alt Hacker NewsBus stop balancing is fast, cheap, and effective
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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...
> 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.
>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.
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.
> 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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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
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.
(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 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.
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.
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.)
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
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.
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.
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 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.
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
"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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
This looks a lot one of those lobbied fake science articles
Where I'm at, busy corridors have a bus that has fewer stops (https://www.cdta.org/brt).
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.
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?
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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
Great website design. Aesthetic next level
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.
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.
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...
People here seem really afraid of walking for 2 minutes.
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.