
The Mystery of the Missing Bus Riders - lil-scamp
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/03/13/upshot/mystery-of-missing-bus-riders.html
======
alexhutcheson
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.

~~~
mirimir
I vaguely remember reading about buses that board ~like subways, through
multiple doors, from ~stations. Maybe in Brazil?

~~~
frandroid
Toronto now has open boarding (i.e. you can enter at any door) through all its
streetcar lines and many bus lines. The new streetcars have totally separated
the drivers from the passengers, so payment is more of an honour system + fare
cops* proposition, compared to the old "show the pass/pay the driver"
paradigm. Boarding speed and fare evasion have both increased.

*: "Revenue Protection Officers", a totally non-Orwellian job title.

~~~
DanBC
A little known fact: bus ticket systems are designed to keep the drivers, not
the passengers, honest.

~~~
alex_c
Can you explain?

~~~
mirimir
Not op, but maybe drivers steal more than riders escape paying.

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aaronbrethorst
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, or OBA, 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. OBA 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](https://opentransitsoftwarefoundation.org)

(n.b. I'm the maintainer of OneBusAway for iOS, and a member of the OTSF
board.)

~~~
xtiansimon
I think transit apps is a really interesting problem. Transit App was a
favorite until a redesign they did a few years ago. And they have never
tackled the user interaction challenge of making transfers make any sense.

This space has very tangible information/ux problems.

~~~
aaronbrethorst
There's a ton that could be done to improve this problem. If you ever want to
pitch in, come join the mailing list or the Slack group.

[https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/onebusaway-
developer...](https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/onebusaway-developers)

[https://onebusaway.herokuapp.com](https://onebusaway.herokuapp.com)

------
irrational
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.

~~~
treis
I live in one of the cities in the article about a mile away from the city
center and this is 100% the problem. It's 3-4 times as slow as driving and
comparable to a brisk walk. And that's assuming that a bus isn't behind or I
just miss one and the next one isn't for 30 minutes. For example, there's a
popular restaurant/bar area 2.5 miles away from my house. Driving is 10
minutes, bus is 50 with a transfer, and walking is 50.

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fmajid
Nearly every comment on the NYT site makes the same point: buses are
unreliable, and filled with homeless, mentally unstable or drugged people who
make them a terrifying experience. What is the response of cities? Kneecap the
alternatives like Uber/Lyft, or spend taxpayers' money not on fixing those two
problems but on ridiculous ideas like paying people to take the bus. Almost as
if the people are here to serve the bus and not the other way around.

~~~
duxup
Are uber and lyft really bus alternatives?

~~~
spikels
For some people for some purposes at some times. A good transport
infrastructure should be multimodal (i.e. lots of competing options).
Thoughtful regulators can balance these interests to provide diverse options.
However - as pointed out above - regulation can also be used to stifle
competition to connected interests.

------
pgrote
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
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.

~~~
vkou
> 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).

This was utterly maddening. A bunch of... Politically-opinionated persons in
rural Washington voted for legislature that bans Seattle from taxing its
residents.

~~~
Mountain_Skies
According to 2018 population figures on Wikipedia, metro Seattle has just over
half of the state's population. Sounds like it wasn't just rural people voting
for that initiative.

~~~
vkou
Seattle voted against it, outside of Seattle voted for it by a larger margin.

Given that the measure does nothing absolutely nothing to the counties who
voted for it, I think I'm pretty justified in believing that their opinion on
Seattle's tax system shouldn't matter one whit. If they don't want to pay more
than $30 for car tabs, they should vote for it in their county, not across the
state.

------
cameldrv
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
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
They’re wildly faster than buses on routes where buses don’t run or where a
transfer is needed.

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freepor
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
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](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21808851)

It blows my mind, and it makes me resent paying the fares at all.

~~~
ChuckMcM
It is the stacking social ills problem. If SF had an effective set of homeless
policies/programs then they wouldn't misuse the bus.

While it is true that people respect "free" services less than paid ones, I
have yet to read any reports from places that have implemented free bus
service that suggested general damage/misuse due to a lack of respect. The bus
service in Logan UT for example is pretty awesome.

~~~
lotsofpulp
Any effective homeless/mentally ill/drug addiction policy would have to come
from the Feds.

~~~
tdy721
What is ineffective about addressing the issue locally? Why “the feds”?

~~~
austhrow743
Unless the solution being proposed is to brutalise the homeless to make them
move elsewhere, then it needs to be enacted at the level with control over
freedom of movement of people. If SF creates policies to help the homeless,
more will move there than already do so.

~~~
carapace
First, the feds should not limit the freedom of movement of a human person
_even_ if said human person does not own or rent a house. One of the messed up
things about being homeless (I was for several years) is people thinking of
you and treating you like some other kind of creature, less than fully human.
SF is doing it right now by making a special "homeless card" complete with
computer-aided bureaucracy to manage the permanent underclass more
efficiently. There's a tech company implementing it for them. <Snark omitted>
To me it's so weird that a city that really is kind and caring will mess up on
implementation.

