Why Commuters Prefer Origin to Destination Transfers
It’s an empirical observation that rail riders who are faced with a transfer are much more likely to make the trip if it’s near their home than near their destination. Reinhard Clever’s since-linkrotted work gives an example from Toronto, and American commuter rail rider behavior in general; I was discussing it from the earliest days of this blog. He points out that American and Canadian commuter rail riders drive long distances just to get to a cheaper or faster park-and-ride stations, but are reluctant to take the train if they have any transfer at the city center end.
This pattern is especially relevant as, due to continued job sprawl, American rail reformers keep looking for new markets for commuter rail to serve and set their eyes on commutes to the suburbs. Garrett Wollman is giving an example, in the context of the Agricultural Branch, a low-usage freight line linking to the Boston-Worcester commuter line that could be used for local passenger rail service. Garrett talks about the potential ridership of the line, counting people living near it and people working near it. And inadvertently, his post makes it clear why the pattern Clever saw in Toronto is as it is.
Residential and job sprawl
The issue at hand is that residential sprawl and job sprawl both require riders to spend some time connecting to the train. The more typical example of residential sprawl involves isotropic single-family density in a suburban region, with commuters driving to the train station to get on a train to city center; they could be parking there or being dropped off by family, but in either case, the interface to the train for them is in their own car.
Job sprawl is different. Garrett points out that there are 79,000 jobs within two miles of a potential station on the Ag Branch, within the range of corporate shuttles. With current development pattern, rail service on the branch could follow the best practices there are and I doubt it would get 5% of those workers as riders, for all of the following reasons:
- The corporate shuttle is a bus, with all the discomfort that implies; it usually is also restricted in hours even more than traditional North American commuter rail – the frequency on the LIRR or even Caltrain is low off-peak but the trains do run all day, whereas corporate shuttles have a tendency to only run at peak. There is no own-car interface involved.
- The traditional car-commuter train interface is to jobs in areas with traffic congestion and difficult parking. The jobs in the suburbs face neither constraint. Of note, Long Islanders working in Manhattan do transfer to the subway, because driving to the East Side to avoid the transfer from Penn Station is not a realistic option.
- The traditional car-commuter train interface is to jobs in a city center served from all directions by commuter rail. In contrast, the jobs in the suburbs are only served by commuter rail along a single axis. There is a fair amount of reverse-peak ridership from San Francisco to Silicon Valley jobs or from New York to White Plains and Stamford jobs, even if at far lower rates than the traditional peak direction – but most people working at a suburban job center live in another suburb, own a car, and either commute in a different direction from that of the train or don’t live and work close enough to a station that the car-train-shuttle trip is faster than an all-car trip.
Those features are immutable without further changes in urban design. Then there are other features that interact with the current timetables and fares. North American commuter rail has so many features designed to appeal to the type of person who drives everywhere and uses the train as a shuttle extending their car-oriented lifestyle into the city – premium fares, heavy marketing as different from normal public transit, poor integration with said normal public transit – that interface with one’s own car is especially valuable, and interface with public transit is especially unvalued.
And yet, it’s clearly possible to make it work. How?
How Europe makes it work
Commuter trains in Europe (nobody calls them regional rail here – that term is reserved for hourly long-range trains) get a lot of off-peak ridership and are not at all used exclusively by 9-to-5 commuters who drive for all other purposes. Some of this is to suburban job centers. How does this work, besides timetables and other operating practices that American reformers recognize as superior to what’s available in the US and Canada?
The primary answer is near-center jobs. Paris and La Défense have, between them, about 37% of the total jobs of Ile-de-France. Within the same land area, 100 km^2, both New York and Boston have a similar proportion of the jobs in their respective metro areas, about 35% each, as does San Francisco within the smaller definition of the metro area, excluding Silicon Valley. Ile-de-France’s work trip modal split is about 43%, metro New York’s is 33%, metro San Francisco’s is 17%, metro Boston’s is 12%.
So where Boston specifically fails is not so much office park jobs, such as those on Route 128, but near-center jobs. Its urban and suburban transit networks do a poor job of getting people to job centers like Longwood, the airport, Cambridge, and the Seaport. The same is true of San Francisco. New York’s network does a better but still mediocre job at connecting to Long Island City and Downtown Brooklyn, and a rather bad job at connecting to inner-suburban New Jersey jobs, but so many of those 35% jobs in the central 100 km^2 are in fact in the central 23 km^2 of the Manhattan core, and nearly half are in the central 4 km^2 comprising Midtown, that the poor service to the other 77 km^2 can be overlooked.
