Going in circles on the Silver Line. Or, how the T could save $1m tomorrow.

Posted on April 26, 2015 by Ari

In my last post on the Silver Line, I wrote about how the poorly-timed light at D Street causes unnecessary delays. If you’re lucky enough to get across D Street, you then go through the power change at Silver Line Way and then begin the loop back to get on to the Ted Williams Tunnel to the airport (and soon, Chelsea). The end of Silver Line way sits right above the tunnel portal. But to get to that point requires a roundabout route, often in heavy traffic, which takes a full mile to return you right to where you started.

If only there were a better way.

There is.

After leaving the busway, the Silver Line outbound route goes down the Haul Road, merges in to a ramp from the Convention Center and D Street, and runs fully half the distance back to South Station—in mixed traffic—before finally turning on to the Turnpike towards the tunnel and the airport. What’s the point of building a bus rapid transit corridor if you then spend the same distance sitting in traffic to get back to where you started?

What’s worse, the “Bus Rapid Transit” endures two traffic lights in mixed traffic, and this traffic is often heavy, especially when when convention traffic from the nearby convention center spills on to the highway at already heavily traveled times of day. The route is more than a mile long, and in perfect conditions takes 3 or 4 minutes, but in heavy traffic can easily take 10 or 15; this traffic especially renders the “rapid” part of BRT useless.

Before entering this morass, there is access to the tunnel via a ramp next to a state police facility. If the buses could use this ramp, they would save three quarters of a mile of travel, two traffic lights, a yield at a merge and, conservatively, two minutes per trip. Combined with the potential savings at the D Street light, these two improvements could save 10% of the total round trip time between South Station and Logan—or Chelsea.

Now, perhaps there’s a technical reason the Silver Line buses couldn’t use the ramp. Maybe it was too steep for the buses. But in 2006, when part of the tunnel collapsed, the T was granted permission to use the “emergency” ramp to access the tunnel beyond the panel collapse. A Globe editorial from that summer praised the T for its quick thinking in utilizing this routing. Yet when the tunnel panels were fixed, the buses were rerouted to the roundabout course which brings them halfway back to South Station before they enter the tunnel.

MassDOT actually has these buttons.
Time to put them in to action.

There’s obviously no physical reason this ramp can’t be used, since it was used in the past. And any argument that the merge wouldn’t be long enough to be safe is unconvincing, especially since it would only be used by a bus every four or five minutes, even when the Gateway project to Chelsea is completed. The in-tunnel merge has 1/10 of a mile before the lane ends, far longer than similar merges on to the Turnpike in the Prudential Tunnel. Suggestions that this would be unsafe are protective hokum; with appropriate merge signage (perhaps even a “bus merging when flashing” light) there should be no reason why this can’t take place safely. The Transportation Department, MBTA and State Police need to convene to figure out the best way to use this facility, but the answer certainly should not be the usual “no,” or “but we’ve always done it that way.”

There’s an environmental justice piece, too, especially with the extension to Chelsea, a disadvantaged city a stone’s throw from Downtown Boston, but a slow ride away by transit. Right now, Chelsea residents are at the whim of the 111 bus—and the traffic on the Tobin Bridge. It seems foolish to build a brand new bus line to Chelsea but not to address one of the major bottlenecks on the rest of the route. If the Governor is serious about implementing reforms to improve service and save money, he should look beyond specious claims of sick time abuse and at where interagency cooperation could save time for passengers and time and money for transit operations.

Dr. Evil. Transit economist.

It costs the T $162 to operate a bus for an hour. The SL1 Airport service operates 128 trips per day, and we can reasonably expect that the Chelsea service will operate with a similar frequency. Fixing the D Street light and using this ramp could conservatively save 4 minutes for each of these 256 trips, which would equate to an operational savings of $1,000,000 per year.

Is this a drop in the bucket as far as the T’s overall revenue is concerned? Sure, it’s less than one tenth of one percent. However, it’s a million dollars that could be saved, pretty much overnight, with basically no overhead investment. We spent more than half a billion dollars building the Silver Line tunnel and stations, and acquiring the buses. And the SL1 buses actually turn a (slight) operational profit! It’s high time we removed some of the stumbling blocks it’s saddled with and let it operate with a modicum of efficiency.

#FixTheSilverLine

Where could the MBTA implement unscheduled short turns?

Posted on April 25, 2015 by Ari

I recently wrote about short turning a bus on the EZRide Shuttle route. People will ask: “why doesn’t the T do this, my bus is always bunched?!” The answer is a) it’s not easy to do, b) they are way too understaffed to do so, and c) their schedules are so much more complex that there are many more moving parts. At rush hours, the T has four dispatchers watching 100 buses; my office has one or two watching nine (although it’s not our only job, sometimes it demands full attention). The need for short turns arises at times when there is heavy traffic and ridership. At those times, it’s all the dispatchers can do at that time to keep some semblance of order among the 250 buses they’re watching, not turn their attention to one particular part of one single route.

And also: there are only so many places and times you can successfully execute a short turn. Our route has a lot of twists and turns which make it easy for a bus to take a right instead of a left and go from outbound to inbound, but often a short turn may require a bus to go around a narrow block in traffic, and you certainly don’t want a bus getting stuck on a narrow corner where it doesn’t belong. There are more issues with the T: we know our drivers are on one route and that their shifts end around the same time. I’ve actually had times where a driver couldn’t cover an extra run because he or she had to be at another job; this is more frequent at the T where shifts start and end in a very complex scheme and at all hours of the day; a driver might finish one trip and set out on a different route, so a short turn would find them far away from where they needed to be. And finally, the T has thousands of drivers, so there is no way for a dispatcher to know whether a driver is familiar with the route and where to make a turn, or whether it’s his first day in the district and he or she is following the route for the first time.

Trains? Buses are much easier than trains. Trains require operators to change ends, change tracks—often at unpowered switches—and obtain a ton of clearance to do so, especially on the older sections of the MBTA system which don’t have the kind of new bi-directional signaling systems that, say, the DC Metro has. If the T had pocket tracks in the right places, it might be easier. But without them short turns would only save time in a few circumstances and a few areas.

And on a train you’re dealing with even more passengers. I’ve been on trains expressed from Newton Highlands to Riverside. Even with half a dozen announcements, a couple of stray passengers won’t pay attention (buried in their phone, perhaps) and then wonder why the train is speeding past Waban. I’ve heard of crews at Brigham Circle, after switch the train from one side to the other, walking through the car rousing passengers who are on another planet (or just staring at their phones). If you can’t run a short turn expediently, it’s not worth doing at all.

That being said, I have a couple of thoughts on routes which could benefit from more active management and, perhaps, some short turns. Both are frequent “key” routes, both experience frequent bunching, and both carry their heaviest loads in the middle of the routes, so that the passengers from a mostly empty bus in the trailing half of a pair could be transferred forwards without overcrowding the first bus. The are (drumroll please): the 1 and the 39. Let’s take a quick look:

Actual NextBus screen shot for the 1 bus.

1. The 1 Bus is one of the busiest routes in the system (combined with the CT1, the Mass Ave corridor has more riders than any other such route except the Washington Street Silver Line) and frequent headways of 8 minutes at rush hours. There is no peak direction for the route; it can be full at pretty much any time in any direction. And it is hopelessly impacted by crowding and traffic, such that bunching is almost normal, and on a bad day, three or even four 1 buses can come by in a row, with a subsequent service gap. (It could benefit, you know, from bus lanes and off-board fare collection, but those are beyond the purview of this post.)

But the 1 has a couple of features that make it a candidate for short turning. First of all, its highest ridership is in the middle of the route. The route runs from Dudley to Harvard, but the busiest section is between Boston Medical Center and Central Square. Going outbound (towards Harvard) many passengers get off at Central to transfer to the Red Line or other buses, inbound (towards Dudley), many passengers get off at Huntington Avenue and the Orange Line to make transfers. So here’s a relatively frequent scenario:

The black lines show the actual headways. The red
shows what could be accomplished by short-turning
one of the bunched buses at Central Square.

An outbound 1 bus gets slightly off headway, encounters heavy crowds, is filled up, and runs a few minutes behind schedule. Meanwhile, the bus behind encounters fewer passengers, spends less dwell time at stops, and catches the first bus. The first bus may have 60 passengers on board and the second 30. The buses remain full past MIT and pull in together to the stop at Central Square, where two thirds of the passengers disembark (and few get on: it’s faster to the the Red Line to Harvard or beyond). So now, the first bus has 20 passengers on board, and the second 10. In the mean time, since the first bus is behind schedule, there is now a 20 minute service gap: the first bus should have looped through Harvard by now, and if the buses proceed as a pair, the first bus will pull right through the loop and head out late and with a heavy load, and even if the second bus has a few minutes of recovery, it will quickly catch the first, and the process will repeat inbound.

You won’t be shocked by this, but I went to Nextbus, pulled up the map for the 1 bus, and at 10:15 p.m. on a weeknight, found this exact scenario. See the map to the right. The first bus has gotten bogged down with heavy loads, so there is a 22 minute gap in front of it, while there is another bus right behind. The bus in front should be going inbound at Central right now, but instead both will continue to Harvard, loop around, and start the route bunched: the second bus will lay over for about three minutes and, most likely, after passing several vacant stops, be right on the tail of the first.

This is what the 1 bus route should look like
without any bunching. This is somewhat rare.

And the loop is a particular problem since there is not time or space there for the route to have recovery time, so if a pair of buses enters bunched, they are likely to leave bunched as well. Instead of having proper recovery time at each end, only Dudley serves to even out headways. So bunches are much more likely on the inbound (Harvard-Dudley) having occurred going outbound. And given the traffic, passenger volume and number of lights on this route, bus bunching is likely.

But what if, magically, that bus could be going inbound? Well, it could, and it wouldn’t be magic. It would be a short turn. If a dispatcher were paying special attention to the route, the operators could consolidate all passengers on to one bus in Central Square. At this point, the empty bus could loop around and resume the trip inbound from Central (even waiting in the layover area for a minute or two if need be to maintain even headways), where the bulk of the passengers will be waiting. The bus with passengers will continue to Harvard. On the subsequent trip, every passenger’s experience will be improved. Anyone waiting for a bus inbound from Central will have service 10 minutes earlier—on a proper headway. And passengers between Harvard and Central will have a bus show up when it would have, except instead of quickly filling up as it reaches stops which have had no service for 22 minutes and subsequently slowing down, it will operate as scheduled.

