Why You Should Care About the Bus (Even if You Never Ride It)
This article was originally published, in slightly different form, on Strong Towns member Will Gardner’s Substack, StrongHaven. It is shared here with permission. Images were provided by the author.
Do you ride the bus?
I recently documented my trips around my city of Fairhaven, Massachusetts, by mode of transportation. One thing that struck me about this data was that, while most under-3-mile trips can be covered on a bike, I’m still forced to drive for a couple of trips each week that are slightly longer (3-5 miles). That’s either because biking to these places takes a bit more time than I have or because the errand involves a kid (e.g. orthodontist appointments) and the Massachusetts DOT-designed roads to get there are not safe or comfortable for kids to bike on.
For anyone who can’t or doesn’t want to drive, transit is the logical transportation mode for trips of this length. In my region of Massachusetts, transit means the Southeastern Regional Transit Authority (SRTA) bus. I like taking buses when I travel to other cities and towns, but I’m somewhat embarrassed to admit that I’ve never ridden the bus here where I live. I’m not alone — I don’t know anyone in my immediate neighborhood who has ever taken the SRTA bus. The apparent reason for that is we all have cars and there aren’t any places we would want to go that we can’t get to quickly by driving. My neighbor Eddie remembers when the bus came through our neighborhood — he described some of the nearby routes and said it was normal for people to take the bus here well into the 1960s and '70s. That was when the rise in car ownership and the ascendency of the Suburban Experiment reached the point where both ridership and support for transit plunged. The bus, like the streetcar that preceded it, disappeared from our streets and out of the consciousness of many people in town.
I recently talked to a local guy who had hit hard times a few years back and lost his license due to his problems with alcohol. When he shared this story, he remarked, “There I was riding the bus every day; talk about humbling.” In my neighbor Eddie’s day, riding the bus was something middle and working-class people just did. Now, it’s seen by those same groups of people as a sign of low status or of having hit tough times. For many people, the bus is seen (if it’s seen at all) as last-resort transportation. And yet, as I bike around town, I see the buses and the people waiting at stops to get on them.
A controversial General Motors ad run in Canada.
The Transit Field Trip
So, who rides the bus? I set aside my Saturday for a StrongHaven field trip to find out. I wanted to run a few errands in New Bedford, so I checked the SRTA schedule, figured out my nearest bus stop and set off walking from my home. Walking away from my house toward a destination beyond Fairhaven Center felt odd. I was wearing a backpack. No adult wears a backpack while walking in my neighborhood unless they are the rare bro into rucking it. It took me over 20 minutes to reach the bus stop. Crossing U.S. Route 6 to the stop required pressing a beg button and waiting a long time for a very short walk signal.
The bus stop here is just a sign. There is no bench or even any indication of where you should wait. Waiting on the sidewalk meant being perilously close to fast-moving cars accelerating to catch the light. If you think I’m being dramatic, consider that a woman died one stop from here two years ago. The pickup that hit her jumped the curb and killed her while she was waiting for the bus. I opted to stand in the yard next to the sidewalk.
MassDOT: Pedestrians are annoying.
While SRTA does have its own app, I couldn’t get it to work (could be my ancient phone). Thankfully the Transit app is very useable and gave me an accurate arrival time for the bus I was waiting for.
The bus arrived on time. I didn’t pay a fare because all SRTA buses are free as part of their “Try Transit” program running through June 2025. This is great for the budgets of all the people who rely on the bus for transportation. In addition, it makes boarding easy and keeps the routes on time, as no one is fumbling for their fare and the driver doesn’t have to monitor payments. The bus was clean, warm and comfortable. There were six other passengers on the bus, including two young kids. Five more people joined the route, including a young teenager and a few older men from a senior housing community. Our group was a mix of men and women, ethnicities and ages. Some appeared to be heading out to run errands or grab lunch; others seemed to be returning from work. I’m guessing I was the only one riding the bus out of curiosity and to document the experience, but I could be wrong! It was a diverse group of people. The only generalization I can make is that all of them were, at least that day, nondrivers for whatever reason.
The Market Basket stop is the most happening stop on the route. Lots of people off and on and there’s a great bus shelter there for everyone to wait. The ride from Market Basket to downtown along the industrial hinterlands of the Hicks Logan district was fast and uneventful.
The Market Basket stop (SRTA).
The downtown SRTA terminal was pretty packed. This is a place that has a reputation for disorder — there was a nonfatal stabbing here last year, and the New Bedford Police Department has reported making quite a few arrests related to drug dealing, open containers and other crimes here. It didn’t seem at all disorderly when I was there (midday and later in the afternoon on a Saturday), and I felt perfectly safe and comfortable waiting for my bus later (which was good because the bus took forever). But I’m a middle-aged guy who rates high in “likes new people and experiences,” so my own sense of personal safety is probably not the best gauge. A couple of unhoused guys were shouting at each other across the bus lanes; it was just a conversation but nonetheless loud. Other than that, it was just a bunch of people waiting on their bus. Oh, and someone with a chihuahua puppy!
