Saving Transit from a Death Spiral
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- čas přidán 17. 02. 2023
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People frequently talk about how transit depends on dense land use, low car ownership and more. But the most important factor for creating a successful transit system is service! In fact, a good transit service can create demand where none existed before.
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Ever wondered why your city's transit just doesn't seem quite up to snuff? RMTransit is here to answer that, and help you open your eyes to all of the different public transportation systems around the world!
Reece (the RM in RMTransit) is an urbanist and public transport critic residing in Toronto, Canada, with the goal of helping the world become more connected through metros, trams, buses, high-speed trains, and all other transport modes.
I live in a medium city with bus-only service that is very deficient, and the transit agency reduced service in the Christmas season, where they could have expanded their ridership, they ended up having police patrols and vans carrying people to and from the city centre.
Meanwhile, I remember my former city where they expanded service hours during the holidays and trains were packed up until midnight. You are spot on with this topic
Oh absolutely the holiday season is a great time to pick up a ton of ridership!
Translink for years now has done special free service on New Years Eve as well as later service. Basically as a way to keep people off the roads when they've had one too many drinks and so that the cabs/Ubers aren't the only thing offering an alternative.
@@AmurTiger WMATA does this too and it's fantastic-they should really extend this to 4th of July and Valentines day IMO. Maybe even St. Patrick's day.
@@RMTransit Meanwhile in Auckland...
Man, I've been saying this for years. 15 years ago, the bus route that services my neighbourhood ran every 30 min peak, 60 off. Which made getting from my neighbourhood to any of the rest of the county's transit system extremely inconvenient. Not to mention driving to the transit centre the bus took you to, took half the time. So I was always inclined to get a ride to the transit centre, then hop on light rail to the bus to collage. Everyone knew this, and did the same. It really should have been every 15 min peak, 30 off. And the two internal city bus routes needed to be split into four, to more efficiently move between neighbourhoods and the transit centre.
Jump to now, the bus route that services my neighbourhood is now "School days and hours only". I guess I probably should quickly define the route. It runs from the city transit centre to the city high school via my neighbourhood, some others, and both middle schools. VTA of course blames cutting service on us for not riding, but obviously we didn't ride due to inconvenience.
The area where I live in Seattle is exactly the same as your previous level of service, 30 minute peak, 60 minute off peak, also compounded by the fact that it's a roll of the dice whether any given bus _even shows up_. I call it "the least reliable line on the network", and so whenever I need to do a trip other than "get to work", I will either drive to the P&R which is a couple miles away and catch a bus, or drive to the railhead which is 7 miles away. Or, y'know, just drive all the way to my destination.
They're extending the main rail line, and I hope they'll alter my nearby route to feed the train quicker and more reliably. I'd take it for way more than just getting to the rail (there's grocery and pharmacy and other retail along the corridor) if it were more frequent and reliable.
I just moved from bay area a couple months ago. of COURSE it's vta 😂
@@adm1nspotter Some of it has to do with the fact that planning boards in charge try to blend a bunch of lines individually rather than "universally."
You can have a bus running 30 to an hour daily but as long as it links with a truncated service that creates a steady flow every 10-15 minutes at best.
The more rural the least cost reasonable it is to operate beyond hourly.
It’s the same for my local route. That is, when the bus actually shows up at all. On many, many occasions tue bus is simply M.I.A. Whenever there’s a shortage of drivers the local routes are the ones that get cancelled with zero notice, so passengers that rely on the route because they don’t OWN a car are left standing outside in the snow.
@@MarloSoBalJr but that is chicken and egg. if you only run every 60 minutes then very few people will take it. and fewer people take it makes it uneconomical. it is a death spiral. vancouver's skytrain was not well utilized when it first opened. they tried so hard to entice people to take it that it had no turnstile so you can ride it for free. fast forward to 40 years. it is extremely popular and if it stops running, people get really mad. and it is so efficient that the public want to see it running 7x24 despite it is impossible
Idk if this is a major factor in Portland, but in my experience most people don't take transit here and around the US because they have a perception that it is for poor people. I've had many co-workers that refuse to take the better option of transit simply because of this.
