Better Transit without Trolleys

Yesterday’s Jamaica Plain Gazette had a very long front-page article by John Ruch about the 39 bus improvement meeting that took place on the February 25th. Here are my reactions to the article:
Franklyn Salimbene of the pro-trolley Arborway Committee said he liked parts of the proposal that essentially repeat ideas from trolley restoration planning several years ago. “I supported them when we were talking about them as streetcar improvements,” Salimbene said.

Thank you, Franklyn, for helpful suggestions!

But the CLF itself finds the process acceptable, staff attorney Carrie Russell told the Gazette. “At this point, there is nothing that would bring us back into court,” Russell told the Gazette, adding that EOT is “moving forward in good faith” and allowed anyone at the meeting to speak freely. “I’m glad to see the Executive Office of Transportation is looking to identify solutions that they actually intend to implement,” she said.

Thank you, CLF!

But the bus still regularly takes much longer than the scheduled 35 minutes or so to run the length of the route, particularly at rush hour.

I would like to see some numbers. Apparently the T is starting to get GPS data on running time. I have asked them for some data.

A main goal of EOT’s proposals is speeding up the bus’s route running time by about 5 to 7 minutes. That doesn’t sound like much, but EOT officials said it is significant for a bus line. One official said that, by standard industry models, it would result in a ridership increase of about 6 percent.

A reduction of mean travel time from 35 minutes to 28 minutes amounts to 20%, and that is significant. However, the bigger potential gains are from reducing the extra 15 or 20 minutes you have to add to your schedule if you want to be sure to be on time, to account for gaps in service creating by bunching. In other words, reducing the distribution of trip times is more important than reducing the mean.

A major part of the proposal is cutting 25 to 35 percent of the 63 stops on the route so that the bus doesn’t have to stop as often. Of course, that also means longer walks to find a bus stop. EOT officials acknowledged that stop cuts are often controversial.

Jim Folk, MBTA Director of Bus Transportation, said at the September 2007 meeting that there are 72 stops on Route 39. The number of stops has been creeping steadily upwards since the trolleys stopped running. Is it so “controversial” to reverse this trend? It was not in the case of the Silver Line on Washington Street. The design committee recommended cutting the number of stops on the round-trip from 40 to 24, and only had to give back one pair in the end.

Another speed-improving tactic would be “optimizing” the roughly 40 traffic lights the bus encounters on the route. That means making sure all the lights are coordinated with each other, and installing “signal prioritization” technology that allows buses to make a green light last longer so they can get through an intersection more easily.

While there may be some gains to be made from improving signal progression, it is unlikely that will help buses, which do not travel at a steady speed due to the need to make stops. However, there is a lot of delay that could be avoided by removing unneeded signal phases and changing signal timing. There are several different transit signal priority techniques, including holding the green, displaying the green earlier, or altering the sequence of phases. A related technique is a “queue jumper”: a short stretch of bus-only lane (often shared with right-turning traffic) that lets buses pull ahead of the waiting queue at the signal.

Officials from the Boston Transportation Department attended the meeting and said they are on board with the traffic light planning. However, questioned by residents, they acknowledged that the traffic lights in the area are not currently networked in a way that would allow for signal prioritization.

I don’t think that’s what they said. I think they said that the CTPS study did not find large benefits from signal prioritization. However, it depends on the type of priority they assumed in the study. Also, did they consider queue jumpers?

But buses rarely pull over all the way for a variety of reasons, including stops that are too short or bad curbs; cars parked in stops; and, apparently, bus driver choice.

One reason drivers may be reluctant to pull to the curb, besides the lack of space, is the delay in returning to the travel lane. A “yield to bus” law would alleviate this problem. See more information under Status.

Along with stop consolidation/removal, the proposal could result in a net gain of on-street parking spaces for private cars in the corridor, which EOT officials indicated is another goal of the project.

Not exactly. One objective is to minimize the loss of parking spaces, but an increase is not a project requirement.

Public transit issues in the corridor are regularly debated as bus-versus-trolley. But as EOT officials explained the Route 39 proposal, it appears that in practice, the 60-foot buses have similar problems to those critics worried that trolleys would create: blocking traffic; trouble getting through traffic; “bunching” of vehicles; consuming large stretches of the street for stops. And EOT’s proposed solutions are similar to those once proposed for trolley restoration. They may also trigger similar controversies.

Here Mr. Ruch is editorializing again, and also trying to stir up controversy, his favorite word. Yes, the point was that trolleys running on the street would have the same problems as buses in mixed traffic, except that the trolleys would be worse because they are longer and cannot maneuver around illegally parked vehicles or other obstacles.

Forced by another lawsuit to begin trolley restoration planning several years ago, the MBTA convened a community advisory committee.

Actually the T was forced by the decision of the DEP that running trolleys is not infeasible, since the T ran them once before (even though it never ran the larger LRVs and did not have to make them wheelchair accessible).

Ferris told the Gazette that idea of bump-outs for the bus is “somewhat less of an issue” because trolley tracks wouldn’t be part of the design. (The decaying old tracks on Centre/South cause frequent bike crashes, though trolley advocates say new versions would be much safer for bikes.) But some wide bump-outs around Boston are dangerous, he said. “As a cyclist safety issue, I think an appropriate bump-out could work,” Ferris said. “Things that come out too far can be a hazard.” But Ferris also questioned the need for bump-outs at all, suggesting that drivers could simply pull over all the way as mandated. He also worried that cars would park illegally along the bump-outs, blocking buses and other traffic. “I’m not sure there really would be a benefit,” he said.

The curb extensions would be at most 6 feet–less than the width of a car. In some cases mini-extensions of 3 feet might be sufficient to create enough width for a shelter; that would be the major benefit. It would be possible on South Huntington to create extensions and still have room for a lane of traffic to pass a stopped bus.

In smaller improvements, the MBTA is conducting “courtesy training” for bus drivers; has posted full transit system maps in the buses; and has four inspectors driving the route every day to bust cars parked in bus stops.

The new maps inside the bus are route maps, not full system maps, although they already have rail-only (!) maps inside the buses. See separate post. Are they really going to “bust” the cars?

Franklyn Salimbene of the Arborway Committee—which has a pending lawsuit seeking trolley restoration—noted that the Silver Line bus route already has many of the proposed features in place and the added benefit of running in an exclusive tunnel, but has service that is steadily declining in schedule adherence, according to recent reports.

But what neither Salimbene or Ruch mention is that ridership has doubled since Route 49 was remade into the Silver Line. Yes, the T needs to do a better job with maintaining service quality on that route — as well as all of its high-frequency surface routes.

One notable gap in the discussion is what something like the predicted 6 percent bus ridership boost would do to Green Line use.

Why is that an issue? If people choose a more reliable bus 39 over the E branch it must be because it suits them better; if it reduces crowding on the Green Line also, that’s so much the better. There is a lot of excess capacity on route 39 today — witness the decline in ridership over the past decade and the empty buses that are the 3rd or 4th in a bunch.