> Had this really not been done before? Apparently not on land. Ferries are an ancient idea, both for crossing water bodies and for traveling along them. They are fixed routes, of course, but that’s mostly because the shore is fixed. Pascal’s idea was that even though carriages could go from anywhere to anywhere on Paris’s street network, a special kind of usefulness would arise if they didn’t do that, but instead followed paths that people could remember and plan around.
While not exactly a transit system, there were fixed trade and courier routes before this where the dependability and consistency induced build up and improvements around the route. There were probably even times and places you could hitch a ride on someone's cart or group up with others for safety because of how well the routes were used.
The site seems to be under heavy load, so I couldn't see it all. But it seems this map only contains city networks, and not regional networks. The regional bus networks in France are really quite weak, infrequent and don't connect well, even with the now larger régions.
I knew that last bit, but somehow missed the selector, large as it is. Being Dutch, I am used to regional and local buses/coaches being more integrated (we also only have a single word for them both),[0] so it didn't immediately cross my mind. Very nice site, you do seem to have most of those regional cars!
[0] We do have touringcars, but those are more used for private rentals, not public transport, except for Flixbus etc. and a handful of longer-distance lines, and then we usually call them a bus again.
If you're traveling to or interested in Paris and its history, I really enjoyed "Parisians: An Adventure History of Paris" by Graham Robb. Has some good, accessible and entertaining history relating to (among other things) the construction of the metro.
That's not a surprise. People orient their lives around what they can do. Thus, things like this become self-fulfilling prophecies. You build it, they come, they add the demand, so you keep it running. It certainly does and has happened that cities have changed majorly at various times because of changes in transit, but it's not particularly common. In most cities even where transit has been torn out, you can see where the lines used to run because that's still a high demand corridor today.
> 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'
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.
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.
Most people are not buying a new car. The typical new car is bought, or more often leased, by someone who keeps it for three years. However, the average car on the road is 12 years old, which means there are a lot of cars that are being driven by someone who didn't buy them new.
Used cars are still expensive. I remember looking a Toyotas and a used Corolla was about 2000$ less than new.
I'd argue that individual car ownership is generally not affordable for most people. You can easily spend over 25% of your income just on transportation.
It's almost a structural problem. America isn't built for public transportation
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.
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.
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'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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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:
> 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:
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.
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.
> 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.
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
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.
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.
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."
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.
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.
I don’t think that there was much fixed scheduling for water transport prior to the the development of steam engines either, because you were usually at the mercy of the winds and the tides.
Rowing was common and well known. Many ferries cross rivers where tides and the wind are not concerns. Winds near shore are often consistent enough to have near fixed frequency routes.
Ancient Mediterranean maps often reveal ferries and such were not going vast distances but rather they would go from small settlement to small settlement. This would be much smaller boats that could be easily rowed and, in turn, have relatively fixed frequencies. The small boats could get into ports that would be impossible to put a large ship into. As ships grew larger and sailing became more popular, longer distances would happen and then winds and tides would be more important.
“Trekschuit (Dutch pronunciation: [ˈtrɛksxœyt] ⓘ; lit. 'tug-boat', i.e. 'tugged boat') is an old style of sail- and horse-drawn boat specific to the Netherlands, where it was used for centuries as a means of passenger traffic between cities along trekvaarten, or tow-canals.
[…]
By 1700, an extensive network of trekschuit- and ferry services linked all of the important cities in the coastal provinces of the Netherlands. Travel by trekschuit was reliable, comfortable, and cheap. The speed was about 7 km/h, which was faster than walking, and more comfortable than by coach. Many foreigners praised the advantages of the system, leading to the introduction of canals, such as the Erie Canal, in the United States. The boats were pulled along by horse on a towpath (in Dutch called jaagpad, named after the jager (chaser) which accompanied the horse)”
Scheduled sailings were common in the Roman world, and some medieval European economies. It helped keep ship sizes small when merchants could anticipate the fixed schedule.
Im sorry i disagree, boats have been running up and down rivers or seas and oceans for thousands of years if not longer. The river is the route, its fixed.
Pretty sure if we went back in time with a time machine, Egyptians and others have been buying passage up or down or maybe both ways the Nile.
This is something so obvious it cant possibly be true.
