(Unedited) Podcast Transcript 418: Get on the Fast Bus!
This week we’re joined by Colin Parent, Executive Director of Circulate San Diego, to talk about their new report Fast Bus! How San Diego Can Make Progress by Speeding Up the Bus. We chat about some of the big things happening in San Diego and how the region can promote and support buses.
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A full unedited AI generated transcript can be found below:
Jeff Wood (2m 7s):
Colin Parent, Welcome back to the Talking Headways podcast.
Colin Parent (2m 26s):
Yeah, thanks very much for having me,
Jeff Wood (2m 27s):
Thanks, for being here. I mentioned before we started chatting, you know we, we talked back in May of 2019 on episode 233. A couple of things have happened since then I imagined. What have you been up to and how have you been?
Colin Parent (2m 38s):
Well, I’ve been fine. You know, 2020 was definitely a challenging year for me personally and for I think everyone. And it also definitely had some impacts to public transit, both in San Diego and nationwide. San Diego’s still seen a decline in transit, but I think we’re fortunate compared to some of our other peer metros that we’ve had a much faster return to, closer to full ridership than some of the other places, which is good.
Jeff Wood (3m 3s):
Yeah, that’s really great and I was surprised to read that, although I guess I shouldn’t be because San Diego’s always been a little bit above the curve in terms of a lot of things when it comes to transit. It’s been interesting to read about over the years, especially the trolley and the bus system and I love hearing about San Diego cuz I feel like there’s a lot of big ideas going on down there that are being considered that maybe other places aren’t trying. And so I feel like that’s really interesting. And also another just kind of, I looked it up last night cause I was interested in knowing, you know, San Diego is the 19th largest region in the United States, which it’s pretty close to the top and I don’t know if you all get enough attention for the amount of really cool things that are happening there.
Colin Parent (3m 36s):
Yeah, I mean we, we certainly feel that way. I mean I, I think sometimes, sometimes we feel left out when you see some sort of publication about like the, you know, the top X jurisdictions or that sort of stuff or some comparison of jurisdictions or regions on some things. Oftentimes San Diego will be left out and it’s, you know, obviously it’s frustrating to to locals, but beyond that it’s also, it’s, I think it reflects like what you’re saying, that there’s a sort of broader sort of misunderstanding or lack of perspective about San Diego’s size and comparison to some of these other places in the United States.
Jeff Wood (4m 8s):
Well, outside of the report we’re gonna talk about in a second, what are some of the big things that are happening in the San Diego region that you’re super interested or super excited about at the moment?
Colin Parent (4m 15s):
Yeah, I mean I think one thing that’s been a big set of conversations in the region is that we’ve had some reforms to the regional transportation agency, sandag, that’s our municipal planning organization, Circulate, my organization. We helped promote a bill that changed how the MPO is governed, basically changing it from a one jurisdiction, one vote model to a voting model that is more proportionate to population. And so now the voting system there is more closer to a one person, one vote model. That’s been very controversial because a lot of folks, there’s winners and losers in that kind of a change. But broadly it’s made the agency much more representative of the population and also much more transit friendly.
Colin Parent (5m 1s):
And so that’s all really great. On the other hand, one of the challenges with it is that we, the sort of the new leadership there and, and some of the things that they’re promoting are a little bit pie in the sky. There’s been a lot of promotion of, you know, things that people are claiming are high speed braille or hyperloops even just kind of, you know, really science fictiony stuff. And that’s not just with the projects that are being proposed, but also the funding mechanisms. There’s been a proposal to have a vehicle miles travel tax, which you know, might be good for a lot of climate perspectives, but in California those things have to be passed by the voters and there’s every indication that that’s not something that the voters would support. So it’s a real mixed bag of proposing a lot of great transit projects or proposing projects that aren’t gonna actually be able to be built and ever be able to be funded.
Colin Parent (5m 47s):
That’s actually not good. And one of the problems with that is that you’re taking a lot of these political energy, a lot of the bandwidth for decision makers and for the media and for advocates, you know, know moving into things that are really just kind of like a, it’s really a conversation about how many angels can dance on the head of a pin as opposed to being focused on the kinds of near term actionable policy changes that might actually improve people’s transit ridership abilities. And so it’s really, you know, a pro and con the changes that are happening in our regional transportation agency, definitely it’s a breath of fresh air. It’s better than it was before, so I don’t wanna over complain about it, but it’s not quite as transformative as maybe the press coming outta the agency I might be suggesting.
