Tag Archives: late night service

What’s up with the taxi queue at Logan?

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Early Monday morning, on Twitter, Cambridge City Councilor Jan Devereux posted this photo of the taxicab line at Logan Airport:

Then she went to check out the Uber/Lyft line and it was no better:

By 1:30, others reported that the cab line was an hour long.

What’s going on here? Where are all the taxis? Where are all the Ubers? Why are people arriving at the airport after midnight then waiting an hour for a ride home? What can we do about this?

It’s not really a simple answer. Please, though, follow me down a rabbit hole.

Logan airport is not a hub airport (okay, not really: Delta and especially JetBlue are doing their best to create a hub, but it still is mostly an origin-destination airport). This is a matter of geography: because it is tucked away at the northeast corner of the country, the airport mostly handles passengers flying in one direction, south or west, either on direct flights, or to other domestic hubs (although international travel has increased markedly in recent years, and JetBlue even has a bank of later domestic flights to accommodate connecting passengers).

Boston’s flights can be grouped in to three main types: short haul flights to non-hub cities, short-haul flights to hub cities, and long hauls, both domestic and international. Only the first group operates without geographic constraints which dictate that flights can only arrive and depart at certain times of day. Non-hub short-haul flights, mostly on JetBlue and Delta (to places like AUS, BUF, RDU, MKE) are spread more evenly throughout the day, because they don’t have to make connections at hubs. Hub-based flights within the eastern half of the United States (say, as far as MIA, DFW and MSP). These flights account for many of the early departures, but few leave Boston after early evening. They don’t arrive in Boston until mid-morning, but are the bulk of the last flights arriving later in the evening. Because of these travel patterns, Logan has a lot of early and late flights: in the morning, people want to get to a connecting hub for the first “bank” of connecting flights, and in the evening, flights have to leave the connecting hub after the last bank has occurred.

(Not all airlines utilize banking at hubs—Southwest most notably runs continuous hubs—and there are pluses and minuses to each method, about which I won’t go into too much depth here. But basically, banking decreases fleet utilization and increases congestion at hub airports since flights arrive and depart all at the same time, followed, in some cases, by periods of relatively low flight activity, but passengers have much shorter connection times at hubs since connections are coordinated. It’s actually something like a pulse system for buses, except that airports have finite numbers of vehicles which can arrive and depart at any given time, and longer dwell times. As airlines have consolidated, hubs have grown and seen more frequent banks such that they are now closer to continuous operation, especially at large airports like Atlanta and Chicago. See how this is a rabbit hole? Also, when I say people want to connect to the first bank, I mostly mean airlines, no rational human being wants to be on a flight departing at 5:15 a.m.)

Then there are longer-haul flights. Transcons have to deal with time changes, cycle times, and the fact that flights generally don’t depart or arrive between 1 a.m. and 5 a.m. local time. So they arrive from the West Coast either as redeyes between 5 and 10 a.m., and then turn to depart between 6 and noon, or as day flights, arriving in the afternoon or evening. Thus, in addition to the overnight lull, there are basically no transcons which arrive in or depart Boston during the midday. International flights (mostly TATLs) generally are redeye flights going out, leaving Boston in the evening, and return during the middle of the day, arriving in the afternoon. All told, Boston has demand throughout the day, but particularly high demand for flights arriving later in the evening.

For instance, O’Hare and Atlanta, the two busiest airports in the country (by number of aircraft movements), have 29 and 24 flights scheduled to arrive after 11 p.m., respectively. Boston has 39. After 11 p.m., Boston is basically the busiest passenger airport in the country (about tied with LAX), and possibly the world (since in many countries, airports have noise regulations which limit late night flights). Yet at the same time, there are few flights departing Boston. The airport has only 14 scheduled departures after 11 p.m., and only six of these are domestic flights (all are JetBlue E190s, so they’re small planes). There is basically zero demand for passengers to get to the airport late at night. This creates a demand imbalance for ground transportation: there’s a lot of demand to leave the airport at midnight, but almost no one who wants to go there.

Here are some charts of the approximate number of airline seats arriving and leaving Boston. I adjusted for the typical arrival time at the airport (60 minutes for domestic, 120 for international) and assumed it would take 30 minutes for the average international passenger to clear customs.

(Note, the seat numbers for arrivals and departures don’t exactly match because each day at Logan is not identical and this was a snapshot of a day. This is total seats available, not total passengers, and is also a rough estimate based on plane sizes at different times of day, but should show general trends well.)

So, it’s clear that there is a good deal more demand to get to the airport in the morning, which doesn’t even out until around 9 a.m., various points of imbalance during the day, and then, starting around 7 p.m., significantly more demand to leave the airport.

A couple of personal anecdotes can illustrate this. The first illustrates the imabalce in the morning. Back before the Big Dig was completed (and, in fact, pre-Silver Line, and back when the airport had half the traffic it has today), when I was going to college, getting to the airport was, perhaps, worse than today. It involved both the elevated Central Artery and then the Sumner/Callahan tunnel complex: a trip to or from the airport to downtown could take an hour (which is, of course, not much different than it is now). For several years, however, the Ted Williams Tunnel had been open to commercial vehicles only. The connecting highways were not yet complete, so this was a way to keep the local streets from getting overrun by people trying avoid the congestion.

From Newton, where I grew up, my father came up with a solution, especially for early morning departures. He would drive me to South Station. Rather than risk the airport traffic, I’d get in a cab for the usually $10 or $12 trip under the harbor in the tunnel only cabs could use. Early one morning, I got in a cab at South Station and told the driver I was going to the airport. He quoted the fare: “$20” and didn’t turn on the meter. What I should have done is say “I’ll pay you whatever the meter quotes at the end of the ride, so it’s in your best interest to turn it on now,” but I was 18 and hadn’t quite figured that out, so at the airport, I paid him $20, noted his medallion number, and immediately reported it.

A month later my dad got a check for $20 from the Boston Police (which oversee taxi medallions), along with a note that the taxi driver had been given a stern talking to that he was never to refuse to turn on the meter for a trip within the city.

But I understand why the driver was reticent to take the fare. He would get to the airport and have two (bad) decisions. One would be to go to the taxi pool and wait in line for an fare back to the city: a long line, because there is much less demand going in to the city at 7 a.m. than there are taxis arriving at the airport. The other would be go cross back downtown without a passenger, but still incur the cost of driving, as well as the tunnel toll (which was one-way inbound at that point), with no passenger to pay it. Still, because of redeye arrivals from the West Coast in the morning, there is some traffic for cabs that do make it to the airport going back, although they have to cycle through the cab pool (or the Uber/Lyft pool) before their next fare. Even now, if you take a cab or a ride-hail vehicle to the airport in the morning, the driver is probably not particularly happy taking the fare.

The second example was an extreme example of the late-night issue. I was flying back from SLC and the flight was delayed several hours. Originally scheduled in at 11:30 (plenty of time to catch the Silver Line downtown and take the T home), the plane was more than three hours late, and didn’t arrive in Boston until about 2:30. The airport was empty. Yet a 757 had arrived with 200 passengers, and no one was making the trip at that point to pick us up. So we all converged on the cab stand, but there wasn’t a cab in sight. Immediately, people started self-pooling: it was clear that if we all took our own cabs, the line wouldn’t clear for hours. “Who’s going to Brookline?” “I’m going to JP, that’s close!” “I’m going to Concord.” “I’m going to Lexington, let’s share.” Every few minutes, a stray cab would roll up, three overtired strangers would pile in, and the line would get slightly shorter. I found a cab pretty quickly, but imagine those at the back of the line may have seen the sun rise.

Finally, here’s a picture of the departures level at Terminal A at 8 p.m. this past week.