Note that one bus is catching the other. This is the start
of the bunch. 10:09 PM. It’s not too late to short turn!

I watched the route for a while longer, and as predicted, the pair of buses looped through Harvard together, and then traversed the entire inbound route back-to-back, meaning that everyone there waited ten extra minutes, only to have two buses show up together. Every inbound passenger experienced the wonders of a 22 minute headway when the route is scheduled for 12. However, with one dispatch call and a transfer of a few passengers in Central, the headways could have been normalized, and the route could have been kept in order. An issue which was apparent at 10:09 (see the screen capture to the right) could have been fixed at 10:15; instead it lasted until nearly 11:00 (see below):

Now, is this easy? Hell, no, it’s not easy. First of all, the drivers have to know that it might happen. Then, they have to be able to clearly communicate it to the passengers. (If you focused on a couple of routes, you could have Frank Ogelsby, Jr. record some nice announcements. Imagine that deep baritone saying “In order to maintain even schedules, this bus is being taken out of service. Please exit here and board the next bus directly behind.” Oh, and of course, “we apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused.”) You’d have to be damn sure that there was another bus behind and its driver was instructed to pick up the waiting passengers. And a thank you Tweet (@MBTA: Thank you to the passengers of the 1 bus who switched buses so we could fill a service gap at Central) would be in order.

Would it be perfect? No. Sometimes you’d have an issue with a passenger who didn’t want to get kicked off the bus. If a bus had a disabled passenger on board, the driver could veto the short turn based on that fact, since the time and effort to raise and lower the lifts would eat in to the time saved by the turn. But most of the time, if executed well, the short turn would save time, money, and create better service for most every rider.

39. The 39 bus is similar. It is heavily used, and it bunches frequently. It also has its heaviest loads in the middle: the stretch between Back Bay Station and Copley is mostly a deadhead move, the bus only really fills up in the Longwood area, and the bus is mostly of empty of passengers along South Street from the Monument in JP to Forest Hills. So at either of these locations, a similar procedure could take place. If two buses were bunched going inbound, the first could drop off in Copley, take a right on to Clarendon, a right on to Saint James and begin the outbound route, rather than looping in to Back Bay and then out again to backtrack to Berkeley before beginning the route. Back Bay is necessary as a layover location when buses are on schedule, but there’s no reason to have a bus go through a convoluted loop when it could be short turned and fill a gap in service.

At the other end, two bunched buses could consolidate passengers on Centre Street in Jamaica Plain, at which point one could loop around the Monument (already the layover point for the 41) and begin a trip inbound, while the other would serve the rest of the route to Forest Hills.

So those are my two bus routes that could be short-turned and unbunched. Combined, they carry 28,000 passengers per day: the busiest routes in the system. I would propose a pilot study where the T figured out when these routes are most frequently bunched (they have these data) and then assign a dispatcher to watch only these two routes during these times and, when necessary, short-turn a bus to maintain headways, along with some driver training to ensure proper customer service and expedient routing. It could also record messages, put up some signs, and make sure to have some positive outreach to passengers. This could be done for a period of time, and the results analyzed to see the effect of actively dispatching such routes. If it were deemed a success—if there were fewer bunches and service gaps (data could show this)—the program could be expanded, and perhaps automated: any time buses were detected as being bunched, a dispatcher could be notified, and then make a decision on whether it would be appropriate to short-turn the bus, or not.

The passengers—well, we’d certainly appreciate it, too.

The art and science of a short turn

Posted on April 25, 2015 by Ari

This post has been a long time coming. A while back I asked people on Twitter if they would be interested in a post about bus bunching and short turns (answer: a resounding yes) and have been stewing on it for a while. I’ve gotten some feedback that this post is too long, so if you don’t care (and it’s quite possible that you don’t) feel free to skip and read something else. Thanks to my coworkers for looking this over and giving feedback, and the bus drivers on the service who executed the short turn.

A bit of background: in my day job, I work for the Charles River TMA. One of the programs we manage is the EZRide shuttle: a small, last-mile commuter shuttle between North Station (major transit node) and Kendall Square (major employment center). The service has been around since 2002, is mostly funded by local employers and property managers, and sort of serves as another branch of the CT buses, connecting North Station, Lechmere and Kendall. We carry about 2500 passengers per day, and are near or at capacity at peak hours (7:45 to 9:00 AM, 4:15 to 5:30 PM). Most of our ridership is comprised of Commuter Rail riders who work in Kendall. The shuttle is free to corporate members and open for a cash fare to the public.

For the purpose of this blog, I am italicizing certain transity jargon and defining them at the end of the article. Our organization contracts the route to a private operator, and we both have dispatch duties. As it breaks down, they mainly deal with driver issues (broken down buses, drivers needing time off the bus, work schedules) and we keep an eye on passenger issues (loading, bunching, headways).

Our route sometimes allows us short turns, especially when there’s bad traffic, but that successfully implementing a short turn takes a lot of know-how, and a bit of magic and luck. Some short turns are relatively easy: two buses are running back-to-back, the first bus as 33 passengers and the second bus has two. (This sort of bus bunching—here’s the best resource on that from WBEZ—is all too frequent on busy routes, even when buses run at a scheduled, even headway.) If we can empty the second bus on to the first, we can turn the first bus back to fill a gap elsewhere on the route. This only works if there is a need precipitated by traffic, but that is often the case.

Since many people have asked (okay, maybe a couple people) for a description of a short turn, here is one, with way too many words, and a bunch of maps, too. A follow-on post talks about locations where the MBTA could implement short-turns.

*****

The Route

A short turn doesn’t just happen. It comes about from a unique set of circumstances, deep knowledge of the route, traffic, passenger loads, the weather, an innate, built-up sense of what the route looks like and how it will be affected by traffic and loading in to the future. Sure, there’s some luck thrown in, but most of that is self-made: a well-executed short turn should be more science than art—it just feels like luck when it works. (And it doesn’t always work; rule number one, before you even consider a short turn, is to try to at least not make things worse.) I’ll describe a recent short turn success, and the elements that go in to it. The whole of the operation, from diagnosis of the problem to the successful implementation of the turn, took about 12 minutes—likely shorter than it will take you to read this blog post.

We have separate morning and evening routes, due to passenger loading (our reverse-peak carries MIT students) and one-way streets. The route map can be found here, and our route in Nextbus’s interface here. The route requires several routes and jogs, mostly due to one-way streets, and it’s prone to traffic, especially during construction. Our evening route can be roughly divided in to four segments, each of which takes about 15 minutes, with 16 minutes of recovery time as follows:

Inbound:
Cambridgeport to Kendall Square (moderate commuter ridership, minimal traffic delays)
Kendall Square to North Station (heavy commuter ridership, moderate to heavy traffic delays)
[12 minutes of schedule recovery time (necessary due to traffic)]
Outbound:
North Station to Kendall Square (minimal commuter ridership, moderate traffic delays, although heavy recently)
Kendall Square to Cambridge (moderate student ridership, minimal to moderate traffic delays)
[4 minutes of schedule recovery time at Cambridgeport]

*****

The Situation

On Thursday, April 9, we had some operational issues. Due to traffic signal timing problems, O’Brien highway backed up, and we experienced a 10 to 12 minute delay on our outbound route (this section carries very few passengers at this time of day, but it is necessary to get our buses from the terminal back to the start of the route). On a nice day, we might have some buses operating empty outbound through Kendall Square, but with cold rain on April 9, we had no buses which were empty and could be rerouted, so we couldn’t deadhead a bus to the terminal, or an intermediate part of the route.

The scenario was to the point where we had a 15 minute service gap. This is not good for a few reasons. First, this is double our scheduled headway is 8 minutes, so this was nearly double our schedule, even if it means that waits will only be a few minutes longer. But the issues would cascade: the first bus to pick up during this gap would fill up well before the end of the route, meaning the headway for later stops would be longer and would wind up being based on the headway of the second bus, so it would wind up being more in the 18 to 20 minute range.

And then: the bus that was supposed to run called in with a mechanical failure. All of the sudden, 7 of our 9 buses were on the outbound route, and we were facing a 20-24 minute service gap. In other words, we were screwed. Here’s the setup:

The arrows show the inbound route, and the red dots show the major passenger generators at this time of day (peak rush hour); as you can see that there are no inbound buses between the west end of the route and the eastern terminal (just off of the map) except for bus 9901, which is most of the way there. (Ignore the times “late”; we’d already had some delays to this point.) Bus 711, shown in gray, is broken down. And the driver of bus 708, at this point, got off his bus to try to diagnose the issue of 708, and due to radio traffic we were unable to tell him to get on his [goddamn] bus and drive the [goddamn] route.

So now we had a problem. 706 caught 708. We needed a bus to run the route, but expected it to fill up before it could board all the waiting passengers, especially at the three red dots. It also coincided with the peak loading time for our route, when even under normal operations buses can load to capacity and leave riders behind. We could send a double draft to run the route, but then the second bus would wind up empty behind the first bus as it boarded passengers (most of our route is too narrow to safely pass) meaning that the passengers later in the route would have a longer wait. While I was yelling at no one in particular about 708 (in our office, using curse words) my boss (who has been watching this route for more than a decade: that’s institutional memory) mentioned that we could deadhead 706. What a splendid idea—as my ire grew with 708 for attempting to fix a broken down bus and not just covering the route I hadn’t noticed this possibility. (To be fair, the driver of bus 708 probably didn’t realize the situation on the rest of the route.)

*****

The Operation, or, the Rules of the Short Turn

Rule #1 of the short turn: Don’t Make Things Worse

The first question to ask in a short turn is: will this actually make much of a difference, and might it make things worse? If you are going to move heaven and earth to get a bus somewhere 90 seconds earlier, it’s much easier to just have buses run the regular route. Unless you can solve a loading issue and a headway issue together, it’s rarely worth doing. (A service gap in a non-peak direction affects many fewer passengers than in the peak.) The second question is: will this short turn now cause more problems later? If the answer is yes (and quite often it is), you have to weigh how severe of a problem it will be, and when it will occur. Can you solve an inbound issue at 5:15 that creates an outbound service gap at 6:15? Fine, better to improve the ride for 50 riders and inconvenience a handful at a much less busy time. If you can get two people off of the second of a bunched pair and on to the first, turn the empty bus and cut the wait time for two dozen, totally worth it. But if you’re trading off a delay for three people now versus a delay for five people later, it’s not worth doing.

