Don’t threaten me with a good time! (Although gov owned grocery seems to have little upside considering how much of elected officials’ attention they would demand
I'm going to be annoying and annoyingly point out the obvious:
You cannot have a good public transit system unless you have sufficiently high population density, which means, at minimum, some combination of single-family and multi-family dwellings. A neighborhood made up entire of single-family housing ain't gonna cut it.
Ultimately it's a geometry problem: you need a high enough population density to provide enough transit riders within easy walking distance of each transit stop. Otherwise you're either wastefully running empty buses, or you're trying to match supply to demand and end up with a sad, lonesome bus that comes by once an hour at best.
I live in Orange County, aka Sprawl Central. Just for kicks and giggles, I sometimes use Google Maps to look up how long it would take to travel to a given destination by car vs. public transit. It typically looks something like 20 min by car vs. 1 h 30 min by transit (because you have to walk to the nearest transit stop, ride the bus 45 min, get off and wait 15 min for the next bus, then ride that bus for 25 min). And then a single tear runs down my cheek as I remember the wonderfully walkable and public transit-friendly Boston where I used to live, and then I get in my car, because I care about the environment, but I'm not a masochist.
If I were running OC Transit, I would give up trying to compete with cars on every trip and focus on the “markets” where you have a lot of people going to the same place at the same time. For example, offer to help dying shopping malls by establishing park-and-ride locations with express commuter service to Irvine (which is essentially “downtown Orange County”). And those same locations could also offer express buses to Angels games (though the way the Angels are playing, a couple of minivans could handle that traffic).
It's not that simple. People without cars still have to be able to get to other parts of the city that don't have huge numbers of people all going there at the same time. For people that don't have a lot of money, a bus that runs once an hour is still better than a $30 Uber ride.
Of course, there has to be some limits to this; it's not reasonable to expect a bus to run on some lonely rural county road, for example. But, within a city, a bus network does need to be comprehensive; you can't just enumerate three or four places that people without cars are allowed to access and say "too bad" if you want to go anywhere else.
The problem is that if you do density first and transit second, everyone hates it because of the congestion and general car-based enshittification. You have to do transit first and density second. But nowhere in the country can actually make a credible promise to increase density once the transit gets built, so the transit is doomed to be a waste of money.
I live in OC too! At least in the northern part of the county, there's enough POPULATION density to run transit just fine. The issue is that 1) For the most part, there's not enough DESTINATION density to run transit, so you run into lengthy and untimed transfers per your example, 2) The freeway system here is excellent, and outside of rush hour hard to compete with, and 3) SoCal in general has an off-putting cultural aversion to transit that treats it as social welfare for kids and low income folks rather than a public good for everyone (and which predictably leads to worse service for all).
OC transit has low hanging fruit by just integrating most routes into Metrolink connections with timed transfers. Think: everywhere I go, I can park my car at one station, take a comfortable train without traffic, and then catch an easy connecting bus (or LA Metro) at the other end if need be.
Bigger picture, I do think there are plenty of corridors that can become centers of concentrated housing development, but they need transit here that works with the sprawl we have first.
The OC buses run mostly empty while displaying signs saying “Now Hiring Drivers”. The “company” is heavily subsidized, with the fare box only providing a small percentage of total revenue, so there is no institutional incentive to attract passengers with a useful service.
Very true - but I do want to clarify that some of the main routes in North OC do get pretty decent ridership (I'm saying this from firsthand experience). But I agree with you on incentives and where effort is focused.
This is my experience when I’m in a strange city. I always try to take the public transportation options when I can. Google shows me that the transit trip is 5 times longer than the car trip and involves 3 transfers.
Transit systems are also less inviting if they involve indirect payment systems like paper tickets or transit cards. All systems should move to Omni like New York City, where you can pay simply by waving your credit card or phone over reader.
Oslo converted an Air Force base into their new airport 30 years ago. They ran a new freeway and HSR to the airport. Now the suburbs along the freeway and railroad are built out and built up. Lillestrom became a bustling walkable community.
This story is not unique nor special. Orange County was orchards before the freeways were built. There are photos of NYC subway construction through sparsely populated land.
The infrastructure has to be built FIRST. Then the people come later.
The thought of someone on the spectrum who doesn’t handle disagreement at all well managing a job like that that’s 90% soft power is like, hilarious if you don’t care but terrifying if you do
He doesn't run his companies operationally. He highs high skilled operators then spends his time cutting through anything he sees as a bottleneck to the organization. He is like an outside consultant ... but with the internal political ability to actually get shit down. Often it is productive when he's done the research to know what might work, and not of value when he hasn't.
Disagree. For one thing they really need to be somewhere where all their technical knowledge about transit can be put to the best use, and I don't think DOT is that place, even though they might do some good things there. For another, I don't think they should go anywhere near US politics - they have said, and might do, some really unpopular things regarding non-transit stuff which would make him a liability for Dems nationally.
Putting them in charge of a big important transit agency would be much better on both those fronts. They would both be in the position to make a lot more positive change, and also in a place where their general politics outside the nitty gritty of running a transit system would be be both welcomed (because they'd be in a liberal city that largely agrees) and irrelevant (because they wouldn't have power over non-transit stuff anyway).
He doesn’t strike me as the kind of person that can handle a transit agency with overlapping and conflicting political stakeholders, entrenched labor interests (unions and otherwise), or interest groups. WMATA would turn him into hamburger.
I love Alon's thoughts on policy generally, but they're disagreeable to the max. Maybe someone who reads the blog but has a shred of political acumen is a better choice...
Aren't we seeing direct evidence that the best thing you can do for transit use is to incorporate congestion pricing for car access? The New York experiment has been remarkably clear in showing that it is a good thing.
That is, as much as it annoys public transit fans, the biggest hurdle to people using it is just how convenient and cheap using your car is.
