In SF, where we literally never enforce bus (muni) fares, our favorite limousine socialist, Dean Preston, is trying to run on "free muni". It's not like they want it to be better. They just want something to campaign on.
The only thing that would make muni better is to privatize it and let Google run it. They already run a much nicer fleet of buses here, which get egged by the anti-tech crowd for being "too nice" and "too convenient allowing the workforce here to freely and easily get to work". Dollars to donuts, if you deregulated them, they'd have them self driving, with high speed wifi and Kombucha on tap before the end of the year.
Meanwhile, muni and SF city government spends 6 years painting the center lane of van ness red to make a bus lane.
I am a die hard democrat, but city governance for infrastructure... I can see how people like Bloomberg get elected to fix messes like this.
The ways in which Google’s busses are nice are a consequence of them playing on easy mode: they make 3-4 stops in the city and then 3-4 stops in Mountain View. At every stop, passengers are boarding or passengers are departing but almost never both at the same time. You’d never want to use one of those busses for revenue service: a Google-run MUNI would look a lot more like MUNI as it currently exists than the GBus. (Never mind that many of MUNI’s major lines are electrified.)
(And which the Google busses are nice, they’re mostly nice by virtue of being new. They don’t have beverage service or anything stilly like that. They’re just off-the-shelf Van Hool busses, not notably different from Greyhounds.)
Also, speaking as an ex-googler, I find it kinda baffling when people suggest, even hypothetically, that Google would obviously do a better job at running an enterprise unrelated to their core businesses than an incumbent. Google has been around for a while now and it has a very well known track record for its side projects: “loses interest after 3 years and summarily shuts it all down” is the default scenario, not “revolutionizes the entire field.”
I had Google Fiber service when I spent the first half of 2021 in Austin. The internet service was great. But when I moved out of town, it took ages to find out how to cancel service (you actually have to use their web form “contact us” and write out in words that you want to cancel service because the have no menu option for canceling service) and the whole process was much worse than any conventional ISP.
Yeah, it's really amazing to me that google -- a company famous far and wide to its deep institutional allergy to ever directly interacting with end users, nevermind providing them with anything recognizable as "customer support" -- keeps trying to get into consumer services.
The shuttles are contracted out anyways; Google's involvement in actually running them on a day-to-day basis is surprisingly small. Everyone involved, up to a surprisingly senior point in the organization, is a vendor or contractor.
Google would not run a better bus service than Muni. The point of commuter buses is to be nice and comfy, but for short distance transit rides that's actually bad because it screws up your internal circulation on the bus. It's the same reason the NYC Metro has way fewer seats than an intercity train.
And moreover, stop allowing the political process to micromanage transportation planner work. It is a seven year debate to even remove a barely used stop, because there is always that one person who doesn't want to walk a single block.
The best examples of privately run buses (Sweden), involve heavy government regulation of everything from transit stops, to route patterns, to boarding procedures. Even in the nordic countries private provisioning of transit service is primarily about holding labor costs down.
Yes it's important to disambiguate what you mean by privatization.
As Matt said:
"An urban transit agency in Europe typically acts as a regulator and, to an extent, a payor of bus companies, but it does not own buses or employ bus drivers"
This is generally the case in Europe I believe, and also in London.
But not for the most part in the rest of the UK, where the buses are truly "privatized" in the sense that private operators typically set routes and fares themselves (and the tickets they sell are only valid on their own services, of course).
This system is.... not great. There is a need for a strong central co-ordinating authority, even if the actual operation of the busses is contracted out to private operators.
It's important to distinguish between intra-urban and inter-urban services.
The latter do just fine left to the private sector; folks travelling between distant locales are generally not time-sensitive, so it's possible to run a good service that covers a wide-ranging area and is profitable.
The former are a shitshow when people try to make them profitable.
Writing from a bus in Phoenix here. Homeless folks on free or lightly regulated public transportation are a major roadblock to commuter bus use. I am pro public services for homeless, yet riding the bus all day for free air conditioning is not optional. That's the top comment I hear from peers when people hear I commute on public transportation. There are also crowding and safety concerns with perpetual riders.
Increasing the fare is a useful gate keeping mechanism. The policy on Phoenix is generally fare optional as bus drivers are trained not to force the issue with non paying riders. I'd much prefer some enforcement and more investment in addressing homelessness directly (more homes).
As a separate point, fare optional creates a societally-perverse situation where conscientious / rule-abiding / meeker people are subsidizing people with the opposite traits.
I’m a Chicago public transit rider and the literal barrier to entry paying bus fare creates is the reason I feel safer riding the bus over the train. Similar story when I lived in Houston and chose to ride the bus over taking light rail. It’s very difficult to convince people to take public transit when there are real safety concerns about who you are riding with-I’ve always lived in the city so I’m used to strange encounters by now but for new riders it can be a big hurdle.
We’re running into the issue here in Boise. There is no mood to relocate a homeless shelter to a major transportation corridor, right in between downtown and the area where they want to make into a dense transportation corridor. The shelter proponents tote this is a plus for the shelter location. When I try to point out that this could have the inadvertent effect of decreasing ridership between on this route, no one takes me seriously.
As a rule of thumb, the better approach than asking drivers to enforce payment is to have a proof-of-purchase system (ticket machines at stops, electronic passes that you can top up at every store in the city and online, whatever) and then have ticket inspectors get on a bus and check everyone's tickets.
There's only one driver, they have a vehicle to move, even if they can overpower someone, they can't drive the bus as well. Inspectors can arrive in groups of two to four and can forcibly remove someone from a bus and turn them over to the police if they are refusing to pay rather than just not paying.
Someone called me a bigot once for stating that more people would ride the bus if we let less homeless on for free. And yes, I live in Seattle, WA. lol. And I ride my bike mostly, bus infrequently. No car. Despite this, I'm still a very bad, no good person for suggesting that some people might ruin the bus riding experience for others.
There is this thing many people do, myself included, where we sometimes say "homeless" when we mean "a stranger who is dirty, smelly, or off-kilter or anti-social in an unpleasant way".
I'm being somewhat pedantic so I hope you'll forgive that. But I point it out only to be clear that the housing status of a bus passenger doesn't bother anyone. It's the behaviors and appearances that we (rightly or wrongly, I'm no expert on the homeless) associate with homeless people that are the problem. I definitely have seen the kinds of passengers you're talking about in Los Angeles but at the end of the day I can only guess if they were actually homeless or not.
So I wonder if that aspect of it is what rubbed some people the wrong way.
Taxes pay for the homeless to ride too! If you don't think of the homeless as a problem but as customers, there's probably a valuable service there. I'd guess that the homeless are
- price sensitive
- time insensitive
- actually going somewhere
So cities could throw in a couple of infrequent routes that traverse the city end to end in a thorough, meandering way. Make those routes free (ideally explicitly but if not, make sure people know).
You didn't address what I think is the most salient aspect of making the bus free: passenger load time. I know this would be ameliorated if every passenger were ready with a contactless card when it's their turn, but you know how people are. If it takes an average of 3 fewer seconds per rider to load, that would mean a line with 1k passengers per bus over its whole route can save 50 minutes in start to end journey time. Some of that would be lost in higher ridership, of course.
NYC has actually experimented with this for some of the most delay-plagued crosstown buses, and my understanding is that it makes them go considerably faster.
