Tag Archives: mbta bus

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.

Kudos, MBTA, on a job well done.

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It’s not particularly frequent that I write (or anyone else writes) a blog post praising the MBTA (although it’s probably less frequent than it should be; the agency does a lot of good work with an old system and all-too-often inadequate funding and support) but today that is exactly what I am going to do regarding the Harvard-to-Alewife shuttle.

Some background: in 2016 I wrote a blog post about how the Harvard-Alewife shuttles could be improved. I noticed it mostly because I was on a training run for Boston (two weeks before my brush with death/fame, but I digress) and ran along Alewife Brook Parkway before taking a bus back to Harvard from Alewife. That was also for the floating slab project which has been with us since, well, at least 2011, and it sounds like the infrastructure will require continued maintenance forever, or at least until the MBTA installs a signal system which allows single-track operation (a regular occurrence for maintenance in Chicago and Washington, D.C.).

My advice went unheeded at the time. When the project came up again this fall, we (TransitMatters; if you haven’t already, become a TM member or apply for our first ever staff position) went all in. We contacted the T, city officials in Somerville and Cambridge, and wrote about it in Commonwealth. The idea is mostly sound. The pushback from the T—which we heard through intermediaries—was twofold, although any problems seemed easily solved:

  • First, they argued that it would adversely affect Alewife-Davis passengers (a valid concern, although I had someone who works with the MBTA looking at how shutdowns affect ridership look at some numbers, and these passengers account for a very small number of overall ridership, as would be expected), which could be mitigated by a single shuttle from Alewife to Davis. 
  • Second, that having buses going to multiple destinations would confuse passengers. Less valid, in my opinion. Apparently a train stopping three stops short of is normal terminal isn’t confusing, but buses with different destinations is? Or as a friend put it: “people can figure out the difference between Alewife and Braintree, right?”

In any case, on Saturday, December 1, the last day of the floating slab project, I got a message from a TransitMatters member: the T was sending buses out to different termini. Some were going to Davis. Some all the way to Alewife. I had been out of Cambridge, but once home I jumped at the opportunity to Hubway (or BlueBike) over to the Harvard Station to check it out. I wanted to see for myself. I wanted the rumor to be true. Alas, when I got there, the buses were operating “normally.”

But I noticed a peculiar difference: rather than being signed for Alewife Sta one of the buses was signed for Alewife Sta via Porter and Davis. If nothing else, this was an improvement in customer information: rather than just the terminal, it showed all of the bypassed stations. By the time I arrived, ridership was relatively low: only about 100 passengers per train, which were handled by two buses, which would be called in to the busway by inspectors as trains arrived. I was somewhat disappointed: I wouldn’t get to see the new system in practice, and that it would only live on as a rumor from a busier time of day. Nor would I be able to commend the T on trying something new. Again, just a rumor on the Internet.

So I walked down the ramp towards the pit, when I noticed a stack of papers sitting on the edge of a trash can (it was above the rim, and, no, I didn’t eat it). My curiosity piqued, I picked one up and read it. What had I’d stumbled upon?

Operator Guide: Harvard – Alewife

Saturday, December 1: 12 PM to 3 PM

We are testing a new Harvard – Alewife shuttle to use buses more efficiently and to provide a better service to our customers. There are a total of 3 different shuttle routes during this time period. A station official will let you know which route to begin when you are arrive at Harvard or Alewife.

The document went on to describe the three routes in detail, the head signs to use (this described the signage I’d seen earlier) and the fact that it had been observed earlier, but not when I was there. The details are that the T rather ingeniously came up with three routes to provide customers routes without sending all of the buses to Alewife. One route ran express from Harvard to Alewife. A second ran from Harvard to Alewife making all stops. A third ran to Davis Square only. While not as efficient as what I had proposed, it was a good balance of customer service and efficiency. I was very impressed, and I hope the test went well.

The skeptic will say “so why didn’t they try this earlier?” I’ll cut the T a lot of slack here. Transit agencies are large bureaucracies, and like ocean liners, they take some time to change course. In this case, they not only had to create this document, they had to vet the route, change the buses sign codes, and communicate with the various officials involved. Could it have happened faster? Maybe. Could it have not happened at all? Most certainly: that’s the easiest thing to do.

Maintenance shutdowns happen. They’re a necessary evil, but they’re an opportunity to experiment. ( (* see below for some brief suggestions) Unfortunately, experimentation is often something anathema to organizations like the MBTA. It takes extra effort for an often overworked staff, and even if the potential payoff is high, the willingness to fail is often low. But in this case, the MBTA tried. I would hope that it was successful, and that it will be the basis for better shuttle services for future floating Slab work, and elsewhere on the system going forwards.

So o everyone involved in the planning and operations staff at the MBTA: kudos and thank you. It’s always a risk to try something new. And to listen to some guy ranting on the Internet. You did both. I hope it worked. I hope that it will work in the future, and that the T use these sorts of situations to try new things to continue to provide the best possible service to its customers.

* Some suggestions for future experiments …

  • When the D Line is shut down from Kenmore to Reservoir, run a local shuttle bus along the route, but encourage through passengers to use the C Line from Cleveland Circle and allow fares (easiest would be to collect no fares west of Reservoir).
  • When the Orange Line is shut down past Ruggles, run every bus terminating at Forest Hills through to the start of Orange Line service, reducing the number of bus-shuttle-subway transfers by allowing passengers on buses to Forest Hills a one-seat ride to the Orange Line trains.
  • When the Green Line is shut next summer from Newton Highlands to Riverside, run alternating buses to Woodland and Riverside, instead of making every Riverside passenger make the tedious loop in and out of the Woodland station.) 
  • If the Lowell Line is shut down on weekends in the future, immediately fire anyone who proposes whatever the bus route used this fall was. Instead run buses from Lowell to Anderson/Woburn and then express to Boston, and serve the rest of the line with the adjacent 134 bus, with a couple of trips added as necessary to supplement service.

Bus yards vs TOD: where is the best place to store buses?

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Boston has a bus problem. Beyond narrow, congested roads and
routes which traverse several jurisdictions—in some cases half a dozen in the
span of a single mile—there are simply not
enough buses to go around. At rush hour, some MBTA bus routes only have
service every 20 to 30 minutes, despite crush-capacity loads on the vehicles
serving them. To add significantly more service would require the MBTA to add
additional buses to the fleet, but procurement of new vehicles is not the rate-limiting
factor. The larger issue is that the MBTA’s bus storage facilities are
undersized and oversubscribed, so adding new buses would require adding
additional storage capacity to the system, a high marginal capital cost for any
increase in service.

Before doing this, the MBTA may be able to squeeze some
marginal efficiency from the system. All-door boarding would reduce dwell
times, speeding buses along the routes. Cities and towns are working with the agency to
add queue jumps, bus lanes and signal priority, steps which will allow the
current fleet to make more trips over the course of the day. Running more
overnight service would mean that some number of buses would be on the road at
all times of the day and night, reducing the need to store those buses during
those times (although they might need to be serviced during peak hours, and may
not be available for peak service). Still, all of this amounts to nibbling
around the edges. Improving bus service may result in increased patronage, and
any additional capacity wrung out of the system could easily be overrun by new
passengers. The MBTA’s bus system is, in essence, a zero-sum game: to add any
significant capacity, the system has to move resources from one route to
another: to rob Peter to pay Paul.

Furthermore, Boston’s bus garages are
antiquated. In the Twin Cities—a cold-weather city where a similarly-sized bus
fleet provides half as many trips as Boston (although about the same number of
passenger miles)—nearly every bus garage is fully-enclosed, so buses don’t sit
outside during cold snaps and blizzards as they do in Boston. Every facility
there has been built since 1980, while several of the MBTA’s bus yards date to
the 1930s; some were originally built for streetcars. Boston
desperately needs expanded bus facilities, but it also needs new bus garages:
the facilities in Lynn, Fellsway and Quincy are in poor condition, and the
Arborway yard is a temporary facility with very little enclosed area.

However, what Boston’s bus yards lack in size or youth they
make up for in location. The MBTA bus system is unique in the country in that there is no bus service through downtown: nearly every trip to the city requires a transfer from a
surface line to a rapid transit line. In the past, elaborate transfer stations
were built to facilitate these transfers, with streetcar and bus ramps above
and below street level (a few vestiges of this system are still in use, most
notably the bus tunnel at Harvard), with bus routes radiating out from these
transfer stations. When the Boston Elevated Railway, the predecessor to
the MBTA, needed to build a streetcar yard, they generally built it adjacent to
a transfer station, and thus adjacent to as many bus routes as possible. Many
of these have become today’s bus yards, and the MBTA has some of the lowest
deadhead (out of revenue service) mileage to and from the starts of its routes.

