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As Uber grows, SEPTA to rethink bus service (New York, its your turn)


Around the Horn

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...Riders like Yan are contributing to a significant shift in the region away from public transit, particularly buses, to Uber and Lyft. SEPTA’s 123 bus and trolley routes lost about 4.4 million ride trips from fiscal years 2014 to 2016, the agency reported, which mirrors shrinking bus ridership nationwide, according to the American Public Transportation Association. The region’s bus ridership by linked trips in fiscal year 2016 was 114 million, the lowest it had been since 2003. 

 

Compared with 2013, the last full year SEPTA operated without ride sharing in the city, the 2016 ridership loss is even more significant. Last year’s more than 161 million ride trips on both buses and trolleys was about 14 million shy of the ridership three years earlier. 

 

Construction and traffic congestion also depress bus ridership, but ride sharing is definitely contributing.

 

“The combination of gas prices and Uber and Lyft give us so much external explanation for what we’re seeing,” Jarrett Walker, a Portland, Ore.-based transit expert who contributed to a redesign of Houston’s bus service, said in a recent interview. “What we’re really talking about is the future of cities,” said Erik Johanson, SEPTA’s director of business innovation. “Public transit is the lifeblood of cities. It’s the only thing that feeds that density.”The ridership drop contributed to SEPTA’s decision to commission Walker’s firm to evaluate the region’s bus system, a comprehensive review unlike any undertaken since buses largely supplanted trolleys in the 1950s, SEPTA officials said. The findings, expected to be available later this year, will likely feed a two-year plan to reinvent SEPTA’s bus network. SEPTA didn’t want to say what those changes would entail until Walker’s review was complete, but anything from redesigning routes to working with the city to reallocate street space to make bus travel more efficient will be considered.
 
This means now Baltimore, Houston, Philadelphia and few other cities are updating their bus networks for current ridership trends as opposed to the current routes created for the 1950's. 
 
New York, you're up next...
 
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http://www.philly.com/philly/business/transportation/as-uber-grows-septa-to-rethink-bus-service-20170721.html

 

This means now Baltimore, Houston, Philadelphia and few other cities are updating their bus networks for current ridership trends as opposed to the current routes created for the 1950's. 

 

New York, you're up next...

Fat chance. The (MTA) is in complete denial. I'm sure they think it's the riders' fault. Smh
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Baltimore redid their bus system about ten years ago so now they will be redoing it again?

 

Baltimore is kind of an outlier since the context for the shuffle is that Hogan needs to do something to make it seem like he cares about Baltimore post Red Line cancellation.

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Philly.com has this as their lead story and it includes an interactive map which by pointing to the route, it gives the difference in the number of passengers  over last two years. What I found interesting was the subway surface routes all gained riders as did Route 66, the trackless trolley line. I tried to find out about the old Red Arrow  routes but for some reason, it did not come up..

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Philly.com has this as their lead story and it includes an interactive map which by pointing to the route, it gives the difference in the number of passengers  over last two years. What I found interesting was the subway surface routes all gained riders as did Route 66, the trackless trolley line. I tried to find out about the old Red Arrow  routes but for some reason, it did not come up..

Ah, that's because Red Arrow is part of the Suburban division as opposed to the routes in the article which are  the City division. Its kind of like the MaBSTOA/ NYCT split or MTA Bus vs NYCT here.

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I found out about this from Jarrett Walker's Twitter. I am so happy he is on this project. I literally aspire to be like him. But for new York, I think we have a shot at updating the system. Look at what's going on for Staten island. I know that it's just the express routes, and, you know, it's Staten island, but if that proves successful that could lead to major changes. I'm thinking within the next decade all of the boroughs will have gone through changes with local and express routes too.

 

 

Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

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When I tested their map, there were Red Arrow Bus Route (# 100's non-rail) that came up along with the actual figures. I tried working with the map using Media as the point of origin and nothing came up. It is possible that since there was a break in service during the two years involved (2014-2016) that the routes were not included  on the map.

What I did discover was that some of the routes that lost passengers, the declines were quite steep. There were two routes in the Roxborough area that had looked at that had declines of 23% or more and one express route that I checked from Northeast Philadelphia had a decline of 50% for the two year period. 

