Category: Urban Transit
Passenger-Miles Are Overrated
One of the pushbacks I got about my post on road boondoggles is that I didn’t control for passenger-miles of travel, and the number for car subsidies is much lower when one divides it by the appropriate number of trillions. This is not the first time I hear people talk about passenger-miles as a measure of inherent worth, but it doesn’t make it any better.
Passenger-miles don’t vote. They’re not a unit of deservedness of subsidy. They’re one unit of transportation consumption. They’re like tons of staple as a unit of food production, or calories as a unit of consumption. We don’t subsidize food based on cents per calorie.
Even as a unit of consumption, there are flaws in passenger-miles as a concept, when it comes to intermodal comparisons. The reason: at equal de facto mobility, transit riders travel shorter distances than drivers. It’s very obvious when comparing total passenger-miles in transit cities and car cities (see e.g. page 36 here). Transit is slower than driving on uncongested roads, but has higher capacity than any road. In addition, transit is at its best at high frequency, which requires high intensity of uses, whereas cars are the opposite. The result is that transit cities are denser than car cities – in other words, need less passenger-miles.
What passenger-miles are more useful for is measuring intercity transportation. At intercity distance, mode choice has less influence over travel distance (though, even then, HSR and driving are shorter-range than flying, and thus passenger-miles can overstate the importance of flying over ground transportation). It is also a proxy for revenue, whereas on urban transit the fare is either flat or weakly dependent on distance. As a result, intercity railroads usually cite passenger-miles or passenger-km, and urban transit operators usually cite passengers.
But when it comes to local transportation, it doesn’t work very well. A country’s mode share expressed in passenger-miles is lower than that expressed in passengers, and this is going to make transit and especially walking look much less significant than they actually are.
Construction Costs, Third World Edition
It’s a commonplace that building things is cheap in third-world countries, with low wages, few labor and environmental controls, and lax regulations. The reality is quite different. The difference disappears once one makes sure to do a PPP adjustment; poor countries’ currencies are persistently undervalued relative to their PPP exchange rate, and often also relative to true market value, and this could lead to a distortion in cost structure.
Recall that in Continental Europe, a fully-underground subway line costs anywhere between $110 million and $250 million per km, removing one outlier at each end from my list. Spanish construction costs are generally much lower than the European average, with commuter tunnels coming in well under $100 million/km.
In Delhi, the Metro’s construction costs are very high. The next phase involves 108 km, of which 41 are underground and the rest elevated, and is scheduled to cost 30,000 crores. At current exchange rates this is $6.7 billion, but at the PPP rate it’s $17.6 billion, i.e. $163 million per kilometer. Such a cost is normal by European standards for a fully-underground line; it’s not normal for a line that’s majority-elevated. It is almost as expensive as mostly-above ground extensions of American lines, for example the Silver Line in Washington.
In Beijing, the subway construction costs are also higher than one would expect given low wages, but only about as high as those of Europe. Fully-underground lines are about $150 million per km: these include Line 8 Phase 2 ($2.5 billion/17 km), Line 6 Phase 1 ($4.9 billion/30 km), and Line 14 Phase 1 ($4.5 billion/30 km); the first two are confirmed to be fully underground, and while I can’t find a claim in either direction for the last, all lines it intersects are fully underground. Chinese high-speed rail costs are quite similar to European costs as well: the lines rated at 350 km/h are between $19 and 50 million per km; there’s little tunneling on most lines, but long viaducts, e.g. the $42 million/km Beijing-Shanghai HSR line is 1.2% in tunnel and 86.5% elevated.
In Baghdad, the under-construction above-ground metro line, built by Alstom, is costing $1.5 billion for 22–25 km. With a PPP adjustment, this goes up to $83-94 million/km, depending on whose report of the line’s length one believes. It’s better than India, but not especially good.