> Had this really not been done before? Apparently not on land. Ferries are an ancient idea, both for crossing water bodies and for traveling along them. They are fixed routes, of course, but that’s mostly because the shore is fixed.
Historically, not true for the “trekschuit” in 1632. For that, the shore didn’t exist before the route was envisioned. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trekschuit:
“The first trekschuit 'sailed' in 1632 between Amsterdam and Haarlem and could carry 30 passengers. The trekvaart or canal was dug in a straight line to facilitate an easy pulling process and to guarantee the shortest route”
My late grandmother once told me this is how she travelled longer distances on occasion as a youth/young woman. Was a good lesson for me in understanding exactly how much she had seen the world change in her lifetime.
We don't know yet, of course, but I have the impression that the century in which things changed most was the century from about 1865 to about 1965. Stuff seems to have slowed down a bit since then. But it's all subjective, really: it depends on what you think is important.
Agree. For the drama of it, I'd move the end-date up to 1969, just to catch the moon landing.
My great-grandfather learned to care for horses, and drive a wagon / buggy, and keenly remembered the first time he saw an automobile. He qualified as a doctor before antibiotics were invented, and then lived long enough to at least exist in a house with a personal computer - whether he ever used it is something I never thought to ask my grandfather!
1969 is a big year due to man landing on the moon. Cars becoming ubiquitous (they certainly were a luxury item well into the sixties here). 1970s gave us the integrated circuit and arguably the start of modern computing. 1980s the collapse of the Soviet Union, genetic research. 1990s: well, I can go on :P
The Carosses à cinq sols was not just an idea but a startup proper; Pascal invested most of what he owned for a sixth of the business, which turned out to be a great investment.
The main idea behind it was a kind of time share. At the time, only the (very) rich could afford to own and maintain carosses and stables with 6 to 10 horses in crowded cities like Paris; it was a truly revolutionary idea that a company would own the cars and the horses, and the general public would pay only for the time traveled.
Then the other genius idea, of course, was fixed routes and predictable schedule, as explained in the post. People actually objected at first that it would be stupid (and ruinous) to have empty carriages going from one place to another instead of chasing customers like a modern cab. But that was the whole point.
As an aside, the book "How Paris Became Paris" mentions Pascal's invention among many other that Paris was first with: elevated sidewalks, city lights, and more for any urban geeks.
Regarding public transport route design, I've long wondered how much efficiency current routes in a given country might be leaving on the table.
As in: if one collected sufficient anonymised travel data to offer a reliable understanding of the population's travel needs, and given the fixed constraints of the existing road and rail network, and the existing number of buses and trains, how much more efficient could the network be by varying routes, timings, stops, and interactions?
Imagine if such a dataset was made available, and a prize offered for the best solution.
The challenge could also be extended to explore optimal areas for investment in additional infrastructure - a wider road here, a new roundabout or branch line there.
(source, 20+ years experience working in traffic planning software industry).
Such data do exist. But they won't avail you (much).
You have similar problems as when you optimise the energy sector, or economy in general.
The "actual" problem you will be optimising on/for, has a lot of conflicting needs and interests, and choosing your trade-offs resemble the 'trolley problem'. I will just enumerate a random list of things that affect and collide with your optimisation.
- your vehicles and vehicle fleets (and road networks, with congestion) provide one part of the problem.
- your vehicle drivers etc., have other needs and union rules; they need to sleep, have breaks, go to the bathroom, eat; swap places on the road, they need to arrive and get home.
- once you are on the road 'you might as well continue driving': There is a huge startup cost each time you pull into traffic.
- you have two peak hours (morning, evening); what should your drivers and buses do in the lull in the middle of the day? (spoiler: they reasonably hate sitting idle for 3 hours, with or without pay).
- lots of politics related to how it is funded and votes, who is paid for operating it. These are the shameful parents for things like frankenstein bus-routes, where 2-3 cancelled budget-cut bus-routes are merged into a single meandering remaining bus-route that makes all its passengers miserable.
- a lot of it is probablility-based/spontaneous; only some traffic patterns are regular (children to school); to service the probability-need, you need a regular service that may run empty/low half of the time, until people need a hair-cut.
The whole thing is handled on a sliding-scale/spectrum, ordered by how short/far into the future, the travel is/can be planned.
On one end, you have taxi/uber, which is on-the-spot travel.
The other end is planned year-service, e.g. a summer schedule of a bus.
