Bikes and Buses, Part 1: Bike Racks

If you travel by bike and bus, you know what it means to “get bumped.” That’s what happens when you’re waiting at the bus stop with everybody else, the bus arrives with a full bike rack, and everybody gets on board but you. You are left standing there with your bike waiting for the next bus or wishing you’d just ridden home to begin with.

This doesn’t happen to me as much as it used to, thanks to Community Transit’s policy to allow bikes inside the bus if it is not too crowded. In the past week I have had my bike both inside and outside of buses. It is not as care-free to hold your bike inside a bus as to have it in a rack, but it is far better than wondering if you’re going to get to work in the morning.

If you’d like to see how easy it is to use a bike rack, the fun way, see this bike rack rap.  Most of Community Transit’s racks work just like this (without the dancing).

Community Transit has had bike racks on all of our buses since 1996, and people have grown to rely upon them. Passengers with bikes make up about 1.3 percent of our boardings overall, but some routes have much higher usage.

• We had six bikes on a Swift bus recently out of 34 passengers.
• Routes 201/202 and Route 275 had 4.5 percent of customers board with bikes in April.
• My former Route 207 had 9 percent of boardings with bikes that month.

Starting in 2005, Community Transit put 3-bike racks (the Trilogy model) on 24 new articulated commuter buses. Prepared to outfit our entire fleet, we purchased our first 12 VeloPorter 3 racks in 2008.

Transit Advertising Helps with Bottom Line

Community Transit’s Swift bus rapid transit vehicles are intentionally different from the rest of our fleet. They are longer than most buses (62 vs. 60 feet), quieter because they are hybrid electric and they have a unique graphic design.

That carefully-crafted look changed a little this month with the advent of advertising on Swift. We kept Swift vehicles free of ads for the first six months to help people recognize our new service. That moratorium is over, and 10 of 15 Swift buses are available for advertising, both outside and in. So far, Titan Outdoor has placed ads on four Swift buses.

Titan just won Community Transit’s bus ad contract this spring.  They are excited about reaching new markets in Snohomish County, and we are hopeful of increasing the revenue we get to help support our service. Ads on Swift buses will be very targeted, for instance, since Swift travels the Highway 99 corridor from 5 a.m. to midnight six days a week. With more than 75,000 residents and 30,000 jobs with 1/4 mile of Highway 99, that’s a good place to be.

Our Double Tall buses, expected to hit the streets this fall, will also become rolling billboards. They provide extra value to advertisers because they provide an especially large canvas, so to speak, and those images will roll through Seattle and up and down I-5 easily seen above traffic.

Bus advertising done right can be very striking and memorable. I especially like ads designed specifically for their application on transit vehicles – like the one that showed a smoker’s mouth positioned around the bus tailpipe. A more pleasant image was the “Lifesaver bus” on articulated coaches. Someone on Facebook recently recalled Community Transit’s blue Orca Run bus that served Tulalip as part of a Route 222 promotion in 2003. Those community-themed bus wraps wore out years ago, but they were fun while they lasted.

Bottom line – we’re hoping transit advertising can make a difference in our bottom line, as it does for other agencies. With these new additions to our fleet on top of existing ad opportunities, our contract with Titan could provide us with an estimated $2.4 million in revenue over the next three years.

Facebook community pages confuse Community Transit community. Confused?

Fans of our page on Facebook may have noticed other Community Transit-ish pages pop up within the past couple of months. It's not just Community Transit -- businesses from Coca-Cola to colleges face these new doppelgangers on the social networking site.

Back in April, Facebook launched a new "community page" structure. Now, when a user's info section lists an employer, a favorite band, or even a general activity like hiking, these listings link to separate community pages for each topic. These community pages draw their information from Wikipedia, as well as what other Facebook users are saying about that specific topic. So in addition to our official Facebook page, there are now two of these community pages listed for Community Transit. We didn't create and don't operate these other pages, which causes some confusion for our audience.