Delta’s last domestic flight leaves at 7:45 (to MCO) and the last hub-based flight leaves at 6:56 (for ATL). Two international flights leave around 8:30. At this time, it’s a ghost town. Note: if you’re picking someone up at the airport in the evening, plan to meet them on the upper level, and note that Terminal A is a great place to wait without having State Police harass you. (Terminal B was pretty quiet, too.)

Here are scheduled arrivals and departures, by carrier, at different times of day:

Note: not all regional flights appear to be in this sample, for instance, there are no Cape Air flights shown after mid-evening, when Cape Air flies several late flights out of Boston, but these flights are minimal as far as number of arriving passengers is concerned.

Notice how departures peak in the morning, then lull in the midday, and then have a secondary peak in the evening, before domestic departures (except for JetBlue) tail off quickly after 7 p.m. International carrier flights are clustered arriving in the afternoon and leaving in the evening. But there is a clear imbalance for flights arriving and departing the airport.

In any case, this has been a problem for years, and it’s a structural issue pertinent to Logan Airport based on the airport’s geography on both a macro and micro scale. On a macro scale, the geography of the airport at the corner of the country means that, late in the evening, flights feed into it but don’t feed out. On a micro scale, the airport’s geography encourages taxi/app-ride/ride-hail use (I’ll call these taxis, for simplicity). The constrained location means that parking costs are high, because demand for parking outstrips supply. The proximity to areas with high trip generation (downtown, and high density areas nearby) means that taxi costs are often significantly lower than a day’s parking cost ($38) in the garage. The combination of these factors push many people to use taxis.

Much of the day, taxi supply roughly matches demand, and there is a minimal delay for these services. But this breaks down at the beginning and end of the day, especially in the evening. Once again, Logan’s geography comes into play. While the airport is close to the city geographically, it is expensive to get to for a taxi driver. When there is high demand for fares back to the city at 1 a.m.—especially once buses have, for the most part, stopped running—there is negligible demand to get to the airport, or even East Boston in general, so to pick up any fare would require the driver to deadhead to the airport.

Unless a driver happens to pick up a stray fare to East Boston, this requires a driver to travel several miles, and to pay the cost of the tunnel toll. Once at the airport, there is no promise that the trip home will be lucrative enough to cover these costs. They might get a $50 fare to a far-flung suburb. But it might only be a $15 fare to a downtown hotel or, worse, to Revere or Winthrop, meaning a driver would then have to drive back home—likely through the tunnel—and foot the bill for the toll both ways. Moreover, this is the end of the day for most drivers: except on a Friday or Saturday night, there is only so much demand for rides after 1 a.m. For many drivers, the potential upside of getting a decent fare from the airport doesn’t make up for the potential downsides, especially when the alternative is shutting off the app (or taximeter), driving home, and going to bed an hour earlier. There is a high disincentive to be in the last group of taxis at the airport: a driver might get one of the last passengers, but if not, there is not likely a job for several hours when the first redeye flights start to trickle in around 4 a.m. There is little incentive for taxicab drivers to go to the airport during this dwindling time, so demand is only met by drivers already in East Boston who need a fare back to the city.

This is not an easy issue to solve. It also shows why Uber and Lyft are basically just taxis: they are subject to the same supply and demand issues that affect the rest of the market. Alas, they’re providing the same service: a chauffeured ride from Point A to Point B. And the airport is pretty much the only place that cabs still have a foothold, partially because matching passengers to specific vehicles is quite inefficient with large groups, like you might find at an airport. This has been a recent point of contention at LAX, which consolidated its taxi and ride-hail facilities away from the terminals (as Logan is planning). It hasn’t gone particularly well to start, but I would venture to guess that there are similar supply and demand issues at LAX. (As several people have pointed out, the buses there are running much more smoothly, too.)

Of course, at LA, there is a temporal aspect to the complaints about #LAXit. Most of the issues are in the evening. Los Angeles has more balanced operations, with plenty of departures in the evening, both redeyes to the East Coast and transcontinentals, mostly TPACs but some TATLs as well. There is probably both more demand for cabs in the evening because LA is on the opposite side of the country as Boston, and also because most of the transcon redeyes leave before 11 p.m., and most of the later flights are international, which are fed more by connecting travelers and by passengers arriving at the airport much earlier. Thus, for the actual demand for taxis, there is a similar, if less pronounced, demand compared with Boston.

I scraped Twitter for #LAXit from the first few days and it seems clear that the issue is mostly in the evening.

But back to Boston. Here’s what the Logan cab pool Twitter feed (because of course Logan’s taxis have a Twitter feed) looked like last Sunday. There was a cab shortage by 8 p.m., and the late night arrival issue was foreseen by 10 p.m. It wasn’t a surprise. It is a market issue.

Is this feed a bot? Certainly not! Note the wrong months, typos, misspellings, random numbers of hyphens and use of quotations. The one thing that seems constant is the use of the word “need” when the airport has a cab shortage (with various qualifiers like all-caps or exclamation marks). I’m pretty sure it’s a guy standing by the taxi pool furiously typing tweets into the Twitter machine. So, I decided to scrape the feed (about 60,000 tweets), and code each tweet by whether it included the word “need” or not, to get a very rough estimate of the frequency of taxi delays at Logan.

From the charts of arrivals and departures above, we would assume that the airport would generally need cabs mid-afternoon, as well as in the evening. If we chart the arrival and departure relationship and the Twitter feed’s need for cabs together, and we shift the need for cabs back 1:15 (probably due to actual behavior of arriving passengers), voila, they match pretty darned well.

A few other notes on the need for cabs:

  • There is more demand on Sundays (36% of Tweets include the word “need”), followed by Mondays, Thursdays and Fridays (28%), with the least demand on Saturdays (20%)
  • The cab shortage is generally higher in the summer than the winter (and highest in May, June, September and October, while lowest in December, January and February), and it has been particularly high this year. In fact, the only higher demand for cabs at the airport was in February of 2015. I wonder why.

TL;DR: it is definitely getting harder to get a cab at the airport, especially during certain times of the year and at certain times of day. And when flights are delayed, this is exacerbated. Departing passengers generally still get to the airport on time, but arriving passengers get in later, meaning the cab shortage is even more acute. Which leads to situations like the one which occurred earlier this week at the start of this post, which may have taken you nearly that long to read

So what can be done about it? Well, Uber/Lyft could use their surge features to increase the cost of a trip to the point where it would make economic sense for drivers to come to the airport at this time of day. But that might double or triple the cost of a ride, so while it is a very market-based solution to the problem, it is not consumer-friendly. It (and taxi starters) could do a better job of pooling rides, and moving the Ubers and Lyfts to the same site might make pooling easier there. A very low-tech idea might be to figure out where vehicles are going and, at high-demand times, put people into lines based on regions to help them self-pool. This might nibble around the edges on the demand side, but it doesn’t help supply. It turns out that Lyft and Uber are not a magic panacea to mobility: they are subject to the same supply and demand issues as the rest of the world. And if the answer is pricing, it’s not a great answer, especially since prices might have to go up significantly to provide enough supply or suppress demand enough to satisfy market equilibrium, especially after midnight when there are really no other options available.

One solution, I think, is that rather than trying to bring supply to the demand, we should move the demand to where there is more supply: get people, en masse, downtown. This requires a magical invention: the bus. While the supply of hire cars is not limitless (there are only about 1800 taxicabs in Boston, and probably far fewer are active today, and many more Ubers and Lyfts, but a finite number), it is significantly less constrained on the other side of the Harbor. Instead of trying to entice drivers to come to the airport, we could instead move riders to where are there are more cars. Most riders are going north, west or south of the airport, and need a ride through Downtown Boston anyway. The bus might not be that appealing to a traveler at 1 a.m., but neither is a 45 minute wait for a cab. This basically takes what LA is doing, and extends it a couple of miles.

