Public Transportation and Gig Workers
An argument about public transportation fares on Bluesky two weeks ago led to the issue of gig workers, and how public transportation can serve their needs. Those are, for the purposes of this post, workers who do service jobs on demand, without fixed hours or a fixed place of work; these include delivery and cleaning workers. App-hailed drivers fall into this category too, but own cars and are by definition driving. When using public transit – and such workers rarely get paid enough to afford a car – they face long, unreliable travel times, usually by bus; their work travel is completely different from that of workers with consistent places of work, which requires special attention that I have not, so far, seen from transit agencies, even ones that do aim at service-sector shift workers.
The primary issue is one of work centralization. Public transit is the most successful when destinations are centralized; it scales up very efficiently because of the importance of frequency, whereas cars are the opposite, scaling up poorly and scaling down well because of the problems with traffic congestion. I went over this previously talking about Los Angeles, and then other American cities plus Paris. High concentration of jobs, more so than residential density (which Los Angeles has in droves), predicts transit usage, at metro area scale.
Job concentration is also fairly classed. In New York, as of 2015, the share of $40,000+/year workers who worked in the Manhattan core was 57%; for under-$40,000/year workers, it was 37%. It is not an enormous difference, but it makes enough of a difference that it makes it more convenient for the middle class to take transit, since it gets to where they want to go. In metro New York, the average income of transit commuters is the same as that of solo drivers; in secondary American transit cities like Chicago, transit commuters actually make more, since transit is so specialized to city center commutes.
Worse, those 37% of under-$40,000/year workers who work in the Manhattan core are ones with regular low-paying jobs in city center, rather than ones doing gig work. The difference is that gig workers work where the middle class lives, rather than where the middle class works (for example, food service workers at office buildings) or where it consumes (for example, mall retail workers). They still generally take transit or bike where that’s available (for example, in Berlin), because they don’t earn enough to afford cars, but their commutes are the ones that public transit is the worst at. They can’t even control where they work and move accordingly, because they by definition do gigs. In theory, it’s possible for apps to match workers to jobs within the right region or along the right line; in practice, the situation today is that the apps can send a worker from Bytom to Gliwice today and a worker from Gliwice to Bytom tomorrow, based on vagaries of regional supply and demand, and the Polish immigrant who complained to me about this with the names of those two specific cities wishes there were a way to match it better, but at least currently, there isn’t.
The upshot is that gig worker travel is, more or less, a subcase of isotropic, everywhere-to-everywhere systems, with no distinguished nodes. This has all of the following implications:
- Travel by rail alone is infeasible – last-mile bus connections are unavoidable, as are uncommon transfers, with three- and at times four-legged trips.
- The bus network has to have the usual features of a modernized, redesigned network, with high all-day frequency and regular transfers – suburb-to-city-center buses alone don’t cut it when the work is rarely in city center, and a focus on rush hour service is useless for workers who mostly travel outside peak hours. This also includes reforms that improve buses in general, regardless of the route taken: proof of payment, bus lanes, stop consolidation, bus shelter, signal priority at intersections.
- For the most part, the buses that take gig workers to work are the same that could take residents of those neighborhoods to work, in the opposite direction. However, in areas with weaker transit than Berlin or New York, much of the middle class drives, making buses within usually lower-density middle-class areas infeasible. In contrast, those buses are still likely to be used by gig workers doing service work in the homes of those drivers.
The last point, in particular, means that one of the more brutal features of bus redesigns – cutting coverage service in order to focus on the more useful routes – can be counterproductive. This is, again, not relevant to large enough cities that their middle classes mostly don’t live in coverage route territory (even Queens doesn’t need this tradeoff, let alone Brooklyn). But in New Haven, for example, Sandy Johnston long pointed out that some of the bus routes just don’t really work, no matter what, because the areas they serve are too low-density, so the only way forward is to prune them.
This more brutal treatment can still be understandable at times. If the route is being straightened rather than eliminated, as we discussed for Sioux City years later, then it provides all workers with faster service – the meanders if anything are to big job centers that are a few hundred meters off the arterial, and gig workers are less likely to be using those meanders than regular service workers. Moreover, if the part being pruned is genuinely low-density, then it may well also have low density of destinations for gig workers. However, if the part being pruned has moderate density, and is just considered low density because the residents are rich enough they never take the bus, then it’s likely to be useful for gig workers, and should when possible be retained, likely with no extra peak service, only base service.
Evidently, routes like that are sometimes understood to have this class of rider, though perhaps not in this language. This is most visible in suburban NIMBYism against buses: a number of middle-class American suburbs oppose the introduction of bus service that may be useful for regular riders, for fear that poor people might use it to get to their areas; in Massachusetts, those suburbs are fine with buses making one stop in the periphery of their town, triggering a paratransit mandate under the state’s interpretation of the Americans with Disabilities Act (in most states it’s within 0.75 miles, but in Massachusetts it’s town-wide), but oppose any further penetration by regular transit.
To be clear, most of the things that would disproportionately benefit gig workers also benefit the network writ large: faster buses with off-board fare collection and (in denser urban areas) bus lanes would make a great difference, and so would shifting service away from the peak. But the network design principles at granular enough a level to discuss pruning marginal routes really do differ, and it’s important to get this right and, at the very least, avoid empowering aggrieved rich people who hire maids and then do local activism to make it harder for their maids to get to their houses.
