In Tucson, AZ, bus fares have been waived due to the pandemic until 2022. I have ridden the bus a few times since this happened. Two years ago, I rode the bus to work regularly, paying fares. The biggest road block to busing to work was figuring out the payment system. I had to get a card, figure out if the month pass was worth it, all of this. When the bus is free, it eliminates a ton of small tasks which probably filter out a lot of casual riders.
So while I would believe the statement that eliminating fares isn't a high priority for current riders and infrequent riders, I think it would be a way to introduce people who never take the bus to public transit.
It's not just any old "someone else" who should ride the bus. It's "someone else who places low-to-no value on their [wasted] time." And doesn't mind getting wet when it rains.
Busses are only good if they are, in the aggregate, better than cars. In DC I constantly see busses ambling around with 0-3 passengers. This cost more money, and creates more CO2, than cars.
By all means make busses free, if it fills them up. (And BTW, DC busses are already free. Get on a metro bus, as I have, in less posh parts of town and most people don’t pay, they just scan an empty metro card)
Something most people miss about public transit: you need some empty buses to have full buses.
Buses that run at off-peak times make the service useful for more passengers. If the bus only runs 7-9:30am and 4-7pm, then you can't rush home if your kid is sick at school, you can't stay late at work or start early one morning, you can't go out for a meal after work, etc. Now, your 5am bus, or the 2pm bus or the 10pm bus will probably be empty most of the time, but their existence and the optionality they create means that more people will catch the peak time buses.
Similarly, if you have a route with peaky demand (e.g. it's going to a school or a large workplace), the bus will be empty on its return leg. But you still need the big bus, empty as it might be, in order to accommodate everyone on the other leg.
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.
Sure we should reform land use regulations and do more to make vehicles pay for the congestion they cause. Dedicated bus lanes would help with this, but making busses more frequent would help a lot, too. One problem I see in Washington DC at least is the use of large busses that do not ever fill up. Why not run more, smaller busses on more routes?
Bus operation costs are dominated by labor, so switching to smaller buses doesn't enable more trips. It's actually more effective to run mostly standard 40-foot buses throughout the system for this reason. https://humantransit.org/2011/07/02box.html
Surely it must be less expensive to run smaller busses than larger busses. I agree that it would be more expensive to run more smaller busses than the actual number of larger busses.
The cost savings from optimizing bus sizes to match expected demand are small enough that it's generally not worth the reduced operational flexibility and increased overhead on parts & maintenance (i.e. now you need parts for each fleet, maybe need specialized repair staff, have to worry about balancing busses between multiple depots, etc.). Same reason Southwest sticks to an all-737 fleet.
That either cuts capacity on busy routes or requires having many (3-4x, if not higher) more busses, each with a driver, which puts opex through the roof. You'd also have difficulty serving peak capacity, since it's hard to hire people to only work for a couple of hours in the morning and in the afternoon.
The distinction between opex (paid by fare revenue plus whatever subsidy the transit agency can get) and capex (largely grants by the feds and periodic bond issues) is a big driver in this, too.
Possibly the discontinuity is too great, but on the margin, paying for more frequent service with more smaller busses is a better way to increase ridership, specifically get people to substitute bus trips for cars than lowering the fare. Heck, maybe HIGHER fares and more frequent service is the way to go.
I really can't relate to the view that sharing a lane with cars is what makes the bus slow. It is 2-3x as much time as a car for the same distance covered, even at an odd time with no traffic.
The most obvious time sink is pedestrian traffic. Since the bus is so large, it needs a correspondingly large gap in foot traffic to make a turn, and such gaps are not forthcoming downtown during commute hours. Even if your bus is not turning, it will get stuck behind one that is. Sometimes for 3-4 cycles. The solution here would seem to be a "Don't Walk + Green Light" phase in the traffic lights.
The next most obvious is wheelchairs. The driver gets out of his seat and spends 5-10 minutes fussing with straps to help secure it to anchors on the bus. On a trip that's only supposed to be 15 minutes in the first place, this is a huge amount of variance. Presumably the designs could be improved.
No one seems to want to think about commuting to and from work and the variable loads those represent. There is no environmental case to be made for buses rolling around mostly empty. And I seriously doubt without deunionizing that you are not going to paying for drivers sitting around and not driving.
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.
>>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.
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 Ryerson researchers found that the hypothetical two-bus fixed-route system was predicted to carry less than half the ridership of the on-demand system (102,000 trips) at a higher subsidy per rider ($14 to $17 per trip with a rider fare of $3). The $10 per trip subsidy of Innisfil Transit’s on-demand system was found by the researchers to be comparable to per trip costs of fixed-route transit (excluding capital) in urbanized areas of under 1 million in population."
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...
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.
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.
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?
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.
