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I believe the central thesis of this article is unsupported, and other assertions are false. One, the article asserts that too many stops is the main cause of

I believe the central thesis of this article is unsupported, and other assertions are false. 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. Two, removing stops will likely not make the remaining stops nicer. Cities aren’t thinking about how to allocate a fixed bus budget. They’re asking themselves how much they have to spend on buses. This is the core of the problem: low cost services are in a death spiral in the US. Budget cuts -> services get worse -> reduced users -> more cuts. In my experience, the bus is not a nice experience. The bus feels dirty, unsafe and hostile. Further, the arrival times are not reliable and are often a long time apart. This means you need to arrive ~10 minutes early and time your bus so that you also arrive at your destination early. You will be wasting possibly 20+ minutes each way. Of course you are also standing in the sun or the cold or the rain while you wait, and probably walking on a hostile stroad and across several lanes of traffic before that point. 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.

the_sleaze_ 8mo 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.
- culi 8mo ago
  Those busses still need designated spots to stop at. They can't be stopping in the middle of a street
  - krab 8mo ago
    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?
    - oblio 8mo ago
      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.
      - krab 8mo ago
        The assumption is that a "waymo bus" would be hailed by an app and the service would plan routes on demand. In such case, bus stops would be needed only in busy areas or in places where it would be dangerous to stop. This is based on the observation that people, including police, tolerate taxi drivers stopping at places where it's technically illegal.
    - cozzyd 8mo ago
      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..
  - idontwantthis 8mo ago
    If you keep asking self driving bros questions you can get them to eventually reinvent buses and trains. It’s fun!
  - amluto 8mo ago
    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” :)
    - the_sleaze_ 8mo ago
      > 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.
      - amluto 8mo ago
        What’s the point of making this dynamic? Go find a city where people are out, having fun, and not buried in their phones, and where the city isn’t full of strip malls and parking lots. There will be people who want to be picked up during busy hours, and having a shelter from the sun or rain is nice, and having a place where there isn’t a parked car or an uber in the way is nice. Lots of Asian capitals are like this.
        the_sleaze_ 8mo ago
        > people are out, having fun, and not buried in their phones and where the city isn’t full of strip malls and parking lots. Are we still talking about how to optimize public transportation on city streets?
  - axus 8mo ago
    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.
    - ragall 8mo ago
      No it couldn't, for legal liability reasons, usability for the travellers, etc...
  - calvinmorrison 8mo ago
    funnily enough, they get designated spots and they still just stop in the middle of the street
- enragedcacti 8mo ago
  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.
  - dghlsakjg 8mo ago
    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.
    - AlotOfReading 8mo ago
      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.
      - dghlsakjg 8mo ago
- janalsncm 8mo ago
  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.
  - rangestransform 8mo ago
    Autonomy is necessary to get the unionized bus drivers out of the way, the cost of running a bus is dominated by staffing costs.
- cozzyd 8mo ago
  Wait until you're waiting in the wind and snow with a toddler, and you'll prefer a bus shelter.
- otikik 8mo ago
  Waymo is worth nothing if there’s congestion. That’s the problem public transportation solves, not lack of connectivity
epolanski 8mo ago
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.
- jzebedee 8mo ago
  This is highly location dependent with how unequal the US transit infrastructure is. It'd help to add your city for anecdotes to mean much.
  - epolanski 8mo ago
    I lived in Columbus Ohio as an exchange student and I really disliked the car-centric nature of...everything. I wish it had better public transport in general but I honestly wish that about pretty much any place.
    - jcims 8mo ago
      Typing this from a suburb of Columbus now. COTA provides decent service to get around in the downtown and directly adjacent neighborhoods, but it drops off sharply as soon as you get outside of that area. Part of the problem is the typical US sprawl of the place. The area inside the beltway is ~200 square miles - https://urbandecisiongroup.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/fc_popDensity_2000.png https://urbandecisiongroup.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/fc... I live just outside the beltway. Driving to the OSU stadium just north of downtown would take me about 25 minutes. According to Google maps, the nearest COTA stop is a 20 minute walk away, then it's an hour and ten minutes to get to the stadium. Agreed it would be lovely to be able to hop on a bus or train and get somewhere within a reasonable amount of time.
- 8mo ago
idontwantthis 8mo ago
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.
