In NYC, it depends heavily on the bus line. Some stop nearly every block (which can be as little as every 100m) whereas some have more widely-spaced stops.
The buses here are notorious for running very slowly (and thus behind schedule), and one of the proposals to speed some some slow buses is to eliminate stops on lines where they are densely clustered. It's become a subject of considerable debate, as residents and in particular older and disabled people are usually against consolidation, whereas most others accept it as a necessary cost of improving service.
The M14, which runs along 14th Street in Manhattan, is an example of where this is happening right now. Currently, the bus spends around 25% of its time standing in stations because it stops pretty much every block. There's a plan to eliminate some of its stops, but it's unclear whether it will succeed. Here's a good read on the subject: https://nyc.streetsblog.org/2019/04/19/never-stop-stopping-r...
Prague
Per [0] (2001; in Czech), average distance between subway stations is 1038m, tram stops 500m and bus stops 698m.
A related metric is walking distance from home to public transportation stop. Per [1] (2011; in Czech), most of people in the city need to walk less than 5 minutes to reach a stop. (There's a table with a breakdown by walking time and city part in chapter 7.) The same work cites average walking speed as 88.69 m/min, which gives you, for most inhabitants, <450m to reach a public transportation stop.
[0] http://envis.praha-mesto.cz/rocenky/DZ_OO/pril_practexty/BK0... [1] https://dspace.cuni.cz/bitstream/handle/20.500.11956/51223/B...
(EDIT: Updated units.)
Here is an interesting article about this subject, suggesting a 400m-rule for walking distance to the next stop: https://humantransit.org/2010/11/san-francisco-a-rational-st...
The city of Zurich, Switzerland recommends a tram stop every 300m-600m: https://www.stadt-zuerich.ch/content/dam/stzh/vbz/Deutsch/Ue... (page 19)
In Freiburg/Germany (250k inhabitants), the mean distance between bus stops is 634m, more distant than those of the tram (453m). Freiburg has more trams (72) than busses (65) running on 44 km of rails and the sum of all bus routes is 160 km. [1]
Trams run in short intervals and they are convenient when they're near, but switching from tram to bus carries a high time penalty two out of three times.
For Switzerland, that distance sounds about right, tending more towards 100m (in major cities). There is bound to be a dataset somewhere: being a tiny country means that we map everything in great detail, and the government takes these topics quite seriously. Some links to get you started:
https://www.geo.admin.ch/en/geo-information-switzerland/geod...
https://www.geo.admin.ch/en/geo-information-switzerland/geod...
You can also visualize a lot of the topographic data on map.geo.admin.ch, which is surprisingly useful/flexible, if not very user friendly.
Some discussion on this topic on this blog, e.g., https://pedestrianobservations.com/2018/10/30/sometimes-bus-...
In Warsaw, Poland, the mean distance between bus stops is 1,041 metres. This may seem a lot, but the distribution is heavily skewed by the fact that Warsaw has 4 express bus lines: not taking these into account, the mean is 699 metres.
Source (Polish): https://warszawa.wikia.org/wiki/Autobusy
20% of stops in Edinburgh are less than 200m from the previous stop, 40% between 200m and 300m and 20% between 300m and 400 metres.
From http://www.edinburgh.gov.uk/download/meetings/id/58073/item_...
For Berlin, there is an interesting visualization of this question:
I live in Dublin and I take the bus everyday, is mad, I'm talking sometimes less than 50m.
The stop in front of my house and the next one is only three houses away, Georgian style, so no mansions or huge houses.
The transport in Dublin is horrible and is on top 5 of most expensive public transport systems. (No subway)
It depends on the bus!
In my local city in China, for example:
The BRT stops every 2km or so, and runs on dedicated lanes.
The tram stops every 1km or so, no variation downtown or out of town.
The 5 buses and 6* buses tend to be long distance within a metropolitan area and stop every 2-500m at pickup and destination, but can run 30km only stopping a couple of times at key pick-up/drop-off locations.
