Comment by petcat
20 hours ago
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.
20 hours ago
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.
Emptying a school bus completely is a lot faster than a city bus stop where people are simultaneously trying to get off the bus and then the new people are also trying to get on the bus and jockey for position and for a seat before the bus can start moving again
So this used to happen on Dublin Bus, but a while back they solved it with an astonishing innovation... a second door! You get on at the front and off at the back. Given that this has been common elsewhere forever, it's unclear why it took them so long, but...
(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.
1 reply →
The experience I shared was on a city bus.
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.
I've never been on a city bus where the driver waits for people to be seated. Hell, when I lived in Vancouver, they would start moving before everyone had even paid their fare, basically as soon as the door was closed.
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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...
So your counter argument is that we should actually only have two bus stops. One at the start of the route, and one at the end?
surely we can think more critically than this...
No, we said less stops, not zero. you cannot take this to extreems and prove anything. Stops are a compromise and most of the US has too many.