Off-Peak Public Transport Usage
pedestrianobservations.com
pedestrianobservations.com
First, where is he getting that car commuters outnumber rail commuters (just barely) in New York? Last I heard the split was 60/40 in favor of rail.
Second, where did he get that it is unusual for management to not use a car? Rather famously Bloomberg himself used to commute to city Hall by subway. By the authors own admission, even the lawyers use the subway. New York doesn't have that weird anti-transit classism of the rest of the country.
Third, what is meant by multi modal and why is it a relevant figure if merit.
Fourth, he clearly used New York metro area, not the city proper in his calc. Can I get some footnotes on if the cross comparison did the same thing to other cities?
Fifth, 10 min headways is exactly the threshold where you can just show up and not pre plan your trip. When you get to the station you will wait on average five min. Compare that to the amount of time spent looking for parking or waiting for an Uber. I am unsatisfied with the conclusion that of peak wait times are the reason for underutilization or that there even is an underutilization problem in the listed American cities.
Most metro lines in London have 2½-5 minute gaps off-peak.
10 minutes is more like the waiting time for the next train from London to Birmingham, after the morning peak: https://traintimes.org.uk/london/birmingham/1000/monday
The busses with 10min interval are okay. The average wait is still longer than I'd like, but it's not quite as frustrating.
But a 5 minute interval should absolutely be the goal. It's probably not possible for many bus lines because of traffic, but for rail and tram lines its not a problem.
With a 5 minute interval public transport becomes more appealing than driving.
One reason why wait time is so important is that people often need to change lines. If you want to take two busses with a ten minute interval, you have to leave 20min early to make sure you get there on time. That makes driving a lot more attractive...
The New York City subway uses extensive interlining which means that two or more services share track for part of their route (typically the part in Manhattan). If trains on the shared track are every 3 min, by conservation of mass, trains on the split part need to be every 6 min.
NYC also is still upgrading it's signaling system so for now train are a 5 min interval even in the best parts and 10 min intervals everywhere else. There is physically no easy fix.
He's getting that number from American Community Survey data, and it's including the full MSA, which includes the entirety of Long Island and half of New Jersey, even if you don't work anywhere near NYC itself. The 60/40 split you're talking about is more representative of the mode share for people who live in NYC proper.
> Second, where did he get that it is unusual for management to not use a car? Rather famously Bloomberg himself used to commute to city Hall by subway.
He's talked with several staff at the NYC MTA, and it's fairly well-known that most of the upper management at the MTA don't use its own services. Bloomberg is an exception, not the rule.
> Fourth, he clearly used New York metro area, not the city proper in his calc. Can I get some footnotes on if the cross comparison did the same thing to other cities?
The author does spend a lot of time trying to compare like-to-like. Official city boundaries are notoriously bad indicators of urbanization--Staten Island is basically a suburb within NYC boundaries, to say nothing of places like Houston, while Boston and Washington, D.C. have core parts of their key business districts just outside official boundaries. The official metric that tends to be most comparable across countries is various approximations of the MSA.
>In the case of a nominally 10-minute bus line, sometimes the span between arrivals will be longer than 10 minutes, and sometimes shorter, and if you arrive at a random time, you have more opportunities to encounter a longer interval than to encounter a shorter interval. And so it makes sense that the average span of time experienced by riders will be longer than the average span of time between buses, because the longer spans are over-sampled.
https://jakevdp.github.io/blog/2018/09/13/waiting-time-parad...
That being said, I don't think the lack of off-peak usage is because of low frequency, but rather lack of density on the suburban stations. If there's only offices at the core stations then people can only really use it for going to work.
This is one of the things that drives me nuts the most about American attitudes towards public transportation -- that they must make a significant portion of their revenue from fares/ridership.
If we think that large scale people moving is important to a healthy city, we should all be funding it, even if we're not all riding it. Everyone benefits when ridership is high -- businesses, other commuters, people who cannot afford cars, etc.
Why do we always seem give transportation (or public housing, etc.) a heavy initial investment then immediately start neglecting it but tightening the purse strings. We're just making our initial investments that much less valuable.
We don’t. New York’s operating budget per passenger is double London’s. (And also much more heavily subsidized. Tickets cover half of operating costs in New York, but all of operating costs in London.)
