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Comment by mitthrowaway2 | Hacker News Reader

That bus with more riders on board also has a higher probability of needing to stop to let people off at each location as well, slowing it down even further!

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This is part of a good route design - most bus stops should be "mandatory" - which means the bus stops there no matter what. Some bus stops are "optional" - driver only stops there if there's somebody waiting or if somebody in the bus presses the "STOP" button near the doors. It's marked on the timetable which bus stop is optional.

It's not worth it to make every stop optional because then the routes become too unpredictable and scheduling is hard. Usually there's like 5-10% of optional bus stops on each route - only in the places where very few people get in/out.

OTOH, it's extremely annoying to sit on a stopped bus when no one is boarding or leaving. That discourages use of mass transit.

It takes like 10 seconds. And you have to keep the schedule anyway - if you skip this bus stop you'll be waiting at the next one longer.

For express or intercity busses, that makes sense, but for high-frequency regular bus routes, I can't imagine that working. It means thar bus stops would have to be extremely sparse, or else the bus trips would need to be extremely slow.

Exactly the opposite. It sucks for intercity buses, cause there's no point. Bus stops are rare and buses don't "bunch up". It's essential for city buses.

This is how it works in every big city in Poland, it's working great. More cities started to use this system over time, because it improves the scheduling so much.

The point of city buses is that they drive in traffic anyway - they rarely drive over 50 km/h and they stop every 5 minutes. How regular they are is MUCH more important than how fast they drive.

If you skip 3 stops because nobody waited there - you get to the 4th bus stop 5 minutes too early and wait for 5 minutes there - potentially blocking the bus stop for others and wrecking havoc with the scheduling. Much better to split these 5 minutes between the bus stops where nobody is blocked.

It's like in gamedev - you don't want to optimize happy case cause you're making the situation WORSE. If your fastest frame takes 5 ms instead of 10 ms it changes nothing at best (and makes for more jerky movement at worst). If your longest frame takes 15 ms instead of 18 ms - it means you can keep consistent 60 FPS now - and that's a HUGE win.

City buses stop much more often than every 5 minutes in my experience. It's more like every couple of blocks, sometimes every block, at least in the densely populated areas.

That is way too often, it makes service too slow. People have things todo and sitting on the bus is not one oi them (even if they are doing something it is rarely what they want todo.

what is right is a compromise but everx block is too much

I agree, but a five minute drive is about a 30 minute walk (for an able-bodied person), which is way too far between bus stops for a non-express bus. Especially if you have to catch a connecting bus going along one of the major streets your bus skipped by.

Yeah, I checked the routes I take and it's 40 minutes for 25 bus stops so about 1.5 minutes between stops.

For intercity busses, keeping an accurate schedule is essential. If you miss your bus because it ran ahead of schedule, it's not a five-minute wait for the next one; you'll possibly even be booking a hotel for the night.

For express busses, stops are far enough in between and all major locations, so you may as well stop at all of them.

For milkrun busses, where the frequency is so high, scheduling errors are only really a problem if the busses bunch up and create excessive gaps.

If a bus trip takes 45 minutes when a car takes 15, more people drive and then traffic gets bad. But busses with dedicated lanes and coordinated light-timing can go much faster than traffic, when they aren't stopping for passengers!

I think you and I must live in cities with very differently-run transit companies!

Same in Sydney Australia,

> If a bus is indicating ( min 5 secs ) and is pulling out from a bus stop they have right of way. Failure to Give Way is worth a $362 fine and [demerit] 3 points.

>bus stops would have to be extremely sparse, or else the bus trips would need to be extremely slow.

Way too many transit operators choose extremely slow. Having bus stops every 100m is popular because it offers almost door to door service. But when every single person separately boards it results in the vehicle being stopped 1/3 of its running time! People generally prefer faster bus routes (average 20 MPH) even if it requires them to walk a block to the stop versus a service that stops every block but averages 6 MPH (bicycle speed).

https://humantransit.org/2011/04/basics-walking-distance-to-...

You can do a study of the actual number of people who get on/off at each stop and then determine which ones should be optional. And at off-peak hours, almost all the stops are optional at least from what I've seen in Chicago.

> And at off-peak hours, almost all the stops are optional at least from what I've seen in Chicago.

Do you not have schedules at bus stops? If you skip almost all the bus stops you'll be like 10 minute early at the first non-empty bus stop, so you'll have to wait for these 10 minutes there (or you depart early which makes people miss their bus).

Potentially you'll be blocking the bus stop for these 10 minutes for other buses.

Why not split these 10 minutes between the empty bus stops instead?

From my experience in NY, where most stops are optional unless someone needs to get on/off, the schedule means very little. If the schedule says the busses come at 15 minute intervals, all you can assume is that the bus might hopefully come sometime within the next 15 minutes. There tend to be stops roughly every block, so having all stops be mandatory would make walking competitive with taking the bus.

This is how it works around me in Detroit. I know the intervals for different routes and for 15min or less it's not a huge deal to wait. There is a major route that runs only once an hour so I will look up the exact schedule or the live bus tracker for that one. The only mandatory stops are the stations on the ends of the lines / bus turn around points / major transit hubs like the train station or the Greyhound/etc terminal.

I often walk from the place I live at one end of the city here in Lublin to the artificial lake at the other end of the city and I drive a bus back. It goes through the city center.

