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Ask Slashdot: If Public Transport Was Free, Would You Leave Your Car At Home?
dkatana writes: The Estonian capital launched a program of free public transport to encourage people to leave their cars at home. But they never did. When Tallinn launched the program ridership numbers did increase, but not by the 20% the city had projected. Instead, they grew by a modest 3%, and by people already using public transport. What happened is that more pedestrians and bike users started to use public transit instead of walking and cycling. But car users continue to drive to work. Do you think the same would hold true in the U.S. if a similar program was started?
If public transport would be free in all of Germany, I would not use this car thing again.
If you make routes that are not useful - or have non-useful time tables - free, people still won't use them. A lot of driving that is done now is done in part because people are making commutes that are not easily - if at all - accommodated by existing public transportation infrastructure. If it takes two hours to get from A to B by public transport because you have to travel to C first - covering at least twice the total distance along the way and waiting for connecting buses or trains - people won't do it.
The other thing is the availability of parking. If parking in the city is affordable and available, that reduces the appeal of public transportation.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
We don't drive cars only because they are cheaper than public transit, but faster too.
People will respond from very high density cities and point out what I say isn't true for them. They don't need free rides for motivation, because in their situation, public transit is actually better. They should take the moment to get some insight; the world isn't waiting for their advice and doesn't want their lives.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
1) I can get anywhere I want with public transportation as it is right now. The problem is that it takes literally four to eight times more time (in my specific circumstances), and my time is far from free.
2) The notion that it's free is, frankly, dishonest and disingenuous. *Somebody* is paying for it, and that somebody is me, in one form or another. Just because the money is not coming directly from your wallet at that instant doesn't mean it's not happening.
3) It ignores subjective value. I often enjoy driving. I don't enjoy being crowded into a bus or tram / trolley. Trains aren't too bad from a comfort standpoint, but still not as fun as driving.
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When they make it illegal to ride public transportation if you haven't bathed in 3 weeks, then we can talk.
Most linux users don't know this, but the man pages were named after Chuck Norris. Chuck Norris fsck'ing hates noobs!
The closest public transportation is about 35 miles from my house. So no.
If you want people to switch from cars to public transportation then you need the following:
1) Speed comparable, if not faster than cars. If the car is 30 faster than the bus, no one takes the bus if they own a car. Time is worth more than anything else we have.
2) Convenient public transportation - it doesn't work if your city is all spread out and you have to walk more than 15 minutes to and from the bus stop. 10 minute walk to/from the bus stop is about the most you.
Otherwise, you need to start imposing costs on using the car - as in expensive parking.
NYC and London have some of the better public transportation systems of the world. They are faster than traffic, with many stops all over the city, and parking is expensive.
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Free of drunk people, or homeless people who smell so bad it's unpleasant to be near them?
Free of limitations in when I can depart, or how much longer the ride takes than driving?
Free of the inability to easily stop to grab a coffee or use the bathroom?
In my neck of the woods, I have been told there are these things called "buses" that come around and pick people up... I often see people waiting under signs that indicate they are "places of bus stopping" - yet I rarely see these elusive contraptions actually on the road, or picking up passengers.
Public transportation is a great idea in theory, but poorly run in practice, even in metropolitan areas. As for Michigan, it might as well as be non-existent. Rural and suburban areas are always poorly serviced. The solution, of course, is for people to move to areas closer to work and other required destinations - but that only works well for people who do not put down roots somewhere with a mortgage.
Free or not, I simply don't have the option. My current employer used to be willing to let me telecommute, now they expect me to commute an hour or more every day, each way, to satisfy some CEO's bizarre notion of esprit de corps (though most of my team members are in other states). I'd gladly ride a bus if it was convenient, both in timing and within a reasonable distance to my destination, but it doesn't even exist.
A car usually costs you several hundred dollars/euros per month. A ticket for public transportation is usually a fraction of that, maybe 100 dollar/euro. Why would you think that reducing that cost would make a significant difference?
I frequently ride public transit in Chapel Hill and Carrboro. It is the largest fare free system in the US. It is used by many people but growth in usage depends on many factors. Park and Ride lots make a big difference for people who live outside of town and must drive to get even close to their destination. Sidewalks make a difference because people who live close enough to walk to a bus stop have to have a safe place to walk. The Chapel Hill buses have bike carriers on the front so that bike riders can take the bus for part of their trip.
But one of the biggest factor is how easy it is to find parking. Cities use a huge amount of their space just to store cars during the day. The more expensive and hard to find parking becomes, the more people will use free public transit.
