How to Ensure You Won’t Have Public Transportation
In talking to both activists and government officials, I’ve encountered some assumptions that are clearly incompatible with any sort of viable public transportation provision. In some cases, when I don’t feel obliged to be polite, I immediately react, “Then you will not have public transit” or “you will not have trains.” These include both operations and construction. None of the political constraints mentioned in those conversations appears hard; it’s more a mental block on behalf of the people making this statement, who are uncomfortable with certain good practices. But there really is no alternative; social scientific results like various ridership elasticities can no more be broken than economic laws. Moreover, in some of these cases, half-measures are worse than nothing, leading reform among certain groups of activists to be worse than if those activists had done literally anything else with their spare time than advocacy.
The practices: operations
There’s a lot of resistance among American transit activists to the sort of bus operations that passengers who are not very poor are willing to rely on.
Frequency
American advocacy regarding frequency comes extremely compromised. The sort of frequencies that permit passengers to transfer between buses without timing the connection are single-digit headways, and the digit should probably not be a 9 or even an 8. Nova Xarxa successfully streamlined Barcelona’s bus network as a frequent grid, with buses coming every 3-8 minutes depending on the route. Vancouver and Toronto’s frequent grids are both in the 5-8 minute range.
However, American transit agencies think it’s unrealistic to provide a grid of routes running so frequently. Therefore, they compromise themselves down to a bus every 15 minutes. At 15 minutes, the wait time is too onerous; remember that these are buses that don’t run on a fixed schedule, so a transferring passenger is spending 15 minutes waiting in the average case and 30 minutes in the worst case. These are all city buses, with an in-vehicle trip time in the 15-30 minutes range. A bus system that requires 30 minutes of worst-case wait might as well not exist. If this replaces buses that run every 20 or 30 minutes on a fixed schedule, then this makes things worse.
Bus reliability
Buses naturally tend to bunch. The only lasting solution is active control, i.e. better dispatching. I’ve heard managers treat the prospects of hiring a few more dispatchers as a preposterous extravagance. This is not because of some political diktat; hiring freezes are stupid, but those managers don’t push back and don’t hire more dispatchers even when there’s no hiring freeze.
There’s a bit more interest in technological solutions, but when I was trying to explain conditional signal priority to some managers, they didn’t really get it. This is not quite the same issue – this is not a compromise due to perceived (almost never actual) political constraints, but rather lack of technical chops and disinterest in acquiring it. But lacking such chops, the marginally labor-intensive solution is the only one, and yet it’s not done.
Bus-rail integration
American managers love to slice the market; this includes transit managers, in a situation where the issue of frequency makes any makret segmentation a net negative to all riders. In the suburbs, this results in a segmentation of buses for the poor and trains for the rich; once the buses have average incomes that are only around half the area average, both managers and activists treat them as a kind of soup kitchen, and resist any attempt at integration.
This is less bad in the main cities – bus-subway integration in the American cities that have subways is good, except for Washington. But in Washington on Metro, and everywhere on commuter rail, there’s resistance to fare integration; New York makes incremental changes to reduce the commuter rail fare premium, but until fares are equalized and transfers made free, this is just a subsidy to the rich segment of the market, rather than a breaking down of the segmentation.
The practices: construction and governance
I bundle governance and construction because, in practice, all the examples I’ve seen of people compromising their own ability to do cost reform involve governance.
Learning from others
At a meeting with some government officials to discuss our costs report, one of the people involved asked us if there are any good examples from the United States, saying that as a matter of politics, it’s hard to get Americans to adapt foreign governance schemes. I don’t know how important this person was; long-time readers know that I don’t know Washington Bureaucratese or its Brussels, Albany, Sacramento, etc. equivalents, and in particular I can’t tell from a title, CV, or social cues whether I’m talking to a decider or a flunky. I certainly did not say “Okay, then you won’t have cost-effective construction, and over time, Americans will learn that the government can’t do anything”; I tried explaining why no, it’s really important to learn from foreigners, especially nonnative Anglophones, and I don’t think it got through.
Building up state capacity
Something about Americans makes them hostile to the idea that the government overtly governs. This is not because they’re inherently ungovernable, but because some of them like to pretend to be. This has led to workarounds, which Bring Back the Bureaucrats by John DiIulio (this is DIIULIO in all caps, not DILULIO) calls the leviathan by proxy model, in which the state is outsourced to consultants. Thus, dismantling the state and instead calling in consultants is supposedly the only way to get Americans to accept government spending. This was said to us, at the same meeting as in the above section, by a different person.
This is, like most political claims that justify inaction, bunk. Consultants are not a popular group in the broad public. “This all goes to consultants” is a standard line justifying misturst of government, regardless of politics, to the point that generic anti-everything populists like to make consultants public enemy #1. In New York, even the unions make this one of their rallying cries in opposition to various kinds of outsourcing; there’s no excuse there to keep hiring consultants to do design and then not knowing how to manage them, where what the MTA should do is replace its leadership with people who know better and staff up to the tune of a four-figure planning and engineering department. It costs money. It costs less money than the New York premium for construction, the difference amounting to around a full order of magnitude.
Saying no to surplus extraction
The United States abounds with examples of infrastructure projects that got outside funding, which could be federal, or even just state if the scale is small enough, that local departments took as opportunities for getting other people’s money.
The solution there is simple: just say no. This requires overruling local regulators, but I routinely see states do it when they care to – Long Island’s entire group of interests, including the LIRR, local officials, and state electeds, opposed Metro-North’s Penn Station Access due to turf battles over train slots into Penn Station that were not even in shortage, until Andrew Cuomo fired LIRR head Helena Williams and all of those supposedly intractable voices were silenced. The ability of California High-Speed Rail to defeat rich NIMBYs in Silicon Valley is also notable; the project is moribund, but not because of NIMBYs.
And somehow, when a municipal fire department or parks department makes demand, the immediate reaction in the same country that did the above is to give in. Federal officials who I’m fairly certain are important deciders told me stories about how “in our system of government” (exact words) there is expectation of municipal autonomy and it breaks some unwritten covenant to interfere when a fire department refuses to certify light rail construction that meets fire code, as in suburban Seattle, because the department wants it to go beyond the code. The state that does not take responsibility and respond appropriately – which in this case ranges from disestablishing the fire department in question to disestablishing the entire suburb – is the state that will not really be able to expand its urban rail network, which is really sad since Seattle’s last extension was good and its high rate of housing growth makes it a good place to invest.
Benchmarking to an external world
Activists and managers may tell themselves that they’re just following some kind of necessary political logic. But at the end of the day, neither the passengers nor the contractors care. If the political logic dictates that the bus system be bad, then passengers will just not use it, and instead get cars and drive and vote against any further increases in transit funding due to memory of its low quality. Likewise, if the political logic dictates that capital construction be run by incompetents with no successful (i.e. non-Anglosphere) experience who can’t say no to requests for other people’s money and who mismanage the consultants, then the region will just not be able to build, even if, like Seattle, it clearly wants to. There’s an external world out there and not just the machinations of political insiders.
Pedestrian Observations 
Bus routes redesign’s or revamping’s are the new orders of the day for many of these transit agencies, which also involves stuff such as bus stop eliminations, and route combinations to save operating costs, etc.
At the level of principle, those are not bad. If due to a lack of coherent planning, a city has, basically, two uselessly infrequent (and/or circuitous) routes and combines them into effectively one route (even if only partially, i.e. they become two branches of a shared trunk) with double the frequency, they can get more ridership out of the same operating cost. Likewise, if the bus stops every ~100m, pruning back the number of stops is often a good idea, because it makes the line less slow.
Bus stop elimination is not a reduction in service – it’s a speedup. American and Canadian agencies need to do it more rather than less; I didn’t mention it because their failure to do so is not the same cope as when people in the field insist that untimed 15-minute frequencies are okay.
Alon, I wont disagree with your her – but the bus redesigns are now spreading to New Jersey as well – see what jass has to say;
jass posted just 3 hours ago
With three bus route makeovers underway, NJ Transit received another federal grant to redesign bus routes, some which haven’t changed since trolley cars ran on them.
NJ Transit received a $600,000 Federal Transit Administration grant to redesign routes in Paterson and Passaic. This is the fourth bus redesign study the agency has undertaken and the second one funded by a federal grant.
The need was quantified by U.S. Rep. Bill Pascrell Jr, who supported the application in a March 10 letter to FTA Administrator Nuria Fernandez.
“North Jersey and Passaic County are among the most densely populated parts of the entire United States,” Pascrell, D-9th Dist., said in a statement. “Nearly one-quarter of a million Americans in Paterson and Passaic commute to work every day. Many of them are middle and working class, and so their livelihoods depend on safe, efficient, and smartly designed bus lines.”
The grant is part of a larger nationwide program that awarded a total of $20 million to 47 communities under the Areas of Persistent Poverty program. That program is designed to improve or start transit programs for residents with limited or no transportation options.
“Through this program, we are bringing affordable, accessible public transit to the very communities that need it the most, making it possible for more people to access jobs, resources, and opportunity,” said U.S. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg in a statement.
The competitive grants were specifically awarded for studies to improve transit in Census-defined low-income areas. Transit agencies applied for the grant and FTA officials said the agency received applications totaling close to $36 million in funding requests.
This would be NJ Transit’s fourth bus redesign, an effort that started in Jan. 2021 with New Bus Newark, followed by New Bus Burlington-Camden-Gloucester in Jan. 2022 and New Bus Hudson in June 2022, which is funded by a $514,045 FTA grant.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/slice-of-20m-federal-bus-grant-is-coming-to-densely-populated-nj-cities/ar-AA1e8UjO
This would be more exciting if NJT hadnt completely dropped the ball with the other plans…
bus routes, some which haven’t changed since trolley cars ran on them.
Some of them since they were horsecar routes running along the colonial era stagecoach route. Many of them make sense because the when the horsecars got electrified 125 years ago people moved to the suburban splendor 20, 30 blocks away from downtown.
Lovely example of the “soup kitchen” attitude that Alon mentioned. I think it bears some expansion.
The grant is part of a larger nationwide program that awarded a total of $20 million to 47 communities under the Areas of Persistent Poverty program. That program is designed to improve or start transit programs for residents with limited or no transportation options.
Read: for those too poor to have a car. Implicitly, it is no longer a design goal for transit to compete with, to replace cars, and thus it won’t count as a failure if it doesn’t.
“Through this program, we are bringing affordable, accessible public transit to the very communities that need it the most, […]”
Communities that aren’t poor don’t need transit? (Actually, if by “transit” they mean something that is perhaps affordable and accessible, but not useful transportation, then indeed, well-off areas have no need of it. They would gladly pay for something that was as useful as cars and thus would lower car traffic with its noise, pollution and danger, but apparently “transit” is not that, according to the Federal “Transit” Administration.)
The competitive grants were specifically awarded for studies to improve transit in Census-defined low-income areas.
Probably there is an effect that could be called “design contempt”. If it’s the kind of thing that would never be used either by people like me, nor by customers whom the business must please, then it’s no surprise that the result is not useful for people wanting to go somewhere. (However, this principle is oft carried too far in the other direction — network design by my personal commute — while its aesthetic/UX part produces all those high-tech pod proposals.)
No, it doesn’t. You’re just foaming at the mouth about what are, for the most part, well-intentioned and low-cost and overdue programs to actually improve people’s lives and improve transit utility and efficiency.
Given the way in which pork-barrel earmarked-based system in which the US federal government and US state governments overwhelmingly funds idiotic, costly, suburbanite-commute-centric rail capital projects, throwing a few crumbs to make the damned buses run better, the damned buses that actual people in need need, is hardly wasteful patronization. What it is is barely noticeable, and barely a start, but entirely the right thing.
Good or bad depends entirely on the results we end up with. If transport is useful the poor are more likely to use it so they can save money, so starting by giving the poor great transit can be a way to start a system. Then as the poor want to go to other areas you expand on your success by giving great service to those other areas, which in turn bring in riders who are not poor but since there is great service they ride anyway.
However it can go the other way: bad service that you would only ride if you have no other choice. Most poor in the US can find enough money for a cheap 10+ year old car, and they have friends who will fix it for free (or help them fix it). They know how to get insurance policies that only cover long enough to get the car registered, (if they are at fault in an accident – well they are poor so you you can’t get anything out of them when you discover they don’t have insurance). That doesn’t leave very many poor people to ride your bad system, but on the lowest end there will still be a few who can’t manage to get a car at all and so will use your bad system.