Public transit advocates need to acknowledge the reality that one of the things killing public transit in the US is spending multiples of what other countries spend to get the same service. For what the second avenue subway is going to cost, France or London would have been able to build three more lines in Manhattan. American governments are selling Kias for the price of Bentley’s and transit advocates are stumped why the public isn’t interesting in buying.
According to Wikipedia New York has a farebox recovery ratio of 47% and London has 65%.
There is absolutely no reason the government can not provide an effective service that serves most people well, but there is a belief among the wealthy and those convinced they will be wealthy one day that nearly every single service the government provides is better provided by someone super wealthy running a for profit business.
It would be fine if it was a truly competing view point. Bureaucracy can in impede fast growth to better ideas. But most of those people in the US decide that the best way to to prove their point and gain wealth is to purposefully implement bad policy so that the government isn't even a potential floor level competitor.
Post offices around the world provide many services to their citizens including health insurance. Public transportation is a pleasure to use in Asia vs rush hour traffic even with crowding. Yet taxes in the US are extremely complicated and potentially expensive despite the government knowing all our nearly all the information needed to file for most citizens because corporations and those seeking to prove a point the government should not tax them have purposefully made it complicated and seek to make it complicated.
Unfortunately, this is happening in France too. SNCF used to be publicly funded to manage all inter-city/town railways and trains, but is now privatised and expected to make a profit.
https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2011/10/why-tokyos-pr...
Americans have a kneejerk aversion to any sort of taxes because they think they will never see the benefits. So these agencies are forced to fund themselves and/or look to the private sector for support.
And how. My hometown is near a state line. There are somewhat lower - about 10¢ per gallon - gasoline taxes on the other side of the border. People will habitually make special trips to a gas station in the next town over - at a cost of half an hour of time (at least) and $2 worth of gasoline - in order to pay $1.50 less in taxes. To another state.
That said, I'm not so sure about
> because they think they will never see the benefits
People don't seem to be quite so opposed to public spending on things like highways and airports. I would guess it's more that America's cherished spirit of individualism means that there's a greater tendency to oppose public spending that benefits society as a whole, but doesn't directly benefit oneself.
I suspect that the drive at the individual level to ...
> directly benefit oneself.
... is universal. Germans, Swedes, Chinese - they're all just as self serving as Americans. In America, we've just built a mythology around that "cherished spirit" that often impedes us from doing common sense things like investing in comprehensive mass transit in places that it makes a lot of sense to do so. It doesn't hurt that the narrative of individualism has been very effectively used by the auto industry.
And they have been conditioned to accept certain exceptions, like the military, or corporate welfare.
That is evidence that the problem could be corrected, with correct (and ubiquitous) messaging, but we are competing against fifty years of effort and most of the major media outlets.
Close. It’s not that they think they will never see the benefits, but rather they know it.
Look, here is a good example of what you and the parent suggest. The ST3 passed in the Seattle ballot, which promises expansion of the public transit network. The project includes light rail to my neighborhood, in about 20 minutes of walking distance from my home. However, the planned date for delivery of the project is 2035. Knowing the realities of public projects in the US, I don’t expect it before 2040s. I’ll be long retired by then.
At the same time, the ST3 involved a tax increase, which for me means about $10,000 (today’s dollars, more in inflated ones) I’ll pay in additional tax before the construction is complete.
In addition to that, since the farebox recovery is only around 30%, the city subsidies covers 70% of operational costs of public transit, and the subsidies come from my taxes too. To put it in concrete terms: assuming I use public transit only for commuting, annual fare costs would be $2.75248 = $1320, and so the whole operational costs apportioned to me would be $1320/0.3 = $4400, so the subsidy would be around $3000 per rider. Fortunately, only 10% of people in Seattle commute via public transit, so it roughly translates to $300/person/year now, which I’m paying to support public transit that I don’t even use. This number is so low only because the driving majority subsidizes the public transit riding few. Thus, since operational costs grow roughly linearly with the number of riders, if majority of people were using transit for commuting, the cost per resident would have to rise significantly. This would make my public transit costs significantly higher than my driving costs, with greatly reduced convenience. So why would I want to support public transit?
The big issue here isn’t that public transit is always a bad idea, it’s just it’s a bad idea in places where government cannot do large projects quickly and cheaply, and cheaply operate them, which in 2020 is the whole US.
ST3 costs you 0.5% sales tax, 0.8% motor vehicle excise tax, and a property tax of 25 cents per $1,000 in assessed value over 25 years. If you have a million dollar home, you'll pay $6,250 in additional property taxes. With a hundred thousand dollar car you'd still need to be spending hundreds of thousands a year on taxable stuff.
