|
|
| Re: ARTICLE: The United States needs fewer bus stops (350755) | |||
 |
|||
| Home > BusChat | |||
|
[ Read Responses | Post a New Response | Return to the Index ] |
|
||
|
Re: ARTICLE: The United States needs fewer bus stops |
|
|
Posted by Stephen Bauman on Thu Feb 5 08:28:12 2026, in response to ARTICLE: The United States needs fewer bus stops, posted by WMATAGMOAGH on Wed Feb 4 23:49:54 2026. This is a popular misconception. I gave a talk at NYC's Transportation Camp on this subject in 2022. The Transportation Center issued a report on this subject back in 2014. Their city-to-city comparison data was based on 2014 data from the NTD. I used this data in my analysis. The cities studied were: LA; Phi; DC; BOS; CHI; SF and NYC.1. This canard has been used as the basis for the MTA's bus redesign projects. However, you will note that many US cities in the article have shorter distances between stops, yet have higher overall bus speeds. The correlation between average distance between stops and bus speed for the various cities is fairly low - around 49%. 2. One important parameter, other than bus stop distance, number of turns, etc. is the number of passengers carried. One parameter is the number of unlinked passenger trips (UPT) per vehicle-revenue-hour (VRH) or vehicle-revenue-mile (VRM). In this regard, NYC and San Francisco have much higher passengers per revenue-mile or revenue-hour than any other city. The correlation between UPT/VRM is for the study cities in 2014 was -91%. (More passengers along the route means a slower speed i.e. negative correlation.) 3. This implies it's the number passengers on each bus, getting on and off, that slows things down - not the spacing between stops. 4. Not all bus passengers are created equal with respect to dwell time. It's the standees in the aisles that block easy access to doors that increase dwell times. This principle was explained in the patent for the BRT's steel cars back around 1914. The seat positions, standee poles and door positions were designed to ensure that every passenger had a clear path to the door. 4a. The Bingham buses that were introduced in the late 1940's were 40 ft long, seated 51 and 19 standees for a capacity of 70 passengers per bus. The current crop of low floor 40 ft buses have a seating capacity around 35 and room for 35 standees for a capacity of 70 passengers per bus. 50 passengers on a Bingham bus could enter or exit unhindered by standees; it's a struggle to enter or leave for 50 passengers on a current bus because of standees. 5. Most US transit operators include the shape file in their GTFS feeds; most European operators don't. This makes it difficult to verify distance between stop claims. However, this metric does not address the customers' concern - how much do I have to walk to get to a bus stop. Weighting by population is difficult because census block data isn't as convenient to obtain as in the US. There is another metric: what's the walking distance from each building to the nearest bus stop. This is a fairly easy metric to obtain from Open Street Maps data and the GTFS stop file texts. The median distance for Greater London (32 boroughs) is 257 meters; the median distance for NYC's 5 boroughs is 269 meters. This despite the allegation that bus stops in London are further apart than in NYC. 6. I noticed that a subscription to your link is $100. I'll pass. |
|
|
|