Small enough? Photo from Motiondesign

The question comes up all the time in the transit business:  why doesn’t your transit agency does not deploy smaller buses?  This question has been posed to me so many times now that my answer is reflexive and automatic.  For those not intimately plugged into the transit business there are four reasons:

1. Capacity. 
2. There is no savings. 
3. There is no money a second fleet. 
4. FTA won’t let us. 

I just realized, however, that one of my arguments was flawed.

The first point is usually the reason people are asking the question to begin with, because they see “empty” buses going by “all the time,” and capacity is the most important and easiest reasib to explain: We can run a large bus empty in the off peak, but we can’t run a small bus bigger during the peak.   

I then explain the most expensive part of operating a bus is the driver and that we pay the same salary regardless of the vehicle size.   Additionally, a recent study by CUTR found the average annual miles per gallon consumed on small buses to be 3.8 versus 4.3 for large buses, an improvement of only 12%, and the average annual per-mile maintenance cost (labor and parts) was actually a penny more for small buses ($1.26 vs $1.25 for large).  Even the savings of purchasing a small bus was insignificant, only $20,000 (8%) over a forty footer.   Whatever small savings a transit property gets from buying and using smaller buses is, however, unimportant during the peak when buses are full and capacity is the main problem.

Of course, with the constant need to replace buses expanding a fleet by only a few buses to increase service is a challenge.  Buying a whole separate fleet of shorter buses to run during off peak hours is not feasible (read: impossible).  TCRP Synthesis 11: System-Specific Spare Bus Ratios puts a nice point on it:

“Especially in the cost-conscious environment of public transit, the fleet manager cannot be burdened with a fleet that includes vehicles that are not carrying their full share of the demand, or buses whose unit costs bring down the overall productivity of the fleet.  Managing fleet size in relation to service levels is smart management and is also fiscally responsible. Transit managers use the performance measurement known as spare ratio as one indicator of their status in this important area.”

So far, so good.  Then we get to the 800 pound gorilla, the Federal Transit Administration.  We always hear there is a spare ratio imposed by FTA that says properties cannot have out of service spares on the lot in excess of 20% of our peak-hour vehicles (technically, VOMS, or vehicles operating in maximum service).  But in checking FTA Circular 9030 1A (1987) we find it says,

 Spare ratios will be taken into account in the review of projects proposed to replace, rebuild or add vehicles. The basis for determining a reasonable spare bus ratio should take into consideration specific local service factors. The number of spare buses in the active fleet for grantees owning fifty or more revenue vehicles should normally not exceed 20 percent of the vehicles operated in maximum service. For purposes of the spare ratio calculation, “vehicles operated in maximum service” should be in accordance with the definition of this term under the Section 15 reporting requirements (49 C.F.R Part 630). (emphasis added).

A requirement would have a “must” or “shall” in there rather than the less demanding “should not normally,” so there is some wiggle room there.  At the same time, 800 pounds is pretty big and no transit agency wants to pick a fight with FTA, so 20% has become the industry norm.  And anyway, the first three points are answer enough for your inquisitor why you don’t buy tiny buses.

My colleague was working on some numbers for our city commission (our board) and he was using raw boarding data to show ridership.  For those not familiar with transit data, a route that has service every 20 minutes should have significantly higher ridership than one running every 40 minutes, but if one accounts for the extra service provided (i.e. the additional cost to the agency) you may find the ridership between the two to be much closer to one another.  I asked him to use a measurement of efficiency, passenger trips per revenue mile, to see a truer measure of transit consumption.

The revised chart sent me reeling.  If you imagine transit on a Cartesian plane (all things being equal), raw ridership numbers would be much higher on routes with greater frequencies, but passenger trips per revenue mile would be the same across the board, i.e. twice as much service generates twice as much ridership and so forth.  But there is no transit service on the planes of Cartesia; we provide additional service where there are major destinations:  large apartment complexes, regional malls, low-income residents, universities and community colleges expecting a greater need and a greater return on our investment. 

Chart 1. Sorted by efficiency

On chart 1 (click on it to enlarge) we see the radial routes in order from most efficient to least efficient by passengers per revenue mile.  The frequencies are written beneath the route number (30T means there is a peak-hour tripper, or 30-minute service in the morning and afternoon) and the first thing to jump out is that the second-most efficient route runs only once an hour.  The most frequent service in the radial system was 20 minutes, all day, on the paired routes 13 and 14, which served predominantly low-income, minority communities.  Those were the fourth and fifth most efficient.  There were three routes that ran every 30 minutes all day, the 23/24 pair and route 25.  All the others were either hourly, 40-minute routes, or had peak hour trippers.  Let’s reorder the chart by frequency.

