Public transit that is not subway on rails suck big time.
I have wasted thousands of hours waiting for the bus that either came early, or is late, under 100 degrees of sun and under snowstorms. Add to that the <10mph average speed that a typical bus that stops every 2 minutes achieves, and a 2mile commute can last easily 45 minutes.
I have walked thousands of miles because the bus stops do not align with my destinations.
Since I got a car and live in the suburbs, I pay much lower housing costs, I start exactly 20’ before my punch in time, I park under my office building and I am never late (maybe 1/300 due to an accident). Oh and I always arrive dry.
Commuting in general is bad. Commuting by bus is one of the worst things that us peasants have to deal with on a daily basis.
Public bus systems can be good; most cities and municipalities simply don't bother to make it so (because "polite society" drives everywhere).
NYC's buses have their own flaws, but they demonstrate many of the necessary conditions for success: dedicated bus lanes, split-service (local and express on the same route, with corresponding bus sizes), and multimodal connections (light rail, streetcars, subways). This is all in contrast to how many bus networks in the US operate: they pick you up on the side of the highway, drive with the rest of traffic, and drop you off on either the highway or in a bus depot in the middle of nowhere.
It's definitely a perception issue that's borne from some reality. Having taken buses in a few cities, I can say some buses were perfectly fine, clean, and felt dignified to ride. A utility of the commons. Some other cities, it felt like taking a vandalized back alley vending machine to work.
Sounds pretty good, if you overlook people smoking meth or crack, publicly urinating and defecating on the bus, violence, etc. Not unique to buses for sure. Thanks, but I'll keep my "polite society" vehicle and properly planned highways in Orange County.
I have never once seen any of these on a public bus, either in my city or others. What you're describing sounds like a civic problem where you live, not some kind of intrinsic quality of public transportation.
I’ve lived in 3 Canadian cities and 1 major US city. Regularly used public transit in all of them. Used transit around both Canada and the US as a tourist, plus a few locations in Europe, Australia.
For any location where I was using it for more than a week I’ve encountered something unpleasant. Various degrees and extremes, but in my experience (not OP) it certainly seems to be intrinsic to public transit.
Some of these could arguably be a net good (it’s much better that the drunk is on the bus rather than driving himself!) and I continue to prefer transit over driving myself when available, but I would never deny that it’s not always an enjoyable experience
To be fair: I've seen plenty of unpleasant things on public transport. Subways, in particular, are a different world from public buses in NYC.
When I think about these things, I interrogate my frame of reference. At least for the US, the most appropriate contrast is the road trips I've taken, during which I saw no shortage of drunk drivers and general mishegaas at gas stations and rest stops.
Totally agree. But to run with your frame of reference point if I may, it’s also important to look at those events from other’s POV. I’m a larger, older man. What I find mildly uncomfortable on a late night bus alone might feel absolutely dangerous for my wife. Or someone with disabilities, etc.
Yeah, that's a great point, and a source of bias. On top of that, it would be a real contortion for me to claim that NYC's public transit is even remotely accommodating to people with disabilities.
Definitely saw a foilie in use on the bus yesterday evening.
The issue is that my city promotes itself as a good example of public transit and receives accolades from public transit folks, and naive people take it as archetypal.
Same. I've travelled by bus in many cities on three continents and never experienced anything like that. The worst bus I've been on was in San Francisco but even that was pretty clean and decent.
I haven't owned a car for three years and public transit has been fine most of the time, but I live in a city that prioritises public transit. On the rare occasion that I can't get a bus somewhere there is a car sharing service I can fall back on.
Yeah, same in Chicago, really the same as mass transit anywhere: You need density to make it work. My little town of under 100K population tries to do city bus services but it's a joke. Most routes run once or twice an hour which is not often enough to be convenient. Busses drive around empty or with one or two riders. It's a service that costs millions of dollars a year to operate and is used by a tiny minority of the people. It's a sacred cow though.
Taking the bus to Javits Center will quickly show how even NY with their subways and buses fall short. I ended up walking about 10 NY city blocks b/c the bus wasn't running.
I won't excuse Javits: they built it in one of the most inconvenient neighborhoods in Manhattan for public transit (presumably because it's a convention center, meaning that most of the expected traffic is out-of-towners staying at nearby hotels). That being said, the 7 to Hudson Yards is (IME) the best way to get there, and is among the more reliable subway services.
Edit: That being said, 10 city blocks is half a mile. That's an ordinary walk in NYC.
Chicken and egg; we've (in the US) culturally encoded public transport as inconvenient, inefficient, and for "poor people," all but ensuring that it remains that way. Other parts of the world don't have that stigma, and are better off for it.
No, public transit systems can only be good on paper. Then they get implemented, the fares are held artificially low for equity reasons, bums move in, polite society abandons the system and it turns into a rolling cesspool. Every time.
My private car however has only my germs. No drugs. No needles. No piss. No stinky bums laying across the seats. My music. Air conditioning. Goes where I want, when I want it.
The only difference is cost. My private car costs me a lot. Your public transit dream also cost ME a lot.
As evidenced by functioning public transport virtually everywhere else in the world: the things you're describing are civic problems, not problems with public transit. It's no particular coincidence that the US, with its car-dominated culture, has more civic problems on public transit than just about any other nation.
> Your public transit dream also cost ME a lot.
Are you operating under the misapprehension that my local, state, and federal taxes don't pay for your roads? We can play that game all day, but I don't think it's going to be a very fruitful one. And that's before we even get to the question of externalities, via which your car costs me a great deal.
> No, public transit systems can only be good on paper. Then they get implemented, the fares are held artificially low for equity reasons, bums move in, polite society abandons the system and it turns into a rolling cesspool. Every time.
