Is BaltimoreLink a smart bus service model?

There is no city in which people don't gripe about their transit system, Baltimore is certainly no exception. In spite of over 700 fairly modern buses deployed from five bus garages, the bus is too often not there when one needs it, it doesn't go where one wants it to and it takes too long to get anywhere. It is never faster than the automobile and it costs way more than the fares pay for. No wonder, then, that cities across the country are trying to find a better, more efficient way to deploy the available resources. Baltimore's LinkBus was touted as nothing less than a transit revolution.

Former MTA Administrator Paul Comfort promised
that the Link system will fix many ills

 Through Baltimore Link we are realigning the old bus routes that were laid out 50 years ago to a new hub and spoke system and linking them in with our light rail and subway system, creating a new high frequency bus route core system (10 minute headways) named "City Link", re-wrapping all of our buses and redesigning and replacing all 5,000 bus stop signs, building many transit hubs in the city, installing transit signal priority though key intersections, installing five miles of bus only lanes and many other improvements needed to make a leading transit system for the 21st century. (Fired MTA Administrator Paul Comfort in an article he wrote April 2017)

The June 18 launch of the much heralded new system came and went but the lament remained the same. Two recent hearings in Baltimore's War Memorial Hall held by the local chapter of the transit Union ATU sure didn't give the impression that a better transit future has arrived. The ATU and many in the audience want the old bus system back, a truly surprising turn of events, given how much scorn was heaped on MTA's bus system in recent years.

Are MTA officials regretting now to have set the high expectations expressed below?

BaltimoreLink is a complete overhaul and rebranding of the core transit system operating within the city and throughout the greater Baltimore region. The project name was developed to emphasize how the redesigned network will provide better connections between origins and destinations and between modes of transportation. To achieve MTA’s overarching mission of providing safe, efficient and reliable transit across Maryland with world-class customer service,
the BaltimoreLink Plan has five major goals:
• Improve service quality and reliability;
• Maximize access to high-frequency transit;
• Strengthen connections between MTA’s bus and rail routes;
• Align the network with existing and emerging job centers; and
• Engage riders, employees, communities, and elected officials in the planning process.
BaltimoreLink will not only address the significant and needed changes to the bus system in
Baltimore, but also to connect all of the different types of public transit under one name. (Public brochure).

The title of “Outstanding Public Transportation System for 2017” bestowed by the American Public Transportation Association (APTA) was given not to Baltimore's MTA or to Houston, BaltimoreLink's model, but Toronto's TTC for a five-year effort beginning in 2013 which put the customers and employees first. Maybe it is this people-centered approach with a customer charter and a new internal management system that appealed to TCC more than TCC's fleet and infrastructure renewal, or the $170 million investment to buy new buses, restore bus lines, and boost the smart card PRESTO.

New Administrator Kevin Quinn speaking at APTA conference

Given that the MTA's union is so antagonistic, Baltimore's $135 million investment bus investment over 5 years is probably not heading for an APTA award any time soon. Baltimore isn't among the top 10 best transit systems in any published list, the awards which former MTA Administrator Comfort notes on his LinkedIn page are all for PR.

Effective transit is crucial for economic development, equity and therefore essential for any larger city. It is not surprising, therefore, that there is a national race towards re-inventing the bus with a "smart" data based approach. Yet, it is hard to tease out what smart bus service models make sense and city after city invents its own models and terminology. Initially many cities created "rapid bus" networks overlaying the standard local buses. The rapid buses emulated a few of the tools that had been so successful in Curitiba, Brazil and Bogota, Columbia.  But dedicated lanes, double articulated train like buses, all door boarding and prepayment proved too radical for almost all US transit agencies and soon the search was on again for other ways to reform bus transit. Currently everybody talks about high frequency networks, the model the MTA picked for their BaltimoreLink reform. Absent remain widely accepted standards and metrics by which the performance of a transit system can be measured. Two months after BaltimoreLink was launched, most accounts are from frustrated riders and few system-wide data are available regarding actual performance.

When the MTA set out to launch its bus reform it started with the political imperative that something had to be done with the existing transit after the Red Line had been nixed. Luckily, the results of years of studying the bus system (Bus Network Improvement Project BNIP) sat in the desk drawers and allowed a running start for reform. But politics were in the way from the beginning, namely by demanding that any reform had to be different, radically new and that it had to be implemented fast. So a race was on.

