Class Warfare and the Bus
On the issue of “do only poor people ride the bus” I’m basically in agreement with Atrios.
The key point to start with, though, as with everything else regarding transit and class is the simple reality that buying a car is expensive. And in most crowded urban areas, parking a car downtown at work is also expensive. This leads immediately to the conclusion that a cheaper alternative, like riding the bus, will be disproportionately appealing to people of lesser means.
But beyond that, you’re left with a big question of where’s the intersection point. What happens in most cities is that most bus lines are really bad. They arrive infrequently, and they move slowly. Consequently, even though taking the bus might be cheaper than driving, it’s a much lower-quality experience. Well, what kind of people are interested in sacrificing a huge amount of quality and time in order to save money? That’d be poor people, primarily. But it’s not a law of nature that bus service needs to be really terrible. The 42 line that I used to take to work pretty regularly came frequently, as did the S1/S2/S4 line that I sometimes used. And you had a pretty diverse class mix on the lines. Not coincidentally, however, these were lines that served some relatively prosperous parts of town. Wealthier people have more political clout and get better public services; meanwhile, better public services are more appealing to wealthier people. I imagine that with the inauguration of the new S-9 express bus service on the same basic 16th Street route used by the other Ses, that a more and more bourgeois crowd will be drawn to the line.
If the city were to go further and carve out more space for dedicated bus lanes (or properly enforce the existing lanes on 7th Street and 9th Street downtown) then bus travel could be more rapid and more frequent and more people would want to do it.
54 Responses to “Class Warfare and the Bus”
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June 11th, 2009 at 8:41 am
Atrios lives in Philadelphia, I live outside of Philadelphia. I use buses and rail transit when I’m in the city, and occasionally out here in the near suburbs, often when I’m doing something involved with getting my car worked on. I took the bus to NW Philly in October to see Obama — driving over there and parking would have been a pain. But in the suburbs bus service is fairly infrequent — you have to build your itinerary around the bus schedule (or spend some time standing around waiting), in a way that is less of an issue in the city. People in north Philadelphia and the near northern suburbs customarily take the Broad Street subway from Fern rock to south Philly for baseball games or concerts (I’m going to do that Friday, to see Eric Clapton — I’ve never seen him, he’s 65 and likely won’t do this many more times, plus it’ll be nice to see Winwood.)
June 11th, 2009 at 8:42 am
oops, I mean I took the bus to NE Philly in October to see Obama…
June 11th, 2009 at 8:44 am
The only reason I don’t take the bus is that it makes what’s a 20-minute commute by car take an hour and a half. If it could be shortened to, say, 40 minutes, I’d be on it every day.
June 11th, 2009 at 8:50 am
That’s actually a significant difference in transit ridership between Canada and the US. Nothing blows my mind more that the class difference you see between the riders of Vancouver compared to Seattle or Toronto compared with Buffalo.
June 11th, 2009 at 8:52 am
I agree with Lisa Simpson, that the public bus is “the chariot of the people, the ride of choice for the poor and very poor alike.”
June 11th, 2009 at 8:53 am
In London, where there are dedicated bus lanes, a congestion charge, and very frequent service, everybody takes the bus, including people with six and seven figure City salaries.
June 11th, 2009 at 8:56 am
“But it’s not a law of nature that bus service needs to be really terrible.”
No. But to make it less terrible requires running more buses more often. Which in turn (probably) means fewer people on each bus. Which in turn means a substantial reduction in the environmental and economic advantages of transit.
When I lived in DC, I did not take the bus or the Metro when I went out because they ran so infrequently late at night. I would often have to wait a 45-minutes or more for one to arrive. And when it did arrive, it usually had two or three people on it.
I guess there are efficiencies to be gained. Maybe if it showed up every five minutes, impatient jerks like me might be more inclined to use it. But I think even in the best-case scenario, you are going to have tons of buses with one or two people on them. And I don’t think that a 45-foot, six-ton vehicle is the best way to get one or two people around town.
So of course you cut back on service to get rid of the lines hardly anyone uses. And people like me start driving. So yeah. Better service can initiate a positive feedback loop. But I think most cities are really, really far away from that tipping point, and reaching it would require gargantuan increases in service. Which does not seem politically feasible at the moment.
