Richard Layman, at Rebuilding Places, blogs about improving bus service and quotes James Hamre, a transit manager in the Washington DC area:
“According to Mr. Hamre, to run the bus line, if it ran on time, would require 22 buses, to provide the current level of service. Instead, they have 42 buses in service on the line daily, to provide the service required.”
IOW, this bus line, if intensively managed, could cut equipment requirements almost by a half. Surely that is a goal to aim for!
*Somewhere else* on the internet today is a post about a student in Portland who, as an experiment, acted as a dispatcher for one bus line in Portland, and managed to maintain on-time performance by having empty buses leapfrog full buses on the route.
It might seem extreme to detail one person full time to dispatch one route, until we compare it with saving the costs of twenty drivers and twenty buses.
And this stuff will matter, eventually. Eventually, we will reach the $6-7/gallon gas prices that will supposedly make people “change their behavior”, and from what we’ve seen so far, “change their behavior” in this context will mean “a tsunami of new ridership swamping already overloaded buses”. It’s time for the transit systems to start thinking outside the box.
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