Regularly numbered buses 1 though 70+ will stop every 500 meters or so, usually at each block.
There's an app, PandaBus, that shows all of the routes and stops for every stop in most Chinese cities, and has live GPS of buses for several cities. I don't know where they get the data, I'm sure you can just ask them.
In Hong Kong, numbering is a bit different and related to the city layout - basically HK is very dense in Central (Island) and Kowloon (peninsula) but due to coastal and mountainous topography very vast in the New Territories with 'new towns' being small urban pockets in the NT countryside.
Take the, IIRC, 73. The 73 route runs from Tai Po to Kowloon. The 73X does this with lots of pick-ups in Tai Po, then expressway to Kowloon with a single stop in Shatin, that's about 80km. The 73K does the same route but doesn't take the expressway and stops at every conceivable point, expending the journey time by an hour or two. HK people please correct me as it's a long time since I was in HK.
And HK also has the Toyota mini buses that have a single pickup point, drive like maniacs for 30-80km picking up speed downhill and losing momentum uphill, then drop off where you ask the driver. Good exciting ride, keep your eyes open!
In Seattle we have and are currently expanding a system of "RapidRide" buses. These appear to have an average stop distance of around 0.3 miles (~500 meters)
Wikipedia claims that RapidRide routes have on average 40% fewer stops than the 'regular' line that they replaced, which would mean the 'regular' buses have stops about every 300 meters.
Anecdotally, I lived in London for a few years and now live in Seattle, and I would say these number's all roughly match my experience. Seattle's stops are spaced quite a bit further apart, but Seattle is also much less dense :)
see https://www.theurbanist.org/2018/03/26/rainier-rapidride-met... and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RapidRide
I live in London and I wouldn't say my local bus stops are spaced at 200m intervals.
In Zone 2, sure. Not in the suburbs.
Definitely density related.
Tokyo. The average distance between stops on major streets are about 200 to 400m here, except some busy areas.
https://busmap.info/map/?q=%E6%9D%B1%E4%BA%AC%E9%83%BD%E6%96...
As you can imagine, buses are just as amazing as trains in Tokyo. They're sometimes running late, but only up to a few minutes. And often they come at the exact time. (There's a time table for every bus stop.) Most buses are accessible and there are a lot of elderly people using it. (Age 70 or older can get a free pass.) When there was a once-in-a-decade snowfall last year, they delayed about 10 minutes, and that was morning rush hours. Again, they do absolutely fantastic job here.
In Prague the usual distance is between 400 and 600m [0].
[0] http://standardzastavek.pid.cz/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/st...
200m is incredibly short. I'd say the average in Bangalore is around 700metres. It varies from 500m in dense parts of the city to 1.5km in the not so dense parts.
In US cities, the densest lines will have one stop per "block" — and that's frequently a regular tenth or eighth of a mile (and more regular as you move towards the newer cities in the west). So you'll typically find minimum distances of 160m or 200m and then multiples of those for express lines or less dense areas.
"on average between 100 and 200m" is an imprecise statement. Where does this metric come from?
Stockholm: Distances vary between different line types, e.g. the backbones lines 1..4 are a different type of backbone transit offering shorter travel times by having longer distances between stops (.5-1km) and shorter invervals between buses. Regular inner city buses have shorter distances.
The free API is fantastic. I'd be willing to bet it's the most comprehensive public API for city public transport in the world (Happy to be proven wrong though!).
As an example This API endpoint is for stops and lines. https://www.trafiklab.se/api/sl-hallplatser-och-linjer-2
In Amsterdam, and I guess many Dutch cities, the rule is that there must be a bus or tram stop within 400m from everywhere within the built-up area, so the maximum distance between stops is about 800m. The average will be lower of course.
In Chicago, there are 1,536 route miles and 10,768 stops, suggesting average spacing is about 230 meters. I'm not sure if that double counts stops that serve multiple routes but it sounds about right.
Depends on the line, heavily.
There are some, especially in the center where distances around 300m are common, in the outskirt, you could ride for a kilometer or more between stops.
