Ricochet is the best place on the internet to discuss the issues of the day, either through commenting on posts or writing your own for our active and dynamic community in a fully moderated environment. In addition, the Ricochet Audio Network offers over 50 original podcasts with new episodes released every day.
Can Buses Ever Be Cool?
Recently, at The American Interest, Walter Russell Mead highlighted a UK think tank’s efforts to persuade the government that buses are superior to trains. “The great train fantasy” is, he argues, preventing us from generating sensible solutions to transportation problems. Trains seem fancy and futuristic, but in reality are expensive and lower-capacity than buses. Also, buses are more flexible. When urban development and demographic changes alter people’s travel needs, you can just change the bus routes. It’s much harder to reroute a train.
Despite all that, buses still seem déclassé, which is presumably a major reason why trains and light rail continue to streak their way through the dreams of liberal urban planners. Trains seem sleek and streamlined and their doors make that cool whoosh noise. Is the coming technocratic paradise going to run on buses? Yeah, right.
For the record, I personally hate mass transportation. As a mom with several small kids, it’s fairly useless to me, and I hated everything about St. Paul’s recent light rail project (which, as far as I could tell, was motivated entirely by the argument, “Hey, Minneapolis has light rail, and we’re just as wasteful and technocratic as they are”). Meanwhile, the people I know who lobby for more and better mass transport are childless urban professionals whose claim that it’s “a quality of life issue” mostly seems to boil down to a demand that we all help offset their transportation expenses so that they’ll have even more money for sushi bars and snorkeling trips. (What? No, I’m totally not bitter.)
Nevertheless, as a reasonable person, I realize that mass transport can, in some circumstances, be practical, and open employment possibilities for more than just childless hipsters. Insofar as we’re going to have it, then, can we at least do it efficiently?
To that end, I’m trying to think of ways to give buses a makeover so that people will decide that they’re cool. One component, obviously, is just good upkeep. The Silicon Valley commuter buses appear to have comfortable chairs and, of course, Wi-Fi. Do many people want Wi-Fi on regular city buses, or is that just a commuter thing? For city buses, it also seems to me that the double-decker would still be more appealing to most Americans (partly because it seems quaint and British), and might be even more so if the top deck had large windows or retractable roofs, making it easier to enjoy pleasant weather on the bus. Pleasant lighting and other small design measures can signal class and comfort in a way that most bus designs currently don’t.
Are there other things that might help? Again, my only interest here lies in figuring out how to persuade people to give up on really stupid mass transport projects (like light rail), in favor of possibly justifiable ones like more efficient bus systems. Redesigning buses would probably be worth a little trouble and expense if it could defuse the allure of high-speed rail.
Published in General
The problem is, people choose to live their lives in a way that some people don’t like, so they blame all sorts of things for it.
As if, said subsidies are not the will of the voter in the first place
New York City, home of the country’s largest subway system, has a huge bus network, and (to the surprise of many) a robust set of private bus companies providing express service into Manhattan from Long Island, Westchester County, and New Jersey. This has been going on for forty years.
Above a certain level of business, rail makes more sense than bus. But dedicated busways (“bus rapid transit”) are a pretty cost efficient way of making the buses half as fast as trains at 1/10th the cost. In the San Fernando Valley (the northern half of the city of L.A.), there’s a very successful busway that was built from abandoned freight tracks.
I like buses, but they have some built in problems. They have one big noisy engine in the back, they accelerate sluggishly, and they usually have a lousy ride compared to rail.
Dumbest way to use light rail? The way DC is doing it; right down the existing streets, so it can’t go any faster than car traffic, but has the potential to tie up traffic all the same.
It’s bus lanes that give them an edge. Without that, not so great.
Also – I wonder if they really are more cost effective once you pass a certain mass of travellers.
I’m not making an argument about vs or degrees. I’m not even saying I’m full bore free market – privatized toll roads and the like.
I’m just concerned with the conservative tendency to nitpick busses and curly -Q light bulbs but kind of skip past subsidized mortgages or student loans.
Do we have a clear notion about where the line is drawn? Other than “I like it”?
I’m a huge fan of the Metro in D.C. It’s clean and uncrowded because it’s barely used. Ok, I know … my bad.
London’s public transportation system (Underground, Overground, Docklands Light Rail) is phenomenal. It was a big help to me three years ago when I was running all over town doing archival research.
Washington’s Metrorail and San Francisco’s BART are, in effect, Lyndon Johnson initiatives. In the early Seventies, as they began operation, they were the first new transit cities in decades.
Atlanta’s MARTA, Buffalo’s LRT, Miami’s elevated line, and Baltimore were Nixon’s.
Carter and Reagan (sadly for clarity, the story blurs together at this point) put Los Angeles, Portland and San Diego into motion. Though L.A. transit system has certainly cost some, it is a relatively spartan system, not a showcase like DC or SF.
Paying for local transit is OK with me–it’s one of the best uses of my money. If you live in Tennessee, though, it would make less sense. Not even the biggest transit booster claims it’s best for everyone.
Exactly my point at #42.
