Comment by arjie
20 hours ago
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).
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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.
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.
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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.
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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.
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.
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> 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.
> 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
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..."
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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.
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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.
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.
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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.