At the same time, think this does show that MY had a point regarding the use of stimulus money in this regard. Instead of looking for shovel-ready capital projects, most of the money might have been better spent on maintaining existing services.
June 11th, 2009 at 8:57 am
I don’t think you can have “high quality” bus service without dedicated lanes at the very least. As you’ve noted before Matt, a lot of people who live in cities own cars… if you have to deal with the vagaries of traffic regardless, why wouldn’t you just drive yourself? I think that’s a big part of why bus lines are thought of as low class… it’s the choice of people with no other option.
BRT is where it’s at.
June 11th, 2009 at 8:59 am
Think one of your constants in that equation might actually be a variable?
June 11th, 2009 at 8:59 am
In my experience, it really varies. Living in Chicago, I took the bus all the time. Living in New York, I never take the bus, because the subway takes me where I want to go. Living in Baltimore, I never took the bus because I was afraid to, though I was much younger then. Living in DC I did take the bus to work because I lived at 16th and Euclid and I had much easier access to the bus, and it happened to be more or less a straight shot to work.
June 11th, 2009 at 9:11 am
And I don’t think that a 45-foot, six-ton vehicle is the best way to get one or two people around town.
You don’t have to use a full-size bus for a route that you know is low ridership. Minibuses hardly larger than an SUV will do fine, and those produce substantial traffic and environmental gains even with three people (besides the driver).
Besides, people going out late at night are not the only, or even the most important, target of mass transit. Most people in a given city/metro area commute twice a day (once each way) and shop a couple times a week – if you can move some of *those* trips to mass transit it makes a huge difference. (One person’s shopping destination, of course, is another’s workplace, although the reverse is not necessarily true.) If they still end up driving or taking taxis at 2 a.m., well, there’s not that much traffic at 2 a.m. anyway. It’s the 5:30 p.m. traffic you really want to deal with.
June 11th, 2009 at 9:12 am
As a former expert on all things wrong with DC, I feel obligated to disagree with any public statements about the S-lines. The buses were always packed by the time they got to Mt. Pleasant..unless three came at the same time and they were always empty.
And catching an S at night was a total crapshoot. The WMATA timetables are no less fiction and no more enjoyable than something written by Stephanie Meyer.
June 11th, 2009 at 9:13 am
Er, disagree with any positive public statements about the S-lines. Criticisms will not elicit comments, just nods of agreement.
June 11th, 2009 at 9:20 am
The buses here in Boston are a nightmare. Schedules appear to be optional, stops are way too close together (do we really need to stop at every block?), and the newer models are far too wide for many side streets.
In some instances I can commute faster walking than taking a bus.
June 11th, 2009 at 9:20 am
I avoid busses in DC like the plague, though I love the metro. However, I commute out to NoVa from DC and take the busses from West Falls Church. Lots of professionals do it and it is for the reasons you indicate. The busses leave at a scheduled time and are as reliable as the Metro. I get to work the same time every day. So I love them. All of which is a way of saying, yup, you are right, increase the predictability and more people will take them.
June 11th, 2009 at 9:21 am
Couple of diverse points.
I’m a former Philadelphia resident; one issue there I would say is that the more affluent areas tend to be served by other, more comfortable, convenient and faster forms of public transportation. The same is true to some extent of one of my other former places of residence, New York. Well, I wouldn’t exactly call the subway during rush hour comfortable, but it’s much faster than the bus obviously. Though New York is to a large extent sui generis because of the inconvenience and expense of owning/driving/parking a car.
I’m outside of Denver now, and my current bus commute is actually faster than driving (an express bus). For that reason, and because of the area where I live the people riding the bus tend to be a pretty homogenous middle/upper middle class group. Of course it doesn’t stop huge streams of single passenger cars commuting along the same route as the bus.
June 11th, 2009 at 9:22 am
My chauffeur thinks this is a bad idea. He points out that they don’t let you sip champagne on buses.
(Well, unless you sit in the back with the winos. Who are the only interesting people on the transport anyway. )
June 11th, 2009 at 9:25 am
Well obviously the answer is to make individual car ownership in any city prohibitively expensive for all but the wealthy. And then further tax everybody to pay for transit systems.
After all the most efficient way by far (as our current recession demonstrates) to increase use of mass transit is to simply make most people poorer.
But we should focus on subways not buses.
And then, once we get the poorer workers underground, why not just keep them there? Latter day Morlocks and all.
