Roman Mars:

This is 99% Invisible. I’m Roman Mars.

Roman Mars:

What if I told you that there was a piece of technology that could do away with traffic jams, make cities more equitable and help us solve climate change? You might think about driverless cars or hyperloops or any of the other new transportation technologies that get lots of hype these days. But my guest on the show this week has written a whole book about a much older, much less sexy piece of machinery, one that he thinks could be the key to making our cities more sustainable, more livable and more fair. Be humble. Omnibus. We just call it a bus now.

Roman Mars:

Steven Higashide is a transit expert, bus champion, and author of a new book called “Better Buses, Better Cities.” And the central thesis of the book is that buses have the power to remake our cities for the better. But he says, if we want the bus to reach its potential, we’re going to have to make the experience of riding one a lot more pleasant.

Steven Higashide:

Americans take 4.7 billion trips a year on the bus. But so many of those trips are miserable. They’re slow, they’re circuitous. You’re standing on the side of the road, sometimes not even with a sidewalk or a shelter. So it’s really a miserable experience. And yet public transit is the most efficient way to move people around. It’s essential if we are going to defeat climate change.

Roman Mars:

So why is the bus a key to the issue of climate change and what is its role as an environmental technology as much as the transit technology?

Steven Higashide:

So transportation is now the largest contributor to greenhouse gas emissions in the US and so that means, on the one hand, it does mean that we have to look at electrifying automobiles. But at the same time, when you look at climate modeling, whether that’s at a municipal level, state level, or national level, you just see that electrification is not going to be enough to meet our climate goals. And that means we have to build cities and neighborhoods where people don’t have to drive as often. And they have to be able to make shorter trips. And so public transit plays a huge role in that and buses play a really essential role in that as well.

Roman Mars:

Can you talk a little bit about how efficient buses can be in terms of moving the most number of people around a city and what are the environmental impacts of that?

Steven Higashide:

So the typical lane of general-purpose traffic in the city – a typical car lane – can carry perhaps a thousand to 2000 people an hour. If you have a bus-only lane that jumps up to four to 8,000 people per hour. So that’s far more efficient. And if you are giving over more of the street to transit and creating a transitway, now we’re talking 10 to 25,000 people per hour. And it’s really that fundamental geometry which makes transit so essential to cities.

Roman Mars:

I think when most people think of a future that’s a more green future, they think of wind farms and solar arrays. They don’t necessarily think of a bus.

Steven Higashide:

Yeah, I mean the bus is very overlooked, but I think that if more people went to cities where bus service was convenient, it’d be pretty eye-opening. I personally was radicalized by taking the bus in London where it seemed like practically every trip I wanted to make, the fastest way to do it was via bus. And sometimes that would be two or even three buses. But the transfers were so convenient. The service was so frequent that I really experienced it as a seamless thing. And you know, maybe that’s a little bit of the rose-colored eyes of someone who is visiting. I know people in London are going to have their complaints about transit. It’s actually really hard to praise transit anywhere because local people know that there are always a lot of problems. But still, it was an eye-opening experience.

Steven Higashide:

We don’t have a huge number of good examples in the US so I think it’s a little hard for Americans to understand. But I’ve had this experience also on some of the buses in Toronto where I open my phone to look at whether I should bike or take Uber or take the bus and so many of the trips there I opened my phone up and taking the bus was faster than Uber, which is so different from when I’m trying to get around in US cities.

Roman Mars:

So why haven’t we embraced the bus in the United States?

Steven Higashide:

I think there are a few reasons for that. The first is that in the US I think often there is this obsession with technology and this idea that we are going to innovate our way out of traffic. And you see that when you see the amount of hype there is for driverless vehicles or Hyperloop. You know Elon Musk proposed a Hyperloop for Chicago that was going to carry 2000 people an hour, which is actually much less than you can carry in a regular bus. And then a lot of it comes down to political power and the fact that most people who ride buses in the US today are lower income. They are people of color. These are folks who have always been, to a large extent, shut out of the political system and a lot of what it takes to make transit better involves organizing those riders and building a new kind of transportation politics.