Second, let's say that SF's $250B homeless policies _work_ , meaning people
get their lives together, get off the drugs or into a place where they can
cope w/ their mental|emotional|physical problems or whatever it is that messed
them up in the first place (and a lot of people _just need a home_ , as they
are perfectly normal and capable but e.g. some debt or a death in the family
or something threw them for a loop and now they're stuck living in their car
or the park or something and it's hard to get back on your feet w/o a support
network, etc.)

Let's say it works, and more homeless people do move here to take advantage of
it. _That is a good thing._ God forbid ol' San Francisco should become a
continent-wide renovation center for human lives, eh?

~~~
austhrow743
Not interested in your moral prescriptivism.

Whether the US federal government enforces its borders or not is entirely
separate from the question of of it does. It can and does. San Francisco can't
and doesn't. If it does a lot to help the homeless nation wide then the levels
get impacted nationwide. If SF does a lot to help the homeless in SF then
rates start the same or rise as move homeless move there from elsewhere in the
US.

That being a good thing in general is entirely out of the scope of getting the
homeless off of public transport.

~~~
carapace
> moral prescriptivism.

What "moral prescriptivism"? What does that mean in plain English please?

I'm not sure what you're saying.

In any event, there's no legal way to stop homeless people from riding the
bus. How would you even know? Brand each homeless person with a big "H" on
their foreheads? Require proof-of-residence each time people board a bus?

------
dec0dedab0de
I stopped taking the bus regularly, then permanently during this time period.

At first it was because my personal schedule, and my bus schedule changed just
enough to make it annoying to make it to work on time, and almost impossible
to avoid routes that spent most of their time in an extremely high crime area.
So most of the time I drove to the train.

Then I got a new job working from home, and I stopped taking the bus and the
train. I must say that I miss the bus quite a bit. It was the most books I've
ever read recreationally. I even taught myself python on the bus, which lead
to the new job.

I also used to take the bus when I thought I would be drinking, and uber/lyft
have completely replaced that.

------
ArtDev
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.

~~~
nkrisc
Chicago buses have an estimated arrival at most stops along the major routes.
Every single but stop also has a unique number on the sign that you can text
to a service and get estimates back by text. It makes using buses so much
easier and less of a hassle because there's less guessing involved. I had my
usual stop numbers memorized so I could text ahead of time and see when to
leave, or maybe decide to just walk the route instead of waiting if it was
going to be a while. They have that info on a website but texting was faster.

------
longtimegoogler
The bus system in Taiwan is amazing. You see all ages represented from school
kids to the elderly. They don't smell and have dedicated lanes in places.
There are so many of them that you rarely have to wait more than 10 minutes at
any stop. It's a great alternative to the subway for shorter rides.

It seems like cities like NY and San Francisco have the density to support
similar systems.

------
gmmeyer
Busses are great in NYC. I take them regularly. They are nice and clean and
fairly quick. They're not always as fast as Uber but they're much cheaper, so
you have a tradeoff. And, sometimes they are faster than Uber, since they have
their own lane in some places!

------
pge
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).

------
gpapilion
As a bus rider in San Francisco for the last 30 years, there a a few things
that made the experience way worse.

The design of munis modern fleet has reduced the seat and isle space. Standing
is hard because your always in the way, and the redesign to accommodate more
handicap seating has really reduced regular seating that could be
perpendicular to the length of the bus.

Reliability is the other issue. Main lines are very reliable, but meandering
cross town routes make a two bus commute undesirable.

------
benatkin
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moebius_(1996_film)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moebius_\(1996_film\))

------
ConsiderCrying
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.

------
asdff
The bus is pretty usable in LA. Most major roads have a bus line going up and
down them every 10 minutes. High capacity routes are given articulating
busses.

Despite the proportions of ridership being low, functionally it is pretty
high, and the entire transit network does hit capacity during rush hours.

------
ycombonator
Maybe because the serfs realized Nytimes writers take Uber and Gov officials
ride around in GMC Suburbans

------
lenepp
It's kind of incredible the article doesn't mention it, but the typical city
bus makes sounds at a decibel level that is harmful to the human body
(anything above 85 dB is harmful).

There's a scene in Mad Men that I always like to bring up when it comes to
things like this, where the Drapers are having a picnic in a bucolic park, and
then they just get up and walk away, leaving their trash behind. It looks
crazy and stupid to us now, because we all collectively woke up and realized
that damaging the world around us makes life worse.

People are using buses less partly for the same reason that they stopped
littering, and normal cars have gotten steadily quieter over the years:
they're waking up to how painfully awful city buses are.

The day will come when someone will make a show about our times, and it will
feature a city bus pulling up and drowning out a conversation, and all the
characters in the scene, who ignore it or just start shouting over it without
thinking, will look as ridiculous to future viewers, as the Drapers did to us
in that scene.

~~~
BubRoss
You think people don't ride buses because they are loud to the people around
them? A bus is still going to be there if they ride it or not.

~~~
nakkijono
Most of the loudness discomfort I've experienced while riding the bus comes
from waiting the bus on the roadside. Traffic in general is ridiculously noisy
for pedestrians. Especially at ~50mph the road noise starts to be unbearable.
Inside a car it's all so quiet. Reducing traffic speeds would help with this a
lot.

