Tech Breakthroughs That Could Make People Love the Bus
citylab.com
citylab.com
I used to live in Seattle, without a car, which meant taking the bus. I thought it worked pretty well until I moved out of downtown to just off the main drag in West Seattle (California Ave.) There, the bus still worked great! Until King County Metro decided to pull service. Suddenly, all-day, all-week service from the stop by my apartment turned into 5 rush-hour trips to downtown a day, weekdays only, peak direction only. Getting anywhere else suddenly required a 2 mile walk to Alaska Junction (or, unrealistically, a local bus transfer. The 2 mile walk was faster.)
I was naive and a fool (fortunately, didn't invest much and was able to move shortly thereafter.) People who invest in areas on the basis of bus service are fools. It's constantly being tinkered with for a host of regions (fluctuating budgets, political pressures, and the damnable need for people making careers to "do something.") You cannot trust a bus route.
Tunnels or tracks in the ground, and associated stations? Those don't move. (They do sometimes get abandoned in the worst cases of nonfeasance.) One can generally rely on continued service over a period of time suitable for investment. There's no substitute for sunk costs as a signal of commitment. It's the investments in density that come with a real transit network that make the difference, not "attracting ridership with fancy buses." See yet again, Seattle. (Sorry, RapidRide is a joke.)
You know what has historically driven ridership and attracted investment in Seattle? Areas around the trolley bus lines. Because, again, you know the route's not going away if the lines are up.
Hmm... after looking it seems they haven't done the full roll out to Seattle.
I'm not sure that's fair. Yes, it's an uncertainty and you need to be aware of it, but it's no worse than investing in an area on the assumption that you won't get laid off or your rent won't increase sharply. Nothing is certain, but you have to settle somewhere.
And it inexplicably misses the single biggest and most obvious criterion: SERVICE FREQUENCY. No one cares about how slick the bus service is if you have to wait 10 minutes for it to show up. Because while 10 minutes might be OK for most people what that really means is that inevitably a vehicle gets skipped or breaks down (this happens a lot more than you think) and you have to wait 20 on a day when you really can't wait 20 minutes for a ride.
If you can't get the buses to show with no more than 10 minute wait at every stop on every day, people won't take them. If you can, they're better than cars. But you have to have the service level first before worrying about glitz like the stuff in the linked article.
Total game changer.
What about a 5 person little vehicle that only comes exactly when people call it?
And for even better service it works point to point, which cuts down of fuel and wasted time.
And to reduce costs even further maybe drive it yourself instead of paying a driver. Although we need to a cost analysis on this. It could be some people would prefer to pay a driver, and other would drive themself.
Where's the sweet spot between 40, 12, and 5?
Second the trips are longer, since they have to drive fixed routes, so people are in the vehicle for longer - sometimes MUCH longer, so more road capacity is taken up.
They way they stop and start constantly also reduces road bandwidth.
To me bus service is about money and parking - not being able to afford a car if you only rarely drive, and a place to put the car.
I am not convinced buses help with congestion. (Trains/subway/T are different because they have a whole new road built just for them.)
?
A RapidRide route brings buses more frequently. It also adds additional infrastructure. It's a noticeably larger level of commitment than a regular route. Density requirements make a lot of sense if a RapidRide route is created.
The Roosevelt neighborhood illustrates why this is important. They received a Link Light Rail station in the middle of their urban neighborhood. Home owners subsequently fought to lower height restrictions to 12m [1].
I'm a firm believer if a neighborhood receives well-done public transit then they should have to meet density requirements.
[0] https://kingcounty.gov/depts/transportation/metro/travel-opt... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roosevelt_station_(Sound_Trans...
Seattle seems to agree. The Rapid Ride buses attempt to keep headways between buses very short.
I don't own a car and travel via public transit frequently. I find that an accurate OneBusAway/Transit estimate is much more useful than headways. I absolutely agree that some kind of predictability is extremely important.