Roman Mars:

And there also seems to be a bit of an effort to change perception. Like if you watch a movie and something bad happens to a protagonist and they lose a job or something bad happens to them, the next scene might be them on a bus and it’s like a defeat almost.

Steven Higashide:

In US media, there’s this real class valence to buses. In the show “Atlanta”, one of the early scenes is the main protagonist, on the bus, sort of complaining that his life hasn’t gone the way that he wanted it to. And there’s this real association between the bus and not making it. And it’s funny how much that doesn’t exist when you look at popular media in Asia or the UK where the bus is just like a park or a sidewalk. There are a lot of scenes with buses that don’t seem to have any special significance because the bus is just part of the ordinary fabric of life and it doesn’t have some broader connotation and in a lot of ways that’s where we need to get in the US, where the bus is just something that lots of people use when it happens to work out for them. And because we’ve designed buses well, it works out well for people in a much wider set of circumstances.

Roman Mars:

What do you think is the most direct way to improve that perception of the bus and make people want to ride it?

Steven Higashide:

The most direct way to improve the perception of buses is just to make the buses themselves better.

Roman Mars:

Yeah.

Steven Higashide:

Because you make buses better and more people start riding. More people start riding, that changes the perception of the bus. It creates the political energy to improve the bus even more and it’s this sort of virtuous cycle. And so I really think it doesn’t start with marketing or communications or some new framing. It starts with actually creating a product that you can sell to people with a straight face.

Roman Mars:

If the way to get more people to ride the bus is to make the bus service better, then city planners would do well to read Steven’s book. It’s basically a manual for how to improve bus systems. Drawing from examples from cities around the country where design decisions made riding the bus better for everyone. Steven says that one of the most fundamental things you can do to improve bus service is just to make the bus run more frequently.

Steven Higashide:

There’s this saying that the transit planner Jared Walker often uses, which is that “frequency is freedom”. Imagine if you own a car and there’s like this giant wall behind the car that only opens once an hour and that’s the only time that you can leave your house and go driving. That’s basically what it’s like if you live near an hourly bus route and it’s not much better if you live near a half-hourly bus route. It’s only when you get to this stage where you have service every 15 minutes, every 10 minutes, every five minutes, that there’s this real sense of freedom that you’re not planning your life around someone else’s schedule anymore. You can just show up whenever you want and feel confident that the bus is going to be there pretty soon. So frequency creates a sort of seamlessness and a kind of freedom that is really important and that frequency is also really important to make networks work.

Steven Higashide:

It’s not really possible to give every single person a door-to-door ride on a bus. That’s sort of the opposite of transit. Transit is taking lots of people from roughly the same place to roughly similar destinations. And one of the ways that you do that really effectively in a network is by creating a grid, by creating frequent connections, where you have to have the confidence that if you get on a bus and you get off somewhere else to transfer, that’s going to be a pretty seamless transfer. You don’t want to have to worry that you’re going to have to get off at some intersection and then be standing around for 25 minutes in who knows what sort of environment. So that’s what makes frequent service so important.

Roman Mars:

Okay, so step one is just to make the bus more frequent. That makes sense. And in the book, step two is also pretty intuitive and that’s to make the bus go faster. Now obviously we’re not talking about giving the bus a stronger engine or making sure the bus drivers speed stop to stop. But you’re talking about freeing the bus from traffic. So how can planners do that?

Steven Higashide:

Yeah, there’s quite a varied toolkit that cities and transit agencies have when they want to speed up the bus. Some very small things like how you place the bus stop makes a big difference. For example, if the bus stop is in front of the traffic light, that is going to tend to slow the bus down because it’s more likely that the bus is going to get caught by a red light. Whereas if you put the bus stop after the traffic light, that tends to be faster. Another thing that makes a big difference is how far apart bus stops are from each other, which I think is pretty intuitive. And then there’s even how riders get on the bus. The general rule of thumb in the US is that people have to line up in this pretty long line, often at the front of the bus and board one by one.

Steven Higashide:

And on busy routes, what transit agencies should be doing is all-door boarding where you can get on at any door. Maybe you tap your card at a reader on the back of the bus and that can cut the delay down from five seconds a person to more like two seconds a person, which really adds up when you’re talking about 20 people getting on at a given stop. And then what we really need in the most congested areas of our cities are bus-only lanes or even bus-only streets, which you’re starting to see in places like New York City and San Francisco and Seattle, where at the busiest times, private automobiles are more or less banned and buses get the right of way.

