Here in Iraq, we do not have bus stops; buses roam the street on certain paths people know, and people can wave at the bus and it will stop for them. This is not that big a problem since most buses are Kia minivans that hold ~14 people, so there is not a lot of dwell time. Larger buses (generally Coaster vans that hold ~25 people) generally operate in areas with high enough traffic that you are not moving faster than 20km/h anyway, so stopping here and there doesn’t slow things that much.
In the end, the routes within Baghdad are composed of minivans connecting the outskirts and larger vans connecting the congested downtown. Almost 70% of Baghdadis use the system and it is generally very cheap; you can go from one end of the city to the other for $1, in maybe 130-140% of the time that it would take you to do that in a taxi or your own car.
This is a system that arose due to the general lawlessness of Iraq and a lack of public transport options like metros and trains, but I think it is efficient even in comparison to Europe. Everyone can just go to the street near them and stop a bus, and the routes get allocated smartly because it is the market doing it; drivers are incentivized to go on routes that get their buses filled, so bus allocation ends up being really efficient.
I don’t know about Europe but in NYC in the rare cases when I took the bus it’s hard to know which stop to get off on if you were in an unfamiliar neighborhood. Better signage in the interior of the bus would be helpful.
This is in large part a function of budget. I've spent nearly my entire adult life in Asia, and seen a dramatic revolution in public transportation across many countries/societies. I take buses and trains often, as well as taxis and ride-share vehicles. Where operators have upgraded equipment, this signage is now incorporated. In many places, right now there is a combination of older and newer vehicles that may or may not offer digital signage. My hack (and probably yours) is to keep an eye on Google Maps while I'm riding.
Most urban standard bus trips are not that long in duration (from getting on the bus to getting off the bus). Most of the time of the trip is getting to the bus stop, waiting for the bus, and getting from the the bus stop at the other end to the actual destination. More distance between stops so the bus can average 10mph instead of 8? Wouldn't hurt. But it's not the topmost of issues.
For example, if I have to walk three blocks instead of two to get to the bus stop it's no big deal (of course in a few years I might not say that, but...). But if I have to wait for twenty-five minutes in the middle of the day ... that's a big deal. If the journey from my stop to my destination is three blocks instead of two that's fine. But if that journey involves crossing two six lane stroads where it is clear that pedestrians are a dangerous enemy who is not welcome with everything optimized for the comfort of vehicles, that's a problem.
If, during the main part of the day one needs to think of bus schedules for intraurban buses, that is A FAILURE. And it's not going to be cured by making stops a little further apart.
An interesting question is how operational design affects user behavior. When I travel back to New York (where I'm from), I take buses and subways all the time. On crosstown streets there is a bus stop every block. On uptown/downtown streets stops are every three blocks or so. I appreciate that some people have mobility issues, BUT the majority of people can and should walk farther than they do, especially in the United States. Walking more improves health, and Americans are the least healthy people in the OECD. I often see passengers getting on a crosstown bus for one stop. For 99 percent of citizens, there's no reason to do that. The system is designed to facilitate it, though, so people take advantage. Which as Mr. Vejendla notes, is to the detriment of the system.
I've taken crosstown buses for one stop for a number of reasons. I need that four or five minutes that I'm saving because I'm late. Or I'm tired. Or because I have mobility issues that are the result of the work that I've done and that one crosstown block is impossibly long in that moment. I've also taken it because that's the way that I decide to spend my $3.
On the flip side, I've missed a bus @ 6th and 23rd and made it to 9th and 23rd, or maybe even 10th and 23rd before the next bus, at 7:30 AM, showed up.
I have no doubt that you've seen a few people take the bus, or a local train, for one stop. Your judgement, however, is accurate only to the extent that you know who that person is and why they've made their choices.
Increasing the distance doesn't make mass transit more attractive for those who are negatively affected by those changes. Increasing service does. In some areas, service may be better with more bus lanes. Or maybe transit agencies need the money to buy and run more busses.
And while it's tempting to believe that autonomous busses would solve the problem, I doubt that will be the case.