And all of this takes time. People have to adjust to the new reality of bus transportation being easier and cheaper than owning and driving a car. Over time, people will make decisions about where to live based in part on the presence of public transit. And if businesses also locate in areas served by transit, then it's easier for people to live and work on a transit line.
"He took a duck in the face at 250 knots." -- William Gibson, Pattern Recognition
To get to work by 8AM, I would have to walk 3-4 blocks to the bus stop leaving by 6:40AM (not so nice when there's 6" of snow and -15F temps or when it's 90F+ at 7AM). I get on one bus to go about 2 miles away, then wait 15-20 minutes for another bus to get downtown.
Leaving work at 5PM, a 5 minute walk to the nearest bus depot at work MIGHT catch the 5:05PM bus, otherwise it's a 30 minute wait, then another transfer to another 15-20 minute ride and a 4 block walk uphill to home.
I could drive even with 7:30AM/5PM traffic in about 20-30 minutes either by Interstate or by a major through town federal highway. So I can give up an extra 1-1.5 hours a day of my time and walk several blocks in quite likely to be less than pleasant weather, or I can drive my car and pay about the same amount for a monthly parking pass as what a monthly bus pass would cost. Due to having children, I couldn't give up the vehicle, it would just mean different routes for the car and the bus.
Having visited cities like San Francisco, New York, Houston, and San Diego in the last year, cities that have well developed urban centers with public transit in mind seem to do much better with this than ones that were designed around cars and are trying to retrofit mass transit into them. The biggest difficulty in getting around NYC was figuring out whether to grab a cab, get on a subway, get a bus ticket, or get on one of the multiple trains. In several cases, there were at least 3 different options to get from A to B in roughly the same amount of time, though prices varied quite a bit. Subway was cheap, trains were pretty cheap, cabs were reasonable only because of the short distances.
Public transportation isn't even the real issue here, it's local zoning laws. When bedroom communities encourage suburban sprawl, you end up with hundreds of McMansions stacked on top of each other and the nearest bus stop is miles away. Meanwhile, roads are built to discourage bicycling (just adding a lane on the side doesn't negate the dozens of dangerous intersections you have to navigate to survive each way). Transportation routes really only service arterial streets, and those are only zoned commercial. My car is 15 feet from my back door. Public transportation isn't ever going to do that with cities built the way they are. Not even close enough to be competitive.
And I'm not just serviced by a poor local system; the American Public Transportation Association named UTA the Outstanding Public Transportation System of 2014.
It isn't an instant thing. Cheap public transportation means that people invest less in cars. It means that homes nearer to public transportation become more valuable. That leads to increases in ridership. Those increases lead to demand to expand the system making it more useful. Then from there the housing stock begins to shift towards more concentrated making cars less practical and public transport more practical. Secondary commercial services change -- think New York City.
A sudden shift in pubic transportation gets the ball rolling but there needs to be a long term sustained desire to shift people away from cars and towards public. It ain't about the $2 / mo. Though price does matter and it does help.
Unless public transit is frequent and ubiquitous, it can't replace a car regardless of price
When I moved to San Francisco, an unlimited Muni pass was so cheap ($35) that it may as well been free, but I still had a car because weekend service is infrequent, and didn't go everywhere I wanted to go. I thought about giving up my car, until I tried an out of town trip on BART one weekend, it would have been an hour (or less) round trip by car, but since it involved a train transfer plus a long wait for a bus (that never came so I ended up walking the 2 miles), the transit part of the trip ended up being being over 3 hours.
Even now an unlimited Muni pass is cheap ($70), much cheaper than owning and parking a car in the city so it's not the cost of transit that makes people hold on to their cars.
On the other hand, when I spent some time in Tokyo, a $170 monthly Metro pass was much better than having a car, few of my friends who lived there full time owned a car.
Please describe these experiences and their differences.
It's not a problem everywhere in the US, and I suspect that to the extent that it is a "problem" it tends to be exaggerated. A homeless person would rather not spend their limited funds on bus fare.
What I do believe is that many white, affluent people are fearful of being in close quarters with poor people and people of color.
I'll be busing it in the near future, solely due to it being free. I'll be moving about 35 miles from work. It's an estimated 45-60min drive. The bus is around 75-90min. At 25-30mpg, I'll be saving $8-10/day for the days I can take the bus. That would be about 85% of my net wage per hour. Considering I cannot pick up the extra saved hour at work, it's the only way to save some money on a tight budget. I also get the benefit of being able to read, instead of driving. I'd rather keep my current 1 mile commute, but we make due with the situation.
