Ever since Houston was recognized as one of the few urban areas whose transit ridership is still growing, thanks to a redesign of the region’s bus system, transit agencies around the country have been considering their own route reforms. Richmond implemented “the Great Richmond Reroute” a couple of weeks ago. New York City transit began planning a reroute in April. Washington Metro announced last week that it would spend $2.2 million studying its own rerouting.
A lot of the ideas behind rerouting bus systems come from Portland transit consultant Jarrett Walker. Walker’s basic ideas are sound: change from a hub-and-spoke to a grid system; increase frequencies; and reduce the number of stops. The goal is to create a system where people can get from any point in the city or region to any other point by a fairly direct route with minimal wait times and at most one transfer.
Bus routes in many cities today aren’t much different than they were when public agencies took over private transit service some 50 years ago, and they weren’t that much different then than the streetcar routes that buses had replaced, usually several decades before that. Agencies have been afraid to change their route structures because they know that any new reroute is going to make some people upset (as Walker says, “Beautiful people will come to you with their elderly parents and their babies and say the redesign will ruin their lives”) with no guarantee that it will attract enough new riders to offset those who quit riding because the old routes served their needs the best.
With many major urban areas seeing ridership decline by 20 to 40 percent in the last few years, however, transit agencies are desperate for new ideas that can recapture some of those lost riders. The changes they will make, however, are most likely to be too little, too late.
On close scrutiny, Houston’s story isn’t as compelling as some claim. In 2012, Houston buses carried 66.1 million trips. After revamping the system, they carried 68.6 million in 2013. So far, so good. But by 2015, the number had fallen to 66.5 million, and in 2017 it was 66.4 million — barely 1 percent above the 2012 level. One reason for the 2015 decline was that Houston opened new light-rail lines that year, which no doubt captured some previous bus riders. But, if anything, the real story is that bus ridership hasn’t declined as much since 2012 as it has in other cities such as Los Angeles.
sildenafil shop In most of the cases, the smallest platelets are the most notably infected. For the plant to be sildenafil india wholesale amerikabulteni.com given the title of “adaptogen” it must meet certain criteria: It must be absolutely safe and a quality product to treat erectile dysfunction. Amazingly, these same girls will say statements like, “I know that you can get pregnant whenever you want to. tadalafil sales Many guys when asked about it, they said that this kind of medicine is highly available in the super viagra generic market.
Houston’s real problem was that it built light rail in the first place. In 2002, as it was starting light-rail construction, buses carried 94 million riders. After the light rail opened in 2004, bus plus rail together beat the 2002 number for three years. Then ridership began to collapse, falling to 77 million in 2010, possibly due to a 12 percent decline in bus service. With the revamp of bus routes and opening of new rail lines, ridership grew to 85 million trips in 2017 — which is still 9 percent fewer than bus alone in 2002.
But that growth is mainly due to the new light-rail lines. Since 2012, light-rail service has nearly quadrupled from 0.9 million to 3.4 million vehicle-revenue miles. For all that, they got a 65 percent increase in light-rail ridership. From 2012 to 2017, bus vehicle-revenue miles grew by 5 percent, but ridership grew by only 1 percent — and bus ridership in 2017 was less than in any year from 1984 through 2011. Since Harris County’s population grew by 9 percent between 2012 and 2017, a 1 percent growth in bus ridership is hardly something to cheer about.
As dismal as Houston’s experience has been, it is better than in Baltimore, which revamped its bus system in July, 2017. Ridership in the ten months after that was nearly 10 percent less than ridership in the same ten months of 2016–2017. Critics blame poor implementation, but the point is that changing bus routes is no panacea.
Jarrett Walker has some good ideas, and if transit were a growing industry they would be worth adopting. As it is, I suspect they will do little to stop the loss of transit riders to other forms of transportation.
There could be another way to sensibly increase bus ridership. Running express service downtown with privately owned licensed vehicles where the driver is driving downtown anyway at commute hours.
Some years ago I was talking with a planning consultant from Portland. He thought that Portland had made a big mistake by spending on rail transit and re-zoning neighborhoods for higher density with great opposition from the inhabitants. He said throughout the Portland metropolitan area there were many isolated block of rather tired generally one story commercial properties on major roads. These are much to spread out to be served by any sort of rail system. He thought that running express bus service past these to downtown and then allowing the properties to be built up as mixed used development with commercial business on the first floor and apartments above was viable. As the properties were older and not necessarily in the best condition there was very little opposition to them being re-zoned and developed. He thought this was much preferable to Portland present zoning and rail building.
Rather than express buses a far more economical mode of transport would be to license individual drivers to be able to carry fares on these routes in an Uber like model. That way anyone driving and parking downtown would make some small but worthwhile extra income at very low additional cost to them. This is the model that would probably have been developed by the free market if transit companies did not have monopoly service. Systems like this already work such as the casual carpool in the San Francisco Bay area, see: http://sfcasualcarpool.com/
Transit in houston in growing, Yeah shuttling illegals without drivers licenses is a growth industry.