In this scenario, we were not going to inconvenience anyone, really, and improve service for a lot of people (and get buses better spaced in to the future). It was a no-brainer.

Rule #2 of the short turn: Know Your Route.

If you’re running a short turn, you need to know your route. You need to know where a driver can go around a block easily, or where they might get stuck in traffic (or worse: a tight corner not suited to a 40 foot bus, a frequent problem in Boston). Before you can do this kind of active dispatching, you have to know where you can safely and expediently turn a vehicle. It helps to have twenty-plus years of dispatching in the other two members of my office (I’m the new guy): they’ve been through everything. Construction detours, full road closures (the Craigie Bridge reconstruction), never-ending blizzards (okay, that was this year) and the like.

Due to the one-way nature of Kendall Square, the route does have a bizarre loop built in, which takes a couple of minutes to traverse but accesses a major stop. So one idea would be to deadhead bus 706 and have him run out of service (and preferably off-route down Main Street to Ames: nothing makes passengers angrier than seeing an empty bus drive by without stopping) and pick up at the last red dot on Broadway. If he got there expediently, he’d be able to at least pick up at that stop—and ensuing stops—and mitigate the service gap there, and take on the passenger load the first bus, 708, would not be able to pick up.

Rule #3 of the short turn: Be Invisible.

To passengers, at least. The best short turn is one where the deadheaded bus doesn’t pass any passengers waiting, where no passengers are asked to leave the vehicle, and where, except for the driver and the dispatcher, no one knows. This could also be phrased as “don’t piss off the riders” which is always a good policy: sending an empty bus past waiting passengers is a recipe for angry calls and emails. Generally, we operate under a policy of transparency with riders (we will suggest alternate transit means during especially bad traffic, for instance—it’s beyond our control but our goal is for our passengers to get where they’re going, not to boost our ridership), but we don’t feel the need to describe every piece of our operation. In the case of a short turn, we might send out a Tweet such as “Service gap inbound due to residual traffic delays and disabled bus. We will attempt to redirect service to fill this gap” usually suffice.

Rule #4: Know your Drivers

Now at this point it is worth pointing out that that you really need to know your drivers when juggling buses in this manner. Some of the drivers on our route could dispatch themselves: they have an innate idea of where every other driver is on the route, what their scheduled times are, and what their likely traffic and passenger load impacts will be. (Another recent night, two long-serving drivers basically rerouted each other and other buses, on the fly, to avoid traffic and fill route gaps far better than I could have even while staring a map of the bus GPS locations.) Other drivers are newer to the route and may not know the vagaries of Cambridge’s off-route street grid, and need a lot more guidance across the route. In this case, the driver of 708 is somewhat newer and knows the route fine, but harder to manage: we were happy that his only instructions were to run the regular route. The driver of 706 is one of our best and has been driving the route for a while; a simple instruction like “deadhead to Main Street, left on Ames, first pickup on Broadway” would be all that he’d need.

So that’s what we did. Bus 708 would run the regular route making all stops, and would likely be full at Kendall Square. (The buses we currently run are 35 foot buses with 32 seats and a stated crush load of 45, although more passengers have been known to cram aboard.) There was no point holding 706—we had another outbound bus behind him—so we sent him to do the pick-ups beyond Kendall, but to take a direct route there, leapfrogging ahead of 708 and shortening the wait at the subsequent stops (and we expected him to fill up at those stops). 708 would then run by those stops a couple minutes after 706, so would have fewer passengers to pick up.

Rule #5: Pay Attention.

But the operation isn’t over until the buses are back on the regular route, drivers know future departure times, and they have recovery built in to get back to normal. So far, everything was going according to plan, but you have to pay attention to a short turn until it’s on its way to a logical conclusion. 706 had made good time on Brookline Street and had chosen an appropriate, off-route path for his deadhead; again, had this bus passed a group of long-waiting passengers, they’d go from irked to irate. 708 was serving some moderate-ridership stops, and headed towards Technology Square, where he’d take on many more passengers.

#Protip: if two buses are coming together, take the second one. It’s unlikely to be any slower (it might actually pass the first bus) and you’re more likely to get a seat.

Anyway, the plan was working, rather swimmingly. And then: nirvana. See how, above, bus 707 is catching up to bus 709? While this is not a busy part of our route, but on a rainy day, there are some passengers who will take a circuitous bus ride to Kendall rather than make the walk. So while bus 709 was stopping for a rider here an there, 707 wasn’t, and he radioed in that he was behind bus 707, and was empty. Bingo. We were worried 708, upon reaching Kendall Square, would be too full for the boardings there. But 707 could conceivably balance the load between three buses as long he was slotted in before 708 reached Kendall. Each of the main passenger nodes would get its own bus, balancing the load well. If it worked. It was worth a try.

But remember: you have to know your drivers. 712 is a driver who had recently bid on to our route, and had had some issues with the route (not entirely his fault: our route flips based on the time of day—since we serve students and commuters in separate directions—and can be confusing for both riders and drivers to learn, although once familiar, it works quite well) and certainly didn’t know his way around Cambridge. In other words, if he’d been in 706 a few minutes earlier, it’s doubtful we would have sent him on the deadhead in the same way we did 706.

Somehow this worked.

But we could coach him through it. 706 and 708 had their charges, and the radio channel was clear. So the call went out. “707: take a left on Broadway, then proceed straight down Main to Third Street. Make a right turn there, and make your first pick-up at Kendall Square.” We’d have to watch him like a hawk and keep in radio contact: if he missed the turn there, at best we’d have to coach him on to Memorial Drive, and on to the outbound route (a portion of our route uses Memorial Drive, and our drivers have never missed the turn and gotten stuck under the Mass Ave overpass). At worst, we’d lose him across the Longfellow for half an hour. (Don’t laugh. This has happened.) The short turn can be dangerous.

And it worked! 707 made the short turn in to Kendall and instead of following 709 on the outbound switched to the inbound. Astonishingly, we had evenly spaced the buses with about 3 minutes between each, which is particularly impressive since that meant that 706 was now 6 minutes—nearly a full headway‚ ahead of 708, who had left the route terminal behind him! And both 706 and 708 were nearly full, so bringing in 707 kept bus 708 from reaching Kendall, filling up there, and then reaching the next stops later, with more passengers to pick up, filling further, and perhaps leaving passengers behind. Much of the credit goes to the drivers, who let us know their situations (when they were empty and bunched) and were willing to jigger their routes in order to balance the load. The fact that such reroutings are not infrequent means that they’re used to being asked to do so, and that they execute the maneuver well.

Once the buses had all made their way on route, we actually had well-spaced buses. In fact, 706 and 708 were a full headway apart at this point: had we not deadheaded and short-turned they’d both be where 708 was, and we’d have cascading issues as they both ran into and then out of the terminal late. (Often, a headway issue at 6 PM can be caused by a traffic jam at 3:30.) But the pieces of the puzzle had fallen in to place, and the short turn had been executed, successfully.

This is pretty much what our map should look like in normal service. (Well, except that the buses were way off their originally scheduled runs, but if I look at the map and every bus is 20 minutes late, that means that we have even headways and just had some issue earlier on.)

As my boss said, it was ballet. It was all over in about 12 minutes. But the best part? We had the buses in numerical order: 706, 707 and 708. Boom.

*****

The Aftermath

Why “art and science (but mostly art)”? It’s often suggested that computers could do this better than people, and why do transit agencies employ dispatchers, anyway, since an algorithm would do a better job? But that assumption is flawed for several reasons. First of all, unless an algorithm has nearly perfect ridership data, someone familiar with the route will have a better idea of where and when stops have heavy demand. Second, an algorithm would have to be able to not only know that a deadhead route will have less traffic at a given time than the normal route, but also communicate that route to the driver (and, frankly, I don’t find Waze and its ilk that useful at the block scale). And the algorithm would have to know which buses were full and empty: passenger counters are not perfect, but a driver can pretty quickly and easily respond to a radio call of “do you have any passengers?”

But the fundamental issue is that this type of service is dealing with people, both drivers and passengers. It’s pretty easy for a person—with some knowledge of the route—to balance out which stops to serve, and in what order, and what stops to prioritize. Maybe you’re a bit less concerned with Kendall Square because it has a shelter, so a minute or two longer there isn’t a problem. Maybe you know that given the weather one stop is more likely to be used than another because it has an overhand or an alcove for people to stand at. Maybe you know one driver is able to navigate the route faster than another (we have one of these: he drives safely and smoothly, but knows the route so well he regularly covers it faster than any other driver), while another is slower. Maybe one bus is balky and you don’t want to push it lest it break down.

Certainly you don’t want to deadhead an empty bus past a full bus shelter, or incur the wrath of customers who—even if you are doing it for the benefit of the service—would be understandably upset. And it’s also important to know your drivers, know what they are capable of, and talk them through what they need to do. Because despite all the talk of autonomous vehicles and hyperloops, right now and for quite some time to come, buses are driven by people and carry people, and despite various limitations, there are certain things where the Turing Test is still yet to be achieved.

A subsequent post will discuss routes where the MBTA could potentially use short turns to mitigate the effects of bunched buses.

Glossary:

Deadhead: run an empty bus without stops, and possibly on a more direct route.
Headway: the time between buses.

Double draft: two vehicles running together; more of a train term coopted here.

Downtown Boston is Busmageddon? Really?!

Posted on April 1, 2015 by Ari

Update: A shortened far less ad hominem version of this has been published in Commonwealth Magazine.

Every so often an article comes along which is so inane, so poorly researched and so utterly stupid that it requires a line-by-line refuting.

The article in question, which has a dateline of March 31 so I’m assuming it’s not an April Fools joke, is:

End downtown Boston’s busmageddon Add reworking bus routes to the MBTA’s to-do list

Oh boy.

The first four paragraphs go on about how people are taking public transit in Boston. Fine. Then you get to paragraph 5:

We need a comprehensive policy regarding usage of the public way.

