Yuppies on the Bus

I was interested to read in yesterday's bus thread that the problem with buses is that "Yuppies won't ride buses." I don't normally ride the bus because I work from home frequently and live near a Metro station, but I certainly take it some of the time. For example, yesterday morning the WMATA Ride Guide told me the fastest way to get where I was going was to take the 52/54 bus down 14th Street rather than to take the Green Line and then walk west after getting off, so I took the bus and plenty of other yuppies seemed to be on board (what's more, if yuppies aren't on the D2 route then who is?)

My sense is that the main determinants of yuppie bus usage are the determinants of everyone else's transit choices -- it all has to do with the speed and cost of taking the bus versus the speed and cost of getting around some other way. If you internalize more of the costs of driving & parking and implement strategies to make bus service faster and more frequent, more people will take the bus. Obviously, a bus can't be made to go as fast as a grade-separated heavy rail system, nor can it carry as many people, so it's better to build heavy rail where you see potential for a lot of demand, but there's not some law of nature keeping people off the bus.

Comments

I'm pretty sure that the reason why people don't ride the bus is because insane people who want to show you their penis or talk to you about space aliens ride the bus.

Or maybe you don't live in LA.

Posted by Craig | April 18, 2008 9:19 AM

Well, no, we don't live in LA, where the public policy for generations has been that to live an ordinary life you must have a car and buses are for the dregs of society. Here in DC, ordinary people take the bus to work every day.

Posted by Bloix | April 18, 2008 9:28 AM

Maybe your experience in D.C. is typical for D.C., but it is not so in all cities. In Houston, my purely personal experience is that working class people take the bus almost exclusively. When I lived in Tampa and started taking the bus occasionally, an accountant friend asked me what it was like being on the bus with all the crackheads. He was a good guy, but I was so angered by this statement--the only people taking the bus at 7 in the morning were people with jobs on their way to work. But I realized that he was expressing a common opinion among yuppies (especially white yuppies).

In a sense, bus lines haven't done a good job marketing themselves to yuppies. Not everywhere--Seattle buses, when I lived there, did things like put cool contemporary art pieces on the sides of their buses, and made sure the community knew about it. But reaching potential high-earning, well-educated riders takes effort.

Posted by RWB | April 18, 2008 9:30 AM

Convincing people who already use pubtrans to take a bus is much different than convincing drivers to take a bus. Believe me, much different.

Posted by lh | April 18, 2008 9:31 AM

I don't take the bus because it wold take me two transfers and over an hour to get to work in the morning (vs. a 20 minute car ride) and in the evenings the bus system doesn't even stop by my apartment inside Minneapolis city limits. Now, I could spend an extra hour on the road and then take a 10 minute walk home, but I could also park right in front of my building.

Posted by Aaron | April 18, 2008 9:34 AM

I'm pretty sure that the reason why people don't ride the bus is because insane people who want to show you their penis or talk to you about space aliens ride the bus.

This is nonsense. Of course if you take the bus to parts of the city where there are more people with mental health problems, they will, in fact, be on that bus.

But bus lines running through Georgetown in DC to Foggy Bottom or to the K Street area, are not going to have people with mental health problems.

I don't know - maybe LA is different in, but I'd guess not.

So I'm glad that Matt Yglesias is pushing buses, because they are really a lot more efficient than building light rail projects.

Posted by Joe Strummer | April 18, 2008 9:41 AM

I take the bus into Boston from the Western suburbs fairly often. Mentioned that to my co-worker, and his response was "what, you take the loser cruiser"? And this is an express bus that costs $5, only stopping in wealthy towns. Buses definitely have issue problems that the subway or commuter rail don't.

Posted by vanya | April 18, 2008 9:43 AM

DC is different in that many high paying jobs won't even allow you to take a car to work. And comparing buses as apart of an extensive rail network compared to a buses only system is flawed. Take Milwaukee. West Milwaukee is about 5 miles from downtown. Now a rail system could easily get people downtown in 15 minutes. Driving during rush hour would be about 15-20. Buses would take nearly 40 minutes given wait times. Plus waiting outside for transfers. so anyone who has a car would rather pay an extra $10 for parking than wait an extra hour. And so only those who can't afford those costs would take the buses.

Posted by Rob | April 18, 2008 9:44 AM

Maybe your experience in D.C. is typical for D.C., but it is not so in all cities. In Houston, my purely personal experience is that working class people take the bus almost exclusively.

This is rather missing Matt's point. Obviously, in many places, yuppies don't ride the bus. The claim that Matt is trying to refute is "we shouldn't put any effort into encouraging bus transit, because no matter what we do, yuppies won't ride the bus." That, in many places with generally poor public transit, the middle class does not ride the bus, is surely not disputed by anyone.

Posted by John | April 18, 2008 9:46 AM

I'm a yuppie in Cambridge MA and I almost never take the bus, but take the commuter rail daily to work and have no compunctions about the T. I do take the bus occasionally, but I never think of it first and usually will drive instead.

I don't know if it's prejudice... I think that's part of it... since where I grew up in Baltimore it was definitely seen as low class. I think the bigger issue is that buses are much more intimidating of a process than subways or light rails. With the latter, it's easy to buy a ticket, the train stops are obvious and maps are everywhere... but with a bus? You have to know how much it costs and bring exact change, know the routes by numbers, and know where you are going well enough to know when to signal a stop, since buses don't often stop at every stop... and on off hours, you can't just "catch a bus" without knowing the schedule because they may not be running at a certain time or may be only coming by every 45 minutes or something.

When confronted with that, it's pretty easy to just go "F-it, let's just drive." Whereas a subway system is incredibly newbie friendly and not really intimidating at all.

Posted by J.W. Hamner | April 18, 2008 9:46 AM

Here in Madison I take the bus nearly every day, about a mile and a half from my house to campus. I live on a main enough street that I can usually get a direct route there and back, and students get a "free" bus pass (paid for out of segregated fees, but unlimited). It's just as well, since parking on and around the UW campus is a nightmare -- we have fewer spots than any other Big Ten campus.

And yet, if I weren't living on a TA's salary, I would never put up with it. Largely because, as the first poster points out, buses are full of crazy people. Not crazy like fun crazy, but "Do you know what the queers are doing to our soil?" crazy. This is why I don't take the bus anywhere but campus.

Posted by Aaron S. Veenstra | April 18, 2008 9:51 AM

Dag, man, I thought I was cool for living in Glover Park where it's affordable rather than living in Georgetown, but now I see that my beloved D2 bus has a reputation for being full of yuppies. Time to move I guess.

To Joe Strummer: actually, just yesterday I was going through Georgetown on the bus and there was a crazy stinky guy cussing and muttering to himself about the pope. But you're right, that kind of thing rarely happens.

Posted by spokeytown | April 18, 2008 9:51 AM

Yuppies take the bus all the time in NYC. There are some express buses that go from Wall Street to Grand Central which I used to take. Others head out to various destinations in the boroughs and upper Manhattan. And the Port Authority ships through huge numbers of affluent commuters out to NJ.

Posted by Helter | April 18, 2008 9:53 AM

Re ""Yuppies won't ride buses."
---------
Do like the airports. Give the fat, lazy fuckers a choice between walking or riding a bus to the parking lot.

They'll ride the bus.

Posted by Don Williams | April 18, 2008 9:56 AM

I remember as a kid in the 50s taking the bus to go into work with my grandfather. (He was a VP at a bank and old enough to make bringing a tyke into the office 'cute'.) We just walked about a block to the stop and pretty soon a bus came along. There were lots of other people on the bus. The point is that at one point in our past, bank vice-presidents and lots of others took the bus into work. Many years later, when I lived near a stop Li'l Yuppie Me also took the bus to work.

Posted by Jeffrey Davis | April 18, 2008 9:56 AM

I'm seconding Craig. Bus travel in LA is a non-starter.

Plus, really, the bus would be stuck in the same traffic as your car would be. When you add in the fact that buses have to make all those stops that have nothing to do with you, I assume that the travel time must be significantly longer. LA is so spread out that the kind of trips yuppies would need, say Westside to Downtown LA (approx 15 mi.), would take forever.

