Comment by janalsncm

But lots of people _do_ already ride buses! There are already current riders, and potential riders who are making these marginal decisions. Occasional riders will decide between transport modes based on the trip - making marginal improvements (or regressions) would change the rate at which they choose to ride the bus.

Even if every current person's mind has been completely made up based on past experience, there are always "new adults" learning to get around and forming opinions.

So I strongly disagree: marginal improvements DO matter. And I agree with the author that this would be a relatively easy improvement to deliver for many cities.

I live in Chicago with the third-closest stop spacing per the article. I'm personally able to walk a block or two further to a bus stop no problem. Bus stop consolidation would save me a lot of time over the course of a year!

As an European I don't mind buses at all. I neither feel unsafe nor I find them dirty.

A single bus carries on average 20 times the people cars occupying the same space would (as you rarely get more than 1 person per car in peak hours).

I'd rather take buses than the car in any city. Cars make cities dangerous, noisy, polluted, congestions make people nervous behind the wheel, fights are far from uncommon. Finding parking, paying for it is another issue, common in Europe where (luckily) city centers are often millenia older than cars.

At no point of me living in the US I found the car-centric model anywhere better.

> Two, removing stops will likely not make the remaining stops nicer. Cities aren’t thinking about how to allocate a fixed bus budget.

But that’s not at all what the article is about? The thesis is not that having bus stops with music and heating and free drinks will make more people take the bus, it’s that in the U.S., the slowness of buses is making them an unattractive option. And stopping too often is a major reason.

As someone living in SF I 100% agree. The bus stops all the time. The muni is also crazy slow on the west side because it has to mark every single stop at every block just like any car instead of just having priority.

At risk of sounding like a mindless futurist, I will say that the Transit App has considerably improved my experience of public transit in the US, because it doesn't tell me when the next scheduled ride is, but instead when the next actual bus is, based on realtime data provided by other Transit users onboard the vehicle.

The only time in recent memory that this screwed me was in SF trying to get a Muni that I thought was a surface route and was in fact underground. So I was standing at a trollybus stop directly over top of the station where I was missing my train.

The one major gap I still feel a lot as a visitor is wanting a transit-aware business search. In Google Maps the "search for X in this area" is a completely distinct workflow from "how to get to X by <mode>", and implicit in the first workflow is that you can infer how long it will take based on the crow-flies distance. And that assumption is very much not true if you are using transit. For example, I would love to be able to be like "show me three-star hotels ordered by transit convenience to X airport and Y event venue" and have it figure out both rides, and call out which ones will have what service level in the evening, overnight, etc.

I live in a relatively large Canadian city. Not as a suburbanite, but right in the heart of the city.

I have a car, which I use when the weather is not nice, or when it would be inconvenient to take public transportation.

Otherwise, on sunny week-ends i often chose public transports. Here they are efficient , clean, secure and most importantly predictable. We have apps for payment and bus status that show us , on the phone, exactly where every bus is at any moment.

You know your bus will be there for you in exactly 2 minutes. Like a Uber, but much much cheaper.

Predictability is a game changer.

Works very well.

The problem with buses is always not enough buses. If a bus came every 5 minutes you wouldn't need to spread out the stops as they would naturally spread out with fewer people getting on/off due to more busses. It would make transfers more tolerable, missing a bus wouldn't matter, buses wouldn't get packed around rush-hour, etc. Buses could be a great public transportation system but I don't think any city cares enough about public transportation to properly fund it. It's easier to pass single, large funding bill for some light-rail boondoggle than it is to continuously fund a working solution.

> 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.

n = 1 but this is precisely why I seldom rode the bus in college. Except for going clear across campus in the evening to apartment complexes that were a semi-substantial trek down the highway it was always quicker to walk. Walking 1.5 miles in 25 minutes was faster than a bus that made 14 stops before it got to where you were going.

I like light rail. It has the advantages of cutting through traffic and being more efficient to boot. I'd say we should adapt buses to a similar modality but anecdotally bus-only lanes don't work as well as they ought to because, as a surprise to nobody, people are bad drivers and interfere with their operation.

I will say in my city I tried the bus twice and the number one reason I never used more is that it was incredibly slow. And the frequent stops were absolutely a contributing factor. People could pull the chord to get off nearly anywhere and did. And a trip that might take 15 minutes by char could take 45 minutes to an hour and fifteen.

That said, I do agree that this being the number one issue everywhere or even where I live is far from certain.

As a driver, the number one thing I hate are bus stops near intersections without dedicated bus lanes.

You've got a point, but the article's thesis is still correct.

The article points to case studies where reducing stops increased ridership: clearly this does make a difference

But I agree that truly good bus service requires commitment and budget. A city that only improves its transit in fast, cheap ways is doomed to bad transit.

did we not read the same article? i saw three main claims in the article:

- removing stops makes the bus faster: obviously true.

