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| Re: ARTICLE: The United States needs fewer bus stops (350777) | |||
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Re: ARTICLE: The United States needs fewer bus stops |
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Posted by Stephen Bauman on Tue Feb 17 15:01:48 2026, in response to Re: ARTICLE: The United States needs fewer bus stops, posted by WMATAGMOAGH on Tue Feb 17 10:12:55 2026. I have yet to hear a logical explanation for why bus stops in the US have to be so close together when European bus stops are further apartYour question should be: what's the objective for making bus stops further apart? Your next question should be: is this objective designed for the bus operator's or the rider's convenience? As I noted in my first post, European bus stops may be further apart for each bus route but the walking distance between each building and its nearest bus stop is approximately the same as in NYC. The distance between stops along the route is a bus operation metric; the distance between a building and its closest bus stop is a rider based metric. There was a recent bus redesign for Queens. I calculated the difference for the operator metric and what I consider to be a rider based metric. The before data is for 18 Sep 2024; the after data is for 17 Sep 2025. Both are Wednesday. Here's a comparison of operator sensitive metrics. The distance between stops increased from 944 to 1411 ft. The number of trips increased from 17051 to 18058. The number of vehicle revenue miles increased from 113,192 to 116,547 The average trip length decreased from 6.64 to 6.45 miles. These figures represent a slight increase in operating costs because of the increased VRM and number of trips. What was the rider's benefit? My rider based metric is how long the trip will take. This depends on the trip origin, destination and time of day. For origin I took any census block or building. For destination I took the closest subway entrance. For time of day I selected every 5 minute interval during the 24 hour day. The trip time was the sum of: walk time to bus stop; wait time for bus arrival; bus travel time; and walk time from bus stop to subway entrance. I calculated the averages and percentiles and filtered by walk distance to subway; hour of day; zip code; legislative districts; community boards and neighborhoods. Here are some demographic data for all of Queens: Approximately 1 million of 2.4 million residents live within 0.5 miles walking distance of a subway entrance. Approximately 113K of 458K buildings lie within 0.5 miles walking distance of a subway entrance. This confirms that multi-family buildings lie closer to subways and single family buildings lie in "subway deserts". Here are some 24 hour results for all of Queens filtered by walking distance to a subway entrance. N.B. 0.5 miles or 800 meters is considered the standard for walking distance to a subway and 0.25 miles or 400 meters is considered what walking distance should be to a bus stop. I'm going to consider only population and buildings that depend on a bus to the subway - walking distance to nearest subway entrance is greater than 0.5 miles. I'll also consider the median values. The assumed walking speed is 3 mph, so the 0.25 distance to a bus stop is equivalent to 5 minutes. The population median bus-to-subway travel time decreased from 23.01 to 22.37 minutes. The population median walk-to-bus time increased from 5.27 to 5.76 minutes. The population median wait-for-bus time increased from 2.61 to 2.66 minutes. The population median bus-travel-time decreased from 9.77 to 9.40 minutes. The population median walk-from-bus time decreased from 3.25 to 2.00 minutes. The building median bus-to-subway travel time decreased from 25.86 to 25.24 minutes The building median walk-to-bus time increased from 5.60 to 6.15 minutes The building median wait-for-bus time increased from 2.69 to 2.77 minutes The building median bus-travel-time from decreased 11.93 to 11.87 minutes The building median walk-from-bus time decreased from 3.25 to 1.70 minutes What does this suggest? The spacing between stops increased by 49%. This resulted in a decrease in population median bus-travel-time of 3.7% and a decrease in building median bus-travel-time of 0.5%. This would indicate that the increasing distance between bus stops has a very small proportional effect on bus travel time. At least in Queens, walking distances to bus stops and waiting times have a greater impact on total travel time. There is a caveat. The before/after travel time data was derived from the static GTFS schedules. The real world performance can differ. It's possible to make comparisons using the GTFS-RT feed. I have archived this data but have not yet started a comparison. My anecdotal evidence is that there's a big gap in perceived performance in my area. There has been a preponderance of what Mike Quill called "banana buses." One advantage of using the static GTFS schedules is to evaluate what planners are promising. I'm underwhelmed by the total performance improvement in exchange extra walking distance. I hope this illustrates real world shortcomings of increasing bus stop distances. |
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