Long-Awaited Bus Fixes Unveiled

After riding New Haven’s broken bus system for a month and interviewing 5,000 riders, state officials recommend new crosstown routes, transfer mini-hubs, bus-priority traffic lights, fewer stops, and express routes. A crowd Wednesday night weighed in.

About 40 New Haveners and local and state public transit officials heard about those new recommendations Wednesday night and weighed in on Phase 2 of a decade-old state Move New Haven transit study that now offers a roadmap for overhauling New Haven’s dysfunctional public bus system.

The meeting took place at a state-organized gathering in the basement meeting area of the Ives main library.

Lisa DiTaranti, the northeast director of transit and rail for the Wethersfield-based consulting firm VHB, walked the attendees through a detailed 28-slide presentation about how best to address the CTtransit New Haven bus system’s manifold delays, inefficiencies, needless complexities, and overall poor performance.

“It’s a big system that hasn’t really had a refresh in a long time,” DiTaranti said about the city’s public bus network. ​“There are so many opportunities to make this system better.”

Wednesday night’s presentation represented the culmination of over a decade of publicly-funded research into the city’s public transit system.

Click here to download the full presentation document.

What started out as a New Haven streetcar assessment in 2008 morphed into 2016’s ​“Move New Haven” transit study, a comprehensive review of the New Haven area’s 18 public bus lines, all owned by the state Department of Transportation (DOT).

Phase 1 of the ​“Move New Haven” study, a collaboration among the city, the state DOT, the Greater New Haven Transit District, the South Central Regional Council of Governments, and the Federal Transit Administration, resulted in the publication of a survey in late 2017 that confirmed what New Haven bus riders have known for years: The system is inefficient, inconsistent, incoherent, and all but broken.

On Wednesday night, DiTaranti presented the study’s Phase 2 findings: a suite of specific recommended improvements to the bus system based off of the data collected and analyzed in last year’s Phase 1 report.

The CTtransit New Haven bus system serves the Elm City and 19 surrounding towns, including North Haven, East Haven, Hamden, and Milford.

DiTaranti said that the Move New Haven team’s next steps are to come up with estimated costs and recommended implementation plans for these suggested improvements. She said in the next few weeks the group will hold another community engagement meeting to discuss how to go about making these recommendations a reality.

She explained that the Phase 2 recommendations are based not just on the data collected for Phase 1, but also on an origins and destination survey that her team conducted in April 2018. Every day that month she and her colleagues rode all of the city buses and spoke with 5,000 different passengers about where they got on, where they were getting off, how far they had to travel to catch the bus, and why they were commuting by bus at all.

Her colleagues discovered that:

• 60 percent of riders started and ended their bus commutes in New Haven.

• 43 percent of trips required at least one transfer.

• A majority of riders ended their trips in downtown New Haven or outside of the city. The CTtransit New Haven bus system serves the Elm City and 19 surrounding towns, including North Haven, East Haven, Hamden, and Milford.

• The majority of New Haven public bus trips took place on just four routes: the 243, which serves Whalley Avenue; the 265, which serves Congress Avenue; the 212, which serves Grand Avenue; and the 238, which serves Dixwell Avenue. Those are the very same lines that the Phase 1 study singled out as carrying the bulk of New Haven’s daily bus commuters.

Speed It Up

The Phase 2 proposed solutions, therefore, focus first and foremost on how best to improve the former B bus Whalley-Congress line and the former D bus Dixwell-Grand line.

“Because improvements on these four routes will benefit the greatest number of people soonest,” DiTaranti said.

She said the six recommended improvements all focus on treating the city’s bus system as a network of corridors, as opposed to its current layout as one downtown hub with various twisting, turning, convoluted spokes.

“We want to make this a modern system,” she said.

Her first recommendation: Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) Lite features. That translates to: faster service with fewer stops, frequent and reliable service with headways (or waiting times) of 10 to 15 minutes or less, and run times that extend from 5 a.m. to 1 a.m. every day.

“When you go to the bus stop,” she said about the city’s current system, ​“you’re not really 100 percent sure when your bus is gonna come.”

