How to stop the decline of public transport in rich countries
economist.com
economist.com
Make it less attractive to take the car by building automated car tolls and let the drivers pay. Subsidize public transportation to make it cheaper for the citizens.
That's basically what has been done in Stockholm (even though I wish it had been done to a greater degree, public transportation needs to be even cheaper). Cars destroys our shared environment and expanding it's infrastructure costs plenty (space, money, pollution). Of course it should be heavily taxed so that cycling, bus and subway infrastructure can be financed.
If it were too expensive there'd be less money to finance public transportation which, I guess, creates a strange dependency. It somehow works, but there's still of course far too much car traffic.
Long story short, a flat toll is an incredibly regressive tax and directly damages lower income communities.
This seems like such a weird commend given that the top of this thread is advocating making drivers subsidize public transportation to encourage people to use it.
When ~90% of adults in the US drive it's hard to argue that driving is being subsidized by anyone other than people who drive. And that's before we account for the forms of tax revenue used for these subsidies that are paid for exclusively by drivers -- like gas and registration.
People who don't drive are subsidizing drivers by not joining traffic.
And if we're talking about subsidies let's take NYC public transportation as an example: They get $6.2B in fares and $8.2B in subsidies from:
- General fund (state & local). - Gas taxes. - Taxes on homeowners. - Property taxes. - Payroll taxes. - Tolls.
So if you want to be gung-ho about killing subsidies you'll be taking most public transportation down with it.
Not expensive enough to cover the costs.
You need to look at the problem a little bit more. Designing a car-centered city and suburbs is expensive. You not only have to build highways to handle traffic, but your building options are limited because you need to build enough parking ; which results in sprawl, leading to less efficient use of the land. The higher costs due to this sprawl are undeniably borne by consumers. There are many other such hidden "subsidies" that have allowed such an overwhelming car-centric culture in the US.
A better question is why haven't cities required sufficient housing near jobs to keep the cost of rent (let alone actual ownership of even a condo) competitive with the suburbs via supply control?
Because to require a particular level of housing near jobs would require a prohibition on offering jobs without developing additional housing, in effect limiting jobs. Even if local governments are given the power to do that, politically, citizens demand that politicians do what they can to encourage job creation, not limit it by some other constraint.
Need for housing ~= {jobs} + {adult students} + {unemployed} + {retired} + {liquidity room} - {All housing in the market}
If the need for housing is positive than actions should be taken to accelerate and promote the development or re-development of new planned accommodations.
If the need is /dire/ (as it is for the large west coast cities) then that the government should take on the buy out and re-development of entire neighborhoods in to areas that are suitable for the continued health and prosperity of the whole (as private interests have clearly failed to do so or regulations have not allowed them to do so).
This planning and redevelopment should also include mass transit and other resources as well as more than meeting 'minimum code' for all construction. (My own views about the inadequacy of such codes are out of the scope of this topic.)
That would help prevent the decline of public transit.
Behavior would change dramatically if, e.g., you had a GPS tracker logging miles and you paid a monthly road use bill, and parking spots were all metered at their true cost.
Imagine how much burden it would be for a poor family to suddenly have to buy a car.
That's the cost America is passing on to poor families. It just doesn't look like much because it's been thoroughly normalized.
* That said, of course with change of policy some people will be hit and some poor people will be hit the hardest, so there should be mitigating measure.
No it won't hit poor people at all if you fund it with progressive taxes and ticket sales. Car ownership on the other hand is not only expensive and unreliable (if you can't afford to buy decent cars), its ridiculously dangerous, increases stress and decreases well being. A well designed public transport assists the poor by making it much safer, cheaper and faster to come into the denser areas (typically with better/higher paying jobs) for work while living in lower COL suburbs.
I sincerely believe that impediments to more public transportation in the US is not chiefly financial; I believe its mostly due to what was before racism, and now is just NIMBYism. People don't want a bus stop or train station in their neighborhood, which will attract the homeless/poor/lower classes etc.
My life living in London would be hugely more expensive if I had to buy a car to get around - not to mention a lot worse since cycling is so much better for me and everyone else.
In Seattle, if I want to get from a suburb on the east side into the city, during ANY trafficked time, it's going to be at least 2 busses (usually crowded, late, or full, so add another ~1), a decent amount of walking, and a 1.5-2 hour total trip. This compounds with the fact that many of the fringe buses only come once every half/hour, and not at all on weekends.
Compare this to a city that had proper infrastructure to start, Philadelphia. I lived a comparative distance, and the population is MUCH higher and denser. But a 5 minute walk and a single 20-30 minute train ride put me anywhere I wanted in center city. While Seattle "has light rail" it's an honest joke next to the coverage in the north-east.
