Today’s read is 5-7 minutes long
Hi friends,
Last fall Michelle Wu, a political progressive and longtime city council member, was elected Mayor of Boston. Wu’s victory was a historic one, as she is the first female, first Asian-American, AND the first person named Michelle Wu to be elected to that office.1
Mayor Wu ran on a number of platforms, but most interesting to me (and the hordes of urban policy wonks I follow on Twitter) was her stance on public transportation and mobility.
Today I’ll look at one of Wu’s most notable initiatives, an early report from the first few months of its operation, and talk more broadly about what we can and should expect from public transit. As always there will be historical tidbits and memes throughout. Let’s dive in.
Today’s Focus
When Mayor Wu took office back in the Fall of 2021, her victory was roundly cheered by the “we like bikes and subways” crowd who believed that she would champion more radical public transit policies. And for the most part Wu’s warm welcome was well warranted, as she filed a proposal for a two-year, $8 million dollar pilot for “free-to-ride” buses on her very first day in office.
This pilot is the topic of today’s newsletter, and while it’s too early to definitively condemn or applaud the program just yet, preliminary reports released last month do have some interesting data points to look out.
How’d we get here?
Now while Mayor Wu deserves a lot of credit for this pilot, the actual first incarnation of fare-free buses in Boston came a few months earlier, when then acting Mayor Kim Janey championed a 4-month long fare-free pilot on the number 28 bus route, one of the city’s busiest.
During Mayor Janey’s short 8-month tenure she successfully allocated $500,000 in COVID-19 relief funds to the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Agency (MBTA), allowing them to run the 28 bus route without collecting any money from passengers. And Janey’s efforts seemed successful in generating more ridership, as the 28 bus route hit an impressive 92% of pre-pandemic ridership levels during the pilot, compared to just 53% on other Boston-area bus routes in the same time period.
This initial success laid the groundwork for Mayor Wu’s program, which not only extends the original route 28 program for another two years, but also expands it by adding two additional fare-free routes (numbers 23 and 29). In total the program will use a whopping $8 million dollars in federal COVID relief funds, or 16x the original pilot’s budget.
These three bus routes (23, 28 and 29) are not only some of the city’s (and the state’s) busiest, but were also carefully chosen for the diversity of their ridership. Over 97% of the route 28 riders are considered “transit-critical”, a loosely defined term that means riders fall into one or more categories like being low-income, lacking vehicle access, being a senior citizen (over age 65) etc. Additionally the fare-free nature is also extended to Boston’s RIDE paratransit service where it intersects with any of the three main routes and allows disabled riders to more easily access public transit.
All doors all yours
The last detail about the pilot I want to focus on is a deceptively simple, but actually pretty impactful change: allowing boarding at both the front and back doors of the bus. All-door boarding doubles the space that passengers can enter or exit through, and in conjunction with the time saved from not needing to wait for people to pay (fumble for their wallets, tap their phone in just the right spot, or argue with the bus driver about fare) it’s expected to save precious seconds at each stop and increase overall service consistency.
Other cities like San Francisco have also tried similar all-door boarding pilots, resulting in faster service times and reliability without any adverse impact on finances.2 And Boston itself actually already tried something similar in 2017 on a different bus route, that also resulted in a 27% decrease in wait times at each stop.
Now in absolute terms this only meant a ~13 second difference at each stop, but multiply that out across
Every stop the bus makes
All the buses on that route
And all the routes in the city
and you start to see how simple changes like all-door boarding can have large, cascading impacts across an entire transit system. Boston is still a ways away from Japanese levels of time sensitivity and efficiency, but it’s definitely a step in the right direction.
Looking at the data
The first official reports on the effectiveness of the original route 28 fare-free pilot were just published last month. Those interested in the full analysis can read it here, but for people who just want summaries/memes here are my biggest takeaways.
Ridership increased from 7,500 riders per week to ~10,2000
Going from 7,500 to 10,200 is about a 38% increase, and Mayor Wu’s office was quick to publish this figure. However, while the MBTA agreed on the raw numbers, they also pointed out that almost all Boston bus routes saw an increase in ridership in the same time period as people slowly returned to public transit post-COVID. After adjusting the percentage for this systemwide increase they argue that the increase was actually a more modest 22% instead of Wu’s 38%.
Avg. trip times increased by 11%, but wait time per passenger actually decreased by 23%
The average trip time for each route 28 bus did increase by 4 minutes, a gain of 11%. However increase in total time is to be expected due to the increased ridership. And in fact, if absolute ridership increased 38%, but wait times only increased by 11%, that actually feels like a decent tradeoff.
Additionally, time savings from the all-door boarding scheme actually meant that route 28 buses spent less time on a per passenger basis, which is also a win in my book.
~1/3 of riders saved money through this pilot
By surveying riders the commission found that ~1/3 of respondents saved money through this fare-free pilot. The remaining 2/3s did not either because they had purchased monthly passes (paid in advance for an “all-you-can-ride” pass) or made transfers to other routes that still required payment. To be honest I think this number requires a little bit more investigation since this survey was opt-in, and only consisted of n=240 respondents, an extremely small fraction of the total riders. Adding to the confusion, 76% of people believed they were saving money, even if their actual behavior (buying a transit pass or transferring lines) meant they probably were not. Go figure.
New riders came from different sources
This excerpt from the official report (slide 14) shows what riders would have done instead if route 28 wasn’t free to ride.