To be clear on another point, none of these reforms would make traveling to clean a randomly-selected apartment in a residential neighborhood pleasant. But they could, through smoother bus travel time and transfers, replace a 1.5-hour commute with a 1-1.25-hour one, which would make a significant, if not life-altering, improvement in the comfort levels as well as productivity (and thus pay) of gig workers. It mirrors many other egalitarian social interventions, in producing a moderate level of income and quality of life compression, rather than a change in the rank ordering by income.
Pedestrian Observations 
My observation is, here in Hong Kong, gig workers contribute transit ridership during off-peak hours highly, and they do favor the off-peak transit service as long as it remains frequent. However, in mainland China where transit degrades significantly off-peak, gig workers are pursing micromobility as their mobility solution. That’s privately-owned e-mopeds, as seen on the streets.
Rail+bike? Either the OV-fiets model or the Copenhagen model of providing plenty of bike space on the commuter trains.
Yeah, in Berlin the deliveries are by bike, at least within the Ring.
MARTA used to have 22 undocumented bus routes for maids and butlers in the northeast Atlanta You are probably too young to remember Big Don and LOOT Rail on the old misc.transport.urban-transit Usenet group (and to be fair, I am happy most of that has been memory holed myself), but there is a reference here from 28 years ago: https://groups.google.com/g/misc.transport.urban-transit/c/u2M0cD3cH8Q/m/uzobFWNF9AYJ
“For some time, MARTA had “secret” bus routes in the 700 series. These routes were designed to connect maids, home health care workers, and nannies from MARTA rail stations to their work sites. These routes were not officially noted in any system map except for a small footprint instructing people who needed transit service in that area to contact Customer Information. No schedules were publicly distributed, and no information was published on the web site. In 1999, the routes were officially “declassified” and information was published. As part of system-wide service cuts, the 700 series routes were eliminated in 2002.”
(Rescued from spam.)
In Japan because passes are point-to-point and buses are meh at best, transit itself is not optimal for “gig-workers” in the transit cities. This is compensated however by the lack of residential segregation, basic dense-low-rise urban form, and ubiquitous low level commercialisation. If you can cycle/walk everywhere and afford a cheapo leo-palace apartment even in Setagaya or Nagareyama you actually have a lot of catchment area for gig-economy jobs and wider precariat/non-permenent jobs. This mix draws on a deeper history of working class affordability strategies (see Bansal’s latest) based on intergrating residential/commerical/light-industrial activities in bike/foot distances (Adachi, Katsushika in Tokyo, Nagata-ku in Kobe, Sakai in Osaka and Atsuta-ku in Nagoya).
The whole fare discussion reeks of bullshit-progressives wanting a cheap magic solution to poverty that doesn’t involve “build more dense housing in transit areas so that low-income incomes can afford a better low-income lifestyle”. Instead we get magic asterisk solution on the scale of “make something dependent on the kindness of state-urban taxpayer” to “overthrow capitalism and nationalise land”. Profits are theft, but zoning segregation based property value appreciation is good socialist praxis until the raptu- I mean revolution.
LeoPalace is even the expensive side of SROs tbh. They are a big brand, and are good for people with little time to do research, and will do corporate/institutional contracts, but with a bit of time to do research locally, it’s not hard to find much better and cheaper SROs (or even entire apartments at same price or not much more) to live in longer term.
The relatively high availability of cheap housing even in more expensive neighborhoods also mitigates the impact of night time transit shutdowns. A lot of closing shift workers can and do walk/bike home, with closing shift workers in more central neighborhoods often paid a bit more per hour to offset somewhat higher housing costs and effectively in lieu of a commute allowance from further out.
The Japanese pricing system for transit is very good for gig workers though. The relatively small discounts of unlimited ride passes means that people who pay as they go because of a less predictable work schedule aren’t penalized vs people who buy the unlimited pass. This is especially true for Japanese gig workers who can and often do live closer to work, and are thus relatively infrequent transit users despite also not driving.
Yeah and expensing for small businesses and such means you can probably write some of transit costs as business expenses*.
I choose Leopalace because I used it (as you seem to have guessed) and because their website is really friendly to non-Japanese speakers so I use it to bludgeon people who think the best way to make working class is to wait until the magic left-wing government comes in with 5% of GDP in social housing investment.
*Japan’s massive hidden tax-subsidies for small businesses are a real problem.
(Different post for different topic)
Alon, where do proof-of-payment enforcers (is that the right word?) fit on the employment spectrum? I mean the major reason why the British Rail Industry refuses to learn what POP is let along discuss adopting it, is “good Union jobs”* will be replaced by something that’s not that. How do their work schedules operate for DB etc?
*British Right has different reasons, miserly desire to punish-enforce the social order, hatred of European example, Nihilism backed by AI-Techno-magic.
Seems to me that while transit is important for these workers, bike infrastructure is even better for precisely the scaling reasons you mentioned for cars. Bikes and low speed electric mopeds/scooters scale down even better than do cars; seldom does a cleaning service have more equipment than, say, a Chinese tricycle could carry. Speaking of Chinese tricycles, it’s quite impressive how much of the Amazon-like gig delivery economy in China depends on these workhorses.
