We all have too much to read, so here's a tip to save time. Whenever any article (such as this one) cites information about incorporated US cities as a basis for any claim about trends in the culture, quit reading. US big-city boundaries are irrelevant to most people's lives, and to anything else that matters about our culture, economy, or destiny.
Christopher Leinberger makes this point in a New Republic article recently, usefully expanded on by Sarah Goodyear at Grist. Leinberger argues that "city" and "suburb" is no longer a useful opposition, and that what really matters are walkable urban places vs drivable suburban ones. True enough, but replacing city with it's near-synonym urban doesn't take us far. "City" and "suburb" are rich, evocative, and succinct words. The word city in particular must be fought for, redefined in ways that defend its profound cultural heritage. The word has an ancient and clear lineage from Latin, one that forms the basis for the word citizen, not to mention civic and civilization.
Greek and Roman political theory was all about the city, in a sense of that word that we can recognize today: groups of people living together in a small space for reasons of security and economy, but also the site of humanity's cultural and intellectual development. City is a word of enormous evocative power to capture a range of ideas that drive urbanism. Leinberger himself can't describe what really matters without using the word urban, which evokes a similar history and resonance.
What Leinberger is really complaining about are discussions of data about incorporated US cities, which are a very narrow and specific problem. A few of the oldest US cities (San Francisco, St. Louis) have coherent boundaries that describe real cultural and demographic units, but many are bizarre shapes of purely historical interest.
Nobody who understands the lived experience of Los Angeles would claim that the City of Los Angeles is a useful or interesting demographic unit. While the city excludes a great deal of dense inner-city fabric close to downtown, it has long balloonlike tentacles extending north to take in the whole San Fernando Valley and also south to grab the port of San Pedro. It also contains a good deal of near-wilderness in the Santa Monica Mountains.
The tentacular, pockmarked, pulsating blob that we call the City of Los Angeles is the map of a long-ago war over water and power. The only people who care about it today are those who work for city government or serve as its elected officials, plus a few who've considered city taxes and services as a reason to locate in the city or out of it.
Americans should notice, too, that bizarre and misleading city boundaries are largely a US phenomenon. Europe, Australia, and New Zealand generally allow central (state or national) governments to draw the boundaries of their local governments, so these boundaries usually (not always) end up making some kind of sense. (With the exception of Queensland, Australian local government areas are too small to have much influence, but that's a different problem.)
As Leinberger says, we need a distinction between walkable urban communities and drivable suburban ones, and American city limits are useless for understanding that distinction. But the word city — whose Latin ancestor meant "walkable urban" for millennia until about 1950 — is still worth fighting for. Legal US "city limits" are an imperfect and aspirational approximation of what cities really are, and what they really mean for the human project. Despite their pedantic misuse by the likes of Cox and Kotkin, city limits have no authority to tell us what a city is, and why we should want to live in a real city or not. The deep attractions and repulsions that we feel for big cities are the key to a longer and truer cultural understanding of what cities are, and of why the civic is the root of civilization.
My experiences in Leeds and Baltimore confirm the validity of a 400m standard for stop spacing. Rarely do you get to experiment with reducing or increasing stop spacing, but we can look at the sum of the experience of the two cities.
In Leeds, there have been a number of routes, normally small single-deck buses running every 30-60 minutes, that have stopped frequently and taken local roads to penetrate various neighbourhoods better than the frequent, relatively fast buses on the main arterials.
These have pretty much all disappeared with time, because people always proved willing to walk about 400m to the main arterials, which is about the furthest you're ever expected to. My experience of occasionally catching one of the slower local routes is that I would be the only passenger.
So, this demonstrates that people really are willing to walk to speed and frequency.
Meanwhile, in Baltimore, buses do stick to the main arterials. But they stop at every corner, just like the streetcars before them, which in Baltimore is about every 120 metres. And hell, are they slow – from Catonsville, MD to downtown Baltimore, I frequently spent 50 minutes to an hour to travel 8 miles that can be driven in about 20 minutes.
What's more, it's an uncomfortable ride, because the bus pulls violently to the corner at every corner, to keep the hell out of the way of traffic. And that's actually the problem with the frequent stops in Baltimore – while boarding time is a bit more complicated (though there's a fixed element to people getting up and making their way out of the bus, and people waiting for the driver's nod to start boarding), you can basically multiply the time spent waiting to pull out back into traffic by the number of stops.
So what you have is a slow service, and by that virtue, a less frequent service, because one bus can make fewer trips. So, if people will walk to speed and frequency where delivered by different routes, then we can assume that people will also walk to speed and frequency on existing routes when that's achieved by means of widely spaced stops.