Long Distance Jitneys to Pennsylvania

VIP Express Transportation provides service every two hours between Upper Manhattan, Paterson and the Poconos

It's another guest post from long time reader George K!

Jitneys in the NY/NJ area are known for serving areas paralleling local bus routes. However, there are only a few limited examples (such as the Chinatown jitneys) that operate with no anchor.

What I found is that the NY-Pennsylvania market has a sizable amount of long-distance buses that operate on a semi-jitney model with no official anchor. They do have approximate departure times, and their schedules are set up to minimize the amount of deadheading (so trips usually leave from the outer end in Pennsylvania starting early in the morning until the early evening, and then leave from the NY terminal 3-4 hours later...there's usually no peak-only trips, since that requires purchasing a whole extra bus and not fully utilizing it throughout the day). Headway vary from every 1-3 hours, with most companies choosing a bihourly headway.

On the outer end of the route, the jitneys typically offer door-to-door service. For example, the jitneys out to the Poconos stop at predetermined locations off I-80 (e.g. gas stations or restaurants) ...all of them have a Paterson stop (taking advantage of the fact that I-80 runs through the city), and most have one or more stops in Stroudsburg. On the outer end, the companies offer door-to-door service to either Scranton, Wilkes-Barre, or Hazleton (Interesting enough, no single company served all three cities). They also included the immediate suburbs of those cities in their door-to-door service area. The benefit of course is comfort and convenience for the passenger in not having to worry about taking a connecting bus to reach the main intercity station in the Downtown neighborhood of these respective cities, but it comes at the expense of reliability to a certain extent, since the distribution of riders who want a particular trip might not necessarily line up with the quickest route to the highway.

For the routes to Lehigh Valley and Reading, they all have a stop at Newark Airport, which makes sense given its proximity to I-78. Most also have a stop in Union City. Surprisingly enough, none of the Reading companies stop in Allentown, despite its proximity to I-78. (The closest thing to a direct connection between those two cities is OurBus, which runs once a day and only stops at the Wescosville Park & Ride).

Interestingly enough, one of those companies (Caribe Tour Express Transportation) also operates from Reading to Philadelphia, with 4 round-trips per day. (Those trips start earlier and end later than the Amtrak Thruway Express service which is contracted out to Krapf Coaches). It would be a mutual benefit to both Amtrak and Caribe Express if those trips were able to be thru-ticketed with Amtrak trains, hopefully leading to a virtuous cycle of service being expanded on the corridor. (For the door-to-door service in Reading, they might want to consider taking the most direct route to/from the BARTA Transportation Center, and then performing the door-to-door service for any remaining passengers.)

To elaborate on the concept that these jitneys operate with no anchor, the Poconos jitneys serve Washington Heights and Paterson, which are far enough from Midtown Manhattan (where most of the intercity buses operate) that in the event of an issue with their preferred jitney, most people would likely look around for another jitney company rather than backtrack all the way to Midtown for an intercity bus. For Scranton, Stroudsburg, and Wilkes-Barre, the individual jitney companies roughly match the frequency of the Martz Trailways buses, and there's multiple jitney companies, so the total number of vehicles moving towards your destination is much greater in Washington Heights or Paterson compared to Midtown Manhattan. For Hazleton in particular, there's one single round-trip to NYC on Fullington Trailways, and it's basically a reverse-peak trip, so that's serving a completely different market than the jitney companies. It is the same situation for reading, with its one single round-trip to/from NYC on OurBus/Klein Transportation (which also doesn't stop in Union City like the jitneys do).

TransBridge and the Lehigh Valley jitneys are arguably the closest example of an anchor/jitney cascade relationship (simply because TransBridge and the jitneys share a stop at Newark Airport...though the frequency to any given point in Lehigh Valley isn't much better than any individual jitney company). But again, TransBridge doesn't serve Union City, and doesn't serve Upper Manhattan, Fort Lee, Paterson, or Irvington, so it is still for all intents and purposes an independent market.

This service opens up a significant amount of opportunities for both commuters and leisure travelers. The flat-rate pricing makes it appealing for budget-conscious travelers (with the risk that the jitney might be sold-out at the last minute, though that is of course a concern even for variable-rate pricing models). Some of the companies add a few extra trips at times when it is expected to be busy (holiday weekends, or weekends in general).

Better-publicizing these services can tap into the market of people who are looking for leisure destinations that don't necessarily require a car rental. For example, a hiker can take a jitney to Stroudsburg, take the Monroe County Transit Authority River Runner up the Delaware River and go for a hike. (Unfortunately, the hours of the River Runner are limited, and it only runs on Saturdays, though I believe it runs on Sundays if it's a 3-day weekend, since it's designed for people who want to canoe down the Delaware River and camp overnight ...they leave their car at Kittatiny Vistor's Center or Delaware River Water Gap Park & Ride, put the canoe on the trailer at the back of the bus, take the bus up north, and then canoe down the river). There's definitely room for improvement on the shuttle (an extension from Milford Beach to Port Jervis to connect with Metro-North would be nice, as well as having the midday trips run the extra mile to the Martz Bus Terminal instead of just the park-and-ride, as well as service that runs past 3:05pm from Milford Beach), but of course that would require additional resources. (Right now, they use 3 buses for the operation. Those expansions would likely require them to add a fourth bus...which they should probably do anyway, since the bus route is actually fairly popular with park visitors, and loading and unloading the canoes often causes buses to run behind schedule ...last year, Raymondskill Falls was restricted to shuttle passengers only). With all that in mind, I think it would definitely be a wise investment.

When gauging demand for intercity service, Amtrak would definitely be wise to look not just at traffic patterns and ridership on established intercity companies (e.g. Greyhound, FlixBus, Martz Trailways, etc), but also ridership on these smaller services. If Stroudsburg - Upper Manhattan is able to sustain 8 small companies who depend on social media and word-of-mouth for advertising, then it seems reasonable that the Amtrak service proposed up to Scranton should be considered for a better frequency than 3 round-trips per day. (Granted, it's possible NJ Transit might decide to supplement it with a few of their own trips in an arrangement similar to the Hartford Line, but in that case, they should be paying attention to this demand as well). The markets don't necessarily overlap 100% (I'm sure the Paterson riders and even a lot of the Upper Manhattan riders will likely stick with the jitneys even if Amtrak service is available), but I suspect that the latent demand is much higher than what's being projected.

The Via experience

Here in New York when people talk about "microtransit," they usually mean Uberpool or Lyftline, and those are the services I've been focusing on. Some have mentioned a third service, Via, that works a bit differently. Via is all shared; there is no service where it's just you and the driver, like a traditional taxi. The prices are fixed: currently five dollars per trip on weekdays if you buy credit ahead of time, and up to just under ten dollars for a pay-per-ride weeknight.

