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Why Is American Mass Transit So Bad? It's a Long Story. (citylab.com)
Jonathan English, writing for City Lab: One hundred years ago, the United States had a public transportation system that was the envy of the world. Today, outside a few major urban centers, it is barely on life support. Even in New York City, subway ridership is well below its 1946 peak. Annual per capita transit trips in the U.S. plummeted from 115.8 in 1950 to 36.1 in 1970, where they have roughly remained since, even as population has grown.
This has not happened in much of the rest of the world. While a decline in transit use in the face of fierce competition from the private automobile throughout the 20th century was inevitable, near-total collapse was not. At the turn of the 20th century, when transit companies' only competition were the legs of a person or a horse, they worked reasonably well, even if they faced challenges. Once cars arrived, nearly every U.S. transit agency slashed service to cut costs, instead of improving service to stay competitive. This drove even more riders away, producing a vicious cycle that led to the point where today, few Americans with a viable alternative ride buses or trains.
Now, when the federal government steps in to provide funding, it is limited to big capital projects. (Under the Trump administration, even those funds are in question.) Operations -- the actual running of buses and trains frequently enough to appeal to people with an alternative -- are perpetually starved for cash. Even transit advocates have internalized the idea that transit cannot be successful outside the highest-density urban centers. And it very rarely is.
This has not happened in much of the rest of the world. While a decline in transit use in the face of fierce competition from the private automobile throughout the 20th century was inevitable, near-total collapse was not. At the turn of the 20th century, when transit companies' only competition were the legs of a person or a horse, they worked reasonably well, even if they faced challenges. Once cars arrived, nearly every U.S. transit agency slashed service to cut costs, instead of improving service to stay competitive. This drove even more riders away, producing a vicious cycle that led to the point where today, few Americans with a viable alternative ride buses or trains.
Now, when the federal government steps in to provide funding, it is limited to big capital projects. (Under the Trump administration, even those funds are in question.) Operations -- the actual running of buses and trains frequently enough to appeal to people with an alternative -- are perpetually starved for cash. Even transit advocates have internalized the idea that transit cannot be successful outside the highest-density urban centers. And it very rarely is.
They are behind it for decades.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/0...
I live outside of Los Angeles. In my case, there's a rail station about five miles from my house. There is also a train station a block from my office. I *could* ride a bike there and then take a train. I honestly would like to. However, the total commute by car is about 40 minutes (17 miles) door-to-door. The MINIMUM commute by rail would be three hours door to door.
Thanks, I'll take my car.
The Kai's Semi-Updated Website Thingy
I work with transit agencies, city planners, major employers, and the commuters themselves. Here's what I know to be the causes:
1. Low population density - If you go to the denser parts of LA, you get good transit. Same with SF, NYC, etc. If you head out to the land of single-family homes, population density drops to the point where you need massive subsidies to keep a route going. But then, you're fighting against...
2. Suburban Road Network Design - When you have mile-long block-faces along arterials, you guarantee that transit riders will need to walk .5-.75 miles on average to a bus route... not even likely the route they need. Then there's the whole issue of...
3. People Don't Live Near Work - Most people have to balance housing affordability, proximity to work, and living in a home they like. Part of that is because those who can afford to buy a home typically want a back yard, front yard, and a two car garage (see #s 1 and 2) and the other part is that given the demand to live near major work centers, the cost per square foot to live near work is pretty damn high. And then there's the issue of people buying up homes for investment (rentals) instead of living in them thereby exasperating the "drive til you qualify" problem, but that's a whole other discussion.
4. Free parking and ignorance of the cost of commutes - People don't want to pay for public transit they're not using, so they vote down funding. That increases user fees and thus makes it unattractive to use because most people don't have separate parking fees. Instead, employers underpay their workers to fund parking costs. Moreover, people assume that "gas need to be bought" so they don't factor the cost of fuel into their commutes and thus can't accurately compare the cost of a monthly transit pass to the cost of a drive-alone commute.
5. Transit Fare Interoperability - Transit systems are typically city-wide or county-wide. Very few cross county jurisdictional boundaries. They are thus, in effect, silo'd. They have their own fare/rate structure (cost per boarding, discounts for multi-boarding passes), pass structure (monthly passes vs. 30-day passes), and absent a multi-jurisdictional agreement (Like Clipper in the Bay Area), many people need to purchase and maintain multiple bus passes for daily commutes. State SHOULD pass laws that require that each county get onboard with multi-jurisdictional pass/pricing schemes by 202X and then set another deadline to have groups of neighboring counties merge their pass/pricing schema until we have statewide transit passes. After all, it has taken over 20 years for the SF Bay area Clipper Card to get to where it is and it still only includes 22 of the local transit agencies. There are over 164 transit agencies in California alone.
