Better Fewer, But Better

Dave Alpert has some interesting thoughts on improving bus service. I'm a big advocate of route consolidation in which a city like Washington that has a lot of bus routes would pare them down to a smaller number of routes that are more frequently serviced. The benefits of frequent service for transit are, I think, hard to overstate. If you're trying to get into a bus that only runs once every 30 minutes then if you want to get anywhere on time you need to be paranoid about not missing the bus and usually wind up showing up too early and wasting time. What's more, if a bus happens to be a minute or two late, panic sets in that you've missed it or that some incident has taken the bus out of service and maybe you need to scurry off and find another way of getting where you're going.

That kind of stress and hassle winds up making the bus a "must avoid" transit method, and helps perpetuate the bad bus branding where you constantly meet carless young professionals who've lived in DC for years and know almost nothing about bus routes. Then low ridership means you can't justify frequent service, leading to inconvenience and fewer riders. Of course I'm a fanatic who'd happily say we should spend the money to just increase frequency on all our routes, but working within realistic budget constraints it's better to pare the number of parallel routes down somewhat and increase service frequency.

Meanwhile note that this isn't just an urbanism issue or an environmental issue (though better buses will make our cities more livable and sustainable), it's also an important equity topic. Buses play a much larger role in the transportation bundle purchased by poor people, so better service can dramatically improve quality of life for the working poor, make it much easier for people to find and keep jobs, etc.

Photo by Flickr user intangible used under a Creative Commons license

Comments

I'm confused - your plan would mean that Grandma with her bad hip would have to walk eight blocks rather than three, right? More routes means more people who have difficulty getting around can take transit more places, right? Surely that's more important than yuppies getting peeved that they're a tad late for that 9:15 conference call.

Posted by The Navigator | May 20, 2008 2:56 PM

I couldn't have said it better myself, Matt. I found myself in that exact situation a year ago, when I tried, as a young professional, to use public transit to commute to the office. I was in that exact scenario, and came to realize why only the extreme poor ride the bus in this town. I got up early in case the bus came early, spent a lot of time waiting, transfered and waited again (the whole route thing is fairly byzantine, the schedule is a freaking book), and found myself commuting an hour by bus in what takes 1/2 hour by car. And on those days when the transfer bus didn't come, or the bus came early, or late, or whatever, and it is back to the car for me until they build mass transit that works. But I haven't said it nearly as well as you. Kudos.

Posted by freddiemac | May 20, 2008 2:59 PM

Installation of bus tracking GPS at heavily used stops is another solution to the problem of not knowing if the bus has come or not and how much longer the wait will be. Including statistics of how often the bus is early/late during which times of day would also help. In fact, it would be nice if some day it was possible to track buses on cell phones.

Posted by lfv | May 20, 2008 3:00 PM

I had that same initial thought, Navigator, but I think the question is whether the transit system wouldn't be better off providing more special services for those with limited mobility (i.e., special buses that pick them up on call, etc.) and focusing the bus routes as MY suggests.

Posted by Glenn | May 20, 2008 3:01 PM

Navigator, at the end of the day, a bunch of yuppies agitating for better bus service and have a stake in the system are going to do a lot more when they're working in conjunction with the "community advocate" to get that grandmother better transportation service. It's both naive and counterproductive to assume that the plight of people like your hypothetical grandmother can get access to better services from a system that doesn't have buy-in from the rest of the community.

Unless you want to relegate the bus system to a charity service for the destitute and infirm rather than a piece of efficient public infrastructure.

Posted by Tyro | May 20, 2008 3:10 PM

When I visit London, the buses now seem to come every 4 minutes or so, and yes that does encourage me to use them.

Posted by otto | May 20, 2008 3:17 PM

I had a very similar experience when I used to take the bus/train to work in Atlanta. My house was, conveniently enough, right on the bus route. There was a stop just two houses down. The bus came twice an hour in the morning which was reasonable and I never missed it.

The problem was picking up the bus in front of the busy downtown MARTA station on the way home. I often waited an hour because the bus was behind schedule. And then, often as not, three buses on the same route would arrive at the same time.

The Navigator, this is not about the convenience of yuppies. If the bus in inconvenient, people who have other options will no longer take the bus. Getting more people to take the bus (so that bus systems aren't seen as a kind of welfare, only used by the poor, for one thing) is a social good. Yes, removing lesser-used routes to save money would hurt some people in the short run, but life is full of such tradeoffs.