As far as commuter rail is concerned, the main difference in ridership between the main European networks – the Paris RER, the Berlin S-Bahn, and so on – and the American ones is how useful they are for plain urban service. Nearly all Berlin S-Bahn traffic is within the city, not the suburbs; the RER’s workhorse stations are mostly in dense inner suburbs that in most other countries would have been amalgamated into the city already.
To the extent that this relates to American commuter rail reforms, it’s about coverage within the city: multiple city stations, good (free, frequent) connections to local urban rail, high frequency all day to encourage urban travel (a train within the city that runs every half an hour might as well not run).
Suburban ridership is better here as well, but this piggybacks on very strong urban service, giving strong service from the suburbs to the city. Suburb-to-suburb commutes are done largely by car – Ile-de-France’s modal split is 43%, not 80%; there are fewer of them than in most of the US, but not fewer than in New York, Boston, or San Francisco.
But, well, Paris’s modal split is noticeably higher than the job share within the city – a job share that does include drivers. What gives?
Suburban transit-oriented development
TOD in the suburbs can create a pleasant enough rail commute that the modal split is respectable, if nothing like what is seen for jobs in Paris or Manhattan. However, for this to work, planners must eliminate the expression “corporate shuttle” from their lexicon.
Instead, suburban job sites must be placed right on top of the train station, or within walking distance along streets that are decently walkable. I can’t think of good Berlin examples – Berlin maintains high modal split through a strong center – but I can think of several Parisian ones: Marne-la-Vallée (including Disneyland), Noisy, Evry, Cergy. Those were often built simultaneously with greenfield suburban lines that were then connected to the RER, rather than on top of preexisting commuter lines.
They look nothing like American job sprawl. Here, for example, is Cergy:
There are parking garages visible near the train stations, but also a massing of mid-rise residential and commercial buildings.
But speaking of residential, the issue is that employers looking for sites to locate to have no real reason to build offices on top of most suburban train stations – the likeliest highest and best usage is residential. In the case of American TOD, even the secondary-urban centers, like Worcester, probably have much more demand for residential than commercial TOD within walking distance of the train station – employers who are willing to pay near-train station premium rent might as well pay the higher premium of locating within the primary city, where the commuter shed is much larger.
In effect, the suburban TOD model does not counter the traditional monocentric urban layout. It instead extends it to a much larger scale. In this schema, the entirety of the city, and not just its central few square kilometers, is the monocenter, served by different lines with many stations on them. Berlin is ahead of the curve by virtue of its having multiple close-by centers as a Cold War legacy, but Paris is similar (its highest-intensity commercial TOD is in La Défense and in in-city sites like Bercy, on top of former railyards attached to Gare de Lyon).
At no point does this model include destination-end transfers in the suburbs. In the city, it does: a single line cannot cover all urban job sites; but the transfer is within the rapid transit system. But in the suburbs, the jobs that are serviceable by public transportation are within walking distance of the station. Shuttles may exist, but are secondary, and job sites that require them are and will always be auto-centric.
Pedestrian Observations 
Are we going to have a post on the new Honolulu rail line? Because it seems to be a big repeat of every mistake in American transit. It was way too expensive to build, starts in the undeveloped and less populated parts of Honolulu including some literal rural areas, and the planned development seems to be not that high density from what I heard. Like everybody knows what to do and American transit planners always go “but I don’t wanna” in return. I’m not sure why we Americans continually do not get it when it comes to transit. The car cult still has a very strong grip on the people.
So if I read this right suburbs have too infrequent transit to risk a transfer. In the downtown you don’t worry about missing the bus are making a connection because there is always another soon. However if you miss a half hour headway connection you are stuck far from work, missing your meeting… with shorter headways you can risk it because worst case you are still only a little late.
And of course if transit isn’t all day, forget it. My kid doesn’t get sick at school often. But transit needs to cover the emergency ride home (not to mention doctor, dentist, and so on, most of them are planned, but still ). I don’t work late often, but when I do I need to get home.
As I remind people, most of the cost of a car is fixed, so the real winner of transit is when you are useful enough that someone feels confident in selling a car. (Note that I didn’t say all cars, most families have more than one, so allowing families to keep a car for rare trips is best of both worlds)
Even in the countries with the best transit and highest usage like Japan and Singapore, government policy often makes having cars expensive and not worth the trouble for many people. On an individual level, cars beat transit hands down nearly every time even with traffic. Cars do cause a lot of problems if everybody has to drive everywhere though. So on a community level cars suck. You need policy punishments to get people out of their cars.
