The other day while waiting for a bus, I was thinking about how city buses should be smaller and run more frequently. Instead of a 40-seater every 15 minutes, they could run a 10-seater every 5 minutes. (More precisely, they could run as frequently as necessary during rush hour to handle all the passengers–a bus a minute if necessary–but more spaced out at other times. For example, on weekend mornings the bus is never crowded, so they could run the much smaller buses with just slightly higher frequencies than they currently run big buses now.)
The advantages of my proposal are clear: the bus comes more frequently, also since the lag time is smaller, loading and unloading won’t take so much time, and as an extra bonus, you’ll probably skip a lot more stops because there are fewer people on the bus who might want to get off at any particular point. Also, I don’t know about fuel efficiency, but I wouldn’t be surprised if the fuel cost per passenger is lower because you’re not having to run these huge empty buses in off-peak hours. Finally, van-sized buses could maneuver better in traffic.
The only additional cost that I see is having to hire more bus drivers, but with unemployment at 9%, I don’t think it would be hard to find people to do this. What really irritates me are those huge, huge buses that take forever to fill up and take about a half hour just to go a few crosstown blocks. If they were broken up into vans, the wait would be less and the ride much more pleasant.
P.S. Yes, I know this isn’t one of the world’s most important problems. But it is a big expenditure, so why not try to do it right?
P.P.S. I’m sure there’s lots of research on this topic but it’s not something I’m at all informed on. The above are just my personal impressions.
P.P.P.S. To those of you who discuss the cost: Sure, it would cost money. But there’s a real economic benefit: people would be able to get around the city faster! A good use of stimulus funds, etc.
I learned a few days ago that this is how it works in Hong Kong: there are both large buses (ala the US) as well as small vans. Apparently the van drivers are kind of insane though, speeding frequently and often getting in accidents.
"The only additional cost that I see is having to hire more bus drivers…."
I would think that at least as important a cost would be the physical investment and maintenance of four times as many vehicles. Even with the smaller vehicles "offline" during much of the day, there are a lot of per-vehicle recurring costs like oil changes and cleaning and so on, plus the sheer infrastructure cost of having a place to park them all overnight.
I agree. I'm not aware of any research on this, but I know a little history. If you go back in time, buses were of different sizes and more common. There are famous pictures of streets clogged with horse drawn trolleys; given the limited weight a team could pull, you had large numbers of these wagons. After that, when electricity ran cars, you still had individual trolleys. The old ones in museums are half the size. Street cars even connected urban areas all over the northeast; it was possible to travel from PA to Maine by interurban street car.
And of course if you go to developing countries, you often find different sizes of buses for short or long hauls.
My guess is that in the days before software, investment in larger buses that (supposedly) ran on fixed schedules and which could handle large and small loads looked like the best choice. I've often wondered about this because the urge in these public utilities is always toward bigger size, lower frequency.
To run just a bit more, I've wondered why the cities and towns (& counties) don't integrate the transportation fleets of buses and school buses. With a little different design, you could have a larger fleet that serves both groups. I don't know if this is done anywhere.
This would represent an increase in cost. There would have to be more vehicles in the system, adding to acquisition cost and maintenance cost. Also you'd have to triple or quadruple the FTEs needed to operate the buses.
I agree that there is probably value in using more smaller buses for certain routes at certain times, but I think this would often cost quite a bit more money. My guess is that the bus drivers salary and benefits is a high proportion of the costs of a bus system. I'm speculating wildly, but I'll say 60%.
Bruno Latour's amazing book "Aramis, or the Love of Technology" answers all question reguarding the design of public transit systems as well as numerous other complex systems.
The system's design and it's capital equipment is deeply biased toward the needs of the rush hour. One element of the rush hour that goes unappreciated is that during rush hour you can pack people into the bus and train very very tightly.
Doesn't this all assume that buses in and of themselves are a worthwhile venture?
Please note that all public transportation at this point is subsidized by tax payers, meaning those individuals taking advantage of these forms of transportation are not paying what it would cost if not for tax payer monies.