Turkey is proving itself to be the Spain of the developing world. Its construction costs are often high per kilometer, but only because Istanbul’s geography is such that lines have to cross under major bodies of water, in seismic terrain. Marmaray, a commuter rail tunnel connecting the European and Asian halves of the city, cost $3.5 billion for 13.6 km of tunnel; while the overall cost, $333 million/km after PPP conversion, is high, it must be weighed against the extreme complexity of the project. The extension of the Istanbul Metro’s M2 line going under the Golden Horn rather than the Bosporus, is $148 million/km, again with PPP conversion. In contrast, the fully underground first phase of M4 is, if I understand the reference, and that’s a big if, $40 million per km (add all three cost amounts, then convert to US dollars); when a line goes underground rather than underwater, Istanbul builds it as cheaply as Madrid. Mainline rail construction in Turkey is also inexpensive: Turkey plans to build 14,000 km of rail, with a substantial portion permitting 250 km/h speeds, for $45 billion; that’s $4 million per km.
Iranian construction costs are low as well. Tehran Metro Line 3, as usual after PPP conversion, is $61 million per km; it is two-thirds underground.
Although there are no third-world lines that have breached $500 million per km, as several first-world lines have, this is probably entirely due to the fact that India, with the highest construction costs, builds its subways mostly above ground. A fully underground Delhi Metro line will probably cost as much as one in Tokyo, despite Delhi’s much less densely built existing network.
The pattern we see here is, first, that the one country on the list following the English legal and political tradition also has English construction costs. And, second, third-world countries do not build rail more cheaply than first-world countries, after adjusting for living costs but not wages; in other words, they spend more of their income on building those lines.
While labor costs in China are lower than in Europe, so is the productivity of labor. If everything in China cost across the board less than in the first world, it would be as rich as the first world; the reason it’s not as rich is precisely that labor doesn’t go as far as in more industrialized countries. China’s rapid growth should be thought of as a process of catching up to what the developed world learned over two hundred years of industrialization that has made it so much more efficient now than it was in 1800.
Quick Note: The Hong Kong MTR is Profitable
There’s a pervasive myth that the Hong Kong MTR is profitable only because the company’s real estate investments subsidize the train operations. For a trivial refutation, go to the MTR’s 2008 financial statement. Operating income was HK$13,995 million, which breaks down as $4,670 million from real estate development and $9,325 million from railway operations. Net income was $8,280 million; the statements do not break down depreciation, amortization, and interest charges according to whether they come from transportation or real estate, but the operating profits from transportation would’ve been enough to cover everything.
For a comparable link to Japanese private railroads, another source of the myth of development-subsidized transportation, see this article from JRTR.
Providence’s Underused BRT
Providence’s best-kept transit secret is its BRT tunnel. Converted from a trolley tunnel in 1948, when the trolleys were replaced by buses, it’s a bus-only tunnel connecting Thayer Street in College Hill on the east with Main Street on the eastern edge of downtown on the west, smoothing out the steep grades of the neighborhood. On the surface, the slope from Main to Benefit, the next street to the east, is 15%; in the tunnel, it’s only about 5%. It’s decades older than the systems generally considered the primogenitors of BRT, such as Curitiba’s. It functions as normal open BRT, with six bus lines sharing the tunnel and branching out on the surface.
Whereas other cities do everything within their power to emphasize their BRT lines, sometimes even drawing them on maps as if they were rail lines, Providence keeps its BRT tunnel hidden. Instead, it emphasizes two bus lines – one using the tunnel, one not – by painting them to look like streetcars and calling them trolleys. On the Rhode Island bus map the tunnel does not even appear, but instead the two fake trolleys are given their own inset; the downtown Providence map does show the tunnel, but makes it impossible to trace the bus routes and see which corridors they serve outside the tunnel.
This carries over to developer and landlord blurbs, which can be taken as indications for how much development transit induces. When I looked for apartments in Providence, several listings noted the apartment was close to the trolley; none said anything about a bus tunnel.
The bus tunnel is equally hidden on the surface of the city’s streets. On Main Street, signs direct the traveler to the train station; I have not seen any that even tell one a bus tunnel exists. The station entering the tunnel is prominent once one knows where the tunnel is, but it’s at a location that’s easy to miss – too far north to be the best route from College Hill or Fox Point to downtown, and on only one of several reasonable routes to the train station.
