The Mystery of the Missing Bus Riders
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
Most buses stop almost every block, they board through a single door, and they use the two slowest payment methods available in almost any system (cash and magnetic strip cards).
However, I don't expect this to change anytime soon, because many existing riders are very invested in keeping buses the way they are. To be clear, their concerns are valid - for a variety of reasons, it may be difficult for many people to walk an additional block to their local bus stop, vs. having a stop in front of their building. Many of the current riders are also long-time residents who are more likely to go to community board meetings, contact their city council members, and protest changes in other ways. If you're a policymaker, it's hard to weight the costs that would be imposed on this vocal set of people vs. the benefits that would accrue to a much less vocal group of people who would benefit from a faster and more consistent bus.
It's hard to complain about your stop moving a block at the committee meeting if they have hard data that everyone's commute is an average of 10 minutes faster.
*: "Revenue Protection Officers", a totally non-Orwellian job title.
Fare control is done by six or seven controllers getting on the bus at once. Check is very quick. In the night they will be joined by a security guard.
Boarding is very fast because of it. Also makes it easy to get in with a baby carriage or wheelchair (relatively).
The studies show that decreasing stops has minimal effect on transit times. Two stops with ten people each only takes a bit longer to board than one stop with twenty people. You save a couple of minutes across the entire length of a bus route.
And each stop removal increases rider commute times - now I have to walk 5 minutes longer to get a bus that's 2 minutes faster. Overall commute: 3 minutes longer. Plus each stop removal decreases the number of people served - if the old stop was a ten minute walk and the new one is a fifteen minute walk, you'll just stop taking transit altogether.
So in general, stop removal is not at all a panacea and is often a 100% negative to transit riders.
What actually works: getting rid of ride-hailing and other things that tend to clog the streets with empty, dead-heading vehicles; dedicated bus lanes and general banning of single-passenger automobiles; congestion charges; making sure transit is frequent and inexpensive so that it works well for people; etc.
As someone with only empirical evidence: 2 stops with 10 people each vs. 1 stop with 20 people isn't a fair comparison. The fair comparison is 10 stops with 1 person each vs. ~2 stops with 5 people each. Over a longer route, the majority of a bus's travel time comes from stopping at/departing a stop.
When I lived in Chicago, I would sometimes take a bus to work. The route I took, 29, had a minimum of one stop per block. In some cases, there were two stops per block. In one particularly bad case, the distance between the stops was literally <500 feet (150 m) [0].
[0]: Go to this link, select route 29, and look between Cermak Rd. and 23rd St. for the two stops in between: http://www.ctabustracker.com/bustime/map/displaymap.jsp
What's more, NYC is rolling out contactless payment for subways. Some of the select buses _appear_ to be equipped for this service as well. Currently, to use the Select service you must buy a ticket curbside at the stop.
OneBusAway, or OBA, in case you aren't familiar with it, is an open source real time transit information system, and includes a full backend, plus iOS and Android client apps. OBA had belonged to the University of Washington until recently, when it was spun out into a new 501(c)(3) non-profit, called the Open Transit Software Foundation: https://opentransitsoftwarefoundation.org
(n.b. I'm the maintainer of OneBusAway for iOS, and a member of the OTSF board.)
This space has very tangible information/ux problems.
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/onebusaway-developer...
It is a metro area where most of the jobs are spread out among distinct suburb areas. The remaining routes do not travel among the suburbs with regularity; the focus is on suburbs to downtown and within the city proper.
Routes that had been 15-minute some of the day and dropping to 30-minute or an hour on weekends (or did not run at all) were upgraded. Major trunk routes, not just ones to downtown but crosstown routes and routes through underserved areas, got upgraded to sub-10-minute frequency during peak commute and many now run all day at no less often than every 15 minutes. Add in two new light rail stations opening in the densest part of the city and ridership has been up.
But, of course, no good thing goes untouched. Last year, statewide voters approved an initiative that guts Seattle's ability to tax ourselves for transit ("$30" car tabs, which are nothing of the sort since even that initiative doesn't reduce vehicle registration costs to $30). If the initiative is upheld--still in doubt because the sponsor of the initiative is not known for writing initiatives that are legally sound, because if they stayed in effect he wouldn't get paid to keep running them--it's going to not only blow a hole in our light rail construction but also cut local bus service by 20-30%.
In any rate, we've proven that if you invest in good service that runs a lot of the time, people will use it.
This was utterly maddening. A bunch of... Politically-opinionated persons in rural Washington voted for legislature that bans Seattle from taxing its residents.
Given that the measure does nothing absolutely nothing to the counties who voted for it, I think I'm pretty justified in believing that their opinion on Seattle's tax system shouldn't matter one whit. If they don't want to pay more than $30 for car tabs, they should vote for it in their county, not across the state.
Now, in addition to eliminating routes which predated their contract, they have dead times in the middle of the day, gaps after "peak" times (which in my case put a 2 hour hole between 1800h and 2000h on my line). And they've canceled service on Sunday and on some lines both Saturday and Sunday.
In the latter case I'm sure NICE would say the LIRR is an alternative, but on the weekend that runs every 2 hours and costs $9 one way versus $2.75
And if you're fortunate enough to make some use of the system, there is no expectation it will still work for you later, because of the contraction cycle the parent described--Every 6-12 months schedules change.