One thing I also haven't seen discussed is making buses smaller. I know this would mean more drivers, but I think the improvement to service would be considerable. The wideness and unwieldy length of buses, plus their sluggish acceleration and braking, slows them down on traffic-heavy streets; in NYC, I can't count the times I've been on a bus that simply can't get past some double parked car and has to wait for several minutes. In the former Soviet Union and other places, there are minibuses ("marshrutkas" in Russian) which are wonderful because they fill up with passengers and then they simply **don't stop** to pick anyone else up, because they're full. This improves total journey time considerably, as long as there's enough service for all the riders. You could just let natural ageing retire old buses, and replace them with a more compact design. A Chevy Suburban is 19 feet long and under 7 feet wide; an NYC bus is generally 35 feet long and 8.5 feet wide. What if we split the difference?
In the quest for that confluence of factors that allows buses to be frequent enough, and fast enough, to be perceived as a reliable option, fareless loading and smaller buses are important parts of the puzzle!
These concerns have generally all been addressed by Jarrett Walker and Alon Levy.
The worldwide best practice for reducing passenger load time is not to make the buses free, but to require fare validation in the bus seating area/at the bus stop/wherever you buy a monthly bus pass, with transit police performing periodic (but random) fare inspection with heavy fines if you're caught freeloading. That way fares still fund the transit agency and gatekeep riders, but complexity of fare purchase does not increase passenger load time.[1]
Smaller buses do not substantially improve bus service, because the vast majority of transit operating expenses go towards labor.[2][3] Worldwide, transit agencies usually handle sluggish acceleration and braking by electrifying the buses, either with batteries, overhead wires, or railstitution.[4] Buses avoid of parked cars when traffic cops make it illegal to park in bus lanes; Alon Levy repeatedly complained about the NYPD's poor enforcement of parking regulations back when he lived in (and focused his studies on) New York. (Sadly, I can't find a good cite.)
Marshrutkas that skip stops when they're full are fast *once you're onboard*. But the randomly skipped stops make it hard to ensure a uniform, frequent timetable at each stop, so much of the saved time gets wasted waiting for a marshrutka to arrive.[5] The rail analogue is Donald Eisele's zone theory, which Levy savages.[6]
Thanks for this in depth and thoughtful answer! I would push back in defense of Marshrutka wait times, to say that as a large bus fills up, it cannot really "go express" because passengers area likely to get off at more stops. During peak times, many NYC routes experience a critical mass of full buses that take a good 2 minutes per stop to load and unload a handful of passengers. That is much less prone to happen with smaller buses, since there are fewer passengers on a full bus. So it's possible that shrinking the buses, alone, would provide speed savings that would effectively increase capacity to offset the smaller number of seats. Probably this offset wouldn't fully make up for the loss of seats, but a small increase in the number of buses plus smaller buses might make for more reliable and fast service overall, compared to using the added labor to run more large buses. Obviously there are tradeoffs with bus size -- we can agree that a smart car is certainly too small, and a triple length bus on a crowded Brooklyn street is too large. The question is, which side of the curve are NYC and Boston buses on? Would service improve marginally if they were 10% bigger, or if they were 10% smaller?
I also concede that when stops are made farther apart (something Boston's system desperately needs -- in done places there are three stops within 1/5 of a mile), the marshrutka advantage diminishes.
In Seattle we have several bus routes designated "RapidRide." They work more like a train — you scan your fare card while waiting at the station (or you can do it after you're on the bus) and you enter the bus through whichever door you prefer (front, middle, back).
These routes all run in designated bus lanes and (theoretically) they come every 10 minutes (waaay too infrequent imo, but better than many other routes in this city.)
The other nice thing about the rapid ride lines is that they have a pretty far reach. I live near the end of the C line, and it can get me to West Seattle almost fast as a car because of how spaced out the stops are
The reduction of dwell time is proportional to ridership, so it’s a very nice problem to have, but the vast majority of routes (especially outside the okay-to-good transit cities) need improved service fundamentals to increase ridership to get to a point where the dwell time improvements make sense
I just spent Labor Day weekend in San Francisco, where we took about 10 Muni trips, and it was shocking how much faster the buses loaded than in NYC, where I live. Now maybe this was a function of the pandemic or the holiday weekend or not enforcing fare collection (see below) or whatever, but my wife -- no bus lover, believe me -- said she would happily ride the bus all the time if it were as fast and frequent as in SF.
The #1 thing for loading, in NYC every rider (on most buses) has to feed their card into the reader at the front of the bus. Not so in SF, where riders boarded through multiple doors and tap in. Huge difference.
In terms of the general experience, traffic also seemed very light overall. We were staying in Japantown and mostly used a high-frequency route along Geary. But we also rode (I think) the 1 and the 44 and the streetcar. Some buses were more crowded than others, none were packed like sardines.
My second-hand understanding (my father worked in public transit for 30+ years) is that in most instances small buses' greater per-passenger operating costs wipe out most other savings associated with them except for really space-constrained routes.
Aren't you making a bit of a logical leap between "bus riders rate low fares low on their list of priorities" and "eliminating fares wouldn't do much to increase bus ridership"? By definition, the survey cited doesn't include people who don't ride the bus now, but might if it was free. And even those surveyed weren't asked "would you ride the bus more or less if it was free". Wouldn't it be more accurate to look at some places that have reduced or eliminated fares, and see what the effect on ridership was? Or compare similar routes or systems with different fare structures?
Any data on how the fear of needing to come up with loose change, or possibly forgetting your transit pass card (or keeping money on it) discourages riders otherwise perfectly willing to pay for the bus (or any public transit)? Serious question. I'm happy to be taxed handsomely for transit in exchange for just being able to hop on and not standing around awkwardly at point of service...
At this point it's embarrassing that buses don't do touchless credit card transactions.
You're right that not having to worry about transit passes does discourage the occasional rider, but if you have a discounted pass (esp if it's flat rate for the month) you probably use the service more. I'd guess the latter effect dominates.
London buses have done contactless credit card transactions for so long they scrapped taking cash (as almost no-one was using it, and it saved them a fortune by not having to handle it).
You can either use a contactless card (or Apple/Google Pay on your phone) or an Oyster card (London transport pass) - you can either load money onto the Oyster (which you can do online, or using cash or card at a machine) or you can buy a weekly/monthly/annual pass on the Oyster.
Yes, this is a fair point. In his post Matt mostly seems to talk about the opportunity costs of lower fares on a continuum, but there is a specific separate benefit to having something that is specifically *free*, versus even a fare of one cent.
There are also some specific dis-benefits, like, it might be more likely to attract homeless people who will just ride it around all day.
This. The bus is pretty much the only time now where I *have* to pay with cash, and probably some coins, no debit cards allowed. Or they have some special transit pass card that only works for their specific city and can only be purchased in special locations and has to be loaded online.
I feel like "figuring out how to pay fares" is a bigger filter than fare price is to a lot of people who might want to ride the bus. It was for me when I wanted to start busing to work and delayed me until I had the motivation to figure it out.
The Circulator style buses which run frequent schedules on fixed high density loops seem very popular. I've never quite figured out the target market. They seem aimed at tourists and business travellers but the routes are sometimes opaque and tough to figure out.
The problem with buses is the high learning curve. You have to know the routes and the rates and the schedules. This works for people willing or needing to put in the effort but it is very offputting to the casual rider you may only need a bus once a week or less.
The learning curve is definitely *a* problem but this is an area where technology makes a big difference. Google and Apple can tell you when the bus is coming and where it goes.
One of the only things SEPTA (Philly-area transit authority) actually does well is that it has a very good bus/train/trolley tracker app. My guess is that that app's introduction in 2017 or so single-handedly pushed up transit use by 10 percentage points or more, simply by telling people when it would be practical to use the bus.
CityMapper is amazing at this. It is consistently ahead of Google or Apple Maps, and covers most major cities.
