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The Future of [Public Transit] in America
Knight_
Dead Dead DeadRegistered User regular
Dead Dead DeadRegistered User regular
Public Transit
Buses, Trolleys, Subways, and Commuter Rail are undergoing some tough times throughout US major cities. Since 2016, there has been a decrease in ridership in public transit throughout the country, including the 7 largest public transit systems in America (New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, D.C., San Francisco, Boston and Philadelphia). These decreases in ridership reduce farebox recovery, the percentage of the line's cost paid for by fares. As farebox recovery decreases, transit authorities must cut costs, usually through reducing service on a line. This can further reduce revenue because people will seek alternate, more reliable means of transportation, causing this damaging cycle to repeat.
What is causing this drop? There are many thoughts. Cheap rideshare services are an obvious culprit, combining the convenience of point to point transportation and speed of a car with the low (currently) prices of public transportation for many users. But they are not alone! Increases in working/learning remotely, online purchasing, low gas costs, and bikeshares all take their own pound of flesh to various degrees. These factors are likely all not going to go away any time soon, so transit authorities are going to have to plan to deal with them.
So, what should be done? Well, if you have a silver bullet, you can probably go make a few million dollars consulting. But aside from that, many transit authorities are exploring new bus systems like express buses, partnerships with rideshare companies on the periphery of their systems primarily as a feeder to commuter rail, decreasing wait times on a line making the service more reliable, or off-board/rear door fare collection which speeds the boarding process and allows faster trips. These methods can help and do not require large capital investment, which is good for most cash strapped authorities, but probably aren't going to cut it in the long term.
A useful public transit system is of incredible value to a city, allowing peoples of all incomes and means to move about while also decreasing congestion. The damaging cycle that is just beginning needs to be avoided and reversed to maintain and upgrade these systems for the future, as increasing urbanization pushes more and more people into cities, increasing demand on the transportation networks therein.
Sources:
National Transit Database
WaPo Story
Philadelphia Inquirer Story
CityLab article
This thread is about discussing the present and future of Public Transportation, and how to keep it a viable service among increasing competition for riders and government dollars.
This thread is NOT about dumping on Uber or other rideshare services.
Buses, Trolleys, Subways, and Commuter Rail are undergoing some tough times throughout US major cities. Since 2016, there has been a decrease in ridership in public transit throughout the country, including the 7 largest public transit systems in America (New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, D.C., San Francisco, Boston and Philadelphia). These decreases in ridership reduce farebox recovery, the percentage of the line's cost paid for by fares. As farebox recovery decreases, transit authorities must cut costs, usually through reducing service on a line. This can further reduce revenue because people will seek alternate, more reliable means of transportation, causing this damaging cycle to repeat.
What is causing this drop? There are many thoughts. Cheap rideshare services are an obvious culprit, combining the convenience of point to point transportation and speed of a car with the low (currently) prices of public transportation for many users. But they are not alone! Increases in working/learning remotely, online purchasing, low gas costs, and bikeshares all take their own pound of flesh to various degrees. These factors are likely all not going to go away any time soon, so transit authorities are going to have to plan to deal with them.
So, what should be done? Well, if you have a silver bullet, you can probably go make a few million dollars consulting. But aside from that, many transit authorities are exploring new bus systems like express buses, partnerships with rideshare companies on the periphery of their systems primarily as a feeder to commuter rail, decreasing wait times on a line making the service more reliable, or off-board/rear door fare collection which speeds the boarding process and allows faster trips. These methods can help and do not require large capital investment, which is good for most cash strapped authorities, but probably aren't going to cut it in the long term.
A useful public transit system is of incredible value to a city, allowing peoples of all incomes and means to move about while also decreasing congestion. The damaging cycle that is just beginning needs to be avoided and reversed to maintain and upgrade these systems for the future, as increasing urbanization pushes more and more people into cities, increasing demand on the transportation networks therein.
Sources:
National Transit Database
WaPo Story
Philadelphia Inquirer Story
CityLab article
This thread is about discussing the present and future of Public Transportation, and how to keep it a viable service among increasing competition for riders and government dollars.
This thread is NOT about dumping on Uber or other rideshare services.
+1
Posts
I wish that more money could be put into capital projects like light rail, as there is a clear preference for exclusive right of way light rail among transit riders, but I just don't know how that can be done in an era where these authorities are struggling to break even on mandatory maintenance on their existing systems.
https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2015/11/americas-top-transit-systems-face-a-102-billion-repair-backlog/415590/
The looming death spiral is visible if you squint, as reliability gets worse and repairs pile up, the system collapses as people stop using it, meaning more money needs to be spent to carry less people, and that's a hard sell for any politician.
This all goes back to the idea of should public transportation mostly support those who need it or those who will financially support it. While business commuters are the ones most likely to be willing to pay more for the ride they also expect a quickness and level of decorum that might be contrary to the overall idea of public transportation and there is a lot of difficulty mixing the two for cities/transit organizers. They are the two groups that use the system and have very different ideas of what should be provided.
Yay, public transit!
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
I think a big issue is that U.S public transit is, for obvious reasons, mostly located in the big cities. Problem is, small towns and rural communities are in desperate need of some sort of public transportation alternative, because having millions of people commuting by driving every day is not going to be feasible for much longer.
