Pathetic not revelatory: Quality of bus stop study in San Francisco

Bloomberg CityLab reports that "better bus stops can boost transit ridership" ("Mapping the Best and Worst Bus Stops in San Francisco").  From the article:

The results of Moran’s in-person census of 2,964 stops, forthcoming in the Journal of Public Transportation, reveal that the likelihood a San Francisco bus rider gets to sit down, stay out of the rain and even board directly from the curb heavily depends on geography. 

Across San Francisco, only about a third of bus stops had shelter and seating, Moran found. A similar amount was also blocked by on-street parking, often forcing riders to weave through parked cars and board in the street. Signage varied widely in type and legibility — the most common kind was paint on a metal pole — while 11% of stops appeared to lack legible signage entirely.

How is this revelatory in 2021?  I think it's pathetic.  This ought to have been known for decades.  Granted the article is about a study by a PhD student, not by local planning and transit agencies, or the  Metropolitan Transportation Commission, the overarching transportation planning body for the San Francisco Bay.  And you shouldn't "shoot the messenger" but still.

One of the DC bus shelters before the Clear Channel contract.

This is probably the most dangerous bus stop I've seen

on Liberty Avenue in the Strip District section of Pittsburgh

Bus service as a system: transit stops are but one element | mode planning versus experience planning.  Because of the balkanization of transit services and operators in the Washington, DC area, I've come to be very much focused on the value of the network. As well as the gaps in planning that result from the lack of coordination and integration.  Although the study referenced by CityLab is only of San Francisco, not other transit agency service areas in the San Francisco Bay.

"Reviving DC area bus service" from 2019 is the most recent sum up with links to past entries.

More and more I am thinking about how transportation planners tend to focus on "mode" rather than quality, experience, and place.  It's not new, but my depth of appreciation for this reality has changed.

Definitely they need people focused on the quality of the experience, which instead is sorely lacking.  If the BYU football team can do it ("Meet the BYU football equipment manager with a Ph.D.," Salt Lake Deseret News), so can transit agencies.  From the article:

... He graduated from BYU in 2014 with a degree in recreational management: experience design.

I've argued that transportation departments should have "chief thoroughfare architects" in addition to "chief [traffic] engineers, and lauded how San Antonio's VIA transit agency has an urban design unit ("VIA urban planner wants to build a better San Antonio," San Antonio Express News). VIA takes a more experience oriented approach to the design of transit stations and shelters, signage and wayfinding systems, and the inclusion of public art.

Design forward presentation of transit information, 

Stone Oak Park and Ride Transit Center, San Antonio

Focusing on the DC area bus service as a network.  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.

My bus learning process.  When I first moved to DC, Metrorail was still pretty new and bus was an afterthought.  I had some experience riding buses in Ann Arbor, both the city bus system, which charged fares, and the University bus service, which was free but mostly went to places I didn't need to go.

In DC, one of my then partner's colleagues rode the bus, and she introduced us to the Metrobus service, as a complement to the subway.  And I soon figured out that depending on where you were and where you needed to go, bus could be faster.

Once I started focusing on urbanism in earnest, around 2000, I paid closer attention to all elements of city living, especially transit.

Going to conferences in other cities, looking to save money, I would use transit there, take a bus or rail from the airport to the city core, etc.  If you know how to use one transit system pretty well, you can pretty much figure out how to use other systems.

Thinking about "transit waiting environments" systematically.  At the National Trust for Historic Preservation conference in 2002, I learned about the Kent State University Urban Design Center in Cleveland, a student design studio for architecture and planning students, doing projects in the metropolitan area, especially Cleveland.

In 2004, for the Greater Cleveland Regional Transit Authority, they released Transit Waiting Environments: An Ideabook for Better Bus Stops, which laid out a typology for transit stop improvements, based on use.  (I ended up using the framework as the basis for recommendations on transit stop improvements in the bicycle and pedestrian plan I did in Baltimore County in 2010.)  At the time it seemed revelatory.

Transit's publics.  In 2005, in "Making Transit Sexy" I wrote:

A long time ago, I read the book Strategic Marketing for Not-For-Profit Organizations by the U of Michigan Social Work professor Armand Lauffer. One of the concepts that has stuck with me over the years is that organizations have three publics: 

1. The input public that provides the organization with resources; 

2. The throughput public that does the work of the organization; and 

3. The output public to whom the organization's activities are directed. 

Transit marketing, promotion, and publicity has at least two different segments of "output publics" -- (1) the people who are interested and involved in the planning issues around transportation and (2) the people that "consume" transit services. 

