The 2021 farebox numbers

Alexander asked on Twitter about the series of posts I did on farebox recovery ratios reported to the United States National Transit Database from 2007 through 2010. The Federal Transit Administration has continued to publish the NTD every year; I just got a little tired of compiling the data, and engagement kind of went down. But let's take a look and see how things are these days!

The Database for each year used to be published in December of the following year, so 2021 is now the most recent year available. The data used to be in Table 26, but the FTA staff is no longer numbering the tables, so now it's in the Metrics table. I've imported the 2021 Metrics table into Google Sheets for your convenience.

Since we're looking at traditional transit providers, the first thing to do is filter out the contract providers (any TOS but DO) and the demand response and vanpool providers (Mode of DR and VP). That leaves us with 22 transit providers.

The first thing I noticed is how many more ferry operators are reporting. In 2010 we had New York Waterway and BillyBey, but in 2021 we have eight: Bay State (Boston to Provincetown), Hyannis Harbor (also Cape Cod), Seldovia Village (connects Homer, Alaska to a Native village with no competing roads), New York Waterway, Chicago Water Taxi, Chatham Area Transit (connecting downtown Savannah to the Convention Center), SeaStreak (connects New York with bedroom and resort towns in New Jersey and Massachusetts) and the Chemehuevi Indian Tribe (connects one end of London Bridge to a casino across Lake Havasu).

In 2010 we had the University of Georgia; in 2021 we have the University of Arkansas and the University of California at Davis. Those don't really count because they're paid for up front by student fees. The Chattanooga inclined plane also broke even in 2021.

A couple of items were flagged by the FTA staff as "Questionable," including the claim by the Golden Crescent Regional Planning Commission that its bus service brings in $9.26 per trip in fares, when their website says they only charge $1.50. They didn't flag the Developmental Services of Northwest Kansas's claim that they earn $16 per trip in fares while only charging $3, but I find that questionable myself. Similarly with Iredell County Area Transportation Services' report of $7.75 per trip contrasts with their website's $1-3 fare. I'm guessing both of those are clerical errors.

That leaves nine bus companies, all in the New York area, making more than a 50% farebox recovery ratio in 2021, which you may remember was a difficult year for transit agencies: Trans-Bridge, Hampton Jitney, Broadway Bus, Olympia Trails, Peter Pan, Orange-Newark-Elizabeth, Monsey New Square Trails, Community Transit, A&C Bus/Montgomery and Westside, and Adirondack Transit.

To answer Alexander's question: there are six bus companies on this list that use the Lincoln Tunnel Exclusive Bus Lane: Trans-Bridge, Olympia Trails (the CoachUSA subsidiary serving Newark Airport from Manhattan), Peter Pan, Monsey New Square Trails (a commuter service focused on Hasidic Jews), Community Transit (a CoachUSA subsidiary serving East and West Orange and Livingston, NJ from the Port Authority) and Adirondack Transit. Of the buses making more than 75% farebox recovery ratio in 2010, some had gone out of business before the adoption of work-from-home arrangements when doctors began discovering COVID-19 cases in March, like Frank Martz Trailways.

Most of the companies missing from the short list were just losing a lot of money. Suburban Transit, the CoachUSA subsidiary serving New Brunswick area, made a 22% farebox recovery ratio in 2021. DeCamp made 21%, and Rockland Coaches, the CoachUSA subsidiary formerly doing business as Red and Tan Lines, made 19%. This is a useful lesson, because the management of these companies took a very conservative approach, canceling all service for months and leading restoration with peak-direction rush-hour service. Rockland has still not restored full-day or weekend service. In contrast, Trans-Bridge, Olympia Trails, Peter Pan, Monsey and Adirondack all run service middays, reverse-peak and weekends.

It wasn't flagged as "Questionable," but I find it questionable that Broadway Bus was able to run eight buses for $13.97 an hour total. If I'm not mistaken, Broadway Bus and A&C may have gone out of business since 2021. With three routes in Newark I don't quite understand how Orange-Newark-Elizabeth (a CoachUSA subsidiary) makes an 81% farebox recovery ratio.

The big success story in this list, of course, is Hampton Jitney, which made a 13% profit in 2021. The Hamptons were infamous as the destination for a number of wealthy people who (with no good reason) "fled the city." They did, of course, have to come back at least temporarily, and while they may be willing to drive out there, spending hours on the Long Island Expressway is a different story. So those who can't afford helicopters take the train or the bus.

Did the Atlantic Ticket accomplish anything?

In June the Long Island Railroad instituted an "Atlantic Ticket" for people traveling on weekdays between southeast Queens and stops along Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn. This fits with the RER, S-Bahn and Overground strategies that have been used in European cities like London, Paris and Berlin going back to the late nineteenth century. Instead of treating suburban trains like a completely separate system from the subways (and buses) they are run through the city center, at comparable frequencies to the subway, with the same fares and free transfers. So how does the Atlantic Ticket do in getting us to this goal of using our trains more efficiently?

Of the four differences between subways and commuter trains, the Atlantic Ticket addresses the fare difference and the lack of free transfers. They are the easiest to see: a rush hour commuter who takes the LIRR and the subway pays $13 one way or $346 monthly for a 55-minute trip from Rosedale to Grand Central, compared to $2.75 or $121 for 30 days for a much more crowded ride on a local bus to a subway. Many people take dollar vans to the subway, which brings the cost up to $4.75 one-way or $241 for 30 days. Riding the x63 express bus takes an hour and a half, but you get a seat and it's less than the railroad: $5.50 one way or $238 for 28 days.

The Atlantic Ticket offers a fare close to the express bus: $7.75 for a single one-way from Rosedale to Grand Central and $240 for 28 days. However, it is only good for travel to (or through) Flatbush Avenue, which takes about an hour and ten minutes from Rosedale to Grand Central. This is still quicker than the express bus, but about twenty minutes longer than LIRR trips through Penn Station. Surprisingly to me, it's also longer than taking a bus to the subway.

Why would someone pay extra for a longer ride? Comfort is one reason: LIRR trains are rarely packed, so even if they don't get a seat on the train they would expect some elbow room. But there's still a packed subway ride from Flatbush Avenue to Manhattan. Is riding a less crowded train for half an hour worth paying $3-5 more, but not worth $10.25 more? Maybe.

Another potential advantage is reliability. The subways and LIRR trains run on dedicated, grade-separated tracks controlled by the MTA. The buses and vans all run on busy avenues filled with other commuters. One insensitive driver can hold up bus riders for several minutes.

There's no word yet on how many people have been buying these Atlantic Tickets, but given the mixed benefits I suspect the number is relatively small. The LIRR Board Book this month credited the US Open golf tournament and the Belmont Stakes for increases in ridership (roughly 2% over last year), but did not mention the Atlantic Ticket at all. In a future post I'll talk about the two other factors, a direct ride (or at least a ride that is comfortable end to end), and frequency.

A better express bus map

Express buses are easy in New York City. Just walk over to your express bus stop at the usual time and wait. Eventually the bus will arrive, you get on board, pay, find a seat and relax. When you're getting close to your stop, push the button, the bus stops, and you walk to work. Now they even have BusTime and MetroCard!

Express buses are easy if you're a regular passenger, that is. If you're not, how do you know which bus to take? You look at the complicated bus map for your borough, not posted in any subway station or bus shelter. Except if your borough is Manhattan. All the express buses are designed for trips to and from Manhattan, but the MTA doesn't show any express buses on the Manhattan bus map.

So you look at the bus map for the borough that's not Manhattan in your trip and figure out which bus is passing closest to the stop in that borough. Find the schedule for that bus. It may be posted on the stop, it may not, but the schedule is critical.

The schedule has tables telling you whether there is a bus scheduled to leave when you want to leave, and when it is scheduled to arrive in Manhattan. Everything besides the original departure time is approximate, and the buses almost always get stuck in traffic, so be prepared to board up to half an hour late depending on how close you are to the origin, and to get to your destination up to an hour late. Be sure to check BusTime so you know whether the bus is even coming.

