updated -- Suggestions for improving Metrobus (a submission to Dr. Transit)

(Photo by furcafe.)

"Rebuilding Places" correspondent Phill Wolf has been thinking about bus transit issues for quite some time, and he has summarized his thoughts in this entry (with some Dr. Transit comments in brackets):

• Improve the ventilation, so it wouldn't be so painful when a really stinky person sits down right next to or behind you. [Dr. Transit remembers one of his favorite commercials of all time, from Dial, about this issue, with a woman lamenting at the end of the commercial "I wish I had a car."]
• Improve the sound insulation, so people shouting won't bother you so much. [One advantage of the subway is being able to move to another car at the next stop, if people are particularly loud or loutish.]
• Don't clump up the buses. Institute a de-clumping policy so that when two buses of the same route in the same direction meet each other, they shuffle passengers and one of the buses expresses to some point far away. [Dr. Transit once heard Chris Zimmerman refer to bus clumping as "the buddy system." Dr. Transit has been pissed off plenty of times to see 7 or more buses pass by in the other direction, while patiently waiting for the bus.]
• Stop accepting cash and paper transfers. Smartrips should be harder to fake, and give policy-makers greater latitude to adjust policies to favor real travelers while discouraging the nut cases who just like to ride the bus and shout at the other passengers. Also, cease distributing "benefits" travel tokens in any form other than registered (non-anonymous) Smartrip cards. [Dr. Transit is torn here. I like the anonymity of cash. I also found in NYC at least that their machines for issuing Metrocards is very very very very very slow. Plus they only have a couple machines per entrance--in a system with 10 times the ridership of DC.]
• Accelerate the adoption of low-floor buses. The increased headroom seems to make people inclined to behave better. [Hmm? that's a question for the Transportation Research Board I guess.]
• Standardize (and generally increase) the leg room. The minimal leg room on most buses gives people an excuse to spread their knees and take both seats. Also, kids sitting behind me always kick the seat back for fun.
• Buy CVT (as in hybrid Hondas) instead of plain automatic transmission. Modern buses with automatic transmission shift gears so hard they threaten whiplash. I can't concentrate on my reading the way I could in the 1970s on those old GM buses with spacewalk transmissions. Switching to CVT would give more people a chance to concentrate on innocent pleasure and thereby reduce destructive and annoying behaviors.
• Demolish decorative planters and trash barrels that block the rear door of the bus, dissuading people from exiting through the rear door. [Dr. Transit notes that when he was riding a SEPTA bus last weekend in Philadelphia that they had signs stating that passengers should exit only from the rear of buses.]
• Let the announcement system, which currently tells people to report anything suspicious, also helpfully advise people to get off the bus through the rear door.
• Prohibit Metro board members from riding in the same private auto more than once a month. Do not give Metro board members free passes. It is important that they be frequent riders, on their own dime, like everyone else.

The Downtown Circulator might answer some of Phill Wolf's concerns as it will have low floors and should provide a means to get around downtown in a tourist-friendly but efficient manner. Photo by Steve Pinkus.

• Downtown, replace Metrobus with a smoother fixed-guideway system that eliminates delays from wheelchairs embarking or disembarking, or passengers getting confused over payment. [Maybe this will be one of the benefits of the Downtown Connector?]
• Publicize the routes to people who see a bus in a useful place and are curious where it has been or is going. A bus system I took in the early 1990s posted the route of each bus on a big sign visible to people on the sidewalk: not as a map, but as the names of the sequence of streets it plies. [This is connected to the roundup entry from last week. Great signage at bus stops and useful maps will help promote riding buses, along with great bus stops--I took some photos of some Philadelphia artistic bus shelters on Chesnut Street last weekend--we'll see if they come out...]

This Metro Rapid bus stop map sign from Los Angeles demonstrates that we can learn from other systems.

• Get rid of the upholstery. It harbors biologically evil things. The best seats are the not-very-padded fuzzy seats that help prevent you from sliding around as the bus rounds corners over the curb.
• Improve RideGuide so it understands that buses on a circular route (like some 87 and all(?) 89) continue past their arbitrary/imaginary suburban end point, so that travel past that point doesn't require a transfer to a (much) later bus.
• Improve RideGuide's representation of the location of a bus stop. For example, it tells you the stop is at "SANDY SPRING RD & VAN DUSEN RD". The intersection has at least 4 corners. Which corner is the one with the bus stop for this bus? You don't have time to cross the street in a really big hurry once the bus becomes visible. It so happens that at that point geographically, the 87 bus and the 89 bus travel on opposite sides of the street trying to reach the same marked destination, so RideGuide could be heaps more helpful.
• Improve RideGuide so it doesn't give indistinguishable choices. For example, try "4th street & main street" (specifying a city does not seem to help). Did you mean"4TH STREET & MAIN STREET (in PRINCE GEORGE'S COUNTY)", "4TH STREET & MAIN STREET (in PRINCE GEORGE'S COUNTY)", or "4TH STREET & MAIN STREET (in PRINCE GEORGE'S COUNTY)"? Warning: Those are 3 different places, in 2 different municipalities. I don't know how they expect me to make sense out of it.
• Improve RideGuide's walking directions. Here I reproduce verbatim what RideGuide says you should do to walk from 8101 Sandy Spring Rd [the Laurel city offices] to the bus stop RideGuide suggested, "SANDY SPRING RD & VAN DUSEN RD". Not even a falling-down drunk could have come up with this.
1. Walk 1 approx. block W on SANDY SPRING RD.
2. Walk straight on GORMAN AVE.
3. Walk 2 approx. blocks W on GORMAN AVE.
4. Turn right on VAN DUSEN RD.
5. Walk a short distance N on VAN DUSEN RD.
6. Turn left on GORMAN AVE.
7. Walk a short distance W on GORMAN AVE.
• RideGuide should tell you how many minutes late the bus usually is at your *destination*, so you can decide whether you've allowed enough time. [Hmm, I actually try to get to the stop a little early.]
• Enforce seat-belt rules. Rarely do I see my bus drivers wearing the seat belt. Do you remember the accident in which a Metrobus driver ran over a bump and was bounced right OFF her driver's chair and therefore lost control of the bus as it smashed through the front of a hairdressers' shop, pinning a customer under a barber chair, whose leg (or legs) had to be amputated?
• Educate bus drivers on what to do with railroad tracks! Trains stick out about 4 feet on either side of the track. My bus very nearly hit a train once. The bells rang but the driver tried to beat it. The gate came down on the bus's roof. The train was visible, coming at us. The bus came to an agonizingly full stop anyway! Meanwhile the train's headlight was bearing down on us and the train horn was blowing, blowing nonstop, closer and closer and closer, as our big old Metrobus slowly wheezed up from its full stop to safety in the nick of time, forty sweating passengers silently marveling at the doppler effect as the train blew past and the horn receded. Of course I wrote a letter to Metro about that! But it didn't make any difference. Perhaps bus drivers think they're supposed to stop where they have a good line of sight up and down the tracks. I will grant him this, my bus driver sure gave us a front-row seat with a darn fine view of that train.
• Shape buses' rear end like the rear end of a PCC car: slightly tapered. The collision I was in the other day (I was riding the D6 bus when it hit a parked SUV as the bus made its final hard turn to the left while pulling into the right-side curb spot ahead of the SUV) would have been avoided if the rear end didn't swing so far.