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Comment by JBorrow | Hacker News Reader

At some level this is driven by street design. The reason bus stops are so close in Philadelphia is because they stop every block, and there's a stop sign every block. The blocks are very small.

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...

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Removing the stops helps a lot. As an example on SEPTA, the 124/125 [1][2] to Wissahickon T.C. takes 10+ minutes longer than taking the 27 [3] when starting at J.F.K. & 15th.

(for context: the 124/5 operate locally west through center city before getting on the highway while the 27 only makes 1-2 more stops in center city before getting on the highway)

Making these extra stops causes the bus to 'miss' the light cycle at almost every stop.

[1] https://www.septa.org/schedules/124?startStop=17842&endStop=...

[2] https://www.septa.org/schedules/125?startStop=17842&endStop=...

[3] https://www.septa.org/schedules/27?startStop=17842&endStop=3...

> Making these extra stops causes the bus to 'miss' the light cycle at almost every stop.

This would be a much bigger change, but it's also possible for the lights to give priority to buses. When a bus approaches a light, that should trigger the lights to advance to the part of the cycle that gives the bus the green light. That way, you prioritize the 20 people in the bus rather than the 10 people each in their own car.

This happens with trams in the German city I live in. The other advantage is energy efficiency, apparently - if you can keep them traveling at a consistent speed, then they can maintain momentum, as opposed to if they're constantly stopping and starting and need to spend more energy getting up to speed.

It's slightly irritating as a pedestrian when you're waiting to cross the road to get to a tram stop, and you see that the tram is coming in less than a minute, and you know you're not going to be able to cross in time. But that's the sort of slight irritation I'm okay with for better fuel efficiency and faster trams.

> The reason bus stops are so close in Philadelphia is because they stop every block

Which is the issue. Philadelphia's blocks were sized in the 1600s, they weren't designed to be the optimal spacing for bus stops. Given how tiny the blocks are, there is no need to stop at every block.

My point was that there’s a stop sign every block, so they need to stop anyway.

Quite a big difference between stopping at a stop sign and a bus stop. Also there isn't a stop sign every block, on the larger streets that most of the busses run on there are lights at the intersections. While Philly does a pretty poor job coordinating its traffic lights, that's a separate issue.

> I have a map from the 50s on my wall and the bus routes are the same, including numbers, as they are today

A surprising number of bus routes in Dublin still follow, to a large extent, tram routes laid out in the 1870s. And use the same numbers. This stuff is _sticky_ (partly because significantly redesigning an existing route tends to annoy people; there's a fairly strong tendency to just make a new one and leave the existing one running in some capacity).

we'll see how cutting stops works out: that's part of what they're planning to rework the trolleys.

https://wwww.septa.org/trolley-modernization/

Wouldn't removing bus stops actually save more money than it costs?

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