The schedule does tell you where the buses stop in Manhattan. There used to be buses with suffixes after the route number (or not) indicating whether they stopped on Third Avenue or Downtown instead of Sixth Avenue, or maybe other routings, but the MTA has been gradually reorganizing them into separate numbers.

One key bit of information that's in the schedules but not the borough bus maps is where the buses stop and where they go express. It may seem obvious because most of the buses go on expressways, but some of them stop on the service roads of those expressways, and some don't. A few stop on Queens Boulevard or Woodhaven Boulevard, but most don't.

As you're probably saying to yourself right now, it doesn't have to be this way. Do the express buses really need to be on the same map as the local buses? Probably not. Is there a way to indicate on the map where the buses go in Manhattan? Probably. Is there a way to indicate on the map where the buses go express? Yeah.

The biggest thing that would make these maps easier to read is not showing extra information. Outside of Staten Island, where a bus network redesign is being implemented this summer, there are fifty express bus routes in the city. Almost half of them run only on rush hours, in the peak direction. Only sixteen of them run seven days a week. So if you're looking for an express bus on a Sunday you don't need to see the QM44, the X63 and the BM5. The resulting map is much cleaner.

That said, as I've written before, it's crazy not to offer Sunday service everywhere. When the Department of Transportation first started subsidizing private companies like Green Lines, they should have made funding contingent on seven day service. When the MTA took over their operations it should have immediately instituted Sunday service wherever there was Saturday service. Running buses on Saturdays and not Sundays is religious discrimination, and it has no place in New York City.

I'll have more to say about this map in the future.

Transmillennial NYC?

A while back I was arguing with someone about "Bus Rapid Transit," and they suggested that New York should emulate the system used in Bogotá. I was skeptical; I've read about the Transmilenio and seen the Streetfilm, It didn't seem a good fit, but I felt like I didn't know enough.

The Avenida Caracas is 120 feet wide. Photo: Peter Angritt / Wikimedia.

I haven't been to the Colombian capital, but I've now looked at the network in more detail, and its applicability to New York area is extremely limited. Implementing anything resembling a Transmilenio corridor without converting general driving lanes to busways would require taking large amounts of land that is currently used for housing, retail or industry. I just don't see that happening on, say, Northern Boulevard or Church Avenue, and I don't want to see it happen.

The twelve Transmilenio corridors (not including the Carrera 7 stub) range from four to eight miles long, and are either at-grade or depressed, rarely elevated. They are all anchored by either the downtown or by a connection to another Transmilenio corridor. They fall into three types, as follows:

Photo: Felipe Restrepo Acosta / Wikimedia.

There is one corridor, the Eje Ambiental, that is roughly sixty feet wide. It could be emulated on any street of that width, like Fulton Street or Bergenline Avenue. I'm not going to consider those here, because they're everywhere.

Four corridors have sidewalks and at-grade crossings, like the Avenida de Caracas (see above); I call them Arterials. They have four to six lanes of car traffic and sometimes a bike path, and range from 120 to 150 feet wide.

The Autopista Norte is about 350 feet wide here. Photo: Felipe Restrepo Acosta / Wikimedia.

The other seven corridors have grade-separated crossings, and at least some of the car lanes are limited access, like the Calle 26; I call these Highway corridors. The corridors can be up to 450 feet wide and include six to twelve car lanes and sometimes a bike path or even two. There are planted medians and sometimes even parks in the medians.

With this in mind, here are the basic criteria for Transmilenio-style corridors:

1. At least 120 feet wide, so no Route 17 corridor in Bergen County
2. At least four moving car lanes after the busway is installed, so no Grant Highway corridor in the Bronx
3. At least four miles long, so no Whitestone Expressway corridor in Queens
4. At or below grade, not primarily elevated, so no Bruckner Expressway corridor in the Bronx
5. At least one good anchor, so no Route 18 corridor in Monmouth County

I will add the following for this exploration of New York, in keeping with our principles (see above):

6. No parallel trains. Some trains are overcrowded, but for this let's focus on corridors with no rapid transit service at all, so no Seventh Avenue corridor.
7. No adding lanes. If a corridor has functioning, accessible parkland, let's leave it, so no Mosholu Parkway corridor.
8. At least 140 feet wide if the avenue already allows curbside parking. On-street parking beats off-street parking, and it's really hard to get the city to install bollards, so no 164th Street corridor.

I am not making any attempt to forecast demand in this post, aside from restricting my exploration to New York City and the counties closest to it. If you do try to think about demand, keep in mind that demand is not static, and it responds to the availability of alternatives.

One thing that surprised me looking at the Transmilenio system was how many of the lines (seven out of twelve) are the "highway" type, with separated local and express carriageways and any retail or housing set back from the sidewalks (almost all of them have sidewalks, which is a lot more civilized than most of our highways here). But when people (like the person I was arguing with) talk about adopting Transmilenio designs in New York, they're almost always talking about arterial corridors within the city limits, so that's what I'm going to focus on for this post.

So, are you ready? Here they are, all five of them!

The thing about arterial corridors in New York City is that we don't actually have very many that fit the Transmilenio model. We have a lot of big, wide avenues that feel dangerous, but when we actually measure them it turns out most of them are only a hundred feet wide, like Church Avenue in Brooklyn or Gun Hill Road in the Bronx. Even Astoria Boulevard in East Elmhurst is only 120 feet.

The remaining Arterial corridors do not form a coherent network at all in the five boroughs. They don't even extend the subway network, because stroads like Kings Highway and Linden Boulevard only widen to Transmilenio widths half a mile or more from the subway. The best you can say is that some of them would provide new routes parallel to crowded lines, like West Street.

The most promising corridor is Woodhaven Boulevard. The City has finally succeeded in upgrading it to Select Bus service, but they never proposed Transmilenio-style high island platforms. They tried to get separated center lanes, but after a long, hard fight with motorists and bean counters they settled for converting some of the inner express roadway to dedicated lanes with median boarding.

Woodhaven is also paralleled by the dormant Rockaway Beach Branch of the Long Island Railroad, which would have much more capacity and be somewhat better located. If the Rockaway Branch is ever reactivated, a Transmilenio-style busway would just add capacity to that, the way an Ocean Parkway busway would add capacity to the F and G trains a few blocks away on McDonald Avenue. Not a bad idea, but not the transformative change promised by some people.

Does that mean there's no application for Transmilenio-style busways in New York? Not quite; things actually look a lot more promising in the suburbs. Stay tuned for that!

Stroller bloat on the subways

If you follow transportation politics you’ve heard of induced demand, a principle that activists have been invoking for decades to oppose road widening: Adding more capacity without market pricing simply invites more people to use a valuable resource. We see induced demand in roads and parking, as well as oil.

People have invoked induced demand in opposition to things that are much less destructive than driving. Transit managers have removed benches, lockers and trash cans from stations in the belief that this will reduce the demand for sitting, storing things and eating.

So what’s the difference between good induced demand and bad? It’s all about what it is that’s in demand. What are its real costs and benefits? Do the benefits justify the costs in the long term, and how long is long term? Can we handle the demand in the short term, and what happens if we can’t?

In terms of trash cans, given the staggering amount of money the MTA wastes on other things it wouldn’t be a huge expense for them to buy enough trash cans so that there’s one within twenty steps in all their stations, and to hire enough people to keep them from filling up and keep the platforms and tracks clean. The same is true for lockers and benches Somebody decided that the benefit wasn’t worth the cost, and I wouldn’t be surprised if that person drove to work and never found themselves on a subway platform holding an empty sandwich wrapper, or waiting for a train with tired feet.

In terms of roads and parking, we know that it costs an obscene amount of money to build a single structured parking space. Elevated roads and tunnels are similarly exorbitant. At-grade roads and parking are cheaper, but still cost a lot. They also encourage driving, with its pollution and carnage and waste of energy. I don’t know about you, but I don’t think it’s worth the cost.

