Stacy Thompson is Executive Director at LivableStreets in Boston. In this episode, Stacy discusses how her advocacy organization has pushed municipalities in the Boston region to prioritize buses. In 2017, the first in a series of “pop-up” bus lane in the Boston neighborhood of Roslindale. This pilot took advantage of the street cleaning schedule to give buses a “red lane” on space that had previously been reserved for parking. The pilot was a success, and has the concept has taken off across the city. Stacy imparts best practices on rider engagement and tips on working with politicians to reclaim our streets for people.
Stacy Thompson is Executive Director at LivableStreets in Boston. In this episode, Stacy discusses how her advocacy organization has pushed municipalities in the Boston region to prioritize buses. In 2017, the first in a series of “pop-up” bus lane in the Boston neighborhood of Roslindale. This pilot took advantage of the street cleaning schedule to give buses a “red lane” on space that had previously been reserved for parking. The pilot was a success, and has the concept has taken off across the city. Stacy imparts best practices on rider engagement and tips on working with politicians to reclaim our streets for people.
“We’re going to double down on buses. They are the biggest opportunity we have for short-term improvements. We focused on our advocacy in the city of Boston -elevating their responsibility to turn over their streets to the bus.” - Stacy Thompson
Read the Getting Boston on Board report LivableStreets has produced.
See MBTA’s video about the Roslindale bus priority lane.
Click here for more information on the TransitCenter panel that Stacy has recently spoke on.
Disclaimer: Political views raised by guests on the podcast do not reflect the views of TransitCenter.
Music: “Comma” - Blue Dot Sessions
Hosted by Kapish Singla
Produced by TransitCenter
Please note that transcripts are generated by a combination of automated speech recognition software and human transcribers. There may be errors in the text.
Kapish: From TransitCenter, this is High Frequency. I'm Kapish Singla.
Kapish: [00:00:05] Bus systems in American cities have reached a state of crisis in recent years. Buses are getting bogged down in traffic, causing speeds and reliability to plummet. People who can afford it are switching to ride-hailing or buying cars, and the rest are stuck with deteriorating service. Fortunately, the conversation about buses is starting to change. Transit advocates across the country have been connecting bus improvements to larger themes of access, sustainability, and equity. These groups are also organizing bus riders into a force with political power. Stacy Thompson is Executive Director of the LivableStreets, an advocacy group in Boston, that has successfully pushed the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority, or MBTA, to make improvements to its long neglected bus system.
[00:00:56] Stacy, the bus system in Boston, like in many other American cities, has been in a downward spiral. Can you paint a picture of how that declining bus service in Boston is affecting residents?
Stacy: [00:01:08] Sure. I think that the declining bus system in Boston is more a symptom of a larger issue that is rooted in decades of neglect. But also a choice that we made in the 1950s to prioritize cars and automobiles. You know, our cities are ecosystems. And we can chalk up declining bus service to being stuck in traffic to a lack of frequency, a lack of reliability. But I think the bigger picture is that we haven't really allowed our transportation system to catch up with the 21st century livability of our cities.
Kapish: [00:01:48] Is there something specific to what's happening in Boston with its bus system?
Stacy: [00:01:55] Fun fact. Boston has the worst congestion in the country. And that doesn't just impact people driving in from the suburbs in their cars. It has had a real impact on the frequency and reliability of the bus system in Boston. Until recently, we hadn't put a single dedicated bus lane on our streets in Boston for more than a decade. And that meant that, you know, hundreds of thousands of people riding the bus every year were adding minutes and minutes and minutes to their trips. And over time, that meant that it just was not reliable or reasonable for folks to take the bus to get to work, to get to school.
Kapish: [00:02:32] And Stacy, how has your advocacy organization changed or contributed to the conversation about buses in Boston?
Stacy: [00:02:40] Well, I often say that LivableStreets is not a transportation advocacy organization--that we are an access and equity organization. And that what we do is we look at our largest shared public assets, which are our streets. Meaning that your city across the country--more than schools, more than libraries, more than public spaces--you own the streets. Half of that public space in Boston is street. So we have been focused on the streets for 15 years and said that this isn't about being a transportation geek. This is about the reality that folks in our city cannot get to where they need to go. LivableStreets said we're going to double down on buses. They're the biggest opportunity we have for short term improvements. We focused our advocacy on the city of Boston, elevating their responsibility to turn over their streets to the bus to make sure that our bus system was serving the people who pay for it.