- bus stops in america are closer together than bus stops in other places: backed up by data in the article.

- making the bus faster makes it better for riders. subjective, but as a bus rider i very much agree.

i don't understand how you can read this article and come to the conclusion that it's about making bus stops "nicer". that's just a little tangent it mentions. it'd be nice if bus stops were nicer.

>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.

With all due respect, I feel the one asserting things without argument might be you. The whole article is about how number of stops is too high and so drives low ridership.

I am incapable of even trying to provide quotes from the text, as that would mean simply restating the text in its entirety.

As others have pointed out a mix of express (and even "rocket") services, rather than physically removing bus stops, already works wonders outside of the US.

Combine that with improvements to things like waiting areas (i.e. introducing shade), frequency of services, price (in my closest city they introduced essentially free public transport for all - it's been a boon), and you've got something that can be effectively weighed against other forms of transport.

No it doesn't fit all situations and people, but it serves the majority well.

> In my experience, the bus is not a nice experience. The bus feels dirty, unsafe and hostile.

This depends very much on where you are in the world.

Full disclosure: I have visited a lot of cities/countries, approx 70k flown miles last year. I almost always try to use public transport where possible.

The last "not nice" experience in a bus was in SFO, travelling back to my hotel from the Cathedral of Saint Mary of the Assumption. Make of that what you will.

The number of stops inversely affects speed, and the bus is really slow compared to driving in pretty much all of the US. A 15 minute car drive is a no brainer compared to a one or two hour bus.

It is possible to have faster buses, even time competitive ones. Though stop spacing is only one component of such a system, the other being dedicated infrastructure and traffic priority.

Having lived in Vancouver and NYC and now LA I think I’ve seen both sides of things, and I don’t think these things are quite as insurmountable as you think.

I don’t think public transit is ever that pleasant, but I rarely felt unsafe in Vancouver or even NYC compared to LA.

One thing that I disagree with is the timing. In a lot of cases I’d rather spend 20 minutes more on the bus than driving. It’s much easier to hop on a bus, listen to music and walk to my destination than deal with traffic or parking. Also, in cities that have properly invested in transit, there are things to do around the transit points. Grocery stores, coffee shops, general stores etc, so I’m often doing 2-3 things in a single trip. Whereas in LA, each of those things is a separate car journey away for me, so overall things are less efficient.

> One, the article asserts that too many stops is the main cause of low ridership in the US.

That's not what I read. The article is saying that you can get meaningful service improvements via what is essentially a free measure: cutting the number of stops. I personally regularly take a route in San Francisco that would unquestionably be better off by cutting a swathe of stops through the Mission, where it stops every two blocks on a street with painful light cycles and tons of pedestrian traffic.

The result is that by the afternoon, two or three buses on this route have piled up, one right behind the other, and passengers have to wait 45 minutes for the next one if they miss one of those.

At least in Melbourne, the tram network genuinely does have too many stops. Stops which are only a few minutes walk from each other.

Which results in the trams being incredibly slow compared to driving even if they are frequent, clean, and generally nice. Since the network already needs total overhaul to be wheelchair accessible, there has been a plan to combine 3 stops in to two wheelchair accessible ones. Which will also speed up the trams since they don’t have to stop as often.

I used buses most of my life before remote work, even having a car, because I lived in place were this is feasible, and for me it is a no-brainer that more stops means a slower trip. It does makes a huge difference.

Marginal improvements do matter, because any improvement in usage you get from slightly improved service gets more people invested in making the bigger, more important changes done.

I feel like you have completely mischaracterized the main thesis of this article, and thus I couldn't disagree more.

A primary issue of buses competing with other forms of transportation is simply that they're too slow, and the main thrust of the article is that intelligently reducing the the number of stops only increases walking time a very small amount but can reduce travel time significantly.

This is certainly my main issue with taking buses sometimes - I often think taking a bus would be easier than driving (e.g. no parking, I could read or do something else while traveling, etc.), and I'd be willing to do that is the bus took, say, 1.5x driving time, but often times it's just much slower than driving.

In other countries there is like the main bus system you take and there is another that take you to the main stops

Stop frequency is too high on most of my trips. I might have 60 stops in front of me for certain trips I make on bus. It contributes to a ton of time all that dwell time adding up. Where there are express routings offered on top of local routes with maybe 1/4 the stop frequency, time savings are like 1.5x by my estimate.

> The bus feels dirty, unsafe and hostile

Low ridership actually makes public transit feel even worse. Encourages loitering and restricts ridership to only the most desperate people. In NYC at least the buses tend to be pretty heavily utilized and I've personally never felt unsafe or put off by the condition of a bus. It's marginally more pleasant than riding the subway.

The buses in SLC are clean and friendly. The only buses I have experienced hostility with are Greyhound, and that hostility came exclusively from the workers. What's the difference between my city and yours? Budget? Population? Probably a mix of both.