Posted by UberMitch | April 18, 2008 9:58 AM

I live in Mount Pleasant, which is about 15-20 minutes' walk from Columbia Heights. It's definitely easier to take the 42, which runs about every five minutes, from Dupont Circle. But some people just seemed sketched out by the experience -- and I think this has to do with a common and unspoken perception that the bus is for poor people. The DC metro is weirdly clean; the buses are dirty. The metro is reliable; the bus is hit-or-miss. That said, a lot of yuppies do ride the bus. Count me among them.

Posted by Chris | April 18, 2008 10:00 AM

I'm young, professional, and live in a relatively upscale neighborhood of Chicago and I take the bus and train almost every day. Granted, you get some interesting people on the CTA from time to time, but it's mostly regular folks of all classes getting around.

But then again, since Chicago and NYC are the only "real" cities in the US, my point and the one made by Helter shouldn't be all that surprising.

Posted by doofman | April 18, 2008 10:01 AM

Well, DC metro area is definitely different. Normally conservative white male types ride the train / metro / bus, and also hitch hike to get to work: http://www.slug-lines.com/

Posted by Pan | April 18, 2008 10:02 AM

In my experience, in cities where parking is limited and buses are convenient and clean, yuppies will happily ride the bus. In other places, particularly where buses have a reputation as scary or dirty, they won't. I think this is congruent with Matt's point.

In many places, buses do have big problems, mostly due to poor urban planning and bad transit policy. In other places, that's not at all the case.

One commenter above cites Milwaukee as a bad city for bus ridership. Just a bit further down I-94 is a nice counterexample -- Madison, where lots of regular yuppie-types commute by bus. Partly this is due to the fact that all employees of UW-Madison, the hospital, etc get free bus passes provided by their employers. Partly it's due to the fact that Madison is smaller, whiter, and wealthier than Milwaukee, so the bus system isn't as scary to yuppies. Partly it's due to the deliberate policy of limiting parking downtown, plus the constricted geography of the city's road network.

Bottom line, it's a better than average place to ride the bus, and a worse than average place to commute by car, so more people use the bus.

Posted by J | April 18, 2008 10:08 AM

J.W. Hammer has it right; people with money shun the bus because the bus can be a pain in the ass in a lot of places, and the first thing people do when they have some money is get rid of the stuff they consider to be a pain in the ass. To get people with money on the bus in a lot of places, the service muct be improved significantly. That means making schedule and route information much easier to access, more busses on the routes, more convienient ways to pay fares, and probably a lot of other measures. Making busses more aesthetically attractive, and keeping them that ways, would help to, which means being less tolerant of behavior which detracts from the experience of others.

There is a good case to be made that busses, perhaps on dedicated lanes, makes more sense than rail, when rail right of ways do not already exist, but only after people with talent for developing systems which provide superior customer service have spent time in the industry. Yeah, the American customer is extremely price sensitive, making providing superior service a challenge. If you've ever contrasted the difference between flying on United, however, with doing so on Southwest, you know that low price doesn't exclude building a positive relationship with customers.

Posted by Will Allen | April 18, 2008 10:16 AM

I've heard this attitude a lot, but I'm pretty sure that it's more an effect of not commuting by bus than a cause, at least in older, denser cities. In Chicago, anyone who claims this simply hasn't been on a major bus line during rush hour.

On the other hand, some lines off-hours -- when, for example, a surbanite going to Michigan Ave might be more likely to ride -- can start to feel like a brief against deinstitutionalization.

That person was never going to commute by city bus anyway, though. They just, for reasons I'll never quite understand, like to entertain us all with tales of big city horrors.

Posted by bh | April 18, 2008 10:16 AM

Atrios seems to have a good take on this issues here over at his place.

Buses are inherently unreliable. I don't mind them, but given the choice between walking and the possibility that taking a bus might be faster, I'll walk. Most bus lines don't run very frequently, so you have to know the schedule and schedule your plans along when the bus will show up. However, buses are also unreliable, so odds are that knowing the schedule isn't going to help, so you're going to end up standing around with no bus in sight, anyway.

Buses could be better, and people advocate for improved bus service on the premise of what it could be, but the reality never seems to catch up with the ideal.

Posted by Tyro | April 18, 2008 10:17 AM

Dunno how relevant this is to other readers, but I prefer the train to the bus because it's easier for me to whip out a laptop and get work done on the train. All other things being equal, if bus seating ergodynamics would facilitate this activity, I'd ride the bus more often.

Posted by Reader X | April 18, 2008 10:21 AM

Dunno how relevant this is to other readers, but I prefer the train to the bus because it's easier for me to whip out a laptop and get work done on the train. All other things being equal, if bus seating ergodynamics would facilitate this activity, I'd ride the bus more often.

Posted by Reader X | April 18, 2008 10:21 AM

My sense is that the main determinants of yuppie bus usage are the determinants of everyone else's transit choices -- it all has to do with the speed and cost of taking the bus versus the speed and cost of getting around some other way.

This is correct, except it misses a big point. Yuppies choose to live in places that give them easy access to commuter rail. This is why DC had tons of yuppie condos built around Metro stops, but not so much around bus stops.

Yes, if a yuppie happens to live in a place where bus access is good and subway access is poor, the yuppie will choose the bus. But yuppies are less likely to live in such a place.

This is my experience in NYC and DC. People living in other communites' experience may vary, of course.

Posted by Al | April 18, 2008 10:22 AM

Even some bus lines in close proximity to each other attract different classes. I live on 14th St in Columbia Heights and work on 14th downtown, but I walk over to the S2/S4 yuppie buses on 16th St rather than take the 50's down 14th. The class and racial differences between the two are stark. (However, my reason for switching is crowdedness and speed.)

Posted by Dan | April 18, 2008 10:23 AM

The 151 bus on the Chicago lakefront is a rite of passage for many young professionals, along with the express 140 series and the express to hyde Park. OTOH, few middle class people in the bungalow belt ride the bus.

The 42 Mount Pleasant bus in DC also is a rite of passage. I take it several times a week. When I move, Both the 42 and the 151 are usually packed. The 42 usually has people in suits, interns at non-profits and mostly Hispanic blue collar workers. The suits and interns are usually white with a smattering of African Americans and various Asian ethnicities. The main annoyances are having to stand and people talking non-stop into cell phones about nothing--usually it's young female professionals in suits who sound like valley girls or 30-something Hispanic women.

Soon I will join matt on the 52/54 because I'm moving. That bus used to be filled with African-American and Hispanic blue collar workers back in the early 90s. I used to take it from my foreign car garage to work on days when I had to have the car serviced. Clearly, the composition of bus riders can change, as neighborhoods change.

Posted by Rich | April 18, 2008 10:30 AM

I do think that in many cities there's an unspoken racial component to it, most yuppies being white. When I take the bus in Baltimore, I'm often the only white person on board.

To me, the biggest problem of buses is their unreliability. It's one thing when headways are 15 minutes or less -- that's about the threshhold for me (and for most people, I think) to just walk to a transit stop at any old time and wait for the next one to come along. Beyond that and you start needing to know the scheduled time for the next pickup. But while with trains the schedule generally maps fairly well to reality (I remember living in San Francisco and knowing to the minute when BART would show up), with buses it's very hit and miss just by the nature of operation in mixed traffic with uncontrollable variables. Honestly, a bus line that operates at less than, say, 20-minute headways will never attract anyone other than people who have no other choice -- but since most people who make planning decisions don't actually ride the bus, they feel free to cut service below this level.

Posted by jfruh | April 18, 2008 10:40 AM

The same arguments were made when trolley service was being phased out for buses. Trolley's were old, dirty, slow and full of the underclass. Buses would be the wave of the future and acceptable to middle class riders.

In a perfect world Matt is correct but perceptions about transit distort service. The suburban mall gets plenty of service but the office park a mile and a half up the road has no buses with five times the workers -- and it's not like those call center drones are making large coin.

Add to that the turf battles that occur within and between a metro area's transit organizations.

Posted by FlatTire | April 18, 2008 10:40 AM

Before I fixed my bicycle, I rode the S bus down 16th to work every day. Looked like plenty of suits and young yuppies on there to me. The 14th St bus too, the one or two times I took it. I stopped because it seemed like it stopped at Every. Single. Block.

"So I'm glad that Matt Yglesias is pushing buses, because they are really a lot more efficient than building light rail projects."

