Better Transit Information
Adam Kotsko correctly observes that improving the job mass transit agencies do of conveying information to the public is one of the most cost-effective ways to make service more useful to people. After all, a bus route that nobody knows about doesn’t help anyone.
As he observes, this problem tends to get particularly bad in smaller cities. The reason, I assume, is that public sector agencies usually only do a good job of customer service if someone for some reason makes it a particular point of political emphasis. And in a small city like his example of Kalamzoo, the bus system is probably a sufficiently marginal phenomenon that nobody wants to raise it.
The good news is that thanks to GPS and smart phones, we’re now living in a golden age in terms of what it’s possible to accomplish in this regard. The NextBusDC iPhone ap can figure out where you are, which bus stops you’re near, which lines stop there, and when the buses are coming (not just when they’re scheduled to come, but actually when they’re likely to show up) thanks to GPS transmitters on the buses. In general one of the best things a city can do these days is simply open information flows up so that third parties can develop interesting applications. If Google can access your city’s public transit scheduling data, then people can use Google Transit to figure out how to get where they’re going and your agency doesn’t need to worry about coming up with a better map-making program than Google’s. But by the same token, if some rival firm does invent a “better than Google” mapping program, they’ll be able to access your data too and launch a competing product.
30 Responses to “Better Transit Information”
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October 26th, 2009 at 9:29 am
Yeah, well, it doesn’t matter how good Google Transit is if the MTA shuts down all F train service between Church Ave. and Jay Street for an entire weekend with no advance warning. People are going to be pretty pissed off.
Or maybe I’m just venting.
October 26th, 2009 at 9:36 am
James, maybe they didn’t have enough signs but I did see them at the Roosevelt Avenue station a couple of weeks ago.
October 26th, 2009 at 9:47 am
SEPTA has an online Train Tracking function, which is a step in the right direction. Two considerable flaws, though.
1) Trains are identified by number, not some characteristic time. Who knows the 4-digit number of their train? Certainly not as many who know it pulls into 30th St at 7:58.
2) Info about trains doesn’t seem to appear until the train has left its origination point. So if you meet the train at one of the first few stops, you’ve got to leave the house at the usual time even if the train is very late or canceled (like this morning!).
October 26th, 2009 at 9:48 am
Perfect example of where free market solutions are appropriate.
October 26th, 2009 at 9:55 am
As far as I can tell, DC’s next bus service is completely useless. For example, the L2 was scheduled to hit my stop this weekend at 11:14. I called next bus, which said it would arrive at 11:16. It actually showed up at 11:12. Next Bus made it *more* likely that I would miss the bus. I have tested Next Bus on a number of occasions, and it is often completely wrong. That is not helpful.
October 26th, 2009 at 9:57 am
These solutions from google etc. are great. But note that if the transit companies themselves were private entities, you would not have a lack-of-information problem (unless the companies were blindingly stupid).
Of course, transit systems hardly ever make money, so truly privatized transit seems unlikely. But why is that?
October 26th, 2009 at 9:57 am
Hmf. The signs should’ve been bigger.
October 26th, 2009 at 9:58 am
You know what else would really help the DC bus system? Some way to buy passes. Correct me if I’m wrong, maybe there is an alternative I just haven’t been able to find, but the only ways for an able-bodied non-senior citizen to pay for a bus are cash or a SmarTrip card, right? And I do know that if you want to pay with cash, you can’t get change. It’s on my mind because I’ve had family visit a couple times recently, and paying for busses has been a problem.
A SmarTrip is fine for frequent bus users like me, but for a hypothetical person who doesn’t use them much but wants to start, or for guests – which you’d think would be obvious in a city with as many tourists as DC gets – they have to either carry exact change, or overpay and eat the loss, or not take busses. Which is really stupid.
October 26th, 2009 at 10:18 am
All over Europe you can buy tickets from machines in stations and in every “kiosk” (here it could be wherever lotto tickets are sold!). In most places, tickets are valid within zones for both buses and metro (subway/tram). Tickets are available for single trips, by the week, by the month, and by the year.
You’d think our own transit systems would have noticed and adapted…but, no.
