I'm interested in finding out whether other cities in the world may have comparably short distances between bus stops and whether they have any datasets that could be used to calculate bus stop distance distributions.
The buses here are notorious for running very slowly (and thus behind schedule), and one of the proposals to speed some some slow buses is to eliminate stops on lines where they are densely clustered. It's become a subject of considerable debate, as residents and in particular older and disabled people are usually against consolidation, whereas most others accept it as a necessary cost of improving service.
The M14, which runs along 14th Street in Manhattan, is an example of where this is happening right now. Currently, the bus spends around 25% of its time standing in stations because it stops pretty much every block. There's a plan to eliminate some of its stops, but it's unclear whether it will succeed. Here's a good read on the subject: https://nyc.streetsblog.org/2019/04/19/never-stop-stopping-r...
Most uptown and downtown buses offer limited and local service, with limited making far fewer stops. Most crosstown buses stop at every block.
One more confounding factor is that about decade ago, the city replaced many crosstown buses with fewer but much larger articulated buses without realizing that the behavior of fewer larger buses is to make the average ride slower because of the time spent receiving passengers. To address that they created a new system for paying on certain buses involving buying a ticket before you board. But that is resulting in skyrocketing levels of fare evasion. Unintended consequences.
The M14 is a special case right now because of limited service on the L train (which runs under 14th street) due to necessary repairs. The M14 is getting swamped with excess people who normally would prefer the subway.
Is a "block" just a continuous building with no gaps for a road or pavement?
i.e.
[#########building##########] [###### building###] [###]
Can you have "blocks" with a lot of detached houses, I would guess that yes you can? So that makes me think its blocks of possibly many buildings between roads?
The "local" stops on a lot of Subway lines really shouldn't be there. I'm looking at you 18th Street, 28th Street, 50th Street and so on. 18th Street in particular is 4 blocks away (where 1 block = <1 minute walking) from 14th Street and the entrances to 14th Street will often extend up to 16th Street anyway (with the platform potentially right underneath).
In the other direction 23rd Street is 5 blocks away.
The Subway spends billions of dollars a year on power. Most of that power (for trains) is spent accelerating so every stop counts.
I expect the same people who are against consolidation of bus stops are against consolidation of Subway stops.
Honestly I personally have never taken a bus in NYC despite living here for nearly a decade. Distances in Manhattan are just so relatively short.
The entire MTA spends less than $500 million on electricity annually (which includes the subway, Long Island Railroad and MetroNorth commuter rail) of a roughly $17 billion dollar budget.
Additionally, the 4.5 million people who use the 28th Street stop on the 1 line and the 6.7 million people who use the 28th Street on the 6 line and the 3.3 million people who use the 28th Street stop on the R/W lines politely disagree with you.
So yeah, those people would be inconvenienced by having to walk a few more blocks, but way, way more people would experience greater convenience by having faster commutes along those very busy lines since they wouldn't need to make such close stops.
There's a happy medium between too many stops and too few. Two stops within a quarter of a mile is way too many. You can imagine a subway system in which a north/south line stopped at literally every block; you'd probably still have more than a thousand daily riders at every stop, but that's no argument to keep every single one of those stops (or even worse, build them). The system performance would be terrible and it'd take forever to get anywhere. The same is still true when you have stops that are only four short blocks away from each other.
I assume that the point of consolidating everybody into one train like this is so they can avoid wasting power decelerating/accelerating on a bunch of trains. I.e. just run all the empty ones to the terminus without stopping.
It was a bit annoying whenever it happened to us, but I think this is a better system than getting rid of heavily used local stops entirely.
Edit: As a reply explains, it's possible my description is slightly inaccurate.
The "acceptable level" probably doesn't account for everyone getting a seat on the continuation train. This used to happen with buses in Wuhan 10 years ago. If two buses on the same route met up and each had only seated passengers, one would send its passengers to the other bus to stand for the rest of the journey. This was annoying because I would travel places at off-peak times just so I could get a seat.
And of course, because this happens occasionally, it affects everyone using the Shanghai Metro because they all need to build in contingency time when planning a trip to get somewhere by a certain time for an appointment.
If you took out half the local stops, I'm not sure what the purpose of the express line would be. Of course the express trains would still be marginally faster, but even as is, I was just having a debate with a coworker this morning about whether transferring from local → express trains actually makes sense. (I absolutely think it does, but she made some good points and it's not always clear cut!)
