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MTA Records Largest Single-Year Ridership Decline in 15 Years


Via Garibaldi 8

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17 minutes ago, BrooklynBus said:

I thought about this a little more and I think this report was a little too harsh on the buses. When they rate a poor routes like the B31 and B84 get high grades and a failing grade is given to a great route like the B1 something has to be wrong. And I can think of three things right away. There is no criteria judging how useful a route is. One way would be to count the number of available transfers to other bus and subway lines. A long route like the B1 which gets you a lot more places is certainly more useful than a short route like the B31, yet this is not considered. And as I stated, I do not see how one out of seven buses bunching (if true, I think it is much higher) deserves an F for bus bunching.

Scheduled service frequency also needs to be considered. The average scheduled daily headway needs to be considered and routes with more scheduled service needs to be given a higher rating than a route with 30 minute headways all day long. 

Another point not considered is fare evasion. Maybe since the Eagle Team only patrols SBS, perhaps it is totally out of control and ridership is down nowhere near 6 percent. 

After all, are they really objective, or is their goal to show the buses are not working well? The MTA's goal is to show how great the buses are so their satisfaction surveys show that passengers are overwhelmingly satisfied with the buses. What we need are objective studies. 

Uh I think it should be cut and dry.  If the bus is prompt then it gets a good grade, and if it isn't, it should get a low grade.  The B31 should be getting an A quite frankly because it travels down Avenue R and Gerritsen Avenue, two corridors that generally don't have traffic issues.  There is no reason why that bus shouldn't be on-time for 90% of the day.  I'll give it parts of rush hour, primarily by the Kings Highway Station.  The B1 deserves the grade it gets because it is slow as molasses.  I use it sometimes from Manhattan Beach to get to the B68 and then over to the X28, and in those instances, it's pretty slow. I've even used it along 86th street, again coming from an express bus, and it was so slow, that I got off and walked the rest of the way.  That line needs SBS because the whole boarding process is painfully slow, and it needs artics and newer fleet too. Those stupid RTS buses crawl and take off so slow.  The fleet is another big problem. The (MTA) has to modernize and get rid of buses running around that are 15+ years old.  It's just absurd.  They aren't reliable, they're slow and then you have a backlog of buses in the shop that need maintenance all at once.

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58 minutes ago, BrooklynBus said:

I thought about this a little more and I think this report was a little too harsh on the buses. When they rate a poor routes like the B31 and B84 get high grades and a failing grade is given to a great route like the B1 something has to be wrong. And I can think of three things right away. There is no criteria judging how useful a route is. One way would be to count the number of available transfers to other bus and subway lines. A long route like the B1 which gets you a lot more places is certainly more useful than a short route like the B31, yet this is not considered. And as I stated, I do not see how one out of seven buses bunching (if true, I think it is much higher) deserves an F for bus bunching.

Scheduled service frequency also needs to be considered. The average scheduled daily headway needs to be considered and routes with more scheduled service needs to be given a higher rating than a route with 30 minute headways all day long. 

Another point not considered is fare evasion. Maybe since the Eagle Team only patrols SBS, perhaps it is totally out of control and ridership is down nowhere near 6 percent. 

After all, are they really objective, or is their goal to show the buses are not working well? The MTA's goal is to show how great the buses are so their satisfaction surveys show that passengers are overwhelmingly satisfied with the buses. What we need are objective studies. 

I picked up on what you're basically saying with all this, right away - To the point where I'm actually more interested in what this coalition's agenda is (if, for anything outside of *hey, virtually all of the bus routes in this city sucks*) than any individual grade any route was given.....

Really, who cares about a grade of how slow & unreliable some bus is.... I've always thought that "pokey" award the Straphangers Campaign "hands" out, was stupid..... It's like a public school gym teacher basing your final grade on how flexible you are or not.....

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7 hours ago, B35 via Church said:

I picked up on what you're basically saying with all this, right away - To the point where I'm actually more interested in what this coalition's agenda is (if, for anything outside of *hey, virtually all of the bus routes in this city sucks*) than any individual grade any route was given.....

Really, who cares about a grade of how slow & unreliable some bus is.... I've always thought that "pokey" award the Straphangers Campaign "hands" out, was stupid..... It's like a public school gym teacher basing your final grade on how flexible you are or not.....

They aren't just a group of bus riders off the street who want to see better bus service. They are affiliated with the Riders Alliance, Tristate Transportation Campaign, the Transit Center and the Straphangers Campaign. That makes them all one big group which makes me suspicious right away. They definitely have an agenda and they got big money behind them. I don't trust Riders Alliance at all. They are a bunch of community activists with little knowledge of transit. I attended be of their meetings and when they didn't like what I was saying, I was told flat out that I would not be allowed to come to their next meeting. They obviously don't believe in hearing other opinions, just their own. Same thing with Streetsblog. I was banned from their site for saying the truth that they did not want to hear. 

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8 hours ago, Via Garibaldi 8 said:

Uh I think it should be cut and dry.  If the bus is prompt then it gets a good grade, and if it isn't, it should get a low grade.  The B31 should be getting an A quite frankly because it travels down Avenue R and Gerritsen Avenue, two corridors that generally don't have traffic issues.  There is no reason why that bus shouldn't be on-time for 90% of the day.  I'll give it parts of rush hour, primarily by the Kings Highway Station.  The B1 deserves the grade it gets because it is slow as molasses.  I use it sometimes from Manhattan Beach to get to the B68 and then over to the X28, and in those instances, it's pretty slow. I've even used it along 86th street, again coming from an express bus, and it was so slow, that I got off and walked the rest of the way.  That line needs SBS because the whole boarding process is painfully slow, and it needs artics and newer fleet too. Those stupid RTS buses crawl and take off so slow.  The fleet is another big problem. The (MTA) has to modernize and get rid of buses running around that are 15+ years old.  It's just absurd.  They aren't reliable, they're slow and then you have a backlog of buses in the shop that need maintenance all at once.

