Better Buses, Better Cities: How to Plan, Run, and Win the Fight for Effective Transit

The typical private car carries between one and two people in a box that takes up over 100 cubic feet. As far as space is concerned, this is one of the least efficient ways to move people that has ever been conceived. The National Association of City Transportation Officials (NACTO) lays the math out simply in its Transit Street Design Guide. Add b

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Mary Skelton Roberts, co-director of the climate program at the Barr Foundation, said the conflation of buses with poverty “is an American construct—building buses that are low quality in neighborhoods that are already struggling. That does not have to be the reality.” It isn’t the reality in places that have good bus service, as professors Ralph B

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Transit expansion also often must clear hurdles that road projects don’t. Most transit expansion projects that receive federal funding get it through a program colloquially known as “New Starts” (officially the Capital Improvement Grants program). Their sponsors have to demonstrate that the project will offer mobility and congestion relief, environ

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Transit service that is useful to most people satisfies seven basic criteria: • The service goes where you want to go. • The service runs frequently enough that you don’t have to think about it. • The service is reasonably fast. • The service is reliable (you don’t have to worry about major delays). • You can conveniently walk from the service to y

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The bus demands particular attention for two reasons. One, buses can be improved quickly. Two, there’s an enormous mismatch between how badly American cities need good bus service and how committed their leaders are to providing it. Every major city in America has streets where, if the bus were made more convenient, transit agencies would reap a bu

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In 2014, Seattle voters approved increases in sales tax and vehicle registration fees to buy even more bus service within city limits. Afterward, city leaders reorganized the agency specifically to emphasize transit’s importance, according to Bill Bryant, who joined Seattle DOT in 2007. Transit had been handled by a workgroup inside the DOT’s polic

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Another inequitable disparity in transit is that lower-income riders often end up paying more than wealthy ones because they can only afford to pay by the ride. Most transit agencies have some type of unlimited pass. An agency where a single-ride bus fare costs $2 might sell a seven-day pass for $20, meaning anyone who takes more than ten rides a w

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Cars also eat away at cities because they need to be stored. In cities such as Hartford, Connecticut, where the amount of off-street parking tripled between 1960 and 2000 to accommodate drivers, neighborhoods can look like desolate, unattractive moonscapes. The parking lots also bring in less tax revenue than productive uses such as offices and sto

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Note that I didn’t say that cities should build bus networks that maximize access to jobs. I said they should maximize access to destinations. That’s because more than two-thirds of transit trips (and four-fifths of all trips) are noncommute trips.10 For this reason, there are usually more people who use the bus in a city than decisionmakers realiz

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