Good! We agree. We do need a comprehensive policy regarding usage of the public way. Right now, approximately 75% of the roadways in Downtown Boston are dedicated to automobiles. Another 20% are sidewalks, and 5% are bike lanes. Yet the number of cars is decreasing (to quote the author two paragraphs earlier), and the majority of people coming to Boston don’t use cars. So why do cars (as usual) get the vast majority of space? Why should they get all the real estate if they only account for a minority of travelers? Who knows.

Loading must be done during limited hours, as is the case in other great cities.

Loading? Fine. That’s a halfway-decent point. Care to elaborate? (Apparently not.)

To keep the city from devolving into perpetual gridlock, we also must address tour buses and MBTA buses downtown.

Boston has no through bus routes through downtown, the only city in the country to do so. Perpetual gridlock? How much of the gridlock downtown is caused by buses at Haymarket (in their own terminal, mind you), the Franklin-Federal loop, the Silver Line and a few other sundry routes, as opposed to, say, tens of thousands of cars trying to ply narrow streets downtown? Tour buses? Sure, get rid of those space-hogging menaces. But getting rid of a few MBTA buses? Please.

And what of these other great cities? What do they have in common? London? Bus lanes. New York City? Bus lanes. Minneapolis? Double bus lanes. Boston? Well, we have the Silver Line, but it barely has bus lanes downtown.

Let’s get the buses off of our streets so that pedestrians and bicyclists can be safe.

Red herring! Red herring! Red mfing herring! T Buses account for, oh, maybe 2% of traffic downtown. Maybe. Probably less. Certainly far less than any other city in America. Take a look at Bostonography’s great bus speed map (a screen capture to the right). Notice that there is actually a gap in Downtown Boston with no bus service. Compared to nearly any other city in the country, Boston has less bus service in its downtown. Other top bicycling cities like Minneapolis, Seattle, San Francisco and Portland have many more buses, yet no one is demanding that buses be pushed to the outskirts there.

Yet buses are menace to pedestrians and bicyclists? Should we consider doing something about the other 95% the traffic downtown? The cars? Or are pedestrians and cyclists somehow immune to them?

As Doug Most reminded us in The Race Underground, Boston constructed the first subway tunnel in the late 1890s to get trolleys off the street; we can certainly do likewise today by making good on the commitment to a tunnel connecting South Station with the Silver Line spur that heads to Dudley Square.

Oh, good lord. Yes, we could spend $2 billion to build the Silver Line Phase III tunnel. Somehow this would solve all of our transportation problems. Except for the buses going to Haymarket, South Station and all of the express buses. It wouldn’t really get any cars off the street (although by his logic, cars on the street aren’t the problem). It would create a low-capacity, slow route that could be replicated for 1/100th of the cost with signal priority and bus lanes. But that might impact cars and their drivers dense enough to think the best way to Downtown Boston is to drive.

There is also no reason why people wanting to go to Salem should have an express bus waiting for them around the corner from Macy’s …

Most people going to Salem don’t wait by Macy’s: they wait at the Haymarket bus station. (Also, if you’re actually from Boston, it’s Jordan Marsh. But I digress.) It’s not perfect, but it’s covered, and the buses pull in to a busway to load and discharge passengers. But so what if they do? Downtown Crossing is right in the center of the city. If we make people from Salem walk ten minutes, or squeeze on to an already-over capacity subway train, they’re more likely to say “the hell with it” and drive. Do cars cause congestion? Or just the 16 buses per day that run from Salem to Downtown Crossing?

… nor should city street patterns necessitate that a bus make a left turn from a right lane to meander through downtown streets to get to the Mass Pike.

The 500-series buses do load on narrow streets and have to reach the Mass Pike. Why? Because they are basically the replacement for the other two tracks of the Boston and Albany railroad. When the tracks were paved over for the Turnpike, the 500-series buses replaced local service there. There were proposals in the ’40s to run service similar to the Highland Branch from Park Street, out the Tremont Street portal, on to the tracks parallel to the current Worcester Line, and out to Allston, Brighton and Newton (huge file here). Instead, we had got the Turnpike, which express bus service, which is express until it sits in Turnpike traffic. If you hadn’t built the city for cars, you wouldn’t have to worry about the buses; the streetcars could be underground in that aforementioned tunnel.

Large buses making wide turns on narrow downtown streets, even more narrow because of mounds of snow, clog the streets and imperil the safety of the public.

Large buses clog the streets? What about parked cars? What about moving cars in traffic? How about we eliminate downtown on-street parking and give the buses their own lanes, and make sure the mounds of snow are removed from them. And do only the buses imperil public safety? No pedestrian has ever been killed by a car, right?

We should eliminate bus lines which make no sense and relocate the terminus of lines now heading downtown to South Station and North Station …

We have an intercity bus terminal at South Station. It’s at capacity. There’s no way to add T buses in to it. And it’s a five minute walking transfer to the already-over capacity Red Line. The current routes that could conceivably go to South Station aren’t perfect, but they seem to work. Maybe we should create a network of downtown bus lanes instead? Cyclists and pedestrians would know where the buses would be, and it would help buses move through downtown more quickly.

And North Station? That’s why we have the Haymarket bus station. It has room for buses and easy connections to the Orange and Green lines. Perhaps when the Government Center Garage is rebuilt, it will include a better bus terminal and connections, and bus lanes across the bridge to rebuilt bridge to Charlestown.

… where there is access to underground transit, commuter rail and the interstate highway system.

Yes, there is access to underground transit. That’s all well and good. Except that underground transit is growing faster than other parts of the system, while struggling with decades-old equipment and overcrowding. Most downtown buses operate like commuter rail: they go from the suburbs to the city. There’s little need for passengers to transfer to commuter rail, rather they want to transfer to their place of work. Instead of dropping people at the outskirts of downtown, we should have more central bus routes that balance operational efficiency with getting people where they want to go. Give as many people a one-seat ride and a comfortable place to wait, and they’ll be more likely to ride.

Even as we eagerly await the Red Sox return to Fenway Park, and the melting of the last mounds of snow (most likely in that order), we should be thinking – and planning – ahead.

If you really want to encourage safer streets, getting rid of transit is certainly not the way to go. Planning ahead will certainly be important, but let’s plan the right way. The right way might be a congestion charge, to get cars off the streets at peak times. The right way might be to build bus lanes so that bus riders have seamless trips through downtown to their destinations. The right way might be to require tour buses, an actual menace to pedestrians and cyclists which provide no actual public good, to stick to certain streets, routes and times.

Or the right way may be to raise the goddamn parking tax. Right now, Boston has one of the lower parking taxes around. Because parking is very much constrained, it is not subject to the whims of supply and demand: a daily tax on parking spaces would likely not even affect the consumer price much, but move some of the profit from the property owners to the city. Given the negative externalities of cars on city streets, and the fact that most people utilizing parking spaces are from out of town, the city should raise taxes and use the money to improve public transportation, perhaps starting with, that’s right, buses.

So the right way is not to demonize public transit and couch it in the guise of pedestrian and bicycle safety is disingenuous at best. Ignoring the fact that nearly all traffic downtown is made up of cars driving on subsidized roadways and offering debunked solutions is a farce. Note the red X on the map to the right. It shows the location of the author’s office in relation to the 448/449/459 and 500-series bus routes in Boston. What are the chances he’s just rubbed the wrong way by seeing a bunch of buses outside of his office? You know, buses that make it really convenient for people to get there?

Let’s build better bus facilities. Lincoln Street and the Surface Artery which all the 500-series routes follow have plenty of room for a bus lane (Lincoln Street has two lanes of traffic and two of parking). Federal has parking on both sides. Why not take some of that space which is making the streets narrow and dangerous and use it for buses? It might make it a little less convenient for Mr. DiCara to drive there. That’s probably his real beef.

And Commonwealth Magazine should be on the hook, both for not fact-checking this article, and for letting someone with no actual expertise in the industry write it in the first place. Just because he saw a lot of buses at Lincoln and Summer one morning doesn’t mean that they’re the problem. I wonder how he gets to work, anyway?

Don’t use bus routes to subsidize malls …

Posted on January 4, 2015 by Ari

… especially if the mall isn’t the final stop on the route.

I recently had the pleasure of riding the entire route of the 34E, one of the MBTA’s longest bus routes. The route starts in Walpole Center, makes a beeline to Washington Street (which extends from Boston to Providence) and runs in a straight line to Forest Hill Station. A straight line, that is, except, for a bizarre figure-eight loop through the Dedham Mall. The loop-the-loop to access the mall unnecessarily lengthens the route, costs the T money, costs passengers time, and subsidizes private development, all to service the front door of an auto-centered development.

Instead of continuing on Washington Street, the mall loop takes 8 or 10 minutes as the bus leaves the street, navigates no fewer than eight stop signs and traffic signals, makes two separate looped turn-arounds and traverses the same intersection three times. The route is scheduled for a full hour for the 14 mile trip from Walpole to Forest Hills, so the detour through the mall accounts for 13 to 16% of the total run time, all to serve two stops (out of more than 80 total on the route) which would otherwise require a 2 to 5 minute walk.

In other words, for riders wishing to get to the Dedham Mall, it would likely be faster if the bus ran straight on Washington Street and they got off and walked in to the mall, rather than taking a circuitous route to be dropped near the door. And for everyone else, it would save 8 to 10 minutes each way of not riding through the mall parking lot.

I rode the route on a weekday evening a few days before Christmas. This should have been a high water mark for people using the 34E to get to the mall. While my bus was full—there were probably between 45 and 50 passengers on board at any given time (and probably 70 or more served along the route)—only two or three got on or off at the mall. So, in order to serve this small number of passengers, the rest of the bus had to loop in and out and in and out of endless parking lots and driveways, because front-door service to the mall is apparently required.

From HumanTransit.org

What is particularly irksome is that in this case—and it’s not isolated, but, at least in Boston, perhaps the most egregious (the 350 serves the Burlington Mall with a similar detour, but much closer to the terminus of the route, meaning that many fewer passengers are inconvenienced by the route’s detour)—is that anyone who rides the bus past the mall has their trip dramatically lengthened (how dramatically? 18 minutes a day, five days a week, 50 weeks a year adds up to 75 hours of extra time on the bus annually). Jarrett Walker talks of “being on the way” and the mall is decidedly not; the 34E takes what should be a straight-line transit trip and degrades it to a mall circulator, despite the thousands of passengers who ride the bus daily.