At one job, it would take me ~35 min to get to work on the light rail, and ~40-50 min if you were driving in traffic. I had a co-worker/neighbor that had their car breakdown, and they refused to take the transit with me or others. They said something like, "I'll never go back to when I had to take the train," while proceeding to go into debt over buying another used car and their wages getting garnished. Americans hate being poor, and taking transit is associated with being poor by many.
And car dependency makes people poor
This is SO true. I live in Calgary, and went downtown for a show the other night. I took the train because parking is expensive and dumb downtown. But taking the train back was a real drag. It was only 9:30pm, but it took almost half an hour for a train to come. This isn't acceptable if you want people to use public transport. Next time I will probably drive.
I use the BRT to get to downtown Calgary, it's a bit more reliable than the C-train, plus it practically drops me off just a few blocks from home, and I don't have to drive to a station
Is CTrain frequency really that bad? Even off-peak, the Edmonton LRT has a 15-min frequency at most.
That's too bad. C Train used to be every fifteen minutes. (One reason for that frequency was said to be the weather, and not wanting people to wait longer when it's -20C.)
@@bearcubdaycare I think it’s *supposed* to be 15 minutes but ever since Covid they’ve been reducing frequency a lot in the off peak hours.
@@yaygya they are supposed to be 15 minutes I think but we’re having delays maybe? Then a train came that was out of service. Then another came and one of the cars was out of service so the other two were full, luckily the next train came 5 minutes later. It was weird.
Very well done. This is the KEY a message about transit. Should be required viewing by politicians, so many of whom really don’t understand the factors influencing transit use (especially quality, broadly defined and including most importantly frequency of service 07:55) and, as said in the video, “the levers that can be pulled.” Great comparison between Vancouver, which is serious about transit, and Portland, which really is just going through the motions. Honestly, this is one of the best RMT policy videos, pulling everything together. 🎉
No not politicians. The people who can put pressure on politicians need to see this. The grandma and grandpa. And we need to make our demands known by our elected officials.
What's stopping the MAX from building mega-TODs outside Downtown? During COVID even NIMBY San Diego broke ground on two $4B infill TODs outside Downtown on the same LRT line. The city council unanimously approved one of them. The other was approved by voters and was mainly opposed by developers proposing an even bigger TOD on the same spot.
@@alexhaowenwong6122 well, if Portland did, so I think Max would be overcrowded pretty quickly! If the service was reasonable!
Thank you this comment means a lot and I did try to bring everything together so it’s amazing that you said that!!!
I would say politicians DO understand this stuff but right wing governments are politically adverse to promoting public transport and tend to only care about car users
3:28 The transit is so good that Birds want to ride it too!
I live in a poorer UK city. Recently the local company, First, cut the bus through my route because "Not enough people are using it," this of course was bullshit as it was the only bus we had and was usually full, and has left my area, full of elderly people who can't drive, stranded. And my mobility impaired self. And more communities outside the city that it went to.
Wasnt the case when I moved here, there were 3 different bus routes, but they all went, one by one.
This is why it is not prudent to rely only on public transit. You are at the whims of whomever is running the transit serves. A bus route can be discontinued or cut back and nothing anybody can do about it.
@@Novusod Okay, what does that actually do for people who have no choice though? Seems more prudent to make political demands and organize to get them than just say "eh, what can you do. guess granny will have to learn how to use an e-scooter" like....
@@Novusod in any good transit city it doesn't make any sense to cut back service unless strictly necessary. Also imagine there were only a few cars in your town, and the only gas station would close "because there's not enough demand". That sounds like the exact same thing, just with cars and public transit swapped 🤔
@@camerontausch7757 Why would you move somewhere dependent on a single bus line or bridge to function? If you and everyone else didn't vote for zoning, anti-development and squatter's rights laws, more people could live closer to things they actually need. If government didn't subsidize all forms of transportation massively, competitors would be able to move in and offer different services at a higher cost when a lower-cost service became uneconomical. If you moved to an island that had a bridge built on it, and the bridge was destroyed, guess what? You either do what the original islanders did and boat over to the mainland, or you MOVE.