Buses definitely have a place as feeders and gap-fillers, but on moderately well traveled routes they're only more efficient in the crudest passenger mile per dollar sense. (Maybe not even that over the very long term.)

In terms of a comprehensive transit policy, where the goal is not just to move people, but also do it reliably and rapidly, encourage more people to use transit, and encourage city development along increasingly transit-friendly lines, buses are lacking.

Rail is generally faster, sexier, and most importantly, permanent. Bus routes, and especially bus stops, are not sexy, and too potentially fickle. If you are a developer putting in a new high density mixed-use building, would you be more likely to bank on the location with a bus stop on the corner, or the one with a Metro or trolley station? If you're considering moving in from the 'burbs, which location is more likely to appeal, or let you give up your car?

(BRT is much better than a regular bus, of course, but still not quite up there with light or heavy rail.)

Posted by jack lecou | April 18, 2008 10:48 AM

As doofman noted above, there are plenty of yuppies on the buses in Chicago. I take them all the time, and they have a huge advantage over most train/subway systems in that they go everywhere. There's hardly a spot in Chicago that you can't get within 2 or 3 blocks of by bus. Trains are great, but the stops are necessarily quite a bit more spread out. (Manhattan is unusual in this regard, because it's just so small and dense that there really are subway stops all over the place.)

One thing Chicago does a great job of is making the buses easy to use. You can go to the CTA's website and put in any two addresses and it'll tell you the quickest bus/train route to get there. Many bus stops are covered and some are heated in the winter. Every bus stop has a map of the whole city & bus system, as well as a sign that explains, in plain English, where the bus goes, what times of day it runs, about how often, and so on.

I remember trying to take a bus in Boston once and being just mystified, because the bus stop basically amounted to a single sign next to the road with some cryptic numbers on it. Yuppies don't like being confused.

In another drastic contrast to Boston, the bus drivers in Chicago are generally polite & helpful. Several times they've let me on even though I was a dime or two short of the fare. If they see you running to catch the bus, they'll usually wait the extra 20 seconds to let you get there.

Posted by Christopher M | April 18, 2008 10:49 AM

Living in Champaign, IL, I take the bus to work every day. And I'm no longer living on a TA's salary. It's a matter of choice. You can read on the bus. You can't read while you drive.

When I was younger, I used to take a combination of rail and bus to work in Atlanta, too. The bus-using population there was poorer, and more heavily African-American, but so frackin what? No one asked me questions about space aliens; everyone was too tired at 8am, headed to work.

Rail is more convenient, where it's practical to build rail. In Champaign, we rely on buses, and the system works extremely well.

Posted by Ted | April 18, 2008 10:50 AM

Indianapolis -- a car city if ever there was one -- has had some initial success with express commuter buses from the northern suburbs. These run from Fishers and Carmel to downtown Indy every half-hour. These are not your typical city buses, more like charters, so it's a pleasant experience. The ride is $2 one-way; given that it's a 20 mile commute it's a win on cost alone.

It doesn't do much to help the intra-city bus situation, which is poor. But for suburban commuters, it's a good start.

Posted by cisko | April 18, 2008 10:51 AM

My friends who live in the Bay area have lots of "crazy people" stories and that's why they don't take the bus. In Boston and other northeast cities, it's different, you take the bus if it goes where you want to go. I commute on the bus along with the subway and have never encountered harassment.

Posted by Brittain33 | April 18, 2008 10:51 AM

Sure, yuppie fear of the bus is real. That's why D.C. came up with the Circulator: a bus for white people.

Posted by Other Ezra | April 18, 2008 10:58 AM

Denver buses are about a 50/50 mix between yuppies and working class.

I've lived here for almost a year after being in Chicago for nearly a decade (where we probably drove once a week, if that). We bought a house about half a mile from the DU light rail stop so we could get by with one car (we decided that we'd rather spend the extra $450/month a car would cost with insurance and gas on a better house in a nicer neighborhood). A job switch moved me to the other side of downtown. I kept on taking the train (now requiring a shuttle ride), but then realized that the bus that stops literally in front of our house also picks up about 5 minutes from my office. So I take that. The total commute is about 20 minutes (the train would take 40). And in the morning when I don't run into work (combining exercising and commuting = very efficient), my daughter waits out front for the bus with me.

Posted by Joe | April 18, 2008 11:05 AM

Any man who rides a bus to work after the age of 30 can count himself a failure in life.

Posted by Margaret Thatcher | April 18, 2008 11:07 AM

Phildelphia is definitely a city where middle class white people take the train, but not the bus. They typically drive to the train station. I spent a year without driving. I learned to use the bus system, but it was not uncommon for me to be the only white person on it.

I am persuaded that there are cities where this is not the case, but there is a psychological obstable, beyond the good points that have been made about scheduling and speed.

Posted by Richard Hershberger | April 18, 2008 11:08 AM

J. Hammer has it exactly right---it's much easier to figure out the subway system than the bus. I live in Brooklyn and work in Manhattan, so generally, subway's the only way to go. But even for other trips, I pretty much never take the bus because I just can't figure out the many-overlaid-layers of routes that make up the bus map. Then there's pickup time (which is probably a somewhat illusory issue, as I imagine it's not that much less frequent than the subway), and the risk of being caught in traffic, and it all seems like too much of a hassle.

And here I suspect we start to get into why buses are considered lower class than subways. In working-class or sub-working-class areas, a lot of information is transmitted by word-of-mouth---like, for example, if you work at ___ St and ___ Ave, you should take the #___ bus, information someone got from some social worker once and has since transmitted to their whole social network. Middle and upper class people are more likely to get information by reading official sources, so the ease of map reading, and sorting through the options on the map, seems friendlier.

As for Bay Area buses: Well, the whole Bay Area has long been covered in crazy homeless people---that seems more a San Francisco thing than a bus thing.

Posted by That Fuzzy Bastard | April 18, 2008 11:11 AM

Hey, I'll second the post by Joe on the general high quality of bus service in the Denver metro area. I've been a daily rider of the RTD system for 15 years. On the routes with HOV lanes, the bus is often quicker than driving. We've also decided to tax ourselves several billion over the next decade or so to build a metro-wide rail system. Who knows how this will all work out, but the trend in this decidedly car-centric part of the world seems to be in the right direction.

Posted by Dr. G | April 18, 2008 11:14 AM

I take the 42 from Adams Morgan to Farragut West every morning, and sometimes I chuckle to myself cos everyone seems to be reading either the Economist or the New Yorker. I even sat behind Matt Cooper of Time once (on the 36 to Georgetown, but still). NW DC is crammed with yuppies so the buses are as well, but it's such a weird/singular town that extrapolating to other cities seems pointless.

Posted by gondolero | April 18, 2008 11:18 AM

"Who knows how this will all work out, but the trend in this decidedly car-centric part of the world seems to be in the right direction."

The light rail seems to be going pretty strong in my experience -- rush hour trains are full, and non-rush hour trains are 1/3-1/2 full (about the same as in Chicago). I liked riding the train to work when my office was in LoDo. But once I moved to Capitol Hill, I realized that the bus that stops in front of my house is also the once that lets off just down the street from here, so it saves me the 13 minute walk from the light rail stop to my house and the 5 minute shuttle ride from the middle of downtown to my office.

Posted by Joe | April 18, 2008 11:37 AM

My cities of bus-riding experience are Chicago, San Francisco, and the East Bay; of these, Chicago gave me by far the best experience, and the reason for that is simply the number and variety of routes. For a small, dense city, SF is underserved, while Chicago is beautifully crisscrossed by bus routes every couple blocks, which also seem to run more often. As strange as it sounds, it is much easier to get around by mass transit in Chicago -- massive, sprawling, relatively un-yuppified -- than in the super-dense, green-conscious fully urban yuppie playground of San Francisco.

And as other commenters alluded to, there does seem to be a California bus-riding crazy person phenomenon, which creates a stigma. As for the East Bay... best not to even bother riding the bus.

Posted by CG | April 18, 2008 11:38 AM

In New York, I can vouch that yuppies take the bus all the time. Heck, there's even a bus for honest-to-goodness rich people--the Hampton Jitney.

In Orange County, where I've also lived, it truly is only alkies and Mexicans.