In addition, running service via the mall requires several hidden subsidies which degrade service and provide a perverse incentive for people to drive instead of use transit. This one, in turn, further subsidizes the car-centric mall over pedestrian-oriented business districts, several of which are served by this route. There is also the direct subsidy to businesses at the mall. If I open a store on a street near an existing transit line, I would not (and should not) expect the transit agency to reroute the transit line to provide a stop at my front door. Yet we provide this service to the mall.

This subsidy can be quantified, in fact. The T doesn’t break down service between the 34E and the 34, but let’s assume that slightly more than half the passengers on the route are carried by the 34E (looking at the total number of vehicles on the route at different times of day)—or about 2500 passengers. The route costs $3.09 per passenger to operate (66¢ average bus fare paid plus $2.43 subsidy), or a total cost per day of about $7725. If we calculate 15% of this approximately $1150, meaning that over the course of a year—even given lower service levels on weekends—the cost to serve the mall is well north of $300,000 per year. [Update: these numbers may be somewhat lower given that morning service—before the mall opens—and some peak evening rush hour trips do skip the mall.]

Here’s another way to look at this: currently, the 20 minute evening headways on the 34E requires 6 buses running the route in about (or just under), each bus makes a round trip in two hours. If the run time were reduced to 51 minutes by omitting the mall, the same six buses could make seven round trips, reducing headways and, thus increasing capacity on the route. If you could get it to 50 minutes, the same headways could be maintained with 5 buses, which would save 1/6 of the route’s operating cost while providing the same service. But, instead, we provide service to the mall, at the expense of everyone who isn’t the mall.

What to do? Make the mall subsidize the route—yes, to the tune of $350,000 per year—or have them build an ADA facility from Washington Street to the mall. The extra cost of running this route in to the mall for 10 years could buy a very nice set of bus shelters, crosswalks and a ramp from Washington Street to the mall’s front door. Another option would be to run the 34—which ends its route nearby—to the mall, instead of putting this joggle in the middle of the 34E. While it might not have the same cost savings, it would at least not have the effect of costing thousands of passenger hours each day. Or, abandon service to the mall all together. Malls are dying, anyway, and it should not be the business of public transit agencies to help prop them up.

The 70 bus is just … bizarre

Posted on October 5, 2014 by Ari

The Boston Globe carried a story this week about Watertownies (Watertownians?) who want better MBTA bus service. Watertown is one of the furthest-in, densest communities in the Boston area with only bus service, and residents want improvements. Residents of Watertown are asking for more buses at peak hours (the T doesn’t have the vehicles to provide this), faster service (perhaps they should invest in bus lanes) and better services overall.

There is particular sentiment about improvements along the Arsenal Street corridor, which is served by the 70 bus. And the 70 bus is one of the most interesting routes in the MBTA system, and one which could certainly stand to be improved. In fact, it’s bizarre, a compilation of several separate routes, and it seems to have taken place haphazardly. The route is one of the longest in the system, and its headways are such that while it may operate on average every 15 minutes, there are frequently much longer wait times, leading to crowding, bunching and poor service levels.

The T claims to want to study the route, but can’t come up with the $75,000 to do so. We here at the Amateur Planner will provide a base analysis (for free), in hopes that it can be used to improve service on this route. One concern in the article is that “There are people waiting 40 minutes for a bus that’s supposed to run every 15 minutes.” Unfortunately, this is not an isolated occurrence based on equipment failures and traffic, but rather the fact that the 70 bus route is set up with uneven headways which mean that a bus which is supposed to come every fifteen minutes might actually have schedule gaps much longer. It’s a complicated story, but fixing the 70 bus should be a top priority for the MBTA.

I. The Route

The 70 bus was, like most bus lines in Boston, originally a streetcar line, much like the 71 and 73, which still run under the wires in Watertown. When the 70 was converted from streetcar to trackless in 1950 and from trackless to diesel ten years later, it was much like any other MTA route. It ran along an arterial roadway from an outlying town center (Watertown) to a subway station (Central), a similar distance as, say, the 71 or 57 (a car line until 1969) intersecting it in Watertown Square. But after that point, it’s fate diverged. Most other lines continued to follow the same routes they always had. The 70, however, absorbed services of the Middlesex and Boston, leading to a much longer route. As time went on it was extended to Waltham (in 1972, combining it with the M&B Waltham-Watertown line) and then to Cedarwood. The 70A routing was only merged in to the route in the late 1980s when through Waltham–Lexington service was cut, adding a third separate line to the 70/70A hodgepodge. (More on the history of this—and every other MBTA route—here.)

It now extends—depending on the terminus—10 to 14 miles from Central Square in Cambridge to nearly the Weston town line. Along the way it serves several distinct activity nodes: Central Square in Cambridge, Barry’s Corner and Western Avenue in Allston, the Arsenal Mall, Watertown Square, Central Square in Waltham, and the outlying branches. While these nodes fall in a straight line, it creates a bus route with several loading and unloading points and heavy use throughout the day. This is not a bad thing—except that the line is poorly scheduled and dispatched, so that it effectively provides far less service than it could.

II. The Schedule

To its credit, the MBTA has very few split-terminus routes. (In many cities, split-terminal routing is the norm, as one trunk route will branch out to several destinations. Since MBTA buses generally serve as feeders to rapid transit stations, it is far less prevalent.) The 34 has short-turn service (the 34E) and the 57 has some short-turns as well. A few other routes have some variations (the 111, for example) but few have the sort of service that the 70/70A has. The 70A is particularly confusing inasmuch as the morning and afternoon routes run separate directions, to better serve commuters but to the detriment of providing an easy to understand schedule. It it almost as if the T has put all of its annoying routing eggs in one basket. Or, in this case, in one route.

The issue is that while there are two routes which are generally separately scheduled, for the bulk of the route, from Waltham to Cambridge, the operate interchangeably as one. For someone going from Waltham to Cambridge or anywhere in between, there should be no difference between a 70 and 70A. If there are four buses per hour, there should be one every fifteen minutes. For those visiting the outside of the route, the buses will be less frequent, but for the majority of the passengers, it wouldn’t matter.

Except, the route doesn’t work this way.

It seems that the 70 and 70A are two different routes superimposed on each other with little coordination. This often manifests itself in buses that depart Waltham—and therefore Watertown—at nearly the same time, followed by a gap with no buses. If you look at nearly any bus route in Boston, it will have even (or close-to-even) frequencies during rush hours. Some—the 47, for instance—may have a certain period of time with higher frequencies to meet demand. But even then, the route quickly reverts to even headways.

This is not the case with the 70 bus. If you are in Watertown Square traveling to Cambridge on the 70, there are 16 buses between 7 and 10 a.m. This should provide service every 10 to 12 minutes. Here are the actual headways (the 70As are bolded):

16 7 9 9 6 13 8 12 8 24 0 24 5 15

Anyone want to point out the problem here? The headways are completely uneven. The route is frequent enough that it should be a “just go out and wait for the bus” but it is completely hamstrung by poor scheduling. The initial 16 minute headway will carry a heavy load—nearly twice the headway of the next trip. The next trip will operate with half the load, and more quickly, catching up on the heavily-laden bus ahead of it. Later in the morning it gets worse: headways inexplicably triple from 8 minutes to 24, followed by two buses scheduled to leave Watertown at exactly the same time. (In fact, one is scheduled to overtake the other between Waltham and Watertown.) This is followed by another long service gap. Miss the two back-to-back buses, and you’re waiting nearly half an hour. This makes no sense.

And it’s not just the mornings. Midday headways are just as bizarre. When traffic is at a minimum and the route should be able to operate on schedule, headways range from 10 to 25 minutes. There are at least three buses each hour (and usually four) yet there are long service gaps—the effective headway is nearly half an hour when it could conceivably be 15 minutes. It’s obviously not easy to schedule a route with two termini, but the vagaries of the schedule mean that missing a bus may mean a wait of nearly half an hour, only to have two buses come with ten minutes of each other. And it’s not like these buses are empty, either. They serve the bustling town centers in Waltham and Watertown, and the Arsenal mall area stops regularly see ten or more passengers per trip. Yet they are subjected to a bus that comes at odd times—not one that is really reliable.

For a time during the evening rush hour, the T actually manages to dispatch an outbound bus every 10 minutes. But overall, most of the weekday schedule is a range of times which have no relation to each other, and mean that the route provides a much lower level of service than it could. (Intriguingly, Saturday service on the 70 is provided on an even 10 minute headway for much of the day; it’s a shame this schedule can’t be used on weekdays, too.)

I’ve been experimenting recently with graphically displaying route schedules. It shows scheduled route times as points, and headways as lines. Time of day is on the x axis, frequency and running time on the y axis. Here, for example, is the 47 bus:

Notice that while there is a major service increase during the AM rush hour, the headway lines are generally flat during different service periods during the day.

Another example is the 77 from Harvard to Arlington:

The 77 is a very frequent bus which sees 8 to 12 minute headways throughout the day. There is some minor variation at rush hours—and longer scheduled trip times at those times—but variations are minimal, and when headways change, they do so by only a couple of minutes.

Most bus routes have this sort of chart. Trip times may vary, but headways do not change drastically during the day.

Now, here’s the 70 from Waltham to Boston:

This is chaos! Instead of a flat line, the headways bounce around uncontrollably, ranging from one or two minutes (this is from Waltham, so the 0 minute headway in Watertown Square is slightly different) up to nearly half an hour. If you go wait for a bus you may see two roll by in the span of five minutes, and then wind up waiting 25 minutes for the next. It’s only during the evening rush hour (the flat blue line) that there is any order to the schedule; even late at night headways bounce around by five minutes or more.

