Posts about Stop Spacing

The buses are particularly slow through Georgetown, where the avenue narrows to one lane in each direction. There are 7 stops on the mile-long route on Wisconsin Avenue from R Street to 28th Street. The bus also stops 7 seven times downtown between 24th Street on Pennsylvania Avenue and Madison Place on H Street NW.

On many of these sections, there is a bus stop at every block for multiple blocks. The 30s stop at Dumbarton, P, Q, and R Streets in Georgetown and at both ends of Lafayette Park and 18th and 17th Streets downtown. More stops means slower trips, particularly during rush hour when crowded buses increase the probability of a passenger requesting each stop.

Metro removed some bus stops earlier this year to improve on-time performance, which lags below the 80% target level (page 25 of the PDF). However, some residents oppose these consolidations and Metro relented on many of them.

It's certainly understandable that communities would want to preserve all of their bus stops. Frequency of stops makes riding the bus more convenient and riders don't have to walk as far to reach the nearest one.

But more bus stops generally mean slower buses, which ultimately makes the bus less convenient. In certain places, removing a bus stop has little impact on the convenience of the bus. For example, do the 30s really need to stop at Jackson Place and Madison Place on either side of Lafayette Park? The park isn't that big and this stretch of H Street is often cluttered with rush hour traffic and other buses.

Alternatively, WMATA could turn local buses into express buses when demand is high. A manager at either end of a line could designate a bus "express" during peak times when the route is particularly slow and the bus could easily flash between "32 Friendship Heights" and "Express," for example, to alert riders. If WMATA published an express schedule, riders could know whether to take the express bus or wait for the local one.

WMATA does currently run an express bus on part of this route, the 37 line. This bus connects Friendship Heights with Archives, but does so via Massachusetts Avenue and Dupont Circle. While this route speeds up the connection for riders going downtown, it does not service Glover Park, Georgetown and Foggy Bottom, which are often slower parts of the route.

Turning a local 32 into an express 32, for example, would mean the bus continues to run the entirety of the Friendship Heights to Southern Avenue route. But this express service would service fewer stops with a high number of boardings. This way, riders in Glover Park and Georgetown could connect to the Blue and Orange lines at Foggy Bottom much faster.

This real-time change could be implemented soon without the need to create an entirely new express route like the S9 or X9 buses. Bus stop consolidation could take more time, but is ultimately necessary to reduce travel times.

Another recommendation is creating a new bicycle route from 39th Street to Idaho Avenue and Porter Street. Additionally, the report recommends adding new bike racks along the Wisconsin Avenue commercial corridor and other key locations in Glover Park.

Consolidate bus stops: The study recommends consolidating some duplicate bus stops on Wisconsin Avenue. This could greatly improve the reliability of the 30s buses. It suggests repositioning "the bus stop on the southbound side at the Chevron gas station to the near side of the intersection with Calvert Street. Northbound and southbound bus stops on Wisconsin Avenue between Edmunds Street and Davis Street (adjacent to the Russian Embassy) should then be eliminated."

Currently, along the 30s line routes, some locations have multiple bus stops on the same block. This reduces the operating speeds of the buses as they have to merge into/out of the curbside lane to pick up passengers. Frequently, the buses also get stuck at traffic lights after picking up just one or two passengers at these redundant stops. Additionally, the merging buses create congestion for other vehicles in the traffic flow, further slowing down other buses along Wisconsin Avenue.

Combining these stops in Glover Park would also result in a higher number of riders at the newly consolidated locations. This would justify improved passenger infrastructure like covered bus shelters at these stops, further encouraging new ridership.

Off-board fare collection: Another important transit recommendation is to work with WMATA to install off-board fare collection equipment at busy bus stops. Such locations include all stops at the Massachusetts/Wisconsin Avenue intersection and all stops within the Glover Park commercial district on Wisconsin Avenue. Cities with successful bus rapid transit have installed ways to pay prior to boarding the bus, improving the operational efficiency of these routes.

Two-way streets: The Glover Park study also recommends converting one-way streets into two-way streets. In more suburban neighborhoods, cul-de-sacs increase vehicle miles traveled and walking distance by prohibiting direct access to major arterial streets. One-way streets create the same issue. Motorists have to drive farther with one-way streets since more direct routes to their destinations are not possible. Additionally, the study notes that the one-way streets in Glover Park create wider lane widths, encouraging people to drive faster than they would with two-way streets and narrower lanes.

Wisconsin Avenue median: Wisconsin Avenue through Glover Park ranges from 55 to 65 feet wide, striped except in the narrowest areas as six lanes with no median. Toole Design studied a number of alternatives for the road, and settled on a configuration adding a median along the entire length, with the median ranging from 6' without trees to 10-11' with trees, and 4 travel lanes in most sections with some non-rush-hour parking, some full-time parking, and some center turn lanes.

Performance parking: To strengthen the commercial district, the report suggests a performance parking district for Glover Park. Residential streets would be resident-only (no 2-hour free parking for non-residents) on one side and metered on the other, while commercial streets would be metered on both sides.