As such, there's _no option_ to tax balance, it would end up being highly regressive punishing those forced to live further out and with no option but to use a car. The vicious cycle comes into play as the increased car traffic makes public transit less emphasized, convenient, and more of a perceived negative, leading to increased car traffic, etc etc. (compounded by less people wanting to take the tax burden they don't see a personal benefit to; there are a few different "tragedy of the commons" type effects in this mess.)
If we had trains that could get me to work like the sister post says about Stockholm's, no need for additional motivation, I wouldn't own a car for an instant, and didn't until my mid/late 20s when I left the east coast, but that's not the reality of the cities we've built, and now we're in a bit of a hole that I'm not sure how to incentivise people out of.
For example if there was an express buss between Bellevue and the U District that didn't have to sit behind cars crossing Lake Washington, I think it would be pretty popular.
The chicken and egg problem is hard to crack. Not enough transit riders -> high car usage -> not enough transit riders -> ...
If we all throw up our hands and say "too hard" it's only going to get worse. Growing up in Seattle and Tacoma, it was pretty frustrating to hear about the supposed light rail connection between the two that's been promised and delayed countless times over the last 20+ years.
Novelty hill rd in the NE was supposed to be 4 lanes, even through the switchback, but because of bad contractor (likely back-scratching internally) and a lack of contractual protections, 4 lanes were paid for but 2 were obtained. If we can't even do simple things right (that road typically bottlenecks for ~20-30 miles straight during rush hour, and is single lane, so no bus advantage) and your aformentioned rail link, it's really a moot point, so the focus might need to be on governance than on the transit itself.
(To address your suggestions, I agree that dedicated bus lanes might be helpful, but worry that given the respective usage volumes 1. would it be effective and 2. can you convince everyone else potential further limitation to their lanes is worth it?. Not to say "throw hands up" but it might need to come coupled with a proposal to offer more car bandwidth.
I've always been skeptical of bike lanes on the longer-haul lines outside of city centers, because at least for the area I live in with huge gaps between "stuff", (and with our weather/geography) it's not a feasible form of long-term travel for most people, even for things like picking up groceries. If it can be built without impacting road bandwidth/significantly increasing cost, I obviously see that as a plus, but I'd need to be convinced that the tradeoff actually provided the right outcome.
My focus is typically on rail build-out, improving bus usage, and aforementioned governance/efficiency, as these seem to align incentives pretty well among various groups of transit users.)
I feel like zoning regulations that altogether prohibit housing density in US cities play an extremely large part in this, and that shitty US transit and strict land-use regulations in US are not two independent phenomena. Allowing landowners to build apartments (or single-family homes on very small lots with high lot coverage and no setbacks, or duplexes/triplexes/quadplexes, etc) with density commensurate with the market need allows transit to suck far less (as does letting transit operators to build their rights-of-way along sensical alignments and allowing commercial density around train stations).
A more reasonable way to develop a city would be to have a cramped, urban core where everything is well connected, has low parking minimums, and minimal zoning restrictions, surrounded by areas of gradually decreasing density, and holding parking in "rings" around these areas. In my mind, I'd like to organize the city in these rings: walkable, bikable, short-drive/suburban, long-drive/rural.
The big issue is the US has made up-zoning impossible. There are no mandatory zoning changes as people move to an area, or anything of that nature. Add to this that many American homeowners derive a significant portion of their equity from their house value and you have a situation where it is very difficult for any area of the US to expand to accommodate to an influx of population.
In my area, the government will use its monopoly on violence to keep you from building in a lot smaller than one third of an acre. Yet, in my pre-code subdivision (exempt from the minimum), houses are being built on 1/12 acre lots and selling just fine. In the rest of the county, the low density you see doesn’t reflect what people want. It reflects what a minority of people who control the local government have imposed on everyone else.
Parking /silos/ owned by the city, right at transit transition hubs, at the edge.
The use case is driving in from the 'savage lands', having ample (free (paid for the same way roads are)) parking, and transferring to the local rail/bus/people-mover-belt system of the dense urban core.
Seattle is a really bad example if you want to talk about poor public transportation. Seattle is one of the few places where bus ridership is increasing. Living anywhere with 5 miles of downtown (beside some areas divided by water) makes having a car somewhere between optional and inconvenient. It's one of the few places where bus ridership is increasing, and Sound Transit 3's implementation will make the Link Light Rail much more accessible. The number of bike trails and separated bike paths is arguably at the point where we might have too many for bike ridership levels. The city is very anticar, increasing the area where minimum parking requirements are not required, making bus only lanes in high traffic downtown areas, and talking about a downtown toll.
Saying it takes 1.5-2 hours to ride a bus from the east side to the city ignores the fact that it takes more than an hour to do so in a car. Not to mention how important the I 90 floating bridge light rail project is to further connect the east side to the city.
