Interesting - I thought that mapping apps on smartphones would change the trend of decline at least a little. One of the challenges of buses is knowing which routes are which, which is often far more difficult to figure out than subway if you are not a regular user. But mapping apps say, "catch the XYZ bus at this stop and get off here" and real-time bus prediction apps that tell you when the bus coming solve those problems. I guess that hypothesis was wrong (though it has been true for me personally that I take the bus a lot more often).
The Mystery of the Missing Bus Riders
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Re: The Mystery of the Missing Bus Riders
#12Can't we just "check in" to a bus stop on an app, then have the bus create a route based on 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.
Re: The Mystery of the Missing Bus Riders
#13Busses are very very slow. Unless you're in a very dense urban area, the extra time to take the bus is unpalatable. The segment of the population that doesn't have a car but can afford Uber Pool will take it because it's about 3x faster and more reliable.
it's more nuanced than that. shared/pool rides being faster is a function of distance (which is correlated to delays).
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.
Re: The Mystery of the Missing Bus Riders
#14In New York, specifically, it's not much of a mystery - the incredibly close stop spacing and inefficient boarding procedures make it so the bus is barely faster than walking. 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…
I think it can be done if you pair changes like removing stops with other improvements that bus riders will appreciate. For example, in my neighborhood the city recently introduced a dedicated bus lane down a major road, and removed a couple stops at the same time to streamline the bus route. I've been following the results somewhat closely, and I haven't heard any complaints about missing stops, only complaints from car drivers.
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.
Re: The Mystery of the Missing Bus Riders
#15If they took the 2% least savory bus riders and kicked them off, even calling them an Uber Black, I think they’d triple their ridership.
I stopped riding the bus mainly due to social reasons: there was always somebody on every trip watching TV on their phone without headphones.
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.
Re: The Mystery of the Missing Bus Riders
#16Busses are very very slow. Unless you're in a very dense urban area, the extra time to take the bus is unpalatable. The segment of the population that doesn't have a car but can afford Uber Pool will take it because it's about 3x faster and more reliable.
it's more nuanced than that. shared/pool rides being faster is a function of distance (which is correlated to delays). 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…
They’re wildly faster than buses on routes where buses don’t run or where a transfer is needed.
Re: The Mystery of the Missing Bus Riders
#17Fun fact for folks in Seattle, San Diego, Tampa, Washington, D.C., Spokane, etc: Professor Kari Watkins, mentioned in the article, is the co-creator of OneBusAway.
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.)
Re: The Mystery of the Missing Bus Riders
#18If they took the 2% least savory bus riders and kicked them off, even calling them an Uber Black, I think they’d triple their ridership.
I stopped riding the bus mainly due to social reasons: there was always somebody on every trip watching TV on their phone without headphones. 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…
It is the stacking social ills problem. If SF had an effective set of homeless policies/programs then they wouldn't misuse the bus.
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.
Re: The Mystery of the Missing Bus Riders
#19In our area it has been a cycle for the last 10 years. Lower funding means route contraction. Route contraction means lower ridership leading to lower funding. Lower funding leads to route contraction. Wash. Rinse Repeat. 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 wi…
We did the opposite in Seattle and have seen impressive results. In 2014, we voted--in the city, after a countywide measure failed--to tax ourselves to buy a whole lot more service hours from the county transit agency. Originally this was because slumping sales tax income was going to force the county to cut service but, instead, sales tax income came roaring back and the city was able to buy so much extra service fr…
> 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).
This was utterly maddening. A bunch of... Politically-opinionated persons in rural Washington voted for legislature that bans Seattle from taxing its residents.
Re: The Mystery of the Missing Bus Riders
#20It's kind of incredible the article doesn't mention it, but the typical city bus makes sounds at a decibel level that is harmful to the human body (anything above 85 dB is harmful).
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.