Annotated Table of Contents Better Buses, Better Cities By Steven Higashide Island Press, 2019 https://islandpress.org/books/better-buses-better-cities Introduction: We Need to Unleash the Bus Americans take 4.7 billion trips a year on publicly run buses. Yet so many of those trips are plodding, unpredictable, uncomfortable, and circuitous. Bus ridership has fallen by 17 percent between 2008 and 2018; in most places, worsening traffic has slowed buses down and bus routes have failed to change in response to shifting city demographics. But it doesn’t have to be this way. Bus ridership has grown in cities as different as Houston, Columbus, San Francisco, Seattle, and Indianapolis—all places where elected, agency, and civic leaders have taken forceful action to improve bus service. The introductory chapter makes a forceful case for learning from those successes. It explains the importance of effective bus service in efficiently moving people through cities, reducing urban inequality, and making progress in the fight against climate change. It makes the case that bus transit is a more essential technology than speculative modes like autonomous vehicles or Hyperloops, and introduces a core thesis of the book: Winning bus improvements requires a political alliance between civic advocates, elected officials, and “visionary bureaucrats” who can effectively communicate transit’s value and deliver projects quickly. Chapter 1: What Makes People Choose the Bus? One of the most corrosive ideas in the transportation world is the belief that most people who ride the bus have no alternative, and they’ll keep riding regardless of how bad the service gets. This kind of thinking often results in a two-tiered approach to transit planning: high-end, “sexy,” expensive transit built to the suburbs to “entice people out of their cars” and terrible bus service for everyone else. This chapter cites research that disproves this binary conception of transit riders, and highlights the fundamental attributes of transit service that is useful for most people:
Service that goes to important destinations; that operates frequently; that is fast and reliable; with a convenient walk to and from destinations; that feels comfortable and safe; and is affordable. It establishes the importance of considering non-work trips (which are the majority of trips) when making transit planning decisions. It ends with a case study of the advocacy group Transit Alliance, which has used media relations, data visualization, and other storytelling techniques to move buses up the political agenda in Miami-Dade County, Florida. Chapter 2: Make the Bus Frequent The difference between a bus that runs every half-hour and a bus that runs every 15 minutes is the difference between planning your life around a schedule and the freedom to show up and leave when you want. Frequent service is one of the most important improvements to bus service that transit agencies can make. This chapter introduces the “ridership-coverage tradeoff” in bus network design—the need to balance high-frequency, productive routes in high-demand areas with lowerfrequency routes that traverse lower-demand areas in order to provide lifeline service. In recent years, several transit agencies have redesigned their networks to emphasize frequent service. This chapter includes a detailed case study of Houston METRO’s 2015 bus network redesign, based on interviews with agency board members, staff, and Houston Mayor Annise Parker, that examines the political strategy and internal organizational structures that allowed the agency to pull it off. It also examines redesigns from Austin and Columbus, Ohio. Chapter 3: Make the Bus Fast and Reliable A swimming penguin and a sprinting rat are just a few of the creatures that can outpace buses in New York City. And yet slow speeds aren’t even the worst quality of these buses; it’s their unreliability, which can make it impossible for riders to plan their lives. This chapter outlines the tools that cities can use to speed up buses, like bus-only lanes and queue jumps, moving bus stops further apart, all-door boarding, and transit signal priority. It argues that U.S. cities often focus too much on infrastructure-intensive “bus rapid transit” improvements in a few corridors, when more modest improvements citywide would produce more benefit. Using Washington, D.C. as a case study, this chapter identifies neighborhood opposition and overly complex planning processes as a major obstacle to bus-priority projects, which can take multiple years to complete in the U.S.—and shows how neighborhood organizing (led by the advocacy group LivableStreets Alliance) and adoption of “tactical transit” approaches to transit planning changed this dynamic in
Boston. It examines how, over the course of a decade, Seattle’s Department of Transportation and King County Metro built the organizational capacity to deliver buspriority projects at a citywide scale. Chapter 4: Make the Bus Walkable and Dignified The pedestrian experience is the transit experience. A bus rider may appreciate frequent and fast service but still be dissatisfied with her trip if she has to trudge through mud on the way to the bus stop, cross the street with her head on a swivel, and wait in the rain with no shelter. Someone who uses a wheelchair may be unable to use the bus at all if there are no sidewalks leading to the stop. This chapter outlines recent studies showing that improving the walk to transit can have measurable impacts on ridership, and that bus shelters have an enormous effect on customer experience. Many U.S. cities, however, have large gaps in pedestrian infrastructure; for example, 40 percent of streets in Denver lack adequate sidewalks, and sidewalks are often the responsibility of local property owners rather than municipal government. Bus shelters, too, can get lost in bureaucracy; the chapter cities the example of Los Angeles, where each shelter requires approval by nine different entities. It concludes by exploring how Metro Transit (the transit agency in Minneapolis-St. Paul) took an equity focused approach to siting shelters. The agency consulted with and hired communitybased organizations to engage riders in order to inform new guidelines for where to site shelters, and created new metrics that aim to put more shelters in neighborhoods with racially concentrated poverty. Chapter 5: Make the Bus Fair and Welcoming Bus service shapes the geography of accessibility, and this means how we plan bus service is deeply intertwined with social equity. Transit agencies are required by federal law to analyze whether fare and service changes disproportionately harm low-income riders and riders of color, but this is often performed as a check-the-box exercise. Planning in ways that intentionally advance social equity requires a commitment from local leaders. This chapter summarizes key considerations when it comes to safety and affordability on buses. Safety is critical to making bus riders feel welcome and must be viewed holistically—not solely through the lens of law enforcement. Research shows that station design, lighting, and human presence all affect rider perception of safety. Police, on the other hand, can make some riders feel less safe.
