Airport Trains Suck. Will REM Too?
cat-bus.com
cat-bus.com
Conversely, many of the airports with relatively high ridership probably have a greater fraction of passengers terminating or originating their trips there.
The analysis really needs to look at the passenger numbers for trips originated/terminated. Not the passengers merely boarding planes there.
This is the second click-bait titled article from this author on the topic. It seems more like an exercise in stats, with very little actual context.
I did some quick digging. The term to google to get local traffic without connecting passenger info is "origin and destination", and it looks like O&D is about a third of the overall traffic[0] since there are ~45m total enplaned annually and of that ~15m enplaned from origin. Doubling the enplaned number to get the enplaned and deplaned number would be about 82k daily average. With 10k daily metro riders, 12% ridership seems pretty good.
[0]: "ATL is anchored by a large, local traffic base with 15 million O&D enplaned passengers for fiscal year (FY) 2014." https://finance.yahoo.com/news/fitch-upgrades-atlanta-ga-pas...
But it's not going to change the fact that ridership of airport transit connectors is low, building expensive rail transit to connect 5K or 10K people is a waste of money. Building cheap rail (i.e. connect to the airport as part of another project) may make sense.
Failing that, you're just going to have to use common sense to obviously realize the Atlanta is not going to do well in this particular comparison. Just like I actually did in the article, where I was being relatively generous with my analysis.
cost(2013$) riders(thousand) cost/rider
O-Train (lrt) 27M$ 14 1901$
If you don't understand why your table is extremely flawed then you should pull this article. If you do understand then you are being disingenuous not generous.
Regarding your unrelated attack, how is it possibly flawed to ask for a transit project to bring a certain number of riders relative to its cost, no matter the mode? This is a standard way to get an idea of the effectiveness of a transit project.
These are back of the envelope calculations that are pretty fuzzy (this is not programming or math, folks), but they are incredibly useful and very easily reveal fishy projects. I wish the public would be more vigilant, even doing very simple calculations like this is helpful -- then maybe in North America we could waste less money on stupid prestige projects, and spend more money on actually building useful transit.
I find your suggestion that I should pull my article extremely unhelpful. We here in Montreal are currently being duped by a semi-private entity to waste a shit-ton of public money on a deeply flawed transit project, while useful projects sit waiting. I want to write about that because I think people should understand how its flawed. If you don't give a fuck about Montreal or Quebec, fine. But don't try to shut me up based on nitpicks that miss the point. If you want to tear down a bunch of bullshit, maybe do something useful and go write about the REM project yourself.
I would recommend changing your units in your site to either be all daily, or all annual. This means that you could meaningfully present and compare percentages of ridership, like I did for ATL above.
Getting back to the numbers at hand, YUL has 82% O&D[0], meaning that for 15M passengers there will be (15m * .82 / 365) -> 33,298 daily users. 30% daily ridership does seem like a steep target to hit. If you get the O&D numbers for all of the airports and compare daily values, you may still be able to express you idea and make a case without people being distracted by inconsistencies.
Another factor to add, eyeballing your graph, would be the correlation of metro ridership to the percentage of airport passengers opting into the metro. The numbers for the southern US would probably be explained by a poorer metro compared to SF and the northeast.
You put yourself out there, and you obviously are passionate about your subject, but please take a step back to look at the suggestions and how they will improve your case or show you new insights.
[0] http://www.admtl.com/sites/default/files/RA2015_A.pdf "The percentage of connecting or transit traffic held steady at about 18%, i.e., nearly one in five passengers, or 2.8 million people for the year, had an airport of origin or destination other than YUL."
The cost is not 'annual', it's the capital cost expressed in 2003 dollars, that is, adjusted for inflation. I would've never guessed crazytony's issue was with that, because it was just a flat attack without any substance. Giving cost in M, ridership in K, and cost/rider in $ seems fine to me. The numbers are meant to be compared across different projects, and are easily verified to be calculated correctly.
You can't just divide annual ridership numbers by numbers of days in a year, because ridership numbers are given for weekdays, and weekends have wildly different numbers. The ratio can be anywhere from 260 to 365, depending on the actual line... or airport.
I left the annual airport passengers compared to the daily ridership intentionally, because those are not numbers that can be directly compared for various reasons. I intentionally wanted to create an obscure ratio because I wanted to compare across different airports, not give any estimatable number for any particular airport.
In any case, this particular graph is not the overall point of the article, I'm merely trying to get an idea whether they are being crazy with their predictions.
Incidentally, the article missed Cleveland Hopkins Airport (CLE). Like SFO, CLE simply has a transit line that ends at the airport, not a special connection. Those seem to be more successful than short-distance shuttles that make a connection to the big system.
Oakland has a shuttle between a BART station and the airport. It's cable-hauled, strangely for a 3.7 mile system.
As usual, Asia is way ahead in transit. Tokyo Haneda has had a monorail for years. Incheon now has a maglev. Shanghai, of course, has the really fast maglev to the airport.
