Comment by nickorlow
21 hours ago
> Frequency ranged from 7.5 minutes to 15 minutes, so these came often enough that people could just go out and wait for them, not worrying about a schedule'
If only most cities could have this today
21 hours ago
> Frequency ranged from 7.5 minutes to 15 minutes, so these came often enough that people could just go out and wait for them, not worrying about a schedule'
If only most cities could have this today
Most European and East Asian major cities do have that. A train every 2-5 minutes during busy hours. In smaller cities (below one million people or so), a train / bus / tram every 10 minutes is probably most common.
Perhaps the poster is in the US where frequent-schedule public transit is a rarity save in a few select cities.
Yes, my local transit system has 15 minute intervals at best, most routes are 30 or 60 minutes. And if you need to transfer routes, that's normally even more waiting. That really limits its attractiveness and so with a few exceptions it's mostly used by people who can't afford a car and are physically unable to bike.
I've often said that if I ran it I would concentrate resources on more frequent service on the highest ridership routes and cut the low ridership routes entirely. But for a variety of reasons that probably isn't possible, e.g. they are getting funding contingent on serving a wider area, etc.
A transit system should ideally be attractive to people who can afford to drive, but choose not to out of convenience. That's a pretty high bar in most areas.
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yes
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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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> 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.
Most big European cities run trains every 10-15 minutes and every 5 minutes during rush hour.
In Dallas TX our lightrail runs about every 15 min too. It's works pretty well and is big enough to be actually useful. I like to use for big events when you know parking is going to be a nightmare or expensive. It's slower than a car though, the trip about doubles in terms of time taking the train vs driving.
On a lot of London Underground lines, 5 minutes is considered poor service in rush hour. Every 2 minutes is required to handle the sheer volume of passengers
Maybe the capitals and major metro ones. My tier-2 EU city is has commuter trains every hour and every 30 minutes at rush hour.
Yeah it sucks, making car commutes the way better alternative.
> Maybe the capitals and major metro ones. My tier-2 EU city is has commuter trains every hour and every 30 minutes at rush hour.
I wonder if some more automation (GoA3/4) would help in being able to run things more often (at least during rush hour?):
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_train_operation
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This exists in many cities. See Bus Rapid Transit and many rail lines. Seattle's network has many instances of this.
Seattle has instances of it, but there are still many parts of the city not well connected by transit.
That's a different goal post. The original claim was:
"If only most cities could have this today"
Seattle has this. No one claimed or required it to be universal within the city.
If I were to speculate, I'd say that perhaps it might only be feasible in small & dense cities with low traffic, as such high frequency requires a lot of resources.
Was born in a small city with frequent public transportation (5-10 minutes for most routes). As I moved to larger & more congested cities, public transport became less convenient and the schedule more erratic.
Definitely not only small cities. Only dense cities maybe, but I'm not sure that the causality link is in the direction you present: big european cities are dense in part _because_ of public transport. They couldn't be so dense without it, you'd need much more car infrastructure (roads, parking lots) which already decreases density, and people would more readily live further out given they'd already need a car anyway.
It's obviously a virtuous cycle, but in the case of European cities, they are the way they are because they began when walking was the preferred mode of transport ("preferred" is doing a lot of heavy lifting in this sentence, I know). The most luxurious transport option back then was a horse carriage, which is not much faster than walking. Everything had to be close to everything, streets had to be narrow.
Another important feature that makes public transport suitable is that they developed concentrically, having only one city center.
With such city planning in mind, public transport is the only rational way to move around lots of people on narrow streets.
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European cities, geographically at least, are a lot smaller than american cities. A dozen or two miles across only for the urban area before you get to the rural parts generally. Berlin has a smaller footprint than a lot of rust belt cities for example. Amsterdam is downright tiny by american standards, maybe even smaller than Toledo, OH. What is more is the road capacity is significantly overbuilt in the US, even in cities like Toledo. A lot of americans have a car based frame of reference where they expect to go arbitrary 30 mile distances in about 30 mins.
Tokyo manages a very tight schedule and they're enormous, so it can't only be scale that matters. And how do you fund effective transit in a smaller city with less of a tax base?
I haven't visited Tokyo, but I definitely plan to.
Regarding your question, if the city is made up mostly of apartment buildings & parks, with limited parking space available, almost everyone uses public transport.
There is obviously a trade-off between how pedestrian-friendly or car-friendly a city can be, thus if a city goes hard in the pedestrian-friendly (removing parking spaces, narrowing streets in the center etc.) direction, public transport becomes very attractive & convenient. Having a car becomes a burden.
Rail plus property model like in Hong Kong could be one (‘tax free’ zone…)
Isn't it the opposite? Larger city -> denser population -> more public transport demand -> better public transport?
Better doesn’t always follow. Nyc has had constant public transit demand but there’s been barely any expansion since public takeover of the private subways.
In Sydney we are very close to Asia so the shame of our rotting train system finally caused the city to invest in modern driverless underground transit, termed 'the metro'. I believe planning began in the 1990s and it only really launched about 5 years ago, so 20 years or so in the making. This system is much faster, cleaner and more modern than the older surface rail, largely helped by the fact it's way underground in most sections due to a lack of surface land availability. However, it frequently stops or requires maintenance and is run by a totally separate bureaucracy than the rail system, who apparently refuse to communicate despite having shared stations. This leads to situations such as one encountered this weekend whereby the rail operator had track work scheduled on a major section of their route, and simultaneously the metro system had disrupted service, such that a great number of passengers were stranded. More importantly, even when it is working they do not coordinate arrival times, such that it is exceptionally common to arrive on one mode, where the platform faces directly the other mode, but it has just departed. 30 seconds of scheduling either side would greatly increase efficiency, but it's nobody's department. This is the sort of thing they do perfectly in Japan, but Australia is a country of 1000 little scams with everyone fervently minding their own scam. We urgently need to replace corrupt humans with AI.
"More importantly, even when it is working they do not coordinate arrival times, such that it is exceptionally common to arrive on one mode, where the platform faces directly the other mode, but it has just departed. 30 seconds of scheduling either side would greatly increase efficiency, but it's nobody's department."
This worked perfectly when I was in Sydney.
Where and in which case? I'm referring to mode-change connections. Of those, two of the last two I've had failed. That's a 100% failure rate. When queried, the station staff said the metro don't communicate with them so adaptive schedules are impossible.
> This is the sort of thing they do perfectly in Japan, but Australia is a country of 1000 little scams with everyone fervently minding their own scam. We urgently need to replace corrupt humans with AI.
Have you even see how sad people in Japan are ?
Go watch a few youtubers travel around Japan and tell me what you see ?
I only see kids to adults to seniors ALL going to school or work.
Why are tehre almost no people having a day off ?
Now you know why they have those gates on trains, they are too stop people jumping...
Specific to the context of proving there is no insurmountable challenge in having multiple disparate mass transit operators provide combined services in an efficient fashion, they are the obvious poster child. This may be true even while I share similar conclusions to your own analysis when considering the broader failures in their society.
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> If only most cities could have this today
Judging by the rest of the replies (most of which I'd agree with), it seems more uncommon that they do not, than they do :) I think this heavily depends on how friendly your government in general is to public transport, which can vary heavily if you're in some specific places in the world.