Have you been to London? Paris? Zurich?
I'm trying to understand the basis for your absolutism and pessimism. In those cities, polite society definitely hasn't abandoned the public transit systems; at least not when I had been.
I am a resident of Bengaluru. We have a city bus service that is quite good, has air conditioning on some routes, and is quite cheap (I spend about 50c to go about 25km).
Our government subsidises the operations of BMTC, so it is cheap.
The central government spent a whole lot of money in cleaning up the country, and I am glad to report that a lot of changes did take place.
All things considered, our cost of living is lower, we try to ensure that there are not too many homeless folks, so that is there.
I used to commute by bus rapid transit. It was great. The buses were every 5-10 minutes during peak times, the stations and website gave spot on updates, the air conditioning always worked, the buses were clean, you had internet the whole way and generally everyone could find seating. When there was an accident or road construction the bus... went around it.
When I moved to a subway-oriented city the trains were a bit more frequent and not subject to street traffic, but they were more crowded, the internet/phone service regularly failed; and when things went wrong, they REALLY went wrong, which occurred monthly. A 15 minute ride turning into hot crowded 1h+ mess was not uncommon. And the regular track and station closures created all sorts of chaos that I never dealt with on the bus.
Bus rapid transit is one of the most underrated modes of transportation and light rail easily the most overrated, IMO. It's not bad, but it has captured the public's attention in an unhealthy way.
Of course, now I work from home and walk to about 50% of the places I need to go, even in the deep suburbs.
> Bus rapid transit is one of the most underrated modes of transportation and light rail easily the most overrated
Bus rapid transit is great and vastly cheaper than anything on rails upfront, but even really well designed ones like Curitiba's one has lower capacity (albeit at a higher frequency, in their case). However until electric buses become the norm BRT has a few other massive downsides - pollution, noise, maintenance, emissions.
Overall, each transportation method (bike, e-scooter, BRT, regular buses, trolleybuses, trams, light rail, heavy rail, commuter rail, car) has it's own set of advantages and disadvantages, and they are often location and urban design specific. The best public transit systems are those with a mix that works for them.
The biggest problem with most bus systems is that they use the same roads as private traffic. This means that for any individual person taking the car is faster than taking the bus. Of course all of these people who live in car-dependent suburbs already have a car so the additional cost to drive is low and they will get there faster and arguably more comfortable (sure, you can't read a book but you have your own personal environment). The end result is that the roads are full, need constant expansion and no one takes the bus.
Subways on rail are often faster than driving so they tend to be incredibly popular and greatly reduce traffic on the road. But subways on rails are not the only way to ensure that public transit is fast.
> I doubt a 2 mile commute could take 45 minutes. It should take... 12 minutes. Let's call it 15.
We can look this up. For instance, going from somewhere random in Tribeca to a random bar 2 miles away is a 42 minute walk or a 37-42 minute bus ride (with 1 change, with busses running every 15 minutes). This is a good example of a failure mode if the bus doesn't go exactly where you want it to.
What if you do a perfect straight line single bus for 2 miles from Tribeca it's still 24 minutes, with busses every 15 minutes, so between 24-39 minutes.
You don't take the bus, it probably is 45mins. You are not including time walking to/from the bus stop at both ends. Time spent waiting for the bus- this is probably the biggest one. Time for people getting on and off at bus stops and paying- in some places, for example in London, there are stops every couple of hundred meters on the route, it is kind of ridiculous.
Having them close together is a massive help to people with mobility issue, bags, and /or small children. TFL policy is to reduce journey times by keeping stops less than five minutes’ from homes, and closer in town centres.
The buses also won’t normally stop unless there is someone boarding or alighting.
Bus Rapid Transit calls when you are proposing a subway or a tram, promising great things at a low price. After you agree to settle for a shinier bus line instead of the nice, fast, reliable transit system you originally wanted, the value engineers get to work compromising the design, and you end up with... another bus route. Maybe it has a different color of paint this time.
It sounds like you were just going to end up with a mediocre, compromised system anyway. "Light rail" is still bringing us things like the Santa Clara VTA system at best, and the Virginia Beach "Tide" at its worst. Likewise cities with "real" subways include such luminaries as Atlanta and Miami. Have you tried to take the metro system in Miami?
Both Seattle, WA and Ottawa, ON built out dedicated BRT infrastructure that was later repurposed for light rail. So I wouldn’t say it’s always just a new coat of paint.
The downtown Seattle transit tunnel is an unusual beast; it was built from the start as a hybrid bus and rail system, though the city did not yet have any plan to build a train network. The builders designed the tunnel and its stations for train service and laid tracks anyway, expecting they would eventually be needed.
So... where BRT is a proposal to save money on transit by building cheaper infrastructure - a promise it can always keep, since bus service can be degraded as far as necessary to fit a budget - the DSTT project instead used the promise of future rail service as a motivation to spend more money on transit, building better infrastructure than they actually needed at the time.
The city of <50k residents from the article is never going to have a subway system on rails. This is a solution for small cities that replaces the terrible bus service you've experienced. The microtransit system described specifically eliminates the bus stops that you cite as drawbacks.
Public bus transit and private car transit are inherently in conflict. You basically can't run them on the same streets and expect the bus to not suck.
You could, of course, run the bus in a dedicated, separate right-of-way to solve that problem. But like you said, just build rail at that point
> You basically can't run them on the same streets and expect the bus to not suck.