With no use for an automobile then they have no need to be outside contributing to our visual and sonic pollution.
Think Green!
Soyent Green!
June 11th, 2009 at 9:27 am
My wife and son use an express bus to commute: it passes through our neighborhood less than a block from our house, hops on a dedicated busway for the run to the central business district, and then drops then off close to my son’s daycare (which in turn is close to my wife’s work). Thanks to the dedicated busway, it is never much slower than driving and parking, and during times of congestion it is actually much faster. Plus, my wife doesn’t particularly like driving in traffic, and she can interact with our son much better than if he was stuck in a carseat in the back of her car.
And, of course, there are a bunch of other professional class people who use that bus as well. Which I think supports Matt’s point: make the relevant bus service cheap, convenient, and of acceptable quality, and people of all classes will use it.
June 11th, 2009 at 9:43 am
What a coincidence — I take those lines — s4/s2 and now S9.
Does that mean I could have been elbowing and jostling with THE Matthew Yglesias for a seat? Sorry about that.
June 11th, 2009 at 9:46 am
I take a commuter bus every day to work. It is almost always full, but not too full that you can’t get a seat. I-395 has an HOV lane, which makes the bus much quicker than driving alone. And, it’s free for me because the federal govt gives Metrochek to cover the commute. The bus is even much faster than the Metro, which I find inexplicable.
June 11th, 2009 at 9:48 am
The buses here in Boston are a nightmare.
Try moving 40 miles west and seeing what we deal with in Worcester. I used to take it from one side of the city to the other. At first it was perfect for me, in that it picked me up and the top of my street and went directly to where I needed to go. It took longer than a car, but it gave me extra time to read or sleep.
Then they re-routed everything. The only exchange hub in the whole city is downtown, in front of City Hall. After they did that, I had to get off there and wait 45 more minutes for the second part of my route. There is another neighborhood not serviced by school buses for some reason, but that’s too far to walk. Most of the kids took the city bus to get to school. After the re-route, they had to go in the opposite direction to get a connecting bus that would bring them back past home on the way to school.
It’s impossible to get a ride past 10 p.m., and they shut down earlier on weekends. And they wonder why none of the kids leave the Clark or Holy Cross campuses to support local nightlife.
And last I knew they were cutting back on service again. But they got a new bus fleet!
June 11th, 2009 at 9:48 am
Wealthier people have more political clout and get better public services;
I can only speak for Los Angeles, but I’m not sure if this is true out here. OK, obviously it’s true for most public services, but the notion of bus service as something wealthier people will actually clamor for is fairly new here.
Take a look at the growth of the Metro Rail system, and despite what the Bus Riders Union claims, there is almost no correlation to an area’s wealth and the level of mass transit it has. The most vocal crowd against Measure R complained that a disproportionate amount of the money was going toward a subway to the Westside. But that’s because the Westside currently has ZERO existing rail despite being one of the most densely populated (and densely job-packed) parts of the Metro area.
The first Metro Rail line went through South-Central L.A. When the Red Line (subway) first opened, it only went as far as MacArthur Park, one of the poorest areas of the city. Then it went to Koreatown, also poor. Northeast L.A. has light rail. East L.A. will have light rail later this summer. The Green Line goes to a big employment center, and along the way passes through Hawthorne and Compton, not exactly wealthy. And the Expo Line, opening next year, will also go through South L.A.
Now most of these lines eventually get to fairly wealthy burbs near their endpoints. But the fact of the matter is that they all go through poorer areas first, and the density of transit is much higher in poorer areas of the city. That only makes sense, because that’s where the people who ride transit the most are!
The same follows for the bus service. Lines are the most dense and headways the shortest in the most densely populated, most transit-dependent areas of the city. And guess what? Most of those areas aren’t wealthy!
June 11th, 2009 at 9:50 am
My experience living in several cities has taught me a few things: First, there’s always one (or two) buslines that you can depend on in a city. Stick to these, and you’ll wonder what all the fuss is about. Next, there’s always a couple of buslines that you’ve never used that actually work pretty well once you find yourself on them. Finally, once you have to transfer bus-to-bus (as opposed to rail-to-bus or vice versa), you’re screwed.
You don’t have to use a full-size bus for a route that you know is low ridership.