October 26th, 2009 at 10:26 am
Privatizing public transit would make sense as long as we privatized all roads at the same time.
October 26th, 2009 at 10:36 am
I think you are missing a small detail. Most people don’t a smart phone (with or w/out GPS) and that is unlikely to change any time soon.
October 26th, 2009 at 10:45 am
I couldn’t make heads or tails of Memphis’s bus system until Google Transit imported their route data. Then I discovered there’s a bus that runs practically from my front door to my place of employment, which I now use all the time.
October 26th, 2009 at 10:47 am
Yeah, all we need is to outfit all of the buses with GPS, set up a system for organizing and updating the data and making it accessible for outside developers, and then get everyone who rides the bus an iphone. Step 3: profit.
October 26th, 2009 at 10:55 am
More information is useful, I agree with that whole heartedly. This past week I would have loved to be in the LRT station in Minneapolis and known when the next train was coming.
But for transit to be truly helpful, we need more of it that isn’t just funneling people into the center of the city. We need more suburb to suburb options. Need more reverse commuting options. We need suburban job centers to be more transit friendly – no walking across huge parking lots from bus stop to building.
I realize things are different in the Midwest from the East (which tend to be denser with more extensive transit options), but these are problems that a lot of cities face.
October 26th, 2009 at 11:04 am
Another problem in smaller cities is there aren’t enough bus shelters or even clearly designated bus stops–you might be standing in a snow drift in the pitch black near a battered sign waiting for the bus to show.
October 26th, 2009 at 11:19 am
Getting Greedy.
It seems to me that it should be possible and not to costly to put a gizmo on buses (and subway trains) which roughly measures how crowded the bus or train is.
It would be very convenient to know that the bus which is going to arrive 3 blocks from here in 7 minutes and go the 5 blocks from where I want to be is standing room only. It would be even more useful to be warned that it is packed to the room for one more only if everyone exhales level.
I live in Rome where crowding of subway trains varies from standing room only to waiting to exhale.
Why settle for time alone. Space is the final frontier.
October 26th, 2009 at 11:36 am
Irrespective of content, it must be pointed out that “Enlarged Views of Downtown Kalamazoo” is a legitimate rival to “Worthwhile Canadian Initiative” as the least exciting headline ever written.
October 26th, 2009 at 11:37 am
Yes, Kalamazoo is a spot on the map
And the passenger trains stop there
And the factory smokestacks smoke
And the grocery stores are open Saturday nights
And the streets are free for citizens who vote
And inhabitants counted in the census.
Saturday night is the big night.
Listen with your ears on a Saturday night in Kalamazoo
And say to yourself: I hear America, I hear, what do I hear?
http://www.bartleby.com/231/0228.html
October 26th, 2009 at 11:48 am
Of course, transit systems hardly ever make money, so truly privatized transit seems unlikely. But why is that?
Because it costs more to run busses or metro lines (especially the latter, I’ll bet) than people are willing to pay in fares, but it’s still worth having the option because of the myriad positive externalities? Because a privatized transit company would try to offer tiered service to make money from the people who can afford to pay more, but tiered bus service would, from a PR standpoint, be radioactive? Because there would be no meaningful competition – there’s only one network per area – so any private transit provider would be a monopoly, so it would need to be heavily regulated anyway? Just guesses.
October 26th, 2009 at 12:01 pm
Georgetown and the surrounding areas on the island of Panang in Malaysia have private bus system. There’s about half a dozen companies with some complementary and some competing routes. I’ve never been so terrified as the time I took a bus along the North coast of the island. My bus and another from a rival company were in direct competition for fares, and were extremely aggressively passing each other to get first crack at the next bus stop on a winding narrow two-lane road.
October 26th, 2009 at 12:26 pm
Yeah, all we need is to outfit all of the buses with GPS, set up a system for organizing and updating the data and making it accessible for outside developers, and then get everyone who rides the bus an iphone. Step 3: profit.
Well, I dunno about step 3, but all the others seem pretty doable:
- Many, if not all, buses in major cities are already equipped with GPS. It’s cheap these days, and there are a lot of uses. Not just for Nextbus, but also for internal management functions, like supervision and route analysis and so forth.