That's just nonsense or specific to some areas. I spent a couple of hours on the Stagecoach buses today travelling from Paignton to Kinsgwear and then Dartmouth to Totnes and back to Paignton. The same journey by car would probably have been more expensive because of the cost of parking the car in busy tourist towns and it wouldn't have been much quicker. Some of the roads are barely wide enough for two cars to pass each other yet the buses still keep to their timetable.
Quite. Bus schedulers are very well informed on traffic patterns and account for this.
Some days when things are faster then usual this means they will ask drivers to stop for a bit in order to avoid running early.
Why is rail any different? If one train goes down on a subway line, all of the trains after it are pretty much stuck too. A few lines can sometimes route around pain, but that's kind of rare.
In general, public transportation is just pretty inconvenient. (Now, I like walking so it's a bonus for me, but I can see how it's not for everyone.)
I still remember when I as a full time public transit commuter well into my adulthood. When new friends who didn't own cars would begin spending significant time with me we'd have to naturally public transit around town. Many of these individuals never really spent significant time outside of a car or a building having to stand around waiting outdoors. This became obvious when the weather got rough in winter and it was revealed they didn't own a proper coat to spend time freezing outside. I've lent out many of my extra coats in these situations.
Under "Counterarguments" section it's been argued that the streetcar lines were already on a downward decline by the time GM bought them, so blaming GM seems tenuous.
US streetcar lines were in the 'transit death spiral' in no small part because they were largely built before cars were common, and became dramatically slower once car traffic started obstructing their right-of-way, which they were usually required by contract to maintain.
(There were many other factors, including their overexpansion during a securities bubble and that their concessions were usually for a 'nickel fare' with no inflation adjustment, which lead to declining real revenue over time)
Streetcars, combining the routing inflexibility of trains with the vulnerability to traffic of busses. We could have saved them if we'd banned cars from city centers and you can argue that if you want to but it wasn't GM that did them in.
"Vulnerability to traffic" can be alternately expressed as "right of way violated by individual cars." The history of the decline of streetcars in the US is the history of automotive companies convincing the public that cars take priority over all other forms of transportation, consequences for the commons be damned.
I think they probably meant the Netherlands' general urban planning principles. Cycling access is one small part, but there are lots of other things that can be copied: making it impractical to drive in city centers, restricting commercial traffic to highways and off-hours stops, fully separating pedestrian and cycling crossings, etc.
Aren’t these just subsidized taxis? They don’t help with congestion, they don’t help with pollution, I don’t see how they ultimately bring down costs since you still need individual cars and drivers...
Perhaps in some limited cases, multiple people going the same way at the same time can share a vehicle, but how often will that work out in practice? I basically never end up sharing an Uber/Lyft with anyone else despite selecting the pool option.
Definitely not the point of these. In larger cities, bus transit is for reducing congestion without massive infrastructure investment. In smaller cities, bus transit is purely for helping people who can't/don't drive get to where they need to be.
The problem is, there is not enough ridership in smaller cities for a bus to be frequent or cover a wide area. This solves that problem, but it only works since congestion isn't a problem.
As soon as there enough people to worry about congestion, bus transit is better.
> They don’t help with congestion, they don’t help with pollution,
So what? The first and only point of a public transport system is, you know, transporting people. Limiting congestion and pollution comes very far in terms of priority, and only once the core mission is fulfilled.
Plus, the counter-factual is not the same use of bus systems, but instead lower use of bus systems in favor of private ride share companies who don’t have the incentive to limit congestion or pollution at all. The consumer revolution has plainly exposed that people will consistently choose the more convenient option.
The object of a public transportation system is to transport the public, not individual people. That means mass design considerations, which are the same considerations as anti-congestion. Reducing pollution is a nice side effect.
>The object of a public transportation system is to transport the public, not individual people
"Individual people" comprise "the public".
>That means mass design considerations
In a town of 49,000 people, and where there are only 5 buses that run once per hour, I think such considerations isn't really worth considering, at least compared to the convenience factor of not having to wait 1 hour.
The point I was making is that public transportation systems should be designed with multiple people in mind. Otherwise they're just subsidized taxicabs (which is fine, in an extremely rural area, but Wilson is a moderately sized city right on I-95).
> In a town of 49,000 people, and where there are only 5 buses that run once per hour, I think such considerations isn't really worth considering, at least compared to the convenience factor of not having to wait 1 hour.
"Mass design" doesn't mean a NYC-scale subway or bus system; it means a combination of (1) incentivizing mass transit, bringing demand up, and (2) expanding access to transit and restructuring routes to meet demand. It wouldn't surprise me if Wilson hadn't done a ridership-based restructuring of their routes and timetables in the last 30 years.
The primary purpose of public transport (within an urban area) is reducing traffic. The vast majority of people can use private vehicles just fine, and if traffic is not an issue, the rest can use taxis. Subsidized ones if necessary.
Reducing traffic is the primary goal. When there is less traffic, the city can reserve less space for streets and parking. That leaves more space for the purposes people are in the city for. Also, areas with fewer cars tend to be more pleasant than areas with heavy traffic.
> The vast majority of people can use private vehicles just fine,
Roughly half the population of the UK has nowhere off road to park the car and only enough space in the road to park one or sometimes only one for each two dwellings and you risk someone else taking the space if you move your car. This means that while it might be literally true there is nonetheless a substantial number of people for whom using a private vehicle is not just fine.
Half the population of the UK lives in areas where public transport has enabled limiting the space required by traffic. In some other parts of the world, similar situations have been resolved by removing excess houses, making more space for traffic.
Also, private vehicles include bikes and scooters, which are often more appropriate for urban settings than cars.
