You need some combination of high-ridership and low-personnel-cost. You can get that in most of Europe and Asia, but incomes in North America are quite high and labour capture is high too. Most jurisdictions cannot afford the drivers necessary at high frequency because there isn’t enough density for it.
Skytrain bypasses this by not having drivers and perhaps as buses become AVs we could add many more of them here in the Bay Area with much higher frequency.
> You need some combination of high-ridership and low-personnel-cost.
Driverless (GoA3) and completely unattended (GoA4) rail operation is possible, which could help with personnel costs:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_train_operation
Software licensing is far more expensive than humans.
In sydney they built a building which cost $100M to be filled with software engineers just to watch and monitor one and now two driver less trains.
Guess which cost more, the building and 100s of software technies and managers or a few dozen drivers ?
People conservative enough to drop the required nuclear bomb on the transit workers union to be able to deploy something like this won't pay for it, and vice versea.
There are already driverless systems deployed in Canada and Europe where the transit service is probably unionized:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_driverless_train_syste...
Existing drivers could be moved to customer service roles on the trains (driver+conductor on 1 train -> one coductor on 2 trains), or moved to non-autoamtable roles (buses, trams).
True, but if you read the comment as U.S. specific, it makes perfect sense. The Democrats in the U.S. are very beholden to the unions and refuse to do anything that harms the union even if it would help the vast majority of people much more. Meanwhile, the Republicans hate transit and while they hate unions too, they hate transit even more and so they're going to not do anything that would help transit. If you're a transit advocate, you have neither party that was actually going to serve you. One party actively hates you and the other party gives lip service but they like other things more and will do things that are harmful to transit because they help the other things they like.
I don't know how to solve this problem, but making people aware of it is a good first step. It helps people who are in favor of transit yell at all politicians who are not helping them. Blind party allegiance is never a good thing.
I think the US problem is that unionized transit workers (and a dwindling number of other unionized workers) can do quite well, but if they were to lose that job, they wouldn't be able to get anywhere near the same salary, benefits, etc. in another job with similar duties. I don't think this is as true in other countries with stronger labor protections overall and a more equitable healthcare system.
Also, the culture for whatever reason seems to emphasize enabling gamesmanship around overtime, special duty pay, etc. as opposed to paying a good steady rate for a normal day's work.
>Meanwhile, the Republicans hate transit and while they hate unions too,v
People hate unions too when they're directly affected by them. Case in point, the dock workers strike from a while back. When people realized their Chinese made slop Amazon christmas presents would be delayed because of the dock workers strike, they suddenly stopped empathizing with them and hating them for it.
Inter-class solidarity isn't much of a thing. If one worker class starts breaking things in society/the economy to get a better deal for themselves at the expense of the other classes, even if they're on the same level, the others will hate them for it.
Another example would be if airline workers would go on strike for better pay and working conditions ... during summer. Imagine how many people who paid for holidays would empathize with them. We are an individualist society.
You could do it in most American cities. You would need to remove car infrastructure to do it. Bus Rapid Transit with protected lanes and median platforms along major arterials is a method most American cities could absolutely support. Some cities might be a stretch, Houston's nightmare sprawl for instance. But I'd put money on it being feasible in 70-80% of cities.
Excited to say we are doing exactly this up here in the Twin Cities. The local transit agency has been planning a bunch of BRT routes and implementing about one every year or two. Often they have dedicated lanes for much of the route, and they typically have wait times around 7-15 minutes depending on time of day. BRT is extremely affordable and efficient and fits quite nicely into legacy car-based infrastructure, too.
It appears to be quite successful in terms of ridership, too (warning: local news website, but you can get all you need from the URL slug): https://www.fox9.com/news/6-months-in-minneapolis-e-line-nea...
It's a self-reinforcing negative feedback loop: Public transport needs riders to fund / justify it; and people drive because the public transportation sucks.
