Urban residents aren’t abandoning buses; buses are abandoning them

[M II A II R II K]

Urban residents aren’t abandoning buses; buses are abandoning them


June 1st, 2015

By Daniel Hertz

Read More: http://cityobservatory.org/urban-res...andoning-them/

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And it turns out that when you disaggregate the national data by urban area, there’s a very tight relationship between places that cut bus service between 2000 and 2013 and those that saw the largest drops in ridership. If you live in a city where bus service has been increased, it’s likely that your city has actually grown its bus ridership, despite the national trends. --- In other words, the problem doesn’t seem to be that bus riders are deciding they’d rather just walk, bike, or take their city’s new light rail line. It’s that too many cities are cutting bus service to the point that people are giving up on it.

- Admittedly, this is a crude way to demonstrate a very complicated relationship. To rigorously test the impact of bus service on ridership, you’d want to take into account all sorts of other things: the presence of other transit services; population density; gas prices; demographics; and so on. --- Fortunately, we don’t have to do that, because researchers at San Jose State University’s Mineta Transportation Institute just did it for us. And they found that even if you control for those other factors, service levels are still the number one predictor of bus ridership.

- A lot of cities have opened new rail lines since 2000 – many of which, if not most, replaced heavily-trafficked bus routes. In those cases, cities are adding rail service and reducing bus service, but it obviously wouldn’t be right to say that those bus riders are being abandoned. --- But while that has surely happened in some places, it just doesn’t match the overall data. Rail service, including new lines, has been booming since long before the recession – but up until about 2009, bus service was growing, too, or at least holding steady. If rail expansions were driving bus cuts, you’d expect to see those cuts all the way back to the beginning of the data. But you don’t. Instead, cuts to bus routes appear right as transit funding was hit hard by the recession.

- Second, you might argue that service and ridership are linked, but the other way around: as ridership declines, agencies cut back on hours and frequency to match demand. Teasing out which way the causation runs would be difficult – and the answer would almost certainly include at least some examples in both directions. --- One quick-and-dirty way to get an idea, though, is to compare ridership changes from one year to service changes in the next year. If agencies cut service because of earlier ridership declines, then you’d expect to see that places with larger drops in ridership in “Year One” tend to be the places with larger cuts to service in “Year Two.”

- But, again, they don’t. In fact, just 3% of the variation in service cuts is explained by ridership changes from the year before. So while that’s hardly ironclad – and I look forward to further research that sheds more light on this problem – it does appear that a major part of the divergence in bus and rail ridership is a result of a divergence in bus and rail service: since the recession, transit agencies have cut bus service year after year, while returning service to rail relatively quickly.

- Why did they do that? I don’t know. But I can speculate that it has something to do with the fact that bus transit supporters are not always the same kinds of people as rail transit supporters. Even though more people take buses than trains in nearly every metropolitan area in the country, train riders, on average, tend to be wealthier and whiter. Not only that, but many civic and business leaders who don’t use transit at all are heavily invested in rail service as an economic development catalyst for central city neighborhoods. In other words, rail tends to have a more politically powerful constituency behind it than buses.

- To be clear, the problem here has nothing to do with whether transit agencies are running more services that are rubber-on-asphalt or steel-on-tracks. As Jarrett Walker has eloquently argued, the technology used by a particular line matters far less than the quality of service: how often it runs, how quickly, for how much of the day. But there are at least two problems here. First, because of the spread-out nature of even relatively dense American cities, it will be a very, very long time before rail transit can connect truly large numbers of people to large numbers of jobs and amenities.

- When Minneapolis opened the 12-mile Blue Line light rail in 2004, for example, it was a major step forward for Twin Cities transit – but still, only 2% of the region’s population lived close enough to walk to one of the stations. For everyone else, transit still meant taking the bus, even if they were taking the bus to a train station. --- And even in places with well-developed rail networks, those systems are usually oriented to serve downtown commuters. Especially in outer neighborhoods, crosstown trips in places like Chicago, Boston, or DC are heavily reliant on buses. Abandoning buses means abandoning those trips, and the people who depend on them.

- Second, there are serious equity issues with shifting resources from bus to rail – again, not because of anything inherent to those technologies, but simply because of who happens to use them in modern American cities. In most cases, shifting funding from bus to rail means shifting funding from services disproportionately used by lower-income people to ones with with a stronger middle- and upper-middle-class constituency. And while transit ought to be viewed as much more than just a service for the poor, we can’t ignore the equity impacts of transit policy.