When it comes to transit fares, agencies should eliminate transfer fees, adopt fare capping, make fare payment as easy as possible, and target discounts to groups most in need, like youth and low-income riders. Fare enforcement must be decriminalized and the root causes of fare evasion understood: In Washington, D.C., research has shown that bus fare evasion is highest in poor neighborhoods that lack stores to purchase transit passes. Woven throughout the chapter is the story of the Portland advocacy group OPAL, which has fought for a community-based definition of transit safety and helped high school students organize to win free youth transit passes. Chapter 6: Gerrymandering the Bus In Detroit and many other U.S. cities, regional transit connections are abysmal. Suburban towns are allowed to opt out of paying for bus service, and buses stop at the city line, forcing riders to transfer between city and suburban buses. The deliberate failure of regional leaders to properly plan or fund transit should be seen as an example of “mobility redlining.” Exclusionary regional and state politics distort the governance of transit and make improving it more difficult. This chapter describes how the voting structure of metropolitan planning organizations (MPOs) and the political pressures on state departments of transportation create an anti-urban bias that hurts transit budgets. Fixing the bus in these places often requires central cities to put transit at the top of their agendas, and strong coalitions that can overcome overt hostility to bus riders. The chapter describes the winning 2016 campaign in Indianapolis, where voters approved an income-tax increase that supported a 70 percent increase in bus service. Campaigners included business leaders and realtors who could put pressure on Republican legislators, and progressive faith-based groups that organized black voters. It also describes smaller-scale reform efforts at Dallas Area Regional Transit, where a bloc of transit agency board members representing Dallas have worked to emphasize frequent bus service. Chapter 7: Technology Won’t Kill the Bus—Unless We Let It Across the country, free-market ideologues are claiming that technologies such as autonomous vehicles, microtransit, and Uber and Lyft will inevitably replace trains and buses. The evidence suggests that will happen only if cities buy the snake oil. This chapter begins by describing how anti-tax campaigners used technological claims to help defeat a proposal to expand public transit in Nashville. It outlines the reality that
fully autonomous vehicles are a long way from coming to market, according to the people working to develop them. It also summarizes the state of “microtransit” (on-demand transit service in small vehicles), which have shown only incremental improvements over existing paratransit and dial-a-ride service, and are unable to scale to provide service that is more efficient than traditional buses and trains. It describes how bus performance data, generated by the same systems that provide real-time information to riders, can be harnessed to identify where buses get slowed down in traffic, allowing planners to pinpoint bus priority improvements. It concludes with a skeptical look at the prospect of automating buses, pointing out that bus operators provide critical community and customer service functions; transit agencies need to judge driverless vehicle experiments with consistent metrics.
Chapter 8: Building a Transit Nation The United States’ spatial history has been abetted by federal transportation policy. The same checkbook that paid for the Interstate Highway System, which bisected city neighborhoods and enabled the outward sprawl of suburbs, also funded transit systems from San Francisco to Atlanta, which mitigate some of that damage. But it’s hardly a balanced checkbook; fights to improve urban transit ultimately cannot be divorced from efforts to right our imbalanced federal transportation policy. This chapter provides an overview of the more than $50 billion in annual federal surface transportation funding, more than three-quarters of which goes to build and maintain highways. Most federal “highway” funding is flexible and in theory can be spent on transit and other multimodal projects. The reason it doesn’t is because the lion’s share of federal transit funding is controlled by state governments whose priorities are biased towards rural and suburban projects. Another distortion is that federal transit funds can be spent on capital projects (like buying new buses), not operating expenses (like paying bus operators). Neither major political party has shown much interest in changing the “highways-asusual” status quo. The chapter concludes by recalling how national, philanthropically funded coalition worked to bend the arc of transportation policy in prior decades. Such a coalition is missing today, but the ambition of the “Green New Deal” might provide needed energy for a more sustainable, transit-focused federal policy.
Conclusion: Winning Mindsets and Growing Movements When you compare the fortunes of bus systems in different places in the United States and around the world, you begin to realize that the extended decline of bus ridership in some cities is not an inevitable consequence of changes in demographics, technologies, or consumer preferences. It’s a consequence of stasis. This stasis can be broken by applying the lessons from winning transit campaigns and successful transit agency change efforts described that can be applied in any region. It describes the alliance of actors that are central to most bus improvement efforts: Civic advocates, elected officials, and champions inside transit agencies. These actors find ways both formal and informal to coordinate. Success requires both a technical understanding of transit networks and a political understanding of power, including the ability to “power map”—to identify who has the power to make transit decisions and how to influence them. It also requires a campaign mindset (among both advocates and public-sector champions) that includes setting goals, building power to achieve those goals, and raising expectations in order to win larger goals in the future. Public agencies can help themselves by gathering public input that is representative of transit riders, and done in ways that make it easier to organize riders in support. Once elected officials agree that transit is a priority, it becomes increasingly important to develop capacity within transportation agencies so that bus projects can be delivered more quickly. Finally, building strong civic advocacy movements is likely to require support from philanthropy.