- Systems for organizing and updating the data already exist and are in operation, e.g., Nextbus, Google Transit.
- Lots and lots of people already have smartphones. More everyday. And keep in mind: a) it’s not so much about the people already riding the bus – they already ride the bus, after all – it’s about new users discovering the bus via their smartphones; and b) today’s fancy pants iPhone is tomorrow’s $45 pre-paid phone – more and more people are going to be on the smartphone bandwagon soon, including lower-income segments that might not have them already.
October 26th, 2009 at 12:32 pm
Cyrus, pirate wench,
The issue about privatizing transit systems and making them profitable has to do with what is made valuable by having the transit system. Where does the additional money turn up.
Consider, for example, two tall buildings, one with an elevator, one without. Rents, especially for space high up in the building are higher in the one building because of the elevator. That’s where the building owner gets the money to run the elevator and that is why you don’t pay to use the elevator. If you had to pay to use the elevator, you would take your business elsewhere, making the rents in that building lower and reducing the income from those rents by more than the income that could be raised by charging for the elevator. It is far more profitable for the building owner to provide you vertical transportation for free and charge the renters more for rent, than to try and charge you for the vertical transportation and suffer the lower rents for building less in demand.
The issue is similar with transportation networks. For various reasons, a city, state or nation cannot provide free horizontal transportation. However providing transportation at rates that do no more than recover operating expenses (or perhaps even a bit less) can work, due to a similar mechanism as that for the building owner. Connect two points by a bus or train and the commerce between those points (and between those two points and other areas around them) go up increasing both the prosperity of the two areas and the revenue from taxes and government fees. It is from that increase in commerce then that the city, state or nation can earn the money to pay for the transportation system that makes that commerce possible. Much like the building owner makes money from increased rents due to the elevator.
October 26th, 2009 at 12:46 pm
“Irrespective of content, it must be pointed out that “Enlarged Views of Downtown Kalamazoo” is a legitimate rival to “Worthwhile Canadian Initiative” as the least exciting headline ever written.”
Downtown Kalamazoo has actually gotten more happening in the eight years I’ve lived here. And I gather that it’s night and day from what it was in the early 1990s.
October 26th, 2009 at 12:52 pm
“Downtown Kalamazoo has actually gotten more happening in the eight years I’ve lived here. And I gather that it’s night and day from what it was in the early 1990s.”
Glad to hear it. It was a dismal place when I was last there, over a decade ago.
October 26th, 2009 at 1:27 pm
Irrespective of content, it must be pointed out that “Enlarged Views of Downtown Kalamazoo” is a legitimate rival to “Worthwhile Canadian Initiative” as the least exciting headline ever written.”
At least Kalamazoo has a funny name. It sounds like it’s in Oz or a Dr. Seuss story. If it weren’t a small Midwestern city famous for nothing in particular (oh, silly me, how could I forget Tim Allen), it would be awesome.
October 26th, 2009 at 2:38 pm
My personal favorite is the system they have in Finland. The location of every bus and tram is tracked in real time and posted on a web page. You can watch the buses crawl along the map until it’s outside your door.
http://transport.wspgroup.fi/hklajoneuvot/
October 26th, 2009 at 2:53 pm
Given the PoMo premises that Kotzko typically favors–words, images, sentences don’t refer to a “real world’ outside the observer, and “truth” is meaningless–the Map of some idea-town we choose to call “Kalamazoo” doesn’t really mean anything, dewd. Public or private–bourgeois binary thinking as well. Our intrasubjective idea-town could just as easily be named ….Oozamalak. We might, or might not public-privatize the Oozamalak light-rail which is not a light-rail. Zut.
October 26th, 2009 at 6:21 pm
For all these free-market advocates, I offer a dose of reality: the private, profitable bus companies in New Jersey do not offer the kind of easy information you’re talking about.
October 26th, 2009 at 8:40 pm
I just checked, and sometime in the past few years the Madison Metro finally got an online route planner. Before then, their website said: “Email or call us with where you want to go and we’ll get back to you in 48-72 hours.”
October 27th, 2009 at 4:48 am
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