I decided to take a bus to a meeting today, and it was bad.
I had to go about one and a half kilometres, and I figured that given I really didn’t want to walk or bike (weather), and given I was on a frequent bus route, I might as well just catch the bus. But the experience really was a throwback — almost all the way to me very first serious Substack post.
The optimal situation would have been:
I walk up to stop
Bus comes within 3-4 minutes (this is a very frequent route)
I get to my destination in <5 minutes
and the journey feels like a good decision.
But, it was not this.
Instead, it was more like:
I walk up to stop (with no shelter)
Bus comes after eleven minutes closely trailed by two other buses
The first bus makes every single mid-block stop to my destination, taking forever to load and unload because it is crush-loaded (the technical term for sardines in a transit can).
What should have probably been a less than ten minute journey took nearly thirty minutes.
Now, the problems I had mostly came down to two things — two painfully bad things: Operations and stop spacing.
The operations problem felt pretty obvious. If you have a crush-loaded bus, it should not be leading an armada of buses down a busy street — It needs to be overtaken. This often does happen, but not alway, and this leads to even worse bunching because the first bus not only picks up and unloads most of the passengers, but it has to do so inefficiently (because it’s crush-loaded) with people slowly making their way to the doors and struggling to squeeze in.
Over my lifetime of riding buses, when this typically happens (which it won’t if you aren’t seeing bunching) you’ll see the bus in the rear bypass the slower front bus and try to balance things out — you aren’t going to fix the bunching (bunching is kind of this stable state — easy to get to hard to get out of), but you’ll at least be faster by speeding up boarding time. In a case like this, if the buses behind the first are not overtaking it, the driver should pull over and put on the hazards for two minutes — it’s that important, and the passengers probably would rather be a minute or two later and not completely jammed!
The other problem — and this cannot be overstated — is stop spacing. A problem that exists in many cities around the world are overly tight spacings between stops, particularly on surface transit routes like buses and trams. Tight stop spacings slow transit down and make it less competitive with other modes and more expensive to operate.
Now, how exactly do tight stop spacings slow a route down?
Well, when you make a stop, there is stop time that grows proportionally to the amount of people getting on and off (the time it takes people to get on and off), and a certain “base cost” that is opening and closing doors (and potentially having the doors held), and for buses pulling to the side of the street. While consolidating stops isn’t going to shrink your variable cost and might even slightly grow it (more people getting on and off is less efficient when you have few doors), but it is going to dramatically lower your base cost.
I believe that in general surface stops should not be much closer than 400 metres, apart which provides more fine grained coverage than most modern metro lines that typically space stations every kilometre. A 400-metre stop spacing means nobody on a corridor needs to walk more than 200 metres to get to a stop. Now, yes, in many cities significant portions of the population live off of the main corridor, but assuming an urban area with ~1-kilometre blocks, that still means a real walking distance of at most 500 metres to a main corridor, and then 200 metres to a stop, which is less than the typically accepted 800-metre distance that someone can walk in ten minutes.
Stop spacing on surface transit is a particularly important issue in a few contexts. The first is anywhere with a lot of sprawl, which doesn’t necessarily mean low-density sprawl either. If a vehicle needs to travel a great distance, a tight stop spacing is going to have an outsized impact on trip times.
Another place it’s a problem is anywhere where alternatives are particularly strong — for example, walking and cycling — and that might not even be a specific city, but a part of a city, such as a flat area with a lot of low-traffic streets. If you have very good travel alternatives, a slow bus is comparatively even weaker!
I do need to acknowledge that in many places, my call to cut stops will get a lot of pushback, either from locals, or even worse — local politicians. This is basically a classic case of “localism” trying to optimize transit for a group of individuals along the line who want to have a shorter walk. But the issue here is that it’s a tragedy of the commons situation like with housing and NIMBYs. If everyone gets a stop that is as close as possible to them, then transit ceases to function, and I think in places where you have a stop every 200 metres, things have swung too far in the “local service” direction. The issue in situations like this is that the impact of removing a single stop has a concentrated negative impact (some people have to walk longer to their stop) and a disproportionate but diffuse positive impact (a large number of trips get faster, and transit gets stronger and more popular) so you have an imbalance in the public sphere regarding who is winning and losing. Of course, there are also exceptions as always, for example a large destination might justify an extra stop — but it should be a transit rationale (lots of riders), and not a political one (loud voices) that drives exceptions.
I'm pretty sure I've seen the world record of bus bunching in Montreal: I counted 12 bunched busses on the 51 Édouard-Montpetit some years ago. This is sooo true also that we need to remove some stops. should be max 300m between stop in downtown, max 400m in dense-suburbs and suburbs. In Canada and the US, we have way too many stops spaced less than 200m away from each other.
I'm proud to say Chicago has turned bus bunching into an art form. Last weekend I waited 20 minutes with my kids on a main road, only to see 4 busses coming in a row. Literally one behind the other. Fortunately Chicago, like my hometown of Hamilton, does have express bus routes that skip most of the stops, but they often get overcrowded and caught up in traffic. That's why I'll go out of my way to take rail if I can.