5 ms·

In NYC, it depends heavily on the bus line. Some stop nearly every block (which can be as little as every 100m) whereas some have more widely-spaced stops. The

by g_sch 7y ago

In NYC, it depends heavily on the bus line. Some stop nearly every block (which can be as little as every 100m) whereas some have more widely-spaced stops. The buses here are notorious for running very slowly (and thus behind schedule), and one of the proposals to speed some some slow buses is to eliminate stops on lines where they are densely clustered. It's become a subject of considerable debate, as residents and in particular older and disabled people are usually against consolidation, whereas most others accept it as a necessary cost of improving service. The M14, which runs along 14th Street in Manhattan, is an example of where this is happening right now. Currently, the bus spends around 25% of its time standing in stations because it stops pretty much every block. There's a plan to eliminate some of its stops, but it's unclear whether it will succeed. Here's a good read on the subject: https://nyc.streetsblog.org/2019/04/19/never-stop-stopping-removing-bus-stops-isnt-easy-in-new-york-city-or-anywhere-else/ https://nyc.streetsblog.org/2019/04/19/never-stop-stopping-r...

cletus 7y ago
I was going to mention NYC too but in terms of the Subway, which is related. The "local" stops on a lot of Subway lines really shouldn't be there. I'm looking at you 18th Street, 28th Street, 50th Street and so on. 18th Street in particular is 4 blocks away (where 1 block = <1 minute walking) from 14th Street and the entrances to 14th Street will often extend up to 16th Street anyway (with the platform potentially right underneath). In the other direction 23rd Street is 5 blocks away. The Subway spends billions of dollars a year on power. Most of that power (for trains) is spent accelerating so every stop counts. I expect the same people who are against consolidation of bus stops are against consolidation of Subway stops. Honestly I personally have never taken a bus in NYC despite living here for nearly a decade. Distances in Manhattan are just so relatively short.
- cjbos 7y ago
  50th seems a bit of an anomaly in your list? Otherwise there would be no stop between 42nd and Columbus Circle (I assume you mean the AC line?)
- ghaff 7y ago
  I'm guessing you have no physical issues and don't think twice about walking 10 blocks. I (usually) don't either but that doesn't describe everyone and am able to just grab a cab or a Lyft if not.
  - LargeWu 7y ago
    There are always going to be competing interests and tradeoffs. Stopping the train is expensive, in terms of time. If one wants to be most accommodating for those with physical issues, then the cost of that is slower or less frequent trains.
    - ghaff 7y ago
      Of course. But it's easy for many to unthinkingly look at public transit through the lens of efficiency for able-bodied riders and ignore those who are long-term or temporarily disabled in some manner.
      - rayiner 7y ago
        That attitude is part of the reason why few people take public transit in most US cities. When the transit system is not optimized for the majority, the majority will not use it. That leads to a death spiral where it becomes just a safety net system for the people who have no alternatives.
  - cletus 7y ago
    Take the 18th Street stop. You actually can't get in or out of this station without using stairs AFAIK. There are other stations like this. Are you really using these stations if you're unable to walk a few blocks? It's expensive in time and money to stop and start the trains. Also you need to maintain a station and employ people there. If you want to provide for those with physical difficulties where walking 4 blocks is an issue, you support those people directly by, say, paying for their Ubers/cabs. Are you American by any chance? I find Americans are more prone to this particular issue of not being able to make exceptions where necessary. People can't walk 4 blocks? Make everyone wait! Have more stops! Build more stations! I mean this is exactly why Prop 13 in California was and is ridiculous. If we're really concerned about old people being forced out of their homes by rising property tax bills, why not just give them in particular a subsidized rate? Why do houses in Malibu and Beverly Hills need caps on property taxes because of some retired person in Bakersfield?
- Wowfunhappy 7y ago
  I really like the frequent subway stops. It makes it easy to hop and and off wherever you are. If they were every block like the busses, I would say that's too much, but they're not, they're every 4-5 blocks, and only in Manhattan. If you took out half the local stops, I'm not sure what the purpose of the express line would be. Of course the express trains would still be marginally faster, but even as is, I was just having a debate with a coworker this morning about whether transferring from local → express trains actually makes sense. (I absolutely think it does, but she made some good points and it's not always clear cut!)
- umanwizard 7y ago
  When I visited Shanghai, I noticed that late at night when there are not many passengers, they will kick everybody off the train at a random stop. They do this with a few trains in a row until there are enough people waiting in the station to fill up a train to some acceptable level. I assume that the point of consolidating everybody into one train like this is so they can avoid wasting power decelerating/accelerating on a bunch of trains. I.e. just run all the empty ones to the terminus without stopping. It was a bit annoying whenever it happened to us, but I think this is a better system than getting rid of heavily used local stops entirely. Edit: As a reply explains, it's possible my description is slightly inaccurate.