Making superficial changes to a network is like adding little bits to a house.  One by one these bits make sense, but over time they destroy the design of the house.  You may also be doing these little remodels because you can’t face the fact that the foundation is rotting. (Jarrett Walker, transit planner in his blog Human Transit)

Houston's reform seemed the most radical with an all new system overnight, in its original form conceived by bus transit guru Jarrett Walker. It was adopted as Baltimore's precedent. Houston's reform was also based on a high frequency network, a concept that favors a simple grid or radial pattern of bus lines on high ridership routes over loopy and lengthy routes that try to capture every neighborhood. Based on a set of data a high frequency network is trying to create public transit that is useful for the greatest number of people. Local lines are then added to provide access to the high frequency network and fill some of the gaps.

The basic philosophy behind Houston's reform is simple. Rather than run a large number of low-frequency bus routes that look good on a map, concentrate vehicles on a smaller number of high-demand routes. This ensures that buses arrive frequently on the routes that riders are most likely to want to take. The result is a system that has fewer bus routes overall but a much richer network of frequent bus routes, where a person can show up at a station and wait for the next bus without consulting a schedule in advance. (Vox)

Bus bunching: Blue line at Saratoga Street

To be able to figure out which configuration of bus routes would have the best results, MTA prepared no less than 46 performance metrics. Some of of those had to do with how the buses run (on time performance, ridership) but many had to do with how the service is spread over the geographic area and what uses and households were served. In light of equity and job access issues, many now rate transit systems by how many jobs they serve within a reasonable commute time (for example this list by Wired is based on that metric). Since transit systems can't pick how dense a city is or where the jobs are located, a land use based metric makes sense in comparing MTA bus system before and after the introduction of Link but it doesn't make much sense in a comparison between transit systems in different cities. In any approach that measures commute times, the transit agency gets punished for routes that reaches out to job centers far in the suburbs. Transit metrics are full of unintended consequences.

The theory of high frequency routes is that no schedule is needed. Traditionally trains and buses run on published schedules and on time performance is measured by how close actual service adheres to the schedule. For convenience most systems have tried to operate transit in regular intervals and at key points also easy to remember time points. ("This bus departs every 20 minutes starting on the hour"). By contrast the popular "high frequency networks" are based on the notion that if a transit service is offered every 15 minutes or less, riders wouldn't need to know the schedule but just show up at a stop and be able to expect service within a wait time that most would find acceptable, especially if actual arrival times can be gleaned from smart phones or real time arrival displays.

One problem with the simplified high frequency grid became quickly obvious when the new route maps were offered for public comment. People who lost easy access to the current long, loopy and unreliable routes in favor of those proposed short, direct high frequency routes didn't want to have any of it, if it meant their nearest stop was further away or they had to transfer from one bus to another to get to their destination.
As a result, every time the suggested system came out of a round of public hearings, it became more like the old system. Refining their route maps kept MTA so busy that they stopped running the variations through their 46 metrics, losing sight of some of the initial goals. In the end, changes were enough to confuse riders used to the old system but not radical enough to deliver on the promised transit revolution.

When the bus service makes the news: BaltimoreLink

One problem has to do with speed. When transit agencies reformed their bus system by differentiating between faster and slower buses just like the New York subway runs local and express trains or Amtrak runs Metroliners and Azela trains, the faster version serves only major stops and achieves its speed by skipping small stops. That approach doesn't work well within the "high frequency network" model because that model is intent on spreading lines out not on bundling local and express on the same route.

Consequently the MTA actually eliminated the four Quickbus lines it had started running in the last 5-10 years. MTA only kept their long existing Express services which serve a strong origin and a strong destination pool and skip everything in between. (Those Express routes connect suburban centers with downtown Baltimore but they don't help residents in the neighborhoods the bus skips over).

In summary, the problem with MTA's Link system is, that it is neither a real high frequency system and even less a rapid system. The distinction between the CityLink buses which are are supposed to be high frequency and the LocalLink lines is as difficult to decipher as the two color schemes in which the buses are wrapped.