- recursivecaveat 8mo ago
  They're no dirtier than subways, which people don't mind. People have a very negative association with buses though. The streetcar experience for example is pretty much identical minus the bumps, but they're perceived much more positively. The timing and routes are indeed brutal though. If I wanted to ride the bus to my work the best route is 20 minutes of walking, 10 minutes of riding on a bus that runs every half hour, then another 20 minutes of walking. This is definitely not a rural area or anything either.
  - angmarsbane 8mo ago
    What I find interesting is that people have a negative relationship with buses but not with trolley cars, like the old SF trolley cars where you could almost hang off them. If we injected some fun or joy into busses like trolley cars would that improve people's relationships or perspective of them too?
realo 8mo ago
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.
- bombcar 8mo ago
  Predictability and reliability is as important, perhaps more important than security. One reason that trains "work" is that the rails on the ground is a promise that a train is coming.
calvinmorrison 8mo ago
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
LucasBrandt 8mo ago
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!
- miltonlost 8mo ago
  > 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! Until there' a snowstorm, and no one shovels. And you have a broken leg, or are elderly, or disabled. Sure, it might save you personally some time, but we live in a society and should try to help out the one's who need help.
  - kjkjadksj 8mo ago
    The solution for that is offering express routes not forcing everyone onto a slow frequently stopping local bus and making everyone worse off for it.
    - cozzyd 8mo ago
      that's right, the best solution is probably something like every other bus (excepting very low frequency buses that have fewer than 5-6 buses per hour) to only stop at every other stop (of course always including interchange points).
  - crummy 8mo ago
    So... Should the bus stops be even closer together?
StopDisinfo910 8mo ago
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.
ragall 8mo ago
> 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.
elzbardico 8mo ago
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.
thomastjeffery 8mo ago
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.
mikepurvis 8mo ago
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.
- anonymous541908 8mo ago
  >"how to get to X by <mode>" I would recommend Citymapper (https://citymapper.com/ https://citymapper.com/) in such a situation.
  - mikepurvis 8mo ago
    Appreciate the recc but what I'm trying to get at in the parent comment is that by that time you've picked X without having an overall picture of the transit story, you've often already lost. Basically, current route planning works well when you already know where you're going, but is much more limited when you're exploring the problem space that is where could I be going. My internal thought process as a tourist is that I have a starting point and end point in a city, and some number of hours in between. I want to do some touristy things in that time, and I don't want to waste it all waiting for transfers. I'm not asking Google Maps to be a tour operator for me, but it also can't even help when I have a specific thing I need of which there are many instances, and I'm like... I don't care which electronics store I go to, I just need an electronics store and would like one that's convenient to where I am by transit. Or like, there are four Apple Stores in this city, which one is fastest to get to by transit? Another recent example was having a seven hour layover in Tokyo where I had to do the Narita -> Haneda shuffle, and wanted to eat something not-airport-food during that time. I really struggled with getting Google Maps to show me where would be a good point to aim for a stop that was convenient by train to both airports; in the end I asked ChatGPT which suggested Ueno Station and I ate monjayaki which was delicious.
kjkjadksj 8mo ago
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.
tomxor 8mo ago
> 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.
- bccdee 8mo ago
  You're being downvoted because you misunderstood the post you're replying to. They aren't referring to profit margins, but marginal utility—i.e. incremental improvements to stop spacing (purportedly) would not be enough to fix a fundamentally broken system.
  - deleted 8mo ago
    [deleted]
GeoAtreides 8mo ago
>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.
sailingparrot 8mo ago
> 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.
- angmarsbane 8mo ago
  I'm confused, do you mean the bus stops at stops where no one is waiting to get on AND no one has asked to get off the bus?
  - estebank 8mo ago
    It does that, but the parent means stop signs. San Francisco where there aren't traffic lights mostly blankets every intersection with 4 way stop signs. The parent is likely referring to The Sunset district, which looks like this: https://www.google.com/maps/@37.7569397,-122.5007035,3a,75y,81.73h,82.1t/data=!3m7!1e1!3m5!1suX2mDsRXeycLc-9TWTGCZQ!2e0!6shttps:%2F%2Fstreetviewpixels-pa.googleapis.com%2Fv1%2Fthumbnail%3Fcb_client%3Dmaps_sv.tactile%26w%3D900%26h%3D600%26pitch%3D7.9046437387336255%26panoid%3DuX2mDsRXeycLc-9TWTGCZQ%26yaw%3D81.73117401490047!7i16384!8i8192?entry=ttu&g_ep=EgoyMDI2MDIyMi4wIKXMDSoASAFQAw%3D%3D https://www.google.com/maps/@37.7569397,-122.5007035,3a,75y,...
