Rural

My friend David Bragdon (the former head of TransitCenter and former elected head of the Portland area’s regional government) has a good, through article at Eno on the problem facing rural bus service, generally defined as services more than 50 miles long not primarily intended for commuting.  He’s not focused on links between big cities, which have air and (sometimes) rail options, and where bus services are often still profitable.  The concern is all the smaller towns that had commercial bus service 50 years ago, but generally no longer do.  These towns have lots of people who need to get to nearby bigger towns for medical services, errands, shopping, and other needs that they can’t get locally.  I call these services “rural intertown” but note that the difficulty of describing this category is probably part of why it’s so neglected.

This should be not be a left-right issue, and mostly isn’t.  Congress, with ample support from rural Republican lawmakers, has long supported a Federal funding program called 5311(f) which provides funding for needed bus links that no longer exist commercially.  But this funding is basically a grant to the state Departments of Transportation, which can spend it on whatever bus service they like.  Bragdon observes that some states are doing great things with this money, creating statewide lifeline networks focused on towns that would otherwise be abandoned, but that other states often just give the money to private carriers like Greyhound, without even checking their claims that the subsidy is needed to keep some service running.  “In short,” Bragdon writes, “many state DOTs spend a lot of money, particularly on highways but to some extent on buses, without explaining what they’re trying to achieve.”

Bragdon is arguing, in short, that like urban transit, intercity lifeline service should be planned.  At its root, planning is the process of identifying goals and making sure that a plan of action actually meets them cost-effectively.  I agree, and anyone interested in this challenge should read his article.

There’s an overlapping problem, though, when we’re talking about shorter corridors (under 80 miles or so) and there are enough towns along the way to justify service every day and several times a day.  Here, the obstacle may be the county-level organization of transit, which gives no agency the job of serving the entire corridor.  I addressed that in the next post.

In the US, public transit is often organized at the county level, so the service ends where the county does. There are countless situations like this, where two significant cities are 20-80 miles apart with a county line separating them:

If transit is provided by county-level agencies, the service in this situation looks like this:

The two transit agencies probably have the best of intentions.  They’ve probably worked together to find a common stop in Town 2 where they meet.  They may or may not have planned the schedules so that the buses meet and people can connect between them to travel to the big cities.  But even if they’ve done that, the end-to-end connection is a gratuitous hassle.   You have to get off one bus and onto another, and worse, there’s a well-above-zero risk that you’ll be stranded if an arriving bus is late.

The better service, and the greater access to opportunity, arises from doing this:

If this corridor is important enough, the county level agencies may have merged to resolve this problem, but usually they haven’t.  Mostly I’m talking about cases where City A and City B are the centers of counties that have numerous internal travel demands, including to other towns in other directions, so that this particular corridor isn’t the most important thing they do.   In fact, it may seem rather peripheral to them.  What’s more, if they are just running to a small town near the county line, the ridership probably isn’t that great, which means that there’s not much impetus to improve things.

So if the county-level agencies aren’t able to combine their services, the state Department of Transportation should look at this situation and see if they can use their leverage to create a solution.  This could mean leaning on the county-level agencies to solve the problem, or it could mean creating (or enhancing) a state intercity bus product to handle these situations.

None of this is easy.  Like all organizations, county level transit operations may feel threatened by the loss of role, importance, or access to funding.  They may be bound up with different labor contracts, which can be especially hard to reform.  A state bus route taking over some local services in the county will need fare integration with the rest of the local system.  But states that want great statewide transit networks need to care about this issue.  A lot of service is already tied up in these county-level rural links, and they won’t always run the most efficient patterns if they are trapped by county lines.