Headway

One of the reasons why buses are sometimes less pleasant to ride than trains is that they’re much more likely to offer a jerky ride. This probably has a lot to do with the traction afforded by rubber tires and the unpredictability of the street traffic that buses travel in. Either way, when you’re on a sideways-facing hard plastic seat, or standing on a crowded vehicle without a convenient handhold, the net effect is that you might become better acquainted with your fellow riders than you’d like.

While some of the jerkiness can no doubt be chalked up to the vehicle, in my experience some drivers definitely have a lighter touch than others. Why not reward the attention paid by a conscientious driver to the quality of the ride? A simple accelerometer in the AVL package would likely be enough to figure out who was doing a good job. (There’s at least one company, Road Safety, selling this type of hardware for first-responder, commercial fleet, and of course anxious parent applications.)

Rather than using this system to punish careless drivers, it’d be be better (if more costly) to offer incentives for a driver to opt into, and perform well in, this type of monitoring. In some ways, this would be similar to the pilot programs that Progressive Insurance has run in which private drivers can choose to have their driving behavior recorded in exchange for reduced insurance charges. This way, it can preserve driver dignity at the same time that the smoother rides improve rider dignity.

Steve Offut over at CommuterPageBlog posted about how transit systems could benefit from more memorable route names:

I’ll bet you there isn’t a single rider who can explain why those buses are called #2, why there are 6 different ones, why those particular letters of the alphabet are used, and why the 2W and 2T are somehow paired with the other 2’s. The numbering is worthless to the rider (who is, after all, the customer). So here’s a system that not only provides zero useful information but actually provides the disservice of confusing customers.

He points to Boulder’s named bus routes as one alternative:

Many of the buses have names: Hop, Skip, Stampede, Bolt, Dash, etc. The more complete names are things like “Skip Along Broadway” and “Dash down South Boulder Road.” Now that’s useful info to a customer.

It’s true that virtually no one knows the arcane numbering system for their city. On the other hand, the picture at the top of Steve’s post demonstrates the wayfinding advantage of numbers: they’re short, so they can be shown in huge type on stops and vehicle headsigns. There’s no reason you couldn’t use similarly short route names using letters, though.

For example, the RER commuter trains in Paris have four-letter names like PUMA and MONA that indicate the stops that a train is serving:

(photo courtesy Barbara Smith)

To be confident that they’re on the right vehicle on an unfamiliar route, a rider generally needs to check two things: the short name (by looking at the headsign) and the direction (from the headsign or by asking the driver “are you going to X?”). Given this, the short name has to be different from the names of places that the route serves, to avoid confusion between multiple routes operating in the same area. (The Boulder and Paris systems both have this property.)

Given sufficient care in picking the names, I think this has great potential. Cheers to Steve for questioning something that we’ve taken for granted for so long!