Jeff Wood (6m 28s):
Well it’s interesting as an outside observer and somebody who, who watches press pretty closely from around the country and the world, it’s interesting to see what comes out of the local newspapers and local weeklys and things like that about the topics that you just mentioned, especially related to that 160 billion transportation plan, the road pricing and, and how, you know, kind of contentious it got during the last election, those types of things. And so I I I find that really fascinating to hear your perspective on it after reading all of the news items on it over the last, you know, several years or so.
Colin Parent (6m 56s):
Yeah, and I’ll tell you Jeff, it’s been a bit of a challenge for us as an organization because, you know, we wanna celebrate this shift toward more transit. Like we’re for that, right? And we’re excited that the agency is talking about transit more so that’s good and we don’t wanna poo poo it too much, but it’s also true that, you know, I give you share you some of the numbers here, you know, that hundred 60 billion plan that they put together, its initial draft assumed that 60 billion of it was gonna come from a road usage charge. And they were also planning to have, you know, around 15 billion from a sales tax measure. And we have tried and failed to pass the sales tax measure a couple of times in San Diego. It’s actually, it is no small feat to get a sales tax measure done.
Colin Parent (7m 38s):
We still haven’t done one in, in over a decade. So that’s a big challenge. But then to also assume that we’re gonna have four times as much revenue from a new policy that is illegal to do currently and that every indication suggests that the voters are not supporting of it is really bordering on irresponsible and allows the agency to sort of say that they’re gonna build a bunch of transit projects that in fact they won’t. And that’s bad and it allows the agency and some decision makers to kind of sort of take their eye off the ball of the things that they could do in more immediate terms. And that’s a big concern and challenge for us and actually a big motivation for our report about how to make the bus go faster that we’ll talk about later because that’s the kind of thing that you actually could do with realistic and near-term revenue.
Jeff Wood (8m 26s):
Yeah, you know, it’s interesting going back to the MPO discussion. I mean it’s, it’s interesting to see how the change in makeup can actually change a discussion in a region. And maybe that pie and the sky stuff that might not have happened before happens now because of the change in leadership at the MPO level because of the way it’s structured. And I know that there’s been just talk around the country about MPO restructuring because of that one vote, one jurisdiction kind of model that actually permeates a lot of regions. And so I’ve actually found myself talking up San Diego’s change and you know, I think Jerry Brown signed it, when was that? It was like 20,
Colin Parent (8m 59s):
I think it was 2018.
Jeff Wood (9m 1s):
2018, yeah. Yeah. And so I just find that fascinating too that maybe, you know, you might actually go one way too far the other direction instead of maybe centering on things like the report we’re about to talk about that are important, like just basic fast bus service.
Colin Parent (9m 17s):
Well I would definitely encourage you to keep talking up the San Diego reform model, changing the voting structure of MPOs toward one person, one vote is absolutely the right thing to do. Putting aside for a second transit, putting aside for a second climate, it’s the right thing to do for democracy. It’s the right thing to do for fairness and for equity and for making sure that the decision makers are representative of the communities that they’re purporting to represent. So that is a hundred percent good, but it’s also true that just because you have a good voting structure and a good government system, that you gotta have the good policies too, and they don’t naturally automatically flow from the good system.
Colin Parent (9m 57s):
And so it’s important to have advocates and policy makers and thinkers coming up with good actionable policy that those good government structures can embrace and implement.
Jeff Wood (10m 8s):
So let’s talk about the bus. What’s the bus network like now in San Diego currently?
Colin Parent (10m 13s):
Yeah, so the bus network in San Diego is pretty robust. It is where the, the line share of the transit writers utilize our trolley is certainly more iconic in San Diego, but it does not represent most of the transit writers. And that’s pretty much true of just about everywhere, right. Maybe maybe the exception of New York, right? Like everywhere else, even, you know, places like LA where you’re, you’re building a lot of light rail and there is a heavy rail network, it’s still, most people are getting around on the bus. And in San Diego it’s the same way. Na trolley is great, we’ve got three lines, we had a recent extension, which is terrific. We’re gonna put out a report about that later this year and so maybe we can come back and talk to you about it. Definitely. But na trolley is terrific, but still the workhorse of the transit system is the bus and the core of the network still sort of follows sort of more traditional models where it, you know, picks people up from more near, near end, you know, trolley, car suburbs and, and brings them into downtown.