We created our Facebook page in October 2008, to connect with our customers and share information with them. Unfortunately, these new community pages don't offer any interaction opportunities for the brands they appear to represent. Just like here on our blog, our official Facebook page has a comment policy to ensure that posts follow basic civility. But many posts that show up on these community pages don't fit our official page's please-keep-it-nice policy, and we can't moderate because we don't own these pages.

Other organizations are experiencing the same frustration over community pages diluting their presence on Facebook and confusing their fans. Facebook indicates that their eventual goal is to merge these community pages with "official" pages, but to date we haven't seen that happen with ours. As of July 2, Facebook finally added some fine print to the bottom of the community pages that reads "Community Pages are not affiliated with, or endorsed by, anyone associated with the topic."

What we'd like you to know:

If you're interested in connecting with us on Facebook, we're featured at www.facebook.com/communitytransit. If you're not sure which page you're on, check the URL or look for our info box on the left side that welcomes you to the official Community Transit page on Facebook.

Community Transit doesn't endorse or operate any other pages on Facebook.

Just a tip on personal Facebook use: take a minute to review your privacy settings -- allowing "everyone" to see your status updates and wall posts means that what you post on your own profile (or to your friends) could be featured on any community page without your knowledge. If you don't want that to happen, keep your settings on "friends only," at a minimum.

Where's Oxy Gene?

By Kristin Kinnamon

Community Transit’s super hero Oxy Gene has been a fixture at summer parades and festivals for the past decade. With his trademark greeting of “Hello, good people,” he’s been an ambassador for “truth, justice and really clean air.”

However, no Sunday service also means no Sunday or holiday parades or events for Oxy Gene. On other days of the week, Oxy will still represent Community Transit, but there will be no buses in his entourage due to the expense.

There is a silver lining for Oxy Gene, who usually marches in at least two parades on the Fourth of July. “Isn’t that the first time in 10 years you’ve had a hot dog without your suit on? “ his supermom asked.

Oxy Gene will manage to keep busy this summer teaching day camp kids how to ride the bus, participating in a Mill Creek kids fun run to raise money for Haitian relief (Aug. 14) and, of course, being a judge at the Taste of Edmonds. “It’s glove-lickin’ good,” he said of the food there.

Where else might you find Oxy this summer?

July 27 – Edmonds Night Out Against Crime

August 3 – National Night Out Against Crime, Mukilteo YMCA and McCollum Park

August 13 – Taste of Edmonds (noon tasting)

August 28 - Monroe Fair Days Parade

September 11– Mukilteo Lighthouse Festival Parade

Downtown Seattle bus bay changes at Lynnwood Transit Center

One of the fallouts from the June 13 service change was confusion at Lynnwood Transit Center’s Bay D5.

Six different bus routes were scheduled to leave that same bay to downtown Seattle each morning. As you can imagine, some of the those buses arrived at nearly the same time and customers were inventively forming various queues to catch a particular bus.

After several days of observation and receiving comments from riders, we’ve made an adjustment that will improve customer loading and bus flow. These changes go into effect on Tuesday, July 6.

• Community Transit Routes 401, 402 and 422, all of which travel to downtown Seattle from the north end via Stewart and 2nd, will continue to depart from Bay D5.

• Community Transit Routes 421 and 425, which travel to downtown Seattle from the south end via Cherry and 4th, will depart from Bay D4.

• Sound Transit Route 511, which travels to downtown Seattle from the north end via Stewart and 5th, will depart from Bay D2.

• All routes will serve their new bay assignments in both the southbound and northbound directions.

Information about the changes is available at the bus bays and on the Community Transit website. Also, staff will be at LTC Tuesday morning to help people adjust to the new bay assignments.

This change means that our newly printed Bus Plus books will be incorrect for these routes at these bays. But it was decided that improving the customer experience was the higher priority. Besides, minor changes are often made between service change cycles which deviate from Bus Plus language. Which is why we now tell our customers that the best, most-up-to-date information can be found on our website.