People already take transit everywhere it has been economic to build good transit. You’re simply not going to have a good system in any area outside the built-up urban areas, because you would need to hire an army of drivers and buy many thousands of vehicles, at absurd expense, to provide a rider experience that would be even close to acceptable in spread-out areas. Transit works due to many origins and destinations being concentrated in small areas. Blocks full of five story apartment buildings. Stadiums. Airports, ferries, commuter rail termini. Tall office buildings, colleges, hospitals. Applying the same model to cities that aren’t big enough to have professional sports teams, the only kind of transit you can afford to build is buses that run every hour or so, and which require you to walk a mile or two at each end for the privilege of using it.
i’m arguing that this is not a chicken or egg situation because the costs involved to bring that chicken to life (especially when starting today - at least the 19th-century head start NYC got allowed them to build quick and cheap!) would be so high that your farm is going to be bankrupt before anybody lays any eggs.
No one is talking about spread out areas. This conversation is about US cities.
Pick a US city, then pick a neighborhood within that city you feel is emblematic of the pattern you observe. We've selected a few -- Seattle, Minneapolis -- go ahead and you pick one where a US city would not be able to support it. Then we can look at that example together.
> This conversation is about US cities.
Yes, exactly. Massachusetts; specifically the area around Boston, has this problem. There's plenty of land set aside for public transportation, but it's significantly underused for the reasons I described a few posts above.
When I started going into Boston one day a week, I tried the commuter rail twice, but it was so horrible I decided it was easier, and more comfortable to sit in traffic. (Even though it costs about 1/3rd to take the commuter rail into Boston.)
I was expecting an experience like Caltrain, I used to take it between Palo Alto and San Francisco and it was delightful. Not only are the trains more reliable, the seats are comfortable too.
Can you define city for me first? Not being a jackass. I'm defining them more broadly than you are, perhaps.
I'm thinking predominantly urban area, probably at least 100k people in a non seasonal capacity. Eg. Pullman Washington is a small rural town that becomes huge during college and quiet in the summer as the students leave.
I tend to think of city limits as the boundaries of a city -- not the broad metropolitan area. Shorline is not Seattle, neither is Bellevue or Renton.
Edit: That said, we used to have streetcar suburbs as a prevailing model. Spokes that radiated out to the suburbs on relatively fast, uncomfortable streetcars. A similar model with trams or BRT could function.
Okay. The type of city I'm talking about would be like Aurora, Colorado.
I'm specifically not making any claims about cities like Seattle, Minneapolis, etc. Other than to say I think most of them already have all the transit that is economic for them to construct given each city's layout, makeup, climate etc.
Taking Aurora[1] there are almost 400,000 people and a median car ownership of 2 per household. This is the type of city where a lot of Americans live, and where no amount of BRT, Light Rail, etc. will convert them to a place where people can rely on transit for most of their trips, or even to decrease that car ownership figure to one per house.
[1] https://datausa.io/profile/geo/aurora-co/
You'd have to change some lights, right of way, and lane use.
I think you run Peoria Station, past the university hospital, down Peoria, cut through to Havana, the commercial districts (The Gardens) on Havana, hit Kaiser hospital, and end at Nine Mile station. Those anchors are high volume destinations -- workers, shoppers, students. It also ties into two regional rail lines, so commuting into Denver becomes a lot easier.
Over all route length is maybe 8.5 miles. Put 8-12 stops along it, particularly along the big anchors. Convert some of those six lane roads into four plus two lane roads. Havana is perfect for mid lane platforms -- these provide not only good transit dwellings time, they also reduce pedestrian panic over having to cross six or seven lanes at once.
Get across town, park n ride to park n ride, in around 35 minutes, protect that time using infrastructure changes. Car trips off the same distance can be faster, but are often slower due to traffic. Once people realize their median transit time can go down by bus, they'll come. Additionally, BRT can spur investment in mixed use development along the corridor.
