A Faster Transit System is a More Equitable System!

Frequent Service is Most Important to Ridership

An October 2022 Circulate San Diego report, “Fast Bus! How San Diego Can Make Progress by Speeding Up the Bus,” identifies bus riders as essential people as hospital workers, grocery store employees, janitors, social services workers, maids, students, retirees, and much more. They are disproportionately people of color and low-income. These valuable members of our community often rely on bus trips that take far longer than they would in a car, but less expensive than owning, insuring, and fueling a car.

In the 2015, San Diego Community Survey Data report, by our Metropolitan Transportation System (MTS), citizens responded with “Service Not Frequent Enough” as the biggest challenge to using transit (“Takes too Long” was #2), and “Not Enough Parking” as the least challenging issue (“Too expensive” was #2).

Campaigns from transit advocates across the county agree that fast, reliable service is, “a matter of racial justice and transit equity.” ⁽¹⁾ The same holds true for San Diego as MTS riders are disproportionately people of color and low-income. ⁽²⁾ Fast, reliable buses are critical to riders’ ability to access jobs, schools, and services. And transit works best for riders between home, work, schools, and regional destinations, such as downtowns, waterfronts, airports/rail stations, hospitals, and regional-scale recreational parks. This is due to the longer amount of time spent at each destination, as transit is not effective for short trips such as shopping.

And speed is the most obvious factor in bus travel time, which is the time between each stop/destination. Increasing bus speed depends on allowing buses to bypass local traffic. Improvements that increase bus speed include:

– Bus-Only Lanes

– Transit-Signal Priority

– Freeway Bus Priority Lanes

[As an aside, the issue I have with SANDAG’s county-wide approach to transit is that it uses a one-size-fits-all focus on transit. North County suburbia, with it being mostly built over the past 60 years, is not the same as urbanized San Diego and South Bay, which has been mostly built over the past 120 years. To get our transit funding passed, they must know how to use different mobility tools in different contexts.]

Dedicated bus lanes, in place of on-street parking or a travel lane is a fair trade in the building an equitable civilization… despite our nation voting yesterday to going back to a less civilized time.