Why don't more people ride the bus?

How to make buses better

What do you think of when you hear the word “bus”?

Do you remember your elementary school days?

Or maybe you just watched Shang Chi?

Or you’re a city dweller.

It probably depends a lot on who you are and where you come from. But for a majority of people growing up in America, the latter isn’t top of mind. Most Americans live in suburban or rural areas without good access to bus transit. There are numerous reasons why more Americans don’t ride the bus — in fact, urban planning is a massive field of study that I couldn’t possibly cover in a few hundred words.

So I want to focus my question — Why don’t more Americans want to ride the bus?

Bus sentiment

There’s a common bias against buses, where people prefer light or heavy rail.

It’s difficult to find empirical evidence of why this bias exists. To actually get the answer, we’d have to ask a lot of people to explain in depth their thoughts on why they prefer trains to buses. Lacking that, I do have a few good guesses:

1. Buses symbolize bad transit. A lot of buses are unreliable, infrequent, and slow.

2. Bus routes are confusing and difficult to figure out. Bus lines are cheaper to build than rail lines, which leads to a lot more of them.

3. Buses can be uncomfortable. They’re often old and need maintenance/replacement.

I’ll dig deeper on these topics below.

Reliability

Buses are structurally difficult to make reliable. They run in traffic along with every other vehicle, make necessary stops, and follow predetermined routes. They are also much larger than a car, and therefore take longer to turn, especially articulated buses (the long stretchy ones). Also, buses usually cannot accelerate as quickly as cars, for safety reasons and since it takes a lot more power to accelerate a large hunk of metal with dozens of passengers.

Honestly, after all this, why would you ever ride a bus? It seems like it has to be slower, right? Not necessarily.

We know of several solutions to making buses faster:

• Signal priority

  • Scientific reading

  • TL;DR — Improvements in bus travel times with small increases in car traffic

• Dedicated travel lanes

  • Summary article

  • TL;DR — Significant improvements in bus travel times

• Overhead electrical wires

  • SF’s trolley buses, trolley buses in Boston

  • TL;DR — Cleaner, cheaper to maintain, work much better on hills.

These solutions can greatly improve a city bus system, but they take political will and money to implement. Unfortunately, many drivers look at streets as a zero sum game, where every inch of road given to public transit is an inch taken away from drivers — an affront to their freedoms.

I don’t think it has to be this way! If your city has a fast and reliable bus system, you can own a car and simply not need it to make most trips.

Route structure

Here’s an example of a city transit map, from San Francisco —

It’s pretty overwhelming, right?

Sure, there are a lot of buses here that go east to west, and some that go north to south. Those are pretty straightforward, but then you have buses like the 10 Townsend, which goes from west to east for a bit, travels north, goes west again and loops back around! For an average person to figure out which bus to take, when they need to transfer, how long they need to wait, etc. — it’s a lot of information.

Apps like Google Maps and Apple Maps solve these problems to some extent, but they often suggest multiple routes with various start and total trip times. This solves some problems but still leaves some confusion on the part of the user.

Some of this complexity is inherent in creating a public transit system. After all, no city is a perfect grid — natural landforms, parks, and historical decisions generally lead to at least a little bit of asymmetry. Additionally, some winding routes are extremely useful to those who are disabled and for whom transferring and traveling on foot to a bus stop is difficult.

Despite these considerations, I think there are still some hallmarks of any good bus route system:

• Frequent buses — There is a constant debate among planners about coverage vs frequency. But for people who don’t use transit regularly, a really good way to reduce frustration is to lower wait times, i.e. high frequency. This means less worry about missing a bus and the feeling that you are always going somewhere instead of being stuck at a bus stop. There is no one size fits all answer, but 5 minute frequencies would be ideal on highly traveled routes.

• Buses on major arterial roads — Major arterial roads may be notoriously unfriendly to bikers and pedestrians, but fast moving traffic can wielded to create a fast, efficient bus line (or even BRT). The best way to get people out of a car is to put a fast bus on the route they would otherwise drive on.

• Coverage — I mentioned the tradeoff between coverage and frequency earlier, and prioritized frequency. But it’s important to note that most people won’t (or can’t) walk further than 10 minutes (1/2 mile) to a bus stop. Without that baseline level of coverage, there’s no point in talking about frequency.

There are much more in depth analyses of creating a good bus route system (e.g. Human Transit’s post), but these points are a good intro to the subject.

Design

Let’s face it — riding a bus in America is far from sexy. Buses tend to be old, often rattle, and are not always the smoothest ride. You have to interact with other passengers, and they might be noisy or disruptive. And sometimes, buses aren’t clean.

I don’t think all these problems can immediately be solved. But I also think these are the least important and least frequently reported concerns. If you’re taking a 20 minute bus ride a few miles, then it doesn’t matter too much since you’ll be off the bus and will get on a different one on the way back.

I could have a laundry list of improvements — like using electric buses to reduce noise or using some fancy bus suspension system to create an ultrasmooth ride — but I don’t think buses have to be luxury coaches for people to use them. They just have to be decent. And that takes funding for maintenance that the U.S. just doesn’t prioritize.

Closing thoughts

In the above sections, I mostly talk about “carrots” to improve bus service. Of course, for those who can afford it, driving a car in America is incredibly convenient — this is the land of abundant parking and wide roads. However, these things definitely come with some massive hidden costs — a good primer on the subject is The High Cost of Free Parking by Donald Shoup.

Cities should give buses some more love! They are the workhorses of the transit system.