google Maps or Uber Pool but all the data about where people take rides at what time of the day and where they go and where the hot spots we have are now fully available to the government to improve the fixed route scheduled public transit.
Much of the world has a primitive version of this but unionized bus drivers prevent this from being economical in the west. It’s absolute comedy that NYC has a full fleet of 40 foot buses operating on its narrow streets, obstructing traffic, and forcing drivers to reverse to make turns. I hope they go the way of the buggy whip maker when autonomy is good enough for NYC, they’ve been holding us back from having so many nice things including smaller and more frequent buses.
Doesn’t LA have these?
> Nithin Vejendla is a transit planner in Philadelphia.
I feel sorry for Philadelphia transit future, this article is totally delulu. Go to any major European city and look how the proper public transport works, and you won’t have to reinvent the wheel
The problem with riding the bus in the US is that you end up around a lot of undesirable people.
What a strange article.
It only mentions in passing the success of express buses, which stop at e.g. one-tenth the stops. Like the SBS buses in New York City. On busy routes, these are already the main solution, because they stop at the main transit intersections where most people need to transfer.
Reducing the number of stops for local buses doesn't seem like it will make much difference, for the simple fact that buses don't even always stop at them. If nobody is getting off and nobody is waiting at the stop, which is frequently the case, they don't stop, at least nowhere I've ever lived.
Plus, the main problem isn't even the stop itself -- it's the red light you get stuck at afterwards. But the article doesn't even mention the solution to this -- TSP, or transit signal priority, which helps give more green lights to buses.
If you're going a long distance, hopefully there's an express bus. If you're going a short distance, bus stop spacing seems fine.
Also, what a weasel name, bus stop "balancing". It's not balancing, it's reduction. When the name itself is already dishonest, it's hard for me not to suspect that the real motive behind this is just cutting bus budgets.
"Bus stop reduction" makes it sound like it will make it harder to take the bus. But the point of the article is that's compensated by the buses being more useful because they get where they're going more quickly. So "balancing" seems apt to me.
But it does make it harder to take the bus. That's the point.
And as I pointed out, there are two proven ways of making buses actually much faster. This seems exceedingly unlikely to help, since buses already often skip stops.
> there are 3.2 feet in a meter
No, there are 3.3 feet in a meter. I know it seems like a minor quibble but it makes me not trust the rest of the article.
Please no. The only place I have extensively taken the bus is Philadelphia, which is listed as the shortest distance between stops, and I wish there were more stops. It gets very cold, and very hot here, no one wants to walk farther.
If you want to increase ridership, make the seats wider and run more often.
People here seem really afraid of walking for 2 minutes.
Counterpoint: The US needs infinite bus stops served by self-driving "buses". The fixed-route mode of transit planning became a dinosaur with the advent of the smart phone.
A lot of people arguing that these changes wouldn't bring benefits, or that the increased walk distance would crater ridership. I can provide some context from the SF 38 Geary[1] (often claimed to have the highest public transit ridership west of the Mississippi). Some time before COVID, there were 4 variants: 38, 38R which stops every three regular stops, and the 38AX and 38BX which would follow the outer route and then skip most of the stops in the middle(the former was explicitly meant to take commuters from the west side of SF to downtown). A dedicated bus line was added to Geary (with some resistance from some locals as in some areas it required removal of some parking spots[2]).
I have experience with the first three variants before and after the dedicated bus lane. 38AX only ran a couple of times in the morning, always packed and would reliably take 30mins from 25th street (it's last stop before downtown) to Market street. Before the dedicated bus lane, the 38R would take about 40 to 45 minutes from 25th street to Market street, after the bus lane it now takes 30 minutes (making the 38AX redundant). Before the bus lane, the regular 38 would take about 50 minutes from 25th to Market. Google maps now says it takes about 40 minutes.[3] So a dedicated bus lane made as much of a difference as removing every stops in between, while stopping every three stops satill yields about 1/4th of time savings even with the dedicated bus lane (and none of these lines start at 25th, used that because it was the final stop before downtown for the 38AX, riders coming from the start in 48th would see additional savings).
When looking at the ridership, the 38AX was always packed (as it came only a handful of times in the morning no one wanted to miss the last one and then have to take the 38R instead losing 10/15 minutes in their commute), the 38R is consistently more used than the 38. Right now the 38R comes every 6 minutes and the 38 every 15, so whether the ridership is impacted by travel time or frequency, I can't say. At night, only the 38 runs.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/38_Geary
[2]: https://sfstandard.com/2023/08/15/despite-protests-sfs-geary...
