How U.S. Cities’ Public Transit Stacks up(fivethirtyeight.com) |
How U.S. Cities’ Public Transit Stacks up(fivethirtyeight.com) |
Amsterdam doesn't have great public transportation. It would drive me insane when I lived there (Indische Buurt / Science Park). Their system of public transportation relies a lot on connecting between bus/tram/subway/railway, but I never found the connections to work well. The frequency of most lines is also pretty darn bad.
Unfortunately a lot of people living in Amsterdam are fine with the sorry state of their public transportation because they feel the Amsterdam mindset is to ride a bike. (There's a lot of truth to that, of course, but the reality is that a lot of non-white Amsterdam-born people rely on public transportation.)
Stockholm's public transportation seemed fine last time I was there, but it's definitely not better than NYC. When I visited a university there, I had to take a subway + bus. Buses suck! Nevertheless, the connection was not bad overall.
The great thing about the subway in NYC is the how the stations are spread out on the map. There are a lot of stations and you will find them in sensible locations. The fact that the subway is operational 24/7 is also amazing. That's a lot more unusual than some people give credit for. You don't even find that in Singapore or Hong Kong or London or Paris. What's less than great is the reliability and the frequency of the trains to/from Brooklyn.
Going from one point in Brooklyn to another also sometimes requires going through Manhattan, which makes the trip take too long.
Another sore point is communication. The signs are confusing and there are virtually no CRTs/LCDs to guide you (if Paris and Brussels can handle the vandalism, so should NYC). The verbal announcements are often confusing or wrong (multiple times, late at night, I heard 'train X was canceled' just as it arrived). A lot of the time you can't even properly hear them. The train models are also incredibly outdated.
Unfortunately, in NY, buses are no good alternative because they are always late and absurdly slow. I always suspected they were intended foremost for old and disabled people since they accelerate very slowly after a stop and seem to stop every block.
I have never been to Helsinki, Tokyo, or Berlin.
One subway system I want to mention is the Beijing one. It's by no means perfect, but the frequency of the subway is just amazing. At many–perhaps most–stations a train stops every one or two minutes. My patience for waiting for trains never recovered after living there.
I have been to Paris/London (multiple times) and their system sucks comparing to NYC. In NY I can get easily from point A to point B anywhere in the city aside from SI.
NYC has 24hours subway service, it's hard to beat that.
Finding out that San Francisco does something better than Seattle does teach something about improving it in Seattle, because the legal, political, cultural, and social environments are much more similar.
Hence, domestic comparisons are more interesting, as they suggest more achievable improvements.
Now decades later, with the automotive lobby not being quite so strong, the asphalt industry has their guy as the head of the transportation department. Non highway projects of any sort are not just discouraged but actively squashed and ostracized.
I'm still astounded they are actually building the new US Bike Route 50 through Central Ohio. It must be forces outside our state government making that happen. Maybe it is a good contract for the asphalt contractors too. I would not be surprised, in spite of that, if our governor's administration figures out a way to stop it.
I have heard many, many times around here: "This is America. I have a RIGHT to drive the biggest car I can afford and I expect to be able to do so whenever and wherever I want. You are not going to force me to ride a bus or subway or train or bike, nor force any of my tax dollars to go to such un-American things."
(Apparently if you have any sort of public transportation system you are forcing people to use it.)
I'd like to see some information on the density of the areas. For example, Chicago is listed as the metro region (8 million people) when the city itself only has about 3 million, and public transport hardly exists outside the city.
If the total rides had been divided by the city population, it would equal much closer to 200 rides per capita.
From doing some of that work manually, I found that many (if not most) public transit systems are emitting more CO2 than if all of the passengers had ridden in a car, with the national average of 1.7 riders per car.
My question is: Why is SF's public transit so popular? It can't be because of the quality. LA is a much bigger city, why isn't public transit more popular there?
SF alone might rank lower. Muni is certainly not "popular" with the population.. it's much less reliable than BART. My terribly anecdotal impression is a lot of people bike or take cabs within SF if at all possible.
Muni has an always packed light rail subway system as well. Unfortunately, unlike San Jose's VTA, that subway has no bike carrying capacity. This makes it difficult to ride the bike to a light rail station and then use it again to reach your final destination in downtown or elsewhere in the city.
Regional heavy rail systems like BART have enormous ridership.
San Francisco buses need dedicated lanes in residential areas. Based on my personal experience, the root cause of traffic slowdowns appears to be double-parked cars. Buses run quickly at night when they are not slowed down by cars.
http://sf.streetsblog.org/2013/10/02/the-sorry-state-of-doub...
