Metro bus service blueprint

[bzcat]

Metro released the latest blue ribbon committee recommendation on improving bus service. The key take away: more "15 minute or less" buses on key trunk routes; less suburban low density sprawly lines.

media.metro.net/board/Items/2015/06_june/20150625brcitem3.pdf

First the good part - see Map on page 5. Everything in blue already has 15 minute or less service.

Streets that would get 15 minute service that currently don't have it - Victory, Topanga Canyon, DeSoto, Tampa, Laurel Canyon, Glenoaks, Glendale Ave, 405 Freeway (788), San Vicente, Rosemead, Santa Anita, Ramona/Badillo, Valley, Main/Las Tunas, Olympic (East LA), Marianna/Eastern/Ford, PCH (232), Vermont/Gaffey, Century, Imperial, and Rosecrans. In addition, existing rail and BRT lines will also maintain 15 minute or less service.

Per Calwatch (who is a registered user here) on Reddit, in order to implement the "15 minute or less" plan, the following changes will need to take place:

This would be funded by the following changes:

1. Increasing the standing ratio on "frequent" routes (those that run every 10 minutes or better) in peak hours from 1.3 to 1.4. So that 720 bus will be scheduled to carry an average of 80 passengers, or 23 standees, an increase of six from today. Note this is an average and the bus will be more packed at some points than others (p. 10).

2. Everything with a "route performance index" below 0.6 gets considered for "remedial action" meaning that they may have their service reduced or eliminated. (p. 13). The 120 and 550 are proposed to be upgraded to 15 minute routes, two are recommended for cancellation (although unsaid, they are 177 and 220), and one is recommended to be combined with another line (620 with 68). These 33 bus lines are the 20% lowest performing lines in the Metro system, but riders need to be aware that these buses could be gone at any time after 2016. Many of these routes are in the San Gabriel Valley - the Pasadena area gets a lot of lines zapped, although hopefully the Gold Line extension opening in 2016 will drive some ridership. Also Inglewood is hard hit.

3. Metro bus service hours are proposed to be kept flat. Since traffic grows every year by 2-3%, this is in effect a 3% cut in vehicle service miles unless other ways of speeding up transit are done, which leads to...

4. Stop thinning (elimination of stops that are "too close together") and elimination of services "traveling outside of our area" is proposed.

To fund the frequent network, 40,000 hours will be taken from making currently frequent buses more crowded, 140,000 hours will be taken by slashing the 38 lines above which are below average, Lines 190, 194, 205, and 270 are cancelled (and may be replaced by Foothill Transit, Gardena, and Norwalk, or may not be), Lines 460 to Disneyland/Knott's Berry Farm and 534 to Malibu are eliminated because they go "outside the [Metro] service area" (even though they serve low wage workers inside the Metro area), which still leaves a "deficit" of 147,000 service hours. Note that the Disneyland bus is not on the low performing list, but cut solely because it goes into Orange County.

Thus, to fully implement a 15 minute network, this would require higher fares or higher taxes (i.e. from a future tax initiative). On the other hand, you could probably implement Categories A and B through the cuts above, although the people in Pasadena, Inglewood, and the Valley may not be happy; and Disneyland workers will end up buying cars because they can't get to work on time with the three additional transfers necessary.

[mattapoisett]

Is Metro still using, for example, two lines (33 + 733) to equate 15 minute service on a single route (Venice)? It always seemed like funny math to me, especially when I've been waiting for more than 25 minutes for a 733.

[jeisenbe]

Two years later, and Metro is still working on another study to turn around falling bus ridership. When is the Measure M operations money going to start improving service?
thesource.metro.net/2017/05/18/metro-plans-to-reimagine-and-restructure-its-vast-bus-system/

The LA Time also wrote about the study, and noted that Metro Bus ridership has fallen sharply since 2012. Since then gas prices have fallen and more people have cars, but bus service has been cut.

In 2009, Metro had this map of service that came every 12 minutes. There were 51 Metro bus corriders (including the Orange and Silver line), counting Rapid/Local as one route, with service every 12 minutes all day!
www.dancohousing.com/downloads/maps_info/trans_12_min_map.pdf

But by 2012, Metro service had declined to the point where the map was switched to "[usually] every 15 minutes." This only worked by adding a 20 minute rapid and a 20 minute local and calling that frequent.
Even with these lower standards, only 30 Metro bus corridors now qualified. By comparison, the number of municipal buses doubled from 11 to about 20, under this lower standard:
media.metro.net/riding_metro/maps/images/15_min_map.pdf

Now service has declined even further, until the passage of Measure M. I found and updated this Google Map, which probably shows all of the true 15-minute, all-day routes in the county (no cheating):
drive.google.com/open?id=1I5NXDxv_YAomObVtOfUdboWPQ_8&usp=sharing

Big gaps for frequent service have opened up in South LA and the San Fernando Valley, especially:

Just recently, Metro announced some improvements, including 24-hour Orange and Silver line service and running several Rapid lines at 15 minutes... but only at peak periods.
thesource.metro.net/2017/06/19/service-changes-go-into-effect-june-25-orange-line-and-silver-line-to-operate-around-the-clock/

Metro needs to run all the Rapid lines (and the associated Locals) at least every 15 minutes all-day, from 6:30am to 730pm or later. If this isn't possible on a given corridor, it would be better to run the locals alone at every 12 minutes, rather than having a local every 20 minutes and a "rapid" every 20 minutes.

