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.
My dad's first job out of college was some sort of statistics-type thing at the CTA and picked up his coworker's expression "herd of angry pachyderms" to refer to bunches of busses.
Chicago also doesn't have frequency as high as it should be which makes the bunching a much bigger problem. Every 5-> Every 15 is much better than every 15-> every 30.
We should be careful not to just remove bus stops in some cities. In many major cities transit and bus coverage is pretty good, you can be sure that a bus stop is within 500 - 800 meters away form you in almost every part of the city. However, in places with poor transit coverage this is not the case. I see short distances between stops in my city quite often but I don't think all of them should be removed due to poor coverage. Of course, coverage should be improved and then should we look at stop being 300-400 meters apart. On the other hand, no matter how poor the transit coverage is, transit stops should never be less than 150-200 meters. There is one ridiculous case were there's is a transit stop behind a bridge (that has no pedestrian crossing btw) and then right after the bridge near a plaza there is another stop! Forget hundreds of meters, this stop spacing can be measured in dozens! This completely ridiculous situation is made further baffling by the fact that unlike the one beside the plaza there is literality nothing beside the first stop. It just an empty field! The only good thing about this is that nobody uses the stop. The plaza stop is used quite often (including myself twice a day) despite the fact that there is no sidewalk, shelter or bench. However, I have only seen one person ever use that stop. So it doesn't really slow anyone down. If you ever come to visit Cambridge (the one in Ontario) do make sure to ride bus route 58 of the GRT to experience this absolute buffoney.
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.
My dad's first job out of college was some sort of statistics-type thing at the CTA and picked up his coworker's expression "herd of angry pachyderms" to refer to bunches of busses.
I love anecdotes like this
Chicago also doesn't have frequency as high as it should be which makes the bunching a much bigger problem. Every 5-> Every 15 is much better than every 15-> every 30.
We should be careful not to just remove bus stops in some cities. In many major cities transit and bus coverage is pretty good, you can be sure that a bus stop is within 500 - 800 meters away form you in almost every part of the city. However, in places with poor transit coverage this is not the case. I see short distances between stops in my city quite often but I don't think all of them should be removed due to poor coverage. Of course, coverage should be improved and then should we look at stop being 300-400 meters apart. On the other hand, no matter how poor the transit coverage is, transit stops should never be less than 150-200 meters. There is one ridiculous case were there's is a transit stop behind a bridge (that has no pedestrian crossing btw) and then right after the bridge near a plaza there is another stop! Forget hundreds of meters, this stop spacing can be measured in dozens! This completely ridiculous situation is made further baffling by the fact that unlike the one beside the plaza there is literality nothing beside the first stop. It just an empty field! The only good thing about this is that nobody uses the stop. The plaza stop is used quite often (including myself twice a day) despite the fact that there is no sidewalk, shelter or bench. However, I have only seen one person ever use that stop. So it doesn't really slow anyone down. If you ever come to visit Cambridge (the one in Ontario) do make sure to ride bus route 58 of the GRT to experience this absolute buffoney.
The stop spacing is my biggest problem with bus routes