The Eights of Making Buses More Like Trains! Strategies for Attracting a Lot More People to Rubber-Tired Transit

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1 The Eights of Making Buses More Like Trains! Strategies for Attracting a Lot More People to Rubber-Tired Transit metro analytics Why are we more likely to ride trains than buses? Partly because visible track means we know where trains go. But with any given bus, few of us know where it came from, where it is going, or how often it comes by. Passive awareness makes a train s path common knowledge to most of us, but few people actively look up bus routes and schedules especially for short, spontaneous trips. So how can buses be more like trains? Let us count the eight ways! For starters, most regions have corridor segments where multiple routes overlap especially true in downtowns. Sometimes these overlaps create amazing vehicle frequency of 2-3 minutes! But no one uses these for short-trips because they don t know how far up the road any particular bus will be going. It is easy to bring these overlaps out of obscurity, creating bus tracks nearly as visible as the trains. Below is a You are Here sign and service concept Metro Analytics recommended for Las Vegas that helps solve the first/last mile problem always associated with regional transit. It shows potential branded corridors to make the system that they have always operated more visible for resort area circulation. With maps like this at the airport, brochures, and at the stops themselves, both visitors and employees will easily figure out that they can use the north-south BRT line envisioned for Las Vegas Blvd, then transfer to an east-west branded corridor for a mile or two, solving the first/last mile problem. Each branded corridor achieves a frequency of 5-8 minutes by using two or three 15- minute routes that converge, traverse the branded corridor, then diverge again. As we developed this document, so many aspects each seemed easy to highlight with just eight elements. So we re going with that and calling it our Eight Plan of strategies to make rubber-tire transit more attractive with or without fixed guideway especially for short, sporadic trips.

2 The Eight-Plan for Successful Transit Circulation 8 #1, 8-Rules for Creating Multi-Route Branded Corridor Segments Rule 1 - Identify Corridors: High-frequency routes, or where infrequent routes converge (creating high frequency) are candidates for branding. Corridor endpoints represent space over which any branded vehicle will carry you. Avoid circuitous corridors. Rule 2 - Corridor Insignia: All vehicles BRT, corridor shuttle, or even regular buses that can be routed to travel the full length of the Queen of Hearts corridor, would display that insignia to inform would-be patrons of the track that the bus will traverse. Rule 3 - You are Here Signs at Stops: Using mall-type diagrams, show all branded corridors, major destinations, and landmarks in the general area so that curious passers-by can gain passive knowledge of how the system works. Rule 4 - Free Fare in Short Corridors: People will pay fares for long commute trips that lower the cost of driving, but for shopping and circulation trips the cost of driving is insignificant. If you want to attract circulation riders, the fare must be free except in the rarest of circumstances. In most cases, even just a 25-cent fare will reduce ridership more than it s worth. Free fares fill vehicles, and full vehicles make tax-payers much happier to fund transit. It also gets more people accustomed to transit, and they ll then pay for longer trips! Rule 5 - Frequent Service = Thick Line: Roadmaps show freeways thicker than local streets, so make transit maps do the same. Long corridors could be branded if they have 15-minute service or better. Brand short downtown corridors if 5-10 minute service is possible by means of dedicated shuttles and/or by interlining multiple routes. Rule 6 - Passive Awareness = Common Knowledge: Simple You are Here signs and insignias on buses will go a long way toward creating common knowledge among the public. Additional steps include media coverage accompanying the unveiling of the corridors; and advertising the corridors on tourist maps, in the Airport, and at popular locations. More expensive 8-enhancements below also help corridors become common knowledge. Rule 7 - Simplicity, High Density: Corridors should be simply understood so that even infrequent users can easily commit the map to memory, and they should have a high number of origins and destinations along the path. Avoid the temptation to brand too many corridors. Start with the best one or two, and build from there. Works well in CBDs, suburban corridors transitioning to higher densities, or other large mixed-use areas. Rule 8 - Display Insignias Outside Corridors: Imagine a suburbanite who happens to work near downtown s King of Diamonds corridor. He frequently sees a bus in his neighborhood, but never bothered to figure out its path. Now the bus displays the King of Diamonds insignia. He mentally connects the dots, and passively learned of a new way to get to work. Page 2 of 13

