Revisiting bus stops and shelters as marketing touchpoints for transit: Oklahoma City ... and DC

There is an article about how the transit agency in Oklahoma City, Embark, is looking to create a small transit hub for commuter buses serving the city's west side, sparked by a land donation from Hobby Lobby ("West-side transit hub gets boost from land donation," Daily Oklahoman), likely motivated by aiming to move the bus stop away from proximity to one of their stores.


An Embark bus stops at Linwood Blvd. and N Kentucky Ave. in Oklahoma City, Nov. 14, 2018. Photo by Nate Billings, The Oklahoman. (This stop reminds me of the transfer bus stop between a bus taking people from the New Orleans Airport to New Orleans, within the city.  Or a super scary bus top on Penn Avenue in Pittsburgh's Strip District.)

The photo illustrating the article isn't the bus stop, on West Reno Avenue, in question, but it does support a point I've made almost since the beginning of writing this blog (2005, in earnest, although the blog was created in November 2004):

bus stops and shelters are marketing touchpoints for transit, not just for existing users of the transit system, but for people who walk or drive by the shelter as well.  The quality of the infrastructure provided communicates how much transit is valued.  Obviously, limited infrastructure that is barely maintained communicates negatively.

I can't remember what I was just reading, but the column argued for a reappraisal of the writings of John Kenneth Galbraith in the context of today's economy and the overdominance of neoliberal thought concerning the primacy of the market, and Galbraith's line about

private affluence and public squalor.

Transit bus infrastructure is a great illustration for that quote.

===
There is an op-ed ("A radical idea for Cuomo's transit panel") in Crain's New York Business suggesting that if Governor Cuomo truly wants to improve "transit" to be transformational he should be pushing for merging the MTA railroads with NJ Transit. Or as the subhead puts it: "Merge our railroads to end turf battles, save billions and make travel seamless."

Concerning the DC area, WMATA has done a big bus transformation study, but given that there is too much to read and process and write about as it is, I haven't gotten around to writing about it.

-- Bus Transformation Project, WMATA
-- "Metro is mulling a major redesign of the bus system. But first, officials need to figure out why people aren't riding," Washington Post

Even though in the region, probably no one else has written more innovatively on the topic:

-- "Making bus service sexy and more equitable," 2012
-- "City Paper's cover story on ways to improve the city," 2013
-- "Transit, stations, and placemaking: stations as entrypoints into neighborhoods ," 2013
-- "Route 7 BRT proposal communicates the reality that the DC area doesn't adequately conduct transportation planning at the metropolitan-scale," 2016
-- "Will buses ever be cool? Boston versus the Raleigh-Durham's GoTransit Model ," 2017
-- "Improving bus service overall vs. reversing falling Metrobus ridership," 2018
-- "Branding's (NOT) all you need for transit," 2018

but I wasn't asked to be on the advisory committee (I did serve on an advisory committee for DC's State Rail planning process).

Last September, Coalition for Smarter Growth sponsored a talk by Jarrett Walker, the bus transit consultant who has been retained by a lot of bus systems (Richmond, Houston, Philadelphia, Alexandria, etc.) to redesign their systems.

His approach defines high frequency service vs. what he calls "coverage".  (I call this network depth and network breadth.)

So I sent an email to CSG, since they are represented on the advisory committee, suggesting the creation of a best practice series of presentations on bus service, to up the potential for innovation in the planning process.  This is from the email I sent last September:

… In June I was in London, and I spent most of one day with Ivan Bennett, the former product design manager for the London bus system. It was amazing. We talked for two hours, and then did a walking tour for almost five hours. (Sadly he was riffed because Crossrail financial demands are leading to cutbacks everywhere else at TfL.)

As he says, the bus network in London is the #2 transit service in the UK, after the London Underground, and ahead of all the daily commuter rail traffic for the entire UK.

Frankly, I think bringing him out here to talk, maybe CSG creating a "better bus service" series could help influence and shape the bus transformation study process.

The Neptis Foundation in Toronto has funded some studies on bus service I think. There are the efforts in Boston cited in my piece above. WRI did a great report. I still like the Transit Waiting Environments report for Cleveland c. 2001--it influenced the transit station recommendations I wrote in the draft biking and walking plan I did in Baltimore County so many years ago. ITDP wants to push BRT all the time, although they fail to distinguish the differences between the US and places like Curitiba, which is somewhat disingenuous, but they would be good to feature,

Even to focus on some real recent implementations of BRT in North America, in Mississauga and Connecticut.

Seattle obviously. Raleigh-Durham. The Albuquerque ART line. Cleveland's HealthLine (oversold in my opinion but still important). FWIW, RideOn is supposed to be one of the more successful suburban bus systems.

I too push bi-articulated buses, which do street running in Europe although they are not allowed by FTA here. I've suggested that bi-articulated buses could have been deployed to deal with the closing of the L line in NYC.

Maybe Van Hool, BYD, Alexander Dennis and other [bus builders] could be convinced to help sponsor such a series. APTA...

Oh well.


In "Improving bus service overall vs. reversing falling Metrobus ridership," these were the major points:

1. The impact of the sustainable mobility platform on use of mass transit services.

2. Is the pool of transit dependent riders shrinking? And in the face of this loss of ridership, given that bus service is relied upon by the transit dependent (people without cars), is this demographic group shrinking, in the areas where the Metrobus service pattern is dominant?

3. The DC area bus transit "network" is not perceived as a system/it is illegible.

4. Reposition bus service as a premium (design) product.

5. Rearticulate and reconfigure bus transit across the metropolitan area into one integrated system.

6. Make provision of dedicated bus transitways (and traffic signal prioritization for buses) a priority.

7. Create a overnight transit network at the metropolitan scale.  ("Night owl service.")

8. Don't forget bus services when creating HOT Lanes.

9. Rearticulate long distance commuter bus services too.

======
I didn't address fares. In the DC area, bus fares are relatively cheap and the weekly bus pass is a bit cheaper than the cost of five round trips. And you can transfer from one bus system to another on the same trip for no additional charge.

But many transit systems charge one fare for a linked trip, bus + rail, while in the DC metropolitan area, that's two fares, albeit with a discount. WMATA is considering big changes in the fare structure.