Colin Parent (11m 7s):
That’s still the, the core of it, but there’s some, some long haul buses and there’s also, I think, you know, somewhat different than some of the other regions. We have a fair amount of freeway buses. That network is actually expanded. And then about five years ago or so, the transit agency did a transit optimization plan, which is sort of a network redesign that’s that a lot of agencies have been doing. And that just sort of shifts some of the bus resources to greater frequencies along high desire routes and increase some frequency on those, you know, and also decreased some frequencies on some less popular routes. And, and they also made some other, you know, useful changes. Like they split up some of the long lines to make them into separate lines just to make sure that the reliability was improved.
Colin Parent (11m 50s):
But of course that came with some consequences because that meant that some people, people were gonna have to transfer or, or the frequency on part of their leg would decrease. But all in all at the agency I think was being, you know, thoughtful and, and trying to implement some of the best practices for a region and for transit.
Jeff Wood (12m 5s):
That 2019 optimization plan, was that impacted by the pandemic? I mean a lot of cities had plans in place or were funding, you know, major restructures, but the pandemic and the resulting reduction in funds before federal intervention kind of changed some calculus a little bit. Did that make some changes to the discussion about optimization plans and frequencies?
Colin Parent (12m 26s):
You know, San Diego has been compared to a lot of the other transit agencies, we’ve been relatively unscathed in that regard. I believe that there have been some modest frequency reductions based on that, but by and large the service schedules have maintained consistency and that is in large part due to the sort of federal bailout monies that came out from the CARES Act and, and from other things really created an important lifeline to make sure the trend that was able to keep operating. So that’s been good, but it’s definitely true that there is a bit, a bit of a fiscal cliff that we’re looking toward. Some of that money is going to run out and the agency may be forced to make some harder choices sometime in the next year or two.
Jeff Wood (13m 7s):
What are the characteristics of a typical bus rider in the region?
Colin Parent (13m 10s):
So in San Diego, our bus riders are, you know, predominantly low income. You know, we’re talking like 20,000 or less a year in income, substantially more people of color than the overall population. And I think somewhat unusual, maybe not unusual, but in a stronger degree in San Diego than other places, a lot more riders who are transit dependent than in other regions. And that is also part of why the San Diego region has had a stronger recovery in ridership because the folks who were riding transit before the pandemic, when the pandemic, you know, started to abate, they weren’t folks who were transitioning to working from home or were able to drive to their offices.
Colin Parent (13m 50s):
These are the bus riders and, and transit writers were at large, but especially bus riders were, you know, really did rely on the bus and needed the bus and continued to need the bus in order to get around to make things happen in their lives.
Jeff Wood (14m 2s):
I think one of your reports said 30 something percent of ridership is essential workers, something you all did during the pandemic, which I thought was a pretty good amount.
Colin Parent (14m 9s):
Yeah, absolutely. And we were being inspired by a similar report from Transit Center that had published a, a similar report about nationwide statistics and we reached out to them, they’ve been, they’ve been longtime partners of ours and we said, Hey, that’s a great report. We’d love to be able to do sort of a local version of that. And they were able to sort of carve out a little piece of their data from the San Diego region and we were able to quickly put that together with the help of one of our volunteers, a former grad student intern, and we were able to really useful show to people that transit continued to be an essential necessary lifeline even in the midst of the pandemic. So
Jeff Wood (14m 43s):
You put together this support fast bus, you know, you mentioned the transit center connection, but I’m wondering kind of what was the initial underlying reason for putting it together together? Like what was the impetus for thinking about reframing maybe some of the importance of the bus?
Colin Parent (14m 57s):
Yeah, well, I mean I think credit really definitely does go to transit center as well on this. I mean, we actually talked about reference them in our acknowledgements in the report. They’ve put out a number of big reports, sponsored campaigns and other regions about how to improve bus service and bus networks. Not just to improve them but to prioritize them, right? And so, so we were very much inspired by that, but part of it was also the reason why we sort of took that on as a priority for our organization is that we saw in San Diego the context that we were in with this new initiative around public transit coming from the mpo, this new desire to invest in our transit system.