Obviously, though, Matt is right that there is inherent about buses that make them poor transportation choices for yuppies.

One thing that would, I think, make them a lot more attractive would be pricing and payment schemes that don't require monthly passes or exact change. Why not swipe debit cards--even the corner bodegas do these days.

Posted by Euskadi | April 18, 2008 11:54 AM

In New York, I can vouch that yuppies take the bus all the time. Heck, there's even a bus for honest-to-goodness rich people--the Hampton Jitney.

In Orange County, where I've also lived, it truly is only alkies and Mexicans.

Obviously, though, Matt is right that there is inherent about buses that make them poor transportation choices for yuppies.

One thing that would, I think, make them a lot more attractive would be pricing and payment schemes that don't require monthly passes or exact change. Why not swipe debit cards--even the corner bodegas do these days.

Posted by Euskadi | April 18, 2008 11:54 AM

I'm a yuppy and I take the bus here in St. Louis. I don't own a car and often chat with people when they are on a bus and don't know which stop to get off. Most of the yuppy's and families I see on the bus are usually going to a Cards (or Rams) game. But they rarely use the Metro or the Buses to get to work or do shopping.

I believe that mass transit is cheaper than owning a car when you consider the cost of car payment, gas, repair and insurance. A metro pass-works on buses and trains-costs $60/month. If you suppliment this cost with taxi rides for groceries and other tasks that require travel off the grid or car rentals for other travel, its still cheaper.

St. Louis has revamped its bus routes to feed the Metro. This works pretty well. The problem for me is that there are too few buses.

If I was revamping the national transit system, I would build more arterial subway lines and increase the number of buses feeding the trains. Lower cost and more convenience has got to be the goal of any transit system.

Posted by Ellen Hamm | April 18, 2008 12:05 PM

Could it be that trains/subways often serve the wealthier parts of town or have jobs downtown where there tend to be more subway stops? I would think that most people--yuppie or not--would prefer to take the subway or train than a bus. People who do not live or work close to a subway stop and can afford a car/gas will often drive instead of take the bus.

Posted by Cheryl | April 18, 2008 12:25 PM

They have buses in Tampa now? I grew up in Town 'n' Country, which, even back then, was not exactly the boondocks, and I think I was in high school before TBART actually ran a bus line out near us. I had a lot of friends in the Culbreath Isles/Bayou and West Shore/North Dale Mabry areas; it would have been nice if there were a convenient bus route from the one area to the other back then.

Posted by Ray Radlein | April 18, 2008 12:28 PM

When I lived in Tampa and started taking the bus occasionally, an accountant friend asked me what it was like being on the bus with all the crackheads.

They have buses in Tampa now? I grew up in Town 'n' Country, which, even back then, was not exactly the boondocks, and I think I was in high school before TBART actually ran a bus line out near us. I had a lot of friends in the Culbreath Isles/Bayou and West Shore/North Dale Mabry areas; it would have been nice if there were a convenient bus route from the one area to the other back then.

Posted by Ray Radlein | April 18, 2008 12:28 PM

I echo what some of the previous posters have said about Chicago.

Basically, yuppies will use public transportation if a) they don't have to wait for it, b) they don't think they're going to get knifed on it, c) it doesn't delay them by more than a few minutes compared to driving, and d) if it is so easy to use that they don't have to think about it.

The portion of Chicago within about three to four miles of Lake Michigan fits those requirements, because a) the buses are generally very frequent (although chronic bus-bunching has hurt them on some routes), b) CCTV and policing have gotten rid of the crack-heads, c) traffic is so bad that buses, cars, bikes and presumably also rickshaws all operate at about the same rate, and d) the grid route system means you basically don't have to look things up when planning a journey.

It is astonishing how many other cities around the United States have failed on these points. In particular, frequency or at least regularity seems to be ignored, and most transit systems still insist on operating a hub-and-spoke. Chicago has stuck to the grid and never deviated from it.

Where are we failing? We're not doing enough on express bus service. Despite the huge increase in traffic we've not implemented bus lanes on Lake Shore Drive, for example, and that has really hurt journey times. And on a number of routes the CTA plain and simply does not have enough buses.

You go to many other places, e.g. St. Louis, and the impression is the bus is for black people, poor people, smelly people and dangerous people. Bi-State/Metro could not reverse their appalling ridership figures until light rail came along. And now you finally have riders who are few or none of the above on the system. Kind of a marketing thing; you had to provide something that was actually better than driving on most counts in order to get people back on to the system, but now they're starting to discover that buses do actually connect to Metrolink as well.

Posted by DBX | April 18, 2008 12:37 PM

A bit more about Chicago buses...

I think it's worth mentioning that they're a lot nicer than they used to be.

If public priorities are right, service really does improve, and attitudes about that service eventually change as well.

There's so much fatalism about transportation issues that isn't justified in the long term.

Posted by bh | April 18, 2008 12:38 PM

If you internalize more of the costs of driving & parking and implement strategies to make bus service faster and more frequent, more people will take the bus.

Ditto if you internalize more of the costs of rail systems. Train fares generally don't even come close to covering operating costs, let alone total costs.

Obviously, a bus can't be made to go as fast as a grade-separated heavy rail system, nor can it carry as many people, so it's better to build heavy rail where you see potential for a lot of demand,

Sure, if you ignore issues of cost, flexibility, scalability, etc. You shouldn't ignore those issues. There are very few places in the United States where heavy rail makes economic and practical sense, and those places already have it. The future of mass transit is automated cars, buses and highways, not rail.

Posted by Mixner | April 18, 2008 12:40 PM

The argument is rail and BRT serve whiter and wealthier communities and TA's gut bus service to poor neighborhoods to pay the operating costs. Dropping single seat rides and using buses to feed light rail is less convenient for most riders and is often framed in these debates as a way to fluff light rail ridership numbers.

Yes most workers need reverse commute or suburb to suburb transit options not morning in, evening out transit to the regions core.

Posted by Flat Tire | April 18, 2008 12:41 PM

I can tell you that LOTS of yuppies ride the bus here in San Francisco. That's partially because parking is so damn expensive in the Financial District, partially because parking sucks in general here and partially because several of the neighborhoods that contain lots of yuppies are well serviced by the MUNI lines. The 1 California runs through Nob Hill, the upper Fillmore, and out to Laurel Heights. The 41 (yuppies everywhere!) and the 45 service North Beach, Russian Hill and Cow Hollow and the 30 (and 30 express, yuppies everywhere! Part II) serves North Beach and the Marina. Monthly bus passes are $45 and a single ride pass is $1.50. Given the high price of gas as well, it's not at all surprising to see yuppies commuting this way.

Posted by Mike P | April 18, 2008 12:48 PM

Au contraire, Mixner. There are many places in the US that are underserved by transit. Granted, it would help if local governments would remove the restrictions that force developers to build at low density and it would also help if commercial was allowed to be more mixed with residential.

How do you explain Dallas and Denver's huge success with attracting new riders to light rail? How do you explain St. Louis massively boosting transit use without diminishing bus use every time they do a light rail line? How is it that in the UK, building a FOURTH passenger rail line between Edinburgh and Glasgow (with trains running every 15 minutes, no less) is more cost effective than adding an extra lane in each direction to the motorway between the two cities that runs alongside the new rail route?

Because, with rail, if you build it, they will come -- as long as the population is dense enough and as long as building the infrastructure doesn't involve demolishing thousands of buildings or tunneling through mountains. And while we agree that the population needs to be dense enough, your definition of dense enough seems to be confined to Midtown Manhattan and Victoria Island, Hong Kong.

Posted by DBX | April 18, 2008 1:04 PM

We're not doing enough on express bus service.

METRA and CTA rail will argue "why aren't you feeding the trains"? The alphabet soup of transit agencies in large metros is a problem. Lack of fare integration is a real PITA. CDOT offers a free trolley service to tourist points around the Loop. It's crammed full of suburbanites who came in on the train but won't ride the CTA. Fear of crackheads? Confusion on what bus to where? Some. But FREE is much more preferable to getting screwed on another set of full fares.