Transportation sucks in Seattle because of the population growth and the lack of investment in the 60s and 70s. Most of the things Seattle and King County has done in the last 20 years in regards to public transportation is correct with a few notable but not critical exceptions.
I agree that we're probably paying for a lack of investment; to the point of my comparison with Philadelphia where the infrastructure was in place. I'd reference my other comment questioning governance, since while you say a few notable but not critical exceptions, I find massive build-out times (Overlake Transit Center, for instance, will be closed until 2023, assuming I'm not confusing dates), lack of funding (discussed this issue at a local city council meeting, apparently it's partly a state/federal problem), and mismanagement (see other comment) to be quite prevelent. I may well be seeing a small slice of this, but my slice's commute is looking anywhere but up, even considering future development.
I'd also add that I didn't ignore that it takes an hour in the car. I'd agree, it takes an hour in a car. But you're in your own car, which many people see as a positive despite the mental overhead of driving, and that's still less time, variance, and inconvenience than the bus. I can only speak to the # of cars I see in the lots at work, these are clearly sufficient dis-incentives to the bus as it currently exists, and we can't ignore that if we want to improve the situation. (I'd also note that your mention of "less than 5 miles of downtown" makes me think we may be looking at very different strata of things; perhaps I should have said initially "Seattle Area", the trains I was referring to in Philly go 20+ miles out in many directions)
[0]https://www.kingcounty.gov/independent/forecasting/King%20Co... [1]https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Qyj31NiW1kc30GX9PCNr...
But, that's a key part of the problem. It's easy to compromise and take public transit instead of a car when the public transit saves you time. For many trips between popular commuting destinations, Seattle doesn't have that yet.
Seattle doesn't have good public transit because it's getting better, it is getting better because it has so much catching up to do. Right now we're pretty good at filling busses with riders, then jamming those busses up in traffic.
There wasn't just a critical lack of investment in the 60s and 70s - the 80s and 90s didn't make great progress with infrastructure either. What did Seattle have to show by 2000? Less than a mile of monorail, a downtown transit tunnel, and a few retired streetcar lines?
Seattle's first light-rail line opened in 2009. By comparison, Portland's MAX opened in 1986 and had over 50 miles of light rail by that point.
I'm optimistic that things are getting better and heading in the right direction, but am sympathetic to the argument that Seattle's system is poor - because in many ways it is.
And/or money. The public parking in the city is prohibitive, alone.
I don't get this at all. Between parking and traffic I almost always save time by taking the bus or riding a bike for trips less than 5 miles long.
Prohibitive, or correctly priced?
https://www.heritage.org/poverty-and-inequality/report/under...
The epicenter of this decline is New York, where cars are already impractical and everyone already relies on the subway.
I like sentences that start with "Of course...". But I tend to think that Stockholm might not be a very representative city of the worst transportation problems.
Stockholm has a population of ~950,000 (or 2.3 million metro) and a city area of 188 km². Contrast that with London with 8.1 million (13.6 million metro) people and 1,572 km². Plus, there are unique geographical characteristics, different population distributions and infrastructures. All these affect commute times and congestion.
I don't think the solution in Stockholm is nearly universal. It might solve the specific problems of that specific city but would fail in many ways if applied blindly in many other places.
Or it may work even better in other cities. What differences between London and Stockholm makes you think that it is going to work worse?
> All these affect commute times and congestion.
And that is why London needs it more than Stockholm. And that is why London already does it. (https://www.visitlondon.com/traveller-information/getting-ar...)
A car is absolutely #1 on my saving-target list, due to that. Oh, and being able to lock stuff inside it. The primary problem is the absolutely awful quality of service (in some areas, at least), not that it is somehow too expensive.
It is not complicated to say that, it is complicated to get those issues past when a large majority of people drive and will never want to stop.
There is no horizon in sight where shared transportation will actually be an improvement on cars so it's always going to be kind of a futile battle.
It becomes obvious what they are doing when more funding for freeway expansions just gets rubber-stamped. That is "an executive decision" by the politicians for "long-term success of the region".
The entire funding model is aligned where they can move money around for more roads, but any public transit funding should be "up to the people to decide"
There's more to it than that though. In cities not named Chicago, DC, and New York, these stupid light rail measures inevitably end up with trips that take waaaay longer than driving, and still involve driving to a bus station. Patronage is predictably low and the system loses money per passenger in perpetuity. No, that can't be why people vote these down, they're just hating on them fancy downtown folks.
It is maybe 6-8 lines total and was incredibly useful because it was designed to be, I didnt need a car to get anywhere and it was clean and cheap (2 euros per trip) .