From a purely operational standpoint, this makes sense: the
buses are stored close to where they are needed. But from an economic
standpoint, it means that the T’s buses occupy prime real estate. Unlike rail
yards, which need to be located adjacent to the lines they serve, bus yards can
be located further away. While this introduces increased deadhead costs to get
the buses from the yard to the route, it frees up valuable land for different
uses. In recent decades, the T has sold off some of its bus garages, most
notably the Bartlett Yard near Dudley and the Bennett Yard near Harvard Square,
which now houses the Kennedy School. The downside is that the T currently has
no spare capacity at its current yards, and needs to rebuild or replace its
oldest facilities.

While the agency has no concrete plans, current ideas
circulate around using park-and-ride lots adjacent to rail stations for bus
storage, including at sites
adjacent to the Riverside and Wellington stations. The agency owns these
parcels, and the parking can easily be accommodated in a nearby garage. The
issue: these parcels are prime real estate for transit oriented development,
and putting bus garages next to transit stations is not the best use of the
land. Riverside
has plans in place, and Wellington’s parking lot sits across Station Landing, which has
hundreds of transit-accessible apartments.

In addition to what is, in a sense, a housing
problem for buses, the Boston area has an acute housing problem for people. The
region’s largest bus yards are adjacent to Forest Hills, Broadway and Sullivan
Square: three transit stations with easy downtown connections. These issues are
not unrelated: there are few large parcels available for housing or transit
storage (or, really, for any other use). If the region devotes land to housing,
it may not have the ability to accommodate the transit vehicles needed to serve
the housing (without devolving the region in to further gridlock). If it uses
transit-accessible land for storing buses, it gives up land which could be used
for dense, transit-accessible housing. What the transit agency needs are sites
suitable for building bus depots, on publicly-owned land, and which would not
otherwise have a high-level use for housing.

Consider a bus maintenance facility: it is really something
no one wants in their back yard. And unlike normal NIMBYism, there actually
some good reasons for this: bus yards are noisy, have light pollution, and
operate at all times of day, but are especially busy for early morning
operations. An optimal site for a bus yard would be away from residences, near
highways (so the buses can quickly get to their routes), preferably near the
outer ends of many routes, and not on land which could otherwise be used for
transit-oriented development. It would also avoid greenfield sites, and
preferably avoid sites which are very near sea level, although if necessary
buses can be stored elsewhere during predicted seawater flood events.

The MBTA is in luck. An accident of history may provide
Boston with several locations desirable for bus garages, and little else. While
most sites near highways don’t have enough space for bus yards, when the regional
highway system was canceled in the early 1970s, several interchanges had
been partially constructed, but were no longer needed. While portions of the
neighborhoods cleared for highways have been, or could be, repurposed in to
developable land, the “infields” of highway ramps is not generally ripe for
development. Yet they’re owned by the state, currently unused, convenient to highways
and unlikely to be used for any other purpose. For many bus routes, moving to
these locations would have a minimal effect on operation costs—deadhead pull-in
and pull-out time—and the land will otherwise go unused. Land near transit
stations is valuable. Land near highways is not.

Building bus yards in these locations would allow the T to
add vehicles to the fleet while potentially closing some of its oldest,
least-efficient bus yards, replacing them with modern facilities. They wouldn’t
serve all routes, since many routes would still be optimally served by
closer-in yards with shorter deadhead movements to get the buses to the start
of the route. (To take this to an extreme: it would be very cheap to build a
bus yard at, say, the former Fort Devens site, but any savings would be gobbled
up by increased overhead getting the buses 35 miles to Boston.) Highway ramps
are optimal because it allows buses to quickly access the start and end of
routes, many of which, by history and happenstance, are near the highways
anyway.

Most importantly: moving buses to these locations would enhance
opportunities for additional housing, not preclude it. Building thousands of
new housing units adjacent to transit stations pays dividends several times
over. It increases local tax revenues and also creates new, fare-paying transit
riders without the need to build any new transit infrastructure. Finally, by
allowing more people to use transit for their commutes, it reduces the growth
of congestion, allowing people driving—and people riding transit—to move more
efficiently.

Specifically, there are five highway sites in the region
which could be repurposed for bus fleet facilities:

  • Quincy, in between the legs of the
    Braintree Split
  • Canton, on the aborted ramps of
    the Southwest Expressway
  • Weston, where the new all-electric
    tolling has allowed for streamlined land use
  • Burlington, in the land originally
    planned for the Route 3 cloverleaf
  • Revere, in the circle where the
    Northeast Expressway was originally planned to branch off of Route 1 through
    the Rumney Marshes.

In more detail, with buses counts from the MBTA’s 2014
Blue Book. These are in-service buses required, so the total number of buses
at each location, accounting for spares, would be 15 to 20 percent higher. The
system currently maintains approximately
1000 buses.

Quincy (67 buses)

All 200-series Quincy Routes

The current Quincy garage serves the
200-series routes, with a peak demand for 67 vehicles. The current garage is in
need of replacement. The current yard takes up 120,000 square feet on Hancock
Street, half a mile from Quincy Center station. This could easily be
accommodated within or adjacent to the Braintree Split, with minimal changes to
pull-out routes. Serving additional routes would be difficult, since the
nearest routes run out of Ashmont, and pull-out buses would encounter rush hour
traffic, creating a longer trip than from the current Cabot yard.

Canton (35
buses)

Routes
24, 32, 33, 34, 34E, 35, 36, 37, 40

This would be a smaller yard and would
probably only operate during weekdays with minimal heavy maintenance
facilities, but would reduce the overall number of buses requiring storage
elsewhere.

Weston (71 buses)

Routes 52, 57, 59, 60, 64, 70/70A, all
500-series express bus routes.

With the recent conversion to all-electronic
tolling on the Turnpike and different ramp layout, the land is newly-freed,
plentiful, and many buses serving this area have long pull-out routes from
Boston. The portion between the two branches of the Turnpike and east of the
128-to-Turnpike ramp is 500,000 square feet, the same size as the Arborway
Yard, and there’s additional room within the rest of the interchange. Without a
bus yard west of Boston, any route extending west or northwest would benefit
from this yard.

Burlington (50 buses)

Routes 62, 67, 76, 77, 78, 79, 134, 350, 351,
352, 354

These routes utilize serve the northwest
suburbs, but most are served by the Charleston and Bennett divisions in
Somerville. Most routes would have significantly shorter pull-outs.

Revere (157 buses)

The two oldest bus garages north of Boston are
Lynn and Fellsway, which account for a total of 125 buses and about 200,000
square feet. They are both centrally-located to the bus network, so moving
buses to the 128 corridor would result in longer pull-outs, except for a few
routes noted above. However, the circle where Route 1 turns northeast and the
Northeast Expressway was originally planned and graded towards Lynn across
Rumney Marshes has 750,000 square feet, and the extension towards the marshes
more. The fill is far enough above sea level to not worry about flooding, and
grade separation allows easy exit and entry on to Route 1. Some buses may make
sense to base at the Route 3 site, particularly the 130-series buses. In
addition to the Lynn and Fellsway buses, this site could take over for many
routes currently operating out of the Charlestown yard, freeing up capacity
there for other uses.

Other routes served by the Charlestown yards
would face somewhat longer pull-out times from Revere, but given the development
potential in Sullivan Square, the T could consider downsizing the yard facility
there and moving operations to a less valuable site. This site, at more than
one million square feet, could likely replace the Charlestown bus facility
entirely.

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 odd history of the 66 Bus Wiggle

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One frequently-mentioned (and usually fallacious) argument is that we need to rework our bus routes because they follow the same routes as they did in the days of the streetcars. (This is a fallacy because, in most cases, the streetcars followed the path of least resistance: straight, wide roads with mixed uses and density. In Houston the uses had changed so drastically since the streetcars it made some sense, in older, denser cities, it doesn’t.) Then there’s the case of the 66 bus in Boston, Brookline, Boston again, and then Cambridge, particularly the two-sides-of-a-triangle “wiggle” to Union Square in Allston. (Here’s a visual primer on the 66)

This isn’t entirely true. There are a lot of reasons why the
66 bus sucks. But this shows the wiggle well.
Via here.

