Continuing with this series describing critical “missing pieces” of an operable public transit network (see https://transalt.com/article/making-public-transportation-work-part-1-alternative-work-schedules/ and https://transalt.com/article/making-public-transportation-work-part-2-park-and-ride-lots/), this installment overviews yet another essential component of public transportation that has gone largely missing for decades: Feeder Service.
In limited contexts, some feeder service still exists. The most common and visible remnant is service to airports – provided by a variety of modes including taxis, transportation network companies (which smother almost everything else on access roads in front of most or many airports’ terminals), personal automobiles (“visitors” dropping off or picking up airport passengers typically comprise about a third of the personal occupancy vehicles traveling to and from airports), an occasional bus, and an occasional shared-ride shuttle service, like SuperShuttle.
The other common form of feeder service is the use of fixed route buses to serve passenger rail stations. The most efficient of these are the bus lines running in Manhattan on the east-west “cross-streets” on which subway stations are largely located, as well as more circuitous and random services in the other boroughs, and in many other major cities whose transit systems recover far less than 35 percent of their operating costs from passenger fares, as does New York City (the nation’s highest). Yet vehicles feeding bus stops seem nowhere to be found – other than where rare park-and-ride lots are located. The major exception is feet – and the occasional skate board, wheelchair or bicycle, as well as e-bikes and e-scooters, many stored in municipal racks often near bus stops.
Precursors and Simplicity
To even older transit professionals with long memories, the origin of feeder service is obscure. Feeder service actually began as a “demonstration project” funded by the Urban Mass Transportation Administration (the forerunner of what is now the Federal Transit Administration) in 1969 known as ”The Haddonfield Experiment.” The Project Director (and possibly the creator of the concept) was Eldon Zeigler.
When it hit the streets, this service was known as the Haddonfield Dial-A-Ride – and likely the first U.S service ever named a dial-a-ride. But unlike decades of dial-a-ride programs that followed, UMTA’s project did not provide one-to-one (exclusive ride) or barely-many-to-few (shared ride) service transporting elderly and/or disabled individuals unable to use fixed route transit to travel to or from their destinations. Instead, the mostly-one-to-many (in the AM peak period) or many-to-one (in the PM peak period), curb-to-curb Haddonfield Dial-A-Ride transported commuters in this southern New Jersey suburb to a nearby rail station on the Lindenwold Line – a passenger rail line that mostly transported commuters to and from their jobs in nearby Philadelphia.
I do not know all the trip reservation and scheduling specifics But I suspect that most riders traveled regularly, Monday through Friday, and rode on what is still known (in the paratransit world) as “subscription service” (or as “standing rides”). If you were on the list, you only had to call to cancel a trip. Otherwise, you were regularly picked up and dropped off without a phone call. “Occasional riders” had to call for a pickup or (in the PM period) a drop-off, and these pickups and drop-offs were inserted into existing schedules as minor deviations along the paths of the mostly-subscription-service-oriented vehicles.
As a scheduling matter, running such a system was a snap compared to the vast majority of stupidly-run paratransit systems of Today: The schedule was largely a “skeleton” of regular riders into which occasional riders were inserted, as noted. Interestingly, this is how I designed the City of Los Angeles’ VALTRANS paratransit system to operate in 1982 – although no paratransit system or NEMT system I have ever heard of or know of has operated this way since – a pity since it is so much more efficient. Instead, robots (i.e., software) combine a core of subscription riders with pre-scheduled immediate-response riders and effectively schedule every one of both types of trips largely independently every single day. And even while same-day reservations can be honored (as per the ADA) to fill gaps in schedules and increase efficiency, no paratransit system I know of accommodates them — as a means of discouraging usage of the system altogether. These would-be riders simply schedule their trips another time, efficiency be damned.
Regardless, as a largely-subscription service, one can understand how simple it was – even without any robots – to operate a feeder system like the Haddonfield Dial-A-Ride. Of course, without robots, live reservation clerks and schedulers were needed to operate such a system. But as a subscription service which few riders had to call, and a scheduling process that only involved inserting occasional riders into existing schedules, few schedulers were needed. And they did not need to be highly-skilled. Besides, this was 1969, and the start of the U.S. Jobs Elimination Program (JEP) lay a few years away. So in terms of the early “Nixon years,” employing live Earthlings to run a transportation system – and both reduce traffic and reduce subsidies for passenger rail systems – made complete sense. Plus, two years earlier, with the creation of USDOT, what operating subsides that were required were paid for partly with Federal tax dollars – just as 80 percent of the capital costs of every transit system was covered with Federal funds when UMTA was created in 1964 (initially within the former Department of Housing and Urban Development – as part of President Johnson’s “Model Cities Program”).