Colin Parent (15m 39s):
We were being pretty troubled by this strong push from the MPO and from other advocates toward some of these sort of big far in the future rail projects that were being proposed. Not just proposed, but but being suggested that we would spend, you know, the lion’s share of our resources around them, that we would focus all of our attention and money toward them. And from our perspective, we were concerned that even though a lot of those things are good, we’re not against those things, but we were worried that that was happening at the expense of the attention and resources being made available for the core bus system.
Colin Parent (16m 23s):
And so we wanted to make sure that we could reinject some conversation in the region about not only why we need to invest in our bus network, but also that doing so would be a really great way to improve ridership and improve things for people who rely on transit.
Jeff Wood (16m 38s):
So the report’s been out since October. I’m curious what the conversation has been since you all released
Colin Parent (16m 43s):
It. Yeah, so it’s ongoing, you know, since October we haven’t seen like a dramatic redesign of the network and we haven’t seen the MPO just like change all their plans and, and all those things. And so, you know, so there’s that. But I do think what it has done, I think really effectively is gotten a lot of the other advocates, a lot of the other elected officials in the region to really start talking about the bus as something they want to see succeed as opposed to being some afterthought in their conversations around transportation or transit. And I think that’s really key to our idea of thought leadership and trying to get ideas out there in Ether. And so we’ve had, you know, very positive responses from board members in the transit agency, from staff members at those agencies and starting to see some sort of anecdotal ways you see people, you know, elected officials like tweeting about the bus, right?
Colin Parent (17m 31s):
Or or tweeting about why we need to have a bus only lane on some major corridor. And it’s, you know, it’s sort of small, like it’s not, you know, it’s hard to like sort of exactly scientifically measure it, but my sense is that like we just didn’t see any of that before, at least in San Diego. And that’s the kind of shift in thinking and approach that is a sort of prerequisite to getting the next steps about making big changes.
Jeff Wood (17m 53s):
Yeah, usually those little things matter. I mean, it’s interesting to think about, you know, maybe releasing a big report or having a big kind of blowout discussion about something, but then a lot of times it maybe fades away and, and so having, you know, those little tiny interactions that continue the discussion I think are super helpful.
Colin Parent (18m 10s):
Yeah, no, that’s right. And Jeff, let me just share too, one of the things that we chose to do this year as part of our strategic planning exercises as an organization is we, we put out a lot of reports, right? We put out a lot of policy letters, we put out a lot of, you know, work product. And one of the things that we chose to do this year or last year rather, was to really intentionally focus on putting out maybe fewer work products, but really trying to talk about them more and to get more people talking about them, do more podcasts, do more op-eds, do more interviews, do more presentations, really trying to push these ideas that we’ve spent so much time and energy crafting and developing and, and writing down and making sure they get out there as much as possible.
Colin Parent (18m 51s):
And so here we are six months after our publication and we’re here talking to you about this report on this podcast. And like for our purposes, that’s not late, that’s actually the point. We wanna have a big report out and have a long tail that we can come talk about it over and over and over again and get people to continue to reference and to refer back to
Jeff Wood (19m 9s):
The report makes several recommendations to speed up the bus, dedicated buson lanes, transit signal, priority frequency improvements, extended service hours, and family friendly fairs. Those are all great and I think that they’re really important, but what are the political difficulties in implementing that program and these improvements?
Colin Parent (19m 25s):
Yeah, I mean I think there, there’re, there’s severalfold. I mean, I mean one of the things about Buson Lanes is that if you ask the transit agency, they generally think, yeah, that’s great, you know, we’d love to do that. We want the bus to run faster, we want more riders, all those sorts of things. But it’s actually not the transit agency who gets to decide that, at least in, in San Diego, in just about any California jurisdiction. It’s the, the jurisdictions, you know, in which the buses run. They have to make those decisions about their own local rights away. And so it is a challenge for any mayor or city council or you know, transportation department to make those kinds of changes on their rights away. There’s neighbors who don’t like it, there’s businesses locally who don’t like it.