Public transport in the USA is almost uniformly low-ball, by which I mean to wave my hands at uncomfortable seating, sparse scheduling, sparse pickup and drop-off locations, smelly (nothing like an old diesel engine to get your sinuses in an uproar), and simply old-school -- the number of cities with proper elevated monorail systems that don't impact the streets or create shadowy hangouts for the unsavory is very small, and those (looking at you, Seattle) tend to not actually implement route coverage that is worth even considering for most excursions unless you're one of the lucky few who live, work and shop right along the line itself.
Offering something worth very little for free isn't going to get anyone very far, no pun intended (but I'm always happy when they fall out like that, lol.)
Considering my own use of private vehicles, I use them because:
o It's point to point; I start where I am and I end up where I'm going
o It's considerably more secure; windows up, doors locked, only trusted riders are on-board, and I control the vehicle
o I have my music (and my ham radio gear), in short, the environment is customized for me
o There's no waiting, no calling, and no communications problems
o Joyriding
o Car sex is fun and safe if done thoughtfully, while public transport sex is a direct route to the courtroom
Any of these would be sufficient, but all of them together are broadly decisive. A bright, scenic trip on a monorail appeals on its own merits; very little else does. That's because I have spent an enormous amount of time on public transport and liked it not at all.
My overall impression is that public transport as implemented here is that it is the very least we can get away with, regardless of the harm done.
I don't think we should be looking at it with an eye to making it incrementally better, either. It's a black hole that sucks very large amounts of money and returns nothing of new value. No one with an actual comprehension of the risks prefers public transport -- I think the most common case by far is that people use it because they have to use it.
What we need to be looking at is electric transport in varieties suitable for the individual and the various types of family units. Non-polluting in and of itself, utterly agnostic as to how the power it uses is generated, thus 100% friendly to conversion from polluting power generation to non-polluting. These vehicles can be extremely light and easy to park/store, ranging from tiny electric scooters for good weather use (we have one... awesome fun) through small enclosed commuter vehicles to full-on sedans and SUVs for people who need those. Circumstances and availability are rapidly improving in this regard. I see it as the best place to put our investment, if we are to be putting it anywhere in particular regarding transport itself. Beyond that, public funding should be going to infrastructure maintainance, because infrastructure decay is a very serious problem in this country.
I also think that in the urban context we tend to separate working- and living-specialized areas. This area is apartment buildings, that area has factories and so on, while shopping has clustered elsewhere. I suspect that's cost us more than it has benefited us. If the majority of people could reasonably live and shop close to their jobs, transport would be considerably less of an issue. But we don't seem to want to swallow that, and so we end up paying for our preference.
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Driving is already more expensive than transit almost anywhere and for almost everyone. Full ownership costs for a car in a developed country tend to be in the range of 50+ c/km (80c+/mi) while bus fares tend to be flat rate of $2-6/trip, by the time you hit a 10km trip it's cheaper to take the bus/train.
People drive because of comfort and convenience, not cost (except those incredibly bad at math, which is a group probably large enough I shouldn't completely discount them)
For transit to win over car drivers they need to improve the convenience and comfort. improving cleanliness and comfort on transit vehicles helps, more express routes help, better schedules help.
Trouble is, those improvements are quite costly to implement. (arguably cleanliness is fairly simple, the rest less so)
People will take transit when it stops close to their origin and destination, has few stops on the way, is not crowded, is clean, and comfortable, and departs when they want to travel. It's a tall order.
Of course some cities have taken the opposite tack, they realize it's hard to make transit better, so they are attempting to make driving worse. This is done by intentionally avoiding needed road upgrades, removing driving lanes, blocking routes, adding transit only lanes or roads (make no mistake, they don't "add" them, they replace an existing road or lane). This does actually work. If driving to downtown takes longer than the train, and you can't find a place to park when you get there, you'll likely take the train instead.
Once people have invested in buying car and already paying for gas, registration and depreciation, they feel like using it. The extra convenience exceeds the marginal cost. So if you make public transport free, the existing car users will continue to use cars, but the sale of new cars will decline. This will take time to show up in ridership statistics. Instead of measuring the ridership of public transport, the city should monitor registration of new cars (old cars registration should not be counted). That trend is a better indicator of long term success.
Another important factor is convenience. How good is the public transport? In my city in USA, public transport is pathetic. It stops at 7 pm on weekdays and no service on Sunday. Long distance (> 10 mile) stop after 9:00 am and do not restart till 4:00 pm. It means that I have to have a car and once I have a car, the marginal cost of operating car is same as the cost of public transport, so obviously I use car.
