The TLC's Group Ride Vehicle Program has been a resounding failure. (Photo via flickr user AllWaysNY)
I live around the corner from the former B71 route, and when the MTA cut this bus route from Park Slope to Carroll Gardens, I was disappointed but I understand the reasoning behind it. When the bus would deign to show up on time, which wasn’t often, it made for a quick ride down to Smith St. on the days I was too lazy to walk, but the MTA was bleeding money on the route. When the Taxi & Limousine Commission announced that the former B71 would be one of the pilot routes for the Group Ride Program, I was guardedly optimistic. Perhaps a private operator could succeed where the MTA had failed.
That optimism was entirely unfounded. Not once in the two months that the pilot ran did I see a dollar van pass down Union St., and by October, Sulaiman Haqq was ready to call it quits. “This is the reason why public transportation is subsidized,” he said. “It is not profitable.”
Of all of the city’s transportation initiatives in 2010, none were as poorly executed, as misguided and as unsupported as the Taxi & Limousine Commission’s Group Ride Program. Designed as a pilot program to replace under-performing bus routes that cost the MTA too much to run, the dollar van suffered to draw riders. It’s shocking, I know, to find that vans that never showed up, didn’t run on a regularly schedule and didn’t take MetroCards couldn’t attract enough passengers to be profitable along routes the MTA found cost-prohibitive to support.
In mid-December as the companies operating in Queens along the former Q79 and Q74 routes closed up shop nine months early, TLC commissioner David Yassky admitted that he didn’t really think this idea through. “The pilot program has yielded a great deal of information about what works and doesn’t work in providing group-ride service,” Yassky said. “At this point, the market does not appear to support service in these areas and we will continue to look for opportunities to supplement the MTA in underserved areas.”
This past weekend, the TLC again opened up the former Q79 route to applicants. and while neighborhood associations are pushing for Group Ride service or a restoration of the Q79, I’m not optimistic another operator will find success where others did not. It simply does not make sense to target low-ridership corridors that aren’t profitable.
In late November, as this failure become evident, Cap’n Transit offered up his analysis of the situation. Later this week, he and I are going to tackle some successful van routes in New Jersey in an effort to understand what works and why. For now, the TLC is going to try again as they claim service along the Q79 will return later this month, but if it didn’t work the first time, how is it going to be any better the second time around?
10 comments
I’m interested in reading what you and Cap’n have to say about the van routes in Jersey. Well, for starters, the demand is there.
In any case, they’re the only reason I got to work on Monday after the blizzard when I had visited family the day before. Bergenline Ave. was passable that morning (by 9 am). Vans were crowded and I had to take two of them. But still, something was working.
It seems like a Catch-22. If there’s enough demand to make a van service profitable, then there should have been enough demand to make a bus line sustainable.
Since there is less overhead for a van service (no unionized labor, few organized competing interests, etc.), it is likely that the van service could run at lower costs and be profitable when a bus would be losing money.
In the case of the dropped bus routes, they only authorized van services where there was no profit in serving the line – no money would be diverted from cash flow that would have gone to the MTA if buses were in service.
If we really wanted to see whether vans were able to serve a community better than the city buses, we’d need to keep them out of the metrocard program, keep them totally separate from the MTA bureaucracy and its rules, and see what happens. I feel that in a free market, vans would spring up to serve the most profitable routes, with some cases, van services growing up to use real buses….
With this being said, it is important to have public transit which is subsidized, so it can serve areas not otherwise connected to the mass transit grid. As areas become populated with businesses or residences, so will the need for mass transit grow. But it is like the chicken/egg paradox – what comes first? I say, that it’s like the field of dreams or a wendy’s burger – if you build it, they will come….
This is disappointing, but I don’t know that you can conclude that there isn’t demand for transportation on these routes based on the failure of this system. I also live near one of the van routes, and I have never seen a van, a schedule, or any indication of where I should even stand to wait for one (I later found this online but I had to really look). Of course people aren’t going to just stand on an unmarked street corner and hope a van shows up sometime before they freeze to death. How many people even knew the van program existed? The problem here really seems to have been the execution – it doesn’t tell us much about demand, and doesn’t mean transportation can’t be profitable.
The Jersey routes were demand created. People without cars WANT to shop along Rt. 4 and GSP. That government agencies such as NJT are mired in bureaucracy and take forvever to figure these things out or cannot or will not implement for any number of reasons.
Ben, as you say, these routes were discontinued for a reason, and that reason was simply that there was insufficient demand for these services as shown by the high operating costs for a line. Who wants to pay a fare increase and then ANOTHER $2 for a lousy van that may or may not show up. I hope DOT returns these spots for parking sooner rather than later.
Another waste of our money…
The B71 ran mainly on Union, not Smith. I found it to be punctual almost all the time. It’s hard to not be on time when the route is so short, you only run one bus every half hour, and you have very few passengers.
I still think the MTA’s old plan to extend the route through the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel was really well considered. The ridership on this route was also one of the fastest growing in the city (although it was very small). Maybe if the MTA allowed the new van operator to go through the tunnel, they would have had better luck.
This route should not have been cut.
I know where that route went. I live right off of Union St. The bus was generally empty and rarely on time, especially at off hours. Because few people used it, boarding times were low, and it beat the schedule. I never once saw the Group Ride van earlier this fall.
I typically caught it at the beginning of its route, so maybe that’s why I found it to be more punctual. I see now you said “to Smith St” not “on Smith St.” My bad.
I think you’ll find that every “successsful” van route in NJ began by jumping on pre-existing bus routes (operated by either private bus companies or public bus companies). A van would jump out in front of a bus, skim off about fifteen passengers, and continue on its way, weakening the bus route to the point that some private bus carriers completely discontinued their routes and some of the NJ Transit routes were cut back significantly.
I still occasionally see a Q74 van at the Kew Gardens station, but they’re not very frequent. A few weeks ago I was there for almost an hour at the beginning of the evening rush and didn’t see a single van.