It's expensive in time and money to stop and start the trains. Also you need to maintain a station and employ people there.
If you want to provide for those with physical difficulties where walking 4 blocks is an issue, you support those people directly by, say, paying for their Ubers/cabs.
Are you American by any chance? I find Americans are more prone to this particular issue of not being able to make exceptions where necessary. People can't walk 4 blocks? Make everyone wait! Have more stops! Build more stations!
I mean this is exactly why Prop 13 in California was and is ridiculous. If we're really concerned about old people being forced out of their homes by rising property tax bills, why not just give them in particular a subsidized rate? Why do houses in Malibu and Beverly Hills need caps on property taxes because of some retired person in Bakersfield?
Per [0] (2001; in Czech), average distance between subway stations is 1038m, tram stops 500m and bus stops 698m.
A related metric is walking distance from home to public transportation stop. Per [1] (2011; in Czech), most of people in the city need to walk less than 5 minutes to reach a stop. (There's a table with a breakdown by walking time and city part in chapter 7.) The same work cites average walking speed as 88.69 m/min, which gives you, for most inhabitants, <450m to reach a public transportation stop.
[0] http://envis.praha-mesto.cz/rocenky/DZ_OO/pril_practexty/BK0... [1] https://dspace.cuni.cz/bitstream/handle/20.500.11956/51223/B...
(EDIT: Updated units.)
If you can speak enough German to navigate the download, you can e.g. find geodata of all bus stops in Zurich at https://maps.zh.ch/?topic=ZVVZH&showtab=ogddownload (they will only deliver to email addresses, so I cannot link the actual data here).
Mean 199m
Median 172m
Min 14m (Zürich, Central <-> Zürich, Central Polybahn)
Max 678m (Pfäffikon SZ, Bahnhof <-> Pfäffikon SZ, Schiffstation)
According to a dataset of 1744 trips from https://data.stadt-zuerich.ch/dataset/vbz_fahrplandaten_gtfs
For people non-familiar with Switzerland, though, it needs pointing out that Pfäffikon SZ is no longer in Zurich city nor Zurich state, but Schwyz (thus the SZ). It still comes up in that data set since it is served by ZVV, the Zurich transport authority. It would also be great to know how you group stops together as "the same stop, just different parts of it". I.e. Central vs. Central Polybahn - I would say these are actually colocated, just served by different lines (tram vs. furnicular).
Alas, it appears that route 631 has it beat - 1440m in direction 1 (avg 130m), 1751m in direction 2 (avg 134m)
(although, peculiarly, the information in TfL's bus route download doesn't match what you get from the web site when you look up 631.)
-----------------------------
389 inbound:
min: 24.14811016418819
lq: 63.13737031546762
med: 117.45915732519208
avg: 159.1719773263877
uq: 188.0955557392336
max: 845.60445291754
389 outbound:
min: 27.01945592261999
lq: 41.34298814984834
med: 117.00503319935248
avg: 146.97253048021068
uq: 167.28703169991314
max: 809.8962084249061
631 inbound:
min: 7.0860750640801
lq: 27.685480182275676
med: 104.91095883281287
avg: 128.12981380619047
uq: 218.11267557818746
max: 363.41330216008436
631 outbound:
min: 7.636546343123111
lq: 45.34651661429212
med: 105.97332735159804
avg: 135.50969372368004
uq: 203.01187569586028
max: 363.41330216008436
Alternatively OpenStreetMap is a huge global dataset. Buses are a small part of https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Public_transport It's easy to extract bus stops https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Overpass_API (https://overpass-turbo.eu/) but you're probably interested in routes as well. It's a rabbit hole of complexity, e.g. a bus terminal is multiple bus stops, some buses skip stops based on time of day, weekday, season (school buses), some stops are just for drivers to take a break or refuel, direction of route matters.
The transport view on https://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=16/21.3308/-157.8868&laye... is a pretty nice visualization. For specific questions on OSM tools there is https://help.openstreetmap.org/ and a mailing list https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-transit
The NextBus service DC uses is clearly using a very naive algorithm that is often (consistently) too fast or slow. Some of the better apps modify it or add their own data.
My country dwelling parents have a bus stop outside their door. There is one bus per day - weekdays only - and that is only in one direction. This I find mind-boggling. A shopping trip would require an overnight stay in town and for a full circuit of the route to be completed. Somewhere there is a bus driver getting paid for that and a local authority that has mandated this service be put on.