Photo: Via publicity photo

I've tried Via several times over the past year. The only real complaint I have is that they don't go to Queens: the service is restricted to Manhattan. I have hope, though, because when I started it was only available from Fourteenth to Fifty-Ninth Streets, and it's now available from the Battery to 110th Street. The next expansion will probably be Brooklyn Heights or Park Slope, but I don't think they'll ignore western Queens for long.

The first couple of times I took Via I had to wait a while, and it was just me and the driver, but the service seems to have caught on quickly. Every time since then, there has been at least one other passenger and the wait time has been minimal. If I've had to wait more than five minutes it was because my "Via-cle" (har) was stuck in traffic less than two blocks away.

Via is much more like a bus than a taxi. Twice I've gotten sedans, but the Via-cles are usually SUVs. I've had at least one trip with three other people, meaning I had to sit in the third row of one of those Suburbans or Navigators or Explorers. Since those aren't really made for people getting in and out frequently, I'm wondering how soon Via is going to start running vans big enough to stand up in.

A number of people have objected to Uber and Lyft because of the “gig economy” arrangements they have with their drivers. Of course, they’re not much worse than the taxi medallion owners in that regard. But on one recent Via trip the driver was chatting with us, and he said that Via drivers are all paid by the hour, possibly even full time. If that is correct, it sounds like a much better deal for them than just about any other taxi arrangement.

As I’ve said before, Uber and Lyft are a huge improvement over the way we did taxis up to a few years ago, but in their current incarnations they won’t do much to help the transit capacity crunch we’re feeling in cities like New York. The Via model is much more promising, and the more Uber and Lyft act on those lines, like with Uberhop, the more helpful they will be in relieving our capacity constraints.

There was another fascinating aspect of my experience with Via, and to some degree with Lyftline and Uberpool, that deserves its own post. I'll write about it soon!

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!

Take the Chinatown Van to the U.S. Open

There were some chuckles on my Twitter feed over the Times article about U.S. Open champion tennis players getting stuck in traffic as they were being chauffeured from Manhattan hotels to the courts in Queens. If you absolutely must stay at a five-star hotel in Midtown, well, I'm afraid you will just have to leave early and sit in traffic. If you're prepared to be a bit more flexible, there are several alternatives, and they'll will work if you're a US Open spectator as well.

1. Get a hotel near Flushing Meadows. There are many fine hotels within a ten-minute chauffeured car ride of the Tennis Center, including ten that are conveniently located near the food and nightlife of Downtown Flushing. There are even two four-star hotels in the area, but they're a bit more isolated and car ride would be a little longer.
2. The Long Island Rail Road. You can stay at the four-star Hotel Pennsylvania, right above Penn Station, and take the train right to the park. You may have to deal with some crowds along the way, but you'll probably get a seat, especially if you wear your tennis whites, and the trip is under half an hour if you time it right.
3. The number 7 train. This was recommended by a number of people, but I honestly can't recommend it. The 7 is my train, and the entire tournament it's been packed with tennis fans. If crowds (as in, someone's texting hand in your shoulder blade crowds) help your game, go for it. Otherwise, consider alternate routes.

4. The Chinatown van. They leave as soon as they're full, so you always get a seat! From the three-star Hotel Mulberry, it's a short walk down to Division Street, where the vans load up just east of the Bowery. For two dollars, you get a ride to Flushing, often with Chinese pop or opera music. In Flushing, most of the vans will let you off at College Point Boulevard and 59th Avenue, where you can walk through the park to the tennis center. If you speak a Chinese language you can ask ahead of time, but generally if you're not on the highway you can just call out, "Stop, please!"
   
   
   
   To return to Manhattan you'll have to catch the vans in Flushing, on 41st Avenue just off of Main Street, but you can get there by the #7 train from the park (which will be much less crowded than the opposite direction) and have a tasty Sichuan dinner in Flushing after the match.

The disaster of New Jersey's emergency transit plan

New Jersey's transportation infrastructure is in crisis. New Jersey Transit told Businessweek that 257 rail cars and 65 engines (23% and 35% of the total, respectively) were damaged or destroyed by Hurricane Sandy. Some of the rail lines were washed out, or blocked with boats and shipping containers. Hoboken Terminal and the PATH train, which connect New Jersey Transit passengers with lower Manhattan, were flooded. The state is in the midst of a gasoline shortage. They needed a plan.

Unfortunately, the emergency plan that New Jersey Transit came up with was horrible. They borrowed 31 buses from SEPTA and are getting another 350 from around the country. They chose eight park-and-ride lots around the northern half of the state, and set up buses to take people from these lots to the ferries and the Holland Tunnel, twenty in the morning and twenty in the evening from each lot. What could possibly go wrong?

The line to board the bus at South Orange. Photo: @ccondry / Twitter.

Well, quite a lot, actually. Turns out that even people who had gas in their cars didn't want to waste it driving to some park-and-ride and back. They probably also didn't want to have their car stuck at some park-and-ride out by the highway with no bus to get them to it, if they had to go home in the middle of the day or late at night. They wanted to walk to the bus, so that's what they tried to do. In towns across the metro area, including Montclair, South Orange, Hoboken and Woodbridge, people waited up to 90 minutes to board packed buses bound for Manhattan. There was only one lane open for buses in the Holland Tunnel, and the usual one-lane XBL in the Lincoln Tunnel, limiting the total number of buses that could cross the Hudson. Many of those who did take the park-and-ride buses were dropped off at ferry terminals, where there was another wait for a boat.

In the ultimate craziness, after trains from Woodbridge attracted unmanageable crowds, New Jersey Transit simply cancelled the service and told everyone to drive to Metropark to catch a Northeast Corridor train. And, you know, let them eat cake on the way.

The commute home was similarly frustrated. The Port Authority Bus Terminal was packed with commuters - first waiting for buses, then waiting to buy bus tickets, finally waiting just to get into the terminal.

Commuters wait to get inside the Port Authority Bus Terminal. Photo: nikocoutroulis / Instagram.

As I write this at 9:30 PM, many people are still at the terminal waiting for buses. Some of them are afraid that at a certain point New Jersey Transit will stop running buses. I'll update this when that part of the saga is over.

The problems in the morning rush attracted some attention from the media. First, WNYC reporter Nancy Solomon discussed the long lines at South Orange. (I've been trying to find that report online, but haven't been able to.) Then it got mentioned by Wall Street Journal bloggers and Capital New York.

In the afternoon, New Jersey Transit released a revised plan for tomorrow. "Buses that were used in emergency service at Bridgewater, Woodbridge and Willowbrook Mall, as well as Newark Liberty International Airport have been redeployed to ease crowding on buses traveling through South Orange, Jersey City, Hoboken and Newark, to New York, the agency said." In other words, there were nowhere near as many cars in the park-and-rides as the planners expected, and a lot more people at the walkable bus stops.

