In NYC, it depends heavily on the bus line. Some stop nearly every block (which can be as little as every 100m) whereas some have more widely-spaced stops.
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...
There's an important distinction to be made here -- in Manhattan, in general, there are crosstown buses and buses which go uptown or downtown. And there are 2 kinds of 'block' in Manhattan, 'long blocks' are crosstown (east/west) and 'short blocks' which are north/south. Long blocks are irregular depending on where you are, and are typically much longer than short blocks ~3x.
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.
It's true that the M14 is special right now because it's currently serving riders of the L train, but the proposal to eliminate stops is part of the citywide Bus Action Plan that is being rolled out progressively by borough. Staten Island already redesigned its bus system, and IIRC the Bronx is next.
Would be 3 blocks? Or is a block only delineated by a road, but not a pavement? Or something else?
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?
A block (which, as you've pointed out is an ephemeral phrase), in NYC at least, is the space along a road from intersection to intersection. It thus usually doesn't count gaps between buildings or alleys or the like. Many of the long (east/west) blocks in Manhattan, for example, have pedestrian pass-throughs in the middle, but that doesn't count as a split in the block.
Etymology note: The word 'blockbuster' was coined by the press to describe the largest conventional bombs used by the RAF in WWII, because they could destroy a city block.
I was going to mention NYC too but in terms of the Subway, which is related.
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 Subway spends billions of dollars a year on power. Most of that power (for trains) is spent accelerating so every stop counts.
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.
Annual ridership figures != people. For stops that are primarily commuter stops you have to divide by hundreds to get the actual person figure. 10k people using any given stop for one round trip twice per day is over 7M annual rides for that one stop. It's actually less than that for 18th St; using real data, the average daily ridership for is 8.6k. Compare with a station that is actually busy, like Union Square, which gets 109k daily ridership. Figures from https://graphics.wsj.com/table/NYRIDER_0420
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 know how the ridership is measured. I’m not sure what your point was. It’s also not surprising that the busiest stations have 10x as many riders as those less busy.
The four track system of the NYC Subway was its most important innovation, and it literally solved the problem your talking about. You don’t want all the stops? Walk to 14th and take the express.
Moreover, if power becomes significant you can add regenerative breaking to regain a large fraction of energy (if they're not doing so already; maybe not because of the age of the trains).
The London Underground definitely does that. Also in part because it reduces the heat output. The underground has been heatsoaking for decades and it’s hitting problematic temperature levels.
When I visited Shanghai, I noticed that late at night when there are not many passengers, they will kick everybody off the train at a random stop. They do this with a few trains in a row until there are enough people waiting in the station to fill up a train to some acceptable level.
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.
Would this really save much efficiency versus the much less disruptive option of taking the trains out of commission (for the evening/morning/etc) when they get to the end of their route?
Same thing happens in Beijing. Where they kick you off happens to be a subway depot where the train will sleep for the night (which isn't always at the terminus, e.g. if it is a loop line or at a remote junction); or it will simply express to the terminus after dumping all of its passengers. Usually, it's just the train's "time" to be off duty, they aren't actually looking at passenger densities or anything like that.
They do this with a few trains in a row until there are enough people waiting in the station to fill up a train to some acceptable level
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.
I really like the frequent subway stops. It makes it easy to hop and and off wherever you are. If they were every block like the busses, I would say that's too much, but they're not, they're every 4-5 blocks, and only in Manhattan.
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!)
I'm guessing you have no physical issues and don't think twice about walking 10 blocks. I (usually) don't either but that doesn't describe everyone and am able to just grab a cab or a Lyft if not.
Take the 18th Street stop. You actually can't get in or out of this station without using stairs AFAIK. There are other stations like this. Are you really using these stations if you're unable to walk a few blocks?
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?
Take the 18th Street stop. You actually can't get in or out of this station without using stairs AFAIK. There are other stations like this. Are you really using these stations if you're unable to walk a few blocks?
I'd imagine for someone in a wheelchair the stairs would present a much greater challenge than an extra four blocks. On the other hand, for someone with a prosthetic leg, climbing a set of stairs while holding a railing is probably far preferable to navigating an extra four blocks of icy sidewalks and streets.
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.
Since both solutions are expensive (and the latter is exposed to exploitation), I'd like to see a cost-benefit analysis (which includes the benefits to non-disabled for having more frequent stops as well).
People can't walk 4 blocks? Make everyone wait!
It gets paid for in time or money. Maybe it's an American thing to value money more than time? I'm not sure anyone else has to wait, though. They can always walk if it is faster.
This. I’m on crutches right now. I’ll have to take stairs to get in and out of the subway almost anywhere, but that extra four blocks takes a ton out of you.
Why do houses in Malibu and Beverly Hills need caps on property taxes because of some retired person in Bakersfield?