The wiggle stems from a route realignment in 1989, where several routes were rejiggered, which is the type of route realignment I think the T should do more of. Before 1989, there were several routes which terminated in Union Square in Allston, not because it is a major activity locus, or a major transfer point, but because back in the day, there was a car barn there and BERy decided to start and end routes there. Back then, the following routes served Union Square Allston:

  • 57 Kenmore to Watertown Yard
  • 63 Cleveland Circle to Central Square via Western
  • 64 Oak Square to Central Square
  • 66 Allston to Dudley (note that there was never a streetcar line across the Anderson Bridge; this was always a bus line)
  • 86 Union Square Allston to Union Square Somerville via Harvard

After the changes, except for the 57 and 64, the routes were split apart and recombined at Union to better serve the needs of the traveling public (what a thought!). The 63 was combined with the 86 to form the current 86 bus (which had been extended to Sullivan in 1981 a few years after the Orange Line was realigned). The 66 was then extended to Harvard Square to cover the section in Lower Allston the 86 bus missed. This better focused service towards Harvard (where subway connections were, since 1985, available in both directions, and which has more terminal capacity than Central) and provided a one-seat ride between Brookline and Harvard for the first time, leaving us with the current routes:

  • 57 Kenmore to Watertown Yard
  • 64 Oak Square to Central Square
  • 66 Harvard to Dudley 
  • 86 Cleveland Circle to Sullivan

Initially, the 66 was routed straight through on Harvard Ave. Apparently there were protests (not sure by whom; see comments) and that the route no longer served Union Square and it was realigned, and since then has cost through-riding passengers (the majority, although maybe not at the time on the new route) several minutes of travel time. The gist of the protest, as far as I can tell, is that you couldn’t get to Union Square on the 66. But this is not a valid argument. The 66 intersects the 57, another high-frequency bus route, which serves Union Square. If you are unable to make the (short) walk to Union, you can instead utilize the transfer feature of the bus network. Most users can walk the 1200 feet (a 4 minute walk) to Harvard Ave; others can use the every-ten-minutes 57 bus and transfer (or the every not-nearly-as-often-as-it-should-run 64). Apparently, planners at the time kowtowed to these complaints. It probably costs the T tens of thousands of dollars in operating costs every year, and likely reduces ridership as potential riders choose other modes because of the length of the route.

A straightened route would consolidate several stops at Harvard and Commonwealth, which could be rebuilt as a high-amenity stop (larger shelter, higher curb, real-time arrival display, signal priority, etc). The few passengers who need to get to Union Square and can not make the walk could, instead, ride the 57 (or even the 64). No stop would lose service (the entirety of the wiggle duplicates other routes) and it would make the 66 faster and more reliable. We hear that the T should replicate Houston’s bus realignment program (it shouldn’t). But small changes like this which would pay dividends are barely even considered. They should be.

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

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!

A quick look at the T’s privatization bus list

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If you follow this page, you’ll know that I’ve gone on in the past about hyperbole about MBTA privatization. And today, with the list of routes out that are up for bid, a few comments. The idea, apparently, is to reallocate the resources from these routes to core services, so that there will be an increase in service by covering these few routes with other vehicles (the T can’t buy any more vehicles because it is out of room to store and maintain buses), except for late night. The T breaks it down in to three groups—low ridership local routes, express buses (most but not all) and late night routes—but I’d split the first group further in to routes under 200 (core MBTA service routes originally run by the MTA) and routes numbered above 200 (peripheral or suburban routes run by other providers).

If this is as far as privatization goes, it seems to make sense, especially reallocating the service hours and vehicles of large buses being used on low volume routes to other routes and times of day. The T shouldn’t spend time and money to maintain smaller vehicles, and for the few routes where smaller vehicles would work, as long as this expands service rather than replacing it (i.e., the buses are put to better use on other routes) it will help service and ridership. The fear, of course, is that in the long run the number of Carmen-operated 40-foot buses goes down, with, perhaps, a deterioration of service. I’m less sure about the express buses, where I think the idea might be to use coach-style buses for these trips, see below.

A couple of resources:
The 2014 MBTA Blue Book
Changes to transit service since 1964
Miles on the MBTA (a kid—a rising sophomore now?—who had ridden nearly every route the T operates, which is impressive)

Note: service hours are estimated, as are riders per hour and riders per trip. Ridership is from the Blue Book, cost is net cost from a separate spreadsheet from the T.

Core Routes


5. The 5 is a social service route; it completely duplicates the 10 except for the stretch along the McCormack Housing Project which would not have service during the midday. It operates with few passengers, most of whom could probably take the 10. (It’s not as bad as the 48, but similar.) It could be operated with smaller buses, easily, which would probably yield cost savings.
6.5 service hours per day
161 riders, 25 riders per service hour, or 12 per trip.
$0.91/passenger mile

18. The 18 is a local route that runs on Dot Ave from Andrew to Ashmont. Because it runs roughly parallel to the Red Line on 30 to 60 minute headways, most people would opt for the Red Line. So it is likely used for short hops by people unable to walk as far. It is likely similar to the 5 in that is is more a social service route than anything else, and could also be operated with smaller vehicles.
17 service hours per day
619 riders, 36 riders per service hour, 18 riders per trip
$0.65/passenger mile

68. The 68 is a lot like the 18: it parallels the Red Line, has few passengers and rarely-if-ever a full bus (except when the Red Line has a fault, but it is doubtful that enough people know about it to use it) and has the main purpose of getting people between Kendall, Harvard, Cambridge city offices and the library. Nearly all of its functions are duplicated elsewhere, and it didn’t even run between 1981 and 1998. It, too, could be operated with smaller buses to carry the passengers necessary, and the bus used for the 68 could be pressed in to service on Mass Ave where it would carry far more passengers.
12 service hours per day
468 riders, 39 riders per hour, 20 riders per trip
$1.00/passenger mile

99.  This one is harder to explain. The 99 is a subway feeder trip, and at rush hour runs every 20 minutes, which leads me to believe that if it has two or three heavy Orange Line trains empty on to it, it will need a full-sized bus. It’s not a route like the 5, 18, or 68: it has a purpose other than shortening a walk slightly for a few people. It has more than the ridership of those three routes combined. Could it be better integrated with the 106 to provide even headways where they share a route? Certainly. But other than cheaper operators, I don’t see how you get away with operating this with smaller buses.
30 service hours per day
1555 riders, 52 riders per service hour, 26 riders per trip
$0.49/passenger mile

201/202. These are two variations of what was Route 20 from Neponset to Fields Corner. The two trips now combine to run every 15 minutes (or so) on a variety of routes. The route is short and it seems that it has relatively low ridership per bus but high frequency; and most people who would take it instead walk to the Red Line (a station at Neponset on the Braintree Branch would obviate much of the need for the route). Depending on rush hour loads, smaller buses may suffice.
72 (?) service hours per day
1339 riders, 19 riders per hour, 9 riders per trip
$n/a

Suburban routes

52. The 52 is an old M&B Route through Newton on Centre Street in Newton and through to the Dedham Mall. It has minimal rush hour feeder ridership since it traverses a not-so-dense part of Newton and most people can walk to the 57 or Green Line or Express bus instead. Whether its ridership merits a smaller bus depends on the loading at different times of day.
17 service hours per day
766 riders per day, 30 riders per hour, 23 riders per trip
$0.49/passenger mile

70A. This is really interesting. The 70 is not listed, because it’s a busy trunk route which could never have smaller buses. However, it is one of the most dysfunctional routes the T runs because … of the 70A! I’ve advocated in the past for splitting the 70A off as a feeder or transfer route to the 70. So in theory this would accomplish exactly that; I would assume that the privatized portion of the route (the 70A) will not run all the way in to Cambridge; otherwise you’ll have even less coordination between the two mostly-parallel routes with different operators. (If the T does do this, they should all be sacked.) I still think interlining the route with the 556 makes as much, or more, sense, but splitting the 70A off of the 70 could be very beneficial.

I have no idea what the 70A portion of the ridership is as it is not broken out in the Blue Book. But if the current two buses were allocated to the 70, it could provide 8 to 10 minute headways at rush hour and 15 minute headways midday, allowing it to provide a Key Route level of service, with even headways (something it does not do right now) and alleviating chronic crowding along the route. This could be a major bright spot in this privatization scheme, if implemented properly.