At the Thayer Street portal, the situation is reversed – it’s easy enough to find the tunnel, but there’s no indication that there’s a bus stop in front of the tunnel, much less a shelter for said bus stop – see some vague photos on my photostream. I found out about the existence of the bus stop only when I saw a bus actually stop there to discharge and board passengers. There’s a well-hidden bus schedule at the east portal of the tunnel, but it inexplicably only lists the eastbound schedule; the passenger is supposed to guess when the next bus will head into the tunnel.
Unsurprisingly, the buses aren’t very well-patronized. The combined frequency of the six lines is 12 buses per hour at the peak and 8.5 in the midday off-peak – reasonable for a single frequent line in a large city, albeit in this case the buses are not spaced evenly – but the buses do not look very crowded to me.
If Providence forwent the specially branded fake trolleys and instead adopted the emerging practice of a frequent network map, including letting people know that there’s a segment of busway that is grade-separated, it could see ridership on the bus tunnel increase dramatically. Thayer Street is a busy commercial street, with ample foot traffic until 10 or 11; while downtown is urban renewal hell, it still has retail at the mall that isn’t found anywhere else in the city, while making it easier to connect from the rest of the city to College Hill would let people commute uphill more conveniently.
Shoddy Study Claims Light Rail Increased Congestion in Paris (Hoisted from Comments)
Jarrett points us to a just-published paper in World Transit Research that contends that Paris’s new T3 light rail line caused traffic congestion on the adjacent freeway, the Boulevard Périphérique, to increase, thereby causing a net increase in environmental damage and a negative social rate of return. Reading it at its original source requires academic access; here is a mirror on this blog, and thanks to ant6n for sending it. The study does not produce much evidence that an increase in traffic congestion indeed happened. As Angus Grieve-Smith explains in the comments on Human Transit:
It’s important to note that the authors did not measure traffic on the Périph. They just observed that average speeds on the highway declined from 45.9 km/h to 43.5 km/h, and that “many witnesses of the public hearing on the extension of the tramway to Porte de la Chapelle testified their fears to see an analogous shift increasing the congestion on Eastern Périphérique.” In other words, bullshit.
The fact is that a large portion of the traffic on the Périph is going from one side of the city to the other. If some of the drivers on the Maréchaux transfered to the Périph, increasing congestion there, some of the drivers on the Périph would take commuter trains across town instead. Some of the drivers would find it more convenient to take the metro instead of the tramway, or to drive an alternate route that doesn´t involve the Périph, possibly one of the parallel boulevards closer to the center of the city.
The study spends very little time arguing that an increase in traffic happened. It almost takes it for granted. The evidence it provides is that the average speed on the entire Périphérique went down 5%, from 45.9 to 43.5 km/h, whereas the average speed on the southern segment, which parallels the T3 line, went down 10%, from 37.9 to 33.9 km/h.
Instead of arguing that the reduction in speed represents extra traffic coming from the lanes removed to make room for the T3, the study assumes that 100% of the reduction in traffic on the Maréchaux, the boulevard on which the T3 runs, was transferred to the Périphérique. This is unlikely: the phenomenon of reduced demand is attested in the literature – see references here. Traffic shifts to less congested times of day, and sometimes disappears entirely as drivers choose not to take the trip. For one example, when the West Side Highway collapsed, about half its traffic disappeared; this percentage is high, presumably because Manhattan has good transit options, just like Paris.
It’s in fact worse than Angus says. Although the paper provides traffic counts on the Maréchaux, it provides no such counts for the Périphérique, although such counts should be very easy to find. Its computation of the traffic increase on the Périphérique comes entirely from prior assumptions about the traffic that disappeared from the Maréchaux. Another, more minor sleight of hand is the choice of years. For the Maréchaux, the paper argues for comparing present traffic to traffic in 2003, just before the tram’s construction began; for the Périphérique, the numbers provided use 2000 as a baseline.