The problem with buses is they suck as a means of transportation. They are, by nature, slow because they must stop to pick up and discharge passengers. They carry high externalities that no one likes to talk about. They are large heavy vehicles that require a lot of very not environmentally friendly inputs. They do a lot of damage to roads particularly on cornering, burn fuel and shed fine particulate brake dust everywhere. (Thank god asbestos is no longer used for braking!) and they are maintenance intensive. Unlike school buses which are readily electrified because they spend most of the day sitting idle they are not. Which means they require a lot of out of service time to charge when used in municipal transit. The technical solutions to this problem are very expensive.
What I find most interesting is that the same arguments used to advocate for HSR and against Amtrak's plans directly conflict with the pro busing arguments. We are told HSR will potentially save hours of time when traveling between cities. Time, we are told, is key to securing ridership. Well, if you value time, buses are not the answer. I note our host uses buses when they are convenient. That is to say his destination is on the route where he picks up the bus. This ignores the fact that route changes and transfers, if such are required, eat your life. They cost time and a lot of it.
Which is not to say you shouldn't have buses. Lots of people need A transportation system. If you want to bring in housing as a consideration that's fine. But I doubt it will provide a solution. If convenience of public transportation is a selling feature for any sort real estate then you may expect real estate ricing to displace the very residents who need that mode of transportation most of all.
In addition to your argument, as Matt explained, if we get more buses on the road and improve the time table, maybe even include some ideas like if the bus is full and no one wants to get off at the stop then the bus continues, the time cost will be reduced.
I visit South Korea every other year for family, and their "public" (it is partly private partly government owned) transportation system is great. Yes, the bus can be slow, but with the subways/trains/bus system, I can pretty much go to any block I want in the metro area and any country-side town I want. They don't have some sort of magic, just reasonableness and competency. It can work in the US too.
Of course, there is a big difference between South Korea (a country half the size of California) and United States as a whole. The amount of people going back and forth from Philadelphia to a small town outside Altoona shouldn't be on the radar of the public transportation system of Philadelphia, so I'm not sure what the comparison was supposed to argue against my quote.
To expand on my condensed statement, it is a completely different system I take within the metro than I would take to go to the countryside, however it is all accessible to me as a visitor or citizen through public transportation, provided I can pay the fare. My point was, in South Korea the local/district/fed gov't structure works together within metros and the countryside, so that there are options for me to get close to my destination without the use of a car.
While I'm not disagreeing with you that the US is different than more dense Asian countries, why not examine a functioning public transportation system has been done with both metro, suburban, and country-side connections to see if it could be tweaked to work in the US, city by city or state by state? To dismiss it completely "as, oh it's Asia, they do things different," is somewhat cynical, when the US has literally one of the worst public transportation systems.
"Except that's not what I did, at all. I specifically responded to this: "and any country-side town I want" by disagreeing with your belief that it could be done more effectively as a public utility in the United States than is already happening under the aegis of private bus services."
First, I never stated it had to be a public utility. I did state South Korea's system is a mix of public and private, initiated by the government. I am stating, government and private companies can working together to create a complementary system where metro public transportation works with suburban and rural public transportation. The US does not have have that. We have Greyhound stations, not a high standard, and other miscellaneous buses, which all pick up and drop off in random areas. So if you disagree with that, then yes we are at a disagreement.
When I say public transportation, I do not mean fully government owned system. It is a transportation for the general public. I would not want the US government to be in charge of every public transportation system. However, the government has power to control over roads, laws, and regulation, so they are an essential part of the future of our public transportation system.
"I have considered this question, as have a host of experts, and almost everyone reaches the conclusion that that last part is a pointless waste of public money and effort that would be better expended elsewhere."
The question of the original article was, should buses be free? Matt pushed against it, and I am in agreement. The funds should be used elsewhere, such as improving the system. That was the point of my addition about South Korea: improving the system.
Why do you say spending public money on rural and country-side is a "pointless waste"? Are those people living there a pointless waste to spend money on? Should we just keep spending money on the cities who have their own funds? This is exactly what is causing America's current divide. The cities get richer and the rural areas get poorer.
Isn't that the government's responsibility to provide for all it's citizens? Why shouldn't the government assist(not completely pay for and make riders pay no fee) private bus companies that service these rural areas? Why shouldn't we invest in making it more convenient for people who live in rural areas to go and work in more dense areas? Wouldn't that in turn help overcrowding in cities? Sometimes it's not a zero-sum game.
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).
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.
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.
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).
As a separate point, fare optional creates a societally-perverse situation where conscientious / rule-abiding / meeker people are subsidizing people with the opposite traits.
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.
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.