I think this goes a very long way in explaining why efficiencies such as yours and other fairly straight forward ideas will never get implemented. Because once politicians become involved, efficiency just stops being a prime concern.
Example – a metro bus line was looking for ways to make up for a budget shortfall (during better times 10 years ago, not today) and took a very close look at their routes. They saw 4 separate routes that barely picked up or dropped off more than 5 people a week in certain areas they stopped. The result for a business is easy, stop going there. For a political company however, one of those routes stayed open specifically to serve a congress member's grandmother. Not as if he didn't have the money to help her, but they are now basically spending thousands of dollars a year to pick up one old lady once a week.
It would be cheaper to send her a cab when she needed it – or in this case let her cheap a$$ son actually do his moral duty by helping his family with his money instead of mine, but I digress…
My only point is that the only way to get true efficiency into most governmental systems is to remove the government from the system.
This principle is applied in a lot of Asian Pacific nations. I've had direct experience in Hong Kong and Manila (Philippines), for example. It has its own disadvantages, which might also well translate to western cultures like the US and Australia. Primarily, people don't like to wait. So they jam into the first mini bus or jeepney that comes along, making them very full and stopping frequently. If everybody was prepared to be a little more patient, it would be more comfortable, but because everybody at every stop behaves the same way, even those who choose to wait for the next one aren't always rewarded for their good manners.
But if you put a sufficiently large number of such small mini buses, it becomes indistinguishable from SUV-choked freeways!
Motorized transportation options lie on a continuum that go from cars to commuter trains, with buses somewhere in the middle. Where the sweet spot lies for any given city probably depends on the population density, congestion, the capacity of the road system, and how compact downtown is. Your shuttle type service has already been implemented, e.g., to take passengers out of busy airports.
Just because it's easy to hire more drivers, it doesn't mean it's cheap!
It costs a lot more and the unemployment rate doesn't totally matter: 40-seaters => 10-seaters means hiring 4x more drivers. So you need a 75% paycut to make this policy change cost neutral. Yikes.
If memory serves, Hong Kong does use some smaller buses as part of it's multi-modal system (not my picture). They also use double decker buses and street cars, but some of that might be more for the tourists (I know I greatly enjoyed them as a tourist).
How about the effect on traffic congestion? 5 instead of 1 big bus would probably create twice-thrice the traffic. I guess, the net benefit depends on the city in question.
I agree that smaller buses would probably be good in a lot of ways – I hadn't considered the stopping/starting time issue, but they'd also make the company more flexible (being able to add seats to a route in increments of 10 instead of 40, or shift them from one route to another) and ease congestion in traffic. But I do worry that the fuel economy and other sorts of costs would suffer a great deal. Smaller buses would have a lot fewer passengers per ton of metal, and thus would take a lot more fuel to move, in addition to it being more expensive to purchase enough vehicles to move the same number of people. And you mention the costs of hiring extra drivers, which are surely non-negligible.
As a back-of-the-envelope calculation, let's assume that a bus averages 3 miles per gallon, and 30 miles per hour, for a total of 10 gallons of gas per hour. That makes fuel costs on the order of $30 per hour. I'm going to guess that bus drivers get paid about $10 per hour, since it's a somewhat skilled job, and many cities already have minimum wages well above the national rate. So if we assume that the impact on fuel costs is zero, then replacing one bus with two will result in a 25% increase in operating expenses.
I think you may be dismissing the "hire more bus drivers" issue a little too cavalierly. I would expect that labour costs make up a considerable percentage of the cost to operate a bus for an hour. I imagine those costs grow roughly linearly with the number of buses, not the number of passengers. Clearly the cost/environmental savings to using transit is the reduction of redundancy, which you lose when you make buses smaller (eventually you get taxis).
Then there is just the issue of finding drivers at any price. Vancouver went through a recruitment campaign in the last year that was clearly quite costly in that it was so visible. Yet they didn't have anywhere close to the goal of doubling or tripling the amount of current number of drivers. Convincing people to be bus drivers is hard, even with high unemployment.