It would be unpopular at first, because it would mean making choices that prioritize buses. But anyone who has ever tried parking at a medical center knows how expensive and painful that can be. That region already supports some of the highest traffic on transit in Aurora, with three of their heaviest routes running along that corridor. Retail and medical workers have to get in to those workplaces. So they either commute by transit or would be served well here.
You'd need ~6 buses in fare collecting service at a time to hit <15 minute service.
If you want some comparisons, look at SWIFT Blue line in Snohomish county, a suburban sprawl outside Seattle. Or Indianapolis's IndyGo Red line. Both took highly car centered infrastructure and became their highest ridership lines, exceeding the buses they were replacing in very car centric environments.
When the Federal, state, and local government direct 97% of transportation infrastructure spending toward making driving easy, we should not be surprised when 97% of people choose to drive their daily trips.
There's a big problem with transit in the suburbs: speed. I'm going to compare the two systems I have some reasonable idea on:
Local. Because of all the stops buses average 25 mph. Long runs, this adds up considerably. It can't be fixed without a lot more buses and a lot fewer stops.
Shanghai. Buses stop much less frequently. More walking, but a bus is not that much slower than a car. And the subway doesn't have traffic jams, long runs you'll almost always get there faster with walking/subway than by car. There is also a climate factor--they get more rain but much fewer extreme days.
Most American cities are not laid out in a way that a few or even a bunch of BRT routes (or tbh even if we get the money cannon out and make them Light Rail) would solve anything.
Transit works well in dense areas. For the median transit trip, even a city with very shaky and inefficient transit like SF, you might be required to take two vehicles (hopefully one is a train or a limited/express bus) and walk 2-4 blocks at each end. Maybe 30 minutes of riding and 30 minutes total of waiting or walking. Driving might be faster, only 25-35 minutes, but it costs a lot of money or frustration to find parking, and cars themselves are expensive so a lot of people don’t even want to have them. Transit is working.
Transplant this pattern onto a suburb and it breaks. Driving is a 25-minute trip in climate control, there’s plenty of room to park on both ends, and roughly everyone has a vehicle already. Assume a very expensive short-headway BRT or Light Rail network appears overnight. The average person checks their trip and sees that they’ll have to first walk 20 minutes to get to the nearest stop, then wait up to 8 more minutes (we’re being very lavish with our spending to keep headways down to 8), ride for a few minutes, hop off and transfer, waiting up to 8 more minutes, then ride for a few minutes, then walk 20 minutes at the end. These are not the result of a terrible transit system design — they are just inevitable for most people who aren’t incredibly lucky in how their frequent trips match up with the routes. 1-2 story suburban density means that it would be cheaper to just subsidize the cost of an Uber for every trip than it would be to provide headways and bus stop spacing that would make transit a close value proposition to driving a car.
Plus, you will still need to keep your car, because if you live in 80% of the country, it sometimes is a type of weather that you really wouldn’t want to walk 40 minutes in each way. And lugging groceries the distances required is also a massive pain. So your depreciation and insurance cost will remain the same, but you’ll trade gas cost for bus fare. It’s presently about $4 for me in gas to drive my kid to elementary school 12 miles away, but it would cost 3 bus fares (two for me, one for her) to make that trip, so about $9 in typical transit systems.
No one in a democracy will ever choose this. Right now in the Bay Area even one of the best transit systems there is (BART), is finding itself on the brink of insolvency, just from the loss of white-collar commuting brought about by remote work, going from a system that needed a light subsidy to one extremely dependent on government funding.
I grew up at the edge of London. Very much low density suburbia.
10 mins walk to railway station, 15 min on train to train to city centre. Faster and easier than driving. Cars were for short trips in the area, luggage, and out of town trips.
Even in a small town my kids used busses quite a bit.
That's cool, but suburban US cities don't have a city center. It's a sprawl of strip malls. There's no route that can solve this problem. Cities would need to be redesigned from the ground up.
"Suburban cities" is a very funny concept to me. Typically the suburbs are not a part of the city.