It definitely doesn't cover everywhere, but that's intentional so they can provide really good service in the cities it does cover - has payment information as well as routing and timetables, has route specific information (e.g. telling you which end of a train to be on so you can hit the right exit or make a connection), can integrate transit and private transport, e.g. suggesting a combined route on bus and bikehire, or a combined train/Uber trip.
They have some paid features (notably the voice guide on public transit - the audio alert telling you to get off is free, but the voice guiding you to the right exit is paid)
Yes, this: I just visited SF and used Muni extensively (as noted above) and found Google Maps to be very accurate in terms of IDing nearby bus routes and when they were arriving, etc. Believe me, I'm not usually a shill for Google.
I see a lot of people commenting on European style commuting, so I wanted to give my two cents on South Korean style commuting.
1) It's incredibly convenient, mostly due to the money card system, T-money, that almost the whole country's transportation system is based on. Wikipedia gives you some great basic information on it if interested. It is a smart, chip-based card that you reload money onto, and you can purchase it at pretty much any public station or convenience store. It will get you on the bus, the subway, the train (even long distance train along with an additional ticket), and even taxis. Within the past couple of years, there is now an app on your phone you can use. There is little to no delay on getting into your transportation of choice.
2) In the metropolitan areas, there are plenty of buses and routes to get you within walking distance of almost any block you want to go to. There are speed buses, leisure (shopping/tourist oriented) buses, general area buses, and long-distance buses, categorized by color. There is a map and timetable at every stop, and we've been to some rather old, unused stops that had the information as well. It's not perfect - there has been times were we had to wait longer than expected, but compared to the US's bus system in lower density towns, it's a night and day difference.
3) Going back to the T-money card, I cannot stress enough how convenient it is to use one card to transfer from a subway to a train to a bus - then maybe you're tired of the public system? Just catch a taxi that has the T-money sign on the side and that will also get you home with your card. The bus system and subway system is not run by the same specific organization, neither are all buses run solely by the gov't or solely private, but they all use the same money transfer system. This is the key to fast passenger loading and to keeping the time table.
4) Most of the general population uses the public transportation system, as in Europe. It is not a "poor" people thing, like it is the US. To be fair, gasoline is far more expensive there, and the government also planned more dense housing in the metro areas, so public transportation can be a monetarily better choice. However, cars are popular, despite the costs, and congestion can be bad, even in the bus lanes. I've driven in cars and taken public transportation, and I will admit the car got me home faster, probably by 30 minutes based on a 1.5 hour car commute compared to a 2 hour public transport commute. (And you walk more with public transportation, take that for what it is.) That being said, my opinion is that the public system is convenient, relatively safe, competitively fast, and makes more fiscal sense for most of the public than car ownership, hence it's popularity.
4.5) Related to the above point and to the author's original point on free bus rides, there is a discount system for seniors, children, and students, which makes sense in supporting the population as a whole.
What I've found in my discussions with this to others is a reoccuring argument that the Korean people, in general, are more organized that Americans and that it can work for them but it wouldn't work for us. That's simply false, and sort of a caricature generalization I think Americans have about Asians in general. Believe me, regular Korean people are not different from regular Americans. We are all humans with basic reasoning skills - this system can work with everyone. It's the (US) government (fed/state/local) that needs to start looking at public transportation as a whole benefit for all citizens, not just those for lower-income.
When I was visiting a friend in Paris this summer I noticed that they've made it impossible to get on the metro without paying the fare. Here in Cambridge, it's very easy to hop on the red line without tapping your CharlieCard, but in France, they have a much more complicated turnstile and security cameras and a person in the ticket booth watching you. You get what you pay for — French trains are a lot faster and nicer!
The people who advocate for free fares also seem to be the last people who would ever advocate for a bus lane, a bus boarding island, or just about anything that gave the bus space at the expense of the automobile.
I don’t think that’s right. There’s a leftist free fare fan base, as well as a reduced dwell time free fare fan base, each of which would advocate for all the policies you mention.
Don’t think this is universally the case and don’t really agree with Matt’s conclusion on who supports this. The people advocating for this in Philly seem (to me) to be very high transit usage people who have goals of making bus usage more popular so that there will be more political support for greater transit investment. A lot of the “free fare” advocacy here centers around students, college kids, etc with the idea that if it’s free more people would get used to taking the bus and become supporters. An additional idea is having colleges pay to make it free for their students in some way. But essentially the argument seems to be to reduce barriers to entry so more people will use and advocate for buses. I think investment in better service would be more successful but I don’t agree with this negative take on their motives.
I don't know if it would be applicable elsewhere, but in NYC being able to make free transfers between buses and subways *effectively* made many bus rides free... In my part of Brooklyn, it was common to take a bus "sideways" to connect with a proper subway line to get to Manhattan. That system worked pretty well, I thought.
Oh, and having the real-time bus tracking was a much bigger help than one might guess for a couple reasons:
- there might sometimes be two nearby bus lines, and you need to know which one will have a bus arriving next
- if you are close to the bus stop, in bad weather you can time your exit from home to minimize time spent standing outside
I should have been clearer about this — I think free transfers (as in New York but also all the good German transit systems I'm familiar with) are very good.
To the extent that all bus-rides are transfers, yes. I wonder what the proportion of transfers vs. bus-only rides is, in most systems?
But in any case, I'm imagining a consolidated transit system in which the bus services and train services draw their revenue from the same pot of money. Free bus transfers make the train service more attractive. When I buy a train ticket that I would not have bought without a free bus transfer, that money goes into the common pot, and supports the bus service.
Agree with Ben Wheeler. Matt, I used to live in DC and take the bus from Chinatown to the H Street area. It would take longer to load the 30 passengers in line than if I had walked the two miles. Ok, maybe not quite as long, but it was so painfully slow it often discouraged me from taking it.
Since moving to Chicago, I take the L whenever I can. When I lived in DC, I took the metro whenever I could. Chicago's subway is configured similarly to DC's, in a spoke-hub setup, so it suffers from a similar problem: areas that aren't on one of the spokes are impossible to access by train.
Still, to get to those off-train areas, I take the bus as rarely as possible, for one reason: it's so damn slow. In the last section, Matt talks about the reforms that would fix this: bus lanes, fewer stops, more buses. These are absolutely essential, in my opinion, to increase ridership. (Chicago has bus lanes, but only in a few areas.)
As an aside, I was in DC back in 2016 when they had to shut down the entire metro because of cable fire concerns. Much like in Chicago, the train is so insanely better than the bus that nobody would take the bus on those routes if they could avoid it. Shifting hundreds of thousands of people from the train to the bus, all on the same day, was predictably terrible. In particular, those bus routes were used so rarely that even the drivers didn't really know what all of their stops were supposed to be.
The consensus among progressive activists (including the “near left,” not just the far left) here in Chicago is that bus drivers are actually hideously underpaid and have insufficient benefits. I’m fairly appalled that you seem not to be outraged by the mere suggestion of busting unions and paying bus drivers less. I grant that you don’t specifically say you agree that it must be done, but you also don’t specifically say that it’s an unacceptable course of action. American progressives are allergic to privatization, but as Europe demonstrates, private bus companies can be regulated and unions can force acceptable pay. But I would appreciate some clarification on your thoughts about hypothetically cutting bus driver pay.
The median individual income in Chicago was $31.6k in 2019. The average CTA driver was making $75.6k in 2018 - top earners are making $150k. "Hideously underpaid" is such nonsense.
Normally, yes. But the ones I hang out with know their history, civics, and law, and don’t traffic in fairy tales or wishful thinking regarding stats or the public record. That’s the meaning of the part of my comment you didn’t quote, referencing the “near left,” As I like to call them.
I mean, counterpoint: if David Rye is to be believed, the average bus driver in the city you referenced is making well above median household income nationwide, and more than double the median individual income in your city.