Around the exurbs/adjacent small city where I live, there is a small bus service that connects the Walmart, commuter rail, city center, etc. But I'd be pretty sure it's mostly used by those who can't drive.
https://www.geo.admin.ch/en/geo-information-switzerland/geod...
https://www.geo.admin.ch/en/geo-information-switzerland/geod...
You can also visualize a lot of the topographic data on map.geo.admin.ch, which is surprisingly useful/flexible, if not very user friendly.
(I must confess I find that awesome).
The stop in front of my house and the next one is only three houses away, Georgian style, so no mansions or huge houses.
The transport in Dublin is horrible and is on top 5 of most expensive public transport systems. (No subway)
https://busmap.info/map/?q=%E6%9D%B1%E4%BA%AC%E9%83%BD%E6%96...
As you can imagine, buses are just as amazing as trains in Tokyo. They're sometimes running late, but only up to a few minutes. And often they come at the exact time. (There's a time table for every bus stop.) Most buses are accessible and there are a lot of elderly people using it. (Age 70 or older can get a free pass.) When there was a once-in-a-decade snowfall last year, they delayed about 10 minutes, and that was morning rush hours. Again, they do absolutely fantastic job here.
https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-average-distance-between-s...
The city of Zurich, Switzerland recommends a tram stop every 300m-600m: https://www.stadt-zuerich.ch/content/dam/stzh/vbz/Deutsch/Ue... (page 19)
Trams run in short intervals and they are convenient when they're near, but switching from tram to bus carries a high time penalty two out of three times.
Source (Polish): https://warszawa.wikia.org/wiki/Autobusy
From http://www.edinburgh.gov.uk/download/meetings/id/58073/item_...
In my local city in China, for example:
The BRT stops every 2km or so, and runs on dedicated lanes.
The tram stops every 1km or so, no variation downtown or out of town.
The 5 buses and 6* buses tend to be long distance within a metropolitan area and stop every 2-500m at pickup and destination, but can run 30km only stopping a couple of times at key pick-up/drop-off locations.
Regularly numbered buses 1 though 70+ will stop every 500 meters or so, usually at each block.
There's an app, PandaBus, that shows all of the routes and stops for every stop in most Chinese cities, and has live GPS of buses for several cities. I don't know where they get the data, I'm sure you can just ask them.
In Hong Kong, numbering is a bit different and related to the city layout - basically HK is very dense in Central (Island) and Kowloon (peninsula) but due to coastal and mountainous topography very vast in the New Territories with 'new towns' being small urban pockets in the NT countryside.
Take the, IIRC, 73. The 73 route runs from Tai Po to Kowloon. The 73X does this with lots of pick-ups in Tai Po, then expressway to Kowloon with a single stop in Shatin, that's about 80km. The 73K does the same route but doesn't take the expressway and stops at every conceivable point, expending the journey time by an hour or two. HK people please correct me as it's a long time since I was in HK.
And HK also has the Toyota mini buses that have a single pickup point, drive like maniacs for 30-80km picking up speed downhill and losing momentum uphill, then drop off where you ask the driver. Good exciting ride, keep your eyes open!
Wikipedia claims that RapidRide routes have on average 40% fewer stops than the 'regular' line that they replaced, which would mean the 'regular' buses have stops about every 300 meters.
Anecdotally, I lived in London for a few years and now live in Seattle, and I would say these number's all roughly match my experience. Seattle's stops are spaced quite a bit further apart, but Seattle is also much less dense :)
see https://www.theurbanist.org/2018/03/26/rainier-rapidride-met... and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RapidRide
In Zone 2, sure. Not in the suburbs.
Definitely density related.
[0] http://standardzastavek.pid.cz/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/st...
The free API is fantastic. I'd be willing to bet it's the most comprehensive public API for city public transport in the world (Happy to be proven wrong though!).
As an example This API endpoint is for stops and lines. https://www.trafiklab.se/api/sl-hallplatser-och-linjer-2
There are some, especially in the center where distances around 300m are common, in the outskirt, you could ride for a kilometer or more between stops.
I found a gis data for Prague public transport, so oyu might be able to query that: http://www.arcgis.com/home/webmap/viewer.html?url=http://mpp...
One stop that always angered me was my bus stop to the next was 125m. Basically across the intersection, and there was almost always a single person over there, causing us to accelerate then stop.
There are many companies that provide transit planning solutions which use GIS (with census data) to aid the process.
But it is very irregular. There are lines with up to 1km between stops