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T ridership up for 15th straight month
By adamg on Wed, 05/30/2012 - 1:30pm
The MBTA said April ridership was up 4.4% over April of last year, and that bus ridership topped 400,000 weekday rides for the first time ever. Officials credited the widespread use of smart-phone apps that let riders know when the next bus is coming, along with an inproving economy.
Green Line ridership led the subway lines with an 8.2% ridership increase.
T officials have factored in a possible ridership decrease starting July 1, when fares increase.
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Comments
Rider apps are the best
The apps are the best thing the T has done in my 20 years in Boston. No more rainy half hours waiting for the next bus. Now I leave home when the bus is 6 minutes away, and get to the stop with 2 minutes to spare, every time.
Agreed. I can adjust my
Agreed. I can adjust my route home if I think I won't make the bus connection.
However, I hate it when they will say bus coming in 10 minutes and then immediately change to 2 minutes. Doesn't happen often though.
Or the opposite
Or when it says the bus is coming in 5 minutes for about 10 minutes. Thankfully that doesn't happen very often either.
NextBus
If you use nextbus.com, some estimated wait times have * next to them. This means the bus has not left its starting point yet. (or may not even be at the station). Its just an 'estimated' time using information from the official schedule, not GPS tracked data. I'm not sure how the apps differentiate this, but next bus does.
The other issues is that I've noticed..
1. If the bus goes off route (i.e. a Detour) it will 'disappear' from the tracker. Then re-appear. Remember the calculations the tracker does is information based on the T. So if your bus goes off route, the tracker doesn't know what to do, so it just removes the prediction thinking the bus went out of service. (I think). It will come back to the tracker once its on route again (I've had to deal with this on the 112 because of the chelsea street bridge construction)
2. If your stop is closer than 4 minutes from the start or end point, it will always act funky. This is because there is a delay up to 1-2 minutes from when bus starts and the tracking system gets an update to display it to your app. Yes it takes a minute for it to register, do some stuff on the T's end, send it out in the feed from MassDOT, then to the app's server, then of course it has to do the calculation, then down to you via the app via your cell phone.
3. When the track says a time for much longer than the time itself (i.e. saying 2 minutes for 10 minutes or more). This can be because its using estimated information. OR the bus went off route OR on some busy routes, the tracker just can't keep up (the 111 is like this in the evening..) OR heck the bus is just stuck in traffic. I find it helpful to look at the map (nextbus.com offers maps) to actually see where the bus is.
4. On many bus routes with big headway's, the bus does not appear on the tracker until 20 minutes before it leaves. This is also true for late evening buses or buses that run only once an hour or more.
5. With that said there are some differences between the apps and how accurate it displays the time. Remember the T just provides the raw location data and schedules. Its up to the apps to do the calculation for accuracy and how to display it. I use NextBus.com because I have a crappy Windows phone, and the few apps there are for my phone, are not as accurate as NextBus.
6. One other thing to note... Bus Drivers do not have the ability to turn on or off the tracker. It just does it. My guess is, either when the driver enters in the route ID into the farebox or changes the sign, it tells whatever at the T that its now in route (this is why infill buses on popular routes appear on the tracker)
No, I don't work for the T. I was a beta tester on the initial trial, and was already familiar with the technology (after being out in SF a while), and I bug T driver friends I know, and read a ton. :)
Apps and NextBus
They all use the same NextBus-provided XML API and NextBus publishes their predictions (3 minutes, 10 minutes, etc) through that API. So any of the apps can give the same predictions that NextBus does. Or they can try to develop their own algorithm based on position data. But NextBus is the source for that too, so they may as well use its prediction service.
"Officials credited the
"Officials credited the widespread use of smart-phone apps that let riders know when the next bus is coming," which is a nice way of saying that the buses don't ever run on time but at least now you can have a clue about when it's showing up.
Yup because they don't need to be.