Distance is measured in units of TIME! Off peak a car on the highways is fast and so if you have a car you can take on jobs a fair distance across town, which gives you a lot more options than if you are limited to customers you can bike too. Even if you can carry everything on your bike the slow speeds mean you would be better off in a car just because it can go so much farther. In fact it is quite possible that for whatever gig you are in that you cannot find enough customers within a reasonable bike range to live and so you need a car to get around just to get enough customers to make your gig work.
Of course some gigs are different from others. If you clean bathrooms for offices – you can get by on a bike as there are enough customers near you – you just need to get enough of them signed up. If you service the fire alarms for those offices – that is done much less often and so you need to cover a lot more of the city to get enough customers (I don’t know what tools/parts this needs, maybe they need a van for the special tools, but for discussion lets assume they are one of those gigs that don’t need a van full of parts).
Transit could get those people out of cars but only if it is reasonably fast.
In my experience, in an urban environment acoustic bike range is about half car range per unit time; off peak highways can be good, but it really depends on the city (e.g. the Boulevard Periphique around Paris is godawful no matter the hour). eBikes and pedelecs will be somewhere in the middle for urban trips. I do agree transit has a place in helping these people, but I think housing affordability and bike infra are _more_ important.
Re: needing a van, I think many or most plumbing/electrical, cleaning, locksmith, and similar tasks could easily be done with the footprint of a Chinese tricycle. Major construction or renovation not so much.
You do understand that those people make money when they are engaging in their trade. Not when they are traveling. If they get there faster they can move onto the next job quicker and some days manage to service an extra customer or two and get paid more.
I bet parking alone would be enough of a time and money saver to make downsizing worthwhile for many tradespeople. Besides, if speed is important those tricycles are capable of going about 75+kph which is plenty in a city. Are they a good solution for the loose sprawl of far flung Long Island? No, but that’s not my argument.
Most places aren’t Manhattan. The few in Manhattan know the tricycles exist because the food delivery couriers use them. They get commercial license plates and park in the commercial only spots or they double park and pay the tickets when they get them. And charge their rich customers in Manhattan more because they have to pay for parking tickets.
I’ve lived in low, medium, and high density areas and had a small or medium car in all 3 density categories. It is quite common to have trouble with parking even in medium density areas, unless you have dedicated parking (driveway or oversized parking lot at both ends). In my visits to other countries, this also holds when I’m driving/being driven.
And the trades people aren’t worried about getting a parking ticket because they are off making money instead of looking for free parking.
I dunno where you live that a parking ticket is cheap enough that it doesn’t wipe out an hour of work or more. Either that or your tradespeople are getting paid insane hourly rates. Regardless, parking tickets in your locality should be more expensive so that other road users can actually use the road.
As a general rule if you have an obvious trade vehicles and set it up so you look like your are working you can just park anywhere. Sidewalks, fire lanes, in front of the main door, block a lane, no parking zones – it is all good and allowed so long as it looks like you are a trades person working in the area.
Using the road implies eventually finding a place to park. Unless you think people take pleasure rides through downtown during rush hour.
Car range depends on proximity to highways. (off peak when congestion isn’t an issue). If you compare just surface streets an ebike is about 2/3rds the speed of a car. However as soon as you get on a highway the ebike is more like 1/5th the speed (1/3rd because of speeds, the rest because the highway doesn’t have forced stops/waits at traffic lights)
Businesses know the above and locate near highways when they are in the suburbs – they know that once people get on the highway they can cruise a long way in a short time and so the potential customers/employee pool is large. Houses tend to locate farther from the highway – you have the annoying trip to the highway, but you quickly learn what the best route is and then you can cruise.
Very similar to why in transit cities businesses locate downtown: it is where you can get most easially/fastest via transit. In a car oriented location the places where you can get most easially are near highways. If you are car oriented downtown is a negative – parking is too hard, and all the people going there clog the highways, by locating on the highways you spread out the parking and the multiple destinations means you better use the highways (traffic isn’t all going in one direction. Of course the problems with the above start to show up at around 500k people in the whole city, but that is a different discussion.
Bikes make things tricky – they want to act like cars (you need to park them), but they are enough slower that your total range means you can’t get to much of the city unless it is very dense. Which is why I like to think of bikes as how your get from your suburban house to the transit station.
As for jobs – my impression is plumbers are expected to have all the pipes and fittings they need with them (including obscure parts that only 1 in 1000 places need), and thus need to have that van to get around. While construction is more of use a few tools to put together materials delivered by truck, and thus a better fit for bikes – if only the di. This depends very much on what you
Having done construction in the past, I don’t think a trike will work for any of them. Sure the tools might fit (though often you are expected to have a large collection of parts on the van – until you get there you won’t know which part is needed, but you better have it with you). However as a gig job you have no idea where you will be next week. Sometimes you work just down the street from your house, sometimes you are an hours drive from your house (drive on local highways, never mind bike or transit time!) You have to take the jobs you can find or you won’t eat – the customer will use someone else and then call that someone else the next time the job is down the street from you!)
Yes, I was mostly speaking of urban areas in terms of gig work and micromobility. I don’t have a solution for sprawling suburbs, and I’m not sure there really is one other than the car, which is of course the point of those suburbs.