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The other interesting thing to do would be to would be to submit an updated FOIL to the NYC T&LC for aggregate Uber and Lyft ride data, to get a sense of where the demand corridors are and at what times people tend to use rideshare. If it turns out that you have corridors (for hypothetical purposes let's say from points along Little Neck to the Floral Park LIRR station on the weekends, or along 73 Av to the Kew Gardens train station, or along the Grand Concourse at night), then if the corridors show significant ridership (say 5k-10k average Lyft rides along a corridor) then you could use that to start a new trial route, or modify/extend service hours and reduce headways on existing lines. The 2015 FOIL response from the T&LC shows 4.5 million trips over a three-month period; I'd expect that number to have grown significantly since then.

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Guys,

 

the bus system in NYC sucks and like some noted, it seems intentional. The only way bus service can improve is with a clean slate approach. Some bus routes will need to be redacted, merged or put off to a boulevard so that the buses can make their way around with more room.

 

Is there a way for NYCT to ask NYCDOT for traffic patterns so that buses can find ways around congested spots?

I've noticed every NYCT Bus has a HOV pass. It irks me that they go unused (except on the B103 and some Staten Island routes) because buses get stuck in traffic they can easily avoid.

 

Maybe it's intentional. Maybe it's not to be.*

 

*hidden pun

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Lol....

 

The MTA does not care about modernizing the bus network.... This city is Manhattan-centric & as such, so is the subway system.... Speaking of which, they're too much in a tizzy right now with what's been going on as of late w/ the subways.... The bus network OTOH is borough-centric.... Somehow, Manhattan apparently is greater than the sum of the parts of this city - even with ongoing gentrification in the outerboroughs (Mathematics be damned!)....

 

It's going to take a HELL of a lot more than.... wait for it.... modern (there's that word again) cab services stealing riders away from MTA's buses & trains in droves for them to wake up & get with the program...... Which quite frankly, I'm not holding my breath for...

 

The new paint scheme exhibited on the XD60's & the XN40's looks nice though...

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Lol....

 

The MTA does not care about modernizing the bus network.... This city is Manhattan-centric & as such, so is the subway system.... Speaking of which, they're too much in a tizzy right now with what's been going on as of late w/ the subways.... The bus network OTOH is borough-centric.... Somehow, Manhattan apparently is greater than the sum of the parts of this city - even with ongoing gentrification in the outerboroughs (Mathematics be damned!)....

 

It's going to take a HELL of a lot more than.... wait for it.... modern (there's that word again) cab services stealing riders away from MTA's buses & trains in droves for them to wake up & get with the program...... Which quite frankly, I'm not holding my breath for...

 

The new paint scheme exhibited on the XD60's & the XN40's looks nice though...

It doesn't help that they run those damn old RTS buses on the hottest day of the summer with no AC. Talk about encouraging ridership.  <_<

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Baltimore is kind of an outlier since the context for the shuffle is that Hogan needs to do something to make it seem like he cares about Baltimore post Red Line cancellation.

 

and aren't they being sued because it violated civil rights? under title 6 of the 1964 civil rights act?

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I found out about this from Jarrett Walker's Twitter. I am so happy he is on this project. I literally aspire to be like him. But for new York, I think we have a shot at updating the system. Look at what's going on for Staten island. I know that it's just the express routes, and, you know, it's Staten island, but if that proves successful that could lead to major changes. I'm thinking within the next decade all of the boroughs will have gone through changes with local and express routes too.

 

On Staten Island, they released the plan for the express routes first, but they do plan on releasing a plan for the local routes later on. The thing is that they want to "sell" the express plan, and have it ready to be implemented (and probably implement it so they can claim it's a success, whether it actually is or isn't, hopefully it is) before releasing their plan for the local routes.

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Riders expects buses to pop up every 5-10 minutes, but with the busiest buses going artic, you're not getting that. The most decline in buses that I've seen was SEPTA Route 17. To satisfy the riders on that particular route, more buses must be added. 21 articulated buses isn't enough to cover the losses of this many in service on one route. Meanwhile Route 14 is on the verge of getting another route for its bus rapid transit on Roosevelt Blvd.

 

The Northeast has see this decline, but look at how many routes over the years that has been merged or discontinued, and thats been since 1984.

 

 

Sent from my iPhone using NYC Transit Forums mobile app

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