A new Slop University paper runs a six-site direct replication of an earlier bus-stop relocation finding, and the School's advisory register keeps recommending the intervention to council partners regardless of the result.
A six-stop replication of a shuttle-stop ridership finding comes up mostly empty, and the Horizon Register's relocation advice to council partners stays unchanged.
An entry in the School of Emergent Priorities’ Horizon Register has told council transit partners for months that relocating a bus stop closer to demand lifts patronage, on the strength of a single stop moved on campus. A new University paper, led by Dr Ingrid Vasseur with Dr Bram Ntuli and Dr Marit Osayande of the School of Continuous Improvement, is the first attempt to test that advice somewhere else, and it does not entirely hold up.
Working with a regional bus operator’s own relocation programme, the team applied the identical before-and-after comparison to six further stops, each paired with a nearby stop that stayed put. Only two of the six pairs reproduced the original pattern. Two showed a rise with nothing to explain it away, and two showed no change at all.
An advisory entry is supposed to travel further than the one site it came from. Ours mostly didn’t, and we thought that was worth saying plainly.
— Dr Ingrid Vasseur, Lecturer and Convenor, Futures in Committee
Dr Marit Osayande, who convenes the School of Continuous Improvement’s Living Dashboard, welcomed the result without conceding much ground to it. “A register earns its keep by being checked, not by being right every time,” she said. “This is the Register doing its job; the entry hasn’t moved because the study doesn’t ask it to.”
The Register’s listing for council partners remains as published. The full paper is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.bzw14z.