Based on the ads I see on CTA, I think the starting salary for Chicago bus drivers is around $36/hour, which comes out (I think) somewhere in the $50k a year range assuming full time work. It could be higher but that’s not “hideous” underpayment. (I have no idea about the benefits.)
I have a friend who is a labor/employment attorney with CTA and according to her bus drivers are by far the hardest position to hire for and retain. Which makes sense—it’s a really stressful job (there’s a reason I ride the bus instead of driving in Chicago traffic), you have to deal with lots of difficult people, and certain routes are legitimately dangerous. I can’t really say whether things would be worse/better without a union, but until we have self-driving buses, I’m skeptical that cutting bus driver pay is a realistic route towards more reliable bus service in big cities at least.
I'm sure there's considerable variation so it's hard to have a single view of how much bus drivers should be paid, but Indeed lists the salary for a Philadelphia bus driver as ~$63k, which doesn't seem like any kind of travesty.
Makes a very convincing case for the rationality (the operative word here) of union-busting or resisting unionization. Tell me why any rational (that word again) business or government entity shouldn't look at the possibility of a 30% reduction in operating expenses and not absolutely go for it. And Matt thought this post was about public transit.
Snark aside, do I think that unions are unproblematic? Of course not, but in a country where a large percentage of the workforce is denied both a living wage and any meaningful benefits, the worker protections and benefits that unions provide point the way, however imperfectly, to how workers should be treated. And always have historically. Absent a much stronger commitment by government to step in and fill some of the role played by unions, like providing providing access to good health care and a secure path to retirement, we have to accept that unions still play a vital, if messy, role in prodding a cut-throat American business class and a mostly passive federal government to deal with workers fairly.
As a bus-rider in Oakland, I can tell you that driving one is not an easy job. Sometimes I wonder if they should have social workers driving buses, but no, you gotta have nerves of steel.
>>When you spend a bunch of money building a metro system, but don’t rezone for dense housing near the stations (looking at you, Los Angeles), you don’t get any riders. <<
Thanks for looking at us, Matt! So you've seen the big residential buildings going up near our transit stations partly as a result of the Transit Oriented Communities initiative that permits denser housing on commercial corridors in transit/job-rich areas?
Yep, still a vast amount of SFH-only land. Though as soon as Newsom signs SB 9 and 10 (presumably when it's safe, after Sep. 14) SFH-only zoning will be no more. Granted, it will probably take 30 or 40 years to actually increase density much, given the slow turnover of housing, but that's going to be the case no matter what.
In NYC at least, it's likely that making the bus free would siphon ridership away from the train, not from cars. The train probably has even fewer negative externalities than the bus; greater economies of scale, no impact on traffic. The idea that the bus should be free because cars are so bad just doesn't make sense here.
"If we don't charge anything for this service, people will be more likely to use it" is tautologically true but not really helpful.
Are there any improved efficiencies with not forcing riders to pay fares or swipe a card? It seems that you could more effectively use multiple entrances on the bus and improve commute times.
I loved the German system where they have tickets machines on the light rail and streetcars (and machines at some stops) as well as easily-bought monthly passes. Then they use all door boarding without making you swipe a card and just have transit police come by occasionally and check. The fine of 60 Euro was high enough that few people would risk getting caught without a ticket, especially when the month passes were around 40 Euro
Foresee? We already have this in New York. As a result of which, proof of payment enforcement has been effectively suspended on the grounds of disproportionate impact etc. etc. About the same time the cops stopped enforcing the turnstiles on the subway, and on the same grounds. I have never seen an enforcement agent on a bus. I'm sure they exist, but I can't see how they can be effective if they're not visible. Only us honest schmoos need pay the fare.
It doesn't have to be spot checks on individual passengers - the checkers randomly pick a bus or train car and then walk through and methodically check everyone in it, including the people who try to disembark.
To Ted's point tho ... I'd imagine there will be "disproportionate" tickets written in the same direction as other crime statistics. It was my first thought on why it wouldn't work here.
I wonder if it's that it wouldn't work here, or that it would work despite complaints of disproportionate impact. If people complain on Twitter, how much does that really matter? Then again, if it does matter, it'll be in blue cities where all the transit is, I guess.
In my experience (New York), someone who refuses to pay the fare will also refuse to pay the fine. And there are a lot of such people. Unless you're willing to use physical force (i.e. 3 or 4 cops throwing people off the bus) or can dream up some serious sanction short of jail, this will not change.
All-door boarding and proof of payment systems are definitely measurable service improvements: they reduce dwell time at stops. They don’t however make busses any cheaper to run.
Anything that makes buses move faster also makes them a bit cheaper for the same amount of service, because you can do the same number of daily runs of a route with fewer drivers and vehicles. There’s also some sort of up front cost savings of not having to put payment verification inside the buses (though this probably gets eaten up putting it at all the stops).
I visit South Korea every other year for family, and yes there are easier ways. All (trains, buses, subways, even taxis) public transportation use a T-money card which has now been turned into an app on the phone. All entrances have a box machine to swipe the card or the phone. It cannot be made much easier than that.
In SF, where we literally never enforce bus (muni) fares, our favorite limousine socialist, Dean Preston, is trying to run on "free muni". It's not like they want it to be better. They just want something to campaign on.
The only thing that would make muni better is to privatize it and let Google run it. They already run a much nicer fleet of buses here, which get egged by the anti-tech crowd for being "too nice" and "too convenient allowing the workforce here to freely and easily get to work". Dollars to donuts, if you deregulated them, they'd have them self driving, with high speed wifi and Kombucha on tap before the end of the year.
Meanwhile, muni and SF city government spends 6 years painting the center lane of van ness red to make a bus lane.
I am a die hard democrat, but city governance for infrastructure... I can see how people like Bloomberg get elected to fix messes like this.
Preston is a perfect example of these bad trends. It's politics *for* rich homeowners but given this vague gloss of leftist ideology.
OK, I'm going to subscribe a second time just for this comment.
The ways in which Google’s busses are nice are a consequence of them playing on easy mode: they make 3-4 stops in the city and then 3-4 stops in Mountain View. At every stop, passengers are boarding or passengers are departing but almost never both at the same time. You’d never want to use one of those busses for revenue service: a Google-run MUNI would look a lot more like MUNI as it currently exists than the GBus. (Never mind that many of MUNI’s major lines are electrified.)
(And which the Google busses are nice, they’re mostly nice by virtue of being new. They don’t have beverage service or anything stilly like that. They’re just off-the-shelf Van Hool busses, not notably different from Greyhounds.)
Also, speaking as an ex-googler, I find it kinda baffling when people suggest, even hypothetically, that Google would obviously do a better job at running an enterprise unrelated to their core businesses than an incumbent. Google has been around for a while now and it has a very well known track record for its side projects: “loses interest after 3 years and summarily shuts it all down” is the default scenario, not “revolutionizes the entire field.”
I had Google Fiber service when I spent the first half of 2021 in Austin. The internet service was great. But when I moved out of town, it took ages to find out how to cancel service (you actually have to use their web form “contact us” and write out in words that you want to cancel service because the have no menu option for canceling service) and the whole process was much worse than any conventional ISP.
Yeah, it's really amazing to me that google -- a company famous far and wide to its deep institutional allergy to ever directly interacting with end users, nevermind providing them with anything recognizable as "customer support" -- keeps trying to get into consumer services.
The shuttles are contracted out anyways; Google's involvement in actually running them on a day-to-day basis is surprisingly small. Everyone involved, up to a surprisingly senior point in the organization, is a vendor or contractor.