The new Q-line in Detroit is 1 line that is three miles total and is more designed as a tourist trap, most people dont work three miles away from where they live. You need to connect it to other systems like an airport or a bus station, and you need more than 1 line (duh).
If you gave everyone horses and only build a three mile road you wouldn't say that "cars are a failure, and roads lose money". For some reason in the States we build out a tiny one line system and then throw our hands up in the air when nobody rides it.
Building a train can make sense. There is a very simple and relatively cheap way to test your route before building rail: put an express bus route on the nearby roads, and give them the same controls emergency vehicles have to change the lights when they come. If the train makes sense this bus route will be always busy and make money. You can even adjust the bus route a few times to study alternate routes. Of course nobody wants to do this as it would kill their pet project.
Most American streetcar systems suffer the same fate: Shiny but slow, much like a theme park monorail; and sold first as a way to boost property values and economic development. They are designed to do everything except provide a useful way to commute.
There should be an 'express' bypass (which actually does this) that hops only among key points (such as the airport to a downtown hub, and maybe the next hub out on the other side).
There should also be /frequent/ service - which probably means you need fully automated routes (it might be best to move the humans to supervising the actual concourses, where human interactions are highest). I also like the idea of a couple days of subservience that's automatically deleted if not expressly copied out for legal proceedings.
Finally, everything should be enclosed and on it's own isolated layer. Subways sound great, above-surface enclosures might work too.
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Why enclosed? Security, noise abatement, weather isolation. The middle point lets you run the trains faster and with less disruption.
To the parent's point, the U.S. system for cars does as well. Including highway + local road funding (and delayed funding that has led to roads and bridges collapsing), parking lot real estate costs, oil exploration subsidies, the national oil reserve, pipeline and ocean damages, national defense, and more.
This is often the equivalent of those cities commuter rail; and one interpretation is not enough readily available last mile options.
Bonus, not everybody drives to those bus station, some of us bike to the rail/bus station. (anecdotally)
I would pay extra for the NYC subway user experience to be like the LIRR user experience. Why can’t it be?
Why do I have to dread getting on the subway after 10pm?
Why do I have to put up with mariachi bands playing in my ear at 6am?
Why do I have to worry about my face getting kicked by a dancer during my commute?
Riding the public transportation systems meant I would arrive at work sweaty (hot crowded train and bus), with a backache (inadequate seats) and a headache (noisy engine).
Those issues made my life so miserable that I swore never to ride those again.
I don't want to depend on a billionaire's altruism.
2. We tried forming a broad spanning coalition and charging it wit public transportation (among other things). Then we gave it 30-40% of all economic activity. And yet, people apparently still feel like only excitable billionaires can fix public transport. I don't see how taking more money from the billionaires and putting it into the government would help.
No more adjustable tray for laptop or books in the back of seat. No more armchairs and the whole seat seems to be designed to be uncomfortable.
One of the reason I now rather listen to podcasts in my car on the highway than not being able to work in the train. No more
If I go by train I expect to be able to work (to compensate for the stress of missing a connection or being late). I can easily listen to podcasts in my car and in much better condition than in the train (plus the fact that 99% of the time I'll be at the office on time).
All in all I don't want to listen to podcasts but I'd rather to listen to podcasts in my car on my way to work than sitting in one of the new and upgraded train seats which don't allow working with a laptop.
Besides, listening to podcasts with a headphone in the train is a no-no because I need to crank up the volume.
But still, riding in a bus is not a good experience.
Now let's imagine, if riding in a bus was a great experience, maybe more people were more forgiving to how much time it takes ?
That's rail / light rail. It makes a difference.
How about the passengers that smell for lack of bathing, too much drink, or that smell like they are trying to cover up one of the other defects by covering themselves in potent airborne warfare agents? (E.G. those body sprays, perfumes, colognes, etc)
I think the above could probably be fixed by a combination of better social support policies and better social morals that helped to promote a tranquil ride zone in part of the transit cabins.
The thing is, you would not notice any of those with proper ventilation and spacing/seating that meant we didn't have to sit on each others.
I've dropped $350 on a pair of noise-cancelling headphones. It was the best investment I've made in a long time, because it let me ditch my car, without a serious reduction in commute comfort.
Bus drivers also tend towards the unpleasant. I realise it's a stressful job but that doesn't make my commute any better.
As the article points out, newer car-hire services mount the most unfortunate competition, because they take advantage of the low costs of private vehicles' road use, and then turn around to collect a fare from each user, which, depending on market conditions, may or may not even result in an operating profit. While these are comfortable for their occupants, they clog up the streets more so than personal-use vehicles, which don't need to patrol the town when their driver is occupied. The fact that the likes of Uber notoriously ignore local regulations hurts even more. These car hire services pay the same way as private vehicles do, but the marginal difference between their usage goes not to the government's coffers, but to private operators.
