Waiting For Transit

"Service frequency determines the average wait time for transit, and thus much of the overall travel time for a trip"

Q: Reallly? People spend that much time waiting for transit? 

A: Not average trip time, average wait time. Wait time, however, is a substantial portion of many transit trips, and the part of the trip people hate worst. The lit says that riders treat a minute of wait as the same as multiple minutes of in vehicle time. Many UTA buses (especially in Utah County) run at 20, 30 or 60 minute headways. Once you include the amount of time you have to wait when the bus is late, this can mean substantial waits. Given that people choose transit based largely on its time competitiveness to the automobile, this is a significant issue. It's most significant for short trips.  TRAX is frequent and (generally) reliable,. A 10 mile bus journey on a local bus is pretty miserable. WFRC likes to use 5-10 minutes for the wait, but I don't that that effectively reflects how miserable the experience is. It assumes people know where the bus stop is, how long it will take to walk there, and how long the wait will be. That is valid if you are taking the bus to work, once per day, but doesn't reflect the experience of using the bus for general transportation. The longer the headway, the higher the time-cost of missing a bus, so the more likely you are to leave your current location early to make sure your make it. If you have to use an (unreliable) bus connection to make that connection (such as bus to FrontRunner), there is even more waiting, because you can't control if you arrive 10 minutes early or 2 minutes too late, so you have to be 25 minutes early to be guaranteed a connection. Hence, I prefer to assume random arrival, at 1/2 headway, for any bus. This becomes increasingly important as UTA moves away from the '1-seat ride' model and toward the more efficient 'transfer network'. 

Consistency Matters

I have friends who would never willingly ride a bus who will eagerly take a ride on TRAX. I cannot blame them. TRAX was the start of my love affair with Salt Lake City transit. The fundamental difference between TRAX and a bus is reliability--TRAX can keep a schedule. When I was commuting to the University of Utah from Sandy, I knew, to the minute, when TRAX left Sandy station and arrived at the University of Utah.

Much as I support buses, I cannot muster any love for them. Because I cannot trust a bus. By its very nature, a bus is an unreliable beast. No bus can keep a schedule, and the sheer uncertainty of that is maddening. Even when I rode a bus daily to work, I still found myself doing the 'bus bob', craning my neck down the street to look and see if the bus was coming yet. When the bus actually came varied by weather conditions, by time of day, and by individual driver. It was actually pleasing when a regular driver was consistently ten minutes late every day.  I knew exactly when I had to be at the stop and I no longer had to stand in the cold for ten minutes every morning, waiting for a bus that the schedule claimed had already arrived. 

The bus schedule was worse than useless. It only shows what time the bus is supposed to come, not when it actually will. It is possible and even likely to arrive ten minutes before the schedule time, and wait 20 minutes to catch a bus. But with 15 minute headways between buses or trains, there is only one chance to catch the right bus, so everyone is forced to be early, just to be sure. Thus, irregular arrival times vastly increasing their door to door travel time, to the enormous detriment of ridership.