How to Fool Transit Riders

Recently, FTA Administrator Peter Rogoff told transit managers, “you can entice even diehard rail riders onto a bus, if you call it a ‘special’ bus and just paint it a different color than the rest of the fleet.” Eugene, Oregon’s Lane Transit District (LTD) proved this with its EMX bus-rapid transit line.

When this line was put into operation, the Antiplanner predicted it would be a disaster because LTD had spent way too much money on buses and had built an exclusive bus lane that was so narrow the drivers couldn’t go any faster than on the crowded streets. But the project may have worked out anyway.

According to an evaluation by the National Bus-Rapid Transit Institute, the EMX is only a few seconds faster than the previous on-street bus service, and at rush hour the difference is statistically insignificant (see p. 70). Moreover, giving the buses signal priority when they are on the street was responsible for some of the few seconds of improved times. This suggests that the $20 million spent on the exclusive busway was a waste of money.
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At the same time, the evaluation found that the majority riders sincerely believed that the new bus was faster. Moreover, perhaps partly because of that belief, ridership in the corridor had increased by 120 percent. I don’t know of any recently opened light-rail line that can honestly say it produced such a huge increase in ridership.

Of course, part of the reason for the increase is that the EMX service is free, while LTD’s previous bus service cost $1.50 per ride. To truly find out what is making the difference, LTD should offer free rides on another route, and offer fancy new EMX buses on a third route with signal priority but without building any exclusive busways.

Of course, LTD is probably more interested in getting lots of federal funds than in finding out what really works. But LTD recently started charging to ride the EMX, so we’ll soon find out how much the free fares contributed to the 120 percent ridership gain.

I still think LTD overpaid for its buses (nearly $1 million each vs. $300,000 for a standard bus and $500,000 for a regular articulated bus), and they clearly did not have to spend $20 million on an exclusive bus way. We will soon learn if Rogoff should modify his statement to read, “you can entice even diehard rail riders onto a bus, if you call it a ‘special’ bus and just paint it a different color than the rest of the fleet and charge no fares.”

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About The Antiplanner

The Antiplanner is a forester and economist with more than fifty years of experience critiquing government land-use and transportation plans.

18 Responses to How to Fool Transit Riders

  1. OFP2003 says:

    THAT IS SO COOL!! Those two sidewalks look like old-fashioned driveways. AWESOME!! But, without fences how would you keep little kids from racing big-wheels on those strips of concrete??? But of course, everyone will want to walk on those cool strips of concrete rather than the paths meant for pedestrians… so cool!

  2. FrancisKing says:

    “… if you call it a ‘special’ bus and just paint it a different color than the rest of the fleet and charge no fares.””

    Quite possibly. In the UK, a bus company decided to experiment with bus prices. Same old buses, but a price half as much, and the new price pasted all over the bus. Result – the buses were soon crawling with ex-car drivers.

    The new track will work if a bus-gate (a new set of traffic lights) is positioned in front of the existing stop line, allowing buses to get to the front of the queue.

  3. FrancisKing says:

    “According to an evaluation by the National Bus-Rapid Transit Institute, the EMX is only a few seconds faster than the previous on-street bus service, and at rush hour the difference is statistically insignificant (see p. 70). ”

    p.70 says this:

    “The implementation of EmX reduced mean total travel time on the route by an overall average of just over one minute (60.5 seconds) to 15 minutes, 1 second. This was found to be statistically significant at the 99% confidence level.”

  4. Dan says:

    In addition to Francis’ mention of cherry-picking, he also hints at what I’ve shown here several times, is that there is a stigma in many places with bus riding. Hence the color change. Not hard to understand. Not hard at all.

    DS

  5. Borealis says:

    So why is there a stigma against bus riding? Can the pro-planner crowd explain why billions of dollars should be spent because of that stigma?

  6. Frank says:

    Nice to see the giant sequoias in the background. Too bad someone couldn’t plan ahead and think about the fact that in a few short years they’ll be overcrowded.

  7. Dan says:

    @5: its a perceived class thing. I don’t know what I did with the paper(s) to hyperlink, but it’s been discussed here several times. As for ‘should’ value judgments, that is the business of the community to decide how their money is spent.

