It’s pretty clear that crush capacity doesn’t mean what you think it means.

I’ve linked to NYCT’s loading guidelines in the past. They are not kept secret. Those loading guidelines apply to hourly or half-hourly averages, not to individual buses. The existence of occasional overcrowded buses does not itself imply a need for more service. If average loads are above guidelines, then, yes, more service is warranted, in conjunction with the next round of frequency adjustments for the line in question (roughly once every two years). Why do I get the feeling that I’ve explained this to you already?

Your repeated insistence that you have seen buses carrying in excess of a crush load places your entire counts in doubt.

If the loading guidelines are not kept secret, why are they not easily available on the MTA website? Or if they are available, they are so well hidden that they are nearly impossible to find. Could you find out where they are from you friend in Operations Planning?

http://www.mta.info/mta/compliance/pdf/1269d.pdf – pages 26-31

I’ve posted this link before. I found it on Google in the first place. If you lose it again, I’m sure you can find it on Google as well. As technologically inept as I am, I’ve figured out how to conduct basic Google searches.

(If your only objection is to the layout of the MTA website, I don’t think I disagree with you there.)

I wasn’t talking about “occasional overcrowded buses.”

I was making a general point about how loading guidelines are used.

The average bus during the three hour off-peak period I surveyed carried 58 passengers. That’s about 50% above a seated bus load which is what the guidelines state. Also, low floor buses have almost 10 fewer seats than an RTS.

When service is frequent, the guidelines don’t require a seated load. And the guidelines don’t distinguish between low floor buses and RTSes.

Going with your numbers (which I question, but for now I’ll accept them for the sake of argument), the B1 carried 1,920 passengers over three hours, or an average of 640 passengers per hour, with an average headway of 5.14 minutes (11.67 buses per hour).

Per the guidelines, the average headway for this load should be between 4 and 5 minutes (if the scale is linear between rows on the loading guideline table, 4.24 minutes, or 14.14 buses per hour). That’s a 21% increase over what you observed. If (as I suspect) the actual loads are somewhat lower than you claim, then the need for additional service is also lower.

A headway of 5.14 minutes would be appropriate for an hourly load of somewhere between 400 and 516 (497 riders per hour if, again, the scale is linear).

And we have to wait two years for the next frequency adjustments when the enrollment grows every six months. Is there any wonder the buses are always overcrowded with students?

Does Kingsborough give NYCT projected enrollment numbers in advance?

You can try to raise all the doubts you want regarding the validity of my counts. If anyone believes you is another question.

The transit professionals I know know what crush loading means and aren’t quite as quick as you are to cast doubt on the Transportation Research Board.

I don’t recall casting doubt on TRB. And as I remember, the questions regarding crush loading had to do with of they consider passengers in the stairwells as part of crush loading. The question wasn’t what a crush load is but if in fact a bus could hold 96 passengers which you questioned and I disproved by telling you I once counted 110 passengers (including about 30 children) board an empty New Look bus through the front door. I don’t believe there was any significant difference between what a New Look could carry as opposed to an RTS.

I can almost understand not including passengers in the front stairwell in the crush capacity, but even that is a stretch. There is absolutely no possible reason that passengers in the rear stairwell would not be included.

The guideline load of an IRT subway car is 110. I doubt you actually saw 110 people on a New Look bus. Sorry.

I believe Kingsborough does provide enrollment numbers several weeks in advance, but that would of course be too late for the pick.

Much too late. If Kingsborough provided enrollment estimates six months in advance, that might be worth something. (To be fair, I don’t know if NYCT asks for them.)

I will look at the guidelines when I get a chance. Thanks for the link which should not require a Google search when your mantra is “transparency”. You would have to know they do exist and what to call them to do the search in the first place. And that isn’t very transparent is it?

If your objection is that the website I’d crummy, I agree, but that’s not what transparency means.

I’m not sure what you find so difficult about a Google search – it’s easier than wading through menu upon menu on a website.

Your estimate of a needed 21% increase in service per the guidelines seems fair. Since the problem may be reliability, not capacity, it is possible that the guidelines are being met in fact.

The problem may be both, or there may well be a negative feedback loop.

It appears that you don’t know what the terms “crush load” or “transparency” mean.

“I doubt you actually saw 110 people on a New Look bus”.

I didn’t “see” 110 people on a New Look bus. As I stated, the bus was empty and I counted all of them enter through the front door one by one. Is that so difficult to believe? Unless there was a trap door underneath the bus allowing people to sneak off the bus, they were all still in the bus when I finished counting. As I stated, there were many children probably under 10 years of age. Probably most of them sat on their parent’s lap. So if you don’t count them, the number was still in the upper 90s consistent with the number I counted on the RTS bus on the B1.

By contrast, the low floor buses seem to be able to hold much fewer passengers. I doubt it if you can get more than 75 in those buses, 80 absolute tops.

Also,

2. “74% of bus riders are satisfied with their bus service.”

“Not my statement.”

That was the MTA’s statement in their 2013 customer satisfaction survey. And since you fully supported their methodology and agreed with that survey, it is a statement you fully agree with so you can’t say that it is not your statement. Or do you no longer agree with the MTA’s methodology?

Okay, so other than your problems with on time performance, is there any part of the customer satisfaction survey you havea problem with?