Google would not run a better bus service than Muni. The point of commuter buses is to be nice and comfy, but for short distance transit rides that's actually bad because it screws up your internal circulation on the bus. It's the same reason the NYC Metro has way fewer seats than an intercity train.
Replace the word Google with Private Sector then.
And moreover, stop allowing the political process to micromanage transportation planner work. It is a seven year debate to even remove a barely used stop, because there is always that one person who doesn't want to walk a single block.
The best examples of privately run buses (Sweden), involve heavy government regulation of everything from transit stops, to route patterns, to boarding procedures. Even in the nordic countries private provisioning of transit service is primarily about holding labor costs down.
Yes it's important to disambiguate what you mean by privatization.
As Matt said:
"An urban transit agency in Europe typically acts as a regulator and, to an extent, a payor of bus companies, but it does not own buses or employ bus drivers"
This is generally the case in Europe I believe, and also in London.
But not for the most part in the rest of the UK, where the buses are truly "privatized" in the sense that private operators typically set routes and fares themselves (and the tickets they sell are only valid on their own services, of course).
This system is.... not great. There is a need for a strong central co-ordinating authority, even if the actual operation of the busses is contracted out to private operators.
It's important to distinguish between intra-urban and inter-urban services.
The latter do just fine left to the private sector; folks travelling between distant locales are generally not time-sensitive, so it's possible to run a good service that covers a wide-ranging area and is profitable.
The former are a shitshow when people try to make them profitable.
Also Van Ness BRT was replace a utility replacement scam, dressed up as a transit project to get federal dollars.
"I am a die hard democrat, but city governance for infrastructure... I can see how people like Bloomberg get elected to fix messes like this."
Yeah, the YIMBY movement encouraging me to follow local government more really makes me wonder if we couldn't drown the whole damn thing in a bathtub.
Sounds like this Preston fellow needs to be asked that good old question: “what are you trying to achieve and how will your idea help you achieve it?”
"By radically re-imagining our transport, this will expand our possibility space to alternatives to capitalistic hegemony."
Writing from a bus in Phoenix here. Homeless folks on free or lightly regulated public transportation are a major roadblock to commuter bus use. I am pro public services for homeless, yet riding the bus all day for free air conditioning is not optional. That's the top comment I hear from peers when people hear I commute on public transportation. There are also crowding and safety concerns with perpetual riders.
Increasing the fare is a useful gate keeping mechanism. The policy on Phoenix is generally fare optional as bus drivers are trained not to force the issue with non paying riders. I'd much prefer some enforcement and more investment in addressing homelessness directly (more homes).
As a separate point, fare optional creates a societally-perverse situation where conscientious / rule-abiding / meeker people are subsidizing people with the opposite traits.
I’m a Chicago public transit rider and the literal barrier to entry paying bus fare creates is the reason I feel safer riding the bus over the train. Similar story when I lived in Houston and chose to ride the bus over taking light rail. It’s very difficult to convince people to take public transit when there are real safety concerns about who you are riding with-I’ve always lived in the city so I’m used to strange encounters by now but for new riders it can be a big hurdle.
We’re running into the issue here in Boise. There is no mood to relocate a homeless shelter to a major transportation corridor, right in between downtown and the area where they want to make into a dense transportation corridor. The shelter proponents tote this is a plus for the shelter location. When I try to point out that this could have the inadvertent effect of decreasing ridership between on this route, no one takes me seriously.
As a rule of thumb, the better approach than asking drivers to enforce payment is to have a proof-of-purchase system (ticket machines at stops, electronic passes that you can top up at every store in the city and online, whatever) and then have ticket inspectors get on a bus and check everyone's tickets.
There's only one driver, they have a vehicle to move, even if they can overpower someone, they can't drive the bus as well. Inspectors can arrive in groups of two to four and can forcibly remove someone from a bus and turn them over to the police if they are refusing to pay rather than just not paying.
Someone called me a bigot once for stating that more people would ride the bus if we let less homeless on for free. And yes, I live in Seattle, WA. lol. And I ride my bike mostly, bus infrequently. No car. Despite this, I'm still a very bad, no good person for suggesting that some people might ruin the bus riding experience for others.
There is this thing many people do, myself included, where we sometimes say "homeless" when we mean "a stranger who is dirty, smelly, or off-kilter or anti-social in an unpleasant way".
I'm being somewhat pedantic so I hope you'll forgive that. But I point it out only to be clear that the housing status of a bus passenger doesn't bother anyone. It's the behaviors and appearances that we (rightly or wrongly, I'm no expert on the homeless) associate with homeless people that are the problem. I definitely have seen the kinds of passengers you're talking about in Los Angeles but at the end of the day I can only guess if they were actually homeless or not.
So I wonder if that aspect of it is what rubbed some people the wrong way.
For what it's worth here in Cambridge the bus drivers usually let it slide if you're a student who forgot your bus pass
Taxes pay for the homeless to ride too! If you don't think of the homeless as a problem but as customers, there's probably a valuable service there. I'd guess that the homeless are
- price sensitive
- time insensitive
- actually going somewhere
So cities could throw in a couple of infrequent routes that traverse the city end to end in a thorough, meandering way. Make those routes free (ideally explicitly but if not, make sure people know).
Also applies in winter for colder climates!
You didn't address what I think is the most salient aspect of making the bus free: passenger load time. I know this would be ameliorated if every passenger were ready with a contactless card when it's their turn, but you know how people are. If it takes an average of 3 fewer seconds per rider to load, that would mean a line with 1k passengers per bus over its whole route can save 50 minutes in start to end journey time. Some of that would be lost in higher ridership, of course.
NYC has actually experimented with this for some of the most delay-plagued crosstown buses, and my understanding is that it makes them go considerably faster.
One thing I also haven't seen discussed is making buses smaller. I know this would mean more drivers, but I think the improvement to service would be considerable. The wideness and unwieldy length of buses, plus their sluggish acceleration and braking, slows them down on traffic-heavy streets; in NYC, I can't count the times I've been on a bus that simply can't get past some double parked car and has to wait for several minutes. In the former Soviet Union and other places, there are minibuses ("marshrutkas" in Russian) which are wonderful because they fill up with passengers and then they simply **don't stop** to pick anyone else up, because they're full. This improves total journey time considerably, as long as there's enough service for all the riders. You could just let natural ageing retire old buses, and replace them with a more compact design. A Chevy Suburban is 19 feet long and under 7 feet wide; an NYC bus is generally 35 feet long and 8.5 feet wide. What if we split the difference?
In the quest for that confluence of factors that allows buses to be frequent enough, and fast enough, to be perceived as a reliable option, fareless loading and smaller buses are important parts of the puzzle!
These concerns have generally all been addressed by Jarrett Walker and Alon Levy.
The worldwide best practice for reducing passenger load time is not to make the buses free, but to require fare validation in the bus seating area/at the bus stop/wherever you buy a monthly bus pass, with transit police performing periodic (but random) fare inspection with heavy fines if you're caught freeloading. That way fares still fund the transit agency and gatekeep riders, but complexity of fare purchase does not increase passenger load time.[1]
Smaller buses do not substantially improve bus service, because the vast majority of transit operating expenses go towards labor.[2][3] Worldwide, transit agencies usually handle sluggish acceleration and braking by electrifying the buses, either with batteries, overhead wires, or railstitution.[4] Buses avoid of parked cars when traffic cops make it illegal to park in bus lanes; Alon Levy repeatedly complained about the NYPD's poor enforcement of parking regulations back when he lived in (and focused his studies on) New York. (Sadly, I can't find a good cite.)