I found a gis data for Prague public transport, so oyu might be able to query that: http://www.arcgis.com/home/webmap/viewer.html?url=http://mpp...
I have no statistics only anedata. In my old neighborhood in Providence RI bus stops we’re within shouting distance of the next stop. This was infuriating to me and a 2 mile bus ride to downtown could take 30-40 minutes. That is literally slower than my normal walking speed (~4 miles per hour). This duration was generally due to the number of stops not traffic. Maybe I’m a fast walker, but that still seems ridiculous.
Just measured the bus line I used to take from Edgewater, NJ into Manhattan (measured first stop in Edgwater to last stop in Weehawken), and it averages a little over 250m between stops, but they range from around 125m-700m between stops.
One stop that always angered me was my bus stop to the next was 125m. Basically across the intersection, and there was almost always a single person over there, causing us to accelerate then stop.
Here is Buenos Aires average is around 200-300m, which I personally find too short. I remember one time seeing two bus stops literally 20-25 meters away from each other. The bus needed to take left on a two lane road so it would circle the block, there was a bus stop just before entering the circle and just before leaving it. Driving distance was ~400m, but walking was a few steps.
I guess one could use openstreetmap data here, since they have pretty comprehensive coverage of bus stops, at least in Europe.
I believe that while there are various guidelines and studies, it is typically up to the transit agency itself to determine stop density and locations.
There are many companies that provide transit planning solutions which use GIS (with census data) to aid the process.
As others have said varies greatly, but it seems most common around here (Beaverton / Hillsboro, Oregon) that they like to stop every block, sometimes on opposite sides on an intersection - which honestly baffles my mind but whatever.
In China, big cities will set a distance of 500 meters between two bus stops. In my hometown which is a quite small city with 500k population, bus stops doesn't really work and every time you want to get on, just wave your hand. lol
In Houston, the bus and rails lines have stops about every 200m (2 blocks). Many of the lines have big gaps between stops (in the multiples of KMs), typically going to a transit center.
In Washington, DC, the distance varies considerably, but 200m sounds about right for the average. WMATA does have a "next bus" service that I see people using.
In Vienna, Austria stops are (AFAIK) very rarely less than ~300m away from each other, granted I'm horrible at guessing distances so perhaps I'm way off.
In Indonesia, the city buses stop wherever it likes. In Jakarta though, the city managed bus (TransJakarta) have dedicated bus stop at about ~1km.
It's obviously density related, even in London.
I feel sad about my country (Philppines) as buses and jeepneys could literally stop anywhere they like which results into heavy traffic.
In São Paulo It is usually between 200m and 600m, ideally 400m.
But it is very irregular. There are lines with up to 1km between stops
London also has bus route 389 - the entire route is I think 1.5 miles, with something like a dozen stops
Here's an interesting write-up about Seattle. The tldr is that it's about 280 meters for the median, 341 for the mean, in the city proper.
https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-average-distance-between-s...
in the East Dallas Texas neighborhoods on major roads i would guess a little under a 1/4 mile. Probably a 5-10 min walk between them.
Ä°zmir: 300m in city proper, 100m in suburbs.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Transit_Feed_Specifica... is the most used file format. Public transport companies used to submit their information to Google Maps and similar (the 'G' used to stand for 'Google'). You can find those searching for 'GTFS <name of city>' in various open data portals.
Alternatively OpenStreetMap is a huge global dataset. Buses are a small part of https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Public_transport It's easy to extract bus stops https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Overpass_API (https://overpass-turbo.eu/) but you're probably interested in routes as well. It's a rabbit hole of complexity, e.g. a bus terminal is multiple bus stops, some buses skip stops based on time of day, weekday, season (school buses), some stops are just for drivers to take a break or refuel, direction of route matters.
The transport view on https://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=16/21.3308/-157.8868&laye... is a pretty nice visualization. For specific questions on OSM tools there is https://help.openstreetmap.org/ and a mailing list https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-transit