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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.
Powerful people don't use mass transit, therefore there is no priority on mass transit.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
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
Many US cities had streetcar lines up until the 50s/60s. They were by and large privately owned, later bought by GM/Firestone, and went bust to be replaced by busses, which required tires. So the cities tore out miles and miles of track.
Stupid right? It's a failure of government that just wanted to move on to cars, and didn't see any value in buying this infrastructure (already on the publicly owned and maintained streets).
The US has long had this fantasy that everything can just be done by private enterprise. For some things it's true. I'm not a fan of government telecom owned telecom monopolies or the government owned energy monopoly in Mexico. But some things provide positive externalities like transit, or roads or bridges really should be owned and operated by the government.
Most other countries figured this out long ago. We still thought we could give short shrify to transit, and hope people just get along with cars, and move further and further away (some weird obsession with wanting more property).
Transit Utah is surprisingly good for mountain state.
I used it to commute for several years. The problem was the increased time spent in the commute.
Using the trains my commute was 1.5 hours from my door to my office. On motorcycle it is 45 minutes. In a car it was someplace in between. They offered wifi on the train, but the quality was too poor to do anything beyond a git push, email or basic browsing. Forget using a VPN. To make the train time useful I had to save work for the train. If I didn't have that kind of work to do, then the extra hour and half was coming out of my personal time. (my quality of life)
Now I work closer to home. Self transport is 15-20 minutes now. Mass transit is 50 minutes but only runs twice a day. But even if it was every ten minutes, I wouldn't do it because I want to be productive.
Self transport (Automobile/Motorcycle) equates to freedom in the US; go where you want when you want.
Mass transport puts you on someone else's schedule instead of your own.
Mass transit can't seem to function in the US because there is just too much space to cover. For densely populated areas there is enough mass to make it work. Without the population density, it cannot make enough money to pay it's own bills, so it naturally fails unless it is propped up by a government.
When I was a teenager in NYC, one could walk up to a subway platform and count on a train showing up in 3-5 minutes.
Today, that time is more like 10-30 minutes, depending on how broke the MTA is from it's monthly pension obligations that month.
The reasons ridership is down is because it's faster to simply walk or to take a cab.
Mass transit suffers from the Amtrak problem. It is unable to provide adequate service because 80% of its budget is spend paying the unsustainable pension promises of yesteryear, and paying absurd salaries to current employees. Seriously, clerks working in MTA token booths get a compensation package worth well in excess of $100K per year, just to change US currency into subway tokens.
Fix that problem, and you fix mass transit.
That statement presupposes that "improving service" could ever have allowed mass transit to keep up. How do you "compete" with personal transit that takes you from door to door, on your own schedule, day or night, from the convenience of your own home, without having to worry about being assaulted or robbed by someone riding with you? It was inevitable that mass transit would lose out when automobiles came on the scene.
The problem with the mass transit debate is two-fold:
(1) It is dominated by people who moan and moralize about what other people "ought" to be doing, rather than what they choose to do as a matter of personal convenience and time savings.
(2) Many of the people doing the moaning and moralizing don't believe in eating the dog food being served to the plebes; they drive their own vehicles. You see, their personal time is extremely valuable, even if they don't consider yours to be.
There is no "conspiracy" against mass transit. Commuters are quite capable of making their own choices about the quickest, safest, most convenient way to getting from point A to point B. Mass transit just can't compete with personal transportation, except in the very densest urban environments.
Most large European cities were large long before the advent of the automobile. This meant their transit infrastructure was designed at most for horse and buggy. To build roads to accommodate automobiles would mean tearing down buildings to widen roads. America by contrast grew up with automobiles and wide open spaces so except for the North East coastal cities the roads are at least big enough for most passenger cars. Several other factors contributed to make mass transit less of a necessity leading to low ridership.
"A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it." - K
We are told we need single-family houses to make us happy and wealthy - so we buy single-family houses. We are told we need cars to make us happy and productive - so we buy cars.
Mass transit has no effective marketing. It's just there, like municipal water service. You can use it or ignore it. And as we keep telling people that the "good life" is outside the city - and hence outside the reach of many transit systems - they don't invest the effort in using them.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
If you have to take a bus that makes 20 stops before your stop then it's not worth it to ride. More express locations would help. I ride the bus. I drive my car 4 miles to an express pickup location with security monitored parking. That express goes straight downtown where I work in 17-20min, half the time it would take me to drive. (plus I don't have to deal with other drivers, can read a book, and get free wifi on the bus) If I had to take a non-express it would take about 2 hrs. Ain't nobody got time for that.
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....
My employer is willing to deduct the cost of a monthly transit pass (in Portland, OR) from my check *pre-tax*, so they are showing their support by offering this incentive and convenience. (The pass arrives by mail each month)
That pass is good for; bus lines, train lines, streetcars, and the buses that run between Portland and Vancouver. It's quite convenient. (easy)
That ease of access should never be underestimated. Even though I got the pass for commuting to work, I have used it to travel to concert venues - I then don't experience that right-after-the-concert-crush of people trying to drive out of a huge parking lot.
Yes, using transit takes longer. There are many instances where I would not dream of using it because of the total transit time involved. But for a lot of reasonably-short-distance travel, it's great.
If more employers installed more bike racks, offered convenience in buying transit passes, encouraged telecommuting, etc. we would all benefit in many (some subtle) ways.
