This:
> I suspect that removing half of the bus stops in a city will piss people off and cause even less ridership.
is thrown out but how do we know it's true? That commenter throws it out as their opinion but my opinion is the opposite -- the stated preference will be that people think it's bad but the revealed preference will show even more ridership as travel times improve.
My point is that you're totally disregarding everything a bus does to stop apart from waiting for passengers to board and de-board. At the very least it has to slow down, then accelerate. Half the time it has to swing the ramp out, which takes forever. Maybe someone has to load or unload a bike. Then it has to re-merge with traffic, and maybe every 10th car will let it in, so that can take a long time too. I don't even know if waiting for passengers is _half_ the time spent, let alone all of it.
(Bafflingly, they went through a transition period where ~all of the buses had two doors, but the driver rarely opened the back door. It wasn't really until covid that using the back door became standard. Improved things greatly.)
> and jockey for position and for a seat before the bus can start moving again
Do urban buses where you are require people to be seated? Didn't realise that was a thing anywhere. Any (urban, non-intercity) bus I've ever been on takes off as soon as the last person gets in.
I'd like to see your math, as it isn't just the loading of passengers that takes time. It would seem that slowing down, completely stopping, lowering the bus, opening the doors, and then closing the doors takes up at least some of the time at each bus stop.
The counterpoint is any bus route that has an express option that runs in parallel. Every time I have taken the express route, the bus can be full to the gills, but is always faster than the non-express bus.
surely we can think more critically than this...
This is even worse than the usual slight of hand wherein one takes a widely diffuse hard to quantify cost and rounds it to zero and then dishonestly acts as though that justifies implementing their pet policy that has some small upside because in this case the downside is known and the upside is less defined.
I'm open to the idea that we could improve the system by deleting stops, but in light of a quantifiable downside I don't see a convincing argument without having some quantification on what the upside looks like.
True I've seen that first hand.
The real killer for bus travel times is not getting up to speed, and the delay from finding a break in traffic when pulling out of a stop.
Additionally, many stops with a lot of people loading and unloading are hubs which would never be balanced away, and often are designated timing points where the bus will wait to get back on schedule, so loading/unloading time is often irrelevant because predictability is being prioritized over speed. Improving speed and consistency with techniques like removing unnecessary stops increases predictability and allows for tightening up timetables and minimizing average hold times.
[1] https://www.wmata.com/initiatives/plans/Better-Bus/frequentl...
As a religious belief it would be inappropriate for me to report stats from my local cities bus service. First of all they didn't get into a religious opinion logically and rationally, so spouting numbers and facts at them will not make them change their mind. Secondly my local city has multiple simultaneous impacts so its almost impossible to estimate how their experiments with stop removal has affected ridership. The article falsely claims the only variable in the system is stop spacing whereas bus service is in extreme turmoil in most communities.
Pre-covid vs Post-covid is wildly different, there has been massive inflation in operating expenses, there's a long term decline in my area WRT passenger-miles before covid which seems to be increasing post-covid, fares have increased by a factor of a little over 4x since 1990 while incomes have roughly stagnated. The article claims the opex of stops is "high" but our city invested $0 (this is a low crime suburb LOL). We got rid of 1/4 of our routes (and drivers) and increased the standard of stop spacing from never more than 950 feet to an average of about 1100 feet now. The elderly and infirm were very mad and very loud about that and they are the most reliable voters out there but halving the fare quieted them down. We lose so much money on the bus service that giving it away for free wouldn't impact the budget very much.
Currently our opex per passenger mile is about $4.50. Fare for adults is $2. We lose about $7 per ride. The loss per rider would pay for two extra people to take an uber on the same route, so there are continual demands to scrap the entire system to save money. Empty buses driving around is causing more, not less, road congestion, and more, not less, environmental damage. Our "Unlinked Passenger Trip per Vehicle Revenue Mile" is about 0.6, which boils down to on average every mile traveled by a bus driver results in 0.6 passengers stepping aboard. Our routes are about 4 miles long and run about once an hour, so on average a driver picks up about three passengers per 4 mile trip. Our drivers are usually alone in the bus. Another way of looking at it, is on average we pay our bus drivers $23/hr, so an hourly route costs $23 in labor, and they pick up less than $6 in fares during each work hour... The ratios are better during rush hour... but worse outside of rush hour.
(edited: I don't understand some of the numbers on the report, if it costs $23 to pay the driver to run a route that picks up three people the fares can't be more than $6 so even if diesel and maint were free we lose $17 per hour per route, so why does the annual report claim opex per passenger mile traveled is only $4.50? After federal subsidies or similar?)
In the long run, an unusable bus service is simply too expensive of a luxury to fund and we'll end up eliminating it. I don't think changing distance between stops matters if the stops, and the bus, are empty, other than it makes sick and old people very angry. If almost no one uses it, it doesn't cost any extra to stop quite literally on every street corner or even stop at every driveway, so increasing stop distance merely makes people suffer needlessly, which seems unusually evil.