Posted by Flat Tire | April 18, 2008 1:06 PM

I'm not exactly a yuppie anymore (too old), but I do share a lot of those characteristics. And I rode the bus a lot for 2 years, when I was commuting from Tacoma to Seattle to go to school. I was quite happy to take routes that doubled my time on the road, just to be free of the aggravations of freeway driving. I would be thrilled if I could take the bus to either of my current jobs, but have been unable to find a remotely practical route (believe me, I've looked). I loved being able to read, study, listen to my I-Pod or sleep while I was commuting, and I'm convinced that taking the bus to Seattle saved my sanity. The buses were generally clean and pleasant, and I had no problems with other passengers.

Posted by beckya57 | April 18, 2008 1:16 PM

It's Chicago Public Transit Day at Yglesias' place! Which is fine by me...

Flat Tire, agreed about the alphabet soup problem. And there's a really dysfunctional dynamic where the the CTA says it's underfunded and the legislature then says the CTA is mismanaged, as if those are somehow mutually exclusive positions. And I'm going scream next time some downstate legistlator babbles something about "throwing money at the problem." 'Cause, you know, those trains should be running on love, or something.

A lot of it ties back to a metro area that's economically one unit but politically several hundred. Though that's something I am fatalistic about...

Posted by bh | April 18, 2008 1:18 PM

Au contraire, Mixner. There are many places in the US that are underserved by transit.

There may be lots of places that are underserved by BUSES. There are few or none that are underserved by RAIL. Rail makes sense only in a few small niche markets.

How do you explain Dallas and Denver's huge success with attracting new riders to light rail?

What "huge success?" Mass transit use in Denver has increased only slightly over the last 40 years, consistent with the slight gowth of its inner city population, and in Dallas mass transit use has declined. Light rail riders in those cities, as in most others with such systems, are former bus riders. Light rail hasn't attracted new mass transit riders, it has simply substituted for buses, at much greater cost. A tiny fraction of the population gets a very limited set of benefits, in the form of reduced travel times for certain journeys, at great cost to taxpayers.

Posted by Mixner | April 18, 2008 1:36 PM

When I lived in Adams Morgan, the 42 bus was essential to getting around and ran frequently enough that you could rely on it. In other parts of DC though, the bus is tough to rely on outside of rush hour because they just don't run frequently enough.

Posted by Sir Charles | April 18, 2008 1:37 PM

DBX,

See the following:

Effects of Urban Rail Transit Expansions: Evidence from Sixteen Cities, 1970–2000

Quote:

Federal, state and local governments have spent more than $25 billion to establish or expand rail transit infrastructure in sixteen major U.S. metropolitan areas between 1970 and 2000. Billions more have been invested to maintain and improve existing rail transit lines. Despite the significant infrastructure improvements associated with these investments, transit ridership has been declining rapidly. The fraction of metropolitan area commuters in the United States using public transit declined from 0.12 in 1970 to 0.06 in 2000. Furthermore, only in a few metropolitan areas has transit increased its share of the commuting market since 1970, and in none of these areas did transit garner more than 10 percent of the market in 2000.

Urban light rail in the United States is for the most part a hugely expensive boondoggle that makes no economic or practical sense.

Posted by Mixner | April 18, 2008 1:43 PM

As a Los Angeles bus commuter, I felt I should chime in here. I had been an auto commuter my whole adult life until I started working in downtown L.A. this past December. The biggest factor in choosing to use the bus was the fact that parking is scarce, inconvenient, and expensive downtown. It would cost me 8 bucks a day, wouldn't always be available, and would entail at least a three-block walk from a lot to my office anyway.

Now that I'm taking the bus, an equally important factor in choosing to remain a bus commuter is that it is much less stressful than driving. Don't get me wrong, I enjoy driving and go on long driving trips for fun, but driving in heavy traffic is not my idea of fun. Once I get on the bus things are out of my hands and I can turn my brain off, read, doze off, or divert myself with the TransitTV.

The two biggest downsides to the bus are that it takes longer (~35 minutes vs. 20 minutes) and you never really know exactly when it's going to come. The theoretical headway for my route is 12 minutes, but that can vary quite a bit, both more frequent or less frequent.

I really have not had any problems with the other riders. The route goes from a heavily Asian suburb (where I live) and then through East L.A. before hitting downtown. Most of the other riders are working-class Latinos and elderly Chinese people. White yuppies like me are quite rare on this line, but they're more common than crazies, whom I don't recall encountering on this line at all.

In a few months, due to my wife's job, we're going to relocate to the San Fernando Valley, and situating ourselves close to the Orange Line will be a top priority. The Orange Line is a bus that travels on its own dedicated busway and connects to the Red Line subway, a very fast way into downtown. I've ridden them both before; the Red Line serves a mix of just about everybody, and the Orange Line has professionals as a significant share of its ridership.

Posted by Adam Villani | April 18, 2008 2:31 PM

I absolutely agree with Mike P.'s comment at 12:48 PM above. I was a yuppie when I lived in San Francisco and took the bus every day to work in the Fin'l District for almost 3 years. I didn't even live in the Marina. The #41 and #45 buslines were so full of yuppies during the morning/evening commute that professionals would invariably bump into colleagues and friends from their various finance, legal, and tech companies.

Posted by JH | April 18, 2008 2:49 PM

Mixner, thanks for posting that paper. Some very interesting material in there, and unfortunately I haven't had time to read all of it but I do want to respond in a timely manner on market share.

The market share data in the paper shows that most of the rot in terms of transit market share occurred in the 1970s in the "old rail" group and in the 1980s in the "new rail" group -- in other words, times of very intense highway construction and de-densification in the suburbs of those cities. Since 1990, the pace of road construction has slowed substantially, and the transit market share declines have stopped, and indeed reversed (a trend showing even more strongly since 2000). You'll also notice a column of figures down the right hand side of that table, a "counterfactual" for what would have happened without the sprawl of the 1970s and 1980s. Those figures look rather better for transit, right? At least they do except for the admitted debacle of the 1960s, when people were abandoning transit services that had become dirty and shoddy and unsafe.

So to a significant extent people since 1970 have been choosing the mode of transport the government provides them with. The idea that people are inherently set against transit seems to me, at least on the market share evidence in this paper, very flawed indeed.

So at least on larger volume transportation routes, the choice comes down more to a cost-benefit, landuse, externality, pollution choice between highways and transit.

And that's a choice rail transit very often wins.

I do concede that rail transit does not always win that choice. But the cost-per-mile figures in the article are very revealing in that regard; there are huge variations from outstanding value for money to total boondoggle. LA's Red Line subway has an excuse for $200 million per mile plus construction (horrible subsoil conditions, earthquake faults and Lord knows what else); I'm not sure that Washington DC on the Green Line does. San Francisco and Atlanta can give themselves a pat on the back -- the numbers explain how those two systems can survive despite some of the weakest arrangements in the country for subsidies (SF building before federal capital grants for transit became available; Atlanta operating with extremely weak support from local and state government).

If I get done reading the article before the thread closes, I'll post back. But thanks again for putting up this link.

Posted by DBX | April 18, 2008 3:58 PM

The cannibalization of bus riders by rail is an old story, but rail systems are much better "vehicles" for smart development than buses and their long-term asset value is probably difficult to guage.

Atlanta's bus system actually isn't bad and the Marta rail has survived despite incompetent management and a lack of a strong funding base. Unfortunately, most of the middle class transit users only ride rail and tend to be out of town visitors or people who've lived in places with transit. The bus system would be more functional and a good adjunct to the rail if employment zones were less unfriendly to it. I used to work in an office park that was between two bus lines and our building was a long walk to either one, with no hsleter for inclement weather. Typical crappy Atlanta planning and one of the many reasons I'm glad I left.

Posted by Rich | April 18, 2008 4:11 PM

DBX,

Since 1990, the pace of road construction has slowed substantially, and the transit market share declines have stopped, and indeed reversed (a trend showing even more strongly since 2000).

Wrong, wrong, wrong. First, you offer no evidence that "since 1990, the pace of road construction has slowed substantially." And your claim that "the transit market share declines have stopped" since 1990 is simply false.

So to a significant extent people since 1970 have been choosing the mode of transport the government provides them with.

No, as the authors clearly note, since 1970 the government has spent more than $25 billion on new and improved rail services in 16 major metropolitan areas, and yet the use of transit has fallen by half. And most of the riders on those rail systems are not new transit riders, but former bus riders who have switched to the rail service, at huge expense to taxpayers.