Marshrutkas that skip stops when they're full are fast *once you're onboard*. But the randomly skipped stops make it hard to ensure a uniform, frequent timetable at each stop, so much of the saved time gets wasted waiting for a marshrutka to arrive.[5] The rail analogue is Donald Eisele's zone theory, which Levy savages.[6]
[1]: https://pedestrianobservations.com/2019/11/13/fare-evasion/
[2]: https://humantransit.org/2011/07/02box.html
[3]: https://humantransit.org/2020/04/whats-wrong-with-an-empty-bus.html
[4]: See https://humantransit.org/2010/05/seattle-the-end-of-trolleybuses.html, https://humantransit.org/2011/02/sorting-out-rail-bus-differences.html, and https://pedestrianobservations.com/2018/12/09/in-motion-charging/
[5]: https://pedestrianobservations.com/2017/06/28/modeling-jitney-bus-competition/
[6]: https://pedestrianobservations.com/2021/07/08/the-invention-of-bad-railroad-timetables/
Oops — I mean "when *they lived in (and focused *their studies on) New York."
Thanks for this in depth and thoughtful answer! I would push back in defense of Marshrutka wait times, to say that as a large bus fills up, it cannot really "go express" because passengers area likely to get off at more stops. During peak times, many NYC routes experience a critical mass of full buses that take a good 2 minutes per stop to load and unload a handful of passengers. That is much less prone to happen with smaller buses, since there are fewer passengers on a full bus. So it's possible that shrinking the buses, alone, would provide speed savings that would effectively increase capacity to offset the smaller number of seats. Probably this offset wouldn't fully make up for the loss of seats, but a small increase in the number of buses plus smaller buses might make for more reliable and fast service overall, compared to using the added labor to run more large buses. Obviously there are tradeoffs with bus size -- we can agree that a smart car is certainly too small, and a triple length bus on a crowded Brooklyn street is too large. The question is, which side of the curve are NYC and Boston buses on? Would service improve marginally if they were 10% bigger, or if they were 10% smaller?
I also concede that when stops are made farther apart (something Boston's system desperately needs -- in done places there are three stops within 1/5 of a mile), the marshrutka advantage diminishes.
One issue is that modern busses need to be wheelchair-accessible, which minibuses often aren't (or they rely on lifts, which are time-consuming).
I like the implication that the future of American municipal transportation is the jeepney.
Dollar vans 4 life
In Seattle we have several bus routes designated "RapidRide." They work more like a train — you scan your fare card while waiting at the station (or you can do it after you're on the bus) and you enter the bus through whichever door you prefer (front, middle, back).
These routes all run in designated bus lanes and (theoretically) they come every 10 minutes (waaay too infrequent imo, but better than many other routes in this city.)
The other nice thing about the rapid ride lines is that they have a pretty far reach. I live near the end of the C line, and it can get me to West Seattle almost fast as a car because of how spaced out the stops are
The reduction of dwell time is proportional to ridership, so it’s a very nice problem to have, but the vast majority of routes (especially outside the okay-to-good transit cities) need improved service fundamentals to increase ridership to get to a point where the dwell time improvements make sense
Yes, my impressions are very much specific to the two highest-density cities in the US: NYC and Somerville MA
I just spent Labor Day weekend in San Francisco, where we took about 10 Muni trips, and it was shocking how much faster the buses loaded than in NYC, where I live. Now maybe this was a function of the pandemic or the holiday weekend or not enforcing fare collection (see below) or whatever, but my wife -- no bus lover, believe me -- said she would happily ride the bus all the time if it were as fast and frequent as in SF.
Did you see a pattern in what was different?
The #1 thing for loading, in NYC every rider (on most buses) has to feed their card into the reader at the front of the bus. Not so in SF, where riders boarded through multiple doors and tap in. Huge difference.
In terms of the general experience, traffic also seemed very light overall. We were staying in Japantown and mostly used a high-frequency route along Geary. But we also rode (I think) the 1 and the 44 and the streetcar. Some buses were more crowded than others, none were packed like sardines.
My second-hand understanding (my father worked in public transit for 30+ years) is that in most instances small buses' greater per-passenger operating costs wipe out most other savings associated with them except for really space-constrained routes.
I'm all for wiping out monetary savings, in exchange for better quality of service! :)
Yeah, if it's a financial wash but with more frequent service that 100% sounds like a win.
Even if the ridership levels are super low? Surely for the 2-5 passenger runs it pencils out?
Aren't you making a bit of a logical leap between "bus riders rate low fares low on their list of priorities" and "eliminating fares wouldn't do much to increase bus ridership"? By definition, the survey cited doesn't include people who don't ride the bus now, but might if it was free. And even those surveyed weren't asked "would you ride the bus more or less if it was free". Wouldn't it be more accurate to look at some places that have reduced or eliminated fares, and see what the effect on ridership was? Or compare similar routes or systems with different fare structures?
Any data on how the fear of needing to come up with loose change, or possibly forgetting your transit pass card (or keeping money on it) discourages riders otherwise perfectly willing to pay for the bus (or any public transit)? Serious question. I'm happy to be taxed handsomely for transit in exchange for just being able to hop on and not standing around awkwardly at point of service...
At this point it's embarrassing that buses don't do touchless credit card transactions.
You're right that not having to worry about transit passes does discourage the occasional rider, but if you have a discounted pass (esp if it's flat rate for the month) you probably use the service more. I'd guess the latter effect dominates.
London buses have done contactless credit card transactions for so long they scrapped taking cash (as almost no-one was using it, and it saved them a fortune by not having to handle it).
You can either use a contactless card (or Apple/Google Pay on your phone) or an Oyster card (London transport pass) - you can either load money onto the Oyster (which you can do online, or using cash or card at a machine) or you can buy a weekly/monthly/annual pass on the Oyster.
Yes, this is a fair point. In his post Matt mostly seems to talk about the opportunity costs of lower fares on a continuum, but there is a specific separate benefit to having something that is specifically *free*, versus even a fare of one cent.
There are also some specific dis-benefits, like, it might be more likely to attract homeless people who will just ride it around all day.
This. The bus is pretty much the only time now where I *have* to pay with cash, and probably some coins, no debit cards allowed. Or they have some special transit pass card that only works for their specific city and can only be purchased in special locations and has to be loaded online.
I feel like "figuring out how to pay fares" is a bigger filter than fare price is to a lot of people who might want to ride the bus. It was for me when I wanted to start busing to work and delayed me until I had the motivation to figure it out.
The Circulator style buses which run frequent schedules on fixed high density loops seem very popular. I've never quite figured out the target market. They seem aimed at tourists and business travellers but the routes are sometimes opaque and tough to figure out.
The problem with buses is the high learning curve. You have to know the routes and the rates and the schedules. This works for people willing or needing to put in the effort but it is very offputting to the casual rider you may only need a bus once a week or less.
The learning curve is definitely *a* problem but this is an area where technology makes a big difference. Google and Apple can tell you when the bus is coming and where it goes.
One of the only things SEPTA (Philly-area transit authority) actually does well is that it has a very good bus/train/trolley tracker app. My guess is that that app's introduction in 2017 or so single-handedly pushed up transit use by 10 percentage points or more, simply by telling people when it would be practical to use the bus.
CityMapper is amazing at this. It is consistently ahead of Google or Apple Maps, and covers most major cities.
It definitely doesn't cover everywhere, but that's intentional so they can provide really good service in the cities it does cover - has payment information as well as routing and timetables, has route specific information (e.g. telling you which end of a train to be on so you can hit the right exit or make a connection), can integrate transit and private transport, e.g. suggesting a combined route on bus and bikehire, or a combined train/Uber trip.