We'll see tomorrow how much better the revised plan is. In the meantime, can we all agree that this shows the utter bankruptcy of the standard park-and-ride mentality that still preoccupies transit planners? No, New Jersey Transit Planners, most transit riders don't want to maximize the time they can spend behind the wheel, especially during a post-hurricane gasoline shortage.

Can we also agree that buses are not better than trains? The "Bus Rapid Transit" zealots at the Institute for Transportation Development Policy have mesmerized too many of New York's transportation thinkers, to the point where we get the Tri-State Transportation Campaign, the Pratt Institute and former Streetsblog editor Aaron Naparstek all arguing that buses should be a higher political priority than trains. In the current world buses have their place, and the "bus bridge" instituted by the MTA last week seemed to work fairly well. But to replace either one of the PATH tubes or the North River Tunnels with buses would take a huge number, and they'd need serious street priority.

I have to admit that I was disappointed in the performance of the private sector. I had expected private bus operators to be more flexible, adding service as needed to meet demand. Since New Jersey's laws allow private bus operators, I had hoped to find that they stepped up to fill the obvious holes in New Jersey Transit's plan. Instead, there is no evidence that any of the major private bus companies (DeCamp, Suburban Transit, Academy or Coachusa) added buses to their existing routes or sent buses to supplement routes that were overcrowded. Apparently the private vans were running their usual routes, but they haven't had enough capacity to get everybody home from the Port Authority.

Of course, it's hard to add extra buses, especially if the route is relatively complex and you have to bring on drivers who don't know it. That's why it's nice to have relatively simple routes like "you go all the way down Route 3 to the end, then turn around and come back."

It's possible that the "cross-honoring" system is contributing to the lack of interest from private operators. I don't know exactly how it works when someone with a monthly New Jersey Transit pass shows up on a DeCamp bus, but it may be that DeCamp doesn't get any money from it, or enough to make it worth running extra buses. It's also possible that DeCamp and friends have simply grown fat and lazy on its government-protected monopoly.

The bottom line is that New Jersey Transit's park-and-ride culture has to change. We know how much Governor Christie likes drivers, and it's possible that that attitude is shared by Executive Director Weinstein, and from him on down. But New Jersey can't go on functioning as a car-dominated society. The longer that Christie and the NJ Transit planners try to stave off the inevitable, the worse it will be.

If the MTA doesn't want to take you to work...

I've got so much to say in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy that I'm posting twice in one night. In my last post I didn't include Flushing on the list of places that should have express bus service to Manhattan, because it already has express bus service to Chinatown.

Even if the MTA and the DOT boneheadedly refuse to go along with any of Transportation Alternatives' recommendations, or the two I added, the City still tolerates a small network of van services to cross the river to Chinatown. If you live in Flushing, Elmhurst, Maspeth or Sunset Park and work in Lower Manhattan, you may want to try these vans. I've been thinking about posting a map, similar to the one I made for New Jersey, but I've hesitated because I don't have complete information. In this situation I'll make an exception and put it up there:

These buses all run at least every twenty minutes, and the Flushing-Chinatown and Sunset Park-Chinatown buses run more frequently. Now, the Chinatown buses are express, so you can only catch them at certain points along the line. Here are some locations where I know you can find an express bus to Chinatown:

• 41st Avenue between Main Street and College Point Boulevard, Flushing
• Broadway and Justice Avenue, Elmhurst
• Eighth Avenue and Sixtieth Street, Sunset Park

If you're not Chinese and the drivers don't know what to make of you, just ask, "Chinatown?" That usually clears things up. The Flushing and Sunset Park locations are the best places to get the line that goes from Flushing to Sunset Park as well. The Sunset Park-Chinatown bus goes local up Eighth Avenue until it heads for the Gowanus Expressway, and the Elmhurst-Chinatown bus goes local along roughly the route I've marked on the map until it gets to the BQE, but I don't know exactly where the Elmhurst bus goes east of Broadway (if you know, please tell me). In Chinatown, here are the places to get the buses:

• Flushing: Division Street, just east of the Bowery
• Sunset Park: Forsyth Street and East Broadway
• Elmhurst: Elizabeth Street, just north of Hester Street

Here are some handy Simplified Chinese translations to help you:

English	汉语	Commuter Vans
Chinatown	曼哈頓華埠	To Elmhurst, Flushing and Sunset Park
Elmhurst	艾姆赫斯特	To Chinatown
Flushing	法拉盛	To Chinatown and Sunset Park
Sunset Park	布鲁克林華埠	To Chinatown and Flushing

I've also added the Flatbush Avenue dollar van route to the map, even though it's a local route and doesn't go over the bridge. Some of you may find it useful. If anyone knows the Utica Avenue route, please let me know and I'll add it.

The wrong lessons to take from the livery van failure

In his frustrating blog post from June about the "failure" of Chinatown buses, Will Doig also alleged that local private van service had failed:

And most important, it’s been tried before — not just in New York, but in many cities — with miserable results. "There was this expectation that these vans would be a perfect substitute for conventional transit," says Columbia University assistant professor of urban planning David King. But, "There are a lot of real problems when you try to formalize informal transit."

I know it's been a few months, but I've had this sitting half-finished in my pipeline, and it leads to an important point. But first, I haven't heard any evidence of an expectation that private vans would be a perfect substitute for conventional transit. Worse, Doig gives no details about what "miserable results" or "real problems" he and King might be referring to. Routes are expanding and the operators are buying bigger and better buses. To me that suggests either success or massive over-leveraging, and the second possibility is highly unlikely in this economic climate.



My guess is that King was referring to the failure of the Taxi and Limousine Commission's 2010 Group Ride program, which I covered extensively at the time. There were indeed several problems, and I came up with eight recommendations:

1. Jitney service is qualitatively different from scheduled government bus service.
2. Admitting ignorance is the first step on the path to wisdom.
3. Consider the customer's perspective.
4. Transit is in competition.
5. Thin markets need an anchor.
6. Sometimes marketing can help.
7. Gaps in service can kill your business.
8. Take constructive comments seriously.

The problem with King's statement, and Doig's, is that most of these things are not specific to "these vans," but they're true when you're launching a new transit service of any kind. They're also not about "trying to formalize informal transit," but about the perils of expecting to make a profit on unprofitable routes.

It's just lazy to give something a half-assed try and then say, "oh, well I guess it doesn't work," especially when it's working pretty well right across the river. Of course, King's statement was fairly nuanced and qualified; it's Doig who turned it into a blanket condemnation of privately owned transit.

If anything has failed, of course, it's Taxi Commissioner David Yassky, who's also promised a hybrid taxi fleet and a borough taxi program. It's then-Deputy Mayor Stephen Goldsmith, who has been awfully quiet since he left under accusations of domestic abuse, but who showed with this project that he's not a budget-cutting privatization guru. And of course it's Mayor Bloomberg, who hired these guys and gave them their orders.