I brought all this up to give you an idea of what goes through my mind when I hear people talking about how accommodations for disabled people help everyone. The usual example people give is how curb cuts for wheelchairs make life easier for parents with strollers. Sometimes people go on to talk about how elevators also help people to use strollers. And that’s where I start giving these people the side-eye.

I’m very much in favor of making our buses and trains wheelchair-accessible. I know several people with mobility impairments, including my own parents, I’ve talked with people who use wheelchairs and crutches about the difficulties of navigating the subway, and I’ve been temporarily disabled in the past. If we induce more demand for travel by people in wheelchairs and those with canes and walkers, I’m all for that, because up to now they’ve been forced to rely on Access-a-Ride, which is slow and inefficient, and limits their participation in society.

I have no objections if we build elevators for people in wheelchairs, and they happen to be useful for people with strollers, or even with “granny carts” for shopping. There is an added cost, though: the elevators are designed with a particular capacity of disabled users in mind, and induced demand from stroller and shopping cart users means kore crowds and longer waits. More demand also means more wear and tear on the machinery, more frequent outages (especially if the MTA doesn’t adjust its maintenance budget), and more money for repairs.

It doesn’t stop just at elevators making life easier for people with strollers, though. It starts getting presented as a moral obligation for us to fund elevators for parents. And since most parents who travel with their kids are women, it gets presented as an anti-sexist obligation to fund elevators. Then you get petitions for the MTA to allow parents to take strollers on buses without folding them. And that’s when I get pissed.

Last year I was on a bus in Great Britain, where people are allowed to bring strollers on buses. The bus filled up and people were having difficulty finding places to stand, because all the floor space was taken by strollers. The women traveling with the strollers made no move to take the kids out and fold them, so everyone else had to squeeze around them, including one woman who delayed the bus because she was not expecting to have to fold her own stroller.

It’s one thing to bring an unfolded stroller on an empty bus in Lebanon, New Hampshire. It’s a very different thing to bring one on a crowded bus or subway in New York City. We don’t have the capacity for it, so insisting on that space is taking away capacity from everyone else, including parents who carry their kids and fold their strollers. If you think there’s a significant value to society in giving that public space to unfolded strollers, get off your high horse and let’s talk about why it’s valuable and how we’re going to pay for it.

The weirdest thing about this debate is that it's not like people don't take small children on subways and buses. They do, and they always have. It’s not always easy, but traveling with kids by car isn’t always easy either. So why are people talking about taking kids in elevators now? I think it's the size of strollers.

When my wife was pregnant we went shopping for a stroller. The “normal” strollers were all large, heavy and difficult to fold. They were also fantastically expensive, with models costing hundreds of dollars. We settled for a “city” model that cost under a hundred and was lighter weight and could be folded with one hand, but it was still pretty heavy and bulky. I think we took it on the train maybe three or four times, and yes, it was a pain in the ass.

We wound up using a sling and a Baby Bjorn to carry the kid for the first year or so. Once he was old enough to hold his own head up we got an umbrella stroller for twelve dollars at Toys R Us. It made a huge difference. Either one of us could push it to the subway stairs, unbuckle the kid, pick him up with one hand, fold the stroller with the other hand, pick that up and head into the subway. With a little practice we could get it done in two seconds. Once we were on the subway (or bus) the stroller slid neatly under the seat.

Even when it was unfolded the umbrella stroller took up relatively little floor space and sidewalk width. It was light enough that either of us could pick the kid up in it and carry them for short distances. It wore out within a year, but I just went back and got another one. By the time we were ready for a third stroller, the kid was ready to walk.

I can understand why people hesitate to fold “city” strollers and drag them up stairs, and I sure as hell understand why nobody wants to carry a full size Graco anywhere, with or without a kid in the other arm. What I don’t quite understand is why people don’t use umbrella strollers.

I mean, people do use umbrella strollers. I just saw one a few minutes ago. What I don’t understand is why so many people assume that you only need one stroller, and the standard suburban models are fine for the city. Why aren’t there periodic articles in Queens Parent and Time Out Kids about the Best Subway Strollers? Why don’t people get schooled in umbrella strollers in the cafés of Park Slope and Sunnyside the way they get schooled in bike seats and breast pumps? When someone complains about being asked to fold their stroller on the subway, why isn’t the first response simply, “Have you tried an umbrella stroller?”

I can think of three reasons. Time Out isn’t running any stories about umbrella strollers because they’re cheap and they’ve been around for years. They’re not writing any stories about plain old bibs and sippy cups either. For similar reasons, umbrella strollers are no good for yuppie prosperity signaling, and because they’re complex aluminum structures they aren’t good for hipster artisanal credit.

The main reason people avoid umbrella strollers is that they can’t hold anything but the kid. Modern strollers have huge compartments that can hold diaper bags, breast pumps and groceries, plus cup holders, bag hooks and even running boards for older kids to stand on. Even the “city” models have at least one basket. When people have one they fill those compartments with everything they might possibly need, which can weigh as much as the stroller, or even a toddler.

This is exactly like “sport-utility vehicles ” which get filled up with all kinds of stuff that the passengers never use, but the driver carries around just in case. Or the large house with rooms full of belongings that the inhabitants haven’t touched in years. And the reason is the same: induced demand. When land and buildings are cheap, people hold on to their stuff. When gas, roads and parking are cheap, people shove their stuff in the SUV and use the gas, roads and parking to cart it all over town. And when train, bus, sidewalk, stair and elevator space is cheap, people shove their stuff in giant strollers and push it all over town.

I wouldn’t have a problem with this if the space really were cheap, but buses and elevators are expensive. I would even be willing to subsidize bus and elevator space for unfolded strollers if we had a real discussion and concluded that this subsidy would bring a real benefit to society. I think there’s a real case for it for groups with more small children than adults, or where the caregiver has a disability that makes it hard for them to carry a child, an umbrella stroller and a diaper bag.

Unfortunately, that is not the discussion we’re having. The discussion we are having is polluted by induced demand, by the assumptions that all small children are carried in giant, unfoldable strollers by physically and politically weak women who are incapable of selfishness, bad judgment, ignorance or any other failings. Can we change that, please?

The problem with offset bus lanes

In recent posts I’ve talked about how transit needs dedicated lanes, and how on a hundred foot avenue you don’t want to take a lane away from parking. The Department of Transportation seems to have figured this out, but there are serious problems with the approach they’ve been taking lately: offset lanes.

Last winter, Joby Jacob and I took the B46 Select Bus Service down Utica Avenue. I was struck by how slowly the bus moved, even in the sections that supposedly had dedicated bus lanes. It was pretty clear why: on many blocks there was a car or truck in the bus lane, sometimes more than one.

Sometimes all the curbside parking spaces were taken by parked cars, and the blocking car was double parked. It takes some spectacular chutzpah to think that your personal need to pick up an egg sandwich is pressing enough to keep a hundred people waiting. But as Donald Shoup has shown us, the underlying problem is that the City doesn’t price parking properly. If it cost more to park on these blocks people would park elsewhere, or for shorter periods of time, or even take transit. That would free up space for these short-term stops.

Sometimes there is space at the curb, but the drivers don’t pull all the way in to the space. This is occasionally understandable if the space is narrow enough that it would take a lot of time to parallel park. A lot of the time, however, there is plenty of room to pull in to the curb. The only explanation I can see for this behavior is that the driver is trying to signal to the police that they understand they’ve pulled into a no-parking zone (bus stop, fire hydrant) and will be leaving as soon as possible. It’s still a hugely selfish move, because it forces an entire bus full of people to wait for a gap in the next lane over to go around.

It doesn’t help that the DOT has debased the value of red paint by using it for part-time bus lanes, letting people get in the habit of unloading trucks and parking cars in red lanes, teaching them that the paint doesn’t really mean “don’t put your private vehicle here!” And the NYPD doesn't seem to be all that effective in keeping the lanes free.

So if we can’t put the transit lane at the curb, and we can’t offset it one lane, what should we do? Stay tuned...

