f you heard that there was a piece of technology that could do away with traffic jams, make cities more equitable, and help us solve climate change, you might think about driverless cars, or hyperloops or any of the other new transportation technologies that get lots of hype these days. But there is a much older, much less sexy piece of machinery that could be the key to making our cities more sustainable, more liveable, and more fair: the humble bus. Steven Higashide is a transit expert, bus champion, and author of a new book called Better Buses Better Cities. And the central thesis of the book is that buses have the power to remake our cities for the better. But he says that if we want the bus to reach its potential, we’re going to have to make the experience riding one, a lot more pleasant.
A Better Way To Travel
Americans take 4.7 billion trips a year on the bus, but many of those trips are miserable. They’re slow and circuitous, and the process of waiting for a bus in the hot sun can be horrible. And yet, the bus remains one of the most efficient ways to move people around cities. Transportation is now the largest contributor to greenhouse gas emissions in the U.S. This means we have to build cities and neighborhoods where people don’t have to drive as often and are able to make shorter trips. The bus can play a key role in making that happen.
The typical general-purpose lane of traffic in a city can carry around 1,000-2,000 people per hour. If you create a bus-only lane, that number jumps up to 4,000-8,000 per hour. If you give over more of the street to transit and create a transitway that goes up to 10,000-25,000 people per hour. Higashide says that in cities like London where planners have prioritized public transit, the fastest way to get around is often by bus. That’s rarely true in US cities.
G1 bus on Clairview Road. Photo by Oxyman (CC BY-SA 2.0)
It’s hard to know exactly why we haven’t embraced the bus in the United States, but Higashide thinks that part of it has to do with our obsession over new transportation technologies and the idea that we will somehow innovate our way out of traffic. For example, Elon Musk proposed a Hyperloop for Chicago that would carry 2,000 people an hour, which is actually much less than you can carry in a regular bus.
Politics of Transit
A lot of it also comes down to political power. Most people who ride buses in the U.S. today are lower-income and people of color. These are people who have always been, to a large extent, shut out of the political system. What it takes to make transit better involves organizing those riders and building a new kind of transportation politics.
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