Routes 23 and 24 were special cases, essentially campus routes operating between a large community college, dense student housing, and Florida State University (44,000 students), all of it west of the central terminal.  In short, most passengers on those two looped routes completed their trips before making it to the terminal and thus did not need a transfer. 

Chart 2. Sorted by frequency.

Chart 2 shows us there is not a strong correlation between the amount of service provided and the level of use.  Two of the 40-minute routes are less efficient than 13 60-minute routes and as noted above the two 20-minute routes are 4^th and 5^th.  Looking at the same two charts from the new, decentralized system there is a very different picture  (note bene: the decentralized routes are mostly twice as long as the radial routes, so the reduction from 26 daytime routes is closer to 24 than the 12 routes shown on charts 3 and 4 would indicate).  Chart 3 shows the routes in order of efficiency,  chart 4 in order of frequency. 

Chart 3. Decentralized sorted by efficiency.

Chart 4. Decentralized sorted by frequency.

What got me so excited when I first saw these charts was that the three 20-minute routes were clearly the top performers.  One of the things we have been telling the public is that with the new system an increase in service on any one route improves the whole system and that this was not true in the radial system.  The structure of a radial system is to have an originating route and a transfer at a central location to a destination route.   The 20-minute service on 13/14 and 30-minute service on 23/24 (campus routes) and 25 (serving a regional mall) were about capacity not mobility.  If we could have run 80-foot buses the additional service would have been largely unnecessary because all three of those routes were largely dependent on connections made at the bottom of the hour.  A rider might take the route 13 bus before the one that arrives for connections at the bottom of the hour because getting a seat was more likely but unless that person was going to a destination on route 14 (which included the 12,000-student Florida A&M university) the additional service did not get the passenger to the final destination any faster.  

The decentralized system provides multiple paths for the same trip, so given the choice of taking a 40-minute route to connect to a 40-minute route or taking a 40 to connect to a 20, a reasonable and prudent person will always choose the latter.  Chart 4 shows this is what is happening.  In other words, despite the heavy investment in greater frequency in the radial system we did not see a corresponding increase in ridership.  In the decentralized system we are seeing that we do and that is a good return on investment.

Once—and I mean 60, 80 years ago—the warehouses, factories, movie theaters, produce and meat markets, bakeries, apothecaries, haberdasheries, and other sources of shopping and entertainment, all of which are also called jobs, were all located in the CBD.  It has been more than 40 years since Petula Clark bayed about downtown in her 1965 hit of that name (“Downtown, everything’s waiting for you.”) and today those functions of daily living are mostly located somewhere other than downtown.  But as the share of regional employment has dipped to or below 10% in most American CBDs, transit agencies have continued to vigorously pursue the decreasing number of people going downtown as the primary target for transit services.  They do this with what we call a radial or hub-and-spoke system.

Pros of the Radial System.  This is not a foolish policy and is, in fact, quite understandable.  The historical roots of radial systems are compelling.  CBDs are still pretty dense and those higher densities are always attractive to transit providers because CBDs were constructed in a fashion that is very convenient for transit users: the buildings are near the road and, along with street trees, provide shade; awnings and balconies protect pedestrians from the rain and sun.  In downtown Minneapolis, to use an extreme example, there is a system of interior and/or underground sidewalks to keep people out of those frozen Midwestern winters.  Downtown walking distances are relatively short and visually interesting; people will walk great distances where there are things to see.  And there are often amenities like sidewalks, benches, and quality lighting as part of the street scene.  CBDs are, in many ways, very good places to drop passengers off.

Above all, radial systems are easy to manage, plan, and operate.  Buses or trains leave a central point (plaza, terminal, station, whatever we call it), go to an end-of-line point, turn around and return.  At the central point we keep information and fare sales booths, bathrooms, security, supervisors, bike stations, lost-and-found, and vending machines.  Maybe even a daycare.   As transit providers this is a very comfortable and familiar scenario. 

The downside.  Unfortunately, radial systems are increasingly obsolete.  The jobs are not downtown anymore.  To use one sad example, in Minneapolis the Target Corporation is building its new world headquarters 15 miles northwest of downtown while the $715 million dollar Hiawatha Light Rail Line starts downtown and runs southeast.  Considerable research by Greg Thompson and Jeffrey Brown has demonstrated the effectiveness of decentralized systems in getting people to the multiple destinations passengers wish to reach while Brookings has documented the difficulties of passengers moving between suburban destinations on transit in places with high-quality, rail transit focused on the CBD (Missed Opportunity: Transit and Jobs in Metropolitan America, May 2011).