No it's not cut and dry. If all you are rating is on time performance and that's all that counts, yes that is cut and dry. But this group was rating a route on much more than that. There is no way that a route like the B31 or B84 which have very limited destinations can be considered "good". If we follow their thinking, then all we should have are two-mile long shuttle routes requiring eight buses to get anywhere. 

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On 2/10/2018 at 7:47 PM, JubaionBx12+SBS said:

My rebuttal to checkmate was founded more in the logic that the frequency of service becomes the main criteria to evaluate routes in an ideal world where the vast majority of routes are reliable. Routes with low frequencies (while needed) just wouldn't appeal enough to get an A if all routes are graded on the same scale and pass the reliability test. Checkmate seems to think any route that is useful and reliable should get an A while not considering that a 3 minute headway can be rated equivalently to a 15 minute headway and one of those is much worse on paper than the other. A route's report card grade to me is not some evaluation on it's existence more than a reflection of what the average joe would think about that route if he used it. The average joe wouldn't be giving A's to the Bx29 and F's to the multitude of low headway routes that have them in any world where the service made sense. 

For starters, you're under the impression that a coverage route automatically has to be low frequency (which thinking about it again, you have a point that coverage routes by definition provide the bare minimum levels of service to an area). In any case, I was thinking that in an ideal world, the MTA would be looking to grow ridership on these routes to a level where they warrant decent headways (so a route like the Bx29 would be running every 10-15 minutes all day, while a route like the Bx12 would run on reliable 3-4 minute headways). 

But then it also begs the question: What is your threshold for frequent vs. not-frequent?

On 2/11/2018 at 8:20 AM, 67thAve said:

Perhaps the speed of NICE operators has to due with the very tight schedules they work with? There isn't that much padding due to budgetary constraints.

Likely that, combined with a different management culture over there. At the MTA, the attitude is that if there's any accident, it's automatically the B/O's fault (sometimes even if the police report determines otherwise, they'll find some way to pin it on the B/O), and so they operate slowly to cover themselves. 

On 2/11/2018 at 9:05 PM, BrooklynBus said:

I just glanced at some of the results and methodology. Although nothing about the methodology jumps out at me as being faulty, I question some of the results. Although most would agree that Staten Island local buses are the worst because of poor headways and coverage, the routes in SI are rated as the best in the city.

Also, I do not understand how the B1 could rate an F in bunching when they state only one in seven bunch.   One in seven sounds pretty good to me. I think it's much worse than that.

I think too much of an emphasis is placed on speed and not enough emphasis on poor headways. I guess that's why the B84 did so well as well as SI routes.

If buses bunch and you still only wait 15 minutes, that's better than no bunching and having to wait a half hour. Poor or inadequate routing is totally ignored in the methodology, but I can't think of a way to consider that either. 

It should also be noted that SBS barely scored higher than their respective locals rating C, D, or F. 

If 1 in 7 bunch, that's about a 14% bunch rate. They must've rounded it off, because this was their grading scale:

Speed: A is greater than 12.5 mph, B is 10-12.5 mph, C is 7.5-10 mph, D is 5-7.5 mph, and F is less than 5 mph

Bunching: A is less than 2.5%, B is 2.5-5%, C is 5-10%, D is 10-15%, and F is greater than 15%

OTP: A is greater than 80%, B is 75-80%, C is 65-75%, D is 50-65%, F is less than 50%

Overall: This is where it gets confusing, because on one hand, they say they either using bunching or OTP, depending on the headway, but the cutoffs involve 1/3 which is only possible if they used both bunching and OTP. In any case, it appears that they did it on a 4-point scale (A = 4.0, F = 0.0) and averaged them out, so anything greater than 3.67 was considered an A, greater than 2.67 was a B, greater than 1.67 was a C, greater than 0.67 was a D, and less than 0.67 was an F (and apparently, if it got an F in any single category, that qualified as an F)

I can see how reliability can somewhat offset a low frequency (if buses are scheduled every 7-8 minutes, but it's known that it bunches up often, you'll be likely to go out at a random time, and might very well end up waiting 15 minutes for a pair of buses. If a route runs every 30 minutes and is reliable, then at least you can time yourself to arrive a couple of minutes before the bus is scheduled). Of course, this all goes out the window if you're dealing with untimed transfers, and of course, there is value to the flexibility of being able to leave your home or job a few minutes later and not have it completely screw up your trip.

So yeah, I do agree that frequency should be included. "Usefulness" of the route can be somewhat estimated by some ridership-based metrics (per-mile, per-hour, per-trip etc), but at the same time, that's influenced too much by population density and the levels of service the MTA provides (running more frequent service in the same corridor will attract some level of ridership in and of itself, and also, routes in denser parts of the city tend to do better on those measurements for obvious reasons). 

 

BTW, you want to set your own criteria for a report card, you can use Scott Stringer's report of route profiles (there's a CSV file that can be downloaded, and I also made another thread where I calculated per-mile ridership and a bunch of other statistics from that data, and ranked the routes accordingly), where he gives the speed, OTP, and wait assessment (just like the Bus Riders Coalition) but also adds other metrics like the number of turns on the route, the number of stops, AM frequency, evening frequency, etc What would be interesting to calculate is the "directness coefficient" (which is how circuitous a bus route is compared to traveling between the two endpoints by car). 

