Matt Yglesias

Bus Stops: Better Fewer, But Better

I noticed in Hamburg that many German bus stations smartly include signs that provide information (provided by GPS I assume) about when which buses are arriving. This seems like a strategy that’s full of win—very useful to riders and beyond its practical usefulness it’s just psychologically reassuring in a way that can make the bus much more appealing to casual users:

Rathausmarkt Bus Station, Hamburg, Germany (my photo available under cc license)

In Berlin having acquired some experience riding the 100 and 200 bus lines over the past couple of days I can say that another good idea from German bus service is that the buses seem to stop less frequently than our buses in DC. Fewer bus stops means faster travel times which are good on their own terms and also allow for more frequent service (since a given vehicle can make more trips per day if it goes faster) which is great as well. Washington is doing some experimenting with limited-stop bus service on Georgia Avenue and 16th Street but beyond those extreme cases it seems to me that most bus lines could easily afford to have 1/3 or 1/2 of their current stops eliminated and they’d still be stopping pretty darn frequently.

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.

Creative Bus Stops

Lots of examples of interesting bus shelters from around the world.

A BRT Plan for DC

Dave Alpert reports that “A committee of the Transportation Planning Board has developed a Bus Rapid Transit network proposal spanning the entire region, from Laurel to Lorton.” I’d like to see this eventually become the map of a streetcar system for the Washington, DC area but you couldn’t complete such a project in time to qualify for an American Recovery and Reinvestment Act grant. And a good BRT system could lay the groundwork for a future upgrade to rail. Besides which, this system would be a very useful thing to have on its own terms, so I hope other leaders in the region will get behind it:

The “rapid transit” elements in this “bus rapid transit” plan are “signal priority, some exclusive lanes or queue jumpers in congested areas, bus stops with fare prepayment and electronic real-time bus information, and low-floor buses” which could be done for about $200 million.

My only concern about this is that I don’t understand why the Orange Line of this network stops in Foggy Bottom when it seems like you could add a lot of value by extending the line slightly to Georgetown.

My Kind of Book

Sometimes the publishing house PR people do a good job of deciding who needs review copies of what, and thus I recently opened up a package to discover My Kind of Transit My Kind of Transit: Rethinking Public Transportation in America. I haven’t had a chance to read it yet, but in the interests of rewarding those who send me books I’m actually interested in, why not offer you some PR copy:

In America’s car-dominated landscape, public transit has long played second fiddle, but rising gasoline prices and the global warming crisis point to a need for alternative means of transportation. Darrin Nordahl sets the stage for these efforts by proposing that the experience of public transit and the quality of the ride are pivotal to the success of public transit.

My Kind of Transit explores America’s most beloved transit systems and how they work. From San Francisco’s cable cars to Pittsburgh’s funiculars to the streetcars of New Orleans, Nordahl recounts a transportation history of both short-sighted planning and visionary policies, and reveals that current American transit systems contain many key elements for successfully expanding public transport. My Kind of Transit explains the characteristics of ideal transit, or “passenger enrichment,” such as transit vehicles that offer views of the surrounding landscape and systems that enable diverse peoples to interact.

Successful public transport must be a uniquely enjoyable experience for riders, My Kind of Transit contends, and it offers a new vision of civic engagement that occurs when we step out of our cars and onto the train.

At first glance, I do think that this sort of issue is oftentimes under-appreciated. Streetcar systems have some substantial advantages over buses. But I don’t think that reciting those advantages, in a technical sense, fully captures the difference. Something like the Barcelona Tram is cool and futuristic, and the MetroBus in DC is not. On some level, it’s just impossible for a bus to replicate that—no bus can ever be as quiet or smooth. But DC’s Circulator bus actually does a pretty good job of capturing some of that “cool and futuristic” appeal while running alongside WMATA’s generally unappealing main bus service.

Better Bus Info

Also on Rob Goodspeed’s blog is an old-but-good post on improving the visual presentation of bus schedule and route data. This isn’t the kind of local government reform that makes for stirring oratory or gets you on the cover of Time magazine but it makes a lot of difference in people’s lives. Better, more usable buses would be good for bus riders and drivers alike.

Wanted: Better Buses

Cavan Wilk posts a DC area transit wish-list for both the near- and the short-term. But he leaves off what I think is one of the very most promising things a city like ours can do — improve bus service. Unlike rail projects, bus improvements can be feasibly undertaken in piecemeal ways rather than in quantum leaps. You can buy a few more vehicles and increase service frequency. You can add bus lanes just on parts of routes. You can build a handful of bulb-outs to speed boarding. Nothing needs to be done in gigantic, multibillion dollar leaps. And relative to rail, buses are disproportionately likely to be used by full-time residents (as opposed to tourists) and by poor people both of which are appropriate targets for our disproportionate concern.

One particular low cost thing that would improve DC’s bus service would be to redesign the little schedule cards that are posted at most bus stops. The way this information is currently displayed in DC does not reflect state-of-the-art thinking and should be changed. They should probably also consider eliminating stops on many lines so as to allow buses to run the route more quickly and therefore also arrive more often. Rather than walking two blocks and waiting five minutes for the bus which then moves slowly to your destination I think most people would rather walk five blocks, wait one minute for the bus, and then get where you’re going quickly. Beyond that — bus lanes, bulb-outs, more buses, better shelters — it’s all pretty obvious what would make for better bus service. It’s mostly an issue of financial and political commitment, but it can do a lot to improve quality of life in the area.

People Not Vehicles

It seems that the goal of the Maryland State Highway Administration “is to get the most vehicles through the area in the most predictable way possible.” You often see transportation departments using metrics of this sort to evaluate different ideas. And it sounds at first glance a bit like common sense. But as Dave Alpert points out a small change in wording can make a big difference:

Even pedestrians aside, the goal should be to get the most people through the area, not the most vehicles. It’s an important distinction, since one bus carries as many people as a whole lane of cars.

