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Buses, ridership, service levels, congestion, busways, and politicians....
Author: BOB2
Date: 06-06-2018 - 09:26
Bus rail interfaces pretty universally suck in both the Sou Cal and Bay Area.
Some of the "loss" of bus passengers in LA come from a shift from MTA's system bus riders to rail (about half of the loss is to better and faster rail, the other half of rail is "new" and often "discretionary" riders. The LA Times usually reports only the Metro bus number as a "loss" of riders. The LA Times likes this headline, and always omits the "total" bus numbers for LA County, because that would undermine that "headline". Since if you do include ridership on the dozens of local systems, and if you include those riding local bus, shuttle, and circulator systems, and add in those former "bus" riders, who now using much better rail service, transit ridership is a actually up. Also, because rail trips are much longer on average than bus trips, total transit "person miles" of travel is way up.
Congestion, cuts in service levels, and poor connections with rail are key reasons for some of that falling bus ridership. I theoretically have bus service over three different routes and two different systems (Pasadena ARTS Bus, and Metro bus), on six different runs, every hour.... Sounds like I have "ten minute" service, and thud, "good" bus access to the Gold Line Station, about one mile from my home. In reality, I have three busses coming "nose to tail" every 30 minutes, offering me a very "poor" quality wait time in an area that has one of the highest population and job densities per square mile in Sou Cal.
Longer wait times from congestion are a real problem, as worsening street congestion lowers the average bus speeds (increasing travel times and wait time between buses) actually causing a relative reduction in "frequency". Wait time is three times the "value" penalty of "travel time", and thus, longer wait times count as three times more than "in-vehicle" "travel" time on transit. So longer waits and longer travel times "increase" the "time cost" of riding the bus, and reduce "demand" (aka "ridership") for that service provider. That congestion also increases schedule "variability", with more random traffic "chaos" disrupting schedules, which causes more unreliable travel times, which also depresses bus ridership.
LAMTA has done a fantastically bad job in restructuring bus services to serve as rail feeders, but then the local systems like Pasadena ARTS has also been a failure in that regard, too. Both large and small bus agencies in Sou Cal seem to think that having more "lines on a map" means "more coverage", so they run lots of lines with poor quality of on-time performance, poor service levels, and inadequate frequencies, with long wait times, slow travel times, and low reliability of arrival times, resulting in much wasted capacity, stuck in traffic, serving no one very well.
Bus guy raises an interesting point with bus lanes and the like. Unfortunately, most of my field work measuring actual bus delay, using "time and motion" observations (yes we actually used stop watches), studying proposed exclusive bus lanes (taken from parking or mixed flow lanes on existing bus corridors) in the early 90's showed little benefit in travel time savings, relative to the costs.
Many heavily traveled bus corridors would also require "double lanes" so that buses could pass buses stopped to pick up and drop off passengers, to avoid "bus" jams. Boarding and alighting improvements at stops, longer stops, fewer stops, would save much more dwell time.
Politicians love seeing lots of bus lines (that they wouldn't actually ever be caught dead riding themselves?) on the "map", since they perceive that as serving of their "district". And, politicians in LA also seem to love some of these really poorly thought out exclusive bus lane proposals, despite the math.
Some of the "loss" of bus passengers in LA come from a shift from MTA's system bus riders to rail (about half of the loss is to better and faster rail, the other half of rail is "new" and often "discretionary" riders. The LA Times usually reports only the Metro bus number as a "loss" of riders. The LA Times likes this headline, and always omits the "total" bus numbers for LA County, because that would undermine that "headline". Since if you do include ridership on the dozens of local systems, and if you include those riding local bus, shuttle, and circulator systems, and add in those former "bus" riders, who now using much better rail service, transit ridership is a actually up. Also, because rail trips are much longer on average than bus trips, total transit "person miles" of travel is way up.
Congestion, cuts in service levels, and poor connections with rail are key reasons for some of that falling bus ridership. I theoretically have bus service over three different routes and two different systems (Pasadena ARTS Bus, and Metro bus), on six different runs, every hour.... Sounds like I have "ten minute" service, and thud, "good" bus access to the Gold Line Station, about one mile from my home. In reality, I have three busses coming "nose to tail" every 30 minutes, offering me a very "poor" quality wait time in an area that has one of the highest population and job densities per square mile in Sou Cal.
Longer wait times from congestion are a real problem, as worsening street congestion lowers the average bus speeds (increasing travel times and wait time between buses) actually causing a relative reduction in "frequency". Wait time is three times the "value" penalty of "travel time", and thus, longer wait times count as three times more than "in-vehicle" "travel" time on transit. So longer waits and longer travel times "increase" the "time cost" of riding the bus, and reduce "demand" (aka "ridership") for that service provider. That congestion also increases schedule "variability", with more random traffic "chaos" disrupting schedules, which causes more unreliable travel times, which also depresses bus ridership.
LAMTA has done a fantastically bad job in restructuring bus services to serve as rail feeders, but then the local systems like Pasadena ARTS has also been a failure in that regard, too. Both large and small bus agencies in Sou Cal seem to think that having more "lines on a map" means "more coverage", so they run lots of lines with poor quality of on-time performance, poor service levels, and inadequate frequencies, with long wait times, slow travel times, and low reliability of arrival times, resulting in much wasted capacity, stuck in traffic, serving no one very well.
Bus guy raises an interesting point with bus lanes and the like. Unfortunately, most of my field work measuring actual bus delay, using "time and motion" observations (yes we actually used stop watches), studying proposed exclusive bus lanes (taken from parking or mixed flow lanes on existing bus corridors) in the early 90's showed little benefit in travel time savings, relative to the costs.
Many heavily traveled bus corridors would also require "double lanes" so that buses could pass buses stopped to pick up and drop off passengers, to avoid "bus" jams. Boarding and alighting improvements at stops, longer stops, fewer stops, would save much more dwell time.
Politicians love seeing lots of bus lines (that they wouldn't actually ever be caught dead riding themselves?) on the "map", since they perceive that as serving of their "district". And, politicians in LA also seem to love some of these really poorly thought out exclusive bus lane proposals, despite the math.