I fully understand the pessimism @Basil Marte is seeing. Many transit systems are the second, those who fund them can’t imagine many people riding great transit, so why bother spending more?
for the most part, well-intentioned and low-cost and overdue programs to actually improve people’s lives and improve transit utility and efficiency.
That is some very welcome unexpected news! I was assuming that the effort would not result in bus lines that run well, that there would be no benefit from the cost.
I messed up that sentence, it is breathtakingly arrogant as written, you’re correct to ridicule it. The original idea I wanted to communicate was the common pattern of:
– designers know what their own problem is, and can tell whether a candidate solution actually solves it or not (any by extension, the solution also works for people similar to the designer);
– if the intended users individually decide whether to pay for the product, the designers bother to find out what the users’ problem is and whether a candidate solution actually solves it (should their initial attempt at this fail, they notice the lack of usership and try again);
– but if the organization creates a double product, if basically it sells a deck of powerpoint slides to one party who decides whether to buy the product on behalf of another party, it is regrettably common that people lose track of exactly what problem the end-users would want solved and thus end up implementing a candidate solution that has some key deficiencies and does not actually solve the end-users’ problem that it was supposed to solve.
Winding, infrequent “coverage routes” are so common because they are the practical optimum of “accessible”, in geographic terms (i.e. as lines on a map). This is the natural, least-resistance outcome of having the problem statement be “bringing accessible transit to communities” independently of the particulars of the contempt. (By this I mean that in a slightly magical alternate world, where “normal people” e.g. rode bikes everywhere (and by magic this worked to about the same degree as “drive everywhere” works in the Sunbelt), and only elderly/disabled people clustering in Low-Health Areas needed buses, the result would be very similar coverage routes.) The explicit attitude of “this is not for everyone, only for poor people who have limited/no other mobility” matters here because it actively engenders this “contempt”, that the designer shouldn’t see this as the sort of thing that they may end up using someday (and thus use their sense of whether it would solve their problem), but as for a class of people they strictly don’t belong to. Given the above, it is a pleasant surprise if the process nonetheless ends with “we decided not to spread the crumbs evenly thin, but to lay the crumbs as thick as pragmatically necessary, despite the politically unpopular cut to geographic scope”, improving utility for some rather than none. (And of course there are ~zero-cost improvements, stereotypical examples being bus stop consolidation and line straightening, that in principle can be done everywhere.)
In Vancouver BC,TransLink reduced service.
During Mid-Day most buses run every 12 to 15 minutes. Some branches every 24 mins.
In Vancouver BC, TransLink reduced service. Most local buses run during Mid-Day every 12 to 15 mins, some branches every 20-24 mins. Long waiting times for riders that need to use two or three buses.
The grid is not complete like on Toronto.
Is that on the city grid too, or just in North Van and such?
That’s on much of the city grid (routes like the 10 and 16). The 20-24 minute waits are on branches that were never considered part of the Frequent Transit Network (individual frequencies on the 4 and 7 for instance).
City of Vancouver grid bus routes
Buses every 15 minutes isn’t THAT bad. It’s annoying, but for many people car payments are more annoying.
If your route doesn’t involve a transfer, it is pretty easy to stay at home for another 10 minutes sipping coffee or washing dishes until the real time bus app says it’s time to leave, and then get to your stop with only a couple minutes’ total wait time. Only if you have to transfer to a 15-minute route (and many riders don’t) does the wait become highly frustrating.
Obviously, there is value in shortening these waits. But there is also cost. Going from 15 to 7.5 minute frequencies means doubling the cost of operating the system. (It’s more expensive than going from 60 to 15 minute frequency) Going from 7.5 to 3.75 minutes means doubling the cost again. These are dramatic cost increases, which produce relatively minor travel time improvements. It is likely that the money would be better spend elsewhere, for example in installing signal priority or improving dispatching, as you mention.
I think the idea is also that with a grid of frequent lines, you save money by not having lots of lines doing redundant paths close to the city center:
https://humantransit.org/2010/02/the-power-and-pleasure-of-grids.html
My impression is that even with a grid, if you are going to a popular location like the CBD, one of your trip legs (the one through the CBD) will generally have high frequency even though the other leg (to your house) is only every 15 minutes.
I know you all hate me talking about swing voters.
But really the aim of public transport should be that the service is good enough for middle aged middle class people to catch.
So basically the fare should be ~£2 and it should run until 11pm-midnight with at least hourly service. In the daytime that probably means a bus every 15-20 minutes.
That level of service is also good enough to let your teenage kids use without having to give them a lift.
Swing voters in my experience do a decent job of big picture politics. They don’t think about it in enough depth to care that it was learned from Europe or even Asia.
That’s seeing things in a European context where swing voters are often suburban commuters. US has very different politics because the urban core blue states all have the fiscal resources to build world class mass transit and the legal powers to build the necessary state capacity. And they have inbuilt democratic supermajorities.
1. American left in all its variety hasn’t really had a theory of state capacity until the last decade. Its heavily influenced by New Left anti-state prejudices while having a more classic left-wing “morality is all you need, if you spend morally you get moral outcomes”.
2. Urban machine patronage politics create obstacles not just to reform but to reformers in general.
If NY, California, Washington, Illinois and NJ can’t make transit work in America, the sunbelt can’t be expected to.
UK is very different because London’s traditionally-Tory commuter belt doesn’t think trains are morally suspect (buses are a different story). And London’s rail city status elevates rail’s prestige across the UK. Indeed the period which saw the best railway policy postwar was the 1980’s which was the best decade in terms of electrification, they cut a lot of unnecessary fat from BR and improved operating costs. Also their land policies began to revive inner cities albeit mostly by accident (stopped building exurban council housing/New Towns).
By the way I don’t think 1979-1997 was especially good on transit policy, I just think the rail policy was the best of the postwar decade. Bus privatization was a complete disaster, and railway privatisation was a wasteful cock-up. They kept the anti-TOD planning system intact etc. And the electrification choices were telling, West Anglian mainline or Lowland Scotland should not have been done before the Midland Mainline (Neither should the ECML). But the East Midland and Yorkshire coalfield didn’t vote conservative and could be ignored.
N/B Among the Federal democracies the US is weird. It lacks a formal politics let alone legal process of inter-governmental negotiation like say Canada or Germany. The closest to it the Westminster-Scotland/NI relationship where the centre is a distant centre which dispatches money and regulations from on high. And its similarly adversarial.
> Among the Federal democracies the US is weird. It lacks a formal politics let alone legal process of inter-governmental negotiation like say Canada or Germany.
I suspect that the sheer number of states makes it hard for governors to gang up as a group on the federal government, in the way that you see in Canada or Australia, notwithstanding the partisan differences between states or partisan alignments between a province and the feds.
There’s also, as you’re seeing now in NJ over the NYC congestion charge issue, a lot of governors who don’t seem to understand that their states don’t meaningfully exist or at least are substantially weaker than they would be without their neighbors. This is definitely more true in the smaller eastern states–witness, too, the pushback from New Hampshire’s governor on the idea of a commuter rail service to Boston; this can certainly fall along identitarian, political lines–but provincialist rivalry where it makes no sense has various incarnations around the country.
Canada is converging to American costs…
That’s a good point. US is more fragmented than the EU currently (and in the future even if the EU gets to the Caucasus and the Urals).
It does suggest you might need some sort of intermediary governance process. Not another layer of electeds but some sort of quorum/boards process (kind of like French local government).
I vote for “circuits” in the Holy Roman tradition (or the East Asian tradition with 道).
Alon, that doesn’t disprove my point. Canada used to not be expensive as you have told us. And its a result of recent policy. Its relatively easy to solve, get a parliamentary majority in a Province, get rid of design-build and build out the necessary staff. To do so in Albany or Sacramento is much much harder because the lack of electoral competition means you have to master the patronage-and-faction game. Furthermore if Ottawa got serious about cost control it has much clearer means to push reforms as condition of getting money. And vote margins on transit in the House of Commons even in Hung parliaments are far less than the last 20 of US senate majorities.
If you wanted to attack Canadian Federalism, the real edge would be how weak Canada’s single market is or the Not-withstanding clause or how it utterly mismanages First Nation affairs.
Public transit should aim to get people on the monthly unlimited ride family pass plan. That is you pay once per month and everyone can ride when they choose to. People with cars never think that this trip costs $x in gas, they just go. However when you have to pay a fare for each trip you start to think is this trip worth the cost. Price the monthly pass such that is is cheaper by just a little for someone who is going to work, and they will buy it then think about using the bus even for trips where traffic isn’t bad since it is free.
Unlimited rides makes transfers easy. No need to ask for a transfer pass, just get on and go. (ideally with all door boarding)
Second-best is to have a tap system which is as seamless as possible. If all you’re doing is tapping a card and going, with no price check, that also carries the same level of ‘I don’t care’ while still charging per-use instead of a flat fee.
Jealous of the Klimaticket though. Would be all over an unlimited train pass if I lived in Austria.
A tap system is better than a flat unlimited pass. A wide area pass for a flat rate means you lose a financial incentive for density.
Financial incentives for density are already huge. The additional incentive provided by fiddling with transit fares is tiny.
Middle class and rich people don’t care about fare levels which are already far below the cost of a car, what they care about is speed of travel (density provides short and thus fast travel). Poor people care about fare levels, but they already can’t afford housing in the core, so raising their fares doesn’t change development patterns.
I generally agree with Eric here, but I want to point out that rich people do care about fare levels *when the transit isn’t good enough for car replacement*–since you’re having to pay something extra on top of already needing to keep the car. In that case, complex or zoned fare schedules & no/overpriced all-you-can-eat options disincentivize using transit for every trip, which in turn disincentivizes car replacement, which both keeps household transit budgets higher than they should be (paying for two modes) & leads to underdeveloped transit systems & building patterns.
The financial incentive for density at the household level is negative. You get cheaper housing in less dense areas. The cost of transportation is the main financial incentive for density.
All of the lowest car use metro areas in the world do not offer wide area unlimited passes.
Japan drives far fewer vehicle kilometers per capita than any country in Europe, and has lower household transportation costs than almost all countries in Europe, and doesn’t do wide area unlimited passes. While Japan doesn’t always follow best practices (e.g. conductor + driver common on metro trains), in this case, it seems like best practice to avoid wide area unlimited passes.
The cost of transportation is indeed the household-level incentive for density. However, this cost is largely not monetary (or not directly monetary), but in terms of time. If we use the very rough approximation of treating one’s wage as a stand-in for “how much their time is worth”, even a very low wage worker (10 $/h) spending an extra 15 minutes per direction commuting will see an extra half hour per workday, or 5 $ per workday, in time-cost. This effect is so strong as to give rise to Marchetti’s constant. This is also ignoring everything outside the commute.
The idea that time is the actual cost is absurd after you realize that commute times generally go up with income.
In addition, public transit breaks Marchetti’s constant because you can do other things with your commuting time. That’s why public transit oriented cities tend to have much longer commute times than car oriented ones. The time isn’t lost. Which further feeds into the idea that time cost is an extremely weak incentive for density.
Based on high transit use metro areas, best practice for fares seems pretty obviously a tap system with distance based fares, cheap tickets for single trips, and restrictive/small-discount monthly passes.
The wide area unlimited pass model rewards people who use transit a lot, and those people are going to use transit a lot regardless, since transit works very well for them. Making individual trips easy to pay for, and fairly priced, is much better for convincing people on the margin to choose transit.
…how real is Marchetti’s constant?
The only two comments I’ll make about it this deep in comments are,
1. Tokyo careens far past the constant – the average commute there is an hour.
2. Commutes by transit are pretty consistently longer than by car; you can explain this within the theory (you’re more productive on a train than in a car unless you’re management, car commutes are underestimated because of parking, transit commuters have short walks to non-work trips whereas drivers have longer drives), but it’s an epicycle.
Matthew, your swing voter approach may work in the UK. In the US, the typical swing voter may be vaguely aware that their city has a bus system but has no idea where the routes go and has never used it.
More importantly, the swing voter knows someone who claims to be an environmentalist, and that person drives to work. The environmentalist has probably done other things in their life to prove they are not a complete hypocrite (but not always), things like upgrade to a high efficiently heat pump, installed solar panels, and made other changes in their life that cost some $$$ and effort. If that person doesn’t ride the bus, then why should someone who isn’t as hard-core bother to look up the routes.
