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Riding the Bus By Meghna Chakrabarti  Listen to story (Real Audio)
The T reports that about 375 million people boarded its trolleys, commuter rail, and buses in the last financial year. Some of the largest ridership numbers are on the buses. WBUR's Meghna Chakrabarti boards the white and yellow vehicles to sample new commuters' opinions about the bus system, and what T officials say in response. TEXT OF OF STORY: [Interior bus sound sneaks up inside next paragraph] MEGHNA CHAKRABARTI: It's rush hour. Imagine, if you will, being inside a box. The box is very crowded. You can't move. The box is loud. It shakes. It smells. And you and the people sandwiched in on all sides have just paid a dollar twenty five each to be inside this box. [Bus sound: Ding. Announcement: "The next stop is?."] CHAKRABARTI: This box is an MBTA bus. [Bus sound: Ding. Announcement: "When riding MBTA buses, remember to exit through rear door..."] STEPHANIE PARISER: There are times when you literally cannot get off the bus, it's so packed. CHAKRABARTI: Stephanie Pariser's company moved to Roxbury, so she's riding the bus a lot more than she used to. PARISER: From the perspective of coming in the morning, there are days when the bus doesn't come at all. CHAKRABARTI: At all? PARISER: Or it will drive right by when it's full. CHAKRABARTI: And, Pariser says, the bus is full, a lot. The MBTA's own numbers show that 11 million more bus rides were taken this year than last. T officials say pump-weary commuters are boarding buses in droves, ditching SUVs that may cost more than $60 a tank to fill up, for a $40 monthly bus pass that gets them unlimited rides. [Bus sound: Ding. Announcement: "Stop requested."] [Bus sound fades out inside next paragraph] CHAKRABARTI: And, according to some riders, unlimited headaches. JOHN CADA: How rude the bus driver are, the dirtyness of the bus. The unreliable service, when they get the schedule, they don't go by the schedule. I hear it all. CHAKRABARTI: That's John Cada with the "T Riders Union," which is located around the corner from the bus depot at Dudley Square. And to all those complaints from new riders, his colleague Lee Matsueda says, this isn't anything new. LEE MATSUEDA: I think the experience that an every day rider has on the bus hasn't changed. There are more people on the bus, but the overall quality of transit, the crowding, the drivers, these things have continued and in some cases, people are calling in reports, it's escalating. CHAKRABARTI: This is the double-edged sword when it comes to the surge in bus ridership. More riders mean more revenue for the T, but they also means added strain on a transit system that, by the T's own assessment, already fails to meet service standards. In fact, the 2006 MBTA biannual service plan reveals that more than half of bus routes did not meet two or more of the T's four standards for service. In other words, the buses were chronically late, crowded, bunched together, or cost too much to run. [Sound of the MBTA Bus Operations Center] JIM FOLK: It's a really difficult situation. CHAKRABARTI: Jim Folk is the MBTA's director of operations and service development. He's in theT's one-year-old bus operations center, surrounded by flat panel displays projecting images of route maps, bus locations, and run-times. By the end of this year, Folk expects to install GPS units on every MBTA bus. The real-time data they receive, Folk says, allows the T to make faster, more effective, schedule adjustments. FOLK: We try to maybe make a route adjustment to attract more ridership. We may try to tweak the frequency to attract more riders. OK, what we want to do is provide safe, reliable customer service that we advertise. CHAKRABARTI: The problem, Folk says, is that every change they make has to be what the T calls, "revenue neutral". What does that mean for riders? Folk says, if the T adds a bus to one route, it has to remove one from another. FOLK: Yes, our hands are tied, but we try to make the best decision possible for the customer. CHAKRABARTI: But Folk says it's the system's $8 billion debt that ultimately limits how much they can improve bus service. [Street sounds] CHAKRABARTI: OK, so I am at the corner of Harvard and Beacon Streets, waiting for the #66, and it looks like at this time of day the bus is supposed to come about every 10 minutes. [Sound of passengers boarding the bus] ERIC FORNO: If they say it's going to be every 10 minutes, it should be every 10 minutes. CHAKRABARTI: Eric Forno is on his way home. The exhausted doctor, still in his scrubs, has just come off a 12-hour shift. FORNO: Not three buses that come together every 30 minutes. An average isn't good enough. CHAKRABARTI: Forno also fears another fare increase. He says once he finishes his medical fellowship, he's leaving Boston, and hoping to find work in a city where he can live downtown, own a car, and not have to depend on public transit. For now, both the MBTA general manager and the State Secretary of Transportation say no fare increase is imminent. That may be good for new bus riders. But the Jim Folk, the T's director of operations, says it's bad for the transit system. FOLK: We're actually looking at the additional revenue that we got from the increase in ridership in the last year, compared to the estimated fuel costs, and it's actually not even coming close to what we're paying for fuel. It's great to have the additional riders and we want more, but to offset the fuel, it's not doing it. CHAKRABARTI: Meaning, Folk says, buses may be full now, but he can't guarantee that the MBTA can provide increased service to match the record demand. For WBUR, I'm Meghna Chakrabarti.
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