As development has moved away from downtown two things are working against the success of the radial.  First, as already noted employment has moved out of the downtown, especially the service and retail jobs that provide many customers to transit agencies.  Secondly, in response to the movement of those jobs transit providers are traveling greater distances from the central point to reach those jobs and new housing as graphic 1 below shows.  If you study old maps from a transit agency in your area you may find routes that 30 years ago were 30- or 40-minute round trips are now 60- or 90-minutes.  The geographic space of the city has expanded and the employment is more likely located at the periphery, but transfers in a radial system are still made largely downtown.

Graphic 1. Somewhere County Densities, then and now

These conditions lead to several phenomena:

Making the Pie Piece (Out-of-direction travel).  Referencing graphic 1, a passenger from point D going to point H must first go to the central point.  Stopping at the hub is not much of a concern for this cross-town trip, but someone coming from I to H would prefer to head directly south (as he would in a car and as shown by the dotted gray line) but instead is artificially forced to go downtown (A) to make the pie piece or out-of-direction travel.  It is frustrating and time consuming.

Redundancy.  Radial systems are based on convergence, so the radial system sends multiple buses along the same roads often at the same times on the way to the central point.  This is particularly common for systems with high headways (60 minutes) that operate on clock-face time (that is, many/most buses are in the central plaza at 30 minutes after the hour, for example).   The resources used to move several buses along a corridor at nearly the same time—driver time, fuel, and maintenance miles—could be used elsewhere outside of the constraints of the radial system.

Redundacy and funnelling are part of a radial system as seen here in Birmingham, AL.

Funneling:  One of the great disadvantages of a radial system is that it is a system of collection or accumulation.  From the historical perspective this is a positive:  buses would travel in and out of neighborhoods to collect as many passengers as possible and then drop them at destinations in the downtown.  But as the urban core became more and more a place to make transfers in order to travel to destinations well outside the downtown that accumulative system started to show its age spots.  

There are two types of funneling: geographic and time funneling.  Geographic funneling is related to the Pie Piece phenomenon.  Staying with Somewhere County a person coming from an apartment at I and going to a regional mall at H would first go to the CBD, A.  Of course people from I are not the only ones going to the mall so passengers from C,D, E, F, and G also go to A and cram onto a bus, causing overcrowding. 

Then there is time funneling.  The redundancy noted above consumes resources and thus contributes to low frequencies on routes.  Assuming the not-uncommon scenario of a city with a majority of its routes running one once an hour, people wanting to travel at multiple times during the course of an hour can only use the single travel opportunity provided by hourly frequencies.  For example, persons wanting to travel at 7:55, 8:05, 8:15, and 8:25 must all use the 7:45 trip in order to get to the desired destination on-time.  Again this contributes to overcrowding on buses. 

One-Box Dilemma:   A clock-based radial system depends on most buses being at the central terminal at a given time, say the bottom of the hour, to facilitate transfers between vehicles.  Every route has a certain number of minutes to travel out and back.  On an hour route, in theory the bus runs out 30 minutes and in 30 minutes, but in practice there are destinations that must be served and buses must be turned around at appropriate locations.  Therefore the end-of-line point has great influence on the complete route.  A route that is cut short to serve a near destination consumes driver time (the driver still has an hour for the complete trip); a route that is extended a little too far causes delay.  Because of the connection requirements (all buses together at one point on the clock) , the One-Box Dilemma can cause a major destination (or just a good turn around point) to either cause a route to have too much or too little time to be correctly executed.

Route dependency:  Lastly and perhaps most importantly when many low-frequency routes (hourly routes) meet at a central point, connections must be made.  Typically transit agencies in this type of system will hold all buses at the terminal for a late bus.  This makes every bus a little late which is seen as a better alternative to putting the penalty (an hour wait) entirely on the passengers of a late bus.  This means each route is dependent on all the others and an accident or other delay on one roadway results in the immediate delay of the entire system making high on-time performance extremely difficult and subject to vagaries of the auto accidents, construction delays, etc.

To review, the objectives of Title VI regulations (49 CFR part 21) are to:

a. Ensure that the level and quality of transportation service is provided without regard to race, color, or national origin;

b. Identify and address, as appropriate, disproportionately high and adverse human health and environmental effects, including social and economic effects of programs and activities on minority populations and low-income populations;

c. Promote the full and fair participation of all affected populations in transportation decision making;

d. Prevent the denial, reduction, or delay in benefits related to programs and activities that benefit minority populations or low-income populations;

e. Ensure meaningful access to programs and activities by persons with limited English proficiency.