People living in terraced houses in the middle of my home town would be rather surprised to hear that I think. Many of the houses in question are at least a hundred years old, they were there and the roads they are on were there long before "public transport enabled limiting the space required by traffic". And anyway the remark is not about traffic, it is about where the cars sit when they are not in traffic. And who is going to decide that your house is an "excess" house? It's not as if it is easy to find a place to live in some parts of the UK.
> In some other parts of the world, similar situations have been resolved by removing excess houses, making more space for traffic.
We already know how to fulfill the mission. Every decision after are second order and involves trade offs of various factors to various stakeholders. This is sacrificing congestion, pollution and possibly cost efficiency in order to gain ride time efficiency
Most of the time these are replacing areas with bus lines with small ridership. Its cheaper and on average faster to service those areas with this model instead of driving a lot of empty busses around constantly. If ridership increases to the point where busses again make sense I imagine they'll resume bus service to those areas.
Some of the transit around me had areas change to this model. I know people who used to ride the bus and now take this. Being able to dispatch a ride (and even schedule one a day ahead of time!) makes things a lot easier, more reliable, and faster. Previously they would have to walk a few blocks to the main street and wait in the 100F weather for up to 10-15 minutes. Potentially they'd have to change busses depending on where they were trying to get to, often having yet another wait in the 100F weather. Now they're able to schedule their ride ahead of time, the car meets them outside their apartment, and they're able to get a ride directly to nearby shops or the light rail/major bus terminal to get someplace else.
There are van taxis that do this in third world countries, they're not terrible. Faster than a bus line and cheaper than a regular taxi. I think if pooling was more of a norm and people were a bit less time sensitive it'd work great here with the support of an app.
If we wouldn't expect the van drivers to be less time sensitive, we certainly shouldn't expect all of society to become less time-sensitive to accommodate inconsistent transportation. We can't afford to have people late all the way down, because lateness accumulates by blowing coordination. It's through promptness and good logistics that we save time that we can use to relax.
We should just prioritize consistent public transportation.
edit: if you're five minutes late at doing something you want to do, you may have wasted five minutes, or you more likely haven't wasted any time, because you spent that five minutes doing something else that you wanted to do.
If you're five minutes late meeting someone, you're far more likely to have wasted their five minutes, unless they can shift other small tasks around to fill those five minutes.
It adds up to a lot of lost time spent waiting and uncomfortable.
People have been convinced they need to be time sensitive. "30 minutes or it's free", "next day shipping", etc. are everywhere. In many cases, we're not as time sensitive as we've been trained to think.
American public transit is so frequently poor that it often means a 10 minute trip by car might be two hours by bus, but a whole bunch of people would be fine with a 30-45 minute option being available.
It's been a few years since I was in Europe, but I'm pretty sure folks there make appointments and show up at work/school at a specific time.
Public transit is fine for all of these things if it runs reliably, often, and with sensible routing. You leave a little earlier, but someone else is doing the driving, so it's a nice time to read, check email, etc.
I think you’re missing that the demand dynamics are different in underserved areas. They’re an alternative to a fixed bus route, so there’s a much greater tolerance for flexibility, i.e: 30 mins for one of these micro-transit buses to show up, and a 50% longer journey time vs. an Uber is very acceptable as a bus alternative, but an Uber rider would be very unlikely to accept that, which means Uber Pool is very unlikely to find a co-passenger whereas micro-transit is.
Also woth noting in many cases these are intended to help link one in further out areas to existing mass transit infrastructure - IIRC Via in seattle has its service area to help one get from home to a link light rail station.
Less parking needed if people take these. In my suburb, it may be hard to get an Lyft and it may cost like $6 to go 1-2 miles if they do show up. Other than that, if I don't have a car, there's no bus to take me to most parts of the city, I'd have to walk or ride or a bike.
Yes, they seem like subsidized taxis but with more capacity than normal taxis and maybe less direct routes than normal taxis. If people have more time than money, I think this can help.
In terms of pollution and congestion, if they increase the density of people traveling more than they increase the total distance traveled, then I would assume they help reduce both.
For a bus line with only a few people replacing the bus with a car is going to reduce pollution on net. Replacing a full bus with a number of full vans will be bad for the environment, of course, but on most routes and most of the time busses aren't full. Ideally we would use a mixture of busses and vans depending on the demand for a particular route.
We have this in Jerusalem.
At busy times the van takes up to around 6 people and at quiet times you're by yourself.
At busy times your ride can take up to triple what it would have taken otherwise, because it makes stops for other people. Like 45 mins instead of 15, which makes it pretty unpredictable.
You also often have to wait a while for it.
They're called TikTak here.
It's mainly useful for getting a direct ride where you'd otherwise have to take more than one bus.
Yessss!!! There is no best one-size-for-all solution for transportation, we need lots of different methods to select the best methods for the situation. Scooters, [e-]bikes, vans, trolleys, buses, subways, trains, funiculars. (And more that have yet to be invented; personally I hope for rentable e-assist pedi-cabs to take cargo like groceries home in cities without the need for a 2-ton+ vehicle)
I think this van service combined with an "Uber Pool" model enables highly efficient trips that can supplement mass-transit. Within the planning of bus routes, there are always routes that will take a lot longer or require transfers, but are rarely taken; vans that can "go anywhere" would fill those gaps, without the need for profit-making (and without the discrimination and exploitation of taxis).
From the article, here's why van supplementation can work: "For $1.6 million, we're providing well over twice as many trips and covering 100 percent of the city with a system that picks you up within 15 to 20 minutes of your request, versus a bus that was only running once an hour." It's more expensive [to the city] but it provides much greater mobility and time-saving for citizens.
