Thoughts while waiting for the bus

I waited for the 1 bus at West Grand and Telegraph for a looong time Wednesday night, after the Obama fundraiser, and this is what was going through my head:

• 20 minute headways my ass. If I had waited for the bus, it would have been a 35 minute wait (luckily I got bored after a while, called my girlfriend, and when she saw I’d still be waiting 20 more minutes, she hopped in her car and picked me up). At least BART changed their headways to 15 minutes this year – I could handle that. 35 minutes is too long to wait for a bus!
• It’s a bit creepy in Uptown at night (unless the Art Murmur’s happening). It’s well lit at the bus stop, but there are very few people around. And Kerry Hamill looking down at me really doesn’t help. Her SAFE NEIGHBORHOODS NOW tagline just reminds me that right now, our neighborhoods aren’t safe. Thanks Kerry.
• Surprisingly, I was under-dressed at the Obama fundraiser I just attended. And I wasn’t wearing jeans and a t-shirt – I had heels, slacks, and a sweater on! How come no one promoted this event’s dress code as suits, cocktail dresses, and stillettos?
• For the intersection of two very busy streets in an up and coming neighborhood, this area needs help! V Smoothe wrote the other day about the need to develop the 20th Street corridor, but Grand needs work two. I really hate waiting here and staring at two gas stations and a bunch of parking lots. Maybe we should apply dto510’s suggestions for development here. I’m all for more interesting buildings, encouragement of public space, and more continuity between the downtown districts. (And V, I’d prefer the PDA of besos on the street to what we have now.)
• I wonder if the friends I just ate with at Luka’s thought they were boring me because I kept staring past them at the beautiful Oakland tree paintings. Anyone know who the artist is?
• Kamala Harris gave a rousing speech at the Obama fundraiser – she’s a very inspiring and articulate speaker. It made me wonder though, for a fundraiser in dowtown Oakland, could the organizers of the event not find any Oakland politicians that could inspire the crowd?
• I love the Franklin Square Wine Bar and am shocked at how many of my friends who work in the area don’t even know it exists. If you haven’t been, go there, tonight!
• I really need to get an iPhone so I can check NextBus before leaving the bar. Though I guess if I did this, I’d lose some of my best thinking time and this post would never have been written.

We need more of these…

I was in downtown Berkeley the other day and saw this at Center and Shattuck:

Sorry for the poor picture quality, but if you can’t read it, the screen lists several bus lines that stop at Center and Shattuck and their upcoming arrival times. It then scrolls through the rest of the lines.

Generally, the much smaller NextBus signs at bus stops work just fine – they show one line at a time and scroll through each line. But at major bus stops, where 5-10 bus lines all stop, I think a larger screen like this is a better option.

Also, I really like that the screen is placed where someone who’s not generally a bus rider would see it, prominently on the corner near the crosswalk – I know it took me many months to even realize that the 14th and Broadway bus shelter had a NextBus sign because it’s hidden inside.

I hope AC Transit plans to install one of these at 14th and Broadway, maybe near (or in) the 12th Street BART station. In fact, these would be great at any BART station.

DIY Bus Stop Furniture

This morning, I walked up to my bus stop on 59th & Telegraph and saw this:

I’m guessing someone from the city or county will haul this away soon, but until then, bus riders have a more comfortable place to wait. And since AC Transit recently installed a NextBus screen at this stop, it should be easy to sit back, relax, and not worry about missing the 1 or 1R.

Rain, NextBus, and the not so rapid 1R

Normally, when I write about riding the bus, I’m pretty positive. Honestly, sometimes I sound like a cheerleader for AC Transit, especially for the 1R rapid bus. And my cheeriness about riding the bus is not a front – I really do generally enjoy it. I don’t mind waiting a few minutes (even in the rain). I enjoy random transit encounters. And most of all, I love not having to drive, or to focus on anything as I ride around town.

But something’s changed this year. Sure, I have a lot of stresses in my life right now, so maybe I’m just being less patient, but it really does seem like bus reliability and speed has decreased greatly in 2008.