I don't think anybody in the world has a good rural public transit solution that would work for the US. There's just too much land and the fact that our highways and cars are actually OK means we can't just copy Russia or India and expect that to work.
Doc: That's right, twenty five years into the future. I've always dreamed on seeing the future, looking beyond my years, seeing the progress of mankind. I'll also be able to see who wins the next twenty-five world series.
The thing is, we did have that solution a century ago:
MORE TRAINS IN US PLZ K THKS BAI
"We believe in the people and their 'wisdom' as if there was some special secret entrance to knowledge that barred to anyone who had ever learned anything." - Friedrich Nietzsche
edit: joke site removed, possibly it's bitcoin mining virus infected!
PT has got to be rock-solid reliable or people will go to other options and once you break the habit, it starts to feel like more and more of an annoyance to get back on a bus.
Well, it's rather hard to maintain a public transit system on bailing wire and prayers, which is what a lot of these systems get to work with. And I don't really see a bus as an annoyance personally - I'd never want to drive in New York City, given the massive headache to do so (high traffic, expensive parking, worry about theft/damage, etc.) The bigger issue, I think, is the stigmatization of public transit in the US - with the exception of a handful of cities such as NYC and Chicago, mass transit is seen as a "lower class" thing.
If buses have to compete with car traffic, they will always lose. If it takes an hour for a car to get from A to B in traffic, then a bus in the same lane is going to take an hour plus whatever amount of time they spend picking up and dropping off passengers.
Unfortunately, in a crowded city with a lot of traffic, dedicated bus lanes means taking away either a car lane or parking, which is often politically unpopular.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
Unfortunately, at-grade rail can get clogged up by car congestion... blocked intersections, traffic accidents, dumb pedestrians and bicyclists, can all throw off the timetable.
Elevated light rail and subways are significantly more expensive, but there's no point in having rail transit unless most of it is either elevated or underground.
So a lot of US cities & counties cheap out, do it half-assed, and then ridership sucks because, surprising nobody who actually knows anything about this topic, the at-grade transit isn't much faster or more reliable than just driving a car.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
Ground the helicopters, boot the cars and scrap the buses.
That may be true for cities, but I don't think public transportation is going to come back to towns and rural areas in this lifetime. The main factor listed in the video - escaping from poverty - only applies once you actually establish residence in a city. Living outside the city is something people do - whether they are rich, middle class, or poor - when they are not actively seeking to increase their financial class. Therefore, a financial mobilizer like public transportation wouldn't be as useful to them as to a person in a city of opportunities looking to switch to and upgrade employment frequently. Rural people get a single job for 50 years and die, so they don't need networking or efficient cost of living solutions. They are resigned to afford the luxury of personal transportation.
Doc: That's right, twenty five years into the future. I've always dreamed on seeing the future, looking beyond my years, seeing the progress of mankind. I'll also be able to see who wins the next twenty-five world series.
Metro gets almost no money to do their repairs, and they’re probably the furthest along in the low money leads to low reliability leads to lower ridership leads to lower money repeat cycle.
Not necessarily? The vast majority of the Japanese rail network is at-grade and it works really well.
It's the same problem other infrastructure has: it's easier to sell a shiny new road or bridge or rail line than the money to keep the existing one running.
The problem isn't the rail being at-grade, it's that in the US, cars are granted massive amounts of privilege on roads.
Additionally, to be frank, Japan doesn't have the same space for sprawl as the US, and so Public transportation is necessity because cars are more a luxury.
That's honestly the key thing to me is outside of the concrete jungle of cities with lots of infrastructure for public transport, Americans are incentivized to use cars for everything, and the culture has grown around that. To change that, you'd have make a public transportation that was cheaper than cars, and goes to all the same places or is no more than a couple minutes walking, and be able to run this service 24/7 with incredibly minimal downtimes. It's a task that would put would bring a titan to tears.
Not all of Japan is downtown Tokyo. There is plenty of sprawl and the vast majority of Japanese families own cars.
Their country is shaped like a banana. You can easily imagine a single line going through it that would cover the area more usefully than any other line. The US is too thick as well as being big.
Doc: That's right, twenty five years into the future. I've always dreamed on seeing the future, looking beyond my years, seeing the progress of mankind. I'll also be able to see who wins the next twenty-five world series.
Japan's major cities have subway systems and the Shinkansen bullet train is entirely grade-separated. The Japanese Ministry of Land has national standards that emphasize the use of grade-separated crossings and Japan builds grade-separated junctions much more frequently than we do.
So, yeah, I'll concede that ground-level rail can work well as long as you separate the other traffic so it isn't competing with right-of-way.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
Cars are not cheap when you account for gas and maintenance. Also, can you clarify what "other factors" you're referring to? There are a lot of things that could be.
Doc: That's right, twenty five years into the future. I've always dreamed on seeing the future, looking beyond my years, seeing the progress of mankind. I'll also be able to see who wins the next twenty-five world series.
This, too, for sure.
We straight-up subsidize cars in the US in multiple ways.
Less than half of our road infrastructure budget comes from gasoline & car tab taxes. The rest comes out of general funds at multiple levels of government. This is also a symptom of our national underinvestment in infrastructure where all transportation modalities are starved for budget.
Also, I know I sound like a broken record, but parking is also subsidized and parking requirements are basically a cash transfer from renters to drivers.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.