210 and 212 are two local routes in Quincy and Dorchester that parallel the Red Line, although they provide frequent feeder service at rush hour. The 212 is a slight variant and only runs a few trips at rush hour, and has far higher ridership per bus/trip than the 210, which has ridership spread more across the day. Since 212 is a feeder, it may require larger vehicles to cope with rush hour crowding, although 210 is more a Red Line parallel route (although it does provide direct service from Quincy to Dorchester that would otherwise require a transfer).
26 service hours per day (21: 210; 5: 212)
210: 736 riders per day, 35 riders per hour, 18 riders per trip, $0.31/pax/mi
212: 293 riders per day, 59 riders per hour, 30 riders per trip, $0.89/pax/mi

439. This is a great candidate for a smaller bus. It carries 97 riders all day, but is the only service to Nahant; it is one of few cases in the area where a town has transit service at rush hour and not at any other time of the day. Even assuming that all riders go inbound on two trips and outbound on the others, (a fair assumption) this is little more than a feeder to the Lynn Commuter Rail station (and a couple of trips to Wonderland) with 20 riders per trip, which could be handled by a smaller vehicle, and this bus could be put to better use.
6 service hours per day
97 riders, 16 riders per hour, 8 riders per trip.
$1.83/pax/mi

451. Way out in the suburbs, this is a bus that is a Commuter Rail feeder to Salem, running at rush hours to and from Beverly. It also provides last-mile service between the Commuter Rail station and the Cummings Center. It could probably be operated with smaller vehicles.
9 service hours per day
163 riders, 18 riders per hour, 10 riders per trip
$0.89/pax/mi

465. Most of the time, this bus runs between Salem and the North Shore and Liberty Tree malls (and you know how I feel about buses to malls; maybe the mall should pay for it). At rush hour, however, it operates like the 451, with more direct service to and from the train station. In fact, during the PM rush hour, passengers to the mall ride the commuter trip first, and can then stay on for the inbound which loops back to the mall. Which actually makes sense. Still, it has relatively low ridership, and a smaller bus may suffice. For a time, the 451 and 465 were through-routed, allowing one-seat rider from Beverly to the malls.
20 service hours per day
414 riders, 21 riders per hour, 16 riders per trip.
$0.65/pax/mi

Express bus routes


I’m a bit more perplexed about the express routes shown. The 500-series routes to Newton, for example, are heavily used (often standing room only on 40′ transit buses) and operate frequently: the type of service transit buses excel at. The same goes for the Medford buses (320 series). The 505, for example, operates 20 inbound trips with 556 inbound riders, meaning that the average load is 28 riders per bus, but this includes a few trips in the 6 and 9 o’clock hours, so at peak times—when the bus runs every 9 minutes—the buses are full. And the bus runs like a city bus from Waltham to West Newton, so a low-floor transit bus is far superior to a high-floor commuter coach. (Many transit agencies do operate coach-style bus service, but it is usually from a park and ride to downtown, which Commuter Rail provides in Boston.) The 502 and 504 provide similar service and frequencies. So in this case you’d need a 40-foot bus, so I’m not sure what the savings would be, unless the successful bidder ran a feeder system to frequent rail service on the Worcester Line that could bypass traffic.

The costs per passenger mile for these express buses ranges from $0.17 to $0.32, with higher fares and longer distances.

The 351 makes a lot more sense, in theory. It is an outbound express bus from Alewife to Burlington and carries about 20 passengers on each of its four trips, some of which may serve as pull-outs for other routes. It also serves an area akin to those served by several of the 128 Business Council‘s shuttles, which serve similar office parks with similar schedules, in areas which otherwise have little if any transit service. It is a good example of a private service that leverages the existing transit network (rather than competing with it) in an area which would likely be hard for the T to justify serving. (Full disclosure, I work for another TMA which operates last-mile shuttles.)

But the issue with the 351 is that it might not operate in a vacuum: some of its trips may be a pullout which then turns as a 350 or a 352. The 352 is also on the list, and I would assume that these would be sold as a package deal. Similarly, it’s not surprising to not see the 170 bus because it serves basically as a revenue pull-out trip for 70 buses. (Although a later trip for the 170 during each rush hour would dramatically help that service; perhaps some of the 70A’s resources could go towards that.) This is the issue with trying to privatize parts of a network: you often wind up pulling on a string and unraveling the whole sweater. These seem to be surgical enough that they won’t dramatically affect it, but—to mix metaphors—it could be a slippery slope.

It will be interesting to see what kind of response the T gets. The union doesn’t seem keen on letting anything out of their grasp, and there would be some perceived risk in operating a trip privately and not running afoul of the Carmen. Unlike the lead-up to Pacheco, there are no proposals to privatize an entire garage, but rather a few small routes. It’s less likely to ruffle a lot of feathers, but the slippery slope argument holds. First they came for the 68, and I said nothing, because I did not drive the 68. Will they then come for the 28 or the 66?

It will be interesting.

The T’s bus maintenance costs are … generally in line with other large transit agencies

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Shirley Leung, the Globe’s business columnist (and Olympics cheerleader) wrote a spurious article on Friday about MBTA privatization (we dissected that piece line-by-line here, and promised this longer post), where she leaned significantly on a recent study from the Pioneer Institute. Why Pioneer is taken seriously in regards to transportation is beyond me. Their numbers rarely stand up to the light of day, and when Very Serious Columnists are taking their analysis as gospel, it is a bad sign for the news media, and bad for local politics in general.

This post will look at some depth at the Pioneer Institute’s bus maintenance cost study, titled “The T’s Bus Maintenance Costs are Out of Control.” I’ve referenced the spurious “research” from the Pioneer Institute before, and mentioned this report; this is a full examination. Their assertion is that the T’s bus maintenance costs are “out of control”, some of the highest in the country, and that the T could save tens of millions of dollars a year if they just reformed how they maintain their bus fleet, asserting that their costs are twice as expensive as “peer agencies” (as defined by them, although we’ll see that their definition of “peer” is, well, suspect). There are numerous problems with this study and the numbers they use in it, to the point where their conclusions are drastically overstated and need to be fully reexamined. Since this is a very long post, I am going to break it in to two pieces: a shorter executive summary, and a larger jump deep in to the weeds of the data.

This post will discuss and dissect the following specious and disingenuous parts of the report:

  • The Pioneer Institute’s faulty definition of “peer agencies”; the metric they use to select agencies is one of few which by definition varies by agency policy.
  • Is “cost per revenue mile” the best metric for measuring the effectiveness of maintenance operations? Does a different number (cost per revenue hour) give us better data and better match how most bus operations account for bus costs, anyway?
  • Pioneer cites Minneapolis as a close analog. But they don’t account for dramatic differences in costs of living and maintenance facilities in the two cities.
  • Pioneer also digs in to the T’s salary database to pull out examples of highly-paid maintenance workers. Yet they look only at the top salaries, not at averages. This is simply hyperbole; their selective use of data serve not to inform people but to scare or anger them.
Overall, much of the supposed variation between the MBTA’s costs and other agencies that Pioneer cites are easily debunked, and they misuse data to misconstrue a problem to fit their agenda of privatization and overall cuts to transit. Instead of looking at appropriate data to try to see how the MBTA could best reign in costs, they use some of the worst data they can find to make hyperbolic statements. And when MBTA reform panels view these data as fact, they’ll make uninformed decisions.

In Brief: By Manipulating data, Pioneer Misrepresents Facts on the Ground

To make its case that the T’s costs are “out of control”, Pioneer first needs to find other agencies to compare the costs to. While there are many ways to use the National Transit Database to choose systems similar to the T, the Pioneer Institute takes an interesting approach. And I don’t mean interesting as in novel, I mean interesting as in suspect. The most logical idea would be to use a list of other large transit systems, but the Pioneer Institute uses miles between “failures” which the NTD explicitly points out in their definitions is subject to variation in agency policy.

By doing so, and by selecting agencies which carry one fifteenth as many passengers at MBTA buses alone (and in some cases as few as one fiftieth—or two percent—of the total number of passengers) they are really comparing apples to oranges. The T is being compared to sunbelt cities (no road salt, roads with less traffic and fewer acceleration and deceleration cycles) with many fewer passengers. These include systems which serve Palm Beach County, suburban Detroit and El Paso, for example, yet the report doesn’t compare the T to Philadelphia or Seattle, much better analogs. Comparing the T to its actual peers—other top-20 transit agencies—makes the costs go from 100% higher to just 40%. More than half of the supposed out of control costs are because of a false comparison.

