The TLC's Group Ride Vehicle Program didn't have to fail. (Photo via flickr user AllWaysNY)
Across the street from the my apartment is a former bus stop. The B71 used to run down Union St., but nearly nine months ago, it was the victim of the MTA’s budget cuts. At some point, a Group Ride Program stop sign popped up at the shelter, but the Taxi & Limousine Commission’s attempt at privatizing transit died an inglorious death. I never once laid eyes on a van making the Union St. run.
These past weekend, the dollar vans made the news again. In a brief item in The Post, two writers explore how commuter vans are picking up passengers. While the story seems to get one fact slightly wrong — the B doesn’t run on the weekends — its point remains the same. With the Q out of service from Coney Island to Midtown, commuter vans have picked up the slack.
Particularly at Aves. H and M, which are undergoing renovation and see no Manhattan-bound service, customers are grateful for the vans. “I don’t know what I would do without the dollar van. Sometimes they drive too fast, but the MTA bus goes too slow and stops too much,” one rider said.
So how did the T&LC get its program so wrong while private operators seemingly make it work? And can a quasi-organized dollar van program be successful in the city? Those are questions that still need answering.
A few months ago, I tried to gain some insight into the commuter van phenomenon. Cap’n Transit and I ventured to the Port Authority and hopped the vans across the river. For a few bucks, these vehicles run as local buses via the Lincoln Tunnel to Union City, West New York and points north. We rode up Bergenline Ave. and came back on JFK Boulevard. The rides are a bit sluggish, but it worked.
In particular, it worked because it adds service to areas that need it. These avenues that run parallel to Manhattan in the eastern urban areas in New Jersey are major commercial destinations, and driving is either too expensive or too much of a pain. New Jersey Transit buses serve the area, but the commuter vans provide lower-cost and more frequent options. They leave New York when they’re full and run often back into the city.
Most vital to the success of these vans though is the nature of the routes. They run what are termed feeder routes. They duplicate bus services in areas that need it and provide other connections that do not enjoy adequate mass transit access. Unlike the T&LC’s pilot program, demand is key. The B71 was eliminated because its ridership was so low. Private service introduced months later won’t solve that basic problem, but commuter vans between Chinatowns in New York City work perfectly well.
Of course, not everything is rosy for these vans. As an article in December noted, 60 percent of the commuter vans failed surprise safety inspections. The program there is loosely regulated, but riders get what they pay for.
In the city, then, the problem was one of focus. Private transit cannot replace mass transit lines eliminated due to high operating costs and low service. Rather, private transit can fill in the gaps. If the Taxi and Limousine Commission can figure out how to license a program that fills in the gaps — or if it can figure out what the gaps are first — the commuter vans can play a role in New York. Otherwise, they’ll simply show that perhaps the MTA had good reason to cut a bunch of bus routes.
9 comments
You talk about 60% of these vans failing surprise safety inspections. After the two high-profile fatal bus crashes in the area recently (one in the Bronx, the other on the NJ Turnpike), it’s just a matter of time before the political response is that the dollar vans are categorically ALL unsafe and they get discontinued.
But it’s nice to hear of a local service (was it really $1?) crossed over into New Jersey. Without the political and union issues of the public transit agencies, that sounded quite easy to implement.
There is definitely a need for these services since the MTA is now reluctant to serve all areas. There first needs to be a study to determine where these services currently are operating and see which ones are not duplicating MTA service.
Six years ago when I was regularly frequenting Kings County Hospital, I saw a thriving van service there. I doubt it if they were duplicating MTA service since it is only served by the Nostrand Avenue subway, the B12 and B44 and to a lesser extent the B35. That means most areas require at least two buses to access the hospital, or there is no service at all particularly from the south near Albany Avenue.
There may even be demand for bus service between areas with a large number of dollar vans, but the MTA is not interested in adding any service. Someone needs to fill the gap, and it needs better regulation to ensure vehicles are safe.
Yeah, unregulated buses are unsafe. So are cars. Should we expect a ban on driving soon?
The vans are loosely regulated”? Try not regulated at all. The vans constantly cut off buses and sometimes even pick up and drop off pasengers right in the middle of the intersection. It’s a free for all. The NJ Transit drivers hate them.