That might be a good idea, but you mention increased labor costs like that's a small portion of the total cost. I'd guess it's something like 50% of the cost of running a transit system.
What you want is a jitney. Good luck finding jitneys in the US, though.
Not just more bus drivers – you also have more buses to maintain.
But I think this idea potentially has a lot of merit – save the big buses for routes that are heavily trafficked, and run those more frequently too. The single biggest disincentive to me catching the bus here is the fact that it only comes once an hour, and once in a while comes really early or really late – and if you miss it, the cost is large. If a bus came even every 15 minutes, I wouldn't be bothered to miss one, and would just go to the stop when I was ready to leave (since a ten minute wait is not really here or there).
Although as a commuter I wish this were doable, I suspect it doesn't make economic sense.
Here's San Francisco's transit budget:
http://www.sfmta.com/cms/rbudget/documents/FY2007…
The MTA does more than just run transit, but 2000 of their 3700 positions are "transit operator". Labor is $443m of $678m total spent. There are quite a number of other people who do vehicle maintenance, who are presumably also proportionate to the number of vehicles, and there are a number of positions that I'm sure are also a function of vehicle numbers.
Until we have robot drivers, I suspect we're stuck with current passenger/driver ratios.
I work as an analyst for a public busing system, so I've got some first hand experience in this area.
First, we don't pay for our buses. Well, we pay 5% of the capital expense, but not the full $350k necessary to pay for the entire bus. Thus the cost of the bus themselves is less important. I suspect this is the case for most bus systems in the US. We get state and federal funds to pay for the buses.
Second, we have some smaller vans (20 person or so). Oddly enough their MPG isn't all that much greater than the big boys.
And third, our biggest non-capital expense is personnel. Meaning, switching to a whole lot of smaller buses running more frequently would kill our budget.
All that being said, if money was available to pay the salaries, I'd be pushing for this…but it isn't.
I think there's another upside out there, which is just greater demand for a service that is more frequent. In the DC suburbs where I live, reducing the frequency of the large buses has an unfortunate effect of suppressing demand, which then leads to a further cut in services. It is a death spiral which is very difficult to get out of. I can see all the costs that the various commenters have called out. But increase in costs doesn't make something a bad idea if it is matched by a commensurate increase in revenues.
On the other hand, can increase in frequencies result in greater demand? How cool would it be (like it is in many parts of the world like London, Singapore where buses arrive every 3-7 minutes) to have transportation available on demand and not have to drive?
With all the pros and cons, this suspiciously sounds like a problem that can be modeled by systems dynamics. Anyone know any good systems dynamics modeling software (freeware, preferably) that could be applied to this problem?
If the system is run by the traditional public utilities, with public benefits and public work rules, the cost would indeed be high. There has been at least talk about a blended system of public and private.
About 10 or more years ago, shanghai, China started to allow private operations on mid-size buses in addition to big buses run by government. Such buses became very prosperous very quickly probably because it was a profitable business.
Mike Munger put together an interesting article on Santiago's decision to move in the other direction (i.e. from small fleets of privately owned buses to a city owned fleet of large buses). A disastrous move, but entertaining reading.
http://www.econlib.org/library/Columns/y2008/Mung…
Another potential benefit of smaller buses is that they can be turned around more easily. An empty bus running behind a nearly empty bus can turn around mid route and head back. This helps enormously in reducing ong waits and first-bus congestion. SF Muni seemed to implement a system like this on street cars 8? years back. It was used rarely do to the difficulty in switching track, but when used it helped a lot.