Congestion pricing actually makes it more convenient to use your car! Just less cheap. Which is great, since the point of the car is to be the convenient option for the moments when convenience is all-important.
My experience in other cities is that dedicated bus lanes do this better. I lived in London just before, and after it introduced congestion pricing. Even before congestion pricing, I was amazed at how quickly buses zipped through the city compared to my experience in New York and DC where buses sometimes traveled at walking speed in rush hour. It became my favorite mode of transportation when I was there.
Dedicated bus lanes in downtown Chicago have snarled traffic for almost no demonstrable benefit. I know one of the issues is the lack of coordination between raised bust stop platforms and (unraisable or time consuming staircase shifting).
It’s frustrating that the focus on public transit in Chicago anyway is the dedicated bus lanes or bike lanes which constrain driving lanes for no discernible benefit . Compared to a lot of easy wins within train infrastructure:
1. Improving public safety (immediate win in terms of usage); related quality of life. Every CTA train smells like a Rastafarian ceremony.
2. Frequency. This drives me nuts as a commuter on the Metra with 30 mins between trains. Even CTA quickly moves to 10-15 mins for no obvious reason during their daily operations.
3. Lack of interoperability or even coordination across lines and CTA/metra.
4. Lack of express service to either airport
5. Lack of timely or effective service between suburbs
That is kind of my point? It is showing as one of the best policies you can do, if you are interested in results. Remarkably so.
What it is not, is a good political move. You have to contend with taxes being a legitimate tool in controlling behavior. Which is hard to do, as taxes have been poisoned in the discourse.
Sure, but isn’t that what growth is for? People might disagree on what percentage of income/property value/sales should be taxed, but surely it shouldn’t just keep going up?
Congestion pricing (and probably carbon tax too) has benefits beyond revenue. We should be cutting other taxes is that’s what it takes to get a good Pigouvian tax passed.
My mental model is that growth should cover maintenance, sure. If you need a massive cash flow to build a new system, you can't really fund that with growth, as easily. Sure, you can take out a loan. But that just adds to the costs.
Carbon taxes would be tougher, here. As annoying as it is for most people to contend with, the fact is most of the egregious carbon use is not here in the US.
I should add that I don't fully disagree with moving the taxes around some. Just pointing out that that is not a panacea, either. People need to comfortable with the fact that it takes capital to build. And that largely means taxes.
I really hate that we have made it so that people are near universally unhappy with what their taxes go to. We could have a pride or enjoyment from the things that we are able to do. I don't know why we don't.
You have to build the transit system before you start making driving inconvenient/expensive or you lose what political will there is. Not that this should be subject to democracy or anything, it shouldn’t
I completely disagree. Congestion prices etc have benefits even when you do not have a robust transit network at the time of institution. It would be genuinely beneficial to have congestion pricing something like statewide and just reduce the sales tax a corresponding amount (or a little less so we can actually pay for road repairs). Drivers benefit from better roads and more dispersed traffic patterns and non-drivers benefit even more from paying less sales tax. And if it makes sense to improve transit options in specific areas given more new demand for such options, then do that.
I'm not clear where you are going with that. The general point is that you have to make it economical to get people to use transit. This means you have to do the big spend to build the infrastructure to support it, and then you still have to make it more expensive to just drive.
The problem a ton of transit discourse ignores, is that cars are extremely convenient if you have one. This is true even in places that have high transit use. People with cars have a huge convenience advantage.
Until there’s a subway stop across the street that comes every 2 minutes and connects to a spaghetti network. I’m just saying that you can do stuff like price parking, implement congestion pricing, whatever, make it inconvenient to drive to privilege transit - but you need a super convenient and comprehensive transit system first
I had jury duty a couple of weeks ago and didn’t want to drive-commute downtown during rush hour and worry about parking, so I took the bus. I was pleasantly surprised how easy it was! Due to dedicated bus lanes on the freeways and one of the arterials, it was as if rush hour wasn’t a thing at all. And it was clean - at that hour there were 14 other people on there who all appeared to be white collar workers. (Everyone I saw paid their fare too, I took notes) I would do it again in a heartbeat!
The only downside was having to wake up earlier than I would have, that bus only ran every 25 minutes during morning rush hour, and to make sure I didn’t miss the bus I had to try for the bus before the one that would get me there right on time. But that may have been a wash with driving given rush hour traffic that the bus zoomed past.
Yep! I was still pleasantly surprised considering what and where my neighborhood is (a SFH zone that’s 20 min away from downtown when there’s no traffic). And pleasantly surprised to see people taking it. The bus had 32 seats and there were 15 people on it when it entered the freeway. It was a hybrid diesel-electric bus. That feels sustainable and worthwhile.
As a frequent public transit user (not looking forward to SEPTA cuts), I think that making public transit smell better would create substantial amounts of positive good will for marginal users. I don't have a car, so I can't really complain when I'm waiting in the station and it reeks of urine and vape smoke, but I have a hunch that scent, more than things being visibly dirty (I don't think a subway station is measurably dirtier than any other urban surface) contributes to the "it's gross" complaint a lot of people have. I lack the knowledge of odor prevention necessary (or empirical evidence backing my claim) to come up with concrete policy solutions, but I will say that the last time I was in DC, I was impressed at how neutral WMATA smells compared to SEPTA (and it was a hot DC summer day, so I was expecting substantial BO).
A complete unwillingness to acknowledge that mass transit beings poor people and their attendant problems into an area that didn’t have them before.
People have a reasonable mistrust of public transit in the states because the state has decided not to keep the bad poors off, and making it cheap to get to McLean has costs that far outweigh the benefits.
Same problem with voucher housing. In principle great. In practice the 7 feral teens in the house down the road are nooooot great Bob.