Now if you have a great bus system, even if the environmentalist is a hypocrite, eventually one of the non-hardcore people they know will have reason to look up the routes. (car breaks down and they can’t get a loaner is a common one) If the bus routes are useful for that trips that person is likely to start riding the bus (depending of course how useful it is), and now people in the office have reason to think maybe they should look up the routes as well. Even if that person goes back to driving they will give better feedback to others (the bus system is minimally acceptable but clearly worse than a car is still a sign that maybe it can be better if someone advocates for a change for the better)
That both of the above almost never happens is a reflection on the quality of the transit system
That’s how these bus systems have half the average user income of genpop and low and decreasing ridership even when no new freeways open (Los Angeles opened its last freeway 30 years ago).
…no.
1. The real-time bus app is jank – the buses sometimes disappear from it, which happened to me in Boston.
2. Not all trips begin at home.
3. Not all trips have an unbounded end time: if you need to be at work on time, you need to assume worst-case scenario when budgeting your time.
0. But Los Angeles has good frequency (10 minutes or less at midday) on many of its routes. So frequency doesn’t seem to be the issue. I would guess the issue is slow/unreliable travel on one hand (no bus lanes, etc), and a highly dispersed urban form which necessitates long trips on the other hand. Many rich cities in Europe have much better bus modeshare than LA, despite not having excellent frequencies.
1. Depends where – mine works pretty well in general, although one has to get used to a few quirks.
2. By “home” I just meant the low-density place that isn’t the CBD. Only with low-density to low-density trips with a transfer is one likely to get hit by the full wait penalty you describe. But a high fraction of trips aren’t like that.
3. That’s true of driving too. Whatever obstacles are likely to come up on the trip, one has to leave early enough to account for them.
I was 6 last time I was in LA, but if they are like other midwest cities I know of most trips are low density to low density. A lot of jobs are in low destiny areas, and most people live in low density areas. Apartment buildings (with acres of parking) could be counted has high density if you want, but they get low density service (everyone drives). And of course there is church, school, shopping (at a suburban mall), and all the other things people do outside of work. There are a lot of low density to low density trips. And because transit is so poor people building museums and the like locate in low density areas where the parking is cheap because if you want people to come you need to give them a place to park.
It is very hard to break this cycle. People who live and mostly go to low density areas don’t go to high density areas enough to support service to high density places, and so in turn even when they want to go it is hard. Not impossible of course, you can point to examples of cities that have broken it, but it was decades of work building good transit (and destinations in high density areas that people want to go to)
0. Which ones? The frequent network at least in the 2010s was defined as five buses an hour, which could be split across local and limited service; looking at timetables now, the only frequent routes I’m seeing by this standard are Wilshire and Western, with Vermont and Olympic running exactly a bus every 10 minutes.
1. Yeah, as I said, it’s jank. I’ve seen some hilarious misses in New York and Boston teaching me not to rely on the app – while in Vancouver, just memorizing “the 84 leaves Vine and 4th at :01 every 12 minutes” was reliable.
2. Okay, but the origin could be a work place or a non-work destination like daycare, where staying longer just means the trip is longer. It’s telling that the introduction of smartphones, giving every person something to do while waiting for a vehicle, has been invisible in ridership models – wait penalties haven’t changed, and overall modal choice hasn’t changed.
3. Buses are less reliable than driving when they come this infrequently without a fixed schedule, is the point.
Los Angeles is rolling out bus lanes on about two major arterial corridors each year since the pandemic began, with a grand opening on Venice Blvd yesterday.
Some of LA’s problems are:
1. LA is so big that at this pace, even after a decade not all of the top lines will have bus lanes.
2. Without bus lanes, buses get stuck in heavy traffic.
3. Even with bus lanes, the distances to get across town can be far enough that Rapid bus lines that stop only every mile or 1600 m instead of every 1/4 mile or 400 m are also needed. Unfortunately, Metro decided to eliminate most of its Rapid lines as part of the NextGen system restructuring it implemented in 2020.
4. None of the rail lines currently have off-peak headways as frequent as 10 minutes, only on the two short shared trunk segments downtown. This includes the fully grade separated subway lines.
5. LA has gone the opposite direction from a systemwide takt: it’s systematically eliminated many of the timed transfers between low frequency lines.
6. The large number of small municipal operators increases redundancy, inefficiency, and complexity.
Although LA suffers almost as much as NY with massive over-consulting and excess scope for rail projects, most of the bus planning and bus lanes are done relatively efficiently.
On a positive note, LA is about to begin a pilot project of managing a frequent local bus (Line 16) on headways, rather than fixed schedules. Unfortunately, while LA had that on its first four Rapid bus lines from 2000-2009, it eliminated that during the Great Recession and the end of the court-imposed consent decree with the Bus Riders Union.
LA Metro currently has at least 31 bus lines with 10 minute or better off-peak headways:
2 Alvarado St/Sunset Blvd
4 Santa Monica Blvd
16 3rd St
18 Whittier Blvd
20 Wilshire Blvd
28 W Olympic Blvd
30 Pico Blvd
33 Venice Blvd
40 King Blvd/Hawthorne Blvd
45 Broadway
51 Avalon Blvd
53 Central Blvd
60 Pacific Blvd/Long Beach Blvd
66 W 8th St/E Olympic Blvd
70 Ave Cesar Chavez/Garvey Ave
78 Huntington Dr
105 Vernon Ave/La Cienega Blvd
108 Slauson Ave
111 Florence Ave
180 Hollywood Blvd/Colorado Blvd
207 Western Ave
210 Crenshaw Blvd
212 La Brea Ave
217 Fairfax Ave
233 Van Nuys Blvd
234 N Sepulveda Blvd
240 Ventura Blvd
251 Soto St
254 Vermont Ave
720 Wilshire Blvd Rapid
901 G Orange Line busway
0. On this map I count 8 individual routes with midday frequency 10 minutes or better (not including BRT like the orange line, not counting routes whose midday frequency is “8-12min” or some other range that goes higher than 10, and counting local/express separately). If you set the limit at 12 minutes and/or combine local/express frequencies, you get many more routes.
3. There are also time-consuming surprises with driving, like traffic and parking difficulties. At least the delay due to missing a 15-minute bus has a ceiling of 15 minutes (if the bus keeps a schedule), traffic and parking have no such ceiling.
Yes buses (and nearly all transit) are slower than driving, but there are many contributing factors to this. I think it’s more productive to use the overall time ratio, rather than one of the many causes of this ratio, when predicting ridership.
“1. The real-time bus app is jank – the buses sometimes disappear from it, which happened to me in Boston.”
If this is at all recent, it could well be the app reflecting that the system is jank. Lately, due to driver shortages, something in the neighborhood of 10% of scheduled bus trips are being dropped. Since they pull operators from more-frequent routes to cover the less-frequent routes (with the goal of not turning off a route *entirely*), the more-frequent routes are often suffering 50% dropped trips.
The schedules have been cut quarter after quarter for over a year now to try and make schedules that can be met with the number of drivers, but the number of drivers keeps dropping.
This is something I saw in 2018.
I think on the issue of consultants, the issue isn’t public preference for them; it’s for private sector over the public sector. More than anything, there’s the idea that someone in X government trusts firm Y to consult, and if firm Y produces a junk study (which is not going to be discernible by the public for many years, if ever, if the resulting course of action by that study produces bad results), it reflects badly on that someone X–the public sector actor–not on private firm Y.
Not that that’s entirely misdirected. Part of it is no doubt that, as you’ve discussed before, there’s insufficient planning capacity in-house for projects to be chosen wisely and so politicians can pick and choose as their constituents like without any rebuttal from colleagues or subordinates that a project doesn’t have public utility commensurate to its cost.
There’s also the problem, at least through most of the U.S. at this point in time, that political logic EXPECTS a bus–or any public transit–to be bad; any public expenditure to make it good is therefore considered to be a waste (“just buy a car”). I don’t say this to excuse the situation; if ever a conversation wends its way to transportation infrastructure and transit, I always try to bring up that driving is hugely subsidized in a lot of ways and yet everyone has complaints about it (price of gas, traffic, roadway condition, others’ driving, etc.). However, at this point, for a lot of Americans, trying to make transit good is like trying to squeeze blood from a stone. Not to mention that American transit agencies’ heads themselves almost never use their own systems; why would they? They all own cars because they know their systems are not good.
The same issue plagues transit as does the rest of the U.S.’ government: low trust of government begets low expectations of performance, which grants permission to govern poorly, which invites actors who are in government only for their own ends, which produces low trust of government, etc.
Firstly you don’t need to disestablish the fire department to get them to behave sensibly. You just have to threaten them with legal action.
Thats normally how you get your way with the public sector when they are being unreasonable and pretending the rules are different from what they are.
Your experience with unionized civil servants is obviously very different than mine.
Maybe it is a more powerful approach here. But this is one of the ways the rich and powerful get their way.
Its dysfunctional but it turns the public sectors allergy to risk on its head.
Those advocating for transit have often got bad transit. Sometimes by design – see the blog post – when you advocate for the things Alon wrote about you get bad transit. this includes being an ally with someone who wants the bad thing even though you yourself are not pushing for it directly.
The result is people who don’t use transit can look at all the efforts of the past and concluding transit is a bad investment and so even the good projects are throwing good money after bad.
From having talked to the sort of government officials who tell me with a straight face that “consultants have international experience,” the mistrust in government is fully earned. What I don’t think the politicals get is that the money doesn’t *have* to be spent; the federal government can cut taxes on high income earners instead, and every time it shows that it can’t do things, another voter gets the idea that tax cuts are better.
There is also the potential where many politicals do get that an incompetent government makes the allure of tax cuts more attractive. Should you be a would-be tax cutter, it’s in your best interest that the state’s money be visibly wastefully spent. A sufficiently sized leviathan-by-proxy is a wonderful target come election season, and then you can make whatever tax cuts and consultant cuts with none of the head-scratching and red-taping which accompanies trying to fire a government employee.
I’m not seeing how this answers the question of, “how do we get out of this cycle?” I’m sure you’re not trying to answer it here, and the answer seems intuitively like it should be “spend what money you do have wisely”. From there, I’d guess the argument is, “be prepared to disappoint some constituents by not giving service on route 2, so that route 1 can have good enough frequency that people on route 2 will keep pushing for funding for a good frequency route 2”. Maybe I’m wrong about that supposition, but if I’m not, I think for most Americans at that point, the answer isn’t “push for funding so we can get the good bus”; it’s “get a car”.
From there, the argument for tax cuts becomes prima facie intuitive even if it doesn’t work out in the very long run. “I own a car, but the government is taking away my gas money with its taxes”. Yes, the long run is the government can’t build or maintain roads, but then the average person is going to intuit, “government can’t do anything right; cut my taxes more”. The very long run is a government that exists solely at the beck-and-call of wealthy people who can e.g., afford private security services and private roadways.
The “tax cuts good” people do everything they can to assure government doesn’t work. It’s what happens when you elect people who think government is bad.
These aren’t constituents. Constituents aren’t clamoring for more use of consultants. Even right-wing populists use “the government should work” rhetoric: J. D. Vance used the fast counting of the ballots in IIRC Brazil to complain about why it takes so long to count the votes at American elections (and naturally neglected to mention that in Pennsylvania, the count is slow because state Republicans forbade counting the early and mail-in vote early).
While most Americans drive, most Americans also like the idea of government-provided infrastructure, and not just for cars; evidently, Biden is really interested in improving the Northeast Corridor, and “let’s make the trains work” is a common rhetorical line by politicians with wide appeal and not especially left-wing constituencies. It’s just, they then outsource planning to consultants, who know from past experience the state will abuse them with infinite demands and not really want high quality, so why bother coming up with a good plan?
So the question is, then, why do they do this? Tradition? Or because there aren’t any in-house people who can do the planning, and developing that kind of capacity isn’t quick or easy, and voters expect at least or desire quick results? I’d also point out that I said “private sector actor”, not “consultant”. Again, the issue is low trust in the public sector, not particularly high trust in the private sector. What those private sector actors decide to call themselves (engineering firms, etc.) is irrelevant; the point is it’s not the gubmint.
What is the solution there? Be honest with voters, that good infrastructure takes time, costs a lot of money (if not relatively, then absolutely; $1B USD is a lot of money for most individuals to think about), will present temporary inconveniences, and require a change in habits to actually be useful? Realism is important, but not usually a font of public support.
They do it because what else are you going to do? Fire Jamie Torres-Springer and Janno Lieber and bring in Spaniards?
