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.
48 comments
In a rational world, managers could just instruct drivers to use their verbal powers of persuasion to get passengers to not exit from the front door when there’s a crowd outside. But in the whacko world of the MTA, either the managers are too incompetent to manage properly, or the drivers are somehow protected by their union from having to take on the “responsibility” of door manager.
It’s hardly a responsibility anybody should want, given that it imposes risk on the driver. It’s probably one of the better examples of why all buses should be POP.
Taking out the front area of seats might ‘motivate’ people to gravitate towards the rear of the buses when they get on, instead of staying towards the front where leaving by that door becomes more compelling (they can sub bike racks in place of where the seats behind the driver are, so the space over the wheel well still has some utility).
Not when it’s crowded. It will motivate them to stand in the front even more.
I think the problem is mostly normative. People aren’t expected to go to the back to stand, so they don’t.
MTA drivers seem to have no trouble telling passengers waiting to board to let others get off the bus first. Which …
I was just in SF two weeks ago and rode Muni and was reminded again of the front to back door skills there. It’s well ingrained. And was pleasantly surprised at how well the RFID clipper card worked. And that it’s to the left so when boarding there becomes two lines. The left direction uses clipper cards, the right direction is paying cash or showing their monthly passes. Boarding takes a fraction of the time.
Someone needs to get that bit of data to King County Metro (Seattle)…which will be switching to all pay-as-you-enter this fall. Moving the readers to the left seems like a really smart move.
Someone always blaming the unions, why?
The fact is if you had to drive a bus for 8 hours a day, you’d probably be up to your ears of dealing with stupid people, not to mention those crazy kids getting off school.
So before you blame the unions, think of the hard job these guys have and remember that they are drivers, not police officers, and not in the marketing department.
I never understood why the machines on buses have to inhale the metrocard and instead have a similar swipe system like in the subway.
Same here. Shouldn’t a swiper be easier to maintain too? Its probably due to transfers and hot they’re taken.
Chicago has a swipe. It’s still slower than the contactless system.
Sure it would be slower than contactless. But its a lot faster than dipping.
PATH Metrocard Turnstyles suck in the card.
I never understood why it’s so hard to implement a European system that relies on the hobo system. Or at least board all the passengers first then swipe cards. This works best on trams, which would be 100x better than busses anyway.
Not hobo system (which is admittedley funny) but honor system.
I had occasion to ride one of the new three-door busses all the way across town on 79th St. last week. It was after 10PM, not crowded enough to have standing patrons, so I took a seat next to the rearmost door. There was plenty of time to watch people exit and, sure enough, people simply took the door they were closest to, or, in the case of my stop, Broadway, a few rose in time to head for the back of the bus, anticipating heading for the 1 Train, which the bus passes before it comes to a stop.
While certainly not a statistically significant sampling to make any profound conclusions, I nevertheless noticed that plenty of folks did exit the front door – despite there being people cued up for boarding – and despite the recorded message urging passengers to exit rearward. They were, after all, New Yorkers.
My take away is that at peak times, when busses are standing room only, the center door will make a difference, because nobody standing near the front of the bus is going to squeeze their way through the sea of humanity, and past the bus’s center joint, just to exit from the rear. So the extra door will have some impact at the times when it is most needed.
But it’s still just a bus – and it will never run “on time”.
I think it not a bad idea more speedy. But look at M34 sbs buses they are small I thought that the sbs uses 3 doors on all sbs fleet. M34 is heavily reliable they should change it to 3 doors fleet
M34/M34A SBS are terrible. The ten minute or so headways are a joke and the two-door buses are too small to accommodate the ridership.
The Orion VII Hybrids is really not suitable to hold all the people. A HUGE Mistake on MTA, Money Thrown Away.
It a waste of money spending all of the money on tiny SBS. The M34 connects with all the major subway stops like
-Penn Station 8th/7th ave lines
-Herald Square
They should save the money on other goods.
Years ago in some cities, trolleys had a one-way turnstile to prevent people from leaving by the front door (but it didn’t collect fares). Something like that could work to improve the flow as long as the driver had the abilty to open it up for wheelchairs and those with difficulty walking.
That only works when the bus is already nearly empty – because the aisle is completely clear. Once the bus is standing room only, as it often is during peak operations, it would become impossible for someone who entered recently and who is only going a few stops to make it all the way to the rear door.
If someone is going to get research psychologists to study the bus system, the study should focus on planners who persist in inflicting buses on the plebes to begin with – and how they do it. The obstinacy of the current system, which never worked well to begin with, is mind-boggling. It sucks for riders too, which I almost suspect is deliberate punishment for not having a car. There isn’t a financial advantage to the current system. Hell, going POP is one of the few cases where the TWU could get more employees and actually improve the financial performance of the system at the same time.