The report also uses “revenue miles” while “revenue hours” would be a better metric. The T, which serves a compact, urban area, has a relatively high maintenance cost per revenue mile while its cost per revenue hour is more in line with other areas. It turns out that per hour (and many bus operation costs are per hour, not per mile) the T has some of the most efficient buses in the country, in the company of Chicago, San Francisco and New York, and far ahead of El Paso and Spokane. To put it another way: not all miles are created equally: a mile on the T will have more stops, more acceleration and more stress on the bus infrastructure, but also many more passengers.

Pioneer then cites Minneapolis as a good analog for the MBTA. While Minneapolis has a similar number of buses to the T, this analysis is somewhat fraught for a few reasons. First, Minneapolis carries only about half the bus passengers of the MBTA (and operates only a nascent rail system, so its overall transit ridership is only 20% of the T). Minneapolis also has much newer maintenance facilities (all have been built since the 1980s) as opposed to the T’s facilities, many of which date from the streetcar era. In addition, Minneapolis has the capacity to store nearly all of their vehicles indoors, a far cry from the T’s outdoor yards. Boston does have an advantage, however; it’s facilities are much more centrally-located, and it has only about half the deadhead requirements moving vehicles in and out of service that Minneapolis has, saving significant operating expenses.

Finally, Pioneer makes a hyperbolic statement about how highly-paid some T maintenance employees are, but it of course only cites the highest paid employees, and doesn’t look at any averages. The average worker is not paid in excess of $100,000; and the $70,000 maintenance salaries commanded by the skilled workers who keep the T’s rolling stock in place may be high, but are commensurate with the high cost of living. (House prices in Boston are twice what they are, for example, in Minneapolis.) The high salaries cited are due to overtime accrued (those lazy union members at it again, working 60 hour weeks), likely at times when many vehicles are in need of repairs to maintain service (the T has a relatively low spare ratio, so a problem which at another agency might be put off while a new bus is put in to service would have to be fixed at the MBTA). These cost differentials, and the fact that the MBTA has invested far less in capital facilities than Minneapolis (upgrading all of the T’s bus facilities would likely stretch beyond a billion dollars), bring the costs much closer together. Additionally, the T keeps a lower headcount (which saves on the number of benefited employees) and instead pays more overtime. This may actually save money, since for many employees the cost of benefits amounts to 30% or more of base salary, so having more employees working fewer hours may cost more.

Pioneer’s study is a textbook case of having an agenda and massaging data to best fit ones premonition. The problem is that under more scrutiny, the numbers mostly fall apart. The T’s maintenance costs are more expensive than several other large systems (although notably less than New York), and there are certainly lessons that we could learn from them. However, instead of beating the drum of the greedy unions and that privatization is the only answer, we should look at what works—and what doesn’t work—and how the T can take advantage of more efficient workplace and management practices. Relations between government and the T unions have never been warm, but specious threats based on hollow data and parroted time and again in the news media will not help the matter. And rather than trying to drive a wedge between management and the laborers, the T should give the unions a seat at the table: workers without the constant specter that their jobs may be outsourced are likely to be more productive, which may save money in the long run.

In Detail: The Numbers Behind the Curtain


What is a “Peer Agency” anyway?


In their report, the Pioneer Institute defines the “peer agencies” against which they compare the MBTA’s costs. Before we get in to exactly how they do so, below are three lists of cities (or in the case of larger statewide agencies, the city or region in which the agency operates). Two are what the Pioneer Institute used as their “peer agency” list. Which do you think is a better fit for the comparison against the T? (NB: I’ve colored systems which appear on two or more of the lists to show the amount of crossover between them.)

List A: List B: List C:
Washington, D.C.
Houston
Oakland
Salt Lake City
Sacramento
San Jose (VTA)
Saint Petersburg
Spokane 
Baltimore (MTA)
New Jersey Transit
Orange County, Calif.
Cleveland
San Diego
Delaware Transit
Suburban Detroit
Palm Beach County
Albuquerque
Cincinnati
Jacksonville
Suburban Chicago		 Washington, D.C.
Houston
Oakland
Salt Lake City
Sacramento
San Jose (VTA)
Saint Petersburg
Spokane 
Minneapolis
San Francisco
Chicago
Fort Worth
Dallas
San Bernardino
Rochester, N.Y.
Syracuse
Providence (RIPTA)
Charlotte
El Paso
Memphis		 Washington, D.C.
Houston
Oakland
Baltimore (MTA)
New Jersey Transit
Minneapolis
San Francisco
Chicago
New York City
Los Angeles
Philadelphia
Denver
Miami
Atlanta
Pittsburg
San Diego
Las Vegas
Portland
Honolulu
Seattle
Any guesses?

List C is a list of the largest bus transit systems in the country by daily ridership. Lists A and B are the lists the Pioneer Institute uses. Does it make sense to compare the MBTA to cities like Spokane, Salt Lake City and Saint Petersburg? Or does it make more sense to use cities like Los Angeles, Philadelphia and Denver? I’d argue the latter. The Pioneer Institute, apparently, thinks the former. Note that of the Pioneer Institute’s two lists comprise 32 cities, of which just 8—25%—are among the top 20 transit systems. The MBTA, for comparison, is the 7th largest.

Before we go any further, let’s look at one piece of data for these lists:

Pioneer List A: Pioneer List B: Top 20 Agencies:
Mean Daily Ridership 157396 186315 483682
Median Daily Ridership 100596 67335 320815

They’re comparing apples to oranges! The average ridership for the top 20 bus agencies is 483,000. (The T carries 405,000 daily.) The average sizes of the agencies Pioneer is comparing the MBTA to are 32% and 39% as big. Looking at the median size (more important, actually, since Pioneer does not weight their averages), the median Pioneer agency is 16-25% as big as the T. Unless there’s a very good explanation as to why they chose these agencies, it seems that they weren’t chosen for a logical reason.

So, how did Pioneer define “Peer Agency”? They looked at two metrics for vehicle maintenance: miles between failures (List A) and miles between major mechanical failures (List B). Pioneer Institute took some lower bound for the size of a bus fleet or daily ridership (somewhere in the neighborhood of 100 buses or 25,000 daily riders; they don’t define this) and sorted it by the overall miles between mechanical failures metric (which they define as “maintenance productivity performance”) from the National Transit Database (NTD) to find the “most similar” agencies.

This is problematic for two reasons. First, choosing this lower bound means that they are going to be comparing a wide variety of systems very different from the T, as seen by the list above that includes several transit systems with one tenth or fewer the daily ridership of the MBTA. Six of the agencies have ridership under one tenth of the T—40,000—another 13 come in under 100,000, or less then a quarter the size of the T. This means that nearly half of the MBTA’s “peer agencies” carry 1/4 or fewer the number of passengers daily; few of these have interconnected rail systems either. One comparison, to Palm Beach Transit, is so risible that on a Sunday, the 28 bus in Boston carries more passengers than the entire Palm Beach transit system.

This is more of an issue, because it means that Boston is being compared to many cities which have far, far less transit service. Since the MBTA carries 2/3 of its passengers by rail (New York, DC and—believe it or not—Atlanta are the only other cities in the country with more rail riders than bus riders) it means that the MBTA carries fifty times as many passengers each day than the smallest “peer” agencies in cities where transit accounts for a tiny percentage of trips. I’m going to pause and say this again: the Pioneer Institute defines a “peer agency” as one which carries 2% as many passengers daily as the MBTA. That’s a rounding error! This is like trying to draw conclusions by comparing Starbucks and an independent coffee shop. It doesn’t make any sense.

Thus, most of these systems will have buses which operate in much different conditions than the T. They have longer distances between stops, far less acceleration and deceleration, fewer passengers per bus and much less time spent with crush-load capacities which put more strain on the vehicle’s physical infrastructure. In most cases, their routes often operate through less-dense city centers and not mainly as a feeder system for subway stations like the T does, with many fewer cycles between full and empty.

Second, and perhaps even more egregious, there’s the definition of system failures (italics mine):

(List A) Other Mechanical System Failure: A failure of some other mechanical element of the revenue vehicle that, because of local agency policy, prevents the revenue vehicle from completing a scheduled revenue trip or from starting the next scheduled revenue trip even though the vehicle is physically able to continue in revenue service. 