Legal private transit still has a chance of working in New York City. Hopefully we'll give it a try one day.

Frequent transit in Hudson County, New Jersey

A common complaint about transit in New Jersey is that there is no official map with bus lines. New Jersey Transit provides maps of its commuter rail and light rail lines, New York Waterway has ferry maps, and the Port Authority provides maps of its PATH trains, but nothing for buses. Part of the problem is that New Jersey Transit runs a lot of buses, and a bus map of the entire state would be incredibly expensive to produce and hard to read. Still, it's kind of silly that they just throw up their hands. The MTA produces maps for each county that they serve, and the Paris RATP makes a great series of bus maps by department. So it can be done.

Since 2008, Doug Kelly has been developing, updating and maintaining an impressive set of Google maps of New Jersey Transit buses (and one of Nassau County to boot). But the other day I was thinking about our frequent network maps discussion from last year, where I made a map of the most frequent routes in Queens. I realized that I don't really want to know about New Jersey Transit Route 120, which doesn't even run all day. Like most people, I want to know the frequent routes.

The vast majority of bus routes are run by New Jersey Transit, but if you've been reading this blog you'll know that there's a large network of privately operated buses, especially in Hudson County and the Route 4 corridor. Many of these buses run on a jitney system, without a fixed schedule. They either wait at one end of the route to fill up before going, or they operate on the driver's best guess as to whether they'll be able to make a profit on the run. How do we know what that is for a given route? Sit out on a street corner with a stopwatch?

Fortunately, we don't have to. Unlike official transit planners in New York City who completely ignore jitneys, the North Jersey Transportation Planning Authority hired AECOM to study the jitneys of Hudson County in detail. Their report is a thing of beauty, and yes it contains frequency counts at different times of day. It also contains a list of all the bus lines that they know of in Hudson County, so I looked them all up on the websites of New Jersey Transit (though it's actually easier to google "NJ Transit" and the route number than to use their clunky interface), the A&C Bus Company, and others, and compiled a list of weekday midday frequencies, and a map to go with them (sorry about the colors).

Map updated August 12 to show NJ Transit Route 87 and the routes on Kennedy Boulevard in Bayonne

I was blown away. I knew that the NJTPA report listed the Bergenline vans as coming every two minutes, so I expected there to be van routes at the top of the frequency list, but I didn't think that the top six most frequent lines would be van lines. I also didn't expect that the Hudson-Bergen light rail would come so infrequently that if you're going to Hoboken you may have to wait up to twenty minutes. I didn't even expect the PATH trains to be every ten minutes during middays.

Most significantly, I didn't expect to find no New Jersey Transit bus route in Hudson County that comes more than once every twenty minutes during the middle of the day. But that actually makes sense if you remember that they're actually forbidden from engaging in "destructive competition" with a private operator, so in the terminology of Klein, Moore and Reja, when there's a thick market they step back and provide only an anchor. Still, it seems to me that in thin markets like everything west of the Hackensack River (Secaucus, Kearney, Arlington, East Newark and Harrison) they would provide more frequent service, but apparently not.

Another thing: these buses run frequently all day, and fill up regularly, without subsidies, and they only have one feature of "bus rapid transit": the Lincoln Tunnel Exclusive Bus Lane in the mornings. No iconic stations or distinctive branding. To be honest, many of them are slow, particularly on Bergenline Avenue. But people take them anyway.

A final note: I worked primarily by corridors, so I didn't include services like the Newark-WTC PATH train, the Broadway Bus and the buses that come every twenty minutes when they're the only service in that corridor. I did, however, include services like the Hudson-Bergen Light rail where interlining makes the vehicles more frequent than once every fifteen minutes.

Chinese names for New York neighborhoods

Here is a list of New York neighborhoods, streets and suburbs with significant Chinese populations, with their names in Simplfied Chinese writing. I do not read or write Chinese, so please submit additions or corrections.

English	汉语	Commuter Vans
18th Avenue	第十八大道	None known
86th Street	八十六街	None known
Avenue U	U大道	None known
Bensonhurst	本森社区	None known
Chinatown	曼哈頓華埠	To Elmhurst, Flushing and Sunset Park
Edison, NJ	爱迪生	To Chinatown (reported)
Elmhurst	艾姆赫斯特	To Chinatown
Flushing	法拉盛	To Chinatown and Sunset Park
Sheepshead Bay	羊头湾	None known
Sunset Park ("Brooklyn's Chinatown")	布鲁克林華埠	To Chinatown and Flushing

Investing in private buses

If you take "dollar vans" in the New York area, you'll notice an obvious difference between the ones that run on Flatbush, the ones that go to Chinatown or Jamaica, and the ones that go to New Jersey. Even in Jersey there is a difference between the vans that run on Bergenline Avenue or Kennedy Boulevard and the ones that serve Route 4 and especially Boulevard East.

The vans that run on Flatbush are typically cramped fifteen-passenger Ford Econolines, with ropes to allow the driver to close the sliding doors without getting out of his or her seat. The Jamaica lines have some cutaway vans with automatic doors, but there are still a lot of Econolines. The Chinatown buses are almost all cutaways, as are the ones on Bergenline and Kennedy.

It's on the high-volume, high-income Boulevard East route that you see the biggest difference. That's where you can find tour minibuses and even full-size buses. I once rode on a school bus, but it was a brand-new bus with modern seating, not some crappy high-backed bench seats.

Back in the nineties I rode an Econoline on the Bergenline route. My wife told me that there used to be a lot more of them on Bergenline, and even a few on Boulevard East. There is clearly some kind of hand-me-down arrangement, with the newest vans used on Boulevard East and Route 4, then sold to drivers on Bergenline and Kennedy. There may also be a parallel seniority system running the other way, since there seem to be more Dominican and Salvadoran drivers on Boulevard East than there were ten years ago.

The obvious question is why the vans on Flatbush don't really get upgraded. Typically, when a Flatbush van driver gets a little extra cash, the van gets a little bling: a fancy paint job, some decals, maybe a better sound system. Why don't the drivers buy bigger buses, or at least ones with automatic doors? What do the Jersey and Chinatown vans have that the Brooklyn ones don't?

The best way to know is of course to ask the drivers. At this point I don't have those connections, but maybe someone reading this does. I can make some guesses, though: it's the regulatory environment.

Even the drivers in Brooklyn and Queens who say they're "legal" just mean that they're authorized to operate a commuter van somewhere in the city. Nobody has the right to legally pick up passengers on the street. Because of this, even the "legal" operators face the possibility of large fines on every run. The expense and the uncertainty don't justify additional investment.

