[smcl]

I'm having trouble making sense of this. It sounds like you want to say you won't take the bus for a journey under 200 metres - which is fine. But the meaning of your sentence is something like: if you want to travel 2 km and the bus stops every 200 metres means you won't take the bus because it would cost too much? How come? And how did you arrive at that 200 metre threshold?

edit: I completely failed to appreciate the distance - after doing a bit of measuring on Google Maps 200m is actually a really reasonable cutoff point, in my city at least.

[eptcyka]

If the bus stops every 200 meters, it has a chance of stopping 10 times, which takes a lot of time. If the weather isn't prohibitively horrible, I have to wait for the bus to arrive and if there's traffic, chances are I'll be able to reach my destination on foot faster than by bus.

It's fine by me, but it seems that I'm just not the target audience for busses.

[realjhol]

It doesn't usually stop that often because half the time people aren't pushing the button every stop.

In central areas where demand is high, busses usually come every ~5-minutes. Even further out in the suburbs, the wait times are 8-10 minutes.

Bus rides are £1.75. You can take as many busses in a day, and it automatically caps at £5.25. You don't need coins, you pay using contactless credit card, or oyster card prepaid cards.

Unless there is service disruption I find the bus is at least twice as fast as walking, typically a lot faster.

I walk if the distance is less than ~30-minutes, but if I do take the bus I never feel like I've wasted my time or money.

[eptcyka]

My experience in London is rather limited, but it seems it's very similar to Edinburgh. As a student in Edinburgh, waiting for a bus to ride 4 stops for some money or walking 2km for free was a no-brainer. Waiting 40 minutes to get into the city from the suburbs via the bus when there is no traffic is really insane when the same trip could be done in a car in 15 minutes, or 25 minutes on a bicycle - in these cases I much prefer the drive, cycling or the walk. Even if walking ends up being 5 minutes slower, I'd still choose walking as I normally need to walk more rather than less, and I get to save a quarter of a pints-worth of money.

[cjrp]

> Unless there is service disruption I find the bus is at least twice as fast as walking, typically a lot faster.

Anecdata, but I can say the opposite is true in central London (London Bridge to Liverpool Street, for example) during rush hour. The bus takes about 20 mins on a good day, and I can walk it in the same time.

[MagnumOpus]

Agreed, but that is really only true for some very specific sections at very specific times (5pm rush hour around the City fringe and Westminster) -- even in rush hour I would say that the 2x rule of thumb works in general.

[OJFord]

Especially given if you're not on the bus you don't (probably) have to walk bus stop to bus stop, you go straight to wherever you're going. Lots of little alleys around there too, saving 2x road to the junction and a light change.

[elAhmo]

This is a perfectly valid comment. And a situation I experience many times.

For example, reaching from Liverpool street to Farringdon could take 30 minutes during peak times. I still have the image of nearly a dozen busses queueing up and trying to take people from the station.

I decided to talk very often instead of not taking the bus and it wasn't slower.

[jstx1]

That specific journey is much faster now that the Elizabeth Line is running.

[elAhmo]

Thanks! I did not mind the walk through, saw so many unique places along that route, like the Barbican.

[jstx1]

> chances are I'll be able to reach my destination on foot faster than by bus

This is only true in extreme cases - very short distances, very heavy traffic, being able to take shortcuts on foot. The majority of bus journeys would be slower on foot by a large margin.

[leoedin]

Nearly every time I think "I can walk quicker than the bus", the bus overtakes me. Even with a bus stop every 200m. The only time I truly can walk quicker than a bus is when it's in complete gridlock traffic.

[dontlaugh]

Stops are quick and busses are (at least for now) frequent. It’s rarely faster to walk and never faster to drive in the areas where busses stop that frequently.

[smcl]

I guess it would also depend on distance. If it's a 10 minute walk vs waiting up to 5 minutes for the bus then a 5 minute bus ride I get it. Also I just plotted distances between stops on my tram commute (waiting for the CI[0] :D) and 200 metres is much shorter than I realised, so actually I think I am with you. The stop distances for my commute home are:

- 100m

- 761m

- 681m

- 371m

- 506m

- 335m

And since it's a tram this is a bit different since it doesn't have to contend with vehicles (it's extremely rare to be blocked by cars or trucks) so this 2.75km ride takes ~11 minutes and that first 100m hop feels really short. I don't know where my ideal cutoff is, but that #63 route in London stopping on average every 42 metres must feel really slow.

[0] - https://xkcd.com/303

[defrost]

For the context, though, the article states that there is only one route with an average stopping distance of 42 metres and that the the next shortest average distance is twice that (83) and the next again (third shortest) ~4x that (152 m);

and

that these routes are "stop on demand" - not stopping every 40m, just potentially if someone waves from a stop or rings the bell.

[smcl]

Yeah fair, I didn't think about that as our "request stops" are usually further out of the city centre (where they're actually further apart) and trams, trolleys and buses tend to stop at every stop closer into the city.