Matt's idea, which I agree with, is that more buses on fewer routes would actually increase overall ridership. With increased ridership you could then expand service.

Another related point--smaller buses would be nice. That same bus that came down my street would pass by till 1 AM, often as not absolutely empty. City transit authorities should have a range of different bus sizes, all the way down to something like a converted cargo van. There's no need to run gigantic buses when they are nearly empty.

Posted by Rob Mac | May 20, 2008 3:18 PM

lfv writes that "it would be nice if some day it was possible to track buses on cell phones." You can already do this in San Francisco using nextmuni.com.

The problem with getting rid of routes is that having to change buses to go somewhere totally kills any hope of getting there in a timely manner. A friend once told me his method of estimating arrival time on the Paris metro - two minutes per stop and twenty minutes per transfer.

Posted by noe | May 20, 2008 3:18 PM

It'd probably make sense to look, not only at parallel routes, but at routes that connect low-income population centers to services, too.

For instance, where I live (in NYC) I'm on a major street with a bus route. I'm only a few blocks from the subway, but the bus route continues on for another few miles. At the end of the bus route is a large public housing complex.

The people living there can either take a very long walk or take the bus to get to the subway (and via the subway, the rest of the city. My neighborhood is not Manhattan, and access to subway is essential to get to jobs, shopping, transportation, etc).

The bus doesn't run that often. I imagine it's quite a disincentive to getting and keeping a job to have to rely on an infrequent bus to get you off the island of isolation where these projects are located.

Posted by Peter Bautista | May 20, 2008 3:19 PM

To simplify even further, the yuppies and grandmas are basically in different transit markets, so there is no real reason to insist on providing the same product for both groups.

Posted by DTM | May 20, 2008 3:20 PM

Relatedly, a lot of city buses stop on every single block of their routes, doubling or tripling the amount of time a trip takes. Cutting down the number of stops would shorten trips, allow buses to run the route more frequently for the same cost, make the bus a more appealing option, and increase ridership. Not to mention the fact that there are probably more people who would benefit from walking an additional couple blocks than there are people who can't, as Navigator mentions.

Posted by flippantangel | May 20, 2008 3:20 PM

In fact, it would be nice if some day it was possible to track buses on cell phones.

Or just do it in a non-flashy way.

The hourly or half-hourly route can work if there's adequate information and staggered parallel routes within close distance. That's to say, if you think -- or ideally, know -- you've missed Bus A, that it's possible to walk a block or two and arrive in decent time to catch Bus B or Bus C, which will drop you off within a block or two of where Bus A stops.

But the problem with a greater varietyof bus routes is that it involves a degree of local knowledge -- not just an awareness of the routes, but of the reliability. There'd be times in London where I'd find out I'd missed a bus and someone would tell me 'walk a couple of minutes up the road and you'll not have to wait so long, since that junction covers another route'.

That works out in the more residential urban areas (Zones 2/3 on the Tube map) where there's an assumption that bus users basically know the lay of the land. But for more central areas, you really need regular service to arterial routes, just to ensure that less experienced users avoid the whole sunk-time thing where, after waiting ten minutes, you're pretty much stuck with waiting however long it takes for the next bus to arrive.

Posted by pseudonymous in nc | May 20, 2008 3:22 PM

It'd probably make sense to look, not only at parallel routes, but at routes that connect low-income population centers to services, too.

For instance, where I live (in NYC) I'm on a major street with a bus route. I'm only a few blocks from the subway, but the bus route continues on for another few miles. At the end of the bus route is a large public housing complex.

The people living there can either take a very long walk or take the bus to get to the subway (and via the subway, the rest of the city. My neighborhood is not Manhattan, and access to subway is essential to get to jobs, shopping, transportation, etc).

The bus doesn't run that often. I imagine it's quite a disincentive to getting and keeping a job to have to rely on an infrequent bus to get you off the island of isolation where these projects are located.

Posted by Peter Bautista | May 20, 2008 3:23 PM

Re: lfv

Chicago's starting to get it's stuff together with regard to gps tracking of buses. Check it out for yourselves:

http://www.ctabustracker.com

(works on web-enabled cell-phones, too)

Posted by Sandy | May 20, 2008 3:25 PM

It'd probably make sense to look, not only at parallel routes, but at routes that connect low-income population centers to services, too.

For instance, where I live (in NYC) I'm on a major street with a bus route. I'm only a few blocks from the subway, but the bus route continues on for another few miles. At the end of the bus route is a large public housing complex.

