The new book “Better Buses, Better Cities” breaks down how transit advocates can win

Author Steven Higashide describes his new book Better Buses, Better Cities: How to Plan, Run, and Win the Fight for Effective Transit as “half technical backgrounder, half political field manual” for public transit – especially bus – advocates. He holds up Houston, Columbus, San Francisco, Seattle, and Indianapolis as examples of cities where effective public advocacy led to increased bus ridership. The District, not so much.

“In Washington, … the most popular bus lines in the city still crawl along in traffic, bleeding riders every year,” Higashide writes. There are bright spots though, like when the DC Council made fare evasion a civil offense. Higashide cites research that says “evasion is often the result of economic desperation.”

Federal policy “has a clear bias towards roads,” with “four out of five federal surface transportation dollars go[ing] to highway programs.” Federal regulations are so vaguely written that service changes that largely disadvantage poor communities cannot be challenged, according to his analysis.

Local transit activists (and GGWash contributors) Cheryl Cort, Aimee Custis, Kishan Putta, and Dan Malouff all get shout-outs, mostly for pushing forward the 16th Street NW dedicated bus lane, scheduled for next year. The decade-plus-long journey of this dedicated bus lane from idea to implementation is presented in the book as an example of the type of hurdles that individuals and organizations face in advocating for faster-moving buses.

“The real problem is that mayoral administrations repeatedly studied the corridor but didn’t seriously plan for a bus lane,” Higashide writes. “They had political interest only in smaller solutions such as changes in bus service patterns and optimized signal timing.”

Be careful with overhyped technology…

“There isn’t much sexy about improving the bus,” Higashide writes. Instead, advocates, bureaucrats and politicians can get hypnotized by bright shiny solutions like streetcar lines, microtransit, and autonomous vehicles (AVs).

The author reserves an especially high level of disdain for AVs and similar technology-driven solutions to transit problems. In a chapter labeled “Technology Won’t Kill the Bus – Unless We Let It,” he chronicles how a Nashville, Tennessee, city councilmember managed to spike a realistic plan to improve bus service by throwing up a smokescreen of unrealistic technology-driven solutions, supposedly developed with the help of Qualcomm and nearby Oak Ridge National Laboratories. The launch event featured a CEO of “smart cities” company, teleconferencing in from Tokyo, where he had just met with the Japanese Prime Minister.

Subsequent investigations showed that the proposed solutions were not as viable as the proponents suggested, and there was some question about whether some of the proposed partners in the plan had actually been consulted before the plan’s presentation to the public. Nevertheless, the campaign, combined with an unrelated mayoral scandal and other factors, helped opponents send the proposal – for which early polls had shown public support – down to defeat by a two-to-one margin on Election Day.

“Technology won’t kill transit, but it can be a handy alibi for those who want to stick in the knife,” Higashide writes.

Don’t count out Texas

The book isn’t all doom and gloom – in fact, much of it is about how organizers and officials managed to achieve improvements in bus service, and how to use the lessons from these victories for more effective campaigns in the future. One such success story comes out of Houston, Texas.

“We all wear ten-gallon hats and ride horses and drive pickup trucks, and nobody takes transit here, or at least that’s what the rest of the country seems to think,” said one Houston transit official. “So when we were able to buck the trend on ridership, that got a lot of people’s attention.”

Houston’s first achievement was to redesign the bus network to correspond with changing needs and demographics. Houston’s decades-old bus routes went downtown, missing job centers that had grown up in the last 20 years. The transit system design also did not address the suburbanization of poverty, providing inadequate service to neighborhoods that formerly been middle-income.

A new plan deemphasized downtown service in favor of increased service south and west of the city, and replaced infrequent weekend service with all-day, all-week schedules. The mayor supported transit officials when the inevitable objections rolled in, and the radical redesign was approved in February 2015.

Houston’s second achievement was to implement the redesign on a short deadline. Transit officials had asked for 18 months for implementation; they were told to do it in six. The deadline was not transit officials’ choice – the mayor who had supported the changes was finishing her term. To ensure the new system’s survival, it had to be on the ground and functioning well before the election. Sunday, August 16, was chosen as Launch Day.

So what went right? Beforehand, six different government agencies coordinated to change information at 10,000 bus stops. New signs were posted and covered with heavy-duty bags displaying current route information, which could be pulled off in seconds just before Launch Day. Bus operators attended additional customer service training.

As Launch Day approached, staff “ambassadors” were posted at bus stops to talk up the changes. An emergency management center, staffed with operations, social media, and police representatives, was activated. Fares were free for the first week after Launch Day. Minibuses cruised discontinued routes in search of those who had not gotten the message. Customer service supervisors were even empowered to dispatch taxis if necessary.

The efforts paid off: Houston was named System of the Year in 2016 by the American Transportation Association. In 2018, overall transit ridership increased, inspiring a dozen other cities to redesign their networks.

What’s the final word?

Better Buses, Better Cities is a short, readable, jargon-free manual of effective methods and possible pitfalls to improve old-school bus service, the unrespected Rodney Dangerfield of the transit world. Or, as the author puts it, “[i]t is an opinionated argument for better buses in our cities.”

This book was published in paper and electronic forms in October 2019 by Island Press. Greater Greater Washington received a free copy for review.