 

17 hours ago, Via Garibaldi 8 said:

Uh I think it should be cut and dry.  If the bus is prompt then it gets a good grade, and if it isn't, it should get a low grade.  The B31 should be getting an A quite frankly because it travels down Avenue R and Gerritsen Avenue, two corridors that generally don't have traffic issues.  There is no reason why that bus shouldn't be on-time for 90% of the day.  I'll give it parts of rush hour, primarily by the Kings Highway Station.  The B1 deserves the grade it gets because it is slow as molasses.  I use it sometimes from Manhattan Beach to get to the B68 and then over to the X28, and in those instances, it's pretty slow. I've even used it along 86th street, again coming from an express bus, and it was so slow, that I got off and walked the rest of the way.  That line needs SBS because the whole boarding process is painfully slow, and it needs artics and newer fleet too. Those stupid RTS buses crawl and take off so slow.  The fleet is another big problem. The (MTA) has to modernize and get rid of buses running around that are 15+ years old.  It's just absurd.  They aren't reliable, they're slow and then you have a backlog of buses in the shop that need maintenance all at once.

4

If it was so cut-and-dry, you would've seen that there's another component to their methodology which is speed. But on top of that, you have to dig through their page to find the exact cutoffs for these components.

16 hours ago, B35 via Church said:

I picked up on what you're basically saying with all this, right away - To the point where I'm actually more interested in what this coalition's agenda is (if, for anything outside of *hey, virtually all of the bus routes in this city sucks*) than any individual grade any route was given.....

Really, who cares about a grade of how slow & unreliable some bus is.... I've always thought that "pokey" award the Straphangers Campaign "hands" out, was stupid..... It's like a public school gym teacher basing your final grade on how flexible you are or not.....

1

I'll say this: From the people I've met who are a part of the member groups (Riders Alliance and Transportation Alternatives), those people know very little about public transit operations, and seem to be strictly focused on the political side. Not necessarily a bad thing (at least buses are receiving more political and media attention compared to years past, which should put pressure on the MTA to study actual solutions to the problems).

I went to a Transportation Alternatives BBQ, and I signed what I thought was a sign-in sheet....turns out that it was a petition calling for the removal of a lane of traffic on Narrows Road North to put in a two-way protected bike lane. I asked what about the buses that use that street: Even if you don't care about the cars, you're going to force the buses to sit in extra traffic. She said "Wait, there's buses that go down that street?" I said, yeah, I take the S53/93 to get from work in Grasmere (and then there's also the X14). And then there was also the half-truth of there being no sidewalk on that part of Narrows Road North (Between Hylan & Targee, there's portions where there's no sidewalk and pedestrians have to walk in the street. The rest of the road has a sidewalk, which gives the obvious solution of just building a wide sidewalk, letting bikes use it, and calling it a day. It's not like there's tons of bikes or pedestrian traffic to the point where they can't safely share the sidewalk, compared to say, Midtown Manhattan)

So yeah, the members aren't always the sharpest tools in the shed, and they stretch the truth and use sneaky tactics to try to get what they want....just like many actual politicians.

8 hours ago, BrooklynBus said:

No it's not cut and dry. If all you are rating is on time performance and that's all that counts, yes that is cut and dry. But this group was rating a route on much more than that. There is no way that a route like the B31 or B84 which have very limited destinations can be considered "good". If we follow their thinking, then all we should have are two-mile long shuttle routes requiring eight buses to get anywhere. 

2

Correction: They were supposed to be rating routes on much more than that. They're strictly grading based on speed and reliability, so by those metrics, those routes get Bs. They should be using more metrics to assign the grades, but they aren't.

To be fair, they do support shorter, more managable routes in general (they supported the M5/55 split for example). Whether that translates into supporting low-frequency shuttles, I can't say for certain.

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1 minute ago, checkmatechamp13 said:

For starters, you're under the impression that a coverage route automatically has to be low frequency (which thinking about it again, you have a point that coverage routes by definition provide the bare minimum levels of service to an area). In any case, I was thinking that in an ideal world, the MTA would be looking to grow ridership on these routes to a level where they warrant decent headways (so a route like the Bx29 would be running every 10-15 minutes all day, while a route like the Bx12 would run on reliable 3-4 minute headways). 

But then it also begs the question: What is your threshold for frequent vs. not-frequent?

Likely that, combined with a different management culture over there. At the MTA, the attitude is that if there's any accident, it's automatically the B/O's fault (sometimes even if the police report determines otherwise, they'll find some way to pin it on the B/O), and so they operate slowly to cover themselves. 

If 1 in 7 bunch, that's about a 14% bunch rate. They must've rounded it off, because this was their grading scale:

Speed: A is greater than 12.5 mph, B is 10-12.5 mph, C is 7.5-10 mph, D is 5-7.5 mph, and F is less than 5 mph

Bunching: A is less than 2.5%, B is 2.5-5%, C is 5-10%, D is 10-15%, and F is greater than 15%

OTP: A is greater than 80%, B is 75-80%, C is 65-75%, D is 50-65%, F is less than 50%

Overall: This is where it gets confusing, because on one hand, they say they either using bunching or OTP, depending on the headway, but the cutoffs involve 1/3 which is only possible if they used both bunching and OTP. In any case, it appears that they did it on a 4-point scale (A = 4.0, F = 0.0) and averaged them out, so anything greater than 3.67 was considered an A, greater than 2.67 was a B, greater than 1.67 was a C, greater than 0.67 was a D, and less than 0.67 was an F (and apparently, if it got an F in any single category, that qualified as an F)

I can see how reliability can somewhat offset a low frequency (if buses are scheduled every 7-8 minutes, but it's known that it bunches up often, you'll be likely to go out at a random time, and might very well end up waiting 15 minutes for a pair of buses. If a route runs every 30 minutes and is reliable, then at least you can time yourself to arrive a couple of minutes before the bus is scheduled). Of course, this all goes out the window if you're dealing with untimed transfers, and of course, there is value to the flexibility of being able to leave your home or job a few minutes later and not have it completely screw up your trip.