3 8 #2, 8-F s To Make Shuttle Circulators Attractive for Short Trips You can maximize return on investment even on a low budget if you adhere to the eight rules of branding, and focus on our Eight-F s that attract higher income riders who have other choices. 1. Frequent Vehicles come so often that no one needs to bother with a schedule. 2. Familiar No need to research routes. You Are Here signs & route branding do the job. 3. Fare In most cases, free fare is essential for attracting short-trip circulation. 4. Fast If possible, reduce time spent at stops or in congestion, to attract more riders. 5. Focus Avoid circuitous routes. Simple routes are better routes. 6. Fun Cool vehicles/stops; creative marketing the little things that remove stigmas. 7. Flexible Creates sense of permanence, but easy enough to change if necessary. 8. Frugal Lower cost per mile = more miles of service! (i.e. Frequency) 8 #3, 8 Enhancements to Attract Even More Riders The 8-rules and 8-F s can support a great branded corridor strategy on limited funds. But if you re able to invest a little more, here are eight enhancements to make it even better. 1. Use Vehicles that Stand Out: a flashy vehicle to supplement regular fleet vehicles can be a rolling billboard that allures people to the system. Most will simply take the first vehicle displaying the right insignia whether it be the flashy shuttle on TV, or a standard bus. 2. Real Time Next Bus Information: Wireless and GPS technology are quickly making it affordable to display next bus information at the most popular stops and via smart-phones. 3. Comfortable, Recognizable Stops: Provide attractive weather shelters with good seating and a corridor theme. 4. Stop Amenities: Encourage sidewalk vendors, trivia snippets about your city, free newspapers or other forms of advertising, to help pass the time. 5. Dedicated Lanes / Queue Jumpers: Transit is always more attractive if it can move ahead of congestion via HOV lanes, queue jumpers, or a dedicated lane. 6. Use Paint: Good signage and vehicle insignias bring corridors out of obscurity, but it will be actually visible like a train if the lane itself is painted, perhaps with a two-foot wide stripe matching the corridor s color (lane need not be exclusive). 7. Bike Lock-up / Bike Rental: Provide credit-card bike rental options at key stops, perhaps similar to how Red Box works with movies return anywhere, and if you like the bike, keep it! 8. Peripheral Parking: Downtown garages encourage yet more vehicles to enter pedestrianoriented places where you don t want them. Park and Ride options at the start of a Branded Corridor allow people to park at more accessible locations, and within minutes ride for free to their final destination. Lower cost or free peripheral parking helps ensure downtown is an option for people who drive, and it gives them a taste of transit many will discover they like! Page 3 of 13