The challenge of curbside transit lanes

Back in May I argued that we should be talking about improving surface transit even for avenues with subways or els, for three reasons. First, it can help calm speeding personal cars and trucks. Second, it can provide local hop-on, hop-off service, which is especially valuable to people who have difficulty walking or climbing stairs. Third, especially with New York’s high construction costs and deference to NIMBYs, it can accommodate increases in demand in much less time than building a subway or el.

Photo: islandjoe / Wikimedia

A couple of weeks ago Sandy Johnston tweeted a great picture from Lisbon to illustrate that street-level transit does not need huge boulevards; the minimum width is not much more than the width of the vehicle. Of course, for it to be rapid transit the route has to be unimpeded by private vehicles, but we could never get a useful network if we only built transitways on our widest boulevards.

The city does have an extensive network of hundred foot avenues, and we can have a decent surface-level rapid transit network once we find reliable ways of making transit rapid within a hundred feet. So what arrangement of road space would do the most to discourage single-occupant driving while still allowing people to get to work and shopping, and to receive and ship things? I’ll talk in future posts about what has worked in the past and what might work in the future, but today I need to talk about a couple of things that don’t work.

The Department of Transportation originally proposed banning vehicles other than transit on Thirty-Fourth Street. That can work; I’ve seen it work on Fulton Street in Brooklyn and yes, on State Street in Chicago. But it only works if businesses can still receive deliveries. I’m not sure what they do in Brooklyn, but I know in Chicago they have alleys. I’ve read promising things about deliveries by trolley and bicycle, but until those are closer let’s plan for some private vehicles, especially on wider avenues.

The Department of Transportation has tried reserving the entire curbside lane for buses on avenues like Second Avenue and 34th Street, with unsatisfying results. To begin with there’s always a major outcry from residents and business owners, who are used to having the curbside lane for turning, unloading and customer parking - and more often than not, parking for residents and business owners.

Good thing that bus lane is there to ensure the speedy travel of new yorkers pic.twitter.com/w7nvTyLGbj

— eric goldwyn (@ericgoldwyn) August 21, 2017

The city has compromised on this issue in a very counterproductive way, by suspending the bus lanes to allow private loading and even parking during middays, nights and weekends, and allowing turning and passenger dropoffs at all times. But they still painted the lane red, teaching drivers that the lanes don’t really matter and making things harder for an already uninterested NYPD.

I’m not entirely sympathetic: it’s been shown that for businesses in walkable neighborhoods in New York, the majority of customers arrive on foot, by bus or by train. The guy who gets his Goya beans delivered to his apartment on 34th Street can have them wheeled around the corner on a handtruck. But as I wrote a few years ago, a lane for parking suits our goals better than a lane for moving cars. If we have a hundred feet to work with, minus sidewalk and transit lanes, I’d rather fill the rest of the space with a traffic lane and a parking/loading lane than two traffic lanes.

Curbside bus lanes can work fairly well in places like the west side of Fifth Avenue where there are no businesses and relatively few turns - although even that lane would benefit from better enforcement. On avenues with businesses and intersections, it’s not the best approach. I’ll talk about other possibilities in future posts.

How we get safer crosstown streets

The killing of Citibike rider Dan Hanegby by a Short Line bus driver on West Twenty-Sixth Street this week highlighted a number of critical problems with the way buses are managed in Manhattan, and pointed up serious conflicts and contradictions in the agendas of transit, pedestrian and cycling advocates in the New York area and beyond.

It’s true that buses are dangerous to cyclists, and to pedestrians as well. The person who has always articulated this most clearly and forcefully has been Peter Smith. In a guest piece for Cyclelicious he focuses on “Bus Rapid Transit”; in a comment on a Greater Greater Washington post he talks about buses and bikes in general, and in a comment on a Bike Portland post he specifically discusses cases where bus drivers hit cyclists.

On a basic level, Smith is right: if we are really committed to Vision Zero, "the end goal is to do away with all vehicles that cannot live harmoniously with human beings — buses and cars should be the first to go." And although he claims that buses are more scary than cars, he also says that "the single occupancy vehicle in the city is the greatest manifestation of that evil—so it shouldn’t be tolerated."

If buses (and cars and trucks) cannot coexist with cyclists and pedestrians, what do we do about it? Smith’s vision is primarily centered around bikes and pedestrians, but sometimes people want to go further than they can bike. Sometimes we want to carry things - maybe very big things. And sometimes we can’t walk or bike at all. The answer, of course, is trains, as I’ve written before, and as @DoorZone wrote on Twitter in response to this tragedy:

NYC should only allow vehicles w/ governors, dead man's switches, & w/out horns south of 60th St. https://t.co/dalSbAOqH8

— DoorZone (@D00RZ0NE) June 16, 2017

That’s a lovely vision of the future, but how do we get to it? Even the wise cannot see all ends, but it seems like gradually investing more and more in rail (including at-grade trolleys), pedestrian and cycling infrastructure, and ending subsidies and requirements for roads and parking will lead to an incremental shift away from cars, buses and trucks and towards trains, bikes and walking. I think we can also do more with wheelbarrows, hand carts, cargo bikes and other non-motorized freight carriers than we currently do.

Unfortunately, our city’s advocates for walking and cycling aren’t conducting anything like a coherent campaign to shift our long-distance and heavy-goods movement from cars, buses and trucks to trains and trolleys. In fact, many of them are actively hostile to subways and trolleys, treating them as luxuries for the rich. In contrast, they elevate walking, cycling - and buses. In particular, they are fond of "Bus Rapid Transit," which they see as cheap, quick and democratic, and sometimes explicitly tout as a "surface subway."

These proposals are often presented as ways to get working-class New Yorkers to from homes outside of Manhattan to jobs outside of Manhattan, but there are still lots of jobs in Manhattan, and it’s a convenient transfer point to get to other parts of the metro area. In particular, there are lots of working-class people who live in parts of New Jersey and Rockland County where the bus is the most convenient way to get to work - and in fact, the Lincoln Tunnel Exclusive Bus Lane is the most rapid bus facility in the metro area.

But because of the way buses are mismanaged in New York City, there are almost no through-running bus lines. People from New Jersey have to get off the bus at or near the Port Authority Bus Terminal and make their way to jobs or shopping, usually by transferring to a subway.

The "Bus Rapid Transit" boosters are right about one aspect of buses: they can be scaled up quickly in response to increased demand. This worked very well when demand for transit rose beginning in 2007, in response to rising gas prices and crashing home equity. People began taking the bus in greater numbers, not just to get from the New Jersey suburbs in to Manhattan, but from cities like Philadelphia and Washington, and even further afield through the Chinatown bus network and relative newcomers like Megabus, Bolt and Vamoose.

The problem was that the "BRT" facility - the Exclusive Bus Lane and the Port Authority Bus Terminal that it feeds into - were already over capacity. So our "BRT" activists immediately demanded that it be expanded, right? No, they were actually pretty quiet about it, which left the bus operators to establish pick-up spots on the street, at handy transfer points in Manhattan, particularly Chinatown and Midtown.

When NIMBY "community members" came out to complain about the buses, were our “BRT” activists there to oppose them? No, they were pretty much AWOL, as they had been when NIMBYs torpedoed the 34th Street Busway. They did nothing as the State Senate forced bus operators to run a gauntlet of NIMBYs before they could legally pick up passengers on the street, and they haven’t had the power to increase off-street infrastructure.

Despite Peter Smith’s allegations I have not seen any proof that buses are any more dangerous than cars. In fact, we would expect them to be less dangerous, since they are operated by trained professionals with their careers potentially on the line. And yet self-proclaimed pedestrian advocates like Christine Berthet continue to repeat these allegations and to lobby for ever-greater restrictions on buses, and others in the livable streets movement echo them.

So what should we do to make our streets safer for cyclists? Some have called for physically separated crosstown bike lanes at key intervals. I like this idea. But what if you’re riding to a destination - or to a Citibike station - that isn’t on one of those streets? Can we create physically separated lanes on every street in the city? I don’t think that’s feasible or necessary.

