“Why do we stop at EVERY corner?” is one of the more common complaints among younger bus riders. It seems intuitively obvious that stopping more=slower rides, especially when you stop to pick up just one person and end up missing a green light, adding literally hundreds of seconds to your morning commute, seconds that should be spent getting more coffee from the break room and reading PlanPhilly, which you justify by telling your boss it’s “work-related” news, even though you’re a wedding planner and we don’t really cover that kind of thing.

Where was I? Buses? Right, yes, buses: why do they stop at every corner? Wouldn’t it be faster if we skipped a few? It’s not like walking an extra block would kill anyone. Heck, most Philadelphians could afford to walk a bit more.

And reducing the number of stops a bus makes has been shown to speed up trips, reducing travel time on a bunch of L.A. buses 1.3 percent for every 10 percent reduction in the number of stops.

A 1.3 percent reduction in total trip time may not seem like a lot, but over the course of a day it can add up to “another bus”: the collective time saved adds up to allow for another run down the route with the same number of buses. In other words, a route that uses 4 buses to collectively service the line 28 times would now be able to run 29 times.

It also means smaller headways between buses, which make for shorter waits, increased frequency, and more ridership. And all without having to buy more buses.

So, man, seriously, why aren’t we doing this?

Well, kind of like actors, what works in L.A. doesn’t necessarily work in Philadelphia. SEPTA, with assists from the Mayor’s Office of Transportation and Utilities and the Delaware Valley Regional Planning Commission, ran a pilot study of six low-cost transit service enhancements – including bus stop consolidation – on the Route 47 bus back in 2011. And the results of that study weren’t that great (you can read it here).

“Overall, runtime in the northbound direction decreased by 1:27 (or roughly 2%), whereas travel in the southbound direction increased by 10 seconds,” the pilot team wrote in a report of their findings. The northbound decrease wasn’t nearly enough to get to “another bus”.

The study’s authors credited headway-based scheduling for almost all of the speed improvement. Headway-based scheduling means schedules simply say “buses come every 10 minutes” instead of listing arrivals at 9:00, 9:10, 9:20,etc., which can sometimes force unexpectedly fast-moving buses to slow down to maintain the schedule.