Assaults on bus drivers have significantly increased in Albuquerque, as documented by the news story below. Not coincidentally, Albuquerque began offering free buses on January 1, 2022.
Free transit is supposed to promote transportation equity by making it easier for low-income workers to get to their jobs and other economic opportunities. But it is more likely to permanently drive those people away from transit if they don’t feel safe on board buses. Continue reading
Philadelphia’s electric transit buses are in a “complete shambles” as a result of poor design and poor quality construction. The buses, which were proudly displayed at the 2016 National Democratic Convention, have broken frames, broken batteries, and other problems, and have been totally withdrawn from service.
Proterra electric buses similar to this one were withdrawn from service in Philadelphia as the weight of the batteries led to cracked frames and the battery range turned out to be significantly less than the manufacturer promised. Photo by SounderBruce.
Although transit advocates like to claim that transit is environmentally friendly, a dirty secret of the transit industry is that buses use 50 percent more energy and emitted 50 percent more greenhouse gases per passenger mile than the average car. That’s based on 2019 data; in 2020, the numbers will be much worse. Continue reading
The formerly free-market Manhattan Institute, which has lately become a shill for transit and other big-government subsidies, has taken a stand against spending $10 billion on a bus terminal in New York City. The only problem is that, instead of the bus terminal, the Manhattan Institute proposes to spend multiple tens of billions of dollars on new underground rail transit lines connecting Manhattan with New Jersey.
The Port Authority Midtown Bus Terminal. Photo by Hudconja.
The 1937 opening of the Lincoln Tunnel led to hundreds of buses roaming the streets of Manhattan after bringing commuters and other travelers from New Jersey. To reduce congestion, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey built a midtown bus terminal near the Manhattan entrance of the tunnel in 1950. That terminal cost $24 million, less than $210 million in today’s dollars. Continue reading
In an era when transit industry buzz is all about light rail, streetcars, bus-rapid transit, and similar exotic (and expensive) services, it is often forgotten that the workhorse of the industry is the conventional bus (which Federal Transit Administration jargon calls the motor bus). Plodding along at average speeds of about 12 miles per hour, stopping as often as six times every mile, conventional bus services carry more daily riders than any other kind of transit and almost as many as all other modes combined. They aren’t sexy, yet close examination reveals a lot of problems within the transit industry.
Click image to download a five-page PDF of this policy brief.
The first modern bus was developed in 1927 by the Twin Coach company. That in itself is a problem because it one of the newest technologies used by today’s transit agencies: streetcars, heavy rail, and commuter trains are all much older. Light rail is newer only as a slight variation of streetcars. The only technology that is really newer than buses is automated guideway systems such as peoplemovers in Detroit and Miami, but they are almost universally regarded as failures. Continue reading
Aiming to compete directly with Uber and Lyft, Oregon’s Lane County Transit District (LTD) has started an app-based bus service in Cottage Grove, which is 22 miles south of Eugene. LTD says that it is making transportation “affordable” because it charges only $1 for the door-to-door service, whereas Uber and Lyft would charge far more.
Called the Connector, the bus service costs riders just $1 to and from anywhere within the Cottage Grove city limits. LTD actually contracts out the service to South Lane Wheels, which is run by the city of Cottage Grove and which already was providing such a service for $3 a ride for up to three miles and roughly a dollar a mile beyond that. Cottage Grove is small enough that no trips within the city limits are three miles long, but South Lane Wheels, unlike the Connector, will go outside the city limits.
According to the city of Cottage Grove’s profile in the National Transit Database, fares collected by South Lane Wheels cover less than 6 percent of its costs. That means the average ride cost taxpayers more than $32 in 2017. Now LTD is adding its own subsidies to those rides. Continue reading
The California Air Resource Board has passed a regulation mandating that all transit buses in the state be electrically powered by 2040. Portland’s TriMet has also vowed to eliminate Diesel buses from its fleet by 2040. The motivation behind these goals is supposedly the need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
Not surprisingly, there’s another hidden motivation. The federal government will cover 80 percent of the cost of a Diesel bus. But it will cover 85 percent of the cost of “low- or no-emissions buses” and 90 percent of the cost of related bus equipment and facilities. That means transit agencies can use their local funds to buy as many electric buses as Diesel buses even if the electric buses cost considerably more. According to one report, a typical Diesel bus costs $500,000 and an electric bus costs $800,000, but those numbers can vary quite a bit depending on how many buses a transit agency orders.
Electric buses come with another cost. According to the Federal Transit Administration, electric buses in Seattle break down every 2,771 miles, while Diesel buses break down only once every 17,332 miles. Continue reading
Ridership on Los Angeles light-rail lines has “surged” (mainly because they’ve opened new lines), but bus ridership is falling much faster. From 2006 to 2016, light- and heavy-rail ridership grew by 28 million rides a year, but bus ridership fell a whopping 103 million rides a year.
Meanwhile, the Los Angeles Metropolitan Transportation Authority (Metro) commissioned a report looking at bus speeds and on-time performance. Thanks to growing traffic congestion–which the report admits is partly due to traffic calming measures–average bus speeds have declined by 15 percent and on-time performance has declined from 76 to 72 percent since 2011.
The strong implication is that there is a relationship between bus speeds/reliability and ridership. But that implication would be just as wrong as an assumption that congestion is caused by too many people driving rather than by local governments deliberately making congestion worse through such things as traffic calming. Continue reading
Thanks to maintenance work on Amtrak and commuter-train tracks around Penn Station on top of the usual number of breakdowns, this is supposed to be the Summer of Hell for commuters to Manhattan. But Ford subsidiary Chariot plans to ease commuters’ pains by introducing microtransit service in the form of an on-demand shuttle bus.
Chariot’s routes in San Francisco.
Chariot is already operating a similar service in San Francisco, competing not only with existing transit but with Lyft Shuttle. As the above and below maps show, Chariot and Lyft have similar but not identical routes. The difference between them is that Lyft uses owner-operated vehicles while Chariot uses company-owned Ford minibuses and treats its drivers as full employees with insurance and other benefits. Continue reading
The Los Angeles Times reports that L.A. bus ridership is falling, so the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (Metro) is “looking to overhaul the system.” Unfortunately, the Times didn’t make the effort to figure out the real problems, instead relying on transit agency claims that they were due to “factors beyond its control.”
In fact, in the past ten years, the number of vehicle miles of revenue bus service offered by Metro has declined by more than 21 percent, from 86.3 million miles to 67.7 million. Transit riders are probably more sensitive to frequencies than anything else, and this 21 percent decline probably did not involve the cutting of many bus routes; instead, it represents a reduction in the frequencies of most routes. That factor was completely within Metro’s control.
Metro’s bus ridership peaked at 399 million trips per year in 2007 (which buses traveled 85.4 million miles), but has since declined to 318 million trips. The 20.2 percent decline nearly matches the decline in bus miles. Continue reading
The latest issue of the Journal of Public Transport, which is published by the National Center for Transit Research at the University of South Florida, has several articles relevant to bus-rapid transit and the debate between buses and rail. In general, the articles support the notion that buses are an adequate if not superior substitute to rail in many situations.
Click image to download the complete issue (9.8-MB); click the links in this post to download individual articles.
One article compares the accuracy of bus-rapid transit cost and ridership forecasts and finds that cost forecasts are much more reliable than for rail, while ridership forecasts may need some work. Of 19 BRT projects considered, only two went significantly over their projected cost, while two others cost less than 90 percent of their projected cost.
.jpg){kind=link}