Hijacking and Squandering
Transportation planners sometimes classify modes or services into three roles: One-to-one, many-to-one (or one-to-many) or many-to-many. As the simplest examples:
• Taxis, limousines and TNCs provide one-to-one service
• Shuttle services provide many-to-one service
• Buses and (especially) trains provide many-to-many service
The Haddonfield Dial-A-Ride provided one-to-many trips (during the AM peak period) or many-to-one trips (during the PM peak period) – where each vehicle’s passengers accessed or left a rail station at one end of their trips. So as a heavily-ridden “subscription service,” the Haddonfield Dial-A-Ride was far more efficient than those “shared-ride” paratransit services that operate today – most of which, in truth, provide mostly exclusive rides. Yet, while the Haddonfield Dial-A-Ride was highly-successful, similar feeder services not only disappeared, but the concept was effectively hijacked by shared-ride paratransit services for elderly and disabled individuals. (“General public” paratransit systems also operate in low density areas.) When the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) was promulgated in 1991, elderly individuals who were not also disabled were eliminated from the mix, and the extraordinary efficiency of a few pre-ADA Dial-A-Ride systems (like that in Tulsa, OK) vanished from the landscape. When robots replaced live Earthlings in the early 1990s, the efficiency of shared-ride service diminished even more, such that many more trips were provided on an exclusive-ride basis – essentially limousine service for the Disabled.
Consistent with the decline in most modes of public transportation in the United States, and the replacement of low-cost services with those experiencing outrageous costs (like AMTRAK service in most areas of the country [see https://transalt.com/article/covid-19-shenanigans-and-liability-part-2-making-money-by-compromising-health/]), feeder-to-bus services nearly vanished while similarly-structured paratransit and NEMT services with embarrassing efficiency (often or mostly providing exclusive rides) proliferated. Particularly as brokers exploded into the field, NEMT service increasingly began to provide mostly exclusive rides. (In one lawsuit I was engaged in, the driver testified that she had never provided a shared ride; many accessible vehicles have room for only one wheelchair.)
In simple terms, the near-disappearance of feeder-to-bus service is merely another element of the collapse of the overall U.S public transportation network, and the extraordinary corruption and waste that increasingly dominate more and more modes.
Taxpayers and Tolerance
Installment after installment in this series, the point remains that we either have a public transportation system that works and that is affordable, or we smother in traffic that wastes billions of hours of our time and billions of dollars of our money. But until teleportation arrives – which Quantum theory actually suggests may someday be possible – we have to travel to and from bus and train stops.
If we do not have a bus stop or train station within a quarter mile of almost every spot in town (I actually designed a fixed route system that came close to this in Southern California in 1983), we must find a way to get people to those places where a bus can reasonably (and safely) stop. This means either these riders must drive someplace not too far away where they can park before stepping on the bus or train (see Part 2 of this series: https://transalt.com/article/making-public-transportation-work-part-2-park-and-ride-lots/ ), or something else is going to have to take them to these stops and drop them off (and pick them up at the stops, reversing the process, in the afternoon).
Both these alternatives – frankly, the only alternatives that exist for supporting public transportation service in the cities, and diminishing traffic to tolerable levels – also assume that these commuter-bus riders can navigate quickly and affordably at the higher-density ends of their trips. Unfortunately, this is also becoming less and less possible. As noted, the highest-performing urban transit system in the nation is the NYCTA – covering 35 percent of its operating costs from farebox revenues. (Remember: 80 percent of the vehicles, and other capital costs, paid for with FTA funds, are not even included in this equation.) In Los Angeles, this percentage is nine. The two years before COVID-19 emerged, transit ridership decreased, nationally, by about 10 percent. A year before COVID emerged, Kansas City’s transit agency (KCATA) – whose “operating ratio” was less than that of Los Angeles County’s – abandoned bus fares altogether, as the cost of collecting and processing the fares exceeded the fares themselves.