    DS

  8. Dan says:

    Too bad someone couldn’t plan ahead and think about the fact that in a few short years they’ll be overcrowded.

    The LArch profession in many universities no longer sees fit to teach its students about horticulture, if you can believe it. I just spent three days listening to arborists lament this fact. The BH has a constant struggle to get her LArchs out of their tiny box and plant appropriate spp. appropriately.

    DS

  9. MJ says:

    …is that there is a stigma in many places with bus riding. Hence the color change. Not hard to understand. Not hard at all.

    Actually that is hard to understand. If the stigma is associated with bus riding itself, then it shouldn’t matter whether it is a red bus or a blue bus (or green, appropriately enough, in the case of Eugene), the same stigma should apply.

  10. Borealis says:

    The Washington DC metro system saw a significant drop in bus and subway ridership when it implemented a price increase this year.

    Beginning in late June, Metro officials raised the cost of all trips for bus and rail passengers. The fare increases included a 25- to 35-cent increase for bus riders, depending on payment method, and a roughly 18 percent increase for train passengers.

    Metrobuses transported 11.66 million passengers in July, nearly 1.3 million fewer than during the same month last year. Metro officials had anticipated a much smaller drop, projecting about 200,000 fewer trips.

    Rail ridership was also down in July, the most recent month for which Metro has released cumulative passenger data. Riders took roughly 20.2 million trips on Metro trains, compared with 20.5 million in July 2009. Metro had projected slight gains in July rail ridership.

    Read more at the Washington Examiner: http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/local/Metro-loses-millions-of-riders-on-bus_-rail-1073871-104179823.html#ixzz11rxUMtWj

  11. ws says:

    Dan:“The LArch profession in many universities no longer sees fit to teach its students about horticulture, if you can believe it. I just spent three days listening to arborists lament this fact. The BH has a constant struggle to get her LArchs out of their tiny box and plant appropriate spp. appropriately.”

    ws: Your use of abbreviations spp. is kind of confusing. Spp. or sp. in the horticulture world refers to an unknown specific epithet (such as Acer sp.). Acer being a maple with an unknown specific epithet in that instance. I believe there is also interchangeability in referring to specific epithet and species as the same thing, but a complete species will have a genus and specific epithet, and sometimes varying fields utilize nomenclature differently.

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Species#Abbreviated_names

    Just because you see a poorly planted row of trees does not mean an LA designated their planting or had anything to do with them. Who says an LA was involved? Because it’s a tree and LAs are somehow “landscapers”?

    Remember, landscape architects play many roles within the planning of spaces. To think that they should know every single species of plants is absurd. You could get bogged down learning the hundreds of thousands plants and nothing else. It’s a broad based field.

    I can think of many examples of landscape architects that involved very little plant materials, if none at all. Pioneer Courthouse Square in Portland comes to mind. There is something called hardscape. Ever been to Europe?

  12. Dan says:

    spp. is species plural.

    Nevertheless, you aren’t claiming in that space that someone other than a LArch drew that plan and spec, are you?? You aren’t claiming the architect directly was involved there?

    DS

  13. ws says:

    I’m claiming I don’t know. What are you claiming?

  14. Andy says:

    Dan, are you seriously so lazy that you have to use a four character abbreviation for a seven letter word? Or are you just a poor communicator?

  15. Dan says:

    I’m claiming the LArch profession is moving away from horticultural knowledge, hence the issues like inadequate spacing as Frank pointed out above.

    DS

  16. Andy says:

    Does Dan really think the Larch people do not have horticultural knowledge? Do the Maple people have syrup knowledge? Do the Oak people know about acorns?

    Why do planners have such a love affair with acronyms and abbreviations? Thankfully the extremely highly educated planning profession, like the quantum physicists, don’t have to communicate with the general public. Because if they did, they would really suck at it.

  17. prk166 says:

    ” I don’t know of any recently opened light-rail line that can honestly say it produced such a huge increase in ridership.” –The Anti-Planner

    I don’t know of LRT projects that have been open and readily shared with the public any of their before and after numbers. They always talk about the after but I haven’t seen any that have talked about what their ridership was before the project.

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