The excellent Humantransit blog has an interesting post on whether your city’s bus stops are located too close together. While it specifically focuses on San Francisco, the post says this generally:
Are your city’s stops too close together? If so, does your city have activists saying this? San Francisco’s standard is that stops should be around 800-1000 feet (250-300m), but 14% are still closer than this. Most North American cities have much closer spacing, sometimes as little as 300 feet (100m). Now and then there’s a good reason: transfer points and senior-disabled facilities have to have stops. But in most places I’ve worked stop spacing is cultural, a matter of agency or industry habit. There’s much to critique about bus service here in Sydney, but they are merciless about stop spacing on their major routes. It’s rarely less than 300m / 1000 ft.
Of course, there’s one nagging virtue to excessively close stops. They make it easy to walk down the bus route, so that you get somewhere even if the bus doesn’t come, but can still catch it if it does come. Sydney’s the first city I’ve lived in where that’s really hard; the bus catches me between stops that are too far apart to run to when I see the bus. But then: Do we want a policy to be predicated on making it easy to mistrust the service? Or do we want one that will help make the service more trustworthy?
There’s an interesting balance to be found here. The more widely spaced stops are, the less frequently the bus has to stop and (theoretically at least) the quicker it can make its journey. On the other hand, the further apart stops are the more difficult it can be to walk to them.
As a bit of an experiment, I took a look at the inner part New North Road and counted the number of bus stops. This is shown in the image below:
This stretch of New North Road goes from Morningside to Eden Terrace, just under three kilometres, and is fairly intensively served – particularly to the east of the intersection with Sandringham Road. Along this section of road there are 10 bus stops – meaning an average distance between stops of just under 300m. Yet the stops are hardly evenly spaced – with a couple of clear bunches. I have put yellow circles around two stops that I think could be eliminated without much problem.
In general, I think that fewer stops is probably a good idea. However, perhaps what is more important than reducing the number of stops is quickening up the procedure of boarding the bus. It took nearly 10 minutes for my bus to load up this evening. My word I cannot wait for contactless smart-cards!
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Interesting topic this. Been thinking about this a bit wrt Wellington recently, where there are some shockers (might get round to starting a thread on it over on the CBT forum).
A couple of examples of stupidly close stop spacing (~ 100m):
– From Karori, Wellington:
http://maps.google.co.nz/maps?hl=en&ie=UTF8&ll=-41.283994,174.739228&spn=0.002358,0.00471&t=h&z=18
– From Papatoetoe, Auckland:
http://maps.google.co.nz/maps?hl=en&ie=UTF8&ll=-36.978543,174.850574&spn=0.001253,0.002355&t=h&z=19
As well as the issue of stop spacing there is the issue of stop placement. IMO, these should generally be as close as possible to intersections or pedestrian shortcuts (alleyways, steps, etc) to maximise catchment. Mid block stops should have very clear & strong justification.
I think the loading is the big issue, cetainly when departing from downtown stops such as Britomart or outside Skycity (two places where I have sometimes sat for ages whilst people boarded). Any idea whether they will allow rear door loading with the new smart cards?
That’s too many bus stops! It needs to have more than two removed.
Onewa Road on the North Shore has 7 stops over about 2ks. Way too many! It is a shame because it is about to be a transit lane all the way down, so otherwise the buses would be able to get down to the motorway in a matter of 2 or 3 minutes. I would have thought 1 stop per 500m is plenty.
Smart cards have slashed boarding times in London, greatly cutting journey times (along with proper bus priority measures). I’m sure this has been one of the biggest reasons for the big jump in bus usage in London as it represented a step-change in service quality. Once you have that the frequency of stops becomes less of a problem. Good service, but easy to get to. Everyone’s a winner.
I imagine that it would be pretty hard to remove bus stops due to local complaints (although it might be easier with Auckland transport). The western most circle you have highlighted looks like it is about outside the underpass that leads to the train station.
Bus stops are configured by people who never take the bus. K Road bus stops should serve all routes passing through, not a selection only. It’s so frustrating I often walk instead.
Well this comes to my mind every day on the bus.reducing bus stops is a good idea but this will not reduce loading time (with the existing ticketing system) as passengers will be concentrated in one stop rather than many. one benefit i see is that the driver need not pull in and out of traffic much. may be MAXX should look at Limited stop services . this will also help MAXX promo use PT and walk to work or school.
I was actually thinking about this on that very bus route the other day. The bus stops around Kingsland, in particular, are so close that if you miss one it doesn’t really matter as the next one is about 200 metres away maybe. It’s great for people getting on but it sucks once you’re on, particularly if, like me, you have a neck injury that gets aggravated by the bus drivers violent braking and acceleration.
On my route (Dom Rd) I find them generally pretty well spaced, same too when I was on Sandringham Rd but it is of course another piece of the puzzle that should be looked at in delivering a great service…
“Bus stops are configured by people who never take the bus.” Ahhhh, I love the sound of a good baseless sweeping generalisation! But on to the point… If we’re looking to take out bus stops we should also be looking to improve the walking environment around the remaining stops. It’s a ped accessibility issue as much as a bus efficiency issue. ARTA are doing a good job of moving away from the concept of “all houses should be with in 400m of a bus stop” which left us with ridiculously circuitous and slow bus routes. But I wouldn’t want to see it move too far the other way with the development of a state highway (limited access) type approach (i.e. great once your on the route, but difficult to get on unless you’re at a major node). This is fine for the RTN for sure, but not QTN and below (I think the route identified is a QTN, but I’m too lazy to check). However, this is just a general comment; it’s not related to the actual route Josh has looked at. I ride my bike along that route, so less buses stopping and holding me up would be great 🙂
I think on QTNs we should think about every 400m – 500m on priority lanes with priority lights, with contactless cards that’ll be some competitive commutes…
R Lin: I agree with you in that it is an accessibility issue and every time I step out to walk to the bus stop (mor often the train station though) I laugh half the way as in “western suburbia” there are bus stops with no footpath (or only 10m of footpath that ends abruptly in a car only bridge) and I’ve seen so many times the “Pedestrian give way to traffic” signs that it seems to be the city’s motto!
I’ve also heard from ARTA that the “400m” thing is one of the things that makes our bus routes not be as efficient as they can be so I can only hope that there will be better days.
I often dream of roads where you step off the bus in a place where it is safe to cross the road, and where buses have absolute right of way when getting back on traffic … I better stop dreaming or I’ll get run over by a car when crossing the road to take the bus
Another issue is that it seems to me that on routes that head into the CBD, only the direction toward the CBD has shelters… If we want to create a “network effect” we have to start thinking the route is just as valid in the opposite direction and outward stops are not just places to “drop people off”…
If you want to see what the region is now aiming for with bus stop infrastructure, check out the Design Guidelines on the ARTA website (http://bit.ly/AKbusStops). It’s a really good document based on overseas examples but tweaked for the Auckland Region. Chapter 3 covers the bus stop spacing stuff with a bit of detail around why it’s sometimes hard to get stops where you want ’em.
Now if we could just get some more funding to retrofit existing stops…
There’s definitely a balance to find and you wouldn’t want to swing too far the other way.
Interestingly most bus routes seem to have very few CBD stops, certsinly less frequently than in the suburbs, which to me seems the wrong way around.
R Lin pointed to the appropriate document, though of course that is new and didn’t guide the placing of the old stops. Noteworthy that in densely settled areas, they recommend a spacing of 200m-400m!
Interesting document, thanks R.Lin…
Bus stop spacing is particularly an issue in London: On Battersea Bridge Road, there are two stops within 50 meters of each other. Great article, Thanks!