When you're a single mom and groceries are an hour ride one-way, and the bus only comes once an hour, and you work late, just getting food is a nightmare that takes 3+ hours at the end of a long day. Because of that, she may have to spend $25-50 on taxis (many grocery stores aren't open late), which further reduces her already stretched income. Supplemental transportation methods can solve this problem and transform quality of life for disadvantaged people in society.
This kind of strategy must be combined with changing the ways cities are built. Your last point about the single mom, this SHOULDNT be a problem. At all. How did people 100 years ago deal with not having access to food without a time consuming trip? They either grew their own, or they lived close enough to a place where they could buy it. The private automobile completely killed the idea of living close to what you need.
> Largely due to the expansion of the welfare state which encourages single motherhood.
That's a wild claim. I highly doubt many women choose to have a kid on their own (with all the physical and mental stress that brings, not to mention time and money spent) only or mainly because they won't starve to death with their kid thanks to some welfare.
This is America trying to fix problems that are caused by their poor-to-nonexistent urban planning, FWIW. I've lived in several countries in Europe, and you have to be far out into the countryside before it gets difficult to go grocery shopping with a bike and bike trailer, or even just a backpack and walking.
We had something like this in the exurbs of Calgary in the 1970s, it was called "DART", for "Dial-A-Ride Transit".
It was semi-on-demand, and not door-to-door.
The scheme was, you called the DART line (from your land-line, obviously) and gave your address, and there was a mini-bus that made the rounds of the residential neighborhood, which would come to your address on its next round. It would then take you to the local transit junction point, a nearby shopping mall with several bus bays where a number of regular bus routes converged, and you would make your connection and complete your journey in the regular way.
It seemed to me to be a reasonable way of efficiently delivering infrequent transit service to a large area, although I personally only used it a couple of times to visiit a friend.
I’ve imagined that self driving cars would fill in this “last mile” from the end destination to an air conditioned transit hub. Once you get enough density in a transit hub, the frequency and destinations should explode, making the network usable, even in car heavy towns like Houston.
I don't see how. Once you have a car you may as well drive all the way there, and self driving makes it much faster. Then you have the convenience of the car when you get there. either way you need a parking lot for the car to sit in.
Transit works best when you can get rid of a car. The cost of owning a car is very high, transit good enough that you would get rid of a car is only a little cheaper. Bad transit is only a little cheaper, but most people will just use their car. Note that I said a car: most people are in a family situation with more than one car (or at least more than one person who could get a car if they wanted one), so we can save money by having them get rid of one car and the other car is only used for those 5% tasks that transit isn't good for.
The self-driving cars in the parent poster's comment wouldn't be personally owned. They'd pick you up, drop you off, and then go get the next person. It wouldn't be doing much sitting in parking lots at busy times, and could park in municipal lots out of the busy areas at night.
- 37,000 trips / week (6-day service). I suspect most are on weekdays.
- 6,170 trips/day
- 13.5 hour operation (5:30 am - 7 pm)
- ~457 trips / hour
- ~30 trips / van-hour
I'm not sure how many seats per van, though I suspect 6--9 (3 rows of 3 seats). If a trip is 15 minutes, then that's an average of 7.5 passengers/trip.
Keep in mind that net trips includes the deadhead (no passenger) portion.
The ridership numbers seem unusually high to me. I'd be interested in seeing trip profiles.
By comparison, BART in the SF Bay Area has an annual ridership of over 20 million, and over 104,000 weekday riders. (I also suspect a Bart rider is two trips.) Bart moves 3x what Wilson are claiming for weekly numbers, and roughly as many people in an hour as Wilson does in a day. The Transbay Tunnel can accommodate 24 ten-car trainsets per hour. Each car can carry more than 200 passengers at crush load, or 48,000 passengers/hour for the tube as a whole.
Put another way, microtransit is trying to shoehorn transit into a sprawl- and car-centric urban landscape. Dense development and well-travelled routes are what make transit efficient and viable.
Make of this what you will: North Carolina’s cities used to have remarkably developed streetcar networks[1].
It is depressing and frustrating to see public authorities attempt to recreate the successes of public transport on fundamentally inefficient, commons-hostile substrates.
I live in a city with a "modern" streetcar. I even rode it to work for a few months. Two reasons why it's not great.
1. It shares busy streets with cars yet has zero ability to maneuver in traffic. If just one car is parked a few inches beyond the edge of the parking lane, the entire streetcar route is blocked.
2. The tracks trap bicycle tires and cause many bicycle crashes. This happened to colleague of mine, fortunately at low speed. There have been dozens of crashes and at least one death.
Electric bus service is cheaper to install and has neither of these disadvantages.
Both of these are serious issues, and point to an underlying problem: cities have been re-planned around their streetcar networks, not with them in mind. Improperly planned, streetcars are just less mobile buses.
There are known solutions to both of these: give streetcars unilateral right of way, isolate them from car traffic at intersections and stops, and give cyclists their own separated lanes.
Depending on the city, electric bus service might be the right choice! But I'll note: we undid all of the things that make streetcars advantageous, and we could redo them with sufficient political will.
Streetcars are always less mobile buses. You can do everything you suggest for buses and get the same benefits plus everything that being a bus offers you.
The advantages to streetcars aren't limited to what I suggest. They also include noise and air quality advantages (hooking up to municipal power sources instead of carrying their own engines), human advantages (they tend to be more comfortable than buses, both because of road quality and size), capacity, and so forth.
There are many, many situations where buses (ideally, electrified ones) are the right choice. But there are also many situations where streetcars are the right choice, which is why many cities run both (or one over the other).
Right, at which point it's a cramped, bumpier trolley. It no longer has the main advantage that buses offer, which is being able to alternate their routes based on traffic or blockages.