By contrast, any bus operator that crosses state lines is protected by the Interstate Commerce clause of the Constitution, and can legally pick up passengers on the street in either state. The New Jersey vans, therefore, can only be fined for violations like polluting or causing a hazard. The owners therefore have an incentive to replace their vans when they can no longer pass inspection. The State of New Jersey is also prohibited by law from engaging in "destructive competition" with private transit operators. If a van passes inspection and obeys traffic laws, it should never have to pay a fine.

So why do the Chinatown vans get upgrades? My guess is that they're better capitalized. Each route is run by a single company that assumes at least some of the risk of fines, while the Flatbush vans seem to all be run and financed by individual operators. The Chinese-American owners may also be able to get outside financing from their immigrant networks at levels that are unavailable to Jamaicans and Haitians.

This is also related to the disastrous failure of the Taxi and Limousine Commission's 2010 "Group Ride Vehicle Program." It relied primarily on Jamaican van operators and their decentralized model, which does not have enough capital to run a loss for any significant length of time.

Beyond thick and thin markets for transit

In their extremely useful paper on private bus transit (PDF), Daniel Klein, Adrian Moore and Binyam Reja give us the concepts of "thick" and "thin" markets for transit: "Another distinction of fundamental importance is whether ridership on the transit route is potentially heavy enough to sustain the cascade of jitneys in the absence of scheduled service," they write on Page 39.

The Flushing-Chinatown van run is an example of a thick market. You could say that the subway provides an anchor, but it's a very inconvenient one: if you give up on the van you have to walk three blocks north to the subway, and then take that to another subway that might not go exactly where you want to go. These vans really function without any anchor.

The vans from Bergenline Avenue to the Port Authority are an example of a thin market. The New Jersey Transit 156 and 159 buses provide scheduled service in case the vans don't come; I've used them myself. They are run by NJ Transit, but they could probably be run at a profit by a private company.

Thick market	Ridership can sustain a jitney cascade without an anchor	Flushing-Chinatown
Thin market	Ridership can sustain a jitney cascade with an anchor	Bergenline-Port Authority

This doesn't capture other possibilities, though. What about a line in some far-flung sprawl suburb where car ownership is very high and roads are wide? For example, Dutchess County Loop A. A line like that is never going to make a profit as long as those conditions persist. To exist, it must remain subsidized until gas prices rise above eight dollars a gallon. Let's call it "No market."

There's also a scenario in between Loop A and the Bergenline Avenue buses, where jitneys can run with an anchor, but the ridership doesn't provide a profit for the anchor, so it has to be subsidized. The Bergenline Avenue buses that go across the George Washington Bridge may be an example of that. Let's call it a "Wafer-thin market."

I would argue that most of the routes chosen by the TLC for their pilot program are wafer-thin markets. Due to competition from parallel routes and private cars, they cannot support profitable transit by themselves, but they may be able to support a jitney cascade if they have a subsidized anchor.

The B39 route across the Williamsburg Bridge had potential to be a thin market. If it were better marketed, it might have worked. The only one that had the potential to be a truly thick market was the B71, if it had been extended through the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel. It could have provided Red Hook and Carroll Gardens residents with a one-seat ride to Financial District job sites, possibly being time-competitive against the subway. I guess we'll have to wait to see that one tried.

Here's our new table:

Market type	Description	Existing example	Potential TLC route
Thick market	Ridership can sustain a jitney cascade without an anchor	Flushing-Chinatown	B71 through Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel
Thin market	Ridership can sustain a jitney cascade with a profitable anchor	Bergenline-Port Authority	B39
Wafer-thin market	Ridership can sustain a jitney cascade with a subsidized anchor	Bergenline-GWB	B23, B71, Q74, Q79
No market	Ridership cannot sustain jitney service, even with a subsidized anchor	Dutchess Loop A

Notice that I've still put the Q79 up as a wafer-thin market. The TLC has put that route out for bid, but I really don't think there's enough ridership to support it without some kind of subsidized anchor. It's great that Bob Friedrich is still fighting for service on Little Neck Parkway, but his best bet is to try to find some funding to subsidize the service. It's just not going to work without subsidies unless there are other drastic changes in the neighborhood.

Learning from the failure of the livery van program

Earlier this week, Taxi and Limousine Commission Chair David Yassky acknowledged that the Commission's plan to run vans on five abandoned local bus routes was failing, and took responsibility for that failure. I don't think it's quite dead yet, and I'll have another post soon on ways to save it, but for now I'd just like to give some reasons why it's failing.

First of all, please send this to every uninformed loudmouth who tries to tell you that they need to run the MTA like a business, man. There are some runs that can never make a profit without radical changes that are beyond the control of the MTA and most potential bus operators. There are also many differences between running a private business and running a public agency. These differences show in the case of the vans.

It's very admirable of Yassky to take the fall for this project, but he's a government guy who spent eight years in the City Council. I don't get the impression that this was his idea. I don't know if he has any business experience, but he's never been a big pusher of privatization. At least some responsibility should rest with the person who told him to do this but didn't give him any resources with the necessary business expertise. Maybe Bloomberg, maybe Goldsmith, maybe both.

So now here are some points to take away from this whole debacle:

Jitney service is qualitatively different from scheduled government bus service. It really seems as though Yassky's (and Bloomberg's) big mistake was thinking that the "dollar vans" are profitable because they're smaller and non-union, and would therefore be able to succeed where the MTA failed. Unfortunately for this program, that's only part of the story: they can be profitable when they operate in thick markets (to use the term introduced by Klein, Reja and Moore (PDF), but will not automatically be otherwise.

Admitting ignorance is the first step on the path to wisdom. Bloomberg, Goldsmith and Yassky have never run a jitney operation. Ricketts and Haqq have never run a transit service for middle-class white people. None of them seem to have read Klein, Reja and Moore, even though I found it by just googling around. Maybe they should have looked to people who had at least some experience or knowledge in those areas.

Consider the customer's perspective. I don't really see any evidence that anyone involved in running this pilot ever imagined what it would be like to be a former passenger of any of these bus routes. Your bus route gets cancelled, so you find other transportation. Three months later, the city gives some guy permission to run fifteen-passenger vans with non-working seatbelts on the route, but you can't use your Metrocard or get a free transfer. You figure you'll give it a try, so you show up at the bus stop one day. There is no schedule, and you can't find any information on the TLC website. Maybe you wait fifteen minutes, maybe an hour. The van never shows up. Nobody is there to explain anything to you. You call a number on the sign, and nobody answers the phone. You're late to work or class. How many times would you go back?

Transit is in competition. People have different ways to get there.

Thin markets need an anchor. If you've got enough competition, you will need some kind of anchor to keep people showing up at the bus stops. You can't do it half-assed.