The problem is in the UK, pensioners can use their bus pass, but bus operators get much less income for each concessionary pass passenger as opposed to normal full fare paying passengers
At 10:40, some years back, the NYC MTA changed the "M" subway line rerouting it along Sixth Avenue in Manhattan (when the line changed from brown to orange). They were a bit surprised that the change caused an increase in ridership along that line. Apparently, there had been a long-standing need that no one knew about.
I’m very proud of TransLink in Vancouver for insisting on not cutting any service through COVID and lobbying for emergency funding hard to make sure it was sustainably. And now, Vancouver’s ridership recovery post-COVID is amongst the highest in North America.
This is absolutely true, Translink deserves major kudos for their efforts!
As a native of Southern California, I'm proud that since 2020 San Diego MTS had the highest service retention in the US, increased midday frequencies on the busiest line to 7.5 minutes, and consistently had a stronger recovery than any other LRT in US/Canada.
San Diego still has a lot to learn from Vancouver. They're building two TODs, each bigger than the Moody Centre TOD proposal, on the same line but without Skytrain level frequencies.
@@Merle1987 the 100 is the pilot project line for battery-electric buses so expect a lot from there. The 10 is... odd. Low density for half the route and multiple routes for the other half. The 99 is the 99. So many buses they climb over each other. Its also getting Skytrain on half the route and is expected to be busier on opening day than most of Portland MAX.
My german town of arround 300K people also reduced frequency during Covid and intended not to increase frequency after it. Only when ridership levels just refused to increase to pre Covid levels, they - grudgingly - increased frequency again which saw ridership increases but still failed to reach pre Covid levels.
One of the issues with mass transit quality is that many people responsible for it fail to comprehend just how punishing even relative short reduction in service quality are for its longterm success. Most people are not willing to tolerate even a few months of reduced service quality as the travel time for them may increase significantly. Thus what happens is that they get angry at loosing so much time and then they buy a car. Once they have buyed a car, they are much much less likely to return to transit and may at best reconsider it when their current vehicle has broken down. Which can take more than a decade. So by "saving money" in the short term, you may quite realistically kill the grow of your service for at least a decade and I am really curios how long it will take to even reach pre Covid levels of public transit use.
@@Merle1987 I didn't notice it that much on #10 and 100. 99?
In "Vancouverism," by urban planner Larry Beasley, one of the six principles of Vancouver style urban design is "broaden transportation choices." He also discusses how a) people will live in a very dense urban environment if everything they need is easily available and close by, and b) given a dense, easily accessible city, a large part of the public will forgo private transportation. Instead they will rely on "active transportation", (walking and cycling), public transportation like the skytrain, and temporary private vehicle use like carshare co-ops and rentals.
The lack of a highway through Vancouver was also an early urban design choice in the 1980s. Beasley and others had paid attention to Jane Jacobs and her citizen revolt against cities designed for cars and not people.
I lived for a couple of years in the Swiss countryside, and the approach to public transport in rural areas compared to Germany and the UK couldn't be bigger. Whilst, e.g. in Germany, many small railway lines have been closed down since the 60s and 70s, due to "low demand" and replaced by cheaper bus routes, this has hardly happened here. But even more striking is the difference, when it comes to bus frequencies: In Germany most villages are served by a bus about 3 or 4 times a day, providing the bare minimum of transport for those people who really don't have the choice of driving, here buses usually run from the early morning to the late evening (like 11pm) every 60 or even 30 minutes. In some areas, villages are even served by night services (usually mini buses or contracted taxis) on the weekend.