In Tucson, AZ, bus fares have been waived due to the pandemic until 2022. I have ridden the bus a few times since this happened. Two years ago, I rode the bus to work regularly, paying fares. The biggest road block to busing to work was figuring out the payment system. I had to get a card, figure out if the month pass was worth it, all of this. When the bus is free, it eliminates a ton of small tasks which probably filter out a lot of casual riders.
So while I would believe the statement that eliminating fares isn't a high priority for current riders and infrequent riders, I think it would be a way to introduce people who never take the bus to public transit.
It's not just any old "someone else" who should ride the bus. It's "someone else who places low-to-no value on their [wasted] time." And doesn't mind getting wet when it rains.
Busses are only good if they are, in the aggregate, better than cars. In DC I constantly see busses ambling around with 0-3 passengers. This cost more money, and creates more CO2, than cars.
By all means make busses free, if it fills them up. (And BTW, DC busses are already free. Get on a metro bus, as I have, in less posh parts of town and most people don’t pay, they just scan an empty metro card)
Something most people miss about public transit: you need some empty buses to have full buses.
Buses that run at off-peak times make the service useful for more passengers. If the bus only runs 7-9:30am and 4-7pm, then you can't rush home if your kid is sick at school, you can't stay late at work or start early one morning, you can't go out for a meal after work, etc. Now, your 5am bus, or the 2pm bus or the 10pm bus will probably be empty most of the time, but their existence and the optionality they create means that more people will catch the peak time buses.
Similarly, if you have a route with peaky demand (e.g. it's going to a school or a large workplace), the bus will be empty on its return leg. But you still need the big bus, empty as it might be, in order to accommodate everyone on the other leg.
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.
Sure we should reform land use regulations and do more to make vehicles pay for the congestion they cause. Dedicated bus lanes would help with this, but making busses more frequent would help a lot, too. One problem I see in Washington DC at least is the use of large busses that do not ever fill up. Why not run more, smaller busses on more routes?
Bus operation costs are dominated by labor, so switching to smaller buses doesn't enable more trips. It's actually more effective to run mostly standard 40-foot buses throughout the system for this reason. https://humantransit.org/2011/07/02box.html
Surely it must be less expensive to run smaller busses than larger busses. I agree that it would be more expensive to run more smaller busses than the actual number of larger busses.
The cost savings from optimizing bus sizes to match expected demand are small enough that it's generally not worth the reduced operational flexibility and increased overhead on parts & maintenance (i.e. now you need parts for each fleet, maybe need specialized repair staff, have to worry about balancing busses between multiple depots, etc.). Same reason Southwest sticks to an all-737 fleet.
What do I know, but maybe all "small" busses is better?
That either cuts capacity on busy routes or requires having many (3-4x, if not higher) more busses, each with a driver, which puts opex through the roof. You'd also have difficulty serving peak capacity, since it's hard to hire people to only work for a couple of hours in the morning and in the afternoon.
The distinction between opex (paid by fare revenue plus whatever subsidy the transit agency can get) and capex (largely grants by the feds and periodic bond issues) is a big driver in this, too.
Possibly the discontinuity is too great, but on the margin, paying for more frequent service with more smaller busses is a better way to increase ridership, specifically get people to substitute bus trips for cars than lowering the fare. Heck, maybe HIGHER fares and more frequent service is the way to go.
I really can't relate to the view that sharing a lane with cars is what makes the bus slow. It is 2-3x as much time as a car for the same distance covered, even at an odd time with no traffic.
The most obvious time sink is pedestrian traffic. Since the bus is so large, it needs a correspondingly large gap in foot traffic to make a turn, and such gaps are not forthcoming downtown during commute hours. Even if your bus is not turning, it will get stuck behind one that is. Sometimes for 3-4 cycles. The solution here would seem to be a "Don't Walk + Green Light" phase in the traffic lights.
The next most obvious is wheelchairs. The driver gets out of his seat and spends 5-10 minutes fussing with straps to help secure it to anchors on the bus. On a trip that's only supposed to be 15 minutes in the first place, this is a huge amount of variance. Presumably the designs could be improved.
No one seems to want to think about commuting to and from work and the variable loads those represent. There is no environmental case to be made for buses rolling around mostly empty. And I seriously doubt without deunionizing that you are not going to paying for drivers sitting around and not driving.
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.
>>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.
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.
This sounds pretty similar to the system they have in Taiwan!
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!
Instead of a free bus, how about a free (or heavily subsidized) uber? https://medium.com/uber-under-the-hood/the-success-of-innisfil-transit-8bea8396a4d1
"The Ryerson researchers found that the hypothetical two-bus fixed-route system was predicted to carry less than half the ridership of the on-demand system (102,000 trips) at a higher subsidy per rider ($14 to $17 per trip with a rider fare of $3). The $10 per trip subsidy of Innisfil Transit’s on-demand system was found by the researchers to be comparable to per trip costs of fixed-route transit (excluding capital) in urbanized areas of under 1 million in population."