It's 12 km on foot one way and probably like 20 km in the bus the other way (it can't drive on the pedestrian/bike path along the river). I walk these 12 km in 2 hours and the bus takes 40 minutes to take me back. There's 25 bus stops on the route I take (and a few more later). There's 2 optional bus stops but they are past the point where I get off the bus.

So that's 1.5 minutes between bus stops (including the stops themselves which take around 5-15 seconds usually).

What's wrong with walking being competetive with buses BTW? The point is that it's better than driving in a car.

NYC is a big, dense city, it already takes forever to get around via public transport. If busses were about as fast as walking, people would just use cars.

There's nothing all that bad about driving a car, so public trasport has to be at least better than walking to be better than driving.

For example, looking at some of the commutes my family does (I work fully remotely), one has to spend 45 minutes to travel ~12km via subway, which would be 20 minutes via car, or 2 hours if walking. Another has to spend 2 hours to travel ~50km via subway and bus (all still within the city) or 30 minutes via car, with the equivalent walk apparently taking 7 hours.

So, in the first case, that's an extra hour and a half they're losing per day to just transport, and in the second case that's 3 hours per day being lost to transport. Now add in time spent taking kids places, and basically you end up spending most of your life outside of work just getting around instead of actually doing stuff.

But you have to search for a parking space and walk from the parking space to the actual destination anyway. Which is like another 10 minutes on top of everything. So buses win over cars in the city center (as long as you can plan to the exact minute so you don't waste time waiting at the bus stops).

My city has actually recently switched to making all stops optional, claiming that it improves efficiency. Let’s see how that will go.

It does if nobody rides the bus you can move faster but somehow you need to ensure the faster but doesn't attract so many riders that you are stopping too often. that generally means watching this and if you get close doingisomething different.

Robotic buses could be made smaller than driver buses since the cost of driver doesn't need to be amortized as many passengers as possible. Then you could implement optional stop skipping. At the end of the spectrum you have Uber X ie taxi with ride sharing.

Buses already do this.

If nobody is waiting and nobody asks to get off they don’t stop. If nobody asks to get off and there’s a second bus right behind, drivers skip the stop.

It amuses me how many people don't know how busses work on that front. I'm assuming most people have more of a train mentality when it comes to this?

I'd guess most people here don't actually take buses on a regular basis. (Or ever. Or any public transit at all.)

Yes of course. But it's not so useful since the buses are so big and they arrive so infrequently. With robobuses you could have smaller more frequent arrivals and then have higher probability of skipping. If the robobus understands the bus stop person's gestures that are they trying to stop it or not...

The cost of a human operator is not even remotely close to as important a factor as you think it is.

SF recently acquired 33 new buses for $1.7 million apiece. Throw in maintenance and fuel costs and it’s easy to see that amortizing over a driver making $40/hr plus benefits is just not that big a deal, especially if you’re now adding a suite of sensors, electronics, and computing hardware.

Let's take this to it's logical conclusion, where each individual rider is given their own packetized vehicle that takes them right to their destination. We can amortize this cost by relying on the riders themselves as the drivers.

What's the cost of the driver vs fuel/maintenance/capital cost of bus?

Respectfully, this is a trick question. The driver isn't exclusively there to drive, they help tourists that ask "Can I get to X, or do I need another bus?". They help wheelchair users, they know to wait extra time when cyclists need to collect their bikes from the front bus rack. They know when to pull poles (and reattach them) on trolley buses in Vancouver (where I hail from). They report fare-dodgers, they radio control saying their bus is too full to pick up anyone waiting at the stop, and most importantly: they write down what goes wrong during their day, so maintenance knows what to fix when the bus is at the garage.

Seriously, Translink runs on a 28-hour day for bus service. If you want someone to test every single system, especially someone that knows how a system should work vs how it does work vs how it failed on this particular bus, you already have an employee for the job; one that's doing customer service and working around any shortcomings at the same time.

I would not count on bus drivers being replaced by AI any time soon.

I've seen a study done not that long ago for a small to medium sized German city. The idea was either taking the existing bus service and expanding it to a 10-minute-frequency all-day on all routes, or else keeping only the three most important (regional) bus routes and replacing everything else with a massive fleet of on-demand vehicles.

The surprising results:

- According to the results of the traffic modelling, the on-demand scenario wasn't substantially more successful in attracting additional passengers than the "classic buses running every 10 minutes" scenario (i.e. in both cases predicted passenger counts increased, but by approximately the same amount). This was because on-demand public transport has quite a bit of time-wise overhead, too: You need to order a vehicle instead of simply showing up at the bus stop, it takes a while for the next vehicle to arrive, due to ride sharing some detours might be incurred compared to a direct route, and the unpredictable journey time variation due to these factors is very disadvantageous when connecting to fixed-route fixed-timetable public transport, such as the remaining three bus routes, or railway services.

- The overhead of operating a large fleet of on-demand vehicles was high enough that even with driverless operation the on-demand scenario was more expensive to operate than the expanded every-ten-minutes bus service with drivers

https://www.keoride.com.au/what-is-keoride

> the Keoride app matches customers who are travelling in the same direction and calculates an optimised flexible route to pick up and drop off customers close to their destination, you can even track the vehicle and get updated on your ETA in real time.

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