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Comment by mplanchard | Hacker News Reader

Transit always seems to be kind of a chicken and egg problem. You can’t have good transit unless you have good ridership, and you can’t have good ridership if you don’t have good transit.

Everywhere I know of in the US with decent transit already had it before the culture of car dominance really took hold, so it was already good enough to maintain sufficient ridership to stay good. Does anyone know of anywhere that managed to bootstrap good public transit after the fact?

Anyway I wonder if congestion pricing could potentially be such a bootstrapping force, pushing enough people to use transit to start the virtuous cycle of increasing ridership and increasing quality.

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Vancouver. The first section of SkyTrain was built in 1985 (40 years ago) well after cars had dominated the city. I couldn't find historical figures for transit mode share, but today more than 50% of all trips are made by public or active transportation, and 90% of residents live within 10 minutes of a frequent transit line.

For context, in most US cities that figure is 2-3%.

This is really interesting, thanks! I haven’t found a good summary of the history in a couple of minutes of searching. Do you know if it was just huge government investment that drove the increase? And what drove the public sentiment to want transit vs more highways or whatever?

Another fact you may find interesting because it's unique, I think, for a North American city of its size: Vancouver has no freeways.

Within city limits, there are no roads with speed limits over 50 km/h (30 mi/h), lots of traffic lights, lots of bus/bike lanes, and lots of congestion. The Trans Canada highway skirts along the side of the city but does not enter it. Things get slow, very quickly.

There are complex historic reasons behind this. Politics, activism, lack of federal funding, etc.

This is a decent article:

https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2016/may/09/story-cities-...

Thank you for the link! This potentially helps to explain the relative popularity of public transit. I’m glad at least some places saw the writing on the wall early with freeway-dominated cities.

I think Detroit is an amazing example in the US of how much a sole focus on building our highways can cripple a city for decades.

> Does anyone know of anywhere that managed to bootstrap good public transit after the fact?

Shanghai. Amsterdam up to a point - they never completely lost their transit, but it was in pretty bad shape.

> Anyway I wonder if congestion pricing could potentially be such a bootstrapping force, pushing enough people to use transit to start the virtuous cycle of increasing ridership and increasing quality.

It can help. You need improving transit and densification to happen together so they can reinforce each other, so you need coordination between transport policy and housing policy, I think that's the key.

The other good reason to choose congestion pricing as the start to breaking the chicken/egg problem is that, outside of NYC and maybe Chicago, public transit in the US is primarily buses on streets shared with car traffic. It's hard to attract ridership and improve buses when they're always stuck in car traffic, so starting by reducing traffic via congestion pricing is particularly pragmatic.

    > Does anyone know of anywhere that managed to bootstrap good public transit after the fact?

Central Tokyo (inside Yamanote line) has almost no national railway lines (just one/two called Chuo between Shinjuku and Tokyo station). Most of its subways are inside central Tokyo. The second subway line didn't open until 1954. Tokyo is much later to build than London, Paris, or New York. I also think that Seoul started building trains very late.

Tokyo was burned to the ground though just before that started. [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombing_of_Tokyo]

It also wasn’t really a major city historically over the types of timeframes as London, Paris, or even New York.

Modern Tokyo is more of a ‘new’ city, and the subways were constructed along with a lot of the new construction - that central Tokyo was almost completely destroyed in the war certainly removed the friction that would otherwise have made that hard, eh?

The free market model is to built transit first. You buy cheap land somewhere and build a rail line or metro to it, so the land value increases. At the same time you develop your real estate there. That's how it began with American rail towns and it is also why Japanese rail and metro companies are also real estate investors.

LA. The rail system is about 25 years old and is pretty heavily used. Helps that some of it parallels some of the busiest bus corridors in the continent (vermont ave).

That's not true. You just have to have competent leadership. You can build the infrastructure first knowing people will use it when it's done.

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