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...
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.
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.
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?
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.
The problem with buses is they suck as a means of transportation. They are, by nature, slow because they must stop to pick up and discharge passengers. They carry high externalities that no one likes to talk about. They are large heavy vehicles that require a lot of very not environmentally friendly inputs. They do a lot of damage to roads particularly on cornering, burn fuel and shed fine particulate brake dust everywhere. (Thank god asbestos is no longer used for braking!) and they are maintenance intensive. Unlike school buses which are readily electrified because they spend most of the day sitting idle they are not. Which means they require a lot of out of service time to charge when used in municipal transit. The technical solutions to this problem are very expensive.
What I find most interesting is that the same arguments used to advocate for HSR and against Amtrak's plans directly conflict with the pro busing arguments. We are told HSR will potentially save hours of time when traveling between cities. Time, we are told, is key to securing ridership. Well, if you value time, buses are not the answer. I note our host uses buses when they are convenient. That is to say his destination is on the route where he picks up the bus. This ignores the fact that route changes and transfers, if such are required, eat your life. They cost time and a lot of it.
Which is not to say you shouldn't have buses. Lots of people need A transportation system. If you want to bring in housing as a consideration that's fine. But I doubt it will provide a solution. If convenience of public transportation is a selling feature for any sort real estate then you may expect real estate ricing to displace the very residents who need that mode of transportation most of all.
Let me be clear. They ARE the least bad option.
In addition to your argument, as Matt explained, if we get more buses on the road and improve the time table, maybe even include some ideas like if the bus is full and no one wants to get off at the stop then the bus continues, the time cost will be reduced.
I visit South Korea every other year for family, and their "public" (it is partly private partly government owned) transportation system is great. Yes, the bus can be slow, but with the subways/trains/bus system, I can pretty much go to any block I want in the metro area and any country-side town I want. They don't have some sort of magic, just reasonableness and competency. It can work in the US too.
Of course, there is a big difference between South Korea (a country half the size of California) and United States as a whole. The amount of people going back and forth from Philadelphia to a small town outside Altoona shouldn't be on the radar of the public transportation system of Philadelphia, so I'm not sure what the comparison was supposed to argue against my quote.
To expand on my condensed statement, it is a completely different system I take within the metro than I would take to go to the countryside, however it is all accessible to me as a visitor or citizen through public transportation, provided I can pay the fare. My point was, in South Korea the local/district/fed gov't structure works together within metros and the countryside, so that there are options for me to get close to my destination without the use of a car.
While I'm not disagreeing with you that the US is different than more dense Asian countries, why not examine a functioning public transportation system has been done with both metro, suburban, and country-side connections to see if it could be tweaked to work in the US, city by city or state by state? To dismiss it completely "as, oh it's Asia, they do things different," is somewhat cynical, when the US has literally one of the worst public transportation systems.
"Except that's not what I did, at all. I specifically responded to this: "and any country-side town I want" by disagreeing with your belief that it could be done more effectively as a public utility in the United States than is already happening under the aegis of private bus services."
First, I never stated it had to be a public utility. I did state South Korea's system is a mix of public and private, initiated by the government. I am stating, government and private companies can working together to create a complementary system where metro public transportation works with suburban and rural public transportation. The US does not have have that. We have Greyhound stations, not a high standard, and other miscellaneous buses, which all pick up and drop off in random areas. So if you disagree with that, then yes we are at a disagreement.
When I say public transportation, I do not mean fully government owned system. It is a transportation for the general public. I would not want the US government to be in charge of every public transportation system. However, the government has power to control over roads, laws, and regulation, so they are an essential part of the future of our public transportation system.
"I have considered this question, as have a host of experts, and almost everyone reaches the conclusion that that last part is a pointless waste of public money and effort that would be better expended elsewhere."
The question of the original article was, should buses be free? Matt pushed against it, and I am in agreement. The funds should be used elsewhere, such as improving the system. That was the point of my addition about South Korea: improving the system.
Why do you say spending public money on rural and country-side is a "pointless waste"? Are those people living there a pointless waste to spend money on? Should we just keep spending money on the cities who have their own funds? This is exactly what is causing America's current divide. The cities get richer and the rural areas get poorer.
Isn't that the government's responsibility to provide for all it's citizens? Why shouldn't the government assist(not completely pay for and make riders pay no fee) private bus companies that service these rural areas? Why shouldn't we invest in making it more convenient for people who live in rural areas to go and work in more dense areas? Wouldn't that in turn help overcrowding in cities? Sometimes it's not a zero-sum game.
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).
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.
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.
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).
As a separate point, fare optional creates a societally-perverse situation where conscientious / rule-abiding / meeker people are subsidizing people with the opposite traits.
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.
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
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.
Also applies in winter for colder climates!