As for having obscure parts — I suppose, but in my experience I have never worked with a tradesperson who had all that many parts on hand, obscure or not. They usually have to go to the store. Better solution is to have plenty of local hardware suppliers IMO.
If like many US cities your transit system has been terrible for many years you will discover that people have responded by buying cars and then finding jobs in suburban office parks. If you want transit to ever make an impact on the city you need to meet people where they are. Those suburban office parks look a lot like gig workers except they are more likely to travel at peak times. Such office parks are hard for transit to serve well, but you have to do it. You can get by with every half hour service off peak, but no less. (office parks tend to be flexible schedule and so if a kid gets sick at school the parent working in the office park is called as they can leave early on short notice, while the other parent may work someplace where leaving early is hard)
Which is to say this discussion isn’t just about gig workers, it is about what is needed to transform your city to a transit city. Once people get used to using transit they will notice that downtown gets better service and tell their boss to move there next time the office moves. However you have to start with where people are.
I don’t dispute the first part of this but I do question the second; lots of US cities (Atlanta, etc) are notable for having perpetual traffic jams as a result of many people living downtown and also driving downtown. I agree that transforming your city into a transit city requires meeting people where they currently are, but the overwhelming majority of them are already currently downtown with abundant parking and bad land uses reinforcing their decision to purchase a car and drive instead of using the bus that doesn’t exist.
The entire premise of this particular article is flawed in the sense that carbon is fungible and any VMT taken off the roads is good: if the only vehicles left on the road downtown were everyone who inevitably gets trotted out as an example of who transit doesn’t work for, that’s still an objective victory compared to the current situation of everyone driving because nobody has a viable alternative. The correct answer for the legions of suburban office park employees currently driving between suburbs is to ignore them as low priority; if you take a sampling of 100 cars in traffic on a city street and discover that about 85 of them are single occupant sedans which originated from somewhere else in the city then the answer has to be figuring out how to serve those 85 people with a transit vehicle, not highlighting the plight of the other 15 vehicles who have weird edge case trips or are skilled trades people in commercial vehicles or otherwise cannot be served well by transit and concluding that “if transit doesn’t work for these people, we shouldn’t invest in it at all.”
I understand the reluctance that people have to take a position that boils down to “yes, some people are being left out here and I don’t care,” but incremental progress is still progress, and trying to solve for every conceivable use case including the ones that are frankly ridiculous (I am explicitly referring to the other threads in this comment section about giving your local carpenter a tricycle or expecting house cleaners to be wheeling carts full of cleaning supplies onto transit) leaves you with a bad service, or no service.
You’re clearly talking to me. What’s the big problem with a locksmith or cleaner using an electric or gas tricycle? A carpenter is a cherry picked bad example, and as I said obviously a major renovation that needs a carpenter (as opposed to a general handyman) is probably not going to be serviceable with a micro vehicle. On the other hand, an aircon service job or clogged pipe can almost certainly be done with a tricycle with cargo space of a few cubic m.
I have seen cleaners with supplies on transit before, but I agree that it’s probably suboptimal unless they are servicing regular clients who provide cleaning supplies.
There’s no “problem” with it, except for the fact that it is at best a cute gimmick and certainly also a sideshow distraction. Whether or not the amazing bicycling handyman could succeed in a city with a functional network of bicycle infrastructure is completely irrelevant to whether or not said infrastructure should be built. Nine out of ten trucks on the road today are driven by people who have never picked up a wrench in their lives. They are the obstacle, not the tenth truck which is actually serving a legitimate use case.
There are clear and compelling economic (and environmental) reasons to invest into infrastructure and those reasons are not invalidated by the presence of market segments who cannot utilize them, which means the important thing is to remain tightly focused on presenting the case for why a road which sees 8,000 daily vehicle trips benefits from a bus lane and frequent bus service that might replace 5,000 of those trips while accepting that yes, this means 3,000 vehicles are left on the road and that’s going to have to be fine.
To add to what @Transit Hawk said very well. There are many things in a city that cannot be done reasonably outside of a car. When I was in Europe I saw cars and trucks in the pedestrian only zones all the time – they were all doing something that you couldn’t do by walking: delivering goods to local stores, tools and construction supplies to various maintenance jobs… So all cities need to have provision for cars and trucks everywhere. There is no reason to argue that perhaps a locksmith could use a bike, as there are in total not too many of these.
It is much more important to focus on people clearly could use transit or a bike and get them out of a car. Why worry about the cleaner when there are 100 desk jobs in the same building driving to work with at most a laptop computer (ie a backpack). Until we get the low hanging fruit we don’t need to ask if perhaps cleaners should just find their cleaning supplies in the building (which is in fact very common for offices); or if locksmiths really need so much stuff with them.
@TransitHawk
Sorry, you’re right, there’s nothing to be learned from other countries. Nevermind that never once did I say that no one should ever drive a van.
@Henry
Sure, I’ll agree with you that downtown core desk jobs are more important for transit. I don’t however agree that micromobility need only focus on commutes; rather, micromobility in residential areas is important for its own sake in addition to having excellent synergies with transit commutes.