Colin Parent (20m 6s):
You know, people who commute on those areas sometimes don’t like it. And, and sometimes the cities just don’t feel like it’s important to them. Like they think their job is to keep the potholes filled and and do those other things. They’re, they’re transited someone else’s job. And so that, that is definitely a challenge. I think fortunately in San Diego we have a, a climate action plan that contemplates a higher mode share of transit. And so you have the mayor and the city council who really bought in the idea they have a role to play with making transit succeed. So we’ve had some successes getting some bus lanes planned for and, and adopted, I think with, with some of the other things about like, you know, family friendly fairs or free transfers, those sorts of things.
Colin Parent (20m 46s):
Those are things that we were able able to do s advocacy directly with at the transit agency, you know, and they’re, you know, sometimes they go along and sometimes they don’t. And sometimes it’s harder. I think some of the big challenges, of course are just around resources. If we wanna have family friendly fairs or free transfers, those sorts of things, those might come out of the bottom line of the transit agency’s revenues. And the challenge is to convince them that it’s gonna be worth it, both in terms of ridership and for fairness.
Jeff Wood (21m 10s):
Do y’all have similar problems that LA does in terms of crossing jurisdictions? LA is a big city obviously, but there’s a lot of different jurisdictions going through, you know, Hollywood, west Hollywood, going to Santa Monica, those places. There’s, there’s a lot of changes in jurisdiction when the road that LA Metro is trying to, you know, maybe turn into a bus rabbit transit route. You have to go through some of these very, very nimby enclaves. Do you have that problem in San Diego where you might have, you’re trying to build a bus rabbit transit line and you have one section might be finished and then there’s a section that’s not done because it’s in a different city.
Colin Parent (21m 43s):
You know, there’s some of that, but I don’t think it’s just pronounced in San Diego as it is in other places. I think, you know, in the city of San Diego that is large enough that it contains most of the high frequency, high demand bus routes. And so the city is able to make those choices on their own without having to secure the buy-in of, of the adjacent jurisdictions for the most part. But that’s not true for everywhere. So, you know, as, as I think, you know, I’m on the city council in La Mesa, which is a jurisdiction that’s about 10 miles east of downtown San Diego, and we share University Avenue in El Cajon Boulevard with the city of San Diego. There’s the two longest streets in the city of San Diego, and they’re the two longest streets in the city of La Mesa.
Colin Parent (22m 23s):
Right. And there are some bus routes that run across them just for a variety of reasons. We don’t, we don’t actually have those challenges between our jurisdictions in part because the, the bus routes that run on University Avenue in La Mesa, they actually, for the most part, switch over to another route in San Diego. And that’s true, that’s true on, on some other things. So, so there’s, there’s some of those coordination problems, but I don’t think they’re quite as severe as some of the places like Los Angeles for, for no particular reason. It’s just, it’s just, that’s just the way it’s,
Jeff Wood (22m 53s):
Yeah. A key frame you all use in the report is, is the amount of time it takes to get to a destination on, on transit versus driving. Why is that really important to talk about when you’re talking about the bus?
Colin Parent (23m 3s):
Yeah, so it’s, it’s really for, for a couple of reasons. I mean, one core reason is that people choose to ride transit, whether it’s the bus or the trolley or the subway or what have you, largely based on how long it takes to get from where they are to where they want to go. And that’s one of the key reasons that a lot of people choose to drive versus taking transit. And that’s not just me saying it, I’m not just saying like, that’s how people ought to make decisions. This is what a lot of survey data sets, we were able to point to survey data that Transit Center put out that national organization. They, they do a, a survey every few, every year or so. And it very consistently, the speed of travel is what Rio or potential writers consistently say is the most important factor for them about choosing whether or not to ride transit.
Colin Parent (23m 54s):
And additionally, mts the local transit agency in San Diego, they do done some similar surveys and they, and they find basically the same thing. And that it’s really just the, the time of travel, the amount of time that it takes to get from where they are to where they’re going. That’s really important. And so if we really want to be, if we want to take into account both the interests and the desires and the preferences of writers, which I think we ought to just from a purely equity perspective, we ought to listen to people who are writers. But in addition to that, if we want, if we have climate goals or revenue goals, ridership goals, all those other things, speed of of the trip has to be one of the top priorities for how we make decisions about where we invest in public transit.