Indeed. If you take a big, heavily trafficked urban thoroughfare — say a boulevard with three lanes in each direction that features a somewhat frequent, fairly popular bus line — and change it to two lanes of traffic in each direction, you’ll reduce the number of vehicles but possibly increase the number of people. The dedicates bus lane will speed the buses up. And since the buses now move faster, the exact same number of buses and bus drivers will be able to service the route on a more frequent schedule, since they’ll reach the turnaround points quicker. This would make the bus service into a more attractive option and if more people take the new, faster bus the increased fare revenue could support a further increase in the number of buses and drivers serving the route.

That all would, in turn, somewhat reduce the number of cars driving the route as some people switch away from the now-less-desirable driving option and onto the now-more-desirable bus option. That reduction in car volume would, in turn, somewhat counteract the increased congestion associated with the decrease in the number of lanes. A new equilibrium would eventually be reached. To estimate whether the new equilibrium would move people faster or slower than the old equilibrium would be a bit complicated and depend on various factors, estimates, etc. But if you’re considering making the switch, that would be the right thing to consider — the impact on the volume of people, not the impact on the volume of vehicles.

Beyond that, a transportation agency should probably take a somewhat broader view of its mandate and also think about things like the impact on the environment and economic development. But, at a minimum, when looking at transportation qua transportation you should be looking at the transportation of individuals rather than the transportation of conveyances. The essence of traffic congestion is that certain kinds of space are at a premium, so ignoring the fact that different modes of move people involving taking up more or less space means you’re missing a big piece of the puzzle.

A Trolleybus Named Desire

Someone in comments quipped sarcastically when he read I was going to be in Geneva that he was looking forward to jejune commentary on Geneva public transit. I don’t really know what jejune means, but it doesn’t sound good. At any rate, as this alert fellow noticed, I don’t like to go anywhere without offering uninformed remarks on local transit issues.

So as for Geneva, let’s start with the trolleybus. There seem to be quite a lot of these around, and I also saw a bunch in Nizhny Novgorod and a few (but only a few) in the Boston area but I think they’re generally rare in the United States. The idea is that you take a bus (albeit in Geneva a long articulated bus) and power it by electricity rather than gas or diesel. The electricity is supplied not via an awesome new engine/battery technology, but rather by an overhead wire à la a streetcar. This combination gives you the low emissions of a streetcar, the low operating costs of a streetcar, and much of the air of permanence of a streetcar but with fewer of the fixed startup costs of a streetcar. In other words, it’s some pretty useful technology that would probably be worth considering in many cities for the most popular bus routes.

That said, whenever I see a low emissions modification of a bus (trolley bus, bus powered by natural gas, etc.) I worry that forests are getting missed for the trees. Even if you take the dirtiest bus imaginable, two dozen people taking the bus to work every day creates much less pollution than two dozen people driving two dozen cars. And the availability of a good bus commuting option for some of your city’s citizens also reduces the volume of car ownership per capita which has further pollution-reduction effects. In other words — getting people to take the bus, any bus, rather than drive is a big win for the environment.

Under the circumstances, the precise environmental quality of your buses should be a distinctly secondary consideration. Your primary concern, even in strictly environmental concerns, shouldn’t be trying to reduce the footprint of individual buses it should be trying to make the bus a more appealing option. Spending marginal dollars on increasing the frequency and overall cleanliness/appeal of your buses and bus shelters can have major environmental impacts. So can creating and enforcing key stretches of dedicated bus lanes. Better maps to help sporadic users and new residents come to understand their bus network are nice. And using modern technology to allow shelters to provide digital readouts showing how soon the next bus is coming (as the DC Metro does for trains, and as a few of the shelters here in Geneva seem to do) makes the whole enterprise lower stress.

BRT Done Right

So-called “bus rapid transit” — basically upgraded bus services — is a very promising transit option. It’s cheaper than rail and, perhaps more importantly, can be put into place faster. It’s not an adequate substitute for rail, but it is a very useful addition to the toolkit. But one major problem with BRT is that really excellent BRT systems exist on a continuum with plain old buses, which can encourage cities to wind up cutting corners and rolling out a substandard product while claiming to be embracing BRT. Streetfilms takes an interesting look at le Mobilien, an excellent Paris BRT system that provides a good example of what BRT done right would look like.

Counterflow Bus Lanes

Dedicated bus lanes are a pretty good idea that can have a pretty dramatic impact on the quality of bus service and don’t carry a large fiscal cost. But most places I’ve seen them, and certainly DC’s bus lanes southbound on 9th Street and northbound on 7th Street, the paint is regularly ignored by drivers which sort of defeats the purpose. How to increase compliance? Well, I saw this in Minneapolis:

The lane goes the wrong way on a one way street. That means that drivers inclined to switch out of a car lane and into the bus lane are running the risk of a deadly head-on collision with a bus, thus creating a good incentive to follow the law. I’m not certain that was the intention of establishing the lane in a counterflow direction (I can think of other rationales) but it’s certainly one effect and maybe something other cities should consider.

A New U Street

U Street, the main commerical corridor in my neighborhood, is in line for a bit of a makeover. Dave Alpert’s rundown of the good ideas and missed opportunities is worth checking out even for those who don’t live in the neighborhood as it illustrates some general principles. As an area resident, one thing I’d like to see would be bike lines on V Street and W Street — the narrow one-way streets just south of U (T, R, and Q) have them, so I don’t see why their more northerly counterparts can’t as well, both streets are just the right width.