Sure, I understand, but a public transit system that is designed for the user who wants maximum convenience (a bus stop every block and a bus every three minutes) is not cost-effective. The examples you have given are a poor foundation for policy, in my opinion. The people who have real mobility issues, yes, I support solutions that serve them. But lateness is a self-inflicted wound, and everyone is tired. The real question is behavioral: how do people respond when they are "negatively affected" by changes. Are they seriously affected, or are they just complaining because a policy change that benefits the community negatively affects THEM? I understand that's how many people think, especially in less collectivist societies (e.g. the United States versus Japan), but ...
I would also put in a plea for more direct ( A to B with out diversions to C through ...). My connection to the DC Metro takes several detours off of the obvious route - to a hospital, to a business, to a commercial area, all to minimise the walking distance for some at the expense of travel time for everyone. The end result is a trip time that is at least double what it should be and this drives me away and I assume it impacts others in the same way.
Take hospitals off that list. If you're taking the bus to a hospital, the odds are decent that having to traverse extra distance is burdensome.
But you do bring up a terrifically valid point: Most buses today are trying to traverse landscapes that were created by, for and only for cars; those landscapes are not sustainable in the long term. Fixing it would be job that greatly exceeds the capacity of a bus system.
Except that hospitals tend to be very large employers, and parking for people who don't have MD after their name tends to suck. Streamlining bus access would still be a net positive.
The way to "increase" ridership is to make it more inconvenient for people who ACTUALLY USE THE BUS.
How many times will increasing the distance put a pedestrian unfriendly road in between the rider and the bus? Are the people who use the bus able to walk an extra block or two? Are those blocks well lit and busy for those of us who take the bus late at night?
As for MDScot's wh-complaint - the people who use the bus most are working class people who need to get to the places they work - a hospital, a business, a commercial area - and not just to the Metro.
I'm going to suggest that he should be looking at WMATA buses and not the Ride-ons which usually have a more direct route.
For all of you who think this is a great idea, do you live in a suburb or a city? Do you do your grocery shopping using a bus? Does your job require you to stand on your feet?
As someone who uses the bus roughly two or three times a month, I can tell you that the people I share a bus with do not look like they need any extra hassle.
And if you are not a regular bus user, the next day it rains, please feel free to take a bus.
When you say the rest of the world you mean Europe, correct?
Where they also have much higher access to trains and more pedestrian friendly cities.
Their infrastructure is not based on cars.
So, yes, in a more pedestrian friendly environment, say Manhattan or DC, you could increase the distance.
But the fact that you don't recognize that even older suburbs may not be pedestrian friendly while you want to adopt those standards tells me you think you're city building in Sims and not recognizing who the users are in the real world in the US.
Do you want to increase public use of public transit or not?
Because ignoring the needs of actual customers ain't the way to go about it.
Faster and more frequent buses helps current riders and more importantly, helps future riders. You’ll never increase transit ridership if you don’t look at why non-transit riders aren’t riding.
You also have to distinguish between urban routes and suburban routes. As someone else complained, they want a bus that goes from their home to the Metro and into DC. It's fast, it's efficient -- easy, right?
It doesn't get home caregivers and cleaning ladies to their jobs in the suburbs. It doesn't get mechanics and hospital staff and cleaning staff to their jobs.
Do you want to reduce car traffic and provide transportation for people who can't afford cars?
Again, if we're talking INSIDE the city, increasing the distance between bus stops may not be a big deal. In a suburb which may not be pedestrian friendly it will be.
What's the goal? Because I hear a lot of judgement from people who don't use the bus. And my guess is for most of you, we could make it free and hand out coffee and you still wouldn't use it.
Most bus agencies do all of that and yet still suffer from low ridership. Why? Because giving people a schedule at a stop doesn’t mean much if the bus takes twice as long as driving and the next bus is 30+ minutes away.
Your statement “do you want to reduce car traffic and provide transportation for people who can’t afford cars” shows exactly what you’re not understanding. If someone can’t afford a car, providing bus service to them doesn’t reduce traffic because they won’t drive anyways. It’s still important to provide transportation to them but you will need to appeal to “choice” riders if you want to reduce traffic. In doing so, it actually forces bus agencies to make their service good and not just an option for those with no other option.