They have some paid features (notably the voice guide on public transit - the audio alert telling you to get off is free, but the voice guiding you to the right exit is paid)
Yes, this: I just visited SF and used Muni extensively (as noted above) and found Google Maps to be very accurate in terms of IDing nearby bus routes and when they were arriving, etc. Believe me, I'm not usually a shill for Google.
I see a lot of people commenting on European style commuting, so I wanted to give my two cents on South Korean style commuting.
1) It's incredibly convenient, mostly due to the money card system, T-money, that almost the whole country's transportation system is based on. Wikipedia gives you some great basic information on it if interested. It is a smart, chip-based card that you reload money onto, and you can purchase it at pretty much any public station or convenience store. It will get you on the bus, the subway, the train (even long distance train along with an additional ticket), and even taxis. Within the past couple of years, there is now an app on your phone you can use. There is little to no delay on getting into your transportation of choice.
2) In the metropolitan areas, there are plenty of buses and routes to get you within walking distance of almost any block you want to go to. There are speed buses, leisure (shopping/tourist oriented) buses, general area buses, and long-distance buses, categorized by color. There is a map and timetable at every stop, and we've been to some rather old, unused stops that had the information as well. It's not perfect - there has been times were we had to wait longer than expected, but compared to the US's bus system in lower density towns, it's a night and day difference.
3) Going back to the T-money card, I cannot stress enough how convenient it is to use one card to transfer from a subway to a train to a bus - then maybe you're tired of the public system? Just catch a taxi that has the T-money sign on the side and that will also get you home with your card. The bus system and subway system is not run by the same specific organization, neither are all buses run solely by the gov't or solely private, but they all use the same money transfer system. This is the key to fast passenger loading and to keeping the time table.
4) Most of the general population uses the public transportation system, as in Europe. It is not a "poor" people thing, like it is the US. To be fair, gasoline is far more expensive there, and the government also planned more dense housing in the metro areas, so public transportation can be a monetarily better choice. However, cars are popular, despite the costs, and congestion can be bad, even in the bus lanes. I've driven in cars and taken public transportation, and I will admit the car got me home faster, probably by 30 minutes based on a 1.5 hour car commute compared to a 2 hour public transport commute. (And you walk more with public transportation, take that for what it is.) That being said, my opinion is that the public system is convenient, relatively safe, competitively fast, and makes more fiscal sense for most of the public than car ownership, hence it's popularity.
4.5) Related to the above point and to the author's original point on free bus rides, there is a discount system for seniors, children, and students, which makes sense in supporting the population as a whole.
What I've found in my discussions with this to others is a reoccuring argument that the Korean people, in general, are more organized that Americans and that it can work for them but it wouldn't work for us. That's simply false, and sort of a caricature generalization I think Americans have about Asians in general. Believe me, regular Korean people are not different from regular Americans. We are all humans with basic reasoning skills - this system can work with everyone. It's the (US) government (fed/state/local) that needs to start looking at public transportation as a whole benefit for all citizens, not just those for lower-income.
When I was visiting a friend in Paris this summer I noticed that they've made it impossible to get on the metro without paying the fare. Here in Cambridge, it's very easy to hop on the red line without tapping your CharlieCard, but in France, they have a much more complicated turnstile and security cameras and a person in the ticket booth watching you. You get what you pay for — French trains are a lot faster and nicer!
This sounds pretty similar to the system they have in Taiwan!
The people who advocate for free fares also seem to be the last people who would ever advocate for a bus lane, a bus boarding island, or just about anything that gave the bus space at the expense of the automobile.
I don’t think that’s right. There’s a leftist free fare fan base, as well as a reduced dwell time free fare fan base, each of which would advocate for all the policies you mention.
Yes, I primarily associate free fare advocacy with various flavors of leftism (whether characterized as progressive, socialist, etc.).
These people have virtually no political power in America, so I think to first order my description is accurate.
Don’t think this is universally the case and don’t really agree with Matt’s conclusion on who supports this. The people advocating for this in Philly seem (to me) to be very high transit usage people who have goals of making bus usage more popular so that there will be more political support for greater transit investment. A lot of the “free fare” advocacy here centers around students, college kids, etc with the idea that if it’s free more people would get used to taking the bus and become supporters. An additional idea is having colleges pay to make it free for their students in some way. But essentially the argument seems to be to reduce barriers to entry so more people will use and advocate for buses. I think investment in better service would be more successful but I don’t agree with this negative take on their motives.
There are much better options for how to spend the money here, both in operational and capital expenditures.
Low-hanging fruit- make an all-transit commute easier:
- Use the Key cards to make multi-modal transfers easy and cheap
- Dedicated ROW, frequency increase, and priority signaling for the Girard, Lancaster, and Baltimore trolleys.
Mid-term- reroute basically the entire E-W bus system around feeding the subway lines:
- 24 hr, high-frequency bus service on Cecil B Moore, Lehigh, and Erie in the north
- Same on South, Federal, Snyder in the south
- Same along the Belmont-Parkside-52nd corridor and 63rd corridor
Long-term- BRT and congestion pricing within Philly county:
- Convert the 8 corridors above to full BRT with dedicated ROW
- Congestion price the shit out of 76 and 676 to drive the suburbanites onto Regional Rail.
I don't know if it would be applicable elsewhere, but in NYC being able to make free transfers between buses and subways *effectively* made many bus rides free... In my part of Brooklyn, it was common to take a bus "sideways" to connect with a proper subway line to get to Manhattan. That system worked pretty well, I thought.
Oh, and having the real-time bus tracking was a much bigger help than one might guess for a couple reasons:
- there might sometimes be two nearby bus lines, and you need to know which one will have a bus arriving next
- if you are close to the bus stop, in bad weather you can time your exit from home to minimize time spent standing outside
I should have been clearer about this — I think free transfers (as in New York but also all the good German transit systems I'm familiar with) are very good.
Are free transfers not common? All of the American transit systems I've used for commuting (Louisville, Chicago, and Seattle) have had them
What about free transfers versus no reverse transfers? (Denver has free transfers, but they aren't valid for a reverse trip on the same route.)
A regular ticket is a 3-hour pass, so it does work if your trip isn’t long.
Free transfers also do not involve the revenue loss to the transit system that free fares would.
In a system where almost all bus riders are transferring to/from rail, it’s basically the same as free fares.
"...it’s basically the same as free fares..."
To the extent that all bus-rides are transfers, yes. I wonder what the proportion of transfers vs. bus-only rides is, in most systems?
But in any case, I'm imagining a consolidated transit system in which the bus services and train services draw their revenue from the same pot of money. Free bus transfers make the train service more attractive. When I buy a train ticket that I would not have bought without a free bus transfer, that money goes into the common pot, and supports the bus service.
That's what a transit agency is created to do.
Agree with Ben Wheeler. Matt, I used to live in DC and take the bus from Chinatown to the H Street area. It would take longer to load the 30 passengers in line than if I had walked the two miles. Ok, maybe not quite as long, but it was so painfully slow it often discouraged me from taking it.
That's where having several smaller more frequent busses along the same route would help.
Since moving to Chicago, I take the L whenever I can. When I lived in DC, I took the metro whenever I could. Chicago's subway is configured similarly to DC's, in a spoke-hub setup, so it suffers from a similar problem: areas that aren't on one of the spokes are impossible to access by train.
Still, to get to those off-train areas, I take the bus as rarely as possible, for one reason: it's so damn slow. In the last section, Matt talks about the reforms that would fix this: bus lanes, fewer stops, more buses. These are absolutely essential, in my opinion, to increase ridership. (Chicago has bus lanes, but only in a few areas.)