- In light of all this, we have to stop talking about America’s bus woes as a ridership problem. All the evidence suggests that when service is strong, and buses are a reliable way to get to work, school, or the grocery store, people will take them. Instead, the problem is that fewer and fewer people have access to that kind of strong bus line. If we care about ridership, we need to restore and enhance the kind of transit services that people can rely on.

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[Doady]

The current LRT fad in the US is just an anti-bus movement. Build LRT in wealthy white neighbourhoods, cut bus service in poor black neighbourhoods. No surprise that transit in decline across the US. Improving transit was never really the aim to begin with.

[lrt's friend]

You would hope that rail transit routes are being planned on corridors where there is the greatest transit need, and it is no excuse to cut bus routes except on the corridor now being replaced by rail. Apparently not. It seems the cost of rail transit operations is being funded by cuts in bus transit service.

And while rail transit often gentrifies neighbourhoods that it serves would suggest a shift of low income transit dependent population to other locations. If that is the case, you would expect the need for bus transit should grow, not decline.

[urbanlife]

Originally Posted by Doady

The current LRT fad in the US is just an anti-bus movement. Build LRT in wealthy white neighbourhoods, cut bus service in poor black neighbourhoods. No surprise that transit in decline across the US. Improving transit was never really the aim to begin with.

I am not sure I buy this, in most cases light rail is used to connect the suburbs to the city with public transportation, something buses have not been successfully at doing.

Though it makes sense to run buses in more dense parts of a city to have it affect the most amount of commuters. For suburban areas it makes more sense to run buses as shuttles that connect to rail stations rather than having the run local or even express routes into a city.

[Doady]

Originally Posted by urbanlife

I am not sure I buy this, in most cases light rail is used to connect the suburbs to the city with public transportation, something buses have not been successfully at doing.

Though it makes sense to run buses in more dense parts of a city to have it affect the most amount of commuters. For suburban areas it makes more sense to run buses as shuttles that connect to rail stations rather than having the run local or even express routes into a city.

That is the problem. I don't think there should be light rail in the suburbs at all (unless it is a suburban corridor like Hurontario Street in Mississauga).

Light rail is an upgraded streetcar, a stepping stone to subway. Light rail should be for high density locations only, replacing extremely busy bus routes that are operating beyond capacity. Unless a bus route has a 3 minute frequency or something like that, then it probably doesn't need conversion to light rail.

Because if the bus service is not successful then any light rail service is not going to be successful either. Why would you build a billion dollar light rail line to replace a bus line with low ridership? It makes no sense.

The whole idea of buses merely being used to connect suburbanites to the city is flawed to begin with. Suburbs have their own workplaces, their own stores. Local suburban transit should be primarily for getting people moving within the suburbs, not for connecting suburbs to the city. To connect suburbs to the city, that is what commuter rail is for.

Light rail is for local transit. It should be built for local transit in mind.

[mrsmartman]

Light rail has a higher capacity and is faster than bus for local service. Some light rail lines can be considered as policy tools to revitalize city centers, which are often paralleled with an general increase in the density of the coverage area.

[urbanlife]

Originally Posted by Doady

That is the problem. I don't think there should be light rail in the suburbs at all (unless it is a suburban corridor like Hurontario Street in Mississauga).

Light rail is an upgraded streetcar, a stepping stone to subway. Light rail should be for high density locations only, replacing extremely busy bus routes that are operating beyond capacity. Unless a bus route has a 3 minute frequency or something like that, then it probably doesn't need conversion to light rail.

Because if the bus service is not successful then any light rail service is not going to be successful either. Why would you build a billion dollar light rail line to replace a bus line with low ridership? It makes no sense.

The whole idea of buses merely being used to connect suburbanites to the city is flawed to begin with. Suburbs have their own workplaces, their own stores. Local suburban transit should be primarily for getting people moving within the suburbs, not for connecting suburbs to the city. To connect suburbs to the city, that is what commuter rail is for.

Light rail is for local transit. It should be built for local transit in mind.

I guess it depends on what you think a light rail train is....in Portland and Seattle it is completely different from a streetcar.

Light rail is more effective than bus when serving surrounding suburb areas because it runs separate from traffic so no sitting in suburban traffic like a bus would have to, it holds more people so means less wait time over a bus that can fill up fast. It also creates more centralized stops for people to easily understand rather than weaving through suburban streets which sometimes don't make sense.

I do agree with you that light rail makes for great connections to high density areas, but to have it run local through those areas does nothing but slow the trains down that could have been better served by streetcars and buses.

