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Metropolitan DC Local Politics
there’s plenty of data that bus ridership rebounded post pandemic |
When's the last time you rode on a bus to go somewhere? |
| Is DDOT *trying* to get kids killed? The main thing this plan will accomplish is redirecting all the traffic on Georgia Avenue onto side streets. Why would you do that? |
If you're really that curious, you can start by requesting years of bus geolocation data from WMATA. That dataset will take some cleaning but where there's a will there's a way. Next you'll have to find yourself a good natural experiment by comparing differences in on-time performance along routes with bus lanes to like routes without bus lanes. This will be a challenge because there are only about a half dozen bus lanes and they are placed along routes that really aren't like any other routes in the city. Don't forget to account for the fact that the installation of the bus lanes - and enforcement thereof - coincided with an event that disrupted and then gradually restored vehicular traffic like nothing else in human history. Inevitably, whatever findings you obtain will be highly sensitive to alternative modeling choices and probably won't convince anyone who understands the slightest thing about bus lanes or causal inference. Of course, you could alternatively do the sensible thing and observe what most of us are seeing with our own eyes and that is that buses tend to move much faster when they are not routinely blocked by traffic. |
Huh? |
That's completely meaningless. Of course, bus ridership is up from the time when everything in Washington DC was closed. The only question that matters is how much bus only lanes increase ridership compared to what ridership was on those routes before the bus only lanes. We've had bus only lanes in this city for five years. How can there be literally no information about how it's gone? I'll answer that: It's because bus only lanes didn't increase ridership at all, and the city doesnt want to admit it. But if bus only lanes don't increase ridership, then why would you create more of them? |
You can repeat this as often as you like, but it only makes you look even sillier. |
I don't think you understand that your position is akin to arguing that the lack of commercially-viable nuclear fusion technology is a grand conspiracy to enrich petrostates. |
16th and Georgia are extremely alike. The buses even share a terminus in Silver Spring. You sound like you're trying to cover something up even though you probably just don't know anything about either of those two streets. |
this one will be cycled out for the new one: “DDOT is supressing data on bus lane failure.” But it may cycle back! |
Tell us more about the DDOT coverup. |
Says who? I don't think that's the only question that matters. |
Kind of seems like DDOT's job doesn't it? Go back and read the stories from 2019 when the city began rolling out bus only lanes. So many big promises! They said it would be so much easier to get around and some blocks would see 70 buses (?!) per hour and how the city stands ready to ticket and tow anyone blocking the lanes. So how did that work out? Shouldn't DDOT be able to answer the question now, five years later, especially if they want to build more bus only lanes? Instead we get this, in their pitch for the Georgia Avenue project: "On peer city projects, bus ridership increased after the installation of bus lanes." Certainly sounds like bus ridership did *not* increase in DC projects or they would have said so. |
Great. You have a sample size of two. Next time, please pay attention in statistics class. |
Something tells me that you wouldn't believe any study authored by DDOT. And, no, DDOT's job is not to write sophisticated quasi-experimental analyses of policy interventions. That is the job of professional social scientists. And a few studies of the efficacy of bus lanes have been written. And they are out there for you to find. But because you are so invested in your little conspiracy theory. I can't say I expect you to go out and find them and, even if you did, I can't say I'd expect the studies to shift your priors. |