Of course, at certain hours, there are hardly any people travelling, but at the peak hours it makes a huge difference. You are far more likely to use public transport for going to work, shopping or meet friends if you know that you will have a transport, even if you're coming back early or running late. So, even if you own a car, people do often prefer to use public transport for regular trips. This also allows for having a drink or two after work with your colleagues, improving workplace relationships. Win-win.
Switzerland's got transit figured out
@@nickberry5520 it really, really does😊
Today I was on a battery-electric New Flyer bus on the Ulster County Area Transit, as special event shuttle in mostly rural Ulster County, N.Y. and many on board were raving about how quiet and nice this bus was. Many of the riders had never ridden transit in this car-dominated area. But I overheard serveral conversations aboard about people saying they'd strongly consider the bus if only ran more frequently, like every 10-15 minutes, than the current at best one-hour headways on most runs with lunchtime breaks. Sadly I live where there isn't even a fixed route line within five miles of me. Like you've preached many times service is key.
What I see a lot (particularly with buses) is an environmental argument for cutting service: if the system's ridership at frequency Y isn't above threshold X, its carbon footprint isn't smaller than people driving cars, so assuming constant ridership we need to cut frequency until it is better. But a death spiral to zero seems inevitable under that reasoning. Usually these are systems that aren't very frequent in the first place, which is why ridership is low.
I don't think this make sense. If your goal is to reduce the carbon footprint, you should make cities livable and create cycling paths. If some people still need to commute, provide train and tram services, deriving electricity from power sources with low carbon footprint. If some people still need to travel from or to areas not covered by the cycle path, train and tram network, provide electric busses. Since this is by definition in the periphery, it shouldn't be a big factor in the total carbon footprint of your region one way or the other. Peripheral bus services are usually more driven by the goal to cover an area than by optimizing the carbon footprint. Providing people with the option to live in the center is having a much bigger impact than reducing bus services.
Buses are also remarkably efficient with their fuel, trains even more so! You don’t need many cars to start making them make sense!
@@eljanrimsa5843 I think that frequently someone is just looking for an excuse to cut service, and this is the post-hoc justification. "Is it green if that bus makes a run with only three people on it?" Thinking about it because I saw this come up in the context of the bus I use to get to work, which is subsidized by the state of New Hampshire as part of the environmental mitigation plan for a highway-widening project they wanted to do. It's a far from ideal situation--it's a park-and-ride-based system. But it's actually less bad than the MBTA commuter rail for my purposes because the MBTA is so broken.
@@RMTransit I think there's a belief that if you ever see a bus or train running completely empty, that's a waste of money or fuel or what have you and the solution is to eliminate that particular run. But they don't consider the knock-on effects of that-- the fact that everyone now has to plan their rides around that hole in the schedule.
I don't think the purpose of transit is really even about reducing carbon emissions. If it were, lots of suburban coverage routes that often run with 1-2 people on board would simply not exist. The purpose of transit is to provide mobility. And that mobility is still needed whether a particular route actually reduces carbon emissions relative to passengers driving cars instead or not.
cutting back service is something the warsaw public transport authority needs to hear about as they've been cutting service hard recently, mostly i think due to workers leaving positions because of inadequate pay and bad working conditions (that last one especially for bus drivers)
I tought that there are plans for subway expansion in the city . Is it real plan or just a marketing ?
Once you get into a death spiral a lot more people will be leaving!
@@Dqtube they are "plans" but they're "plans" for 30 years in the future and also they're stupid
@@Dqtube it's reallish :) but with the fact that money for invest are almost free, but city has to use it's own money to operate the transit Warsaw metro expansion can lead to cutting every service above ground because "you have now a metro, please use it". One last thing: metro is needed to make more room above for cars.
I come from the rural part of the black forest in Germany, the nearest city is Freiburg, with about 220 thousand inhabitants. It has a tram system and an S-Bahn system, the tram system if extremely iconic for the city and offers fantastic service. The annual ridership of the tram system alone, without the S Bahn system, is higher than that of the LA metro. Its a metro system, where average travel distances are probably higher, but still, the LA county, which de facto is the functional unit of the city of LA has about 10 MILLION inhabitants, while the city of Freiburg includes several rural towns, that functionally shouldn't count as part of Freiburg, so a realistic size of Freiburg would actually be less, than the city proper. And I mean, come on, when just one of the 2 major transit systems of a city, that is about 2% the size of LA gets anywhere close to the capacity and ridership of the LA metro, I'm wondering wtf is going on. How can this be reality?