People generally can accept which every grocery store is close to their house. They might make a special trip to a special store once in a while, but milk is milk. Of course price does matter, but in general people live close enough to a few grocery stores that they can choose for the basics. Similar for clothing, restaurants, parks, church – you generally have enough choice near home to not worry about crossing town. We still need good local transit, but the specific choice of which stores you get people to do not matter to the people, just that there are enough options to have reasonable choices.
For a job you don’t get a choice like that. You go where you are hired. For gig workers this place is different every day (sometimes different parts of the day).
You most certainly do. For most jobs because the vast majority of jobs are plain ol’ regular jobs that are available close to home. Job seekers don’t even consider the jobs far away.
They aren’t making money while in transit. Why can’t you grasp that concept?
If they take a slow vehicle they make less money. Just like the people on the slow buses.
In modern non-transit cities you cannot give transit enough of a subsidy from taxes to pay for the costs. Voters will rebel and reduce your budget. You have to provide enough service that voters think you are not wasting their money and that means some of them need to see what if not useful service at least could become useful service to them in the future. Keeping voters who are not using transit but yet expected to pay for transit is hard, but critical! You can get some by saying transit is for “poor folks” and then find the very best routes (which might be profitable on fares) but you will run out of those routes long before you serve enough voters to keep your subsidy. (again, this is hard – I’m pointing out a problem but I don’t know if there is a solution)
My impression of the modern US city (Europe is different!) is the people don’t live downtown. This is slowly starting to change, but still the people living downtown are a very small minority. Of course such people are easy to serve on transit in general (density) and the difficulty of parking and traffic just makes them more interested in transit. However the bottom line is there just are not that many of them.
You actually can give transit enough of a tax subsidy to pay for its costs; you just can’t do so on a per-rider basis whether that’s through fares or a headcount based subsidy. But it is completely possible to balance the budget around property taxes in much the same way as how every profitable transit system abroad is making most of its profit off of real estate.
However, letting transit agencies become real estate developers is anathema to the US voter and something like a transit-oriented property tax is certainly going to be seen as far too radical to ever be viable. So, with the actual solutions ruled out in this way, we’re left with a need to find some way to start shifting the Overton window until the real solution becomes viable.
My belief is that the best way to do that is to focus on the key improvements that we can make quickly that will provide a great service to the downtown core, and reinforcing to suburbanites that transit is providing a measurable benefit to them even as they continue to drive, e.g., one bus with 40 people on it means 39 less vehicles on the road to get “stuck” behind.
There is also a need to keep costs down. TfL buses recovered ~78% of its costs from bus income in 2022/23 and the tube recovered ~90% of its costs in that year.
But London is different from any American city in that it lacks downtown highways, has a massive rail network, has lots of bus lanes and has expensive parking.
US taxpayers at least in Blue states (which has most the big cities) are perfectly willing to funnel oddles of dollar down public transit agencies. Its just those agencies are so incompetent.
@Borners
US taxpayers at least in Blue states (which has most the big cities) are perfectly willing to funnel oddles of dollar down public transit agencies. Its just those agencies are so incompetent.
Yes, they are incompetent, but also, as you note, most US taxpayers even in Blue states can make use of downtown highways, and don’t see the inherent socioeconomic costs of there being those highways downtown in the first place.
Point out to them that the traffic they complain about will never go away in big cities if everyone’s driving–even into/around weakly-centered metros like my hometown of Portland–and that providing strong incentives to driving everywhere via bad land use and crappy transit is both individually and collectively expensive and wasteful, and they kinda just shrug their shoulders. The status quo bias is real, for every social category.
Blue states are happy to funnel oddles of dollars to union labor. Transit agencies are just a place where you find lots of union labor so they become the middle man. Transit agencies are very competent in doing the things politicians want – it is just that name gives the impression they are for something else which they are incompetent at – but make no mistake, they are not for transit, they are for expensive things related to transit.
With all this conversation you’ve got close to a conclusion without mentioning it: when you build road capacity to attend to people that really needs it (like that suburban car, van, truck, fire truck, disabled driver car, etc), you can’t choose who uses the road or parking, and that capacity ends up being used instead by the people living close to that new capacity. In my city (with excellent internal transit, bad suburban one, any too many cars per square meter) statistics show that most of the cars in the city actually come from the city itself, even if the internal modal share of car is quite low in proportion to other modes.
In summary: you won’t improve the commute of a suburban driver by adding car capacity inside the city. You can use private motor vehicles for accessibility, but not for capacity.
I have something in my mind that in cities with ring roads or highways, the congestion charges would be more effective if they were aimed at preventing people from using the city as a shortcut, rather than preventing people from outside to enter inside. I wonder if any city has tried anything of the style, how did they do it, and what were the results?
Yes, exactly this. We are 100% in agreement on where the cars are originating and where they are going in cities with weak and invisible transit. However,
I think this is a point of self-contradiction because the majority of the vehicle mileage, being entirely self-contained within the city and therefore explicitly not running through, would remain completely unaffected by any such through traffic reduction measures. (Assuming it was designed to truly only hit through traffic, which I’m not sure is actually possible to do and which if we speculated on it any farther would also dramatically shift us away from transportation policy and into technology policy instead.)