Sometimes marketing can help. In thick markets, everyone knows about the transit service and the operators compete on the basis of value. In thin markets, knowledge is scarce and marketing becomes much more important.

Gaps in service can kill your business. Wouldn't it be bizarre if all the Q74 riders had simply stopped going to classes, if the Q79 and B39 riders had stopped shopping, for three months, just waiting for someone to come along and put up a small, cryptic sign? They didn't; they found other ways to get where they were going.

Take constructive comments seriously. The TLC has been completely defensive and unwilling to entertain reasonable suggestions. Isn't that the point of a pilot, to gather feedback?

Well, I'll have another round of suggestions coming up soon. Gotta keep the hope alive! Or something like that.

Transportation myopia

I've been writing this blog for over three years now, and there have been many issues that have come up repeatedly. There is one particular issue that I've found in just about every debate, every problem. It causes potential allies of transit to turn into enemies; it causes transit advocates to miscalculate their strategies. It has probably been the single biggest factor in the proliferation of unwalkable sprawl, and the bankruptcy of transit systems, over the past sixty years. I've decided to call it transportation myopia.

Essentially, transportation myopia involves people forgetting, even for a moment, why they care about transit, and treating transit as a goal in itself.



If their goals relate to the environment, they may forget that transit only helps the environment by getting people out of cars. We see this with the Tappan Zee Bridge project, where anti-sprawl advocates have been pushing for transit, but few have questioned the State Department of Transportation's primary goal of widening the bridge from seven lanes to ten.

If people are concerned about the financial and political support that transit receives, they may forget that transit is competing for customers and for political supporters against the road/parking/gas/car system. We see this with the "Save the G" campaign, where advocates failed to address a multi-year, billion-dollar investment in rehabilitating and upgrading the G's primary competition, the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway.

Why do I need a name for this? So that I don't have to keep restating the reasons why it's a bad idea to consider the Q74 without mentioning the Kew Gardens Interchange, and so on and so on. I can just say, "Q74 advocates show transportation myopia," and link to this page. Less work for me, and perhaps most importantly, less than 140 characters.

A lot of transit advocates that I know and respect have demonstrated transportation myopia. If I call you out on it, it's nothing personal. We're on the same side, and I'm doing it to help you accomplish a goal that we all share. I've probably written some myopic things in the past, and you should feel free to call me out if I do it again.

Van operators know how to sell

Yesterday afternoon I was walking down Sutphin Boulevard when I heard a man shout "Six!" Other men nearby were saying the same thing, chanting "Six! Six! Six!" I didn't ask, and I could be completely wrong, but I'm guessing they were referring to the Q6 bus route. They seemed to be loading people into gypsy cabs (a share taxi route?), and nearby was a sign nearby saying "Authorized Commuter Van Pickup."

First, a clarification: A week ago I wrote, "The operators are mostly Jamaicans and Haitians who have their experience running the dollar vans in Flatbush and Jamaica." Jarrett pointed out that many non-New Yorkers might be unaware that the Jamaica I'm referring to is a neighborhood in Queens that is a major transit transfer point, with two subway termini, a massive Long Island Railroad station, a station on the AirTrain to Kennedy Airport, and two bus terminals. It is also a popular shopping district, and the home of York College, a large hospital and several courthouses. Confusingly, many of the people who live in this Jamaica, work in Jamaica, or "change at Jamaica" are immigrants from the Caribbean island of Jamaica. Apparently the names come from different words, pronounced in very different ways, in two distantly-related aboriginal languages, one Algonquian and the other Arawakan.

When I was in college, one of my classmates was a Jewish woman from Queens who had just gotten a new hairstyle, braided in African-style cornrows. She mentioned that when she told people she had gotten her hair done "in Jamaica," she had to clarify that she had not just come back from a Caribbean vacation.

In any case, Jamaica, Queens is also a major terminus for "dollar vans." People transfer primarily from the subways to the vans, but also from commuter trains, buses and other van lines. As on Flatbush Avenue, most of the people involved in running these vans are immigrants from Jamaica or Haiti. The usual explanation is that they were familiar with the concept, because jitneys are common in those countries.

On the streets between Jamaica and Archer Avenues you can see this business in action. In addition to the guys yelling "Six!" you can find several loading areas for vans. Some just have the "Commuter Van Pickup" sign installed by the City, but others have more elaborate signs. Some just have drivers, and others have people selling the van service, but all of them have at least one van waiting.

Information for the newbie is scarce: most of the vans have no markings at all indicating what route they travel on. If they have markings, they give the MTA bus line that anchors their route, but if you don't know where the Q5 goes, that number doesn't help you much. Some of the drivers are quite fluent in Jamaican patois, but less so in New York English. Still, they are quite good at letting people know that they are available to take you somewhere.

Contrast that to the Q74 and B39 situations, where you have the DOT sign, but no other signs and no vans. They left it to the Taxi and Limousine Commission to provide someone on the sidewalk to get people into the vans, but there were no vans to get into. Somewhere in the middle is the Q79 experience reported by our tipster, where after fifteen minutes' wait the van company owner came out to tell him that a van would be along soon.

Clearly, this is not about not knowing how to sell. It's about wanting to sell. If the van operators thought there was any money in the Q74 service, they would be out there waiting at the stop, and they would have five guys standing on the sidewalk chanting "Van to Queens College!" at everyone who walks past. They clearly don't. This pilot project is floundering, and the only way to save it is with some kind of anchor program. Will anyone step up to create one? Ricketts? Yassky? Sadik-Khan? Goldsmith? Bloomberg? Walder? Bueller?

What you get when you make hasty generalizations

On Monday I pointed you to a Times op-ed by Elliott Sclar and Robert Paaswell, and observed that they chose to focus on the private transit systems of third world cities like Calcutta (which in that particular spelling is practically shorthand for crowds and squalor to most Times readers) and ignore the reasonably clean and safe vans in New Jersey and Chinatown. Last night I showed how this guilt-by-association game leads to a number of erroneous conclusions.

First, I want to discuss one bizarre point in the op-ed, the parenthetical aside in this paragraph:

Indeed, even though the van companies are already operating on the former bus routes, the Taxi and Limousine Commission has not added enough personnel to cover its new regulatory responsibilities. (It’s worth asking why, if such funds were available, the city shouldn’t reinstate some of the bus routes instead).

Sure, it's worth asking. There are no dumb questions. But an answer comes to my mind pretty quickly: one TLC enforcement agent can monitor several routes. One agent is a lot cheaper than the number of bus drivers needed to run all those routes. So it's worth asking why, if I answered this question right away, the guys who run two prestigious academic institutes couldn't come up with the answer before their op-ed went to press. My guess is they didn't want to know, and they thought it would make them sound clever. Not exactly.

