Tony Judt has a fascinating piece at New York Review of Books on the ideal of social democracy manifested by most European governments: a democratic state with relatively high levels of taxes and government services. Writing from a leftist perspective, he worries about the recent rise of economic analysis as a primary basis for government decisions. This trend, which he traces to Margaret Thatcher, has shaped the thinking of a generation of bureaucrats, not just in Britain but throughout the Commonwealth and also in parts of Continental Europe. It’s almost universal in the British-derived cultures of Australia and New Zealand, where I work now. Here, it often seems an idea about transit counts for nothing if it can’t be expressed in terms of “Cost Benefit Evaluation” (CBE) and “Key Performance Indicators” (KPI). Continue Reading →
Transit Advertising and Transit Self-Esteem
This Air New Zealand ad, on a bus shelter in Sydney, raises the issue of transit self-esteem. “$100 says the bus won’t be late,” it says, then, in much smaller print: “Looks like you win.”
Should transit agencies accept advertising that demeans their service?
Advertisers are often tempted to do exactly that, especially when selling vacations or other forms of escape from the everyday. The bus is both a profitable site of advertising and an irresistible metaphor for the tedious life. If you imagine your transport mode as a romantic partner, the bus in mixed traffic is the worst of both worlds: neither sexy nor capable of commitment. When advertising on a bus, it’s not surprising that advertisers find ways to play on that. Continue Reading →
Technology Obsessions in the U.S. National Transit Database
The US National Transit Database (NTD) is out for 2008! (Yes, a one year lag counts as fast in this business.) For those of you who aren’t compulsively drawn to spreadsheets, Cap’n Transit tries to get to the bottom of farebox recovery, the percentage of operating costs paid by fares.
Farebox Recovery Ratio Agencies 70-200% Lincoln Tunnel buses, inclined planes, Hudson River ferries, SEPTA [Philadelphia] trolleybuses 40-69% Big city rail, college town buses 30-39% Big city bus and light rail 0.1-29% Small and medium city bus and light rail, plus assorted boondoggles 0 Free services
The Apple iPad: A Boost for Buses Over Trains?
Tory Gattis at New Geography argues that mobile computing products such as the new Apple iPad will be a boon for transit, but not for trains: Continue Reading →
On Incompleteness (of Networks, of Life …)
Reader Russell Bozian thinks he spies a theme coursing through recent posts.
Will partially built houses ever be energy efficient? Ones where the walls are up, but the roof has not been put on yet? If you don’t qualify for a full home loan, will banks even lend you half the money you need to build a house? Will the banks figure that you can at least have half a good life, living in a house with walls but no roof? …
Jarrett, your original post wonders out loud why Portland can spend tens of millions on transit and not, in 2010, see a much higher percentage of people commuting to work on public transport. But at the present build rate, won’t it take at least until 2050 before Portland has a comprehensive and ubiquitous public transport network, such as we see in Manhattan? Why do we starve public transport of the money it needs to finish a decent network of routes, and then pause to criticize its incomplete performance statistics? Would we ponder why the waterworks is not delivering much water to our faucets, if we only gave them enough money and right of way for each water line to stop 100 feet short of our houses?
Continue Reading →
Comment of the Week
On the phenomenology of crowding and reliability, from Alon Levy:
People’s perception of utilization is always going to be skewed upward. There are always more people to witness crowding than emptiness. If half the trains run at 100% capacity, and half run at 20%, then five sixths of passengers will see 100% crowding rather than 20%; therefore, real utilization will be 60%, while perceived utilization will be 87%.
Continue Reading →
If Your Bus is Late, Should the Agency Pay?
An engineering professor in Montréal got his transit agency to pay for his taxi fare because his bus didn’t show up. Unfortunately, it took many days of his time in small-claims litigation, so his trophy, a $40 check from the agency, should probably be framed rather than cashed.
Now and then a transit agency tries some kind of “on time or we pay” guarantee. In the Montréal suburb of Laval, for example, the buses are equipped with Global Positioning System (GPS) technology. The deal is that if your bus is more than five minutes late (a fact that the agency can verify via GPS), you can demand a free bus ticket, which is nice but not much of an incentive for the agency. It seems to me the same GPS-driven approach could be used to implement a policy if “when we’re more than x minutes late, we stop collecting fares.” That would actually help a late bus get back on time, because fare transactions are so time consuming. Continue Reading →
Portland: Another Challenging Chart
A while back I posted some City of Portland data showing that in the past 12 years, during which four new rail transit segments were opened, the percentage of Portlanders who take transit to work, called the journey-to-work mode share, didn’t improve at all.
Several commenters wondered if data for the whole Portland region, as opposed to just the city, would look different. One also raised questions about the representativeness of the City survey’s sample.
So Portland reader Nathan Banks dug into the Census for similar data. His charts show census data for 1990 and 2000, plus American Community Survey (ACS) data for the years since 2000.
He’s done charts for all three of the Portland area counties. You can see a PDF of his charts here: Continue Reading →
Unemployment and the Transit Imperative
As US leaders suddenly pivot to focus on unemployment, Emily Garr at The Avenue picked up on a line of President Obama’s recent speech in Lorain County, Ohio.
You can’t get to work or go buy groceries like you used to because of cuts in the county transit system.
She goes on to describe cuts in the transit services to this suburban county that are definitely not “trimming the fat” but more like multiple amputations.
Transit advocates need to be picking up this line. Back in the mid-90s, when welfare reform was timely, I routinely ran passenger surveys on various transit systems as part of planning projects. The surveys had many other purposes, but I made a point to ask both “what is your trip purpose?” and “if transit had not been available, how would you have made your trip?” A common answer to the second question was that the person would not have been able to make the trip. Cross-tabulate that with a trip purposes of “work” and you get a count of people who could not hold their jobs without public transit. It’s an easy thing to do in any customer survey, and every transit agency and advocate should know this number.
It’s also important to notice that the people who are on the verge of not being able to hold their jobs are mostly in relatively low-wage jobs in the service sector — restaurants, fast food, big box retail, etc. These people are commuting all day and much of the night. Transit that supports high employment is all-day service, not just peak service aimed at the generally better-off 9-to-5 commuter.
Transit’s Zoom-Whoosh Problem
My friend Dale, a Portland poet and essayist, recently shifted his commute to downtown from car-and-sometimes-bus to usually-bicycle. He’s posted “ten things I’ve learned after six months of riding a bicycle” (here, preceded by three interesting paragraphs on Jefferson and Adams). My favorite of the ten:
9) It’s just as fun as when you were a kid. You go zoom! and whoosh!
You’re a sky creature, not a miserable earth-crawler. And you get to
the end of your commute feeling invigorated and intensely alive.
And I thought: Yes, transit has a zoom-whoosh problem. Nobody today will describe the riders of the 14-Hawthorne bus (Dale’s other option) as “sky creatures.” Indeed the 20th century bus operations model — lots of stops, one-by-one fare transactions, getting stuck in turnouts or behind parallel-parking cars — is the closest thing to “earth-crawling” that modern technology can offer at scale. Continue Reading →