The problem of people cramming on the first bus is ever present and adds enormously to system inefficiency. There is some good OR work on this (a friend used to work in this hopelessly underfunded field). There might be two ways to get around the problem: Pricing and Education. In a pricing model you might imagine having the second bus pulling up diretly behind the bus as people scramble to get on and the second bus driver yelling out: thsi bus is free! Packing the last 5 passengers into a crowded bus takes a long time, perhaps they would get on the second bus. (Drivers did this for a while on SF MUNI but I doubt it was sanctionned) Education, experience and faith in the system help too. When I moved to San Francisco years back, there was no faith in the system (it was often faster to walk over twin peaks than take the muni). This meant that there was incredible crowding in the first muni cars and buses and lots of empty cars and buses running behind. Once faith was restored in the system, people were much more willing to wait the minute or two to get on an empty train and have a seat. (For this to work the NextBus system needed to be introduced, so people would know how long the wait would be).
Realistically, moving to small buses wont happen. The labor cost is clearly too high. But lots can be done by having more flexible management, to re-route buses for example, creativity in pricing, faith in the employee driver, faith in the ridership etc.
Maybe the first to purchase autonomous street vehicles will be a transit system. That would cut labor. The lanes could be semi-controlled, vehicles fairly slow. A city like LA might be a good place to try. A good test bed for the technology?
In Vilnius, there seem to be private minibus lines parallel to the full size public ones, sometimes even on the same routes. They don't use the bus stops, you just wave if you want to get on and shout when you want to get off again. A minibus ticket costs 20% (or $0.20) more than a public bus ticket.
Apparently there is a market for this, provided that driver wages are low enough.
"The only additional cost that I see is having to hire more bus drivers, but with unemployment at 9%"
This is how it works in the Latin American countries I've visited, and its great there. Latin American bus systems are actually useful for commuting, something rare in the US, because the buses arrive frequently and move quickly. In fact, I'm pretty sure only the US uses the big, slow moving, stop every three blocks bus system model.
However, I raised this point on a transit web forum and was shouted down precisely because of the cost of hiring additional bus drivers. Remember, in the US these are often unionized positions. They are more expensive than you think. Labor is relatively cheap in developing countries.
Another thing is that in cities in developing countries, officials seem to take a more relaxed attitude towards gypsy cabs and minivans.
It looks like that if you want smaller and faster buses you may have to break the transit unions first. Then you have to deal with senior citizens lobbies, since having big buses that stop every three blocks but take a long time to get places work really well for the elderly even if they are not ideal for just about everyone else. I would not trust most people over the age of seventy on a municipal bus in Brazil, for example.
Finally! You write about something I research! But pretty much everybody else has covered my points. There is a large amount of engineering research on transit operations and optimization. From the riders' perspective, of course service frequency is an important variable, along with on-time performance. There has been some research that might be interesting to you, trying to optimize on-time bus performance with smaller buses, which should in theory result in fewer overall stops (fewer riders, less likelihood of any given stop needed, except for the confounding problem that destinations are nonrandomly distributed across urban geographies). It's very interesting. Nigel Wilson has done research here, and a bunch of operations research folks at UCB, too.
While it would be nice to have buses every few minutes, labor costs of US transit systems are high relative to capital costs. Most of the large municipal operators in the US are unionized, which means the hourly wages are high-ish, and it's difficult to cover your peak service demand just by putting more drivers out there because unions tend not to be supportive of split shifts or part-time workers, and your peaks occur at odd hours on shifts (morning commutes, evening commutes), or if they do support split shifts, there is a big wage bump for putting up with it (which we'd all want, too, so I'm not throwing any stones.)
I think what you are describing is a PRT (http://bit.ly/eXCmI) — (I want them too). There was a pretty good article on them in the economist a few years back (http://bit.ly/IVTuz), but you'll need a subscription to get it.
You mean http://www.commtrans.org/Projects/Swift.cfm ? Come back to the Seattle area starting November 30 and see how it works.
I think it's just a matter of time.
If the autoindustry wouldn't think that nobody wants to buy self driving cars and would invest more money into the techonolgy self driving buses are around ten years away. (The car industry just doesn't get future trends)
Once you completely eliminate the cost of the driver you will have a public traffic system that will work much more efficiently and will be able to rewire itself on-the-fly to changing demand.
It might be effective enough to eliminate the need for individuals to own cars through.
That might be another reason why the car industry doesn't invest into the techonolgy…