[HN Gopher] The Mystery of the Missing Bus Riders
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The Mystery of the Missing Bus Riders
Author : lil-scamp
Score : 21 points
Date : 2020-03-13 18:17 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.nytimes.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.nytimes.com)
| pge wrote:
| Interesting - I thought that mapping apps on smartphones would
| change the trend of decline at least a little. One of the
| challenges of buses is knowing which routes are which, which is
| often far more difficult to figure out than subway if you are not
| a regular user. But mapping apps say, "catch the XYZ bus at this
| stop and get off here" and real-time bus prediction apps that
| tell you when the bus coming solve those problems. I guess that
| hypothesis was wrong (though it has been true for me personally
| that I take the bus a lot more often).
| irrational wrote:
| Just too inconvenient. I was tired of driving my teenager 15
| minutes to her job, so I looked up the bus route. From our house
| it is basically straight down a single major road to her job. But
| to get there on the bus meant transferring two times and would
| take her an hour and a half. Insane.
| ArtDev wrote:
| Can't we just "check in" to a bus stop on an app, then have the
| bus create a route based on that?
|
| How about a button at each stop, with a live estimate when the
| bus will arrive?
|
| Currently, the bus system is like a newspaper. Inconvenient,
| messy and smells bad.
| alexhutcheson wrote:
| In New York, specifically, it's not much of a mystery - the
| incredibly close stop spacing and inefficient boarding procedures
| make it so the bus is barely faster than walking.
|
| Most buses stop almost every block, they board through a single
| door, and they use the two slowest payment methods available in
| almost any system (cash and magnetic strip cards).
|
| However, I don't expect this to change anytime soon, because many
| existing riders are very invested in keeping buses the way they
| are. To be clear, their concerns are valid - for a variety of
| reasons, it may be difficult for many people to walk an
| additional block to their local bus stop, vs. having a stop in
| front of their building. Many of the current riders are also
| long-time residents who are more likely to go to community board
| meetings, contact their city council members, and protest changes
| in other ways. If you're a policymaker, it's hard to weight the
| costs that would be imposed on this vocal set of people vs. the
| benefits that would accrue to a much less vocal group of people
| who would benefit from a faster and more consistent bus.
| burkaman wrote:
| I think it can be done if you pair changes like removing stops
| with other improvements that bus riders will appreciate. For
| example, in my neighborhood the city recently introduced a
| dedicated bus lane down a major road, and removed a couple
| stops at the same time to streamline the bus route. I've been
| following the results somewhat closely, and I haven't heard any
| complaints about missing stops, only complaints from car
| drivers.
|
| It's hard to complain about your stop moving a block at the
| committee meeting if they have hard data that everyone's
| commute is an average of 10 minutes faster.
| aaronbrethorst wrote:
| Fun fact for folks in Seattle, San Diego, Tampa, Washington,
| D.C., Spokane, etc: Professor Kari Watkins, mentioned in the
| article, is the co-creator of OneBusAway.
|
| OneBusAway, in case you aren't familiar with it, is an open
| source real time transit information system, and includes a full
| backend, plus iOS and Android client apps.
|
| OneBusAway had belonged to the University of Washington until
| recently, when it was spun out into a new 501(c)(3) non-profit,
| called the Open Transit Software Foundation:
| https://opentransitsoftwarefoundation.org
|
| (n.b. I'm the maintainer of OneBusAway for iOS, and a member of
| the OTSF board.)
| pgrote wrote:
| In our area it has been a cycle for the last 10 years. Lower
| funding means route contraction. Route contraction means lower
| ridership leading to lower funding. Lower funding leads to route
| contraction. Wash. Rinse Repeat.
|
| It is a metro area where most of the jobs are spread out among
| distinct suburb areas. The remaining routes do not travel among
| the suburbs with regularity; the focus is on suburbs to downtown
| and within the city proper.
| techsupporter wrote:
| We did the opposite in Seattle and have seen impressive
| results. In 2014, we voted--in the city, after a countywide
| measure failed--to tax ourselves to buy a whole lot more
| service hours from the county transit agency. Originally this
| was because slumping sales tax income was going to force the
| county to cut service but, instead, sales tax income came
| roaring back and the city was able to buy so much extra service
| from the county that we hit the limit for number of buses,
| places to put them, and drivers to drive them.
|
| Routes that had been 15-minute some of the day and dropping to
| 30-minute or an hour on weekends (or did not run at all) were
| upgraded. Major trunk routes, not just ones to downtown but
| crosstown routes and routes through underserved areas, got
| upgraded to sub-10-minute frequency during peak commute and
| many now run all day at no less often than every 15 minutes.
| Add in two new light rail stations opening in the densest part
| of the city and ridership has been up.
|
| But, of course, no good thing goes untouched. Last year,
| statewide voters approved an initiative that guts Seattle's
| ability to tax ourselves for transit ("$30" car tabs, which are
| nothing of the sort since even that initiative doesn't reduce
| vehicle registration costs to $30). If the initiative is upheld
| --still in doubt because the sponsor of the initiative is not
| known for writing initiatives that are legally sound, because
| if they stayed in effect he wouldn't get paid to keep running
| them--it's going to not only blow a hole in our light rail
| construction but also cut local bus service by 20-30%.
|
| In any rate, we've proven that if you invest in good service
| that runs a lot of the time, people will use it.
| cameldrv wrote:
| Busses are very very slow. Unless you're in a very dense urban
| area, the extra time to take the bus is unpalatable. The segment
| of the population that doesn't have a car but can afford Uber
| Pool will take it because it's about 3x faster and more reliable.
| clairity wrote:
| it's more nuanced than that. shared/pool rides being faster is
| a function of distance (which is correlated to delays).
|
| from my experience (in LA), they're often no faster than buses
| for short trips (up to ~4 miles). between 4-6, it's typically
| breakeven. for trips over ~6 miles, shared/pool rides are
| usually faster (and gets more so with longer distances).
|
| but note that the bulk of bus trips are under 10 miles, so it
| takes some thought to get the best bang for buck.
| sokoloff wrote:
| They're wildly faster than buses on routes where buses don't
| run.
| [deleted]
| freepor wrote:
| If they took the 2% least savory bus riders and kicked them off,
| even calling them an Uber Black, I think they'd triple their
| ridership.
| carapace wrote:
| I stopped riding the bus mainly due to social reasons: there
| was always somebody on every trip watching TV on their phone
| without headphones.
|
| And people stopped waiting for others to disembark before
| boarding. That's the weirdest thing: the bus stops, the doors
| open, and the people waiting to board just start piling in
| before the people coming off have left. Maybe that's only in
| SF.
|
| And then there's this:
|
| > In Gavin Newsom's book Citizenville he talked about how,
| after becoming SF mayor, he discovered that fare collection
| cost as much as the revenue generated from fares. He started
| the process of making the bus free but was told by so many
| advisors that the busses would become "dumpsters on wheels,"
| from a combination of homeless people using them for shelter
| and people not respecting services that are free, that the plan
| was scrapped.
|
| ~ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21808851
|
| It blows my mind, and it makes me resent paying the fares at
| all.
| ConsiderCrying wrote:
| A very thorough analysis. I'd assume that the newer generation,
| the ecologically-conscious one, will be taking public
| transportation more, for sure. And even though many of these
| people also fall into the category of those 'working from home',
| they're also the more outgoing ones. So there's not really a
| reason to say buses will keep suffering, it's likely to be a
| cyclical thing.
| Sam_Harris wrote:
| paywall
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