While the CityLink buses, indeed, run on routes with high rider volumes, they are often not any more frequent than the LocalLink routes. Annoyingly, they are also no longer set up to be faster by being more direct, except that they get occasional signal priority and dedicated lanes. (LocalLink buses are not equipped with the transponders to communicate with traffic signals).
Since one of the MTA's goals was to spread "high frequency lines" over a broader geographic area, there are now fewer bus lines running on one and the same street making it harder for riders to switch to another service if the bus doesn't show up on time. In some corridors this "thinning" of bundled lines has led to severe overcrowding of buses. MTA trimming extra long lines and the distinction between Local and City Link buses also forces people to transfer more often than before, presumably for a more reliable service.

High frequency networks are popular: Minneapolis

Baltimore bus riders are missing their "Quick Buses" which MTA had introduced in 2007 with  with the QB 40 roughly mimicking the then planned future Red Line. Today the QB 40 is in part the CityLink Blue but the new service stops much more frequently and is not getting folks as fast to key destinations as the QB 40 used to do it.

The high frequency approach over speed may have created lasting discontent even though frequent service (15 minute or less) has been stretched over longer periods of the day and spread over a larger area of the region but that won't satisfy riders if buses come in packs of two or even three buses making a maximal ten minute wait a 20 minute or even a 30 minute wait. With BaltimoreLink this bus bunching appears to have become worse and not better. There isn't any clear remedy against bunching in sight as long as the MTA doesn't' invest in a much stronger operations control system which can intervene to slow or accelerate bunched buses until they operate properly in their time slot. For such fine-tuning the ops center would need to be sure where buses really are (i.e. have accurate locator systems), it would need to have a communication system that can reach any bus operator at any given moment and supervisors would have to be equipped with a clear set of "de-bunching" strategies.
In summary one can say that if and when Link doesn’t perform per the set standards (namely on-time performance or set headway) the riders are worse off than when the same thing happened in the old system because the new system is less redundant. A bus failing to show up causes bigger ripple effects because there are more transfers and fewer parallel services on the same route. As such the new Link system is less resilient and requires more quality control to work satisfactorily.

WMATA runs local and express buses

Meanwhile Houston touts its reform as a success, even though the bulk of the reported ridership increase comes from new Light Rail lines that opened at the same time the bus system had been reformed. In spite of the positive spin, Houston is experiencing some of the same problems as Baltimore: Bus bunching, added transfers and deleted express routes.

To be fair,aside from the noted difficulties in measuring the performance of bus systems, there are also externalities that all systems are subjected to: All suffer ridership loss when gas is dirt cheap or if sprawl continues unabated placing jobs and riders into places that just can't be served with transit in any efficient way.

[..] the success of a transit project is almost synonymous with whether it serves areas that are dense in both jobs and population and have expensive parking — in short, lively urban neighborhoods. In the report’s model, the combination of these factors explains fully 62 percent of the ridership difference between transit projects. Berkeley study.

Clearly urban mobility is the result of many factors including those, such as land use and energy cost, which are not the domain of the transit agency. Yet, it is worth remembering APTA's people centered Toronto award: Maybe improved morale of those who make the transit run is really key. Poor morale at the MTA had already been noted as a prime concern in then Governor O'Malley's transition team and current secreatry Rahn and his Amnistrator Comfort didn't mince words:

It didn’t take long to see that this 3,300 employee transit agency – the 11th largest in the nation – was in serious need of an overhaul. It was listless, unmoored and just floating along, with no real direction and with its systems in disarray and stuck in the 1980’s.(Fired MTA Administrator Paul Comfort in an article he wrote April 2017)

ATA's vendetta against BaltimoreLink and the MTA as well as the ousting of MTA Administrator indicate that not everybody at the MTA is singing from the same sheet and that MTA could possibly improve on the principle of putting employees first. A motivated staff pulling in the same direction as management with the goal of optimal customer service is key to success in any organization.  It is also time for the MTA to consider what its long-term perspective is for is next.

A plan for the future is a key ingredient for a successful transit agency and tat plan needs to include more than a reformed bus system, no matter how successful it may eventually turn out to be. The predictable arrival of self driving cars, vans and shuttles will once again upset the way how transit must be optimized.

Klaus Philipsen, FAIA

A discussion about this topic on WYPR's Midday with MTA Administrator Kevin Quinn, Transit Equity Coalition founder Sam Jordan and me can be heard here. 

Related article on this blog: How does CityLink really perform?
Best Cities for Public Transit (SmartAsset July 2017)
How Your City’s Public Transit Stacks Up

For a list of cities with progressive mobility strategies see here.