The MBTA runs the Silver Line until 1:15 a.m., which could easily bring passengers to South Station, where catching a taxi or ride hail vehicle is easier than at the airport. Massport and the T, however, do a poor job of advertising these late buses, both with signage telling passengers the hours as well as real-time information about the buses’ whereabouts (important especially if you are unsure if the last bus has left). But these are easy issues to solve. The bus real-time data is available: I have no issue pulling it up on mbtainfo.com, for instance.

Not helpful, especially if you’re trying to figure out if the last bus has left, or even deciding if it’s worth waiting in a cab line versus waiting for the bus.

And Massport could put up static signage:

NO CABS? NO PROBLEM!
GET A CAB ACROSS THE HARBOR
MBTA BUS TO SOUTH STATION
SKIP THE LINE — SAVE MONEY
BUSES EVERY 8-15 MIN UNTIL 1:15 AM
ADDITIONAL BUS AT 2:30 AM

And as I’ve written before, with some minor schedule tweaks, the T could use the Silver Line 3 returns from Chelsea to supplement this service even later, and keep one bus in service to make an extra round trip to provide service until 2:30 when, on most nights, the planes have all landed. Alternatively, or in addition, Massport could continue its Back Bay Logan Express bus later in the evening and into the early morning (or even 24/7), providing late night trips to the taxicab-rich parts of Boston when there are cab shortages at the airport (and perhaps even direct service to large hotels in the Back Bay).

Even more, the Logan Taxi Twitter feed often includes this kind of Tweet:

By 10:00 most evenings, someone at Logan knows how many late flights are coming in. So, conceivably, the bus driver could be held on duty to make extra trips in the cases of delays. Massport, which already helps to subsidize the fares for the Silver Line, could shoulder the rather minimal cost of the extra trips. And passengers arriving at midnight would no longer have to face an hour-long wait for a cab, when there are many more options across the harbor.

The market has never provided enough cabs at Logan when they are needed, and at certain times of day, lines of cabs are the rule, not the exception. Assuming the market will take care of this has never worked, and it is unlikely that it ever will. If Massport worked with the MBTA, however, it could pilot a project to move people downtown and create a secondary taxi queue there, where drivers would be much more willing to go for a fare, because even if the demand had dried up, they wouldn’t be out the tunnel tolls, mileage and time to show up at the airport.

A short history of the new early morning bus service

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Back in the halcyon days of March, 2016, I wrote a series of blog posts about overnight transit after the T unceremoniously axed late night transit service. I had them all planned out (if not fully written) and posted the first one at 8:30 on a Thursday morning before I went to work. (My blog posts in Pacific Time for no apparent reason.) The first post was about how the T should be clearer about when and where it provides early morning transit service, rather than burying the details on paper schedules and webpages.

It was popular, apparently. Several thousand views that day alone and it’s still one of the most read posts on this page. It caused a shouting match of sorts on Universal Hub with one commenter saying the current schedules which showed the trips with five-point-font notes were adequate (I’m still not sure why) which resulted in Stuart Spina stepping in and dropping the mic:

Is it really that hard to just publish a special Sunrise timetable?  

AND CAN THE BUSES ACTUALLY BE SIGNED UP FOR THEIR ROUTES!!!???  

Frank’s voice tells you when the doors open that the bus is “Route 192 with service to Haymarket” and yet the sign says “39 HAYMARKET” “39 VIA FOREST HILLS”…

But the best part was an email I received from the T at 11:52 a.m., barely four hours after the blog post went live from a service planner there:

Greetings. The MBTA received the following customer feedback this morning, which referenced your blog post. I can’t vouch for what he says are errors in your post, but I thought you might be interested to hear it. 

Issue Reported by the customer: Customer called to say that there is a website called amateurplanner.blogspot.com that gives a list of all the early morning bus trip . The problem is the blog is not giving out correct information. mainly on the 57 to boston and rts 117 leaving haymarket and the 109 . He would like to know if mbta could create a separate schedule in the packets for the early morning bus trip , He states that everyone does not know how to read the schedules and that’s why there is little ridership. This would stop independent bloggers from giving out incorrect information. 

As for your post, I agree that the information may be difficult to find for some users, but just like all other bus schedule info, it is available on our paper and HTML schedules for the relevant routes (e.g., the 194 trips shows up on both the 89 and 93), as well as our GTFS feed. The 191-194 numbers are purely for internal purposes in our scheduling software, and not as some sort of obfuscation. They are so different from the normal routes that we decided they should have separate route numbers rather than be listed as a variant of a normal route. Most users would likely find the normal route numbers less confusing, so that’s what the public sees when they see these trips on schedules or Trip Planner. Just as these trips are listed under the normal routes that make up the early morning trips, if you plan a trip with Google Maps or Trip Planner that uses the 194, it will display it as 89/93. 

I can see how a separate page about early AM routes might be helpful to some folks, but if I were a regular 89 or 93 rider, I would still want to have the early AM options for my route on my paper schedule for those routes, since that’s what I care about—not early AM options for the other side of town. I’ll bring up this idea for a separate sunrise service page with my colleagues, and also discuss whether we can improve how these early AM trips are described.

Let’s unpack that a bit. First, in the letter written to the T, it’s unclear exactly going on. A customer called to tell the T there is a website. Wait, really? Someone read my blog and was so incensed they called the T? And then they tip their hand. Note they go to “he would like to know …” and “He states …” Wait, who states? The customer? Or the website? I am convinced to this day that the T called themselves up and sent in this comment, particularly because it was sent to me barely four hours after the blog post went up.

If so, it would be either the quickest the T has ever responded to anything, or a testament to the fact that they really should have better things to do.

My response was that my information was not wrong (although I made some clarifications) and as Stuart pointed out it is confusing when the ASA announcement is different from the bus’s head sign. And what would preclude keeping that information on the paper maps, as well as creating a special website? They’re not mutually exclusive.

I thought my post was equivocal and fair. But apparently I’d touched a nerve.

Long story short: a week later, we’d (we = TransitMatters) proposed the entire night bus plan on this blog and in Commonwealth Magazine. Since then, we’ve been through several iterations of the plan with the T in fits and starts, and we’re working on launching a 24/7 bus route pilot in addition to earlier service (and a dedicated web page for it, although I think some mapping would help) on these additional routes. It’s been two years, but hopefully this is the start of building, as I called it two years ago: robust, equitable and efficient overnight transit.

The T is sort of fixing East-West (!)

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Back in September, some of the #10PeopleOnTwitter pointed out that there was something amiss with the T’s end-of-service procedure (called “East-West”, because it’s when the trains leave Park to the east and the west). What should be a relatively quick process was frequently taking more than half an hour. Looking in to the schedule, I realized it was because a certain train from Heath had a guaranteed connection at Park, and was scheduled 20 minutes after the other trains, every train—and every downstream bus—was delayed.

So I wrote a blog post, with some help from a variety of people on Twitter (with screen grabs, coding and the like), put some numbers to it, and let it rip. Jim Aloisi wrote about it, the T took issue with the numbers, Jim shot back at them, and the issue was left unresolved: for the most part, it seemed like the T was uninterested in something which would both save them money and create a better experience for their passengers. No one reached out to us (other than to yell on the Internet at Jim) and it was left at the T saying “nothing to see here; this isn’t a problem.”

And yet … this week, the Fiscal Management Control Board announced that, as of the new schedule rating at the end of the month, the 12:47 car from Heath Street will no longer have a guaranteed connection at Park; instead, the 12:32 car will. This should mean that the E train will no longer be guaranteed to hold up the process (other lines still might, of course). While us Twitter folk certainly wouldn’t mind the recognition, I think we’re all glad that the T is going to make this change. So, this is kind of a big deal. Yes, we will be monitoring it after the first of the year to see how the changes play out.

(My ask: that the T have some sort of petition system for this. If you write a petition, and you get x number of people to sign on, they at least give you a response. There are a lot of things that riders may see that management does not. My other ask: take the savings from this, and run late night service.)