DC makes good use of these minibuses on the 32/34/36 lines. The problem is that they still don’t run them enough, meaning that the logical use of a bus line to connect U St. station to Adams Morgan turns out to be slower than walking.
June 11th, 2009 at 10:10 am
Just for another datapoint, here in Pittsburgh there’s the East Busway, which runs from Downtown out to the near eastern suburbs, utilizing part of the old Penn RR right of way (so it’s totally grade separated, with a limited number of stops that are more like stations). It runs through one of the nicest and one of the worst neighborhoods in the city, and the buses are packed full of people across the SES spectrum (including 6 figure professionals). In general Pittsburghers of all stripes use the buses, but the EBA, which is literally the fastest way to get Downtown from the east and runs constantly during rush hour, is a model for busing that’s equal to light rail.
June 11th, 2009 at 10:14 am
So buses suck unless they don’t suck.
June 11th, 2009 at 10:23 am
My idea is to shut down car access on L street and make it half bus-only and the other half bike only. The current bike lanes that are shared with cars are dicier than riding in traffic due to double-parkers, opening car doors, and general carelessness, and currently the WMATA and Circulator buses run slow as molasses and get bunched up on K due to all of the traffic. Making L bus/bike only would fix this, but how to implement this I haven’t the foggiest clue.
June 11th, 2009 at 10:27 am
“In London, where there are dedicated bus lanes, a congestion charge, and very frequent service, everybody takes the bus, including people with six and seven figure City salaries.”
I wouldn’t go as far as to say everyone takes the bus, but certainly it spans the classes. There are plenty of routes where the underground or overground trains will be quicker than a bus, so they’re the default. But, where there is a bus service, there are almost no routes where a car would be quicker.
June 11th, 2009 at 10:30 am
Let me just add that a big reason why L.A.’s Westside lacks mass transit right now is because of Westside politicians like Zev Yaroslavsky and Henry Waxman working against a subway being built to their area.
It’s the same reason why there’s no freeway in Beverly Hills — wealthy areas and their politicians clamoring against transportation infrastructure.
June 11th, 2009 at 10:35 am
So buses suck unless they don’t suck.
That seems obvious, and yet there are some people who will argue that buses suck even if they don’t suck.
June 11th, 2009 at 10:43 am
I miss good bus service and small-to-mid-sized cities used to provide it. I went to work by bus — 2 transfers! — when I got out of high school, and it wasn’t too bad. My grandfather — an executive at a bank — used to take the bus to work in the 1950s. In the summer of 1965, I visited a friend who lived in a city of less than 50,000 people and it provided a bus service. They were small vehicles and carried around 10 people. Like a van. But they were (relatively) timely and let us move all around the city. Which we needed since we were too old to hang around at his house and too young to drive.
These days, when we visit big cities like Chicago or NYC, we take the bus as often as we take rail.
At home, though, I live around a mile to work and if I don’t drive my car or ride my bike, I walk. It’s a ~20 minute walk and it would be a $1 charge for the bus and a 20 minute wait if I miss the scheduled run. (Note to bus drivers: it’s merely inconvenient if you’re late, but it’s a mortal sin to leave the stop early.)
June 11th, 2009 at 10:50 am
Many of the big-city transit plans I’ve done have dealt with this issue.
The political problem with bus lanes is that their positive impact is spread out over the whole corridor while their negative impact (usually loss on-street parking) is intensely felt at a single point, e.g. a convenience store that’s losing its parking space in front. As with many transit proposals, the negatively impacted people plus all their neighbors and friends and customers will sound a lot louder, politically, than the people who might ride the bus if it ran faster. It’s very hard for a local politician to support a bus lane when that happens.
Part of the problem is that transit agencies often approach the problem too humbly. They ask “what can we do to speed up the buses a little?” They need to ask “how fast should our network be?” Set a standard and then implement it. That’s how the highway engineers did it!
So you need to be pursuing a citywide network of reliable bus services. In some cities we’ve done this by defining a network of services that would be fast and reliable, and then establishing a policy operating speed standard, much like the “level of service” that road planners use. If the operating speed drops below the standard, you have a “deficiency” which triggers a study of remedial action, which might be a segment of bus lane.
If you can build a constituency around a whole network, and an operating speed standard for it, then each individual battle to remove a parking space is about “implementing the network,” and you’re more likely to win that battle.