Most of the paper’s effort is spent not on trying to prove that traffic increased, but on computing the social costs and benefits under questionable assumptions. Doing that is difficult to say the least without knowing more about the nature of traffic on the Périphérique, and the study makes even more questionable assumptions there. To be fair, the biggest smoking guns do not concern the social cost that according to the study is by far the highest, slower traffic speeds; those follow from the assumptions. Instead, they serve to showcase a careless and even biased thought process.
First, the difference in carbon emissions between free-flowing traffic at 38 km/h and 34 km/h is small; what causes fuel consumption to rise in traffic jams is not lower average speed but rather stop-and-go traffic. Thus, even a first-order estimate of extra fuel consumption is impossible given the study’s numbers and assumptions. Fortunately for the study, the carbon cost it uses is so low (€25/ton) and the overall effect posited not large enough that the overall magnitude posited is negligible.
Second, in its computation of economic costs, the study makes the following observation about the project’s cost:
Available information on the monetary costs associated with the project is scarce. One has only the ex ante costs envisioned in the official preliminary Public Inquiry: 341.8M€ for the initial investment and 43.9M€ for the exploitation of the tramway. Experience suggests that ex post costs are likely to be appreciably higher (Flyvbjerg et al. 2002).
For the record, it took me all of three minutes to search on Railway Gazette and Google and find ex post costs amounting to €311.5 million. Worse, the paper says it chooses to use the original cost estimate for lack of other numbers, but then multiplies the original budget by 1.3, the standard factor for public projects in France. As far as I can tell, the reason for multiplying budgets by 1.3 is to cushion against small budget overruns, which could turn slightly beneficial projects into net liabilities; it’s a more honest way of including a contingency budget. In other words, the paper claims that costs probably ran over but its cost estimate for net benefit purposes assumes they didn’t, while in reality they didn’t run over while the paper assumes they did.
Quick Note: Barcelona Rail Tunnel
Barcelona’s rail tunnel connecting the existing high-speed rail station, Sants, with city center, has just been completed. The tunnel’s total length is 5.8 km. As for cost:
The tunnel has cost over €179·3m to build, including extensive measures to protect historic buildings such as Gaudí’s Sagrada Familia from any settlement.
I believe this sets a new modern-day record for low construction costs – about $40 million per km – certainly in cases of inner-urban construction. It balances out the city’s Line 9 boondoggle, which has run so many times over budget it’s now a full $180 million per km.
Airport Access vs. City Access
New York’s MTA and Port Authority have just released slides from a meeting discussing alternatives for transit access to LaGuardia. While the airport is the nearest to Midtown Manhattan by road and thus the option of choice for many business travelers, its transit options consist of local buses within Queens or to Upper Manhattan, and as a result its passengers are the least likely to use transit: about 10%, vs. 15% for JFK and 17% for Newark. Transit to the airport has been on and off the agenda for quite some time, with the most recent attempt, a Giuliani-era proposal to extend the Astoria Line, torpedoed due to community opposition to elevated trains.
Regular readers of this blog know that I have little positive to say about transit geared toward airport travelers. Business travelers are much better at demanding airport transit than using it. However, LaGuardia’s location is such that it could serve as a useful outer-end anchor for multiple lines providing transit to underserved areas. One is north-south service in Queens east of the Astoria Line, for example along Junction Boulevard; there’s already a bus that goes on Junction, but it’s slow and infrequent, and the lines do not combine into a single trunk except on airport grounds. Another is east-west service along 125th Street, which is replete with traffic and supports higher combined frequency on the four lines serving it than any other bus corridor in the city. Yet another is any service to East Elmhurst, which is a very dense neighborhood far from the subway.
The alternatives analysis seems biased in favor of Select Bus Service, i.e. not quite BRT, but such a question can just as well be asked of any mode of transportation, up to and including subways. However, even if the proposal is to physically separate the bus lanes, much good can be done on those corridors, independently of airport traffic. Because BRT can be done open rather than closed, the airport travel market could in principle even be served by a few direct buses from 1st/2nd Avenues through the Triboro Bridge, or perhaps over the Queensboro if the city adds physically separate lanes on Northern or Queens Boulevard. Those business travelers who are willing to use airport transit put a premium on direct service to the CBD: circumferential lines such as those proposed here would do more good for ordinary city residents than for air travelers.