Jeff Wood (24m 38s):
And so you can parlay that kind of into the discussion about frequency as well. I think basically if you want more speed, you also want more frequency, so you’re not waiting at a stop, I imagine.
Colin Parent (24m 46s):
Yeah, no, that’s exactly right. And so there’s a lot of different ways to make the bus go faster, right? Well we, we call the report fast bus, very simple, easy to understand, right. You know, but it’s not necessarily the, the goal, the goal isn’t necessarily to put like rocket engines on the back of the bus. Like that’s,
Jeff Wood (25m 2s):
That’s what I think when I saw the report title, I was like, right. And then some reference to Ricky Bobby as well.
Colin Parent (25m 9s):
Absolutely. Yeah, exactly. Right. Well, I guess, you know, if someone wants to invent the rocket bus, you know, I’m, I’m all ears, let’s let’s talk about it.
Jeff Wood (25m 17s):
But,
Colin Parent (25m 17s):
But, but the core idea is that, you know, actually the, the reality is that, you know, a regular bus can go pretty fast. The barriers to, to travel for someone’s, someone’s commute time is not science or, or design of the bus, right? It’s all these other things. It’s the how much traffic they’re stuck in, or as you say frequency, it’s like how much, how much time people have to wait. So if someone has to wait for 20 minutes to work to, to get to their bus, but the bus ride is only 15 minutes, well they’re not thinking of it as a 15 minute ride. They’re thinking of it as a 35 minute trip. So frequency is, is really not, is about reducing the amount of wait time so that their overall trip is lowered. And same thing with, and a bus only lane, you know, that lets the bus go faster, not because the bus is somehow like able to travel at a, you know, sort of not, not, not that it adds rockets to it, it’s that it can, it can, it can travel as fast as it’s actually designed to travel as opposed to being stuck in in traffic behind a bunch of other vehicles.
Jeff Wood (26m 15s):
You mentioned elected officials saying, you know, basically if, if we had bus lanes it would be, it would be much faster to, to ride this bus. Do you see kind of those discussions pop up more often? I mean you, you mentioned it previously, but I’m curious if people have started thinking about the buson lanes as a bigger solution rather than, you know, let’s widen the freeways.
Colin Parent (26m 36s):
Yeah, so we’re seeing that on a couple of important ways. So, so one is that sandag, the MPO in the region, you know, one thing about which we have zero criticisms is that they’re sort of abandoning their prior plans to add more general purpose lanes on freeways, which is great. Now they’re still talking about adding some extra right of way on freeways, but they’re talking about doing that only to create managed lanes that would prioritize transit service, bus service on those, on those highways. And that’s terrific and the agency is really making a big, a big push to do that and they deserve credit for, for making that, those kinds of efforts. You’re also seeing in the city of San Diego, especially around some of the community plan updates, which are sort of the neighborhood level land use and transportation planning documents they’re contemplating and including bus only facilities on the surface streets in those places as well as bike lanes and some other things.
Colin Parent (27m 34s):
And so they’re doing all those things and, and it’s been great and, and some, some of them are interesting where they like sort of, they choose to do that, but they’re actually not gonna build it for 10 years. So it’s interesting people make the hard political decision and then like fast forward 10 years and they actually build them and a lot of people are surprised that it’s happening, but that’s ok. You know, that’s good. At least, at least it’s happening. So that’s, that’s all for the good. I think one of the challenges to that though, one of the, one of the sort of remaining things that need to happen is a lot of those buson facilities are being planned and built in areas where it is relatively politically easy to do that. So for example, like El Cajon Boulevard, university Avenue, the two longest streets in the region that I referenced earlier, there, there’s been some facilities added to those, which is good.
Colin Parent (28m 19s):
But those are also areas where car traffic is actually decreased over the last decade or so and they’re really large. And so there’s plenty of room to do those. So, so it’s good to build those bus only facilities, but they also have fairly modest impact in terms of increasing bus speed where it would do the most good to provide bus only facilities or places in downtown places where there’s a lot of traffic places where the bus really does get tied up in car traffic. We haven’t seen quite as much interest and initiative in creating bus only facilities in those locations. Not zero, but not so much as, as we’d like, and I’ll give you just an example.