Leaving all of that to one side, it’s a lot easier to make the case that preventing through traffic from utilizing cities as through routes is as easy as simply defunding and removing those highways, something which has been done in the past to great success and which could continue to be successful in the future. So long as there is an unbroken road, people will drive it regardless of whatever mechanisms you put into place to discourage that; shifting through traffic onto the bypass/ring highways is a matter of breaking the through line. Syracuse, NY is currently in the process of doing that with Interstate 81, tearing down the viaduct and shifting 81 through traffic to the bypass while leaving in place a boulevard along which traffic entering or departing Syracuse can continue to do so. That project is still ongoing, but it’s going to succeed, and is instructive: removing the freeway removes the through traffic, while having minimal impact on the origin/destination traffic.
In contrast, the infamous Big Dig simply expanded Interstate 93’s capacity through downtown Boston at devastating and extremely well-documented costs. Among those costs is the fact that it has actually increased the amount of north-south through traffic bypassing Interstate 95 in the region by taking the “shortcut” through Boston, and although it should be tolled anyway, there isn’t a toll price high enough to stop through traffic from simply continuing to use that tunnel.
I can see the same dynamic in my city, which has excellent and accessible internal transit.
I guess there’s been some kind of misunderstanding here… My point wasn’t about cars that start and finish outside the city. My point was about cars that start or finish inside the city, going to the other side on the city (or outside) through the main central streets, out of marginal convenience over using the ring road or transit, leaving the full pack of externalities (space, accident rate, pollution, noise, etc) precisely where there’s most people living and working.
My point then is that congestion charge, instead of being a white or black of driving in the city, it should charge in proportion of the number of km driven inside the city, or in proportion to the number of neighborhoods crossed without using the ring road. Or maybe other cities have already tried something else with the same objective?
I think in this case though we’re back to the same initial issue discussed in the rest of this thread, which is that for the most part the convenience of driving over transit is actually quite substantial in every American city with the very narrow exception of NYC if you’re able bodied and your origin/destination are both Manhattan or the inner halves of the Bronx/Brooklyn/Queens. Congestion pricing will work in Manhattan assuming it ever actually happens because that is the one place in the country where the choice to drive is marginal enough that it can be feasibly discouraged through pricing; everywhere else, it’s still a good idea to correctly price road infrastructure, but that won’t necessarily reduce VMT because there’s no real transit to push those trips onto. The places that are generally accepted to be “the second-best transit in the US,” i.e., Washington or Chicago or Boston, are full of inner-city drivers who are electing to drive on routes where transit doesn’t serve them effectively because of things like a complete failure to actually prioritize bus speed/frequency, or in Boston specifically it’s because “the T” fundamentally cannot be trusted to do anything and is falling apart before people’s eyes in real time.
Again, to be clear, we’re lighting an absolutely egregious amount of money on fire every single day because road infrastructure is universally underpriced. We have to solve that problem. (We’re actually able to make substantial headway on solving that problem with tools we already have – eliminating subsidization of vehicle purchases, appropriately charging for parking, raising gas and vehicle taxes and tying them to inflation – these are all of course political nonstarters but just because the US public doesn’t like to hear it doesn’t mean that’s not what the answer is.) We also have to invest in real transit that is actually usable in every US city. However, those are two distinct problems and solving one doesn’t necessarily solve both. In fact, discouragement pricing would be ideally deployed as a revenue source for road infrastructure specifically because the costs of road infrastructure are directly tied to its usage – as VMT approaches 0, both road expansion and the cost of road maintenance proportionally fall, and so the revenue from correctly priced VMT falling in line with it does not cause nearly as much of a problem as it would otherwise cause if it resulted in a legitimate funding shortage for transit.
We should deliver the transit that works for people, and then people will use it. We should charge the true cost of driving because we can’t afford not to. We might even advance both causes at the same time, but we absolutely cannot tie them to each other.
The point of a city is all the different things you can do close to you. If you never leave your house then you can move to rural Alaska or something. Roads might be under priced, but they enable so much activity in the city that this is a good trade off.
Yes we should get people on transit, but except for a few in Manhattan (that you mentioned) the car is strictly better than anything else. Fix the transit system so it is useful for more trips first, otherwise you will be voted out and your proposed changes lost.
Of course getting good transit is hard. Almost nobody cares, and a large number have only seen bad transit and thus cannot imagine good transit and in turn see all money to transit as wasting money. (and those who do put money to transit don’t care about transit they care about jobs and so expensive projects are good enough for them)
The existence of road infrastructure is what is enabling the activity, not the fact that it’s under priced. Rather, it being under priced simply shifts the burden of payment away from the activities being supported by the infrastructure. We are all still paying the true cost of the roadway, whether it is in subsidy or lost economic potential from parking lots and structures or even in the negative externalities of the automobile.
Correctly pricing road infrastructure will certainly cause an initial massive backlash, which is one of the reasons why it won’t happen, but the lost activity will recover over time as people adjust and the corresponding elimination of the subsidies needed to close the gap frees up that money to drive other economic activity. And we have to do that regardless of transit investment or anything else because the alternative is, both metaphorically and literally, burning the future to keep the party going in the present.
One way or another, the bill always comes due.
Electric cars are reaching purchase price parity with internal combustion cars. Once that happens, electric cars are the same price or cheaper than internal combustion, nobody except very dedicated gasoline lovers are going to want internal combustion cars.
