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

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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The City of Los Angeles has perhaps the clearest example of an approval process that was designed to fail. Placing a single bus shelter within city limits requires sign-off from nine different entities: the local councilmember; the city bureaus of Street Services, Engineering, Street Lighting, and Contract Administration; its departments of Plannin

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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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First, they can cut down on the amount of time the bus is stopped to pick up passengers. Many American buses stop every few blocks, sometimes every block, and on some rare occasions, multiple times on the same block! By eliminating certain stops and asking riders to walk a bit further, they can make the trip faster for everyone. Even how bus stops

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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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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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When researchers have looked into how “captive” non–car owners really are to transit, they repeatedly find that people do not fit into a neat binary. In 2016, my colleagues at TransitCenter and I surveyed 3,000 people in seventeen U.S. regions about their travel behavior. The resulting report, Who’s On Board, found that people who lived near better

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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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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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