Sins Against Humanity are a Part of American Railroad History

[Willbridge]

There are of course other factors that have lead to the downgrade or failure to upgrade in some transit services. The bus service in my city is for the most part way better than it was when I was growing up, but there are geographic limitations to some routes. Others have been shortened to meet safety guidelines, after a fatality several years ago transit busses no longer can back up at the end of a route and must now go around a block to get back onto the route. The concept of a block is daunting in some of the suburban route ends. Also the further towards the northern outskirts you get in my city, the fewer east/west routes that are suitable for bus travel there are. So the map tends to look like fingers off of a central palm, which ends up making the trip to a central transfer point work against anyone trying to take the bus between neighborhoods.
While none of that is inherently racist, it has the effect of making the bus unappealing to the suburban neighborhoods which have the least minorities and more appealing to the urban ones which have developed into minority neighborhoods as time went on.

You hit on a little understood sidelight of suburban transit planning. Some roadway layouts would require literally traveling unproductive miles to get to a place where it is acceptable as a turnaround. In the same metro area another suburb designs convenience center intersections so that they have a road around the back side of the center and apartments across the street. A bus route clicks right in there and the operator will like their break.

The racial and/or income issues involved with transportation are much more complex than discussed here. Gentrification results in new issues as the gentrifiers tend to faithfully cram onto weekday peak service for all the good reasons and then drive out to shop or ski on the weekends. Based on ridership the remaining longer term residents eventually lose some or even all weekend and night service. Some community leaders are fixated on getting better service with their community and will point fingers at lightly used suburban locals, but guess who is among the riders on the suburban locals? THEIR constituents riding to where the jobs are.

Now, as suburbs age and interest rates remain low the "doughnut ring" suburbs are attracting families who would have been confined to the inner cities before. The doughnut ring suburbs -- often platted in the 1920's/30's -- are usually easier to access with buses than the mile-square 1970's/80's plats but often have no sidewalks. Some areas within cities like Denver and Portland that annexed doughnut ring suburbs also have no sidewalks. Some have token sidewalks that are "narrow-gauge" -- too narrow for a wheelchair or to get around an open car door.

Trying to juggle things like these made service planning constantly interesting.

More on these issues in an old article that I wrote:

The Terror Tax

 

[sttom]

Some of how badly local transportation works is dependent on the state and how the agencies are set up. When I lived in Nevada, Washoe County has a county wide agency with a sales tax dedicated to public transit. Which has led to them having a system of about 20 routes where all but 2 have at least hourly service throughout the day. Most of the routes run more frequently than that through the day and a couple even have late night service to 2am. Where I live now in Contra Costa county, CA we don't have a one county wide agency, we have 3 JPAs and AC Transit which is a district, but it mostly serves Oakland and Berkeley. What the hyper localized set up in California has led to is a system where I have 7 routes in my city, 2 are peak ours only and the other 5 run at best every other hour, weekdays only. Service ends at 7pm and there is one route on weekends that runs I think 6 times per day. If we had a system similar to Reno, the street about half a mile away from me would have at least one line running every 30 minutes every day of the week for most of the day. Currently, the bus system is so useless that for me to have gone to my old job, I would have had to walk 1 mile to the nearest bus stop, taken one bus halfway to work (about 5 miles away), transferred onto another bus for the remaining 3 miles. To top this off, to get home I'd have to take a completely different bus to a different spot, transfer then make another mid route transfer to get home. This is what happens when you have an agency that runs without dedicated funding and is run at the behest of suburban city councils. As to what would fix it, I have my opinion on the subject, I would much prefer the 1 agency per county with a dedicate tax since it at least led to a useful, if inconvenient system in Reno, instead of the localized and worthless system that runs near me now. And for full disclosure, I did use RTC Washoe when I lived in Reno, I've never used the local bus system where I live now.

 

[AFS1970]

We have a state bus agency, part of our DOT, but operates in 3 or 4 different zones that do not connect. Then there are a couple of cities that run busses. and we have a local bus that runs up US1 and essentially connects two of the busier transit zones and is jointly operated by the state and one of the city companies.

On a positive note, when I was growing up, the last bus into my neighborhood was at 6:21PM ( I still remember the schedule) When I got married my wife moved here and being from NYC wondered how anyone got around town. Now most routes run until at least 11PM. So there are improvements.