So yeah, I do agree that frequency should be included. "Usefulness" of the route can be somewhat estimated by some ridership-based metrics (per-mile, per-hour, per-trip etc), but at the same time, that's influenced too much by population density and the levels of service the MTA provides (running more frequent service in the same corridor will attract some level of ridership in and of itself, and also, routes in denser parts of the city tend to do better on those measurements for obvious reasons). 

 

BTW, you want to set your own criteria for a report card, you can use Scott Stringer's report of route profiles (there's a CSV file that can be downloaded, and I also made another thread where I calculated per-mile ridership and a bunch of other statistics from that data, and ranked the routes accordingly), where he gives the speed, OTP, and wait assessment (just like the Bus Riders Coalition) but also adds other metrics like the number of turns on the route, the number of stops, AM frequency, evening frequency, etc What would be interesting to calculate is the "directness coefficient" (which is how circuitous a bus route is compared to traveling between the two endpoints by car). 

 

If it was so cut-and-dry, you would've seen that there's another component to their methodology which is speed. But on top of that, you have to dig through their page to find the exact cutoffs for these components.

I'll say this: From the people I've met who are a part of the member groups (Riders Alliance and Transportation Alternatives), those people know very little about public transit operations, and seem to be strictly focused on the political side. Not necessarily a bad thing (at least buses are receiving more political and media attention compared to years past, which should put pressure on the MTA to study actual solutions to the problems).

I went to a Transportation Alternatives BBQ, and I signed what I thought was a sign-in sheet....turns out that it was a petition calling for the removal of a lane of traffic on Narrows Road North to put in a two-way protected bike lane. I asked what about the buses that use that street: Even if you don't care about the cars, you're going to force the buses to sit in extra traffic. She said "Wait, there's buses that go down that street?" I said, yeah, I take the S53/93 to get from work in Grasmere (and then there's also the X14). And then there was also the half-truth of there being no sidewalk on that part of Narrows Road North (Between Hylan & Targee, there's portions where there's no sidewalk and pedestrians have to walk in the street. The rest of the road has a sidewalk, which gives the obvious solution of just building a wide sidewalk, letting bikes use it, and calling it a day. It's not like there's tons of bikes or pedestrian traffic to the point where they can't safely share the sidewalk, compared to say, Midtown Manhattan)

So yeah, the members aren't always the sharpest tools in the shed, and they stretch the truth and use sneaky tactics to try to get what they want....just like many actual politicians.

Correction: They were supposed to be rating routes on much more than that. They're strictly grading based on speed and reliability, so by those metrics, those routes get Bs. They should be using more metrics to assign the grades, but they aren't.

To be fair, they do support shorter, more managable routes in general (they supported the M5/55 split for example). Whether that translates into supporting low-frequency shuttles, I can't say for certain.

Last I checked I'm entitled to my opinion.... <_< Really no point in telling me the obvious.

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1 minute ago, Via Garibaldi 8 said:

Last I checked I'm entitled to my opinion.... <_< Really no point in telling me the obvious.

That's not an opinion. The methodology that they used was based on reliability and speed. If you want to make up a report card that grades the bus routes strictly on reliability, go ahead and do it.

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4 hours ago, checkmatechamp13 said:

For starters, you're under the impression that a coverage route automatically has to be low frequency (which thinking about it again, you have a point that coverage routes by definition provide the bare minimum levels of service to an area). In any case, I was thinking that in an ideal world, the MTA would be looking to grow ridership on these routes to a level where they warrant decent headways (so a route like the Bx29 would be running every 10-15 minutes all day, while a route like the Bx12 would run on reliable 3-4 minute headways). 

But then it also begs the question: What is your threshold for frequent vs. not-frequent?

I suppose this adds to your point, but in any case, I don't care much for any advocacy of a "one size fits all" level of frequency of bus service for every bus route in a network.... Also, this notion that the existence of a coverage route can never be optimal in an ideal network...... All areas don't have the same amounts of people funneling in & out of them.... Also, there is such a thing as over-serving some line/route on some a mode of transportation (much as people don't like to think about it or believe it, with comments such as "well, you can never have enough bus/train service).....

....the hell you can't.

4 hours ago, checkmatechamp13 said:

I'll say this: From the people I've met who are a part of the member groups (Riders Alliance and Transportation Alternatives), those people know very little about public transit operations, and seem to be strictly focused on the political side. Not necessarily a bad thing (at least buses are receiving more political and media attention compared to years past, which should put pressure on the MTA to study actual solutions to the problems).

I went to a Transportation Alternatives BBQ, and I signed what I thought was a sign-in sheet....turns out that it was a petition calling for the removal of a lane of traffic on Narrows Road North to put in a two-way protected bike lane. I asked what about the buses that use that street: Even if you don't care about the cars, you're going to force the buses to sit in extra traffic. She said "Wait, there's buses that go down that street?" I said, yeah, I take the S53/93 to get from work in Grasmere (and then there's also the X14). And then there was also the half-truth of there being no sidewalk on that part of Narrows Road North (Between Hylan & Targee, there's portions where there's no sidewalk and pedestrians have to walk in the street. The rest of the road has a sidewalk, which gives the obvious solution of just building a wide sidewalk, letting bikes use it, and calling it a day. It's not like there's tons of bikes or pedestrian traffic to the point where they can't safely share the sidewalk, compared to say, Midtown Manhattan)

So yeah, the members aren't always the sharpest tools in the shed, and they stretch the truth and use sneaky tactics to try to get what they want....just like many actual politicians.