Places like NYC and Tokyo are much safer than Dallas or LA, and that’s not even taking car-specific deaths and lifestyle factors into account. I mean NYC has some of the highest tax rates in the world; if it were uniquely unsafe for rich people too they would just leave. Instead they take mass transit to work every day.
"Places like NYC... are much safer than Dallas or LA"
I'm going to leave Tokyo out of the conversation because that's another ball of wax altogether.
But a problem I see with a lot of these comparisons is people aren't clear about what they're actually comparing.
Like, usually when people from Dallas or LA are worried about crime they might experience on their trip to NYC, they're not comparing NYC to the equivalent urban core of Dallas or LA, they're comparing NYC to whatever super-safe suburb of Dallas or LA they live in.
And while to be sure, those people absolutely have an exaggerated perception of crime in NYC, and are usually surprised by how safe they feel once they get there - they're not wrong about the direction of the crime rate difference compared to the neighborhoods where they live and spend most of their time. So coming at them with "ackshually NYC is safer than your city, here are the numbers" just falls flat.
It doesn’t cause the comparison to fall flat, it just adds some nuance. People like the idea of being able to drive somewhere cheaply, and are worried in the abstract about their safety on public transit, but in practice we see that at least some cities can do congestion pricing and mass transit in a way that people prefer. We should learn from those wins instead of getting stuck in 1960s Jim Crow Atlanta thought for the rest of our lives.
The city I think of is Philly. Philly’s burbs would probably be more open to transit if they had any hope that Philly would prosecute assholes on the train.
This is kind of true in LA as well but LA is doing pretty well on transit over the last 15 or so years.
The problem with LA is the severe declines in ridership over the couple decades preceding COVID. I would love to be able to give them more credit as it seems like they've done better than most of America at the construction side of things, but unfortunately, when it comes to actually getting people to use transit, whatever they're doing isn't working. And this is in California where they have the advantage of gas prices approaching European levels.
I generally agree with you, and don't agree with Jimmy Hoffa about transit increasing crime in neighborhoods. Was just making a narrow point that people, afraid of crime in NYC, who come from cities which have higher crime on paper, aren't *quite* as irrational as they may appear (though they could stand to be be more rational).
When I said fall flat I meant in terms of persuasion, not in terms of fact.
Caltrain (serving the poors of... Palo Alto) and the MBTA commuter rail (... Weston) are very badly managed. This is a grant to improve them. Ds not being tough on crime is not the root of all evils
One question I have: it seems like mass transit policy is dominated by how things should work in big cities. But I've lived in small cities (<200,000) and in suburbs for most of my adult life, and public transit in those places seemed not to work so well. I have this vague intuition that a suburb-focused kind of mass transit might look really different from what works in Manhattan. Maybe it's just Uber or Waymo or some similar thing, but I wonder if you could have something that was more responsive and played better with low population density than the usual once-per-hour large county bus that has five riders on it.
There were some low hanging fruit in the low to mid population places I have lived in.
For instance, in Binghamton NY, all the local busses would leave the greyhound station simultaneously, on the hour, which seemed idiotic to me. (The intercity bus station is the only practical, non-car way of reaching nyc from there, so this is kind of a big deal and a big inconvenience).
In Salt Lake City, the local authorities seemed fixated on building out and extending the tram system further south instead of adding more small buses that would efficiently navigate the foothills. It is good that they have a tram to take you to the airport, but does that tram have to run all the way to byu? on a somewhat related note, i was once in a hurry and left my bike parked at one of the bike rails near the mormon temple while catching the tram to the airport. when i came back a week later, the bike was gone.
I live in a suburban part of Seattle city, and we have this service available in my neighborhood. I’ve never used it but I do think running vans instead of buses to low density areas is a good thing.
It sounds good on paper. But, when you start meandering to serve each and every trip, the number of people per hour a vehicle can serve is really tiny - like on the order of 2 or 3. The result is a service that seems great if you're the only one using it, but even a relatively tiny number of other people using it, all vehicles are busy carrying other customers, and your wait time to be picked up ends up being substantially longer, and less predictable, than just having a regular old bus that runs once every half hour.
In theory, an agency can avoid this problem by adding more vehicles, but that's really expensive, and you end up with a system that costs far more per boarding to operate than a conventional bus system, even in areas that don't generate particularly high ridership. And, of course, if there's any kind of special event that creates a temporary spike in ridership, and demand-response-based system will completely break down. Whereas, a bus can put those normally-empty seats to use and get people where they need to go.
I think it’s more of a last mile service. I have 3 buses easy walking distance from my house, but they’re all basically every 30 minutes. There’s a wider variety of buses and some higher frequency buses in that service area that I might use that van for last mile service for.
Yep - the 'well actually' pro transit uber alles crowd conveniently ignores the settled reality of life as most Americans currently experience it. Would it be great if you could wave a wand and pull half the population out of the exurbs and somehow convince them of the pleasures of apartment living and offer buses or micro transit options so awesome it causes them to junk their big ass trucks? Maybe - but literally none of that is going to happen - you can engage in progressive urban planning on the margins (Hank Hill grousing about flex posts in Arlen is actually pretty funny), but we've poured a lot of concrete in the last 100 years and the interstate highway system and the American love of SUVs isn't going anywhere. I hate to be Eeyore but the facts on the ground mitigate against radical change, esp for a party like the dems who need to actively re-earn voters' trust in their judgment and values.
Even in European countries with dense cities, extensive public transit and heavily taxed fuel, there are still a lot of cars on the roads. Maybe more little ass Fiats than big ass trucks, but people everywhere still like their own wheels.
The U.S. has thousands of miles of underused or abandoned freight rail corridors in urban and suburban areas. Many of these corridors could be converted into rapid transit or commuter rail lines at far lower cost than building new rights-of-way. However, legal, regulatory, and inter-agency barriers often stall these conversions for years.