After spending a few hours running errands and grabbing lunch downtown, I came back to the terminal to catch my bus home. My scheduled bus never arrived, and judging by the comments of a few of my fellow riders, this was not the first time this happened. According to SRTA’s data, this route is late about 10% of the time, which is frequent enough to make it feel unreliable to anyone who needs to get to work on time every day. I had a book and time to kill, so I waited another 30 minutes for the next bus and rode home.
Cities Should Support Bus Travel
From what I saw on my field trip and from SRTA’s ridership data, it’s clear that the bus plays a vital role in ensuring that nondrivers are able to travel. As I’ve discussed in previous posts, nondrivers are a diverse group and include everyone from young people to seniors to veterans to people with disabilities to people who can’t or don’t want to pay the (on average) $8K-$12K a year to own and drive a car. Even if many of us never take the bus, we should support this mode of travel and the people who ride it. Bus riders are kids, older adults, service workers and parents — they deserve safe and reliable transportation. Giving workers the ability to take free transit to work in town means businesses have access to a larger workforce. More people on the bus means fewer people in single-occupancy cars, which reduces traffic and air pollution. Buses are good for communities.
What would it look like for our town (and every town) to increase support for the bus and the people who ride it? I’m not the expert here, and I’m sure the daily riders would have many ideas. But I’d have to imagine having actual shelters at bus stops, complete with route information and places to sit and get out of the rain and sun, would be a good start. Shorter headways and better reliability, both of which rely heavily on funding, would be a big help. Research suggests that people with other options won’t ride the bus if they have to wait more than 15 minutes to catch it. Additional hours (the bus no longer runs into the night in my city) and routes would help too.
And what about people like me who have cars and live in the nearby suburbs but would love to have transit as an option for some trips? It makes sense that SRTA wouldn’t prioritize the needs of people with other transportation options over those who rely on the bus. But what if there were a use case that could attract riders like me while improving service for those folks who are dependent on the bus?
Could we learn from places that, rather than relegating transit to being a service thought of as solely for the poor, attempted to elevate it to something that everyone would want to use at least occasionally? I’m not well-versed enough in all the tradeoffs of various transit schemes to proffer any robust solution, but I’d be interested in looking at ideas for this. As I try to envision better alternatives for urban highways than further stroadification, I keep coming back to what I’ve seen in places like Holland or, even closer to home, on the Green Line going out to Brookline, Massachusetts, where inner-ring and streetcar suburbs are well-served by transit, leading to tremendous liveability and economic vitality along the entire route.
Making Buses More Appealing
We’re a long way from having light rail down along the Route 6 corridor (a guy can dream). Still, it’s not insane to think we could have a zippy bus route that could reliably get you to many destinations as quickly as or even faster than driving a car. While dedicated bus lanes may not be feasible, we could at least have transit signal priority for buses, allowing them to have continuous green lights. In order to attract people who might otherwise drive, this line would need to have nice-looking and well-lit shelters that mimic those of light rail kiosks. It would need to have short enough headways that you wouldn’t need to check a schedule before heading to the stop. At the stop, there would need to be real-time displays of bus arrival times to reduce wait-time anxiety.
The Route 6 Rapid, as I’ll call it, is the use case that would address my own want (I won’t call it a need) for transit for 3-to-5-mile trips. It focuses on my personal preferences, but if it meets my (admittedly weird) preferences, I imagine there are many other people who would hop on such a bus. In implementing this new line, I wouldn’t want SRTA to take away or in any way diminish existing routes for its core ridership. But with its potential to attract new ridership, reduce congestion and spur economic development along its spine, this kind of new line might be a good pitch for local, state and federal funding. Rather than reducing the quality of service offered to lower-income folks, improvements like the ones I envision would enhance and elevate the bus experience for everyone. As the saying goes, programs for the poor often become poor programs. Perhaps if transit weren’t viewed as a last resort or a handout to the poor, more elected officials and people with pull at the state level would be motivated to invest in it beyond providing the most bare-bones service.
The Lifeblood for Better Land Use
The recent passage of the 40R zoning overlay here in Fairhaven creates the opportunity to develop additional mixed-use development along our side of the Route 6 corridor. However, allowing for a change in land use without paying attention to the transportation network that serves our town risks creating development patterns that do little more than update the veneer of the car-dependent plazas built in the age of the Suburban Experiment. Housing is much less affordable when it requires a working couple to pay $24K annually to maintain two cars so that they can each get to work. Maybe the Route 6 Rapid wouldn’t work, and maybe other routes would be more successful. The beauty of buses is that their routes are adaptable — the investment it would take to test the Route 6 Rapid is a drop in the bucket compared to the cost (currently pegged at $111 million) of widening Interstate 195, which is already underway.
If you have yet to try your local bus — hop on sometime! And consider sharing your perspective and dream route in the comments. We owe it to everyone who has no other option than transit to start paying attention to where our buses are going and how fast they get there.
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Will Gardner is an education consultant and the founder of Alma del Mar Charter Schools. He’s currently scheming about how to improve his town, but he’s happy to help you with whatever you’re working on. You can find him at StrongHaven.substack.com.
