Dropped trips down as MBTA considers redesign of bus routes

Having cut the number of dropped bus trips almost in half in the last three months, MBTA officials on Monday detailed for its board what the agency has done and is planning to do to address what its general manager called "the biggest single thing" the T can do to improve in the near term: enhance bus service.

"We are making progress. We are not where we want to be yet by any means, but we are making progress systemwide," MBTA Deputy General Manager Jeff Gonneville said, referring to dropped trips, or scheduled bus service that, for one reason or another, does not happen.

Since early June when a task force on dropped trips began meeting, the number of dropped bus trips on the MBTA has been reduced by 46 percent, T officials told the Fiscal Management Control Board on Monday. And on Sept. 11, there were zero dropped trips on routes originating from the T's Charlestown Garage and zero dollars were spent on overtime at the garage for the first time in more than 10 years.

Deputy Chief Operating Officer of Strategy and Planning Jessica Casey told the FMCB on Monday that her team will begin meeting one-on-one with board members to discuss a slew of draft proposals for bus service improvements, the result of the T's "Better Bus Project" and conversations with regular bus riders.

Casey said the goal of the Better Bus Project is to close the gap between the bus service that the MBTA operates on the streets today and its ideal level of bus service as described in the FMCB's 2017 Service Delivery Policy. The MBTA's bus network serves 51 communities and accounts for more than a third of all trips on the T. Nearly 450,000 trips are taken on the MBTA's 175 bus routes each weekday, the T said.

"Bus service improvement is the biggest single thing that we can do in the next two years before we get rail cars and track and signals and all these other things done that are going to take a little longer to implement," MBTA General Manager Luis Ramirez told reporters Monday. "The bus network is the best place for us to spend a lot of our time right now improving service."

More than 100 Better Bus proposals have been split by the MBTA into three categories: one batch that can be implemented the next time the T makes its quarterly schedule adjustments; another batch that would require FMCB approval, but no additional money; and a third batch that would require FMCB approval and additional resources.

As examples of the types of changes the T could make with FMCB approval at no additional cost, Casey named route realignments, route merging, changing bus stop locations, and adjusting the variance in bus service.

The proposals will be shared with the board this fall and go before riders for public comment in January, Casaey said. The FMCB will be asked in April to vote on some of the proposals, and the T expects to implement the approved proposals next fall, though board members asked that the T shorten the timeline to be able to implement some changes next summer.

"The public has been waiting for a very, very long time, so we've got find ways to speed this up," board member Monica Tibbits-Nutt said.

The FMCB also received an update Monday on the status of the MBTA's redesign of its bus network, a project meant to respond to demographic and land use changes to get the T to a "route system that reliably and efficiently serves the largest number of existing and potential riders while also serving customers with significant equity and mobility access needs."

Scott Hamwey, manager of long-range planning at the Department of Transportation, told the FMCB that the redesign project is different from the Better Bus Project but will build off of its findings, calling the Better Bus Project "foundational work."

Hamwey led the FMCB through a presentation on the broad goals of the redesign project and sought board input on a variety of topics, including whether the board wanted the team to consider redesigning the whole bus network or focus solely on low productivity routes and new transit corridors. The answer was a little of both.

"I would like it to be something close to an examination of the whole network, with an attempt to understand what are the places we're missing, what are the gaps and with an eye towards instituting entirely new routes in many cases to serve the communities that are underserved or where capacity is needed to get folks to the places they want to go," board member Steve Poftak said.

Tibbits-Nutt said she thinks the T needs to consider a change to the geographic area that its buses serve and told Hamwey that his team should not shy away from the possibility of scaling back some suburban bus routes.

"I think we need to have some very, very hard conversations with some of the municipalities about some of these routes because we are not the best person to be operating some of these," she said. "We do need to take a very holistic look at this, but not necessarily redraw every single line."

Board member Brian Shortsleeve encouraged Hamwey to be bold with his team's recommendations and not to be afraid of rocking the boat.
"If this process ends up just reinforcing the status quo, we didn't accomplish much," he said. "The goal of this is to be disruptive to the status quo, make some strategic decisions, go deep in areas we think we're good at ... I think you gotta have an approach here to be disruptive to the status quo."

Hamwey said the first phase of the project -- defining its scope and developing its goals -- will continue into early 2019 and that the analysis of transportation corridors will last through much of 2019. Changes will likely be implemented on a rolling basis and beginning as pilots late in 2019 and into 2020, he said.

Again, the FMCB asked that the timeline be shortened. This time, Poftak asked that the T complete the bus network redesign before the FMCB's statutory authority expires on June 30, 2020.

"It is a priority of this board, we would like to see it done," Poftak said.


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