One plan under consideration for Webster Avenue would bring an element of true bus rapid transit to the Bronx (Via NYC DOT and MTA)

The absurdly painfully slow process of bringing simple bus lane improvements to one street in one borough has claimed another victim as the city and MTA are examining ways to speed up transit along Webster Ave. in the Bronx. This time around, the various stakeholders are looking at the B44, a so-called Phase 2 route. After identifying the route in 2009 as SBS-ready, the city hopes to launch service in late 2013. What a ridiculous timeframe.

Anyway, as the project ambles along slower than a crosstown bus at rush hour, the MTA and DOT hosted an open house on the Webster Ave. line. This routing is a north-south one that parallels the 4 and the B/D subway lines and connects the 2 and 5 trains at one end with the, uh, 2 and 5 trains at the other end. It also intersects with the Bx12 SBS route, and of the 125000 residents who live within a quarter mile of the route, the vast majority of them do not own cars. Currently, an end-to-end run on the bus can take up to an hour.

Last night at the open house, potential plans were laid out for all to see, and they finally included median bus lanes. Noah Kazis from Streetsblog was on hand to file a report. While the MTA and NYC are also considering curbside and offset bus lanes, the center lanes stole the show. Kazis writes:

Since bus riders wouldn’t be able to wait on the sidewalk to board the bus, DOT would build new protected platforms in the street. If the platforms are built totally level with the bus floor, as on the subway, this would make boarding the bus much faster, especially for the elderly or disabled. As on all SBS routes, passengers would pay their fares before boarding, allowing buses to spend time moving rather than waiting for each passenger to dip their MetroCard in turn.

Median-running bus lanes and platform-level boarding are two of the most important features of world-class BRT identified in the Institute for Transportation and Development Policy’s BRT Standard scorecard. Existing Select Bus Service routes haven’t met the threshold for bus rapid transit according to ITDP’s system; the Webster Avenue route, it seems, could break the mold.

The Webster Avenue project is still in a very early stage and all three options are little more than concepts at this point. However, the potential for serious transit improvements is especially high here, because there’s already strong political support for Select Bus Service. Both State Senator Gustavo Rivera and Assembly Member Vanessa Gibson have endorsed Webster Avenue SBS, though they have not spoken about particular designs. More than 50 people participated in Wednesday’s open house, said a DOT spokesperson, and were broadly supportive of the transit improvements.

Of course, as the before-and-after diagrams from the SBS presentation [pdf] make perfectly clear, parking spots will be lost and traffic lanes as well. The regular slew of NIMBY business owners will raise a stink, and perhaps, the city will “settle” for something less groundbreaking in another 15 months.

To this, I say, “Prove me wrong.” It’s bad enough that these SBS routes don’t cross borough boundaries and deliver people from the Bronx to, say, a job hub or an airport in Queens. But let’s bring truly dedicated lanes to an area that needs traffic mitigation and transit improvements. The next step will be doing it in less than 48 months but perhaps I’m getting ahead of myself.

©2012 Second Ave. Sagas. All Rights Reserved.

This short bit from The Post pretty much sums up the public reaction to the move. With an intentionally inflammatory headline, the article focuses on the popular routes — the M23 and Flatbush Avenue’s B41 — that will see longer headways at various times of the day. The changes themselves are cost-neutral to the MTA but will have an impact on riders.

According to the Transit materials, these schedule changes are “a product of NYC Transit’s continuing effort to review and revise bus and subway schedules to ensure that they accurately meet customer demand and are in compliance with with MTA Board-adopted bus loading guidelines.” Some schedule changes are due to surface transit conditions as well. According to the staff summary, the changes will add somewhere from one to five minutes of wait time on some lines while reducing it on others. Most buses will end up with capacity at around 95 percent.

So it this a service cut? In the past, I’ve always been very hesitant to embrace these scheduling changes. While we don’t want empty buses running along our streets, we also don’t want to reduce service, and by first establishing load guidelines that make buses more crowded than we would prefer, the MTA Board can then cut service to meet those new load guidelines. In 2010, they did so extensively to meet budgets.