The goal is simple. If buses are a competitive alternative to driving a car, more people will take the bus and taking the bus will be a better experience because it’s faster and more frequent. It seems like your goal is to just slap lipstick on an undesirable service and hope someone makes the irrational choice to ride a slow bus.
This is an interesting summary of the stop-frequency optimization and corresponding potential operating costs improvements. However the author makes 2 claims which I don’t think can be obvious assumptions:
1- “The problem with buses are that they are slow”
While I don’t disagree that the buses are slow, I don’t think that is the main problem that holds down ridership in the US. The primary issue is that most people think of buses as something that poor or young people use.
This is related to the next questionable assumption - that increasing efficiency/speed will increase ridership. Is this borne by experience? Did Vancouver, San Francisco and Portland see increased ridership after they optimized bus routes? My instinct is that marginal improvements in speed are not going to be apparent to the vast majority of drivers.
Fascinating post, thank you. One question you left unanswered is why American bus routes are structured in that way. Why the difference to European and other (although I am a native New Yorker, and travel there often, most of my life experience is in East and Southeast Asia) networks?
Bonus comment: in Hong Kong there is phrase that describes a unit of distance, translating from the Cantonese it is "two bus stops". Why does Hong Kong need a term for this distance? I was told that "two bus stops" is the maximum distance any Hong Kong person will walk for a meal at lunchtime. Which I presume is why in Central Hong Kong (and throughout the most densely populated areas of the city), there is a McDonald's every 300 meters or so – in order that no one should have to walk more than 150 meters to the Golden Arches.
I think 1/4 mile (1300 ft) between stops might be a bit much. This will never fly in California where politician focus is to the disabled and disadvantaged, the hell with everyone else
I can imagine the hue and cry over the possibility of making someone in a wheelchair, even if there are only say two such passengers daily, roll 1/4 mile to get where they need to go. or to get on a bus.
Because if you don't ride the bus in a suburban neighborhood, it's like a man telling you how to use a tampon.
It seems simple until you do it.
Because I drive a stick, when I broke the ankle, I used public transit for some trips. And while I wouldn't recommend breaking an ankle, using a knee scooter for two months was eye opening in terms of what different sidewalk conditions did to your mobility.
I still use public transit for some trips. But last year when they changed the bus route, I switched to the county bus which meanders rather than the WMATA bus -- because WMATA now has me wait in an underground parking area.
You have to be a lot braver than me to go into a dark area not knowing if there will be other riders.
You've made a lot of comments getting at having dense bus stops being necessary to reduce the rate of crime suffered by bus riders. While I can see the intuitive argument for this, I'm curious if there is any evidence that this actually helps, that is some causal effect where decreasing bus stop distance decreases crime, or increasing bus stop distances increases crime. Failing this ideal difference in difference, what about just general data about the walk to public transit stops being particularly bad for crime.
I think the focus on crime and safety needs to be properly calibrated to its actual impacts. As an intuition pump, consider that the US is much safer now than it was a few decades ago, and yet we seem to be making greater concessions to safety than before (arguments like this but in plenty of other areas as well e.g. unaccompanied children). We may be over-securitizing based on perceived safety benefits when it just isn't worth it. There are some parts of some cities where this may be legitimately dangerous, but I would be surprised if bus stop distance contributed significantly to crime in the suburbs.
One note, perceived safety is still an issue, if someone suffers anxiety about their safety this is a real harm independent of the actual danger they are in and some public policy to alleviate this can be justified.
I do agree that public transit is often perceived as dangerous, but I worry that this is just part of the general feeling of it as being lower class. It is an affect issue not a real material issue (generally and in cases like this, not always).
1. Is it possible you are missing "not" in your sentence? ". . . infrastructure is NOT made for people who have your issues."? Because otherwise it doesn't make sense to me.
2. I use public transit because I'm a city kid. If I can, I prefer to use bus or subway. But I own a car and I have no problem driving. If you want to make me walk through empty dark spaces to wait for a bus, then I'll drive.
How does that increase ridership?
The people I see on the bus don't necessarily look like me. In fact, the vast majority don't. They look like working class people going to and from work.
So if you did mean to say that infrastructure isn't designed for people like that, what I hear you say is you want a public transit system that doesn't meet the needs of the actual users.