You state now that you are uncomfortable with these surveys, but often quoted the statistic that 99% of M15 SBS riders and 90% of local riders were satisfied as partial proof that SBS was working great.

“Not “hate” – they simply refuse to use them or avoid them like the plague.”

Tell that to all the people standing in crowded buses.

Annual bus ridership is less than half of annual subway ridership. There are a lot of transit riders in New York City who simply won’t touch buses, since they’re too slow and unreliable for their needs. As subway ridership grows year after year, bus ridership has been consistently dropping.

“No, that’s not what I said. I said that, in a survey of bus riders, people who do not ride the bus cannot possibly be counted as satisfied or unsatisfied or anything else, for the simple reason that they are not surveyed.”

But you also stater, “A large number of New Yorkers simply avoid buses like the plague because they are so slow and unreliable. They are neither satisfied nor unsatisfied with their bus service since they don’t use the bus in the first place.”

Of course, you have nothing to say when I made this statement: “This is clearly an impossibility because according to the MTA you can only be satisfied or unsatisfied.”

Sorry, I have no idea what you’re talking about here. A survey of bus riders does not gauge the opinions of people who don’t ride buses. That is all I am saying.

I am not the only one who criticized the interpretation of the MTA’s 1-10 scale. Ben Kabak also stated that a rating of 5 and 6 should be considered as “Not satisfied nor dissatisfied.” If they did that, their numbers would have had some reliability. But you supported the MTA ‘s interpretation that in a survey of bus riders it was not possible to be neither satisfied nor dissatisfied. You had to be either satisfied or not satisfied.

I did? When did I say that?

I certainly do understand the difference between elimination and reduction. It’s just that the wait assessment numbers and methodology do not provide a convincing case that bunching was actually reduced. A bus that arrives 6 minutes later than the scheduled interval is given the same weight as a bus that arrives 35 minutes later than the scheduled interval. Plus the numbers are nearly three years old and no dates were provided when the surveys were taken, so there is no way to check if the days checked were typical or not. There also is no margin of error given.

Wait assessment is a measure of service regularity. it’s not some new-fangled thing that was invented for SBS – it’s been around since 2000. It’s not a perfect measure by any means, but it does a decent job of measuring what it’s intended to measure. Like you, I’d prefer to see more granularity – a minor fail and a massive fail are treated equally, but that’s a shortcoming of any pass-fail measure.

The numbers are 2.5 years old because they are in a report that was published over two years ago, a report which outlined how a three-year-old SBS project was performing in comparison with its predecessor.

That doesn’t prove anything since the mileage, capacities and coverage areas provided by subways as opposed to buses varies greatly. I will grant you that given the choice, more will prefer subways over buses especially for long trips, but there is a population that prefers buses over subways because they do not have to walk stairs, may be more likely to get a seat, or perceive them as safer, and would never set foot on a train.

I’m not suggesting that people largely prefer subways over buses for trips that make sense by subway. That shouldn’t be surprising. The problem is that for trips that don’t make sense by subway, lots of New Yorkers still avoid the bus – either they use other modes, like driving, or they take a circuitous trip by subway, or, worse yet, they forego the trip entirely. In other words, the near-absence of fast, reliable bus service in New York City reduces mobility.

Despite the generally wide coverage of the Underground and commuter rail services, London has seen huge growth in bus ridership since 2000, in large part due to efforts taken to reduce traffic congestion (e.g., congestion pricing), to implement bus lanes on busy streets, and to generally make bus service faster and more reliable. Bear in mind, also, that bus stops in London (as in most of the rest of the world outside the U.S.) are much more widely spaced than ours. At this point, bus ridership in London is significantly higher than Underground ridership.

Also, subways are not always faster. Last year one evening I had to travel from 42 Street to 23 Street on 7th Avenue. We saw a bus coming and decided to take it. We got off at 23rd Street in about 5 minutes. Chances are if we took the train in five minutes we still would have been waiting for the train after descending the stairs.

I didn’t say that subways are always faster, especially for short trips.

Now you say you disagree with the MTA’s interpretation of their 1-10 scale? That’s news to me. Do you realize that considering a 5 and 6 as “neither satisfied or dissatisfied” rather than not allowing that option invalidates the entire survey, because percentage points could vary by 20% or so depending on what proportion of the satisfieds are indeed a “6″.

I would suspect the numbers of 5s and sixes to be very high.

As I said on Sunday: “I do not know much about survey methodology, and I prefer to leave the discussion to those who have a better understanding.” As far as I can tell, your understanding is no better than mine.

How long do you think the MTA will use an old survey as proof positive that SBS is working? They need to do periodic retesting and make that information readily available, not by having to read hundreds of pages buried in executive reports that you have to search by date.

If you’re asking whether the MTA will update its one-year progress report to reflect three years worth of data, I strongly suspect not – it wouldn’t be a one-year progress report anymore. Performance data should be and is collected periodically, as a matter of course.

As I’ve said, if you wish to argue that the MTA should have a better website, I will agree with you completely. But publicly available information is still publicly available information, much as you’d like to deny it.

A before-and-after study compares performance before and after a change. It is not a before-and-after-and-after-and-after study.

There are many performance metrics that are collected on a regular basis. They are publicly available. I have shown you where you can find them. Are you going to look at them or are you going to continue to insist that they don’t exist?