@Alon Levy I’m not ultimately the one asking questions, here. The facile answer is obviously yes. If there’s no one competent internally–here meaning as broadly as the Anglosphere–go find someone externally who is. Is that not your own suggestion: benchmarking to an external world?
If no one in American government is curious, and people interfacing via advocacy or voting don’t value good transit–or good government, generally–because they don’t know what it should look like and are also, as you’ve rightly pointed out in the past, uncurious Americans, where is the solution? “….the region will just not be able to build.” Well, this is a national problem, so what do we do if no one’s looking or willing to look outside our borders/linguasphere?
The answer to the question is:
Metrication
One could think of it as merely a proxy –ie. for typical American + British insularity and isolationism and refusal to countenance standards set by others, let alone by the bloody French! And it is. There is 100% correlation of countries who so utterly mismanage public transit and those who refuse to metricise. So while all the Anglosphere doesn’t match up to most of the rest of the rich world, both Canada and Australia aren’t as bad as those two. Heck, even Australian conservatives–essentially reactionary, empire-loving hangovers from the 40s/50s–gave us the metric transition in the mid-60s, something that looks miraculous in the context of today’s politics. Almost happened in the UK in the 70s when metric was legislated (and though many don’t realise it, even today metric remains the legal measure there) but then Thatcher undid it in the early 80s (just as it was actually happening) when she made dual metric labelling etc discretionary rather than mandatory; as a consequence they ended up seemingly forever trapped in this halfway house.
So while an excellent proxy I reckon it is also substantially causative. This concerns the ruling elites, not the engineering and scientific class who long ago accepted working in metric. Can you imagine what the people who actually do stuff (those engineers etc) thought of the Thatcherite U-turn?
So, my proposition which flows from those facts are that if you wants things to change in transit, or whatever, don’t beat your head against those specific headwinds. Instead argue for metrication. Then voila, yes almost magically, other logical things will flow from it.
I had some faint hopes that Obama might do it–and there was some kind of case to spend the money after the GFC because even economists claim it would bring an economic efficiency dividend; but no, he gave trillions to bankers instead. I can’t see much more hope for Keir Starmer, who after all is precisely one of those elites (a lawyer) who can’t see what the fuss is about and who has been cowed into attempting “the best of Brexit” rather than rejoining, and of course going metric would be perceived by Leavers as total capitulation to Europhiles. I mean, why should the victors of Waterloo have to accept this perfidious system of the losers? When the UK turns truly metric then I believe it will be ready to rejoin the EU (who should make it conditional), and possibly start building better transit too. The reverse is never going to happen, ie. better transit while being in metric denial.
“The sort of frequencies that permit passengers to transfer between buses without timing the connection are single-digit headways, and the digit should probably not be a 9 or even an 8. Nova Xarxa successfully streamlined Barcelona’s bus network as a frequent grid, with buses coming every 3-8 minutes depending on the route. Vancouver and Toronto’s frequent grids are both in the 5-8 minute range.”
Left unanswered is whether the street grid can handle these increased bus frequencies, even if other motor vehicles were excluded. I have reasonable doubt that several intersections in NYC cannot handle the existing bus traffic.
I’ve written a program that itemizes the time of day every scheduled NYCT, MTA Bus, NICE (Nassau County), and Bee Line (Westchester County) for every intersection in NYC. The results for a 17 July 2023, a typical weekday reveals the following results.
1. there are 1437 instances where the number of scheduled buses crossing an intersection within an hour are equal or exceed 100 bus trip crossings per hour.
2. of these 614 equal or exceed 125 scheduled bus crossings per hour
3. 239 equal or exceed 150 scheduled bus crossings per hour
4. 69 equal or exceed 175 scheduled bus crossings per hour
5. 20 equal or exceed 200 scheduled bus crossings per hour.
Whether or not intersections can handle the number of bus crossings, currently or suggested by increased frequency, depends on intersection geometry, traffic signals, and pedestrian traffic. There’s at least one NYC instance where more than 200 buses per hour are scheduled for an intersection two two-way streets, each of which has only 1 traffic lane in each direction. The curb lanes are reserved for bus stops. Moreover, it’s the third busiest pedestrian intersection in NYC.
Increased bus frequency proposals that exceed the intersection crossing constraint should be a non-starter, whether proposed in-house or by outside consultants. The obvious solution is a grade separated right of way.
If two bus routes with a bus every 6 minutes cross, then there are 40 bus trip crossings per hour. A lot of places have more because of issues with rush hour, or some atypically strong routes (Utica, Nostrand, etc.), or some heavy interlining (M1-4, M101-103); the point of a frequent bus grid is to beef up frequency on other routes, not to try to squeeze more frequency out of routes with a nominal bus every 2 minutes at rush hour, at which point the limiting factor is bunching and the only solution is to build a subwawy.
I agree that a subway or some form of “grade separated ROW” is the only solution. The problem is to figure out where the problem exists.
A pdf of the decreasing number of hourly bus crossings by intersection can be dowlnloaded from https://public-transit-time-bucket.s3.amazonaws.com/share/20230712_city_hourly.pdf
As you can see, Nostrand and Utica Aves in Brooklyn are way down on the list. Nostrand peaks at only 91 crossings per hour (Flatbush & Nostrand @ 8am) and ranks 1901. Utica is slightly better: max of 120 crossings per hour (Utica & Ave H @ 8am) and ranks 767.
As for Manhattan, Madison & 5th Aves @ 57th St are the top intersections but rush hour only phenomena.
The real problem is the subway terminals in Queens. This should not be surprising because only 50.5% of Queens residents live within 1/2 mile of a subway entrance. The figures for the Bronx, Manhattan and Brooklyn are: 78.2%; 96.4%; and 84.3%, respectively.
Where are they looking to expand rail transit? Manhattan with the SAS phase 2, the Bronx with Metro North Penn Sta Access and the Brooklyn-Queens IBX, which avoids the subway terminals.
Yeah, I was considering also mentioning the issue of short sections with many lines coming together, like the streets around Flushing and Jamaica.
One of the things bus redesigns have done is move buses away from congested places in city centers; Nova Xarxa increased bus speeds partly via stop consolidation and bus priority lanes and partly by moving buses from a radial system to a grid. In New York the equivalent feature would be integrating the LIRR with subway fares and running more frequency all day, so that the buses that currently all go to Jamaica-179th, Jamaica Center, and Flushing can instead go to an LIRR stop.
The Flushing LIRR station is a block away from the subway.
And the LIRR stations behind it are farther out. So if the LIRR were integrated into the system, buses could run straight north-south through Bayside, connecting Port Washington Branch and Main Line stations, rather than bending to just hit Flushing and Jamaica.
You didn’t say you wanted the bus to go to Bayside. People can get off the bus before it gets to Flushing. And on the bus on their return trip.
The bus doesn’t pass through Bayside LIRR – the only connection point with the rail network is Flushing-Main Street (or Jamaica-179th, or Jamaica Center). The way the network is currently set up, there’s no real place to go to on those buses except Flushing or Jamaica, but if the LIRR were integrated into city transit, then instead of going diagonally, they’d go straight north-south.
There are two political problems.
Nassau and Suffolk counties do not want to share the LIRR with NYC’s unwashed masses. Here are two recent examples. First, the LIRR decided to make more Pt. Wash trains stop at Bayside as part of using the 63rd St tunnel. Nassau County objected and the additional stops were scrapped. The program for people entering a Queens station could by a budget ticket to Flatbush Ave with a free transfer to the subway system will be scrapped, as part of the fare increase.
That’s not to imply that the LIRR would not serve Queens residents that lack walk-to-subway access. Here’s how many more people would gain walk-to-rail access, with the proposed LIRR City Pass:
Click to access new_routes_lirr_queens.pdf
These results, problems adding more trains to NYC, and Nassau/Suffolk County reluctance to share the LIRR suggests a different approach. Surprisingly, much of the new walk to rail access is on the Pt. Wash branch east of Flushing.
My idea is to operate shuttles between Bayside and Willets Pt every 5 minutes. These stations were chosen because they already have terminal reverse tracks that would not interfere with through service. Willets Pt has multiple platforms. There is a yard east of the Bayside station that could be used to relay shuttle trains without interfering with through service. Express tracks could be built at the Murray Hill Station for through train bypassing slower shuttles.
The fare would be the subway fare for the shuttles. The SBS pay teminals would be installed at the stations. Shuttle riders would get a ‘LIRR’ receipt at these terminals with a Metrocard swipe. The tickets would be collected by LIRR conductors, just like on other trains. The FRA would continue to reign supreme.
The riders would then walk to the Willets Pt IRT station for a free transfer to the #7 line. Extra trains would turn around at Willets Pt to accommodate the increased passenger load. The load at capacity limited Main St would be reduced.
It would be nice if something similar could be worked out for Jamaica trains. The Belmont Park station could be used to turn around shuttle trains on the Main Line. Finding reversals for the other branches would require new construction. Ditto for turning trains at/near Jamaica.
As you noted in another post, buses would be re-routed to terminate at the shuttle stops and avoid the trek into Flushing or Jamaica.
The transfer to subway should be sufficient to prevent Nassau/Suffolk residents from driving into Queens to take advantage of the reduced fare.
The question of whether the NIMBYs of Long Island are a veto point was answered when Helena Williams’ position at the LIRR was realigned with her skills and talents. Instead of CityTicket and other subsidies for the upper segment, or some shuttle system to remind everyone that if you don’t want a forced transfer you must pay extra, smash the segments and charge subway fares on trains in New York; Long Islanders are welcome to make New York State a better place by moving to Florida.
This was trivial to find, that the Q13 and the Q31 serve the Bayside LIRR station. If I want to take the Q13 from Bay Terrace to the Bayside LIRR station I don’t care where it goes to south of the tracks. If I want to go from Bay Terrace to all the retail and services on Northern Blvd. I don’t want a bus that goes to Jamaica. If I do get the urge to go to Jamaica the Q31 goes there.
People east of the East River lead rich and rewarding lives without going into Manhattan. It’s too bad the buses go where they want to go, not where you imagine they should go.
Bus lanes, signal priority, back door boarding, network simplification, etc. can all significantly improve bunching without the expense of building a subway.
If delays, bunching, etc. are caused by too many buses trying to cross an intersection within a given time period, then bus lanes, signal priority, and back door loading won’t reduce the number of bus crossings within the intersection. These solutions are designed to speed buses between intersections.
Network simplification won’t help, if the overused intersection(s) are the primary destination.
Our great-great-great grandfathers realized this, when they started building elevated lines in Manhattan in the 1870’s and in Brooklyn in the 1880’s. There are limits to what a street grid can handle. If bus traffic alone exceeds this limit, then getting rid of buses by building subways is the only solution.
The dwell time saving produced by pre-payment disappears, when the bus is loaded with standees. Pre-payment only speeds up entry from the door to beyond the fare box. If there are multiple passengers entering and there are standees, then dwell time is limited by the time it takes the passenger to move from the fare box to finding standing room.
One measure of how common this is can be determined from the NTD. The number of unlinked passenger trips (UPT) per vehicle-revenue-mile (VRM) is higher for NYC buses than almost every other major city and by a lot. There’s a much higher correlation between average vehicle speed and UPT/VRM than between the average distance between stops (as determined by the published GTFS data for the transit agency).
The data is fairly clear. NYC buses are slower than most because more passengers are getting on and off per distance traveled. The solution is to increase VRM by decreasing headways. However, many NYC intersections already have more bus crossings than they can handle. Decreasing headways would make the problem worse. The solution is to follow our great-great-great grandfathers’ example by building grand separated transit.
The door. The door.
You just don’t get it, do you?
Get out of NYC, get away from GTFS a bit, stop dreaming of subway lines that aren’t coming for decades, if ever, get real world.
If the typical trip is short – which in NYC buses it often is (or so I’m told), then the solution is a tram that can handle more people than a bus.
Grade separation is a good thing for most transit problems. However for short trips (that are not transfers to grade separated systems) they are a negative as you need to get from the street to where the bus/train is. For short trips is needs to be easy to get on and off, and faster than walking. Grade separation has the downside of taking longer to get from street level to the transit.
Ideally everyone wants both at grade and grade separated transit systems available at all times as they fill different niches. However only a few places are dense enough to support both. If you are not that dense then grade separated is probably overall a better match for what people want to do on transit. However for the few very dense places in the world both are worth having.