Another way to visualize these data are to look at the average headway versus the effective headway. Here, the gray line shows the moving average of three headways, which smooths out some (but not all) of the variability shown above. However, the yellow line is more important: it shows the greatest of the three headways, which is the effective headway: if you go out and wait for a bus, it’s the maximum amount of time you may wind up waiting. Here’s the inbound route:

The average headway for bus is generally about 10 minutes at rush hours, and 15 to 20 minutes during the midday, which is not unreasonable for this type of route. However the effective headway is much worse. It is more than 20 minutes for much of the day—and often eclipses 25 minutes. For most routes, the average and effective headway would be equal (or close to it). For the 70, the effective headway is sometimes double the average.

The outbound chart shows what is possible. From 4:00 to 6:00 in the afternoon, the average and effective route are nearly even—this is when buses are sent out on equal headways (and this is what the entire day would look like for most routes). However, during much of the rest of the day, the headways are less sensible. It should be possible to operate a service every 20 minutes or better, but there are often 25 minute waits for the bus, despite the fact that the two routes share an outbound departure point in Central Square.

All of this does not align with the T’s stated policy. According to the MBTA service deliver policy, “passengers using high-frequency services are generally more interested in regular, even headways.” This is the practice for most routes, but not for the 70.

III. What can be done?

As currently configured, the 70’s headways are particularly hamstrung by the 70A. Not only is it longer and less frequent than the Cedarwood route, but it’s outer terminus is not even a terminus but instead a loop (with a short layover), so the route is practically a single 25-mile-long monstrosity beginning and ending in Central Square. Without a long layover and recovery point, the route is assigned two buses midday and can’t even quite make 60 minute headways: the 10:10 departure from Cambridge doesn’t arrive back until 12:11, and that’s at a time of day with relatively little traffic!

It’s also not clear why the 70A needs to run to Cambridge. It is a compendium of three routes—the original Central–Watertown car route, the Middlesex and Boston’s Watertown–Waltham route and the Waltham portion of the M&B’s Waltham–Lexington route. This is a legacy of the 1970s—and before. It would seem to make much more sense to combine the 70A portion of the route with one of the express bus routes to downtown Boston, and run the 70 as it’s own route with even headways.

There seem to be two reasonable routes to combine the 70A with, each of which could probably provide better service with the same number of vehicles: the 556 and the 505. The 556 provides service from Waltham Highlands (just beyond the Square) to Downtown Boston at rush hours, and to Newton Corner at other times. It has an almost-identical span of service to the 70A and operates on similar headways (30 minutes at rush hours, 60 minutes midday). Instead of running all the way in to Cambridge, 70A buses could make a slight diversion to serve Waltham Highlands and then run inbound to downtown. Currently, the 70A is assigned five buses at rush hour, and the 556 four. It seems that using two of these buses to extend the 556 to North Waltham would easily accommodate 30 minute headways, freeing up three buses to supplement service on the 70. During the midday, one bus could provide an extended 556 service between North Waltham and Newton Corner (where connections are available downtown), and it might be possible to extend run 60 minute headways between downtown and North Waltham with just two buses, allowing the other to supplement service on the 70, or allow for transfers to the 70 and Commuter Rail in Waltham and express buses in Newton Corner.

The other option would be to extend the 505. The 505 is currently a rush hour-only bus, but its span of service matches that of the 70A at either end, it is only from 10 until 3 that it provides no service. The simplicity with the 505 is that it’s current terminus is in Waltham Square, so it would be a simple extension to append the 70A portion to the route. The 505 currently runs very frequently in the morning with 10 buses providing service every 8 to 9 minutes, and has 7 buses running every 15 minutes in the evening. If every third bus in the morning and every other bus in the evening were extended to North Waltham, it would provide the same level of service as the 70A, but with direct service downtown. Midday service would be more problematic, as it would require two buses to operate, and additional vehicles would be necessary to supplement the loss in service on the 70 (although the T has a surplus of buses midday, so while it would require extra service time, it would not incur new equipment needs).

Either of these solutions would allow for 10 vehicles to provide service on the 70 route at rush hour, and they could be dispatched at even intervals during that time. With recovery time, the roundtrip for the 70 at rush hour is less than 120 minutes, so with ten buses it could easily provide service every 12 minutes, and perhaps be squeezed down to every 10 minutes with faster running time on the shoulders of rush hour. If every other trip was short-turned at Waltham, 10 minute service would be possible, with service every 20 minutes to Cedarwood. And the headways would be even—no more 20 minute waits in the middle of rush hour. Transfers could be made at Waltham for 70A patrons wishing to go to Watertown or Cambridge. During the midday, similar even headways of 15 or 20 minutes could be offered—no more long waits for a crowded bus with an empty one right behind.

Over the years the 70/70A has been cobbled together from a number of routes, and this has hobbled the efficacy of the route. While the exact scheduling of the route has to take in to account many other factors (pull outs and pull ins, union rules, break times, terminal locations and the like—and as someone who recently helped create a route plan for a very short route, I can attest there is more to route planning than meets the eye), it would be hard to make it any worse than it is now. With some creative thinking, the T should be able to provide better service for everyone who takes the 70 bus without expending any more resources, and should be able to increase the effective capacity, and make it a better experience for its customers.

The cost of doing nothing

Posted on February 19, 2013 by Ari

The worst traffic in New England is on I-93, going north and south into and out of Boston. When highways were canceled in 1970s and money put towards transit, I-93 was left doing the duty of two highways south of the city (since the Southwest Corridor was nixed) and four to the north (where Routes 2 and 3 were meant to access the city via Cambridge, and Route 95 was to be routed over the Northeast Expressway). The phrase that comes to mind is “three quarts of [something] in to a two quart pail.” There is simply not the roadway capacity to handle the traffic on this road in the morning or evening, there are choke points at other interchanges, and as a result traffic is backed up for several hours each morning and evening, turning a 60 minute drive from Manchester to Boston in to a two- to three-hour ordeal.

The corridor from Concord, N.H. to Boston has frequent bus service, but these buses sit in the same traffic as everybody else until a short carpool lane just to the north of Boston. There is no rail service beyond Lawrence and Lowell, meaning that alternatives to driving require many motorists to travel I-93 to some extent. New Hampshire is spending $800 million to widen its section of the road, and is leaving space for future rail transit and building bus park-and-ride facilities. However, under the previous Republican administration, the state refused to study rail transit service. That vote was reversed recently, and New Hampshire will commission a study of rail service north of the border. *

As usual, opponents come out of the woodwork whenever transportation dollars are slated to be spent on anything other than King Car. “Where are you going to find a few million dollars?” they exclaim, “When you just spent a billion on widening a roadway!” It’s a waste of taxpayer dollars! A boondoggle! It will never pay for itself!

Tell me, again, who is paying the billion dollars to widen 93? Oh, wait, that is a necessary public investment.

There are several salient issues here:

Widening the roadway in New Hampshire makes some empirical sense, and going northbound will eliminate a traffic-knotting lane drop at the border. However, the bigger issues have to do with infrastructure further south in Massachusetts not being able to handle more cars from the north. So widening the roadway will not aid many travelers, and may in fact make overall traffic worse where people want to go.
I-93 would be a good candidate for a proper HOV, or perhaps HOV/Toll lane, which would aid bus traffic and encourage carpooling, and given the number of buses on I-93 would benefit a high number of road users.
In regards to rail, and to echo a frequent sentiment at the California High Speed Rail Blog, the cost of doing nothing is not zero. In other words, if there are no changes made to transportation between New Hampshire and Boston, there are significant costs which New Hampshire will incur. We’ve already seen that the cost of widening I-93 in New Hampshire is nearly $1 billion. What are the costs of poor access to the Boston job market for New Hampshire residents? Of lower property values because of decreased demand due to this limited access? Of time spent in cars in traffic for hours per day? Of tourists who don’t take a weekend trip because of traffic on Friday evening?

First, how widening in New Hampshire doesn’t help traffic down south, or the three quarts in a two quart pail issue. New Hampshire can widen I-93 within its borders all it wants, but driving solely I-93 in New Hampshire gets you from nowhere to nowhere. No offense meant—there are not the major, growing job centers in Southern New Hampshire as there are in Massachusetts. Much of the traffic on I-93 is destined for offices along 495 and 128 in the Bay State, or further south in Boston. Adding space on this section of I-93 will ease some congestion in the state, but it will only lead to more cars traveling southwards in to an existing wall of traffic. The utility of the road for everyone, but especially for New Hampshire commuters, is not enhanced by this project.

Every morning, from 6 a.m. until 9, 10 or even 11, traffic on I-93 grinds to a halt. It first slows in Lawrence, where traffic backing up off of I-495 can slow the commute. Even as the roadway widens from three lanes to four, traffic slows south of 495 as it approaches the wholly inadequate interchange at 128, where traffic backs up off the mainline and through the tight cloverleaf. From there, traffic sometimes eases through the Middlesex Fells, but the roadway then narrows from four lanes to three, one of which is a carpool-only lane. Although traffic no longer backs up off of the Central Artery (which cost, ahem, $15 billion to replace), it’s sufficiently squeezed down that there are only so many cars which can find their way in to the downtown tunnel. Mitigating the 128 interchange is no easy task and will probably cost on the order of $200 million or more. Adding capacity to the roadway through Somerville is a non-starter, and this squeeze will probably never be expanded.

There is a way to increase the utility of the highway without widening it, which is to change the demand model for the roadway by introducing an HOV facility. Right now, there is a 2.5 mile long carpool lane on the southbound side of the roadway from Medford to Boston. This saves carpoolers, and buses, a few minutes on their morning commute, since the lane starts before the Somerville lane drop. However, it is otherwise inadequate in several manners. It provides no access to the Storrow Drive off ramp, which serves major employment centers in Boston and Cambridge. It also reintegrates traffic on to the Central Artery where it has to merge across several lanes to exit. Most importantly, however, it starts far too far south, and during peak hours the traffic jam starts far before the lane becomes available. Oh, right: there’s no HOV lane going northbound.

I-93 is the most heavily-traveled interstate bus corridor in to Boston of any length. Between 7 and 10 each morning, 27 buses travel from 495 to Boston (mostly private carriers from Hanover, Concord, Manchester, Nashua and Andover, Mass.). Another 21—Logan Express and MBTA—enter at or near 128, and 21 more MBTA buses enter the roadway in Medford. Most of these buses sit in traffic with everyone else. Once they access the carpool lane, and assuming they are operating at or near capacity, they transport 3500 people—about 1200 per hour, even though there is only a bus every three minutes. The capacity of a lane full of single occupancy vehicles is only about 1800, and in heavy traffic, it’s less. A better facility might also see buses coming down I-95 shift to 495 and 93 to avoid traffic on Route 1 as well, and encourage more people to ride.