[lrt's friend]

Originally Posted by Doady

That is the problem. I don't think there should be light rail in the suburbs at all (unless it is a suburban corridor like Hurontario Street in Mississauga).

Light rail is an upgraded streetcar, a stepping stone to subway. Light rail should be for high density locations only, replacing extremely busy bus routes that are operating beyond capacity. Unless a bus route has a 3 minute frequency or something like that, then it probably doesn't need conversion to light rail.

Because if the bus service is not successful then any light rail service is not going to be successful either. Why would you build a billion dollar light rail line to replace a bus line with low ridership? It makes no sense.

The whole idea of buses merely being used to connect suburbanites to the city is flawed to begin with. Suburbs have their own workplaces, their own stores. Local suburban transit should be primarily for getting people moving within the suburbs, not for connecting suburbs to the city. To connect suburbs to the city, that is what commuter rail is for.

Light rail is for local transit. It should be built for local transit in mind.

I really don't buy this entirely. By your logic, the C-Train in Calgary should have never been built. It connects the suburbs to downtown and runs through areas of low density and prior bus frequency likely did not meet your requirements.

The type of rapid transit chosen depends on distances involved, expected ridership, and the availability of transit corridors.

Commuter rail seems most appropriate when distances are great, perhaps more than 25 km, when there are a number of satellite cities, and when there is a suitable network of rail lines that connects into downtown.

The value of commuter rail can be very limited because the trains usually have to compete with freight service. Frequency is often poor, and the trains large and expensive to operate. This means off-peak service is often limited or non-existence. The end result could be very limited ridership.

In cities that are trying to kick-start rapid transit, commuter rail may not be the answer, if the goal is more than a few thousand commuters per day.

To a degree, I agree that in ideal situations you would hope for density and high bus ridership on an LRT corridor but that is not always the case when you are building LRT to serve as the city's rapid transit spine, and when ridership is going to be created by a combination of feeder buses and Park n Rides. That is exactly what is happening here in Ottawa with the potential of having the highest LRT ridership in North America on opening day of our LRT line now under construction.

In this city, commuter rail is out of the question. There is no rail infrastructure serving downtown and there is no possibility of recreating it. We therefore have to look at alternatives and in our case, LRT was the choice allowing the most flexibility for this city in the future.

I understand the choices being made in the Greater Toronto area but those same choices and the rationale behind them will not work in this city.

[Doady]

When Calgary's LRT was built in 1981, Calgary had around 100 riders per capita annually (around 150 boardings per capita). Calgary Transit was already a very heavily-used bus system when it built its LRT. It's LRT was built on the foundation of a successful bus network.

Calgary Transit ridership hasn't actually improved dramatically since 1981 (they now have around 120 riders per capita). But the point of the LRT was the higher capacity, because the bus system in 1981 probably reached its limits.

You can see the same thing in Ottawa. Another small city with INSANE bus ridership so they are converting BRT to LRT.

I can see the value of LRT in small city like Calgary or Ottawa to connect suburban residents. When I was talking about commuter rail, obviously I didn't mean Calgary and Ottawa. These are small urban areas, smaller than the City of Toronto. TTC is local. All the transit in Calgary and Ottawa is local. There is no need for commuter rail.

I was mostly referring to the US cities, which are much larger, that's why I made reference to racism. Of course Canada is doing a good job building LRT! But the US is not, hence the article in the OP.

What are the most successful light rail systems in the US? The Green Line in Boston. The MUNI Metro in San Francisco. Pure local transit, within very dense cities with very strong bus networks. LRTs are not about connecting to faraway suburbs.

[electricron]

Originally Posted by Doady

What are the most successful light rail systems in the US? The Green Line in Boston. The MUNI Metro in San Francisco. Pure local transit, within very dense cities with very strong bus networks. LRTs are not about connecting to faraway suburbs.

Good point about cities that have commuter rail lines reaching out to the outer suburbs like Boston. MBTA has 13 commuter rail terminating stations in the suburbs. Lousy point about cities that don't have any commuter rail lines reaching out to the suburbs. Most of the new light rail lines being built in America today are in cities without commuter rail lines, and reaching out into the suburbs is a need that needs to be fulfilled. Light rail is far superior than streetcars at reaching out into the suburbs with its greater distances between stations increasing average speeds. Electric propulsion of light rail is far superior than diesel propulsion of commuter rail at reducing pollution. Cities are building rail transit to meet various needs, not just to move riders efficiently, that's where your one solution fits all requirements falls apart. There are various reasons why light rail lines are the best solution to build transit to the suburbs in some ciites.