    - sailingparrot 8mo ago
      Yes, that’s what I meant and yes I was referring to the N line in the sunset as the worst offender (in my commutes)
  - sailingparrot 8mo ago
    Sorry, in the case of the bus there are too many bus stops (although there are more express lines now), so the bus stops a lot instead of having less stops where more people get off and walk one more block (what the article talks about). The muni (tram), stops at stop signs at every block on the west side like the N line, so it’s extreeeemly slow. A system where the tram has priority over cars and does not need to stop at every single block would be life changing.
logifail 8mo ago
> 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.
bccdee 8mo ago
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.
tootie 8mo ago
> 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.
notatoad 8mo ago
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.
alexjplant 8mo ago
> 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.
- bobthepanda 8mo ago
  They could work, but in countries where they do work you have some combination of police actually willing to write traffic citations and cameras.
EPWN3D 8mo ago
> 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.
eikenberry 8mo ago
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.
- hnav 8mo ago
  I think that's where BEV and L4 autonomy comes in once it's commodified. Buses are huge in part because of having to amortize the driver and that makes them very crude. An autonomous mini-bus that can fit 10 people would fit more organically into cityscapes, destroy the pavement less, be run at 20% of current headways, etc, etc. Honestly the only big issues there I can think of are seatbelts (lower mass means that it may decelerate much more rapidly than a normal bus in an accident) and accessibility.
  - servo_sausage 8mo ago
    If there is a case for a smaller bus due to autonomy, there is a case for no bus at all. Ultimately public transport that doesn't get its own infrastructure (lanes, rails, or tunnels), is just a economic compromise to move people for cheaper than a car... It's not better for the user in any way. And if it does need special infrastructure to make sense, it gets harder and harder to justify at all once autonomy is in the mix.
kelvinjps10 8mo ago
In other countries there is like the main bus system you take and there is another that take you to the main stops
- supertrope 8mo ago
  This is the coverage vs. capacity trade-off. Buses running between full on stations are faster than buses that comprise the network edges. Because the core of the network is focused on capacity. Buses that meander around to provide coverage, minimize walking, and stop every other block are really slow. Like 6 MPH end to end, no faster than riding a bicycle! Do we want a bus network to compete with walking/biking or with driving downtown?
  - kelvinjps10 8mo ago
    These buses are for the disablities elderly problem, regular people prefer to walk a little than wait for those buses.
bobthepanda 8mo ago
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.
sfink 8mo ago
> 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?
Bukhmanizer 8mo ago
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.
- philistine 8mo ago
  I'm from the East Coast. I lived a bit in Vancouver. The bus is the place to be. Everybody from all walks of life is on the bus. I went to Seattle for one weekend and experienced the sad view of only the poorest people taking the bus. It was enlightening and changed my outlook on life.
Glyptodon 8mo ago
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.
oatmeal1 8mo ago
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.
Gigachad 8mo ago
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.
ErroneousBosh 8mo ago
> The bus feels dirty, unsafe and hostile. Americans think everything is unsafe, except for things that actually are unsafe.
hn_throwaway_99 8mo ago
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.
panick21_ 8mo ago
> 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.
som 8mo ago
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.
- bobthepanda 8mo ago
  The article mentions that other countries have much higher spacing between stops to begin with, so in that sense they don’t remove bus stops today because they already have.
thaumasiotes 8mo ago
> 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.
mattmaroon 8mo ago
I also love the logic “others countries do x and more people ride the bus there therefore x must increase usage of buses”. Umm, maybe they just can’t afford cars as easily as we can.
StingyJelly 8mo ago
> The arrival times are not reliable and are often a long time apart. Which can be caused by having too many stops and having to choose a suboptimal route that can service them all. In the town I live in I try to avoid almost all buses except the express ones that have just a few stops but choose a reasonable route and thus are rarely late.
vachina 8mo ago
Bus needs to be slightly slower than cars to be viable, not 2x-4x the time taken. Otherwise what’s the point.
HexPhantom 8mo ago
It seems like stop balancing is best understood less as a silver bullet and more as one of the prerequisites for making buses fast and frequent enough to actually compete with driving
sporkland 8mo ago
You're talking abstractly but the author mentions SF and NYC in the intro where cars come with deep pain points, but at least in SF there are so many bus stops it leads to trip times that are much slower than say an Uber/lyft/waymo.

