Posted by surprisetalk 19 hours ago
I agree with the claim that "fewer stops, faster service" on the surface.
However we'd have to see if that's truly the case, as cities have red lights and traffic, so the bus stops anyway ... I believe, taking this into account, the difference might not be that significant.
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.
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.
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.
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'.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.