You can make bigger buses, but they still need to conform to a different set of safety and size standards. Trolleys can make better use of standard lane space (and frequently fit better into standard lanes in older cities, since they can articulate for turns much better).
Laying track does not have to be expensive. Small-to-mid-sized cities in Europe do it cheaply and sustainably; many of the US's cities have streets that are already graded for streetcars and could be replanted without full surveys. I won't claim that it's uniformly cheaper than running a bus network, but that's not the sole factor in our civic construction process -- we also consider quality of life, performance, and appeal.
Nontrivial after adding the second deck (common in UK & Hong Kong), or an articulation (common in EU and mainland China)
However for tram, the upper limit is your platform length. It's also common to run single trains off-peak, couple two together during busy hours to double the capacity.
Even when cyclists have their own lanes, they need to cross the streetcar tracks in order to (1) make turns and (2) avoid obstacles (e.g. cars suddenly pulling out). If they don't plan and execute the track crossing at a perpendicular enough angle, the wheel gets trapped and the rider usually wipes out. The victim is then often blamed for getting hurt by infrastructure of a design that is known to hurt people [0].
You're absolutely right. I think the way Amsterdam does this is instructive: nearly all cycling-trolley crossings are completely perpendicular, and all cycling-automotive crossings are isolated and separate from any nearby trolley crossing.
> If just one car is parked a few inches beyond the edge of the parking lane
In places where I have lived and worked that have trams the car always comes off worst because the tram is just so much heavier and more robust. And no one is going to defend the car owner because the tram has right of way. I have even seen buses just touch cars that were illegally parked in bus stops, just a gentle scratch and easily deniable, but you can bet that the car driver never does it again.
In my experience, the streetcar driver is unwilling to make contact. It waits (perhaps for the car to be towed), passengers hop off and continue their journey on foot.
In my past life I built and sold dispatch software for microtransit / on-demand rides. (UberPool as a service, more or less.)
What this article doesn’t say:
* Many, many cities have something similar already, but only for riders with disabilities. (“paratransit”) You need to schedule your ride the day before, but they will take you from door to door.
* The cost per ride is quite high: more than $20 per ride, often. This cost is borne by the city, while riders pay little to nothing. In very few cases does it make financial sense - most places aren’t replacing their buses with microtransit.
* The best utilization I’ve seen is on campuses, where there are a fixed set of stops in a small region, and a large population of people who can’t or don’t want to drive (maybe due to limited parking).
Istanbul has an oddly good system, where vans run a set route, but you can ask for them to stop wherever. I feel like this would be a better balance that would allow for greater coverage, while also lowering the cost of equipment and in the very least, eliminating the need to walk as much to a stop. It's also faster because it's basically a large taxi, so once the van is full, you only stop where the passengers need. This is only a supplement there, but I think it would work better than the majority of bus set-ups currently used.
> These days, the service runs about 37,000 trips a week, Lentz said, or more than two and a half times the 26,000 rides the old bus system ran in a typical, pre-pandemic week.
Are "trips" different from "rides" in some way that makes this arithmetic correct?
> It’s one tool for providing lifeline access to hard-to-serve areas, where availability, not ridership, is the point.
From your own article. Flexible/microtransit/whatever you want to call it can be a good idea, and it can be done right. Its not a replacement for a bus route with any level of decent ridership, its for the areas where there literally aren't enough people interested in riding a bus to make the bus practical. Once ridership numbers get high enough, the transit groups should absolutely upgrade those areas to actual bus lines, but until then it is an option to serve places that otherwise wouldn't be able to be effectively served by decent bus service economically.
It makes me think of how I've heard some universities will pave the paths that students had walked, vs creating the paved paths and hoping students walk on them [0]:
> The team at UNC went back into the archive for us and found some plans from the 60s and 70s, when they were really expanding the campus. An archivist discovered one of the written goals for planners was to "build paths where students were going rather than building some sort of grid system."
I believe micro-transit could play a similar role, basically helping the planners even figure out which routes people want to take before they turn them into fully funded routes.
You buried the lede for this piece. It doesn’t say that micro transit is a bad idea, just that its objectives are different than fixed route transit. Specifically, it optimizes for coverage instead of ridership, which makes sense for low density areas.
Even the NPR article says that larger cities are experimenting with micro transit but only for harder-to-reach areas.
It has a place as a complement to fixed route transit, not as a replacement.
It is the future, getting the large inefficient buses off the system is the goal.
His thesis that the vehicles meander and no technology will fix that is refutable in that technology can identify opportunities to minimize inefficiencies. A good algorithm will create efficient routes for the flexible transit.
Finally, the author is a public transit consultant. He is not going to be good for a reference when he is on one side of an item. He may be a subject matter expert, but he is blinded to what can be accomplished. Judging from other people’s comments from other countries, my thesis is more accurate.
Fixed route service is FAR more efficient than any sort of micro transit service can ever be, unless we are looking at areas with very low demand.
The most efficient algorithm is always going to be having people gather in one spot to be picked up and dropped off rather than driving all over to different points.
>Fixed route service is FAR more efficient than any sort of micro transit service can ever be
Theoretically fixed route service is far more efficient. Practically, it's not because it takes a lot of demand to run at high frequency and high utilization. As an example, I live in Atlanta and it costs the system $9 per bus ride these days. And given the nature of the system and the city it usually takes people more than one bus ride to get where they need to go.
Lyft/Uber usually comes out to be slightly to much cheaper excepting long cross-metro rides. The problem is that I don't get my $15.50 subsidy.