The house my father grew up in in San Jose is now worth multi-millions but my grandmother couldn't possibly have paid the ever increasing property taxes while she was still alive and I think people would have whined about subsidies in well-off neighborhoods like you're doing now. I mean, she lived in that house since the late '40s and Silicon Valley just kind of moved in next door...
That's always the case. Parts of Manhattan used to be absolute squalor, the worst conditions a city had seen, complete slum housing packing 8 people in a bedroom. Now the area has changed and those same 1 bedrooms might go for 4k a month after a power wash and fresh primer. In Detroit, the city used to be very nice and developed instead of derelict before all the rich white people fled to the suburbs. Cities have never not changed, and it's shortsighted to think that they should exist in stasis when that's never been the case in the 10,000 years of history of cities on earth. I find it ironic that the generation which celebrated ripping out entire neighborhoods for interstates and airports and sports stadiums and parking lots complains when someone wants to build an apartment of all things in the lot across the street.
Prop 13 is a bind for people like your grandmother who live on fixed income and who anticipate living at a fixed level. This law insulated them from the housing market, yet they benefit from it's insulation from property tax when they do finally sell their 100k home, in the tax man's eyes at least, for 2m. In that case, surely it would be better to pay your back taxes when you sell, after you've realized your 2000% gain, but that just would make too much sense I guess.
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!
Americans have no sense of proportionality or optimizing for the system rather than the individual. It makes living in American cities infuriating.
From a question on the density of subway stops to a rant about Prop 13 in two steps. Impressive. Note to self: research the average number of hops from any topic on HN to Prop 13.
There are always going to be competing interests and tradeoffs. Stopping the train is expensive, in terms of time. If one wants to be most accommodating for those with physical issues, then the cost of that is slower or less frequent trains.
Of course. But it's easy for many to unthinkingly look at public transit through the lens of efficiency for able-bodied riders and ignore those who are long-term or temporarily disabled in some manner.
That attitude is part of the reason why few people take public transit in most US cities. When the transit system is not optimized for the majority, the majority will not use it. That leads to a death spiral where it becomes just a safety net system for the people who have no alternatives.
Comments
In NYC, it depends heavily on the bus line. Some stop nearly every block (which can be as little as every 100m) whereas some have more widely-spaced stops.
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...
There's an important distinction to be made here -- in Manhattan, in general, there are crosstown buses and buses which go uptown or downtown. And there are 2 kinds of 'block' in Manhattan, 'long blocks' are crosstown (east/west) and 'short blocks' which are north/south. Long blocks are irregular depending on where you are, and are typically much longer than short blocks ~3x.
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.
It's true that the M14 is special right now because it's currently serving riders of the L train, but the proposal to eliminate stops is part of the citywide Bus Action Plan that is being rolled out progressively by borough. Staten Island already redesigned its bus system, and IIRC the Bronx is next.
Stupid question, probably. But I'm not American.
Is a "block" just a continuous building with no gaps for a road or pavement?
i.e.
Would be 3 blocks? Or is a block only delineated by a road, but not a pavement? Or something else?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?
A block (which, as you've pointed out is an ephemeral phrase), in NYC at least, is the space along a road from intersection to intersection. It thus usually doesn't count gaps between buildings or alleys or the like. Many of the long (east/west) blocks in Manhattan, for example, have pedestrian pass-throughs in the middle, but that doesn't count as a split in the block.
In American English, blocks are deliminated by roads and mostly used in dense urban environments, often where the blocks are rectangular.
Etymology note: The word 'blockbuster' was coined by the press to describe the largest conventional bombs used by the RAF in WWII, because they could destroy a city block.
Wikipedia has a great explanation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/City_block
I was going to mention NYC too but in terms of the Subway, which is related.
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.
Annual ridership figures != people. For stops that are primarily commuter stops you have to divide by hundreds to get the actual person figure. 10k people using any given stop for one round trip twice per day is over 7M annual rides for that one stop. It's actually less than that for 18th St; using real data, the average daily ridership for is 8.6k. Compare with a station that is actually busy, like Union Square, which gets 109k daily ridership. Figures from https://graphics.wsj.com/table/NYRIDER_0420
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 know how the ridership is measured. I’m not sure what your point was. It’s also not surprising that the busiest stations have 10x as many riders as those less busy.
The four track system of the NYC Subway was its most important innovation, and it literally solved the problem your talking about. You don’t want all the stops? Walk to 14th and take the express.
Probably that it's inaccurate for you to say "the 4.5 million people who use the 28th Street stop" because that number is ridership, not people.
C’mon -- that was a rhetorical flourish.
A rhetorical flourish that conveniently made your argument appear much stronger than it actually was.
That literally is the point of rhetoric.
Moreover, if power becomes significant you can add regenerative breaking to regain a large fraction of energy (if they're not doing so already; maybe not because of the age of the trains).