LA metro only has a few lines to serve a city proper that's well over 1000 square kilometres in size
@@frafraplanner9277 LA metro rail has about 173 km in system length. The Freiburg tram has a system length of almost 36 km. The Freiburg tram serves 78 stops, LA metro rail has 87 stops,still more than in Freiburg, but also, the tram network in Freiburg is a low capacity system and definetively not a high capacity metro, like LA. But also, 10 MILLION vs 200 thousand people. The tram stations of Freiburg serve a comparably very small city, you don't have as many people in the region served by he system.
@@martinbruhn5274 and most L.A. residents aren’t in walking distance of it! That’s why usage is so low
@@kaitlyn__L And still, you have single LA neighbourhoods the size of Freiburg and still the LA Metro isn't even that close to the ridership of the Freiburg tram. It just doesn't add up.
Very interesting video. Paris tram T2 replaced an old Transilien line, which had a low frequency and ridership, which is why it was converted to a tram line. But today, it is the second busiest line in the system! In France, all transit projects have far exceeded expectations in terms of demand, Paris RER, line 14 (wich will overtake line 1 next year), modern europeans tramways in 30 cities, French-Swiss Geneva RER (wich I hope you’ll talk about in a future video as its super interesting)
Yep, that’s actually a great example of taking a line that has a poor service and doing something to make the service much better!
We have an interesting problem with this in Melbourne. We converted two rail lines (South Melbourne and St. Kilda) into light rail lines, and in the process converting them back to heavy rail impossible.
They are now the two most overcongested tramlines in the city.
There is some proposals to build an underground heavy rail tunnel to re-solve this problem again. It is still a "This wouldn't be a problem if we didn't assume the lines were moribund completely" situation however.
That's the issue with T2, since conversion from an almost ghost line and after the multiple service, frequency and route upgrades the ridership keeps increasing, to the point it was cracking at the seams.
This line is like a blackhole, the more you feed it, the stronger its gravity pull gets.
They've put double trains (UM2) to reduce congestion, it gave a temporary breath of fresh air and now it's once again badly saturated.
The situation is not going to improve but rather to turn for the worst as ENGIE, one of France's main energy providers will soon open a 6 000 employees campus (not even counting indirect jobs) roughly 1km North of La Défense towards the current North end of the line.
And the campus is just one several new developments, as there are new towers, new offices, a new student residence, the new Nanterre la Folie and La Défense CNIT stations opening soon with RER E West extension ; all bringing new traffic and demand.
As if it wasn't enough, line M15 South, the first stretch of Grand Paris Express' line M15 set to open in 2025, will see its temporary Western terminus located at Pont de Sèvres, where M9 ends and just across the bridge from a tram T2 station.
So a bunch of M15 South' traffic will be left with only T2 to access La Défense and all new the developments around and beyond it.
Current T2 users are having cold sweat inducing nightmares about the mess it's going to be.
Some memes have circulated showing 12 coupled trains forming a single consist and 360 meters long stations.
Or Indian style seating on the roof, double decker versions... Horizontal body stacking in the trams, riders with suction cups to travel outside the tram...
T2 riders with padded body armor and helmets marked "T2 ready", a game of Tetris with human blocks titled "T2 in 2025", etc.
I almost forgot my favorite one : a terrified Sarah Connor at the sight of "T2". 🤣
Many are strongly questioning SGP's choice of Pont de Sèvre as the temporary Western terminus for M15.
Because continuing on to the next planned station, Saint Cloud, would have provided an exchange opportunity with Transilien lines L & U, spreading the massive ridership increase expected from M15 South onto 3 different lines instead of solely T2.