Don’t take the above as a statement that NYC shouldn’t also expand their subway in those areas. They should and it would take some pressure off the bus.
San Francisco is not remotely an example of doing things remotely correctly, but to note is that the busiest grade separated rapid transit route in the city (BART) lies parallel to or directly under the most heavily used surface transit routes in the city (the Muni 14/14R/49 bus lines, which bus lines in fact carry more passengers than any of Muni’s janky “light” rail subway-surface lines.)
Fare non-integration and high BART fares and costs aside, the basic and unchangeable reality of BART inter-station spacing and the (in)accessability of BART stations (including long mezzanine-level detours due to stations with limited surface access based around limited fare gate banks) along with underwhelming BART frequency, mean that the bus service works better for a very large number of people, despite bunching, despite jam-packed conditions, despite crap average speeds, despite all theory that buses are bad and subways solve all.
Yes, there are higher-ridership bus routes and higher buses per lane elsewhere, but this is an OK real world example: transit should go where people go, and most people in most cities aren’t going underground for anything, and going underground to get somewhere isn’t a net win for many people in many cities.
@Stephen Bauman
Look at this from the other direction. If, at the extreme, a bus line is completely free, or more realistically, uses roving inspectors (who go “wherever the bus takes them”, they check tickets/passes while the vehicle is in motion) and most passengers use monthly passes, there is absolutely no need for passengers to stop at any fare-checking device. They can board at any door (or, if you use a directional-flow system, board at the 1st and 3rd doors of a single bus, 1st and 4th on an articulated one, while alighting passengers use the 2nd, or 2nd and 3rd doors) and go straight to whatever sitting/standing room they find. For the minority of passengers without a pass, ticket-puncher machines are small and cheap enough boxes that more than one can be installed per vehicle, logically not right next to the door. For smartphone ticket systems, QR codes are virtually free and can be pasted to a large number of places.
@Basil Marte
None of the items you mentioned would alter the number of buses crossing an intersection within a given time period. They will not alter the time it takes each of these buses to clear clear and permit a follower to enter the intersection. That’s a constraint not addressed by fare collection methods, bus lanes, traffic signal priority, etc. There are not many places on this planet that run up against this constraint. However, NYC has its share.
The presence of standees significantly increases the dwell time per entering/leaving passenger regardless of fare collection method. The addition of more doors per linear foot has its limitation. It would reduce the distance to the nearest entrance/exit but increase the number of standees due to fewer seats.
– Ad absurdum, if bus traffic is so high on a particular street (or crossing), create a double-stack bus lane at the crossing, by kicking out cars altogether from the street/crossing in question if necessary. (Vans and such can still use it during off hours, if nothing else, then overnight.)
– Articulated (or double-articulated) buses help somewhat, there can be proportionately more bus and less space-between-buses, thus more floorspace moving through the crossing, even if the number of vehicles decreases. This straightforwardly extends to light rail.
– “The presence of standees significantly increases the dwell time per entering/leaving passenger […] more doors would reduce the distance to the nearest entrance/exit but increase the number of standees due to fewer seats.” Wait, what? If the bus is packed with standees “like a can of sardines”, thus at each stop, some standees need to “spill” from the bus, i.e. in order to let alighting passengers leave, they have to step off the bus for a few seconds before getting back on, yes that does slow down the process. But at that point of capacity limitation, you mostly care about how many passengers physically fit into the vehicle you have, and since more standees can fit into a unit of floorspace than seats, you want fewer seats and more standing room, even ignoring doors. Whereas if we aren’t at this passenger density — there are standees, but not so many that they inhibit each other from moving — then in my experience, there is no or negligible slowdown. (Many passengers, even if they were sitting, move to the door while the bus approaches their stop.)
@Basil Marte2
One reason I posted a link to NYC’s hourly bus crossing data, was the hope that people would examine the data before proposing irrelevant solutions.
I live 1/2 mile from the Main St & Roosevelt Ave intersection (-73.83014, 40.75957). There are busier intersections in Jamaica but that’s 5 miles away. I have observed the Flushing intersection for many years.
“create a double-stack bus lane at the crossing, by kicking out cars altogether from the street/crossing in question if necessary”.
The two-way north-south street is Main St. It is 50 feet wide (4 lanes). A busway is already installed on it (no vehicles except local deliveries). There are bus stops at the curb lanes on both sides of the intersection. This means that only a single bus can enter the intersection from each direction. No turns are permitted at the intersection.
The two-way east-west street is Roosevelt Ave. It is 40 feet wide on the west side and 35 feet wide on the east side. There are bus stops at the curb lanes on both sides of the intersection. This means that only a single bus can enter the intersection from each direction. Only buses are permitted to make turns at the intersection. A left turning bus will block a bus from the opposite direction.
It’s also the third busiest pedestrian intersection in NYC, per NYCDOT.
Pedestrians, not vehicles, are one obstacle. They prevent a bus from turning off Roosevelt Avenue for 35 of the 55 second long green aspect of the traffic signal.
“Articulated (or double-articulated) buses help somewhat, there can be proportionately more bus and less space-between-buses, thus more floorspace moving through the crossing, even if the number of vehicles decreases”.
The amount of intersection congestion a vehicle creates is proportional its navigation time it through the intersection. Longer buses take a longer time within the intersection. The blocks are fairly short ~ 160 ft. This means the blocks can hold only 2 60-ft articulated buses vs. 4 40-ft buses per traffic light cycle. Thus, going to articulated buses would actually reduce capacity.
“But at that point of capacity limitation, you mostly care about how many passengers physically fit into the vehicle you have, and since more standees can fit into a unit of floorspace than seats, you want fewer seats and more standing room, even ignoring doors”.
The substitution of standing room for seats is a mistake of today’s transit planners. Standees will impede entrance/egress, unless there are clear paths between every location on the vehicle and the doors. The need for clear paths results in far fewer standees than crush loads.
According to the TCRP’s Report 165, Transit Capacity and Quality of Service Manual, 3’d Edition, chapter 5, exhibit 5-20, a seated passenger takes up 3.8 sq ft. According to exhibit 5-17 of the same volume, with “Reasonably easy circulation within vehicle” requires 4.3 to 5.3 sq ft per passenger. Degrading to: “Moving to and from doorways requires some effort, which may increase dwell time” requires 3.2 to 4.2 sq ft per passenger. Going to crush loads (2.2 to 3.1 sq ft per person) results in “Moving to and from doorways extremely difficult, increasing dwell time”
Dude, we get it! You’ve done the (hyper-focussed, micro-local) work! Good job being numerate about one thing … which is one more thing than nearly anybody else manages.
But yeah. Somehow there are things outside New York City. Things you quite evidently can’t even conceive. Things that are vastly more relevant to vastly more people around the planet (and around your country) than your (cool! I’m impressed!) GTFS scraping of a tiny number of road intersections in New York City. There are other ways to run surface transit than what you see out your window or in your local GTFS feed. Trust me! NYC is an astonishingly interesting place, but not because of the efficiency or quality of its transit service. In that respect, it’s just “a place”, one from which nobody outside North America would think they have anything at all the learn, and honestly once from which North Americans interested in making anything work ought be drawing cautionary tales, in this century.
PS “The substitution of standing room for seats is a mistake of today’s transit planners” — total looney tunes. Out of touch with mass transit everywhere on the planet, including your very own very very very very personal New York City. That’s Just Not How Peak Demand Works, anywhere, at any time. Get a grip. MInd the gap.
Extending my intersection crossings program to the entire world is on my to-do list. We will then be in a better position to judge how atypical NYC’s experience is and by how much.
“your (cool! I’m impressed!) GTFS scraping of a tiny number of road intersections in New York City”.
My GTFS and map scraping includes every intersection within NYC’s city limits. I don’t list intersections that don’t have any scheduled bus passing it. I haven’t been cherry picking.
PS “The substitution of standing room for seats is a mistake of today’s transit planners” — total looney tunes. Out of touch with mass transit everywhere on the planet, including your very own very very very very personal New York City. That’s Just Not How Peak Demand Works, anywhere, at any time. Get a grip.
I’m critical of most MTA decisions regarding their transit operations and planning. I believe the organization is shows the effects of 50+ years of the Peter Principle at work.
Peak passenger flow is the product of (passengers/vehicle) x (vehicles/hour). The second term is the service level. It’s the reciprocal of headway. One headway component is dwell time at stations. If dwell time increases faster than passengers/vehicle, then the strategy of adding more passengers/vehicle is counter productive for the goal of increasing the passengers/hour count.
The BRT-BMT type A/B rolling stock is the only subway car I know that considered dwell time for its interior design. The cars were 67 ft long, had seats for 75 passengers and 75 standees. Their combination of longitudinal and cross seats “compartmentalized” the car so that every passenger was within a short distance to a wide door. Moreover, the position of standee poles and straps insured clear paths were maintained to/from every location and the closest door in the car.
These cars were replaced in the 1960’s with 60-footers, with longitudinal seating to increase capacity. The 60-footers have a service load capacity of 145 passengers seating & standing. The number of seated passengers has been reduced from 56 for the R-27’s to 30 for the new, improved and vitamin enriched R-211’s.
The BMT stations had to be lengthened from 536 to 600 ft, to accommodate longer trains. Despite greater capacity (8×150=1200 A/B’s vs 10×145=1450 R-27+), the new rolling stock wasn’t able to maintain the A/B’s schedules. The problem was increased dwell time, despite significant decreases in peak hour demand.
The same was true for buses. NYC buses used to have 2×2 cross seating, except over the wheel well. They were 30 ft long and sat around 40 passengers. The seats had thick cushions for comfort. Today’s low floor buses seat 34 passengers and are 40 ft long (60 ft for the articulated buses). They feature 2×1 cross seating (for more standees) and a very narrow aisle to get around the wheel well that’s near the front. The predictable increased dwell time has resulted in the call for pre-payment and/or all door loading.
There are numerous academic studies regarding the relation between standees and dwell time published by the TCRP. Most indicate that a lot of standees and short dwell times cannot co-exist.
There’s also the question of how public transportation passengers should be treated. They do deserve a seat. Standing at crush loads isn’t a way to lure them to public transportation.
@Stephen Bauman, I kinda find it difficult to believe that pretty much every rapid transit provider on the planet has moved away from carriages with lots of seats to ones with lots of standing without doing modelling to show it increases capacity.
The Victoria Line in London for example is constrained by dwells, so if they thought more seats would help I kinda think they’d have done it. I am pretty sure they have done modelling in London to work out how to do passenger flows through the bigger stations and the Elizabeth line stations in particular.
I suspect when the train is busy that people move towards the doors before their stop – so you don’t lose too much time for stations even if the train is crowded – and perhaps the doors are bigger to make getting on and off easier. Plus you need to allow a certain minimum amount of time for the disabled and elderly to get off the train at each stop.
With buses however you probably have a point as people are more reluctant to get up before the bus has stopped. Probably it is a particuar issue in New York because it has struggled much more than other rich cities to build new metro lines since the early 1950s.
Turns out that you might not know quite a lot! It’s a big world out there. Let’s have adventures!
Seriously, you need to get out from under your tiny little rock. Or just stop pretending to anybody else that the view of the underneath your rock is interesting or relevant, cosy and endlessly fascinating as you might find it.
PS TCRP (everything in the US related to transportion planning) is laughable Special Olympics, produced by morons for morons, “studying” moronic concepts, producing moronic outcomes. Nobody’s interested.
If you are having trouble squeezing sufficiently many buses through an intersection, the task of luring passengers to transit has been accomplished with a resounding success. Sure, only some lines, only some parts of those lines, and only at some times of the day, will see crush loads, thus interior design has to find
appropriate compromises.
“The amount of intersection congestion a vehicle creates is proportional its navigation time it through the intersection. Longer buses take a longer time within the intersection.”
Yes, and their passenger capacity increases more than their intersection-occupancy increases, hence increased passenger capacity. Reductio ad absurdum: imagine 400 foot long eighteenfold-articulated “buses”, with the same acceleration and braking performance as the 40-foot long single ones. Yes, they do take multiple times as long to cross, but nowhere nearly ten times as long.
“The blocks are fairly short ~ 160 ft.”
You can write “the Commissioners were not gods, they could not foresee the needs of the future two centuries from their time, thus they made a decision that, while reasonable for their time, for our purposes today counts as a mistake” on a piece of paper and it will not burst into flames. Block off that end of the cross-street for vehicular traffic.