As an aside, I was in DC back in 2016 when they had to shut down the entire metro because of cable fire concerns. Much like in Chicago, the train is so insanely better than the bus that nobody would take the bus on those routes if they could avoid it. Shifting hundreds of thousands of people from the train to the bus, all on the same day, was predictably terrible. In particular, those bus routes were used so rarely that even the drivers didn't really know what all of their stops were supposed to be.
The consensus among progressive activists (including the “near left,” not just the far left) here in Chicago is that bus drivers are actually hideously underpaid and have insufficient benefits. I’m fairly appalled that you seem not to be outraged by the mere suggestion of busting unions and paying bus drivers less. I grant that you don’t specifically say you agree that it must be done, but you also don’t specifically say that it’s an unacceptable course of action. American progressives are allergic to privatization, but as Europe demonstrates, private bus companies can be regulated and unions can force acceptable pay. But I would appreciate some clarification on your thoughts about hypothetically cutting bus driver pay.
The median individual income in Chicago was $31.6k in 2019. The average CTA driver was making $75.6k in 2018 - top earners are making $150k. "Hideously underpaid" is such nonsense.
https://news.wttw.com/2019/09/26/bus-driver-fired-after-striking-cyclist-was-among-highest-paid-cta-drivers
The phrase "the consensus among progressive activists" should be a bit of a warning sign.
Normally, yes. But the ones I hang out with know their history, civics, and law, and don’t traffic in fairy tales or wishful thinking regarding stats or the public record. That’s the meaning of the part of my comment you didn’t quote, referencing the “near left,” As I like to call them.
I mean, counterpoint: if David Rye is to be believed, the average bus driver in the city you referenced is making well above median household income nationwide, and more than double the median individual income in your city.
Based on the ads I see on CTA, I think the starting salary for Chicago bus drivers is around $36/hour, which comes out (I think) somewhere in the $50k a year range assuming full time work. It could be higher but that’s not “hideous” underpayment. (I have no idea about the benefits.)
I have a friend who is a labor/employment attorney with CTA and according to her bus drivers are by far the hardest position to hire for and retain. Which makes sense—it’s a really stressful job (there’s a reason I ride the bus instead of driving in Chicago traffic), you have to deal with lots of difficult people, and certain routes are legitimately dangerous. I can’t really say whether things would be worse/better without a union, but until we have self-driving buses, I’m skeptical that cutting bus driver pay is a realistic route towards more reliable bus service in big cities at least.
Just to note that $36/hr is in fact 72k/year at 40 hr/week, 50 weeks/year.
Thank you! Was typing on the train and my mental math skills are obviously rusty.
BTW -- You were right on the annual starting salary. It's around $50k. The average is ~$75k so that includes the drivers with long tenures.
I'm sure there's considerable variation so it's hard to have a single view of how much bus drivers should be paid, but Indeed lists the salary for a Philadelphia bus driver as ~$63k, which doesn't seem like any kind of travesty.
"I’m fairly appalled that you seem not to be outraged by the mere suggestion of busting unions and paying bus drivers less."
Yeah, that was another brilliant suggestion from Tyler Cowen, shilling for busting unions again.
There's a caption that applies to all New Yorker cartoons, and it applies to him as well.
Makes a very convincing case for the rationality (the operative word here) of union-busting or resisting unionization. Tell me why any rational (that word again) business or government entity shouldn't look at the possibility of a 30% reduction in operating expenses and not absolutely go for it. And Matt thought this post was about public transit.
Snark aside, do I think that unions are unproblematic? Of course not, but in a country where a large percentage of the workforce is denied both a living wage and any meaningful benefits, the worker protections and benefits that unions provide point the way, however imperfectly, to how workers should be treated. And always have historically. Absent a much stronger commitment by government to step in and fill some of the role played by unions, like providing providing access to good health care and a secure path to retirement, we have to accept that unions still play a vital, if messy, role in prodding a cut-throat American business class and a mostly passive federal government to deal with workers fairly.
As a bus-rider in Oakland, I can tell you that driving one is not an easy job. Sometimes I wonder if they should have social workers driving buses, but no, you gotta have nerves of steel.
>>When you spend a bunch of money building a metro system, but don’t rezone for dense housing near the stations (looking at you, Los Angeles), you don’t get any riders. <<
Thanks for looking at us, Matt! So you've seen the big residential buildings going up near our transit stations partly as a result of the Transit Oriented Communities initiative that permits denser housing on commercial corridors in transit/job-rich areas?
Yep, still a vast amount of SFH-only land. Though as soon as Newsom signs SB 9 and 10 (presumably when it's safe, after Sep. 14) SFH-only zoning will be no more. Granted, it will probably take 30 or 40 years to actually increase density much, given the slow turnover of housing, but that's going to be the case no matter what.
Anyway, thanks for looking at us.
In NYC at least, it's likely that making the bus free would siphon ridership away from the train, not from cars. The train probably has even fewer negative externalities than the bus; greater economies of scale, no impact on traffic. The idea that the bus should be free because cars are so bad just doesn't make sense here.
"If we don't charge anything for this service, people will be more likely to use it" is tautologically true but not really helpful.
Are there any improved efficiencies with not forcing riders to pay fares or swipe a card? It seems that you could more effectively use multiple entrances on the bus and improve commute times.
I loved the German system where they have tickets machines on the light rail and streetcars (and machines at some stops) as well as easily-bought monthly passes. Then they use all door boarding without making you swipe a card and just have transit police come by occasionally and check. The fine of 60 Euro was high enough that few people would risk getting caught without a ticket, especially when the month passes were around 40 Euro
Spot checks in the US probably won’t work. I can foresee endless spats (all perfectly plausible) about one or another group bring unfairly picked on.
Denver uses spot checks (proof-of-payment) and this isn’t an issue that I’ve ever heard about.
Foresee? We already have this in New York. As a result of which, proof of payment enforcement has been effectively suspended on the grounds of disproportionate impact etc. etc. About the same time the cops stopped enforcing the turnstiles on the subway, and on the same grounds. I have never seen an enforcement agent on a bus. I'm sure they exist, but I can't see how they can be effective if they're not visible. Only us honest schmoos need pay the fare.
It doesn't have to be spot checks on individual passengers - the checkers randomly pick a bus or train car and then walk through and methodically check everyone in it, including the people who try to disembark.
To Ted's point tho ... I'd imagine there will be "disproportionate" tickets written in the same direction as other crime statistics. It was my first thought on why it wouldn't work here.
I wonder if it's that it wouldn't work here, or that it would work despite complaints of disproportionate impact. If people complain on Twitter, how much does that really matter? Then again, if it does matter, it'll be in blue cities where all the transit is, I guess.
They complain to politicians, to whose opinions the transit agencies are sensitive.
In my experience (New York), someone who refuses to pay the fare will also refuse to pay the fine. And there are a lot of such people. Unless you're willing to use physical force (i.e. 3 or 4 cops throwing people off the bus) or can dream up some serious sanction short of jail, this will not change.
The point isn’t to change the enforcement mechanism. The point is that if the fare is free, you don’t need any enforcement mechanism.
Especially since the transit system would then be unworkable for anybody with any kind of choice.
All-door boarding and proof of payment systems are definitely measurable service improvements: they reduce dwell time at stops. They don’t however make busses any cheaper to run.
Anything that makes buses move faster also makes them a bit cheaper for the same amount of service, because you can do the same number of daily runs of a route with fewer drivers and vehicles. There’s also some sort of up front cost savings of not having to put payment verification inside the buses (though this probably gets eaten up putting it at all the stops).
If we’re talking about free fares, you don’t even need them there.
I visit South Korea every other year for family, and yes there are easier ways. All (trains, buses, subways, even taxis) public transportation use a T-money card which has now been turned into an app on the phone. All entrances have a box machine to swipe the card or the phone. It cannot be made much easier than that.