Like do they just guesstimate where they’d see the most use?
In my city they have a planning commission. They take into account local studies, population patterns, future construction, and ridership data. They plan out the bus routes and stops and then they have a period of public comment. If there’s a need for a new stop, residents can petition their local representatives and join commission meetings to make suggestions. Stops are usually eliminated or consolidated when ridership data indicates they’re not necessary during annual reviews.
OP you should play Cities Skylines 2 (the original is good too if you have an older system). Then you can design your own bus routes and learn for yourself. It seems like the kind of game that would be right up your alley.
If you are expecting consistency from something like this, you should try getting involved in local politics at least once.
Whatever way you imagine for deciding it, the answer is yes, they do that.
Do they gesstimate? Yes!
Do they hire engineers to guesstimate? Yes!
Do they concede to popular pressure? Yes!
Do they concede to money pressure? Yes!
Do they use the placement to guide the city’s evolution? Yes!
Do they change the placement because a business “bribed” (i mean lobbied) for them to not to put a bus stop near them as they don’t want to see the poors near them? Yes!
In my experience in Germay, the more expensive shops are closer to public transport. In the same vein apartments near public transport stops are the most sought after and therefore most expensive ones.
Wouldn’t it be the other way around ? Lobby to get a bus stop to drag more customer ?
In the US I think busses are generally associated with the bottom of society, so not the customer you want. Just my interpretation
Or in the case of my city, they built a bus stop in the massive parking lot between Walmart and Sam’s Club for the opposite reason!
I’m sure it was added for both employees and customers.
Yeah that is why I said business not store and yes this is very uniquely American.
I can understand the pessimism in some of the answers given so far, especially with regards to the poor state of American public transit. But ending a discussion with “they guess” is unsatisfactory to me, and doesn’t get to the meat of the question, which I understand to be: what processes might be used to identify candidate bus stop locations.
And while it does often look like stops are placed by throwing darts at a map, there’s at least some order and method to it. So that’s what I’ll try to describe, at least from the perspective of a random citizen in California that has attended open houses for my town’s recently-revamped bus network.
In a lot of ways, planning bus networks is akin to engineering problems, in that there’s almost never a “clean slate” to start with. It’s not like Cities Skylines where the town/city is built out by a single person, and even master planned developments can’t predict what human traffic patterns will be in two or three decades. Instead, planning is done with regards to: what infrastructure already exists, where people already go, and what needs aren’t presently being met by transit.
Those are the big-picture factors, so we’ll start with existing infrastructure. Infra is expensive and hard to retrofit. We’re talking about the vehicle fleet, dedicated bus lanes, bus bulbs or curb extensions, overhead wires for trolleybuses, bus shelters, full-on BRT stops, and even the sidewalk leading up to a bus stop. If all these things need to be built out for a bus network, then that gets expensive. Instead, municipalities with some modicum of foresight will attach provisos to adjacent developments so that these things can be built at the same time in anticipation, or at least reserve the land or right-of-way for future construction. For this reason, many suburbs in the western USA will have a bulb-out for a bus to stop, even if there are no buses yet.
A bus network will try to utilize these pieces of infrastructure when they make sense. Sometimes they don’t make total sense, but the alternative of building it right-sized could be an outlandish expense. For example, many towns have a central bus depot in the middle of downtown. But if suburban sprawl means that the “center of population” has moved to somewhere else, then perhaps a second bus depot elsewhere is warranted to make bus-to-bus connections. But two depots cost more to operate than one, and that money could be used to run more frequent buses instead, if they already have those vehicles and drivers. Tradeoffs, tradeoffs.
Also to consider are that buses tend to run on existing streets and roads. That alone will constrain which way the bus routes can operate, especially if there are one-way streets involved. In this case, circular loops can make sense, although patrons would need to know that they’ll depart at one stop and return at another. Sometimes bus-only routes and bridges are built, ideally crossing orthogonal to the street grid to gain an edge over automobile traffic. In the worst case, buses get caught up in the same traffic as all the other automobiles, which sadly is the norm in America.
I can only briefly speak of the inter-stop spacing, but it’s broadly a function of the service frequency desired, end-to-end speed, and how distributed the riders are. A commuter bus from a suburb into the core city might have lots of stops in the suburb and in the city, but zero stops in between, since the goal is to pick people up around the suburb and take them somewhere into town. For a local bus in town, the goal is to be faster than walking, so with 15 minute frequencies, stops have to be no closer than 400-800 meters or so, or else people will just walk. But too far and it’s a challenge for wheelchair users who need the bus. Whereas for a bus service which is purely meant to connect between two bus depots, it would prefer to make a few more stops in between that make sense, like a mall, but maybe not if it can travel exclusively on a freeway or in dedicated bus lanes. So many things to consider.
As for existing human traffic patterns, the new innovation in the past decade or so has been to look at anonymized phone location data. Now, I’m glossing over the privacy concern of using people’s coarse location data, but the large mobile carriers in the USA have always had this info, and this is a scenario where surveying people about which places they commute or travel to is imprecise, so using data collected in the background is fairly reliable. What this should hopefully show is where the “traffic centers” are (eg malls, regional parks, major employers, transit stations), how people are currently getting there (identifying travel mode based on speed, route, and time of day), and the intensity of such travel in relationship to everyone else (eg morning/evening rush hour, game days).
I mentioned surveys earlier, which while imprecise for all the places that people go to, it’s quite helpful for identifying the existing hurdles that current riders face. This is the third factor, identifying unmet needs. As in, difficulties with paying the fare, transfers that are too tight, or confusing bus depot layouts. But asking existing riders will not yield a recipe for growing ridership with new riders, people who won’t even consider riding the existing service, if one exists at all. Then there’s the matter of planning for ridership in the future, as a form of induced demand: a housing development that is built adjacent to an active bus line is more likely to create habitual riders from day 1.
As an aside, here in California, transit operators are obliged to undergo regular analysis of how the service can be improved, using a procedure called Unmet Transit Needs. The reason for this procedure is that some state funds are earmarked for transit only, while others are marked for transit first and if no unmet needs exist, then those funds can be applied to general transport needs, often funding road maintenance.
This process is, IMO, horrifically abused to funnel more money towards road maintenance, because the bar for what constitutes an Unmet Transit Need includes a proviso that if the need is too financially burdensome to meet, they can just not do it. That’s about as wishy-washy as it gets, and that’s before we consider the other provisio that requires an unmet need to also satisfy an expectation of a certain minimum ridership… which is near impossible to predict in advance for a new bus route or service. As a result, transit operators – under pressure by road engineers to spend less – can basically select whichever outside consultant will give them the “this unmet transit need is unreasonable” stamp of disapproval that they want. /rant
But I digress. A sensible bus route moves lots of people from places they’re already at to places they want to go, ideally directly or maybe through a connection. The service needs to be reliable even if the road isn’t, quick when it can be, and priced correctly to keep the lights on but maybe reduced to spur new ridership. To then build out a network of interlinking bus routes is even harder, as the network effect means people have more choices on where to go, but this adds pressure on wayfinding and fare structures. And even more involved is interconnecting a bus network to a train/tram/LRT system or an adjacent town’s bus network.
When they’re doing their job properly, bus routing is not at all trivial for planners, and that’s before citizens are writing in with their complaints and conservatives keep trying to cut funding.
Probably put them where the people are standing around in the morning.
They observe the bus in its natural habitat, making notes of its hunting paths, and place bus stops along its feeding grounds where the prey congregated.
