There is a nationwide bus driver shortage. The Port Authority is actively hiring new drivers. If any readers know of someone who might be interested, job details can be found here. It is not only bus drivers that are in short supply, the economy is at full employment for the first time in decades. There are particular shortages in all job categories that require a commercial driver’s license; resulting in truck driver shortages as well. Therefore, maintaining the pre-pandemic level of service hours may be challenging and bus driver salaries are likely to rise. These factors are likely to result in systemic changes in the costs of providing transit service.
There are things the Port Authority should do in partnership with local governments to maintain and expand service in this new employment environment.
Speed up the Buses
When buses run faster, the same service frequency can be maintained with fewer buses and therefore fewer drivers. As bus driver salaries increase, the financial return will improve for capital investments that improve bus speed.
Capital investments that speed buses include:
- Signal priority for transit vehicles at intersections.
- Dedicated lanes for buses, including extending the East Busway and a bus lane on the Fern Hollow Bridge.
- Fare collection methods that minimize vehicle delay. A proof of payment system that allows fares to be paid before boarding would be ideal.
- Allowing boarding at all doors would reduce dwell time at stops. This could be done with off-board fare payment or by having connect card targets for fare payment at each door.
- Raised sidewalks at bus stops for level boarding. This reduces the amount of time for passengers to board and disembark.
- Stop Space consolidation: Increasing the space between bus stops speeds up buses which don’t need to stop as often. The reduction in in-vehicle travel time is greater than the increased time to walk to a stop.
Many of these investments will require collaboration with local governments. Pittsburgh should make it a priority to work with the Port Authority on these types of projects.
Increase Ridership on Existing Routes
Increasing ridership allows for more use of articulated buses to capture the additional passengers. This reduces the number of drivers per rider, reducing the operating cost per rider.
Cost effective methods to increase ridership include:
- Better signage and wayfinding so new riders can navigate the transit system.
- More bus shelters. Bus shelters are one of the most cost effective ways to increase ridership.
- Better marketing of the transit system.
- Zoning reform so more people can live within walking distance of frequent service transit lines. Ending parking minimums in the zoning code increases the savings that people can realize by going car free.
- Charging for parking at park and rides. Counter-intuitively, charging for parking at park and rides that fill up regularly increases ridership. It incentivizes people who can walk, bike, carpool, or even find street parking at a less convenient spot to do so, leaving more spots for people who need to park to access the bus and have a later commute time.
The use of shuttle buses also makes less sense given the driver shortage. Therefore projects like the Mon Oakland connector shuttle should be revised to be compatible with the use of full size buses.
Redesign the Bus Network with More Transfers
Bus network designs that rely on more transfers can provide greater service frequency with a given number of drivers.
To understand how, imagine a bus route that has four branch lines and a trunk. Headways are 20 minutes on the branches and 5 minutes on the trunk1The 61 and 71 bus routes each have four branches with similar headways to this..
Maintaining 20 minute headways takes 3 buses per hour, whereas 5 minute headways takes 12 buses per hour.
If the trunk segment of the route were run as a separate line with passengers required to transfer, the system could maintain a reasonably high frequency with fewer buses. For example, 8 buses could provide 7.5 minute headways. Reassigning the buses saved on the trunk the branches would enable the headways on those branches to be reduced from 20 minutes to 15 minutes2Increasing frequency from three buses per hour to four reduces headways from 20 minutes to 15 minutes..
This network change would allow for better management of the headway between buses3The headway is the amount of time between transit vehicle arrivals. Buses have a tendency to bunch where several buses arrive in quick succession followed by a long interval between arrivals.. On high frequency bus lines, it is best to target even headways (having a bus come every 5 or 6 minutes) rather than bunching and having two buses every 10 to 12 minutes. On lower frequency lines it is best to target arriving on schedule and to avoid arriving early in particular. These performance goals can conflict. A system that requires transfers allows bus dispatchers to focus on meeting schedule on the branches and keeping even headways on the trunk.
The Port Authority should also evaluate eliminating or adjusting low ridership, infrequent circuitous routes like the 71 and the 74 to focus on connecting people to the high frequency network rather than getting them to their destination without a transfer4For example, if the 71 were eliminated, riders could use the more frequent 61A and 61B buses with a transfer. If the portion of the 74 bus in Squirrel Hill and Point Breeze were eliminated, the shorter route would allow buses to provide more frequent service Homewood, Larimer and Lincoln-Lemington and connect them to the busway and other higher frequency routes..
Transferring between bus routes is a pain if either of the routes is infrequent. However, it is a manageable inconvenience between frequent routes and when the redesign is done well the improved frequencies that transfers allow more than offsets the inconvenience of needing to transfer. Building quality bus shelters at the transfer points will reduce the inconvenience of making the transfer.
Fortunately, the Port Authority’s new fare policy has made transfers free, which will allow these types of network changes to be made without increasing the fare required.
For more on how transfers can be used to improve a bus network design, see Jarrett Walker’s blog post on the topic.
Light Rail Expansion
Pittsburgh’s light rail system has higher operating costs per passenger than its bus system. However, many rail systems have lower operating costs than bus systems. With rail, a single driver can move more passengers. The cost advantage that this provides increases as labor rates go up.
Alon Levy writes that with rising labor costs, bus redesigns are a band-aid and the focus should be on expanding rail systems. This may be harder for Pittsburgh, which has a lower total population and a lower population density than US cities that have meaningful rail ridership.
However, there are many successful metro systems in Europe serving cities that have smaller populations than Pittsburgh6As an example, the Tramway of Montpellier, France has about 15 times the ridership of Allegheny County’s light rail system despite having a metropolitan area population less than half that of Pittsburgh’s. A brief review of the list of Tramway systems in Europe shows that Montpellier is not an outlier.. The best practices for passenger rail exist outside the United States. Allegheny County should evaluate what places with the best practices are doing and implement them to bring down the operating costs of its rail system. If it is able to do that, a light rail system expansion would be a good investment. Upgrading the East Busway and the bus routes between downtown and Oakland to rail should be the first priorities.
For a light rail expansion to be successful, people need to be able to walk to the stations. Pittsburgh needs zoning reform so that developers can build dense housing within walking distance of the stations and it needs street designs that prioritize pedestrian safety and travel times over cars in the station walk sheds.
Conclusion
A theme of this blog has been that Pittsburgh should make investments that make its transit system more efficient and productive. Labor scarcity increases the return on these types of investments. If we can make our transit system more efficient, there will be a stronger case to make further investments.