But this is changing. Dedicated lanes are being put in place. http://sf.streetsblog.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/Picture...
Roads are publicly funded and owned just like tracks are. The cars themselves are privately owned, so I guess that's market points for cars. But, trains involve a direct transaction that (partially) funds the facility in a user-pays way. Roads are funded by taxes. They try to use registration and petrol taxes that are related to use of roads but it's still a tax, not a normal transaction. If you drive on a private road, you still pay petrol tax and the taxes can't be tied to use of a specific road. I'd say that's market points to the trains.
Getting to the more fuzzy trains have a social egality to them. Everyone sits in the same cars looking at each other, sharing space. You end up squished against people of races, creeds & classes that you mightn't associate with normally. They're seen as environmental which is left wing. They're inclusive of the marginal people who can't afford to drive, are to young or otherwise unable.
Cars have a personal liberty aspect to them. Your car. Your space. Your rules. Go where you want, when you want. Open roads. Wind in your hair. They don't have a schedule set by someplace else or stops decided on by some comitee. Cars are status symbols and and opportunity to show wealth. Car ownership is something to aspire to. They're symbols of the great capitalist/industrial age.
I have interesting associations with the late 19th & early 20th centuries, the formative years of trains and cars. I associate the industry of the late 19th more with socialist symbols. The plight of the working man, Marxism (pre-Lenin and the east-west associations), early labour movements, decaying empires. Coal soot. Europe. I associate the early 20th industry with American ascension. Iconic technicolour images of manufacturing wealth pampering American housewives with vacuum cleaners and weekly trips to a beauty parlors. All the values of that time and place. A certain type of clean shaven naivety.
I can't quite put a thorough argument together, but I think the symbolism is interesting.
Most U.S. public mass transit could not maintain itself based on "user pays", even forgetting about capital expenditures. Unsubsidized, fares would rise, ridership would fall, and prices would then need to be still higher to compensate.
On the other hand, the gas tax and other user fees (trucking, etc.) already fund the majority of U.S. highway spending both maintenance and capital (even with 1/6 of it redirected to mass transit!), and could easily fund all of it if the political will were there. Some people would drive less if we charged 2x the gas tax or had an odometer tax, but nobody thinks the system itself would be unsustainable in the same way that most public transit would be if it had to be funded entirely by its users.
Your point on Chicago is well taken - I was surprised to see SF/Oak ahead of it, as they "feel" harder to navigate with transit only, but I was forgetting that the suburbs are included in Chicago, which is basically impossible once you leave the city limits.
Ann Arbor, MI (#20) is a great example where University of Michigan runs a fleet of buses that puts many small cities' systems to shame. Lafayette, IN (#30) is partially supported by serving Purdue University. Bloomington, IN (#40) has two bus systems - the city's, and Indiana University's. (Disclaimer: these are all customers of DoubleMap.)
Not sure why you think it would be a false impression - public transit is used a lot in college towns.
In urban neighborhoods on the red and blue lines, for example, car ownership is basically superfluous.
The same is true within the US. It is neither legally, politically, culturally, nor socially homogenous. Learning how to improve public transportation in Seattle would be more productive if you studied Amsterdam than if you studied Memphis or Baton Rouge.
No point giving pats on the back all round when nobody is even attempting to change the "legal, cultural and social" environment.
Regardless, the effect of even a tiny subsidy for cars affects the cost recovery of transit. By subsidizing cars, you actually force larger subsidies for transit. The operating and maintenance costs of car use scale linearly with vehicle miles travelled, whereas the costs of transit scale as a step function (you don't need a new bus for every user, you need a new bus for every 60 users...riders 2 through 60 ride for free) on the scale of an individual transit vehicle, and roughly log linear in aggregate. Therefore, every transit user you subsidize into a car increases the per user cost of all the rest of the transit users. If car users paid even a tiny fraction more than the pittance they currently do, it could push enough users onto transit to make it sustainable. And if they acctually paid their true costs, almost nobody would drive at all.
That a direct quote from here: http://taxfoundation.org/article/gasoline-taxes-and-user-fee...
Which cites its source as the, "U.S. Census Bureau, State and Local Government Finance 2011."
Even so, your own link says 50% of state and local roads are funded with user fees. The IHS number is around 70%, even with 1/6 of the gas tax redirected to public transit. If you doubled the user fees and eliminated all other sources of funding, the IHS and the state/local road system would still thrive. Not so most public transit.