June 11th, 2009 at 10:52 am
Bus system in NYC is used by all and works very well. I was just in yesterday visiting a distant (but very wealthy) relative who takes the bus everywhere. He loved that he could get anywhere for only a dollar (he’s an older gentleman).
I think regardless of how wealthy many people are, they like to save money. They like to think they’re getting a good deal. They like to spend their money efficiently. Bus appeals to people of all income brackets!
June 11th, 2009 at 11:28 am
Matt, also consider that legislators have more of an incentive to provide good, frequent transportation to wealthy people who will, ideally, use it to go to commerce centers and spend loads of money. The poor are unlikely to do that.
June 11th, 2009 at 11:33 am
I’m generally a fan of DC buses. At least the ones I use, the L2/L4 on Connecticut Avenue and the 42 in Adams Morgan. I do have a lot of friends who avoid them, but my experience has been that they’re actually reasonably reliable (no more than 5 minutes late 75% of the time, a little less reliable on weekends). I also like to save myself some frustration by carrying a schedule with me. While Metro is okay (also reasonably reliable, say, 70% of the time, but much less reliable than a few years ago), I like traveling aboveground when I can if I’m not in a hurry.
The basic problem is, of course, traffic. If traffic is awful, then the buses will run slow too (along with cabs, which are supposed to be designed to get you places fast in exchange for paying 10 times more). Less traffic, better buses.
One final bit of praise for WMATA’s new edition buses, too. They’re much quieter than the traditional buses (no more rattling windows when the bus hits a bump).
June 11th, 2009 at 11:36 am
I live in the LA area. There are commuter tracks that run between my house and within 2 miles of my work. It’s a 30 minute drive to school. To catch a train, I’d have to leave 3 hours earlier than I normally would. Part of this is the infrequently-running trains. But another part is the 90 minute 2 mile bus ride from the train station to work.
I used to think that a shuttle was the solution here. But then I realized that the train still runs so infrequently that I’d have to leave at least two hours earlier than I would if I drove. All horribly inconvenient.
(And then there’s the problem where trains stop at midnight, and are unusable if I want to go out and see a show and come home late at night.)
This problem seems easy to solve. Yet it won’t be.
June 11th, 2009 at 11:41 am
What we need is the SUPERBUS.
If you give people good coffee and good music, they’ll get out of their cars and ride the bus.
June 11th, 2009 at 12:29 pm
solved ur problem
June 11th, 2009 at 12:38 pm
My husband uses the bus occasionally to get to and from his work. He’d use it more frequently but for two problems: the bus only comes every half hour (and stops at 7:30 pm, which means he doesn’t always make the last bus) and has a horrifically large error bar in its schedule. Sometimes, it’s fifteen minutes early, sometimes twenty minutes late, and there’s no way to predict which it will be on any given day. If buses are incapable of keeping to a schedule, and let’s face it, city traffic will always make things a little unpredictable, then one vast improvement would be a way to check when the bus will actually arrive. An update accessible by cell phone would help a lot. Given the number of people who now have cell phones and the advent of GPS devices, this should be feasible, if not quite economical yet. But it would do a lot to improve bus systems.
As Matt may remember, in college some enterprising students set up a system to track the various campus shuttles. At the time, I think that it was based off the published schedules, but it was quite useful, none the less.
June 11th, 2009 at 1:02 pm
Philadelphia has pretty good coverage by mass trans, between commuter train, subway, and bus… but it’s all designed to get people in and out of the city, and around the city. I live in one suburban community and work in another – 7 miles as the crow flies, but if I wanted to take public transit it would take me 35 miles and 3 bus routes to get to and from work.
My wife is in the same situation with her job – 7 miles the other direction from our house. So we have to have two cars, with all the attendant costs involved.
Sure, one or the other (or both) of us could look for work in the city…. and take a resulting cut in pay, benefits, and add an additional 3% income tax. No thanks.
June 11th, 2009 at 1:10 pm
I would imagine that only warfare has failed as long and as spectacularly as the bus and still maintained a hold on the public purse.
The first buses in America were pulled by horses. They were called omnibuses, and conditions aboard them made the Tokyo subway look like a model of decorum by contrast. Naturally cities seized any opportunity to upgrade to rail, even cable cars which, with cables several miles long, were a nontrivial proposition.