-- Does public perceive this free public transport continue to be free in future as well?
-- Is it good enough to completely get rid of the car?
If both of the above are 'yes', then it should show up in the new car registration statistics.
The Onion, fifteen years ago, published what is still the most accurate article about public transportation ever written http://www.theonion.com/articl...
The question is flawed. The fact is that most US public transportation is awful. This is quite literally by design. In the 1950's, a conscious decision was made by policy makers to begin neglecting public transportation and to start investing public money in road systems in a big way. This is what built the interstate system, for example. A few places, Portland Oregon, for example, took some of that interstate money and invested in public transportation. Portland's system is actually quite good, now, and if you lived there, you would probably use it quite a bit.
But if you live in one of the countless suburban freeway islands, using public transportation is absurd. The way the roads and infrastructure are laid out make it almost impossible to install an efficient public transportation system. In many suburban areas, the mere act of walking somewhere is almost impossible or illegal.
There is a truism in transportation design: the freeways make the sprawl. And the converse is also true: passenger rail transportation increase creates clusters of density. Evidence of this can be seen in the observation that since the massive reduction of passenger rail transportation in the US, there have been almost no new dense walkable diverse large scale downtown core cities established. The big ones, New York, Chicago, etc. were established during the age of passenger rail. Most new cities are freeway places, and usually don't achieve the density of the older cities. By choosing to build freeways, we chose to create suburban sprawl. The only way to get out of this trap is to slow the building of freeways, and to increase investment in passenger rail.
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My slow non stock car is plenty fast. I never get a chance to open it up for long. I outran an idiot in a Maserati the other week (he clearly couldn't drive). Boy was he pissed. I think he might have hurt his car at the second launch.
My preference it for quick over fast for driving in traffic. There is nothing quite as fun as out-driving someone with money but no skills.
And all but the most extreme sports cars are suspended on mush. If I'm going to have to rework a car to suit me, I might as well build a sleeper.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
When I lived in NYC, I would have paid 3x what I was paying to use public transit. I could get to anywhere in the city, or at least within ~2-3 blocks of anywhere, quickly, easily, and efficiently—a car would have slowed me down considerably.
On the other hand, living in southern California, I wouldn't have switched to public transit if I'd been offered at $300 a month bonus to do so. It would have meant hours every day walking around on foot in a very pedestrian-unfriendly city.
Two things are required:
1) Very good coverage of the geographical areas of interest, with frequent runs, to minimize time loss walking and waiting
2) Pedestrian-friendly environs when walking and waiting
If you need to spell times and connections out on your route map—i.e. if you need more than just a diagram of where the stations are—then you probably won't see public transit use increase no matter what you do, because your public transit system just won't get the job done.
A good, workable public transit system that doesn't negatively impact lifestyles and livelihood can tell its users everything that needs to be told with a simple, pocketable list of stations (visual or textual) and a poster on the wall of each station listing what's connected there, without any reference to time.
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"But one of the biggest factor is how easy it is to find parking. Cities use a huge amount of their space just to store cars during the day. The more expensive and hard to find parking becomes, the more people will use free public transit."
Well no, that's not really a big factor. If you can't park at your destination of choice and public transit won't get you there, you won't go.
It won't be free, so the entire thought experiment is pointless. To make the public transportation no charge at time of use, that means somebody else is going to be taxed to provide that. Since I'm always one of the people being taxed for this sort of thing, the real question would be, "If your taxes were raised substantially in order to get rid of fares for public transportation, would you use public transportation in order get some of your tax money back, even though you will lose the convenience, flexibility, speed, and independence that comes with driving?"
... and yet any attempt to use it in order run any sort of errand or outing means lengthy walks and waits outdoors, a dirty and smelly ride, almost without fail some rowdy and threatening teenagers, and a price tag that's roughly the same as typically expensed driving mile. So here in this area we spend literally billions on public transportation, but it's used by only a narrow group of people who happen to have residential and work proximity to the perfect route.
I live in the close-in burbs of a major metro area. There are buses, metro rail, some light rail
I live about 12 miles, as the crow flies, from a datacenter I use. It's normally about a 25 minute drive. There's a metro rail stop just two blocks from that destination, and one (with no parking, and little bus access) about two miles from where I live... but that rail ride costs about $12 (or $20, if you can park), and takes about 70 minutes one way. If somebody's taxes were raised to make that trip "free," it would still be grotesquely expensive in terms of time and flexibility.
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