The dollar buses also head south from the Lincoln Tunnel to Journal Square.
I used to ride them pretty regularly when I lived in Jersey City. Back then it was $2 to the Port Authority or $1.25 to Journal Square. The buses were frequent. You never had to wait more than a few minutes for someone to pick you up. However, a lot of the drivers were aggressive in getting from stop to stop. They were literally competing for for passengers. In rush hour you’d have guys racing each other down Kennedy Blvd. to get to the next bus stop first. Not exactly the safest of situations especially when most of them would pack on as many standing room only passengers as they possibly could. I was on one that got in accident. Thankfully no one was injured. But, we did get delayed while the cops came to fill out an accident report. When one van is in accident, no one is coming to take you the rest of the way. You either wait or hop off and pay another fare.
Also, if you were heading into the city on a nearly empty bus there was a pretty good chance that the driver would hang out at the last stop before the tunnel for as long as he could, sometimes up to 20 minutes, before heading into the city.
Periodically, the MVC would stop the vans do random inspections of these vehicles. Many of them were pulled out of service when that happened. The majority of the vans were in pretty rough shape. They weren’t exactly the cleanest of rides either.
It was far from perfect, but there weren’t a whole lot of other options. It was a mile-and-a-half walk to the PATH and/or Light Rail and NJ Transit Buses were a lot less frequent and more expensive.
The dollar vans take much longer than an NJ Transit bus. For instance, when you take a bus from Fort Lee to Port Authority, it runs express on River Road but the dolalr vans make dozens upon dozens of stops on Bergenline Ave. The difference in time? The NJ Transit bus arrives in NYC about 45 minutes faster.
The New Jersey “dollar vans” began by jumping on the existing routes of conventional bus services, both publicly operated and privately operated. To my knowledge (and I know the area well) no “dollar van” established a new route, that is, a routing without conventional bus service.
While the “dollar vans” do offer customers increased frequencies, they caused a number of the private bus operators in the area to reduce or eliminate services. In some instances, NJ Transit picked up routes abandoned by private operators; but routes that were once profitable and cross-subsidized other routes were no longer profitable, increasing the burden on the riders and taxpayers.
Also, as mentioned by others above, many of the “dollar vans” tend to fail safety inspections. When the Motor Vehicle Commission does an inspection on a “dollar van” route, the “dollar vans” simply disappear, leaving their passengers without service and overcrowding conventional bus service on the route. Go to http://www.nj.com for a range of articles on the subject. Put the word “jitney” in the search engine. Articles dated 9/25/08, 7/11/10, and 1/21/11 are particularly relevant.
I have a few “gripes” about this article.
1) The group ride service is still operational on the former B71 route. In fact, it is still growing. If you want to take a ride, e-mail me and I’ll get you the driver’s contact information. Remember that the group ride services as currently configured are essentially “big taxis”. They work like SuperShuttle does: you call them and they come get you. I would have preferred a fixed schedule, but I understand why the system is set up as is.
2) The program was designed to fail. If the buses stopped on June 27, you would want the vans out on June 28. That did not happen. They were finally allowed to run at the end of August, after the ridership base evaporated. This is not the basis for a successful program. People came out and blamed the vans for the failure (as was expected) and further hurt their public standing.
3) The legal guys have been BEGGING for enforcement because it would knock out 75% of the vans out there. When enforcement shows up, the legal guys make money. In fact, the city makes money taking the vans of the illegal guys too. You would think that would be a win-win situation. However, it is widely known that regular enforcement would make the commuter vans in Brooklyn and Queens as legitimate as Mario Transportation in Manhattan and the city does not want that.
4) The system in place now is largely based on the foundation laid by private carriers. The reason that the private carriers no longer exist in the volume they used to has a lot to do with government milking them to death. Subways used to gush cash in an era where passenger railroading broke even. However, when the city doesn’t allow you to raise fares for 44 years, it kills you. NYC is a natural transit market that should be highly profitable, but government policy has hurt innovation in the system.
The bottom line is that as long as government policy is to make transit a bad investment in NYC, the options available will reflect that.
[…] alone. In fact, these are lessons that Cap’n Transit knew back in October and lessons that I wrote about in March. If two amateur transportation analysts understand how to run a semi-successful dollar program, why […]