Thank you for the TCRP report. Exhibit 5-20: a standee without baggage takes 2.2-2.6 ft², seated 3.8-5.9 ft². Furthermore, in the text on the same page they state that transverse seating takes 5.4 ft² on average (longitudinal seats take 4.3). Area for speedy movement comes on top of this in both cases, and is presumably identical.
I found this in the “quality of service” powerpoint on their site: “Transit-supportive area defined as an area capable of supporting hourly weekday transit service:
At least 3 households per gross acre or 4 jobs per gross acre
Assumes 33% farebox recovery”
Er, these are some very American choices. As a European, I’d describe hourly service to 3 families/acre as “the intercity bus also makes a stop at this village”. (Then the next village is something like 5 km (3 miles) away, until then only fields and small forest patches.) I wish I could say newbuild exurban development didn’t exist, unfortunately it does, but there is zero expectation that it should receive any kind of transit service.
The specific intersections Stephen is mentioning are neighborhood centers in Queens at the edge of the subway system, where a lot of buses from different directions converge. These are pretty awkward buses in some ways – demand is very peaky (this far out, people drive unless they’re going to Manhattan), and ridership is high but never top-10. That’s why I talk about improving the commuter rail system for urban usage – the LIRR lines go way to the east, but the buses don’t really serve them because the LIRR has premium fares and peak-only timetables, so bus riders go to the subway instead.
The single digit time rule applies to rapid transit too right? Chicago is currently running its L lines every 8-15 minutes in response to COVID ridership declines.
BART and Miami Metrorail are at 30 minute headways off peak.
Single digit headway between all stations on the line within the CSA or MSA. Trips within a CSA/MSA should be spontaneous, if you feel like going someplace just go. If the boss needs you to work late you don’t think about your trip home. You never have a ticket for a specific train/seat (of if there is assigned seating then the assignments are made not more than 2 minutes before the train arrives at the station – I don’t know how you do this in the real world) Within a CSA/MSA there is economic integration, people are making regular trips between them and the transit system must support that.
Even on longer trips between CSA/MSA, if you can’t support 20 minute headways then you don’t have enough passenger demand to support a good ROI, and even this headway is marginal (you have to have good cost control and a single track line with carefully planned passing areas to pull it off). There are plenty of long distance routes that should support single digit headways over longer trips (the NEC for example) that we should invest in. (the above assumes high speed rail, which is what we should be thinking about for trips between CSA/MSA – low speed rail on existing infrastructure makes people drive or fly)
It doesn’t help that Unions and management both tend to take the other is evil approach. They cannot work together because both sides assume the other is acting in bad faith, and so they have to act in bad faith. (see the prisoner’s dilemma and the variations thereof). I see this most strongly with my friends in the union, they are constantly yelling about how evil management is, but management also does anti-union. The result is cooperation isn’t possible.
One subtle way this hurts is most union contracts specify is someone does leave the union for a management role they have to start at the bottom – years of service in the union cannot count even though those years of service mean they know what is going on and don’t need as much training. However management as to promote from the outside unless you were in the union for less than a couple years, or already have enough years to have a full union pension you lose more than you gain by switching to management. The first doesn’t have enough experience with the union side to long term really understand how things work from that standpoint and so they cannot make useful changes. The second retires completely just as they figure out how management really works as get to the point where they could make useful changes (if they even switch tracks, since they already have a pension many who could do well don’t bother trying)
It’s not prisoner’s dilemma when management tells me things that are demonstrably untrue about wages in New York vs. in Stockholm, it’s just international ignorance eby people who think that just because their wages would be lower in Sweden, so would those of useful people.
The fight between management and the Union is often prisoner’s dilemma. There are lots of other problems as well in the transit world.
Good managers will work in the private sector where relations between employees and management is less hostile and the pay is better.
Plus to be fair to the managers if the relationship with the staff is very hostile how do you work out which aspects of things working better in Sweden are applicable in New York City?
I mean for example the start of the full overnight service on the 1 train (I.e. when the frequency drops below a train every 15 minutes) is 2:12am at the terminus and the first train in the morning to cross that threshold is at 4:42am – if you shut the metro overnight between those times that only gives you 2h30 for maintenance which isn’t a lot if you need 45 minutes of prep and 45 minutes of cleanup time.
In contrast in London with the central line at the terminus at Epping (say) there is 3h55 between the first and last trains which arrive at 1:15 and leave at 5:10 respectively. This gives you 85 minutes longer for actual maintenance work.
The right solution to that is track design. Double track everything, and put in switches between the tracks before each platform. If you do this right (very tricky!) over any section of track covering 4 stations (technically passing areas, you don’t have to have a station so long as trains can switch tracks and stop for the other to pass, a station is a good place to do this) you can close for maintenance every section of track/switch/platform once every 4 days, while still running service on the open parts of the track. You have to plan this up front though as where the stations go is partially dictated by where your night schedules needs a station. You can do a train every half hour both directions if you do this right, but you have to plan the whole line around those schedules. You also need to build the whole line around safety separation for the workers who are touching the track while the next track is active.
If you get it right (which only a handful of lines in the world do) you get an 7 hour maintenance window every night. While it is annoying for the few people riding at night to have a slightly different schedule and platform to wait on, they still get acceptable service.
@Henry, the gap at the terminus of the 1 train where there is a train less than every 10 minutes on the 1 train is 1:16-5:07. Basically the same as when the tube is shut completely in London.
“But in Washington on Metro, and everywhere on commuter rail, there’s resistance to fare integration; New York makes incremental changes to reduce the commuter rail fare premium, but until fares are equalized and transfers made free, this is just a subsidy to the rich segment of the market, rather than a breaking down of the segmentation.”
Thankfully, WMATA (Washington Metro) finally made transfers from bus to rail (and vice versa) free in the 2021 budget. https://www.wmata.com/initiatives/changes-2021.cfm Of course, you still have to pay the fare difference if the total rail fare is more than the flat-rate bus fare (the downside to a zoned rail system), but that’s more a tax on rich suburban long-distance commuters than it is a subsidy for the rich segment of the market (who are far less likely to take busses at all).
You can have a zoned system with fare integration. You can even have distance-based fares with integration, as in Singapore. The issue is that even within the District, Metro costs more than the bus, and once this segmentation is in place, people get used to taking Metro or to taking buses and oppose changes.
Quite frankly I am not really sure how the poor are able to block changes to bus services. They typically don’t vote and don’t have powerful connections.
But honestly a discount for the poor for using the metro would probably be a good idea anyway which would solve the problem so 🤷🏼♂️.
Through radical activism! Los Angeles has the Bus Riders’ Union, an accelerationist group that believes that through making the United States harder to govern they can forge alliances with third-world Marxism. This way, the BRU convinced everyone that it’s racist to build light rail when the demographics of Los Angeles rail users are still poorer and less white than those of drivers, just less poor and whiter than those of bus riders.
In Washington, it got bundled into civil rights activism, rather than Maoism. The issue is that DC has an enormous black-white income gap (as does New York) – essentially, the town-gown dynamics there are such that poor whites don’t really live there; middle-class black Washingtonians don’t trust the city or public services and suburbanize to Prince George’s County (“PG County”). So the segmentation of buses and trains is seen in racial mode choice, and then the civil rights groups complain that making people switch from taking a bus all the way to Downtown Washington to transferring to a faster and more frequent Metro service at Anacostia is racist.
There are some discussions on the American left about calling for means-tested fares, as you propose. But they’re generally less popular than breaking whatever fare integration exists and making the bus free. This is for a couple of reasons:
1. Means testing has negative connotation in the United States; this even leads Americans to falsely believe that universal programs are longer-lasting than means-tested ones, which they aren’t (Medicare and Social Security are not means-tested, but Medicaid is).
2. Free transit plays into the “government services should be free” ideology of the left. One of very few things the broad US left takes from other countries is that British and Canadian free-at-the-point-of-service health care is a good example; they can’t deliver that in the United States, but they can try to make other things free.
3. The American way of doing policy is to start with a pilot program, and making a single bus route free works better at pilot scale (where it can cannibalize parallel routes) than at systemwide scale.
Metro isn’t zonal. It’s distance based, and based in such a way that the current train fare scheme is impossible to fully harmonize with the bus schedule. After all how are you going to charge bus riders the extra 25 cents or whatever it costs me to ride from Farragut North to Metro Center at Rush hour. There are some first order obvious fixes (make the district one fare) but of course the boundary being so artificial probably makes that messy with Maryland in a lot of places. I think there are at least four metro stations (Friendship heights, Takoma, Southern Ave, Capitol Heights) that still effectively on the border between the district and Maryland.
“ Buses naturally tend to bunch. The only lasting solution is active control, i.e. better dispatching”
What about using bus only lanes? Wouldn’t that reduce bunching as well since buses wont be stuck in traffic?
Might help–though the buses are all going to be caught in the same traffic.
I expect the bigger issue is that the time a bus spends at each stop is proportional to how many people get on and off there, and people rarely wait to take a later bus. So the lead bus comes and picks up a huge crowd, getting more and more behind schedule in doing so; and it makes all the stops, because the more people there are, the more likely it is that somebody needs every stop. Since it’s late, the subsequent stops can accumulate more passengers before it shows up, exacerbating the overcrowding and large-dwell-time issue. All the while it gets later and later, meaning less of a lead over the following bus.
Meanwhile the following bus hits each stop and sees fewer people than expected (since more passengers took the delayed earlier bus). So it runs faster than expected, has a better chance to encounter stops where no one is boarding or needs to stop (which it can thus skip), and in general can move faster than expected.
The endpoint of this process is either two or more buses back-to-back, or an awkward leapfrogging that winds up being even more annoying to negotiate (and might not even be possible depending on the bus lane structure).
It helps a bit, in the sense of reducing the initial delays, which the mechanism in the post I linked to magnifies over time until buses bunch. But even with dedicated lanes, buses end up bunching without active control – and usually bunching is a problem of busy routes, precisely the ones where dedicated lanes are likely to be designated.
This requires overruling local regulators
How autocratic of you. Sounds great as long as they are your type of autocrats. They could be the kind you don’t like.
That’s not how local regulators work. The local authority having jurisdiction can adopt any code they want. And do.
all of those supposedly intractable voices were silenced.
A few Long Islanders protested loudly, stamped their feet and threatened to hold their breath until they turned blue. The LIRR is a subsidiary of the MTA not the other way around. Amtrak owns Penn Station not the MTA. Amtrak decides who uses it. Grade separating the Main Line and adding a third track was going to cause the fabric of the universe to rend too, they have completed that. And I’m sure they sit around grumbling about how it’s not 1955 anymore etc.
disestablishing the entire suburb
There ya go being autocratic again. Dis-incorporating municipalities is very very difficult most places.
Since when is part of democracy “a suburb can refuse to certify state infrastructure that’s in compliance with state regulations”? Hell, in most of Europe (France being the main exception), the state forcibly merged localities just for efficiency in the last few decades – the idea that they can withhold permits until they’re paid off is ridiculous.
They can’t. The inspector, assuming the inspector has jurisdiction, can’t refuse to pass it on a whim. Paying them off is illegal, for both parties in the transaction.
The inspectors have refused to certify things on a whim repeatedly, in suburban Seattle and in Dallas.
then someone sues, they get kicked around in court and the approval is given.
What actually happens is that the state folds and gives the fire department or local development corporation what it wants; the federal and state officials we’ve spoken to treat these local actors as a veto point, even if it’s informal, rather than as obstacles who can be coerced judicially or legislatively.
Still think if the feds called their bluff at least occasionally by suing that it wouldn’t happen.
Some inspectors do need to be reined in. Their job is to ensure that it was built correctly. Either it was built to the code form, or it the design was stamped by a professional engineer. Either way, it isn’t – or shouldn’t be – in their power to ask for changes except where it doesn’t meet the code/design. If they don’t like the code, then they can work with the relevant agencies to change it (this is extremely complex). If they don’t like the design otherwise well too bad, a professional engineer said it was good so bring it up with the certification authority of the professional engineer.
Inspectors are good. However I’ve seen them demand changes that as an engineer I know have no structural purpose.
However, American transit agencies think it’s unrealistic to provide a grid of routes running so frequently.
Most places, the only people who want to use them can’t drive for some reason. Running empty buses every ten minutes isn’t going to attract anyone.
but until fares are equalized and transfers made free, this is just a subsidy to the rich segment of the market, rather than a breaking down of the segmentation.