"Transplant this pattern onto a suburb and it breaks." Well, we're talking about the city, aren't we?
Let's pick a city, I'll let you choose, and tell me which suburb within that city is a classic example of the pattern you feel is commonplace. Then we can discuss a concrete plan.
> "Suburban cities" is a very funny concept to me.
An example near and dear to me is Portland. Although there is an urban core, so some people would claim it is not in fact a suburban city, the footprint of the city is dominated by single family homes. And generally not the endless modern tract variety, either.
Most of the area of London is family homes. It is surrounded by commuter towns too.
The difference might be that the suburbs and commuter towns have local centres.
People still use cars, but they use them less and for shorter journeys.
Appleton, WI.
You've got:
Grand Chute, Kimberly, Little Chute, Combined Locks, Harrison, Fox Crossing, Greenville, etc.
Show me where you think the main hub of this area is that many people all want to go to that a train or more unused city buses will solve.
Appleton has 75,000 people. I guess under some definitions that's a city.
I'd focus on the college corridor. (Airport, Fox River Mall), Appleton Transit Center, Downtown Appleton, Lawrence university, maybe a little east. Theres some decent anchors along that line, but it might make sense to deviate from college ave to hit them.
Because this is a small town, this route is small. Probably need only 4-5 buses in active revenue service to achieve those 15 minute time tables.
Then I'd probably prioritize an intersecting route from Richmond, Oneida, and Memorial.
Both would need light and right of way changes to prioritize bus traffic.
Route 15, which strongly parallels my suggested route, Carries 15% of the whole transit network's total load and is considered a high revenue route despite only hourly service. This route heavily serves workers and students.
The route was decreased in frequency not due to flagging demand, but because they could not sufficiently staff the route. Their general manager is quoted as saying, "we are having trouble finding enough drivers to drive the buses". They lost like a third of their drivers over the past five years.
If the route was staffed and had priority right of way, making it a key means to get across town, you'd definitely see riders come back.
How well would you have fared if you had grown up at the edge of Manchester?
I do not know. Maybe it depends on when. I have lived in Manchester as an adult but in the centre and have visited it fairly recently. From what I have seen of it the transport system is pretty good now, but I do not know what it was like back then.
When i lived there it had a decent tram system and lots of busses.
Bus Rapid Transit is neat but you don't need it to create a reliable public transit system. A smattering of American cities have had reliable and popular public transit system (Portland in the late 90s I recall). The problem is that good transit system get gutted whenever a city runs a deficit and so public transit converges to its stereotype - a slow moving, irregular single line filled with those not having a choice about riding it.
If you go back further, 80-100 years ago every American city / town had functional public transit systems. The wide median strips on a couple of boulevards in my mother's hometown recall the street-car lines that she rembered seeing torn out in the 1950s. When she and my dad moved back there about ~15 years ago, after they'd retired, they voted against the in-fill development and public transit initiatives proposed by an urbanist mayor, because "[town's] too small for that".
> you don't need [BRT] to create a reliable public transit system
No one made this claim.
No you don't.
You need a state or other body committed to fixed routs and seeing their long term benefit. The American ideology that public transit must directly support itself with revenue is what has resulted the miserable transit system that we see today.
Edit: I should add that the ideology of transit supporting itself also corrodes the key idea of fixed, scheduled routs, high-lighted in the article. I know in the US that even if a town I'm happens to currently have a decent public transit system (an occasional though uncommon occurrence) I know it will be crap in a couple years as revenues fluctuate since local transit is a political football, so I'd never count on public by selling my car or other decisions.
It’s not an American idea. It’s a pretty normal concept that public transit is not a charitable program and must yield benefit commensurate with spend. The view that public transit should have low farebox recovery is predominantly American and the opposite of the majority of successful public transit programs everywhere in the world.