Imagine, she said, if all day long you knew with confidence that the bus was going to run every 10 minutes.

To get to that reality, she said, the bus system needs to allow for bus priority at intersections, accurate real-time information and user-friendly maps, faster fare payment mechanisms to reduce the time spent at any given stop, and smart technology buses that communicate with city traffic lights to encourage a light to stay or turn green when a bus is approaching.

Fewer Stops

Recommendation number two: Bus stop consolidation.

“We know that a quarter-mile is not really a burden” for most bus commuters, she said about the ideal distance between bus stops.

But for the four mostly heavily trafficked routes in the city, she said, there are stops roughly every 700 feet.

She said she would recommend reducing the Grand Avenue bus’s current 115 stops to 73, the Dixwell Avenue’s current 96 stops to 66, the Whalley Avenue bus’s current 107 stops to 69, and the Congress Avenue bus’s current 106 stops to 71.

“We would only eliminate things based on common sense,” she said, focusing on underused stops and stops removed from important city landmarks and major institutions.

She said that every time a bus stops to pick up passengers is one, two, even three minutes added to a trip. Cutting 42 stops from the 212 Grand Avenue line could save 82 minutes for someone travelling from end to end, thereby freeing up buses to run the same lines more frequently.

Since 2012, she said, Providence, R.I., removed 1,000 bus stops, or 20 percent of the stops in the city’s entire public bus network, as a result of the city’s own public transit overhaul.

“And people love it,” she said. Even though there are bound to be some losers whenever a bus stop is removed, she said, targeted removal of underused stops could make the system dramatically more efficient and effective on its most trafficked routes.

Marion Sachdeva, a frequent rider of the Whalley Avenue line, said she hopes that Move New Haven and local and state transit officials embark on a serious education and community engagement plan before removing any bus stops, so that drivers and riders alike know where buses will no longer pick up.

“This isn’t happening tomorrow,” DiTaranti said. ​“This is happening maybe next year.” But in between now and then, she said, there will be plenty more public information sessions and community meetings about if, when, and where to remove bus stops.

Not Just The Green

Move New Haven’s third recommendation: Transit mini-hubs to supplement the current central hub on the downtown Green.

These mini-hubs would sit at the intersection of two or more well-trafficked bus routes, she said, and would allow passengers to transfer between lines without having to travel downtown first.

“Are there any crosstown buses now?” asked Dwight resident David Firestone.

“No,” DiTaranti replied. ​“Everything goes to the Green.”

She recommended four potential locations for different mini-hubs that would serve the four most popular bus routes:

• One in Westville at the intersection of Whalley Avenue and Blake Street, where the 243 splits into the 243A and the 243B

• One at Campbell Avenue and Main Street in downtown West Haven, where the 265 branches off into the 265B and intersects with the 271 bus.

• One at Grand Avenue and Ferry Street in Fair Haven, where the 212 branches into the 212W and the 212U and intersects with the 215 bus.

• One at Dixwell Avenue and Putnam Avenue in Hamden, where the 238 intersects with the 237.

While praising Move New Haven’s recommendations, New Haven Urban Design League President Anstress Farwell urged that any changes to the bus system should not remove the hub at the downtown Green altogether.

“The Green truly is an important transportation hub,” she said, considering its proximity to the city’s business and cultural and political epicenter downtown.

DiTaranti said that the goal of the mini-hubs recommendation is to ensure that the bus transfers that happen at the Green are only the ones that truly need to take place downtown.

“Does every bus have to stop there all the time?” she asked. ​“Maybe not.”

She said that CTtransit might also want to look into moving the downtown hub from the Green potentially to a parking lot on Tower Lane, but that that move would require changing every single bus’s route.

Keep A Straight Line

Move New Haven’s fourth recommendation: Route simplification and restructuring. That is: Ensuring that frequently used lines are as straight, direct, and simple as possible, and are not weighed down by little-used, out-of-the-way deviations.