But you're totally right that it's not a shuttle bus anymore, those are gone now. :)
Suppose I want to go from Palo Alto to SFO. I can take the Caltrain and get to Millbrae very quickly. Check. Then I can fantasize that someone would dig a very expensive tunnel from the Millbrae station to SFO and either run a train every 5-10 minutes to SFO or run one train to SFO for each Caltrain that stops at Millbrae.
Amazingly, my fantasy is half realized. That tunnel exists, is electrified, is well-maintained, and it's called the BART. For reasons that probably make sense in the minds of the mess of uncooperative local transit agencies, the train doesn't run before 9 pm on weekdays, and they steadfastly refuse to make the timing work well for Caltrain riders.
On weekdays before 9, I can still use the train, but there's an extra pointless transfer, and they still refuse to make the schedule workable.
So building the thing is only part of the battle. The transit agencies still need to make sure that the schedules and, in particular, time spent sitting around waiting for transfers, doesn't slow it down to the point of unusability.
https://www.bart.gov/sites/all/themes/bart_desktop/img/syste...
Maybe you should talk to your elected officials about why.
For the counties that are part of BART, the SFO connection is great.
One of the things the Puget Sound region got right with its transit is to have a super-regional, standalone agency with its own tax and bonding authority that has the express mission of "connect the discrete local agencies together with express service." How it does that (see also: Spine Destiny in relation to Link) is a matter of some debate but it factually does accomplish the goal with almost all parts of the region being equally accessible through their major transit hubs. If, for example, Snohomish County up and said "pfft, screw that Sound Transit business," why should a) the county leaders not have responsibility for, if nothing else, not being effective at showing the benefit of connectivity to the regional system; and b) SnoCo be able to complain about not having the benefits of the system that it voluntarily left?
Political systems are only "abstract" if one doesn't place stock in the influence of that level of government.
No, the people never had a choice, but they would have likely never participated by choice. They would have been paying full share while waiting many years after SF and Alameda County for service, plus most passenger traffic would have been through-traffic between SF and Santa Clara County (which itself opted out because BART would not extend more than a couple of miles into the county until over a decade later).
They are common on BART where many transfers are timed transfers, but are relatively uncommon on other systems, since timed transfers comes with a large decrease in timetable flexibility which ultimately results in less system responsiveness to loading, since if a busy line has a timed transfer to a less busy line, you have to run trains at the same frequency down both lines. (BART varies the number of cars in response to passenger loading, but has less flexibility to vary the train timing.) It also requires a high on time arrival rate, since the trains need to arrive within about 1-2 minutes most times so neither train has to wait for the other. BART's OTA rate is actually pretty good and most timed transfers have both trains show up within 30-60 seconds of each other.
BART only has five different lines though, which helps make this work, and also increases the need somewhat, since transfers aren't otherwise as common.
If you consider the timetable mechanics carefully, you'll realize why timed-transfers for trains going different directions right at the end of a line are much worse than creating a time table to allow timed transfers elsewhere. You have to completely change turnaround time at the end of the line, idling staff for longer or messing with people's mandated break times, or etc etc etc. OR massively increase service frequency, with the corresponding increase of frequencies on the other lines with timed transfer to the line you've changed frequencies on.
SamTrans used to run a more frequent shuttle like BART service between SFO and Millbrae when they were more directly involved in operations cost and setting the BART timetable, but then they reduced their involvement. If San Mateo county reduces its involvement, it isn't incumbent on BART to turn its timetable upside down to try and make the transfers faster to serve people in their county and other counties that don't pay in to BART at a loss to the district and the counties that do pay for an effective transit system.
It's not like they can just make a small adjustment to better serve those passengers. And it's not like the passenger volume between SFO<->Millbrae justifies the change.
The passenger volume between every single other BART station (other than Millbrae) and SFO is served fine by the current timetable. Making a change here literally only helps people coming from Millbrae.
Huh? I've taken Caltrain to Millbrae and Uber to SFO many times. The transfer right now is so bad as to be unusable. Why would you use the current ridership to decide whether making the transfer not suck is reasonable?
It's like Sonic.net saying they'll bring me fiber if 50% of my community signs up for 3Mbps DSL first.
So no, it's nothing like your analogy.
And, even if the traffic would be similar to have an operating loss ratio similar to the other lines, that still doesn't address the fact that fundamentally it would be to provide service for transit users who live in counties that voted to reduce their BART service and opt out of that transit system. So in your analogy it would be like a Comcast customer complaining that when they use their friend's sonic.net line, the speeds aren't to their liking.
http://www.bayrailalliance.org/question/why-is-the-caltrain-...
In retrospect, an Airtrain connection to Millbrae would probably have been a better choice, but the person who pushed through the SFO BART station, Sen. Quentin Kopp, was hostile to Caltrain and had no interest in making a Caltrain<->SFO connection efficient.
I've never taken it, and I already know what it is. I bet I could ask anyone in the city "How do I get on the 747 bus?" and they'll know what I'm asking for.