And these are the statistics without any major benefits for ridership. These buses cope with the same traffic as everybody else in the morning and in the evening. Their operators are hamstrung by unpredictable traffic conditions which can cause schedules to run an hour late, or more. And there is no real time savings for riders. There is definitely a cost benefit versus driving, but the buses can’t go any faster than cars on their own. However, an HOV lane the full length of I-93 in Massachusetts would dramatically improve these commutes. It could be built for minimal cost by cannibalizing a lane off the current roadway. It would only require infrequent entrances, and exits before Boston would have to be minimized to preclude the possibility of the mainline backing up in to the HOV lane. It would allow buses to standardize schedules, and attract new ridership based on time savings—many of whom would otherwise be on their own in cars on the road.

An HOV lane would also attract carpoolers, and to keep the traffic flowing a minimum of three passengers might be feasible during high demand times. This might encourage slugging from these far-flung park-and-rides in to the city. If the time savings were high enough—and at times avoiding traffic on I-93 can save an hour or more—many single-drivers would be keen to grab a couple of new friends for the ride.

Finally, this project could be paid for by tolling the carpool lane depending on the traffic conditions. At certain times of day, allowing single drivers to travel the length of the lane for $10 or more would raise significant revenue and allow those who wanted to avoid traffic to do so. While often derided as “Lexus Lanes” such a system would be optimized first for traffic conditions and then for revenue. If the HOV facility was near capacity from carpools and buses alone, the price could be astronomical. If the rest of the road was mostly free-flowing, it would be low enough to entice a few drivers to save a few minutes without breaking the bank. And revenue from this lane could go to paying for the initial improvements, as well as funding parallel transit options.

Finally, The Cost of Doing Nothing Is Not Zero. Basically, inaction on transit in this corridor will have negative repercussions throughout the region. Quashing a study because rail will require a subsidy (as opposed to $800 million highway widening projects, which apparently pay for themselves) is as bad policy as it is politics. Rail service would provide access to jobs in Boston from New Hampshire, but also access to job sites in New Hampshire from Boston. In theory, rail service would run express from Boston to Lowell in 40 minutes or less, and then provide access to the Spit Brook Road area, Downtown Nashua, Manchester Airport, Downtown Manchester and Concord. With gas prices poised again to break $4 per gallon, precluding access except by car—even to dense, downtown areas—is a good way to stagnate long-term growth.

New Hampshire has to realize that most of its population lives within the “commute-shed” of downtown Boston, and it is inextricably linked to the larger city to the south, even as it derides it with shouts of Taxachusetts and worse. If New Hampshire’s goal is to provide better access on I-93—and it seems that it is—it has to have some sort of alternative from Massachusetts to actually improve the access that I-93 provides. Whether this is a high occupancy facility or rail transit—or some other mode—is a valid question. Whether it should be studied, however, is not.

( * It should be noted that while the Amtrak Downeaster services has several stops in New Hampshire, it is funded solely by the State of Maine. New Hampshire benefits dramatically from the service, which transports hundreds of Granite Staters to Boston every day.)

The Portland-Boston options

Posted on December 15, 2011 by Ari

If you’re going from Portland, Maine to Boston, you have several choices. You could drive … if you like to be aggravated, spend a lot, have it take no less time and lose two (or more) hours of productivity. Or, you could take the bus or the train. This page has, previously, talked about buses and trains further south along the Northeast Corridor, but the conditions are different further north.

From Boston to DC, Amtrak is a luxury product competing with air travel, boasting faster travel times and more amenities. Buses are cheap (cheaper than Boston-Portland for twice the distance) but offer cramped seats, sometimes shady equipment and the opportunity to sit in traffic for six hours if you happen to hit rush hour (likely). From Boston to Portland, travel times are faster for the bus, costs are similar, and there is a sort-of symbiotic competition between the modes; the train actually provides mostly for trips which don’t traverse the whole of the route, the bus serves air travelers, and both serve as alternatives to driving (there are no Portland-to-Boston flights).

Here’s a quick comparison between the bus* and the train in several metrics.

(* We’ll discount the couple of Greyhound buses along this route, which take longer, have no Wifi, and an overall inferior product.)

First, why is driving a poor choice? The costs, mainly (even if you have free parking at your destination).

	Car	Bus	Train
Fare	—	$16-27	$20-25
Tolls	6.50	—	—
Gas	$14	—	—
Other maintenance	$11	—	—
Total	$31.50	$16-27	$20-25

Notes:

Bus fares: $22 one way. $27 to Logan Airport. $32 same-day round trip and discounts for college students. Train fares depend on time of day, either $20 or $25 (a few very-off-peak trips are $15, college students can buy six trips for $76).
Tolls $3 in Maine, $2 in NH, $3 one way in MA (using Tobin Bridge).
Gas: 110 miles at 27.5mpg and $3.50 per gallon. Other maintenance: 10¢ per mile.
Add another $35 to get the IRS-computed cost of driving (55¢ per mile)

Travel time — The bus is scheduled at 1:55, the train at 2:25. This seems like an easy win, right? Not entirely. Outside of rush hours or weekend getaway and drive-back times, the bus will probably arrive at its terminal faster than the train. During rush hour? The bus could spend an hour getting in to our out of Boston. Also, it partially depends on where you are going. If you are going to the Financial district or somewhere along the Red Line, the bus will get you nearer to the Red Line, although it’s a bit of a walk. For the Green Line or Orange Line, it’s more of a wash, and near North Station (say, for a basketball or hockey game) you’d be better off taking the train. If there’s bad traffic, the bus will spend quite a bit of time getting from one side of downtown to the other. So, verdict: Bus, but not always.
Frequency — Here, the bus winds, rather handily. It runs every hour for most of the day. The train runs five trips daily, although there are more frequent trips during rush hours, quite useful for outbound commuting during rush hour when getting from South Station to Route 1 is particularly bad. Verdict: Bus, except perhaps at the peak of outbound rush hour.
Guarantee of a seat — If you go to buy a ticket for the train and it says it’s sold out, it’s sold out, no ticket. (You could board and play dumb and buy a ticket on-board by phone, but you might wind up standing. I’m not sure if Amtrak overbooks, but if you have a ticket they will let you on. When trains are sold out they sometimes check tickets on the platform.) On the bus, you buy a ticket, and it’s good, well, forever, but there are no reservations: everyone lines up for the bus, and if there are more riders than there are seats, well, you wait for the next bus. At heavy travel times, this means that you have to show up half an hour before departure, negating any real travel time savings. Amtrak suggests you show up half an hour early, but I haven’t been the only one sprinting down the platform to make a train. Concord Coach would have to amend its ticketing policy to allow for seating reservations (i.e. sell tickets for specific times) to guarantee seats. Which would be nice. Verdict: Train.
Comfort — Here, the train takes the cake, as it can exploit economies of scale in a way that the bus can not. A bus is, basically, an airplane with a top speed of 75 mph, legroom-wise (the windows are bigger). The train has seating pitch equivalent to airlines’ domestic first class and wider seats. And you can get up and walk around on the train. Verdict: Train.
Luggage — The train and bus both have advantages here. On the train, you can carry on however much luggage you’d like and store it above you on the (large) overhead luggage racks. On the bus you can put luggage in the under-bus bins. You can take skis, for example, on either. Verdict: Both
Bicycles — Both modes allow bicycles, with caveats. For the bus, the caveat is that the bicycle is only taken if there is sufficient room, which may not be the case at busy times (especially weekends when many passengers have luggage). On the train, bicycles are taken at all times, but there is a $5 charge, although you could probably get on without a bike ticket and no one would be the wiser. The bike on the train doesn’t go underneath with the potential to get rattled around, an issue if you have an expensive ride. Verdict: Both
Arrival times — While Amtrak suggests you arrive half an hour before your train, your ticket reserves a seat. On the bus, that is not the case. (see above) If the bus is full when you show, you may be waiting for the next one. (They don’t specify this on the website, but suggest arriving especially early during the holidays.) Both experience delays, although not very frequently. Verdict: Both
Airport service — Concord Trailways serves the airport directly, although they charge an extra $5 for the service, it is generally direct to and from Portland. Amtrak requires two transfers to the terminal, but for a $20 ticket it’s less than the bus, even with T fare. Verdict: Bus
Food — On the bus, you get pretzels and a bottle of water. On the train, you can go to the cafe and buy a beer. It’s not free, but if you have your own water bottle Poland Springs is not that exciting. Verdict: Train
Wifi/power/entertainment — This depends on how much you like PG-rated movies. If you do, the bus provides them for free. If you don’t, the train provides slightly better wifi. Both bus and train have power ports. The peak wifi connection speed on the bus is 45 KB/sec. On the train the use several providers and it’s over 100 KB/sec. Neither is fast, but one will load Gmail a bit faster. (Also, you can use your iPhone for ticketing on the train.) However, the train traverses some cell-signal-free areas in New Hampshire and Maine, the signal along I-95 is better. Oh, and if you make a phone call on the bus, you get yelled at; on the train you can go to the cafe or a vestibule and talk away. Verdict: Both
Restrooms — If you have the choice, use the facilities at either terminal. If you require the restroom during the trip, the one on the train is slightly better. Verdict: Train
From a transportation planning perspective — This is a bit of a harder question. Ostensibly, the bus breaks even but, of course, it is subsidized, significantly, by government-built and funded roads (or roads funded by the tolls of other travelers). The train has significant government investment in infrastructure, and a direct subsidy to cover operating costs (they’d have to double costs to break even). Both are energy efficient. Both are quite advantageous over automobiles. Taking the train may take a bit longer, but it’s a more comfortable ride, and, perhaps, non-drivers shouldn’t be forced in to uncomfortable conditions. The bus is at its top speed, but with more patronage and investment, perhaps, a train could make a non-stop trip in 1:30, which would easily negate the bus’s advantages. But, for now, we’ll go with a verdict of Both

So, which wins? Well, the train wins, 4-3-4. But really, the traveling public wins, with 25 daily departures along the route. Take whichever is more convenient, especially since travel time is probably the main factor for most trips and the bus (usually) wins out there. If you’re interested in comfort more than travel time, the train is where it’s at. For speed (and a movie) the bus is hard to beat, especially outside of rush hour. If you’re in Portland and a bus leaves in 10 minutes with a train in two hours, by all means get on the bus. Plan your day around the schedules, but it’s perfectly easy to treat the corridor like a transit system (albeit one with poor headways, although they are better than most MBTA commuter rail lines). Take whichever you’d like.