In between, with computers we have a lot of "urgent-but-planned" flexi-flexible traffic, where people book on the day or the week,
and a number of bookings are then weaved to be driven like a pearl string
(so e.g. a number of people will share a ride in a medium sized bus, that does pre-planned pseudo-taxi-service.)
Pretty much all large public transit authorities already collect all sorts of data about requirements and usage, and have scientists/engineers on payroll to optimize the network within the economic and political constraints these systems operate in.
I know my city has that data, but it doesn't help if you optimize for the wrong thing. AFAICT the highest priority is that "everybody has to be within 3 blocks of a bus stop", resulting in serpentine routes the article decries.
"everybody has to be within 3 blocks of a bus stop" is a political choice. It might result in a system that is not optimal from the perspective of a different metric. If you think that different metric would serve people better, go advocate for it politically. But realize that whatever metric gets adopted will still be a political choice. There is no escaping that.
Of course, as you say in the OP, one can certainly encourage the public to use simulations based on publicly made-available data as a guide during these political discussions to convince people that a certain metric is better than others.
Not much. People plan for the lowest common denominator. If service levels surge during certain days or hours that's great, but people don't want to get burned by a period of thin service. Imagine if Fedex said overnight mail could no longer be delivered on Thursdays in certain towns. You'd have to remember to check if today's Wednesday and if the recipient's town is a low service zone. Or you could just switch to a more consistently available network like UPS.
Most transit is already biased to the 9-5 with thin nighttime service. As such most people uber back from the bar than wait for the 30 min owl bus service.
The interesting thing with transit is that optimal may not be the most optimal. E.g. your model might suggest half mile stop frequencies. Seems good, until the public comment period and all the old folks who take the line show up and ask their particular stop not be displaced.
There is a reason why a lot of american bus networks basically follow the same old streetcar routes that were always there. People become used to existing patterns and build lives around them. New transit is a good opportunity to apply this model, but reworking old transit is tricky because some of your existing ridership will end up with a worse offering by definition, and they will protest. While the people who might benefit will not show up with equivocal advocacy in the public comment meeting.
The bus stop spacing problem is very real. Buses stop every other block in my area. The average speed end to end is no faster than riding a bike! If you suggest deleting some stops people scream about their own convenience or pretend to care about the disabled. By trying to cater to every single constituency, we've designed a bus route that serves no one's interest. A slow bus might not exist at all. People will just buy a car, going into high interest debt if need be.
Bus speed is also reduced by people scanning tickets etc. THe simple answer is to skip the charade about pretending public transport is a business and concentrate on moving people and safety.
Buses can stop every other block, but in practice, they rarely do. Most bus routes that I've taken are neither full nor busy with passengers at every stop. Certainly not all day long. Most bus routes can get away with bypassing several miles' worth of stops at a time. Passengers tend to cluster around certain spots at certain times. Even the main routes have busy times, as well as quiet times in long stretches.
By building in the capability to stop very frequently, they can serve the most people and every area in the route, equally. But day to day, hour to hour, they are definintely bypassing stops, and I can name at least 3 bus routes where the vehicle will certainly reach the speed limit of 45mph or so in-between.
I live in Helsinki, where there is a good tram and bus network. Every now and again a major road will be dug up, in the city center, and trams often get rerouted for a few months to work around that.
I've noticed that there are some diversions which are definitely beneficial to me. There are busses from my house to the city center, as well as a tram. If the tram diverts to a different destination that essentially doubles my available "travel destinations" in a way that's really useful.
So no doubt, for me personally, there are changes that could be useful. But perhaps they would be less useful for others.
The best answer for many problems, is to avoid the action in the first place. Just because you can do it doesnt mean you should do it, and public transport is mostly thought to serve commuting.
A lot of people commute for hours to sit at a computer...which means they could work at home.
You might explore "gray" semi-formal bus networks. Where the on-the-table gap is sufficient to fund businesses. And where the efforts to shut them down, provide insights into mechanisms, incentives, and interests, around that inefficiency.
due to how hard it is to change the networks, I think there's a lot of inefficient route design. if you look at SEPTA in Philadelphia, they're in the middle of realigning a lot of their bus routes for the first time in 60 yrs and ridership has increased noticeably since they started.