Yes, it's all about their own selfish motives; which is why I'm not putting stock into these "grades"....

But you having been to these types of meetings/hearings of the sort in the past, why would you sign (or even print) your name on... anything.... that you aren't sure of what it's for? And why would there even be a sign-in sheet to begin with? Then again, I don't bother wasting time or energy going to these pow-wow's, so it's all alien to me....

13 hours ago, BrooklynBus said:

They aren't just a group of bus riders off the street who want to see better bus service. They are affiliated with the Riders Alliance, Tristate Transportation Campaign, the Transit Center and the Straphangers Campaign. That makes them all one big group which makes me suspicious right away. They definitely have an agenda and they got big money behind them. I don't trust Riders Alliance at all. They are a bunch of community activists with little knowledge of transit. I attended be of their meetings and when they didn't like what I was saying, I was told flat out that I would not be allowed to come to their next meeting. They obviously don't believe in hearing other opinions, just their own. Same thing with Streetsblog. I was banned from their site for saying the truth that they did not want to hear. 

Of course not.... and quite frankly, I'm not convinced they want to see better bus service at all.... They just want to be seen & heard - much like the kid in the class sticking crayons up their nose & throwing snack packs on the wall all day....

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4 hours ago, checkmatechamp13 said:

Likely that, combined with a different management culture over there. At the MTA, the attitude is that if there's any accident, it's automatically the B/O's fault (sometimes even if the police report determines otherwise, they'll find some way to pin it on the B/O), and so they operate slowly to cover themselves. 

That's heavy. And it explains performance declines. B/O's are basically trying to cover their asses b/c they feel like management is out to get them, so its become an "Us vs Them" mentality.

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5 hours ago, checkmatechamp13 said:

That's not an opinion. The methodology that they used was based on reliability and speed. If you want to make up a report card that grades the bus routes strictly on reliability, go ahead and do it.

I said it should be cut and dry.  That's MY opinion. Not sure why you keep telling me about the methodology for.  I simply stated what I feel it should be based on.

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5 hours ago, checkmatechamp13 said:

For starters, you're under the impression that a coverage route automatically has to be low frequency (which thinking about it again, you have a point that coverage routes by definition provide the bare minimum levels of service to an area). In any case, I was thinking that in an ideal world, the MTA would be looking to grow ridership on these routes to a level where they warrant decent headways (so a route like the Bx29 would be running every 10-15 minutes all day, while a route like the Bx12 would run on reliable 3-4 minute headways). 

But then it also begs the question: What is your threshold for frequent vs. not-frequent?

Likely that, combined with a different management culture over there. At the MTA, the attitude is that if there's any accident, it's automatically the B/O's fault (sometimes even if the police report determines otherwise, they'll find some way to pin it on the B/O), and so they operate slowly to cover themselves. 

If 1 in 7 bunch, that's about a 14% bunch rate. They must've rounded it off, because this was their grading scale:

Speed: A is greater than 12.5 mph, B is 10-12.5 mph, C is 7.5-10 mph, D is 5-7.5 mph, and F is less than 5 mph

Bunching: A is less than 2.5%, B is 2.5-5%, C is 5-10%, D is 10-15%, and F is greater than 15%

OTP: A is greater than 80%, B is 75-80%, C is 65-75%, D is 50-65%, F is less than 50%

Overall: This is where it gets confusing, because on one hand, they say they either using bunching or OTP, depending on the headway, but the cutoffs involve 1/3 which is only possible if they used both bunching and OTP. In any case, it appears that they did it on a 4-point scale (A = 4.0, F = 0.0) and averaged them out, so anything greater than 3.67 was considered an A, greater than 2.67 was a B, greater than 1.67 was a C, greater than 0.67 was a D, and less than 0.67 was an F (and apparently, if it got an F in any single category, that qualified as an F)

I can see how reliability can somewhat offset a low frequency (if buses are scheduled every 7-8 minutes, but it's known that it bunches up often, you'll be likely to go out at a random time, and might very well end up waiting 15 minutes for a pair of buses. If a route runs every 30 minutes and is reliable, then at least you can time yourself to arrive a couple of minutes before the bus is scheduled). Of course, this all goes out the window if you're dealing with untimed transfers, and of course, there is value to the flexibility of being able to leave your home or job a few minutes later and not have it completely screw up your trip.

So yeah, I do agree that frequency should be included. "Usefulness" of the route can be somewhat estimated by some ridership-based metrics (per-mile, per-hour, per-trip etc), but at the same time, that's influenced too much by population density and the levels of service the MTA provides (running more frequent service in the same corridor will attract some level of ridership in and of itself, and also, routes in denser parts of the city tend to do better on those measurements for obvious reasons). 

 

BTW, you want to set your own criteria for a report card, you can use Scott Stringer's report of route profiles (there's a CSV file that can be downloaded, and I also made another thread where I calculated per-mile ridership and a bunch of other statistics from that data, and ranked the routes accordingly), where he gives the speed, OTP, and wait assessment (just like the Bus Riders Coalition) but also adds other metrics like the number of turns on the route, the number of stops, AM frequency, evening frequency, etc What would be interesting to calculate is the "directness coefficient" (which is how circuitous a bus route is compared to traveling between the two endpoints by car). 

 

If it was so cut-and-dry, you would've seen that there's another component to their methodology which is speed. But on top of that, you have to dig through their page to find the exact cutoffs for these components.

