Date: Wednesday, December 21, 2011 12:38:07 pm
To: "Hope4America" <Hope4america@yahoogroups.com>
Cc: politicalforum <PoliticalForum@googlegroups.com>
From: "Bruce Majors" <majors.bruce@gmail.com>
Subject: [LA-F] The (Illegal) Private Bus System That Works
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The (Illegal) Private Bus System That Works
By Lisa Margonelli
Brooklyn's dollar van fleet is a tantalizing demonstration of how we might
supplement mass transit with privately-owned mini-transit entrepreneurs
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Winston Williams owns and operates this advertising-wrapped dollar van /
Lisa Margonelli
America's 20th largest bus service -- hauling 120,000 riders a day -- is
profitable and also illegal. It's not really a bus service at all, but a
willy-nilly aggregation of 350 licensed and 500 unlicensed privately-owned
"dollar vans" that roam the streets of Brooklyn and Queens, picking up
passengers from street corners where city buses are either missing or
inconvenient. The dollar van fleet is a tantalizing demonstration of how we
might supplement mass transit to include privately-owned mini-transit
entrepreneurs, giving people alternative ways to get around, and creating
jobs.
To see how the dollar van universe works (I'll get to why it's illegal in a
minute), I spent a morning riding around with one of Brooklyn's dollar van
entrepreneurs, Winston Williams of Blackstreet Van Lines. I caught up with
Winston's pink, advertising-covered van on Livingston Street in downtown
Brooklyn and hopped in the front seat, and off we went up Flatbush Avenue.
Almost all of the dollar vans are Ford E350's, with a high body and side
doors and enough seats in the back to hold 14 people. Once you notice them
in the parts of Brooklyn and Queens where they work, they're ubiquitous.
Winston looks in the rear-view mirror and explains that the trick is to
keep a distance between the vans in front and the vans behind to maximize
the chance of getting passengers. At $2 a ride, he needs to get 14 people
in the van on the 5.6 mile trip from downtown Brooklyn to King's Highway to
turn a profit. The cost of licensing, insuring, staffing, and fueling the
eight vans in his fleet is considerable.
Some people worry that dollar vans pick up passengers who would otherwise
ride the bus, but Columbia Assistant Professor of Urban Planning David King
and doctoral student Eric Goldwyn say that's not likely. Dollar vans seem
to complement the bus service, and they have real advantages. Goldwyn has
ridden in the vans and conducted tallies where he's found that on some
corners there are four city buses an hour and 45 to 60 vans, meaning that
passengers literally don't have to wait more than a minute for a ride.
Also, the vans can be a lot faster than public transit. A service that runs
between Chinatowns can get from Flushing to Sunset Park in 20 minutes while
the subway will take an hour and 13 minutes at minimum. And for regular
riders, there are other perks. "I've heard they offer more services -- for
example, they'll wait while a parent walks a child up to the door of
daycare or a school." That is service that you can't get from a bus.
With its pink advertising wrapping, Winston's van gives the impression that
the inside will have a party atmosphere. But it doesn't. The passengers,
most of whom are from Jamaica (like Winston) or Trinidad, sit quietly. One
Trinidadian woman dressed in business clothes overhears me interviewing
Winston and volunteers that vans are a common way to get around the
islands. The interior of the van is clean, gray, and institutional -- very
much of a piece with Winston's overall business plan to brand his vans and
make them mainstream.
He'd like to eventually move beyond the Flatbush route and pick up, say,
hipsters in Williamsburg and bring them to Manhattan. If this sounds
improbable, it's really not: Think of the incredible popularity of food
trucks, which were known as "roach coaches" only 10 years ago. A hip fleet
of dollar vans, providing proximity and cheap transit to 20-somethings,
could easily catch on. If the vans ran on cleaner engines -- hybrids or
natural gas -- they could be part of a greener city. (In another move to
raise the profile of his vans beyond Flatbush, Winston allows a music
promoter called Dollar Van Demos to film rappers in his vans for broadcast
on the Internet.) But no broader growth can happen until the vans can be
branded and made attractive to people who don't already know them, says
Winston.
Ah, and that's where the illegality comes in. Winston used to have his vans
all painted with a green stripe, so they became easily recognized in the
neighborhood. While this "uniform" was good for business, his vans also
caught the attention of police of various kinds who ticketed him for
stopping to pick up passengers, and he accrued fines that ate into profits.
This is the paradox of Winston's work: While he is fully licensed, insured,
and inspected, his vans are prohibited from doing the one thing they really
do -- picking up passengers off the street.
David King, from Columbia, quips that all dollar vans are 100 percent
illegal (because they work the curbs), but some are 200 percent illegal
(because they don't bother to get licensed in the first place). Winston
says police don't cite the unlicensed vans, which eat into his business,
but do go after the licensed ones for the curb infractions. "The law gets
made up as you go along," Winston says, adding that the pink cellphone ad
on the van is both an attempt to make a little money as he cruises up and
down Flatbush, and a trial balloon to see whether there's a specific law
prohibiting advertising on the vans. Later, one of the 500 or so completely
illegal vans pulls up beside him, and in friendly Jamaican patois, Winston
accuses the driver of being a terrorist. "It's not like I hate against
them. But I'm running a business and they're running a hustle," he says.
The existence of laws and the lack of enforcement put the legal drivers in
a bind that Winston describes as a Catch 22. In 1993, New York outlawed
dollar vans entirely. It took the intervention of some activist van owners
with the help of the Libertarian Institute For Justice to get them
legalized. Deliberate or not, the city's perverse policy of half-legalizing
legal vans and failing to enforce laws against the unlicensed ones limits
the growth of what could be a useful transit resource. Winston describes a
decade and half of Coyote and Roadrunner exploits with the law, concluding
with, "Let there be a train strike, a blackout, a storm, or 9/11, and
people are practically tearing the doors off." Last year, when the city was
trying to cut bus routes, they even tried to substitute official dollar van
routes, but that program was canceled when van drivers were uninterested in
the routes, and riders were uninterested in the vans.
You might want to know why, exactly, jitneys or dollar vans are illegal in
most states. The answer lies in the history of public transit. Until the
early 1950s, most transit systems in the U.S. were privately owned
companies that operated as regulated monopolies (like electric utilities
today) and expected to provide transit service to an entire city. In
exchange, they got the right to be the city's only transit service. Transit
ridership peaked during World War II, but the transit companies slid into
bankruptcy afterwards, as they were expected to serve greater suburban
areas, service declined, and more and more federal money went into highways
-- all of which tempted people to buy cars and abandon the trolleys and
buses. Most of the country's 200 private transit franchises died in the
1950s. (Roger Rabbit had nothing to do with it. I swear.) In the late
1950s, cities took over the bankrupt transit lines and tried to make a go
of them, retaining for themselves the monopoly on the right to provide
service. In the early 60s the feds became involved in propping those
systems up, but without much enthusiasm. Meanwhile, private transit were
prevented from driving the streets even when they offered serviced
differen I have been the Taxi/Limo business for 36 years. this sounds great! Got room for a southern white guy from Florida?
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