The people living there can either take a very long walk or take the bus to get to the subway (and via the subway, the rest of the city. My neighborhood is not Manhattan, and access to subway is essential to get to jobs, shopping, transportation, etc).

The bus doesn't run that often. I imagine it's quite a disincentive to getting and keeping a job to have to rely on an infrequent bus to get you off the island of isolation where these projects are located.

Posted by Peter Bautista | May 20, 2008 3:25 PM

I'd imagine that decreasing the number of routes would also have the nice side effect of simplifying the bus system -- fewer routes to learn -- which always seemed to me like another serious deterrent.

Posted by Dave Herman | May 20, 2008 3:25 PM

Tyro,
I live in Philly and I can assure you, poor and less-abled people can indeed use a bus system that doesn't have much buy-in from others: that's precisely what they do here on Septa buses.

I don't disagree that it's plausible to imagine a retraction-to-spur-ridership-that-funds-expansion. You're right, it's possible. But it's also unlikely. I'm dubious that we should take routs away from the elderly so that we can achieve our ultimate goal of restoring routes to the elderly. As a yuppie who rides transit, I'm a huge fan of expanding public transit, even for yuppies, but let's just increase the funding and pay for the expanded service while maintaining existing lines, rather than hoping that we'll get the funding to restore those sacrificed lines at some future time.

Posted by The Navigator | May 20, 2008 3:39 PM

As someone who has actually taken the time to understand the basic bus routes throughout downtown DC and its most popular neighborhoods, what amazes me is that a lot of people who you think would never take the bus are totally open to it if you explain to them how to do exactly what they want to do. I have personally de-bus-virginized a number of my co-workers and friends by explaining to them how to get where they want to go the first time. Most of them are much more inclined to learn these things on their own once they realize that's it's actually not that difficult or scary.

Posted by Lee | May 20, 2008 3:41 PM

This is another area where travelling outside the United States is an eyeopener. You see frequent, small, buses moving fast, with stops spaced several blocks apart even for local busses. The routes are intuitive and often displayed clearly on the bus itself.

Once you encounter such a system you realize that we are doing just about everything wrong. Take New York City. The bus route maps look like spaghetti, the vehicles are enormous and cumbersome in traffic, they run so infrequently and are so big that it takes several minutes when they stop for all the passengers to embark and disembark, and they stop almost every block. The one thing the authorities there are getting right are putting up permanent shelters at the bus stops so people at least know where to catch the bus (the old bus stop markers were small placards). There are some crosstown Manhattan routes where you can walk faster than the bus.

I'm not sure why bus systems in the US are run so badly. Its either done purposefully to keep people buying and using cars, or its another consequence of local government agencies often becoming patronage mills which only incidentally and halfheartedly deliver services to the general public.

Posted by Ed | May 20, 2008 3:45 PM

Navigator, I think there are simply much more effective solutions to serving the destitute and elderly other than maintaining vestigal, ever-30-minute lines which only drag the rest of the system down. Running lines as charity is fine, but it's not a public transit infrastructure. Public transit infrastructure with buses means having a bunch of rapid lines with frequent arrivals. Now, I think that these lines can run *on top of* those infrequent, vestigal lines to go over their most-frequented segments, but if you want to advocate for charity cases, do that. But don't confuse it with public transit.

Posted by Tyro | May 20, 2008 3:54 PM

They have a lot of tools that could be made useful for the average bus rider by testing -- such as the posted schedules, the Internet "map your ride feature" and the recently scrapped call to find out the next bus trial. But none of those tools are accurate. I read recently in the Post that they had hired bus line supervisors to regulate the buses, possibly to improve the situation where you have three buses at the same time and then a 30 minute wait for the next three buses. I think they could tweak what they have and markedly improve their current bus service.

Posted by mccon | May 20, 2008 3:54 PM

They have a lot of tools that could be made useful for the average bus rider by testing -- such as the posted schedules, the Internet "map your ride feature" and the recently scrapped call to find out the next bus trial. But none of those tools are accurate. I read recently in the Post that they had hired bus line supervisors to regulate the buses, possibly to improve the situation where you have three buses at the same time and then a 30 minute wait for the next three buses. I think they could tweak what they have and markedly improve their current bus service.

Posted by mccon | May 20, 2008 3:54 PM

I'm a New Yorker who never rides the bus.