As I’ve been arguing for years, we need to reconfigure our "side" streets as yield streets. They are all at least sixty feet wide. If you’ve ever been on one when it’s closed for construction or events, you know that they have plenty of room for two-way car traffic, and a hundred years ago they were all two-way. They can even accommodate a lane of parked cars on each side, plus a lane of moving cars in each direction, as long as the vehicles are all relatively narrow. When people started double parking it caused congestion, so the city changed them to one-way traffic flow - which has in turn led to a large increase in traffic as drivers circle the blocks. But when there is no double-parking the driving lane is extra wide, which leads to drivers speeding and crowding out cyclists.

The solution, as recommended by Andres Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk and the NACTO Street Design Guide, is to reserve space for loading zones throughout the length of each block, return all the streets to two-way flow, and ramp up enforcement of double parking. Then it is important to monitor the situation and increase the space for loading zones as necessary. Additional traffic calming measures like chicanes and pavement treatments may be necessary. If the design is implemented properly, drivers will be deterred from speeding by the prospect of a head-on collision, and will be less likely to pressure cyclists into the door zones.

You might have wondered why, instead of 26th Street in Manhattan where Dan Hornegby was killed, I used a picture of the 137-00 block of 45th Avenue in Flushing to illustrate an over-wide one-way cross street. As you can see from the second photo, the rest of the blocks on 45th Avenue are two-way, and people drive much more slowly and carefully. (Holly Avenue, one block south, is the same width, two-way, and a bus route.) Again, these yield streets are not a substitute for protected bike lanes, but a treatment for streets that are not chosen as high-priority cycling corridors. In other words, it should be the default configuration for all streets that are less than eighty feet wide.

In the long term, yes, we do need to get buses off our streets, but the urgency to get private cars off the streets is just as great. In the short term, we could do a lot more to accommodate buses in Manhattan, like facilitating through-running and stops on major crosstown streets. To make crosstown streets safer for cyclists, we should implement protected bike lanes leading to Citibike stations near all Midtown subway stations. The rest of the crosstown streets should be reconfigured as two-way yield streets.

Long distance coaches should carry bikes

Someone got a bike on a Chinatown bus. Photo: Craig Lebowitz / Wikimedia.

A couple of years ago I was in Penn Station and heard an announcement about bustitution due to track work. The announcer informed us that the buses would not be able to accept bikes. Just the day before I had been talking with some people about cycling in Montreal. I haven't had a chance to experience it, because I haven't been there since before they rolled out the Bixi bike share. Years ago I had planned to bring my bike there on a visit, but there was bustitution and Amtrak informed me I wouldn't be allowed to take the bike on the substitute buses.

In many small cities, government-run local buses are equipped with a front rack that can hold two or three bicycles. But the policy of long distance, usually private, coach operators (at least in North America) is typically that they will only allow bikes to be stored in the cargo bins if they are in boxes, with the handlebars removed. Of course, it is very difficult for a bicycle rider to carry a box large enough to hold the bike, and removing and reattaching handlebars requires time, skill and specialized tools.

Why do they do this? It smells to me of that toxic combination of elitism and liability worries that makes it painful to interact with American corporations. The owners and executives of the coach companies don't take their own buses, and they don't ride bikes. They don't want to take bikes on the coaches: they take up a lot of space, it's time-consuming for the drivers, and they're afraid of being sued if the bikes get broken. Their lawyers said something about liability, so they made a rule: no bikes.

If we could get long distance coaches to accept bicycles in a convenient way, this could easily be used to extend the coach network, with a measurable benefit to the lives of people who don't own cars. When I was a teenager, I was essentially cut off from all the jobs at the local mall because it was five miles from the nearest coach station. The roads from the bus station to the mall were relatively friendly to bike riders, but the roads from my town to the bus station were not. This would also encourage people to take a coach for tourism.

I’ve seen a few blog posts by bike advocates in favor of racks on city buses, or space for bikes on trains. But I don’t recall ever seeing one in favor of convenient bike storage on long-distance coaches. Do you know any coach operators that carry bikes conveniently? Was there anything that overcame their objections and persuaded them to do this?

Do we need the Port Authority Bus Terminal?

In 2015 I talked about the proposal to build a new bus terminal in downtown Flushing, and came up with the following list of six features. The current Port Authority terminal on 41st Street provides some of these some of the time:

1. One-stop shopping for buses.
2. Easy transfer between buses, and from buses to trains.
3. Short-term bus layovers.
4. Long-term bus layovers.
5. Avoiding street congestion. There are ramps for the upper level, and an outbound tunnel under Ninth Avenue. This leaves many buses stuck in traffic, particularly those heading north and east.
6. Ticketing, shelter, bathrooms, food and shopping for people waiting for buses.

Any transit system is easier and more attractive with one-stop shopping, short-term bus layovers and easy transfers. But long-term bus layovers, avoiding congestion and passenger facilities are more important for long distance trips than short ones.

If I’m taking the bus to Binghamton, I might have to wait an hour or more, so it’s really important for me to have shelter, bathrooms, tickets and food. (It would be nice to have seating and a place to store my bag, but that’s a whole other post.)

Cheaper services with higher frequency, like the New Jersey Transit 166 bus, don’t need a terminal, any more than the M5 does. Of course we all need safe places to pee and grab a snack, but people waiting fifteen minutes for a half hour New Jersey Transit bus ride don’t have any more need than people waiting fifteen minutes for a half hour New York City Transit bus ride.

All movement is quicker if you don’t have a lot of people or vehicles in your way. But for someone who’s getting off right on the other end of the Lincoln Tunnel, going up three flights of stairs cuts out most of that time savings. Trips with more than a mile between stops benefit more from grade separation, because they have the time for a bus to get up to speed.

As I pointed out in my post on the proposed Flushing bus terminal, there are actually advantages to having buses pick up and drop off on the street. It allows for through-running, so that passengers whose destination is beyond the terminus can just stay on the bus, which then heads out to a layover point in a less congested area. Street pickups can also make transfers more efficient and robust by spreading them out across multiple stops.

Street-level transfers are better for the local economy. Bathrooms and shelter are public goods that need to be provided by the government, but food and shopping? That’s what downtown streets are for, in a very real sense. In Flushing the streets do an excellent job of providing snacks, drinks and banking for bus and train passengers. A government-owned building filled with corporate concessions is necessarily less dynamic and less friendly to small businesses.

The Port Authority Bus Terminal in Midtown provides all these services for long-distance bus lines like Greyhound, Peter Pan and Adirondack Trailways, but it claims to have no room for other long-distance carriers like Megabus, Fung Wah, Vamoose and Hampton Jitney. Some of these companies claim they save passengers money by not paying gate fees to the Port Authority, which is another way of saying that the City doesn’t charge enough for what is essentially a rental of valuable commercial real estate.

Other bus companies say that they offer more convenient pickups in Chinatown and the Upper East Side. But that just begs the question: if bus terminals are so great, why we don’t have them for every direction that buses go? Someone decided it was better to have apartment buildings at the mouth of the Midtown Tunnel, and office buildings near the Holland Tunnel. Were they wrong?

The other claim, that there is no room in the Port Authority terminal for Bolt and LimoLiner, is also questionable. Why do Red and Tan, Academy and Suburban load all their buses in the terminal, when most of them leave frequently for short runs? Why is New Jersey Transit, a government-owned provider of short-haul services, the biggest carrier in the terminal?

Imagine if New Jersey Transit shifted just half of their bus pickups to the street. First of all, I’ve been told that there are more jobs in East Midtown than near the Port Authority. Some of the buses could pick people up and drop them off closer to their jobs. Second, the buses could provide transfers to other trains beside the Seventh and Eighth Avenue, Broadway and 41st Street lines. That would all take a load off the E, 7 and Shuttle trains.

