Comment by petcat
18 hours ago
I ride the bus and I can tell you right now that I would be pissed if this guy took away my bus stop. That's my critique. I think it's perfectly valid.
18 hours ago
I ride the bus and I can tell you right now that I would be pissed if this guy took away my bus stop. That's my critique. I think it's perfectly valid.
Only because you know your loss but cannot imagine your gains in time.
The gains just mean that I sit on the bus while twice as many people are trying to board at every stop. The bus is stopped for twice as long.
> The bus is stopped for twice as long.
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.
I've watched 30 kids get off at their school in the morning. It takes 15 seconds. By your logic, 30 stops adds 15 seconds to a bus's schedule, which is pants-on-head crazy.
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That would be true if busses didn't have to accelerate, decelerate, open doors, kneel and go through the many parts of stopping that aren't strictly people getting on or off.
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.
that's simply not how it works, and quite obviously so. the stop time is absolutely not linear in the number of people who board the bus. just think about all the time it takes to slow down, possibly make the whole bus kneel, and then sit up again. by your argument, there should be infinity bus stops, each of which only allowing one single person to load. like, what? surely we can think more critically than this...
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So 1/Nth of the ridership is gonna have their stop deleted at a sum total of X man years. But it's all gonna be worth it based on a projected possible upside that may not materialize dependent upon many factors?
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.
You would be pissed that you have to walk for an extra 2 minutes? I wouldn't, but sure. Would you also be pissed about overall bus travel time decreasing by a generous amount?
How far do you walk to your bus stop? How far would you have to walk to the next-closest bus stop?
Would it outweigh you having to stop half as often?
All that means is longer lines and congestion of people waiting to board. So the bus is stopped for longer. This seems like a net nothing to me.
Sections of lines that already have meaningful congestion at adjacent stops wouldn't be a good target for balancing. WMATA in D.C. recently eliminated about 5% of bus stops as part of their overhauled bus network, this is how they described their strategy[1]: "We thought carefully about each stop, looking at things like how many people use it, how far away it is from the next stops, and whether it's safe to walk there. We also listened to feedback from thousands of bus riders."
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...
Doors open time is actually possible to optimize and speed up; with modern tap to pay systems, you can have all door boarding where even at the busiest stops dwells are measured in seconds.
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.
> longer lines and congestion of people waiting to board
True I've seen that first hand.
what if they removed only 33% of the stops? so per 3 stops, one is removed and the remaining were rearranged. it might even happen that the new bus stop is closer to your house. i agree, for the average person, the distance to the stop increases though.