I will also point out that the Concord Coach provides one of the best intercity bus experiences I’ve had. Unlike many Boston-to-New York routes (and I’m including Bolt and Megabus, which will make random, 15 minute stops at gas stations in Connecticut for “snack” where is sure seems like there’s some payola from the gas station operator for bringing in 50 captive customers) the service is very professionally run. The buses leave from terminals, not streeetcorners, the staff answers questions, and it does not seem like a two-bit operation. Considering that 20 years ago the only bus service to Portland was provided by Greyhound, Concord Coach has proven that the market can be captured and expanded (in 1997 they only ran 9 round trips daily) with service and quality.

“ten of the drivers”

Posted on March 18, 2011 by Ari

A quick follow-up to my recent post about buses in the northeast:

The driver of the bus has been suspended due to discrepancies in his license. Not that surprising.

More surprising is that, according to the Times, the New York State Police pulled over 36 buses at checkpoints (probably at those “all trucks and buses stop” weigh stations that you never see open). Of those buses’ drivers “Ten … had violations so serious that they were made to stop driving immediately; backup drivers were called.” Emphasis mine, as this was the last line of the article (burying the lede?).

Imagine if 28% of airline pilots had enough discrepancies on their airline pilot certifications that they weren’t allowed to fly? Or if more than a quarter of Amtrak engineers were unqualified? Or imagine the uproar if the MTA or MBTA or some other transit agency was found to have 28% of their drivers unfit to operate its vehicles?

Until there is any half-decent screening policy in place for bus drivers, I will think more than twice before taking the bus.

Are buses the wrong technology for the Northeast Corridor?

Posted on March 14, 2011 by Ari

In the past few years, most every budget-conscious (read: cheap) traveler in the northeast corridor has jumped on the bus. Fifteen years ago, Peter Pan owned the Boston-to-New York corridor, and with an almost-monopoly charged fares which were not much less than Amtrak. Since then, the industry has changed very significantly:

The trains have gotten faster, better, and more expensive. 15 years ago, train travel still required an engine change in New Haven and barely cleared 100 mph north of there. Travel times were four and a half hours. Despite Acela’s lack of actual high speed, travel times have been shaved by an hour (or, for the cheaper alternatives, half an hour). And the train has gone from competing to the bus to competing with the airlines, so fares have risen (as has ridership) significantly.
Bus options have multiplied and fares have dropped. It was only in the late-1990s that the Chinatown Bus fad began. While Peter Pan would charge (and I’m going on memory here) $25 to $40 each way from Boston to New York, Fung Wah and its many competitors had fares of $10—often payable in cash to the driver. They had no overhead (bus stations), very low personnel costs and, with full buses running constantly, at high rates of speed, a profitable, if uncomfortable and traffic-prone service. But, $10! Almost instantly, fares were cut by 50-80%, and the bigger players, once they caught on, came up with copycat services for lower prices. Now there are as many as half a dozen buses running between Boston and New York each hour, most of them express service. It’s the free market at work.
Technology has made non-air service much more productive. Fifteen years ago, if you had a laptop, it was big, clunkly and slow. Sure, you could write up a report on it, but only with the information you had on hand. Otherwise, if you got on the train, you were in the dark for four hours. Same with cell phones: keeping a connection through the wilds of Connecticut and Rhode Island was an iffy proposition at best. Oh, and if your NiMH battery ran low, well, hopefully you’d packed a magazine. Airplanes had the same downfalls, but you were only in the air for 45 minutes. Now? Cell service is uninterrupted. Most buses and trains offer free wifi (it has a way to go, but you can generally send email at least). Laptops are light and powerful, most have long battery lives, and many buses and Amtrak offer 110V power outlets. Productivity is attainable, at least on the train where you’re not packed in like sardines.

To boil it down, however, the allure of buses is their cheapness. The legroom of an airplane (if that) and the speed of a car (if that). If the bus and the train were priced similarly, would anyone take the bus?

But as cheap as buses are, they have several minor deficiencies which, when compounded, make for a transportation mode which lacks many safety features of air and train travel. It’s not just a question of oversight of small, fly-by-night (or, um, drive-by-night) companies. It’s an issue of buses using over-capacity infrastructure clogged with other large vehicles traveling at high speeds.

Buses are, in a sense, quite scalable, which is one of their selling points but also a cause of many problems. If you run out of room on one bus, you just add another bus (although buses have to run at or near capacity to attain the efficiency which makes them so cheap). One more driver, one more set of wheels—the only issue is that peak travel times tend to have more traffic, so companies often have to charter tour buses (known as wet leasing) at these times (which may not have the same amenities). However, this further segments the industry, and means that while airplane pilots and railroad engineers have stringent training and safety guidelines, bus drivers from tour operators may be driving routes for the first time (I heard a story recently of a bus which took the Merritt and somehow didn’t hit any bridges before it was pulled over by the state troopers).

The bus companies afraid to ever have prices above a set maximum (since their product is based solely on low prices), so they vary pricing on the low end of the scale (Buy in advance for $1 tickets!). No company has started charging $40 or $50 for travel on Thanksgiving weekend even though the extra $20 would be pure profit. The fear is that higher prices, even when demand may call for it, might drive their customers to other lines or other modes. But it means that during times of high demand, wet leasing is almost a given.

The issue with scalability then becomes the terminal facilities, which are more scalable than airlines and railroads simply because there is an alternative: load the buses curbside on the street. (At least in New York; Boston effectively banned this a few years back by threatening to write tickets to Chinatown buses which would block streets for twenty minutes at a time loading and unloading passengers.) This makes it much easier for the overall bus network to add capacity, but it impedes street flow in several locations in Manhattan.

Buses also seem prone to rather catastrophic failure, as is the case with most mass transit. However, while train derailments and airline mishaps—despite the over-capacity infrastructure—are rare, bus issues are commonplace. Several years ago, after watching Chinatown buses roll along well above the speed limit and seemingly take corners on two wheels, my mother offered to pay the difference between them and a more traditional bus line (whose drivers’ main concern didn’t seem to be their next cigarette break). It’s not to say that bus travel isn’t quite safe: it is. Buses on city streets never get going too fast and drivers have rest at the end of their routes, and buses on rural highways don’t have much other traffic to contend with. Which leaves buses on heavily-traveled highways, with drivers behind the wheel for four hours straight, or, with traffic or weather, much more.

In a most of the country, this is not as much of an issue as in the northeast. But in the northeast, there is very little highway which resembles rural interstate. Every conceivable route between Boston and New York is three lanes wide (save 95 or 395, which is narrower in portions but significantly longer than other routes). Exit ramps are often short and abrupt, speed limits change continually, and gridlock is frequent. Complicating the matter, south of Hartford, there are several automobile-only parkways, concentrating commercial traffic on I-84, I-684 and I-95. (And thank goodness that buses aren’t trying to buses aren’t vying for space on the raceway known as the Merritt.) (Update: This doesn’t necessarily keep buses off of low-bridge roadways; a driver in Syracuse got lost and took a cars-only parkway, resulting in four deaths in 2012.)

Finally, buses are solely dependent on the vigilance of their drivers, who often drive long shifts under less-than-ideal conditions in traffic and weather. Airlines are heavily regulated and operate under the auspices of the air traffic control system as well as their own companies’ dispatchers. Oh, and they have “operator redundancy” in the form of a copilot (if one pilot nods off there’s another to fly the plane). While railroads can implement systems such as positive train control, speed limiting and, in the long run, exclusive right-of-way to separate their operations from other traffic, buses assuredly can not. There’s no backup safety system: one minor slip-up by the driver can result in a major incident. There’s also little oversight: bus drivers are not tracked by speed (some claim to speed limit their buses, but I’m pretty sure I’ve seen buses over 80 on the Mass Pike), leaving that up to state highway authorities, who may not be particularly vigilant in ticketing speeding or otherwise unsafe drivers.

These are all relatively minor issues, but they compound. Let’s run them down:

Bus scalability results in frequent wet leases, and drivers who are unfamiliar with roads, routes and traffic patterns
Buses frequently speed, increasing the likelihood of an accident
Buses, due to their profile, are prone to rolling and flipping
Drivers are often poorly paid and work long shifts in excruciating traffic, leading to fatigue
Roads between Boston and New York are confusing and often have short merges and sharp turns, and congestion, in addition to delaying buses and fatiguing drivers, creates more dangerous traffic conditions
Many roads are car-only, so buses are squeezed on to roads with heavy truck traffic.

It is this last point, truck traffic, which was responsible for the recent bus catastrophe in New York. No one knows if the bus was actually clipped by a tractor trailer or was attempting to avoid it, but it is clear that an incursion by a truck’s trailer played a part in the accident (as did driver fatigue and the geometry of the roadway). And another driver cites trucks as a major problem:

“Tractor-trailers are our biggest problem,” Mr. Ha said. “When the rear of the truck slides toward you, you have to stay calm because if you steer too hard to avoid it, you might flip.”

Drivers know that trucks are a problem. And accidents—truck-related or not—are frequent. While there haven’t been any accidents of this magnitude yet, the bus service in the northeast has been a powder keg with a lit fuse, and the frequent breakdowns, fires and rollovers have had remarkably few deaths. Until now. It will be interesting to see if this accident, which seems more related to the structural operation of buses over busy highways with fatigued drivers rather than glaring driver error, changes the demand curves for transportation in the NEC.

In any case, it’s time to look at our regional transportation structure and decide whether the low end of our transportation structure should be road based or should be modernized for safety, speed and reliability. Amtrak’s antiquated Northeast Corridor is maxed out, New York’s airports are as well, and the roads are congested and not particularly safe. Perhaps Amtrak’s $100b+ proposal for the Northeast Corridor, with the potential to have capacity to move most traffic off the road, is a safety issue.

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