Moving some local NJ Transit buses to the street would free up space in the terminal. I’ve heard that the tight schedules are a source of delays, so just having more wiggle room would improve reliability on the remaining routes. This would still leave room to bring in some long distance services off the street. If it turns out we still need room for long distance services, we can move more NJ Transit buses to the street, as well as some of the shorter, more frequent runs by private carriers.

Some people might complain that the buses would just get stuck in Midtown traffic. This is why it is essential to give them, and the jitney vans, full access to the dedicated bus lanes on 34th, 42nd and 57th Streets, and to make those lanes real busways instead of the half-assed arrangement we’ve had since the DOT botched the process on 34th Street. It would also help to make them true through-running routes, going through the Midtown Tunnel or over the Queensboro Bridge.

You may have heard that the Port Authority board has declared its bus terminal to be at the end of its life, and said that it wants to use eminent domain to acquire a new property somewhere west of the current terminal, build a new terminal there at a cost of billions of dollars, and sell the current terminal to developers. The main thing wrong with this is that it would be horrible for subway transfers.

It’s bad enough to have a terminal where only the east end touches Eighth Avenue, meaning that some passengers have to walk more than two avenue blocks to get to their trains. The Port Authority Board wants to add at least another full avenue block. From what I’ve heard, most of these people have chauffeurs and all of them have free parking, and they’re baby boomers who equate driving with success, so none of them ever make this transfer.

Stephen Smith has argued that any amount in the billions should be spent building enough train tunnels under the Hudson to accommodate all the bus passengers, so that bus transfers can be made in New Jersey, and the terminal can be torn down and not replaced.

I agree with Stephen’s vision as the ultimate goal, but in the medium term there will be short trips that are best made by bus through the Lincoln Tunnel, and those trips should have access to our streets for pickup and dropoff. There will also be long distance bus trips that will be more convenient if they connect to the subway than to a commuter train, and we should have a terminal for them in Manhattan.

The good news is that a terminal serving a few long-distance routes can be much smaller than the current one. It could fit on the site of the South Wing of the current terminal, and probably doesn’t need as many levels - or the parking garage. If that wing really needs to be rebuilt, some of the buses could be relocated temporarily to the lower level of the North Wing - or the Farley Post Office.

The bottom line is that we don’t need a huge bus terminal if we have trains. If we want to spend billions improving our transit system, rail is a much more efficient, sustainable and wise place to spend it.

The safety and comfort of ridesharing

"It’s so 2015," Vogue writer Karley Sciortino's friend said to her in Los Angeles last year. "This girl I know just fucked a guy she met in an UberPool." Intrigued, Sciortino spent some time researching and discovered that there were indeed a bunch of young people hooking up in the back seats of Uberpool and Lyftline cars.

Via-cles are getting bigger

As of press time I have been unable to confirm this, but it doesn't seem too far-fetched. What I have seen is that the vast majority of passengers on Via and express buses are women, of all ages. The first five or six times I took Via, the other passengers were all women.

Contrast these tales of young twentysomething women eagerly flirting with men in Uberpools to the horror stories of women of all ages being harassed and assaulted on subways, and it's clear that women feel a lot more comfortable sharing Ubers and Lyfts than subways with strangers. It's not too hard to figure out one reason: taxis have a driver sitting just a few feet away who could potentially intervene if a guy oversteps any boundaries. Both services also have rating systems for passengers, and a passenger who harasses other passengers is likely to get low ratings - or even be banned from the service.

But women also report feeling more comfortable on local buses (in Manhattan), express buses and commuter trains. Public buses and commuter trains can't ban passengers, but they do have a lower passenger-to-driver ratio than subways. The higher fares on express buses, commuter trains and taxis also discourage overcrowding (but not always, especially on the Long Island Railroad). And that feeds into the hookups as well: a guy who can afford to take an Uber, even if it's an Uberpool, is more eligible in some women's eyes than a guy who takes the subway.

I should point out here that it's not just women who are discouraged by crowds from riding transit. As a guy I've had to deal with belligerent and inconsiderate people. Some of them have even wanted to fight me, but I don't trust them to fight fair.

In my middle age I have aches and pains - not always enough to qualify as a true disability, but enough that I don't want to stand up in crush conditions for an hour. At those times Via or Lyft can be a welcome relief. I don't want to separate myself from other travelers. I just want a little space, a seat and someone who can step in and protect the vulnerable.

Old-style taxis and single-passenger Uber and Lyft services have their own problems. Women are regularly harassed and even assaulted by male drivers, to the point where every once in a while someone tries to start a service with all female drivers. The presence of additional passengers can actually counter this harassment somewhat.

As I wrote last month in response to Emma Fitzsimmons and Sarah Kaufman's posts about the experiences of women on transit, this runs counter to the Spartan aesthetic of some transit advocates. In this view, if even one person is crowded on a train, all must be crowded.

Of course it's not fair for women and guys who aren't tough to pay more for the privilege of not being assaulted on our way to and from work (or shopping, or fun). Poor people will be faced with the choice of an unsafe trip or no trip at all. We should do more to ensure a minimal level of safety and comfort for all.

This does not mean that we shouldn't allow people to pay more for comfort and safety. They have already been doing that for millennia, and most commonly these days they do it by driving their own cars or taking taxis. Uberpool, Lyftline and Via offer that missing middle: safer than the subway but more efficient than a private car.

I don't think I've heard women who regularly take transit accuse Uber or Via or even Leap of elitism. These accusations come mostly from men and cyclists, who seem to think that transit can create a classless society all by itself. I'm not waiting around for that.

Transportation values are arbitrary - somewhat

This has been sitting in my queue for years, possibly in response to this post by Engineer Scotty, and tonight I realized it was pretty much ready to go:

Photo: El Salvador Spanish Schools / Panoramio

For all you bus-haters out there, I wanted to post this excerpt from the world's greatest writer of train travel. In 1978 Paul Theroux traveled from his childhood home in Medford, Massachussetts to Esquel, Argentina, mostly by train. All over Latin America, he found that people not only preferred buses to trains, but they saw trains as dirty old conveyances for poor people, and buses as fast, modern, classy transportation. Here he is in El Salvador:

But no citizen of this town had any clear idea of where the railway station was. I had arrived from the frontier by car, and after two nights in Santa Ana thought I should be moving on to the capital. There was a train twice a day, so my timetable said, and various people, with hesitation, had directed me to the railway station. But I had searched the town, and the railway station was not where they had said it was. In this way, I became familiar with the narrow streets of Santa Ana; the station continued to elude me. And when I found it, on the morning of my third day, a mile from the hotel, in a part of town that had begun to tumble into plowed fields and cash crops, behind a high fence, and deserted apart from one man at an empty desk — the stationmaster — I understood why no one knew where it was. No one used the train. There was a major road from Santa Ana to San Salvador. WE TAKE THE BUS: it seemed to be a Central American motto in reply to all the railway advertising which said TAKE THE TRAIN — IT is CHEAPER! It was a matter of speed: the bus took two hours, the train took all afternoon.

The anti-bus terminal

The Department of City Planning thinks it would be a good idea to have a bus terminal in the new "Flushing West" district that they're planning (PDF). Apparently at one of their outreach sessions people talked to them about "Rerouting of bus routes to alleviate traffic on Main Street" and the "Need for a distinct central bus terminal." So they said they would "Evaluate siting a mixed-use Bus Transit Center (BTC) near northern and southern edges of the rezoning area."

As this map shows, there are twenty MTA bus lines that converge on Flushing, as well as the #7 subway, the Port Washington Branch of the Long Island Rail Road, and private buses to Chinatown and Sunset Park. There are also private buses to various casinos in the region. Of these, the underground 7 train station is the only one that is at all protected from rain or snow. The buses pick up and drop off at a variety of stops along Main Street, 39th Avenue, Roosevelt Avenue, 41st Avenue and 41st Road.

Because the Flushing West district starts at Prince Street, a block west of the western entrance to the Main Street subway station, the proposed bus station could be as close as the corner of Roosevelt and Prince, 225 yards from the subway, or as far away as Northern Boulevard and the river, three quarters of a mile from the subway.