Furthermore, by cutting bus service even just a little, buses become less convenient. Their riders are more willing to pursue alternate routes than subway riders are, and a longer wait will inevitably lead fewer people to take the bus. For the bus to thrive, in other words, it has run frequently and reliably. So a few lines will suffer with fewer buses at various times during the day. These buses will be more crowded and less frequent. If we want to encourage transit use, that’s not a desirable outcome at all.

For more on the specifics of the service adjustments, check out the section that starts on page 110 of this pdf. In the meantime, the weekly service advisories follow after the jump.

From 12:01 a.m. to 11:59 p.m., Saturday, April 28, 3 service is extended to New Lots Avenue due to platform edge, mechanical and electrical work at Fulton Street and renewal of switches north of Borough Hall.

From 12:01 a.m. to 11:59 p.m., Saturday, April 28, there are no 4 trains between Brooklyn Bridge and New Lots Avenue due to platform edge, mechanical and electrical work at Fulton Street and renewal of switches north of Borough Hall. Customers should take the 3, N, Q or R instead. Note: 4 trains operate local in both directions between 125th Street and Brooklyn Bridge.

From 6 a.m. to 11:30 p.m., Saturday, April 28, there are no 5 trains between Grand Central-42nd Street and Bowling Green due to platform edge, mechanical and electrical work at Fulton Street and renewal of switches north of Borough Hall. Customers should take the 4 (operating between Woodlawn and Brooklyn Bridge.), Q or R trains instead. 5 trains run every 20 minutes between Dyre Avenue and Grand Central-42nd Street.

• For service between Grand Central-42nd Street and Bowling Green, customers may take the 4.

• For service between Brooklyn Bridge and Bowling Green, customer may use the nearby Cortlandt Street, Rector Street and Whitehall Street R stations, served by the uptown Q and Brooklyn-bound R trains during this time.

From 6 a.m. to 6 p.m., Saturday, April 28, there are no 6 trains between Parkchester and Hunts Point Avenue due to demolition and removal of abandoned wires north of Whitlock Avenue station. Free shuttle buses provide alternative service. The 6 trains operates in two sections:

• Between Pelham Bay Park and Parkchester
• Between Hunts Point Avenue and Brooklyn Bridge.

From 6 a.m. to 8 p.m., Saturday, April 28 and Sunday, April 29, Flushing-bound 7 trains skip 82nd Street, 90th Street 103rd Street and 111th Street due to the installation of conduit and signal platforms for Flushing CBTC.

From 12:01 a.m. Saturday, April 28 to 5 a.m. Monday, April 30, Brooklyn-bound A trains run local from 59th Street-Columbus Circle to West 4th Street, then via the F Line to Jay Street-MetroTech due to electrical and substation work at Jay Street MetroTech.

From 6:30 a.m. to midnight, Saturday, April 28 and Sunday, April 29, Brooklyn-bound C trains run via the F line from West 4 Street to Jay Street-MetroTech due to electrical and substation work at Jay Street MetroTech.

From 12:01 a.m. Saturday, April 28 to 5 a.m. Monday, April 30, Coney Island-Bound D trains run via the N line from 36th Street to Coney Island-Stillwell Avenue due to station and line structure rehabilitation near 9th Avenue.

From 12:01 am to 6:30 a.m., Saturday, April 28 and Sunday April 29 and from 12:01 a.m. to 5 a.m., Monday, April 30, Bronx-bound D trains run express from 36th Street to Atlantic Avenue-Pacific Street, skipping DeKalb Avenue due to track work north of Atlantic Avenue-Pacific Street.

From 12:01 a.m. Saturday, April 28, to 5 a.m. Monday, April 30, E trains operate via the F in both directions after 36th Street in Queens to West 4th Street in Manhattan due to work on the 5th Avenue Interlocking Signal System Modernization project. E trains travel via the 63rd Street tunnel and 6th Avenue corridors, stopping at F stations. Downtown trains resume the E route at West 4th Street.

From 6 a.m. to 6 p.m., Saturday, April 28, L trains operate in two sections due to fencing installation at Canarsie Yard:

• Between 8th Avenue and Broadway Junction
• Between Broadway Junction and Rockaway Parkway (every 24 minutes)

From 12:01 a.m. to 6:30 a.m., Saturday, April 28 and Sunday, April 29 and from 12:01 a.m. to 5 a.m., Monday, April 30, Manhattan-bound N trains run express from 36th Street to Atlantic Avenue-Pacific Street, then via the Manhattan Bridge, skipping DeKalb Avenue due to track work north of Atlantic Avenue-Pacific Street.