Roman Mars:

So in terms of bus-only streets, just recently here in the Bay area, San Francisco banned private cars on Market Street and that’s still brand new, but I know they did something similar in Manhattan.

Roman Mars:

Can you describe that effort?

Steven Higashide:

In the last few months, New York City has essentially banned cars on 14th street and this is an enormous advertisement for the bus and it’s an enormous advertisement for what cities can be like when we prioritize transit and don’t give over every bit of street space to the private car. If you walk around 14th Street today and see the bus wait in action, what’s amazing is not only is the transit fast, but the neighborhood is so much nicer. It’s so much quieter without all the cars. You can see ambulances have a clear shot and aren’t getting stuck in traffic. Trucks are allowed on this transitway, so it’s actually very convenient for the businesses that are on this corridor and people feel safe and empowered to cross the street basically anywhere because there’s so much less traffic. So it’s a much more pleasant place to be and we can create more neighborhoods like that when we move the car to the margins and have great transit in its place.

Roman Mars:

Is there always this antagonistic relationship between cars and bus systems?

Steven Higashide:

I do think that there has been and will continue to be tension between cars and the city because, fundamentally, you cannot scale up an automobile-based system of transportation and fit it into a city and have it work for everyone. In the early 20th century, I think a lot of people realized that the car was doing great harm to the fabric of cities. And there’s a lot of important history to read about the ways in which, for example, public opinion was really against automobiles and the violence that they brought into cities. I think we have to keep in mind, sometimes urbanists talk with a little bit of hyperbole about banning cars, which I think is very appropriate right now in specific neighborhoods. But we have to reckon with the fact that in a lot of the sprawling US, transit just doesn’t get you the same access to jobs and opportunities that cars do. And the solution to that is really scaling up and creating great transit. But I do think that there is some tension there and we do have to find ways to roll back the dominance of the automobile in our cities.

Roman Mars:

I think it’s interesting to think about the entire network that hooks into the bus, and one of the things you mentioned is that you also have to make the experience of getting to and from the bus easier and integrate that into the system that we’re talking about. So how does that play a role in creating a vibrant and functional bus system?

Steven Higashide:

The walking experience really matters when it comes to transit. I mean most people are walking on at least one end of their trip. And so the pedestrian experience really is the transit experience, and you can provide someone with a bus that is frequent and fast and reliable, but if their experience when they get off the bus is that they have to cross an eight-lane road and there’s not a sidewalk and there’s nowhere to wait, they’re not going to experience that as a great transit experience.

Steven Higashide:

So this is really important and it also is hard and frustrating because almost always the entity that controls sidewalks and the walking experience is different from the government agency that is providing bus service. So there’s a lot of work that has to happen to develop those relationships, to create some sort of regular process. Walkability is a huge problem in America. You go to Austin, Nashville, Denver, these are all places that have like $1 billion backlog in sidewalks. Where huge amounts of the street network don’t have sidewalks. And even in places like Philadelphia and New York, you see these huge lawsuits because curb ramps aren’t sufficient for people. So I really think walkability is this urban crisis, which we don’t talk about that much and it definitely has an impact on public transit.

Roman Mars:

So another way to improve bus service is to make it more equitable and safe. So how do you go about making it so that everyone feels comfortable riding the bus?

Steven Higashide:

I think a lot of times transit agencies look at survey data showing that people are worried about their personal safety on transit, which is a major reason why people don’t ride or a major reason why people stop riding. But transit agencies see that safety is a concern and often they very quickly go to policing as the answer. And that is one solution that makes some riders feel safe. But, it can also make riders feel less safe and you don’t want to create an environment where people feel like by getting on transit could have implications for their immigration status or it could lead to them being embroiled in the criminal justice system. And there are a lot of aspects of safety, whether that’s lighting, station design, human presence, which may or may not be law enforcement.

Steven Higashide:

These are really things where conversations have to happen at the community level, where you have to have this conversation about what is the community definition of safety and sort of not just assume what the answer is. And then I also think when it comes to equity, fares are really important. How we pay for transit, how much, and whether people are really being treated equally. And let me just give a couple of examples.