In a world in which New York’s construction costs are normal rather than very high, it would be possible to speculate about subway extensions. Although city officials have favored an extension of the Astoria Line, there are better ways to serve that segment of Queens, providing north-south service to East Elmhurst and perhaps additional east-west service north of the Flushing Line. My preference is something like this: a shuttle under Junction intersecting all existing and possible future radial subways, and a continuation of Second Avenue Subway along 125th Street. Although it has a gap in service from Harlem to the airport, Second Avenue Subway Phase 2 has a natural tie-in to 125th, making the airport less important as an anchor than it is for surface transit; and even with a subway, 125th may well have enough remaining bus traffic to justify physically separated median bus lanes.
Although the possibility of subway extension is remote given current construction costs, an SBS extension is likely. It’s affordable at current costs and willingness to pay, and provides lines on a map that political leaders can point to and say “I did it.” In addition, boosters and business leaders tend to like airport expansions, and those are sometimes useful for the city.
Although New York currently prefers closed to open BRT, it’s still possible that airport access will indeed be used as an excuse to improve city transit with circumferential SBS routes in Queens and Harlem. It’s unlikely much good will come of it – note how the slides talk about “service to the airport and Western Queens” instead of “service to Western Queens and the airport” – but it’s feasible.
24/7 Rapid Transit
It’s a commonplace in New York that the New York City Subway is almost the only one that runs 24/7, and that the rest – PATH, PATCO, and two lines of the Chicago L – are small operations. The reason for this operating plan is that the main Manhattan trunklines have four tracks, making it feasible to shut down tracks for weekend and late-night maintenance and skip a few stations in one direction. Occasionally, even midday midweek service is disrupted. This leads to complaints from passengers who actually ride transit in the off-peak, as well as various politicians, and exhortations from political defenders of the MTA that it’s a necessary byproduct of 24/7 operation.
In fact, there’s one additional system not mentioned above: the Copenhagen Metro, which began 24/7 operation in 2009. Although around-the-clock operation on weekends is common in some European cities, such as Berlin, Copenhagen took the extra step to run 24/7 reliably. It has only two tracks, like some lines in New York, but made sure it would be possible to single-track at night for maintenance. Late-night headways in Copenhagen are 20 minutes, like in New York, and this gives enough time to reduce long segments to a single track and run wrong-way service. Copenhagen’s trains are automated and this helps with wrong-way signaling, but it’s not a prerequisite and wrong-way operation is already done late at night on the subway in New York.
What this means is that there’s a technical solution to the problem of late-night and weekend service disruptions: make sure that there are crossovers placed at regular intervals to allow 20-minute service on single track. Installing switches requires extra capital construction money, but is orders of magnitude cheaper than building extra tunnels, and would make late-night maintenance much easier. Headways are such that a switch would be required every 7 or 8 minutes, which means every 2.5-5 km. At some places, crossovers already exist at that density, for example at all four tunnels from Queens to Manhattan, and all that’s required is schedule modification.
The result would still not be as satisfactory as in Copenhagen, ironically because of the multi-track trunklines. Under the slow-fast-fast-slow system used in New York, as well as most other four-track lines, it’s impossible for a local train to cross over to the opposite track without fouling the express tracks. This would create serious problems even on the three-track lines in Queens and the Bronx, since extra switching moves would be required, shortening the acceptable crossover spacing. It would still be possible, say with crossovers 6-7 minutes apart, but the maintenance requirements would be higher.
On the four-track mainlines, I don’t see any solution that unequivocally improves on the status quo. It’s possible to have the same crossovers, but at even tighter spacing, and without any express traffic. Weekend express traffic could possibly still be retained, but not late-night express trains, and late-night frequency would be reduced to 20 minutes even on combined lines, for example the local 1/2 in Manhattan.