From 12:01 a.m. Saturday, April 28 to 5 a.m. Monday, April 30, Manhattan-bound Q trains run via the R line between DeKalb Avenue and Canal Street due to track work north of Atlantic Avenue-Pacific Street.

From 11:30 p.m. Friday, April 27 to 5 a.m. Monday, April 30, Coney Island-bound Q trains run express from Prospect Park to Brighton Beach due to track panel installation south of Kings Highway.

From 6:30 a.m. to midnight, Saturday, April 28 and Sunday, April 29, Manhattan-bound R trains run express from 36th Street to Atlantic Avenue-Pacific Street, then via the Manhattan Bridge, skipping DeKalb Avenue due to track work north of Atlantic Avenue-Pacific Street. Note: Manhattan-bound Q trains replace the N and R, stopping at Jay Street-MetroTech, Court Street, Whitehall Street, Rector Street, Cortlandt Street and City Hall.

From 12:01 a.m. to 6:30 a.m., Saturday, April 28 and Sunday, April 29 and from 12:01 a.m. to 5 a.m., Monday, April 30, there are no R trains between 59th Street and 36th Street in Brooklyn due to track work north of Atlantic Avenue-Pacific Street. Customers should use the N instead. R trains operate between 95th Street and 59th Street in Brooklyn.

©2012 Second Ave. Sagas. All Rights Reserved.

More buses with three doors will hit the streets of New York City soon.

As we well know, New York City buses, particularly along crowded routes, suffer from a boarding problem. With a MetroCard system that requires riders to dip their cards in one direction, boarding can seem interminable, especially at popular stations during rush hour. With a contactless fare payment system still a few years from seeing the light of day, the slow bus board process is one of the main reasons why it’s often faster to walk than it is ride the bus.

In addition to the slow boarding process, riders exiting through the front cause additional problems as those folks waiting to board must first have to wait for others to exit. Over the years, the MTA has tried — not very hard — to combat this problem. Low-floor vehicles make buses easier to enter and exit, and bus riders are reminded to exit in the rear. No one listens.

The best approach for combating this problem can be found along the Select Bus Service routes where pre-board fare payment options allow bus riders to skip the slow process of dipping a MetroCard. This isn’t coming to the local bus system any time soon, but the MTA is trying to import another SBS feature. The three-door bus is the latest in the MTA’s ongoing struggle to speed up travel.

The Times tackled the saga of the three-door bus yesterday. In what has become a hallmark of recent Times transpo coverage, the article treats these buses as a novelty. It’s a “Ha ha! This bus has three doors” type of article complete with a reference to the doors as a “complication” and a quotation from a psychologist trying to figure out why New Yorkers can’t exit buses like normal people elsewhere. “The back door has more real or imagined perils,” one Dr. Elyse Goldstein said.

Silly quotes aside, the piece sheds some light on the MTA’s bus plans:

Howard H. Roberts Jr., a former president of New York City Transit, said the agency had struggled with exiting problems on buses for years. He said it was especially hard because the fronts of buses are often filled with elderly passengers who want to minimize how much walking they do. “They prefer to get off at the front, the same door they got on,” Mr. Roberts said. “It’s a cultural thing, and it’s not particularly easy to solve that problem.”

..The authority recently ordered 328 buses equipped with three doors, supplementing its existing fleet of 90 three-door buses on its Select Bus Service routes. Henry Sullivan, chief maintenance officer for the authority’s Department of Buses, said that while it was too early to track what effects the extra door was having on passenger flow, he remained hopeful.

“Without having statistics, I know they’re using the middle door more,” he said about riders. “It’s easier for them to get out.”

It can’t hurt to try a third door, and the MTA had to order these buses for SBS routes. But it seems that people close to the front of the bus will just exit at the front while those near the rear and middle doors will opt for those points of egress. Buses will forever be inefficient and clunky for New Yorkers, and without pre-board fare payments, the boarding process will remain a painful one. Of course, if New York bus riders continue to head to the front door to exit, well, the drivers can always just tase them for it instead.

©2012 Second Ave. Sagas. All Rights Reserved.

