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Tag buses

“Curb Rights” at 20: A Summary and Review

People sitting on a bus

At 4:30 am, alarms on my cellphone and tablet start beeping, just enough out of sync to prompt me to get up and turn them off. By 5:00 am, I riding as a passenger along an unusually sedate New Jersey Turnpike, making friendly conversation with my driver and survey partner to make sure he stays awake. At 5:30am, as most of the city sleeps, we find a drab concrete picnic table outside the bus depot and chow down on our cold, prepared breakfasts. Around us, buses are revving up and their drivers are chatting and smoking cigarettes. At 5:50 am, we find our bus and introduce ourselves to our driver for the day. All of the Alliance drivers seem to be Hispanic. Our run begins. You wouldn’t expect it, but the first run is always the sweetest. The riders trickle on, making it easy to approach them, and unlike the typical 8:00 am rush hour rider they are usually friendly and receptive to my request. I approach them and mechanically incant “Good morning Sir/Ma’am. Would you like to take a survey on your commute today for NJ Transit? It will only take a few minutes of your time.” My partner sits in the front, tallying the boardings, exits, and survey refusals. We will spend the next eight hours zigzagging across the New York City metropolitan area, asking harried riders about their commute. For the past month or so, this has been my part-time job: surveying bus riders about their origins, destinations, and travel preferences for NJ Transit. The job is just engaging enough that I rarely have time for sleeping or class readings, but has enough slow periods that my mind can wander on the question of bus planning. Although I am not authorized to read any of the surveys […]

More links!

Why didn’t I catch onto this whole linking thing earlier? Are these link lists boring for you guys? 1. Human Transit has a great post on “density” and all the different ways to measure it, with a cool picture of sprawling apartment buildings that illustrates why transit use in the Las Vegas metro area is so low, despite the fact that it’s actually slightly denser than the Vancouver metro area (?!). 2. Rich old white Manhattanites against BRT lanes. 3. Privately-paid rent-a-cops gaining traction in Oakland. 4. Longtime Moscow mayor Yury Luzhkov has been fired, which some hope will make things easier on property developers in one of the world’s most expensive real estate markets (“[Current] city policy practically rules out private land ownership and forces developers to lease plots under “investment contracts” that often give a share to the city”). Most, however, are girded for a multi-year transition while new palms are greased. 5. Damon Root at Reason magazine explains why Columbia’s Manhattanville eminent domain takings are illegal even post-Kelo.

Weekend links

Links, links, links! 1. The Washington City Paper has a great expose on street food in DC called “Inside D.C.’s Food-Truck Wars” with the subtitle “How some of Washington’s most powerful interests are trying to curb the city’s most popular new cuisine.” 2. Mary Newsom at the Charlotte Observer thinks it’s a bad thing that Charlotte allowed so much density around its wildly popular new light rail line because it’s driving up property values. The Overhead Wire says that this is natural when land is scarce, and that “if you built all the [proposed] lines at once, that pressure gets relieved five or six ways instead of one way.” This is to some extent true, but another solution to the scarcity of transit-oriented property is to allow more even development around the existing line by loosening zoning and parking rules. 3. Ryan Avent finds research that finds that congestion pricing in Stockholm, where citizens voted on the plan after a seven-month test period, became more popular after they experienced it. Then again, congestion pricing in New York and elsewhere depends not only on people living in the city, but also people living outside of it, who are much less likely to warm up to it. Also, it looks like Stockholm expanded transit (mostly bus) service along with congestion pricing. 4. The pilot private van initiative in NYC that we discussed earlier has been floundering, and Cap’n Transit has been all over it. Literally every post on the front page of his blog is about it. There seem to be many reasons for the vans’ failure, and I might write something on it in the future, but in the meantime read Cap’n Transit if you’re interested. 5. Philadelphia Inquirer architecture critic Inga Saffron praises recently-fired Philadelphia Housing Authority boss Carl Greene’s […]

