Hacker News Reader

Comment by Retric | Hacker News Reader

So walking 100-200 feet vs waiting longer, entering your destination, paying more even after checking multiple apps for pricing…

I am not in great shape but I know which I prefer.

View on HN

Any bus that has stops every 100-200 feet is unbearably slow. Even every 1/8 of a mile is too much to be an time efficient mode of transportation unless you have BRT imo.

I’ve said it several times but you average ~165 feet when walking to a stop every 1/8th of a mile. Max is 1/2 the distance because you can walk either direction and average is again 1/2 the max because you start at a random point not the worst possibility. 5280/8/2/2 = 165.

As to unbearably slow, there’s this idea of express busses and buss only lanes etc. The core of cities really isn’t that big, it takes forever because traffic is slow or mass transit is infrequent.

All these calculations are only true if your destination is on the road the bus runs along. Since not every road has a bus line, you also usually have to walk multiple blocks perpendicular _away_ from the bus line in addition to some of the distance between stops.

If your road doesn’t have a bus line then that’s a problem not an inherent limitation.

Ideally you want a grid where bus lines are near intersections so going from North to East means crossing 1 street so you can go anywhere with 2 waits and a street crossing.

Fair enough. Not familiar with SF bus system but the bus system where I live, which is considered quite good I think, has each bus line 1/2 mile apart from each other. Almost no one lives directly along a route so there's an extra 1/8 mile average walk just to get to the route, not a stop on it. Fine by me but a lot of people don't seem capable of that for whatever reason. Combine that with the bus not actually going to where you're trying to get and I can see why people aren't huge fans.

The reason is usually that they need a car for some journey, once they have paid that fixed cost, they may as well use it for more journeys.

(On average), for a walk to the stop of 100-200 feet the bus would need to stop every 200-400 feet. 300 ft seems to be roughly 100m, which is probably much too short a distance still. 250m or ~800 ft aligns better to my experience with cities with good transit, and in the worst case scenario you have to walk 125m to your nearest stop.

Almost.

1/8th of a mile is every 660 feet, but the farthest you can be from one is the midpoint so 330 feet. However for every trip starting at the midpoint there’s another at and the bus stop thus the average would be 1/2 that distance again or 165 feet.

Assuming a 1D world, you can beat this in practice.

Busses around me don't stop at every stop, only if there are people waiting at the stop or someone has requested a stop by pressing a strip along the windows or one of the almost dozen buttons on the bus.

show me an american city where a bus stops every 100-200 feet every 3 mins. Heck show me where it'd even be possible in an american city. That sounds like the most inefficient bus ever.

That’s a bus stop every ~1/8th of a mile not 200 feet.

You cut it in half because you can walk to the closest stop and cut it in half again before you’re starting at a random point not the worst possibility so 5280/8/2/2 = 165 feet. Except we don’t exit buildings or get on busses in the middle of the street so it’s not random.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com