01025746

Component

This study uses ethnographic fieldwork methods to explore and understand bus culture and behavior. The focus is two lines in Los Angeles running along one of the city’s main thoroughfares, the Wilshire Boulevard corridor. One line is an established local route and the other is a newer bus rapid transit (BRT) line. The findings suggest that life on buses involves a myriad of complex social and interpersonal interactions. Regular disruptions to the social order occur along several dimensions, including negative and positive disruptions, the scope of disruptions, their quality as brief or more sustained, and their sensory impacts. This paper also introduces the idea of “experiential reliability” – or the consistency of experience – as a possible factor in the mode and route choices of riders. The number of disruptions and the maintenance of social order on the two lines are very different even though bus environments generally can be considered looser social spaces (along a continuum of tight to loose). The local bus is characterized as a space with frequent predictable disruptions as well as a number of unexpected ones. In addition, the tolerance level for disruptive activity is much higher in this space. On the Rapid buses, disruptions occur much less often and any challenge to the social order is squelched quickly. These findings suggest not only that bus spaces are rich, informative, and overlooked sites of social life, but also that the experiential aspects of bus riding have important implications for transportation planning and travel behavior analysis.

01020180

06-1872

English

26p

2006

Transportation Research Board 85th Annual Meeting

CD-ROM

Figures (5) ; References

Bus routes; Buses; Culture (Social sciences); Fixed routes; Passengers; Sociology

Disruptions; Ethnographic studies; Experiential reliability

Los Angeles (California)

Operations and Traffic Management; Passenger Transportation; Public Transportation; Society

Transportation Research Board Annual Meeting 2006 Paper #06-1872

TRIS, TRB

Mar 3 2006 10:49AM