[3]: https://www.google.com/maps/dir/37.7799217,-122.4846478/37.7...
Great website design. Aesthetic next level
The only stops needed are the ones outside my house and outside my office.
The dilemma. Bus takes me about the same time where I want to go if I was just walking, assuming the bus spawns at the bus stop as soon as I get there. Last time I had to take a bus from place of work to home and took about 3 hours. Most of the time sitting in traffic and bus stops. I made the same journey with a cab in less than an hour. I think bus in busy town is only useful if you have mobility issues, carry a lot of shopping and have no funds for other means of transport. In my city also buses are typically occupied by feral youth, covered in dirt and smell of weed. You have to always check if the seat doesn't have fresh bubble gum on it or worse. Joys of London.
does the author ride the bus as their primary (or secondary or tertiary) form of transit?
Wrong.
This seems way too tightly focused on this one issue. If it were the case that longer distances between stops alone would result in increased ridership, then Las Vegas ought to have better ridership than most European cities by this article’s stats. Does it? Well, those stats aren’t mentioned in the article, but I’d be surprised, given that for the US cities for which I am familiar with their bus service, the average distance between stops is actually inversely correlated with the quality of the service. Hmmm.
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.
It's arguments is that all the better things are impossible to do without political will and money and therefore we should implement their bad idea.
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.
The United States needs a regulatory innovation that allows broad benefit actions that nonetheless have specific losers.
I propose inordinate taxes on corporations and very wealthy individuals.
Ah, a direct pull from the Fascist Manifesto. Bold attempt. I think it’s probably good for some state to actually put this into play so that we can see whether it is indeed broad benefit with specific losers. I’m rooting for California’s proposition just to see what happens, actually.
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.
It's crazy to tax unrealised gains. You pay tax based on money you don't have, just a bureaucrat's decision as to how much your portfolio went up.
I take it you've never heard of property taxes?
Yeah, I think so too. But if we’re going to tax them I think setting the limit to 5x median American wealth is fine. That way it impacts a broad enough base that it’s not two wolves and a sheep sitting down to dinner.
That's arbitrary and would still cause issues. You'd cause a mass liquidation event and discourage investing or create a bunch of winners in the tax accounting industry. Unrealized capital gains tax is very unserious and IMO just populist drivel.
> You'd cause a mass liquidation event
What if the tax could be paid with assets instead of currency? And the assets went into some kind of sovereign wealth fund?
Can you be more specific?
Yep. I think the common thread between NIMBY success, bus stops everywhere, and an 8 hour planning meeting to decide if there are too many ice cream shops in the Mission are that we need unanimity to get going.
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.
What has been proven to increase bus speeds is bus-only lanes and congestion pricing. This article is some techno austerity slop.
> lacking basic amenities like shelters, benches, or real-time arrival information. Uneven and cracked sidewalks and a lack of shelter or seating present a particular challenge for elderly and disabled riders.
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.
Very detailed analysis.
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.
There are simulators for this, and of course there's data from places that have actually done it.
In Dublin we have a bit of a mixture of newish bus routes which largely have a sensible number of stops, and ancient routes (the oldest evolved out of tram routes laid out in the 1870s), which tend to have a stupidly high number of stops, because once you put one in it's very contentious to remove it. The super-regular stop routes are _so slow_.
In my city there are, so called, express buses, but I haven't seen that anywhere else.
The difference between the SF 38 and the 38R which stops 1/3rd as much is 1/4th of the travel time in <5 miles.
That's an interesting point.
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.
The way it is done her ein my European city is that the bus stop is move behind the traffic lights. The bus and the system are in radio contact, thus the position is known. The time the bus needs from current location to the traffic lights on green light can be predicted, thus the system can calculate whether to keep the green light till the bus arrives or turn red, let the crossing traffic go and then turn green for the bus again. The less predictable time of passenger getting off and on (takes time when crowded, wheelchair takes time, but can be fast when nobody requires that stop) is behind the traffic lights, thus doesn't have to go into the calculation.
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.
> However we'd have to see if that's truly the case, as cities have red lights and traffic, so the bus stops anyway.
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.
Imagine stopping at the bus stop and then immediately stopping at red light
I'm guessing you don't live in a city. They plan bus stops at lights, so that doesn't really happen - just sometimes there's an extra-long bus pause for mount/dismount.
