The bus eventually went up to $1 per ride but I still think about these two options and wish my town had something like it. With a few small improvements I don’t see why we can’t reasonably subsidize these relatively cheap options in most towns/small cities. The rental car one would be harder, but even the bus would suffice. It notably didn’t stop at any grocery stores, only Walmarts so that’s another thing to improve. But I’d give up my car in a second for that bus back home.
I’m not even sure if this is still their active website http://0060325.netsolhost.com/about.htm but it gives you a picture of what I’m talking about. There’s either another service or a replacement that is $2.00 instead of $1.00 that goes by DCT from what I can tell. I don’t live there anymore so hard to know the current setup. I’m really underselling how good that bus was/is.
If you look at the Honolulu transit project (Formerly HART, now called Skyline), I think it shows everything wrong with US transit projects:
1. It goes nowhere useful, only going to a bunch of random places on the west side of Oahu where no one really goes.
2. It was pitched as an economic uplift project, not a transit project. "If we build a train in these largely-ignored areas, it will help the people there!"
3. It took years and years to build, full of cost overruns, because it was also pitched mainly as a job creation project. You can't sell a transit project based on that alone, so instead they're pitched as welfare or job-creation programs, which creates the wrong set of incentives. After all, if the project takes longer, that's more jobs!
Now I drive my single occupant 6603 lb truck to work once or twice a week, and WFH the rest of the time.
Sure, there are issues with those trains sometimes, but it is really an easy decision.
In NYC transit isn’t viewed the way you’re describing it, pretty much everyone takes it. And yet NYC’s system expands at a glacial pace. A good part of the reason is because everything costs so damn much. Part of that is everyone wanting a piece of the pie so the simplest, cheapest option is very rarely the one chosen.
I’m not suggesting that we need another Bob Moses, but he does prove there is some way to cut through the glacial movement of politics and bureaucracy
Japan, for instance, many train stations have small/medium/large shopping centers built on them. The train makes money not only by fares by but renting out the shops, running department stores, groceries stores, renting offices, apartments, etc... There's what I think is a positive feedback loop.
That's clearly not the only way to do it but it might be a way in the USA? because treating it as a public service just makes it a political tax burden. Something to be cut, under funded, etc....
Los Angeles used to have one of the largest public transit systems. Over 1000 miles of track (compare to NYC 650 miles?) and tons of stations. Most of it was built commercially to sell housing. According to this documentary it worked, until the deals they'd made with the cities to maintain the roads the trains went down ended up costing too much money.
https://www.amazon.com/This-Pacific-Electric-Stephanie-Edwar...
This video also shows two extensive train systems from past L.A.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BQfUFhchIlM
It feels like in Japan, they kind of solved that issue by letting the train companies run their stations as retail/office spaces and all the other stuff mentioned above.
I think Singapore, Shanghai, Hong Kong probably have government based public transportation but it feels like they've managed to turned many stations into commerce hubs at least.
Yes, many of the transit companies in Japan are really more accurately described as real estate companies that own and operate train lines. Most of their profits come from the real estate, not the trains, and the trains are mainly a way to get people to go to the properties.
One big difference you can see between the US and Japan along these lines is the stations: in the US (and Canada from what I've seen), there's absolutely nothing inside the stations, just fare gates and a platform and train tracks. In Japan, the station has vending machines, shops, underground connections to nearby buildings, spaces for vendors to set up temporary stalls, etc. In the high-traffic stations, it's easy to stop in a convenience store, or in a Starbucks, before getting on your next train, and of course the train company is getting money from that in the form of rent. Some really big stations have larger shopping areas attached. But the US seems allergic to renting out commercial space in stations for some reason, and wants transit systems to get all their funding from fares and taxes.
All that is also ignoring the other big items: weather & culture. I'm in Dallas, although this applies to many southern cities, where people most people are not used to the weather. Going to speak broadly, this applies to a vast majority of folks. They leave their HVAC home to their HVAC car to their HVAC offices and so on. The women especially get dressed up and do their make-up and hair daily before ever being seen my a non-housemate. Men are often still dressing in clothing that they'd like to keep clean. We don't carry changes of clothes around with us or have a natural style (like I see in European cities where biking is normal). Sweating and being rained on and such is completely foreign to us. We generally wouldn't show up to work after having walked a mile outside. This is why we don't even ride bikes for transportation even when going short distances. It would require a huge shift in perspective and culture around these things.
That’s before we talk availability, comfort, etc.
Other than subways, public transportation is always going to be subpar.
In theory, starting in West Oahu made sense because it’s cheaper to build out there, and TOD will grow the tax base to support the urban stations, but you have to actually build something for that to work.
It very clearly should have gone from the airport to Waikiki Beach (or at the very least Ala Monana center), which would have actually taken tourist traffic off the roads. But if it did that, those tourists might not rent cars or take taxis! The rental car lobby and taxi lobby don't like that one bit.