Detroit, perhaps unsurprisingly, was the first city to endorse ‘bus rapid transit’- in 1919. This immediately put Detroit public transit in a terminal decline from which it has never recovered, in spite (or because?) of repeated efforts by the city to build ‘bus rapid transit’.
If you consider your time to be of any value (and naturally most wealthy people do) you won’t cherish those hours on the bus. One solution is to move to a trusted bus line that takes you directly to work. Unfortunately, one of the selling points of the bus has always been its ‘flexibility’, which in plain English means the routes get changed.
What can be done is for the transit agency to upgrade bus routes to electric trolleybus routes. Hanging the wire is a pretty good sign the route is there to stay, and the electric buses have better acceleration and are almost silent, a blessing for riders and nearby residents alike.
And, who knows, maybe the electric bus route will attract enough residents and businesses that eventually it could be upgraded to a streetcar. It seems that many upscale passengers who won’t ride a bus will ride a streetcar. Something to do with streetcars being quieter and having a smoother ride, I imagine.
June 11th, 2009 at 1:24 pm
Battling a busload of hypercaffeinated people for control of the radio dial on the way to work? Sounds great!
June 11th, 2009 at 2:49 pm
It’s odd when Matt turns all hyper-rationalist reductionist, isn’t it?
The fact is, well-off people avoid the bus. When I lived in Hyde Park, Chicago, Illinois, well-off people took the Metra, while poor folk (and me) rode the #6 Express bus. The Metra was slightly faster, but for most terminated at a less convenient spot. It was more predictable–it ran on time–but didn’t come often. The bus wasn’t entirely predictable, but was predictable enough, was less expensive, and came a few times an hour.
June 11th, 2009 at 3:10 pm
I live in Stockholm, Sweden (yes, I know that is much different than the U.S. as I come from Atlanta) where there is a fabulous bus system that works in tandem with the subway and commuter trains. Everybody uses all of them all the time. But again, this is NOT the U.S.
June 11th, 2009 at 3:14 pm
“If you consider your time to be of any value (and naturally most wealthy people do) you won’t cherish those hours on the bus”
I do. Well, cherish may be a bit strong, but it gives me an opportunity to read the paper, catch up on podcasts or do some work. You can’t use a laptop while driving a car.
June 11th, 2009 at 3:53 pm
Ah Al, a Singles reference, who knew you could be so hip, or maybe you’re not and I’m really old…
June 11th, 2009 at 4:22 pm
Let me show you around the Utica/Rome (NY) area. You have two small cities about ten miles apart which are not connected by either of their bus systems, both of which suck.
Rome’s buses go to the shopping centers to the retirement homes to the hospitals, and nowhere else. They have zero stops in anyone’s neighborhood, although Rome’s streets are laid out in a neat grid that would suggest that a properly run bus system is at least possible.
Utica’s bus lines sprawl quite a bit, to the point where most of the suburbs are covered, but it takes forever to get anywhere. A trip that would take fifteen minutes by car takes an hour and a half by bus. Life’s too short.
Then there is the information problem. The only place I have ever seen bus schedules is online. Not in any public places, not at any of the nearly invisible bus stops, nowhere.
Then there’s the layout. It’s not as farked up as Rome’s, but it’s bigger. A few wheels around the hub-and-spokes system would help a lot. So would a connector between Rome and Utica. So would a few express park-and-ride lines on the numbered highways.
As a result of all of this, I rarely see anyone actually riding a bus around here. I might hop on one with a laptop and a video camera to prove my point to the county people who make the decisions, hopefully before gas goes back to four bucks a gallon.
June 11th, 2009 at 4:35 pm
We live in a close-in suburb of Pittsburgh. After a joint morning appointment last week, I dropped my wife off at her downtown office with the plan that she would catch a bus to a large park’n'ride lot near a movie theater where I would take our children to see Up. I’d then pick her up and we’d head home.
She found that by leaving her office at 6:00 (hardly a long day) there was no bus service to the park and ride any more, so I had to end up driving half way into the city to pick her up at the furthest point north she could reach. Now the Port Authority is planning on cutting bus service further, and I have to wonder what is left to cut if you can’t even rely on them for a standard working day.