Supposedly the U.S. installed 33 gigawatts of solar panels last year and we are on track to install more. The batteries get a little bit cheaper and it’s going to cost too much to burn stuff.
Electric cars take up the same amount of space on the road or in parking lots. They won’t solve the congestion or parking problems.
Transit improvements you haven’t mentioned that would be especially good for gig workers:
–Not having routes with many different stopping patterns: too many stopping patterns is not a good idea in general, but someone who uses the same route on a regular basis can memorize where they all go, while they can be quite confusing to someone new to riding that bus (i.e. someone who rides a different route every day). For example I know that New Jersey’s 76, 76R, 76M and 76P busses stop in Kearny while the 76X does not, but this could be quite confusing to a new rider.
–Not having bus routes with large separations between different directions: for example, in part of Newark, the northbound and southbound routes of the nj 76 bus are 390 m apart, despite the fact that the northbound route runs on a two way street. This is again something that is merely an annoyance for a regular rider of that route but can be quite distressing for a new on.e
–Flexible monthly passes: NJ Transit rail passes can only be used for rail trips between the exact pair of stations listed on the pass, making them useless for people who go to many different places.
They could change the 76 to 215, the 76R to 243, the 76M to 269 and 76X 954 and outta towners would have no clue that those buses go to the Broad Street Station.
What is confusing about the eXpress bus being designated X? Or understanding that an express service might not go everywhere?
Yes, X does suggest express, but it doesn’t tell you where the bus goes express. And having so many variants of one line isn’t a really good idea because none of the variants get much frequency– the M, X, and R only get 3 trips per direction per day! The R busses, which are a short turning variant, should just run the whole route– they can’t be saving that much money by eliminating 15 daily bus-miles– the M and P which serve office parks should either be replaced with connecting shuttles or dropped, and the X should ideally be rendered unnecessary by a modern commuter rail system with more frequent service, which would allow people traveling from Newark to Rutherford or Hackensack to take the train instead.
No it doesn’t tell you where it goes express. Adults will ferret that information out one or another and not bitch and whine that the universe doesn’t revolve around them.
Adults will figure it out if they ride for a few weeks. However there are tourists who don’t understand your city that will be confused. There are adults who are making a one time trip some place they won’t go again (job interview that fails to land a job, medical specialists…) who will be confused. There are “special needs” adults who won’t figure it out. There are adults starting the job on the first day who really want to be on time who won’t figure it out that first attempt These are groups that transit still needs to serve. Keep the routes as simple as possible so it can be figured out faster. Your city is complex so this isn’t an easy problem. However it is important.
It took me 45, 50 seconds to figure out what was going on. I don’t know what kind of neurological anomalies you imagine most people have but it’s not that difficult to figure out bus schedules. Even complicated ones. They are surprising similar all over the world.
If you make the route “simple” the people who figured out the rush hour branch, that takes them to work, won’t be able to take the bus to work anymore and will buy a car.
@adiron, you are probably top 0.1% globally for understanding public transport systems.
Billions and billions of people manage to get where they want to go, daily, worldwide. Without the help of their mommy.
Most of those billions are not riding transit. Even of those who are, most of them are taking the same trip(s) they took last week. They are not figuring out the system, they already figured it out.
Some complexity is needed – a single one way route covering every street in NYC would be simple but useless (it would take several days to complete the full trip and so most destinations are not in reasonable reach even though you just have to get on and then wait to get there). Make the system as simple as possible though. Too many routes doing almost the same thing is hard.
Yes there are billions of them. They go places they don’t usually go by looking at information frequently organized like NJTransit bus schedules without extensive training or an emotional crisis.
NJTransit doesn’t run buses for the fun of running buses or confusing yokels from the hinterlands. They run buses because there will be passengers using them. If you make the route “simple” the people you uncomplicated will go out and buy a car.
The friendly customer service agent at the information booth in Penn Station Newark can tell the yokel that just got off an Amtrak train that the bus to the Broad Street Station is “that way” while pointing to the Raymond Blvd. bus lanes. And that any bus that is a 72 or 76, 76M, 76P, 76R or 76X. The agents might suggest using the light rail. If it was me I’d look at the computer in my hand and see which one is scheduled to run next.
Arithmetic is hard. Percentages can be confusing. 57 plus 37 is 94. OnTheMap seems to grasp the concept that the percentages should add up to 100…
You’re reading it wrong. Of 40k+ workers, 57% worked in the core and 43% worked outside the core. That compares to 37% and 63%.
There are lots and lots and lots of over 40k jobs outside the core. Lots and lots and lots of them. Because most people work outside of the core. Which is why it’s the core.
Please provide counter evidence instead of vibes then. ‘lots and lots’ in no way precludes Alon’s figure.
The Census Bureau and the American Community Survey? Most people of any stripe, contortion or twisted transit fan reverie work outside of the core.
Where do you get this stuff? Productivity measures how much you produce. If you are commuting you aren’t producing anything. The clue is that you don’t get paid for being a passenger. Nor can you stuff those hours in a savings account and take 8 of them out twice a month to get another work day.
Gig workers and hourly workers can pretty straightforwardly convert commute time saved to work hours.
Hourly workers work the hours the boss wants them to work. If there isn’t any work the boss ain’t gonna pay them no matter how much they loiter around. The house keeper who does three hours of house cleaning in the morning and three hours in the afternoon, at a different house, isn’t going to be able find 27 minutes worth of it where she changes buses. Or at either end.