Tangential question: if labor is such a large proportion of bus service cost, why haven't we seen more progress on self-driving buses? Should be an easier problem than self-driving cars, no?
This is a moot subject in any case. Probably within the next 10 years, all surface transportation in a city will transition to be by autonomous vehicles.
People will call/app for a ride. Those on the lower end of the economic scale will be subsidized for their rides. Humans will not be allowed to drive, due to safety considerations.
Jojo, you need to talk to someone who is currently dependent on subsidized transportation because of handicaps.
A friend who is dependent on the Ride in Boston has to build a couple of hours into his schedule for pickups and expects to wait a few hours after his appointment to be returned home. He has no other choice. He doesn't have the mobility to take public transit but if you want to talk wasteful, he's spending up to four hours for what should be a 20-30 minute drive.
I've heard similar complaints about the same type of service in Maryland.
That doesn't even address the difficulty of who pays to subsidize that transport. Would it be the same people who just cut Medicaid and SNAP?
The oldest boomers turn 80 this year.
When you see the future do you want boomers taking public transit or driving?
Me? I vote to making public transit the preferred option for as many people as possible.
Great article, but the typo in the title will keep some people from reading it, or taking it seriously. It should read "America" not "American", or "American Buses need fewer stops"
Here in Iraq, we do not have bus stops; buses roam the street on certain paths people know, and people can wave at the bus and it will stop for them. This is not that big a problem since most buses are Kia minivans that hold ~14 people, so there is not a lot of dwell time. Larger buses (generally Coaster vans that hold ~25 people) generally operate in areas with high enough traffic that you are not moving faster than 20km/h anyway, so stopping here and there doesn’t slow things that much.
In the end, the routes within Baghdad are composed of minivans connecting the outskirts and larger vans connecting the congested downtown. Almost 70% of Baghdadis use the system and it is generally very cheap; you can go from one end of the city to the other for $1, in maybe 130-140% of the time that it would take you to do that in a taxi or your own car.
This is a system that arose due to the general lawlessness of Iraq and a lack of public transport options like metros and trains, but I think it is efficient even in comparison to Europe. Everyone can just go to the street near them and stop a bus, and the routes get allocated smartly because it is the market doing it; drivers are incentivized to go on routes that get their buses filled, so bus allocation ends up being really efficient.
I don’t know about Europe but in NYC in the rare cases when I took the bus it’s hard to know which stop to get off on if you were in an unfamiliar neighborhood. Better signage in the interior of the bus would be helpful.
This is in large part a function of budget. I've spent nearly my entire adult life in Asia, and seen a dramatic revolution in public transportation across many countries/societies. I take buses and trains often, as well as taxis and ride-share vehicles. Where operators have upgraded equipment, this signage is now incorporated. In many places, right now there is a combination of older and newer vehicles that may or may not offer digital signage. My hack (and probably yours) is to keep an eye on Google Maps while I'm riding.
DC/MD buses have both a lit sign behind the driver and an automatic announcement of the next stop.
Which makes it so much easier when taking a new bus route.
Sure.
But it depends on so much more than the route.
Most urban standard bus trips are not that long in duration (from getting on the bus to getting off the bus). Most of the time of the trip is getting to the bus stop, waiting for the bus, and getting from the the bus stop at the other end to the actual destination. More distance between stops so the bus can average 10mph instead of 8? Wouldn't hurt. But it's not the topmost of issues.
For example, if I have to walk three blocks instead of two to get to the bus stop it's no big deal (of course in a few years I might not say that, but...). But if I have to wait for twenty-five minutes in the middle of the day ... that's a big deal. If the journey from my stop to my destination is three blocks instead of two that's fine. But if that journey involves crossing two six lane stroads where it is clear that pedestrians are a dangerous enemy who is not welcome with everything optimized for the comfort of vehicles, that's a problem.
If, during the main part of the day one needs to think of bus schedules for intraurban buses, that is A FAILURE. And it's not going to be cured by making stops a little further apart.