Well, there is some of that. It's not near as much as you might guess. Predictable transit is very helpful because people plan their life around it. What the data you're looking at will show where the bottlenecks are, and yes, you can remove a few bottlenecks and make people's life a little bit better, but it's not going to be a major change because of major change will not show up in the data until well after it's made.
I don't remember the terms used, but I've seen data sets of where people live and work in Manhattan, and you do see people who live on subway lines take jobs on that same line, and they don't take jobs on a different subway line that while possible is overly inconvenient.
people have already arranged their life around the existing transportation that exists around them. They are not going to change their life because it is already in place. They want bottlenecks fixed but otherwise don't really need a change to their life. Even if a change would greatly benefit them, they often can't see that and wouldn't imagine themselves making the change to their comfortable life.
The real value of transportation experts is they can look at a map and all your data and say, if we make these changes, over 20 years, the city will redevelop in this way, and then we can ask questions. "Is that how we want the city to develop?" however, the data is never going to show that because the data shows what people are doing today, not what they're going to do in 20 years. Don't get me wrong, experts get this wrong too when they make predictions. However, there is a lot of things we can use to inform our predictions. even though we're not perfect, we can make predictions that are usually right.
Varying the route timing is the absolute worst thing you can do. People need to depend on your transport system. If they have to look at a schedule that's going to change by day to figure out when they can actually get somewhere, they're going to get frustrated and start looking up for an alternative that they control. If you vary your timing at all, it's only because you're changing between a train every minute to train every five minutes. You don't get to go any farther apart than that without losing writers because they no longer can trust that the system will get them there when they want to be there. Physics puts a lower limit on time. I believe the current record is a train every 90 seconds, and I'm not sure how much closer together you can get. The limit for a bus is three minutes apart and even that is extremely hard.
Transit systems that are running worse than 5 minute frequencies have large drops in ridership and as they increase frequency: ridership jumps because people start to use, they can always just go out when they're ready to go. If this wasn't so expensive, everyone in the world would be running 5-minute frequencies all day.
It is and it makes my point exactly. People have arranged their lives around the east west line they live on. They wouldn't accept a job on a different east-west line even though as a crow flies it's not far - Getting there is not easy.
The question that we cannot answer for Manhattan data is what if Manhattan added a few North South lines or I can think of hundreds of different things that Manhattan could do. I don't live there and I haven't studied the data in depth so I couldn't tell you what is a good useful thing for Manhattan to do. But I can tell you that there are lines that would over the next few decades greatly change how people in Manhattan and the rest of the city live. Unfortunately, Manhattan is particularly bad about the costs and so they can't even afford to remove the obvious bottlenecks much less a whole new line that would over time be make the city much better.
about ferrys. Douglas Adams let one of his protagonists in Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency postulate that the book of revelations was the product of despair waiting for a ferry
Two things can be true at the same time. Pascal was certainly a prodigy, but he was also largely living off family wealth and could afford to not specialize.
> Had this really not been done before? Apparently not on land. Ferries are an ancient idea, both for crossing water bodies and for traveling along them. They are fixed routes, of course, but that’s mostly because the shore is fixed. Pascal’s idea was that even though carriages could go from anywhere to anywhere on Paris’s street network, a special kind of usefulness would arise if they didn’t do that, but instead followed paths that people could remember and plan around.
While not exactly a transit system, there were fixed trade and courier routes before this where the dependability and consistency induced build up and improvements around the route. There were probably even times and places you could hitch a ride on someone's cart or group up with others for safety because of how well the routes were used.
there were already post carriages but they were not inner city
Well he'd be proud to see the extend of the fixed routes network in France today : https://cartes.app/?style=transports#6.32/47.811/2.097
Each blue polygon is a network. Zoom to see the lines.
Of course we should do way better, and unify all that with a single ticket and single website for route planning.
The site seems to be under heavy load, so I couldn't see it all. But it seems this map only contains city networks, and not regional networks. The regional bus networks in France are really quite weak, infrequent and don't connect well, even with the now larger régions.
Yes it's almost constantly under heavy load from illegal LLM indexers.
You can see regional coach networks by clicking "car", it means coach bus in French.
I knew that last bit, but somehow missed the selector, large as it is. Being Dutch, I am used to regional and local buses/coaches being more integrated (we also only have a single word for them both),[0] so it didn't immediately cross my mind. Very nice site, you do seem to have most of those regional cars!