Proposed Solution:
Establish a National Rail Corridor Conversion Program (NRCCP) to fast-track the transformation of disused or lightly used freight lines into passenger service.
Key Elements:
Federal mediation between freight railroads and transit agencies to negotiate shared-use or sale agreements.
Streamlined environmental review for projects using existing rail alignments.
Dedicated capital funding for track upgrades, stations, and electrification.
Land banking authority to preserve corridors at risk of abandonment.
This would allow cities to deploy new passenger service in a fraction of the time and cost of new rail construction, especially in growing suburbs and secondary cities.
When I was a kid in the 90s private ski schools hired school buses to take neighborhood kids up skiing. The Seahawks and Mariners hired county buses to take people to the games.
Both of these are today banned.
My abundance neoliberal idea is to deregulate whatever the hell caused that.
Let American private businesses hire transit agencies and school districts for transportation again!
1) Eliminate all tariffs and "buy America" rules, allowing transit agencies to purchase buses and trains from foreign countries for far less than it costs them today to buy American-made buses and trains.
2) Grant visas to bus drivers in foreign countries interested in moving to the U.S., in order to alleviate the bus driver shortage we have here, and forestall unsustainable wage growth that makes service very expensive.
Of course, both of these suggestions are unlikely to ever happen. Democrats won't do it because both these ideas would leave impacted unions extremely pissed, and the pleasing unions is more politically important than making transit better. And, Republicans won't do it because these ideas go against the core of Donald Trump's beliefs that imports and immigration are fundamentally bad. Plus, Republicans could care less about the efficiency of transit, as a less efficient system is easier to attack, and argue for getting rid of it.
In addition to 1) and 2), I would also go through all the FTA regulations that government imposes on transit agencies and decide which ones are actually necessary, and which ones are just unnecessary rules and bureaucracy. I'd be willing to bet a lot of it is just unnecessary bureaucracy.
I would also restructure the grant criteria, redirect some money from capital to operations, and limit capital projects that qualify for grants to those that really improve the transit system vs. create vanity streetcars that don't actually provide any mobility.
With regards to 1), I will also add to this that it currently costs less to buy a Chinese-made *battery* bus in Europe than it does to buy a diesel bus in the U.S. So, when people say that bus electrification is unaffordable, the reason why it is unaffordable is not inherent in the technology, it's our country's trade policy. (That, combined with the fact that the entire U.S. bus market is too small to create the economies of scale necessary to introduce a whole new power technology at reasonable cost; a global bus market, however, is big enough to create those economies of scale, especially with the rest of the world investing more in transit in general than the U.S. does).
Unfortunately, not really economical unless you can find a way to run the buses autonomously. As it stands today, the bus driver costs more than the bus itself, so a small bus costs nearly as much to operate as a big bus. In fact, it is quite often actually cheaper for a transit agency to just run big buses all day, even if their capacity is only needed during peak hours, in order to avoid buying a whole extra fleet of small buses and paying drivers to move buses around with "out of service" signs to swap the small buses and big buses twice a day.
I understand that it is more expensive but it would provide much better service and ought to increase ridership. And you would not need an “extra fleet,” just more of the smaller ones.
It’s like lots of things you get better police protection with more police officers. A way to use the increase income from street parking fees and a way to employ the former Zoning exception issuers. :)
Of course, more frequent buses are better! But, as the operating cost for a small bus isn't that much less than a big bus, it is primarily the age-old debate as to whether to raise taxes to fund better service.
At the same time, bigger buses than strictly necessary to carry current ridership has many advantages. Many bus route with overall low ridership have occasional demand spikes. For example, a high school letting out, or a special event. A big bus can more easily handle such spikes without the risk of leaving riders on the curb. A bigger bus also leaves passengers with more room, for example, if you need to carry luggage, or if you need to get away from another passenger who is behaving obnoxiously. Of course, if a bus twice as big cost twice as much to operate, this wouldn't be worth it, but if a bus twice as big costs only 10% more to operate (which is more like the real world), then it probably is.
I don’t really care about the size of the bus; it is the frequency that matters. I live near a major street and buses I might want to use to go places ARE pretty frequent so bussing instead of driving and parking is real option. Less frequent service would not be.
While smarter transit policy and management would go a long way, I wonder how much effect it will have when the rest of daily life in the US is so auto-oriented. Slow boring of hard boards indeed.
I would like to be able to ride a free bus from my rent controlled apartment to the government owned grocery store.
Havana beckons!
why not enlist then?
Don’t threaten me with a good time! (Although gov owned grocery seems to have little upside considering how much of elected officials’ attention they would demand
I'm going to be annoying and annoyingly point out the obvious:
You cannot have a good public transit system unless you have sufficiently high population density, which means, at minimum, some combination of single-family and multi-family dwellings. A neighborhood made up entire of single-family housing ain't gonna cut it.
Ultimately it's a geometry problem: you need a high enough population density to provide enough transit riders within easy walking distance of each transit stop. Otherwise you're either wastefully running empty buses, or you're trying to match supply to demand and end up with a sad, lonesome bus that comes by once an hour at best.
I live in Orange County, aka Sprawl Central. Just for kicks and giggles, I sometimes use Google Maps to look up how long it would take to travel to a given destination by car vs. public transit. It typically looks something like 20 min by car vs. 1 h 30 min by transit (because you have to walk to the nearest transit stop, ride the bus 45 min, get off and wait 15 min for the next bus, then ride that bus for 25 min). And then a single tear runs down my cheek as I remember the wonderfully walkable and public transit-friendly Boston where I used to live, and then I get in my car, because I care about the environment, but I'm not a masochist.