However, in Damascus, Syria (which I visited in 1997 during a brief window when it looked like peace might break out), I found a city with very few private cars and no subway.

Instead, an endless fleet of white "service taxis" (basically vans, although a few station wagons) ran up and down and across town -- Damascus is a grid; a medieval grid, but still a grid -- every two minutes. All you did was go to any corner and wave down the next white van you saw heading your way, and pay the driver basically ten cents. You had to get off on the right cross-street, which you had to figure out on a map, and then do this again. Two trips and you were at your destination -- without knowing any Arabic and without needing to get anyone to speak any English. I have never been in a city that was so easy to get around on public transportation.

If the bus comes all the time, it's a nobrainer to take the bus, even if you can't speak the language.

Posted by Diana | May 20, 2008 3:57 PM

Buses are essential, but they should be replaced by tramways as much as possible. In the Paris region there are several, including one in Paris.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paris_Tramway_Line_3

San Diego uses an old-fashioned term "trolley". Not good marketing.

http://world.nycsubway.org/us/sandiego/

Posted by bernarda | May 20, 2008 4:06 PM

Buses are essential, but they should be replaced by tramways as much as possible. In the Paris region there are several, including one in Paris.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paris_Tramway_Line_3

San Diego uses an old-fashioned term "trolley". Not good marketing.

http://world.nycsubway.org/us/sandiego/

Posted by bernarda | May 20, 2008 4:10 PM

I have a question - from an environmental perspective all we really care about is grams of CO2 per passenger kilometer. If we run the busses often enough for them to be convientient they may often run near empty. Therefore, the amount of CO2 per passenger kilometer will rise.

Now, a 74mpg VW Polo 1.4 TDI creates 99g of CO2 per kilometer. Let us say that to make the busses popular the amount of CO2 per passenger kilometer for a bus (or other mass transit) was 99g or higher: Would Matt still be in favor of mass transit?

Posted by jmo | May 20, 2008 4:13 PM

We figured this out years ago in Boulder. We used to have big buses that ran infrequently. Then, we switched to small buses that run every ten minutes. Now, those buses still run every ten minutes, but some of the buses have grown larger because the ridership has increased. I have it good. I can walk out of house at any time, walk two blocks, and know that the bus will come within ten minutes. Or, I can look at my schedule and ensure that I don't have to wait more than two minutes.

Posted by fostert | May 20, 2008 4:15 PM

San Francisco is addressing this issue as we speak. Their idea is to divide service into two tiers: the dozen or so major transit corridors, which will see frequent high-capacity service with fewer stops and various express lines; and community service lines, which will have less-frequent service, but which will still come within four blocks of every building in the city.

This is all somewhat obvious, but the key is that "frequent service" means buses at 5-10 minute intervals: short enough that you can just walk to the bus stop whenever you feel like it. That's the barrier transit systems need to break in order to be convenient enough for widespread use.

I should add that virtually everyone in SF rides the bus, a state of affairs brought on mainly by geography, crappy rail service, and enforced scarcity of parking. Everybody bitches about it, but it basically works.

Posted by haighterade | May 20, 2008 4:19 PM

Tyro,
Maybe it just depends on the size of the city. Here in Philly, we're not talking about just the elderly and the truly destitute - they're outnumbered by the working class, with an admixture of us yuppies along certain lines. Few lines are 'vestigial', AFAIK - they get used. Maybe in smaller cities we'd be looking at 'vestigial' lines with big buses carrying a handful of people. That's not ideal, obviously - I'm all in favor of a Boulder- or SanFran-style system as described above, where bus size + frequency match ridership needs - but I think you're wrong to say that buses that only serve the working poor and elderly aren't a public transit system - it's not optimal by any means, but it is transit. And I don't think there's a good alternative - the suggestion made in this thread of a separate van service for rides for the elderly is itself a proposal for a charity system, and precisely what I want to avoid. That is what we have for Medicaid medically-related transportation, and it's a terrible system, and I suspect it's doomed to remain a terrible system. You're just not likely to get a reservation- or on-demand-based van/taxi service that's going to provide decent service in place of regularly scheduled bus routes - the vehicles won't show up regularly, they'll get lost, people will get to their appointment but won't be able to get home again, etc.

So, yes, by all means, lay rapid lines on top of the lesser used ones, but even in smaller cities, I recommend strong hesitation before abandoning those lesser used ones. You say you think there are far better options - I'm all ears and I'd be happy to hear of a better option, but I'm dubious that it's out there and that it's realistically achievable.