I'll say this: From the people I've met who are a part of the member groups (Riders Alliance and Transportation Alternatives), those people know very little about public transit operations, and seem to be strictly focused on the political side. Not necessarily a bad thing (at least buses are receiving more political and media attention compared to years past, which should put pressure on the MTA to study actual solutions to the problems).

I went to a Transportation Alternatives BBQ, and I signed what I thought was a sign-in sheet....turns out that it was a petition calling for the removal of a lane of traffic on Narrows Road North to put in a two-way protected bike lane. I asked what about the buses that use that street: Even if you don't care about the cars, you're going to force the buses to sit in extra traffic. She said "Wait, there's buses that go down that street?" I said, yeah, I take the S53/93 to get from work in Grasmere (and then there's also the X14). And then there was also the half-truth of there being no sidewalk on that part of Narrows Road North (Between Hylan & Targee, there's portions where there's no sidewalk and pedestrians have to walk in the street. The rest of the road has a sidewalk, which gives the obvious solution of just building a wide sidewalk, letting bikes use it, and calling it a day. It's not like there's tons of bikes or pedestrian traffic to the point where they can't safely share the sidewalk, compared to say, Midtown Manhattan)

So yeah, the members aren't always the sharpest tools in the shed, and they stretch the truth and use sneaky tactics to try to get what they want....just like many actual politicians.

Correction: They were supposed to be rating routes on much more than that. They're strictly grading based on speed and reliability, so by those metrics, those routes get Bs. They should be using more metrics to assign the grades, but they aren't.

To be fair, they do support shorter, more managable routes in general (they supported the M5/55 split for example). Whether that translates into supporting low-frequency shuttles, I can't say for certain.

Someone should tell them their metrics are deficient. In general, I don't support shorter more manageable routes. People think shorter more manageable routes mean cutting routes in half. That is not the solution except in the case of the ok'd B61 where few were traveling through Downtown Brooklyn. The solution is shorter but more overlapping routes with more short services. Cutting routes in half increases the need to transfer and more three bus trips and under the current fare system it increases the necessity to pay double fares so it actually discourages bus travel.

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1 minute ago, BrooklynBus said:

Someone should tell them their metrics are deficient. In general, I don't support shorter more manageable routes. People think shorter more manageable routes mean cutting routes in half. That is not the solution except in the case of the ok'd B61 where few were traveling through Downtown Brooklyn. The solution is shorter but more overlapping routes with more short services. Cutting routes in half increases the need to transfer and more three bus trips and under the current fare system it increases the necessity to pay double fares so it actually discourages bus travel.

At the same time there is nothing wrong with a route like the B31, yet you feel it should be extended west. I disagree.  Extend it west and have it run through more residential areas. I mean it's going to get whatever it gets.  

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3 minutes ago, Via Garibaldi 8 said:

I said it should be cut and dry.  That's MY opinion. Not sure why you keep telling me about the methodology for.  I simply stated what I feel it should be based on.

Because speed and reliability are not the only two factors that matter. How useful a route is is also important and as Checkmate said, that could be measured by passengers per mile.  

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1 minute ago, BrooklynBus said:

Because speed and reliability are not the only two factors that matter. How useful a route is is also important and as Checkmate said, that could be measured by passengers per mile.  

As a rider, speed and reliability are two MAIN factors in whether or not I use a bus.  I mean how useful a route is... Are you kidding me? That's like stating the obvious.  The bus can go everywhere I need it to go, but if it comes whenever it wants to, well who cares about where it goes when it isn't getting me there in the first place?  In fact there's a few routes like that I simply stopped using.  Yeah it went where I wanted to go, but it was extremely unreliable.

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1 minute ago, Via Garibaldi 8 said:

At the same time there is nothing wrong with a route like the B31, yet you feel it should be extended west. I disagree.  Extend it west and have it run through more residential areas. I mean it's going to get whatever it gets.  

There is plenty wrong with the B31. Since its connections are so limited, getting to most of Brooklyn from Gerritsen Beach is a three bus two fare trip. That's why the route is practically only used to serve the subway. That means for 20 hours a day, it runs nearly empty and that is very inefficient. It also means that unless someone from Gerritsen Beach is going to Manhattan, they will choose to drive. Don't you want less traffic and more people using mass transit? 

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Just now, BrooklynBus said:

There is plenty wrong with the B31. Since its connections are so limited, getting to most of Brooklyn from Gerritsen Beach is a three bus two fare trip. That's why the route is practically only used to serve the subway. That means for 20 hours a day, it runs nearly empty and that is very inefficient. It also means that unless someone from Gerritsen Beach is going to Manhattan, they will choose to drive. Don't you want less traffic and more people using mass transit? 

In other words, you're saying that feeder routes are useless?  I don't buy that.  Both the B2 and the B31 are feeder routes, and both have seen a severe loss in ridership.  You think that's just because?  I don't.

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2 minutes ago, Via Garibaldi 8 said:

As a rider, speed and reliability are two MAIN factors in whether or not I use a bus.  I mean how useful a route is... Are you kidding me? That's like stating the obvious.  The bus can go everywhere I need it to go, but if it comes whenever it wants to, well who cares about where it goes when it isn't getting me there in the first place?  In fact there's a few routes like that I simply stopped using.  Yeah it went where I wanted to go, but it was extremely unreliable.

Did I say that route coverage is more important than speed and reliability? No. I just said it is an important factor and needs to be considered. I can also take the opposite position from you. Let's say a route is scheduled every two minutes and is very reliable. But what good is that for me if it doesn't take me to where I want to go? So let's not argue what are the most important factors, but just agree that all three are not important. 

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2 minutes ago, Via Garibaldi 8 said:

In other words, you're saying that feeder routes are useless?  I don't buy that.  Both the B2 and the B31 are feeder routes, and both have seen a severe loss in ridership.  You think that's just because?  I don't.