If what you said was true then it would be the inverse - operating costs would be mostly paid out of government subsidies in the areas with most ridership. But in fact, it is (and predictably so) the case that good transit systems have high farebox recovery - the HK MTR, Taipei MRT, and the Tube are those I’m familiar with and they’re all much nicer and more frequent and have high farebox recovery.
In fact, I find the whole thing confusing. Do people actually believe public transit is meant to be some kind of giveaway to a small number of riders? It’s clear from looking worldwide that where it is useful riders pay high enough fares because it is so useful.
I can understand some sort of bootstrap capital investment (or one-off interventions like for COVID-19) but the idea that operating costs should be predominantly covered from general taxation doesn’t really hold up if you look at which places are effective at this.
> It’s not an American idea. It’s a pretty normal concept that public transit is not a charitable program and must yield benefit commensurate with spend.
This is why most transport systems fail, they only see short term local costs and not the big picture.
If all public transport were free the state would actually save money. TIcket sales are not free, all those machines and servicing costs big money, but thats a drop in the bucket.
Public transport is a lower cost than roads, All them roads the gov runs for free costs far more than the ticket sales. Hospitals are also not free, people driving cars results in lots more accidents, more cars more vegetables. Guess who pays for the later ?
How does this relate to the Interstate Highway System? Its funded neither by fares nor general taxation, but some weird "parallel construction" system of taxation.
The Highway Trust Fund which pays for the IHS is funded by its users through taxation on gasoline and diesel. I wouldn't call that a weird parallel construction.
Fuel taxes only cover half the cost of roads. https://taxfoundation.org/data/all/state/gasoline-taxes-and-...
The correct takeaway from that article is in its headline "Gasoline Taxes and User Fees Pay for Only Half of State & Local Road Spending". The parent and GP are talking about the IHS which has at least 80%+ of spending met by use-taxes. That rate exceeds the farebox recovery ratio of every mass transit system in the US.
State and local roads are notoriously inefficient and we should be reducing spending on them, and improving guidance so that municipalities stop taking on projects that have unsustainable maintenance costs. Just like white elephant transit projects, these should also be curtailed.
The result of this system is that if you happen to use less gas for any reason (certainly relevant in this day and age), your transit is essentially subsidized! That's the weird bit in my mind.
Many (flyover) states make up for the "lost" fuel tax revenue by charging a flat rate EV fee on yearly registrations. https://taxfoundation.org/data/all/state/electric-vehicle-ev...
Some states add this for plug-in hybrid cars and even hybrid cars.
Understood! From my view this looks like we're having to adapt our system to address the disconnects caused by attempting to simulate fares via taxation.
> The view that public transit should have low farebox recovery is predominantly American and the opposite of the majority of successful public transit programs everywhere in the world.
Not unreasonable, but low farebox recovery (or "subsidies") may still be less expensive than building out roads/highways to handle various situations:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commuter_rail
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vxWjtpzCIfA
The idea that roads are subsidized for commuters should also be considered:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Congestion_pricing
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_price
> Do people actually believe public transit is meant to be some kind of giveaway to a small number of riders?
Yes. Absolutely yes. I mean I don't know what "people" "believe", but that's how public benefits are supposed to work in an equitable system.
"An advanced city is not one where even the poor use cars, but rather one where even the rich use public transport." In my opinion, that idea extends to anything that we know makes a society better: libraries, public education, etc. It shouldn't even be controversial to a sensible person that those are not revenue generators, let alone profit centers.
It's analogous to "handicapped parking" (as it's called in the US) and similar accommodations: people will balk at the costs or other arguments used when compared to a relatively large population who don't need them, until they suddenly require those accommodations for themselves or a loved one.
Be a poor, physically-disabled human being in a small, underfunded town, then come at me with "farebox recovery" BS. We need to stop pretending like we don't live in a post-scarcity world, but we just choose to allow terrible people to run things and make bad faith arguments to keep ignorant people ignorant.
Good public transit even benefits those not using it by reducing other kinds of traffic. Everbody should be in favor of such investments but many people just don't think that far during their next traffic jam frustrations in rush hour.