So at least on larger volume transportation routes, the choice comes down more to a cost-benefit, landuse, externality, pollution choice between highways and transit. And that's a choice rail transit very often wins.

As I said, there are very few markets where conditions favor rail service over buses or other alternatives, and all or most of those markets already have rail. Long-distance passenger rail in the United States is virtually dead. Commuter rail makes sense only in a small number of old-transit metropolitan areas that already have it. And urban light rail is a hugely expensive fiasco that has simply switched existing transit users from buses to trains, at huge cost, rather than expanding the number of transit users.

Posted by Mixner | April 18, 2008 4:27 PM

You'll also notice a column of figures down the right hand side of that table, a "counterfactual" for what would have happened without the sprawl of the 1970s and 1980s. Those figures look rather better for transit, right?

Yes, and if Germany had won the war, things would be different too. So what? The point is not that transit might have been a success if things had been different, but that transit has been a failure. And unless you have a magic wand you can wave to change the entrenched policies and preferences that Americans have demonstrated for half a century or more in favor of urban flight, suburbanization, low population density, and new development that looks like Phoenix and Houston rather than New York and San Francisco, there is no chance that the you're going to be able to reverse the trend of the last 40 years.

New and upcoming technology allows us to make much more efficient use of existing roads and highways than we do now, which will further raise the premium of buses over trains, and private motor vehicles over public transit.

Posted by Mixner | April 18, 2008 4:49 PM

All I can tell you is that transit ridership in the US is at a 50 year high according to APTA, up 32 percent since 1995, and the numbers you put in your post do not square with what is in the article you posted (which indicates transit's market share decline stopped a long time ago), and during the current decade transit has been growing at a faster percentage rate than any other commuter mode. I also suggest you go and see how much bus infrastructure costs and how much a capacity a bus route is actually capable of handling. Pittsburgh would be a good place to start as they have about the longest experience in the US with bus rapid transit. It hasn't been effective. Seattle, another BRT-experienced city, realized they were not getting value for money from their infrastructure from buses alone, and are adding light rail tracks to it.

APTA puts out actual ridership numbers for US and Canadian transit. Maybe you might try looking them up. Also a lot of the communities you say can't support transit are posting much higher ridership growth rates than those you concede can. For an example of this, see http://www.apta.com/media/releases/060118ridership_increases.cfm

While I have tried to engage you in debate, I am inclined toward the view that you are trolling this site because of the way you glom on to any transit-related thread on the blog and dismiss any argument out of hand. I was hopeful that the article you posted -- which I concede shows some grossly expensive transit projects -- indicated a change in direction, but I guess not. When the topic is rail, you try and switch discussion to buses. When the topic is buses, you try and switch it to some Jetsons-esque notion of personal transportation or else just throw up your hands and say we all need to go on driving.

You would be more plausible if you show your hand at the start, and I'm assuming that your hand is "I'm personally, ideologically and morally opposed to mass transportation, and I don't want my tax dollars to go anywhere near it, even when a mass transportation project proves more efficient than a highway one -- I don't want to use it, I don't like it, and I'm not paying for it." Do I about have your position correct?

Posted by DBX | April 18, 2008 5:29 PM

One thing that is already improving the bus-riding experience in general is advances in information technology. Here in SF, there is a program called NextBus where many of the buses are equipped with GPS devices so that their actual arrival times can be predicted. You can see real time information of where each bus is on a Google maps mashup (http://www.nextmuni.com/googleMap/googleMap.jsp?a=sf-muni&r=22&d=23025&s=FILLSUT0), and some of the busier bus stops (e.g. 16th/Mission and 8th/Market) are actually equipped with digital displays that tell you when the next bus is coming (also, there are mobile apps you can get that will give you the info--and these will only get more common and accessible over time).

You'd be surprised what a huge difference this makes: knowing exactly when the bus is coming takes all of the anxiety out of waiting for the bus. Even if it's running late, you can at least warn people that you won't be somewhere on time, or duck into a cafe and have a coffee while you wait (I'm sure the shops around the bus stop appreciate the extra business). Also, you can time leaving your house so as to minimize your wait at the bus stop.

For a long time I took the 22 Fillmore to work, and NextBus made the experience a thousand times better.

Posted by David Morris | April 18, 2008 5:54 PM

One thing that is already improving the bus-riding experience in general is advances in information technology. Here in SF, there is a program called NextBus where many of the buses are equipped with GPS devices so that their actual arrival times can be predicted. You can see real time information of where each bus is on a Google maps mashup (http://www.nextmuni.com/googleMap/googleMap.jsp?a=sf-muni&r=22&d=23025&s=FILLSUT0), and some of the busier bus stops (e.g. 16th/Mission and 8th/Market) are actually equipped with digital displays that tell you when the next bus is coming (also, there are mobile apps you can get that will give you the info--and these will only get more common and accessible over time).

You'd be surprised what a huge difference this makes: knowing exactly when the bus is coming takes all of the anxiety out of waiting for the bus. Even if it's running late, you can at least warn people that you won't be somewhere on time, or duck into a cafe and have a coffee while you wait (I'm sure the shops around the bus stop appreciate the extra business). Also, you can time leaving your house so as to minimize your wait at the bus stop.

For a long time I took the 22 Fillmore to work, and NextBus made the experience a thousand times better.

Posted by David Morris | April 18, 2008 5:57 PM

Fuck--sorry for the doublepost. Hey: how come this website is so crappy when it comes to posting a comment? It takes like 30 secs and gives you an error half the time..

Posted by David Morris | April 18, 2008 6:01 PM

DBX,

All I can tell you is that transit ridership in the US is at a 50 year high according to APTA, up 32 percent since 1995.

You are confusing number of trips with rate of use. Obviously, the number of trips can increase even as the rate of use falls dramatically, due to population increase. The rate of use of transit fell by half between 1970 and 2000. An American in 2000 was only half as likely to use mass transit as an American in 1970.

And, predictably, even your number-of-trips comparison with 1995 is wildly misleading. 1995 had the lowest number of transit trips since 1978. The long-term pattern has been this: The number of transit trips peaked in the mid-1940s, then steadily declined till about 1960, and has fluctuated within a range of about 30% since then. Over the same period, the U.S. population has increased enormously. An ever-decreasing share of trips are made by public transit. An ever-increasing share are made by private motor vehicle. This has been the pattern for decades. It shows no sign of ending.

Like many other proponents of mass transit, you cherry-pick dates and figures to try and hide the real trend of the past half century: A massive decline in public transit.

Posted by Mixner | April 18, 2008 6:03 PM

DBX,

and the numbers you put in your post do not square with what is in the article you posted (which indicates transit's market share decline stopped a long time ago),

You keep repeating this false claim. As the data the authors present clearly shows, in almost all of the 16 cities surveyed, transit use declined not only between 1970 and 2000, but also over the more recent period between 1990 and 2000. The only city with signicant transit use that experienced an increase between 1990 and 2000 was Boston, and even that increase was small.

Posted by Mixner | April 18, 2008 6:16 PM

DTM masquerading as someone else,

I also suggest you go and see how much bus infrastructure costs and how much a capacity a bus route is actually capable of handling.

It't not my job to do your homework. If you think there is evidence that light rail is a superior alternative to buses, produce it. Good luck.

To give you an idea of just how economically insane light-rail subsidies are, I direct you to this analysis by two Federal Reserve economists. Using the example of the Metrolink system in St. Louis, using published cost data, they calculate that:

the annual light-rail subsidies could instead be used to buy an environmentally friendly hybrid Toyota Prius every five years for each poor rider and even to pay annual maintenance costs of $6,000. Increases in pollution would be minimal with the hybrid vehicle, and 7,700 new vehicles on the roadway would result in only a 0.5 percent increase in traffic congestion. And there would still be funds left over—about $49 million per year. These funds could be given to all other MetroLink riders (amounting to roughly $1,045 per person per year) and be used for cab fare, bus fare, etc.

Posted by Mixner | April 18, 2008 6:28 PM

DTM,

When the topic is buses, you try and switch it to some Jetsons-esque notion of personal transportation or else just throw up your hands and say we all need to go on driving.