Posted by The Navigator | May 20, 2008 4:41 PM

Noe:

The problem with getting rid of routes is that having to change buses to go somewhere totally kills any hope of getting there in a timely manner. A friend once told me his method of estimating arrival time on the Paris metro - two minutes per stop and twenty minutes per transfer.

Right, the only thing that people hate more than waiting for a bus is transferring. Also there is a limit to how far most people will walk to any transit line, on average 15 minutes. It should be needless to say, but one can go too far in either direction, having only two routes in the city running every minute isn't very useful, and neither is running 120 lines once an hour. There are trade offs, I have no idea where DC is in that equillibrium.

Posted by AJ | May 20, 2008 4:51 PM

In addition to real time bus arrival info at major stops (via GPS), SF and other public transit systems using the nextbus.com system have GPS information available for every bus stop over the internet. This is incredibly convenient especially when you have a web-enabled phone. Since I got mine, I haven't to wait outside for a bus - I just check when the next one is arriving and step outside to catch it, or if something is messed up, know to catch a cab, another line, etc.

Posted by Bus Rider | May 20, 2008 5:22 PM

Fewer routes doesn't necessarily mean that you have to walk further to catch a bus: If, when reducing the number of routes, you lengthen them and have each route hit more stops, the total density of stops in the city need not change.

Of course, this probably means that you spend more time actually on the bus to get where you're going (because the longer routes will meander more). But since you (presumably) spend less time waiting, it's not clear that total trip time would be longer.

Spending less time waiting and more time actually on the bus also makes bus transit more appealing in northern cities where waiting at a bus stop means standing around in freezing cold weather for a big chunk of the year.

Posted by ElZo | May 20, 2008 5:31 PM

I'd like to point out that this bus problem is exactly what prevails in my old home town of Fargo-Moorhead (pop. 140,000) except that your have to wait 45-60 minutes for a bus.

This is an excellent reason why you need to build up mass transit and how cities built farther west lack it.

Posted by MNPundit | May 20, 2008 7:15 PM

Buses are on schedules, and, in Los Angeles at least, their locations are monitored in real time.

Cell phones can also be located, roughly, in space.

It ought to be possible to set up a system by which you could text a bus route number and get back the nearest buses plying that route, and their expected time to arrival at major stops.

If the transit agencies put a unique number code on each bus stop in the city, you could text that code and get back, immediately the route numbers and expected arrival times of buses headed to that stop.

Posted by Bruce Wilder | May 20, 2008 7:42 PM

The two-tier system people are describing is essentially what Los Angeles now has. Over the past several years Metro has been adding many Metro Rapid lines to the system. These red buses operate on the busiest routes, come about every 10-15 minutes, depending on the route, have the magical turn-stoplights-green power, and stop about every half mile or so.

This is in addition to the regular (orange-colored) buses that stop every block or two. The Metro Rapid lines don't operate late into the evening, as they're basically just there for the peak hour service.

So essentially they get coverage with the regular buses but you can get better service on the Metro Rapid lines.

(This is different from the Express lines that get on the freeway and head out to farther-away locations. There's also the Metro Orange Line, which operates on its own busway, the City of L.A.'s DASH service, which are local circulators, and other services.)

The one innovation I would really like to see in L.A. would be electronic signs telling me how far away my bus is. The buses are already equipped with GPS to tell you what the upcoming stops are.

Posted by Adam Villani | May 20, 2008 8:10 PM

Need "express" busses during rush hour.

Posted by Danny C. | May 20, 2008 8:42 PM

Just to speak to the class dimension here -- having reliable bus service ought to be most important to lower income folks working service jobs. Yuppies can almost always be 15 minutes late to work, but folks working as white collar support staff, or working at a Starbucks or a Best Buy don't have the same luxury.

I used to live up in Petworth in DC -- half way in between the Petworth station and the Fort Totten station. The distance from my place to either metro was over half a mile. There's also a bus that runs between the two that was scheduled to run every 15 minutes. The bus was absolutely unreliable, and, to the extent that I relied on it, I was late. On one particularly egregious day at Fort Totten -- when the bus took over 45 minutes -- the woman waiting next to me took the step of calling Metro to ask where the bus was, as her child's school had called her to tell her that they had called child services on her for failure to pick up her daughter.

No tremendous point here, except that on time service -- or more frequent service -- would have made transit a much better option.