Meanwhile, in Brooklyn, with word that the Smith-9th Sts. renovation will take nearly six months longer than anticipated, the MTA will introduce BusTime to the B61 in June. This bus — the only one serving Red Hook — helps alleviate the lack of nearby subway service, and Transit says they readied these buses ahead of schedule to help stranded straphangers adjust their travel schedules.

Finally, BusTime will take center stage at my next Transit Museum Problem Solvers event. Michael Frumin who has spearheaded the BusTime effort will be my guest. He’ll be on hand to discuss how BusTime can help with the problem of declining bus ridership throughout the city. It’s set for Wednesday, April 25 at 6:30 p.m. at the Transit Museum. Save the date.

©2012 Second Ave. Sagas. All Rights Reserved.

Without unseasonably warm weather, bus ridership in January would have shown a decline.

Over the past few months, I’ve burned more than a few pixels assessing the MTA’s ongoing decline in bus ridership figures. Select Bus Services has proven popular, but as we know, the downward trend in ridership numbers has been both long-term and steady. MTA Board members would like to see this trend reversed, but it’s unclear how the MTA plans to do so.

In advance of Monday morning’s MTA Board committee hearings, the authority released its latest ridership figures, and again the bus numbers show a decline. As the authority notes, average weekday bus ridership actually climbed in January 2012 from January 2011 by approximately 5.6 percent. However, as the authority notes, “adjusted for weather differences, bus ridership would have had a small decrease.” In other words, had we had winter in January this year, bus ridership would have declined yet again. The rolling twelve-month average decreased by three percent.

So is there a way to solve this decline? Maybe technology can be a part of that answer. Earlier this year, the MTA unveiled its BusTime application on Staten Island. The in-house bus tracking system will soon spread to the Bronx and one other borough this year before a full citywide rollout is completed by the end of 2013. In the meantime, WNYC’s Jim O’Grady reports on the early Staten Island success of the technology.

He reports:

The MTA’s BusTime system has been up and running in Staten Island for barely two months and already an estimated 10 percent of all bus riders use it every weekday. The service lets riders use a mobile device to text or scan a bus stop code and receive a message with their bus’s location.

“Having that information on the phone just revolutionizes the experience of riding the bus,” said Josh Robin, a project director with the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority, which has had its own version of the program since 2009. “You can look on the screen and see the bus moving toward you instead of peering down the road, hoping to see the lights and LED sign of a bus.”

Staten Island is the first of the city’s five boroughs to receive BusTime, which, according to transportation analysts, is off to a flying start. “I think it is a smashing success to have 10 percent of the riders using it within a year of opening the service,” said Dr. Kari Watkins, a civil engineering professor at Georgia Tech who studied real-time bus arrival information in Seattle. She said it has taken two and a half years for that city’s version of BusTime, called OneBusAway, to be used by 20 percent of its riders.

The MTA cannot yet determine if BusTime will lead to an increase in ridership on Staten Island, but I believe as this technology becomes an accepted part of the bus landscape, ridership will inch up a bit. Simply put, BusTime solves the pain of waiting for a bus, and that wait is one of the main reasons why people don’t take the bus. There have been countless times where I’ve glanced down an empty avenue in search of a bus, and with no vehicle in sight, I opt to walk instead. The schedules posted at bus stops are generally useless, and with BusTime, potential bus riders will know when to wait and when to take the bus.

Now, BusTime is only one piece of the puzzle. We need buses that are faster on the streets, have priority signaling and dedicated lanes. We need buses that aren’t slowed down by endless boarding queues as riders go through the painfully slow process of a MetroCard dip. We need bus routes that are maximized to deliver riders from where they are to where they need to be in a way other transit options do not. For now, though, we’ll settle for a good app that tells us when the bus is coming. It’s a start.

©2012 Second Ave. Sagas. All Rights Reserved.

A November report showed how popular the M15 Select Bus Service had become.

City Council Member Jessica Lappin and her East Side constituents like what they see out of the Select Bus Service along First and Second Ave., but they all wish the MTA and NYPD weren’t so heavy handed with fine enforcement. In her second annual report card for the city’s latest efforts at speeding up buses, Lappin gave the service a solid B, up for a B- last year, but she urged the MTA to better fix its fare payment machines and ease up on enforcement in the meantime.

