Why don’t more people ride city buses? Is it because the buses don’t feature wireless Internet service? Is it because there are, as yet, no “intelligent” bus stops—“[c]urved and gleaming like a Frank Gehry structure” and “wrapped in an LED ‘skin’ that can play video”? Not so much, I think.
The main piece (“Bus 2.0”) in the Boston Sunday Globe Ideas section this week surveys some big concepts in urban bus transport that have been rolling out of places like the Mobile Experience Laboratory at MIT. That brainy bus stop is one such idea. But the biggest of big concepts under review is “smart mobility,” or the notion that the key to improving the way cities move people around is to move data around more efficiently. GPS devices, goes the theory, will enable system managers to track buses with precision and riders to know precisely when the next bus will arrive at their stop. Networked vehicles will feed riders a stream of information—“from international news, to e-mail, to data about the passing neighborhoods.” And so on.
Now, before bus managers decide to invest in smart mobility, shouldn’t they give old-fashioned, unmodified mobility a try? Neither high concepts nor high technology will do much to fix the problems that beset public transit here in the greater Boston area. The author of the piece, Justin Peters, nods at that truth: “Much of the most innovative thinking now focuses on improving the passenger experience, instead of the more difficult challenge of moving buses faster through crowded city streets.” But he lets Federico Casalegno, director of the Mobile Experience Lab, hold forth at length on his vision of the bus voyage of tomorrow:
“The more communication that happens between citizens, the stronger the urban garden. . . .
“You transport people but don’t give any means for people to share anything else but their physical presence. If they had another way to be connected, they’d probably create smart communities.”
When I take the 66 Bus through Brookline and Boston on my way to work, the “physical presence” of my fellow passengers is presence enough, thank you very much. I don’t want meaningful relationships with them. Isolation, anonymity, being “alone in a crowd”—this is what makes “mobile experience” of the public-transit variety bearable. And viable.
There are two reasons why people, even those who willingly take rail-based public transit, don’t ride the bus if they can help it. (Okay, there’s a third reason: Everybody knows that riding the bus is for losers. But that “reason” basically derives from these other two.) The Globe Ideas article touches on both of them, ever so glancingly. First, unlike a trolley or a subway train, a bus lacks a dedicated right-of-way. Riding a bus, you’re just one schlump among a sea of schlumps caught in traffic—and, at that point, why not just take your own car? A subsidiary problem is that of “bus-bunching,” which the article refers to and which plagued the 66 route for a long stretch of weeks earlier this year. I’d wait at a stop for half an hour, and then three buses would roll up at once, conga-line fashion. These are matters of actual mobility, or lack of it, and making buses “smarter” will do only so much to address them.
Second—and this point, I concede, is very high-concept, with an emphasis on experience rather than mobility—buses and the bus lines that they traverse lack presence. A subway or light-rail line traces a permanent loop through a city, punctuating its course with stations that correspond to (or, indeed, create) urban landmarks: Times Square down in New York, Brigham Circle over in Boston, Coolidge Corner in my own dear Brookline. A bus, meanwhile, skitters through town as if it were ashamed of itself, pausing under duress at stops that are all but invisible. As the Globe piece notes, those who designed the MBTA’s newish Silver Line tried to lend it some presence by providing a dedicated lane for it and by creating named station stops along the way. The Silver Line has received mixed reviews, I believe. But, with those measures, the “mobile experience” visionaries seem to be on the right track.