So yeah, you are wealthy and are being asked to put in more than some others. But you'll still see benefits -- light rail stations increase local business, remove vehicles from the road, pollute less, and you'll help leave a legacy for your children and your community.
> This number is so low only because the driving majority subsidizes the public transit riding few. Fortunately, only 10% of people in Seattle commute via public transit...
Have a source for that? Because from what I've read 25% of commuters use a single occupancy vehicle (car or motorcycle), 10% use a rideshare (car/vanpool), 49% uses transit, and 10% use walking or biking. [1] And the number of transit commuters is on the rise overall.
[1] https://www.seattlebusinessmag.com/seattle-using-public-tran...
Sorry, looks like I'm bad at mental math. I'll edit my comment.
> Have a source for that?
See [1], page 14. It's probably something like 14-15% now. Your link only talks about people who commute to downtown area.
[1] - https://kingcounty.gov/~/media/depts/transportation/metro/ac...
What about my taxes that go to paying for roads I don't drive on? There's no way the $~200 car registration is covering all the costs involved in maintaining an extensive road network.
On top of that, while we’re counting up taxes I pay for which I do not receive a direct benefit: on the odd chance I did drive in my own neighborhood, why should I be paying taxes to subsidize all the roads in every other neighborhood.
The point I’m making is: you can get as petty as you want in comparing what you pay with what you get, but in the long term, do you really want to live in a society that can’t have nice things because there’s one person who might just benefit slightly more from them than you can?
Are Americans already so far down the road of considering public transit beneath them, that the only people who use it must not be able to afford cars, so it's not reducing car usage so it's OK to hate on?
The analogy about transit riders complaining at paying for roads they don’t use is wrong, and for more fundamental reason than the simple fact that the transit does in fact use roads. The biggest difference is that since overwhelming majority people drive instead of using public transit, so majority of the costs of roads is covered by drivers. Look, I’d love to move to system where you are charged for road use in proportion to your use of it. However, it would then only be fair to do the same with public transit. If public transit was actually paid for by the riders, instead of being subsidized by non-riders, bus fares would be pretty much as high as Uber fares on the same routes.
Again, the issue is not that public transit is universally bad idea, it’s just most US cities simply aren’t able to build and operate them cheaply enough for it to make sense.
No - If I take the train, I’m not using the road. If I take a bus, I’m using the bus lane and I’m not using the other lanes. In fact, I can’t use them because my bus is already using the bus lane, so why should I pay for them?
To apply your logic, I’m being over-taxed by 3x too because the road is 4 lanes wide but I can only drive in one lane at a time.
See how silly this complaint is?
Sound Transit has consistently delivered projects on-time, and outside of an increased land acquisition cost, has been relatively on-budget[2].
I don't want to debate on a fact-by-fact basis, but I'll say that you're off on the percentage of Seattle that takes transit to work: it's north of 20%[3] (from what I can see), and bucking a nationwide trend of that falling in other cities. Seattle is, IMO, doing the right thing to work through the massive influx of population it's gotten. I only wish it was started 20 years ago (or more!) and could be done faster.
Personally, I am more than happy to pay the increased vehicle registration tax, sales tax and property tax. I purchased a house close to the light rail explicitly because I wanted to have convenient transit access, and I see the benefit of how these tax dollars were spent every day. Even if you don't directly ride the Link, it's taking traffic off the road and making commutes easier.
I think transit _options_ are an extremely important quality of life item that creates a more dynamic and healthier city. They're just that though - options. I own a car, and I use it for trips that don't make sense to do any other way (e.g. going Skiing). That doesn't mean I want a world where nobody drives, but a world where people have multiple choices for personal mobility.
[1]: https://st32.blob.core.windows.net/media/Default/Document%20...
[2]: https://www.masstransitmag.com/rail/article/12171636/ahead-o...
[3]: https://seattletransitblog.com/2019/09/28/census-reports-ste...)
This is only the symptom of the real problem, which is way too high cost of building. Light rail construction costs are planned to be around ~$500M/mile. In comparison, whole subway line in my home town of Warsaw, finished in 2014, built 6 miles of underground subway for ~$200M/mile. Considering that subway typically costs 5-8 times more than light rail per mile, $500M/mile is simply insane.