I don’t like this “even in” construction. Singapore specifically has an all-pricing incentive system to get people to use public transport, so cars are very convenient if you can afford the car taxes. This is not at all how European cities with very high modal splits (Paris, Stockholm, Berlin, Prague…) work.
People do origin-end transfers in the suburbs all the time, just not in the US. But that requires good bus-train interface, including timed connections, short walk times, and integrated fares; American commuter rail rejects all of this, since it works by the principle of market segmentation, such that commuter rail is branded as for the middle class and buses are branded as for the poor.
Outside of the Northeast and Chicago there is no mass transit. To make a transfer there has to be something to transfer to.
Hey, the Bay Area exists and even had higher modal split than any other non-New York metro area before corona.
I suspect you are cooking the books somewhat. If San Jose is not metro San Francisco, Worcester and Providence are their own separate MSAs too. Or count Trenton MSA along with Bridgeport-Stamford MSA in New York’s. I’m not going to attempt to find 2019 APTA reports or interpret them. None it changes that to take the bus to the train station there needs to be a train station. That has something more than a thrice weekly Amtrak land cruise.
I’m using MSAs throughout, so Baltimore isn’t part of Washington, Providence and Worcester aren’t part of Boston, and San Jose isn’t part of San Francisco. I think if you use CSAs then Chicago > San Francisco but I no longer remember, and the numbers are from last decade anyway and San Francisco has taken an unusually large hit to its transit ridership from corona.
I’ve known people who took transit to the origin of even commuter rail in the USA. This was almost always invariably driven by low parking access at the commuter rail station. (Naperville still was notorious for how difficult it was to park at.)
I suspect though that for a lot of people in the future e-bikes/e-scooters will end up outcompeting feeder bus service. I’ve heard that already e scooters have become a big thing on the Long Island railroad.
~Looks angrily at South London’s missed connections hubs~
https://www.google.com/maps/place/Pig+Farm+Access/@51.3980932,0.0671555,1342m/data=!3m1!1e3!4m6!3m5!1s0x47d8abbb5c4b21c1:0x87d4d85d12779dad!8m2!3d51.4005929!4d0.0638252!16s%2Fg%2F11c2md5tcn?entry=ttu
A F***ing pig farm!
The Overground not stopping at Brixton is one of the worst IMO.
Its not even in the top 5 given the Northern line is right there and the Victoria is at capacity (its also easier to reengineer). Its just the most noticeable because its Brixton. The worst ones are the South London junctions that have not stations. Queensway road, Bedmondsey, Loughborough Junction, Neasden the zone between Caledonian road and Camden Road are much worse.
Everyone whinges about how bad the Victorians were for having competing commuter networks and how “hard” it makes everything (highest track density in the world is “hard”). Japan still has competing commuter rail and I can count the number of stupid missed connections between those networks on two hands*.
*Alon exaggerates the number of missed connections in Tokyo because the stations are so big that they overlap. And most of those are the subways not the privates.
Of note, Long Islanders working in Manhattan do transfer to the subway, because driving to the East Side to avoid the transfer from Penn Station is not a realistic option.
They didn’t read the study you cited. And use the fastest method, depending on the time of day and day of the week. Time of year. Manhattan gridlocks frequently in December. The traffic reports call it a “gridlock alert day”.
Long Islanders transfer to the subway to work on Wall Street too. So do some New Jerseyans but New Jerseyans tend to take the train to Newark or Hoboken and change to PATH. The stereotypical Wall Street mover and shaker lives in Connecticut. They aren’t walking to Wall Street from Grand Central.
East Side Access is open and will be running a full schedule soon. They will be changing in Jamaica for the East Side instead of Penn Station. Like they have been since forever. Silly them, they didn’t read the study and have been changing trains out in the wilds of Jamaica for generations. Which will give some relief to the New Haven line once Metro North trains go to Penn Station. So that New Haven line passengers will no longer have to get on the shuttle to Times Square. And change trains again. All of them use the subway to get to Rockefeller Center and Union Square too.
And New York City subway users change trains all over the place all the time. Most of the people getting on or off the Flushing line at Flushing Main Street aren’t walking there. Silly them, they didn’t read the study that says they shouldn’t do that sort of thing.
Philadelphians have been changing trains at the 69th Street Transportation Center since it opened in 1907. Wikiepedia says it’s the second busiest transfer point after ….City Hall… with connections between everything depending on which concourse you want to use to get to which line. They reconfigured the Seashore lines and New Jersayans use PATCO to get to Philadelphia instead of changing to the Philadelphia subway in Camden. They didn’t read the study either.