  - Wowfunhappy 7y ago
    Would this really save much efficiency versus the much less disruptive option of taking the trains out of commission (for the evening/morning/etc) when they get to the end of their route?
    - umanwizard 7y ago
      I'm really not an expert on subways, so I don't know. But I can only assume that the people who run the Shanghai metro know what they're doing.
      - Wowfunhappy 7y ago
        Sorry, shouldn't have framed that as a question directed at you specifically. :)
  - seanmcdirmid 7y ago
    Same thing happens in Beijing. Where they kick you off happens to be a subway depot where the train will sleep for the night (which isn't always at the terminus, e.g. if it is a loop line or at a remote junction); or it will simply express to the terminus after dumping all of its passengers. Usually, it's just the train's "time" to be off duty, they aren't actually looking at passenger densities or anything like that.
- JackFr 7y ago
  > The Subway spends billions of dollars a year on power. Most of that power (for trains) is spent accelerating so every stop counts. The entire MTA spends less than $500 million on electricity annually (which includes the subway, Long Island Railroad and MetroNorth commuter rail) of a roughly $17 billion dollar budget. Additionally, the 4.5 million people who use the 28th Street stop on the 1 line and the 6.7 million people who use the 28th Street on the 6 line and the 3.3 million people who use the 28th Street stop on the R/W lines politely disagree with you.
  - darkmighty 7y ago
    Moreover, if power becomes significant you can add regenerative breaking to regain a large fraction of energy (if they're not doing so already; maybe not because of the age of the trains).
    - lathiat 7y ago
      The London Underground definitely does that. Also in part because it reduces the heat output. The underground has been heatsoaking for decades and it’s hitting problematic temperature levels. This article is a great read: https://www.ianvisits.co.uk/blog/2017/06/10/cooling-the-tube-engineering-heat-out-of-the-underground/ https://www.ianvisits.co.uk/blog/2017/06/10/cooling-the-tube... Apparently about half of the heat generated in the tunnels is/was from braking. And the tunnel temperatures have risen from 14-30C since around 1908. Is a good read about the engineering challenges.
  - CydeWeys 7y ago
    Annual ridership figures != people. For stops that are primarily commuter stops you have to divide by hundreds to get the actual person figure. 10k people using any given stop for one round trip twice per day is over 7M annual rides for that one stop. It's actually less than that for 18th St; using real data, the average daily ridership for is 8.6k. Compare with a station that is actually busy, like Union Square, which gets 109k daily ridership. Figures from https://graphics.wsj.com/table/NYRIDER_0420 https://graphics.wsj.com/table/NYRIDER_0420 So yeah, those people would be inconvenienced by having to walk a few more blocks, but way, way more people would experience greater convenience by having faster commutes along those very busy lines since they wouldn't need to make such close stops. There's a happy medium between too many stops and too few. Two stops within a quarter of a mile is way too many. You can imagine a subway system in which a north/south line stopped at literally every block; you'd probably still have more than a thousand daily riders at every stop, but that's no argument to keep every single one of those stops (or even worse, build them). The system performance would be terrible and it'd take forever to get anywhere. The same is still true when you have stops that are only four short blocks away from each other.
JackFr 7y ago
There's an important distinction to be made here -- in Manhattan, in general, there are crosstown buses and buses which go uptown or downtown. And there are 2 kinds of 'block' in Manhattan, 'long blocks' are crosstown (east/west) and 'short blocks' which are north/south. Long blocks are irregular depending on where you are, and are typically much longer than short blocks ~3x. Most uptown and downtown buses offer limited and local service, with limited making far fewer stops. Most crosstown buses stop at every block. One more confounding factor is that about decade ago, the city replaced many crosstown buses with fewer but much larger articulated buses without realizing that the behavior of fewer larger buses is to make the average ride slower because of the time spent receiving passengers. To address that they created a new system for paying on certain buses involving buying a ticket before you board. But that is resulting in skyrocketing levels of fare evasion. Unintended consequences. The M14 is a special case right now because of limited service on the L train (which runs under 14th street) due to necessary repairs. The M14 is getting swamped with excess people who normally would prefer the subway.
- LandR 7y ago
  Stupid question, probably. But I'm not American. Is a "block" just a continuous building with no gaps for a road or pavement? i.e. [#########building##########] [###### building###] [###] Would be 3 blocks? Or is a block only delineated by a road, but not a pavement? Or something else? Can you have "blocks" with a lot of detached houses, I would guess that yes you can? So that makes me think its blocks of possibly many buildings between roads?
  - robrenaud 7y ago
    In American English, blocks are deliminated by roads and mostly used in dense urban environments, often where the blocks are rectangular.
    - JackFr 7y ago
      Etymology note: The word 'blockbuster' was coined by the press to describe the largest conventional bombs used by the RAF in WWII, because they could destroy a city block.