 DC's DDOT website is really about the first segment, while Arlington County's Commuter Page is about promoting transit usage. Frankly, the former group, the citizens and other stakeholders interested and involved in the planning issues around transportation should really be considered part of the "throughput public" anyway... Both publics need information, but we are not serving the transit consumers very well

In 2006, I argued for a differentiated set of shelter types as part of the then new DC bus shelter contract, including a form more appropriate for historic districts, but the majority opinion in public meetings supported a unified, more modern design ("DC Bus shelter planning").

DC's Clear Channel bus contract | transit stops and shelters as marketing touchpoints.  In late 2005, DC signed a big contract with Adshel/Clear Channel for new shelters.

At one of the first public meetings in 2006, I made a point that was surprisingly new to the DDOT project manager, "bus shelters are the primary and most prominent 'marketing touchpoints' for transit," and that the quality of the transit waiting environment communicated how much--positive or negative--the community values transit, and also that the stops and shelters marketed to everyone passing by, not just to riders.

Not every DC bus stop has a shelter, even on highly used routes.  Here, a shopping cart has been turned on its side to provide seating.

More recently, I've argued that there should be a program of "creatively" augmenting bus stops with shelters and seating worked into the physical environment, such as sitting benches as part of existing stone walls, etc.

Product design and usability.  Later I learned to think more systematically about "street furniture" and about applying "product design"--London was the pioneer--"usability," and web design's focus on the "user experience" as approaches to transit system design ("Branding's (NOT) all you need for transit," "World Usability Day and urban planning"). 

Wall Street Journal graphic based on the EMBARQ report.

And yes, all through this period (2004-2021) there have been reports, studies and experiments with  transit stops and transit marketing and how to improve, such as:

-- From here to there: creative guide for transit marketing, EMBARQ
-- "Jurong bus stop makes waiting fun, Straits Times, Singapore
-- "Bus shelters as social spaces, as potential vectors for virus: Seoul's new anti-covid bus shelter" (blog)

Graphic from Straits Times, on the experimental bus stop in Jurong.

This is distinct from thinking about transit stations, which as buildings, get a lot more attention, e.g., "Transit, stations, and placemaking: stations as entrypoints into neighborhoods" and "Revisiting the review of the Takoma Langley Transit Center" or the SEPTA report Modern Trolley Station Design Guide and the various train station publications by Network Rail.

Rendering of an Albuquerque Rapid Transit bus stop, with special crosswalk treatment.

Introduction of bus rapid transit lines is often used to rebrand the stops, street furniture, wayfinding and branding of those bus lines, but it usually isn't carried across to the transit system as a whole.  

But one problem is that these full rebrands are costly and the cost is frequently seized upon for criticism by anti-transit forces.

Merseytravel, the transit authority in Liverpool, uses the color yellow as a brand identifier, and this is extended to bus shelters.  (Although not the buses, as the service was privatized by the national government years ago, and is balkanized and chaotic as a result.)

One problem: individual jurisdictions tend to be responsible for bus stops, not the transit agency.  In most places, individual jurisdictions, not the transit agency, are responsible for transit stops, unless they are on transit agency property.  

From a usability and design standpoint this is a real problem, because stops and shelters can be incredibly inconsistent from place to place, where riders need consistency and to be able to "read the system" as a unitary and understandable product.  (This is especially true, because outside of major cities, most Americans don't have a lot of experience with transit.)

Night time/lighting | Hot and cold weather.  Most systems don't adequately plan for night time use, by augmenting lighting to improve safety.  Some places, like Calgary, Minneapolis, and Montreal, provide shelters that work better in winter, even with heating.  And in Phoenix, some bus shelters have misters, to cool the air in summer.

Bus stop safety is a big issue too. Among others, Professor Anastasia Loukaitou-Sideris of UCLA has studied this ("On Bus Stop Crime," Access Magazine). 

When transit agencies have rail and bus modes, do they treat bus service like an unfavored child?  When you talk to planners in the bus side of WMATA, operators of Metrobus and Metrorail in Greater Washington, DC, it's very clear that WMATA is more focused on subway (rail) service, and treats bus as a secondary service ("Reviving DC area bus service: and a counterpoint to the recent Washington City Paper article").  This happens a lot.

