Also, the Muni planners have to allow for penetration into the zones between the routes. Some stops on the J-Church Metro line are both close together and at the start of a wickedly steep hill (20th-Liberty-21st-22nd). Plus the cut the tracks run in is unsafe for pedestrians.

San Francisco is a crazy quilt - clean grids on most of the flats with awesome tangles on the hills. Yes, some stops can be trimmed. But the trimming could trigger boarding jams and missed connections. One of my definitions of a nightmare would be attempting to build a computer model of SF's Muni. The models that have been built don't seem to allow for enough of the Murphy factors. So the planners get what looks like a great solution and it breaks down when the rubber/steel meets the road/rail.

My suggestion is that those planners might want to try the dart board method. Take a large cork board, pin a map of San Francisco to it, and then throw some darts at it.

Yes, England is camera happy in general and that is not culturally applicable here. But if we have red light cameras designed to catch particular crimes, then cameras on transit to catch particular crimes should not be a giant leap.

-marc

I was wondering whether buses could be outfitted with cameras that would allow drivers to take photos of vehicles' illegally traveling or stopping in the bus lane, which would be used by law enforcement to cite those motorist based on license plate number, geographic information (based on GPS from the bus), and date/time. I know bus drivers aren't cops, but they are in quite a handy position to note and document these transit-retarding conditions!

At some point, the aggregate time spent walking to and from stops must approach the time saved with faster vehicles stopping less often. For shorter trips walking time might actually exceed ride time.

Has anyone tried yet to make this work given real world constraints on a sample line?

-marc

Did anyone spec out a stop consolidation regime for a line yet that would yield savings?

-marc

It's simply absurd that so many buses in that city stop. at. every. single. block.

I will call my supe, Nat Ford, whatever it takes. Please, let's get this done.

Has it occurred to anyone - at the least anyone in the advocacy community active on this blog - that Muni needs more money! Perhaps enough to invoke the 'Best Practices' that would improve service, rather than shift it from one user to another?

Say you get off at Geary Blvd and to your destination on Clement St. Even if MUNI stop at same east-west block as your destination, from Geary to Clement is 700ft! If you can't walk 700ft and you are so lucky to be on 6th Ave, you can wait for bus 44 that come every 15-20 minutes to take you from Geary to Clement. Just about everyone I know will simply walk 3 minute to cover this 700ft! If you can handle walking 700ft from Geary to Clement, you can handle bus stops at 1400ft apart.

When you take the walk between your actually orignation and destination to the bus stop into account, the distance between stops on a route become much less of a issue. It is unlike for most trips that the bus you want to take passes right in front of your. You will have to walk one or more blocks to get to your bus route, period.

How much does it cost to remove seats from around vestibule area?

How much does it cost to change the boarding policy?

Congestion charging is not needed if you have exclusive bus lanes. Of course, one may argue bus lanes take time to implement (politically) -- but does it really take 10 years? MTA was created 10 years ago to deal specifically with the bus lane issue.

The TEP-CAC asked for system wide POP as an TEP early implementation project back in 2007 with near unanimous support, but the MTA balked.

Stop consolidation has costs if spacing standards are to be maintained as any stop reconfiguration capable of saving enough time to add up to another run would require a lot of painting to remove and create stops. Please, try this for a route and get back to us with a concrete proposal.

POP is a concrete proposal. Start of proposal: Allow all-door boarding for riders with fast passes and transfers. End of proposal.

-marc

I've previously argued here that 50% adoption would cut peak-commute run times on the N Judah by up to 5 minutes (if you've ever waited for boarding at Carl & Cole, UCSF, and Duboce & Church, you know what I'm talking about). That's almost enough to give the line an extra run. Now, unfortunately the N Judah doesn't have too many stops to consolidate (except the superfluous Carl & Hillway).

But on a line like the 33, 6, or 71, a combination of reduced dwell times thanks to Translink and stop consolidation could gain enough time to cut a run (or increase service frequency with the same number of runs).

That is the elephant in the room. Don't get me wrong: driving a bus in SF is more difficult than it sounds. It's not exactly the same as driving a Google shuttle. But I'm curious to see what the depressed labor market could bear in terms of wages and relaxation of work rules.

Streetsblog: How about a post discussing various Muni work rules? I think we deserve to know what we're paying for.

Yes, I mentioned the Congestion Charge fairly prominently when discussing the London example.

I'm not sure if you realize there is no money for the other Best Practices. We can't replace the fleet, or the seating, or implement congestion charging. Stop consolidation is the one thing Muni can do to preserve or improve service while being forced to make budget cuts.

KABOOM!

Translation: you can screw transit dependent and working San Franciscans with crappy service and high fares, but you can't screw organized labor. Solidarity forever!

-marc

(The term "Record" of course being relative, given Caltrain's pathetic mode share.)

And those who use the example of London Transport buses are cherry-picking the data. The huge speedup in bus service is a direct consequence of the Congestion Charging -- which significantly sped up all road traffic by reducing the number of cars on the road. As well, London replaced their fleet with modern European equipment, with boarding and alighting through all doors, plus seating configuration more conducive to standees and passenger flow in the bus.

Yes, London does also have longer spacing between stops, and yes, stop consolidation can show benefits. But stop elimination should come after doing all the other Best Practices.

Incidentally, London contracts out bus routes to private firms through competitive bid. So if you __really__ want to reduce Muni overhead without cutting routes.....

It is dangerous to build public support in favor of stop consolidation without conditions and public pressure to demand those conditions, because based on the lack of accountability, giving this MTA an inch means they take a foot.

And absent any concrete proposals for stop consolidation on any given line with modelling that predicts savings, this is all hot air enabling a dysfunctional bureaucracy that has repeatedly done the wrong thing.

Show me how you will take those 500, 600,700 and 800s and translate them into 900, 1000, 1100 or 1200s without missing a stop at a community facility or a transit transfer.

-marc

It absolutely is a service reduction, just apparently not for your particular niche of transit use. That doesn't mean the people that use the current service won't feel the pinch.

"Muni really isn't that big of a bus system. Chicago CTA has 3x as many riders as Muni..."

I guess we need to define 'big.' My question was about bus ridership so I'll assume that's what you meant. Chicago has 3x the bus ridership of Muni, in a city over ten times the size. SF is a small city and Muni is a correspondingly small system, but an awful lot of San Franciscans take Muni because it's just plain possible to do.

Too be honest, I think bikerider gets it right. We can have this philosophical argument over who Muni should serve and what segment of its ridership should have its resources shifted to other segments, but even removing every stop you wanted to wouldn't make the difference some proponents claim. Buses aren't slowed that much by stopping for passengers compared to the delays caused by cars and stoplights.

"the root cause: too many cars on the streets are slowing down buses."

Then it is also analogous to what went on 4-6 years ago with commuter rail systems in a galaxy even farther away than the UK called "San Francisco/San Mateo/Santa Clara County". On Caltrain, 3 stops were completely eliminated and multiple stops had service greatly reduced. The end result was record ridership levels.

I find that hard to believe, that Bus vs. Tube; Bus vs. L; Bus vs. MuniMetro is the same for London, CHicago and SF.

quickly googling over the internets, I come across figures that put London's bus to tube ridership ratio at about 2:1; Chicago's at 3:1; and SF's at 4:1. Of course, I'm not including intra-SF Bart, but then again the MuniMetro isn't really a rapid rail network in the same sense as the Tube or the L. If you have other data, I'd like to see it.

But your general point remains valid; even though bus ridership is a less critical component to London's overall transit network than it is to SF's, it still operates more efficiently there than it does here, and we should strive to at least equal that.