by g_sch 7y ago

cletus 7y ago

I was going to mention NYC too but in terms of the Subway, which is related. The "local" stops on a lot of Subway lines really shouldn't be there. I'm looking at you 18th Street, 28th Street, 50th Street and so on. 18th Street in particular is 4 blocks away (where 1 block = <1 minute walking) from 14th Street and the entrances to 14th Street will often extend up to 16th Street anyway (with the platform potentially right underneath). In the other direction 23rd Street is 5 blocks away. The Subway spends billions of dollars a year on power. Most of that power (for trains) is spent accelerating so every stop counts. I expect the same people who are against consolidation of bus stops are against consolidation of Subway stops. Honestly I personally have never taken a bus in NYC despite living here for nearly a decade. Distances in Manhattan are just so relatively short.

cjbos 7y ago
50th seems a bit of an anomaly in your list? Otherwise there would be no stop between 42nd and Columbus Circle (I assume you mean the AC line?)
ghaff 7y ago
I'm guessing you have no physical issues and don't think twice about walking 10 blocks. I (usually) don't either but that doesn't describe everyone and am able to just grab a cab or a Lyft if not.
- LargeWu 7y ago
  There are always going to be competing interests and tradeoffs. Stopping the train is expensive, in terms of time. If one wants to be most accommodating for those with physical issues, then the cost of that is slower or less frequent trains.
  - ghaff 7y ago
    Of course. But it's easy for many to unthinkingly look at public transit through the lens of efficiency for able-bodied riders and ignore those who are long-term or temporarily disabled in some manner.
    - rayiner 7y ago
      That attitude is part of the reason why few people take public transit in most US cities. When the transit system is not optimized for the majority, the majority will not use it. That leads to a death spiral where it becomes just a safety net system for the people who have no alternatives.
- cletus 7y ago
  Take the 18th Street stop. You actually can't get in or out of this station without using stairs AFAIK. There are other stations like this. Are you really using these stations if you're unable to walk a few blocks? It's expensive in time and money to stop and start the trains. Also you need to maintain a station and employ people there. If you want to provide for those with physical difficulties where walking 4 blocks is an issue, you support those people directly by, say, paying for their Ubers/cabs. Are you American by any chance? I find Americans are more prone to this particular issue of not being able to make exceptions where necessary. People can't walk 4 blocks? Make everyone wait! Have more stops! Build more stations! I mean this is exactly why Prop 13 in California was and is ridiculous. If we're really concerned about old people being forced out of their homes by rising property tax bills, why not just give them in particular a subsidized rate? Why do houses in Malibu and Beverly Hills need caps on property taxes because of some retired person in Bakersfield?
Wowfunhappy 7y ago
I really like the frequent subway stops. It makes it easy to hop and and off wherever you are. If they were every block like the busses, I would say that's too much, but they're not, they're every 4-5 blocks, and only in Manhattan. If you took out half the local stops, I'm not sure what the purpose of the express line would be. Of course the express trains would still be marginally faster, but even as is, I was just having a debate with a coworker this morning about whether transferring from local → express trains actually makes sense. (I absolutely think it does, but she made some good points and it's not always clear cut!)
umanwizard 7y ago
When I visited Shanghai, I noticed that late at night when there are not many passengers, they will kick everybody off the train at a random stop. They do this with a few trains in a row until there are enough people waiting in the station to fill up a train to some acceptable level. I assume that the point of consolidating everybody into one train like this is so they can avoid wasting power decelerating/accelerating on a bunch of trains. I.e. just run all the empty ones to the terminus without stopping. It was a bit annoying whenever it happened to us, but I think this is a better system than getting rid of heavily used local stops entirely. Edit: As a reply explains, it's possible my description is slightly inaccurate.
- Wowfunhappy 7y ago
  Would this really save much efficiency versus the much less disruptive option of taking the trains out of commission (for the evening/morning/etc) when they get to the end of their route?
  - umanwizard 7y ago
    I'm really not an expert on subways, so I don't know. But I can only assume that the people who run the Shanghai metro know what they're doing.
    - Wowfunhappy 7y ago
      Sorry, shouldn't have framed that as a question directed at you specifically. :)
- seanmcdirmid 7y ago
  Same thing happens in Beijing. Where they kick you off happens to be a subway depot where the train will sleep for the night (which isn't always at the terminus, e.g. if it is a loop line or at a remote junction); or it will simply express to the terminus after dumping all of its passengers. Usually, it's just the train's "time" to be off duty, they aren't actually looking at passenger densities or anything like that.
JackFr 7y ago
> The Subway spends billions of dollars a year on power. Most of that power (for trains) is spent accelerating so every stop counts. The entire MTA spends less than $500 million on electricity annually (which includes the subway, Long Island Railroad and MetroNorth commuter rail) of a roughly $17 billion dollar budget. Additionally, the 4.5 million people who use the 28th Street stop on the 1 line and the 6.7 million people who use the 28th Street on the 6 line and the 3.3 million people who use the 28th Street stop on the R/W lines politely disagree with you.
- darkmighty 7y ago
  Moreover, if power becomes significant you can add regenerative breaking to regain a large fraction of energy (if they're not doing so already; maybe not because of the age of the trains).
  - lathiat 7y ago
    The London Underground definitely does that. Also in part because it reduces the heat output. The underground has been heatsoaking for decades and it’s hitting problematic temperature levels. This article is a great read: https://www.ianvisits.co.uk/blog/2017/06/10/cooling-the-tube-engineering-heat-out-of-the-underground/ https://www.ianvisits.co.uk/blog/2017/06/10/cooling-the-tube... Apparently about half of the heat generated in the tunnels is/was from braking. And the tunnel temperatures have risen from 14-30C since around 1908. Is a good read about the engineering challenges.
- CydeWeys 7y ago
  Annual ridership figures != people. For stops that are primarily commuter stops you have to divide by hundreds to get the actual person figure. 10k people using any given stop for one round trip twice per day is over 7M annual rides for that one stop. It's actually less than that for 18th St; using real data, the average daily ridership for is 8.6k. Compare with a station that is actually busy, like Union Square, which gets 109k daily ridership. Figures from https://graphics.wsj.com/table/NYRIDER_0420 https://graphics.wsj.com/table/NYRIDER_0420 So yeah, those people would be inconvenienced by having to walk a few more blocks, but way, way more people would experience greater convenience by having faster commutes along those very busy lines since they wouldn't need to make such close stops. There's a happy medium between too many stops and too few. Two stops within a quarter of a mile is way too many. You can imagine a subway system in which a north/south line stopped at literally every block; you'd probably still have more than a thousand daily riders at every stop, but that's no argument to keep every single one of those stops (or even worse, build them). The system performance would be terrible and it'd take forever to get anywhere. The same is still true when you have stops that are only four short blocks away from each other.