@Casey – good points. I am no fan of subsidies, be they for buses, rail, homes, or school. But I also do not want blame unjustly applied for things either. The decline of city cores is complex, encompassing huge demographic and technological changes, and mixed in with politics all the way. Even wihout real or implied subsidies, city cores would have declined. As they exist today they are remnants of mid 20th century structures, built for purposes since passed up. Some have continued to reinvent themselves, many have not however. Detroit should be plowed under, its day is spent. If dense cities are what people want in the future, they will grow organically where the need and desire dictate, but only if city planners are all fired or exiled. Rail is a Victorian solution to moving people, and a tempting target for city governments to sieze. It is land and capital intensive, and unable to adapt should people shift. 21st century cities should be allow more organic solutions to emerge and desist from trying to plan (meaning dictate) what comes.
Ironically, Jimmy Carter came into office as a near-enemy of mass transit, since he felt taken by the fiscal promises and poor performance of MARTA construction while governor of Georgia. Transit smacked of the corrupt northern political machines and big unions that Carter always thought of as the worst side of his own party, the troglodytes. He wasn’t 100% against it–no Seventies Democrat could go that far–but he went as far as he could, doing a backstage veto of Los Angeles’ subway plan and slowing down other ongoing projects. He felt, not exactly unreasonably, that laying down rails should only happen after you’d squeezed every ounce of improvement out of demand management, toll lanes, buses, and carpooling. Give Carter this; he was a cheapskate.
Reagan, on the other hand, was ideologically far more congenial to transit cutting, but there were some complications. For one thing, he was from L.A., and many of his longtime political supporters (frankly, big business pals) were in real estate, the bond market, reinsurance, electrical engineering and construction, all worthy US and California interests, and they wanted the subway. So Adam Smith took a hike. Another complication was the fact that much of the US defense industry, especially up and down the west coast, had been urged to retool to produce made-in-USA transit in the Seventies. Boeing made trains for Chicago, Grumman made buses, and aerospace subcontractors built BART’s trains. This was a Nixon/Ford initiative to help preserve these companies for future needs after the Vietnam cutbacks.
The Reagan administration would have been happy to pull the plug on these projects (most of which were already winding down), but they didn’t want to pull the fiscal rug out from under favored companies too quickly, because we needed them in good financial shape to participate in Eighties re-armament.
In my town, the streetcars weren’t taken away because they were obsolete, but rather all the rail lines leading to the very convenient downtown train station were torn out in the 1960s and a new train station built on an inconvenient spot in the suburbs, because the planners and bureaucrats thought that trains and train tracks were “ugly” and not a suitable aesthetic for a “world-class” capital city.
Looking at the old maps that show where all the old rails were located, one can easily imagine that they could have been very efficiently converted for light commuter rail.
But no, all that steel was torn out and replaced with asphalt, and now the city is spending millions to create a new (shorter, less convenient, much more expensive, and mostly underground) light rail line downtown, after 40 years of building a pretty darned great Bus Rapid Transit system that works just fine (but which, like the old trains and tracks, has now been deemed aesthetically unsuitable by today’s planners and bureaucrats).
It’s not the car companies who oppose this, but rather the taxi companies (and taxi unions).
Just look at how much money they throw at municipal politicians at election time to ensure that ride-sharing and car-sharing services are regulated into oblivion.
(In my town, our new multi-million dollar light rail system will not extend to the airport, despite the fact that several underutilized rail lines already exist which get really close to the airport. The reason is that a single company has a monopoly over taxis in this city, and that company donates heavily to pretty much every municipal politician.)
Take the bus to/from Denver International Airport (DIA) to west metro Denver area, you are forced to stop at the downtown Denver bus station, Five Points neighborhood–a low income, minority housing area–and DIA employee parking areas first. I’m sure this is the case for points south and north of DIA. If those buses were express from those far areas they would double the ridership.
ET–Bike lanes are everywhere now, not just NYC. Parking and multi-lanes are being crowded out by non-gas tax paying tiny minority of people.
YES! Bike lanes are definitely subsidized by motorists, and the taxpaying businesses who have to fight even worse congestion for the privilege of staying in a city.
I’d wager that bike lanes are subsidized more by property taxpayers then by gas taxpayers.
Yabbut, that position seems to neglect that in many (most?) European cities it’s the city cores that continue to thrive and the suburbs that are Stygian wastelands. This happened because European governments chose to subsidize different things than North American governments chose to subsidize.
The most maddening sight in my town in the winter is a beautifully ploughed bike lane with no cyclists on it right next to an unploughed sidewalk that is crawling with pedestrians.
Happens every snowfall. I’ll try to remember to snap a photo for y’all the next time.
Tell me about it! It is high season here in my little resort town with narrow streets and the obligatory bike lanes. The endless number of Lance Armstrongs around here are creating unnecessary traffic jams; cars have no room to drive by the cyclists and have to wait for the opposite lane to clear so they can cross the dividing line and pass them.
Inevitably, though, just when you think you’re free and clear, you hit a red light and those persistent pests manage to catch up to your car and the dance begins anew.
I’m not sure I’d describe European suburbs as Stygian wastelands.
Yabbut, that’s only because you aren’t nearly as poetic as moi.
;-)
Mohammedan wastelands?
They might be able to help, in that they can drop you off at the front door of your building and then drive to an inconvenient parking location.