You can see from the above slide that while ~5% of riders did switch over from driving to riding the bus (a win for environmental, safety, and congestion reduction reasons), ~8% of folks did switch over from walking or biking. This has got some people on Twitter wondering if reducing walking/cycling is reason to criticize the pilot.
Personally, I think they’re being a bit overdramatic. First off, 5% fewer people driving is good. Full stop. And that 8% there might be surprising but going from a net positive (walking/cycling) to a slightly less but still okay net positive (riding the bus) isn’t really cause for concern. The buses will still run so there’s not really an additional impact to emissions/traffic, and if it means those 8% of people got to their destination a little faster that’s great.
Some good, some bad, a lot to learn
So overall, the pilot saved some folks money, induced a lot more ridership, and got a few cars off the road. Survey results also showed that riders generally had a positive view of all-door boarding and understood the time-saving implications.
On the other hand, it also did slow things down (avg. travel times went up) and potentially discouraged some folks from walking/cycling otherwise.
So what do think? Is this pilot good or bad? I know I just threw a lot of data at you so let me quickly summarize things with a few…
Post-survey reflections!
#1: Not the best it could’ve been, but it’s just a pilot
Making the bus fare-free did result in increased average trip time, but it did do good as well! It’s also important to remember this is just a pilot program, and we shouldn’t let the pursuit of perfect outcomes get in the way of celebrating pretty decent ones. Over the next two years there will be plenty of time to see what works, what doesn’t, and gain some insights for future attempts.
#2: All public transit is a service, and they pretty much all lose money, and that’s maybe okay
If the city can find the money (which they did) and some folks are able to save money and get where they need to be (which they did) then I’m okay with it not actually being a profitable venture (which it wasn’t).
Besides, pretty much every major urban transit system is already heavily subsidized, so while the marginal benefits to the city of charging $2.50 instead of $0 does translate to a lot of money, I’d argue that the marginal benefits to those riders, especially those in low-income or transit critical categories, are potentially huge. Not all public transit riders are living paycheck-to-paycheck, but for the people who are, ~$20/week in saved transit fare really does make a difference.
Maybe there’s some kind of identifier you can swipe, or register a card as a low-income rider that gives you a discount? Though tbh I can think of about a million ways that could go wrong but just a thought.
#3: Carrots are good, carrots and sticks are better
The pilot was successful in getting a few people who would have otherwise driven to take the bus instead. But if you want to really discourage people from driving and get cars off the road, then making alternatives (public transit) more appealing is only half of the equation. The other half is something like removing free street parking, actually pricing curb space at a market rate (meaning, way more than the $1.25 you use to park your car for an hour) and reducing total city space devoted to parking spaces, lots, and garages.
I could fill a whole article on why free parking is bad for cities (and one day I will) but for today the important part is that I think this fare-free pilot is good, but could use some backup in the form of disincentives for driving. Carrot, meet stick.
#4: Maybe we aren’t using the right carrots to induce ridership
And lastly, while I think fare-free pilots make sense on the surface, it’s possible that there are other more effective options. Maybe making things free isn’t as good as making them higher quality. For example, if your goal is to move as many people as possible and allow people the most access to mobility, which of these sounds like it would make a bigger impact:
A free bus that comes twice an hour
A bus that costs $2.50 but comes every 6 minutes
Depending on who you ask you might get different answers, but maybe increasing quality would have a greater positive impact than just making things free. This is a dense topic that I won’t get too into here, but interested readers can check out Darrell Owens’ excellent piece on that topic here.
Conclusion
Wu’s pilot is still in its infancy, but these initial reports are promising. Not just for the positive outcomes they demonstrate, but also for the areas of improvement they help identify. Inducing ridership is good, as long as you’re prepared for slightly longer trip times. All-door boarding is good, but it’s also much more effective when folks save time not swiping transit cards or paying with cash, etc. etc.
Of course I’m also not suggesting that it would be easy to simply make all of Boston’s buses free. According to the MBTA, that would cost somewhere between $56 to $70 million USD, not to mention that there would likely be substantial increases in operating costs due to greater volume.
But even with this dose of fiscal reality, I’m still excited to see initiatives like Mayor Wu’s actually get off the ground. I’m a fan of pilot programs in general because even if they aren’t successful in their intended way, cities can often learn from their mistakes and help that inform future policies. To quote a few extra-hardo #hustle #grind instagram influencers, you either win or you learn.
Especially with the US Infrastructure bill allocating billions of dollars to cities for various uses, I’d love to see similar pilots start to pop up in other places as well. Who knows, maybe in two years I’ll do a follow up post and we can collectively laugh at how right or wrong I was about the whole thing. Either way, with the data we have now about it, it seems like it’s off to a good start.
That’s it for today, as always thanks for reading and don’t forget to absolutely OBLITERATE that like button.
-Max
If you want to get technical, before Wu came to office her fellow councilwoman Kim Janey was named acting mayor (but was not elected) after incumbent Marty Walsh was named Biden’s Secretary of Labor. So while Wu is the first woman to be elected, she is technically the second woman to hold (acting or otherwise) the mayoral office.
It makes sense that Boston would mirror San Francisco in this case because, to quote Bill Burr, Boston is basically just San Francisco + racism.
Cost and Convenience on Boston Buses
Great reading! I’m especially interested, because I love public transit and I lived in Boston previously (and am excited about Michelle Wu!). I think the last point you made about trade-offs with free public transit (e.g., free with less frequency vs not free with more frequent options) is really important. I’m interested to see how city governments navigate and prioritize these factors as more cities hopefully try out similar pilots.