Both the Congress Avenue/Whalley Avenue and the Grand Avenue/Dixwell Avenue routes have 12 variations each, she said. And some of those variations have as few as 40 riders per day.

“We’re going to take that money and reinvest it in the most-used routes,” she said about eliminating little-used route variations like the 265’s segment from West Haven Center to Savin Rock and West Walk.

She said that one potential replacement for the little-used route variations would be an on-demand service, like what the Norwalk Transit District currently operates. She described such as a service as a combination of public transit and the popular ride-sharing service Uber.

Downtown resident Miriam Grossman said that eliminating bus route variations based on their current low frequency of usage is a little bit of a chicken-and-egg problem: A route may be seldom used because of infrequent service; that low ridership only drives less and less frequent buses.

That’s where on-demand service would come in, DiTaranti said. Because, she said, buses that run only a handful of times each day are not serving anyone well, even the few dozen people who still use those routes and have to plan their days around catching the few buses that do run.

“How can anyone plan their life around service frequency like that?” she asked.

Bus-Traffic Light Connection

Move New Haven’s fifth recommendation: Transit signal priority. By using traffic lanes prioritized for bus use and transponders that allow buses to communicate with nearby traffic lights, buses can get a head start at any given intersection instead of cars.

“This is not even new technology,” DiTaranti said about the bus-traffic signal transponders. She said they have been around for at least a decade, and are currently in use in New York City.

Hamden resident and New Haven Public Schools teacher Yasmin Amico asked about how separated bus lanes would work on a street like Dixwell Avenue, which already has bike lanes, parking spots, and frequent car traffic.

DiTaranti said that there is indeed enough space on Dixwell and other similar thoroughfares for a designated bus lane.

“And in the hierarchy of users,” she said, ​“maybe the car shouldn’t be king anymore. Maybe buses and bikes should go first, then cars should go third.”

She recommended four New Haven stretches as ripe for transit signal priority technology: Elm Street and Broadway between Howe Street and Temple Street, Chapel Street between Church Street and York Street, Grand Avenue between Olive Street and Ferry Street, and Congress Avenue between Cedar Street and Davenport Avenue.

Express Routes

The sixth and final Move New Haven recommendation, DiTaranti said, is frequent and diverse transit networks. Translated as: express bus routes.

“In New Haven,” she said, ​“every single route is a local route.” That doesn’t need to remain the case.

She said adding express lines to the city’s four most-used bus routes could reduce headways to 5 to 6 minutes each.

“The majority of people taking the bus now are not choice users,” DiTaranti said, meaning that most riders do not ride because they want to, but because they have no other transportation options.

With a modern, connected, frequent, diverse, reliable, and easy-to-use bus system, she said, she believes that people who may otherwise commute by car or Yale Shuttle may opt to take the public bus instead.

Hamden City Councilman Justin Farmer asked if Move New Haven is looking into how better to encourage students and staff at Yale, Southern Connecticut State University, the University of New Haven, Albertus Magnus College, and Gateway Community College to use the city’s public transit system.

State DOT Transit Manager Lisa Rivers said that earlier that day she received a call from a representative at Yale asking about the U‑Pass system, which provides free access to CTtransit buses and trains for students at participating schools.

“What we would like to do is make Yale not feel obliged to provide public buses,” DiTaranti said.

City transit chief Doug Hausladen reminded attendees that this year’s general election ballot includes two proposed constitutional amendments, including a transportation lockbox amendment that, if passed, would ensure that state dollars budgeted for transportation projects are actually used for transportation projects.

“How are we voting on that?” Hausladen asked across the room to local voting rights advocate Aaron Goode. Goode gave him a double thumbs up. A dedicated transportation lockbox, Hausladen said, could help pay for the capital and operational costs necessary to realize Move New Haven’s various recommendations.

“What if only one of these was done?” DiTaranti asked about the bus system recommendations. ​“What if all were done? What would that mean to New Haven?”

Learn more about Move New Haven and its upcoming public meetings at http://www.movenewhaven.com/

Click on the Facebook Live video below to watch Wednesday night’s public meeting.