A recent posting by Adam Cohen on a local website started me thinking about the PVTA and our system of public transit around here. We see the buses go by every day, going up King toward Greenfield and Florence Heights, and out toward Williamsburg and the jail. And from time to time, like every year or so, I ride one. And always the buses, which are huge, run almost empty. The motivation for the routes they run, a lot of the time, are political and humanistic. They serve the poor, the people who live in housing complexes, and the elderly, who have given up their cars. The Mayors of our towns pack a lot of clock with PVTA and when they say we need a bus, they get a bus. Light ridership? One size (big) fits all. My wife and I saw the same thing when we spent last winter in California, these huge buses running up and down the Coast Highway through affluent beach communities. Often they had no more than four or five people riding in them, most of them hispanic domestic employees on their way to work or going home in distant communities where housing is cheaper. You just think five minutes about these buses and their carbon imprint and huge engines and their unionized drivers and their administrational expenses and you might think, hey, there's got to be a better way.
I think of Peru and their collectivos. If you want to get around Peru and you don't mind a little excitement, you go down to the corner of the nearest main street and look for a collectivo. Hold up your hand and there will be a shriek of brakes, and you jump in. They were usually Datsuns when I was there in the seventies. They ran on no particular schedule: they leave their destinations when full, will leave their passengers off anywhere along the route, and pick up anywhere. And yes, they are anarchic, but thats not necessarily a bad thing. You get a good driver, and you might get a bad driver. But God gave you a mouth and you can yell and tell the guy to slow down, and organize your fellow passengers to yell at him too. Public transportation by ten guys with ten cars and dues and a couple people hustling passengers in the bigger cities. A little more anarchism in our over-organized over regulated world might be nice. There is a good posting on jitneys in Wikipedia, which are mainly popular in the undeveloped world. Since we are heading toward being an post-industrial economy, maybe its time to break the back of the public transit monopoly and license and lightly regulate jitneys. A Boston-Amherst-Northampton route would flourish and drive down Peter Pan prices. And the efficiencies are obvious. Cars that operate full or nearly full burn a lot less gas that these big heavy buses with their Cummins diesels.
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Here are more articles on these ideas:
http://northassoc.org/2009/12/23/transit-thinking-outside-the-bus.aspx
Last year, policy analyst Randal O'Toole ran the numbers for the CATO Institute, where he is a senior fellow, comparing mass transit vehicles to private vehicles, ranking each based on how much energy they consume and how much CO2 they emit. The average motorized city bus, he reports, burns 27% more energy per mile than a private car and emits 31% more pounds of CO2. The U.S. Bureau of Transportation Statistics confirms that the average city bus requires 20% more energy per passenger than the average car...
Ridesharing applications for smart phones -- users enter their location and desired destination and a cost-conscious carpooler responds -- are already in wide use, Mr. Rubin says. Self-sustaining, small-scale private jitney systems have successfully operated for years in Atlantic City and Puerto Rico (all North America's early public transit systems were privately operated until they were nationalized). And with billions freed up from public transit funds, it appears entirely feasible to simply offer subsidized Prius taxis, or even car subsidies, to the small portion of the public entirely reliant on public mobility...
http://northassoc.org/2007/11/27/randal-otoole-the-folly-of-smart-growth.aspx
People who are disabled, too old, too young, too poor, or otherwise unable to drive have long been the major users of public transit... [I]nstead of building high-cost, high-capacity rail lines and then attempting to redesign cities to provide ridership, planners should focus on designing transit systems systems to serve low-density urban areas. That means using low-capacity jitneys, shuttle vans, and demand-responsive transit systems. It also means demonopolizing public transit, opening the door for private providers of transportation services...
See also "Private buses make a comeback in NYC" at
http://marketurbanism.com/2010/08/16/private-buses-make-a-comeback-in-nyc/
...the outer boroughs’ immigrant communities have had robust networks of informal private vans (known in NYC as “dollar vans”), which operate illegally but have been hard to prosecute, likely due to the fact that they are used mostly by linguistically-distinct immigrant communities. The recent cuts even propelled the bootleg bus phenomenon out of its immigrant ghetto, when a brave bus operator named Joel Azumah made headlines by operating a bootleg bus route along routes cut in Manhattan, Queens, and Brooklyn...
The city’s Taxi and Limousine Commission appears to have headed that call, and under the direction of chairman David Yassky is trying to replace at least some of the old bus routes with private buses. Unlike the city’s much-abused private van service, where operators are technically not allowed to pick up riders off the street who haven’t called ahead of time, the buses would operate with many of the privileges of regular city buses, with the added flexibility of being able to alter their routes to fit customers’ needs. Cap’n Transit has speculated that this discretion could be used as a back-door way to expand the private buses’ reach to areas not officially sanctioned by the program...
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