I can't help thinking of companies like Walmart who move into areas, drive out small businesses, and then decide to pull out of town. Of course, it's a free market and they can do that, but in the case of public transit in the hands of private for profit companies it's a terrible burden on anyone who doesn't have a car.
And Nassau County has some of the highest taxes in the nation. Go figure.
from my experience (in LA), they're often no faster than buses for short trips (up to ~4 miles). between 4-6, it's typically breakeven. for trips over ~6 miles, shared/pool rides are usually faster (and gets more so with longer distances).
but note that the bulk of bus trips are under 10 miles, so it takes some thought to get the best bang for buck.
And people stopped waiting for others to disembark before boarding. That's the weirdest thing: the bus stops, the doors open, and the people waiting to board just start piling in before the people coming off have left. Maybe that's only in SF.
And then there's this:
> In Gavin Newsom’s book Citizenville he talked about how, after becoming SF mayor, he discovered that fare collection cost as much as the revenue generated from fares. He started the process of making the bus free but was told by so many advisors that the busses would become “dumpsters on wheels,” from a combination of homeless people using them for shelter and people not respecting services that are free, that the plan was scrapped.
~ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21808851
It blows my mind, and it makes me resent paying the fares at all.
While it is true that people respect "free" services less than paid ones, I have yet to read any reports from places that have implemented free bus service that suggested general damage/misuse due to a lack of respect. The bus service in Logan UT for example is pretty awesome.
Second, let's say that SF's $250B homeless policies work, meaning people get their lives together, get off the drugs or into a place where they can cope w/ their mental|emotional|physical problems or whatever it is that messed them up in the first place (and a lot of people just need a home, as they are perfectly normal and capable but e.g. some debt or a death in the family or something threw them for a loop and now they're stuck living in their car or the park or something and it's hard to get back on your feet w/o a support network, etc.)
Let's say it works, and more homeless people do move here to take advantage of it. That is a good thing. God forbid ol' San Francisco should become a continent-wide renovation center for human lives, eh?
Whether the US federal government enforces its borders or not is entirely separate from the question of of it does. It can and does. San Francisco can't and doesn't. If it does a lot to help the homeless nation wide then the levels get impacted nationwide. If SF does a lot to help the homeless in SF then rates start the same or rise as move homeless move there from elsewhere in the US.
That being a good thing in general is entirely out of the scope of getting the homeless off of public transport.
What "moral prescriptivism"? What does that mean in plain English please?
I'm not sure what you're saying.
In any event, there's no legal way to stop homeless people from riding the bus. How would you even know? Brand each homeless person with a big "H" on their foreheads? Require proof-of-residence each time people board a bus?
Obviously something is wrong with your calculations, otherwise that would be reality. And the error is in the assumption that a tax base of a single city will sit around and pay the amount of money required to rehabilitate and/or house the mentally ill for the nation.
Labor is extremely expensive, especially labor where one might have to deal with dangerous mentally ill people who may have criminal pasts. It’s ludicrous to suggest a single city could possibly tackle the issue and shoulder the tax burden of the rest of country shipping them it’s most destitute citizens.
This is not even taking into account the legal matters that would need to be resolved on a federal level with involuntary housing of the mentally ill homeless population.
At first it was because my personal schedule, and my bus schedule changed just enough to make it annoying to make it to work on time, and almost impossible to avoid routes that spent most of their time in an extremely high crime area. So most of the time I drove to the train.
Then I got a new job working from home, and I stopped taking the bus and the train. I must say that I miss the bus quite a bit. It was the most books I've ever read recreationally. I even taught myself python on the bus, which lead to the new job.
I also used to take the bus when I thought I would be drinking, and uber/lyft have completely replaced that.
How about a button at each stop, with a live estimate when the bus will arrive?
Currently, the bus system is like a newspaper. Inconvenient, messy and smells bad.
There are already many, many apps for that.
Google Maps will give you some decent good route mapping and alternatives, though less realtime than apps that use data back ends like NextBus.
You can do better routing than Google if you're familiar with a route/combination and its intricacies, but if you're in a part of town you don't know as much, Google Maps' transit routing is a godsend.
It seems like cities like NY and San Francisco have the density to support similar systems.
The design of munis modern fleet has reduced the seat and isle space. Standing is hard because your always in the way, and the redesign to accommodate more handicap seating has really reduced regular seating that could be perpendicular to the length of the bus.
Reliability is the other issue. Main lines are very reliable, but meandering cross town routes make a two bus commute undesirable.
Despite the proportions of ridership being low, functionally it is pretty high, and the entire transit network does hit capacity during rush hours.
There's a scene in Mad Men that I always like to bring up when it comes to things like this, where the Drapers are having a picnic in a bucolic park, and then they just get up and walk away, leaving their trash behind. It looks crazy and stupid to us now, because we all collectively woke up and realized that damaging the world around us makes life worse.
People are using buses less partly for the same reason that they stopped littering, and normal cars have gotten steadily quieter over the years: they're waking up to how painfully awful city buses are.
The day will come when someone will make a show about our times, and it will feature a city bus pulling up and drowning out a conversation, and all the characters in the scene, who ignore it or just start shouting over it without thinking, will look as ridiculous to future viewers, as the Drapers did to us in that scene.
Perhaps the culture really is that diffrent in the U.S., that I never expected someone to prefer personal vehicles to public transit for environmental reasons.