“More East Siders are onboard with Select Bus Service, and want to see it expanded to other locations,” Lappin said. “But the MTA still needs to do a better job with fixing broken ticket machines and other inconveniences.”

Lappin’s report card breaks down the service into four categories based on responses from her constituents. Overall, 98.3 percent of the 1155 respondents who took the survey said they have used the Select Bus Service. This number may be skewed a bit as a transportation survey will attract those who use transportation, but these are the folks who are most attuned to the good and bad of it all.

By and large, Upper East Siders seemed content with the speed of service. Most wait times are between five and ten minutes, and nearly 70 percent of respondents said speeds were good or excellent. Lappin rated speed an A, and while fare payment was problematic, according to MTA studies, the time saved by eliminating the painfully slow MetroCard dip is the driving factor there.

The biggest issue arose with ease of use of those fare payment machines though. While 55 percent of respondents rated the pre-board machines as good or excellent, nearly 45 thought them to be fair or poor. The Council Member offered up her take: “Council Member Lappin’s office frequently receives complaints about broken Select Bus Service ticket machines. When the machines are broken or out of paper, it is impossible to buy a ticket. Without a ticket, riders risk being issued a $100 summons. Constituents have also complained that ticket machines are dangerously close to the street.”

Hand in hand with this concern are complaints over enforcement. Twenty respondents were ticketed when SBS payment machines failed to produce receipts, and riders complained that buses were stopped during fare inspections, thus defeating the purpose of a faster commute. One East Sider’s tale highlights these concerns. “Last September I received a $100 summons even though the SBS ticket machine wasn’t working,” Jodi Penchina said. “When I called the MTA & Transit Adjudication Bureau to explain what happened, they made it impossible to get answers. It wasn’t just the ticket machine that was broken—the entire SBS fare collection system is broken and it needs to be fixed.”

DNA Info offered up more tales of fare-payment woes and the subsequent summonses that so plague the new system. We’ve heard these complaints for years, but the stakeholders in the Select Bus Service system have yet to respond to them. Machines are repaired often enough, and enforcement is often overzealous. It’s what works though to keep the buses moving.

So Lappin gives the buses a better grade in 2012 than she did in 2011. It’s an incremental step up, but as Select Bus Service becomes more pervasive, and the MTA and NYC DOT more adept at respond to complaints, those marks should only rise. If they don’t, something has gone wrong.

©2012 Second Ave. Sagas. All Rights Reserved.

To me, this is an intriguing bit because of DesignLine’s tortured history with its delivery of buses and its lack of recent success. DesignLine ran a 2007 pilot in New York City, and although customers gave high marks to the vehicles, Transit eventually determined that the vehicles were not robust enough for New York City. At around the same time, the city of Baltimore issued a similar announcement concerning DesignLine buses, and many in the transit production industry questioned the long-term viability of the company.

So now Smith will take the reins. He served as the head of MTA Bus, the president of MTA Long Island Bus and most recently as the SVP with Transit overseeing buses. He was well-respected at the MTA and can take his insider perspective to a company that needs the help. A shift like Smith’s from buyer to vendor is not a rare one within the transit industry. It’s a tight-knit community that often can’t shake its “inside baseball” reputation. We’ll see now what future awaits these DesignLine buses.

©2012 Second Ave. Sagas. All Rights Reserved.

Photos from DUMBO seem to suggest that buses aren't creating traffic problems. (Photo by flickr user katebriquelet)

In his 1981 book The Highway and the City, Lewis Mumford wrote on the relationship between cars and urban life. “The right to have access to every building in the city by private motorcar in an age when everyone possesses such a vehicle is actually the right to destroy the city,” he said. Perhaps Mumford was overreaching a bit, but as we’ve seen over the last few years, New Yorkers go to crazy extremes to defend what they believe is their inalienable right to curbside access.

The most famous example of curbside NIMBYism came along 34th St. as residents decried the way a dedicated bus lane would — GASP — require them to walk from the corner or cross a street to get to their apartment buildings. They could not unload their cars! They could not get direct door-to-door taxi service! It was an urban NIMBY nightmare.