Update 1/21/17: based on preliminary data, the average delay experienced by trains and buses has fallen by an average of 12 minutes over the first 19 days of the new schedule. To put it another way, from April to December of 2016, the last trains left Park Street before 1:10 a.m. 6% of the time; since then, the last trains have left before 1:10 84% of the time. A further data analysis will follow.

A single letter costs the T $2–3 million every year

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Every night in Downtown Boston at about 12:45 a.m., a procedure, in theory, occurs to allow passengers to transfer between trains downtown and not miss the last train. (This dance is called “East-West”; the name probably goes back decades.) Here’s how it should work (note that this is from an operations standpoint; passengers transfer as they normally would):

  1. The final Green Line trains from Lechmere, Boston College, Cleveland Circle, Riverside and Heath Street arrive at Park Street. 
  2. The last southbound Orange Line train waits at State Street for the last inbound Blue Line train.
  3. Once it arrives, the Blue Line train continues to Bowdoin, loops, and waits at Government Center. The Orange Line train proceeds south to Downtown Crossing.
  4. The last Alewife Red Line train leaves Downtown Crossing when this Orange Line train arrives and runs to Park.
  5. Passengers at Park transfer between Red and Green Line trains. Once this occurs, these trains are released, and a domino effect takes place.
  6. When the Ashmont-bound Red Line train gets to Downtown Crossing, the Orange Line trains waiting there are released. (There’s no guaranteed last connection for Braintree passengers.)
  7. When the northbound Orange Line train gets to State, the Blue Line train there is released. There is a second meet (which is not necessary) between this train and the Lechmere Car at North Station.
    8. This is what the last train ballet should look like (thanks
    to Mark Ebuña for the screen grabs). These trains would
    remain stationary for more than 20 minutes. And that’s
    on a good night.
  8. As these trains propagate out through the system, 56 “w” trip buses (the schedule notation of “w” means that a given bus will wait for the last train, although a few schedules use other letters) wait for transfers before making their last trips outbound, completing the domino effect.
The rail portion of this ballet, again in theory, should take about 8 minutes. The last trains out of Park Street are scheduled out between 12:45 and 12:53 (the later times because four Green Line trains have to all leave in succession on a single track). The system can then be shut for the night, leaving a bit more than three hours for track maintenance before the first trains the next morning.
Unfortunately, in practice, that’s not how it works. As Marc Ebuña tweet-stormed recently, it takes a whole lot longer. And this costs the T a lot of money.
The last train connection is not guaranteed for passengers to Heath Street (who can take the 39 bus, which is held for connections at Back Bay), but it is guaranteed for Lechmere. Since there’s no layover at Heath Street (since the Arborway terminus was abandoned), these trains have to turn back in to layover at Lechmere. The last train to Heath Street leaves Park at 12:30, arrives Heath at 12:47, and turns back to Park, with a scheduled arrival of 1:06. (In 2007, this train was scheduled 10 minutes earlier, and the “w” note was not present as recently as 2013, although I believe the T has guaranteed these schedules before then.) And this train is given the “w” notation, so that while every other train should be—if they’re on schedule—ready to depart at 12:45, they wait for another 21 minutes before making this connection. And if the Lechmere train is late? The trains still wait. On September 4, for example, the Red Line waited 40 minutes.
This letter costs the T at least $3 million per year. The “w” notation reads:
“Last trips wait at some stations, primarily downtown, for connecting
service. Departure times are approximate.”

This is entirely unnecessary. Earlier Lechmere trains are just as able to make the connections. There’s a train scheduled to arrive Park at 12:41. If this train were the “w” train, it could drop passengers at Park and continue to Lechmere; any later train could pick up any passenger waiting, but connections for arriving passengers on such a late train would not be guaranteed, other than for buses meeting this train at Lechmere. Or these trains could be operated as non-revenue services, and the 39 bus, which connects inbound with trains at Copley, could provide this service. Other than a few late riders inbound on the E Line, no passengers would be adversely impacted, while every other passenger on the system waiting at least 20 extra minutes (the earliest the last Red Line has left Park Street in the past 30 days has been 1:09, the average has been 1:19—thanks for the coding from @MBTAinfo) would benefit. I’m usually not one to advocate for earlier service, but in this case, either publish a later, more truthful schedule, or run the service on time.

Then there are the costs, which cascade very quickly through the system, since the single Lechmere trip which operates late causes trains on every other line, and 56 bus trips, to all experience delays of at least 20 minutes. But the operators still get paid (overtime, in fact) and the power stays on and the inspectors keep the stations open and the operations staff stays on duty until the last trains pull in. It costs nearly as much money to keep a train stationary as it does to run it, and with overtime, it may cost more. In 2014, the T reported that a bus cost $178 per hour to operate, a heavy rail car $240 and a light rail car $264. Giving them the benefit of the doubt that they’re operating single car green line trains, the cost per hour of four light rail cars (B, C, D and Mattapan), 30 heavy rail cars (five trains at six cars each) and 56 buses comes to $18,224 per hour, or $304 per minute. If the Lechmere car causes a 21 minute delay (as scheduled), this costs $6,384 per day, or $2.33 million per year. In fact, the average delay is more on the order of 34 minutes, which costs $3.77 million. This assumes that all delays are caused by the late Lechmere car; if we attribute 20% of the delays to other causes, there is still a direct operating cost of 1.9 to 3 million dollars per year. (These costs are likely even higher now.)

Two to three million dollars. All because of a “w” on the schedule.

But it gets worse. The T has precious little time between the end of service and the first trains the next morning; most lines aren’t scheduled to be cleared for powering down or work until about 1:30, leaving only about three hours and thirty minutes until service starts in the morning. A 20 to 30 minute delay accounts for 10 to 15% of this time, meaning work crews have to wait for this unnecessary delay before performing maintenance.

Then there are the passengers. If you take the last train, the schedule—and any real time data—will show it coming at a certain time. But you’ll either wind up standing on a platform for 20 to 30 extra minutes, or sitting on the train downtown for that amount of time. There is probably significant ridership loss from people who know how long the wait takes, and choose another mode. This fare revenue is probably minimal in relation to the operating costs, but certainly not zero, but the impact to passengers is more drastic. If we assume just 10 passengers per rail car and two additional passengers on each bus who don’t transfer from a train), it amounts to 450 passengers each inconvenienced by 20 to 30 minutes. That adds up to 150 to 225 hours per night, or 50 to 75 thousand hours per year.

The FMCB’s response to a budget gap has been to push privatization, which is not guaranteed to fill any such gap, but will draw the ire of the unions and potentially degrade service. Yet various measures which this page has noted have fallen upon deaf ears. There’s a lot of money to be saved at the T. There’s a lot of very low-hanging fruit. (Like publishing a set of schedules without a “w” for the 12:47 departure from Heath Street. And who reads paper schedules, anyway?) This problem would be very easy to fix: the next schedules would be amended with a different note for the E Line, perhaps “x: last trip making connection downtown departs Heath Street at 12:25.”


Making that change would go a long way towards paying for real, actual overnight service.

[Thanks to James Jay for noticing this, Marc Ebuña for burning the midnight oil, @MBTAinfo for the code and Stefan! for the maps.)

Robust, equitable and efficient all-night transit for Boston

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Do you think that the T should implement real, useful 7-day-a-week late night service? Make your voice heard! Email latenightservice@mbta.com by April 4. More details here. 


A more condensed version of this proposal can be found at Commonwealth Magazine.


The recent post regarding the T’s early morning routes has been one of the top three most popular ever posted to this page, surpassing 5000 views (and much more quickly than any previous post). But if you thought that I’d just discovered the early morning routes, you’d be wrong, I’ve known about them for some time (yet never had need to ride one). However, what piqued my interest was the fact that these routes could be used for something much larger: actual all-night service for the MBTA service area.

