Matt Yglesias sees into my life:
The benefits of frequent service for transit are, I think, hard to overstate. If you're trying to get into a bus that only runs once every 30 minutes then if you want to get anywhere on time you need to be paranoid about not missing the bus and usually wind up showing up too early and wasting time. What's more, if a bus happens to be a minute or two late, panic sets in that you've missed it or that some incident has taken the bus out of service and maybe you need to scurry off and find another way of getting where you're going.
Well, Matt, the other option is that you could be really lucky and live in a place like Medford Square, which is very heavily served by buses, which go to four different train stations, but each of which arrive every 45 minutes to an hour, outside of rush hour.
This, of course, requires one to print out from the MBTA website little pdfs of the 94, 95, 96, 100, 101, 134, 326, and maybe even the 354 bus schedules, and keep them all stapled together in a booklet, so that you'll know which one is likely to take you to Davis/Sullivan/Wellington at any given time, so you can get downtown. (That's if the buses actually show up.)
Or you could get in the car and drive, create more CO2 and congestion, and probably get a $100 ticket from Tom Menino for splitting a meter for parking in front of a super-long pickup truck.
So yeah, I'm on board with frequency.
stomv says
Time between arrivals is one of the reasons why I hate bus travel but love subway travel. Others are knowing when my stop has come, not having to flag down the vehicle so it’ll stop, and (often) having better protection from the elements while waiting.
randolph says
Does anybody know of any studies to answer the question of whether increasing frequency will increase ridership enough to make the service improvement economically viable?
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p>Dropping frequency to cut costs seems to create (or contribute to) a death spiral of lower ridership, rising fares, and higher costs. Ever been to Philly? I wonder if the reverse would be true.
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p>When I think of the hundreds and hundreds of hours I’ve wasted waiting for T buses…
demredsox says
No. Local bus service never pays for itself. If transit systems could increase service without any additional money, they would. The MBTA needs more funding, plain and simple, ideally through an increased gas tax.
stomv says
maybe. It doesn’t pay for itself through increased fares, but it just might if one considers the net economic benefit ranging from more employment to increased property values. The MBTA isn’t going to see most of that money though.
demredsox says
To be fair, all the bus routes through the most dense areas are as frequent or more frequent than subway service.
randolph says
but if you rely on a bus, you rely on it for more than getting to and from work on a weekday 9-5ish schedule. if i didn’t have a car, i wouldn’t leave my neighborhood on weekends.
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p>also, to your earlier comment. understanding that bus service never pays for itself (is there a mode of transit that does exist without heavy gov’t subsidy? not highways, bike paths, trains, plains, or transit) is there an optimal balance of ridership x frequency x fares? any idea of economic studies hinting at it?
pablo says
The hypothesis that bus service runs better than trains in dense locations like Arlington is in the eye of the beholder. In the case of Arlington Center, the beholder has better eyes if headed inbound.
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p>Here in Arlington, there are lots of routes running through the center, and if your intent is making a connection to a downtown train you have several options. For example, if it is high noon, you have some options (listing the bus immediately before and after noon). Note that you connect to Red Line trains that run every 13 minutes to Braintree and 13 minutes to Ashmont, so there is a 6-7 minute interval on service between Alewife and JFK UMass. For Lechmere trains,the midday interval is every 9 minutes.
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p>67 Turkey Hill to Alewife
45 Minute Interval, 11:28 a.m., 12:13 p.m.
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p>77 Arlington Heights to Harvard
12 Minute Interval, 11:49 a.m., 12:01 p.m.
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p>79 Arlington Heights to Alewife
25 Minute Interval, 11:35 a.m., 12:00 p.m., 12:25 p.m.
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p>80 Arlington Center to Lechmere
35 Minute Interval, 11:45 a.m., 12:20 p.m.
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p>87 Arlington Center to Lechmere via Davis
30 Minute Interval, 11:45 a.m., 12:15 p.m.
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p>350 Burlington to Alewife
Hourly service, 11:52 a.m., 12:52 p.m.
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p>The question is, if you are coming back from downtown by train, all these buses don’t converge at one handy T stop, and the buses don’t coordinate with the trains. You need to get on the train and name your poison – which train stop will you head toward. Your choices are Alewife, Davis, Harvard (or Porter), and Lechmere. Here’s the outbound schedules:
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p>LEAVING ALEWIFE:
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p>67 Alewife to Turkey Hill
45 Minute Interval, 11:45 a.m., 12:30 p.m.
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p>79 Alewife to Arlington Heights
25 Minute Interval, 11:50 a.m., 12:15 p.m.
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p>350 Alewife to Burlington
Hourly Service, 11:20 a.m., 12:20 p.m.
——————
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p>LEAVING HARVARD
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p>77 Harvard to Arlington Heights
12 Minute Interval, 11:59 a.m., 12:11 p.m.
——————-
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p>LEAVING DAVIS
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p>87 Lechmere to Arlington Center via Davis
30 Minute Interval, 11:55 a.m.,
——————-
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p>LEAVING LECHMERE
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p>80 Lechmere to Arlington Center
35 Minute Interval, 11:45 a.m., 12:20 p.m.
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p>87 Lechmere to Arlington Center via Davis
30 Minute Interval, 11:40 a.m., 12:10 p.m.
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p>
stomv says
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p>That’s only true if the MBTA runs the two trains exactly 6.5 minutes apart. They don’t. There’s far more randomness than that. In fact, it’s probably a closer approximation to assume that the system has memoryless interarrival times, and therefore the wait is 13 minutes. Realistically, it’s neither, so you do something closer to splitting the difference, 10 minutes.
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p>6.5 minutes is the best case. Any deviation throws that number off. After all, when you’re trying to get to an appointment, you’re not really interested in an average, you’re interested in something like a frequent worst case.
pers-1765 says
An odd thing about Alewife is that bus service dies after 10pm. So if you want to get to Arlington Center and you miss the last bus, you need to take the Red Line back to Harvard and catch a bus from there.
stomv says
that it’s because Alewife is much more of a commuter type station, whereas the population using Harvard Square is [choose: a-bunch-of-lazy-slackers, or a-bunch-of-hipsters-not-tied-to-the-corporate-rat-race ]. In any case, commuters don’t use the station much after 10pm, whereas slacker/hipsters do.
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p>[based on no data, just instinct]