Kapish: [00:03:34] And in 2018, LivableStreets produced a report called "Better Buses: Getting Boston On Board." Can you tell me what that report is about?
Stacy: [00:03:43] We wanted to put together a report that laid a clear roadmap for the most effective way to transform our bus system in the short term. And for the city of Boston--that was really focused on seven or so key corridors that could utilize key components of bus rapid transit, meaning putting down dedicated lanes, utilizing signal priority. A few key corridors serve 100,000 people every single day. And if we could make those handful of corridors more effective, we would essentially help one-fifth of the entire bus population.
Kapish: [00:04:25] And one of the successes of the report was that the city of Boston agreed to do these pop-up bus lanes. Logistically, what did that look like?
Stacy: [00:04:33] So logistically, we needed to demonstrate what was possible and show the community that, in fact, adding bus priority would not hurt anyone. So the city implemented two sort-of test pilots before making the Washington Street Bus Project permanent. The first one was what they called an operational test. So they utilized the street cleaning schedule where they knew that cars were already going to be sort of not parked in the area where we wanted to use the bus lane. They put cones down, put signs up, and just picked two Tuesdays where they tested the pilot to see if it would work. And then in the spring, the city implemented a month-long bus priority project, which again involved operational staff going out in the mornings, putting down orange cones, and allowing the bus to run along what is typically a space reserved for parking in the corridor.
[00:05:31] Coupled with that, the city of Boston worked with the Metropolitan Area Planning Council and LivableStreets to survey people along the corridor before and after the pilot to understand how successful it was. And I think this is one of the most important things any advocacy organization or city can do when you are piloting a project because perception is not the same as reality. And having data to back up people's experiences is really important. And then I think most interestingly is that the data showed that overall trips were improved by about 25 percent, meaning they became faster by by roughly 25 percent. But people perceived time savings that were much, much larger than that. So getting an extra 5 minutes back or extra 8 minutes back by some people was interpreted as 25 or 45 minutes. And so I think that that is also a true expression of the quality-of-life change. You know, I've also said that it is possible that for some people they did get personally 25 or 45 minutes back because they didn't have to get to the bus stop early in case there they had to wait a really long time. That it is possible that we are so focused on the actual minutes someone spends on a bus that we don't look at the full picture of that impact. All told, and when you combined those groups, the projects got a 94 percent approval rating. I often say what project in city government gets a 94 percent approval rating?
Kapish: [00:07:09] On that note of the rider experience and the surveys, I think one of the interesting things that you said, earlier, was just the perceived reality of improvements to people's lives. The data shows that maybe this route saved five minutes, but people were really feeling that it saved 20 to 30 minutes. Can you tell me a bit more on what you were just hearing from the real impact of what those extra minutes meant for people?
Kapish: [00:07:36] Interestingly, on Roslindale, the biggest impact we found were people who had children. My understanding is that morning is a difficult time and that children take up a lot of space and time and that getting them from point A to B and like making sure that they don't have to stop in the middle of it and take over their clothes and go to the bathroom, or that they even keep their shoes on their feet. And so much of the positive feedback we got was from parents who really appreciated that they could get to the bus stop and know that it was maybe only a three minute wait with their kid. And those little things are the difference between that parent getting in a car and dropping their kid off at daycare or that child getting on the bus and telling their parents they want to be a bus driver when they grow up. And so, again, we come back to, you know, it's great that we have a 25 percent time saving on this line. I prefer the more qualitative story of the children who are becoming bus enthusiasts because they're so excited to go to the bus every day. And it's such an enjoyable experience.
Kapish: [00:08:35] What do you think that LivableStreets can take credit for?
Stacy: [00:08:39] I think LivableStreets can take credit for a few things. We intentionally set out to change the conversation around buses. We spent a lot of time hosting events, talking to people, talking to press, letting them know that the bus was a good thing. We're excited about the progress we've made so far, but we have so much more room for growth, particularly at the municipal level. In addition to the bus lanes and signal priority--we need benches, we need bus shelters, we need safe crossings. We're seeing incremental progress. But the next phase is really convincing our state legislators to make those really critical investments and, you know, order a couple hundred more buses, build new bus facilities, and get us to the next level.
Kapish: [00:09:34] This conversation is part of the event's program at TransitCenter, a foundation that works to improve transit in cities across the US. For more information, visit transitcenter.org.