But is there actually even a need for a distinct central bus terminal? It's a good idea to go over the reasons we have them. City Planning gave only one: "Provide relief to bus congestion from curbside layovers in the downtown." But if we think about existing bus terminals like the Port Authority or Newark Penn Station, they provide value in several ways:

• One-stop shopping for buses. Right now if you're going to Bay Terrace, you can take either the Q13 or the Q28, which is handy because they leave from roughly the same spot in Flushing. But if you're going to Northern Boulevard in Bayside you'll have to decide ahead of time whether you're taking the Q12 or the Q13, because they leave from stops a block apart.
• Easy transfer between buses, and from buses to trains. Right now if you want to change from a northbound Q44 to an eastbound Q13, or from the 7 train to a southbound Q17, you have to walk a couple of blocks on crowded sidewalks.
• Short-term bus layovers. Some of the bus routes (like the Q44) pass through Flushing, but most of them terminate there. It makes sense to start and end as many bus driver shifts as possible at transit hubs, because it encourages drivers to commute by transit. Sometimes drivers need a short break between runs, and sometimes they finish a run early. It's important to have enough short-term bus storage to handle those needs.
• Long-term bus layovers. Demand is not flat for buses; there are rush hours. It is often more efficient to store buses close to the transit hub in the middle of the day instead of sending them to the depot (a two mile trip) and back.
• Avoiding street congestion. One of the biggest time savers for bus riders at the Port Authority is that most of the buses have direct ramps into and out of the Lincoln Tunnel, and don't have to compete with private cars.
• Ticketing, shelter, bathrooms, food and shopping for people waiting for buses.

The first thing to ask is what the current arrangement does and doesn't provide. It does not avoid much street congestion or provide for long-term layovers. According to the City Planning powerpoint, the buses stored for short-term layovers get in the way of buses picking up and dropping off passengers. As I detailed above, some of the transfers require walking multiple blocks through dense crowds, and there are a few problems with one-stop shopping. There is very little shelter for people waiting for buses.

On the plus side, transfers from the 7 train to most of the buses are pretty quick and easy. One-stop shopping for the buses that go on Main Street, Kissena Boulevard and Parsons Boulevard works pretty well, and now that bus schedules are available through Google Maps it's even easier to know which bus is scheduled to leave next. There are public bathrooms and Metrocard machines in the subway station. Downtown Flushing's biggest advantage is in terms of food and shopping. If you're transferring in a hurry you can usually pick up a scallion pancake, a Big Mac, a bubble tea or any of a staggering variety of other fast foods and beverages before the next bus leaves. Within a block of the Main Street station there's a Macy's, a Duane Reade and half a dozen Chinese mini-malls.

So what would the proposed bus terminal provide that we don't already have? Shelter and space for short-term layovers, maybe shorten a couple of the transfers and make one-stop shopping a bit easier. Hmmm, maybe that would be worth it if someone else paid for it...

But note that the terminal proposal doesn't do anything to address the biggest obstacle to bus flow: private cars. And it would make the single most important transfer - the transfer from the 7 train to any bus - at least a block long, and potentially much longer. People currently disperse from the corner of Main and Roosevelt in all four directions to board buses using six staircases and two escalators; the proposal would concentrate them all along one route, accessed by one staircase: the one at the northwest corner.

Some people go to Flushing specifically for the restaurants. Others go for specific shopping and cultural anchors, and stop at restaurants on their way. But if you think about it for a minute, it's clear that the dispersed pedestrian flow from the subway to the bus stops is one of the biggest drivers of business at the shops and restaurants in the area.

There are of course other factors at play, but I wonder how much of the affluence and growth of Downtown Flushing relative to other transit hubs like Jamaica and Journal Square can be credited to this layout, where businesses are on the way in a sense that can't be said of the other hubs. How many people would cease to walk by the Quickly+ on Roosevelt if the B12 terminus were moved west of Main Street? Are the Flushing merchants ready to find out?

Sadly, I'm guessing that they are. That first quote from the City Planning powerpoint, "Rerouting of bus routes to alleviate traffic on Main Street," sounds just like the kinds of quotes that Flushing's elites give to papers. No matter how clear the evidence that the vast majority of shoppers arrive by bus or train, both the old white elites and the new Asian elites seem utterly convinced that anyone who matters comes by car.

Despite what livable streets advocates, city planners and the developers themselves wanted, these merchants and politicians insisted on raising the amount of parking in the new Flushing Commons development to an insane level. They fought bitterly a recent attempt to increase bus speeds through the area by dedicating lanes of Main Street to buses (PDF). The new mall south of Roosevelt Avenue comes with a staggering amount of parking.

It would not surprise me at all if it were a merchant or politician who asked for "Rerouting of bus routes to alleviate traffic on Main Street." This is clearly someone who sees the upper-middle-class white and East Asian drivers as the rightful users of Main Street, and the bus riders, many of them black and South Asian, as interlopers who must be banished to the periphery.

This is yet another situation where we have to ask "who's getting out of the way?" The only way that I could see a bus terminal as an improvement is if it (a) directly connected to the subway and (b) bypassed a large amount of car traffic. No long nasty tunnel like the one to the Port Authority; I'm talking about demolishing a big chunk of one of the blocks at the corner of Main and Roosevelt. I'm talking about bus-only underground ramps from further out on Main, Kissena, Parsons and Northern that flow right into the bus bays and layover garage.

Of course, that would be a humongous cost, and if you're going to dig a tunnel you might as well put in an orbital subway connecting Flushing to Jamaica, the airports, Astoria and Upper Manhattan. None of it sounds like it would justify the cost of construction, so let's drop that, at least for a few decades.

What could we do that's cheaper? In 2012 the Department of Transportation considered reconfiguring Main and Union Streets to provide dedicated bus lanes, and rejected those options because they didn't want to slow down private cars and trucks (PDF). If we really want to improve bus service, we could revisit those options. We could also widen the sidewalks on Main Street to make room for bus shelters.

What we should not do under any circumstances is move bus stops away from Main Street and into the Flushing West area. Transit advocates need to be clear: that is not a bus proposal, it's an anti-bus proposal. The staff at City Planning listened to the anti-bus people; now they need to listen to the pro-bus people and kill any effort to put a bus terminal in Flushing West.

No, e-carpooling will not replace fixed-route buses

A lot of people have been talking about "microtransit" lately - sometimes meaning shared e-hailing services like Uberpool and Lyftline, but also some larger services like Bridj, Via and Leap, and even dollar vans. I've read some wise things, and other things that are ...less wise. I think this is going to be a few posts, and I'm going to start with the question of whether electronic taxi-sharing services like Uberpool and Lyftline will, or even can, drive public buses out of business, and the role of pricing.

Photo: dibaday / Flickr

Last August, Timothy B. Lee wrote,

In the short run, these services will be a way for yuppies to pay a little less for their taxi rides. But they're also starting to blur of the line between taxis and buses. In the long run, that line is likely to disappear altogether, as all conventional buses are replaced by smaller and nimbler just-in-time transportation options.

No, "flexible" transportation services are not going to replace buses, ever, as long as they're competing on a level playing field. Jarrett Walker had the ultimate takedown years ago, and then reprised it again and again when people kept repeating the same nonsense:

You can spare yourself a lot of confusion about flexible service by keeping in mind the physical facts of the matter: Driving a special routing to respond to a customer request takes more of a driver's time than picking up a customer along a fixed route. Since we pay for service mostly in hours of labor, we have to care about how many passengers we'll serve with each labor hour, so flexible service is intrinsically limited on that important score. That's why when flexible routes near their (very low) capacity limits, we usually try to turn them back into fixed routes.

In February, Uber analyzed its data from Los Angeles and concluded that many people were using it as feeder service to get to the Metro, leading Chris Plano to reiterate Timothy Lee's speculation in March:

On the other hand, ride-hailing could actually be stealing riders from transit. If the same trip can be completed in less time with an Uber or Lyft than using the Metro, some riders will choose the speedier option. However, at the moment, it is unlikely that hordes of people will abandon transit for ride-hailing simply because transit is still less expensive.