If I were running OC Transit, I would give up trying to compete with cars on every trip and focus on the “markets” where you have a lot of people going to the same place at the same time. For example, offer to help dying shopping malls by establishing park-and-ride locations with express commuter service to Irvine (which is essentially “downtown Orange County”). And those same locations could also offer express buses to Angels games (though the way the Angels are playing, a couple of minivans could handle that traffic).
I like your comment overall and I shall overlook your insulting the Angels 😊
It's not that simple. People without cars still have to be able to get to other parts of the city that don't have huge numbers of people all going there at the same time. For people that don't have a lot of money, a bus that runs once an hour is still better than a $30 Uber ride.
Of course, there has to be some limits to this; it's not reasonable to expect a bus to run on some lonely rural county road, for example. But, within a city, a bus network does need to be comprehensive; you can't just enumerate three or four places that people without cars are allowed to access and say "too bad" if you want to go anywhere else.
What should the target be for "how far does someone have to walk from the nearest stop to get to this part of the city"? 20 minutes? 15? Less, more?
The problem is that if you do density first and transit second, everyone hates it because of the congestion and general car-based enshittification. You have to do transit first and density second. But nowhere in the country can actually make a credible promise to increase density once the transit gets built, so the transit is doomed to be a waste of money.
I live in OC too! At least in the northern part of the county, there's enough POPULATION density to run transit just fine. The issue is that 1) For the most part, there's not enough DESTINATION density to run transit, so you run into lengthy and untimed transfers per your example, 2) The freeway system here is excellent, and outside of rush hour hard to compete with, and 3) SoCal in general has an off-putting cultural aversion to transit that treats it as social welfare for kids and low income folks rather than a public good for everyone (and which predictably leads to worse service for all).
OC transit has low hanging fruit by just integrating most routes into Metrolink connections with timed transfers. Think: everywhere I go, I can park my car at one station, take a comfortable train without traffic, and then catch an easy connecting bus (or LA Metro) at the other end if need be.
Bigger picture, I do think there are plenty of corridors that can become centers of concentrated housing development, but they need transit here that works with the sprawl we have first.
The OC buses run mostly empty while displaying signs saying “Now Hiring Drivers”. The “company” is heavily subsidized, with the fare box only providing a small percentage of total revenue, so there is no institutional incentive to attract passengers with a useful service.
Very true - but I do want to clarify that some of the main routes in North OC do get pretty decent ridership (I'm saying this from firsthand experience). But I agree with you on incentives and where effort is focused.
This is my experience when I’m in a strange city. I always try to take the public transportation options when I can. Google shows me that the transit trip is 5 times longer than the car trip and involves 3 transfers.
Transit systems are also less inviting if they involve indirect payment systems like paper tickets or transit cards. All systems should move to Omni like New York City, where you can pay simply by waving your credit card or phone over reader.
True, and transit still could be a LOT better in relatively high density and demand neighborhoods.
Or just run driverless everything empty or full. Seriously, there should be no streets without subways, no matter how rural
Sadly, I think you'll end up with driverless homeless shelters pretty quick if you go this route in modern America.
> I'm going to... blah, blah, blah, <facts>, yadda, yadda, yadda, <logic>, ...
Yawn. Tron's comment is so much better than this...
Oslo converted an Air Force base into their new airport 30 years ago. They ran a new freeway and HSR to the airport. Now the suburbs along the freeway and railroad are built out and built up. Lillestrom became a bustling walkable community.
This story is not unique nor special. Orange County was orchards before the freeways were built. There are photos of NYC subway construction through sparsely populated land.
The infrastructure has to be built FIRST. Then the people come later.
Literally just put Alon Levy in charge at the DOT
I think a "special advisor" role might be better
The thought of someone on the spectrum who doesn’t handle disagreement at all well managing a job like that that’s 90% soft power is like, hilarious if you don’t care but terrifying if you do
elon seems to be doing well...
He doesn't run his companies operationally. He highs high skilled operators then spends his time cutting through anything he sees as a bottleneck to the organization. He is like an outside consultant ... but with the internal political ability to actually get shit down. Often it is productive when he's done the research to know what might work, and not of value when he hasn't.
Or if he doesn't want to do that, at least find somebody that is reading everything coming out of the Transit Costs Project.
Disagree. For one thing they really need to be somewhere where all their technical knowledge about transit can be put to the best use, and I don't think DOT is that place, even though they might do some good things there. For another, I don't think they should go anywhere near US politics - they have said, and might do, some really unpopular things regarding non-transit stuff which would make him a liability for Dems nationally.
Putting them in charge of a big important transit agency would be much better on both those fronts. They would both be in the position to make a lot more positive change, and also in a place where their general politics outside the nitty gritty of running a transit system would be be both welcomed (because they'd be in a liberal city that largely agrees) and irrelevant (because they wouldn't have power over non-transit stuff anyway).
He doesn’t strike me as the kind of person that can handle a transit agency with overlapping and conflicting political stakeholders, entrenched labor interests (unions and otherwise), or interest groups. WMATA would turn him into hamburger.
I love Alon's thoughts on policy generally, but they're disagreeable to the max. Maybe someone who reads the blog but has a shred of political acumen is a better choice...
Nah, Sound Transit
DoT is mostly roads and airplanes though.
So much of the discourse around public transit is stuck in unexamined assumptions.
For instance: do the wheels on the bus *have* to go round and round?
Not if it's a hoverbus!
"hoverbus!"
Expand this to 400 words, and you could win a cool two grand.
Tired: hover bus
Wired: the cat bus from My Neighbor Totoro
As much as I love David Drake, no... blowers are ridiculous.
Aren't we seeing direct evidence that the best thing you can do for transit use is to incorporate congestion pricing for car access? The New York experiment has been remarkably clear in showing that it is a good thing.
That is, as much as it annoys public transit fans, the biggest hurdle to people using it is just how convenient and cheap using your car is.