Recently, a similar situation long brewing in Brooklyn’s DUMBO neighborhood came to a head. Some local residents along Main St. have complained about the way the B25 ambles down Main St. as it turns around to head back toward Fulton St. on its way to East New York. Here’s how The Brooklyn Paper summed up the dispute:

Residents on Main Street in DUMBO are demanding that the Metropolitan Transportation Authority re-route a bus that they claim causes traffic jams and road rage on their already cramped street — saying it’s only a matter of time before someone gets run over by the B25. “We’ve been petitioning the MTA for years,” said Ethan Goldman, a vocal opponent of the B25 bus route. “This is a huge problem that could easily be fixed, but they refuse to listen.”

For decades, the B25 bus has run from Downtown to DUMBO via Cadman Plaza West before heading east on Front Street to Main Street.But that was before the neighborhood became a hotspot for families and art houses including Galapagos Art Space and powerHouse Arena.

Now during the morning rush, DUMBO residents complain that one or more buses get stuck between illegally parked delivery trucks and cars — creating a din of perpetual honking and screeching tires in a neighborhood that is already among the noisiest in the city.

Re-read that last paragraph and revel in its logic. The bus is a problem because it gets stuck behind illegally parked trucks and cars. It’s not the cars and trucks that are problematic; it’s the city bus. “If the enforcement is only way that this bus route is going to work, that’s a sign that this isn’t a good plan,” Rob Perris, district manager for Community Board 2, said.

The comments from DUMBO residents, gathered at the bottom of a post on Brownstoner and torn apart by Brooklyn Spoke are just as illuminating. Here’ s a gem:

Main Street is now a major destination in New York City, and on Saturday and Sunday there is asteady stream of limos coming down Main Street dropping off their parties on the street to takephotos in the park and to go to various restaurants in the neighborhood. The limos and the busesare engaged in a weekend-long battle for access to Main Street and wedding parties and guestsare regularly dodging the never-ending on-coming buses that always seem to travel in pairs.

In the same group of letters, inconsistencies abound. Some residents claim delivery fleets and illegally parked cars are a problem while others say the street is simply too narrow and too congested with children — who somehow navigate the delivery trucks and parked cars? — to support buses. The valid concerns of speeding bus drivers who aren’t respectful or careful enough of pedestrians are lost in the din of a group of people who just don’t like buses. (Although how the buses could be speeding that dangerously with the streets clogged with illegally parked cars is another conundrum here.)

DUMBO residents are seemingly alleging that buses are responsible for the traffic on their block, and their solution isn’t to enforce traffic laws or rethink the placement of loading areas. It is to ban buses. Let’s make it someone else’s problem so our idyllic little streets can be restored to their proper dignity, fit for cars and front-door deliveries. In any city, cars have a place; deliver vehicles have a place; limos and taxis have a place. But they do not have unfettered access to the streets at the expense of anything else. “Sharing” is a lesson we should have learned in kindergarten, but it is often lost on people battling over street space.

I believe Doug Gordon at Brooklyn Spoke summarizes it best: “New York is in a strange place right now. We have visionary leadership transforming our streets every day. We are home to some of the most innovative thinkers, business people, artists, and techies. But when it comes to thinking our way out of the traffic hell that engulfs so many neighborhoods–and the climate change that will come to swallow low-lying neighborhoods like DUMBO–it’s all too easy for the narrow-minded and loud to win out over the nuanced and creative.”

©2012 Second Ave. Sagas. All Rights Reserved.

Meanwhile, the MTA’s and New York City’s investment in its bus network has been lukewarm at best. It seemingly takes nearly as long to get a Select Bus Service route up and running as it does to build out a subway extension as planning meetings bog down the process. The most radical street reconstructions, such as those envisioned for 34th Street, have fallen away in the face of NIMBY protests, and the city has struggled with basic bus improvements such as a faster ride to La Guardia Airport or Brooklyn/Queens connections that span popular neighborhoods.

This attitude toward buses should change, though, one commentator has recently alleged. Will Doig, writing last week, at Slate penned a paean to buses. We might hate the bus and all it stands, but we should begin to love it. He writes:

When it comes to improving mass transit, there’s a lot of low-hanging fruit on the humble city bus. The vital connective tissue of multi-modal transit systems, the bus could be an efficient — nay, elegant — solution to cities’ mobility woes if only we made it so.