I've ridden TriMet daily in the past, SoundTransit daily, and the L in Chicago daily. (Now I bike.) Maybe one trip in 20 or 30 there'd be unpleasantness.
Not overwhelmingly a shit experience. Mostly fine.
(Also FYI 80% of the US lives in cities. And 82 million of us--a fourth of us--live in the top 10 metropolitan areas alone.)
Public transport in the US is an overwhelmingly shit experience not because of the geography of the country, but because it all got sold out to lobbyists who wanted to sell as many cars as they could. Shit public transport = more cars.
It's overwhelmingly shit because urban planning favoured cookie-cutter suburbs far out of town, with no local amenities and no convenient transport connections in any reasonable walking distance. They never had to be designed that way.
Add to that the whole nuclear family rhetoric - a husband, a wife, some kids, a couple of cars...
People won't pay out of pocket to upgrade infrastructure and provide these services knowing how much they've been gutted over the past hundred years, so it really requires a government who is willing to invest in it and support it and begin to change the perception of public transport. That will probably come at a loss but an arguable purpose of a government is to provide such services that a corporate entity won't, without profit motive, because it is still ultimately in service of its people.
This isn't the only topic where people in the US are convinced they're in a unique situation that nobody else in the world has ever encountered and then solved, and I'm sure that it almost always boils down to some element of corporate lobbying that rejects any attempt to make life easy for citizens.
That's such a boring scapegoat. Rail was a plenty powerful industry at the time who afforded themselves plenty of lobbyists. Personal vehicles were a literal revolution. What always seems left out is that people overwhelmingly wanted this state of affairs and largely still do. People here are acting like people would love public transportation if only their minds hadn't been corrupted by the bad people.
> It's overwhelmingly shit because urban planning favoured cookie-cutter suburbs.
But now that we're here what do you propose we do? Going back in time for a do over isn't exactly a solution.
> People won't pay out of pocket to upgrade infrastructure.
* People who own cars don't use public transportation and have little desire to start.
* The overwhelming majority of people own cars.
* Public transportation comprehensive enough to replace cars is ludicrously expensive.
* People who don't use a thing don't want to pay for a thing.
=> It's not exactly a leap in logic that people wouldn't vote for it.
I think you've got a better chance of creating programs that just outright buy cars for the poor.
If a group can look at evidence of successful public transport (and other things) and still decide that can never work for them, for various nonsensical reasons (big country, x million people, the guiding hand of the free market, whatever), then they can at least be honest with themselves and say what their problem really is.
Source: here now
Why? Cities are built at human scale (i.e., vertical)
- One bus ride in western mass with crazy drug head yelling crap.
- Six T rides in Boston, one ended with some drunk dude yelling and cursing at me. Another with some bum hassling a woman and then pretending to have a gun when my buddy stepped in.
- Four Metro train rides from CT to NY. Not too bad. Only saw two fights that didn’t involve me.
- A few metro rides in Paris, nothing bad, just a few harmless beggars.
- A few time in the Tube in London. Jolly good there.
So, my personal answer to this question is safety. Fewer crazy passengers and more security.
I also rode the trains and subways in Tokyo for a week and a half and saw nothing odd, except the odd looks my wife got for wearing a shirt with the wrong date on it. (It was a shift from a marathon and just happened to coincide with Pearl Harbor Day, IIRC.)
I think you had a lot of bad luck in the US, and I don't think the percentage of craziness you experienced is the norm. I know it happens, and it absolutely discourages people from public transit, but I just don't think it happens that much.
- Homeless people with severe B.O (~1x/week)
- Obnoxious bible thumpers hollering at everyone in the subway car (2-3 times)
- Panhandlers walking from one end of the car to the next (~2x/mo)
- Mariachi bands and dance troupes invading the subway car (~2-3x/week)
- A woman changing her toddler's diaper on the seat right next to me (ew; thankfully only once).
And the only actually threatening ones:
- Mentally ill people talking to themselves (maybe a half dozen times ever) and grumbling at people around them (~2-3 times ever)
- Some creep sitting next to me and asking personal questions and ignoring my requests to leave me the fuck alone.
You can avoid most of these situations by avoiding any disproportionately empty subway car. If you get in the wrong car by accident, you switch at the next stop (<2 min). Most of the rest will leave on their own within a few minutes.
For every unpleasant encounter I've had on the subway, I've had one that's restored my faith in humanity: half the car helping out a woman who fainted; the whole car grinning at each other while an actor in a green rabbit suit did magic tricks for the kids sitting across from her; offers of tissues to someone who developed a spontaneous nosebleed. I've never seen tourists stare in confusion at a map for more than a couple minutes without someone stepping in to offer directions; once with someone else nearby stepping in to translate to Japanese!