Congestion pricing actually makes it more convenient to use your car! Just less cheap. Which is great, since the point of the car is to be the convenient option for the moments when convenience is all-important.
The advantage of congestion pricing for transit is it makes buses go faster
My experience in other cities is that dedicated bus lanes do this better. I lived in London just before, and after it introduced congestion pricing. Even before congestion pricing, I was amazed at how quickly buses zipped through the city compared to my experience in New York and DC where buses sometimes traveled at walking speed in rush hour. It became my favorite mode of transportation when I was there.
Dedicated bus lanes in downtown Chicago have snarled traffic for almost no demonstrable benefit. I know one of the issues is the lack of coordination between raised bust stop platforms and (unraisable or time consuming staircase shifting).
It’s frustrating that the focus on public transit in Chicago anyway is the dedicated bus lanes or bike lanes which constrain driving lanes for no discernible benefit . Compared to a lot of easy wins within train infrastructure:
1. Improving public safety (immediate win in terms of usage); related quality of life. Every CTA train smells like a Rastafarian ceremony.
2. Frequency. This drives me nuts as a commuter on the Metra with 30 mins between trains. Even CTA quickly moves to 10-15 mins for no obvious reason during their daily operations.
3. Lack of interoperability or even coordination across lines and CTA/metra.
4. Lack of express service to either airport
5. Lack of timely or effective service between suburbs
Snagging the front seat on the top floor of a double decker is my favorite tourist experience.
That is kind of my point? It is showing as one of the best policies you can do, if you are interested in results. Remarkably so.
What it is not, is a good political move. You have to contend with taxes being a legitimate tool in controlling behavior. Which is hard to do, as taxes have been poisoned in the discourse.
My preferred solution of “offset the tax with a cut on a different tax” has seen shockingly little support from policy makers and talkers.
People will hate a new tax a whole lot less if their taxes don’t actually go up.
Problem is you do have to raise additional funds to pay for new things. And maintenance costs don't go down, either.
Sure, but isn’t that what growth is for? People might disagree on what percentage of income/property value/sales should be taxed, but surely it shouldn’t just keep going up?
Congestion pricing (and probably carbon tax too) has benefits beyond revenue. We should be cutting other taxes is that’s what it takes to get a good Pigouvian tax passed.
My mental model is that growth should cover maintenance, sure. If you need a massive cash flow to build a new system, you can't really fund that with growth, as easily. Sure, you can take out a loan. But that just adds to the costs.
Carbon taxes would be tougher, here. As annoying as it is for most people to contend with, the fact is most of the egregious carbon use is not here in the US.
I should add that I don't fully disagree with moving the taxes around some. Just pointing out that that is not a panacea, either. People need to comfortable with the fact that it takes capital to build. And that largely means taxes.
I really hate that we have made it so that people are near universally unhappy with what their taxes go to. We could have a pride or enjoyment from the things that we are able to do. I don't know why we don't.
The real point is that drivers should assume the cost of some of the externalities of car ownership
Some is a good start but what if we charged for ALL of the externalities?
Well, they pay gas taxes… but I agree and it also helps begin the transition to taxing them as they use less gas
This.
You have to build the transit system before you start making driving inconvenient/expensive or you lose what political will there is. Not that this should be subject to democracy or anything, it shouldn’t
I completely disagree. Congestion prices etc have benefits even when you do not have a robust transit network at the time of institution. It would be genuinely beneficial to have congestion pricing something like statewide and just reduce the sales tax a corresponding amount (or a little less so we can actually pay for road repairs). Drivers benefit from better roads and more dispersed traffic patterns and non-drivers benefit even more from paying less sales tax. And if it makes sense to improve transit options in specific areas given more new demand for such options, then do that.
I'm not clear where you are going with that. The general point is that you have to make it economical to get people to use transit. This means you have to do the big spend to build the infrastructure to support it, and then you still have to make it more expensive to just drive.
The problem a ton of transit discourse ignores, is that cars are extremely convenient if you have one. This is true even in places that have high transit use. People with cars have a huge convenience advantage.
Until there’s a subway stop across the street that comes every 2 minutes and connects to a spaghetti network. I’m just saying that you can do stuff like price parking, implement congestion pricing, whatever, make it inconvenient to drive to privilege transit - but you need a super convenient and comprehensive transit system first
I had jury duty a couple of weeks ago and didn’t want to drive-commute downtown during rush hour and worry about parking, so I took the bus. I was pleasantly surprised how easy it was! Due to dedicated bus lanes on the freeways and one of the arterials, it was as if rush hour wasn’t a thing at all. And it was clean - at that hour there were 14 other people on there who all appeared to be white collar workers. (Everyone I saw paid their fare too, I took notes) I would do it again in a heartbeat!
The only downside was having to wake up earlier than I would have, that bus only ran every 25 minutes during morning rush hour, and to make sure I didn’t miss the bus I had to try for the bus before the one that would get me there right on time. But that may have been a wash with driving given rush hour traffic that the bus zoomed past.
Frequency is freedom!
Yep! I was still pleasantly surprised considering what and where my neighborhood is (a SFH zone that’s 20 min away from downtown when there’s no traffic). And pleasantly surprised to see people taking it. The bus had 32 seats and there were 15 people on it when it entered the freeway. It was a hybrid diesel-electric bus. That feels sustainable and worthwhile.
As a frequent public transit user (not looking forward to SEPTA cuts), I think that making public transit smell better would create substantial amounts of positive good will for marginal users. I don't have a car, so I can't really complain when I'm waiting in the station and it reeks of urine and vape smoke, but I have a hunch that scent, more than things being visibly dirty (I don't think a subway station is measurably dirtier than any other urban surface) contributes to the "it's gross" complaint a lot of people have. I lack the knowledge of odor prevention necessary (or empirical evidence backing my claim) to come up with concrete policy solutions, but I will say that the last time I was in DC, I was impressed at how neutral WMATA smells compared to SEPTA (and it was a hot DC summer day, so I was expecting substantial BO).