Too bad they screwed this up when they built the International Terminal, which is connected with a bus on surface streets that gets stuck in traffic and at lights. If you're flying an airline with a presence in the domestic terminal, you can use the internal transit system to get to the International Terminal but otherwise you're stuck switching from the train to the bus or vice versa. It's an annoying bit of extra friction that shouldn't exist.
In most of the US, transit riders can’t wait to be able to afford a car and get out of transit. For good reason: the transit experience for them is terrible
Here's some more detail about China, which has the two largest transit systems in the world: Shanghai and Beijing.
In 1993, Shanghai had one line running 2.7 miles with 4 stations. Less than 30 years later, the system had 15 lines, 500 miles of track, and 500 stations. [1]
And in that same time frame, the Beijing subway system was expanded, from 2 lines in 2002 to 27 lines and 500 miles of track, with 13 million riders per day in 2022. [2]
Also in that time, 30 other cities in China got subway systems as well.[3]
In 1993, China's per-capita GDP was $537. By comparison, per-capita GDP in the US was 50 times larger (about $23k). Since then, the gap has narrowed. US per-capita GDP is now 5x of China (66k vs 12k).
China demonstrates that, even with small GDP, if you prioritize the needs of the people over entrenched commercial interests, it can be done.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_Shanghai_Metro [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beijing_Subway [3] https://qz.com/1010911/a-beautiful-data-animation-shows-the-...
Finally, the largest transit system in the world isn't in China, it's in Tokyo, Japan (though to be fair, it isn't really a single system since it's run by many different companies).
Everybody wants a car because public transit sucks. Do you think that those people would still want a car if they lived somewhere with a good public transit and walkability?
I'm not sure why we even call those cities, because they're not. They're big sprawling towns.
China's public transit success was because of their small gdp per capita, not in spite of it. Their developing economy gave them labor at slave wages and allowed the government to just bulldoze peoples houses without much backlash. Not having those things are the biggest problems the US faces when it comes to building infrastructure.
Nobody wants to ride public transit that is unreliable/late, has limited service times/areas, prone to strikes, dirty or unsafe, etc. It's easier and/or better to own a car or Uber in most areas. It's not really going to improve since we're stuck in a catch-22.
What happened to the old ones? They were largely replaced with buses. Some of Dublin’s bus lines _still_ follow the path of tramlines from a century ago. And the thing is, _at the time_, this kind of worked. Not many people had cars in 1928. There was no significant traffic, and the buses operated about as fast as the trams, and were cheaper to maintain (and the trams from a century ago weren’t the 400 person capacity monsters you get now; they were similar capacity to buses). A few decades later, when traffic picked up and suddenly the buses weren’t so fine, the tram infra was all gone, and it was far too late to go back.
I was in Florence not long ago and they are building out a very impressive light-rail network [1]. Twenty years ago a similarly ambitious network was planned in Cincinnati, OH and it was voted down 2-1 [2].
[1] https://en.comune.fi.it/administration/tramway/system.html
Many urban transportation types and city planners in general give off a culty, can-I-tell-you-about-my-Lord-and-Savior-Mass-Transit vibe that is very off-putting to many, if not most Americans. Their writings gloss over the practical issues of American weather, last-mile, families with children, lugging home shopping, aging…along with deprecating any personal valuations of saving time, spontaneity, avoiding unpleasant interactions, carrying your large purchases with you…. You ignore my real world, lived experience in your screeds, I ignore you. And so they shout into the void.
https://www.census.gov/library/visualizations/2021/geo/popul...
https://www.eea.europa.eu/data-and-maps/figures/fragmentatio...
I could see local areas like California or New York getting some high speed rail but even then, how many people would use it and where would they be going?
Then why do all of those 50 countries has so extremely similar problems? Not all have the same level of those problems, but the states with the least murder rate are similar to the EU countries with the highest murder rate etc, or good public transit is like EU bad public transit etc. Police brutality in the states with the least is like police brutality in the worst part of EU etc.
Cleary there must be some very shared culture for that to happen, as there are many such extreme stats compared to the rest of the world. Otherwise you would have a lot of states that were like average European countries.
The fact there isn't really high speed rail connections across large cities in the Midwest is kind of silly considering there isn't much terrain to contend with like there is on the coasts. Even the 1 new route Amtrak introduced from Chicago to Minneapolis has seen pretty high demand.
I was in San Francisco once and the latest Caltrain going from Sunnyvale to San Francisco was before 11:30PM, and the latest Caltrain going from San Francisco to Sunnyvale was three minutes after midnight. In New York PATH trains, LIRR trains, Metro North trains, New Jersey transit trains all leave well past that.