4 8 #4, 8 Strategies to Minimize Costs and Pay for the System Because most transit requires a fare and is too infrequent for sporadic trips, people generally use transit for longer trips that they repeat almost daily. But it is possible to attract lots of shorter, sporadic trips by designing service around the 8-F s, and staying within Activity Centers. But how do you pay for free, high-frequency service? Here are several ideas that could help. 1. Use Small, CNG Vehicles Which can carry more people? A 40-seat full sized bus that comes every 30-minutes or passenger circulators every 10-minutes? Trick question the large bus can carry more, but shuttles will carry more. Why? Higher frequency attracts more people over the course of an hour, but relatively few people in 10-minute increments. So start with small vehicles, and upgrade to larger if it proves amazingly popular! Small vehicles may not require a commercial driver s license, expanding the pool of drivers able to serve for lower compensation. They are also fuel efficient, less expensive to purchase, and easy for more mechanics to service. CNG s are also cleaner and cheaper in the long run. 2. Circuitous = Expensive It is easier to achieve high frequency if the overall route is quite short ideally not much more than a 3-4 mile round trip. Straight routes, like trains, are easy to commit to memory; and turns add time, which increases costs. 3. Brand the Overlaps Regional service often overlaps in popular segments. Use the 8-rules for branding to reveal opportunities for short circulation trips, and allow free rides if the entry/exit both occur within the overlap. This way you get many more riders at virtually no additional cost. 4. Public-Private Partnerships Hotels and other businesses in popular districts often have their own shuttle vans. Organize businesses to instead contribute to a single more frequent, more visible system, and post sponsoring logos on the shuttles. Consider volunteer drivers (retired, off-duty fire fighters, etc.) and give them perks like rec passes, etc. 5. Special-Use Districts Mixed-use areas have hundreds of apartment buildings, condos, and businesses that will all benefit from high-quality transit circulation. Establish a fee based on their proximity to the service, and their appropriate share of its overall cost. 6. General Fund Contributions Many cities recognize that younger generations and growing senior populations both want and need better transit circulation. They also see great circulation as key to strong economic development. They may be prepared to contribute to circulatory systems, so long as their share of costs is affordable to them. 7. Transit Authority Assistance Costs for regional operators are usually covered through federal grants to local transit authorities, as well as dedicated sales tax. Fares are usually a small part of the equation often around 20%. For longer trips enough are willing to pay that 20%, but few will pay even a pittance for short trips, so don t bother trying to collect on routes designed for circulation. It slows things down, and lost ridership will greatly exceed any revenue you could have collected. Instead fund 80% through normal means, and consider secondary revenue sources or reduced capital and operating costs, perhaps with strategies described here. 8. Convince Your DOT Free, Frequent, Familiar transit can attract double to triple ridership or higher enough to impact highways and make a case with DOT s that they should participate in helping to reduce out-of-pocket costs. It also attracts popular businesses an economic case! Or create your own strategies. These are just ideas to help get you started. Page 4 of 13

5 8 #5, Eight Vehicles That Could Work Well for Circulation Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and the range of vehicles available for short-trip, purposespecific circulation is extensive. Vehicles shown here have characteristics attractive for short-trip circulation to attract riders, minimize costs, and ideally both. Fixed guideway trams or streetcars can be good choices if the objective is to catalyze strong mixeduse growth, but location-location-location should be selected very carefully, as it can be an expensive mistake if the market has obstacles beyond just lack of quality transit. Low-floor minibuses can be good starting options for helping make important Activity Centers even more important, and ready for higher capital investment later. Catalytic development may still be possible even with less capital investment, if combined with strategies in this document. Or maybe the objective isn t so much catalyzing development as simply achieving high frequency, or helping dependent citizens reach important destinations in a suburban community. In that case, vans could work better than mini-buses with savings in fuel, purchase price, and lower wage expectations, making it possible to achieve higher frequencies at less cost. Whatever the objective, use vehicles that overcome stigmas visually appealing, comfortable, functional, and right-sized. Standard 15-passenger vans Ford extended full-size van Mercedes Sprinter Avondale s Zoom! Ford minibus Toyota s Hino Poncho, low-fl. mini Composite Mobility s low-fl. mini European-style trams Dongfeng branded minibus Interiors usually changeable Page 5 of 13

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7 8 #6, Eight Examples of Branded Bus Corridors These examples all employ elements of the strategies in this paper. The strategy of branding route overlaps as a corridor is still somewhat rare, but the opportunity exists in most major cities. Canberra, Australia and Bellingham, Washington are excellent implementations of the overlap strategy. The other six do not use overlap, but do have many great branding attributes. 1. Canberra, Capital of Australia Australia s capital city, roughly 380,000 residents, is an excellent example of exposing high-frequency corridor segments that occur when low-frequency routes overlap. Blue Rapid is the heaviest overlap, with seven routes creating an average frequency less than 5-minutes in peaks. It is advertised as 5-8 minutes to allow for gaps in random arrivals. To qualify for their Rapid program, segment frequency must be at least 20-minutes. Kristin Blume, a senior manager with Canberra s transit agency, reports excellent success with the system. It has almost no additional cost. We just found a good way to highlight frequency that was already there. Page 7 of 13