the_sleaze_ 8mo 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.

culi 8mo ago
Those busses still need designated spots to stop at. They can't be stopping in the middle of a street
- krab 8mo ago
  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?
  - oblio 8mo ago
    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.
    - krab 8mo ago
      The assumption is that a "waymo bus" would be hailed by an app and the service would plan routes on demand. In such case, bus stops would be needed only in busy areas or in places where it would be dangerous to stop. This is based on the observation that people, including police, tolerate taxi drivers stopping at places where it's technically illegal.
  - cozzyd 8mo ago
    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..
- idontwantthis 8mo ago
  If you keep asking self driving bros questions you can get them to eventually reinvent buses and trains. It’s fun!
- amluto 8mo ago
  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” :)
  - the_sleaze_ 8mo ago
    > 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.
    - amluto 8mo ago
      What’s the point of making this dynamic? Go find a city where people are out, having fun, and not buried in their phones, and where the city isn’t full of strip malls and parking lots. There will be people who want to be picked up during busy hours, and having a shelter from the sun or rain is nice, and having a place where there isn’t a parked car or an uber in the way is nice. Lots of Asian capitals are like this.
      - the_sleaze_ 8mo ago
        > people are out, having fun, and not buried in their phones and where the city isn’t full of strip malls and parking lots. Are we still talking about how to optimize public transportation on city streets?
- axus 8mo ago
  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.
  - ragall 8mo ago
    No it couldn't, for legal liability reasons, usability for the travellers, etc...
- calvinmorrison 8mo ago
  funnily enough, they get designated spots and they still just stop in the middle of the street
enragedcacti 8mo ago
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.
- dghlsakjg 8mo ago
  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.
  - AlotOfReading 8mo ago
    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.
    - dghlsakjg 8mo ago
janalsncm 8mo ago
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.
- rangestransform 8mo ago
  Autonomy is necessary to get the unionized bus drivers out of the way, the cost of running a bus is dominated by staffing costs.
cozzyd 8mo ago
Wait until you're waiting in the wind and snow with a toddler, and you'll prefer a bus shelter.
otikik 8mo ago
Waymo is worth nothing if there’s congestion. That’s the problem public transportation solves, not lack of connectivity

epolanski 8mo ago

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.

jzebedee 8mo ago
This is highly location dependent with how unequal the US transit infrastructure is. It'd help to add your city for anecdotes to mean much.
- epolanski 8mo ago
  I lived in Columbus Ohio as an exchange student and I really disliked the car-centric nature of...everything. I wish it had better public transport in general but I honestly wish that about pretty much any place.
  - jcims 8mo ago
    Typing this from a suburb of Columbus now. COTA provides decent service to get around in the downtown and directly adjacent neighborhoods, but it drops off sharply as soon as you get outside of that area. Part of the problem is the typical US sprawl of the place. The area inside the beltway is ~200 square miles - https://urbandecisiongroup.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/fc_popDensity_2000.png https://urbandecisiongroup.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/fc... I live just outside the beltway. Driving to the OSU stadium just north of downtown would take me about 25 minutes. According to Google maps, the nearest COTA stop is a 20 minute walk away, then it's an hour and ten minutes to get to the stadium. Agreed it would be lovely to be able to hop on a bus or train and get somewhere within a reasonable amount of time.
8mo ago

idontwantthis 8mo ago

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.

recursivecaveat 8mo ago
They're no dirtier than subways, which people don't mind. People have a very negative association with buses though. The streetcar experience for example is pretty much identical minus the bumps, but they're perceived much more positively. The timing and routes are indeed brutal though. If I wanted to ride the bus to my work the best route is 20 minutes of walking, 10 minutes of riding on a bus that runs every half hour, then another 20 minutes of walking. This is definitely not a rural area or anything either.
- angmarsbane 8mo ago
  What I find interesting is that people have a negative relationship with buses but not with trolley cars, like the old SF trolley cars where you could almost hang off them. If we injected some fun or joy into busses like trolley cars would that improve people's relationships or perspective of them too?