It's incredibly unlikely that there is one coherent cause for low or high ridership. All we can do is improve the utility of the service. That means improving comfort (keeping it clean), reliability (running on time with minimal detours), throughput (carrying enough people), speed (minimizing the number of stops on the route), latency (minimizing the wait until the next bus), availability (more stops that service potential destinations), and coherence (more routes that take you directly from A to B, minimizing transfers).

Personally, I feel most undeserved by latency: the routes that are convenient to me run every 30min, and the routes that run most often run every 15min. I would ride the bus way more often if routes ran every 10min. I would ride them all the time if they ran more often than that. This seems like a pretty obvious opportunity that will never happen so long as prospective budget is determined by current ridership.

In my experience buses are safe and clean, despite what people say and assume in my city both online and in real life. However they are not on time or predictable and that is a huge problem.

> I believe the central thesis of this article is unsupported

You believe wrong. The article gives examples of cities that have already done that, and have seen average speeds go up and total ridership go up as well.

> Cities aren’t thinking about how to allocate a fixed bus budget.

Lol, dude.

> 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 an odd argument to make. Just as a correlation doesn't prove that there is a causal relationship, the lack of a correlation cannot prove that there isn't.

funnily enough, buses in philadelphia are IMO pretty nice. Especially the current fleet. No more hiking up narrow stairs. They sit low to the curb, easy on and off, go to a lot of locations, and they're clean inside and out.

Compare that to the subway which several stories below city hall, nasty, dirty, filthy, stinking air, human excrement, rats, etc... I love the bus

> the number of bus stops might matter at the margins, we’re not talking about a system where marginal improvements will matter

The central argument of reducing stops is increasing bus speed, not reducing margins, It's in the second paragraph.

[edit]

Top comment is a straw man, attempt to correct course downvoted... I'm not sure how much value HN has left for useful discourse, who the fuck are you people, if you even are people.

> The bus feels dirty, unsafe and hostile.

Americans think everything is unsafe, except for things that actually are unsafe.

> I believe the central thesis of this article is unsupported, and other assertions are false.

...but then your "In my experience..." section repeats the article's assertions? As in, everything you list as a drawback of riding the bus is exactly what the article claims can be improved by intelligently cutting out some percentage of stops.

Also, I didn't see the claim that "too many stops is the main cause of low ridership." That would be an overreach. The central claim that I see is that optimizing the number of stops, which turns out to result in a net reduction in pretty much all major American cities, is a relatively easy way to marginally improve many aspects of bus systems.

I think your counterarguments are valid, but they're just fleshing out the article's thesis. Simply reducing bus stops and holding everything else constant would not magically improve ridership and the overall experience. And as you say, reducing bus stops and removing money supporting the system will definitely not result in improvements. (And I agree that it is the likely way it would transpire politically.)

You would need to reduce stops and direct the savings into improving the remaining stops. You would need to convert the change into more reliable schedules. To make sense, that would need to increase ridership, and adjust the demographics of riders to include people who don't have to accept "dirty, unsafe and hostile" because they have no other choice. There's little incentive to improve things when the audience is captive and powerless. Also, increased ridership leads to more resources to accomplish the rest.

Of course, the dependencies between all these changes make the improvements more speculative and harder to achieve politically, so I do agree that you can't "just" reduce the number of stops and improve everything. As you said, that would more likely just drain more blood from an already anemic system. But the article is talking about a relatively cheap and easy way to improve things; everything else transit agencies can do is harder and/or more expensive.

> 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.

That first sentence says marginal improvements won't matter. The second sentence says that marginal improvements ("an attractive option for more people") are what are needed. Maybe you're saying that marginal improvements have to reach a threshold in order to be worth doing or achieve any noticeable gains?

I think you missed the core arguments of the article. Fewer stops mean faster bus and faster bus helps with regularity and wait time. It also means you can do more loops with the same number of buses and drivers so it reduces cost per trip.

It's not marginal at all. Stops rebalancing actually address your core issues. Less stops also mean more money per stop to provide nice shelters which solves your second issue.

> Two, removing stops will likely not make the remaining stops nicer.

Not buy itself, but as a strategy for the operator to focus on fewer high quality stops, over time that will have an effect.

> So while the number of bus stops might matter at the margins

You are ignoring that some of the things you complain about would be helped by fewer stops.

> we’re not talking about a system where marginal improvements will matter.

Its crazy to say marginal will not matter. Then nothing will ever matter. There is no revolutionary solution anywhere in sight. You need to improve on the margin with the budget you have.

> you need to make the bus an attractive option for more people.

... by marginally improving every aspect as much as you can.

Why have bus stops at all, waymo should build a transit bus or large van and run them autonomously. Then they could optimize the fleet as they please. Bus stops were a solution to a lack of connectivity and demand.