Image by Alex Winston used with permission.

Waiting 40 minutes for the next bus is an all too common experience for many of Richmond’s Southside residents, but the frequent runs of the Greater Richmond Transit Company’s Pulse bus rapid transit line were supposed to ensure riders along Broad Street never have to wait more than 10 to 15 minutes. Unfortunately, over the past few weeks the Pulse has faced a bout of bus bunching, especially during the evening rush hour.

What’s wrong?

Bus bunching occurs when buses that were scheduled to be evenly spaced along a route get clumped together—often due to traffic—and end up arriving at stops in “bunches” of multiple buses at the same time, with longer-than-scheduled gaps between bunches. The resulting unreliable service and longer wait times inevitably cause frustration among riders.

The phenomenon often leads to overcrowded vehicles being followed virtually immediately by buses that are nearly empty. That makes the bunching even worse, as the front bus takes a long time to load and unload at stops, while the empty buses behind load faster and catch up.

“Bunching gets bad when we lose dedicated lanes and we’re working in peak hours. That’s when high performance goes down,” said GRTC CEO Julie Timm in a recent interview. “Unfortunately we don’t have dedicated lanes for the entire Pulse route. Just like any other vehicle along those corridors we get backed up when we become impacted by congestion. The good news is that we also have standby buses to deal with overcrowding. They’re deployed to help with overcrowding and spacing.”

The problem has gotten so severe in recent weeks that one rider noted he could’ve walked to Main Street Station from Scott’s Addition faster (68 minutes) than he would’ve gotten there with the Pulse’s delays (71 minutes). Another rider had her 30-minute Pulse pass expire before she had ever even boarded a bus.

The problem is clear, but do we have solutions?

How can we fix it?

As a frequent Pulse rider himself, Ross Catrow—the Executive Director of RVA Rapid Transit—offers both sympathy and possible solutions for those delayed by bus bunching.

“This impacts riders across the city, reducing reliability and trust in our public transit system. Luckily, fixing bus bunching is relatively straightforward: Make payment easier and quicker, give buses priority through bus-only lanes and transit signal priority, enforce those lanes (a great step would be to get rid of the handful of parking spaces at 3rd & Broad), and, if needed, get bigger buses or increase the frequency of the bus,” Catrow said.

No matter how competent GRTC staff are in ensuring dispatchers keep an eye out for bunching and deploy extra buses, delays will remain inevitable as long as Richmond’s culture treats the bus as a second-class mode of transportation. In a recent interview, Carrie Rose Pace—GRTC’s Director of Communications—stated, “There are a number of items outside of GRTC’s control that we note are impacting Pulse service, and they boil down to construction, police traffic control, or traffic congestion.”

While GRTC cannot change the lack of dedicated lanes from Government Center eastward (where congestion is worst) or the Capitol Police’s manual traffic control on 14th Street that holds up buses in favor of government workers driving in and out of their parking lots, Richmonders will be cheered to know the items Catrow listed are all on GRTC’s to-do list.

To solve the problem of people carelessly parking in the bus-only lanes, GRTC plans to work with the City of Richmond to lobby the General Assembly for enforcement cameras on the front of Pulse buses. When New York City’s MTA launched a similar program in October, the GIF of a bus ‘vaporizing’ vehicles in its way became an online sensation. If drivers knew they were guaranteed to receive a ticket, such a camera pilot would likely serve as a strong deterrent to those who might otherwise be tempted to illegally park in bus lanes.

To speed up payment and reduce people having to go through the slow process of paying a cash fare to board, GRTC anticipates launching its much awaited reloadable tap card—similar to WMATA’s SmarTrip cards—next year. However, GRTC is still figuring out the legal arrangements of reloadable cards, which are treated as gift cards under current Virginia law.

Sometimes when a transit card goes inactive for over a year, the system keeps the remaining balance. If tap cards are handled like gift cards, then GRTC would be liable to keep track of and return any money left on inactive cards indefinitely, a logistical hurdle Timm worries could become overly cumbersome to her already thin-stretched staff.

The groundwork for a reloadable transit card system has already been laid in GRTC’s fare payment software, but such a new system will also require the company to hire customer care representatives to manage lost or damaged card claims—new territory for GRTC.

Lastly, GRTC plans to experiment with articulated (accordion) buses on its highest trafficked routes. Just last week an extended 60-foot bus stopped over in Richmond to offer GRTC’s board a test ride. With minor changes to the alignment of some Pulse platforms, Timm expects the buses to be a great addition to the system; however, she warned, “It’ll be important for our region to consider how we dedicate lanes to our bus transit as we look at adding in bigger vehicles. It’s difficult enough for a 40-foot bus to get around illegally parked cars to merge into traffic, but it will be even harder for a 60-foot bus to do so.”

Articulated buses are a common sight in Washington, DC. Image by BeyondDC licensed under Creative Commons.

As the persistent bunching of Pulse buses in recent weeks has shown, the city needs to begin implementing solutions or else the miracle of Richmond’s transit turnaround and its 17% growth in ridership could disappear as quickly as the illegally parked cars in the MTA GIF. Despite their frustration, Pulse riders surely agree with the CEO of their transit system on one thing: “As traffic gets more and more congested, it’ll become increasingly important to prioritize our transit system with dedicated bus lanes,” said Timm.

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Tagged: brt, bus rapid transit, buses, richmond, transit, virginia

Wyatt Gordon is the senior policy manager for land use and transportation at the Virginia Conservation Network, and an adjunct professor at Virginia Commonwealth University's Department of Urban Planning. He's a born-and-raised Richmonder with a master's in Urban Planning from the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa and a bachelor's in International Political Economy from American University.