realo 8mo ago

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.

bombcar 8mo ago
Predictability and reliability is as important, perhaps more important than security. One reason that trains "work" is that the rails on the ground is a promise that a train is coming.

calvinmorrison 8mo ago

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

LucasBrandt 8mo ago

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!

miltonlost 8mo ago
> 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! Until there' a snowstorm, and no one shovels. And you have a broken leg, or are elderly, or disabled. Sure, it might save you personally some time, but we live in a society and should try to help out the one's who need help.
- kjkjadksj 8mo ago
  The solution for that is offering express routes not forcing everyone onto a slow frequently stopping local bus and making everyone worse off for it.
  - cozzyd 8mo ago
    that's right, the best solution is probably something like every other bus (excepting very low frequency buses that have fewer than 5-6 buses per hour) to only stop at every other stop (of course always including interchange points).
- crummy 8mo ago
  So... Should the bus stops be even closer together?

StopDisinfo910 8mo ago

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.

ragall 8mo ago

> 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.

elzbardico 8mo ago

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.

thomastjeffery 8mo ago

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.

mikepurvis 8mo ago

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.

anonymous541908 8mo ago
>"how to get to X by <mode>" I would recommend Citymapper (https://citymapper.com/ https://citymapper.com/) in such a situation.
- mikepurvis 8mo ago
  Appreciate the recc but what I'm trying to get at in the parent comment is that by that time you've picked X without having an overall picture of the transit story, you've often already lost. Basically, current route planning works well when you already know where you're going, but is much more limited when you're exploring the problem space that is where could I be going. My internal thought process as a tourist is that I have a starting point and end point in a city, and some number of hours in between. I want to do some touristy things in that time, and I don't want to waste it all waiting for transfers. I'm not asking Google Maps to be a tour operator for me, but it also can't even help when I have a specific thing I need of which there are many instances, and I'm like... I don't care which electronics store I go to, I just need an electronics store and would like one that's convenient to where I am by transit. Or like, there are four Apple Stores in this city, which one is fastest to get to by transit? Another recent example was having a seven hour layover in Tokyo where I had to do the Narita -> Haneda shuffle, and wanted to eat something not-airport-food during that time. I really struggled with getting Google Maps to show me where would be a good point to aim for a stop that was convenient by train to both airports; in the end I asked ChatGPT which suggested Ueno Station and I ate monjayaki which was delicious.

kjkjadksj 8mo ago

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.

tomxor 8mo ago

> 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.

bccdee 8mo ago
You're being downvoted because you misunderstood the post you're replying to. They aren't referring to profit margins, but marginal utility—i.e. incremental improvements to stop spacing (purportedly) would not be enough to fix a fundamentally broken system.
- deleted 8mo ago
  [deleted]

GeoAtreides 8mo ago

>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.

sailingparrot 8mo ago

> 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.

angmarsbane 8mo ago
I'm confused, do you mean the bus stops at stops where no one is waiting to get on AND no one has asked to get off the bus?
- estebank 8mo ago
  It does that, but the parent means stop signs. San Francisco where there aren't traffic lights mostly blankets every intersection with 4 way stop signs. The parent is likely referring to The Sunset district, which looks like this: https://www.google.com/maps/@37.7569397,-122.5007035,3a,75y,81.73h,82.1t/data=!3m7!1e1!3m5!1suX2mDsRXeycLc-9TWTGCZQ!2e0!6shttps:%2F%2Fstreetviewpixels-pa.googleapis.com%2Fv1%2Fthumbnail%3Fcb_client%3Dmaps_sv.tactile%26w%3D900%26h%3D600%26pitch%3D7.9046437387336255%26panoid%3DuX2mDsRXeycLc-9TWTGCZQ%26yaw%3D81.73117401490047!7i16384!8i8192?entry=ttu&g_ep=EgoyMDI2MDIyMi4wIKXMDSoASAFQAw%3D%3D https://www.google.com/maps/@37.7569397,-122.5007035,3a,75y,...
  - sailingparrot 8mo ago
    Yes, that’s what I meant and yes I was referring to the N line in the sunset as the worst offender (in my commutes)
- sailingparrot 8mo ago
  Sorry, in the case of the bus there are too many bus stops (although there are more express lines now), so the bus stops a lot instead of having less stops where more people get off and walk one more block (what the article talks about). The muni (tram), stops at stop signs at every block on the west side like the N line, so it’s extreeeemly slow. A system where the tram has priority over cars and does not need to stop at every single block would be life changing.