For political reasons that would be untenable in the US. Therefore we have to pay full price to build a thing we’re not good at building and don’t have the ramped up supply chains to support. If there’s only one company left that builds a component you need, guess what? You pay whatever they ask.
From Kyiv to Singapore, sure, but not far west of Kyiv. I’m not aware of _any_ Chinese transport project in Western Europe?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MTR_Corporation?wprov=sfti1#Sw...
Here are some of the current U.S. cities with rail projects under construction:
Los Angeles, California - Extensions to the existing light rail network
Denver, Colorado - Commuter rail lines
San Diego, California - New light rail extensions
Seattle, Washington - Ongoing Commuter rail lines
Minneapolis, Minnesota - Southwest Light Rail Transit (SWLRT) project
I have lived in some cities where things are not like this. Where public transportation is amazing and getting better by the year.
It’s a shame every time I read people ignorant how a modern city can function with a pedestrian/bicycle/tram/bus/train. Where it’s quiet and calm.
But how do you convince people who have only seen the insides of cars that public transportation can be superior?
The US's basic problem with large building projects nowadays is federalism. There are so many different jurisdictions that opponents can always find some court or legislative body that they can exploit to slow down or stop the project.
Everything else flows from that.
Lawsuits? Too many courts.
Legislative opposition? Too many governmental units. Even if the public as a whole supports it, some jurisdictions will not.
Administrative permit hearings, which go on endlessly? Too many governmental units.
Yes, things used to work better in the US, but things change and all systems decay.
It’s hard in the US because of politics, corruption, favors, contracts for the purpose to burn money, transit other than cars is only for poor people (a US thing), poor people aren’t a priority, reputation for working on transit for people won’t get you reelected by your rich donors and constituents.
It’s kind of a shame because whenever Americans get back from Europe they rave about being able to take the train everywhere.
I commuted to Denver daily from Boulder, CO for three years and never drove during that time.
My shortlist of why I only want bus service to Boulder County ( for reference I typically pick up the bus at Table Mesa).
I only moved to Boulder in 2009 so I know I haven't carried as much tax burden as some people who "dream of light rail to Denver" but I'm very very happy with the FlatIron Flyers.
1. Buses can adapt to weather conditions
- Frequently coworkers training up from the tech center were 10x more likely to have issues with trains when the weather was icy, during the three years that I compiled this list of why I prefer buses.
2.Buses can adapt to other buses on the same route failing
- the RTD train infrastructure has very few places that light rail can pass one another so it doesn't matter if your train is working if the one ahead of your fails
3. Buses do not have routes altered/closed for maintenance
- when I would take the light rail to the company's Parker office or visiting friends it was surprising to have to get off and catch a bus around a section of rail under repair.
- I acknowledge that sometimes specific stops can be closed or moved but rarely is a whole section down and require alternate solutions (i.e. deboarding the train to board a bus to deboard on the other side of maintenance and board a new train)
4. Buses have express options.
- see the comment above regarding the few places that RTD rails can pass other trains
- note when the W line opened the express bus routes were removed, I think that was also true with another line but I can't remember. My favorite part of this is the coworkers I know who used that route started driving because the train was significantly longer commute times.
5. Buses typically have storage for up to six bikes per vehicle and don't block entries of others
- as an avid bike-the-final-mile commuter having storage for bikes that don't hinder other passengers boarding or exiting is nice (if you want to complain that it sometimes means staying at a few stops longer go ahead)
6. Buses Can turn over quicker at end of the line
- waiting for the E Line to swap directions at union station was comically slow when compared to catching the FF2 that just dropped off people and pulled around to pick up.
7. Buses can reroute around accidents that happen.
- E line and other northbound rail had to stop because of a car accident on the I-25 on the other side of a jersey wall where someone died. But the law says all traffic must be stopped from crossing an area of a certain diameter from the accident scene. So the next train had to stop. No place for passengers to deboard in the middle of the railway and blocked trains behind it.
- See comment above where other trains would be impacted as well
8. IMO, The payment and boarding method is a better User experience on the bus.
- this was more true before the mobile app could hold an annual pass
9. I'm sure I could come up with more reasons.
- oh, I'd rather take the AB to the airport than the A-train (sheesh that is a long train ride for such a short distance)
- oh, someone just mentioned the "rich people lane" yes, the bus uses the HOV lane! How great.
10. Air circulation is better inter city buses
When my office opens I'll return to bike/bus commuting. It is a bummer that during covid the express buses have stopped but understandable. The few times that I have bused in during 2020 the added time of FF1 was noticeable. Typically bike/express-bus takes me 50minutes house door to office door
https://chartingtransport.com/category/australian-cities/
At least 80% of surface passenger kilometers are in cars.
Public transit does not need to turn a profit, it's a public service. It must provide a service. It is already paid off.
"... but muh capitalism brought me the iPhone!"
Yeah, what about being able to walk your fucking neighborhood though?