To that I'll add: Protection from the elements. If train stops were like bus stops, no one would find that acceptable.
On that note, one can't help but wonder if the neglect of buses isn't a passive form of racism / class-ism.
Anecdotally, one of the patterns I've noticed is the further down the economic ladder you move, the longer you wait for services. Given that time is money, this works against those who likely need the time most.
(I also argue that it needs to be faster than individual transit. Unfortunately, individual transit is something people won't accept being slower, even if mass transit could make the whole trip faster.)
What stops me from using mass transit (including bus and rail service) is that its schedule in my town is totally inadequate. Stops are not frequent enough, service starts too late in the morning and ends too early at night, and travel time to most destinations is slower than by car. Fix these major problems and I happily use transit.
Anecdotally it is much worse in cases where the bus in question passes through areas where non-affluent white people will be getting on and off.
It varies depending on the size of the city, in my experience. NYC might be the most egalitarian city in America regarding public transit use. Other large cities are similar or slightly less so. In small cities, it's very much considered a low-income thing.
No, but subway funding and management is controlled by the state, not the city -- and the majority of residents of the state do not use transit. I get the impression that a lot of people in the state still think of NYC as the crumbling inner city of the 70's: the place where poor people live.
The governor is more interested in optics ("Now you can charge your phone on the bus! We replaced the tiles in this subway station!") than restoring service, let alone expansion. He has diverted funds from the subways to, among other things, pretty light shows on bridges and supporting failing upstate ski resorts. With the subways failing, those who can afford to are taking cabs and black cars more and more, which contributes to the traffic congestion crisis.
The mayor gets driven everywhere in a black SUV and seems to have never learned that not only to most of his constituents not commute in personal vehicles, the majority don't even own cars.
Additionally, the city has a LOT of public buses. In some ways (frequency, coverage), bus service in the city is much better than most of the rest of the country. In other ways, it's unusably bad (mostly, time to get from A to B due to traffic, too-frequent stops, silly winding routes, slow payment/boarding, overcrowding, inufficiently frequent service outside rush hour, bus bunching decreasing apparent/useful service frequency).
The NIMBYs and traffic enforcers all seem to believe that bus riders are "not us" (and yes, outside of a few crosstown corridors, bus riders average poorer than subway riders). The result is obstacles to the creation of bus lanes and busways, and utter lack of enforcement of those we do have.
- Secure storage - Have a secure trunk locker located anywhere in the city. Entirely self-service mobility with no advanced reservation needed means you can park it anywhere in city or country.
- Peaceful getaway - Need a quiet minute away from all the stress and noise of your city? Or do you want a break from the droning silence of the countryside? Both needs can be accommodated. Cars can provide a quiet space wherever you want. Alternatively, cars can feature loud entertainment and/or powerplant system, forcing others to share in your chosen audio.
- Climate controlled sleeping - More and more Tesla and Prius owners are discovering the joys of unofficial "camping mode" which the cars will endure. Pair with the peaceful getaway above for maximal enjoyment.
- Personal autonomy - Need to feel in control of your life? We'll give you a personal racecar you can use to express your frustrations with modern society. There will be plenty of "lap traffic" to pass. (These unwitting racers are merely trying to arrive at their destination unscathed.)
- Status symbol - Enjoy the privilege of having others ask to ride in your car. Have others know to visit a 3rd party, because they see your car out front. Brag about the costs of maintaining your symbol, and use these woes to stratify yourself in the social hierarchy.
The things that make me avoid them and instead use my car:
- You get sick by using them. The passenger density is way too high and invariably you'll end end up having a seat neighbor with some cold or flu virus.
- There is no privacy at all during rush time - it's super packed and just a horribly stressed environment. I don't want to sit squashed up to some random stranger.
The solution to all of this is obvious: Instead of 2+2 seat arrangements, look at business class seat configurations. Or just make the buses longer, and go with 1+1 seat configs.