Here are a few more of their erroneous conclusions, which happen to result from applying their selective methods to perfectly accurate observations. Sclar and Paaswell are correct that appropriate regulation is necessary for transit to be an effective tool for achieving our goals. But they make a mistake in conflating public ownership and regulation. In reality these are not the same thing. You can have poorly regulated government enterprises; the MTA is often said to be one. You can also have well-regulated industries that are privately owned, like restaurants. If the authors are Communists who believe that everything should be run by the State, they don't say that upfront, and if they're not Communists they don't make a good case for transit being treated differently from food preparation.

Once established, Sclar and Paaswell argue, transit providers can become organized and entrenched, protecting their interests at the expense of the public. They are correct here: I can think of one city in particular where a "cartel" of transit operators has jealously guarded their monopoly even though the public winds up paying more money for less service. Unfortunately for their argument, it happens to be our city, and the cartel is the Transit Workers' Union. They may not engage in the kind of violence that the authors breathlessly related, but they are certainly succeeding in stifling innovation and impeding efficiency measures.

In this op-ed, the argument I'm probably the most sympathetic to is the one about employee wages and hours. I strongly believe that everyone deserves a job with decent pay for a reasonable workday. But it doesn't make sense to fight this battle in every workplace. Transit cannot shoulder the burden of social justice by itself. There are other social goals that I consider more important than maintaining the wage levels of unionized public-sector transit workers. What does it matter how much you're earning if you spend most of it on Metrocards, or if you're obese, your wife gets run over, your kid has asthma, or your house gets flooded.



I am also troubled by the hours worked by van drivers, but I'm equally troubled by the amount of overtime racked up by MTA workers. I don't want to see anybody overworked, no matter how much they get paid for it.

In contrast, Sclaar and Paaswell don't seem concerned at all about the amount of overtime that MTA operators are working. That makes me think that they don't really care about the hours anyone works. They just know that other people might care, so it's a handy thing to throw at the vans.

And I think that's the bottom line. This op-ed isn't science, and it's not journalism. It's a couple of cranky old guys who've been doing things a particular way their whole lives: publicly owned, unionized transit. That way is running into some difficulties, so someone tries a different approach: private jitneys. This also happens to hurt their friends in the union.

Do Sclar and Paaswell actually go try the vans? Do they ask around to find out how vans can be successful? No, they start from some prejudices they formed on a cramped bus ride in Rio, and brainstorm all the bad things they can think of about jitney service. They edit it (sort of) into an op-ed, and presto! Top of the Times opinion page. Yay.

More ivory tower nonsense

Yesterday I told you about a very sloppy Times op-ed by Elliott Sclar and Robert Paaswell. The authors link private jitney service to third-world cities, suggesting that they're necessarily dirty, dangerous and foreign. They ignore the jitneys that ran on New York streets in the early part of the twentieth century, which were emphatically not foreign, the Brooklyn and Chinatown "dollar vans" that may sometimes be dirty and dangerous, and the New Jersey vans that are fairly clean and well-regulated, but are not particularly foreign.

You can see how silly Sclar and Paaswell's guilt-by-association game is if you think about other things that exist in third-world cities. For example, Bamako has open-air food markets that stink to high heaven, so if we have open-air food markets they'll stink to high heaven. If we had followed that logic twenty years ago we wouldn't have any greenmarkets.

As I wrote back in January, there is nothing inherent in the concept of private transit, or the jitney service model, that makes jitneys dirty, crowded or dangerous. They are that way because lots of people in those cities are desperate enough for transportation that they'll put up with danger, crowds and filth. Most New Yorkers are not desperate, and we won't put up with that level of danger or discomfort. Go to West New York and you'll find private vans (and buses) that are clean, well-maintained and pretty safe. They need to be in order to attract customers. They're also fairly well-regulated by New Jersey authorities.

Another area where Sclar and Paaswell ignore well-known facts is their assertion that the vans are bad because they don't take Metrocards. I agree that this should be changed, but it wouldn't be that difficult. Metrocards are currently used by the Airtrain, the PATH train, Bee-Line buses, and the Roosevelt Island Tram (currently out of service). From 1996 through 2006 they were accepted by the seven private companies that offered bus service under franchise agreements with the Department of Transportation.

Metrocards - or whatever technology replaces them in the future - could even be used to regulate private van operators. Want to accept Metrocards? You have to show a recent inspection certificate. Too many moving violations? We'll deactivate your Metrocard account. But Sclar and Paaswell aren't trying to find solutions, they're trying to find reasons to reject the vans.

Stay tuned, there's more to come.

Under Sclar and Paaswell's noses

On Friday the Times ran an op-ed piece by Elliott Sclar and Robert Paaswell against the City's pilot private van project. or at least the headline and cartoon were against the vans; the actual article pulled its punches at the end.

There are so many things messed up with this article, it's hard to know where to start. The best place, I guess, is with the skimpy data. This is an opinion piece, not a peer-reviewed paper, but the level of scholarship is shockingly low compared with academic Times writers like Paul Krugman and even Eric Morris. I honestly don't get it, because Sclar and Paaswell seem to write fairly well-researched and thoughtful articles for academic journals. Apparently they feel that different standards apply for a politically-oriented opinion piece, so they popped out this turd.

Sclar and Paaswell talk about private transit "in the developing world," specifically referencing Calcutta, Rio de Janeiro and Johannesburg, but they don't seem to be aware that we've had private van services operating in the New York area for at least fifteen years. Are there "higher levels of pollution and more accidents and traffic fatalities" in Flatbush, in Jamaica, in West New York? If there are, it's not particularly the fault of the vans.

Space in op-ed columns is limited, but this is an important piece of information that deserves to be mentioned. I can think of two reasons why they could have left it out. Maybe they really are clueless and don't know about the three massive local private transportation operations taking place a short subway ride from their offices, or maybe they know but are leaving it out because it spoils the picture they want to paint of Bloomberg turning New York into Calcutta. Either way, it's something they and the Times should be ashamed of.

The op-ed is a little bizarre in another way: Sclar and Paaswell assert that "the Bloomberg administration considers private transit services a temporary solution, to end as soon as the money to restart the affected routes is found." I've heard allegations to that effect, but nothing official. If it's true, it would be big news, because running one of these lines requires a major investment of time and money. If the city is asking the van owners to make that investment while all the while planning to yank their licenses when the routes start to show a profit, well that would screw them over in a major way, and Sclar and Paaswell show a serious lack of empathy for van operators by framing it this way: "informal services like commuter vans, controlled by powerful operators, can become difficult to dislodge, thanks to the political influence they wield." Well yeah, if the city encourages someone to make an investment and then arbitrarily takes it away without adequate compensation, they should be prepared for the investor to get upset.

Still, the authors don't seem quite sure whether Bloomberg wants the vans to run permanently or not, so at the end they give suggestions for both possibilities - fairly reasonable suggestions that are pretty incongruous given the ominous tone of the rest of the article.