North Jersey jitneys take off

by Stephen Smith In the past few years, a relatively new phenomenon seems to be taking hold in cities across North Jersey: the jitney. Similar to the dollar vans that ply the streets of Brooklyn and Queens, jitneys carry more than a taxi but less than a full-sized bus, and run semi-regular routes that often shadow city bus routes. But unlike the dollar vans of New York, the jitneys in North Jersey are legal and regulated (albeit lightly), and so in addition to local feeder service and circuits around New Jersey, they also run routes directly into Manhattan. In terms of quality, the jitneys appear quite advanced – customers report that jitneys come more frequently than NJ Transit buses, and the price is lower (at least for individual tickets). The small bus size guarantees everybody a seat, and buses display stickers to indicate the presence of air conditioning. The complaints about the jitneys are familiar: they drive erratically trying to pick up fares, they’re poorly maintained, they don’t follow traffic rules. Recent random inspections have led to the impounding of more than half of the vehicles inspected, with violations ranging from missing fire extinguishers to gas leaks. The jitney drivers have countered that the inspectors are biased against them and don’t subject NJ Transit buses to such stringent checks, and they’ve also downplayed the nature of some of the violations against them. In any case, the dangerous driving that the jitneys engage in to poach fares from each other is a problem that needs to be solved, lest it take the whole system down. Because the roadway and curbs are provided as public goods to all comers, we encounter a tragedy of the commons, whereby the competition between drivers ultimately becomes counterproductive and harmful of overall welfare. While our ideal […]

Private Buses: Econtalk Takes A Second look at Santiago

Back a couple years ago, I noted an Econtalk podcast with Russell Roberts and Duke University Professor Mike Munger on the private bus system in Santiago, Chile.  This week’s episode starts with Munger’s update on the Santiago transportation system after visiting for three weeks and spending a lot of time traveling the city’s buses and transit.  This discussion comes at a perfect time to follow-up on Stephen Smith’s post on private busing in New York. Munger and Roberts discussed the advantages and problems of the evolution of the system over the years.  In the case of the private system with over 3,000 competing private bus companies, accidents and injuries were common, and pollution was problematic.  However, the regulation and publicization of the buses led to unintended consequences that were probably far worse than the drawbacks of the private system.  Unfortunately, although the administration has apologized for the failures of the system, it would be politically impossible to revert to some of the beneficial aspects of the private system.

Private buses make a comeback in NYC

by Stephen Smith Transit activists have been bemoaning recent cuts in the MTA’s bus routes throughout New York City, but the cuts may have a silver lining, in particular for market urbanists: they may usher in the return of private buses to the streets of New York City. Private buses (and subways, and streetcars) were once the only transit options available to New Yorkers, but since the early 20th century, and especially after World War II, virtually all intracity routes have been subsumed by various levels of government, and the network has barely grown at all since nationalization (not withstanding the Second Avenue Subway, conceived eighty years ago by a private company). Now that’s not to say that private operators haven’t tried to compete – the outer boroughs’ immigrant communities have had robust networks of informal private vans (known in NYC as “dollar vans”), which operate illegally but have been hard to prosecute, likely due to the fact that they are used mostly by linguistically-distinct immigrant communities. The recent cuts even propelled the bootleg bus phenomenon out of its immigrant ghetto, when a brave bus operator named Joel Azumah made headlines by operating a bootleg bus route along routes cut in Manhattan, Queens, and Brooklyn. This experiment was quickly quashed by an unrelenting bureaucracy, but at least it demonstrated the mutual desire on the part of riders and entrepreneurs for private service. The city’s Taxi and Limousine Commission appears to have headed that call, and under the direction of chairman David Yassky is trying to replace at least some of the old bus routes with private buses. Unlike the city’s much-abused private van service, where operators are technically not allowed to pick up riders off the street who haven’t called ahead of time, the buses would operate with many of […]

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