I think up-to-the second awareness of time remaining would be a major improvement to the experience. I know the time remaining is uncertain, but a lot of information exists but is not making its way to the user.
Allow me to browse my phone while I wait, without paying attention at all, until I get a notification when the bus is 30s away.
If I'm wandering whether to go in the nearby bakery, allow me to see a "best guess" estimate and a "surely won't take less than this much" estimate for the remaining time.
For very infrequent routes, allow me to set my alarm clock to X minutes before the "surely won't take less than this much" estimate to the stop near my home, to be evaluated at runtime.
Electric buses have been around for a while, they're called trolleys. Putting the batteries inside the buses is an improvement, but hardly a breakthrough, and I'm not entirely sure it would make me "Love the Bus"
Likewise, autonomous buses have been around for at least a couple decades in the form of driverless trains. For high-density routes with lots of passengers doing the same itinerary, I feel it's probably cheaper in the long run, more maintainable and safer to use rails, so I'm not sure an autonomous bus is an innovation we want over trains.
Seamless payment is not a tech breakthrough at this point, it's just a matter of getting regulators and government contractors to implement seamless payments.
"Accessibility" is not a tech breakthrough and the things mentioned in the article make me question the author's understanding of the state of assistive technology and the actual current needs of people with disabilities.
As for "Minibus or ‘trackless train’", that's indeed a super interesting question that hasn't been solved in the space of transportation: given a very dense ad-hoc demand for transportation from region A to region B, how can you broker a collective transportation solution that is cheap, efficient and desirable over, say, a slower multimodal option, or more expensive private transportation. Sadly, the article discusses minibuses (which we've had, in Brazil at least, for longer than I can remember) and only mentions they "can" be routeless but doesn't fully explain how that could be achieved.
Driverless is an interesting prospect, but shared unsupervised transport starts to feel like a safety issue, especially late at night.
Systems that don't already have live bus tracking, syndicated into map apps etc, should get it - it makes the system far more usable.
Edinburgh already has hybrid and full battery buses, and I believe Glasgow will get some soon. The main driver here is dealing with diesel emissions. https://lothianbuses.co.uk/news/article/Lothian-introduce-th...
The fixes needed are simple - and related to the to comment on "infrastructure as a commitment signalling device".
Just charge the living bejesus out of single occupancy cars, force major roads to be bus and cycle only, and have serious decade long plans for pedestrianising most city areas - the car has to go.
It has been possible to experience an electric bus ride for well over a century to verify that it's not "mind blowingly different".
Ever heard of the trolleybus? It's an electric bus that draws power from overhead cables.
I suspect the benefits are you don't have to lay rail + you can use normal vehicle lanes + you get the benefits of not having a combustion engine (smog, mechanical issues, fuel storage/re-fill).
I'll stick to my bicycle.
Fun story:
The double-decker buses in Las Vegas overheat in the summer. You wouldn't think that a desert city where it's 100°-120°F for months on end would have buses that overheat.
The problem is that the double-decker buses are sourced from a company in Britain, which has a very different definition of "hot" than Nevada.
If you ever go on vacation to Vegas and see one of the double-decker buses driving down the Strip with its back engine cover wide open, it's the driver trying to keep the bus from overheating. There was an article in one of the Vegas newspapers about it.
The official policy is to simply let the buses overheat and go out of service. The bus drivers get in trouble for cooling their engines that way.
Vegas also has level four self-driving buses, as mentioned in the article. The first one got backed into by a truck within minutes of being deployed.
It implies that people who currently take the bus should for some reason be considered ab-normal, which they definitely should not be, by any non-classist definition.
but the biggest thing that will make people flock back to the bus, imho, would if they actually ran on schedule. i commute to work daily via AC-Transit in berkeley and have already lost count this week alone how many times the bus was scheduled to appear and didn't...
At best I begrudging tolerate some amount of automated law enforcement as a necessary evil. I don't love it. Then again, I'm one of the people who reads 1984 as a warning, not an instruction manual.