As it simply won't fit, it just can't !
In late 2019, the line was exceeding 220 000 passengers a day, the throughput of a good subway line in many cities.
Traffic has come back since 2020 and seems to be in with a revenge, as some are expecting it to go even higher well before ENGIE's campus opens next year.
(Plus, ENGIE being a rather inclusive company, one can expect the campus will host a number of people in wheelchairs using line T2, slightly reducing standing space in the trams).
T2 is already expected to become the crazier, meaner, badder and messier little cousin of M13, hurray!
The rolling sardine can at peak hours.
IDFM is dancing around the bush about solutions, they think improving street right-of-way operations near the North end of the line has to come first and should improve things for the whole line and only after they plan on adding trams and maybe (the doubtful kind of maybe) change trams for 60+ meter long single ones with a different internal layout.
The problem with adding new trams, in other words increasing frequency, is that it's essentially equivalent to requisitioning the streets for the tram and gridlocking car traffic in the area. (Not that I would have any issues with the idea, 🤣).
One thing's pretty sure, it's that T2 is on the path of becoming the closest thing to hell that a tram can be.
We're seeing here the limits and drawbacks of line conversion and staged construction and opening of high capacity adjacent or connecting lines.
Some low ridership heavy rail lines were built as such for a reason, they had much higher traffic before.
They probably can revive, get back and exceed their former ridership quickly if the conditions are right.
Transforming them into a lighter form of rail with fancy new vehicles and good service can induce an overwhelming demand that the line can no longer handle.
Sure, developing housing, jobs and shops along the line like crazy doesn't help. But no one should complain about TOD, even though in that case TOD stands for Transit-Overwhelming Development. 🥳
It's the perfect example of too much induced demand.
That's partly why M15 is being built but the guy that decided to put the temporary terminus at Pont de Sèvre deserves to be trampled by the hordes coming from M15 South on their way to La Défense...
T2 users' ordeal is set to last for 5 years until M15 West section opens.
Apart from that T2 is a very nice line to ride during the lowest off-peak times.
In many parts of the US, people have shifted to work from home. This has caused a significant drop in demand for transit, especially during peak commuting hours. And many transit agencies, with less fairbox revenues, are forced to cut service to compensate, since their revenues have gone down and tax subsidies haven't increased to compensate. Reportedly, in the general San Francisco Bay/Silicon Valley area, almost all transit agencies will have to cut service by about 25% in a year or two unless something changes.
They aren't "forced" to cut service. They choose to.
I recommend the Andy Byford column in the Globe and Mail today on this very topic!
"We must urgently reinvent public transit for the postpandemic world. With work-from-home here to stay, the entire model of moving people around needs to be rebuilt. Wholesale service reductions are not the solution"
Going along with that, we need to move away from transit commute mode share and towards transit trips per capita as a performance metric. In the US, only 20-25% of trips are "commute trips," which excludes an enormous transit market: students going to school/uni, errand runs, leisure trips, tourists, business travelers, and even people who live in an adjacent city but commute to your city.
Yep, it’s a great column!
@@alexhaowenwong6122couldn’t agree more. Properly measuring progress on attracting non commuting trips is vital. The issue is building and operating transit that’s competitive for those trips is more difficult, but it can be done.
In general, the idea of the post-pandemic world is often used as a "justification" (i.e. excuse) to keep the status quo instead of improving the situation regarding urbanism and transportation (e.g. suburbs instead of cities, cars instead of public transportation), double so when the arguments are quite narrow minded (see Alex's response).
@@alexhaowenwong6122 I think this highlights part of why Vancouver's system has recovered ridership better. Thanks to service frequency and transit oriented development there was already a reasonable degree of non-commute trips going on. This is further emphasized by the on service that has not recovered well, the West Coast Express, being a far more explicitly commuter service in purpose and character.
I lived in a city, Calgary, that used express bus services to build usage in advance of planned light rail lines, and used small fifteen person buses to provide frequent service to sparser neighborhoods and in off peak times elsewhere. And I've lived near a city half as big that just jumped in with full size buses with a transit center at a poorly used mall, with low frequency, and never got demand up.
