Routes won't always be the right unit of measurement in MD. For example, I'd rate the D5 a very successful/highly utilized route. What's particularly striking is that it keeps obviously affluent people who are headed from Bethesda/Palisades to workplaces downtown out of their cars.
But it certainly doesn't have more than 6,000 riders a day. It's rush-hour only service and only one-way during each rush hour (Bethesda to DC in the morning; DC to Bethesda in the late afternoon/early evening).
Long story short, efficient provision of transit rather than volume should be the goal. Different places will have different needs. It makes sense in the city to have bus lines that start very early in the morning and run after midnight. That'd be a waste in the 'burbs. As a result, the routes in the city will have higher ridership than the routes in the burbs.
I'm also curious about what counts as a route -- are the D1/D3/D6 and the 30/32/34/35/36 eight separate routes or 2 routes? I ask because each series has a single schedule and because your summary above suggests that the 30-series is being counted as a single route.
It makes no sense to compare ridership on the D5 with ridership on the 30 series. There are probably more 30-series buses running in a given hour as there are in a whole day of D5 service.
I'm merely using numbers in the grossest sense. Remember my discussion of the mobility or transit shed? Each route needs to be planned-marketed-strengthened in that manner.
4,000 or 5,000 people on a bus or 4,000 more cars... you decide! I think you know my feelings about that.
I just combined numbers of some subroutes. I didn't include 35 e.g., but combined because that's what's relevant to riders--overall use of a bus route in a particular corridor.
E.g., we still need to talk about edge of the city bus issues along western ave. The Sibley hospital proposed expansion should be considered in a mobility shed planning context...
I've always thought the MacArthur cooridor out to Sibley had a lot of potential to develop into a transit oriented urban village while still maintaining its small town character. Key to that would be a streetcar down MacArthur (or perhaps a reconstruction of the Cabin John line, the trackbed still exists).
I wouldn't be surprised in the residents there had no interest in such development, but I'm not envisioning a Clarendon high-rise like growth, more like upper Connecticut, just south of Chevy Chase Circle.
all of the DC trolley system re-hash should be utilizing the old trolley routes.Many rights of way exist to this day- and are not going to be used. This is idiotic.We should recreate the old routes- and add some new ones. The city grew up on these old trolley routes and many still thriving business corridors exist along these routes.Yet the newest trolley is going into an un-populated area of Anacostia.Very strange "logic" at work here.
The Anacostia decision has to do more with "social justice." The problem then becomes under-utilization. And under-utilization is used to justify not further investments in other areas. It's a fine line to draw...
Map, 1955: I think green is trolley red is bus. http://www.flickr.com/photos/rll...yman/221069621/
Map, 1908: http://www.flickr.com/photos/rll...yman/280011228/
Richard,you have a talent for seeing thru the BS
4,000 people on a bus isn't 4,000 fewer cars. By that logic, my 9 year old and I are keeping 12 cars a day off the road by using buses to get to and from her school. Add 4 more cars every time we hop on a bus together to run an errand.
And, of course, those 4,000 people aren't on "a" bus. They are on lots of different buses. Seems to me a successful route is one where you get a high number of passengers per bus. That figure is obscured by focussing on high-volume routes.
For what it's worth, last one condition of the Sibley expansion was going to be the provision of a free public shuttle from the FH metro to the hospital (paid for/run by the hospital).
the more public transportation the better. The more people that walk or bicycle places instead of driving the better.Whatever way it is done- the goal is to subtract cars and trucks from our battered landscape and restore sanity to our living places.
Public transit is a hard sell on a variety of levels (funding, ridership), so it's always going to be a question of priorities. Not so much a question of "is more better than less?" but "where" and "for whom/what?"
If the goal is to get cars off the road, my take is that the two places to start are with problem areas (places with traffic congestion/bottlenecks) and with demographic subgroups whose transit patterns are easiest to change.
The reason I mentioned the D5 is that it seems to address both issues -- Canal Road at rush hour is one of the bottlenecks; relatively affluent government workers whose hours are very regular is the demographic.
And if the goal is getting cars off the road, I'm not even sure that "public" transit is the relevant category. For example, another demographic I see that should/could be removed from cars is kids being taken to school. But the answer there may be private rather than public buses (although my guess is that it will probably take public action of some sort (laws, zoning orders) to effect this change). Van pools are another underdeveloped private sector option that could have a lot of potential for decreasing the number of car commuters. Now there's a project for the downtown BID...
Part of the reason I mention this is that it's worth remembering that "getting cars off the road" may not be the only or even the most important goal for public transit programs. Such an objective will typically involve directing transit subsidies toward the middle/upper middle class (who have the choice of driving) rather than maximizing the mobility of the least well-off (who are most likely to be public transit dependent). And, of course, there are a host of economic development stakes in public transit decisionmaking which have more to do with steering investment than decreasing traffic.