Posted by Danathan | May 20, 2008 11:28 PM

Increasing frequency is crucial to increasing ridership, but there's no point if there's no money behind it. London's buses have become much better and much more popular (bendy buses aside)since they reduced the time. There's no need to plan anything - you just turn up at the stop and you know one will turn up in less than 10 minutes. They've also introduced easily understandable maps at every stop, and some stops now have due times displayed. One innovation that I think would help a lot, but has only appeared on a small minority of London buses, is stop indicators on the buses themselves. If you don't know your destination well, it can be a little intimidating trying to work out when to get off.

Posted by Ginger Yellow | May 21, 2008 7:48 AM

"Of course I'm a fanatic who'd happily say we should spend the money to just increase frequency on all our routes"

Gmo has it right: Buses are only better than cars from a CO2 perspective if they're running close to full; If you increase the frequency of the buses like that, they run largely empty, and you lose the energy efficiency.

What you really need to do is kill the municipal choke hold on taxis. In the Philippines they don't regulate the number of taxies, jitneys, and so forth, they just run a tax and inspection system, and the result is that in the smallest of towns you can step out of your front door, and a moment later somebody pulls to a stop to give you a ride.

Posted by Brett Bellmore | May 21, 2008 9:26 AM

Now, a 74mpg VW Polo 1.4 TDI creates 99g of CO2 per kilometer. Let us say that to make the buses popular the amount of CO2 per passenger kilometer for a bus (or other mass transit) was 99g or higher: Would Matt still be in favor of mass transit?

I would be, because a) the average car in the US is considerably larger and less efficient than a VW Polo, so buses will still be cleaner; b) you'll be taking cars off the road, thus reducing congestion, which is a local pollution problem (smog from idling cars) and a general quality-of-life issue (traffic jams are unpleasant), if not a climate change issue.

But this is concern trolling, because you'd need to be running a vast number of empty buses to make cars look cleaner.

Posted by ajay | May 21, 2008 9:37 AM

I dunno about this...I live in San Francisco and the last damn thing I want to see is more Muni buses....Now an expanded BART system? Now, that's a different story.

-

Posted by Hank Essay | May 21, 2008 10:05 AM

GPS tracking, combined with Matt's suggestion, would go a long way to increasing the use of bus lines. A particuarly nice system is in place in Paris and its suburbs; each bus station has a lcd display with real-time updates of when the next bus will arrive. It's also available over the internet, but it's having the information at the stop that is really nice. Wikipedia (French) has an article on it: http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/SIEL_(bus)

Posted by anonyme | May 21, 2008 10:43 AM

"I should add that virtually everyone in SF rides the bus, a state of affairs brought on mainly by geography, crappy rail service, and enforced scarcity of parking."

This might be your experience, but it's not mine.

I live in San Francisco and work for a software company here and I'd say roughly 80% of my co-workers drive to work - alone. Sure, there's some hybrids mixed in there, but they still drive work (and alone).

San Francisco is starting to be taken over by gigantic parking garages instead of actual buildings, just like most every other city.

Posted by KK | May 21, 2008 11:10 AM

"I should add that virtually everyone in SF rides the bus, a state of affairs brought on mainly by geography, crappy rail service, and enforced scarcity of parking."

This might be your experience, but it's not mine.

I live in San Francisco and work for a software company here and I'd say roughly 80% of my co-workers drive to work - alone. Sure, there's some hybrids mixed in there, but they still drive work (and alone).

San Francisco is starting to be taken over by gigantic parking garages instead of actual buildings, just like most every other city.

Posted by KK | May 21, 2008 11:12 AM

Two random comments:

First, working class people and professional class people probably have more aligned transit interests than either of those groups and non-working people, such as the elderly.

Second, you would really have to work very hard at it to make a popular commuter bus route less efficient from a CO2-emissions perspective than using cars for those passengers instead. The number I found for a current technology 40 foot diesel bus was 1828 grams of CO2 per km. So the break-even point with the extremely efficient (and therefore nonrepresentative) car cited above was just 18 or 19 passengers. For comparison, I think the target average for commuter routes is usually around 25 passengers per 40 foot bus, and apparently LA's Orange Line buses average something like 70-80 passengers on weekdays (albeit on 60 foot buses).