…….. what planet do you people live on?
37 minutes is pretty easily one or two deliveries, and as for hourly — it depends for sure, but I have an hourly coworker who is valuable enough that they could easily work an extra hour or two a day if they wanted to (and sometimes do).
How much shorter is the commute when your coworker works overtime?
That house keeper would love to spend those 27 extra minutes at home with his/her family. Those 27 minutes might even be enough time to prepare a cheaper home cooked meal instead of eating out and so can save a couple hours worth of income every day in cheaper food costs.
I don’t know why transit people are so blind to how valuable time is to poor people. Sure they don’t earn very much per hour, but they still get the same amount of hours per day as anyone else.
Cooking dinner instead of eating out doesn’t make her more productive. Productivity measures your paid labor. It took her just as long to scrub the bathroom as it would if she bought a car. It would take her just as long to scrub the bathroom if her commute was a walk across the driveway from the former guesthouse.
Henry: I don’t think anyone here is blind to that. Personally I’d describe the situation as Adirondacker nitpicking the word “productivity” while using a questionable definition — while it may be a useful simplification to declare that, as far as e.g. taxation is concerned, all homemakers are assumed to have exactly zero productivity, surely that isn’t the right approach here.
I think that for our purposes, we should consider travel time time to the worksite as a part of the setup cost of the task. (Incidentally, this would also apply not just to gig workers, but also to fixed-site workers. If two people perform identically in an 8-hour shift, but one has a 30 minute per direction commute while the other has a 60-minute one, we could say that the adjusted productivity of the latter would be only 90% as much. Everyone in this discussion would understand that this doesn’t imply that the former can convert that extra hour per workday into a 11% income increase.) Relatedly, much of the discussion on trip chaining should transfer to gig workers.
Economics is important and can’t be ignored, but it isn’t everything. Productively it easy to measure, but it isn’t the only important measure and it is wrong to treat it like that. We are talking about 27 unproductive minutes in any case – you are unlikely to find a job you can do with that time, but you can do plenty of non-economic things with that time.
If the cleaner has a family they can easially save $40/day just by cooking at home – this will lease for a brand new car in just a week, and a couple more weeks will handle insurance, tax and other costs. (A Kia Forte leases for $199/month near me – obviously a luxury car would be unaffordable). All this and you likely get to spend that time cooking with family/loved ones. There is no way slow transit can compete with that.
The definition is PAID work.
Because if you aren’t getting paid no one gives a shit how fast or slow or how much you are or aren’t doing whatever it is you are doing. Or when you do it.
We should care how fast/slow you do whatever when talking about transit. Many jobs expect you to be there on time and you will get in trouble for late. Your church service, softball game, book club … – all start at a specific time and you need to be there before it starts (some are more accepting of late than others).
When the topic is transit everybody needs to care about how long it takes to do something. Speed is very important for everybody except a few 3 year olds, retired people, and transit fanatics nobody is on transit for the experience of transit, they are on transit as a means to get someplace and the less time they spend there the better.
Your boss doesn’t care how much time you spend making dinner. Or if you make it yourself, get take out or eat-in the restaurant, whatever kind of restaurant it is. If you dawdle making dinner or doing the laundry it doesn’t change anything you do at work.
Leave my boss and national economics out of this! I care about my life. I care about my personal finances how the national GDP or whatever measure looks is irrelevant. The only question is my life better. Those productivity measures are for those “high brow” people sitting in their offices off in DC (or where ever the capital is) and mean nothing to my day to day life.
Making transit faster may not show up in any national measures – it may even show up as a negative (since people stop buying cars and so there is less car related productivity!). However it makes life better for everybody anyway!
If you leave your boss out of it whatever you are measuring it isn’t productivity. It measures PAID LABOR. If you get home faster and have the gumption to cook Grandma’s extra special recipe that can’t be measured. And doesn’t have a dollar value.
My anecdotal observation is that many gig workers in dense urban areas such as Rio de Janiero or NYC (food delivery etc.) use e-bikes to do their work. Even Amazon packages in Manhattan are delivered by cargo e-bike from parked semi-trucks. It’s not that much slower than car or rail, and usually is the cheapest option. Those that need to carry equipment (home repair etc.) seem to almost always use vehicles. “such workers rarely get paid enough to afford a car” seems to vary a lot by metro area and profession. More in-demand work gets paid better and they want to usually own vehicles for non-work purposes anyways. And the pay can be surprising high if they are successful at getting business. I’ve heard of cleaners in manhattan earning over six-figures at one point.
In south and southeast asia, most households in urban areas own 2-wheelers.
My anecdotal knowledge is that in a dense area like Barcelona, package deliverers are often given a shopping trolley full of packages to deliver in the same zone, they reach the zone by transit or company van, and they just walk the area. Workers on construction related jobs always seem to be in a hurry in their vans. It’s not strange to see people with a big toolbox with wheels riding the subway (which has excellent accessibility), so I guess a locksmith can choose the mode depending on the places he has to reach today, and transit is the better option in places where it’s hard to park. Food delivery is normally done by ebike, which would be much more used for other jobs if it weren’t for bike theft.