I could probably write pages about my complaints of my transit experiences during the past two weeks, but I’ll spare you the pain I put my girlfriend and co-workers through by narrowing the complaints down to three simple thoughts…

1. The bus is never there when I’m waiting for it.

2. NextBus stopped working.

3. The “rapid” bus has slowed down, to the point that taking the regular 1 is sometimes as fast or faster than taking the 1R.

OK… I lied, I can’t just leave it at that… I have to explain…

1. Since the rapid bus line started on Telegraph in mid-2007, I remember few times when I waited more than 15 minutes for a bus. Even when the buses got bunched up, there were 8 buses per hour on the line (5 rapids and 3 regular) so you were bound to catch a bus pretty quickly. But during the past two weeks, I’ve waited more than 20 minutes (and sometimes more than a half hour) for a bus on at least 4 occasions. Luckily, I sometimes have avoided waiting in the rain by hanging out in my apartment and checking NextBus every couple minutes, but that brings me to my next point…

2. NextBus is broken! Of course, last year there were a few times when it failed me, but this year it’s failed me nearly every day. It says a bus will be there in 8 minutes so I book it out my front door and onto Telegraph, run to the 1R stop, and proceed to wait for 20 minutes. Or it tells me a bus isn’t coming for more than a half hour so I hang around in my office for a while, wait until the time drops down to 10 minutes, and walk to 14th and Broadway and there’s nobody waiting at the stop! Something tells me a bus did arrive sometime in that last half hour, unless everybody decided to stay home from work that day. To top it off, the NextBus status signal at the 14th and Broadway bus stop stopped working a few days ago, so I have to gamble by taking the 1, since I can’t tell when a 1R is coming…

3. Lately though, that’s not a gamble because the 1R no longer goes fast. Sure, it makes less stops, but the drivers rarely hit the speed limit and they’re in no hurry to move away from a stop. I’m wondering if riders complained about how fast they were in 2007 (I used to make it to work in 10-12 minutes) – maybe the fast driving scared them? I’m not sure, but the drivers have changed and it’s really frustrating. Today was the worst though. After passing up a 1 because I saw a 1R right behind it (usually a good choice), the 1R drives off fairly slowly, stops at a regular 1 stop for no good reason to pick someone up, proceeds on slowly, and then stops at another 1 stop and turns off the engine. She proceeds to just sit there for 10 minutes! She didn’t get out to use the bathroom or get something to eat. She didn’t make a phone call. She just sat. And yes, on regular buses this is normal behavior because they have to stay on schedule, but that’s why those of us in a hurry ride the “rapid” bus. And when people went up to ask what was happening, she just screamed at them and told them to mind their own business. Needless to say, I arrived to work late when I had aimed to get in early.

Woo! That was exhausting. But really, I’m not interested in complaining just for the sake of complaining. The truth is that no matter how much I love AC Transit and my particular bus line, it’s just not equipped to deal with inclement weather, bad traffic, or the varying behaviors of bus drivers.

So what’s the fix? Let’s start building Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) already. I don’t know about other bus riders, but I’m so ready for it. I really dream of the day when I don’t have to rely on NextBus because buses will arrive every 5 minutes. And the bus will travel almost as fast as a car because boarding will be streamlined. And you know what I look forward to most? Writing loving notes about my bus rides, instead of complaining tirades.

Guess I don’t know everything about public transit…

AC Transit has become a pretty significant part of my life. I spend several hours on buses every week, I think about public transit all the time, I talk about transit issues to anyone who will listen, and I even write about bus conversations here. So you think I’d know most of tips and tricks about riding the bus by now.

But last week, I was humbled, as a co-worker from San Francisco clued me in about NextBus.

If you ride the bus as often as I do, you’ll know that the major inconvenience is not knowing when the next bus will arrive. Printed bus schedules are more like guides than dependable schedules.

So NextBus has worked with AC Transit, Muni, and other bus agencies to install GPS tracking devices in the buses to help predict when the buses will arrive at various stops along their routes. Just visit their site, choose your route, and choose your stop, and you’ll get a message looking something like this:

Next 1R to Berkeley Bart Station vehicles in:2, 3 & 13 minutes

Finally, no more missing the bus by 30 seconds and waiting a half hour for the next one.