BART is an interesting example too. There might be guy diddling himself in a trenchcoat, but at least everything is clean and nothing smells.
A complete unwillingness to acknowledge that mass transit beings poor people and their attendant problems into an area that didn’t have them before.
People have a reasonable mistrust of public transit in the states because the state has decided not to keep the bad poors off, and making it cheap to get to McLean has costs that far outweigh the benefits.
Same problem with voucher housing. In principle great. In practice the 7 feral teens in the house down the road are nooooot great Bob.
Places like NYC and Tokyo are much safer than Dallas or LA, and that’s not even taking car-specific deaths and lifestyle factors into account. I mean NYC has some of the highest tax rates in the world; if it were uniquely unsafe for rich people too they would just leave. Instead they take mass transit to work every day.
"Places like NYC... are much safer than Dallas or LA"
I'm going to leave Tokyo out of the conversation because that's another ball of wax altogether.
But a problem I see with a lot of these comparisons is people aren't clear about what they're actually comparing.
Like, usually when people from Dallas or LA are worried about crime they might experience on their trip to NYC, they're not comparing NYC to the equivalent urban core of Dallas or LA, they're comparing NYC to whatever super-safe suburb of Dallas or LA they live in.
And while to be sure, those people absolutely have an exaggerated perception of crime in NYC, and are usually surprised by how safe they feel once they get there - they're not wrong about the direction of the crime rate difference compared to the neighborhoods where they live and spend most of their time. So coming at them with "ackshually NYC is safer than your city, here are the numbers" just falls flat.
It doesn’t cause the comparison to fall flat, it just adds some nuance. People like the idea of being able to drive somewhere cheaply, and are worried in the abstract about their safety on public transit, but in practice we see that at least some cities can do congestion pricing and mass transit in a way that people prefer. We should learn from those wins instead of getting stuck in 1960s Jim Crow Atlanta thought for the rest of our lives.
The city I think of is Philly. Philly’s burbs would probably be more open to transit if they had any hope that Philly would prosecute assholes on the train.
This is kind of true in LA as well but LA is doing pretty well on transit over the last 15 or so years.
LA is actually an unsung transit success story imo, it needs to continue to expand but it’s built a lot more than Seattle for cheaper
The problem with LA is the severe declines in ridership over the couple decades preceding COVID. I would love to be able to give them more credit as it seems like they've done better than most of America at the construction side of things, but unfortunately, when it comes to actually getting people to use transit, whatever they're doing isn't working. And this is in California where they have the advantage of gas prices approaching European levels.
I generally agree with you, and don't agree with Jimmy Hoffa about transit increasing crime in neighborhoods. Was just making a narrow point that people, afraid of crime in NYC, who come from cities which have higher crime on paper, aren't *quite* as irrational as they may appear (though they could stand to be be more rational).
When I said fall flat I meant in terms of persuasion, not in terms of fact.
Caltrain (serving the poors of... Palo Alto) and the MBTA commuter rail (... Weston) are very badly managed. This is a grant to improve them. Ds not being tough on crime is not the root of all evils
So you've decided to negatively polarize yourself into being a classist aristocrat instead?
One question I have: it seems like mass transit policy is dominated by how things should work in big cities. But I've lived in small cities (<200,000) and in suburbs for most of my adult life, and public transit in those places seemed not to work so well. I have this vague intuition that a suburb-focused kind of mass transit might look really different from what works in Manhattan. Maybe it's just Uber or Waymo or some similar thing, but I wonder if you could have something that was more responsive and played better with low population density than the usual once-per-hour large county bus that has five riders on it.
There were some low hanging fruit in the low to mid population places I have lived in.
For instance, in Binghamton NY, all the local busses would leave the greyhound station simultaneously, on the hour, which seemed idiotic to me. (The intercity bus station is the only practical, non-car way of reaching nyc from there, so this is kind of a big deal and a big inconvenience).
In Salt Lake City, the local authorities seemed fixated on building out and extending the tram system further south instead of adding more small buses that would efficiently navigate the foothills. It is good that they have a tram to take you to the airport, but does that tram have to run all the way to byu? on a somewhat related note, i was once in a hurry and left my bike parked at one of the bike rails near the mormon temple while catching the tram to the airport. when i came back a week later, the bike was gone.
I live in a suburban part of Seattle city, and we have this service available in my neighborhood. I’ve never used it but I do think running vans instead of buses to low density areas is a good thing.
https://kingcounty.gov/en/dept/metro/travel-options/metro-flex
It sounds good on paper. But, when you start meandering to serve each and every trip, the number of people per hour a vehicle can serve is really tiny - like on the order of 2 or 3. The result is a service that seems great if you're the only one using it, but even a relatively tiny number of other people using it, all vehicles are busy carrying other customers, and your wait time to be picked up ends up being substantially longer, and less predictable, than just having a regular old bus that runs once every half hour.
In theory, an agency can avoid this problem by adding more vehicles, but that's really expensive, and you end up with a system that costs far more per boarding to operate than a conventional bus system, even in areas that don't generate particularly high ridership. And, of course, if there's any kind of special event that creates a temporary spike in ridership, and demand-response-based system will completely break down. Whereas, a bus can put those normally-empty seats to use and get people where they need to go.
I think it’s more of a last mile service. I have 3 buses easy walking distance from my house, but they’re all basically every 30 minutes. There’s a wider variety of buses and some higher frequency buses in that service area that I might use that van for last mile service for.