Seriously. I was out in San Francisco in 2002ish visiting some friends, and wanted to go somewhere. I asked them where to find schedules for the bus, and my friends looked at me like I had three heads, and then showed me nextbus.com
In San Francisco where this technology has been used for about 12 years (yes really!), they pretty much stopped printing schedules (you have to go to certain stations to get them). And the schedules are useless anyways, they just say like "every 10-15 minutes". This is because everyone uses NextBus. The stations and major bus stops all have countdown clocks (so even if you don't have a cell phone, you can use nextbus too)
This is because what is "on time". If you solely rely on NextBus, you don't know what the 'scheduled' time the bus is suppose to be at your stop, except that it it arrives 'around' a usual time everyday. Give or take 5 minutes....
I lived near the initial pilot program for this. Once it started, I kinda stopped looking at schedules. I still don't. The only time they are helpful is if I need to be somewhere at a certain time or I wanna know a rough estimate in advance, so I can plan out my trip. NextBus tells me when I really need to be at the stop (so I can either hang out a little bit more or dart out the door).
Now if we can get the T to add Real Time Tracking for the Green Line. I often find myself avoiding the Green Line (if I can) just so I can use NextBus to track the T.
Exactly
It's silly to expect buses to run on time to the minute when they have to deal with traffic, not to mention people who take forever to load up their Charlie cards, people who have to ask the driver a million questions before they get off the bus, etc.
Sometimes I'll be waiting at a stop with an elderly person and I'll be like "Don't worry -- it'll be here in one minute." Then when the bus comes a minute later they think I'm a fucking wizard or something.
FUZZY MATH
I don't mean to be a debby downer but the parking lots are half empty and the mass exodus of college students started last month coupled with the bad economy and empty commuter rail cars should mean less ridership. On the other hand give that person a raise who came up with these numbers he or she has a great future.
You kind of do mean to be a downer
For one thing, the stats are for April so most college students were still around. And the data is comparing ridership to April of last year, not the previous month.
Do you pass by every parking lot and ride every commuter rail train? Is the economy worse than it was a year ago?
I'm not putting it past the T to juke the stats to make them look better, but I'll take their methodology over your very limited personal observations.
What train/station are THEY visiting?
I would LOVE to see what trains and stations this dear anon is basing his/her conclusions on. Because I've started getting to the office at 7:15am to avoid the massive crowds that have taken over the peak hour transit times over the last three years.
Yeah.
This is a bit off topic on a thread about the T, but not totally because of the accusation about the "bad" economy.
The T is seeing record ridership, and the traffic around here is worse than I can ever remember, particularly on 128, including during the boom times of the late '90s (which, of course, was also pre-Big Dig).
So my question is, if the economy is so damned bad (as even the local msm loves to tell us), where the hell are all of these people going during rush hour(s) everyday, and why are they driving around so much at $3.XX/gal?
Mixed-up
Contrary to suburban opinion, the vast majority of riders walk to T stations. Commuter rail parking lots are overbuilt and have always been "half empty" by and large.
According to these stats, Commuter rail ridership decreased from 134 to 130 thousand trips from Apr 2011-Apr 2012. So that is true. However, the vast majority of folks use the bus or rapid transit, and those went up.
Apr 2011 -> Apr 2012
bus: 393 -> 414 thousand trips
subway: 528 -> 549 thousand trips
trolley: 242 -> 262 thousand trips
Commuter rail is, as usual, massively underperforming. But that can probably be chalked up to its general crumminess.
catchthebus
I use the CatchTheBus android app, and at least on the routes I use the most, it has always been accurate within a minute. MAybe it's just luck. Does CatchTheBus use the same software as nextbus?
The apps all use NextBus
They are front ends for the data NextBus provides, which is just a front end for the data provided by the MBTA and other transit agencies. My experience has been that accuracy is quite high for mid-route locations, less good at or near the point of origin. If a bus is sitting at Forest Hills, NextBus uses the schedule rather than GPS data. If that bus leaves late, NextBus won't know this until after it is moving and has hit a stop or two.