For all the bleeding heart liberalism in Berkeley, it's amazing how little pride and professionalism AC Transit has in delivering a service the working poor need to depend on.
1) Time it takes to walk to the station.
2) Waiting for an indeterminate amount of time, often in excess of 10 minutes, which is considered a good peak-hours frequency for some reason.
3) Standing-room-only, overcrowding, the relatively intense motor coordination task of staying upright while the bus lurches around, the unpleasantness of holding an arm over your head for tens of minutes.
4) Difficulty of escape from someone trying to talk to you or polluting the cabin with the smell of urine or music from a shitty phone speaker.
5) Absurd travel times 3-5x what it would take in a car due to frequent stops and use of surface streets.
I rely entirely on public transit, and the only good bus experiences I’ve had were with a suburban commuter express which behaved like a car (or better, due to priority lanes) for the vast majority of the trip. But it was so infrequent, and the subway from my office to the bus depot had such high variance due to extreme congestion among trains, that it was no better for end-to-end travel time than a car.
2) You're not supposed to need to wait an "indeterminate amount of time." Buses are supposed to be on schedule, a schedule that gets thrown out of whack by issues such as double parking.
3) More predictable, regular service should help with overcrowding. Buses that don't have to swerve in and out of blocked lanes don't have to lurch around as much.
5) Travel times are significantly shorter when they have clear lanes (ideally dedicated, or at least without double parking).
> 1) Time it takes to walk to the station.
Fortunately, there's a bus very near my section of the apartment building. It likely takes me longer to get my car out of the parking garage than to walk to the stop.
> 2) Waiting for an indeterminate amount of time, often in excess of 10 minutes, which is considered a good peak-hours frequency for some reason.
The bus here runs every 30 minutes. The keys here are flexibility, planning and predictability. If your schedule is flexible (mine is) then you're not stuck waiting 30 minutes for the next bus, you just need to be at the stop shortly before the 30 minute timer. Which means you kinda need to plan things out some, so your time isn't wasted.
Where this all falls down is predictability. Busses are incredibly bad here. The rides I've taken have been roughly 15 minutes late each, with a wide variance. That's what really kills the commute for me.
> 3) Standing-room-only, overcrowding, the relatively intense motor coordination task of staying upright while the bus lurches around, the unpleasantness of holding an arm over your head for tens of minutes.
At least when I take the bus, it's pretty light. Nothing like the free bus system I occasionally took working for a university. It's probably worse for longer commutes / Express busses where there's a ton of people who want to get from point A to a point B 50 miles way, but at least my bus there's a roughly even in/outflow.
There's only one coworker who gets off the bus with me, which I find a bit surprising given how convenient it is.
> 4) Difficulty of escape from someone trying to talk to you or polluting the cabin with the smell of urine or music from a shitty phone speaker.
Headphones work okay, but they're not a panacea for obnoxious people.
> 5) Absurd travel times 3-5x what it would take in a car due to frequent stops and use of surface streets.
That's what the commuter express is for.
So what tech innovations would help these concerns?
Well, Google maps has kinda deciphered business hours based on nearby cellphone usage and polling, it knows how delayed busses currently are, and could probably offer a predicted schedule.
Additionally, customers using commuter navigation apps like gmaps could probably provide additional insight into passenger needs. And if we're airing grievances, I could use an app feature that signals the driver to stop on my behalf, because 9 stops is not easily countable when you don't actually stop at every sign.
Dedicated lanes addresses timeliness but if the number of people per hour of a bus lane is less than the traffic it replaces it's a net negative from an infrastructure perspective (yes it's more environmentally friendly, whether it's worth it is up for debate)
Autonomy would be nice because then you could cut some pretty big costs but I expect unions to prevent that.
Accessibility is basically catering to edge cases. As others have pointed out in the past, it's more efficient to have a subset of buses be handicapped accessible or have a dedicated handicapped accessible van service
This is just a puff piece that doesn't really address any hard issues.