Better Buses, Better Cities
“Unlike increases in frequency (which cost transit agencies money), speeding up the bus saves transit agencies on their operating budget. When a route gets faster, fewer buses and drivers are needed to provide good service. An analysis of Washington, DC’s transit system found that if the agency could improve bus speeds by 1 mph, the agency’s costs would decrease by 4 percent.11” (Steven Higashide, Better Buses, Better Cities)
• Coverage routes cover geographic areas with little demand. These are typically infrequent, and they sometimes meander in order to increase the amount of area they cover. This service is inconvenient to use, but it may provide essential lifeline access to people who need service, or be justified by the need to provide service to every municipality that pays taxes into a district." (Steven Higashide, Better Buses, Better Cities)
“Although this tactic looks to the future, it is quite old. For decades, it has been a common tactic of conservative think tanks to fight against plans for high-capacity transit by pointing cities to some other technology instead, such as dynamically priced high-occupancy toll lanes, bus rapid transit (as an argument against proposed rail projects), and personal rapid transit. Driverless cars and data-driven vans are just the newest technology filling in the blank. For many years, Cato Institute senior fellow Randal O’Toole opposed plans for rail by calling on cities to make bus improvements instead. But a July 2018 post on his Cato Institute blog gives away the game. In it, he wrote that “in the short run, agencies can experiment with low-cost improvements in bus service,” but ultimately they “need to back out of transit services that fewer and fewer people are using . . . [and] die with dignity.”7” (Steven Higashide, Better Buses, Better Cities)
“But the majority of cities need to devote most of their energy to making high-capacity, fixed-route transit perform better in the places where it can. When existing bus routes are unreliable and slow, focusing attention on microtransit is like trying to perfect dessert at a restaurant that routinely burns the entrees. If effectively serving the most riders is the key goal, then the question of how to replace the bus on the urban fringe is less important than the need to make the bus work in busy corridors.” (Steven Higashide, Better Buses, Better Cities)