In the past ten (?) years or so real estate brokers have provided their For Sale signs with a dispenser for flyers describing the house in detail, including asking price, contact info., and photos. There's a swing-up top that keeps out the rain.
Why don't bus companies attach a similar dispenser to the poles at their bus stops? (Just for the bus line(s) stopping at that stop.) Such timetables are currently provided inside the bus. But that doesn't allow people waiting for a bus to learn when it will (hopefully) arrive, and it's more of a hassle to obtain one in that situation.
That's because there are passengers boarding behind one, and one wants to grab a seat before all are taken, and one wants to get seated before the bus starts rolling, and because there are half-a-dozen timetables available and it takes a while to figure out which one applies to the run one is currently on.
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PS: A very important benefit of this arrangement--and one I bet bus companies have overlooked--is that it would entice non-riders to become riders. I.e., it would reach people who currently don't ride the bus, but walk by bus stops on their way to a garage or taxi-stand.
Distributing bus schedules at stops could get abused.
Most major bus stops do have a schedule of busses for that stop posted anyways.
It's true that vandals could trash some schedules. But you'd think they'd get tired of it eventually. Anyway, an experiment that encompassed a dozen stops (say) for six months (say) would be cheap and demonstrate the amount of damage that would occur.
It's true that many (not all) stops have schedules posted, when there are little transparent sheds to post them in. But lots of stops lack those sheds.
And posted schedules don't tempt the passerby to read them. But a schedule that he could take home and study would. Since bus lines need increased ridership in may areas to be viable, this may be the most important advantage of this set-up.
Some companies place the routes and schedules on-line.
That's a great idea too. (They have it in Seattle and it's nice not to have to rely on picking up a new set of printed schedules every three months, when the schedules are updated.) But it doesn't offer the opportunity of inveigling in new riders. hat I'm suggesting should be tested on one of a city's routes for a year or two, to see if ridership increases.
a major con to this otherwise great idea is the cost of distributing the timetables - depending on the size of the bus system, it could be prohibitively expensive. in a large city with extensive bus route coverage, there might be too many stops and it might be too time-consuming to keep them stocked to pull this off efficiently. a lot of large agencies are already posting schedule displays at some stops, so they're at least trying.
seems like it'd be a good, manageable fit for small systems, or maybe some mid-size ones - or it could be applied selectively at large systems, like at high-usage stops.