… seems to me the study excluded places where suburbanites change between trains or trains and buses. If you exclude places where suburbanites do indeed take two and three seat rides, it will appear they won’t…. A glance at BeeLine schedules or NICE schedules might be interesting. PACE buses and Metra.
secondary-urban centers, like Worcester, probably have much more demand for residential than commercial TOD within walking distance of the train station
Single use zoning. How suburban of you.
I don’t tell the Census Bureau how to define NECTAs. Worchester is the primary city in the Worcester MSA. Though a bit of digging it seems the Census Bureau may have reconfigured things and that doesn’t agree with what Wikipedia thinks they are. It’s it’s own MSA. Or was. And I’m not in the mood to find out when Massachusetts disincorporated what was Worcester County.
The railroad arrived in 1835 and it’s a dense walkable New Urbanist’s wet dream. They can do both things, redevelop one block into ten story office buildings and another into elevator condos. Or do both in one block with commercial on the lower floors and residential on the upper floors. Like the blocks and blocks of 19th Century and early 20th Century buildings within a New Urbanist’s wet dream of a walk from the station that already exist.
Whatever they do it’s still going to be the place with the big hospital, courts and other local offices of the city or state government. According to Wikipedia so much office space that the newly formed Cannabis Control Commission’s headquarters are in Union Station. And so much demand for rail service a second !!! !!! platform will be in service next year.
Zoning can be mixed-use, but it doesn’t mean most buildings are. It’s remarkable how, even with mixed-use zoning, nearly all buildings in dense Berlin neighborhoods are all-residential; even on main streets, there’s a mix of buildings with and without ground floor retail.
And Worcester specifically is not at all a dense walkable urbanist wet dream. I forget if I’ve said this in comments or just social media, but the name of this blog originates in a Facebook album I made two months before (re)starting blogging, about how unwalkable the route from Holy Cross to Worcester Union Station is. At some point I was walking in the median of a grade-separated highway. Among the three secondary New England cities I’ve spent time in, Providence > New Haven > Worcester.
That’s what you get in Brooklyn too. It usually begins to peter out into single family houses a few blocks away from the main avenue.
I would have taken the bus between the two. Though I’m not masochistically frugal and might have splurged on a cab. Did you surf around on Streetview to pick the most unpleasant route or did you ask someone, who owns a car and uses it, how to get there? Drivers have a radically different view of the world compared to pedestrians. For instance, almost always, they let pedestrians walk the wrong way on one way streets.
For blocks and blocks around the station it’s the kind of development that happened because the trolley car arrived. If it wasn’t replacing a horsecar. And that is what you are going to get in most of North America not the Upper West Side or Lake Shore Drive.
“He points out that American and Canadian commuter rail riders drive long distances just to get to a cheaper or faster park-and-ride stations, but are reluctant to take the train if they have any transfer at the city center end.”
Its an interesting observation and I think it applied to leisure trips to.
I frequently see people on reddit looking for travel advice and its something like
“I live in PA and want to visit NYC for a long weekend, should I drive to Metropark and take NJT or drive to Harrison and take PATH”
….and the obvious answer is “why not simply take the Keystone from the station 2 miles away from you?”
Its a weird psychology thing.
The Keystone is slow and infrequent. The station nearby might not have overnight parking.
You don’t want to drive to MetroPark or Harrison, there is no place to park. Hamilton might be possible on weekends. Secaucus but Secaucus is expensive.
No place to park in Metropark? It’s a park and ride. It’s in the name. Theres like 5,000 spaces.
There is a years long waiting list for them. Or was.
It’s not a “weird psychology thing,” Amtrak’s just too overpriced to be competitive. Going from (say) Lancaster, PA to NYP on Amtrak this coming Friday is, best case, $68 round-trip (and easily more like $100). NJTransit from Hamilton is $34 RT. (And PATH is what, $6?)
Hamilton’s 100 miles from Lancaster, so call it $20 in gas, and $12 in EZPass tolls. The Hamilton lot is $12/day vs. $10/day for the Lancaster one, so you’re out maybe an extra $6-$8 there.
All in, best case for Amtrak, the solo traveler is breaking even by going to Hamilton, and has to weigh the convenience of not having the drive vs. the annoyance of Amtrak’s inflexibility and unreliable service. Take two or more people, and it isn’t even close to competitive.