I could go on....
Even if it was clean, on time and lacked smelly bums.
But again, it isn't. While I was in the midst of moving, I had temporary accommodation in San Jose with a light rail station in front of my apartment. It was only 7 stops to get to work, where there was another station right in front of the building. I decided to give it a try.
Long story short: it reminded my why I hate public transport. It's slower: my travel time doubled. I have to work on their schedule: I have to wait for a train to come. Is that going to be 10 minutes? Or perhaps 25? While it's either hot or supercold outside. It just sucks.
And I didn't even mention the stupid rules they have:
- I'm not allowed to eat or drink anything;
- I can't have pepperspray on me;
- Not that I have one, but even if I had a firearm and CCW permit I would not be allowed to carry it;
Did I mention it's shitty expensive? Did I mention the amount of pandhandling bums? Did I mention the body odors of people from all over the world?
No thanks, I'll take my private transportation. Public transportation sucks.
I'm not a complete idiot... Some parts are missing.
Every consider that the modern person just doesn't want to ride mass transit for their daily lives?
I can consider that avoidance of mass transit is what a lot of people do and personally like, but "modern" is not correct description of such behaviour. Plenty of modern people use mass transit.
Self-driving cars can drive in tight "platoons" that greatly increase the carrying capacity of roads.
Sort of like those tight collections of cars known as "trains"?
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
Done
It's called Anthropogenic Global Warming and is backed by 99.7% of all peer reviewed formal journal published articles on Climatology over the last 50 years.
Trains in America are not even the in the same league as trains in Europe. If you have never been on one you simply don't know the difference. European, and Japanese, and even Chinese trains travel at much higher speeds than anything in the US. The higher speed is accompanied with a totally different riding experience: much less noise, vibration and being tossed around.
You are correct in comparing buses. But you are missing the point of my previous post. Buses are fine when used in conjunction with other mass transit systems(subway, trams, light rail, hihgh speed trains), but buses do not cause the synergistic effects that permanent mass transit connections do, thus they have negligible effects on property value and utility, partly due to the fact that bus stops are moved around frequently and they don't generate the amount of foot traffic, except where bus hubs connect with other mass transit systems. When you couple this with the American system of having separate bus systems for children of school age, which have zero connection with other bus systems or other mass transit connections, because they are 100% decoupled, you end up with public bus systems that remain under utilized and inefficient.
Additionally you have a different social environment on public transit when each adult on the bus is responsible for safeguarding the well being of young children. In Europe 6-7 years hop on the trams by themselves to go to school, frequently in the company of other school-aged children, they are not accompanied by adults, but each adult on the tram understands their responsibility towards safeguarding the children. Let's put it this way, it's just really different than what we experience here in the US.
There are important exceptions, alternate implementations of bus systems that actually do have the kind of synergistic effects. One city in China, whose name I forget, actually has a setup with a major artery traversing the city alone one axis have something like 12 lanes, with the interior 4 lanes physically isolated from the surrounding 8 lanes, where there are bus stop every 100 meters and the buses run continuous loops up and down this artery, the buses hit each bus stop with something like 30 seconds between buses, creating a hyper efficient form of mass transit which actually surpasses subways in terms of utility and mobility.
But again most cities in America *only* have bus systems and they do not connect with any other forms of mass transit. Which means that bus systems utterly fail, on their own, to create the synergistic economies which are to be found everywhere where buses compliment actual mass transit systems.
I lived in a city named Marburg in Germany from 1994 till 1998, part of the 190 Deutsch Mark(60 dollar) tuition fee for University studies included free use of all public transit within 100km of the city. I had an opportunity to study Latin in Frankfurt which was roughly 90km distance from Marburg. Marburg has approximately 60,000 inhabitants, Frankfurt some around 1.5 million inhabitants. 5 days a week I would leave my apart, walk 100 yards to the bus stop, caught the bus to the central train station, caught a train to Frankfurt, went to the subway station beneath the Frankfurt central train station, rode the subway for 3 1/2 mites, exited the subway climbed up the stairs to the street, hopped on a tram for the remaining two miles, and then walked 100 yards to the Latin class, where I studied for 4 hours and then did the exact same trip in reverse.
The total trip time from my apartment to the Latin class was about 75 minutes, the same in reverse, and in 4 months I never ran into a delay, and I probably only had to walked about 250 yards total each way. And this was included in the cost of the University Tuition.
There is nothing like this in the United States, there are only a handful of American cities that have rudimentary mass transit systems, nothing approaching what roughly 300 million people take for granted across most of Europe.