Annotated Table of Contents Better Buses, Better Cities By Steven Higashide Island Press, 2019 https://islandpress.org/books/better-buses-better-cities Introduction: We Need to Unleash the Bus Americans take 4.7 billion trips a year on publicly run buses. Yet so many of those trips are plodding, unpredictable, uncomfortable, and circuitous. Bus ridership has fallen by 17 percent between 2008 and 2018; in most places, worsening traffic has slowed buses down and bus routes have failed to change in response to shifting city demographics. But it doesn’t have to be this way. Bus ridership has grown in cities as different as Houston, Columbus, San Francisco, Seattle, and Indianapolis—all places where elected, agency, and civic leaders have taken forceful action to improve bus service. The introductory chapter makes a forceful case for learning from those successes. It explains the importance of effective bus service in efficiently moving people through cities, reducing urban inequality, and making progress in the fight against climate change. It makes the case that bus transit is a more essential technology than speculative modes like autonomous vehicles or Hyperloops, and introduces a core thesis of the book: Winning bus improvements requires a political alliance between civic advocates, elected officials, and “visionary bureaucrats” who can effectively communicate transit’s value and deliver projects quickly. Chapter 1: What Makes People Choose the Bus? One of the most corrosive ideas in the transportation world is the belief that most people who ride the bus have no alternative, and they’ll keep riding regardless of how bad the service gets. This kind of thinking often results in a two-tiered approach to transit planning: high-end, “sexy,” expensive transit built to the suburbs to “entice people out of their cars” and terrible bus service for everyone else. This chapter cites research that disproves this binary conception of transit riders, and highlights the fundamental attributes of transit service that is useful for most people: