Posted by surprisetalk 17 hours ago
I’m sure bus stop distance optimization is a good thing to do at the margins, but this article is not convincing that it’s the biggest problem with US bus service.
Bus stops at the margins are actually cheapest because it often consists of a pole which is skipped 90% of the time. At the margin you already have fewer stops further apart and there is basically nothing to trim. If nobody is at the stop 90% of the time does it mean we don't need it? No. Your riders in that area may largely not be commuters and grandma needs to get out of the house and go to the store periodically.
You are paying near zero for 10 stops over 5 miles so that each run the bus can stop at a different 2 at a cost of 30 seconds per run.
It’s limited so it’s not a huge tax on corporations, just on the billionaires but I think it would be good to see. There are other states so if we’re wrong America won’t suffer.
Personally I’d like to see the tax set at a million dollars and include all unrealized gains including being the beneficiary of a trust or owning land and so on. But this prop will be a good start.
What if the tax could be paid with assets instead of currency? And the assets went into some kind of sovereign wealth fund?
By contrast, AVs are in production on the streets of SF despite local opposition because we decided these decisions are made at the state level.
I’m looking for a legislative mechanism that moves things from the former to the latter.
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.