I think routes need to have more than a single purpose to be successful. They can be feeder routes and line haul routes as well. As I said, unless you are going to operate feeder routes only in the rush hour, without another purpose they tend to run nearly empty the rest of the day and are therefore very inefficient. 

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4 minutes ago, BrooklynBus said:

Did I say that route coverage is more important than speed and reliability? No. I just said it is an important factor and needs to be considered. I can also take the opposite position from you. Let's say a route is scheduled every two minutes and is very reliable. But what good is that for me if it doesn't take me to where I want to go? So let's not argue what are the most important factors, but just agree that all three are not important. 

You mean that all three ARE important.  I would argue that for as much as these advocacy groups complain about bus lines needing to be redone, many of them still serve the riding public of terms of going where they need to go.  The main issue as to why ridership has plummeted is really reliability and how slow buses have become.  We could re-do several lines tomorrow.  Unless those buses move faster and come as they are scheduled, no one will really care.  You talk to any rider who stopped using buses or doesn't want to use them and ask them why they don't use them, and the first they'll say is they're SLOW and don't come as scheduled.  Rarely have I heard anyone say that they don't go where I need them to go.  

 

1 minute ago, BrooklynBus said:

I think routes need to have more than a single purpose to be successful. They can be feeder routes and line haul routes as well. As I said, unless you are going to operate feeder routes only in the rush hour, without another purpose they tend to run nearly empty the rest of the day and are therefore very inefficient. 

You still didn't answer my question as to why both routes lost so much ridership?

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34 minutes ago, BrooklynBus said:

Someone should tell them their metrics are deficient. In general, I don't support shorter more manageable routes. People think shorter more manageable routes mean cutting routes in half. That is not the solution except in the case of the ok'd B61 where few were traveling through Downtown Brooklyn. The solution is shorter but more overlapping routes with more short services. Cutting routes in half increases the need to transfer and more three bus trips and under the current fare system it increases the necessity to pay double fares so it actually discourages bus travel.

I don't support long-winded routes just because they offer transfers to more routes either..... The cord's gotta be cut somewhere.....

I don't think anyone's really looking  to split a route that carries heavy that travels a moderate distance though; say like a B35 or a B1....

Now the M101, that route needs to be broken up.... Same with the B82.

26 minutes ago, BrooklynBus said:

There is plenty wrong with the B31. Since its connections are so limited, getting to most of Brooklyn from Gerritsen Beach is a three bus two fare trip. That's why the route is practically only used to serve the subway. That means for 20 hours a day, it runs nearly empty and that is very inefficient. It also means that unless someone from Gerritsen Beach is going to Manhattan, they will choose to drive. Don't you want less traffic and more people using mass transit? 

I'm not sure how much more usage you'd get from extending that route though.... And the driving that goes on in Gerritsen Beach, I'm not convinced the lot of it that goes on down there, is due to insufficient coverage with the B31....

24 minutes ago, Via Garibaldi 8 said:

 Both the B2 and the B31 are feeder routes, and both have seen a severe loss in ridership.  You think that's just because?  I don't.

Dicking around with service over the years certainly didn't help... That type of shit is definitely a deterrent to ridership.....

19 minutes ago, BrooklynBus said:

I think routes need to have more than a single purpose to be successful. They can be feeder routes and line haul routes as well.....

I think a route's purpose{s} should be defined.... Suburban bus systems tend to do a better job than the MTA at this (hell, FWIW, if it's not SBS, the MTA doesn't give a shit about advertising its buses anyway).... If that's a single purpose (like a B74, Q70, etc), so be it.... If it's a multi-purpose route (like a Q44), same deal, so be it.....

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Just now, B35 via Church said:

I'm not sure how much more usage you'd get from extending that route though.... And the driving that goes on in Gerritsen Beach, I'm not convinced the lot of it that goes on down there, is due to insufficient coverage with the B31....

Dicking around with service over the years certainly didn't help... That type of shit is definitely a deterrent to ridership.....

That's precisely the problem.

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2 hours ago, Via Garibaldi 8 said:

You mean that all three ARE important.  I would argue that for as much as these advocacy groups complain about bus lines needing to be redone, many of them still serve the riding public of terms of going where they need to go.  The main issue as to why ridership has plummeted is really reliability and how slow buses have become.  We could re-do several lines tomorrow.  Unless those buses move faster and come as they are scheduled, no one will really care.  You talk to any rider who stopped using buses or doesn't want to use them and ask them why they don't use them, and the first they'll say is they're SLOW and don't come as scheduled.  Rarely have I heard anyone say that they don't go where I need them to go.  

You still didn't answer my question as to why both routes lost so much ridership?

Bus Turnaround Coalition and the NYC Comptroller are the only ones who are talking about redoing routes. Reliability is nothing new. It always has been a problem. When I surveyed 8,000 riders in 1975, the most frequent complaint was reliability. Slow speeds was not a popular comment. While there is more traffic these days, it is balanced out by quicker loading times due to MetroCard instead of paying with coins, so I doubt if speeds really gave declined that much. Similarly, I doubt if reliability is a greater problem today then it was years ago. The second most popular complaint in 1975 was the bus driver and the buses. Today, those comp,aunts are far less with better buses. (Drivers refusing to kneel buses, pull up to the curb and lack of AC were common complaints then. As for complaints about routing, you are correct. Few complained then and few complain now. I attribute that to riders regarding routes as a given and not something they can change.