An interesting question is how operational design affects user behavior. When I travel back to New York (where I'm from), I take buses and subways all the time. On crosstown streets there is a bus stop every block. On uptown/downtown streets stops are every three blocks or so. I appreciate that some people have mobility issues, BUT the majority of people can and should walk farther than they do, especially in the United States. Walking more improves health, and Americans are the least healthy people in the OECD. I often see passengers getting on a crosstown bus for one stop. For 99 percent of citizens, there's no reason to do that. The system is designed to facilitate it, though, so people take advantage. Which as Mr. Vejendla notes, is to the detriment of the system.
I've taken crosstown buses for one stop for a number of reasons. I need that four or five minutes that I'm saving because I'm late. Or I'm tired. Or because I have mobility issues that are the result of the work that I've done and that one crosstown block is impossibly long in that moment. I've also taken it because that's the way that I decide to spend my $3.
On the flip side, I've missed a bus @ 6th and 23rd and made it to 9th and 23rd, or maybe even 10th and 23rd before the next bus, at 7:30 AM, showed up.
I have no doubt that you've seen a few people take the bus, or a local train, for one stop. Your judgement, however, is accurate only to the extent that you know who that person is and why they've made their choices.
Increasing the distance doesn't make mass transit more attractive for those who are negatively affected by those changes. Increasing service does. In some areas, service may be better with more bus lanes. Or maybe transit agencies need the money to buy and run more busses.
And while it's tempting to believe that autonomous busses would solve the problem, I doubt that will be the case.
Sure, I understand, but a public transit system that is designed for the user who wants maximum convenience (a bus stop every block and a bus every three minutes) is not cost-effective. The examples you have given are a poor foundation for policy, in my opinion. The people who have real mobility issues, yes, I support solutions that serve them. But lateness is a self-inflicted wound, and everyone is tired. The real question is behavioral: how do people respond when they are "negatively affected" by changes. Are they seriously affected, or are they just complaining because a policy change that benefits the community negatively affects THEM? I understand that's how many people think, especially in less collectivist societies (e.g. the United States versus Japan), but ...
I would also put in a plea for more direct ( A to B with out diversions to C through ...). My connection to the DC Metro takes several detours off of the obvious route - to a hospital, to a business, to a commercial area, all to minimise the walking distance for some at the expense of travel time for everyone. The end result is a trip time that is at least double what it should be and this drives me away and I assume it impacts others in the same way.
Take hospitals off that list. If you're taking the bus to a hospital, the odds are decent that having to traverse extra distance is burdensome.
But you do bring up a terrifically valid point: Most buses today are trying to traverse landscapes that were created by, for and only for cars; those landscapes are not sustainable in the long term. Fixing it would be job that greatly exceeds the capacity of a bus system.
Except that hospitals tend to be very large employers, and parking for people who don't have MD after their name tends to suck. Streamlining bus access would still be a net positive.
Right.
The way to "increase" ridership is to make it more inconvenient for people who ACTUALLY USE THE BUS.
How many times will increasing the distance put a pedestrian unfriendly road in between the rider and the bus? Are the people who use the bus able to walk an extra block or two? Are those blocks well lit and busy for those of us who take the bus late at night?
As for MDScot's wh-complaint - the people who use the bus most are working class people who need to get to the places they work - a hospital, a business, a commercial area - and not just to the Metro.
I'm going to suggest that he should be looking at WMATA buses and not the Ride-ons which usually have a more direct route.
For all of you who think this is a great idea, do you live in a suburb or a city? Do you do your grocery shopping using a bus? Does your job require you to stand on your feet?
As someone who uses the bus roughly two or three times a month, I can tell you that the people I share a bus with do not look like they need any extra hassle.
And if you are not a regular bus user, the next day it rains, please feel free to take a bus.
Did you read the article? The issue is there are too many stops, the rest of the world seems to get along fine with less.
When you say the rest of the world you mean Europe, correct?
Where they also have much higher access to trains and more pedestrian friendly cities.
Their infrastructure is not based on cars.
So, yes, in a more pedestrian friendly environment, say Manhattan or DC, you could increase the distance.
But the fact that you don't recognize that even older suburbs may not be pedestrian friendly while you want to adopt those standards tells me you think you're city building in Sims and not recognizing who the users are in the real world in the US.
Do you want to increase public use of public transit or not?