8 2. Bellingham, Washington Bellingham, in the Seattle area, creates Go-Lines on corridor segments where infrequent routes combine to create headways of 15-minutes or better. Corridor stations are simple and inexpensive, but very obvious, to help attract people who don t seek out route maps or schedules (i.e., most of us). The red, green, and gold Go-Lines achieve 15-minutes with just one route, but the blue line gets better than 15-minute service using six routes! The downtown routing is shown here, but many of these corridors are branded well outside of downtown. Consultant Jarrett Walker, author of the book Human Transit and the blog HumanTransit.org, designed the Canberra Parliamentary Shuttle system, and also introduced this braided shuttle idea to Bellingham through a Long Range Transit Plan project in 2005 an idea inherent in the original Portland Transit Mall of Page 8 of 13

9 3. Denver, Colorado, 16 th Street Mall The 16 th Street Mall in downtown Denver is among the most successful branded bus corridors in the United States. Its shuttles are the only vehicles allowed on the street. It could be described as a BRT, but it is better thought of as a Branded Corridor because it follows perfectly the eight rules noted earlier, and includes many of the eight enhancements identified. The corridor is 1.25 miles long and carries over 50,000 riders per day significantly higher than much longer light rail lines. This branded corridor connects with light rail routes and other regional bus service, and acts as both a local circulator and a regional last-mile distributor that brings nearly all of Downtown within ¼ mile walk of the light rails. This in turn enhances the ridership of the light rail. Different than Canberra, RTD does not route its diesel-fueled regional buses up 16 th Street to achieve high-frequencies RTD s dedicated CNG vehicles run at 2-minute headways. These free, frequent, familiar, and fun shuttles are standing room only, serving mall patrons and commuters transferring to regional routes. Page 9 of 13

10 4. Boulder, Colorado, Hop, Skip, Jump, Dash One of the key reasons people don t ride buses is because they don t know where a given bus came from, or where it is going. Bus Rapid Transit, Light Rail, and Streetcars all overcome this obstacle with dedicated, highly visible track and pathways that create a common knowledge of where the routes go. Bus Branding is a relatively new, innovative marketing technique that creates a similar common knowledge effect without the megamillions cost of fixed guideway. It helps people discover what you ve been providing all along. One type of branding focuses on the vehicles themselves or a singular route. Another focuses more on a particular corridor with overlapping service. Both cases share many similarities. Boulder, Colorado is a good example of combining both vehicle and corridor branding. This city of about 100,000 northwest of Denver reports that in 1990 their Community Transit Network had about 5,000 riders per weekday. By 2002, the system had over 26,000 riders a 5-fold increase and an unusually high share of total trips even for a community with an above average number of sustanability-minded citizens. The amazing increase in ridership is the result of several factors, but perhaps the largest single factor was naming the bus routes something fun and memorable to bring them out of obscurity and make them cool. Instead of boring routes like 262, 17, 34, 330, theirs are called Hop, Skip, Jump, Dash, etc. Vehicles on each line are then painted with that theme, and bus stops display the themed logo. Routes are semi-circuitous, but generally follow popular corridors, winding through neighborhoods only at the start of the route. System maps are visible in many locations around town, and show where it is possible to transfer from Hop to Skip. They also increased overall service on these branded lines to generally 10-minutes all day long. They have not yet set aside much dedicated right-of-way for transit, but the high ridership makes that more practical all the time. An excellent on-line video that tells the story of their system can be found at: Or learn more direct from the city. See the Community Transit Network at Page 10 of 13

