The primary objective of this study was to develop a quantitative approach to estimate bus dwell time and time lost serving stop, which included acceleration and deceleration time, dead time, and time for serving boarding and alighting passengers. A polynomial model incorporating kinematics of a particle was derived for estimating bus acceleration and deceleration time. In addition, descriptive statistics methods were used to analyze dead time. A case study was conducted to show the applicability of the proposed model with data collected from the seven most common types of bus stops in China. R-square and Mean Absolute Percentage Error (MAPE) were calculated to be 0.8840 and 13.20% for non-peak and 0.8387 and 13.46% for peak, indicating the method was well-validated and could be practically used in China. Further research can be conducted to investigate the effects of different weather conditions and locations on the performance of the proposed method.