Hacker News Reader

Comment by janalsncm | Hacker News Reader

In my experience, the problem was long wait times between buses and unreliable pickup times. That meant you realistically had to add buffer at each end of your trip: in case the bus was early and in case the bus was late. Not only was that more than 20% of my trip time, it was also mental overhead of worrying whether you already missed the bus.

The bus might come 2x per hour. Maybe 2:18 and 2:48. But it might come at 2:15 or 2:25. So you need to arrive at 2:13 and possibly wait 12 minutes. Or if you arrive late you might be waiting 30+ minutes.

Make the buses fast and safe.

View on HN

Removing unnecessary bus stops is a prerequisite to making busses fast. You can't run a fast bus service if the bus is stopping every single block.

There are 2 big prerequisites for fast bus service :

1. Dedicated bus lanes (speed, predictability).

2. Traffic light priority ( speed, predictability).

How many US cities implement even one of those?

Not nearly enough

Dedicated bus lanes that are physically separated from car traffic specifically, like the BRT system in Mexico City.

Regardless of exclusive RoW or signal priority, it is physically impossible for a bus route to:

1) stop every few hundred feet to pick up and drop off passengers

2) maintain an effective speed significantly faster than running

That optimizes speed, not latency.

I don't care how long it takes to get off the bus nearly as much as I care how long it takes to get on.

For fixed route transit, speed is latency. The faster the bus can make the average trip, the tighter the timetable can be given the same number of buses. Fewer stops also improves consistency which means you can plan to arrive at the stop closer to the scheduled time, and timetables can be tightened even more by reducing the layover times that keep the bus synchronized with the time table.

Separately, the variability problem can be somewhat solved with the real-time location updates that many agencies provide. You'll still have to wait the same amount of time, but some of it can be done comfortably in your house when the bus is running late.

It helps with latency too or schedule padding. Bus schedules are unreliable because of all the stops which slow them down and encourage bunching of busses on a route with a lot of service.

Bus bunching is often blamed on traffic or scheduling, but in my experience in NYC, a lack of enforcement and/or accountability plays a role too. I live near one end of a bus line and commute to the other end 5 days day a week. On a daily basis, there are large gaps where buses miss their scheduled times. Then, as they approach the end of the line, they arrive and depart in groups of three or four, which only worsens the problem.

For a fixed number of busses, the faster the busses are traveling the less time there is between busses.

Right, but for a fixed schedule...

Schedules get adjusted based on budgets. Faster busses yield better schedules.

There already are “express” buses that don’t stop at every stop. They don’t solve the issues I described above. Cutting the time between bus arrivals would be a much more effective solution.

Making buses faster can improve frequency though, and it's likely cheaper to improve frequency by making them faster than buying and operating more buses. The speed is almost directly correlated with the interval between buses, going 20% faster means ~20% less time between buses.

A bus route that is made twice to be twice as fast (whether through stop consolidation or some other means) will mechanically be twice as frequent, given the same number of service-hours. Slow buses are either more expensive to run, or come less frequently.

I reliably pickup times are amplified by the number of stops that are made. The stop and go time is fixed. The amount of time it takes 2 people to exit a bus versus four is lot linear. It depends on how full the bus is. But it definitely does slow down when people are getting off and on at every single stop.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com