11 5. Hartford, Connecticut, Star Shuttle The Star system in Hartford, Connecticut shares much in common with the branded corridor concept outlined here, but it also lacks much and should be considered more like a traditional downtown circulator than high-frequency Branded Corridors. Star s stops are clearly identified as free in the downtown area, and maps across downtown clearly reveal where you are, and where you can go. However the route is designed as a circular shuttle encompassing all of downtown, and does not really focus on any discernable corridors. As of 2007 there were only two vehicles on the loop at any point in time, both going clockwise along this 2.5 mile loop. It takes about minutes to complete the loop, creating about minute headways in one direction. One of the key missions of a circulator is to compete for short, spontaneous trips that are too long for most people to walk. Impediments such as a fare to pay, infrequent vehicles, or circuitous routes between origins and destinations encourage people to walk, take their car, or limit their lunch breaks just to places that are within walking distance. In the Star system, wait times can reach 15-minutes too long to attract most people. The circuitous routing makes it unattractive to the market it is designed to target. Since it only goes clockwise, one must go all the way around the loop to get back to where they came from. Consequently daily ridership averages about 200 per day, with burst of up to 1,000 on rare occasion, or 2,000 if there are conventions or events in town. 200 is low ridership given the visibility they ve created and the fact that it is free. Hartford could greatly enhance Star s attractiveness, and create true branded corridors in several ways. First, use regional routes to traverse the loop in both directions, and give those a Star insignia to complement their dedicated shuttles. This will create 3-5 minute typical waits so that people can trust that they won t wait long. They could invest in next bus technology to further enhance patron knowledge and system reliability. To make better frequency more affordable, they could use smaller, more efficient minibuses and offer perks to volunteer drivers who accept tips. Since circuitous loops add time to your trip and make the map difficult to commit to memory, if Hartford could concentrate excellent service on just two or three key corridors, it might be easier to understand, far more frequent, and directly in line with many origins and destinations. Page 11 of 13

12 6. Salt Lake City, Utah In Salt Lake, Metro Analytics recommended the branded corridors shown here as part of a comprehensive circulation plan for Downtown Salt Lake City. Though not yet implemented, it is part of both city and regional plans. The City, the Utah Transit Authority, and many business leaders realized that the regional bus system, which isn t going away, can be harnessed into branded corridors, and may help build ridership to support their effort to construct and feed streetcar lines so that shorttrip circulation will be easy anywhere within downtown. The ability to simply organize existing routes into branded corridors results in a very low startup cost, making it possible to initiate the corridors within months of the completion of a plan. This plan will enhance the attractiveness of living Downtown as residents can circulate more easily. It will greatly extend the range of walkable destinations from regional rail lines to virtually all of downtown. 7. Pittsburgh Busways Pittsburgh s Martin Luther King, Jr. East Busway is among the oldest and most successful busways in the United States. Opened in 1983, it is now 9.1 miles, with 9 stations and 1 stop, and 28,000 daily riders. This exclusive right-of-way for buses includes gradeseparated overpasses to improve bus speed. Its exclusive guideway makes it closer to classic BRT than to a branded corridor, but it also definitely follows many of the 8-Rules and 8-F s of this paper. Low-cost branding strategies take otherwise obscure route paths and reveals bus trains where frayed-rope routes converge into a common track. But Pittsburg s system is an actual track though unlike a train track, it operates more like a bus freeway three routes run the whole length, but 29 routes enter and exit along the way. So it has high visibility, but patrons still have to figure out which buses might leave the track prior to their destination. Page 12 of 13

13 8. Las Vegas Boulev ard, The Deuce The Deuce on Las Vegas Blvd. creates a Branded Corridor. Though there is no specific insignia, the vehicle itself is an eye catcher, and it is common knowledge that any double-decker on the Strip is guaranteed to travel between the two major transit centers at both ends. In operation since about 2006, it operates 24/7. From 3-11 p.m. it runs on a very frequent 7-minute headway which is perceived by the public as an almost insignificant, 3.5 minute average wait. Because of congestion and dozens of people at each stop feeding bills into an onboard ticket machine, vehicles are very slow, often averaging 5-mph or even less. Despite the slow speed, ridership often exceeds 30,000 per day (comparable to light rail). This system could easily reach 100,000 or more, rivaling many subway systems, if measures can be taken to increase speeds, connect to the airport, and solve first/last mile distribution using branded corridors. Metro Analytics developed the playing card themed concept shown here as part of a circulation study for the Resort Corridor area. If it can be implemented, it will help workers in apartments just off the Strip discover high-frequency east-west access to the north-south Deuce/BRT on the Strip. Visitors would discover the same thing. And instead of creating additional free parking in the congested core, peripheral parking could be coordinated at the endpoints of these branded corridors, offering quick shuttle service to visitors who can no longer reach internal parking anyway because of excessive congestion. Want to Learn More? Metro Analytics offers presentations and can help you determine the role these innovative concepts could play in your region. Contact us at or info@metroanalytics.com. Page 13 of 13