Metro also plans to improve the schedule listings in the vertical information case on the poles. Today, the cases show a schedule for the entire route. If the bus stop is not one of the major points, then the schedule doesn't say at what time the bus is supposed to arrive, and riders have to interpolate between the nearest two points, assuming they know what these are. Instead, the new design shows only the times when a bus is supposed to show up at that particular stop. A horizontal bar along the bottom will list major destinations farther along the route, and the approximate number of minutes the bus takes to get there.

This is a huge improvement in many ways. At many bus stops, it's too easy to get confused about which buses go to a particular destination. A bus showing up with a final destination sign of "Southern Avenue" doesn't make this easier. That will still be a problem at some very low-ridership bus stops, since the standards recommend information cases for stops exceeding 50 boardings a day, but almost any stop which a casual rider or tourist will use in an area that's not just their own neighborhood should exceed this threshold.

The one change that RAC members suggested when they saw this last month was to modify the grid of times. The proposed design lists the times in a table, reading horizontally. But many members noted that riders could easily assume they are supposed to read downward, like a schedule, to see arrival times; coloring alternate columns in gray, as the design does, further reinforces this incorrect conclusion.

Metro should consider a visual design, like stem and leaf schedules, that has no visual cues promoting a false reading of the list. When we see a grid, we assume that items relate to those left and right as well as those above and below. But that's not the case here. The stem and leaf schedule, or other layouts with horizontal but not vertical continuity, would maximize usability of these schedules.

Finally, the standards recommend revising bus stop spacing to 4-5 per mile, as we discussed recently. Overall, Metro has done a nice job of improving the bus stops, and more importantly, has communicated their thoughts to the RAC, the Accessibility Advisory Committee, the Board, and others to hear input. Even if they don't make every choice I would, we know they won't overlook anything huge, the way the SmarTrip team did when designing the new SmartBenefits system.

As a former daily rider of the 50s Line along 14th Street in Northwest and Southwest DC, I am intimately familiar with the stop frequency for buses. In fact, from my stop at 14th and Shepherd, the next bus stop to the south was only about 375 feet away at Randolph Street.

In fact, for the segment of the 50s Line between the downtown split of the 52 and 54 to the Colorado Avenue Terminal, where most buses turn back, the average distance between stops is 623 feet. For reference, the length of a Metro platform is 600 feet. A railcar is 75 feet long. That means that on average, between stops, the 14th Street bus line travels, on average, barely more than the length of an 8-car train. Passengers at Gallery Place walking from the Green/Yellow level to the 9th & G Entrance walk farther within the station.

The 52, 53, and 54 have the following average distance between stops:

• Downtown segment, 52 southbound: 837 feet
• Downtown segment, 52 northbound: 855 feet
• Downtown segment, 54 southbound: 808 feet
• Downtown segment, 54 northbound: 784 feet
• Combined 52, 54, New York Ave to Colorado Ave northbound: 633 feet
• Combined 52, 54, Colorado Ave to New York Ave southbound: 611 feet
• Combined 52, 54, Colorado Ave to Takoma Station northbound: 648 feet
• Combined 52, 54, Takoma Station to Colorado Ave southbound: 735 feet

Interestingly, that the segments with the longest distances between stops are located downtown. This is where Metrorail has the shortest distance between stops. In the residential segments north of the city, bus stops are very frequent.

Of course, it is vital that bus stops be accessible to the most people, but we have to draw a line. After all, people often walk some quite a good distance to get to quality transit. If buses got people to work or to the store more quickly, they would probably be willing to walk farther.

A policy of increasing the distance between stops to at least two or three blocks apart would be a good place to start. Especially in walkable neighborhoods. With stops 3 blocks apart, once you reached the street on which the bus ran, you'd never be more than one block from a stop.

So far, Metro's solution has been to implement limited-stop services like the S9 on Sixteenth Street and the 79 on Georgia Avenue. In the case of 16th Street, the S9 makes only 14 stops between Silver Spring and McPherson Square, with an average distance between stops of 2,678 feet. With fewer stops, the 16th Street Express is competitive with the rail system. According to Metro's trip planner, a trip from Silver Spring to McPherson Square takes about 27 minutes by rail and about 36 minutes with the S9.

But why should riders have to wait for a new service before trip times improve? Why not reduce the number of stops overall? Perhaps the "local" stop buses needn't have 2,600 feet between stops, but 1,000 certainly sounds like a better number.

The Manual on Uniform Traffic Control Devices suggests that the average person walks 4 feet per second. Other studies show that the elderly make around 3 feet each second when on foot. Increasing the average stop spacing on the 50s line from 623 feet to 1000 feet would increase the average distance between stops by 377 feet, which could be covered by someone walking at 3 feet per second in a little over two minutes.

Limited stop buses are certainly a positve aspect to our transit system. And I hope that WMATA is able to implement more of them. However, reducing travel times on all routes should be a priority.

In fact, WMATA is currently working on a set of bus stop optimization criteria. One of the factors is bus stop spacing. According to a report given to the Riders Advisory Council earlier this month, Metro reports that other transit systems, like Seattle's King County Metro, have found a good balance between access and efficiency at 4-5 stops per mile, which is a little over 1000 feet apart. Right now, WMATA has 63 bus routes with stop spacing exceeding 5 stops per mile.

WMATA's proposed bus stop standards would help create uniformity and ensure safe, accessible stop design across the region. It would serve as a guide for jurisdictions in the region when considering bus stops.