Colin Parent (28m 59s):
We, when we were doing our report, we did a little transit field trip and we got some, some advocates and, and and volunteers and community members together. And we got on a bus in downtown San Diego and took it up Park Boulevard, which is kind of a large boulevard in, in San Diego. And that Boulevard is one where the, the city of San Diego was planning to build some bus only lanes, right? Which is great, but it took us about five minutes for our whole party to board the bus at the bus station because there’s this big long line and there’s only one door that you’re allowed to board. And then it took us another five minutes to get like five blocks in downtown because there was a lot of traffic and there was a very limited bus only facility.
Colin Parent (29m 40s):
And then when we got onto Park Boulevard, then we were smooth, smooth sailing, you know, there was not a lot of traffic there and it was fine. Now would it be a little bit better if there was a bus only lane, I guess, but like, not much better. And so where you really needed the bus only lane was in the core parts of downtown where the bus had to contend with all these other challenges. But that’s not actually where the city is planning to build those facilities. So I don’t wanna, it’s good that the, the Bustle facilities are being built, but they’re, they’re still not being built in the, in the most advantageous places because those are also the places where it’s the most politically challenging.
Jeff Wood (30m 14s):
We’ve talked with companies like swiftly before who have, I should say also sponsored the podcast in the past, but basically, you know, they have a lot of data stuff that transit agencies use to figure out where the choke points are. And it’s interesting to look at some of their maps and look at, you know, you’re right, the, the lanes where they might be might not be the most important parts. It might be this one intersection that’s causing the most problem. So if you just fix that one intersection, it could do the same thing as a 300 million bus rabbit transit, you know, design and, and rebuild of a, of a whole corridor. And so that, that’s interesting to think about it from that perspective of, of where are the choke points and what are the, what are the most important parts of the plan because it could be that, that it might not be as as hard as you think it is.
Colin Parent (30m 55s):
Yeah, I think that’s right. And I think one of the things that’s not happening now that we want this report to help encourage to happen is that it’s not, I, I don’t think that the people in the planning department, the city of San Diego or the people in the transportation department and you know, San Diego or other jurisdictions are like getting up in the morning and thinking, how do we make the bus go faster? Like that’s not their, no one’s told them to do that, right? And yeah, they have some, some sort of ancillary goals around climate and ridership and those sorts of things, but they’re thinking about all these diverse, you know, goals and challenges they have. And what we’d like them to do is to really elevate this bus speed as, as a top priority so that they can choose to look at where those choke points are and prioritize their efforts and resources toward those as opposed to instead sort of looking at, you know, sort of where are the lowest hanging fruit kinda things to do.
Jeff Wood (31m 47s):
That’s interesting. There is a, like you mentioned before, there’s a climate action plan and the goal for transit is I think 15% ridership by 2035. And so how do climate goals across a, the state of California, I mean that’s a, there’s a big push at the state level, but also locally for your climate action plans. How much does that push the discussion about buses and transit generally, in terms of thinking kind of one silo that people are often sitting into? Maybe another one.
Colin Parent (32m 14s):
Yeah, I, I think some of our allies that the climate action campaign have been really, you know, focused on this. And one of the things they keep on pointing out is that every time the City of San Diego updates their community plans, those sort of neighborhood level documents that include both land use and transportation elements, they do an analysis to see what the likely impact is gonna be in terms of mosha on those, you know, how many people are gonna ride transit, walk and bike and that sort of thing. And quite routinely the plans are not going to meet the goals of the city’s climate action plan and the city still adopts them and the climate action campaign points that out and they’re very mad about it and wants the city to do stuff. The city’s point, which I think is, you know, is fair as they say, listen, we, we gotta make all the changes that we can, but we also need sandag and MTS and, and state and the federal government to make additional changes and additional investments to, to sort of meet us halfway.
Colin Parent (33m 6s):
So I I, I don’t have a strong sense as to whether or not the city’s doing enough. They can always do more, but I mean, I I don’t have a strong sense that, that they’re like really asleep at the switch on that. I, I don’t think that’s necessarily fair, but it is true that the changes that they’re making are not enough. That maybe they can make more changes, but beyond that they, they also need buy-in from partner agencies to help them get there. But I do think that the core of it though is that they’re like making these changes largely in these community plan updates, these neighborhood level updates and they’re not necessarily looking at how do we make the two line or you know, or the seven line being, you know, as fast as it possibly can across multiple planning districts.
