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Comment by asdff | Hacker News Reader

The interesting thing with transit is that optimal may not be the most optimal. E.g. your model might suggest half mile stop frequencies. Seems good, until the public comment period and all the old folks who take the line show up and ask their particular stop not be displaced.

There is a reason why a lot of american bus networks basically follow the same old streetcar routes that were always there. People become used to existing patterns and build lives around them. New transit is a good opportunity to apply this model, but reworking old transit is tricky because some of your existing ridership will end up with a worse offering by definition, and they will protest. While the people who might benefit will not show up with equivocal advocacy in the public comment meeting.

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The bus stop spacing problem is very real. Buses stop every other block in my area. The average speed end to end is no faster than riding a bike! If you suggest deleting some stops people scream about their own convenience or pretend to care about the disabled. By trying to cater to every single constituency, we've designed a bus route that serves no one's interest. A slow bus might not exist at all. People will just buy a car, going into high interest debt if need be.

Buses can stop every other block, but in practice, they rarely do. Most bus routes that I've taken are neither full nor busy with passengers at every stop. Certainly not all day long. Most bus routes can get away with bypassing several miles' worth of stops at a time. Passengers tend to cluster around certain spots at certain times. Even the main routes have busy times, as well as quiet times in long stretches.

By building in the capability to stop very frequently, they can serve the most people and every area in the route, equally. But day to day, hour to hour, they are definintely bypassing stops, and I can name at least 3 bus routes where the vehicle will certainly reach the speed limit of 45mph or so in-between.

Depends on bus usage in your city. Mine is pretty high so it stops every stop. I’ve had bus trips that were 50 stops a leg and people are stopping at every one. That is a lot of delay right there. Doesn’t even get better at night; service pattern contracts then so ridership per bus is still high enough even at those hours. There ought to be more express service offerings that would skip over local stops.

Bus speed is also reduced by people scanning tickets etc. THe simple answer is to skip the charade about pretending public transport is a business and concentrate on moving people and safety.

Bus always has longer dwell time than rail in general. The biggest time sink I see is in disabled passenger operations. Ramp has to come down, passenger goes in, then the bus operator has to leave their cockpit to lift up the disabled area seats to be flush to the wall, and hook in the tiedown straps in the wheelchair, before returning back to the cockpit, closing their door, buckling in, raising ramp again, and finally going.

For trains there is of course no difference in dwell time between disabled and able bodied passengers. Not sure how this issue gets solved with bus if the issue is they are too rocky to not have the chairs strapped down. BRT platforms would solve the ramp issue with flush floor boarding but you still have the strapping down delay.

Ticketing systems slow both bus and trains. I remember the gov spent $500M on TownHall in Sydney just to rework the entrance/exit pathways to improve efficiency.

How many years will it take to get the money from tickets to payback the renovation costs ?

Like many things public transport, stop trying to make it a business and make it a service for the public.

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