Comment by the_sleaze_
9 hours ago
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.
9 hours ago
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.
Demand-responsive transport (DRT) has been tried a bunch of times in all sorts of different environments and pretty much never lives up to the promise. Predictability is really important and ridership drops as soon as users start having to plan too far ahead, which in the past has been essential to DRT routing.
Autonomy could improve responsiveness to demand but you still run into other issues. DRT usually won't be able to take advantage of things proven to make buses faster and more consistent (bus lanes, reducing stop count, transit priority signals). Futher, consistency and response times gained by dynamic routing can easily be overshadowed by increased variability in trip time as the route adjusts to add new passengers or make out of the way drop-offs.
I've seen it work pretty well in a number of places in the form of privately owned minibuses/vans that can rapidly go where the demand is needed.
As an example, all throughout the Eastern Caribbean this system works really well (in my experience better than most centrally planned bus systems in large cities). On any given island you can go to any main road and within a few minutes a minibus will come along. Most of the time if your aren't familiar with the geography, you just tell the conductor where you are trying to get to, and they will make sure that you get off in the right spot to get where you are going or connect to another minibus. Typical cost was ~$2.
Predictability was pretty low, but because of the small size of busses, there were a lot of them roaming around, I don't think I ever waited more than 15 minutes, and that was in very out of the way places.
It's really not ideal. Similar systems are common in Central Asia. They make it difficult for travelers to predict journey times, it's unfriendly to tourists, and it's much less accessible to other populations (e.g. the disabled). They also don't scale well to large urban environments or out of the way journeys in my experience.
2 replies →
I believe this is also how it works in many Mexican cities.
> has been tried a bunch of times in all sorts of different environments
Has it? When, where and with what technology?
> Predictability is really important and ridership drops as soon as users start having to plan too far ahead
Uber etc have proven this to be patently false. Existing buses are experiencing dropping ridership - Uber is not.
> won't be able to take advantage of things proven to make buses faster and more consistent
You're replacing buses with auto-shuttles. Just let the shuttles use the bus lanes.
> bus lanes, reducing stop count, transit priority signals
All of these are usable if you widen the scope to include auto-shuttles.
> consistency and response times gained by dynamic routing can easily be overshadowed by increased variability
What is the difference between Busing and Shuttles here? A bus user can keep yanking the stop cord, there can be 1 or 2 disabled passengers who take several minutes to board, there can be 50 children getting on / off. These issues are constants and all are improved with demand based shuttles.
Those busses still need designated spots to stop at. They can't be stopping in the middle of a street
Indeed. And if you want a lot of people to board the bus efficiently at the same time, you need them to agree to congregate somewhere before the bus arrives. One might call such a meeting point a “bus stop” :)
> you need them to agree
The app would say - meet here.
> One might call such a meeting point a “bus stop” :)
Call it what you want, it could be in a strip mall parking lot, a convenient corner or just in front of the apartment building. Optimized for traveling distance between the passengers.
1 reply →
I think a bus could stop in the middle of the street, but a bus stop still removes dependence on a smartphone and protects from the weather.
No it couldn't, for legal liability reasons, usability for the travellers, etc...
Taxis/Ubers/... can and do stop in the middle of a street. Why would that be different for a bus picking up a single person?
yes, and it keeps blocking my bus. Fortunately it is now legal in Chicago for drivers to get fined for stopping in bus stops/bus lanes automatically via cameras on the buses. Not sure if it is actually happening though..
What if it's 5 people? 10? What if instead of many huge buses like today it's 5x as many smaller buses?
You can't just have buses stopping randomly everywhere, it doesn't scale.
1 reply →
funnily enough, they get designated spots and they still just stop in the middle of the street
If you keep asking self driving bros questions you can get them to eventually reinvent buses and trains. It’s fun!
Autonomy isn’t necessary, but aside from cost there’s nothing stopping a city from operating a bus more like a shared Uber ride. Having fixed stops at fixed times is fairly primitive. They would be smaller shuttles.
Autonomy is necessary to get the unionized bus drivers out of the way, the cost of running a bus is dominated by staffing costs.
Waymo is worth nothing if there’s congestion. That’s the problem public transportation solves, not lack of connectivity
Wait until you're waiting in the wind and snow with a toddler, and you'll prefer a bus shelter.