This dynamic is not the same as all but live music becoming free, and merely screwing musicians out of royalties. That is merely institutionalized theft where both the perpetrators and victims lie in the private sector. Providing free bus service costs taxpayers real money. The question is: How much longer are taxpayers going to put up with these trends? Are taxpayers likely to add public transit to the welfare system? Keep in mind that, unlike programs like Social Security (which have no economies of scale — although payroll deductions could be increased for those paying into the system), and MediCare (until recently, wholesale costs of the medicines could not even be negotiated), the costs of public transportation are almost entirely the result of corruption and waste. This reality is a bitter irony for the nation that invented automobiles and airplanes.
Common sense suggests that exclusive-ride service – taxis, limousines and TNC (like Uber & Lyft) — are too costly for most people to use for feeder service. This is especially true as our residences move further and further away from clusters of work destinations (mostly cities). Parallel to this, these modes are increasingly too costly as the distribution of wealth makes such services less and less affordable to more and more people who need them. Compounding this further, those individuals who increasingly cannot afford them are more and more often those individuals who cannot work “remotely” but who, instead, must actually travel to and from their jobs.
Existential or Redeemable
In recent years, the misnomer “existential threat” was hackneyed to death. Frankly, the concept is oxymoron: If something is existential, it is not a threat. It is the future’s reality.
Like so many things many Americans long for – including a return to the White Christmas-flavored world of Bing Crosby, or simple conveniences like telephones that fit the contours of one’s face – the false promise of “seamless transportation” (the illusory cliché of transit industry bureaucrats) seems to be fading and further away. Over the past decades, our institutions (like public utilities commissions) have destroyed the potential of new modes like SuperShuttle (see https://transalt.com/article/bad-regulations-and-worse-responses-part-2-the-rise-fall-and-transformation-of-supershuttle/). And all type and manner of institutions have failed to prevent new modes that decimated traditional modes that were doing fine (see https://transalt.com/article/bad-regulations-and-worse-responses-part-3-invasion-of-the-tncs/, https://transalt.com/article/bad-regulations-and-worse-responses-part-4-judicial-heroism/, https://transalt.com/article/bad-regulations-and-worse-responses-part-5-executive-branch-responses/, https://transalt.com/article/bad-regulations-and-worse-responses-part-6-industry-and-association-responses/ and https://transalt.com/article/bad-regulations-and-worse-responses-part-7-conclusions/. Other modes like AMTRAK spread COVID-19 (see https://transalt.com/article/covid-19-shenanigans-and-liability-part-2-making-money-by-compromising-health/) while our commercial airline industry spread disruption and inconvenience as its contribution of transportation corruption (see https://transalt.com/article/expanding-the-mode-split-dividing-line-part-1-exponential-airline-industry-corruption/).
In response to this eulogy of failures, the motorcoach industry has done nothing – even while National Bus Trader outlined a complete strategy for realizing new opportunities (see https://transalt.com/article/survival-and-prosperity-part-1-magic-corridors/ and https://transalt.com/article/survival-and-prosperity-part-3-the-gains-of-winning-the-cost-of-failure/ — including a detailed vision of the vehicles needed (see https://transalt.com/article/survival-and-prosperity-part-2-the-magic-coach/) and the concepts for deploying them (see https://transalt.com/article/survival-and-prosperity-part-4-service-concepts/).
Is the U.S. public transportation system redeemable? I doubt it. Public transit was rescued as recently as 1964 and 1967 – while 10 years after operating assistance was introduced, passenger fare recovery ratios had shrunk to 50 percent. Transit ridership declined by 10 percent during the two years preceding COVID-19 (as noted). TNCs have decimated the taxi industry, and are already penetrating the schoolbus, transit, motorcoach and paratransit sectors. More and more service is contracted out to companies paying drivers (often 1099 workers) starvation wages, and thinning management to a skeleton of its former self. And trains are derailing on straightaways in stations. No need to even discuss the deterioration of the infrastructure upon which these modes travel.
There is a saying that one begins to grow old when his or her dreams turn into regrets. Otherwise, there is a small silver lining. We will soon have nice memories.