Jarrett himself, in a comment on Plano's post, mentions that Uber and Lyft executives "are often quite explicit about wanting to draw people away from public transit," and seems to believe that because the e-hailing services are less regulated than the public transit agencies, they might actually succeed.

I'm not convinced at all. I'm guessing that these are actually people who might have driven to the Metro station, but even if they switched from riding feeder buses, Plano is dancing around an important point: these are people who are willing to pay a premium price for a faster trip. Let's say they're spending five dollars for an Uberpool to the train station. They would probably be happy to pay four dollars to ride a public bus, and for four dollars a pop (no free transfer), LACMTA would probably be able to run the buses frequently enough to satisfy them. But because LACMTA charges a consistent $1.75, and would probably be bitterly attacked if they tried to charge more in some neighborhoods, this leaves an opening for Uber. I really doubt that Uber could make that work, even with driverless cars, for less than a bus fare.

Stay tuned for more!

Who's getting out of the way of the buses?

The Transit Workers' Union Local 100 has been campaigning against New York's recently enacted Right of Way law, which gives the police and courts more power to punish drivers who injure or kill people in the crosswalk. Essentially, it established the rule of law where previously the right of a person to pass, to take up public space, and to threaten and even kill others was granted based on the size and power of that person's vehicle, or the extent to which a police officer sympathized with that person. Or the extent to which that person was dead.

The TWU bus drivers see this as a problem because the previous state of anarchy favored them. They're union members piloting some of the largest vehicles on the road. There are many times when I've been crossing the street and had to wait because a driver swung his bus out in front of me. I had to get out of the way. Most people did. Some of them didn't, and some died. Too many.

But there have also been times when I've benefited from that anarchy. I've seen sedans, SUVs and sports cars come to a halt at a green light, as my bus driver takes a left right in front of them. If the driver had followed the rules, we might have sat for a while waiting to make that left turn.

Yesterday, a Local 100 spokesperson tweeted a picture of a bus waiting to turn off of 181st Street while an "oblivious pedestrian" crossed Wadsworth Avenue with the light. Several times in recent months the TWU has threatened to take extreme care to avoid violating the right-of-way of pedestrians, to which pedestrian advocates have replied, "No, please don't fling me in that briar patch!"

When pedestrian advocate Robert Wright observed that the pedestrian crossing Wadsworth had the right of way, a Local 100 spokesperson tweeted, "The point is that there should be a turn signal so that peds can be safe when buses have to turn." And yes, this is one way that the problem could be solved, but having lots of turn phases can cause more problems.

Even before that tweet, the picture had gotten me thinking: what if we wanted to give bus drivers the priority they used to have, but enshrine it into law? We give police cars, fire trucks and ambulances the right to take street space; if we think buses should have more priority, why not give a similar right to them? What if all in-service buses were allowed to turn whenever they wanted, and all other traffic had to yield?

Then it got me thinking that if they had this priority, we would need some kind of signal to tell pedestrians and other drivers to get out of the way. Police cars, fire trucks, ambulances, they all have sirens and flashing lights. Sirens on every bus would be overkill. Flashing lights?

Photo: New York City Climate

Hey wait a minute! Didn't there used to be lights on some of the buses? Yes, when the first Select Bus line debuted on Fordham Road it had flashing blue lights on the front. The idea was partly to distinguish Select Buses from the local buses operating on the same route, but also to notify drivers that the bus had priority.

You may also remember what happened to the flashing lights. After four successful years of Select Bus Service, when it was rolled out on the S79, Staten Island politicians complained that the lights were "distracting to drivers," and pressured the MTA to shut them off.

Where was the Transit Workers' Union in this? I haven't found any mention of them. If they tweeted or sent out a press release, it wasn't picked up. But they did endorse State Senator Bill Perkins for re-election, after he repeatedly opposed plans to extend the M60 select bus lanes to West 125th Street.

Local 100's choice of 181st Street for this action is telling. 181st is a critical bus corridor connecting the A and #1 subway lines with transit-poor neighborhoods in the western Bronx. The buses are constantly getting stuck behind double-parked cars. The Department of Transportation tried hard to speed them up, but local politicians watered the plan down to nothing. Where was the TWU?

These issues - stiffer penalties for hurting pedestrians with the right of way, dedicated lanes for buses, and lights to reinforce the priority of buses in those lanes - are all issues about who's getting out of the way. In that sense, they're like the bus bays in Tenafly, or pedestrian overpasses: an indication of the priorities of the government. The right-of-way law says that pedestrians are as important as bus drivers and riders, and the TWU has fought that tooth and nail. The dedicated lanes and flashing blue lights said that private motorists were less important than bus riders, and the TWU didn't lift a finger for it.

To Save Money on Marketing Buses, Try Running Enough Buses

I like bus improvements. I hate Governor Cuomo's terrible proposal to run an elevated "AirTrain" from Willets Point to LaGuardia Airport. So you'd expect that I would like Josh Barro's post last week arguing that we should improve the buses to LaGuardia instead of building the AirTrain. He writes, "Transit agencies are spending millions of dollars on new rail infrastructure that is no faster than existing bus service, simply because riders perceive a train as better than a bus." And then he goes on to make a nice argument that we should tell these poor deluded people that the train is actually not better.

This is wrong nationwide, but it's wrong on even more levels in the case of transit to LaGuardia. This is because people are already riding the bus to LaGuardia. On the first weekend of the M60 Select Bus Service I rode the bus, and it was packed. Since then I've ridden it twice more, and both times it was crush-loaded. The Q70, Q72 and Q48 aren't quite as heavily packed, but they have very healthy ridership. The Q70 probably gets even higher ridership than I give below, because it had only been in service for three months by the end of 2013.

Route	M60	Q48	Q72	Q70
2013 average weekday ridership	17,013	2790	5764	3716 (August 2014)*
2015 weekday buses	139	62	71	96
Average riders per bus	122	45	81	39
Loading capacity	112	70	70	70
Seated capacity	62	40	40	40

The M60 is packed, and the other buses are pretty full. If I were wealthy, or if my employer were paying, I would take taxis over the M60 almost all the time. I would probably take taxis over the Q72 or the Q48 as well; the Q70 experience is the only one that has been close to comfortable for me.

Why does the MTA not run enough M60 buses to bring the loads down to reasonably comfortable levels? I have no idea. but imagine that someone did what Barro suggests and spent a ton of money on "marketing" these buses. Imagine if that marketing succeeded in attracting the 70-90% of people who currently arrive by taxi or private car (PDF). The MTA would not be able to serve the people that they attract. They would have a horrible time and take a taxi from then on out.

Barro frames this with a quote from the National Bus Rapid Transit Institute, "Bus-based public transit in the United States suffers from an image problem." Yes, the BRT people keep repeating that buses are just as good as trains, and everyone just needs to be shown the light, but notice two things. First, the actual report (PDF) that Barro drew the quote from gives a much more nuanced picture and hardly makes a strong case that marketing is all you need. Second, this report and Barro's post, and this lame entry from EMBARQ a couple weeks ago, are just three more in a long line of bus scoldings where someone patronizingly tells you to love your bus without showing any interest in taking the bus themselves.

When Barro first tweeted the link to his post, I responded by telling him that the M60 is frequently packed. His response to me was simply, "even more reason not to spend $1 billion on a train." Well, I don't know about a billion dollars, but as Stephen Smith frequently reminds us, high bus ridership is actually one indicator that a potential train line is worth spending money on.

What bothers me most about Barro's piece is how since he posted it on February 10, several people have uncritically cited it as either an argument for more bus marketing, or an argument against subway expansion. It is neither, because it is based on inaccurate information. I hope that Barro will post something correcting those mistaken impressions as soon as he can.

* Thanks to @AHInQueens for the Q70 ridership figure.