[lrt's friend]

Really, the technology is blurring between light rail and heavy rail choices. Light rail trains are now capable of higher speeds than in the past. What Ottawa is buying into is brand new technology that offers speeds that light rail could not achieve previously. This makes light rail more feasible over longer distances and giving cities more choices in train configurations and costs of operation. It is no longer necessary to operate 6 or 12 car trains. If you are building a new right of way anyways and not sharing track with heavy rail trains, then light rail is becoming more and more a possibility even over longer distances. If you are sharing track, then heavy rail trains remain necessary.

[Eightball]

I'm car free, but I would never live like that in a place without an extensive rail system. You get what you pay for - buses are too slow, overcrowded, poor ride quality, poor acceleration etc

[Crawford]

Originally Posted by Doady

The current LRT fad in the US is just an anti-bus movement. Build LRT in wealthy white neighbourhoods, cut bus service in poor black neighbourhoods. No surprise that transit in decline across the US. Improving transit was never really the aim to begin with.

Exactly.

I am absolutely stunned at the light rail fanboy-ism, declaring that a single light rail line will do all sorts of incredible and unlikely things, while simultaneously not caring even a bit about bus transit, which is the backbone of every transit system in the U.S.

I think the average person on SSP would trade one light rail line in their city for 50% of their bus service being cut. It's really that bad.

To take an example, in Detroit, the bus service is being cut, year after year, basically where the system is half what it was 10 years ago. But because a 3 mile private streetcar line is being built (and replacing existing public bus service), everyone is going crazy declaring some gigantic transit revolution. Huh?

There's nothing inherently wrong with light rail but it's just one piece of the puzzle, and if you don't have a good bus system, then you don't have a transit system worth a damn.

[fflint]

Originally Posted by Doady

What are the most successful light rail systems in the US? The Green Line in Boston. The MUNI Metro in San Francisco. Pure local transit, within very dense cities with very strong bus networks. LRTs are not about connecting to faraway suburbs.

The Green Line does indeed connect Boston with its suburbs. So does Philly's, Portland's, LA's, San Diego's--of the most popular light rail systems in the US, I'm pretty sure San Francisco's is the only one to remain strictly within city limits.

[urbanlife]

Originally Posted by Crawford

Exactly.

I am absolutely stunned at the light rail fanboy-ism, declaring that a single light rail line will do all sorts of incredible and unlikely things, while simultaneously not caring even a bit about bus transit, which is the backbone of every transit system in the U.S.

I think the average person on SSP would trade one light rail line in their city for 50% of their bus service being cut. It's really that bad.

To take an example, in Detroit, the bus service is being cut, year after year, basically where the system is half what it was 10 years ago. But because a 3 mile private streetcar line is being built (and replacing existing public bus service), everyone is going crazy declaring some gigantic transit revolution. Huh?

There's nothing inherently wrong with light rail but it's just one piece of the puzzle, and if you don't have a good bus system, then you don't have a transit system worth a damn.

Detroit is a technicality, people there are happy when anything that happens doesn't involve flushing the city down the sewer. At this point in time, Detroit should have had a rail system similar to Chicago's built 100 years ago.

[Doady]

Originally Posted by electricron

Good point about cities that have commuter rail lines reaching out to the outer suburbs like Boston. MBTA has 13 commuter rail terminating stations in the suburbs. Lousy point about cities that don't have any commuter rail lines reaching out to the suburbs. Most of the new light rail lines being built in America today are in cities without commuter rail lines, and reaching out into the suburbs is a need that needs to be fulfilled.

If a suburb doesn't have commuter rail, then they should probably build commuter rail.

Originally Posted by fflint

The Green Line does indeed connect Boston with its suburbs. So does Philly's, Portland's, LA's, San Diego's--of the most popular light rail systems in the US, I'm pretty sure San Francisco's is the only one to remain strictly within city limits.

I was discussing with urbanlife about the merits of LRTs in places that are so suburban and low density that they are unable to even support good bus service. I thought it was obvious by "suburbs" we were not referring to places like Cambridge, Massachusetts, that were primarily developed in the 19th century.

I never said an LRT should always be within a central city and never cross any municipal boundaries ever. I was talking about built form, not boundaries. If a place is so low density that it cannot support bus service - the most basic, most flexible and cheapest of transit modes - then it cannot support expensive LRT either. That's all I was saying.

--

BTW, I was wrong about Calgary.

Calgary Transit's ridership is essentially the same now as it was in 1981 when the LRT was first built. 53.5 million riders in 1981 vs. 107.5 million riders in 2013. Population 593k in 1981 vs. 1.15 million in 2013. So the per capita ridership only increased from 90 to 93.