But while we’re on the subject, it occurred to me: what is with the TWU suddenly having a stiffy for tasing people? The TWU survived the ’70s and ’80s without tasers. Now it’s demanding them in a relatively low-crime era. (Okay, some of it is the perception that tasers aren’t very harmful and don’t do lasting damage.)
Buses are still around because subways in NYC seem to cost billions of dollars per mile. As for the payment system, never blame on malice what can be attributed to incompetence (or bureaucracy).
Well, surface transit should be around. That there isn’t some LRT in NYC is kind of ridiculous, but there should always be some surface transit and some of it should be buses.
I’m not really sure this can be attributed entirely to incompetence. There is a sense that everybody needs to pay, hell or high water. It would be better to forgo some revenue for some more efficiency, and make up the loss in inspection fines. That’s true on both buses and LRT. The SelectBus shouldn’t be anything special, operationally.
As an (almost) daily SBS customer, pre-board payment is the way to go. Ways to improve this: give the fair inspectors readers so that monthly/weekly pass holders don’t have to swipe and install on-board payment swipers. Would make a great product already better.
As for the door issue, it’s not really an issue on SBS, where all 3 points of egress are also points of ingress. However, on the traditional crosstown busses, it always boggles my mind how many want to exit from the front. wouldn’t be too much to ask the drivers to chide passengers.
Nova LFS articulated buses just suck.
The two rear door exits should swing outward, not inward. It will decrease amount of injuries that resulted when people standing on the yellow area.
Select Bus Service is not even that fast. It is a limited-stop bus “extra”. MTA and NYC-DOT still have not fix numerous problems on the SBS lines.
MTA, Money Thrown Away!!!
You know the areas are yellow because people shouldn’t be standing in them. And please stop it with this “Money Thrown Away” crap. If you want to see money thrown away, figure out what would happen without a transit network in New York City or investment in the one we have. Too bad we don’t a “Robbing The Public Blind with Faux-Populist Bullshit” acronym for the TWU.
Says who those not-so-dumb passengers standing there freely.
Money Thrown Away should be the new name of this sorry state Transit Agency.
I was on a bus on Woodhaven blvd when a teenage girl asked to no one in particular, why these annoying announcements about leaving from the rear? She answered herself “I don’t want anyone telling me what to do!”.
I cringed and hoped not to get my butt kicked, but I answered, it’s quicker for people to get off the back if everyone did it, the buses would be faster. She thought about it for a second, and said “Thank you, that makes sense”.
i love this
In Rio de Janeiro, the busses are partitioned about a quarter of the way in. People pay the fare at the partition, not when they get on the bus. You board the bus (and busses in Rio are crowded), the bus starts moving, people pay the fare and move to the rear of the bus. There are seats at the front, ahead of the partition, so its possible to just sit at the front of the bus and then pay the fare and move to the rear sometime later in the ride.
I’ve thought about why this system -which is a good system in terms of getting the bus to move fast- won’t work here. One obvious thing that comes to mind is that busses in Rio are fast, and will take off quickly with people still standing on line to pay the fare. Even elderly Cariocas hate them. Social services in New York do seem to be geared mostly towards the (current) elderly, and that alone puts a limit on how fast busses can be in this city.
The second problem is that busses in Rio each have two employees, the driver and the fare collector who sits at the partition. From what I can see, this works well, the fare collector acts sort of like a conductor, keeping an eye on what is going on with the passengers in the bus so that the driver can concentrate on driving. They also keep each other company. Since people are paying an actual person, and not a machine, there is no issue with the machine not reading the card or jamming, or someone inserting their card in the machine the wrong way (actually people pay in cash and get change). The fare collector also manages the line of the people on the bus waiting to pay the fare. But I can see how this can’t be implemented in New York given high unionized labor costs.
Some people here argue that one problem is the sheer cussedness of New Yorkers, but this is Rio where this other system operates, so I really don’t think that’s a factor. The main problems seem to be the use of the second employee, and the fact that busses in New York are really geared to serve the elderly and can’t get that fast (also, in Rio busses are the main form of public transportation, so operating them as slow as New York busses is a non-starter, people would be late for work too often).
However, if we are going to make the busses as big as they are getting (busses in Rio are actually on the small side), it might be worthwhile to experiment with moving the fare collection farther into the bus, or even at the exit. If at the exit, people will just have to know to line up to pay the fare well before their stop. They will figure it out.
Labor is cheaper in Brazil. In all Western countries, the driver’s salary is already the biggest expense in bus operation, so a second worker on board would be completely unaffordable.
Instead of bigger buses, how about working on smaller (in the horizontal direction) Americans 🙂
Fare collectors on buses sounds like bumblefuck, rent seeking TWU makework taken to the tenth power. POP works fine the world over, and is the way to go on NYC buses. Token booth clerks are already borderline useless.
Level boarding and POP would mitigate both those problems.
One route that seems glaringly obvious for an articulated bus is the M60. I rode the route 4 times during my visit and while living in New York last year, and I can’t understand why a standard 40 low-floor bus is being used on that route.