Because ignoring the needs of actual customers ain't the way to go about it.
also affects foot traffic for small businesses.
Faster and more frequent buses helps current riders and more importantly, helps future riders. You’ll never increase transit ridership if you don’t look at why non-transit riders aren’t riding.
Putting up electronic signs at bus stops with schedules and discouraging parking in dense urban areas will encourage nonriders.
Or you could do what WMATA does and have a "Plan my trip" app.
https://www.wmata.com/schedules/trip-planner/
You also have to distinguish between urban routes and suburban routes. As someone else complained, they want a bus that goes from their home to the Metro and into DC. It's fast, it's efficient -- easy, right?
It doesn't get home caregivers and cleaning ladies to their jobs in the suburbs. It doesn't get mechanics and hospital staff and cleaning staff to their jobs.
Do you want to reduce car traffic and provide transportation for people who can't afford cars?
Again, if we're talking INSIDE the city, increasing the distance between bus stops may not be a big deal. In a suburb which may not be pedestrian friendly it will be.
What's the goal? Because I hear a lot of judgement from people who don't use the bus. And my guess is for most of you, we could make it free and hand out coffee and you still wouldn't use it.
Most bus agencies do all of that and yet still suffer from low ridership. Why? Because giving people a schedule at a stop doesn’t mean much if the bus takes twice as long as driving and the next bus is 30+ minutes away.
Your statement “do you want to reduce car traffic and provide transportation for people who can’t afford cars” shows exactly what you’re not understanding. If someone can’t afford a car, providing bus service to them doesn’t reduce traffic because they won’t drive anyways. It’s still important to provide transportation to them but you will need to appeal to “choice” riders if you want to reduce traffic. In doing so, it actually forces bus agencies to make their service good and not just an option for those with no other option.
The goal is simple. If buses are a competitive alternative to driving a car, more people will take the bus and taking the bus will be a better experience because it’s faster and more frequent. It seems like your goal is to just slap lipstick on an undesirable service and hope someone makes the irrational choice to ride a slow bus.
This is an interesting summary of the stop-frequency optimization and corresponding potential operating costs improvements. However the author makes 2 claims which I don’t think can be obvious assumptions:
1- “The problem with buses are that they are slow”
While I don’t disagree that the buses are slow, I don’t think that is the main problem that holds down ridership in the US. The primary issue is that most people think of buses as something that poor or young people use.
This is related to the next questionable assumption - that increasing efficiency/speed will increase ridership. Is this borne by experience? Did Vancouver, San Francisco and Portland see increased ridership after they optimized bus routes? My instinct is that marginal improvements in speed are not going to be apparent to the vast majority of drivers.
Fascinating post, thank you. One question you left unanswered is why American bus routes are structured in that way. Why the difference to European and other (although I am a native New Yorker, and travel there often, most of my life experience is in East and Southeast Asia) networks?
Bonus comment: in Hong Kong there is phrase that describes a unit of distance, translating from the Cantonese it is "two bus stops". Why does Hong Kong need a term for this distance? I was told that "two bus stops" is the maximum distance any Hong Kong person will walk for a meal at lunchtime. Which I presume is why in Central Hong Kong (and throughout the most densely populated areas of the city), there is a McDonald's every 300 meters or so – in order that no one should have to walk more than 150 meters to the Golden Arches.
Americans simply don't walk, or don't want to. We're famous for taking elevators to the first floor.
And driving to the adjacent big box store parking lot.
I think 1/4 mile (1300 ft) between stops might be a bit much. This will never fly in California where politician focus is to the disabled and disadvantaged, the hell with everyone else
I can imagine the hue and cry over the possibility of making someone in a wheelchair, even if there are only say two such passengers daily, roll 1/4 mile to get where they need to go. or to get on a bus.
If the stops are 1/4 mile apart then the closest stop is at most 1/8 of a mile away.
🤦♂️ You should get a job in government!
Do you ride a bus on a regular basis?
Why is your question germane to the statement I made?
Because if you don't ride the bus in a suburban neighborhood, it's like a man telling you how to use a tampon.
It seems simple until you do it.