Colin Parent (33m 47s):
They’re not thinking in those terms and I appreciate why it might be more challenging for them to do that, but that’s the kind of systems thinking that, that we’re gonna need to get people more involved in.
Jeff Wood (33m 56s):
So what’s next for you all? What’s next for promotion of the report? What’s next for trying to get some of these things implemented? What’s the plan?
Colin Parent (34m 4s):
So a couple of different opportunities. So sandag, the municipal planning organization, they’re gonna be updating their regional transportation plan. They’re actually gonna be taking out some of the vehicle miles traveled revenues that they had included in their initial plan. And so that’s gonna probably reduce the amount of revenues that they have, which hopefully also gives them an opportunity and an impulse to rethink where their transit priority investments are gonna be. So instead of focusing on hyperloops or you know, what they call high-speed rail, I don’t even, it’s not even clear what they mean by that. Instead of focusing on these big ticket items, they’re not even planning to build for 50 years. Trying to be a little more cost effective in how they’re gonna spend things, which is almost by definition will have to be buses and making bus frequency enhancements.
Colin Parent (34m 51s):
Those are the most cost effective kinds of things. And so I think that’s one of them. And then another one that, you know, our report that I sort of referenced a little bit earlier, we have another report coming out later this year called Making the Most of the midco, the mid-coast is a, an extension of our pre-existing light rail line that ran, that previously ran from the border of the San Ysidro border to downtown. And then it’s been extended another 10 miles up to the U C S D campus and into the big biotech sector in that neighborhood. And that is a, that’s been the biggest transit investment in the city’s, the region’s history. It’s helped increase ridership on the trolley by a really substantial amount. That’s a really great project, but it’s also, it needs help, it needs bus feeder routes, it needs bike and, and pedestrian connections.
Colin Parent (35m 38s):
It needs more development capacity near those transit stops. And so we have a big report that we’re coming out that’s gonna, you know, identify all the ways that both the city of San Diego, our regional NPO and the transit agency can all make investments to really capitalize on the investment that we’ve made on that mid coast. That’s where we’re probably making the most of the mid-coast and we have like a whole section in that just pointing out how you can just do a lot of the things we’ve talked in our fast bus report, do that around that area for the buses that feed into that mid-coast line to be able to juice up ridership and to make sure that more people are able to utilize this 2 billion investment of the taxpayers so they can get to work and get to school and be able to get things done in their lives.
Colin Parent (36m 20s):
And so we’re really excited about that and from our perspective it’s also sort of another opportunity to sort of point back to our fast bus recommendations and say, Hey, you know, we said that we should do this everywhere. Here’s this great near term opportunity that the business community cares about, politicians care about, the university cares about, let’s take some of these recommendations, implement them here, make contributions to our client, make contributions to affordability, but also make contributions to our economy because this isn’t gonna allow people to be able to get to work to some of the highest paying biggest opportunity jobs in the region and really capitalize on this big public investment for our region’s success and prosperity.
Jeff Wood (36m 57s):
Awesome. Where can folks find the Fast Bus report and then the Future report when it comes out?
Colin Parent (37m 3s):
Yeah, so Circulate sd.org, that’s our website and if you go Circulate sd do org slash fast buss, you’ll find our fast bus report. We try to make it easy and you can download the PDF and read a nice glossy version. We also always put our reports in a mobile first version, so if people wanna read it on their phones or read it on their desktops, that’s definitely an easy option. And also when we put our reports on there, we also include links to all of our press coverage. And so when this, when this podcast comes out, we’ll we’ll put a link up there and you can also read some of the other things that other people have written about the report or, or other interviews that we’ve been able to give about it. And the Mid Coast report will also be also be up there too.
Colin Parent (37m 43s):
I can’t tell you that, I can’t tell you the link yet cause it’s not published. But we’ll have that there and it’ll be structured in a similar way so that people can kinda hear our recommendations, internalize them and maybe even share them and, and tweet them out at their elected officials to, to get them to do the right thing.
Jeff Wood (37m 57s):
Awesome. We’ll call in. Thanks so much for joining us again. We really appreciate your
Colin Parent (38m 1s):
Time. Yeah, well I appreciate you having me on and, and for your attention to what we’re doing here in the San Diego region