Steven Higashide:

So a lot of transit agencies, it actually turns out that wealthier transit riders pay less because there’s a discount for a monthly pass. Whereas low-income riders can’t afford to pay for that monthly pass upfront. So instead they’re paying 2.50 every time they get on and it adds up to much more than the cost of the monthly pass over time. So one thing that a few transit agencies have started doing is something called fare capping where, if you’re paying by the ride, once you get to that level where it’s at the same level as the monthly pass, all your rides are free for the rest of the month after that. So it’s like no one ends up paying more than the cost of that monthly pass.

Roman Mars:

You mentioned one of the things about the frequency is everyone getting on all the doors available. And I think this leads to people thinking about fare evasion and is fare evasion really a problem? Part of my brain thinks that this cannot possibly be a problem, like it really costs that much or causes that big of a problem. What is your take on that and how it fits in with the stuff you’ve been thinking about?

Steven Higashide:

Sure. I mean I think it’s really important to take a customer-focused approach to fare evasion. When you look at bus fare evasion, you have to confront the fact that in most places it’s actually kind of hard to pay for the bus. If you pay in cash on some systems, you have to pay via exact change. It can be very unclear where to buy a transit pass. When researchers looked at this in Washington DC, they found that the neighborhoods where rates of fare evasion were the highest were places where there was a lot of poverty and also no store where transit passes were sold. This really tells us a couple of things. First that if you criminalize fare evasion, to some extent you are criminalizing poverty, which isn’t equitable and you also oftentimes are punishing people for the shortcomings of your own user experience.

Steven Higashide:

It should be the case that if you want to load your transit pass, it should be really obvious where to do that. Whether that’s on an app, whether that’s at a convenience store, it should be really obvious, but in most places, it isn’t. And I think you also have to ask yourself if people aren’t paying the fare because they literally can’t afford it. It’s not like transit agencies are missing out on huge amounts of revenue. If you crackdown, that just means people aren’t going to ride and it means that they’re not going to get to work or to healthcare or make the trips that they need to make.

Roman Mars:

More about making cities better by having better buses, after this.

[BREAK]

Roman Mars:

One of the things that struck me when talking to Steven is that we have the technology we need to make our cities more livable and more sustainable, the problem is that we just aren’t making the best use of that technology.

Steven Higashide:

We talk so much about technological innovation in transportation, when the real innovation that is needed is innovation in governance or innovation in the public process so that we can build the transit projects much more quickly. One of the things that I write about in the book is the unfortunate fact that a lot of bus lane projects are designed in a way that is like a highway megaproject with multiple rounds of design and dozens of public meetings and you end up with a situation where it can take six or eight or in some cases even 10 years to put a bus lane on the street. And we just don’t have that time if we want our cities to be sustainable.

Steven Higashide:

There’s a lot of innovation that can happen in the public process to make these projects happen more quickly. And in fact, cities like Boston and now Washington DC and other places are adopting something called ‘tactical transit,’ where they will put some cones on the street or just paint the street and test out a bus lane and measure the actual performance and survey riders. And the whole process takes maybe a few weeks or a few months instead of multiple years.

Roman Mars:

Yeah. That seems to be like one of the great advantages of the bus is that as a design solution, it’s quite flexible, it’s not on rails. It has all the good things that a transit system has. It has lots of capacity for people, but if you need it to turn the corner of one block before the route that you’ve done for the past 10 years, the driver just turns the wheel, it’s a matter of just telling the driver to do it and letting everyone know. It seems like a designer’s dream to have that type of ability to iterate and be flexible.

Steven Higashide:

Yeah. A lot of what we have to do in cities is actually realize that promise. Planners talk about the bus being flexible, but then you look at Columbus not redesigning the bus network in 40 years and you ask yourself, “Well, how flexible is it really?” In the US, I feel like you see a lot of business boosters and economic development advocates call for world-class transit and what they mean is that they want a streetcar or something. And then when you actually go and look at world-class transit networks, it’s robust bus service that then feeds into rail, but buses are sort of like the capillaries of the transit system reaching out to every place.