You are imagining things. I’m not going to take the E train to Forest Hills, hike to the LIRR station, take the LIRR to Penn Station and change back onto the E train. Or take the bus to Fordham Road to get to Grand Central to change for the 4 5 or 6 when I can take the 2 or 5 without getting on the bus. Or take the 7 to Woodside, change to the LIRR and then the 1 to get to Rockefeller Center. Or..
Most Americans don’t want to have public transit, other than roads. The symbolic importance of getting your own car after taking buses and trains in the US is enormous. It forms a defining social boundary between the middle class and working classes. The cultural imperative of maintaining that boundary is very strong in the US. American transit is meant to fail. It’s all on purpose.
Better to embrace the fact that buses are a lifeline social service in most American cities, but still an essential one. Frequencies don’t matter as much, and it’s better to focus on destinations favored by Black and low-income riders. Since transportation is the fourth biggest expense for US households, there’s a strong case for making the bus free as well.
Making the bus free without making the train free introduces the WMATA problem of having two parallel networks into every American city, is the problem.
Re destinations favored by low-income riders, there really aren’t such things. The most that’s visible in travel patterns is that low-income riders are less likely to be going to the CBD – that’s why in Washington, SF, and a few other US metro areas (but not New York), transit commuters outearn solo drivers, since transit is mainly an option for the CBD. So the solution there is to improve service to non-CBD destinations, which means having a better transfer system, less CBD-centric buses, etc.
Who said the bus would be free?
Buses should be free so that very low income people can afford to ride.
Employed low income people should be making enough money to afford a bus pass.
Transportation is a huge impact on low-income household budgets: 26.9% of household budget is spent on transportation for those in the lowest income quintile vs 10.4% in the highest quintile. This is a burden that can be alleviated by making transit free.
Moreover, folks who are disabled, chemically dependent or experiencing homelessness may not have the ability to earn regular employment.
Double the low income household’s income it would be 13.5%. Making the EBT card a transit solves the problem.
@Ramona the only reason the lowest quintile spends 27% of their income of transportation is because the public transport quality in America is so bad it is basically non-existent.
There’s no way that anywhere in Europe aside from perhaps tiny villages of under 1000 people that you have to have a car to the same extent – and even there someone could give you a lift to the nearest large village for you to get the bus.
The solution isn’t to make the buses a moving homeless shelter – its to make the service good enough that middle aged middle class people will use it when they want to go out for a beer.
@Ramona
Minimum wage in NYC is $15/hr which is about $2400/month. A monthly MTA pass is $127. With the poverty discount, it’s $64. So for a minimum wage person who uses transit, transportation is 5% of their income, or 3% with the discount. Not 27%. Making transit free would only have a tiny impact on their finances. (The 27% figure overwhelmingly comes from poor people who drive.)
Not every poor person can get enough hours for a 40 hour work week, or they may not be employed at all.
@Ramona a car costs several thousand dollars a year to run even if it just sits on your driveway.
You’d be doing extremely well to run a car for the $1500 a year the New York transit pass costs even without the poverty discount.
Most US cities either have no rail, or a bare bones network so integration is not much of an issue. Your point about reducing emphasis on CBD commutes means that it’s much easier to provide a coverage-based route network across the city at half-hourly or hourly frequencies. Direct routes and having routes on all major roads and residential streets are particularly advantageous for disabled passengers.
That would make no difference to most Americans. They do everything they can to NOT take buses or trains BECAUSE they are markers of poverty in the US. This is about culture and class, not costs.
I think they at least partly don’t take trains and buses because they suck.
Even in New York how many suburban lines have more than an hourly train off peak?
You know what? I’m post middle aged, post middle class, and … fuck you.
You clearly have absolutely no idea — NO IDEA —, not the slightest idea, how desperately bad transportation is for less-than-middle-class people in the US.
I’m not poor, not remotely, but I’m not enough of a tone-deaf asshole to believe that transit that would serve me on my ways to bars in the evening — and I do this pathetically often enough, without driving, and while being INCANDESCENT with rage about how bad it is to try to do so — is what the multitudinous, downtrodden, actively oppressed underclasses of the US need in order to get to and from shit employment sites via shit transit service in order to “earn” the salaries they pay their landlords.
Ooooh let’s level up bus service to the level I feel comfortable with after a boozy night with the customer success sales followup team after nailing the commission targets for a successful sales quarter! Go go go middled aged middle class bus service (four nights a year, maximum)
In my experience services that are exclusively targeted at the poor usually land up being terrible.
Services that are used by the middle and upper middle class actually land up usually working pretty well.
So actually running a bus service that works for everybody means that you lose the mentally ill on the bus who the poor hate just as much – and it forces the bus company to actually run a decent service – because after all if the upper middle class are using it there’s a risk of a formal complaint if the bus doesn’t turn up.
Interestingly, transit targeted at the upper middle class tends to be terrible as well. That form of transit gets people to their 9-5 jobs downtown, but can’t handle people want to work any other shift, make weekend trips, going home early, or even getting around near their house (ie a grocery run). Jobs for the poor and middle class tend to not be downtown, so only those who make enough that the company can afford the prestige of a downtown office can ride transit.
Of course the two different types of systems run very different patterns. At least the transit targeted at the upper middle class is useful to the target for some purposes, but it is still bad overall. If traffic was not a problem the target would drive instead of dealing with the transit they get. Upper middle class can afford nice cars and parking costs. Some are cheap enough to use transit to avoid parking fees, but they can afford monthly parking downtown).
@Henry, thats a fair point. But a service targeted at everyone would actually hopefully be pretty good.
Because once you are running a reasonable peak service running a reasonable off peak service shouldn’t cost much more money.
The grocery store has free parking.
Your experience as a “middle and upper class” blog commenter may not be precisely aligned with the needs of “the poor”; no more than the execrable, paltry, irrelevant, patronizing, “services targeted at the poor” come anywhere close to serving the real world needs (NEEDS!!!) of poor people in the real world. We all want urban public transportation that isn’t catastrophically inutile, but some of us manage to manage even when it is. Good for us! Well done, us, good job being born where and when we were!
It would be super great for you (and for me, an upper-class, affluent. over-educated, hyper-priviledged, leisure-class blog commenter myself, and for our partners, and our friends, and all the People Like Us) to have sub-10-minute headway metro service from our favoured bars to our homes, but … ask yourself … how’s that non-“exclusive” service working out for the person washing the cocktail glasses and mopping the bar’s toilet floors two or more hours after we’ve gone home? How do they get home, and where are their homes?
“Services that are exclusively targeted at the poor” by People Like Us do indeed “land up being terrible”. Strange, that. Hard to imagine how that happens.
If it weren’t for legal restrictions on buildable density (a.k.a. zoning), their homes could be in much more convenient locations.
Incidentally, American housing regulations are an excellent example of patronizing going wrong. By banning approximately every housing option that is below a middle-class standard “to protect the poor”, the cheapest remaining legal option became proportionately quite expensive. (E.g. because they lack a separate, private kitchen, the FHA ruled that microapartments don’t count as a residential land use, thus they can’t be built in areas zoned for residential use.) People below middle class either have to buy a larger quantity of housing than they would otherwise have, or if they cannot afford that, they become some form of homeless. The reformers, however benevolent their intentions may have been, overlooked the fact that the price tag was a crucial criterion for a proposed solution to be acceptable.
Tell that to working-class and middle-class Americans. I’m describing their views, not my own.
The solution is to accept this fact and tailor our remaining transit service to disabled and extremely low income/Black people.
That will still leave some large contingent of poor people overburdened by either housing or transportation costs, because building cities to allow the possibility of universal car ownership–i.e., not having car ownership be a meaningful marker of class–means building cities that cannot be well-served by transit. Car-centric transportation systems also lead to sprawl, which discourages density, which means that people who are wealthier and like to live car-free will out-compete for housing poorer people who feel the same. Alternately, people who don’t care about having a car or not will force poorer people into living in less desirable locations, further from work/amenities, closer to major arterial roads with their local pollution–that’s the suburbanization of poverty we hear about.
Car-centric urban planning also leads to job sprawl, which can reduce working class power because there ends up creating a more fractured jobs market, so employers don’t need to compete so hard for workers. You cannot have a truly car-dependent society and an egalitarian one. Other factors are obviously at play, as well, but that’s kind of the point: insofar as transportation is an input to social good (however defined), using a means of transport which is materially more efficient means leaving more private and public resources for other inputs to social good.
All of this still leaves aside that it’s still not at all certain that everyone on Earth could have equal-ish access to the socioeconomy via car dependency without destroying the planet’s environment.
> All of this still leaves aside that it’s still not at all certain that everyone on Earth could have equal-ish access to the socioeconomy via car dependency without destroying the planet’s environment.
Given right-now-happening six-sigma antarctic ice-cap lows, while a huge number of people on Earth still don’t have access to cars, I think we can say that’s a definitive ‘no’ at this point.
Electric cars will be cheaper than internal combustion cars very soon.
@adirondacker12800 Hence why I said “car dependency”, not gas-powered cars exclusively. It’s not clear that we can sustain 8 (or even 4 or 2) billion EVs and the materials to make them and the electricity to power them, and there are just better ways of using that electricity than ensuring everyone has equal access to history’s most prolific gadgetbahn (“However did people get around before cars?” They walked, and then rode bicycles, and then trains.)
The automobile genie is out of the bottle and you aren’t going to stuff it back in.
@adirondacker12800 Very true, but there’s something more than a little grotesque in expecting to travel door-to-door everywhere in an air-conditioned living room when others are dying of heat stroke and sludging through mines to provide the materials which enable that expectation to seem sane and normal. I’m hardly a sunshine-and-roses kind of person, but….Ya know, first time tragedy, second time farce…I think maybe it just loops back into tragedy after that.
The really sad part of it is that so many people don’t even appreciate what amazing machines cars are, because they need to get Rifle and Breighlynn to basketball in their 5000lb la-z-boy cube with its 3 touchscreens and 17 cupholders. Modern miracles, and most people couldn’t even tell you where their car was made.
That’s what has already been done in much of the US. In Cincinnati Ohio, where I live, buses are for only poor people, not even working class people but the absolutely destitute. No one but poor blacks take buses. Black men, in particular, will go to almost any length to not take a bus. It is seen as a sign of failure.
Maybe this is euro-centric too. But theres no way swing voters definitely are in favour of public transport being completely free.
Alon have you seen Ezra Klein’s new project on this?
You’ve complained about his not leaning into foreign examples more.
I do like “Everything bagel Liberalism”, its much more pointed and polite than my personal “ponies and b***jobs X*”
X= socialism, free-market, libertarian, localism, sustainable etc
In Britain fixing rail construction costs directly helps you with levelling up.
And a rolling electrification programme would benefit the vast majority of MPs in parliament – including a lot of swing districts.
This gives the political parties a lot of incentive to do this kind of stuff.
If Kahn had fixed the missed connections on the tube in north west London that would probably have swung Uxbridge the other way in the recent by-election. And electrifying the Chiltern mainline and enabling the “Chiltern metro” service would be cheap and would help both in those London seats as well as Wycombe and Banbury constituencies which are both on Labours target list.
In reply to @borners talking about Canada and fixing costs there. Gone to the wrong place ☹️.
Both parties have reasons to pursue reform and not to. Labour has no formal anti-state capacity factions, but it has huge intellectual blind spots thanks to its history as a failed revolutionary Imperial-nationalist party whose day job is being England’s catch-all-left party by default. Its instincts and intellectual culture are towards eschatological completion through “British” moral superiority.
And the Tories in their current form just want burn everything to the ground because One Nation Toryism, Thatcherism and Brexitism have all failed to create Great Britain on their terms.
And improved transport will not solve the fundamental problem that Outer Britain lacks any distinguishing economic niches outside leveraging housing and labour costs within the British market. Transportation let alone housing is much more a blockage on London’s economy than Manchester’s because the latter’s is real estate bubble built on the Southern housing crisis and taxpayer. If good transportation solved regional imbalances then Osaka would not be in relative decline to Tokyo and Nagoya. And you can say the same for why L.A outperforms Chicago or Philly despite having worse transit infrastructure.
If you want levelling up you have destroy Outer British society as its currently constructed i.e. a collection of feuding xenophobic boroughs convinced they are special because of their great-grandparents. I’ll take levelling up seriously when they sign up to match the Thames Valley’s immigration numbers, build as many houses and generate an intellectual and policy culture that isn’t a carbon copy of London’s with a different vowel pronunciation and “we good, south bad” scribbled all over it.
