What revenue service hours can tell us about bus ridership in Richmond

researched and co-authored by Nicholas Smith

Recently, we took a look at the most recent bus ridership numbers from GRTC and saw how making a bus more useful inevitably leads to more ridership. We can also dig a bit further into those ridership numbers and get a sense of which buses are most productive and which ones...are not.

When we look out across the entire GRTC system, a few things are clear. First, a handful of buses are absolutely workhorses and should be our focus when thinking about investments in greater frequency and on-street improvements that give priority to transit. Second, a few of the region’s less-frequent routes could definitely benefit from a frequency increase. At a minimum, the City should expand its frequent, daytime service to at least 10:00 PM.

We’ll jump into the data in a bit, but, first, it’ll help to understand revenue service hours. Revenue service hours are a measure of how much bus service a system or individual route provides—it’s one bus picking up and dropping off passengers for one hour (not counting waiting time at the end of a line). Some bus routes are longer than others, so to compare apples to apples we want to see how many people are using a vehicle for every hour it is in service picking up and dropping off passengers. A quick example: It takes one single bus one single hour to run the entirety of GRTC’s Route #86. That bus leaves Southside Plaza at 5:40 AM, arrives at Ampthill Heights at 6:00 AM, and then returns to Southside Plaza at 6:26 AM. That is one service hour. If we wanted to double the frequency of Route #86 to every 30-minutes, we’d need to add an additional bus to the route. That’d be two service hours. That’s an oversimplification of the actual #86, but you get the point. More revenue service hours on a route (or in a bus system) means more bus service for riders.

Alright, with that in mind, here’s a graph of average weekly bus ridership by route from May 12th, 2019 through August 3rd, 2019.

Clearly the #1ABC, #2ABC, #3ABC, and #5 are popular, high-ridership routes. This makes a lot of sense as they’re the most frequent local routes in the system. Again, if you make buses more useful—in this case by making them more frequent—more folks will ride them.

If we look at ridership data from the same time period by revenue service hour, things get a little more interesting. Remember, this is the number of riders for every hour an individual bus is out there picking up and dropping folks off. Frequent routes require more buses but should serve more people. Looking at ridership by revenue service hour lets us see which routes are the most productive, accounting for the frequency factor, and which routes need more investment.

Again, the system’s frequent routes are at the top of the list with some really strong numbers. Consider the #1ABC, which requires ten buses to serve the entire line. With around 30 rides on each bus per revenue service hour, the combined #1ABC serves around 300 people every hour on average across the entire route. That’s awesome, and shows that GRTC’s frequent routes are excellent investments! In fact, when looking to expand and extend the Richmond region’s bus system, a good place to start would be to run these frequent routes later into the evening and on Sundays (currently, frequent service stops around 7:00 PM).

It’s clear that lots of folks—across many demographics and geographies—are already living, working, and playing near these frequent routes and that they would benefit from even more of that frequent service. Additionally, these frequent routes provide quick connections to the system’s less frequent routes, so riders headed to destinations all across the city would benefit from improvements to the frequent routes. And, don’t forget, like we saw in Henrico, extending frequent service later into the evening and on Sundays will make new trips possible and attract new riders. The City should do all it can to give on-street priority to these bus routes, which carry hundreds of people per hour, including more transit-only lanes, transit signal priority, and removing parking to install bus-boarding islands. Then, as ridership grows along these already-strong routes, we should start planning for increasing the frequency even further to 10-minutes—especially on the #1ABC and #5.

The next thing that jumps out is the strong performance of the #86. This hourly route serves a large portion of the city’s Southside, including parts of both the 8th and 9th City Council districts. It’s an area with a significant number of individuals living in poverty, a large Latinx and Black population, and a part of town that’s seeing a decrease in property values. It’s also a large area that’s only served by a handful of buses, leaving large gaps—sometimes almost spanning two miles—between routes. The #86 punches above its weight (or, rather, punches above its frequency) in terms of ridership per revenue service hour. It is the top candidate for a frequency increase from once an hour to twice an hour. Similarly, the East End’s #12, which serves multiple public housing neighborhoods and the new grocery store, would be a good place to consider an increase from 30-minute service to 15-minute service.

Express buses, which were not included on the above graphs are an entirely different situation because of their peak-only, inconsistent schedules. We’ll dig in more to the region’s express buses (and a bunch of other fascinating stuff) in the future. Stay tuned.

The Richmond region has seen a year’s worth of changes and improvements to its bus network—but we’re not done yet! There are easy wins to be had by giving on-street priority to our strongest bus routes and increasing the frequency of some less frequent routes that show strong potential. By far, the easiest, most beneficial change, would be to run today’s frequent service until at least 10:00 PM. This would give more folks more access to more opportunities for work or play, make new types of trips possible, and, ultimately, increase ridership.

This week in transit: Fill! That! Bus!