The cost, and not construction schedule, is the real problem. The construction schedule is so slow precisely because money is scarce. If we could build light rail for $50M/mile instead of $500M/mile, the project would make way more sense, and would also most likely be more than halfway done by now. On the other hand, since the money is scarce, not only we know that we won't get the project finished by 2035, but it also means that won't get anything more than ST3 by 2035.
I think transit _options_ are an extremely important quality of life item that creates a more dynamic and healthier city. They're just that though - options. I own a car, and I use it for trips that don't make sense to do any other way (e.g. going Skiing). That doesn't mean I want a world where nobody drives, but a world where people have multiple choices for personal mobility.
I agree. At the same time, I'd like everyone to internalize the cost of the options they choose. That means charging the costs of transit to transit users, and at the same time, charging drivers for congestion they cause.
Add on that Sound Transit, unlike most transit agencies, has pretty stout restrictions on its borrowing capability. Sound Transit cannot sell bonds to pay for the entire project, or even most of it, up front, due to a debt cap imposed by the Washington State constitution. So it borrows, builds, pays down with tax revenue, then borrows again, and so on. This form of borrowing incurs more interest expense and requires a much longer timeframe for construction because the money simply isn't available and isn't available efficiently. (Also, the voters of the Sound Transit tax district have consistently voted in favor of these tax increases over the past 21 years, so it isn't like we didn't have a say in the spending.)
Here's where I'll editorialize for a little bit, and I am sorry if this sounds like I'm personally attacking you. I promise I'm not, but I do get a little frustrated: All of this is endlessly debated, particularly in transit advocacy circles. Sound Transit isn't operating like this because someone woke up and thought "well, better do a shit job and spend 15 years building because fuck the taxpayers." We got where we are through a series of decisions made over the course of sixty years--dating back to the original votes on Forward Thrust and the freeway revolt and an earlier taxpayer revolt against public borrowing--and now we live with those consequences.
It's not fair or reasonable to point to a country with a cost of living half of Puget Sound's and a wildly different tax and public agency system. For one big example, I checked and the bulk of the Warsaw Metro's M1 €230 million expansion was financed in one big block by a consortium of investment banks and the Polish central government. The M2 €1 billion expansion is half-funded solely by the EIB. We don't have the benefit of those public banks in Washington. The closest we get is Federal Transit Agency funding from the US federal government in the other Washington, but even that is usually a third to just under half of a project's cost (and is often in the form of loans, not direct grants, that further reduce borrowing capacity). Local borrowing, a piece at a time, from tax revenue makes up the rest.
We'd love to discuss all of this with you instead of you just being mad that you feel like you're being screwed by a bunch of freeloading transit riders.
Expansion map: https://www.soundtransit.org/system-expansion/west-seattle-b...
M2 funding source article: https://www.railwaypro.com/wp/warsaw-receives-eib-funding-fo...
Still more expensive than 6 miles fully underground line with 10 stations, and 1/3 mile of under river tunnel in very permeable sand soil.
> Add on that Sound Transit, unlike most transit agencies, has pretty stout restrictions on its borrowing capability. Sound Transit cannot sell bonds to pay for the entire project, or even most of it, up front, due to a debt cap imposed by the Washington State constitution. So it borrows, builds, pays down with tax revenue, then borrows again, and so on. This form of borrowing incurs more interest expense and requires a much longer timeframe for construction because the money simply isn't available and isn't available efficiently.
Yes, that's what I meant when I said that it's only so slow because money is scarce. If the construction was cheaper, the shenanigans you describe wouldn't be necessary.
> (Also, the voters of the Sound Transit tax district have consistently voted in favor of these tax increases over the past 21 years, so it isn't like we didn't have a say in the spending.)
Sure, but 54% to 45% vote is hardly a large margin.
> Here's where I'll editorialize for a little bit, and I am sorry if this sounds like I'm personally attacking you. I promise I'm not, (...)
And yet you drop lines like:
> We'd love to discuss all of this with you instead of you just being mad that you feel like you're being screwed by a bunch of freeloading transit riders.
That's simply a nasty ad hominem strawman. I'm mad, because I'm complaining that this project in particular, and Seattle public transit in general is way, way to expensive for what it is?