What this means for future trunklines is that, if four-tracking is required for capacity or for express service, it should not run as was built in New York a hundred years ago. Instead, the slow tracks should be in the middle, and the fast tracks on the outside; this allows more operational flexibility as well as short-turning local trains, at the cost of making it harder to build infill stations. While the subway short-turns some local trains, for example the C at 168th and at Euclid, this requires flying junctions, which contributed to the IND’s excessive cost.
Maximum flexibility could be obtained by building every station with two island platforms, as if it were an express station, and having express trains skip low-traffic stations. This way, two tracks could be shut down for maintenance along the entire line with no ill effect on reliability, except that retaining express service would required timed overtakes. The problem is of course the much higher cost of such a line, especially if it is underground.
For underground lines, there’s very rarely a reason to four-track. Washington may complain about lack of flexibility and express service, but modern subway lines with good rolling stock and wide curves can achieve acceptable average speed even with medium stop spacing. The Copenhagen Metro averages 40 km/h, a speed previously reserved for systems with very long (~1.6 km) interstations such as the Moscow Metro, even though its stop spacing is just 1 km. Capacity is the only serious drawback of two-track lines, but if it is so pressing then the city should built two separate two-track lines, which with tunnel boring machines cost about the same as one four-track line.
Why Transit Should be in the Fast Lane
Local buses tend to use the slow lane, which in North America means the rightmost lane; this is how they access the curb to pick up passengers. New York’s painted bus lanes on First and Second Avenues are to the right, with the buses slower than the cars both in perception and in actual practice.
Occasionally, transit uses the fast lane, especially if it’s BRT or a streetcar; for some of the access challenges of boarding not from the curb, see an old Human Transit thread on the subject. The issue of whether there should be sidewalk- or median-adjacent transit lanes came up in comments on Cap’n Transit’s blog. So let me explain why higher-grade transit than local buses, which means rail or BRT, should run in the median, with boarding from raised curbs either on the sides or in the center.
1. Service identity. This is probably the overarching concern, especially on the question of whether to have raised curbs or instead stop traffic in the slow lanes and have people cross to the bus from the sidewalk. ITDP’s magnum opus standards for full-fat BRT virtually take median running for granted, and only consider alternatives when the right-of-way is constrained. This is also mentioned as the highest grade of BRT in a conference paper examining BRT on city streets.
2. Fewer conflicts. Using pedestrian-friendly two-phase stoplights, it is impossible to eliminate turn conflicts, though in Delhi they found that median running (right lane in India) had fewer turn conflicts. In addition, it’s possible to eliminate conflicts with cars entering or exiting the parking lanes, as well as stopped cars left near the curbside lanes.
3. Median lanes are politically easier to physically separate, since separating them does not deprive cars of curbside access. If cars can physically violate transit lanes, they will, either accidentally or intentionally (my mother’s car’s GPS guidance routinely sends her along the tram-only lanes). As APTA mentions in its own standards for BRT,
One major advantage of a median busway is that there is typically no demand for other vehicles to stop in the center of the street for purposes such as parking or as a breakdown lane. As a result, there is a lot less reason for vehicles to want to occupy the center of the road and less resistance to creating a physical barrier separation between the busway and the adjacent general traffic lanes.
Point #3 is what killed the proposal for the 34th Street Transitway, which would have run two-way on one side of the street with one direction running contraflow. The NIMBYs on East 34th Street complained specifically about curbside access, using such language as “Delivery and service trucks… no longer have direct access to buildings and stores along stretches of 34th Street.” Most issues they raised involved curbside access or else bus noise adjacent to the street, both of which would have been solved by median lanes.
To add to what Steve Stofka is writing about grids, if I had to design a street from scratch, it would look a lot like a two-way version of a Manhattan avenue, with bus lanes in the middle. It would be 30 meters building to building, and about 20 curb to curb; this is enough space for two parking/loading lanes (2.5 meters) buffering pedestrians from moving traffic, two car travel lanes (3 meters), and two median bus lanes (3-3.5 meters), with room left for physical separation (measured in centimeters). Raised curbs for stations should add 3-4 meters, at the expense of either parking or sidewalk space once every few hundred meters; one advantage of trams, or buses with doors on both sides, is that they can use less space-consuming island stations.
