I hadn’t yet found an eye doctor since moving to Washington, D.C., so during a trip back home to the Sacramento area last year I paid a visit to the doctor’s office I’d gone to growing up to get my vision prescription updated. The schedule was timed for my bus – Sacramento Regional Transit Route 26 – to leave one minute after a light-rail train arrived, an example of smart route integration intended to facilitate a seamless transfer for riders coming from the city’s downtown area.
As I waited aboard the bus, an operator shift change occurred. I observed the incoming operator park her car on a side street adjacent to the station and engage in some light-hearted conversation with the employee about to get off work, who then proceeded to get in a different car and leave.
Shortly thereafter, the light-rail train we were awaiting arrived – one minute late.
As the grade crossing bells rang and the train pulled into the station, I stared out the window, with an eye out for customers making the switch to our bus. But something seemed wrong: the bus was moving! Before I could speak up, we’d left the station and began traversing our route. We were right on time, but the people who’d been on that one-minute-late train would have to wait another 30 minutes for the next bus.
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Common-sense errors such as the one I witnessed that November afternoon are all too common on American transit systems. When people who operate a system – from front-line employees to high-level politicians and agency officials – don’t use it, it’s challenging for them to understand the severe impacts issues like missed connections have on riders. The resulting problems with service repel would-be customers, preventing regional transportation from becoming more multimodal.
To solve this problem, transit providers must incentivize their employees and force their officials to ride.
Make it easy for transit employees to live a transit-oriented lifestyle
As we’ve analyzed in our recent series on multimodal options serving low-density areas, a lot of people who are open to trying transit don’t regularly use it due to limited service, cultural stereotypes, and infrastructural obstacles. While transit employees approach personal transportation decisions no differently than anyone else does, their employers should put extra emphasis on encouraging them to ride.
Transit agencies should study the neighborhoods they serve, using their transportation knowledge to identify attractive housing options with an easy car-free commute to an employee’s workplace – be it the agency’s downtown headquarters or a bus garage in an outlying area. Once the employee has chosen where they’ll live, their employer could also help connect them to life needs, such as stores, doctor’s offices, gyms, and day-care centers, that also are easy to access without a car.
Provide service that fulfills transit employees’ needs
The challenges of providing sufficient transit service for off-hour shift workers are well-documented. Transit-vehicle operators inevitably fall into this gap – an employee scheduled to operate the first bus of the day can’t take that bus route to commute to their job
Transit agencies have several options to address this. Guaranteed Ride Home (GRH) programs provide multimodal commuters a limited annual number of fare-free trips home in certain special circumstances, including required job overtime. Such options could be ideal for transit employees who only need to work beyond system service hours occasionally, and their employers could work with program providers to provide expanded service to employees who regularly start work early or get off late.
GRH may not be feasible in all situations, but fortunately transit agencies have additional options to ensure their employees’ commute needs are covered. Taxicabs and app-based ride hailing operate at all hours, so agencies can contract with these companies to provide their employees discounted trips when transit is not an option, either directly to their home or to/from an alternative transit line that is operating when the employee commutes. Such contracts could be a part of a more thorough, mutually complementary integration of fixed-route transit and app-based ride hailing in low-density areas.
If you’re a transit official and don’t want to ride the system you oversee, get out of the industry
When high-level transit officials use their system, everyone benefits. Leaders not only get to enjoy multimodal options that may well be preferable to driving, but also develop an understanding of what riders are looking for, improving their ability to oversee and upgrade service.
But when these officials don’t see things from the perspective of a regular transit rider, everyone suffers. While a front-line employee’s error due to lack of rider understanding may lead to short-term frustration for select customers, similar mistakes by powerful individuals can lead to deep systemic problems. We’ve seen the consequences of such mistakes on two of the country’s largest transit systems – D.C.’s WMATA and New York’s MTA.
In Washington, WMATA board chairman and city councilmember Jack Evans is notorious for parking his car illegally – occasionally even blocking bus stops. Given this behavior, it’s not surprising that he threatened to force Maryland to halt construction of its badly needed Purple Line over a bureaucratic spat. In general, public sentiment that Evans is out of touch with riders has fueled harmful negativity surrounding the transit agency.
Meanwhile, a few states to the north, New York Mayor Bill de Blasio has faced ridicule for using an SUV motorcade to go work out at the gym. When he’s not exercising, he strives to find ways to, using structural technicalities, deflect blame for the subway’s mishaps instead of embracing the challenge as a central part of his platform.
Photo by Sam Kittner for Mobility Lab.