> All of this is endlessly debated, particularly in transit advocacy circles. Sound Transit isn't operating like this because someone woke up and thought "well, better do a shit job and spend 15 years building because fuck the taxpayers." We got where we are through a series of decisions made over the course of sixty years--dating back to the original votes on Forward Thrust and the freeway revolt and an earlier taxpayer revolt against public borrowing--and now we live with those consequences.
Again, the debt service costs of ST3 are less than 10% of the cost of the project, and the problem with the very schedule is not lack of money, but rather too high of an expense. This whole thing proves that the taxpayer revolt against public borrowing was very much correct: without it, instead of overpaying by factor of 5x on one project every 20 years, we'd do the same every 4 years.
> It's not fair or reasonable to point to a country with a cost of living half of Puget Sound's and a wildly different tax and public agency system. For one big example, (...)
Again, this excuses why project takes 20 years, but not why it costs 5 times more than what it should. If the costs were reasonable, the schedule would also be shorter.
It's worth noting that if you look at the cost of ST2's University Link Extension, I believe it was $1.9b overall (with half of that coming from the federal gov) for 3.5 miles of completely underground Link, which would make the cost about ~$540M/mile all in, by my calculations. This is, at least, as complex as a "subway", no? I don't want to come off as attacking you personally, but I don't think saying that the cost of the University Link expansion should have been "5-8x less than $200M/mi" is reasonable.
I'm no expert, but I would love to see a cost breakdown of both projects - land acquisition, construction, cost of debt services etc. There's surely some complex work to be done in tunneling under the Montlake Cut, I would be land costs more to acquire in Seattle, etc. In addition, ST is bound by some really weird debt cap rules that mean they literally can't borrow money in the most advantageous way, which definitely increases the cost.
> I agree. At the same time, I'd like everyone to internalize the cost of the options they choose. That means charging the costs of transit to transit users, and at the same time, charging drivers for congestion they cause.
Sure. Looking at Sound Transit's numbers, they estimate that ST3 costs the typical adult $170 annually: https://www.soundtransit.org/get-to-know-us/news-events/news....
If you have a more expensive house, or a more expensive car, it's bound to cost you more. This seems appropriate to me - people with more money paying more than people with less money. As someone who is fortunate to be able to afford to own a home and a nice(r) car, I'm happy to pay a greater share of that pie.
Beyond that, it's not like we do a great job of externalizing the car here either, especially when the impact to the environment is taken into account. Do you think that people who only drive should not pay for the transit that takes cars off of the road so that they can afford to? It's not a zero sum game.
I don't feel like I'm getting fleeced by the government when I pay my ST-related taxes, and I don't feel like ST is trying to 'take advantage' of me. I'm confused where that mentality comes from, honestly.
No, because it only added 2 stations, and that's where the real cost is. Tunelling is relatively cheap, it's the underground station construction that's adding real expense. The 6 mile Warsaw line has 10 stations on it. Typical cost of subway construction in the US is on the order of $800M-1B/mile.
> I don't want to come off as attacking you personally, but I don't think saying that the cost of the University Link expansion should have been "5-8x less than $200M/mi" is reasonable.
Indeed, but I didn't say that. That $500M/mi figure I gave was for ST3, most of which will be above grade. Of course light rail construction in the US will have different costs than light rail construction in Poland, but the difference here is too extreme to excuse it by talking about cost of living differences.
> There's surely some complex work to be done in tunneling under the Montlake Cut,
Surely not as complex as 10 times longer tunnel under Vistula River.
> ST is bound by some really weird debt cap rules that mean they literally can't borrow money in the most advantageous way, which definitely increases the cost.
By less than 10%. It's all in ST reports.
> If you have a more expensive house, or a more expensive car, it's bound to cost you more. This seems appropriate to me - people with more money paying more than people with less money.
This only seems appropriate to anyone in the context of taxation. If grocery stores charged you more for food just because you make more money, you'd most likely be outraged.
> Beyond that, it's not like we do a great job of externalizing the car here either, especially when the impact to the environment is taken into account. Do you think that people who only drive should not pay for the transit that takes cars off of the road so that they can afford to? It's not a zero sum game.
Which is why I recommend charging for congestion. This automatically makes mass[1] transit more attractive.
> I don't feel like I'm getting fleeced by the government when I pay my ST-related taxes, and I don't feel like ST is trying to 'take advantage' of me. I'm confused where that mentality comes from, honestly.