Vancouver has the highest gas prices in NA.
Vancouver's transit operator Translink is enjoying a big influx of funding from the government and is increasing service hours.
Unsurprisingly Vancouver transit ridership is experiencing record growth.
> Average weekday boardings on buses were up 9.5 per cent. Expo/Millennium Line average weekday boardings were up 9.2 per cent, while Canada Line’s boardings grew 8.1 per cent. On SeaBus, average weekday boardings increased by 13.1 per cent, thanks in part to increased sailings. Even West Coast Express ridership is on the rise, up 6.7 per cent.
http://vancouversun.com/news/local-news/transit-ridership-hi...
oh no, the main problem is one of time, none of these buses match up so despite being a mere 3-4 miles an average commute via public transport is well over an hour, not only that but the timetable is not even close to accurate, youll often wait for a bus marked on the digital info boards as coming any min only to find that bus actually never existed and you have another 30 min wait
basically if you want to get to work on time be prepared to leave at least 2 hours early. you may be thinking "hey its only 3-4 miles, just walk you lazy bastard!" but sadly again this town does not lend itself well to things such as walking or cycling because there is no such thing as flat roads here, youre either going up a steep hill or down one
a reasonably priced tram system or even a properly organised and reasonably priced bus service could fix these issues easily but sadly that will never happen
How the Koch Brothers Are Killing Public Transit Projects Around the Country
Regretted systems: guided buses. Both Edinburgh and Cambridge regret theirs and Edinburgh built trams over it instead (with massive disruption and cost overrun, but not actually regretted yet).
There are people who regret it. There are always people who only want roads and cars. It just depends who is in power.
Best city public transport ever and getting better every day. For the most part.
2 min: Walk to bus stop
15 min: Bus to transit center
35 min: Bus to rail
20 min: Train 1 then switch
15 min: Train 2
45 min: Bus to transit center
20 min: Another bus
15 min: Another bus
3 min: Walk to work
Including wait times, we are at 3 hours 45 minutes. Compared to 1.5-2hrs by car depending on traffic. I don’t think more funding can realistically fix this. People are spread out and the USA is a big place.
When public transit is built, residential and commercial properties spawn up around its stops. This is why my Manhattan commute is 15 minutes door to door.
TL; DR The lack of public transit, and public subsidies for parking and roads, drives density within America’s metropolitan areas.
the state of many metropolitan transit systems is very similar, tens of billions in deferred maintenance, high payroll costs, and even worse is not keeping up pensions.
the folly many cities fell into was trying to make light rail work, the idea of build it and they will come did't pan out and some expansions that a few networks have tried were more expensive than the original build. to make up for money short falls and force ridership some agencies resorted t cutting bus service.
can we save transit, sure, but it has to be adapted to how people live and not be built out to change how people live. it needs to be taken out of the hands of politicians who love cutting ribbons on expensive projects that don't deliver. any good transit solution will need to involve better road planning, fully integrated traffic signaling, and pushing to provide better service that earns riders instead of passing laws to try to coerce them
So yea the system is poorly managed, but without it NYC would not function.
I have a 3 mile commute that takes me roughly 10-15 minutes during morning rush hour and maybe another 5 in the evening. According to Google Maps walking takes an hour and public transit take 45 minutes.
Not that 20 minutes to go 3 minutes in the evening by car would be that great either, of course
We would need to start ( especially in cities) to optimize for range.
But there are places in the US that do have density where people sit in traffic all day and think its normal. It doesn't have to be complicated -> 400,000 cars move up and down my local freeway during rush hour, so build a subway underneath and make stops every mile or so.
Go to the Ruhr/Cologne area of Germany, it is bunch of little and big cities all spread out across a large region and they have hundreds of transit options from high speed trains to trams to bus lines etc. Its very easy to get around and you don't have to sit in traffic on the autobahn.
We need better transit in the States, you can't bury your head in the sand and proclaim that AV cars will solve everything. You have massive urban centers and metro areas that will continue to grow and roads just don't scale that well (look at LA)
Some anecdota: the netherlands has an excellent public transport networks. Our busiest train station, Utrecht Central station, has over a hundred million passengers going through it each year. To put that into perspective: there are roughly 17 million people in the Netherlands. To put that into further perspective: utrecht has 330K inhabitants. Over 5 times the entire population of the entire country is going through that station each year, and over three hundred times the entire population of the city the train station is in. I'm stunned daily by how little delays we have.