TAKE ACTION

This coming Saturday, September 7th, GRTC will host a food drive benefiting Feed More at the Willow Lawn Kroger. Stop by between 12:00–4:00 PM and fill the bus with the sorts of shelf-stable food items for which Feed More is always on the hunt. Conveniently, since the food drive is literally at a Kroger, you can buy all of the most-needed items right on the spot. And, of course, Willow Lawn is easily accessible from most parts of town via GRTC’s bus network.

AROUND THE REGION

The Henrico CitIzen has a good piece looking back on the past year of newly expanded bus service in Henrico County. Rider stories support what we already know from the data: Adding nights and weekends to Henrico’s major routes made public transportation more useful to more people. Here’s one rider talking about Route #91: “And what’s worse, people who perhaps did not have the means for a car and live out here along [the Laburnum] corridor in particular couldn’t take jobs that required shift work.”

Two other things to note:

1. While ridership on Route #79 (which runs by Regency) has decreased, a proposed mixed-used development in the area will ultimately drive a lot of bus ridership. Henrico’s assistant director of Public Works says “We know there’s more development coming in that area that will help make that route more successful, so we have the route in place anticipating that development.” Smart. Also, looking into the future a bit, when the Pulse gets extended further west, the Regency area will need a frequent route connecting it, via Parham Road, to Broad Street. With VCU buying a 234,000-square-foot building out that way and the County hinting at denser development around the intersection, there is a possibility we could see westward Pulse expansion in the not-too-distant future.
2. One of the major complication with extending public transportation into a county dominated by decades of suburban landuse patterns is the lack of safe ways to walk to that improved bus service. Currently, it’s incredibly unsafe to cross Broad Street in the western parts of Henrico County, and it’s disappointing to read that VDOT will only consider building elevated pedestrian bridges in that area because of the heavy car traffic. That kind of infrastructure sounds expensive and, unfortunately, unlikely. By doing nothing at all, though, the message to bus riders here is that their safety is less important than car drivers’ convenience.

ELSEWHERE

Two big transit success stories from across the country:

Today, Indianapolis will launch the Red Line, a 13-mile Bus Rapid Transit line with 10-minute headways and an all-electric bus fleet. Richmond’s BRT was the new hotness for the last year or so, but, there’s no doubt Indianapolis’s new system will now be all anyone’s talking about (well, anyone who spends time thinking and talking about cool transit infrastructure). Back in Richmond, we should ask ourselves what the next surprising, bold thing we could do as a mid-sized city with a lot of transportation momentum?

From Streetsblog: “Voters in Phoenix have soundly rejected a proposal that would have halted the expansion of the city’s light rail system—a proposition that had the backing of dark money linked to the notorious anti-transit Koch brothers.” Most transit referendums in recent memory, but not all (see Nashville), have passed in a big way, and it’s nice to see an anti-transit referendum fail similarly.

—Ross Catrow

This week in transit: GRTC hires a new CEO

AROUND THE REGION

Big bus news this past week: GRTC has hired Julie Timm as their new CEO. Timm most recently served as the Director of Development for Nashville’s transit agency and previously worked with nearby Hampton Roads Transit. It is, of course, an exciting time for public transportation in the Richmond Region, and it’s fantastic to hear that GRTC has found someone to lead them through their next stage of growth toward a frequent and far-reaching regional transit system. Timm will get started in Richmond at some point next month.

What kind of impact did Henrico adding nights and weekend service to their major bus lines have on ridership? Now that we’re deep into summer—almost a year after those changes—we can dig into ridership data and learn a few things. One thing that’s abundantly clear is that if you make transit more useful more folks will use it. Increasing the span of bus service allows all sorts of trips that were impossible before: Afternoon shifts, evening errands, Saturday jobs, and more. See if you can spot the point at which the county added more service to the #91 and #7A/B:

Greater Greater Washington’s new Virginia Correspondent, Wyatt Gordon, has a good look back at the last couple of years of transit progress in Richmond—it even features this familiar (and depressing) table of spending on public transit in Richmond and among our peer cities. We’ve got a lot of work to do if we want a truly frequent and far-reaching transit system for our entire region, but, dang, we’ve made some progress and have some momentum!

In the Richmond Times-Dispatch, Bill Lohmann has a story about Thyraellis Howard, a woman who commuted from the East End to Innsbrook to finish up her education—that’s a trip that takes a couple buses and a 2-mile bike ride. These sorts of stories are supposed to be heartwarming examples of resiliency, and they are, but they also point out the limitations of our existing transportation network. Trips from the East End, where tons of people live, to Innsbrook, where tons of jobs exist, shouldn’t be this hard.

Do you want to drive a bus? GRTC is hiring operators, and maybe that’s you?

ELSEWHERE

This story in the New York Times about segregation and highway-building in Atlanta almost exactly mirrors what played out in Richmond during the 1950s and 60s.

—Ross Catrow