Leap, a luxury bus service that lets affluent San Franciscans commute between two of the city’s wealthiest neighborhoods while sipping fancy coffee and enjoying free WiFi, strikes many people as the epitome of Bay Area douchebaggery. But the service offers compelling lessons mass transit would do well to heed.
The service, which charges people six bucks a ride (five if you buy in bulk), is one more player in the crowded, and proven, field of privately run transportation services. As long as people have been moving around, there have been gypsy cabs, jitneys and paid shuttles of every description. Leap is, cost and amenities aside, really no different.
Still, it would be hard to find a better symbol of the cultural and socioeconomic divide the go-go-go tech industry has brought to the Bay Area than seeing people pay handsomely to enjoy a Blue Bottle-serving, Internet-providing, proletariat-shunning transit system. Especially when the city’s own bus line runs the same routes.
Go ahead and drop the pitchfork, though, because it could make your commute nicer too. Leap and others like it (including Via, which takes people pretty much anywhere in Manhattan for $5, and Chariot, which charges $93 for a month’s worth of unlimited rides in San Francisco) are doing many things public transportation agencies can, and should, learn from. These private transit firms have an eagerness to try new things, embrace new technologies and, most importantly, to fail.
“Transit agencies are inherently risk-averse,” says Paul Supawanich, a transportation consultant at Nelson Nygaard. “One key thing that could be learned from these new companies is their ability to try something, adjust, and iterate quickly.”
The whole notion of public transportation is relatively new. The New York subway system, for example, was for many years a loose network of privately owned lines until the city bought them all in 1940. Integrating and making private systems public ultimately made sense, and government funding carried the caveat that these services be run for public good. Safety and reasonable efficiency become the priority, Supawanich says. But guaranteed funding and no real competition left little incentive to aim any higher.
And so many of our bus, light rail and other transit systems deliver service that’s generally acceptable, but hardly amazing. A 2014 survey by San Francisco’s MTA found 64 percent of riders deemed service good or excellent. Eighty-five percent of Seattle’s public transit riders are “satisfied.” New York’s MTA found a satisfaction rate of 74 percent in 2014, but admitted this month that service is declining even as fares are rising. But ridership has increased in each of these cities as the cities have grown. For many residents, public transit is the only practical way to get around.
But even if the experience is great, there are gaps in service. Buses and trains simply cannot go everywhere, all the time. That’s where the private sector comes in. New York has one of the nation’s most comprehensive public transit systems, and its subway system alone carries 5 million passengers daily. Yet there is no quick or easy way to reach John F. Kennedy or LaGuardia airports. That gave rise to a cottage industry of shuttle buses. Elsewhere in the city, “dollar vans” carry 120,000 people a day, says Sarah Kaufman, adjunct assistant professor of planning at New York University. Via offers $5 rides in a luxury SUV anywhere in much of Manhattan.
Passenger aboard the luxury Commuter bus, Leap. Leap
“What’s great about these shuttles is that they offer public transit solutions for people who would not normally take transit—places where it’s inconvenient, inefficient, or overly stigmatized,” Kaufman says. And this, ultimately, is good for everyone, because it eases congestion, reduces emissions and generally makes life better for all of us. Leap may reek of elitism, but having those people in one bus instead of many, many cars or cabs is a good for everyone.
For the most part, these services find and fill gaps in mass transit, at a price point matching customer needs. Those that don’t are eventually supplanted by competitors.
It isn’t like a transit agency like the San Francisco Muni doesn’t realize it could do better. And you’d like to believe Muni (and other agencies) wants to do better. But in many cases, they are held back by their own inflexibility and mandate to be all things to all people.
Mass transit agencies typically have established, entrenched user bases. That makes change—be it adding or abandoning routes, reallocating resources, and doing pretty much everything else—difficult. They tend to be large, bureaucratic operations with many stakeholders. Riders. Employees and their unions. Elected officials. Funding agencies. The list goes on.
“Agencies have a lot of process they have to go through to make any changes to their service,” says Ratna Amin, director of transportation policy at the Bay Area planning nonprofit SPUR. There are reasons for that process—including everyone’s right to voice their opinion and taking the time to weigh benefits and disadvantages—“but often the rider suffers.”
Then there are jurisdictional and engineering limits, funding often languishes and services get cut when things get tight. Federal, state, and local laws dictate what kind of service agencies have to offer. Because these are public agencies spending public money, there’s a lot of public scrutiny—which really means criticism. “There’s really an expectation that things shouldn’t fail,” Amin says. “So it’s hard to launch a totally new way of doing things.”
All over the country, public transit ridership is growing rapidly, far outpacing population growth. But funding hasn’t kept up, especially since the 2008 financial collapse, and particularly with regard to money coming out of Washington. Cities “are stretching themselves to raise their own funds and to innovate,” according to a 2014 report from Transportation for America. “But without a strong federal partner the twin demands of maintaining their existing infrastructure and preparing for the future are beyond their means.”
Private transportation models can be successful because they’re free of those constraints. They don’t have to worry about pleasing everyone. That gives them far more latitude. Startups like Leap are infusing transit with the culture of Silicon Valley, which at its best is about fresh ideas, moving quickly and iterating solutions.
Beyond the leather seats and premium coffee, Leap has done several things to make getting around easy. Riders can pay via smartphone, so there’s no need to carry around a transit card or cash. You can check in via Bluetooth, so you don’t have to touch your phone. Leap runs express service, saving riders time. It doesn’t follow a timetable, but instead dispatches buses every 10 to 15 minutes. Riders can track their location in real time, and know at a glance how many seats are available. It selects routes based on where its potential riders are, and where they want to go.
These are hardly revolutionary moves, but they present an experience altogether different from mass transit. This isn’t to say it’s time to privatize public transportation and let the whole thing go under if it can’t make a profit. But with freedom to fail comes freedom to innovate, even if it’s on a small scale.
Many of the things people would like see improved already are on the minds of transit officials, Amin says. Things like flexible service and routes that change as demand does. Smartphone payment systems. Developing routes based upon crowd-sourced data. One way to move beyond ideas to reality to to adopt pilot programs to relatively quickly and easily see what works, and iterate upon it.
One area ripe for experimentation, Kaufman says, is moving people with disabilities, who have a legal right to affordable transportation. Today, paratransit riders must request a ride one day in advance; the bus arrives within a 60-minute window. Getting to a doctor’s appointment shouldn’t be like getting your cable installed. But providing truly accessible vans to a scattered population is expensive and and hard to do efficiently. Agencies should have the freedom to experiment.
There are some good examples for others to follow. This year, four cities in central Florida are trying a “Flex Bus” system that riders can summon to carry them from commuter train stations to their final destination. Like many public transportation projects, its rollout has been delayed, but it’s still a new approach to moving people around.
SF evaluation found it “made parking easier and cheaper while reducing circling and parking tickets.”
Encouraging more experimentation requires tweaking regulations governing transit agencies, funding new ideas, bringing in outside expertise, and changing the attitude of those in charge (or changing those in charge). And, Kaufman says, communication with the public is key. Agencies must be clear that whatever they may do is experimental, an exploration of how to improve service. Hopefully, the public will see it that way, and embrace change. Maybe it’ll work. If not, hopefully they’ll try something else.