However: the Uithof, the (mostly) STEM part of the Utrecht University's campus, is pretty big by Dutch standards. Most of them use the public transport to get there. There are roughly 35K people using public transport to travel to the Uithof each day, with an estimated 45K in 2020. There are a little over 2 double-bendy busses going to the Uithof from the Central station each minute during rush hour. Each double-bendy bus can, according to the specs [1], carry 150 people. A friend of mine who still goes to the Uithof daily using these busses told me that if he has to get there during rush hour, or leave during rush hour, will often have to wait anywhere from 30 to 45 minutes until there's space for him on a bus.
To combat this, the goverment is spending 440 million euros to build a tram line from Central station to the Uithof, and it's still not sure that this will be enough.
What I can say though is imagine all of those people at that University driving cars everywhere and parking at the Uni, and it quickly becomes a dystopian hellscape like LA. We should not let the perfect become the enemy of the good and forsake all public transit because it is difficult or expensive.
Another fun short anecdote: that tramline they're building has run into a lot of problems on the Uithof itself. The Uithof contains a lot of rontgen and other electromagnetically sensitive equipment due to being home to a large hospital as well as several research groups using similar equipment. It has been moved several times during planning processes, as well as have its speed severly limited to not to interfere with the aforementioned equipment.
> What I can say though is imagine all of those people at that University driving cars everywhere and parking at the Uni, and it quickly becomes a dystopian hellscape like LA.
Yeah, I'm not trying to imply that this would be a better solution, because here it clearly is not, especially since the highway going past the uithof is a horrible bit of two-lane highway, which is a permanent traffic jam literally as far as the eye can see (and do not underestimate how far you can see in a land as flat as the Netherlands) in both directions during rush hours.
2 double-bendy buses is 300 people per minute. If he has to wait 45 minutes, he's in a line with 13,500 people. At 3 people/meter, that's a line 4.5 kilometers long. Now, I imagine it's more like a large crowd. But are you sure he has to wait 45 minutes? And are you sure there are two double-bendy buses per minute? 9292 says in the spits from the Uithof-Centraal there is one bus every 4 minutes.
I made a mistake while writing that: it should've been 1 bus every two minutes. Don't know why I decided to quadruple the capacity...
> 9292 says in the spits from the Uithof-Centraal there is one bus every 4 minutes.
Strange. Maybe they did change this, but I recall there being 30 of those buggers per hour during rush hours.
I ride a bicycle a 3 miles to work every day, and while I'm sure I could work up to it I'm not entirely sure if I can do 24 miles without stopping because I haven't done it in so long. And keep in mind my 3 miles commute is more than the vast majority of westerners ever do - I probably have a higher base fitness just by using a bicycle at all.
3 miles is pretty standard around here, I think about 75% of people could do it. (excluding small kids and bedbound elderly) (some of them will have muscle aches at first, maybe, and be really slow)
https://www.afdc.energy.gov/data/10311
Certainly there are plenty of motorcycles that beat it without much effort/technique as well.
So, what am I supposed to be taxed for again? The environment inside a moving box full of strangers, and the scheduling headaches, doesn't excite me much as an alternative.
I wonder how much of the "decline" is because of people who work from home. I don't think uber is entirely the cause, more like uber displaced taxi drivers.
The societal benefits of poor people being able to get to work every day.
Sidebar, I wonder how an EV car stacks up to an EV bus.
The point is that it gives an opportunity to reduce the "m" in the mpg.
Any recommendations on where to start looking?
- ebikes.ca - Informative website, sell high quality items with a lot of the problems worked out and with support. Prices are fair given the added value. Motor and trip simulators for calculating speeds and feeds etc.
- bmsbattery.com - Chinese vendor of cheap but mostly functional components. Not much support and shipping will add 30% to prices, but very inexpensive if you can make it work.
- lunacycle.com (US), e3emv.com(China) - Sell high quality battery packs
- endless-sphere.com - massive discussion board full of good information leavened with the usual opinionated know nothings, but mostly civil.
Assuming you need to go less than 25 miles and don't need to climb long steep hills and intend to pedal lightly I'd say you are looking for a small front geared hub motor rated for 250-350 watts and a small controller rated for 20A or less along with a 48v battery between 350-600 watt hours capacity. Target speed should be around 18 to 20 mph. Start with a nice used practical commuter bike, older mountain and road bikes and hybrids will all work. Get something that started out as a decent bike, not big-box store "bike shaped object".
I've built a few now and am pretty happy with the process and results.
I'm considering the BBS02 but I really like the torque sensors. I was hoping that there was some mass produced Chinese model T but couldn't find it.
Yes, trucks have more wheels and therefore bigger contact surface, but it only partialy compensates bigger mass. Pressure on road is still few times bigger than of typical car.
Buses however, are big but not that heavy, so they are not as bad as trucks.