There are "transit geek" books on typefaces and maps, but not so many, especially by the geeks, on transit as a "design product" and the issue of usability.

London's design and usability centric approach to transit was developed around the Underground (subway) because at the time, the agency wasn't responsible for bus service.  Rather than treating the design principles differently according to mode, the same product design approach was extended to other modes, as they became responsible for them.  

The product design guide for Transport for London isn't mode specific: Underground; bus; tram; light rail; water taxi; and Overground all use the same basic concepts, and the modes are treated as a complementary and integrated set of services.

And of course, London's distinctive red double deck buses are as equally distinctive as their Underground service ("Making bus service sexy and more equitable.")

London buses, Flickr photo by Hendra Lee.

Red is the defining color of London's buses.

Red is incorporated into the system's bus shelters and other elements.

Flickr photo by Loco Steve.

What about bus only agencies?: transit service versus social service.  When an agency only has bus service, ideally they endeavor to make it great.    And there are a number of transit agencies that  do so to the best of their ability, such as VIA in San Antonio, the transit system in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, Rochester, New York ("Creativity Helps Rochester's Transit System Turn a Profit," New York Times) etc.

But because even bus exclusive transit agencies are often seen as a social service--providing mobility options for people who can't afford to own a car--rather than a transit service, even they are likely to stint on the quality of the waiting environment (" The real reason American public transportation is such a disaster," Vox).

Some places are investing in bus stop improvements.  One is Salt Lake City.  Rather than a systematic program across the metropolitan area, the  transit stop improvements in Salt Lake City are being funded by the city, which a few years ago passed a tax initiative, Funding the Future, aimed at improving bus service.

Seattle was a pioneer in, first with Bridging the Gap, now Move Seattle, which includes specific bus route improvements initiatives, but not a general improvement to bus stops. 

Other communities have programs focused more on access to rail stations such as the First/Last Mile Access Study for the Utah Transit Authority, the Bicycle and Pedestrian Access Improvements Study for WMATA , etc.

In my writings on the Purple Line light rail project in Suburban Maryland), a number of recommendations called for bus route, shelter, and station improvements as a complementary program, with the idea of leveraging the new transit infrastructure as a way to drive improvements across the entire transit network.

Conclusion.  It's not that the SF study flabbergasts me.  It's that Bloomberg treats the finding as "news" or at least "new."  

Given how the US is a car-centric place ("The Petro States of America," Businessweek), I suppose I shouldn't be surprised that many transit systems don't invest in the quality of the transit waiting environment. 

Like in the DC area, each jurisdiction in the Raleigh-Durham metro has its own bus agency, plus a cross-jurisdictional regional agency, functioning more like WMATA.  While the agencies are separate, over time they've come to collaborate closely, to save money and provide better service.

More recently, they came up with a unified graphic design for their buses, using colors to differentiate agencies, to create a more unified and legible network.

All transit systems should be endeavoring to "design their system as a product" with a focus on a high quality "customer" experience.

Ideally, what would come out of the article in the Journal of Public Transportation ("Are Shelters in Place?: Mapping the Distribution of Transit Amenities via a Bus-Stop Census of San Francisco") is that Metropolitan Planning Organizations, the area planning agencies tasked by the federal government for area-wide transportation planning, should make bus service improvement a priority:

• Treat the bus service system as a network, regardless of the operators
• Focus on creating a legible system, incorporating product design, usability, and user experience design approaches
• Systematically study stops and stations as an MPO responsibility and come up with a metropolitan-scale improvement program, based on a family of related designs for stops, shelters, and stations.
• Encourage metropolitan areas to create initiatives like Move Seattle and Salt Lake City's Funding Our Future as a way to fund transit network improvements, with a special focus on stops and shelters.
• For areas with multiple agencies, adopt a unified graphic design system for liveries, using the Go Transit model in Raleigh-Durham ("Will buses ever be cool? Boston versus the Raleigh-Durham's GoTransit Model").

Other concepts that should be integrated into a rider experience-focused approach are:

--  Signature Streets and Places ("Extending the "Signature Streets" concept to "Signature Streets and Spaces"")

-- Sustainable Mobility Platform ("Further updates to the Sustainable Mobility Platform Framework").