(List B) Major Mechanical System Failure: A failure of some mechanical element of the revenue vehicle that prevents the vehicle from completing a scheduled revenue trip or from starting the next scheduled revenue trip because actual movement is limited or because of safety concerns.

While most NTD numbers are rather concrete (“passenger miles traveled” or “revenue service hours”) these much more fungible based on different maintenance criteria for different agencies. Note especially that the first list is explicitly based on local agency policy. So, not only is Pioneer choosing cities with much smaller systems, but they are compounding this issue with a metric which varies by local agency policies! What’s more, some agencies, like the Maryland Transit Agency, don’t report “other mechanical system failures”, only major ones.

It would make sense to use a variable that is well-correlated for this analysis. Here are the r-squared values for agencies with at least 25,000 daily bus passengers:

  • Major failures and maintenance cost per revenue mile: 0.049
  • Other failures and maintenance cost per revenue mile: 0.018
  • Average weekday passengers and maintenance cost per revenue mile: 0.39

One of these things is not like the others. One of these things is correlated order of magnitude with the cost per mile than the others. And the numbers range more than one might expect: major failures range from every 1600 miles to once every 117,000 miles; and other failures, for agencies which report them, range from once every 2900 miles to once every 953,000 miles.

What might cause a bus to be removed from service in one system might not in another. There’s nothing wrong with that, but it makes it very suspect to use these numbers as a basis for further analysis, especially when better numbers certainly exist. It would make much more sense to choose the cities in the top 20 to compare to the MBTA. The problem is that such a list wouldn’t have supported the Pioneer Institute’s “conclusions” nearly as strongly.

Pioneer is measuring the “productivity” of a bus maintenance shop by the frequency with which the buses broke down without looking at any other data. This is like measuring the “productivity” of a doctor by the frequency with which his or her patients die. Which is all well and good—some doctors are actually more productive than others—except that a cardiologist is going to have more patients die than an optometrist, a gerontologist is going to have more patients die than a pediatrician, and a doctor that works in a high smoking state like  Kentucky is going to have more people die than someone working in Utah. If you’re not correcting for the age of the vehicle, variations in the kinds of vehicles used, and variations in the duty cycle, you’re going to come to some screwy conclusions.

I like charts, so here is one. It shows transit systems with more than 20,000 riders. Note how the Pioneer Institute’s “peer agencies” are mostly clustered in systems with much lower ridership than the MBTA. I threw in a best fit line for fun, and, yes, larger agencies have higher maintenance costs. Which is not surprising.

In any case, it comes down to a sort of Occam’s Razor question: the obvious definition of “peer agency” would be “other large transit systems.” Since that was not the metric used, we need to look in to why it was not. If there’s no good answer why it wasn’t—and there isn’t—then it certainly seems like the reason Pioneer used these criteria is to try to prop up their preconceived conclusion, rather than to make an honest argument.

I’ve only compiled the 2013 data (why? because I am doing this evenings and weekends and I don’t have a paid team of fellows and researchers funded by right-wing climate change deniers to go back through several years), but note the following:

Pioneer List A: Pioneer List B: Top 20 Agencies:
MBTA maintenance
cost % of average		 208% 192% 153%

In other words, just by choosing a more representative data set, we’ve explained away half of the discrepancy between the T and other agencies.

But, wait, there’s more. Let’s say you only looked at the small group of agencies clustered near the T. There’s a big (50% increase) gap between Denver at 250,000, and Seattle, at 391,000, and another 50% gap between SEPTA and the CTA. If we compare Boston to Seattle, New Jersey, San Francisco, New York MTA Bus division and Philadelphia, the T averages just 140% of those other agencies, barely one third of the difference Pioneer’s “data” show. That seems like a much more representative sample than, say, Salt Lake, Sacramento, San Jose, Saint Petersburg and Spokane. I would wonder if the Pioneer Institute would deign to offer an explanation as to why they chose “peer agencies” in the manner that they did.

As I see it, there are three. One is that they randomly picked the metric to categorize this, and somehow stumbled on to the worst one they could since it’s really the only NTD data which varies by agency. I doubt this based on the Occam’s Razor principle that if you asked a student in a first year transportation statistics class what to use, they’d be hard-pressed to come up with what Pioneer did. The second is that someone doing research at Pioneer just isn’t that bright, and that’s a possibility. But the third is more nefarious: they came in to the study with a question they had a preconceived answer for, and then found the snippet of data which best supported their thesis. The problem is, well, the data.

Are all miles created equally?


Once the Pioneer Institute chose the wrong systems to compare the T to, they then chose to compare those systems based on a metric of “maintenance cost per mile.” On its face, this seems like a good analysis, and it’s not bad, but it ignores the issue that not every mile is created equally. For instance, which causes more wear and tear on a bus: a mile in stop-and-go traffic with a stop every 800 feet and 60 passengers on the bus, or a mile at 35 mph with two traffic lights and two passenger stops carrying 20 or 30 passengers?

Here’s another way to think about it: which is more stressful for your car? Driving with four passengers, a full trunk in stop-and-go traffic or a highway trip? The former is what buses in major cities are put through on a daily basis. But in many of the “peer systems” on the lists above, buses ply faster suburban arterials in much less dense areas. This means that they make fewer stops, and at those stops they pick up fewer people. That means less wear and tear on door mechanisms, air bags, transmissions, tires and even the vehicle frame. Wear and tear on a bus depends on its operational environment.

A better metric—one that accounts more for operational differences—would be maintenance cost per revenue hour. Bus costs are usually measured in hours (operators are paid by the hour, not the mile) and calculating revenue hours is a better way to account for different operating environments. For instance, a bus in City A might average 10 miles per hour and a bus in City B might average 15 mph. However the bus in City A might have more passengers over the course of that hour, more openings and closings of the doors, and a heavier average load. Cost per hour lets us better account for this.

So how does the T stack up on this basis? It’s still quite high, around $45.00, while the top 20 cities average to $30 and the Pioneer “peers” come out at $25. Instead of being 200% of its peers, the T is “only” 180%. So by using this metric, the T is still underperforming. However, there are more outliers in the same range. In the previous chart, the T was the only agency in the range of the New York systems; in this metric, it is joined by three others: VTA (Santa Clara County/San Jose), Pittsburgh and Detroit. Still, it is 50% higher than its peers, so there is some room for improvement. Perhaps Pioneer’s conclusions should not be “we need to privatize everything and eliminate the unions” but rather “let’s see what these other cities are doing and what we can do better.”

Is Minneapolis the right analog?

Much of Pioneer’s study focuses on comparing the MBTA to MetroTransit, the bus system in Minneapolis, Saint Paul and the surrounding area. After comparing the T to the two lists of 20 cities (one of which includes MetroTransit) the authors focus in on comparing the T to one such agency which is more like the T. (And in a stunning use of logic, they don’t choose, say, El Paso.) MetroTransit operates a similarly-sized fleet to the MBTA, and also operates in winter weather (which is not the case for many “peer agencies” above). So comparing the T to Minneapolis is not a bad choice.

But are there differences that probably account for a lot of the difference? Certainly. First of all, Minneapolis carries about 215,000 bus passengers, about half as many as Boston. The average trip is longer, as buses are the workhorse of the system (the two rail lines combine for only about 60,000 passengers per day), so there are fewer bus-rail transfers. But the number of trips per revenue mile in Minneapolis is still only 60% of Boston*—in fact, Boston has one of the highest number of trips per mile of any system in the country.

[ * This will probably be lower in coming years, as Minneapolis replaced one of its busiest bus lines—the 16 and 50, connecting downtown Minneapolis and Saint Paul and accounting for 10% of the total system ridership—with a light rail line in 2014. This has led to a significant overall increase in transit use (already nearing 2030 estimates with 36,000 daily riders), but an overall decrease in bus patronage and the number of passengers per bus. The 16 ran at 24 hour service and 10 minute headways at most times of day and was supplemented by the limited stop 50, especially at rush hours. Combined, they carried 24,000 passengers per day. ]

Pioneer examines several years of data (to their credit) and I’m looking just at 2013 (because this isn’t, you know, my job), so there are obviously fleet age questions, but when looking at a sample of this size (2 cities), there are all sorts of questions. Did numbers spike some years because many buses went out for mid-life overhaul? Were old buses give only very necessary maintenance in anticipation of retirement? Did new buses coming online require much less maintenance? I’m not sure how much difference this might make.