[0] We do have touringcars, but those are more used for private rentals, not public transport, except for Flixbus etc. and a handful of longer-distance lines, and then we usually call them a bus again.
Thanks ! Yes, the French system is strange, it's a mess. Regionalised.
Being in the US, I feel mildly annoyed when the French complain about their public transit.
It occurs to me looking at the map that a tourist in modern day Paris would still be well-served by this network.
That thought also made me wonder how central Paris' modern metro system overlays onto this. Here's a quick little visualization: https://stirring-biscotti-a978fa.netlify.app/
If you're traveling to or interested in Paris and its history, I really enjoyed "Parisians: An Adventure History of Paris" by Graham Robb. Has some good, accessible and entertaining history relating to (among other things) the construction of the metro.
That's not a surprise. People orient their lives around what they can do. Thus, things like this become self-fulfilling prophecies. You build it, they come, they add the demand, so you keep it running. It certainly does and has happened that cities have changed majorly at various times because of changes in transit, but it's not particularly common. In most cities even where transit has been torn out, you can see where the lines used to run because that's still a high demand corridor today.
> 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.
Most Americans can not afford to buy a new car cash.
Only Chicago , and maybe Pittsburgh allows the average(income ) person to live car free and have a decent apartment.
You have folks in LA who pay upwards of 800$ a month in car payments on a 70k yr salary.
Most people are not buying a new car. The typical new car is bought, or more often leased, by someone who keeps it for three years. However, the average car on the road is 12 years old, which means there are a lot of cars that are being driven by someone who didn't buy them new.
Used cars are still expensive. I remember looking a Toyotas and a used Corolla was about 2000$ less than new.
I'd argue that individual car ownership is generally not affordable for most people. You can easily spend over 25% of your income just on transportation.
It's almost a structural problem. America isn't built for public transportation
How used? 2010 Corolla is about $10k, while 2024 will be $20-30k.
America is plenty dense for transit, but you need to build it first and that is expensive.
It was basically a year old, but with financing incentives a new car was the same price.
A 15 year old car will have 15 years of issues. I might be willing to risk it at 3 to 5k. 10k is a lot to gamble.
There are used cars available for any price you can afford to pay.
this is a function of population density, it is impossible to have a frequent and reliable public transit in a low density suburban sprawl.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
It's a rich first world country. Everything is already automated. The driver/conductor is justo monitoring.
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
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.
North American cities very much were built around walking and trams.
The US auto companies paid for the destruction of tram lines with the long term goal of selling more cars.
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.
> 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.
I don’t think that there was much fixed scheduling for water transport prior to the the development of steam engines either, because you were usually at the mercy of the winds and the tides.
Rowing was common and well known. Many ferries cross rivers where tides and the wind are not concerns. Winds near shore are often consistent enough to have near fixed frequency routes.
Ancient Mediterranean maps often reveal ferries and such were not going vast distances but rather they would go from small settlement to small settlement. This would be much smaller boats that could be easily rowed and, in turn, have relatively fixed frequencies. The small boats could get into ports that would be impossible to put a large ship into. As ships grew larger and sailing became more popular, longer distances would happen and then winds and tides would be more important.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trekschuit:
“Trekschuit (Dutch pronunciation: [ˈtrɛksxœyt] ⓘ; lit. 'tug-boat', i.e. 'tugged boat') is an old style of sail- and horse-drawn boat specific to the Netherlands, where it was used for centuries as a means of passenger traffic between cities along trekvaarten, or tow-canals.
[…]
By 1700, an extensive network of trekschuit- and ferry services linked all of the important cities in the coastal provinces of the Netherlands. Travel by trekschuit was reliable, comfortable, and cheap. The speed was about 7 km/h, which was faster than walking, and more comfortable than by coach. Many foreigners praised the advantages of the system, leading to the introduction of canals, such as the Erie Canal, in the United States. The boats were pulled along by horse on a towpath (in Dutch called jaagpad, named after the jager (chaser) which accompanied the horse)”
Scheduled sailings were common in the Roman world, and some medieval European economies. It helped keep ship sizes small when merchants could anticipate the fixed schedule.
Just dig a canal along the route you want, and use horses to pull the boat along it. See the other comments about the trekschuiten in the Netherlands.
That's right, I just read about that. Even crossing the English channel apparently was unpredictable at times.