As far as the B2 and B31's loss of ridership, the B31 ridership actually has been going up when the borough's ridership in general has been declining. As far as the B2, there are several reasons why ridership has declined. In the 1950's, it was considered one of the borough's best routes. That was because buses operated every two minutes in rush hours and every 10 minutes most other times. Then in July, 1975, because of the budget crisis, the MTA decided to target the most heavily used routes by cutting rush hour service in half from every two minutes to every four minutes on the B2, B41, 44, 46, 35. Buses were overcrowded before the cuts and after the cuts could not handle the ridership. This was total incompetence. I still have the NY Post newspaper article 

somewhere with the MTA's justification that this poses no real inconvenience for bus riders because they only will have to wait two additional minutes for a bus. Few know but that was the beginning of the gypsy cabs followed by dollar livery vans. So the MTA only has themselves to blame for that. I documented that for the B46 in a 1978 report I wrote. And the MTA really welcomes the dollar vans, because it means they need to provide less service. 

So these initial cuts, just led to future service cuts. Back to the B2. So those cuts resulted in lower ridership. Four minute rush hour service soon became five minute service. Kings Plaza in 1971 boosted ridership for awhile. Then came the extension of the B9 to Kings Plaza around 1980. That also hurt the B2 since subway riders could now change for the B9 as well as the B2 for Kings Plaza. But the real blow was rerouting the B31 from Avenue U to Avenue R in 1993. That cut B2 service because in half in spite of promises from the MTA (in meetings I attended) that B2 service would remain unaffected by that change. They also stated that an increase would in B3 service would not be necessary, but three m the later, they were forced to increase B3 service. 

Then they cut B2 weekend service altogether in 2010 and then brought it back a few years later. So the B2 history is rather complex. To remain viable it needs either a western or southern extension. I prefer west.

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4 minutes ago, BrooklynBus said:

Bus Turnaround Coalition and the NYC Comptroller are the only ones who are talking about redoing routes. Reliability is nothing new. It always has been a problem. When I surveyed 8,000 riders in 1975, the most frequent complaint was reliability. Slow speeds was not a popular comment. While there is more traffic these days, it is balanced out by quicker loading times due to MetroCard instead of paying with coins, so I doubt if speeds really gave declined that much. Similarly, I doubt if reliability is a greater problem today then it was years ago. The second most popular complaint in 1975 was the bus driver and the buses. Today, those comp,aunts are far less with better buses. (Drivers refusing to kneel buses, pull up to the curb and lack of AC were common complaints then. As for complaints about routing, you are correct. Few complained then and few complain now. I attribute that to riders regarding routes as a given and not something they can change.

As far as the B2 and B31's loss of ridership, the B31 ridership actually has been going up when the borough's ridership in general has been declining. As far as the B2, there are several reasons why ridership has declined. In the 1950's, it was considered one of the borough's best routes. That was because buses operated every two minutes in rush hours and every 10 minutes most other times. Then in July, 1975, because of the budget crisis, the MTA decided to target the most heavily used routes by cutting rush hour service in half from every two minutes to every four minutes on the B2, B41, 44, 46, 35. Buses were overcrowded before the cuts and after the cuts could not handle the ridership. This was total incompetence. I still have the NY Post newspaper article 

somewhere with the MTA's justification that this poses no real inconvenience for bus riders because they only will have to wait two additional minutes for a bus. Few know but that was the beginning of the gypsy cabs followed by dollar livery vans. So the MTA only has themselves to blame for that. I documented that for the B46 in a 1978 report I wrote. And the MTA really welcomes the dollar vans, because it means they need to provide less service. 

So these initial cuts, just led to future service cuts. Back to the B2. So those cuts resulted in lower ridership. Four minute rush hour service soon became five minute service. Kings Plaza in 1971 boosted ridership for awhile. Then came the extension of the B9 to Kings Plaza around 1980. That also hurt the B2 since subway riders could now change for the B9 as well as the B2 for Kings Plaza. But the real blow was rerouting the B31 from Avenue U to Avenue R in 1993. That cut B2 service because in half in spite of promises from the MTA (in meetings I attended) that B2 service would remain unaffected by that change. They also stated that an increase would in B3 service would not be necessary, but three m the later, they were forced to increase B3 service. 

Then they cut B2 weekend service altogether in 2010 and then brought it back a few years later. So the B2 history is rather complex. To remain viable it needs either a western or southern extension. I prefer west.

That's an absurd conclusion.  It isn't viable because the (MTA) cut service, and all the extensions in the world won't make a difference if they keep slashing service on the line.

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21 minutes ago, Via Garibaldi 8 said:

That's an absurd conclusion.  It isn't viable because the (MTA) cut service, and all the extensions in the world won't make a difference if they keep slashing service on the line.

So you are saying that if B2 service was again 2 minutes in rush hour and 10 minutes at all other times, the demand would suddenly return to what it was in the 1950s? Given the changes in the the B9 and B31 and the fact locals have pretty much abandoned Kings Plaza as a destination, I really doubt that would be the case. Yes if they improved service drastically, they would get a few more riders but not nearly enough to warrant it. I doubt it that even a 10 percent increase in service would increase ridership by 10 percent because the route is of such limited use. 

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13 minutes ago, BrooklynBus said:

So you are saying that if B2 service was again 2 minutes in rush hour and 10 minutes at all other times, the demand would suddenly return to what it was in the 1950s? Given the changes in the the B9 and B31 and the fact locals have pretty much abandoned Kings Plaza as a destination, I really doubt that would be the case. Yes if they improved service drastically, they would get a few more riders but not nearly enough to warrant it. I doubt it that even a 10 percent increase in service would increase ridership by 10 percent because the route is of such limited use. 

No, I'm saying that service was destroyed due to service cuts.  You admitted it yourself.  That said, what makes you think that an extension would do anything more than make service worse and more unreliable?

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