Good Industry Practices Thread
In contrast to the mismanagement highlighted in the last few posts, there’s a set of best industry practices for good transit. Here is a list of what I believe are the most salient. As far as possible I’ve avoided contentious issues that well-run agencies disagree on. By its nature, the list is open, and you should feel free to comment with your own ideas of what’s more important.
1. Regions should organize regionwide transport associations (the German Verkehrsverbund) with integrated fares and schedules, even across political boundaries. One ticket should be valid on all trips, and transfers should be free even across different operators. Bus and rail schedules should coordinate to minimize transfer time; rail-rail transfers should be cross-platform when possible and timed when possible, even if frequency is high.
2. Schedules should be organized on simple clockface intervals (Takt): instead of complex timetables, the same pattern should repeat every half hour or hour, and should be compressible to a system map. Supplemental peak services should be integrated into the same takt, for example arriving at the half-points or maybe third-points if the peak is very prominent. Minimum off-peak frequency for regional branch lines is hourly; for commuter rail and anything else intended to serve as suburban transit, it’s half-hourly; for urban services, it’s 15 or at worst 20 minutes.
3. If express service is desired, it should be limited-stop and make stops at all major stations, rather than running very long nonstop segments. For a good example, go here and click on the interval timetable links. In addition, the express buses and trains should run on their own clockface schedule, and express trains should have timed transfers to maximize utility and overtakes to minimize the amount of four-tracking required. The practice on Metro-North and other legacy US railroads of having peak commuter trains make a small number of suburban stops and then run nonstop to the CBD should end; not everyone works in the CBD.
4. Boarding should be level. For regional rail, this means at least moderately high platforms are non-negotiable. For surface transit, this means low-floor equipment; high-floor BRT is a feature in Latin America, where it’s a lower-cost replacement for a subway, but in developed countries, the cost of paying so many bus drivers is such that BRT is a replacement for local buses and should be open with many curb stops in outlying areas.
5. All payment should be done on a proof-of-payment basis. Any vehicle, no matter how long, should have at most one employee on board, operating it. The fare should be enforced with random inspections; it pains me to have to say it, but the inspectors should never hold a bus during inspections. This should be done systemwide, even on local buses, as is normal in Paris, Singapore, and every German-speaking city; turnstiles are only worth it on extremely busy trains (nothing in the US outside New York) and maybe also legacy subways that already have them. To discourage fare dodging, there should be a large unlimited monthly discount, as well as unlimited 6-month or annual tickets, so that most riders will be prepaid; the unlimited monthly pass should cost about 30 times as much as a single ride even with multi-ride discounts.
6. Intermediate-grade surface transit – i.e. the BRT and light rail lines providing service quality higher than a local bus and lower than rapid transit – should run in dedicated lanes, except perhaps on outer branches. Bus lanes should be physically separated, and tram lanes could even be put in a grassy median. Except for special cases where one side of the street is much more important than the other, in which case one-way pairs may be defensible, those dedicated lanes should be in the median of a two-way street, when street width permits it, which it does everywhere in the US except the North End of Boston and Lower Manhattan.
7. Intermodal transfers should be painless. Commuter trains should run through from one side of the region to the other, to allow for efficient suburb-to-suburb travel, and the infrastructure should be upgraded to allow for such operations. It should be unthinkable to terminate transit short of its natural destination. Though transfers at the originating end are unavoidable, planners should still endeavor to place rapid transit stops at every walkable place the line intersects, and achieve adequate speed by running better rolling stock. (In contrast, bus stop spacing should be 400-500 meters, rather than 200-250 as is common in North America). Parking lot commuter stations should be rare; they impede reverse-peak traffic, are expensive to provide, and help ensure transit will be used only when there’s no alternative.
Any other important principles for transit, dear commenters?
Pedestrian Observations 