And if you then look at diesel-electric and compressed natural gas options (a fairer comparison to a car on the far end of the emissions scale), the emissions rate of buses go even lower. And potentially you could actually use all-electric buses, if they ever get the battery technology sorted out, with emissions then being determined by your source of electricity, down to effectively zero for some power sources. And of course you could also use smaller buses on some routes if the volumes were reliable but too small for the 40 foot buses, and so on.

To be sure, I wouldn't claim bus routes can entirely replace cars, or that trying to do so would be desirable from an environmental efficiency standpoint. But whenever even just a small number of people are regularly taking the same route, it is likely going to make sense to get them together in one vehicle for that route. Cars really only make sense when you are talking about small numbers of people doing irregular trips (and, incidentally, that is why car-sharing may end up making a lot of sense for people living in areas where public transit can serve their regular transit needs).

Posted by DTM | May 21, 2008 11:40 AM

The one innovation I would really like to see in L.A. would be electronic signs telling me how far away my bus is.

You may very well see this coming. Many transit systems are already mapped in Google maps. Google's (and others to be fair) Android platform does cell positioning that identifies your location and items around it. Add GPS or a similar cell positioning system to a transit network and voila!, find your bus's position on your cell phone.

Posted by Roboticghost | May 21, 2008 11:56 AM

London has radically improved its bus service under Ken Livingstone as mayor, and I expect those improvements to stay in place under BoJo, because the ridership gains have been spectacular.

In the US a big challenge is going to be dealing with unions. All too often, bus drivers manipulate routes to coordinate break time with one another and this is a major contribution to bus bunching, which ruins the frequency of a service. And when management tries to intervene, if it tries to intervene at all, chances are they'll get hit with a grievance by the union.

Here in Chicago it's going to be very interesting to see what happens now that all the buses are GPS equipped and live information on the location of buses including bunching is being posted on the internet by the CTA. The GPS system has actually been in place for many years -- it provides live stop indicators on all the buses and the last non-GPS buses left service I think in 2003. But connecting this GPS system to the internet is new and it's a great performance measurement tool in terms of telling the whole world, live, whether or not "we've got bus bunching."

Posted by DBX | May 21, 2008 12:26 PM

Another car-less DCer here - I've actually found the bus service in DC to be quite good, particularly along crowded routes like the 42, the 30 buses on Wisconsin, and the 90 buses crosstown. (Sure, sometimes traffic congestion means you wait longer than you should and don't get there on time, but that happens to drivers too.)

I'll echo Lee's comment above - the primary reason some folks don't take the bus because they aren't used to them - they don't know the routes and frequencies. DC is a transient town, so there's always a significant fraction of folks who are on the steep edge of the transit learning curve. One of the best things Metro ever did was start putting bus maps on bus shelters - the system isn't easy for first-timers to navigate, and metro bus maps are much harder to obtain than metro train maps. However, if you are with bus-virgins (Lee's term) they will more than happily follow you on a bus as long as you know where it's going. (Also an impediment - car owners aren't in the habit of carrying their Metrocards with them everywhere, so be prepared with exact change to loan your bus virgin friends)

I'm all for increasing bus frequency on certain routes (first on my wish list: the B30 express to BWI so needs to run more frequently than every 40 minutes) but unfortunately I think the fundamental problem is that many of the routes served by 30 and 40 minute buses simply don't have the potential mass transit ridership to support a more frequently served route. I'd like to be proven wrong on this, but in a city as spread out as DC it seems unlikely.

Posted by Matilde, DC | May 21, 2008 1:18 PM

Another car-less DCer here - I've actually found the bus service in DC to be quite good, particularly along crowded routes like the 42, the 30 buses on Wisconsin, and the 90 buses crosstown. (Sure, sometimes traffic congestion means you wait longer than you should and don't get there on time, but that happens to drivers too.)

I'll echo Lee's comment above - the primary reason some folks don't take the bus because they aren't used to them - they don't know the routes and frequencies. DC is a transient town, so there's always a significant fraction of folks who are on the steep edge of the transit learning curve. One of the best things Metro ever did was start putting bus maps on bus shelters - the system isn't easy for first-timers to navigate, and metro bus maps are much harder to obtain than metro train maps. However, if you are with bus-virgins (Lee's term) they will more than happily follow you on a bus as long as you know where it's going. (Also an impediment - car owners aren't in the habit of carrying their Metrocards with them everywhere, so be prepared with exact change to loan your bus virgin friends)

I'm all for increasing bus frequency on certain routes (first on my wish list: the B30 express to BWI so needs to run more frequently than every 40 minutes) but unfortunately I think the fundamental problem is that many of the routes served by 30 and 40 minute buses simply don't have the potential mass transit ridership to support a more frequently served route. I'd like to be proven wrong on this, but in a city as spread out as DC it seems unlikely.