You aren’t making an apples to apples comparison though, your assertion is that it costs the system $18 for you to take a trip, but you’re only looking at the fare charges by Uber/Lyft. Uber and Lyft continue to operate at a loss, and are therefore subsidizing their rides as well. Additionally, they are able to maintain a contingent workforce that a public transit agency would likely never be able to get away with. Uber and Lyft are directly subsidized by investor money, in addition to the lower wages earned by drivers who also cover the capital expenditure for vehicles and cover the maintenance costs.
And final point, mass transit demand still hasn’t returned to pre pandemic levels. Obviously, it may be the case that we have seen a long term shift in demand, but the fact remains that the current system was built out/provisioned for a higher level of demand, so it’s not surprising that the cost structure is higher right now than it should be. Pre pandemic it looks like bus/rail cost Marta around $4.50 per trip.
>You aren’t making an apples to apples comparison though, your assertion is that it costs the system $18 for you to take a trip, but you’re only looking at the fare charges by Uber/Lyft.
The $18 is operating cost and doesn't include capital costs. Lyft is EBIDTA profitable and Uber likely is on rides too. Their fares are enough to cover the operating cost of the system. Comparison is as apples to apples as it can be.
>Pre pandemic it looks like bus/rail cost Marta around $4.50 per trip.
Even still. To use a practical example, my kid's day care is 4 miles away. I would need 2 buses to get there by MARTA so $9 if we assume pre-pandemic costs. Lyft will take me there for between $8.93 and $14.17 with various options on shared + wait time. For a solo car for a pick up in 4 minutes it's $11.01.
Lyft will take me 9 minutes to get there while MARTA will take 46 minutes if I time everything perfectly. More realistically it's an hour which is barely faster than walking the 4 miles.
Lyft’s adjusted EBITA was $55 million in Q1, given their active rider number stands at ~19 million, at best they are likely offering rides at cost.
That still leaves out the costs incurred by the drivers. Opex for transit agencies includes maintenance, insurance and driver salaries and benefits which are much more costly than it is for Lyft.
You are right that sprawling metro areas are very well suited for mass transit, though. There does need to be a sufficient amount of demand in order for it to work.
The fact of the matter is that the main problem is a land use pattern that requires over $9 to travel to and from a child’s daycare.
Buses require expensive drivers and so they are the most expensive form of transit. A small bus costs almost as much as a big on to run. A train costs more per trip, but a train typically has many more people on. In theory you could run a train for service where a small bus would work, but since nobody does that the fact that a train would cost a lot more for that service is irrelevant.
Buses are far from the most expensive form of transit. High-speed ferryboats or helicopters probably claim that prize. I'm pretty sure airplanes are also more expensive, as are subways if you include the cost to build them in the first place, as well as cars if you include total cost of ownership.
Cost is typically measured per passenger km or some such. Ferryboats can come out cheap if there are enough people on them. I'm not aware of anyone using helicopters for mass transit. Airplanes are very cheap for long distance service.
> A good algorithm will create efficient routes for the flexible transit.
You assume there is such an algorithm. That assertion so far has proven false, and I see no reason to believe that any algorithm can overcome the fundamental problems.
We already have this in my rural area in the states. There's a shuttle that picks people up to funnel them to either the local parking lot near the interstate (to catch a larger bus to the closest city center) or to disperse them to the 5 or 6 large employers across 3 counties.
You call the company, they send a van. Usually you get picked up with two or three other people and it might take an hour to get where you're going (when a car could do it in 30-45 minutes in a direct route). Or you schedule a regular pick up, and they coordinate to have you ride with 10 or so other people, but the ride is a lot shorter.
And it's 100% free. The large employers pay to subsidize its use for the entire area because they get such a value from it. You can get the shuttle to take you anywhere.
Indeed, and in Germany it’s called "Rufbus” and that’s what you have in small villages where a regular bus service is not available.
I know there are such in other countries but I don’t know the other names.
If I had to guess it comes from Russian маршрут/marshrut (route). Маршрутки/Marshrutkas in the former Soviet Union typically run on fixed routes just like busses.
It picks up people and takes them to the closest light rail station or takes them home from the station. It has a fixed radius of operation and typically there are 2-5 people in the van. It is a feeder system to bring riders to light rail trains.
I recall Hong Kong's solution, at least when I was there a decade ago. You had the Metro with fixed rails for core routes, then double-decker buses that went to additional areas in large loops. Next were the green minibuses that had small loops, branching off from the other services. After that were red minibuses, which had specific pickup locations, then would drop you off anywhere nearby. All of which could be paid for using the same Octopus card.
I think Hong Kong can pull this off in part because so much of the city is long thin corridors which can be nearly entirely serviced by the metro, commuter train, by light rail in the new territories (and I guess the cable car). This covers a high percentage of commuter needs, and so buses, minibuses, and taxis are to some extent gap-fillers to get people from major arteries to the remaining small proportion of outlying destinations.
This is amazing. Of course a full train or bus can be an order of magnitude more efficient, and so should be installed and run where there’s demand, but replacing the prohibitively-expensive private option of Uber with an affordable, if slower, city option is just… lovely!
The greater Helsinki area municipal transit authority "HSL" had this years a go.
You could hail a mini bus with an app if you had some friends with you.
I guess it was not sustainable, even if it was well liked. As it got shut down after a few years.
I take the buses in Brooklyn pretty regularly, and I don't find the routes themselves especially lacking[1]. But higher volume would be nice, and I'd be interested to see evidence presented that smaller buses would accomplish that (versus more dedicated bus lanes and high fines for blocking the lanes).