Honestly, I don't feel too fleeced by local government either -- this is rather my complaint for federal government. However, just because I can afford something doesn't mean that it's a good decision to spend money on it. I make this kind of cost-value analysis everyday in my life with my after tax money, and I don't see why I should be silent when the government spends my before-tax money on stupidly expensive projects of little value.
[1] - mass, but not necessarily public transit, that really depends on average passenger load per bus.
Which is why that viaduct tunnel with no underground station was so inexpensive :).
Broadly: I'm not arguing that it's cheaper to build a subway in other parts of the world, that's absolutely true. A lot of ST3 cost is forecast in 2040 dollars, which slightly inflates the cost. Of course, even if you bring that back to 2020 dollars, take away the 10% for debt cap wonkiness, you still end up paying more than you would in many other countries, this has been true here, in NY, LA, SF and everywhere else in the USA.
I'd love to see that fixed!
But in the interim, I'd rather use progressive taxation to fund quality of life improvements for everyone in the area - even folks that don't directly take the light rail will some benefit.
I don't think it's fair to compare taxation to grocery store shopping, either - that's a strawman much like comparing a household budget to the national debt doesn't make sense in reality. It's fair to say we'll fundamentally disagree on that, and that's ok!
I'd love to see a congestion charge as well - passing more of the real cost of using a car would go a long way to exposing that the normal way of life in the USA comes with a lot of hidden costs, and I hope would shift the balance to public transit. I would love to be able to couple that with a more efficient construction cost as well - unfortunately, I don't have the answer to that.
It is six times as large as each of University Link tunnels, and in fact was largest tunnel bored by a TBM in the world. But yes, it’s high cost was also a travesty. This place cannot get anything done cheaply.
> But in the interim, I'd rather use progressive taxation to fund quality of life improvements for everyone in the area - even folks that don't directly take the light rail will some benefit.
I’d rather not, but since I don’t have much choice, I’d rather have government project clear higher bar than “some benefit”. It’s easy to get “some benefit”, the question is whether benefit is commensurable to the cost, and when it comes to Seattle, the answer is usually “no”.
> I don't think it's fair to compare taxation to grocery store shopping, either - that's a strawman much like comparing a household budget to the national debt doesn't make sense in reality.
I think it’s very fair, and you don’t like it because taxation is a clear loser here.
> I'd love to see a congestion charge as well - passing more of the real cost of using a car would go a long way to exposing that the normal way of life in the USA comes with a lot of hidden costs, and I hope would shift the balance to public transit. I would love to be able to couple that with a more efficient construction cost as well - unfortunately, I don't have the answer to that.
Indeed, I’d love people to be able to build more dense places, so that people who like them can move there, instead of remaking my place in their image at my expense.
I don’t think this conversation is going much farther, but I appreciate that it’s been even keel. I hope you find what you’re looking for somewhere!
And the other 90% are mostly in cars, which occupy finite road space that can't be expanded very much. Which is a roundabout way of saying that that's the biggest benefit to pitch at die-hard solo drivers.
I made a bunch of assumptions, picked a city to compare NYC to (Berlin), and did some math.
NYC Subway may run ~960 trains per week per line. Berlin s-bahn & u-bahn may run ~1270 trains per week per line.
I am curious how other cities compare
Assumptions:
- u-bahn day peak = 5 hours @ 4min/train
- u-bahn day = 8 hours @ 10min/train
- u-bahn night = 8 hours @ 15min/train
- u-bahn weekend = 24 hours @ 15min/train
- s-bahn day peak = 5 hours @ 10min/train
- s-bahn day = 9 hours @ 15min/train
- s-bahn night = 7 hours @ 30min/train
- s-bahn weekend = 24 hours @ 20min/train
- nyc peak = 5 hours @ 10 min/train
- nyc off-peak = 19 hours @ 10min/train
- nyc weekend = 24 hours @ 12min/train
Conversely NYC can run trains all night because so much of the system is double tracked, letting them close one track each way for maintenance overnight.
Sounds about right. For work trips, the origin and destination are both predictable. I can carefully choose where to rent in order so that I would live conveniently close to a public transport stop. But for "fun" trips and anything else, there's a lot more spontaneity in the destination, often not served by public transport, so a car is still necessary.
Anyway, I can't say for any other cities, but a population figure of 3.7m for Vienna is ridiculously overblown. The actual figure is 1.9m for the city, Wikipedia gives 2.6m for the metro area. But even just the city itself is sprawling and very badly connected towards the outskirts, so even the 1.9m are very unevenly served.