Posted by Matilde, DC | May 21, 2008 1:22 PM

1. Probably the cheapest effective thing transit companies could do to improve bus service would be to simply post route maps and timetables at each bus stop. The downside is that you'd have more people angry at the system when they coint point to a sign that says the bus should've been there 20 minutes before.

2. In the Philippines they don't regulate the number of taxies, jitneys, and so forth,
I took a look at Mexico City's similar system a few years ago for a class, and there are problems there with strongarm tactics being used by competitors and also with pollution from the minibuses. Both of these problems are less an inherent problem with free-market jitney systems and more of a problem with just poor law enforcement and air quality enforcement.

Posted by Adam Villani | May 21, 2008 1:56 PM

Maybe this has been said before, but I'll point it out anyway. First, I think that decreasing the number of routes in favor of increasing frequency of service will only hurt those in smaller neighborhoods, further from transit, who probably are in greater need of the public transit [if only considering those who are reliant on buses because they cannot afford other modes of transport]. There must be a way to increase service and keep as many bus routes as possible.

What I've noticed in Washington is that the transportation actually service to segregate the city even more. One afternoon, I needed to go from U St, about a 10 min walk from the U Street Metro to any redline station. I did not want to get back on the metro because I didn't want to make the huge loop to get to the redline in the direction of Shady Grove. So, having gotten in the habit through living in Europe of just going to a bus stop and figuring it out from there, I turned up at a bus up and looked at the routes. For an area so close to Adams Morgan and only about 2 miles from Woodley park, the ONLY bus line that ran from U Street to a redline station was a bus that ran only in the evening to shuttle people from the U Street Metro to the nightlife areas! Its shocking that people in this neighborhood, who cannot nessecarily afford metro or cars, and stuck with busses which shuttle them only around poor neighborhoods. Its as though transit is boxing people in. This seems to be a bit of a rant, but I feel that as a city service, transportation should be democratic and should not box people in. Reducing routes would have that affect.

Posted by bruxelle | May 21, 2008 4:44 PM

Maybe this has been said before, but I'll point it out anyway. First, I think that decreasing the number of routes in favor of increasing frequency of service will only hurt those in smaller neighborhoods, further from transit, who probably are in greater need of the public transit [if only considering those who are reliant on buses because they cannot afford other modes of transport]. There must be a way to increase service and keep as many bus routes as possible.

What I've noticed in Washington is that the transportation actually service to segregate the city even more. One afternoon, I needed to go from U St, about a 10 min walk from the U Street Metro to any redline station. I did not want to get back on the metro because I didn't want to make the huge loop to get to the redline in the direction of Shady Grove. So, having gotten in the habit through living in Europe of just going to a bus stop and figuring it out from there, I turned up at a bus up and looked at the routes. For an area so close to Adams Morgan and only about 2 miles from Woodley park, the ONLY bus line that ran from U Street to a redline station was a bus that ran only in the evening to shuttle people from the U Street Metro to the nightlife areas! Its shocking that people in this neighborhood, who cannot necessarily afford metro or cars, and stuck with buses which shuttle them only around poor neighborhoods. Its as though transit is boxing people in. This seems to be a bit of a rant, but I feel that as a city service, transportation should be democratic and should not box people in. Reducing routes would have that affect.

Posted by bruxelle | May 21, 2008 4:44 PM

another one from me... have noticed in other parts of the world systems of private shuttle buses, known for example as Sherutim in Israel. They mimic public bus routes, cost about 20 cents more and allow people to get on only at bus stops but off where they want. They fit about 10 people. They play to the market, amplifying transport options on heavily traveled routes where they can make money. Its an option.....

Posted by bruxelle | May 21, 2008 4:48 PM

bruxelle says, "the ONLY bus line that ran from U Street to a redline station was a bus that ran only in the evening to shuttle people from the U Street Metro to the nightlife areas!"

That's not true, actually. The 96 bus will take you to Woodley Park metro from U Street metro during the day.

Posted by Matilde, DC | May 21, 2008 5:12 PM

We need to have all the buses running GPS and uplinks and provide that data in an open format so that you could access it by cellphone and get eta's.
We need a networked public transportation system.

Posted by Aaron | May 22, 2008 1:32 AM