Stop spacing is a trade between the walk and the ride

Comparisons of stop spacing usually pick a winner. This one picks the circumstances, which is more useful.

The arithmetic points in two directions

Adding a stop reduces the walking distance for people near it and adds deceleration, dwell and acceleration time for everyone on board. The walk saving is enjoyed by a few; the time cost is paid by all passengers passing through, on every trip, all day. On a busy route, the aggregate time cost of a lightly used stop can exceed the aggregate walking benefit substantially.

This calculation is straightforward and is rarely done because stops are added individually and never reviewed together.

Historic spacing reflects a different city

Many bus networks inherited stop spacing from tram routes or from an era of lower vehicle speeds and different land use. Stops accumulate over decades in response to individual requests and rarely get removed. The result in many cities is spacing considerably tighter than any current guidance would recommend.

Consolidation therefore usually means removing stops rather than adding them, which is the harder direction politically.

Who loses matters more than how many

The people most affected by a longer walk are older passengers, disabled passengers and anyone carrying shopping or children. They are also disproportionately likely to depend on the bus, which makes uniform consolidation regressive.

At street level, selective consolidation that retains stops at hospitals, care facilities, steep gradients and major generators addresses most of this. A consolidation programme that treats every stop as equivalent will produce exactly the objections it deserves.

Stop placement relative to the junction matters

A stop beyond the junction lets the bus clear the signal before dwelling and avoids blocking the approach. A stop before the junction lets passengers alight closer to a crossing and can allow the bus to use its dwell time to wait out a red signal. Practice differs by country and by whether signal priority is in use, and the choice interacts with the junction design.

Where stops sit immediately before a signal without priority, the bus routinely pays the delay twice.

Skip-stop and overlay services split the difference

Running a limited-stop service over the same corridor as a local one gives speed to long-distance passengers and access to short-distance ones. It requires enough frequency to support two patterns, which is why it appears mainly on busy trunk corridors. Passengers find dual patterns confusing unless the branding and stop marking are unambiguous.

Where frequency is insufficient, splitting service between two patterns makes both worse.

Local statute governs most of this, and it varies street by street.

Consolidation delivers measurable speed

Cities that have carried out systematic stop rationalisation have generally reported meaningful journey time reductions on the affected routes. Faster routes need fewer vehicles for the same frequency, which frees operating budget to increase service.

That reinvestment is the argument that turns a removal programme into a service improvement. Where the saving is banked rather than reinvested, the passengers who lost a stop received nothing in return, and they notice.

Side by side

The takeaway

Every stop is a small tax on everybody already on the bus. Some are worth paying.

Cities are built by a thousand small permissions, not one big plan.