No, I don't think we'll have flying cars any time soon. We will, however, have increasingly automated buses and cars and highways, and these developments will make hugely expensive and inflexible rail systems even harder to justify than they are now. The bus information technology that David Morris decribed above is one example. It greatly reduces one of the primary obstacles to higher bus ridership--uncertainty and lack of information about wait times and travel times.

But the real revolution will be in private cars. Eventually, we'll have fully automated cars and roads where there is no driver, only passengers. But long before that, new technologies that make driving easier and allow drivers to make more efficient use of road space, avoid congestion, and reduce driving times will appear. They already are appearing. We already have cars with adaptive cruise control, GPS navigation systems, automated parallel parking, and other such features. We'll soon have cars that can park themselves in ordinary parking lots. And semi-automated cars that can drive themselves on special lanes, allowing much greater traffic density. All of this will make private cars more and more attractive in comparison to all forms of public transit. Eventually, even buses are likely to disappear, and public transit will evolve into an automated taxi system.

Posted by Mixner | April 18, 2008 7:07 PM

Mixner,

Eventually, we'll have fully automated cars and roads where there is no driver, only passengers.

I'm skeptical about this. Like I think was mentioned in an earlier MY post, predictions about the future tend to take whatever current-day innovations are in vogue and project them along a tangent into the future to yield absurd results. Thus, in the 50s and 60s when flight technology was advancing at a rapid pace, you had predictions of rocket-cars and the like by the year 2000. Along similar lines, people tend to take the trajectory of progress in a discipline in its infancy and project that progress into the future, but end up being wildly off base because there is not yet an understanding of where the difficulties lie in the field. For example, who would ever have thought in 1950 that it would be relatively easy to design an electronic brain that is a master chess player, and yet impossible to design one that can hold up an intelligible conversation?

In this case, we may have a tendency to project information technology--the internet, cell phones, computers--into the future in an unrealistic way. I mean, the technology is not even remotely there for any kind of self-driving car--things like cruise control and GPS are inventions that help humans do the human task of driving on the open road--actual automation is another thing altogether.

While I think information-type advances will definitely impact transit, I think it is safer to look for ways that it will affect it more from a social angle in the near-term than from a brute force technology angle in the long-term. For example, with current advances in wireless networking and GPS you could probably devise a pretty rad congestion pricing scheme that would make roads far more efficient. But this is a lot different--and a lot less risky--than saying that there will be automated robot cars in 40 years who will somehow manage to be a lot more efficient than humans.

Posted by David Morris | April 18, 2008 8:08 PM

Mixner,

You keep mentioning the $25 billion spent between 1970 & 2000. That is less than $1 billion a year. Yet you don't mention how many hundreds of billions much has been spent on roads in that same time period. If the same amount of money had been spent on transit as on roads during that 30 year period I think I could safely say that transit use would probably approach if not exceed auto use. And roads receive MASSIVE subsidies from Local, State and the Federal Governments. And if you dispute that show me a city, county or state budget that doesn't include road building and maintenance. And most of this money does NOT come from gasoline taxes.

Posted by Steve | April 18, 2008 8:10 PM

David Morris,

There's nothing "voguish" or absurd about automatic cars. They have been foreseen practically since the car was invented. But only now is the technology to make them possible beginning to appear. There are already working examples. The recent DARPA Urban Challenge demonstrated several vehicles successfully driving themselves around an urban environment, obeying road signs and signals, avoiding obstacles, etc. But before fully automatic vehicles, we'll have semi-automatic cars that can drive themselves in limited domains such as on special freeway lanes, similar to HOV lanes. This has also been demonstrated. It will allow much higher traffic densities, as cars travel at high speeds separated by only a short distance. It will also greatly improve safety and fuel efficiency.

Posted by Mixner | April 18, 2008 8:36 PM

Mixner:

That 32 percent figure I quoted.

OK, instead of using APTA data that only looks at transit and doesn't do much with market share, let's look at the Bureau of Transportation Statistics. I'll play even farther on your turf; the least favorable performance measure for public transit, passenger miles. (Why is it the least favorable measure? Rather a lot of public transit journeys tend to be short, and a high proportion of car commuting takes place in far flung, low-density areas, so these things will show up particularly strongly in passenger miles as reduced transit use and increased car use). Pity they only go up to 2005, so we can't see APTA's report of 32 percent through 2007.

In any case . . .

Transit's market share if you measure transit versus road use (and road use includes both passenger cars and other 2 axle, four wheel vehicle so that we capture SUV and pickup truck use) is admittedly not at all good, about one and a quarter percent. But the way things are changing in my view vindicates rail advocates.

Growth from 1995 to 2005.

Driving (passenger car PLUS other two axle, four wheel vehicles) goes up 27.2 percent.

Transit (all modes) up a mere 24.8 percent. You'd reach the 32 percent if you went to APTA's 2007 date. And I'm not sure driving would still be 2.4 percent ahead in growth rate simply because of what has happened to gas prices; the growth rate in driving slowed noticeably in 2006 as I understand (I'd like to see standardized BTS stats on that, though).

So, on bus use, I concede your point. It grew fast in the 1990s but not as fast as driving. And during the economic stagnation of the first Bush-43 term, while driving grew v.e.r.y slowly, bus use actually declined.

Now for the key figure for me, because let's face it, most bus systems aren't like Chicago, and generally I strongly prefer rail to other modes of transportation. Rail rapid transit, as in the total of light and heavy rail, goes up 41.1 percent (light rail goes up faster than heavy rail, but heavy rail is still well ahead of the growth rate for passenger cars, buses, commuter rail, etc.). Even if you throw the deadweight of commuter rail in there (and it IS deadweight, let's face it, American commuter rail is lame compared to elsewhere, unimaginatively run, few reverse commute options, minimal service for non-commuters), rail transit of all kinds had a 30.1 percent increase, still more than driving.

Rail transit is GAINING market share, understood? And that's despite significant cuts in funding for new rail transit starts since the Gingrich revolution. Rail transit does not have nearly the funding environment that it did when conservative rail advocate Paul Weyrich had the Reagan Administration's ear. But use still kept going up.

Posted by DBX | April 18, 2008 8:42 PM

You keep mentioning the $25 billion spent between 1970 & 2000. That is less than $1 billion a year. Yet you don't mention how many hundreds of billions much has been spent on roads in that same time period. If the same amount of money had been spent on transit as on roads during that 30 year period I think I could safely say that transit use would probably approach if not exceed auto use.

I have no idea how you think you can safely say that. Or why you seem to think that roads are not involved in transit (public buses generally use the same roads as private vehicles). Or why you seem to think that spending as much money on transit systems that do not involve roads (meaning, basically, rail) as on roads would make remote sense economically. Rail makes sense only in a few areas, generally older cities with high population densities and a large suburb-to-inner-city commuting requirement. The vast majority of the country isn't like that.

Posted by Mixner | April 18, 2008 8:59 PM

A Boston experience: I only took the bus when I had to get from Brighton to Cambridge, which is the kind of route that poor people take, since most Harvard types live closer to Harvard than my point-of-origin in Brighton. Every Single Day that I rode the bus I cursed the city of Boston for not building a North-South subway line west of the city. Trying to get from the south part of Brighton to Harvard Square on the subway requires taking an above-ground train that has to stop for traffic and/or picking up BU kids approximately every 100 feet, going underground to Downtown Crossing, switching trains, and rolling through many intermediate Cambridge stops. The bus service was so inefficient that it didn't usually save much time, but at least with the bus there was a theoretical possibility of reaching Cambridge in less than an hour. A few times I missed the bus and just walked to Cambridge, but when I had to get there in a hurry I would hope for the bus to be on schedule and be disappointed. I eventually turned into a car-in-Boston guy primarily because the 66/86 bus made me hate life so much.

Posted by cgaros | April 18, 2008 9:02 PM

Mixner,

I did not say rail, I said transit. That could be BRT in a dedicated right of way.

Yes, the vast majority of the country is not like that. However, the vast majority of the country does not contain the vast majority of the country's population. I know it's a "what if" but as I said, "if same amount of money had been spent on transit as on roads during that 30 year period I think I could safely say that transit use would probably approach if not exceed auto use" and I stand by that statement. People will use the transportation systems that are available to them. Europe is an example. Transit is fairly ubiquitous even in less dense, suburban areas and people use it because it is available and convenient.