It isn’t that X goes down if you do Y that matters but whether the utility from X going down is commensurate with the cost of doing Y. There is a cost of reducing traffic which I am happy to pay and a cost of reducing traffic which I am not going to pay. So just telling me something will reduce traffic will not induce me to pay. You also need to handle the other side of the sheet.
It’s a pretty normal concept that public transit is not a charitable program and must yield benefit commensurate with spend.
The benefits of public transit derive to all of society not necessarily those immediately riding it. That's true of a multitude of state spending, education, social services and so-forth.
The US doesn't directly charge for many of the costs of roads, certainly it doesn't charge for the drawback in the form of pollution and urban sprawl. But when you get to buses, suddenly "you're not a charitable problem..."
This argument has to face up to the fact that all of the best systems have high farebox recovery and all the American systems have low recovery except for NY (which is still lower than the good ones). Essentially, if it’s so great to have low farebox recovery why does the Tube, HK MTR, and Taipei MRT have high farebox recovery?
Theorycrafting is all well and good but if you claim that some metric X (farebox recovery) is negatively correlated with some outcome Y (frequent good transit) then you do have to explain why all the good outcome Ys actually have high X. Reality has to meet the theory.
> This argument has to face up to the fact that all of the best systems have high farebox recovery and all the American systems have low recovery except for NY (which is still lower than the good ones).
Perhaps drivers/commuters should also be better charged for the resources they use:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Congestion_pricing
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_High_Cost_of_Free_Parking
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_price
We can let The Market™ decide what the alleged convenience of driving is worth.
We don't expect roads to be profitable. We don't expect airports to be profitable. But there is a solution to this as well. If the train operator owns the land around each station and collects rent on the shops and homes, they can become profitable.
Um, many airports are HIGHLY profitable where capitalism took on a Thatcherite turn.
I sudoect that airports can be far more portable than airlines, actually, since shopping, eating and drinking are much cheaper to deliver on the ground. And there’s parking too.
FAA grants require airports to set fee structures that enable them to be as self-sustaining as possible accounting for their ability to capture economic activity. They are not supposed to use the grants as a fee replacement. Airports, in general, far exceed the performance of US public transit systems. SFO is cash-positive even accounting for the cost of capital expenditure and on its own sees as many passengers as a top 20 transit system.
One might have instead believed that because SFO is so valuable to the region it should be heavily subsidized, but the property repeated worldwide is that valuable things are things people don't mind paying to use. Because they're valuable.
I think even more important than balance sheets is land use. There's a vicious cycle of car dependency. Things that make driving easy make alternatives bad (government built toll-free roads, mandated parking minimums, restrictive zoning, lack of sidewalks, lack of protected line lanes, wide and high speed urban roads).
A train service only earning 50% of its costs through ticket sales is okay if it provides a useful transportation network. But because we are so dependent on cars, people fight removing parking spots for a dedicated right of way. So public transit get stuck in traffic, and funding is kept at skeleton/welfare service levels resulting in 30 min to an hour between vehicles. The useful public transit network can't even get off the ground because no one believes there will be a critical mass of support to fund and build a useful network.
This here, public transit works when the city is built around it. You can't build public transit around a massive car centered pile of crap.
Where I am, we're getting the worst of it, where we're treated as if no one needs a car because there's a bus that comes by every half hour most of the day (unless it just doesn't show up), but we still get driving made more difficult without a viable alternative. It's frustrating.
Any mass transit system with more than 15 minutes between vehicles is a joke.
> The American ideology that public transit must directly support itself with revenue is what has resulted the miserable transit system that we see today.
Is that true? In Portland, to use an example familiar with me, the fares are nearly pointless. They probably exist primarily as a behavior enhancement than any fiscal reason. The transit system is paid for with taxes.
AFAIK the MTA (New York City) has the highest ratio, and it's still like 1/3 fares and 2/3 taxes. Second place is under 20% and it just goes down from there.