I think that the big challenge with buses is that they get mired in the same traffic as cars, yet (unlike cars) they can't deviate from their fixed route. Unless you get around that problem (e.g. with dedicated lanes), buses aren't a very attractive alternative to driving except where parking is expensive/impossible.
Buses can be viable in many places. I managed to get to E-W Hwy & Rte. 1 for a meeting in less than 30 minutes during rush hour, leaving from 12th and Monroe NE.
U R right about transit planning for people with choices vs. those without. I write about this alot. It's not politically correct, but the point is to deal with reality.
As far as your point about buses (etc.) vs. other aspects. One thing to remember is that van pools are reasonably ok, but most other car forms not.
In any case, doing transportation demand management planning, what I call mobility shed planning, as well as creating transportation management (not parking) districts, can accomplish broader range planning focused on mode shift from single occupancy vehicles, which is the real point.
I take the bus every day. Typically I take it to the Metro and ride the subway in to work. Recently though, I've just stayed on the bus, which also gets me to work, just about 8-10 minutes later than the metro. The reason I do this is because I enjoy riding the bus. I don't have to walk down a thousand steps. I can normally find a seat and read the paper. I can watch the city go by. There's better people watching than the subway. Plus I save a 1.35.
But the one thing that pisses me off about the bus is the feeling I get that the bus drivers are not playing by the rules. They don't even try to keep to a schedule. That's why I am very eager for the NextBus. First off, I can check to see whether a bus is coming soon as I leave (which is very important on the weekends when they go down to every 20 minutes). But I also hope that the nextbus will enable Metro (or private citizens) to identify when the bus is going off the schedule and why. I'm hopeful it will become a useful auditing tool.
for a city of it's size, the scattershot infrequency of our buses is a scandal.I also think the street reorg after they shut down the streets by the White House messed things up. They need to make better bus signage that someone w/o a cardiologists training can de-cypher. It was never that complex before the White House street shutdowns.Actually I like Penn Avenue closed off- more streets should be car free.They need to open up the Elipse side to bicyclists and pedestrians to make it work right.
My comment about "public" transit not necessarily being the right category was less about types/scale of vehicles than about alternative models of collective action.
Subsidies often become the sticking point re public transit investment and they can be particularly problematic when the point is made that they disproportionately benefit the already well-off (a point increasingly being made in VA, it seems).
So maybe the place for governments to intervene is in compelling various attractors (employers, schools, shopping districts/BIDs) to provide transit alternatives to their destinations. (This is either a complement to or an alternative framing of your distinction between transportation management and parking management.)
The goal would be to require that various corporations/institutions internalize more of the costs (solve more of the problems) associated with their activities. Government's role would be essentially coercive but coercion would be directed to collectivities that are better able (than individuals) to develop and deploy the capital/organizational resources necessary to coordinate transportation.
If our only alternatives are governmental subsidies vs. individual choice, we're probably screwed.
Schools used to provide school buses. When I went to college, car ownership by students was essentially prohibited. By contrast, AU seems to have massive parking lots despite the fact that it's anything but a commuter campus. Some apartment buildings and employers provide shuttles. In short, we have models of privately owned/organized/subsidized shared transit and that may be a model worth promoting.
Just an aside -- I'm not talking public-private partnerships here which often seem to involve either feeding at the public trough and/or cherry picking the few profitable transit routes while leaving essential but costly routes in governmental hands.
Sue -- that's what TDM is supposed to do, and why I am so vehement about its necessity within the DC planning framework. Sometime when you have nothing to do, check out the Transportation Demand Management Element of the Arlington plan...
I'll check it out. Just from studying Metrorail usage stats a few years back, it became clear to me that Arlington was very oriented toward providing access to the stations from homes and from the stations to workplaces. The former seemed to be handled through bus routes and the latter often through private shuttles.
I agree with you that DC's Comp Plan lacked a transportation plan and that was a serious mistake. From what I've seen, the "transportation planning" that does get done in the District has almost nothing to do with getting people places and is more oriented than toward RE development and/or trophy projects.
When TDM comes up in DC it is generally parking management and often takes the form of parking restriction at residential and retail sites which strikes me as incredibly stupid, especially along jurisdictional boundaries like my neigbhorhood. (I see the logic behind parking restriction at workplaces -- but if you don't drive to work, you're leaving your car at home -- parked.)
Although there's plenty of lip service to the goal of reducing car dependency in DC, even the most basic/obvious policy options for achieving that goal aren't being adopted. Truth is it's a convenient mantra for developers who want more density and for car-sharing companies who want the public to pay to house their inventory, but otherwise government doesn't care much as far as I can tell.
Sue I agree w/ your DC assessment.The govt here doesn't care& In my neighborhood- the Hill/Navy Yard- parking is a big driver of opinions and emotions...everyone- especially the older elite crowd , is car dependent. Parking preservation is paramount- and much density has been sacrificed to this kind of selfishness.Its cars over people. I know people who drive to go 3 blocks- cant park and wind up circling for 20 mins to find a spot. why not just walk?
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