I started this discussion on mastodon, but want to here too. If you could create the perfect bus stop, what would it have? Here are some of my ideas:
⛑ Safety:
- Shelters: no advertisements blocking views. Enclosed shelters must have 2+ exit points.
- Solar lights
♿ Accessibility:
- A space in shelters for wheelchairs.
- Marked wide paved section for wheelchairs & those with mobility difficulties to board a ramp onto the bus.
- Braille on bus stop signs & tactile pavement.
🚲Other:
- Bike racks
- Vending Machines
- Public water fountain
- Tiny library
Do you have more ideas?
Edit: realized the photo i added is ai, but i can’t seem to get rid of it so 🤷♀️
apps are not a substitute for being on time every time. The only substitue is a bus ever 5 minutes or less so you don’t bother checking the clock.
A bus every 5 minutes makes sense in cities, less so in more rural areas where the bus would be empty most of the times. I would consider a bus every 20 minutes to be enough as a minimum service.
sort of. Rural areas can’t support a frequent bus but suburban areas can support a bus more frequent than they get. Lack of service is why those butes are empty: people who tan afford a car and wouldn’t face much traffic drive instead of slaving their life to the but schedule.
note that it takes several years of frequent service for people to figure out the bus doesn’t suck and it takes a great network as well as frequency. An such no transit systen has the money needed to prove me right. Still I maintain transit doesn’t need nearly as high density as most people think. What density gives you is enough people who can’t drive to support a systen those who can would choose to use.
Unfortunately that frequent traffic is only feasible in rather dense urban, or possibly suburban areas.
Our local operator runs huge deficits outside the major hubs, and even that is just for a bus every 30 minutes, most of which are completely devoid of passengers.
Ever used a bus every 30 minutes? They force you to slave your life to the schedule. there are no quick trips as you are waiting 28 minutes for your next trip after buying your coffee. You can get to work but that is about it. no wonder most people don’t ride.
give people in that area better service and they will ride. (but probably not in numbers to pay for thth but - only the largest bendein the midele buses can pay for them selves on a reasonable fare.
Yes and i still do when I go back to my home town. People who have no other choice still use it so it’s “OK” cause everyone else drives. But in rural very sparse places it’s really not feasible.
almost nobody lives in those rural sparse areas. Forget about them and focus on the much larger numbers who live in more dense areas and yet get terrible service. Even suburbs can support better service.
You’re right. I’m sorry for those people but it’s a game of numbers. For those it’s better if they just drive to the nearest transportation hub.
If you give great service to the city and suburbs there will be enough left over to bring some service to rural areas. However if you give bad service to suburbs (much less the really dense citiy which often has poor service in North America) there will be no money for anything else.
Of course. The problem is that many people see public transportation not as a public service but as a business, so certain areas financing others is “unfair”.
Yes, for several years, and only because I had no other options. Once I got a drivers license I bought a car & first switched from bus-train-bus to car-train-bus (saving roughly a half an hour daily), but after they put high parking fees on the commuter parking I ditched public transit altogether (slightly more expensive even after accounting for the fee but cut my commute by another hour daily).
With that said, it’s simply not feasible in many areas to up the service. Personally, I think the way to go in these cases is focusing on the denser areas at first, ensuring that the service is great and enable interoperability with personal transportation such as cars and bikes so that people can enjoy the best of both worlds.