The comic book begins with the three characters who will guide us through the steps of using the system: an elderly white man, a younger black man, and an a woman of indeterminate but clearly non-Caucasian origin.  She is in a wheelchair.  They are essentially welcoming all comers, letting the public know this transit system does not discriminate.  Between them they cover the five immutable characteristics of race, ethnicity/nationality, age, disability status, and hair.  (Okay, hair is not considered a basis for discrimination but with a bald-American, a half-bald-American, and a fully haired-American pictured BART doesn’t seem to be taking any chances.)

Using simple language and large letters (for those with poor eyesight), the three go through the step-by-step process of riding the transit system including paying the fare, choosing the route, negotiating the turnstiles, and boarding the train.  More importantly the whole thing is rendered in friendly, accessible black and white drawings—again, B&W is easier for some with visual disabilities to follow—with lots of arrows and pictograms.  FTA likes pictograms, having even put out a powerpoint introduction to Title VI (found here) that includes a slide showing several pictograms of common rules on transit (pictured below).

Pictograms from FTA Title VI presentation

The book is too basic for a PhD or most other reasonably intelligent, native-born US Americans, to use Miss Teen South Carolina’s phrase.  But those are not the people the book targets; it was made to explain transit to people with developmental disabilities, young people, and most of all LEPs, those with limited English proficiency.  Readers may recall BART spending $800,000 to establish its standard for a “major service change” a seemingly unseemly amount, but much of that money went to interpreters for multiple languages—Mandarin, Vietnamese, Spanish, Russian, etc.—at many public meetings.  San Francisco is America’s European city that also happens to be our window on Asia and a 9-hour drive to Mexico.  Many cultures converge there and the transit agency has an obligation to reach out to them.  That obligation is called Title VI and that little comic just might do the trick.

Skyway image from Wikipedia

A recent post about the soon-to-be constructed Atlanta Streetcar/downtown circulator prompted a reader to forward an article from Jacksonville about their downtown circulator, which happens to be an automated guideway, or people mover, JTA calls the Skyway.  Ridership is low, 30% of their pre-construction estimates, and the service is very expensive to the tune of a $4 million deficit each year (which seems weird because it is automated and electric so there are no driver salaries or fuel costs) and at least one councilman wants to destroy the thing.  The best line from the story:  “[JTA Director] Blaylock said he wasn’t looking to get rid of the Skyway, and the system still had a chance to be viable. That claim drew snickers from some City Council members.”

This story caught my attention because the Skyway is a downtown circulator in what is the weakest downtown I have ever seen.  Jacksonville is this strange place that lays claim to being the largest city in America; this has not to do with population but with the geographic extent of the place:  Jacksonville consolidated with Duval County in 1968 so city and county are the same size, over 900 square miles with a population under 900,000.  The downtown is typical of Florida downtowns (Tampa, Tallahassee) where they roll the sidewalks up at night and nothing happens.  There is little activity and few attractions outside of the office towers that attract people in cars to drive downtown to work.  The Skyway is one of those transit projects (like, I believe, the future Atlanta streetcar) that was built to attract people rather than to serve people and in doing so has failed miserably.

More importantly for this post, however, is the crazy part of the article.  JTA director Michael Blaylock said the Skyway could be torn down at the end of its design life which is in 2036.  At the current level of fiscal health that would mean a cost of $100 million to the transit agency over the next 25 years.  Why not tear it down, council members asked?  Because JTA would have to pay FTA back for the money it provided to construct the system, in the neighborhood of $80 million. 

This brings me to the difference between a property and a recipient.  A Property is a governmental or commercial operator of public transit. A Recipient is a government or commercial public transit provider that accepts funding from the Federal Transit Administration.  Becoming a recipient of the FTA is the transit equivalent of selling one’s soul to the devil; in exchange for funding the recipient is obligated to follow FTA regulations like Charter, Half Fare, and Buy America, and endure Triennial Reviews, or in this case give back 80 million dollars if, after 30 years, the project doesn’t work out.  Most recipients receive only capital funding from FTA but that mammon is hard to resist.  That money comes with strings attached.  Well, chains really.

Councilman Guliford also asked about reducing service?  “At least then we could limp along without paying as much to operate it,” he said.  Blaylock replied FTA would not accept that and would ask for its money back and this at a time when JTA is hoping to get federal money to construct a $180 million multi-modal station that would help with the ridership on the Skyway.  So let me revise my earlier statement:  FTA money is impossible to resist.