I've got a bunch more to say about this op-ed, but this is a good place to stop for the night. Feel free to join in!

The vans do exist!

I got an email yesterday from an anonymous reader:

Today I decided to take the Q79 up to Panera Bread in Douglaston and do a little work on my laptop. I started at the "Group Ride Vehicle Stop" at the corner of Little Neck Parkway and Jericho Turnpike.

After I'd been waiting there for about fifteen minutes, a man walked up and introduced himself as the owner of the van company! He said that there would be a van along within five minutes, and called the driver on his cell phone to make sure. In a few minutes the van pulled up and off I went. That's what I call personal service!

We didn't pick up any other passengers along the way, but the driver was friendly and professional, and the van was reasonably comfortable. The driver was frustrated that the city had let so much time pass between the cancellation of Q79 service and the beginning of the van pilot. He pointed out that there was a fair at the Farm Museum today, and said he had brought people there earlier, but nobody wanted a ride on this run.

Before, while we were waiting for the van, the owner said that business had been slow, but that he was committed to making it work. He's currently running two vans on the line, and since it takes 15-20 minutes to go from one end to the next, that means that the headway is about 15-20 minutes. He said that as business picks up, he hopes to increase that to four vans.

I gave him the address of your blog, and your email address, as well. I would have taken a van home, but it was after 6PM so I had to walk part of the way!

Thanks for the report, and thanks to the owner of Alpha Van Lines for sharing that info with our tipster! If anyone has more news about the vans, feel free to drop me a line.

Who's prepared for a loss leader?

Yesterday I observed that the new pilot van project is shaping up to be a bust because (a) nobody's marketing it, and (b) the vans aren't showing up. I don't know for sure why this is, but my guess is that it's the interaction of three facts: these van owners have never started a new route, they're used to keeping a low profile, and the structure is very decentralized.

The main factor, I think, is that this is a very new situation for everyone involved. The operators are mostly Jamaicans and Haitians who have their experience running the dollar vans in Flatbush and Jamaica. They started up during the transit strike in the 1990s, and have been going ever since, but I've noticed that they don't seem to have expanded. For example, It seems fairly obvious that if you go to Jamaica and you go to Flatbush, you might want to connect the two and maybe serve Crown Heights and Brownsville as well. As far as I can tell, that service doesn't exist, and the routes are very similar to the way they were when they were started.

The Chinatown vans seem newer, but they travel on express routes with no direct competition, and were serving a pent-up demand when they started. The Jamaicans, the Haitians and the Chinese have all lived under the shadow of the repressive commuter van laws, which meant that they had to be very subtle about marketing their services, so when they finally have the opportunity to do real advertising and PR, they shy away from it.

The whole structure is weird, too, at least with Community Transportation. The city contracts with Community, but Community only owns a small number of vans, maybe even just one. The rest of the vans are independent contractors who work for Community, and if they don't want to drive a route, the company management has very little power to force them.

I'm guessing that the individual van owners aren't prepared for the upfront costs of providing anchor service. They probably operate on very thin margins and don't have enough money to go for more than a day without bringing in something. They also probably don't feel much ownership of this project, and thus not much desire to see it succeed.

The decentralized ownership in Community Transportation thus leads to a situation of perverse incentives. The people who are most committed to seeing the Q74 pilot succeed - Bloomberg, Goldsmith, Yassky and Ricketts - lack the power to actually compel the vans to show up. The people who have the power to provide service - the actual van drivers - don't have much stake in the project. In this way it actually reminds me quite a bit of the congestion pricing campaign.

What's the answer? Very simply: figure out ahead of time whether the market is (to use Klein's terms in this PDF) "thick" (has enough passengers to support jitney service right off the bat) or "thin." If it's thin, you can't just run a few vans and expect people to flock to them. Someone has to be responsible for marketing and anchor service. And I think it's pretty clear by now that all five routes are thin markets.

Fortunately, in this pilot project it's not too late. The TLC's solicitation of interest in the project mentioned that they would allow up to three groups to participate in each route. I bet they wouldn't say no if a credible private group offered to take on the route with the most potential (I'd say the "hipster shuttle" between Alphabet City and Greenpoint) and commit to (a) spending at least $1000 on advertising, and (b) running vans, empty or not, at least every fifteen minutes, 7AM to 1AM, for the rest of the ninety-day pilot. From what I've seen, that's what it would take to actually get a route like this going.

Adrift without an anchor

The vans really are MIA.

I realized yesterday that I have not yet actually seen an official "Group Ride Vehicle" on the street. Now I've spent more than three hours looking for them at various times of day on six separate days over the past week and a half.

I thought I saw two last Wednesday, but they definitely didn't have the official stickers. It's been suggested to me that they were "poachers" - commuter vans that were not authorized for this particular program.

At first I thought it might have just been Community Transportation that was either uninterested or incompetent, but then a reporter for the Brooklyn Courier waited for two hours on Monday without seeing a single B23 van. Okay, I thought, those aren't very promising routes; maybe the new and improved B39 "Hipster Shuttle" will have more luck.

Yesterday I went to try the B39 and found this van in the stop at 14th and Irving. Needless to say, it wasn't going to take me to Brooklyn, and it wasn't there to cover the new van service. There were two guys standing nearby, probably Con Ed office workers on their coffee break, and they told me they'd been there for ten minutes and hadn't seen any "Group Ride Vehicles." I waited for fifteen minutes after that, but no vans showed up.

So if the vans weren't thee, where were they? I'm guessing on illegal runs where they knew there would be higher ridership. That would guarantee them a certain minimum income per hour.

Well, okay, but by doing this they're essentially guaranteeing that there will not be enough vans to provide frequent service, and as a result people will not wait for the vans, and these lines will fail, and they will lose an opportunity to expand their market to new customers. Why would they do such a thing? Why would they do absolutely no marketing? And why bother signing up for the pilot project if they weren't prepared for even a single day without customers?

I've been puzzling over this for the past week and a half. I've come up with some likely reasons, but I'm not sure that all of them apply, or that they're the whole story. My best guess is that it's the interaction of three facts: these van owners have never started a new route, they're used to keeping a low profile, and the structure is very decentralized.

For a lot of this explanation, I'm going to draw on the excellent analysis by Klein, Moore and Reja (PDF), particularly the notion of minimal scheduled service as an "anchor" that brings in customers. But really, the concept of an anchor should be familiar to anyone who's started or expanded a business. Basically, you can never be sure that customers will appear out of nowhere, no matter what you're selling, and you need to be prepared to go for six months without any income, and a year or two without any profit. So you keep your restaurant open for the full hours even if it's empty, until word gets around and it stays full. Judging by the number of restaurants that I've seen close within a month or two of opening, it's not uncommon for people to fail to plan for this possibility.