Smart Stops: Bus Stop Optimization Tool

The Smart Stops tool unites community priorities and best practices, creating better service.

Bus stops are the front door of the transit system. They also play a significant role in the quality of bus service, including whether a bus arrives on time. While close bus stop spacings provide shorter walk times to transit, they also result in longer trip times, less comfortable rides (due to frequent slowing, stopping, and accelerating), and a greater likelihood for problems like bus-bunching, which affects on-time performance.

To address these issues, we developed Smart Stops, a bus stop optimization tool to help cities and transit agencies determine their ideal bus stop spacing. By reducing the number of stops, our model makes bus service more time-competitive with driving. At a time when curb space is increasingly valuable, removing bus stops can also provide opportunities to repurpose the curb.

Our robust engagement process identifies community values, so that we can program our model to reflect what’s important to the public, in addition to best practices. Our model prioritizes the most desirable and appropriate stops, weighing factors such as transit demand, site selection, stop amenities, and pedestrian and wheelchair accessibility. We factor in land use and density as well as different service types, such as BRT, express, and local bus service. This allows us to examine priorities on a systemwide level—rather than a stop-by-stop approach, which can be more politically fraught.

We provide transit agencies with a transparent and data-driven process for bus stop prioritization that’s grounded in community values, providing momentum for implementation. Smart Stops compliments our industry-leading service and market analyses to give transit agencies more ways to improve service and increase ridership.

In practice:

For the Southwest Ohio Regional Transit Authority (SORTA), our tool identified 800 stops for removal—20% of all SORTA stops—none of which would require any existing customer to walk more than five minutes to a new stop.