Its all very well to demand “rolling electrification” but the money has to come from somewhere. The lost decades of easy money in the 1950’s and 1990’s are gone. Khan wasn’t elected to pay for electrification with housing, he was elected on a platform of “affordable housing”. I.e. don’t change the status quo. Which is understandable given the 2014 local government reforms basically punish locality that dares to have population growth (value capture can pay for some infrastructure but not all).
PS Anyone who thinks I’m being histrionic. The most sustained industrial policy to move activity north is investment in military shipbuilding and aerospace….and they have to fly engineers from London to the factories because Roll Royce finds it cheaper to pay for private jets than to pay people to live in Lancashire. And people wonder why the British military industrial complex has lost market share.
Hey, I’m doing my best to reduce the British military-industrial complex’s market share.
(Context: the UK wants to sell Eurofighters to Saudi Arabia; this requires German permission, and while SPD and FDP think sawbones are based, Annalena Baerbock doesn’t want to okay the deal.)
Which is stupid*, no Eurofighters just means KSA buys some J-17s. They have the oil money at a time where the West is conflict with Russia and Iran and the energy transition isn’t mature yet. Western left needs to grow up and realise its not 1960 anymore and other regions have the power to say no and impose costs on us directly. If the Greens wanted to screw KSA then they shouldn’t have killed German nuclear power industry.
*not that I would call Eurofighter especially successful compared to F-15 variants or Rafale. Hence reliance on Gulf customers who are not especially bright customers.
And I’m stupid should have said J-16’s.
Anyone sensible who lives in a town that needs ‘levelling up’ would surely prefer to have the aminities of a nice town in the Thames Valley – even if the price was more housing construction and the immigration.
There are a very small number of deeply racist people in the south who are against all change – and I’d expect the north to be similar.
“Anyone sensible” is clearly not enough to elect politicians who support it (see Lisa Nandy MP for Wigan).
And the only distinctively northern immigration experience i.e. bringing in Pakistanis to work in textile mills that closed months after the pioneer individuals arrive is used to justify doing sod all.
Its not that Southern English people are less racist or Xenophobic once you adjust for education and ethnic composition effects there are a very few regional differences English politics (to some extent that’s the problem). The difference is that London already is a cosmopolis, so its not a choice anymore, its a reality. Which is true economically too, the Thames valley is a diversified high-value added agglomeration cluster already, it has been since the 15th century. That’s the real inequality, overcoming it requires that the regions of outer England actually prove their own rhetoric of moral superiority. Or at least do so before housing reform destroys their dreams.
Do we think that if Uxbridge had gone from safe blue to a narrow Labour win rather than a narrow Tory win, Keith would not have used this as an opportunity to remove self-ID from the manifesto?
More seriously: the issue with rail construction as a form of leveling up is that place-based resentment is against whoever is most successful. In Germany, there was a lot of East Germany-wide resentment toward the West in the 1990s and 2000s; by now, with Berlin converging with urban West Germany (though not with its really rich parts like Munich and Hamburg), the resentment is instead toward Berlin and increasingly even the centers of Leipzig and Dresden. So the UK can and should, as a matter of good economic policy, invest in the transport infrastructure in the Met Counties, but it’s not going to reduce resentment, or reduce inequality (these are two different things – Blair-Brown get no accolades for reducing Britain’s Gini index).
I think it would have changed outcomes – yes. Because the political elite is innumerate.
Alon, as I’ve said before, the Labour party is committed to solving nationalist dysphoria with conversion therapy, its natural Transphobia is a fit for the “British” left. Deadnaming is structural to “British” politics, almost any domestic policy discussed by Sunak or Starmer (including rail) is about England only but they always say “Great Britain” or “national” because if say the E-word, England might rape somebody in the bathroom (read walk out of abusive marriage-family).
Less polemically. You’re totally right about the overrated political benefits of successful “levelling up”. East Germany and the Southern US are the two most successful cases of it in the developed world and for some reason pluralities of voters in both region vote Nazi. Because radical economic change means radical social change, to the point of destroying the previous society. That’s the lesson the Outer Britain taught the world with the Industrial Revolution and they’ve never bothered to learn it themselves.
Labour is being more cautious on trans issues IMO because that’s where the voters are unfortunately.
And in France the areas which have weaker TGV service do seem to be more likely to vote for the far-right there than elsewhere. And the far right is a big problem in France – much more so than Germany IMO.
Perhaps Britain and the US have also become more far right because the Conservatives and Republicans have moved in that direction – but a lot of it could be historic support and lack of persuasion to get their voters to change their minds on how to vote.
One thing I haven’t seen in the discussion is comfort and cleanliness. I live in Los Angeles near the red line and I can tell you my wife refuses to take it again after trying it. Why? Well it’s simply not possible to take the red line without being made to feel uncomfortable. Men staring or (in one case) touching themselves. People clearly in crisis shouting obscenities. Obviously the station smells like urine. If you can afford a car why would you take the train?
It’s frustrating because Los Angeles is starting to have a decent transit network, but if comfort and cleanliness remain poor they will not be able to grow ridership. Not all of societies problems are in metros purview but man I wish we could just take the train in peace. Even if there’s only 4 tph, if it was clean and safe I would use it regularly.
I mean thats awful. And not that weird shit doesn’t happen here too – but its rare.
It is rare in LA too. However the people who are likely to behave like that are also the most likely to have other problems such that they cannot “drive like normal people”. As such they are over represented on the transit systems. In places where transit is more often used be normal people they are a much smaller percentage of the total users and so you see it less. Also when there are more “normal people” on transit that applies pressure in its own way to prevent them from acting out.
I think it’s a given America won’t have public transport beyond the few denser cities and corridors.
The typical American suburb and ‘shed in car park’ retail format don’t lend themselves to public transport. In this sort of environment you are just not going to tempt people out of their cars in any meaningful volumes. Fundamentally it’s not the cost (or affordability) of public transport that shifts mode share – it’s the ability to park and the cost of running a car. In a country with plentiful parking and no fuel tax, buses don’t stand a chance. Where buses do ok in places like Toronto and Vancouver it’s in places (just) approaching European densities and European levels of motoring difficulties.
LA urban area has the population of Rhine-Ruhr but will only ever have a transit network the size of Cologne’s. Miami urban area is continuous suburbia stretching the length of Brighton – Peterborough. I don’t see buses playing anything more than a tokenistic social welfare role.
I can picture shifting the dial just enough to make things happen in a European context. When it comes to American politics I genuinely don’t know where to even start.
And because of the limitless fraud and feather-bedding associated with American “public” works even in the denser corridors of the denser cities, it’s a given that America won’t have public transport there, either.
It’s just a purely criminal operation. Nothing matters aside from maximizing cost. Nothing. And there does not seem any way to change that.
No matter, soon enough much of the planet will be uninhabitable by mammals and nobody will have to worry anymore about unnecessary mezzanine levels on zero-ridership subway lines to nowhere.
There are fuel taxes in the U.S. Low ones but taxes.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuel_taxes_in_the_United_States
We have to come up with a different method. Electricity doesn’t have fuel taxes on it.
If we didn’t zone everything more than 30 years old historical so you can change it. If we didn’t zone land use and maximum density. If we didn’t force parking at all buildings but let the market decide. (probably a few others)
Then, if there was great transit in the dense part of the city, people who own parking lots in the dense part of the city would redevelop them into a dense building as there is more money in renting a building than collecting parking costs. People who live on the edge of dense area (this is the most likely part to be zoned historical despite not being historical) next to the great transit would also see they can tear down their not very dense building (house) and building something bigger.
The above is a 20+ year progress. Parking lot owners are charging for parking now because there is demand. If they all closed their lot for a building nobody would rent in their building as there isn’t enough parking for the people who want to use it. However great transit means you can attract people to transit, and in turn this means parking isn’t in demand so can redevelop your half empty lot (or more likely redevelop a full lot in the densest part – pushing those parking there now to the half empty lots a but farther out). It will be even longer (if ever) before parking ramps get redeveloped.
If you demand overnight results you won’t get them in a free country. China can force things through faster, but there are a number of downsides to that control making it not the ideal to strive for even if they sometimes get things right. However there are a number of inter connected things that can change: if we get changed over time things will respond for the better.
You are asking reactionary American politics to think long-term and stick to a long-term plan …
In my mind the solution to the LA sprawl is to significantly densify existing centres and significantly depopulate and rewild the suburbs. You need political consensus today for a giant 20+year project, and ask the county and state governments to take considerable financial risk – this sort of thing will have to be done through legislation, taxation and compensations, and the whole thing will have to survive half a dozen elections. My head hurts just thinking about it all.
To be fair in California or New York that should be possible.
Jane Jacobs has entered the chat.
Do the suburbs need to be depopulated? Maybe it’s better for people to be living in San Bernardino than in Houston TX?
No, for several reasons.
1) Population growth will “refill” the suburbs “after” people move closer to cities.
2) Living costs are, basically, housing+transportation. For the imagery conjured by “depopulated”, of buildings abandoned en masse, suburban housing cost would have to be forced below zero by either suburban transportation costs going through the roof (not just politically unlikely, but the cost is “did you assume civilization collapsed?”-level, privately organized for-profit bus routes would keep cost below that), or by urban housing becoming so cheap to build (physically/economically unlikely), or by a combination of both. That’s not going to happen, either. What may happen is that suburban housing becomes dirt cheap (a bit below the cost of building more of it), so they are rarely built new, and when someone does move out (or dies, etc.) sometimes they sell their house+plot to a neighbor, who pulls down the house and turns the space into a large yard. Thus over decades, gradually the suburbs de-densify into exurbs. People who don’t just say “oh I like nature and a large yard” out of Stockholm syndrome but actually do like these things and are willing to accommodate semi-rural density inconveniences (no piped water, no sewer, no streetlights) to get them will stay.
3) The whole point is that the suburbs are a sideshow and we basically don’t care what happens to them. Urban density goes up (which benefits people), and whatever change this causes in the suburbs, is acceptable. Any effort spent on bringing about any particular outcome in the suburbs is wasted.
My plan would depopulate the suburbs, but it works more subtly and so people don’t feel attacked when you propose it. As such you won’t be voted out and all the changes rolled back in the next election. (some will be rolled back – that is politics – but not all, and what remains is still useful long term)
Duplexes in the suburbs would help a lot IMO.
I just don’t think there’s enough people to fill new town centre apartments and the existing suburbs. You could incentivise the market to build town centre flats (‘simply’ remove zoning restrictions) and let the suburbs depopulate naturally – afterall America has experienced ‘natural’ depopulation before, just that in previous times it was central / inner areas. The danger is I’m not sure the market itself will deliver that – i.e. I’m not sure there’s an overwhelming desire to move to walkable areas. I’d love to be proved wrong.
Part of me hopes that Americans are slowly–slowly–beginning to realize what an enormous, imposed cost car ownership is for 99% of people. Sure, there are people like me who like cars in and of themselves, but even just judging by the kinds of cars that are popular here–fundamentally utilitarian vehicles–it seems pretty clear that most people have a car because they need one. I think there are too few Americans who’ve experienced modern mass transit–high quality buses, subway lines built post-~1970–to realize that it’s not an inherently unpleasant experience, and that if you don’t structure your urban fabric around universal car ownership, it doesn’t need to be one of meaningfully-limited mobility.
Re: walkable neighborhoods being desirable, there is the undeniable fact that outside of rust belt cities or younger cities that’ve never had strong historic cores, the elevated price of housing in downtowns suggests that there is at least some large contingent of people who would like the option to live car free who currently can’t afford to. Most of my days, that is also me.
Most middle class Americans want a detached house with a yard in a neighborhood with a minimal Black population.
@Ramona even if that is true, it can be satisfied with much higher population densities and much higher quality transit.
The USA is going to get another 100 million people in the next few decades. They could fit in the existing Urban areas.
I am very happy that you wrote this post because many of these things needed to be said with regards to the public sector’s mindset with regards to public transit. I have always said that the best transit system would have both private and public options available. A lot of it has to do with the mindset of the operator. The commuter express and local bus systems are two different types of service and you can’t run them the same way.
Likewise, free bus service not operated by an airport or a resort is generally very bad. Poor people (Black is not synonymous with poor BTW) don’t have a lot of money, but they still have an interest in something called VALUE. Most of the unfilled jobs in most cities are on the second or third shift and this drive to cut back bus services decreases the value of those systems.