We walked ten minutes from every Metro Bus stop along real streets and counted the homes, schools, hospitals and offices within reach.
Colombo's Metro Bus has seven lines and 110 stops. The lines run from Kadawatha in the north to Panadura in the south, and from Ekala to Kesbewa. They follow the main roads into the city.
A bus is only useful if you can get to a stop, and for most people that means walking. So we asked a simple question: who lives within a ten-minute walk of a stop?
We measured the walk on the real street map, from OpenStreetMap, at a steady pace of about 800 metres in ten minutes. The slides below build up the picture one layer at a time.
In short
The Metro Bus goes where the main roads go. That is a sensible place to start. The main roads carry most of the offices and hospitals, and a bus on Galle Road is easy to find.
But people live in the streets behind those roads, and the walk from home is the one most riders have to make first. Today, one person in five along the lines can walk to a stop in ten minutes. The other four cannot.
We think the lesson for the next line is in the second slide. Measure the walk, not the circle. A circle drawn around a stop counts almost twice as many people as can really get there, and the extra people are exactly the ones the bus misses.
The biggest of those gaps is the crowded north of the city, a few kilometres from Fort. We think that is where a new stop would reach the most people, and it is where our next piece goes.