I also noted that you did not respond to the query about how many hundreds of billions of dollars have been spent in the US over the last 30 years on road building. You also did not respond to the query of the massive subsidies that automobiles and roads receive in the US. Why is that?

You have also not said anything about the massive financial and social costs that the automobile imposes on our society, let alone the 50,000+ lives lost each year and the hundreds of thousands injured.

Posted by Steve | April 18, 2008 9:26 PM

Mixner,

I did not say rail, I said transit. That could be BRT in a dedicated right of way.

Yes, the vast majority of the country is not like that. However, the vast majority of the country does not contain the vast majority of the country's population. I know it's a "what if" but as I said, "if same amount of money had been spent on transit as on roads during that 30 year period I think I could safely say that transit use would probably approach if not exceed auto use" and I stand by that statement. People will use the transportation systems that are available to them. Europe is an example. Transit is fairly ubiquitous even in less dense, suburban areas and people use it because it is available and convenient.

I also noted that you did not respond to the query about how many hundreds of billions of dollars have been spent in the US over the last 30 years on road building. You also did not respond to the query of the massive subsidies that automobiles and roads receive in the US. Why is that?

You have also not said anything about the massive financial and social costs that the automobile imposes on our society, let alone the 50,000+ lives lost each year and the hundreds of thousands injured.

Posted by Steve | April 18, 2008 9:27 PM

DTM,

Driving (passenger car PLUS other two axle, four wheel vehicles) goes up 27.2 percent. Transit (all modes) up a mere 24.8 percent. You'd reach the 32 percent if you went to APTA's 2007 date.

Where are you getting these numbers from? Give me a link. Identify the table or chart you're referring to.

You seem to have missed the point, anyway. 1995 was an especially low year for transit use so a comparison between 1995 and more recent years produces a highly misleading rate of growth. As you can see from APTA's historical table 1, there were fewer transit trips in 2005 than in any year between 1912 and 1958. And only a slightly higher number in 2005 than in 1958, almost half a century before, despite a huge increase in the national population. Compared to a generation ago, Americans are only half as likely to use mass transit. They are much more likely to use a private car.

Rail transit is GAINING market share, understood?

It's as if you don't read anything. How many times do I have to explain this. Transit use is declining. Declining massively. It's declined by 50% just in the past few decades. Rail is "gaining market share" only by poaching market share from buses. At much higher cost. See the Federal Reserve analysis I linked to above. For the obscene public subsidies consumed by the St Louis light rail system, we could buy a car every five years for every poor rider of that system, and give them another $6,000 a year to run it, and give all the non-poor riders over $1,000 a year each. The economics are utterly crazy.

Posted by Mixner | April 18, 2008 9:28 PM

Mixner,

You also mentioned in a previous post that transit usage is down. Well, you can't use something that doesn't exist. Despite your $25 billion figure there has been a massive DISINVESTMENT in transit over that 30 year period, especially in comparison to the amount of money spent on roads and the size of the US economy. Exxon-Mobil made more in PROFIT last year than the $25 billion spent on transit (from your own post) over a 30 year period. There have been MASSIVE cuts in transit over that 30 year period. So again, if there's no transit there to use people obviously can't use it.

Posted by Steve | April 18, 2008 9:33 PM

Steve,

I did not say rail, I said transit.

Right. That's why your statement didn't make any sense. "Spending on roads" vs. "spending on transit" is a false dichotomy, because most transit is buses, and buses use roads.

Yes, the vast majority of the country is not like that. However, the vast majority of the country does not contain the vast majority of the country's population.

I meant that where the vast majority of people live is not like that. The vast majority of Americans do not live in densely-populated old cities with large suburb-to-inner-city commuting requirements. Only a handful of cities, with only a small fraction of the national population, are like that. That is why rail does not make sense as transit for the vast majority of places in the country where people actually live and work. It only makes sense in a small number of niche markets: Subways in a few old cities, commuter rail in certain areas surrounding New York and Chicago. The areas where rail makes sense already have it. Most or all of the new rail systems that have been built over the past few decades are an utter boondoggle, an economic fiasco, consuming huge sums of money to provide modest benefits to a tiny fraction of the populations in the areas they serve.

Posted by Mixner | April 18, 2008 9:42 PM

Mixner,

And don't even get started on the old "so it's not worth the money". Comparing trips in a transportation corridor to all of the trips in an urban area is comparing apples to oranges. If you are going to do that, then you should also compare the trips on every highway to all of the trips in an urban area. I challenge you to find any urban or suburban highway that carries 2-3% of the total trips made in the urban area it's in. You may find a handful but I doubt you'll find any more than that. So by that logic, basically none of the urban and suburban freeways built in the last 30 years should have been built, because "they only carries 2-3% of the total trips made and so aren't worth the money".

Posted by Steve | April 18, 2008 9:42 PM

Mixner,

You STILL haven't responded to the query about how many hundreds of billions of dollars have been spent in the US over the last 30 years on road building vs. the $25 billion (again from you) on transit. You also did not respond to the query of the massive subsidies that automobiles and roads receive in the US. Why is that?

You STILL have also not said anything about the massive financial and social costs that the automobile imposes on our society, let alone the 50,000+ lives lost each year and the hundreds of thousands injured.

I've noticed you seem to be very choosy on the points you respond to. Why is that?

Posted by Steve | April 18, 2008 10:00 PM

No, Mixner, it is as if you aren't reading anything. I cited the source.

OK, I'm being slightly harsh, as I forgot to put the actual BTS link in my post. So here you go, to save two seconds of Googling.

http://www.bts.gov/publications/national_transportation_statistics/html/table_01_37.html

But only slightly harsh. You have made so much stuff up in this thread that it beggars belief.

Your spin on APTA data is beyond the pale. It is as if nothing happened between 1958 and the present, as if everything stood still. You can selectively quote all you want, but to gloss over the collapse in transit ridership driven by pro-road federal and state policy, followed by the huge increase in transit use driven by a more consumer-choice-oriented era -- that reveals your true agenda. Spin, not fact.

Posted by DBX | April 18, 2008 10:12 PM

DTM,

No, Mixner, it is as if you aren't reading anything. I cited the source.

You claimed the numbers came from the Bureau of Transportation Statistics. You provided no link or other citation.

The BTS data confirms the trend of the declining rate of transit use reported by other sources. Between 1980 and 2005 (the longest period for which it reports transit data) transit passenger miles increased by only about 25%. Over the same period, private road vehicle passenger miles increased by a whopping 80%. A larger and larger share of Americans are abandoning transit and driving cars instead.

The numbers for rail show that almost all growth in rail passenger miles has occurred in commuter rail and heavy rail. And almost all heavy rail is subway rides. And most subway rides take place in just one city, New York. The growth in rail passenger miles has been concentrated almost entirely in a handful of subway and commuter systems in old-transit cities.

Intercity rail has been a disaster. The number of intercity rail passenger miles in 2005 was less than a third of the number in 1960, despite a huge increase in the U.S. population over the same period. Long-distance passenger rail in the United States has been dying for decades. In another 20 years, it may be completely dead. The Boston-NYC-Washington route might survive, along with a handful of infrequent, tourist-oriented services, but other than that it'll probably be extinct.

Posted by Mixner | April 18, 2008 11:07 PM

I am not DTM. Who is DTM?

Go and check my posts on transit on the Chicago Tribune Topix pages if you don't believe me.

Moderator, can you block this fool?

Posted by DBX | April 18, 2008 11:35 PM

I am not DTM.

Riiiiight.

Posted by Mixner | April 18, 2008 11:41 PM

Mixner,

I'm still waiting for your response to my queries. Could it be that you don't HAVE any response?

Posted by Steve | April 19, 2008 11:50 AM

That's right. I don't have any response to your utterly irrelevant queries. Also, have you stopped beating your wife yet?

Posted by Mixner | April 19, 2008 2:58 PM

Mixner,

A man who has confidence in his point of view will support it with verifiable facts and figures.

The mark of a man who knows his arguments are totally unsupportable and have no basis in fact is when he stoops to personal insults.

We now know which one you are.

Posted by Steve | April 19, 2008 4:10 PM