That said, more routes should also be frequent. You’ll never build major ridership for a local transit service that requires careful planning to use. The higher the frequency, the more likely people will turn up to use the service; there’s an optimization point where you need to balance frequency and ridership.
Especially in North America, there are lots of routes that are FAR too infrequent to be considered “reliable”. And if people aren’t sure that bus route is reliable, they’ll plan to not use it.
When you consider how much more expensive it is, in real and knock-on terms, for a city to be built around a presumption of car ownership and parking availability compared to running even “excessively” frequent transit service, it’s a no brainer. Add more busses. Unfortunately, a lot of people fundamentally misunderstand which parts of the city budget are the major cost centers so they believe transit is “expensive” but parking and pavement for cars isn’t.
100% agree. All transit routes should run at least every half an hour for at least 14 hours per day (even holidays), and every hour the rest of the time. If you can’t afford that, then the transit is not reliable and everyone needs a car.
Running every 5 minutes all day means you start to wonder why you even have a drivers license when you never drive.
That said, more routes should also be frequent. You’ll never build major ridership for a local transit service that requires careful planning to use. The higher the frequency, the more likely people will turn up to use the service; there’s an optimization point where you need to balance frequency and ridership.
Especially in North America, there are lots of routes that are FAR too infrequent to be considered “reliable”. And if people aren’t sure that bus route is reliable, they’ll plan to not use it.
When you consider how much more expensive it is, in real and knock-on terms, for a city to be built around a presumption of car ownership and parking availability compared to running even “excessively” frequent transit service, it’s a no brainer. Add more busses. Unfortunately, a lot of people fundamentally misunderstand which parts of the city budget are the major cost centers so they believe transit is “expensive” but parking and pavement for cars isn’t.
100% agree. All transit routes should run at least every half an hour for at least 14 hours per day (even holidays), and every hour the rest of the time. If you can’t afford that, then the transit is not reliable and everyone needs a car.
Running every 5 minutes all day means you start to wonder why you even have a drivers license when you never drive.