And yet we rarely do. Streetcars are replacing bus routes in cities across the country, and billions are thrown at light rail while the overlooked bus is left to scream “Marsha, Marsha, Marsha!” “If you decide that buses don’t merit investment, you’re going to miss a lot of opportunities to help people get where they’re going, and to expand their sense of freedom of movement, just because you don’t like the vehicle they’re riding,” says transit consultant Jarrett Walker.

Making people like the bus when not liking the bus is practically an American pastime essentially means making the bus act and feel more like a train. Trains show up roughly when they’re supposed to. Buses take forever, then arrive two at a time. Trains boast better design, speed, shelters, schedules and easier-to-follow routes. When people say they don’t like the bus but they do like the train, what they really mean is they like those perks the train offers. But there’s no reason bus systems can’t simply incorporate most of them.

Doig, who links to a recent post of mine on the MTA’s bus woes, urges American cities to adopt and adapt true bus rapid transit lanes for their cities. Forget Select Bus Service, a vision of what Limited bus service should be; embrace the dedicated, physically separated lane. Other changes, such as frequency mapping and more comfortable vehicles, could improve the bus commuting experience too, but faster service remains a paramount concern.

Now, I’m of two minds when it comes to buses. I firmly believe the city should prioritize buses over, say, cars when it comes to planning transportation routes, but can a bus network in a city without space for the wide boulevards that have made TransMilenio be bus rapid transit? Can we expect buses to drive development and ferry the same number of people as a subway can? I don’t believe so.

Buses should be a complementary part of a transit system. Because they do not run on fixed tracks, they can be routed to serve areas the subway doesn’t and can’t reach. They can bring people from one already-established neighborhood to another. They can serve that role as the “vital connective tissue,” as Doig writes. They can’t, though, replace subways now or into the future.

So we don’t have to see buses as the future of everything, but if we tried to love them a little bit more, perhaps they could be more useful. It’s all about predictable service, faster speeds and better routing that gets people from where they are to where they want to be. Local buses have become second-class citizens in the transit world, and it’s time to reassess their place in our transportation ecosystem.

©2012 Second Ave. Sagas. All Rights Reserved.

These buses are bunched intentionally at their Brooklyn Heghts terminal. (Photo by flickr user Stephen Rees)

Last week, when I left my apartment to head to work shortly after 8 a.m., I noticed a common occurrence in New York City: Despite scheduled times that allow for around 6-7 minute headways, the B67 and B69 were traveling north along 7th Ave. one on top of the other. It was a classic case of bus bunching, a problem that plagues many transit agencies and leads to complaints concerning reliability of service. Solving it has never been easy.

This week, an Atlantic Cities post by Eric Jaffe has been making the rounds, and in it, he discusses a new approach to solving bus bunching. Two professors have a “self-equalizing” way of running buses on congested city streets. Jaffe writes:

John Bartholdi III and Donald Eisenstein propose a method of bus coordination that abandons the concept of tightly-managed headways or schedules. Without the restriction of meeting pre-specified targets, drivers instead follow the flow of traffic, and natural headways emerge over time. The result is a “self-equalizing” system with less bunching and more reliability…

The system outlined by Bartholdi and Eisenstein imposes simple adjustments at control points based on an equation whose goal is to both reduce the mean headway on a line and increase overall uniformity of headways. Because the calculation operates independent of a fixed schedule, adjustments can be made at any number of control points. When systems want more headway stability, say for longer routes, all they have to do is add more control points. “The result is that headways are constantly adjusted to become more nearly equal,” the authors write…

For the study, Bartholdi and Eisenstein told drivers to abandon their schedule, ignore headways, and drive with the flow of traffic. When they reached a control point the “self-equalizing” equation computed their next departure time. Compared to average headways recorded on the same day for two weeks prior to the experiment, the new system reduced headway and increased stability

So far, this system has been tested along one 18-mile route in Chicago and on the Georgia Tech campus bus system which sees around 5000 riders per day, and the two say its working. So could this be a piece of the bus problem facing New York City? Ridership is declining because of the unreliability of service. We don’t know when the next bus is coming, and routing needs some work. But solving the bunching problem or at least alleviating it could improve the rider experience, and right now, every little bit helps.

©2012 Second Ave. Sagas. All Rights Reserved.