logifail 8mo ago

> 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.

bccdee 8mo ago

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.

tootie 8mo ago

> 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.

notatoad 8mo ago

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.

alexjplant 8mo ago

> 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.

bobthepanda 8mo ago
They could work, but in countries where they do work you have some combination of police actually willing to write traffic citations and cameras.

EPWN3D 8mo ago

> 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.

eikenberry 8mo ago

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.

hnav 8mo ago
I think that's where BEV and L4 autonomy comes in once it's commodified. Buses are huge in part because of having to amortize the driver and that makes them very crude. An autonomous mini-bus that can fit 10 people would fit more organically into cityscapes, destroy the pavement less, be run at 20% of current headways, etc, etc. Honestly the only big issues there I can think of are seatbelts (lower mass means that it may decelerate much more rapidly than a normal bus in an accident) and accessibility.
- servo_sausage 8mo ago
  If there is a case for a smaller bus due to autonomy, there is a case for no bus at all. Ultimately public transport that doesn't get its own infrastructure (lanes, rails, or tunnels), is just a economic compromise to move people for cheaper than a car... It's not better for the user in any way. And if it does need special infrastructure to make sense, it gets harder and harder to justify at all once autonomy is in the mix.

kelvinjps10 8mo ago

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

supertrope 8mo ago
This is the coverage vs. capacity trade-off. Buses running between full on stations are faster than buses that comprise the network edges. Because the core of the network is focused on capacity. Buses that meander around to provide coverage, minimize walking, and stop every other block are really slow. Like 6 MPH end to end, no faster than riding a bicycle! Do we want a bus network to compete with walking/biking or with driving downtown?
- kelvinjps10 8mo ago
  These buses are for the disablities elderly problem, regular people prefer to walk a little than wait for those buses.

bobthepanda 8mo ago

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.

sfink 8mo ago

> 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?

Bukhmanizer 8mo ago

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.

philistine 8mo ago
I'm from the East Coast. I lived a bit in Vancouver. The bus is the place to be. Everybody from all walks of life is on the bus. I went to Seattle for one weekend and experienced the sad view of only the poorest people taking the bus. It was enlightening and changed my outlook on life.

Glyptodon 8mo ago

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.

oatmeal1 8mo ago

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.

Gigachad 8mo ago

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.

ErroneousBosh 8mo ago

> The bus feels dirty, unsafe and hostile. Americans think everything is unsafe, except for things that actually are unsafe.

hn_throwaway_99 8mo ago

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.

panick21_ 8mo ago

> 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.

som 8mo ago

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.

bobthepanda 8mo ago
The article mentions that other countries have much higher spacing between stops to begin with, so in that sense they don’t remove bus stops today because they already have.

thaumasiotes 8mo ago

> 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.

mattmaroon 8mo ago

I also love the logic “others countries do x and more people ride the bus there therefore x must increase usage of buses”. Umm, maybe they just can’t afford cars as easily as we can.

StingyJelly 8mo ago

> The arrival times are not reliable and are often a long time apart. Which can be caused by having too many stops and having to choose a suboptimal route that can service them all. In the town I live in I try to avoid almost all buses except the express ones that have just a few stops but choose a reasonable route and thus are rarely late.

vachina 8mo ago

Bus needs to be slightly slower than cars to be viable, not 2x-4x the time taken. Otherwise what’s the point.

HexPhantom 8mo ago

It seems like stop balancing is best understood less as a silver bullet and more as one of the prerequisites for making buses fast and frequent enough to actually compete with driving

sporkland 8mo ago

You're talking abstractly but the author mentions SF and NYC in the intro where cars come with deep pain points, but at least in SF there are so many bus stops it leads to trip times that are much slower than say an Uber/lyft/waymo.