In the aftermath of the MBTA’s
decision to cancel its recent late night service program, it might be useful to
consider some facts that are not well known, and that may provide the pathway
toward establishing a robust late night transit service that is regional in
scope, that responds to clear needs, and that does so affordably. Of the top 15
transit agencies in the country, only three—Boston, Houston and Atlanta—fail to
provide some overnight service. The plan laid out in this proposal is built
upon the T’s current early morning service, but rather than serving only Friday
and Saturday nights, it is geared primarily toward getting people to their late
night and early morning jobs.
The MBTA currently runs
approximately a dozen early-morning trips,
originally geared towards fare collectors and now oriented more towards
early-morning workers (they were not shown on public schedules until 1999).
These trips are shown on published schedules—often with just a small schedule
notes—but otherwise not publicized (although this page described them in some detail). These trips arrive at Haymarket around 5:00am,
with connecting service via the 117 Bus to Logan Airport
A study of early morning service
conducted by CTPS (MassDOT’s Central Transportation Planning Staff) in 2013
found these services to be well used. Indeed, there was extreme overcrowding
on one route: the single 117 trip (Wonderland-Haymarket) carried 89 riders. In
response, the MBTA added two additional trips as well as earlier trips on Bus routes
22, 23, 28 and 109.
This map shows ½ and 1 mile buffers of the proposed late night
network superimposed on the T’s current route map.
See a full-size map here.

This proposal would use these
trips (with some minor changes) as a baseline for a new, more robust
“All-Nighter” service. This would allow the use of current MBTA bus stops and
routes, and be mostly an extension of current service, not an entirely new
service. It would provide service to most of the area covered by MBTA rail and
key bus routes. The changes include:

  • The primary connection point would move from
    Haymarket to Copley. This significantly shortens many of the routes and
    avoids time-consuming travel through downtown Boston to Haymarket,
    allowing a single route to operate with one vehicle instead of two, thus keeping costs down. In
    addition, Copley is somewhat more central to late night activity centers.
  • The current early-AM routes provide good coverage
    near most rail and “key bus” corridors with the exception of the Red Line
    in Cambridge and the Orange Line north of Downtown. (This plan does not address the longer branches to Braintree and Newton which serve lower-density areas which would have lower ridership and higher operation costs.) To fill these gaps the
    Clarendon Hill route would be amended north of Sullivan Square to follow
    the route of the 101 bus serving Somerville, Medford and Malden. A new
    route would be added following Mass Ave along the Red Line/Mass Ave
    corridor to serve Cambridge, then run through Davis Square and terminate
    at the Clarendon Hill busway.
  • A separate service would be run from Copley to
    Logan Airport. It would follow surface streets from Copley to South
    Station and the Seaport making local stops, use the Ted Williams Tunnel to
    the airport, and then terminate at the Airport Station, where it would
    allow connections to the 117 bus, which would terminate there rather than
    Copley. This bus could be operated or funded by MassPort in partnership with the MBTA, much like the Silver Line, since it would directly benefit the airport. This service
    could be through-routed with the 117 bus to Wonderland via the airport,
    which wouldn’t require additional buses and would eliminate a transfer.
  • Hourly service would operate on all routes, with
    a “pulse” connection at Copley. (What’s a pulse? Here’s the answer.) All buses would be scheduled to arrive at
    approximately :25-:28 past the hour and depart at :32-:35 past, allowing
    customers to transfer between the various lines at this time. A dispatcher
    could hold buses to make sure passengers could connect between lines. With hourly headways, a timed and guaranteed connection is required to provide any network effect and allow access between routes. 
  • Cities served by these routes could set traffic
    lights to “flashing yellow” for the routes between midnight and 5 a.m. to
    best accommodate schedules (this is already the case on many of these
    corridors).
  • Buses to the airport would allow employees to
    arrive a few minutes before the hour, in time for shift start times, and
    would then make a second loop through the airport to pick up employees
    finishing shifts a few minutes past the hour.
  • Airport buses would also allow overnight
    travelers to make their way to downtown by foot, bicycle, Hubway, taxicab
    or TNC (Transport Network Companies like Uber and Lyft), and make the
    “last mile” to Logan on a bus. This is especially important for
    late-arriving flights to the airport at times when there are often few
    cabs available. The MBTA could explore public-private partnerships with
    TNCs or other providers to bring customers to Copley Square to access
    all-night service.
  • The :30-past pulse time would allow workers
    finishing shifts on the hour to access buses to Copley, or walk to Copley
    itself, for connections to their final destination.
This service, based on current
late-night and early-morning published schedules, would require 10 vehicles for
four hours (approximately 1 a.m. to 5 a.m.), or 40 hours of service per day (with an extra hour on Sundays). At
this time, the MBTA operates approximately 10 hours of service covering the
early-AM routes, so the net hours of service would be 30. In addition, these
trips could be added to existing shifts, so rather than a deadhead trip between
a terminal and garage at the beginning or end of service, they would utilize a
bus already in service, saving an additional 6 hours (approximately) of
service, so the net hours per day would be 24.
Assuming a marginal cost per hour
of service of $125 (since this service would require no new capital equipment or vehicle storage, because
most of the bus fleet lies idle overnight, the full cost should not be used for
these calculations), this would cost approximately $1,095,000 per year;
assuming ridership of 843 per night (based on existing counts), the net cost
would be $757,000, with a subsidy of $2.46 per rider, in line with existing bus
subsidies—the cost might be slightly higher if the T needed to assign an inspector to the overnight service and extra police personnel, but they may already be on duty at those hours and could be shifted from overnight layover facilities.
Further, if Massport provided the
link between Copley and the Airport on an in-kind basis (as they do for SL1
airport fares), it would reduce the cost to the MBTA by approximately 10%; if Massport
through-routed such services along the route of the 117 it would reduce the
MBTA’s expenditure by 20%. Thus the range of cost to the T would be somewhere
between $600,000 and $1.25 million, between 7% and 13% of the cost of the most
recent discontinued late-night service. This service would serve approximately
308,000 riders annually.
While “Night Owl” bus service was
run from 2001-2005, it was perceived as serving very different population and purpose than this
proposal, focusing on the “drunk college kid” demographic on Friday and
Saturday nights only (the most recent late night iteration had the same issue, although the T’s equity analysis showed otherwise). While that population would certainly benefit from
overnight service, this service would be aimed directly at providing better
access to overnight jobs—in addition to the airport, most routes would pass
nearby major hospital clusters—especially from low-income areas.
These routes would (unlike the
prior late night services) follow existing bus routes and stops, provide
coverage to much of the region’s core neighborhoods—but not necessarily to each rail station’s front door. For example, the Green Line in Brookline would be served
by the 57 bus along Commonwealth Ave and the 39 bus on Huntington Ave, within a
mile of the B, C and D branch stations in the town, thus providing a similar
level of service more efficiently (and obviating the need to create nighttime-only
bus stops along the rail lines). Most of the densely populated portions of
Boston, Brookline, Cambridge, Chelsea, Everett, Revere, Malden, Somerville and
Medford would be within a mile of service, with additional service to parts of
Newton and Watertown. 

In addition, by following normal bus lines, buses
would use existing, known stops along major streets (rather than requiring
passengers to search for nighttime-only stops adjacent to or nearby rail
stations), and bus numbers could even match daytime routes (for instance routes
could be named: N15/9, N28/SL5, N32/39, N57, N1/88, N93/101, N117) to provide
continuity. The goal is to make the system both useful and easy to understand
both for regular users and customers with less-frequent overnight needs. (Using existing routes would also reduce the start-up costs for such a service.)