For example, everybody uses the airport trains in Tokyo, because Tokyo's train network is awesome, and the trains are both faster and cheaper than taking a taxi. The Tokyo Monorail, which is only one of two links to one of Tokyo's two main airports, has a ridership of over 300,000 pax/day. By comparison, DFW's airport link gets under 2,000 pax/day -- in large part because the total ridership of the entire DART light rail network is barely 100,000 pax/day!
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airport_Rail_Link_%28Bangkok%2...
For reference: I checked on the Swiss Rail Network operator page and there are 18 transit options to get from the main station in Zürich to the airport (https://i.imgur.com/GJTC0F3.png ). Some of these connections are trams and take a while longer. There is even a direct train to get from Zürich Airport to Geneva Airport. It takes 3 hours and 9 minutes which is about the same as taking the plane with checked-in luggage.
Also here's a simulation of the timetable of the rail network: http://maps.vasile.ch/transit-sbb/
The flight itself is REALLY quick and very scenic, even (especially?) at night with the moonlit snowy mountains [1], which are to your side, not under you (try to look south), and the stars. You're barely getting used to being in flight and they are already handing over the little chocolate and asking you to fasten your seat belt. Both ZRH and GVA (especially GVA) are ultra fast airports where check-in and security are a breeze (I recommend the mobile boarding pass) and there is fairly little walking. You can definitely door-to-door it in much less on the plane even with checked-in luggage (unless it's substantially changed in the last 3-4 years). Price wise I used to fly that route for 30-40 CHF, very competitive. It was sometimes cheaper to fly to London via ZRH than direct from GVA.
Meanwhile, whilst there are a few direct trains, most have a stop in the middle to change trains (from memory: Bern? maybe Biel or something that starts with L) and you have to carry your bags back out and stand in the cold for a few minutes and stress about whether you're on the right platform. Also, the bag space in second class is quite limited. On the plus side, you avoid taking trains to/from the airports, or getting frustrated with Switzerland's low speed limits on the highway.
I'm surprised the OP uses North American cities as examples of airport connectors. Hong Kong, Tokyo (NRT) and Shanghai to cite three big international destinations have great airport connectors which make sense considering the distances at play. I've always wondered why planners don't send their team to visit the top 10-20 airports in the world to check what the competition is doing.
Singapore is an example of the airport being close enough that you might as well take a taxi and a rapid transit to the "centre" (what is the centre, anyway - CBD, Orchard? there are a lot of hubs) makes less sense. Montreal's situation looks more like Singapore's than Tokyo's.
London is an example of where the extremely expensive airport connector (Heathrow Express) ends up somewhere with nothing except cheap hotels and slow connections, which is why they're finally getting round to building Crossrail, which goes from the Heathrow terminals all the way to all the major hubs (including the City and Canary Wharf, great news for those who have to fly transatlantic).
Yes, for some connections you'd have to change in Bern.
Without getting that extreme, there's definitely a case to be made for knowing expected processing time from arriving to the airport to being in the plane (and generally, the distribution of probable door to door time when you buy your flight). I've done LCY in under 10 minutes once, but was turned away at LHR because I arrived there 44 minutes before the flight and BA cutoff at 45. The biggest queues in Europe are usually going out, rather than into the flight.
Train is great if it is well planned. I did MRS-GVA by train and it took 5 hours as it was going 30kph between Lyon and Geneva. SNCF oversold the TGV and there were 10-20 people standing per carriage. The queue at Geneva Station customs added a further 10 minutes. Next time: Blablacar.
I'd do the same thing because (well, I assume,) North America has a unique level of motorisation and city density. It makes sense that people who regularly drive to work will choose drive to the airport as well.
There is an express rail connector from Heathrow to Paddington that costs around 15 pounds and gets you into London in about half an hour. If you have more time you can take the Picadilly tube line from Heathrow to Victoria station in about an hour. More stops and less room for luggage on the tube, but it will cost less.
Crossrail is not about connecting heathrow, it is to connect the southeast with London, the phase II link to Heathrow is just bonus. In fact, it will use the exact same line as the heathrow express uses now when it goes from Paddington through Heathrow and further west. A crossrail link just means you don't have to switch trains at Paddington to finish the trip to Heathrow if you started in the SE commuter belt.
It's perfectly useful, especially for people who park at the airport's economy lot. But the graph on this page makes Phoenix's train seem useless.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PHX_Sky_Train
(When Terminal 4 was designed/built in the late-80's, they left space for a people-mover-tunnel. When they came back 20 years later to build the people-mover, they realized there wasn't enough space for the tunnel. They built an elevated people mover instead. This is/was the only/first airport train to go over an active taxiway.)
there's a lot of linked reading on airport connectors' rather bizarre propensity to attract huge amounts of capital spending relative to their eventual ridership numbers.
And how is that a problem for the person writing the post?
Other than tax-wise, which can easily be solved with a ticket price?