Buses

Over the past few years, the MTA has witnessed a bus problem emerge. With slower traffic, unreliable schedules and slashed and reduced routes, the city’s local bus system has sometimes become an afterthought. Popular crosstown and through-borough routes can stick pack ’em in, but bus ridership has undergone a steady decline as subway use has skyrocketed.

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.

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.

Bus ridership figures have declined dramatically over the past few years.

As the MTA touts the fact that subway ridership is on the up-and-up, its ever-shrinking bus network is telling a different story. Authority board members want to do something, anything, to reverse the downward trends, but a simple fix lies right beneath the authority’s nose. Will it be enough to save the bus system or are more dramatic changes in order?

First, the numbers. Subway ridership, we learned last night, is at levels not reached since 1947 before white flight, the true rise of the automobile and the general decline of New York City and its infrastructure. Bus figures though are going the wrong way. For 2011, bus ridership was 665.3 million — a hearty number, yes, but one that is 31.6 million trips fewer than the total from the year before. Bus ridership, in other words, declined 4.5 percent from 2010 to 2011.

These declines were not isolated to any time of the week either. Weekday rides were down 4.3 percent while weekend ridership shrunk by 6.4 percent. 2011 marked the first full year after the June 2010 service cuts that decimated the bus network, and it seems as though those cuts have driven a stake through the heart of the bus network.

Interestingly, the MTA doesn’t believe it’s losing transit riders, and the numbers bear them out. Average subway ridership increased by more than the number of bus rides lost between 2010 and 2011. Perhaps as the buses grow more inconvenient and less frequent, transit riders will opt for the subways instead. That’s the line Transit is pushing at least.

Yet, we shouldn’t be so accepting of that argument. A healthy and vibrant bus network is a component to any transit system. Although buses aren’t nearly as environmentally friendly as a subway, they serve to localize trips and offer more flexibility than a subway track. Buses can carry people over shorter distances and could offer interborough trips that are more direct than the round-about subway routing that invariably carries nearly everyone into and out of Manhattan.

So how to fix the buses and reverse this long-term trend? At the MTA Board committee meetings yesterday, some board members floated various ideas. “We have to start looking at the possibility of smaller buses in areas where there are not many people who need that service, and maybe a discounted fair for off peak hours, so as to encourage people back to using the buses,” Charles Moerdler said.

MTA officials, who described the declining bus ridership totals as “dire,” did not seem to embrace Moerdler’s idea. “Reducing off-peak fares is not something that we are considering at this time,” an authority spokesman said in a statement. Transit officials, meanwhile, are hoping that they will one day have the money to restore buses lost to the cuts but do not know when that time may be.

Even if we wait for money to materialize to restore these lost routes, the solution probably isn’t added service. Instead, it is to speed up the bus system. Buses in New York, as I’ve said many times before, are slow, plodding and unreliable. They’re at the whims of surface traffic and suffer through endless boarding delays. The secret of the faster and more popular Select Bus Service is the pre-board fare payment. That alone is responsible for the bulk of the service’s faster speeds. Enforced dedicated lanes and signal prioritization will help, but nothing gets buses moving faster in New York City than an end to the interminable wait for people to figure out how to dip their MetroCards.

Of course, instituting pre-board fare payment in its current form at every local bus stop in the city would be costly and inefficient. Many bus routes do not attract enough people for such a measure, and those are the ones that would benefit from more service. Transit then should try a balancing act: A faster roll-out of SBS-like services along popular routes coupled with more reliable service along others could make buses more attractive. Only then will New Yorkers return to the city’s surface transit network.