Im sorry i disagree, boats have been running up and down rivers or seas and oceans for thousands of years if not longer. The river is the route, its fixed.
Pretty sure if we went back in time with a time machine, Egyptians and others have been buying passage up or down or maybe both ways the Nile.
This is something so obvious it cant possibly be true.
> Had this really not been done before? Apparently not on land. Ferries are an ancient idea, both for crossing water bodies and for traveling along them. They are fixed routes, of course, but that’s mostly because the shore is fixed.
Historically, not true for the “trekschuit” in 1632. For that, the shore didn’t exist before the route was envisioned. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trekschuit:
“The first trekschuit 'sailed' in 1632 between Amsterdam and Haarlem and could carry 30 passengers. The trekvaart or canal was dug in a straight line to facilitate an easy pulling process and to guarantee the shortest route”
My late grandmother once told me this is how she travelled longer distances on occasion as a youth/young woman. Was a good lesson for me in understanding exactly how much she had seen the world change in her lifetime.
Just imagine how much we will see change in our lifetimes.
For some of us; that's dial-up, to AI, to who knows what.
We don't know yet, of course, but I have the impression that the century in which things changed most was the century from about 1865 to about 1965. Stuff seems to have slowed down a bit since then. But it's all subjective, really: it depends on what you think is important.
Agree. For the drama of it, I'd move the end-date up to 1969, just to catch the moon landing.
My great-grandfather learned to care for horses, and drive a wagon / buggy, and keenly remembered the first time he saw an automobile. He qualified as a doctor before antibiotics were invented, and then lived long enough to at least exist in a house with a personal computer - whether he ever used it is something I never thought to ask my grandfather!
1969 is a big year due to man landing on the moon. Cars becoming ubiquitous (they certainly were a luxury item well into the sixties here). 1970s gave us the integrated circuit and arguably the start of modern computing. 1980s the collapse of the Soviet Union, genetic research. 1990s: well, I can go on :P
The Carosses à cinq sols was not just an idea but a startup proper; Pascal invested most of what he owned for a sixth of the business, which turned out to be a great investment.
The main idea behind it was a kind of time share. At the time, only the (very) rich could afford to own and maintain carosses and stables with 6 to 10 horses in crowded cities like Paris; it was a truly revolutionary idea that a company would own the cars and the horses, and the general public would pay only for the time traveled.
Then the other genius idea, of course, was fixed routes and predictable schedule, as explained in the post. People actually objected at first that it would be stupid (and ruinous) to have empty carriages going from one place to another instead of chasing customers like a modern cab. But that was the whole point.
As an aside, the book "How Paris Became Paris" mentions Pascal's invention among many other that Paris was first with: elevated sidewalks, city lights, and more for any urban geeks.
Regarding public transport route design, I've long wondered how much efficiency current routes in a given country might be leaving on the table.
As in: if one collected sufficient anonymised travel data to offer a reliable understanding of the population's travel needs, and given the fixed constraints of the existing road and rail network, and the existing number of buses and trains, how much more efficient could the network be by varying routes, timings, stops, and interactions?
Imagine if such a dataset was made available, and a prize offered for the best solution.
The challenge could also be extended to explore optimal areas for investment in additional infrastructure - a wider road here, a new roundabout or branch line there.
(source, 20+ years experience working in traffic planning software industry). Such data do exist. But they won't avail you (much). You have similar problems as when you optimise the energy sector, or economy in general. The "actual" problem you will be optimising on/for, has a lot of conflicting needs and interests, and choosing your trade-offs resemble the 'trolley problem'. I will just enumerate a random list of things that affect and collide with your optimisation. - your vehicles and vehicle fleets (and road networks, with congestion) provide one part of the problem. - your vehicle drivers etc., have other needs and union rules; they need to sleep, have breaks, go to the bathroom, eat; swap places on the road, they need to arrive and get home. - once you are on the road 'you might as well continue driving': There is a huge startup cost each time you pull into traffic. - you have two peak hours (morning, evening); what should your drivers and buses do in the lull in the middle of the day? (spoiler: they reasonably hate sitting idle for 3 hours, with or without pay). - lots of politics related to how it is funded and votes, who is paid for operating it. These are the shameful parents for things like frankenstein bus-routes, where 2-3 cancelled budget-cut bus-routes are merged into a single meandering remaining bus-route that makes all its passengers miserable.