The London Underground definitely does that. Also in part because it reduces the heat output. The underground has been heatsoaking for decades and it’s hitting problematic temperature levels.
This article is a great read: https://www.ianvisits.co.uk/blog/2017/06/10/cooling-the-tube...
Apparently about half of the heat generated in the tunnels is/was from braking. And the tunnel temperatures have risen from 14-30C since around 1908.
Is a good read about the engineering challenges.
When I visited Shanghai, I noticed that late at night when there are not many passengers, they will kick everybody off the train at a random stop. They do this with a few trains in a row until there are enough people waiting in the station to fill up a train to some acceptable level.
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.
Would this really save much efficiency versus the much less disruptive option of taking the trains out of commission (for the evening/morning/etc) when they get to the end of their route?
I'm really not an expert on subways, so I don't know. But I can only assume that the people who run the Shanghai metro know what they're doing.
Sorry, shouldn't have framed that as a question directed at you specifically. :)
Same thing happens in Beijing. Where they kick you off happens to be a subway depot where the train will sleep for the night (which isn't always at the terminus, e.g. if it is a loop line or at a remote junction); or it will simply express to the terminus after dumping all of its passengers. Usually, it's just the train's "time" to be off duty, they aren't actually looking at passenger densities or anything like that.
Thanks for the clarification. Good chance that this is what's going on in Shanghai as well. I don't speak Chinese at all so I was pretty clueless.
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.
I really like the frequent subway stops. It makes it easy to hop and and off wherever you are. If they were every block like the busses, I would say that's too much, but they're not, they're every 4-5 blocks, and only in Manhattan.
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!)
I'm guessing you have no physical issues and don't think twice about walking 10 blocks. I (usually) don't either but that doesn't describe everyone and am able to just grab a cab or a Lyft if not.
Take the 18th Street stop. You actually can't get in or out of this station without using stairs AFAIK. There are other stations like this. Are you really using these stations if you're unable to walk a few blocks?
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?
I'd imagine for someone in a wheelchair the stairs would present a much greater challenge than an extra four blocks. On the other hand, for someone with a prosthetic leg, climbing a set of stairs while holding a railing is probably far preferable to navigating an extra four blocks of icy sidewalks and streets.
Since both solutions are expensive (and the latter is exposed to exploitation), I'd like to see a cost-benefit analysis (which includes the benefits to non-disabled for having more frequent stops as well).
It gets paid for in time or money. Maybe it's an American thing to value money more than time? I'm not sure anyone else has to wait, though. They can always walk if it is faster.
This. I’m on crutches right now. I’ll have to take stairs to get in and out of the subway almost anywhere, but that extra four blocks takes a ton out of you.
The house my father grew up in in San Jose is now worth multi-millions but my grandmother couldn't possibly have paid the ever increasing property taxes while she was still alive and I think people would have whined about subsidies in well-off neighborhoods like you're doing now. I mean, she lived in that house since the late '40s and Silicon Valley just kind of moved in next door...
That's always the case. Parts of Manhattan used to be absolute squalor, the worst conditions a city had seen, complete slum housing packing 8 people in a bedroom. Now the area has changed and those same 1 bedrooms might go for 4k a month after a power wash and fresh primer. In Detroit, the city used to be very nice and developed instead of derelict before all the rich white people fled to the suburbs. Cities have never not changed, and it's shortsighted to think that they should exist in stasis when that's never been the case in the 10,000 years of history of cities on earth. I find it ironic that the generation which celebrated ripping out entire neighborhoods for interstates and airports and sports stadiums and parking lots complains when someone wants to build an apartment of all things in the lot across the street.
Prop 13 is a bind for people like your grandmother who live on fixed income and who anticipate living at a fixed level. This law insulated them from the housing market, yet they benefit from it's insulation from property tax when they do finally sell their 100k home, in the tax man's eyes at least, for 2m. In that case, surely it would be better to pay your back taxes when you sell, after you've realized your 2000% gain, but that just would make too much sense I guess.
Americans have no sense of proportionality or optimizing for the system rather than the individual. It makes living in American cities infuriating.
From a question on the density of subway stops to a rant about Prop 13 in two steps. Impressive. Note to self: research the average number of hops from any topic on HN to Prop 13.
There are always going to be competing interests and tradeoffs. Stopping the train is expensive, in terms of time. If one wants to be most accommodating for those with physical issues, then the cost of that is slower or less frequent trains.
Of course. But it's easy for many to unthinkingly look at public transit through the lens of efficiency for able-bodied riders and ignore those who are long-term or temporarily disabled in some manner.
That attitude is part of the reason why few people take public transit in most US cities. When the transit system is not optimized for the majority, the majority will not use it. That leads to a death spiral where it becomes just a safety net system for the people who have no alternatives.
50th seems a bit of an anomaly in your list? Otherwise there would be no stop between 42nd and Columbus Circle (I assume you mean the AC line?)