But what I do think makes a difference are two factors:

  • The Twin Cities have a much lower cost of living than Boston
  • While Boston uses a variety of maintenance yards, some of which date back well in to the streetcar era, the Twin Cities made large investments in large, modern and enclosed maintenance facilities.

Boston is an expensive place to live. Housing prices are skyrocketing and affordable housing is somewhat hard to come by. Working on buses requires the ability to commute to a maintenance facility, most of which are located in areas with high housing prices, and staff need to be paid accordingly. Minneapolis is far less expensive. Housing prices in the Twin Cities in 2014 were just 53% as high as in Boston, and the overall cost of living was 16% lower. Since personnel costs are a large part of maintenance costs, it is not surprising that it costs more to pay staff in Boston.

Then there’s the question of capital investment. One of the reasons the T is reluctant to add bus service is that it can’t expand its fleet. The number of buses is constrained by yard space, and new bus yards don’t come cheap. Recent discussions about rebuilding the bus yard at Arborway have quoted figures in the range of $200 to $250 million, and that’s one of more than half a dozen facilities the T operates. Rebuilding enough bus yards for the whole system would likely be a billion dollar project, or higher.

What’s more, the current locations of the T’s bus yards are worth a lot of money, and would help with the regional housing crunch. One sits at Arborway, and could be sold for $20 million (or leased to a developer as well)—and the city would also reap property taxes from a property which is currently untaxed. Another, Cabot, sits steps from the Seaport District and South Station, Albany is similarly situated in the South End, and the largest is the Charlestown Yard, in a decrepit-but-transit-rich part of Sullivan Square. So there’s the opportunity cost of not selling these off for development as well. But having well-located bus yards is an asset to the T, as it’s non-revenue (“deadhead”) mileage is some of the lowest of any large system (11%), it can’t afford to lose any facilities without replacing that capacity, and large plots of land in warehousing or industrial areas are not plentiful in Boston.

Minneapolis, on the other hand, has relatively new bus maintenance facilities. Every facility has been built since 1980. (And there are only six facilities, as opposed to the MBTA’s nine, lending economies of scale.) With lower land prices and much less density, most of the facilities are relatively centrally located, yet don’t take up valuable, transit-rich land. What’s more, every bus facility in Minneapolis is fully enclosed. In Boston, most bus facilities consist of an open yard with a maintenance garage. In the case of Arborway—one of the largest facilities—it is a small, temporary building. Buses are by and large stored outside. In Minneapolis, nearly all buses are stored inside. There’s adequate room to work, and the buses being stored don’t sit overnight in freezing temperatures.

Even still, the Twin Cities’s bus yards are not as centrally-located as Boston’s (T yards are often shoehorned in to small parcels; MetroTransit yards are usually larger and squarer). While Boston runs 11% of its mileage out of revenue service (deadhead), the Twin Cities run 24% (and as far as hours go, Boston is 9% deadhead and the Twin Cities 14% owing to a larger and less-crowded highway system in the Twin Cities). To access these newer, more efficient facilities requires significantly more operation expense. It would be as if the T built new bus facilities in Billerica, Southborough and Brockton: they’d likely be more efficient, but savings would be eaten up driving buses back and forth to and from them. Given the T’s salaries, if their garages were located such that they required 14% deadhead hours like the Twin Cities, it would add $5 million to annual operating costs.

That being said, MetroTransit has certainly invested money in vehicle maintenance facilities that the T has not. If the T had spent a billion dollars on a set of brand new bus maintenance facilities, it would likely spend less on maintaining its buses. Of course, if we assume that there is $1 billion in deferred facility capital outlay and that a bus maintenance facility has a useful life of 50 years, it would cost $20 million per year to build those facilities, money the T is currently spending on other projects. I’m not saying that this is a logical way to do business; the T should budget for and build adequate maintenance facilities. But comparing a system with new, enclosed facilities with the T’s antiquated mishmash of bus yards and small garages certainly needs some qualification.

The T’s maintenance budget runs $40 to $60 million ahead of MetroTransit each year. But, again, there’s much more to this than meets the eye. If the T required as many deadhead hours as MetroTransit, it would cost $5 million extra in operating costs just to get the buses to and from the garage. Given the difference in cost of living, the T’s salaries are higher than MetroTransit’s. If we only look at salary, the cost of living difference accounts for $6 million of that difference, and if we add in benefits it’s $11 million. And then, there’s the $10 to $20 million annually that the T hasn’t spent on new maintenance facilities. Better fleet renewal and capital outlay for maintenance facilities would probably help the T’s maintenance budget: maintenance is not siloed financially from the rest of the transit system’s operation.

In 2013 the T spent $104 million on vehicle maintenance to MetroTransit’s $45, so I’ll use those numbers. I will note that was a year before the T accepted a large order of New Flyer hybrid buses, which should require less maintenance than the 20-year-old RTS fleet they replace. In 2013 T’s bus fleet (average age: 9.4 years) was significantly older than MetroTransit’s (average age: 5.1 years). (I’m not even accounting for the lower capital costs the T has with an older fleet, although the fleet age obviously manifests as higher maintenance costs.) This could certainly be reanalyzed for other years; by using the year when MetroTransit had a much newer fleet, this probably paints the T in a worse light than is actually the case. According to Pioneer, during years in which the fleets for the MBTA and MetroTransit were similar ages, the T’s costs were only about double MetroTransit’s.

In any case:

Total Annual Expendeture $105m % of total
– Deadhead operation cost difference

– Cost of living difference (salary, salary+benefits)

– Facility construction

 –$5m

–$6m-$11m

–$10m-$20m

 5%

6-10%

10-19%
Adjusted total $69-$84m 66-80%
% of difference $21m-$36m 35-58%
† Adjusted total ($90m MBTA) $55m-$70m 22-39%
† % of difference ($90m MBTA) $20m-$35m 44-78%

† From 2006 to 2009, MBTA costs were about 200% of MetroTransit costs, and the bus fleets’ ages were similar. Assuming that if the T had a similarly-aged bus fleet to MetroTransit and double the costs, it would have a $90 million maintenance budget. If this is a good way to account for the fleet’s age difference, between 40 and 80% of the difference could be explained by deadhead operation expenses, cost of living and facilities.

Citing high salaries as a scare tactic


One of the favorite pastimes of the anti-union, anti-government folks is to find someone who works for the government and makes a lot of money and hold it up as an example of government waste (well, unless it’s a football coach; they’re fine with that). In their report, they go and find examples of people making a lot of money (a painter making $80,000! A machinist making $120,000! A car cleaner bringing home $70,000!) and use this to show how wasteful government is. But, of course, this is hyperbole. These are outliers: probably people who worked a lot of overtime—some 60 hour weeks—in order to make that much money. Since transit runs 24/7, there’s overtime to be had: a few extra buses break down, or someone calls sick and a worker picks up an extra shift. Are there some savings to be had from better oversight of overtime? Probably. But without showing the average numbers, these are pure scare tactics, a rhetorical device that doesn’t stand up to any scrutiny. Luckily, I have the T’s salary database sitting around (which is public record, of course), so we can do some such analysis.

Yes, all MBTA salaries are public information.
You can access the file here.

It’s unlikely the T will ever be able to use non-union employees, even if maintenance is privatized. Given the construction boom in Boston, these salaries do not seem far out of hand for union labor (union sheet metal workers, for example, make nearly $100 per hour, or $200,000 per year, although they don’t of course, have the job security a T worker does). Here are the base salary ranges for the major employment categories among the T’s bus maintenance personnel:

Fueler $34964 – $43014
Machinist $57262 – $77750
Car cleaner $60278
Painter/Carpenter $82035
Foreman $87672 – $100672
Sheet metal $89669
Pipefitter $94994
Wireperson $95617

On average, employees earned 119% of their 2015 base salaries in 2014. Why? As mentioned before, overtime. Could the T hire more employees and pay less overtime? Probably. But if they did, there’d be outcry from Pioneer about how even more workers were getting the platinum-level union compensation package and benefits. They want to privatize operations, and assure lower pay and benefits for everyone. Is that a way to treat public employees? I’m all for accountability, but it shouldn’t require these sort of threats.