- a lot of it is probablility-based/spontaneous; only some traffic patterns are regular (children to school); to service the probability-need, you need a regular service that may run empty/low half of the time, until people need a hair-cut.
The whole thing is handled on a sliding-scale/spectrum, ordered by how short/far into the future, the travel is/can be planned. On one end, you have taxi/uber, which is on-the-spot travel. The other end is planned year-service, e.g. a summer schedule of a bus. In between, with computers we have a lot of "urgent-but-planned" flexi-flexible traffic, where people book on the day or the week, and a number of bookings are then weaved to be driven like a pearl string (so e.g. a number of people will share a ride in a medium sized bus, that does pre-planned pseudo-taxi-service.)
Pretty much all large public transit authorities already collect all sorts of data about requirements and usage, and have scientists/engineers on payroll to optimize the network within the economic and political constraints these systems operate in.
I know my city has that data, but it doesn't help if you optimize for the wrong thing. AFAICT the highest priority is that "everybody has to be within 3 blocks of a bus stop", resulting in serpentine routes the article decries.
"everybody has to be within 3 blocks of a bus stop" is a political choice. It might result in a system that is not optimal from the perspective of a different metric. If you think that different metric would serve people better, go advocate for it politically. But realize that whatever metric gets adopted will still be a political choice. There is no escaping that.
Of course, as you say in the OP, one can certainly encourage the public to use simulations based on publicly made-available data as a guide during these political discussions to convince people that a certain metric is better than others.
Not much. People plan for the lowest common denominator. If service levels surge during certain days or hours that's great, but people don't want to get burned by a period of thin service. Imagine if Fedex said overnight mail could no longer be delivered on Thursdays in certain towns. You'd have to remember to check if today's Wednesday and if the recipient's town is a low service zone. Or you could just switch to a more consistently available network like UPS.
Most transit is already biased to the 9-5 with thin nighttime service. As such most people uber back from the bar than wait for the 30 min owl bus service.
The interesting thing with transit is that optimal may not be the most optimal. E.g. your model might suggest half mile stop frequencies. Seems good, until the public comment period and all the old folks who take the line show up and ask their particular stop not be displaced.
There is a reason why a lot of american bus networks basically follow the same old streetcar routes that were always there. People become used to existing patterns and build lives around them. New transit is a good opportunity to apply this model, but reworking old transit is tricky because some of your existing ridership will end up with a worse offering by definition, and they will protest. While the people who might benefit will not show up with equivocal advocacy in the public comment meeting.
The bus stop spacing problem is very real. Buses stop every other block in my area. The average speed end to end is no faster than riding a bike! If you suggest deleting some stops people scream about their own convenience or pretend to care about the disabled. By trying to cater to every single constituency, we've designed a bus route that serves no one's interest. A slow bus might not exist at all. People will just buy a car, going into high interest debt if need be.
Bus speed is also reduced by people scanning tickets etc. THe simple answer is to skip the charade about pretending public transport is a business and concentrate on moving people and safety.
Buses can stop every other block, but in practice, they rarely do. Most bus routes that I've taken are neither full nor busy with passengers at every stop. Certainly not all day long. Most bus routes can get away with bypassing several miles' worth of stops at a time. Passengers tend to cluster around certain spots at certain times. Even the main routes have busy times, as well as quiet times in long stretches.
By building in the capability to stop very frequently, they can serve the most people and every area in the route, equally. But day to day, hour to hour, they are definintely bypassing stops, and I can name at least 3 bus routes where the vehicle will certainly reach the speed limit of 45mph or so in-between.
I live in Helsinki, where there is a good tram and bus network. Every now and again a major road will be dug up, in the city center, and trams often get rerouted for a few months to work around that.
I've noticed that there are some diversions which are definitely beneficial to me. There are busses from my house to the city center, as well as a tram. If the tram diverts to a different destination that essentially doubles my available "travel destinations" in a way that's really useful.
So no doubt, for me personally, there are changes that could be useful. But perhaps they would be less useful for others.
The best answer for many problems, is to avoid the action in the first place. Just because you can do it doesnt mean you should do it, and public transport is mostly thought to serve commuting.
A lot of people commute for hours to sit at a computer...which means they could work at home.