As Calgary shows, don't expect a culture change simply from building LRT. For LRTs to be successful, the transit culture has to be there in the first place. Calgary already had high transit ridership with buses and that carried onto light rail, and eventually it will carry on to subway/metro. Building light rail is just about increasing the capacity, nothing more or less. If the place doesn't need more capacity (i.e. the bus service is getting cut, bus ridership is skrinking, people don't want to use buses), then they don't need light rail.

[fflint]

^I'm not talking about Cambridge, either. I'm talking about suburban stations like Riverside out in Newton Lower Falls. But whatever. It is entirely common for light rail systems in the US to connect cities with suburban areas.

[urbanlife]

Originally Posted by Doady

If a suburb doesn't have commuter rail, then they should probably build commuter rail.



I was discussing with urbanlife about the merits of LRTs in places that are so suburban and low density that they are unable to even support good bus service. I thought it was obvious by "suburbs" we were not referring to places like Cambridge, Massachusetts, that were primarily developed in the 19th century.

I never said an LRT should always be within a central city and never cross any municipal boundaries ever. I was talking about built form, not boundaries. If a place is so low density that it cannot support bus service - the most basic, most flexible and cheapest of transit modes - then it cannot support expensive LRT either. That's all I was saying.

--

BTW, I was wrong about Calgary.

Calgary Transit's ridership is essentially the same now as it was in 1981 when the LRT was first built. 53.5 million riders in 1981 vs. 107.5 million riders in 2013. Population 593k in 1981 vs. 1.15 million in 2013. So the per capita ridership only increased from 90 to 93.

As Calgary shows, don't expect a culture change simply from building LRT. For LRTs to be successful, the transit culture has to be there in the first place. Calgary already had high transit ridership with buses and that carried onto light rail, and eventually it will carry on to subway/metro. Building light rail is just about increasing the capacity, nothing more or less. If the place doesn't need more capacity (i.e. the bus service is getting cut, bus ridership is skrinking, people don't want to use buses), then they don't need light rail.

Actually that is what confuses me about what we are discussing. Buses have to run in traffic and along the same routes that cars run, especially in the suburbs. With light rail, it is sometimes easier to do more direct routes with specific stations rather than a simple bus stop sign on a busy suburban road.

Here in Portland and in Seattle, the focus of LRT is to provide a rail connection out to the suburbs. In Seattle it is more so this fact which focused a lot on the park and rides, but in Portland we do try to focus our inner city stops to be more walking friendly and focus less on the park and rides.

[Nouvellecosse]

Originally Posted by Doady

If a suburb doesn't have commuter rail, then they should probably build commuter rail.

It seems to me that several of the large US cities you're condemning basically have commuter rail, only it's commuter rail using LRT vehicles since they give greater flexibility in terms of potential corridors and can solve the last mile problem delivering riders to multiple stations across the city centre rather than a single one which may be inconvenient.

The real problem here is the cities themselves. They're too auto dependant and lack density. Too large a proportion of the populace is out in the 'burbs and they don't have inner cities with enough heft to support a central city system.

If a city like, say Dallas, decided to build conventional commuter rail, they either would have been forced into using existing right of ways which might still be in freight use limiting frequency, or might have been through inconvenient corridors as many freight routes run through areas that are industrial or otherwise unsuitable as main transit corridors. But LRT stock can use street running or use corridors not possible with heavy rail. Or, there may not have been any corridor available to areas the city wanted to reach with commuter rail so if they were going to go to the bother of creating a new corridor, having the flexibility offered by LRT stock would save costs. And if you're going to invest in a new corridor you may as well have decent frequency. Instead of say 2 or 3 trains at peak and hourly (or worse) off peak, there could be decent service like 3 or 4 trains per hour throughout the day. And if you're going to have that kind of frequency you may as well electrify to save on maintenance and operation costs.

You can say the systems were poor investments due to their cost per rider, but if the systems were say 1/3 the length and focused on the central city, the ridership increases would have been even lower as many of the riders would have already been transit users. In these types of cities, there's no way you're going to get as high a number of riders as you would get for the same investment in a denser, more transit-friendly location.

[10023]

Buses need designated routes as well. Riding a bus where there is no dedicated bus lane (perhaps shared with taxis, but not with private cars) sucks.

And American buses generally aren't nice to ride. I take the bus all the time in London, but don't think I did it more than a few times in the 8+ years that I lived in New York. Part of that also had to do with taxis being much cheaper.