Because I drive a stick, when I broke the ankle, I used public transit for some trips. And while I wouldn't recommend breaking an ankle, using a knee scooter for two months was eye opening in terms of what different sidewalk conditions did to your mobility.
I still use public transit for some trips. But last year when they changed the bus route, I switched to the county bus which meanders rather than the WMATA bus -- because WMATA now has me wait in an underground parking area.
You have to be a lot braver than me to go into a dark area not knowing if there will be other riders.
But, hey! I'm sure it looked efficient on paper.
You've made a lot of comments getting at having dense bus stops being necessary to reduce the rate of crime suffered by bus riders. While I can see the intuitive argument for this, I'm curious if there is any evidence that this actually helps, that is some causal effect where decreasing bus stop distance decreases crime, or increasing bus stop distances increases crime. Failing this ideal difference in difference, what about just general data about the walk to public transit stops being particularly bad for crime.
I think the focus on crime and safety needs to be properly calibrated to its actual impacts. As an intuition pump, consider that the US is much safer now than it was a few decades ago, and yet we seem to be making greater concessions to safety than before (arguments like this but in plenty of other areas as well e.g. unaccompanied children). We may be over-securitizing based on perceived safety benefits when it just isn't worth it. There are some parts of some cities where this may be legitimately dangerous, but I would be surprised if bus stop distance contributed significantly to crime in the suburbs.
One note, perceived safety is still an issue, if someone suffers anxiety about their safety this is a real harm independent of the actual danger they are in and some public policy to alleviate this can be justified.
I do agree that public transit is often perceived as dangerous, but I worry that this is just part of the general feeling of it as being lower class. It is an affect issue not a real material issue (generally and in cases like this, not always).
Which has what to do with how far apart the stops are? Try to focus. "Brevity is the sole of wit"...
You don't ride the bus. I'm guessing you're not European.
And you're bragging about having the attention span of a mayfly.
Okey dokey.
Like so many things in the US, infrastructure is made for people who have your issues. I'm not trying to be mean, but it's the fact
1. Is it possible you are missing "not" in your sentence? ". . . infrastructure is NOT made for people who have your issues."? Because otherwise it doesn't make sense to me.
2. I use public transit because I'm a city kid. If I can, I prefer to use bus or subway. But I own a car and I have no problem driving. If you want to make me walk through empty dark spaces to wait for a bus, then I'll drive.
How does that increase ridership?
The people I see on the bus don't necessarily look like me. In fact, the vast majority don't. They look like working class people going to and from work.
So if you did mean to say that infrastructure isn't designed for people like that, what I hear you say is you want a public transit system that doesn't meet the needs of the actual users.
Is that what you meant to say?
Tangential question: if labor is such a large proportion of bus service cost, why haven't we seen more progress on self-driving buses? Should be an easier problem than self-driving cars, no?
Self driving cars have killed pedestrians. What local government wants to risk that lawsuit?
San Francisco 10 miles across. Should be easy, but the transit system is terrible.
This is a moot subject in any case. Probably within the next 10 years, all surface transportation in a city will transition to be by autonomous vehicles.
People will call/app for a ride. Those on the lower end of the economic scale will be subsidized for their rides. Humans will not be allowed to drive, due to safety considerations.
This is just not true. You can have a hundred people on a bus, you can't have that many autonomous cars roaming around.
Jojo, you need to talk to someone who is currently dependent on subsidized transportation because of handicaps.
A friend who is dependent on the Ride in Boston has to build a couple of hours into his schedule for pickups and expects to wait a few hours after his appointment to be returned home. He has no other choice. He doesn't have the mobility to take public transit but if you want to talk wasteful, he's spending up to four hours for what should be a 20-30 minute drive.
I've heard similar complaints about the same type of service in Maryland.
That doesn't even address the difficulty of who pays to subsidize that transport. Would it be the same people who just cut Medicaid and SNAP?
The oldest boomers turn 80 this year.
When you see the future do you want boomers taking public transit or driving?
Me? I vote to making public transit the preferred option for as many people as possible.
Great article, but the typo in the title will keep some people from reading it, or taking it seriously. It should read "America" not "American", or "American Buses need fewer stops"
How walkable were the streets?
How many major roads without crosswalks were involved?
Again what's the street lighting like?