To add it all together …


Pioneer’s top line statement—that the T could have saved $250 million in bus maintenance costs over 6 years—is specious. They massage and manipulate data, but it doesn’t stand up to any scrutiny. Does the T have some of the highest maintenance costs around? Yes, it does (although New York is higher still). Some of this is due to the operating environment, some is due to local costs of living, some is due to the lack of appropriate facilities and, yes, some may be due to the performance of MBTA employees. The T could probably reduce it’s overall maintenance expenditures with different management practices, but to insist that those are put in to place without any funding (for instance: to insist on better management while many repairs take place in outdated and/or temporary facilities) is just silly. To use blatantly and obviously manipulated numbers to make this argument is disingenuous, and, once examined, the Pioneer Institute’s argument falls apart. There is very little defense for this sort of sloppy “analysis,” and it certainly should not be relied upon to make policy changes.

Using several different—and more honest—metrics, we can explain away much of that difference:

  • 60% of the Pioneer Institute report’s difference in costs arise from their suspicious definition of “peer agency.” Of the $250 million that they claim the T could save, that accounts for $150 million of it.
  • Just by using maintenance cost per hour instead of maintenance cost per mile, the difference is 20% lower.
  • In comparison to the Twin Cities, we can explain 35% to 75% of the difference in costs between the two systems.
The Pioneer Institute had an agenda: to reduce the power of public employee unions and privatize all that they can. Their position may well be “why spend time and money figuring out how to reform our management when we can just outsource it and let the magic of free market competition figure all that out for us, via a contractor, now?” But without good data on other systems (Has any large system privatized and had major cost benefits? They don’t say.) this is a hollow sentiment. And the MBTA’s current contractors have been doing a less-than-stellar job of late: the publicly run subway operations recovered from the blizzards far more quickly than the private-contract Commuter Rail system.

Pioneer saw a well-compensated set of individuals, and tried to make a case that they are lazy, that they have a poor work ethic, and that compared to their peers in other cities, that they have poor work quality. It’s true that MBTA costs are higher than many other agencies, and the T could probably implement policies to bring costs down to some degree. Upon further examination, however, it is the “research” coming from the Pioneer Institute that is low quality, not the work of the maintenance department at the MBTA.

Bus Lanes on the Harvard Bridge

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April was Bus Month here at Amateur Planner, and May is showing no signs of slowing down. I noticed recently that in a traffic jam on the Harvard Bridge (which occur regularly, especially during baseball season), there are not many buses on the bridge, but they carry a large portion of the people crossing it. So I waited for the next traffic jam on the bridge (not a long wait) and went to take a photograph, which I then annotated:

This was taken at the 250 Smoot marker (so about two thirds of the way to hell), and I noted that, in stopped traffic, there were 20 cars per 100 Smoots (this is a bit more than 25 feet per car; Smoot markers make it really easy to quickly measure things). I took a quick census of the number of people in each car (appeared to be about 1.3) and set about making the graphic above. (The bus numbers account for one at all-seated capacity, one at normal standing capacity, and one at crush load.)
Then I tweeted it, and it may have gotten retweeted a couple of times.
There was one bizarre (in my opinion—and I’m really not sure if it’s uninformed or malicious) response thread, which amounted to the following (as requested by the Tweeter, the full conversation is below):
This is where the bus does go. (1/4 and
1/2 mile buffers of MBTA bus routes.)
So, pretty much everywhere.

Responder: Plenty of people need to get where buses don’t go.
Me: I’m fine with them having one lane of the Harvard Bridge, and the buses go a *lot* of places; if they ran faster than cars, more people would take them.
Responder: So glad you’re not making the rules.
Me: Here are areas within 1/4 and 1/2 miles of bus routes, where again are people going that the buses don’t go? [See map at right.] And why should my tax $$ go to pay for buses to sit in traffic so cars can … sit in traffic? >50% of the people on the bridge are in buses. Why not give them 50% of the space?
Responder: It’s the when, not the where. Bus schedules don’t nec. match ppl’s schedules. RedSox fans all over NE. [editor’s note: see original Tweet in thread.]
Me: So if the buses were 15 minutes faster than driving, people would take them, and anyone who *drives* to Fenway deserves a dope slap. [There’s] plenty of parking at Alewife-Riverside-Wellington-Wonderland. Trains run every 5 mins. Why should 20k+ bus passengers be delayed 10 mins for a few Sox fans?
Responder: It’s about making connections too—when too many connections get inefficient, driving works.
Me: Driving works? Tell that to the people on that bridge: people were walking faster. Bus lanes means more people opt for transit, fewer cars overall, and less traffic.
Responder: Just because buses work for you doesn’t mean they work for all.
Me: That’s the problem. They don’t work. The deck is stacked in favor of driving. I’m not saying ban cars, I’m saying let’s equalize street real estate. Why shouldn’t a bus with 50 passengers have priority over a car with 1 or 2?

But this is the usual reactionary inability to see the greater good. Take away a lane from cars, and it’s an affront to driving. An affront to freedom. Un-American. Never mind the majority of people on that bridge aren’t driving cars. They don’t matter. Still, I haven’t heard this turned in to an equity argument, so that’s kind of groundbreaking.

So the first part of this blog post is a plea: Ms. Cahill, I want to know what goes through the mind of someone who can’t see that transit efficiency is a societal benefit, and that it will amount to more people using fewer vehicles. Please email me, comment here, and discuss. I want to know.

The second part is me, trying to quantify what would happen to vehicles displaced by a bus lane on the Harvard Bridge, and what the time savings would be for bus riders as opposed to the time penalties for drivers. And, as I am wont to do, I did this in chart form. I imagined a hypothetical traffic jam stretching across the bridge (0.4 miles) in a closed system where all of the cars feed off of Mass Ave on to the bridge (this is close to the case, but some traffic does enter from Memorial Drive):

At first glance, going from two lanes to one would double the length of roadway needed to store the same amount of cars. But several other factors come in to play. First of all, the buses take up the space of 8 cars—at least. Then, we can assume that 10% of the cars remaining will shift modes: if taking the bus is all of the sudden significantly faster than driving, people will use it. And people in taxis (by my estimation, 10% of the traffic on the bridge) will likely switch in greater numbers since they’re starting closer by: I estimated 50% mode switch there. Then there’s induced demand: make the traffic on Mass Ave worse, and some drivers—I said 10%—will choose another route, whether it’s the Longfellow or the BU Bridge or further afield.

Add these together, and I would guess that traffic would increase by between 1/3 and 1/2. Assuming that traffic moves at 5 mph, this would mean an increase of 2.5 to 4 minutes for each person in a car on the bridge. But it would also mean that buses would cross unencumbered by traffic, making the trip in one minute, and saving every bus passenger 7 (this assumes that the bus lanes extend back to Vassar Street, displacing bus stops and a few parking spaces on Mass Ave through MIT). With these numbers, drivers would incur 510 minutes of additional delay, but bus passengers would save nearly three times that much time—a dramatic benefit.

Am I way off base with these numbers? I don’t think so. When the Longfellow went from two lanes to one, vehicle traffic decreased by nearly half! Traffic spread to other locations, people chose other modes (walking, biking, transit), or didn’t make trips. The traffic apocalypse that was predicted didn’t materialize, and life has gone on.

The Harvard Bridge is one of the most heavily-traveled bus corridors in the city, up there with the North Washington Bridge, the Silver Line on Washington Street, the 39/66 concurrency on South Huntington, portions of Blue Hill Avenue, some streets to Dudley and the feeder buses to Forest Hills. (All of these should have bus lanes, by the way.) The 1 and CT1 combine for more than 15,000 trips per day and, at rush hour, better than one bus every 6 minutes. The bridge also carries the heavily-traveled M2 MASCO shuttle 6 times per hour. Combined, these routes account for a full (usually crush-load) bus every three minutes—which is why in a 10 or 12 minute traffic jam there are three or four buses on the bridge at any given time—transporting at least 1000 passengers per hour.

Bus lanes would allow these bus lines to operate more reliably, more efficiently and more quickly, meaning the same number of buses could run more trips, and carry more people. Which, if they’re 10 minutes faster than cars, they’re going to be carrying! This would be something that could be tested and quantified, and it could be done as a temporary pilot with cones and paint. There is no parking to worry about, no bus stops to relocate: just set aside one lane for buses (and give buses signal priority at either end of the bridge). This would take the cooperation of MassDOT, DCR, Boston and Cambridge—and prioritize “those people” riding transit over real, taxpaying non-socialist Americans—so I don’t expect it to happen any time soon.