The route uses 125th St through the heart of Harlem and East Harlem, where residents use it as a “Grand Central Shuttle” of sorts. The pace of the trip isn’t as painful as a north-south route, but the route needs an articulated bus. The buses used on the SBS are a good start.
And living in city where 25 to 60 minute headways are the norm, the SBS’s 10 minutes would be welcome in St. Louis.
I have seen articulated buses on the M60 from time to time. I never seem to get one of them myself, they’re always going the other direction…but they do exist.
Speaking of the M60, I really wish there was a way to get the 125 St crosstown riders to take any of the 3 other buses (M100, M101, Bx15) because the M60 fills up enough with airport travelers and employees, and those headed to Queens. Use one of the other buses if you’re just trying to go from Lenox to Lex!!
First of all, articulated buses never should have been put on the crosstown routes in the first place. The MTA was under pressure to buy these buses after years of resistance and refusing. Once they were bought, they realized that the only depots that could handle them were for the crosstown routes. So they were placed there Typical ass-backward planning. Then instead of using them to add capacity, they cut service instead. 4 artics replaced 5-standard 40 foot buses.. This greatly slowed boarding times and delayed service along with less frequent service. Since most rides on the crosstowns at short, many just chose to walk instead and th MTA responded by further cutting service.
Several years ago when I took an artic on 23rd Street during a rain, it took me 30 minutes just to travel from 6th to 12th Avenue without traffic or waiting for the bus which spent 5 minutes at each light loading and unloading.
In 2003, I suggested three door artics for SBS and was told that the buses were not structurally sound for use in NYC by Operations Planning and they proceeded to order the two door variety.
Now they finally realize their folly and ordered three door artics which shoud greatly speed service when buses are crowded.
Many times if you are seated near the front, you can’t use the center door even if you want to because the bus is too crowded. Other times it makes no sense when no one is boarding. Perhaps people would heed the pre-recorded announcements if the operator had he discretion to only play them when needed instead of them being an annoyance which everyone ignores.
Let’s not forget how many doors they have in advanced first-world countries:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/7.....hotostream
http://www.flickr.com/photos/7.....hotostream
This is starting to remind me of razor blades…
http://www.theonion.com/articl.....des,11056/
It all depends on whether the purpose of the bus is to move people or to sit while people are boarding.
How much do extra doors help with boarding? Everyone still has to board through just one door (the front) unless there is prepayment. Alighting from the bus is somewhat faster with more doors, but that was never the bottleneck.
They will help a lot when the bus gets very crowded. It will also encourage more riders to move to the back excuse they will know they can get off quicker. Crosstown buses have been known to spend 5 minutes loading and unloading as much as 20 passengers per stop because turnaround is very heavy. That is absolutely ridiculous. That means 20 minutes to travel 3 avenue blocks without traffic. Long dwells also cause drivers to miss signals which adds another minute to travel time.
The buses tell people to board at odd-numbered doors, starting with the first door from the front, and alight from even-numbered doors; I do not know to what extent people follow those rules.
This is done without fareboxes at bus stops as in New York. If it works like in other POP European cities, then most people have unlimited monthly passes because of the large discounts they provide, and the rest can pay the driver at the front.
A lot of people exit through the closest door.
On the older two-door buses, for many riders that’s the front door – which holds up the boarding process.
On the newer three-door buses, only a few riders are closer to the front door than to the middle door. Most people will exit through the middle and back doors, allowing the slow boarding process to start sooner.
Faster on and off can be done as with what the Mexico City Metrobus system does. They have a limited access platform in the middle of the street where you enter via a pay turnstile. People are free to enter any door of the bus pass the turnstile. Here is a link to the photos http://www.metrobus.df.gob.mx/galeria.html This would have been a good alternative to the honor system that the Bx12 Select buses use along Pelham Bay Parkway.
Actually, they would be a terrible alternative to best-practice POP. Turnstiles are maintenance-intensive and slow down boarding, and aren’t feasible on a citywide open bus system. Latin America builds closed BRT systems, to the point that the buses have high floors since people board from high platforms, which are another cost increaser.
The way things work in first-world countries, at least the ones that treat buses as transportation rather than as a welfare system, is:
1. People can board any bus from any door.
2. People are responsible to have a valid fare; the fare is enforced with random inspections. The bus is never held or slowed down during inspections.
3. Riders with valid unlimited passes don’t need to take any action to validate their fare. Riders without pay the driver if there aren’t smartcards or tap their smartcard at the bus stop or on the bus if there are. Validators are dirt cheap.
4. Buses have low floors, so that boarding from raised curbs is more or less level. High platforms are expensive.
For the record, three-door buses have been running on non-SBS lines for almost two years. The Times just didn’t notice.
The single most frustrating thing about NYC buses us the inability of the moronic ridership to understand the simple civil concept of exiting from the back. They’re like the jerks who crowd luggage carousels at airports, instead of standing back six feet so that everyone can see.