JackFr 7y ago

There's an important distinction to be made here -- in Manhattan, in general, there are crosstown buses and buses which go uptown or downtown. And there are 2 kinds of 'block' in Manhattan, 'long blocks' are crosstown (east/west) and 'short blocks' which are north/south. Long blocks are irregular depending on where you are, and are typically much longer than short blocks ~3x. Most uptown and downtown buses offer limited and local service, with limited making far fewer stops. Most crosstown buses stop at every block. One more confounding factor is that about decade ago, the city replaced many crosstown buses with fewer but much larger articulated buses without realizing that the behavior of fewer larger buses is to make the average ride slower because of the time spent receiving passengers. To address that they created a new system for paying on certain buses involving buying a ticket before you board. But that is resulting in skyrocketing levels of fare evasion. Unintended consequences. The M14 is a special case right now because of limited service on the L train (which runs under 14th street) due to necessary repairs. The M14 is getting swamped with excess people who normally would prefer the subway.

LandR 7y ago
Stupid question, probably. But I'm not American. Is a "block" just a continuous building with no gaps for a road or pavement? i.e. [#########building##########] [###### building###] [###] Would be 3 blocks? Or is a block only delineated by a road, but not a pavement? Or something else? Can you have "blocks" with a lot of detached houses, I would guess that yes you can? So that makes me think its blocks of possibly many buildings between roads?
- robrenaud 7y ago
  In American English, blocks are deliminated by roads and mostly used in dense urban environments, often where the blocks are rectangular.
  - JackFr 7y ago
    Etymology note: The word 'blockbuster' was coined by the press to describe the largest conventional bombs used by the RAF in WWII, because they could destroy a city block.