Yes I am not a bus passenger. I have used buses in some US cities over a decade back, and from those rare trips my memories are not aligned with yours. Alright ...
It ignores the problem of people with difficulty walking, for whom 400 yards is a serious burden, and significantly limits their access to buses. And then think about bad weather, slippery ground, etc.
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'.
As someone who rides the bus: it's payment that causes slowdowns. Waiting for everyone to get on the front of the bus and tap often takes multiple traffic cycles. If we wanted to treat public transit as a true public good (as it ought to be), it should be funded from taxes and free at point of service, and then front and back can be used. But that'd be too much efficiency and cost the rich too much.
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
There is a downside of making buses free, similar to the experience of cities which stopped enforcing "turnstile hopping" for trains, which is that it attracts a small number of hostile and malicious riders. An advantage of treating transit as a public good means this downside becomes an empirical question, not a moral one: Which approach leads to more ridership? In some cases, enforcing fares leads to more ridership by increasing safety and decreasing the amount of time spent cleaning up befouled surfaces.
Sorry, I don't believe you that what would stop those "hostile and malicious riders" is the $2 fare to hop on.
Let's use Seattle as an example. We tap orca cards to pay to get on and recently debit cards. This doesn't in fact keep the crazy people from getting on without paying at all. Only cops/security actually prevent this and most of the time we do a whole lot of nothing.
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.
That's the argument Mamdani makes to argue to make busses free. Taking the payment away would produce a lot more of reliability.
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.
One compromise is to tap inside; some systems do this.
There are a lot of other ways to speed up payment. they are better as well imho
That is an accepted issue among bus planners. One solution, I think used at least in part of NYC is to pay at the bus stop, before you board. Related is enforcing boarding and paying in front and leaving via the back door, so the leavers don't delay the boarders.
> enforcing boarding and paying in front and leaving via the back door, so the leavers don't delay the boarders.
In my experience, being able to pay at any of the doors increases throughput because people are not bunched up in a single door, neither to get on or off, Parallelizing (and load balancing!) the movement of people. Not having to tap to pay (either because it is free, because monthly passes don't require it or because you can pre-pay at a machine or online) would have some additional time gains at rush hour on popular lines.
buses are bad because they are full of ni ggers
Libertarian publication run by the wealthy suggests course of action that will disproportionately harm the poor, I’m shocked!
I don't think you read or understood the article if this is your takeaway.
This sounds exactly like one of those birds-eye technocratic moves which inevitably destroys the system it tries to fix because of a failure to properly understand it, which nobody really can since it grew organically for actual reasons. Classic nerd overconfidence.
Read differently, the United States needs more of a forcing function to get people to take the bus and less focus on convenience.
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.
People don’t use public transport for many reasons other than this, personal safety and comfort being two big ones that no amount of optimisation can fix.
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.
Increased ridership can help a lot with that. People typically behave better when there's a large audience.
United states does not need buses ! What might benefit is smaller vans that do more intelligent routing than fixed bus routes. Unfortunately city admins run bus services as jobs programs for adults and not for the convenience of the people. Buses get funded by taxes and not fare collection and as a result even private competition can not emerge.
> and as a result even private competition can not emerge.
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.)
Confirmed: the van network in Brooklyn exists, a ride still costs $2 (compared to $3 on an MTA bus), the vans / minibuses largely follow popular bus routes, and stop basically anywhere along the route where it is safe, including on a red light.
I've ridden collectivo type vans in a number of latin america countries (Philippines has same although sometimes in form of jeepnee), they work quite well, you shout 'para' or some such where you need to stop and wave boldly when you need to get on. Much prefer it to a bus, and also since they are privately owned it is very easy to kick assholes off which is one of my biggest gripes with dealing with public transit.
Your post is confusing.
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...
nothing in this comment is rooted in reality
City buses aren't profitable. There's no fare that would cover costs. Your choices aren't to have a subsidized government bus service or have competitive private bus services, your choices are to have a subsidized government bus service or have no bus service.
Sharing a van with strangers is more unpleasant than buses, given the cramped seating.
wouldn't a network of vans require hiring a lot more drivers per passenger than busses need? sounds like a jobs program.
Tell me you don't live in a real city without telling me you don't live in a real city.
Where I live the busses are quite useful and get used by a lot of people.
Don't discount the ability of political extremists to discount even the evidence they see themselves (or reframe it massively), if it conflicts with their agenda.