You might explore "gray" semi-formal bus networks. Where the on-the-table gap is sufficient to fund businesses. And where the efforts to shut them down, provide insights into mechanisms, incentives, and interests, around that inefficiency.
due to how hard it is to change the networks, I think there's a lot of inefficient route design. if you look at SEPTA in Philadelphia, they're in the middle of realigning a lot of their bus routes for the first time in 60 yrs and ridership has increased noticeably since they started.
Well, there is some of that. It's not near as much as you might guess. Predictable transit is very helpful because people plan their life around it. What the data you're looking at will show where the bottlenecks are, and yes, you can remove a few bottlenecks and make people's life a little bit better, but it's not going to be a major change because of major change will not show up in the data until well after it's made.
I don't remember the terms used, but I've seen data sets of where people live and work in Manhattan, and you do see people who live on subway lines take jobs on that same line, and they don't take jobs on a different subway line that while possible is overly inconvenient.
people have already arranged their life around the existing transportation that exists around them. They are not going to change their life because it is already in place. They want bottlenecks fixed but otherwise don't really need a change to their life. Even if a change would greatly benefit them, they often can't see that and wouldn't imagine themselves making the change to their comfortable life.
The real value of transportation experts is they can look at a map and all your data and say, if we make these changes, over 20 years, the city will redevelop in this way, and then we can ask questions. "Is that how we want the city to develop?" however, the data is never going to show that because the data shows what people are doing today, not what they're going to do in 20 years. Don't get me wrong, experts get this wrong too when they make predictions. However, there is a lot of things we can use to inform our predictions. even though we're not perfect, we can make predictions that are usually right.
Varying the route timing is the absolute worst thing you can do. People need to depend on your transport system. If they have to look at a schedule that's going to change by day to figure out when they can actually get somewhere, they're going to get frustrated and start looking up for an alternative that they control. If you vary your timing at all, it's only because you're changing between a train every minute to train every five minutes. You don't get to go any farther apart than that without losing writers because they no longer can trust that the system will get them there when they want to be there. Physics puts a lower limit on time. I believe the current record is a train every 90 seconds, and I'm not sure how much closer together you can get. The limit for a bus is three minutes apart and even that is extremely hard.
Transit systems that are running worse than 5 minute frequencies have large drops in ridership and as they increase frequency: ridership jumps because people start to use, they can always just go out when they're ready to go. If this wasn't so expensive, everyone in the world would be running 5-minute frequencies all day.
I live fairly near a commuter rail stop—about a 8 minute drive but not walkable or cycle really even if I biked which I don’t.
It sorta works for going into the nearish big city for a 9-5 event. But it’s worthless for the evening because of infrequent trains.
I think Manhattan is kinda special because the lines are mostly parallel, there aren't as many east-west lines.
It is and it makes my point exactly. People have arranged their lives around the east west line they live on. They wouldn't accept a job on a different east-west line even though as a crow flies it's not far - Getting there is not easy.
The question that we cannot answer for Manhattan data is what if Manhattan added a few North South lines or I can think of hundreds of different things that Manhattan could do. I don't live there and I haven't studied the data in depth so I couldn't tell you what is a good useful thing for Manhattan to do. But I can tell you that there are lines that would over the next few decades greatly change how people in Manhattan and the rest of the city live. Unfortunately, Manhattan is particularly bad about the costs and so they can't even afford to remove the obvious bottlenecks much less a whole new line that would over time be make the city much better.
There’s also enough job density to be this particular.
"Efficency" in what domain? Travel time? Cost? Convenience/comfort?
Anyone else click through thinking this had to have been invented before 2024?
about ferrys. Douglas Adams let one of his protagonists in Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency postulate that the book of revelations was the product of despair waiting for a ferry
He really was a real Trail "Blaise"r
This is an example of the power of constraints that David Epstein talks about on Youtube (@DavidEpsteinAuthor) and in his book (Inside The Box).
"He was fortunate to live at a time (the mid-1600s) when, if you were born to the right parents, nobody told you you needed to specialize."
Or, he could have been just that much smarter than you you, dismissive author.
"At age 11, Pascal had re-derived much of Euclid’s geometry from scratch because his father kept the books from him"
Guessing not in the author's bio
Two things can be true at the same time. Pascal was certainly a prodigy, but he was also largely living off family wealth and could afford to not specialize.