Yep - the 'well actually' pro transit uber alles crowd conveniently ignores the settled reality of life as most Americans currently experience it. Would it be great if you could wave a wand and pull half the population out of the exurbs and somehow convince them of the pleasures of apartment living and offer buses or micro transit options so awesome it causes them to junk their big ass trucks? Maybe - but literally none of that is going to happen - you can engage in progressive urban planning on the margins (Hank Hill grousing about flex posts in Arlen is actually pretty funny), but we've poured a lot of concrete in the last 100 years and the interstate highway system and the American love of SUVs isn't going anywhere. I hate to be Eeyore but the facts on the ground mitigate against radical change, esp for a party like the dems who need to actively re-earn voters' trust in their judgment and values.
Even in European countries with dense cities, extensive public transit and heavily taxed fuel, there are still a lot of cars on the roads. Maybe more little ass Fiats than big ass trucks, but people everywhere still like their own wheels.
I asked ChatGPT5
2. Problem: Underutilized Rail Corridors
(≤400 words)
The U.S. has thousands of miles of underused or abandoned freight rail corridors in urban and suburban areas. Many of these corridors could be converted into rapid transit or commuter rail lines at far lower cost than building new rights-of-way. However, legal, regulatory, and inter-agency barriers often stall these conversions for years.
Proposed Solution:
Establish a National Rail Corridor Conversion Program (NRCCP) to fast-track the transformation of disused or lightly used freight lines into passenger service.
Key Elements:
Federal mediation between freight railroads and transit agencies to negotiate shared-use or sale agreements.
Streamlined environmental review for projects using existing rail alignments.
Dedicated capital funding for track upgrades, stations, and electrification.
Land banking authority to preserve corridors at risk of abandonment.
This would allow cities to deploy new passenger service in a fraction of the time and cost of new rail construction, especially in growing suburbs and secondary cities.
Sounds good, but is it true
Seems so:
https://www.fastcompany.com/90713249/4-underused-u-s-rail-lines-that-should-get-a-second-life
"Monorail! Monorail!"
When I was a kid in the 90s private ski schools hired school buses to take neighborhood kids up skiing. The Seahawks and Mariners hired county buses to take people to the games.
Both of these are today banned.
My abundance neoliberal idea is to deregulate whatever the hell caused that.
Let American private businesses hire transit agencies and school districts for transportation again!
If it were up me, I would do things:
1) Eliminate all tariffs and "buy America" rules, allowing transit agencies to purchase buses and trains from foreign countries for far less than it costs them today to buy American-made buses and trains.
2) Grant visas to bus drivers in foreign countries interested in moving to the U.S., in order to alleviate the bus driver shortage we have here, and forestall unsustainable wage growth that makes service very expensive.
Of course, both of these suggestions are unlikely to ever happen. Democrats won't do it because both these ideas would leave impacted unions extremely pissed, and the pleasing unions is more politically important than making transit better. And, Republicans won't do it because these ideas go against the core of Donald Trump's beliefs that imports and immigration are fundamentally bad. Plus, Republicans could care less about the efficiency of transit, as a less efficient system is easier to attack, and argue for getting rid of it.
In addition to 1) and 2), I would also go through all the FTA regulations that government imposes on transit agencies and decide which ones are actually necessary, and which ones are just unnecessary rules and bureaucracy. I'd be willing to bet a lot of it is just unnecessary bureaucracy.
I would also restructure the grant criteria, redirect some money from capital to operations, and limit capital projects that qualify for grants to those that really improve the transit system vs. create vanity streetcars that don't actually provide any mobility.
With regards to 1), I will also add to this that it currently costs less to buy a Chinese-made *battery* bus in Europe than it does to buy a diesel bus in the U.S. So, when people say that bus electrification is unaffordable, the reason why it is unaffordable is not inherent in the technology, it's our country's trade policy. (That, combined with the fact that the entire U.S. bus market is too small to create the economies of scale necessary to introduce a whole new power technology at reasonable cost; a global bus market, however, is big enough to create those economies of scale, especially with the rest of the world investing more in transit in general than the U.S. does).
Smaller busses running more frequently.
Time of day street parking rates with fees set to achieve ~95% capacity; there is (almost) always a space if you are willing to pay.
"Smaller busses running more frequently."
Unfortunately, not really economical unless you can find a way to run the buses autonomously. As it stands today, the bus driver costs more than the bus itself, so a small bus costs nearly as much to operate as a big bus. In fact, it is quite often actually cheaper for a transit agency to just run big buses all day, even if their capacity is only needed during peak hours, in order to avoid buying a whole extra fleet of small buses and paying drivers to move buses around with "out of service" signs to swap the small buses and big buses twice a day.
I understand that it is more expensive but it would provide much better service and ought to increase ridership. And you would not need an “extra fleet,” just more of the smaller ones.
It’s like lots of things you get better police protection with more police officers. A way to use the increase income from street parking fees and a way to employ the former Zoning exception issuers. :)
Of course, more frequent buses are better! But, as the operating cost for a small bus isn't that much less than a big bus, it is primarily the age-old debate as to whether to raise taxes to fund better service.
At the same time, bigger buses than strictly necessary to carry current ridership has many advantages. Many bus route with overall low ridership have occasional demand spikes. For example, a high school letting out, or a special event. A big bus can more easily handle such spikes without the risk of leaving riders on the curb. A bigger bus also leaves passengers with more room, for example, if you need to carry luggage, or if you need to get away from another passenger who is behaving obnoxiously. Of course, if a bus twice as big cost twice as much to operate, this wouldn't be worth it, but if a bus twice as big costs only 10% more to operate (which is more like the real world), then it probably is.
I don’t really care about the size of the bus; it is the frequency that matters. I live near a major street and buses I might want to use to go places ARE pretty frequent so bussing instead of driving and parking is real option. Less frequent service would not be.
While smarter transit policy and management would go a long way, I wonder how much effect it will have when the rest of daily life in the US is so auto-oriented. Slow boring of hard boards indeed.