Bus stop balancing is fast, cheap, and effective

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.

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...

Unless you can address this fundamental problem "just walk more" isn't a viable option for transit users.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.)

I think this general attitude is the source of the general poor quality of public transit in the US (even though the quote refers to the UK). Public transit is considered a mode of the designated underclass, and nobody making policy decisions considers themselves a member of that class. In the US you aren't really considered an "active participant" in white-collar society unless you have a car (though NYC is a notable exception to this maxim, it holds true in essentially all other cities)

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 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

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).

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.

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.

The buses are also smaller, with many fewer bendy-bus. So if you go to fewer stops, you could overwhelm individual buses.

So if you want shorter distance between stop you need to optimize the ingress/egress with lots of doors. And you need a fast accelerating bus, like an electric or preferably trolley bus. But the US does the exact opposite, short stops with bad buses.

But yeah, the US makes so many mistakes with buses, its actually crazy. Of course, many other make many of the same mistakes but usually only a few not all of them.

Canada is also making many of the US mistakes, but at least in large cities their buses see far more use then in comparable US cities. So they are doing better while still having some feeling North American.

So I agree, some amount of stop reduction does make sense in the US. And its attractive because its basically a 'zero cost' solution. But by itself its only a drop in the bucket.

The real problem is car priority in all aspects of design and its total primacy in the way of thinking.

Making fewer stops helps the commute people and those that are able bodied. It doesn't help serve the people that are handicap.

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'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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

I will say that a simple measure like moving bus stops to the corner after the intersection can improve transit times. My uncle used to work for the Chicago Transit Authority and worked on a project to try to implement this, although it would appear from my own travels in the city that it was far from universally implemented.

I suspect that's because rail users are more likely to have jobs which can be done remotely.

The writer might also consider that short distances between bus stops helps people who cannot easily walk longer distances.

London is trying out some services which have fewer stops, such as the Bakerloop route which follows a proposed route for a new Tube line. Perhaps this combination offer is a good choice at least for urban areas.

1. In the Dundas/College triangle, there are are 2 stops less than 100m apart. 2. At the Queen St turnaround, there are 4 stops all within 150m of each other 3. At Bloor St, there are 2 stops 100m apart

These are all within a single 2km section of the bus's 10km route.

I'm pretty sure it's the car-centric design of American cities that are the root cause of European buses having higher ridership.

Nevertheless I agree with the basic premise of bus stops being spaced further apart where they are not.

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

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.

You already know what the conclusion is going to be, the interesting part is how the author gets there.

350, 350, 300, 250

650, 250, 300, 300, 350

It's fine. But we do have proper sidewalks between those.

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.

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 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

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.

If you want to increase ridership, make the seats wider and run more often.

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.

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.

At least in Los Angeles, the main problem with buses (for me) is not that they're slow, but that they're disgusting. They're always dirty, and the people who ride it aren't particularly nice. I once rode the bus with a backpack, put it on the floor, and when I picked it up it was all stained with beer. I saw people drinking a soda can and then throwing it out the window. That's the main reason why I stopped riding buses.

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...

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.

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.

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'.

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.

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