Also, it's not true of course that the French (and Germans, and Austrians) typically take their 5 weeks of vacation in a single block in the summer. That wouldn't leave any vacation time for the winter holidays, other school holidays, etc. Two-, maybe three-week blocks are much more typical in my experience.
Lack of frequent service or worse gaps in service mean that someone might have to drive or even worse suffer lost opportunity if they cannot drive/pay for a ride of some sort.
Though I would prefer if transit had dedicated underground routes to insulate the noise and make service independent of the weather.
The US makes it easier for people to own a car as a non-primary form of transportation than much of Europe. Taxes, licensing, insurance, fuel, and used vehicle prices are all comparatively cheaper, and parking spaces are more abundant.
Germany for example, requires more than 550 times the amount of automobile bodily injury insurance than my state here in the US. Pretty sure I wouldn’t be able to afford to have a car just sitting around for occasional use if I lived there.
[0]: https://www.soundtransit.org/ride-with-us/service-alerts/lin...
When the period between 2 trains/buses/whatever is below 5 minutes, you don't check the timetables, you don't plan anything, you don't calculate anything, you just walk to the stop without thinking.
When the period is 10 minutes or more, you handle it more like an intercity train, you check, you plan, you calculate. Or you don't and you wait, and wait, and wait.
Personally, I don't have a problem with it, but it is a bit of an obsession of mine to plan and calculate everything... also I've lived most of my life in places where you'd be happy with a train, or a bus, every 2 hours (supposing there was a line). For people who have been accustomed to the comfort of mind of the first option, it is felt harder to switch to the second option.
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But then there is the problem of transfers. There, low frequency strikes badly and there is nothing you can do about it, contrary to the first wait at the first stop. Personally, I had no problem with 15 minutes period buses, but the transfers were killing me, and it was getting much worse during low-activity times. Just a small-looking increase in the period has exponentially bad consequences.
Less terrible, there is also the case when you have to arrive at a fixed time. Unless the arrival time matches, a low frequency forces you to start earlier. So, the time is wasted even if you calculated your first wait.
And it's not just a subjective "good enough" thing where it's not worth optimizing the last few percent: even if you did want to perfectly optimize to the fraction of a second, you'd still want to include some buffer time for unpredictable delays on the way to the station. When the train interval isn't bigger than your buffer then all that synchronization effort is completely wasted.
(PS: not related to your post, just a remark on the wider discussion: it's quite misleading to say "Germany" when referring to a service level that is pretty much exclusive to Berlin)
First, there is the problem of being careful understanding which figure is given to you.
For example, for Toulouse, he quoted 125.7 M metro+tram trips. But 125.7 M is not the number of trips, but the number of metro+tram "validations" (each time you transfer to another bus or metro line, it counts as an extra validation (yes, in this city, even between metro lines)). The total number of trips (132 M) is 30% lower than the total number of validation (188 M). There is no detailed by mode number of trips, so you cannot get the number of metro+tram trips. I guess the best you can do is apply the 30% discount to get an approximation of 88 M metro+tram trips [and I shouldn't even write that because that depends how we decide to count mixed-mode trips].
Then, there is the problem of deciding if some assumptions which are valid here are still valid there.
He has decided to ignore bus network.
Still in the case of Toulouse, the bus network usage is a bit bigger than one metro line, but the thing is that there are only 2 metro lines... Very roughly, each of (metro line 1), (metro line 2) and (bus network) is 1/3 of the total passengers. Worse, if you consider the number of kilometres ran, the bus network represents 73%!
Now you may argue that most bus passengers transfer from or to the metro. It could be true. But that would only affect the relevance of the figure of trips/inhabitant.
However if you want to talk about the quality of the service, the quality of the offer, I don't think you can neglect something that represents 1/3 of the passengers transported and almost 3/4 of the kilometres offer (those figures mean that the metro lines only cover a very small part of the territory, and that's indeed how it is, the bus network is 50 times longer than the metro network). The frequency and spread of the bus offer has to be taken into account, hasn't it? Maybe in other cities the bus network can be neglected, but I don't think it a good idea to neglect it by default.
(One could add that in the case of Toulouse, the bus traffic has grown clearly and steadily, while the metro traffic plateaued years ago.)
And at this point you fall back on the first difficulty I mentioned: how difficult it is to compare networks which grew differently and developed different structures.