Roman Mars:

What is the cost of us not investing in the bus system?

Steven Higashide:

The cost of cities not investing in buses is deepening in equality. In new Orleans for example, for folks who live in New Orleans and have access to a car, you can access 80-90% of jobs in the city within a half hour. If you are walking and taking transit that declines to 10%, 15%, 20%. It’s such a smaller life. And if cities don’t invest in buses, if they don’t invest in transit, they really are pushing particularly low-income households into this really hard place where they feel compelled to buy a car because that’s the only way to get access to opportunity, but that car ends up being a financial trap of its own. We are at a point in the US where automobile debt is at the highest levels recorded in history and it’s just not financially sustainable, so there are better ways and the bus is a huge part of it.

Roman Mars:

And even to the extent that because the bus can be so limited, it limits people’s ability to participate in democracy.

Steven Higashide:

In the book, I cite some work that’s been done by Professor Otto, at CUNY, at the City University of New York, and he relates this story where he was talking with some folks on the bus in the Hudson Valley here in New York and there are these plans to change the bus system there and folks on the bus are talking amongst themselves as to whether the changes are going to be good for them and it’s this really rich discussion. So the bus driver says, “Oh, you guys really have some good ideas. You should go to city hall and let them know what you have to say.” And the bus riders just dismiss this immediately, because the buses stop running at a time where if they go to city hall and testify, they’re not going to be able to get back home because the buses aren’t running anymore. And so it’s not just access to jobs that we have to think about, it’s access to civic participation, it’s access to food, it’s access to church, it’s access to libraries, it’s access to all the things that we really need to live our full lives. That’s really what’s at stake here when we talk about buses and public transit.

Roman Mars:

So why don’t we finish up by talking about Houston, one of the cities you profiled in the book. And what struck me about this case study is that the city really dreamed big and really went for it. Can you describe Houston’s approach and how it differs from the way cities usually do things?

Steven Higashide:

Sure. So the typical way that bus routes change is sort of a tweak here and a tweak there, which sort of adds up over the years, sometimes into these routes that squiggle all over the place and there’s not a single person who can really tell you why. What was really radical about the approach taken in Houston, which has been emulated in many other cities at this point, is that they designed the network from scratch. They sort of realized that the bus network had become less and less relevant to people and in a lot of ways hadn’t fundamentally changed in decades so it wasn’t really something that was worth building on. So instead they asked if we were designing this from scratch based on what we know today about how demographics are changing, about where the job centers are in Houston today, what would that system look like? And so they drew it that way and the result was a system that put a million additional jobs and a million additional households within walking distance of frequent transit. It’s really quite an accomplishment.

Roman Mars:

That seems like such an accomplishment that more people should know about it, but all I tend to read about in terms of transportation stories are new fancy things and just new technologies.

Steven Higashide:

I think that there’s a secret reason why a lot of people in the transportation space focus on technological innovation and that’s because they’re shying away from their own responsibility and they’re hoping that the private market is going to solve the problem, but what private transportation companies have given us are boutique services for the well-off and what we need is affordable widespread transit and that requires public champions.

Roman Mars:

Yeah, and also it requires public champions and also an acceptance that it’s never done. I feel like there’s this idea that there’s this technological Holy Grail which will solve the problem and therefore, then the problem is solved. Whereas this isn’t a problem like that. This is just a problem of maintenance and care and thinking about the city and what your constituency is. It just seems like it’s a different mindset than the Silicon Valley mindset.

Steven Higashide:

Yeah, I think that’s a great point. Cities are changing and transit systems have to adapt to meet that and I think a lot of what I write about in the book, a lot of what’s really important is actually the role of the public sector and creating public agencies that are strong and responsive and have the capacity to be able to do something, like build a pipeline of projects, or to plan and implement bus priority projects across the city, or to do public engagement in a way that is real and not check the box and work very closely with neighborhood-based organizations. These all require hiring people and hiring people with skills and undoing this hollowing out of the public sector that I think exists in a lot of places. I think we have to be open to what might seem to some to be radical, but which I don’t think it’s radical at all to call for tripling the amount of bus service or quadrupling the amount of bus service that we provide in most cities. I think the experience elsewhere shows that we could do that and people would use it.