The T’s current
plans to mitigate the removal of late-night service are anemic, targeting a
single line or a couple of trips on a single day. This proposal, on the other
hand, would bring overnight service to much of the area which hasn’t had such
service in more than 50 years. It would be a win-win solution. It would benefit
the Fiscal Management Control Board by focusing on low income areas and job
access routes while costing a small fraction of the recent late-night rail
service, and by showing that its goal was to provide better service, not just cut existing trips. But more importantly, it would benefit the traveling public, by
allowing passengers to make trips by transit to major job sites at all hours of
the day.
It would be important, as well, to run this plan with discrete goals in mind; while the late night service was painted as a failure by MassDOT, by comparing the ridership to the previous iteration of late night service, it was an unmitigated success. The T’s mitigation plans would add buses piecemeal to its early morning system with no specific performance metrics. Instead, it should look in to creating a better network with specific goals, and measure the efficacy of the system in providing better connections to people traveling at odd hours.

This plan is designed to be affordable and robust, serving
real needs across the region, responding to social and mobility equity, and
doing so without the need to turn to the private sector, which cannot and will
not offer similar service at such affordable costs. Should it work, it would
enable the MBTA to set a standard for quality 24/7 service—service which is
provided in Philadelphia, Seattle, Cleveland and Baltimore, not to mention peer cities like New York, Chicago and San Francisco—and the kind of
service a city and region like ours both needs and deserves.
*****
Here are sample schedules, assuming a :30-past-the-hour pulse at Copley. Schedules are based on current early-AM service. These times would be repeated hourly at 1 a.m., 2 a.m., 3 a.m. and 4 a.m. daily and 5 a.m. Sunday. Each route would require one vehicle unless otherwise noted.
Ashmont-Andrew-Copley (15 Bus, Red Line Ashmont Branch)
Dep Ashmont Station 1:02
Andrew Station 1:17
Arr Copley 1:28
Dep Copley 1:35
Andrew Station 1:46
Arr Ashmont Station 2:00

Mattapan-Dudley-Copley (28 Bus, Silver Line Washington)
Dep Mattapan Station 1:03
Dudley Square 1:14
Arr Copley 1:25
Dep Copley 1:35
Dudley Square 1:46
Arr Mattapan Station 1:57
Hyde Park-Roslindale-Forest Hills-Longwood-Copley (32 Bus, 34 Bus, 39 Bus, Orange Line, 2 vehicles)
Dep Hyde Park 12:50
Forest Hills 1:04
Longwood Medical Area 1:16
Arr Copley 1:25
Dep Copley 1:35
Longwood Medical Area 1:44
Forest Hills 1:56
Hyde Park 2:10
Watertown-Brighton-Kenmore-Copley (57 Bus, Green Line)
Dep Watertown Square 1:02
Kenmore 1:19
Arr Copley 1:25
Dep Copley 1:35
Kenmore 1:41
Arr Watertown Square 1:58
Clarendon Hill-Davis-Harvard-Copley (Red Line Alewife, 87/88/89 Bus, 1 Bus)
Dep Clarendon Hill 1:03
Davis 1:06
Harvard 1:12
Arr Copley 1:25
Dep Copley 1:35
Harvard 1:48
Davis 1:54
Arr Clarendon Hill 1:57
Malden-Medford-Sullivan Square-Haymarket-Copley (Orange Line North, 101 Bus, 93 Bus, 2 vehicles)
Dep Malden 12:49
Medford 12:59
Sullivan Square 1:07
Haymarket 1:17
Arr Copley 1:25
Dep Copley 1:35
Haymarket 1:43
Sullivan Square 1:53 
Medford 2:01
Arr Malden 2:11
Broad & Ferry-Sullivan Square-Haymarket-Copley
Broad & Ferry 1:00
Sullivan Square 1:10
Haymarket 1:17 (express via Rutherford)
Arr Copley 1:25
Dep Copley 1:33
Haymarket 1:41
Sullivan Square 1:48 (express via Rutherford)
Arr Broad and Ferry 1:58
Wonderland-Chelsea-Airport (Blue Line, 111 bus, 117 bus)
Dep Wonderland 1:31
Chelsea 1:44
Arr Airport 1:55
Dep Airport 2:00
Chelsea 2:11
Arr Wonderland 2:26
Copley-South Station-Airport
Dep Copley 1:32
Arlington via Boylston 1:34
Washington via Boylston 1:35
South Station via Essex 1:38
Seaport 1:41
Terminal A 1:45
Terminal B 1:47
Terminal C 1:49
Terminal E 1:51
Arr Airport Station 1:55
Dep Airport Station 2:04
Terminal A 2:04
Terminal B 2:06
Terminal C 2:08
Terminal E 2:10
Seaport 2:14
South Station 2:18
Washington via Kneeland 2:21
St James via Charles 2:24
Arr Copley 2:27
Alternate Copley-Airport-Wonderland through service (2 vehicles; this would provide better connections downtown but may not serve airport shifts as well from Chelsea and Revere):
Dep Wonderland 12:38
Chelsea 12:53
Terminal A 1:06
Terminal E 1:12
South Station 1:19
Arr Copley 1:25
Dep Copley 1:35
South Station 1:41
Terminal A 1:48
Terminal E 1:54
Chelsea 2:07
Arr Wonderland 2:22

Does your transit system have a pulse?

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In this post I’ll describe something which is probably unfamiliar to big city transit system users, but which is very familiar for those who use smaller systems: a pulse. A pulse is a timed transfer between multiple routes in one location (or, in some cases, multiple locations) where buses wait for each other in order to allow passengers to transfer between them. Large systems with complex networks generally don’t use pulses both because of the complexity of scheduling and bus frequency: a transfer will often only mean a few minutes’ wait. But with 30- or 60-minute headways on many smaller systems, a pulse is an efficient means to create a usable network.

There are four requirements for a pulse system to be feasible:

  • The system must be small enough. With more than 15 or 20 routes, the complexity of scheduling every bus to one central point will overwhelm the pulse savings, and may also result in inefficient and overlapping routings to reach the pulse location. Some large systems may have pulse features in peripheral locations, or certain times of day.
  • A convergence of routes. Trying to schedule multiple pulse meets at multiple locations is quite complex, and mid-route meets are operationally inefficient since buses usually need a few minutes of schedule padding to allow for variances in travel times. Most pulses take place at a central location where multiple routes lay over. So a network needs to be focused on a single location.
  • Minimal traffic. Pulse networks are based on buses keeping their schedules. In cities with heavy traffic, unless there are busways, a bus that is delayed for five or ten minutes may result in the rest of the pulse being delayed, or passengers missing transfers.
  • Not too much crowding. Crowding on transit is generally a good thing, since it means that people are using the system. Too much crowding, in addition to passenger discomfort, leads to slower run times which, much like traffic can cause a pulse network to break down. In addition, crowding shows that more frequent buses are needed, and pulse networks provide coverage and predictability, but are not easy to scale, because to change the headways on one route, you need to change the headways on all the others.
    • Burlington, Vermont’s 30-minute pulse system shows how routes of
    different lengths operate with different numbers of buses; this is
    more difficult with an hour headway pulse.
  • Routes have to be similar in length. Pulses work best when a single bus can make a roundtrip in an hour, including schedule padding. Issue arise when, say, a destination is 28 minutes of schedule time from the pulse location. You can’t feasibly run it with one bus, since if that bus is at all delayed it will either delay other pulse buses or cause missed transfers. But putting two buses on the route is a poor use of resources, since each bus will now lay over more than half the time. So an hourly pulse network works only with routes where most round trips can be completed in under 50 minutes, and where others are long enough so that resources don’t sit idle. This is less of an issue with 30 minute pulses, as routes can be shorter and still align with the pulse.
San Francisco’s late night transit services involve a series of timed transfers.
Where are pulse networks run? Pretty much everywhere. For instance, many of the regional transit authorities in Massachusetts run pulse networks, even if they don’t advertise them as such. For instance, if you look at the schedule for nearly every bus in Brockton’s BAT network, it will leave the “BAT Centre” (or the BAT Cave, and after it receives the BAT signal; the Centre has received high praise from Miles on the MBTA; another feature of a pulse system is that it makes it worthwhile to invest in central infrastructure since all routes serve it) at exactly the same time. Buses pull in, passengers transfer, buses pull out. Simple.
Once headways drop below 20 minutes, transfers become very, very difficult if they’re untimed, which is why pulse systems make sense in lower frequency networks. Most of the time, transferring between subways in New York means waiting only a couple of minutes for a train. But after midnight it is often an exercise in futility if you have to change lines, since you may spend as much time waiting in a station for up to 20 minutes as riding the train. Without information on departures or guaranteed transfers, even the country’s only full-service 24-hour subway loses much of its utility.
Jarrett Walker has a good if somewhat wonky description of how a pulse system works here, as does this presentation from the Chittenden Country Transportation Authority (in Burlington, Vermont, where I stole the graphic above). Even San Francisco gets in on the pulse system, for it’s late night service most buses start in a single location, and a few other timed transfers are accommodated as well. In Boston, the transfers to the 117 downtown during early morning service are a proto-pulse, although with a more robust overnight service, a pulse would make more sense.