Road wear There is strong potential to reduce the damage to roads (and thus the cost of maintaining them, which is immense and seriously in arrears) thanks to the robotruck. That's because heavy trucks and big buses cause almost all the road wear today. A surprising rule of thumb is that road damage goes up with the 4th power of the weight per axle. As such an 80,000lb truck with 34,000lb on two sets of 2 axles and 6,000lb on the front axle does around 2,000 times the road damage of a typical car! An interesting solution is now possible. With fully self-driving trucks (or platoons with nobody in the rear vehicle) you can have two half-weight trucks, which would do 1/8th the damage. 4 1/4 weight trucks would do roughly 1/16th the damage. This is a bit more expensive in fuel and truck wear, though you can get back some of it with platooning. The platoon can space out further on bridges to avoid stressing them.
https://ideas.4brad.com/otto-and-self-driving-trucks-what-do...
In parts of Europe where the temperature soars over 40°C in the summer, trucks are forbidden from driving during the daytime because when the asphalt softens, they do more damage than a car.
Fixed-route 19th-20th century public transportation networks are inefficient because most of the vehicles are pretty empty most of the time. This makes these systems expensive on a passenger-per-seat-mile basis. Not to mention the colossal waste of people's time spent trying to accommodate their journeys to those fixed routes (and schedules).
Example: LA's Metro system is subsidized to the tune of about 50 cents per passenger seat/mile, or was as of 2009 (http://www.newgeography.com/content/002361-los-angeles-metro...)
In 10-15 years, transport companies like Lyft/Uber/Didi will be able to offer municipalities a much better deal than that. An electric car or van without a driver in it, with an operating lifetime of a million miles, will cost on the order of 20-40 cents a mile to run. Get 3-8 paying customers into the vehicle, and there is absolutely no need for a 50 cent per passenger seat mile subsidy.
Also if you’re subsidising mass transit only for the poor, why not just give them subsidy directly?
I do.
People are leaving rural and suburbs for cities. Cities are becoming more dense. Fixed line transportation offers significantly more passengers/area/hour than roads. Tokyo supplies 40M daily train rides. Nothing Lyft/Uber/Didi is doing suggests anything close to that amount of density.
Hyperloops are going to push maximum passenger density of fixed route paths even higher.
You know what else sits empty most of the time? Highways.
Ok, I was being snarky. Couldn’t resist. Snark aside, this is not an insurmountable problem with public transit. The Vancouver SkyTrain operates on the assumption that frequent, automated, short trains are better than longer less frequent ones. Headways are about 90 seconds during peak commute hours and scale with demand.
> Example: LA's Metro system is subsidized to the tune of about 50 cents per passenger seat/mile, or was as of 2009
Hong Kong’s turns a profit. And who said transit systems have to turn a profit anyway? Just like our roads, they are provided for public benefit.
A large amount of transit money is spent building, operating and maintaining a dedicated transit right of way, needed to make any sort of rapid transit work.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/19/climate/koch-brothers-pub...
I am unaware of this trend across multiple rich countries of less public transit. Anyone have actual numbers instead of hersay?
I could believe that people travel longer distances than they used to, in ways that transit never served. But less public transit itself? Is love to learn more.
1) Allow transit systems to provide a luxury tier of service with no upper limit on price
2) Mandate that 100% of the money that comes from (1) has to be pumped back into expanding transit infrastructure
https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2011/10/why-tokyos-pr...
Trying to meet the Paris climate accord and making sure people don't die from poor air quality makes this a legal requirement. Ofcourse the US has Trump so there is no such pressure to get people out of their SUVs.
Just reducing traffic would payoff in terms of less wear and tear on the roads, and less need to expand the roads.
And with any luck, free public transit would help poor people the most. Allowing more people to find work.
Yes.
And if by some miracle we can help people get jobs, by making transportation cheaper then we call it a win-win.
Note, even if public transit was free that wouldn't make everybody use it all the time. But it might reduce the number of cars on the road, and help a few people out of poverty.
Scheduled set of stops between basically two places.
Each of those stops rely on people walking a couple blocks or more to a stop for the route.
Basically, you deconstruct and make on-demand the route. As people register for a trip, you combine a set of origination and destination points into closely grouped numbers, pick up a set of people in close proximity, and drop off them off.
At high density times, there will be opportunities for substantial "rideshare" efficiencies.
At less high density times, you save overhead of the busses with a couple riders.
If you've ever taken the cheaper alternative airport -> city hotel van that goes to all the hotels in a downtown from an airport, that is basically the idea. It isn't as convenient as 1:1 taxi transport, but it's a lot better than the vagaries of train/bus hopping.
It seems strange that with all the graph and NP-complete interview-ready people on this site that this isn't completely obvious. Self-driving vehicles will obviate all but the highest density mass transport.
And then if you get self-flying drones going...