Those in prison are **not committing any crime** outside it.
No, but by being imprisoned they are both (a) loosing much of their ability to make a living through non-criminal means when they get out (because people generally don't hire ex-cons) and (b) getting the connections and skills that set them up for committing more crime when they get out. That's why most of the data indicates that, when all other things are equal, people who are given custodial sentences are more likely to re-offend than people given non-custodial sentences. That in turn is why America having one of the largest prison populations in the world is a cause of, as well as a symptom of, America's relatively high crime rate.
If intelligent life is too complex to evolve on its own, who designed God?
The US used to have the best mass transit in the world.
Then cam the streetcar conspiracy:
>>
Between 1938 and 1950, National City Lines and its subsidiaries, American City Lines and Pacific City Lines—with investment from GM, Firestone Tire, Standard Oil of California through a subsidiary, Federal Engineering, Phillips Petroleum, and Mack Trucks—gained control of additional transit systems in about 25 cities.
The companies were sued for their conspiracy, but mass transit never recovered.
Of course. But they keep building them because building mass transit systems is a way of extracting subsidies from the federal government. San Jose Light rail is a prime example, trains to nowhere with virtually no riders on most of the routes. No one cares much about the operational cost or whether it works or not - the vast majority of the money that local governments can scam out of the taxpayer have already been gotten once it's built, so anything after that it just gravy.
California's supertrain, same thing, it's not there to solve a transportation problem, it's there to get money for a make-work project, and it's irrelevant whether it is going to ever function as a viable transport system. As of a year ago, the allegedly 25-ish or so billion dollar system sold to the taxpayers was up around 98 billion as of about a year ago (if you read the fine print, which was below a much more optimistic estimate in large letters at the top) and if ever completed, will be about 250-300 billion.
The goal is not to build a train line, it's to *spend money building a train line". The way thing are lining up, it's going to be a 50-year long version of the WPA, unions, politicians, hangers-on, all get their beaks wet, and the rest of the taxpayers get screwed.
Of course, all the leftists love these pointless train projects, because they check all the boxes - collectivist (no more individual travel, everybody follow a schedule set by the authorities), they permit payoffs to all the constituent groups like unions (which all then kick it back through campaign donations, effectively a money-laundering scheme like Solyndra), a promise of future endless taxpayer bailouts, and the need to form conspiracies to explain why they all, ultimately, fail (Koch Brother, GM, other evil mysterious forces).
For cities like LA, with a few exceptions, there's no practical solution involving public transport as it's impossible to cover either a) the large distances required without making several stops and/or transfers and/or b) the last mile (in reality two or three) to get to one's destination. What's left is to encourage policies that reduce the need use roads regardless of the means of transport. Not as simple.
American culture is pure selfishness. It's all about "me me me" without any consideration to their community, municipality, country, state, or even country.
Because SANE people realize that they don't exist to serve the State, the State exists to serve them.
But almost all public infrastructure in USA are in very bad shape. USA got a D+ rating in 2017 from (ASCE) American Society of Civil Engineers https://www.infrastructurerepo...
The article mentions the Boston subway system frequently, but does not mention that ridership is way, way up since the Great Recession (almost 25% on the heavy rail portion of the subway, source: MBTA "Ridership Trends Final 022717", also see http://www.t4ma.org/boston_is_...). While there are plenty of reasons to dislike the subway system in Boston (including rampant corruption, gross ineptitude, poor management, inadequate maintenance, etc.), it is working at capacity during rush hour, and there are well-publicised plans to expand capacity. It's not clear how much more room there is for expansion, however, as, for example, the Red Line trains run every 3 minutes during rush hour, and need to maintain a minimum separation.
But declining ridership? Not in Boston.
Put my fist through my alarm clock with its ding-dong death inside my ear. - The Blackjacks.
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Things that move on tracks, accelerate and stop with far better behavior. A electric street car basically move like a high end electric car, where it can change speed in really elegant and powerful ways. The same with elegant stops. And a greater loading space versus how much padding the exterior adds.
These are on top of things like priority in right of way. Or being simpler mechanism means cheaper unit cost.
Basically: This isn't about cars per intersection anon, but people per intersection instead. Where working public transport means people can use bikes/trams/street cars or trains to go somewhere, and they will because its actually possible. So instead of 200 cars per minute it could be 3 buses, which means there is more space for everything else.
When I travel in Europe I never use a car. It's really rather liberating and I can stay longer because I'm spending less money. (Admitted minor point)
After that, I spent a good while being lower income when I was younger. Oh lord would it have been nice to live in a country where public transportation was widely available and I didn't have to spend such a significant portion of my income on a car and all of it's associated bills. When I go shopping or out to eat literally anywhere the vast majority of those people operating those stores are in the exact same boat as I was back then. The extra money saved by these masses would likely be spent elsewhere contributing far more to job growth then buying and maintaining a car whose construction is largely automated.
And then after that, I remember when I had to commute by car at a slightly older age. What a garbage fest it is commuting by car. I'd have a traded a slightly longer commute by mass transit where I could read, work, or just plane space out the entire time over stop and go traffic where I'm just stuck sitting there having to focus on the road.
And then after that, in all my travels in the US, our highways are never wide enough during high traffic periods and likely never will be under our current transportation model.
In summary, a car is a major expense for most Americans. Sure the convenience of car ownership is nice and I currently thoroughly enjoy it but for many Americans it's an absolute burden.
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