The T’s “secret” early AM service … unmasked

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In 1960, when the MTA cut overnight service (for the first time), some trips were retained. At the time the purpose of these trips was to allow MTA (and later MBTA) fare collectors to get to subway stations. This shadow system was not made “public” until 1999, but by “public” it means that the trips have different numbers combining multiple routes and are shown only on some online timetables and on printed timetables as just a note in very, very small print.

But they’re incredibly useful. Say you have a 6:30 departure from Logan Airport. Without this special knowledge, your only option is to drive and pay to park or take a taxicab or TNC vehicle. Everyone loves paying $30 to get to the airport, right? The T is useless for flights that depart before 7 (the earliest outbound Blue and Silver line services get to the airport around 6 a.m.). Even though the airport runs at full capacity at 6 a.m., many flights depart earlier, and most airport staff have to arrive by 4 or 5 in the morning. Once you learn the secret of the early AM buses, you can get to the airport, or downtown, quite a bit earlier.

An outdated map of early-AM T services; the 109
service was added in 2014 after a study showed
demand for additional early services.
The network actually serves most of the region!

Here are the routes covered by the buses. There are two sort-of-separate services, the ones which operate to Dudley to connect to the 171 bus at 3:50 and 4:20 and have a later trip downtown. The others have a single trip downtown to meet the 117 for a connection to Logan (as far as I know, the T does not guarantee this transfer by having the 117 hold until connecting buses have arrived). They are as follows (I’ll mention internal route numbers in the 191-197 series since those are sometimes referenced in schedules or online trip planning):

  • The 15 bus operates trips to the airport via Dudley and Andrew from Ashmont, as well as to Haymarket. The later trip follows the Silver Line’s route, the first use the 171; the later trip does not have connecting service to Logan. These trips are shown on the 15 bus schedule; the later trip is officially known as the 191 (see, more confusing than it needs to be).
  • The 28 bus operates from Mattapan to Dudley and meets the 171 and 15 as shown above for transfers. These trips are shown on the 28 bus schedule.
  • The 32, 24 and 39 operate as one continual trip from Hyde Park to Roslindale to Jamaica Plain, Copley and Haymarket, and connect to the 117 to the airport. This trip is shown on the 39 bus schedule, although the route is officially the 192. This route does not operate on Sunday.
  • The 57 bus operates from Watertown to Kenmore, Copley and Haymarket, officially as the 193 although the trip is shown on the 57 bus schedule. This route does not operate on Sunday.
  • The 89 and 93 buses operate from Clarendon Hill to Sullivan Square and on to Haymarket as the 194. This is shown on the 89 bus schedule.
  • The 109 and 92 operate from Broadway and Ferry in Everett to Sullivan Square and on to Haymarket. The portion of the trip to Sullivan is shown in the 109 schedule and the 92 schedule. This should allow a transfer to be made at Haymarket to the 117.
  • The 117 operates several early morning trips inbound to Haymarket in addition to the connection outbound to the airport. 

Is there any information on the MBTA’s website about these services? No! I can’t explain this. The only map I could find was from a 2013 study of these services from CTPS; the T can’t be bothered.

These buses run, they have plenty of capacity (well, most do) and they are, for all intents and purposes, kept secret from the traveling public. The schedules are buried, there’s no information about connecting services to Logan, and no effort has been made to create an “early AM” page with information about which buses run, where the run, and when they run. Most of these buses have been running these routes for close to 60 years—and close to 20 years on public schedules—yet no one knows about them. And the MBTA’s website does its darndest to keep customers in the dark.

Yeah, real helpful

For instance: if you load the 171 bus schedule, you get an error message that there are no trips, because it automatically loads the inbound schedule, which indeed doesn’t have any. You need to load the outbound schedule to see the trips. And the 171 is good for Hubwayers; there’s a station to drop your bike right in Dudley.

Or check out the 57 bus schedule. It shows a bus leaving Watertown Yard at 4:33 and arriving at Kenmore at 4:50 (a trip which, during rush hour, is scheduled for more than twice as long). Yet there are no times given for any intermediate stops. So does the bus make these stops? Probably. But who’s to say it doesn’t run express? If you want to take the bus from Brighton (Washington Street at Chestnut Hill Avenue) not only are you not given a time, but really no guarantee that the bus would actually run.

Despite this, these routes provide a good base for a discussion about how late-night MBTA service could actually be provided, not just on Friday and Saturday nights, but every day, for allowing low-income workers to get to jobs at the airport and elsewhere. With the T required to mitigate cutting late night service, and currently proposing a very weak mitigation plan, that’s an additional discussion we need to have. But for now, the agency at least ought to tell people about the service they already provide!

Let’s use numbers to examine the T’s late night debacle

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Surprising no one, the T cut late night service. Why? Because it cost money to operate (like any transit, but still). Because it wasn’t as efficient as rush hour passengers. While we don’t have all of the T’s data, we have some, so let’s look at it, shall we?

1. Passengers per hour on a partial system 
According to the T via BostInno, the late night service carried 16,000 passengers when it ran until 2:30 (two hours of service) and 13,000 when it ran until 2:00 (90 minutes of service). Per hour, this means that the system carried 8000 and then 8700 passengers per hour. From the same post, there are 72,000 passengers during a peak commuting hour, 33,000 during a weekend afternoon, and 14,000 during the first hour of service in the morning. 
Of course, these numbers are misleading, because while all routes run at rush hour, and most run early in the morning and during the weekend, fewer than a dozen bus routes run during the late nights, accounting for 300,000 daily passengers. So the universe of people who could use late night service is only about 70% of the total passengers (and this doesn’t account for reduced train boardings because passengers can’t transfer to a bus that doesn’t run). If only the late night routes ran between 5 and 6 a.m., we’d expect ridership to be just 9800 per hour, or about what late night ridership is. (And if you were to, say, look at a Saturday morning, it’s probably significantly lower.)
So by that logic, should we cut service at any time it is less than, say, 10,000 per hour? Maybe we shouldn’t run service before 6:30 on weekdays? Or before 10 on Sundays?
2. Cost effectiveness compared to rush hours

The T has claimed time and again that late night service isn’t cost effective, because it costs more than average. I’m not making this up: the T’s chief administrator said exactly this. But that’s not how averages work, especially with a peak-demand service like transit. It is always going to cost less per passenger to provide transit at high use times, and more at low use times. The idea is where you want to draw the line. The T paints the picture of this money-hemorrhaging service during late night hours, but only compares it against the overall average, which includes times when the T makes money (yes, during rush hour, the T makes money). A much fairer comparison would be to compare it to, say, all weekend service, or 10 p.m. to end of service on weeknights. Those times probably have similar cost effectiveness. If you compare it to 8:15 a.m., it’s extraordinarily inefficient. But if we had the numbers to compare it to, say, 10:30 p.m. on a Tuesday, or 9:00 a.m. on a Saturday, I bet it would hold its own.
It should be notable that the stated cost for late night service went up from $7.68 in 2014 to $13.39 in 2015, a 74% increase, even as, when measured by passengers per hour, it became more efficient. This might be some more dubious—I mean, innovative—accounting from the FMCB, and it wouldn’t be the first time I’ve accused them of that. 
3. Defining success (moving the goalposts)