By the way, riders to and from Lynnwood now have more options because of the service change. Several routes (Routes 421, 422 and 425) from north Snohomish County now make stops at LTC on their way to and from downtown Seattle, meaning there are more buses to choose from between Lynnwood and Seattle. Now that we’ve got the bay issue worked out, we hope more riders will learn to take advantage of this benefit.

Moving Beyond June Service Changes

Last week was not a celebratory time at Community Transit. We said goodbye to about two dozen co-workers who were laid off – a lower number than we’d feared thanks to others who retired early or made other choices. We’ve now had no service on Sundays for two weeks, and we know how hard that is and will be for many or our riders.

We did successfully implement one of the largest service changes in our 34-year history. “Success” in this case means that most riders were aware of our changes and many have been adjusting to new routes and service this past week. Community Transit employees in all departments made a tremendous effort to help our customers through this transition.

Already we are looking ahead (I do not say looking forward) to our next service change in February 2011. We planned this round of service reductions to avoid future ones, and that appears to be holding true. Still, we don’t expect to be able to restore service at that time. If you’ve following any of the financial news, you know that things are not yet looking up for our economy in general, for Washington state transit funded by sales tax (like us), or for new funding from the state or federal government.

Is the bus on time?

We publish schedules for our bus routes that list what time the bus will be at select stops along the route – these scheduled stops are called “timepoints.” Most timepoints are at park & rides or major connecting points to assist people in planning and in making transfers between buses.

We also post schedules at every Community Transit bus stop. Unless the stop is also a “timepoint” the posted time is only an estimate. Route 113 between Mukilteo and Lynnwood, for instance, has 51 northbound bus stops but only seven scheduled timepoints. All the other posted stop times are estimates. To plan a trip, you look at the timepoint before your stop and figure the bus will be at successive stops sometime soon after.

Nobody likes to wait for a bus very long, and it’s even worse if the bus comes early and you miss it. Experienced bus drivers know what parts of the route they tend to run ahead on (and thus they may drive a bit more slowly), and where they tend to run behind (but know they’ll catch up later). If a bus arrives early at a scheduled timepoint, it will pause at that stop until it is officially time to go. That usually blocks a lane of traffic for a few seconds and makes passengers wonder what’s up.

The bottom line is, getting bus schedules right is important. Community Transit regularly tracks the on-time performance of our system as a whole. In May, 93 percent of trips surveyed departed on time. When you consider the vagaries of rain squalls, traffic jams and even the extra time of having lots of passengers board and deboard, that’s not bad. We also have occasional delays due to mechanical breakdowns, passenger or driver illness and construction reroutes.

Last week Community Transit Service Planners asked for my help checking the on-time performance of Routes 105/106, Routes 115/116 and Routes 201/202. I spent four hours at Ash Way Park & Ride in Lynnwood watching buses come and go while also answering customer questions, handing out the new Bus Plus book and learning about transit scheduling from the agency perspective (I already experience our scheduling as a passenger on a weekly basis). I wrote down exactly when buses arrived and departed so that Service Planning can assess whether their route schedules are accurate. Some of the buses I timed started their routes more than 20 miles away in Arlington. We had staff checking the times all along the way – such extensive surveys happen only a few times each year.

We only change bus schedules twice a year, so the public won’t see results of this test until next February (though internal driver departure times and non-timepoint scheduling could change before then). It takes many months to consider changes, test timings and synchronize the schedules in time for sharing with transit partners, coordinating bus and driver needs and publishing Bus Plus books.

Right now we use a combination of sophisticated software and low-tech manual timing surveys and bus driver reports to develop and refine bus schedules. Sometime next year we hope to launch a real-time information system that will make the art of bus scheduling a bit more of a science. No matter what, whether the bus is on time or not will always depend most upon people – the ones inside the bus driving or riding, and the ones outside the bus setting traffic signals, making public policies or causing traffic.