Do they pickup multiple passengers? It does seem like subsidized taxis, and not really "mass transit," but I'm glad it's helping people. I think a tram system powered by overhead lines is much more efficient, and better, they just need to lay the tracks.
I think about Berlin and how you can get just about anywhere on the tram system, and if you are well behaved your trip could be, well, free.. [0]
Santa Clara County, CA, had that in 1974-1975.[1] It was a failure. Mini-buses running around with zero or one passenger.
The trouble is, there have to be a lot of people wanting roughly the same trip for mini-buses to work. Otherwise you're just running a taxi service with an oversized vehicle.
It works when there's a common source or destination, such as an airport or a downtown area or a school. It doesn't work in a big diffuse area, where everybody wants a different trip.
Where’s this all coming from lately? Seems that walkable cities (code for making vehicle ownership so expensive and onerous that only the elite can drive) and the push for public transit is a top down affair that is being force fed to the public not just via the usual media outlets, but also legions of GPT based Internet shills.
It also seems very European. All the big cities already have buses and trains in the US. Outside these places it’s not only not practical, it’s totally infeasible. So who is making this push? WEF? Mayor Pete?
Back in the late-70s/early-80s the town I lived in had a thing called Dial-a-Bus which was longer than a minivan with maybe 10-15 seats, built lighter than a modern airport shuttle. It could pick you up from home and drop you off at an address, etc. I remember when the price jumped from 10 cents to 25 cents per ride. Prank calls were a thing unfortunately.
I've often calculated how long I'd have to spend on mass transit to get to some desireable event and back - and decided, reluctantly, to skip it. Because the waits+rides would take longer than the event lasted.
The option to use microtransit once a week would be well worth paying twice as much.
> Establish a system of small taxi-like buses, carrying up to six people each, radio-controlled, on call by telephone, able to provide point-to-point service according to the passengers' needs, and supplemented by a computer system which guarantees minimum detours, and minimum waiting times. Make bus stops for the mini-buses every 600 feet in each direction, and equip these bus stops with a phone for dialing a bus.
Why does no one talk about the private bus companies and the colectivos that are found throughout Central and South America? The system is amazing for anyone who has used it, compared to alternatives.
Perhaps tell us why it’s amazing and the road to where it is today.
I think most can surmise that all forms of transit have been repeatedly tried all over the world. Sharing details and their applicability to other other municipalities are what will advance transit.
Sure. I’m not really an expert in how they work but if you speak Spanish they’re easy enough to use.
Most cities have private bus companies that run their own routes. Where the bus is going is posted in the front on a piece of paper and you just hop on when you see one. The companies compete with each other so the routes often change, the prices are low and supply always meets demand.
Colectivos are a different phenomenon. In certain meeting places there are combi buses (12 pax vans basically) each one going to a different place usually a suburb or a neighboring town or a landmark outside of town or somewhere within commuting distance. You pay a small fee and the driver will sit there until all the seats are full, and then drive to the destination. Sometimes you sit 5 min before departing, sometimes 30 min. But usually it’s not so bad and it’s far and away the cheapest way to get these longer distances reliably.
in Hong Kong - especially in the New Territories - the mini-van is basically the main mode of semi-public transport.
The '小巴' basically operate fixed routes, seats about 13, pick up and move per stop, but don't stop on empty stops unless called to do so via open outcry from a passenger who wants to get off at that spot.
Somewhere in between taxi (entirely private, no fixed route) and bus (entirely public, fixed route). They're great, and generally missing from transportation systems in the Western world
Berlin had an on demand ride sharing shuttle service, called BerlKönig, that has been run by Berlin's public transport provider BVG. Unfortunately it was recently discontinued, but apparently the BVG is planning a new on demand service.
BerlKönig was automatically following routes that would optimize for a higher load factor.
For me it was the best option for certain scenarios.
Cities have the demand to support real transit which is vastly more cost and energy efficient. They have congestion which isn't helped much by shuttles compared to a bus or other high capacity transit. Congestion also slows the shuttle down so you need more shuttles and more depots. They also have more destinations at cyclable distances.
Paratransit is for mobility for theose who can't drive in areas that can't justify a train or enough buses for a <1hr max wait time. It needs a larger per km subsidy to be affordable.
> They have congestion which isn't helped much by shuttles compared to a bus or other high capacity transit
Multiple simultaneously driving taxis can be replaced by one shuttle van at times or for routes where large busses would run mostly empty, because they lack flexibility.
Yeah, if you need coverage shuttles are great albeit at a high marginal cost per trip. If you need capacity then they don't really work. A city will spend more on shuttles than they would on a network extensive and well designed enough to get good utilization.
I guess they are useful in some US cities as a stepping stone where there are massive political and legislative barriers to building a functional city.
But I found them useful in Berlin (see my other comment in this thread) and Berlin already has one of the best public transport networks in the world, I think. For me they were just closing the gap between taxi and public transport. In terms of use cases and in terms of pricing.
Point. I guess I was more responding with the use case of an alternative to mass transit.
I agree that filling the gaps that busses or trains can't is a great use case, and I guess that my point about small towns was just one example of a gap.
I have wasted thousands of hours waiting for the bus that either came early, or is late, under 100 degrees of sun and under snowstorms. Add to that the <10mph average speed that a typical bus that stops every 2 minutes achieves, and a 2mile commute can last easily 45 minutes.
I have walked thousands of miles because the bus stops do not align with my destinations.
Since I got a car and live in the suburbs, I pay much lower housing costs, I start exactly 20’ before my punch in time, I park under my office building and I am never late (maybe 1/300 due to an accident). Oh and I always arrive dry.
Commuting in general is bad. Commuting by bus is one of the worst things that us peasants have to deal with on a daily basis.