When the Night Owl service ended in 2005, it was a failure: at the end, only 655 passengers were using it nightly over two hours: 327 per hour. (It should be noted that in 2004, the subsidy for the service was higher than the 2013-2015 service.) The current iteration of the service carried 13,000 passengers in just 90 minutes, averaging 8667 per hour, 26.5 times as many. The service didn’t make money, but it was never going to. The beancounters saw the numbers, and declared it a failure. It’s too bad, because based on its ridership, it was a success.
I think that a lot of the work that the fiscal and management control board is doing is worthwhile, and there are certainly places in the MBTA budget where efficiencies can be found to reduce costs. (I’ve, uh, strongly suggested some on this page.) Yet when they want to cut service, they have a knack for massaging numbers to fit their narrative, even if the bigger picture doesn’t support it. This makes the whole operation much less credible: decisions made with poor data should be anathema to their process.
Unfortunately, they’re not.

ONE NIGHT ONLY! The T will provide 24 hour service this Saturday

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It’s kind of gimmicky, but this Saturday, the good ol’ MBTA will be pretty darned close providing 24 hour service on some routes. The reason? Well, to start, late night schedules, but mostly because it’s the beginning of daylight savings time. Here’s the alert from the T:

Saturday: Despite the start of Daylight Savings Time, the number of available Late Night trips will remain the same Sunday morning (March 8). Last trains will depart from downtown at 3:30 a.m. with outer connections following later.

At 2 a.m. on Saturday, the clocks will magically advance to 3 a.m. The MBTA services running will not magically disappear in to the ether, but the T will basically assume that the time change won’t take place until the end of service. So some of the latest-running trains and buses, which normally don’t finish their runs until about 3:00, will actually not reach their terminals until 4:00. Notably, the last 28 bus will reach Mattapan at 4:05 a.m., the last Mattapan trolley will arrive around the same time, and several other lines will operate until about then.

Most T service doesn’t begin until 6 a.m. on Sunday mornings, but a couple of lines, notably the aforementioned 28, operate early airport service. (There should be a discussion that better service should be provided to the airport, which has expensive and limited parking, many low-wage jobs, and many early shifts, and which is completely inaccessible from most of the city by walking or bicycling, because ocean.) So service at Mattapan this Saturday will include:

3:00: inbound 28 bus departs *
3:15: outbound 28 bus arrives
3:20: inbound 28 bus departs ‡
3:40: outbound 28 bus arrives
3:45: inbound 28 bus departs *
3:59: inbound 28 bus departs †
4:05: outbound 28 bus arrives
4:45: inbound 28 bus departs †

* Saturday late night service   † Sunday AM service   ‡ Trip scheduled on both Saturday late night service and sunday AM service (!)

Now, it’s worth noting that there is a service gap of nearly three hours in outbound service: the first outbound bus on Sunday isn’t scheduled to arrive in Mattapan until 6:40. But what I find most intriguing is the fact that for nearly an hour, the Saturday and Sunday service actually overlaps (on a normal weekend, the last outbound arrival comes in just 15 minutes before the first inbound departure). Most interesting: the 3:20 a.m. inbound trip can be found on both the Saturday schedule (the 2:20 inbound trip bumped an hour) and the Sunday schedule (the regular 3:20 departure). Will the T run two buses inbound from Mattapan simultaneously, one on a Saturday schedule and one on a Sunday? It’s almost worth venturing down to Mattapan to see.

These are strange times we live in indeed.

Measuring the externalities of late night transit

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On the same day that the future of the MBTA’s late night service was reportedly imperiled, the Commuter Rail operator Tweeted that its trains would not be held for the end of the Garth Brooks concert slated to begin at 10:30 p.m. There was no such Tweet necessary from the core bus and subway services, because the Friday concert would certainly end in time for the late subway trains which would depart downtown around 2:30.

Which is a big deal. Concerts of this sort are permitted by the city of Boston, and without late night T service, they probably would have not occurred at all. It’s not every night that a popular act will play for the first time in nearly two decades in Boston, but the possibility of scheduling later shows brings tens of thousands of extra visitors to the city and whether they ride transit or not, they support the local economy.

Are all of the concert-goers discretionary visitors? No. Certainly some would have come downtown and taken advantage of nightlife if there were not this concert. But many do. The nearest venues on Brooks’s current tour are in Pittsburgh and Buffalo, so this is a regional draw; and may even attract some fans from abroad who would come to Boston for the show. There are 15 million people in New England, and only about one in six of those live within a late-night MBTA service corridor (and the Garth Brooks demographic is probably less likely to live in town). But others may book a hotel, or arrive by car for dinner, and then go and see the show.

How much is a concert of this type worth? Let’s throw around some numbers (and, yes, these are all guesstimates, yell at me in the comments if I’m off by an order of magnitude but not if I’m off by 25¢):

  • The TD Garden holds about 20,000 people for concerts. The price for each ticket for these shows is $57, and according to this site, about $15 of that goes towards running the facility. That’s $300,000. Add to that $10 of food and beverages purchased by each concert-goer, another $200,000. Let’s assume that half of this total goes towards staffing and another 10% towards state and local taxes. That’s $300,000 for the local economy.
  • What about parking? Let’s say half of the people coming to the concert park downtown, and pay an average of $10 to do so (some people will find free meter parking—and may use the MBTA to get to and from it—while some will pony up $40 to park at the Garden). That’s another $100,000, with about 7% captured as sales tax (and if Boston had additional parking taxes like many other cities, it could capture more).
  • But those are the direct costs. Let’s say that 1000 people at the concert “make a weekend of it” and book a hotel room in town at $200 per night. That’s another $200,000 (taxed at 14.45%). They’ll have $100 worth of meals, too, so there’s another $100,000. A good number (half?) of people will come in early before the concert and go for dinner or a beer (or both), spending, say, $25 per person, or $250,000; if the concert lets out at 12:30 a.m., some may take advantage of late night service and have a beverage afterwards as well.
  • And late night ridership? Let’s say 5000 people take the T to the concert, and 1000 of those park at an outlying terminal, and half of these people already have a monthly pass. The numbers aren’t huge, but it still accounts for $5000 in additional fares and $4000 in parking fees. Not huge, but not nothing.

Let’s add this up. You get about $1,150,000 in additional local spending. With sales, hotel, meal and payroll taxes, local and state governments can recoup about $100,000 directly in sales taxes. And the T gets about $10,000 in additional fares. These concerts won’t occur every weekend, but even if there are 10 such events per year, it would pump an extra $11 million in to the local economy, of which at least $1 million would reach tax coffers, and an extra $100,000 for the T. The total cost of running late night service is not offset by this, but these events are only feasible because of the extra service.

Then there’s the real game-changer: are acts more likely to come to Boston if they can perform two shows per evening? For a busy venue like the Garden (with the Bruins and Celtics and other events like Mice on Ice), being able to squeeze multiple events per day allows an act to open for only two or three days but have five or six shows. (It’s no coincidence that the Garth Brooks concert falls during the NHL All-Star break; shows don’t materialize out of thin air, although they do get set up overnight.) If you get a couple extra shows to play Boston which otherwise would not, then you’re getting multiple shows on nights the Garden might otherwise sit dark.

This past summer, I participated in a hackathon that showed parallel results over a longer time range: late night T service seemed to increase ridership earlier in the evening and longer-distance taxi fares later on. But we didn’t examine the potential for late night events to boost the local economy. If the T looks towards cutting service, it really should make sure to look at events like this which benefit from the availability of late night service (even if not that many people use the service to get to the event). Not doing so may be penny-wise and pound-foolish.