Best-case, the rapid could be 50% faster than the local (though 20 to 30% is more common). But even if the Rapid averages 15 mph and the local 10 mph, it takes 5 miles of travel to save 10 minutes by taking the rapid. Most bus trips are much shorter than that; even the average rail trip is only about 6.5 miles. So if you have to wait more than 5 minutes for the next Rapid, it's rarely better than taking the local sooner, unless you are going 10 miles.

The "Blue RIbbon Committee" plan Strategic Bus Network was pretty impressive: 15 minute service all over the place, and surface BRT on all the main Rapid corridors. It would be great to see something like this in 3 years:

[culvercitylocke]

We won't have good bus service again until we have another lawsuit forcing them to provide good bus service.

[jeisenbe]

Here's what that "Strategic Bus Network" would look like on a map, as far as I can tell. Having BRT with exclusive bus lanes on all these major routes would be excellent.
Many of the BRT routes follow the paths where we would like to see rail in the future: Vermont, La Cienega, Fairfax, Santa Monica Blvd, Venice Blvd, Van Nuys, Westwood, Slauson and Long Beach Blvd
I'm not certain of the difference between "Rapid" and "BRT Lite" (Red vs Blue), but here you go:

drive.google.com/open?id=1nINybLOgShXU4wPkMjDyQO-iwUk&usp=sharing



For comparision, here are the buses and trains that actually run every 15 minutes or better all-day, as of 2016:
(You can also see this map by changing which boxes are checked, via the link to Google Maps)

[jeisenbe]

I hope it doesn't take another lawsuit! I believe 20% of Measure M, or almost 1/2 Billion a year, will help subsidize transit operations.
Perhaps that is mainly meant to pay for future rail service and maintenance, but it could add lots of bus service sooner.
And the Lincoln, Van Nuys and Vermont BRT lines (and maybe one on Reseda) were shown in the Measure M maps, so Metro is committed to some BRT improvements at least.

[jahanes]

So the Next Gen Bus Study is in kind of a weird place, in that the board is set to approve the plan the very next month, and when you go on it's webpage, you see PDFs entitled "regional service concept" and "bus plan" with dozens of pages each. And yet, there is no indication that Metro has released THE bus plan, the way the bus lines will be configured, in map and schedule form. I cannot see how Metro can claim to present a "plan" without doing so in this format, especially as certain graphs and figures hint at the existence of actual configurations, as with the "reach maps" and claims that a specific number of lines will see a specific increase in such-and-such a metric. It would have been nice if the community outreach sessions had incorporated mock-ups of a plan, but it should at least be accessible to the entire public before it goes into force.

I've been eagerly following the bus redesign process from abroad at college and this omission is conspicuous to me. A cynic would say that Metro is trying to pull off the appearance of a democratic process by filling pages with colorful data related to the plan itself while saving the actual planning for behind closed doors, to avoid the inevitable blowback.

[culvercitylocke]

Dec 26, 2019 22:07:06 GMT -8 jahanes said:

So the Next Gen Bus Study is in kind of a weird place, in that the board is set to approve the plan the very next month, and when you go on it's webpage, you see PDFs entitled "regional service concept" and "bus plan" with dozens of pages each. And yet, there is no indication that Metro has released THE bus plan, the way the bus lines will be configured, in map and schedule form. I cannot see how Metro can claim to present a "plan" without doing so in this format, especially as certain graphs and figures hint at the existence of actual configurations, as with the "reach maps" and claims that a specific number of lines will see a specific increase in such-and-such a metric. It would have been nice if the community outreach sessions had incorporated mock-ups of a plan, but it should at least be accessible to the entire public before it goes into force.

I've been eagerly following the bus redesign process from abroad at college and this omission is conspicuous to me. A cynic would say that Metro is trying to pull off the appearance of a democratic process by filling pages with colorful data related to the plan itself while saving the actual planning for behind closed doors, to avoid the inevitable blowback.

Indeed, if I were to guess it’s going to be an overall across the board service cut of 25 to 35% and branded as next gen to sell the service cut with no other substantive changes. They’ll improve speeds and headways mostly by slashing about 40% of local stops because metro thinks that service ought to be more inaccessible for poor people.

[culvercitylocke]

I mean what could wrong with a service redesign by consultants that have never set foot in Los Angeles or on any Los Angeles bus rubber stamped by a board that has universally never ridden a bus?

[bzcat]

I don't know who Metro hired as a consultant so I'm not going to tar and feather them until I see the plan. A lot of cities have gone thru similar redesign to modernize the network and some of them are quite successful in boosting ridership.

The challenge with LA is the large swath of low density housing with dependent ridership and decentralized destinations which normally calls for a robust grid with universal fare structure and easy (free) transfers. But the political reality built around buses in LA has been to emphasis on single door to door ride and low fare, which combined has the consequence of appeasing politically connected loudmouth but results in a low quality network.