June 11th, 2009 at 5:19 pm
Atrios (and Matt) seem to have very little experience living outside their cliquish anti-suburbanite bubble. Anyone in the Northeast who can afford not to take a bus will not take a bus. No one likes standing in the rain or cold waiting for a bus, no one likes the inconvenience of being tied to a schedule, uncomfortable seats or maybe no seats, feeling stressed out when you miss your bus, etc. Most people like cars and are very happy driving them to work. Is this life style untenable? probably, but liberals need an attitude change to help push for reform. Don’t tell people they’re idiots or snobs for not riding the bus, that won’t work.
June 11th, 2009 at 5:31 pm
As another DC public transit commuter, I have to take issue with some of the claims being thrown around. I’ve lived and worked in several places in downtown, Georgetown, and in the less-nice areas of northeast, and the buses are pretty much universally good… in the morning.
By the afternoon, though, it’s a just as universal clusterf*@k. I hate to be the one to point fingers, but there’s just as much traffic during the morning rush as during the afternoon, but the buses manage to be more or less on time in the morning, and hellishly late in the afternoon. Inevitably, I’ll wait 30 minutes at a bus stop where there is supposed to be a bus every 6-8 minutes, and then a caravan of 4 tailgating buses will pull up together. I really think that DC has just done a terrible job training its drivers or mandating that they keep to their schedules. I dunno if this is a common issue in busy cities, or a uniquely DC problem, but it seems to me that the bus timeliness problem could be fixed with relatively little time and money and some better training.
June 11th, 2009 at 6:39 pm
The fact is, well-off people avoid the bus. When I lived in Hyde Park, Chicago, Illinois, well-off people took the Metra, while poor folk (and me) rode the #6 Express bus. The Metra was slightly faster, but for most terminated at a less convenient spot. It was more predictable–it ran on time–but didn’t come often. The bus wasn’t entirely predictable, but was predictable enough, was less expensive, and came a few times an hour.
The 6 is terrible. But, at the same time, it is a model of efficiency compared to many other Chicago bus routes.
The 6, the 55, and the other South Side (poor people! hurrah!) buses tend to be driven by incompetents, stop nearly every block, and bunch up.
I cannot tell you how many times this has happened. Chicago “averages” a bus every quarter hour or so, but only by allowing two or even three buses to arrive at once. The city constantly proclaims that this is a problem they are “taking steps” to end, but eppur si muove.
Unfortunately, Chicago’s train system is abysmal; during rush hour, the entire CTA outperforms the Lexington Ave trio. So, everyone’s forced to take the bus.
Chicago ought to have a wide ranging rail grid. Instead, it has two shitty lines to take people out to the airports, a single line to service the ballparks and allow 20 somethings to go bar hopping on the North Side, and the rest to provide a pittance of service to the poorer areas of the city.
The fact that Chicago relies so much on buses only serves to increase the already terrific congestion that the city’s overworked road network can’t handle. Meaning pretty much anywhere you look, your commute is going to suck. Except, perhaps, the Metra.
June 11th, 2009 at 6:54 pm
Re: Vancouver compared to Seattle or Toronto compared with Buffalo.
Seattle and Vancouver may be comparable cities, but comparing Toronto to Buffalo is like comparing a watermelon to a grapes. Toronto is best compared to Chicago, or maybe even NYC.
June 11th, 2009 at 9:16 pm
lack of champaign on public buses “(Well, unless you sit in the back with the winos. Who are the only interesting people on the transport anyway.)” I though that winos are partial to non-sparkling wines.
Personally, I thought about an idea to popularize long distance trains: have legal drinking age reduced to 18 for train passengers. It is logical: the increase to 21 was argued as a measure to increase driving safety. The inspiration was a promotion of “party zug” by Deutche Bahn (zug = train, actually, partyzug in German) for German Spring Break.
Say, it would take 48 hours from Minnesota to Florida, but with booze and company, it would not be overly long ride (conductors would be trained to check symptoms of alcohol poisoning).
Actually, in a similar way, passenger boat traffic could be revived. Say, students from Pittsburgh could travel by boat toward New Orleans, Friday-Monday cruise, sober out a bit (thouse under 21), and then take Thursday-Sunday cruise back.
June 12th, 2009 at 7:49 am
#4 and #52
Buffalonians are a much higher class of people than Maple Leaf fans so this is naturally reflected in the transit ridership.
The denizens of Yorkville really drag down Toronto’s overall class rating.