I recommend a view on the system of the AKN in the north of Hamburg/Germany which besides the outskirts of Hamburg serves a pretty rural area with a pretty impressive service level of up 10 minutes (20 minute off peak) in its southern part. The A2 serves as a city metro for the city of Norderstedt(82,000 inhabitants), while the A1 connect several smaller cities and towns of 4-30,000 inhabitants in a metro style service. Ellerau, a city of 6,000 has two stops.
Reducing service is the answer of bean counters who only see the world as numbers on spread sheets with no understanding or concern for how those numbers actually relate to real world conditions.
It's like the old saying goes 'the bean counters can tell you the monetary cost of anything, but understand the actual value of nothing'.
Yep basically! In this case, cutting service is how you initiate the death spiral!
The more I watch your great videos, the more grateful I am to live in London. Crossrail was in the news a lot when it was delayed and over budget but now that it’s providing an incredible service to the city, it’s quickly becoming taken for granted. I suppose that’s life!
Just like with every major transport project - no one complains about the original Shinkansen cost overruns either!
Build it and they will come. Public transit is one of those things you need to build ahead of demand, which is why it's so hard. The only thing you should be reactive about is if a line turns out to be at max capacity, which is an excellent time to upgrade. Ridership will follow the specific qualities of the line and the area it lives in. Sometimes getting a line more popular means just more frequent service, sometimes it means connecting it better with other lines, and sometimes it's about getting a better overall ride quality.
Excellent video - particularly your closing remarks! In the UK, bus companies in particular seem to go straight for 'reduce the service', and lots of your suggestions about 'improve the quality' just go on the 'too much bother' heap - and these are mostly the supposedly 'customer-friendly', 'innovative', and 'enterprising' private companies... Terence Conran (a retail guru, back in the 1960s and 70s) pointed out that, for most organisations, 90% of sales are of only 10% of the range on offer; - but that, if you don't offer that range, people won't come to you to buy! Yet transport operations (in the UK at least) often cut back less-used services, on the grounds (as you quote) that 'they are not justified', forgetting that cutting them back will decrease the attractiveness of the whole transit network, and drive people back to car-travel.
*glares at Toronto*
for context TO saw that ridership hasn't fully recovered from pre-pandemic levels so now they are cutting service
Knowing Reece, this must have been a spectacular hair day. 😇
That’s complicated
My city's transit frequency keeps getting cut, even though the transit agency knows it's a bad idea. They just literally can't hire enough drivers. Pay starts at $11 USD higher that the local minimum wage, $15, with a huge hiring bonus, yet they have hundreds of job vacancies, last I heard. I wonder how one goes about fixing this scenario.
How bad are the working conditions?
The solution is probably more pay, driving a bus should be treated like any career
Obviously there is some reason this offer is not good. If this is good pay for that area, they must have some terrible working conditions.
Consider why are there so many vacancies in the first place? High turnover because of terrible working conditions, leading to vacancies.
Is this DART. It sounds right based on payscale, and it's infuriating.
Thank you Reece (from Roger Sexton) for a superb video. If you provide an excellent transit service, people will flock to it, forsaking their cars. Right from the start of your video I was thinking that the whole country of Switzerland is a prime example of this proposition. Then at 5m 28s you mentioned Lausanne, surely the smallest city in the world to have a HEAVY metro. But this Lausanne metro has been wildly successful, and a second HEAVY line is being planned to Blecherette. Austria (next door to Switzerland) now has its extremely cheap 1095 Euro annual Klima-ticket valid for the whole country. But Austria now needs to focus on getting its levels of service up to Swiss standards..
Are you a time traveler?
@@ungh8365 he’s a Patreon member!
I agree. Roger Switzerland is an excellent example!
@@ungh8365 No. I, Roger Sexton, am a 'Patron' of Reece's channel, which means I get early access to some of his videos. I live in Britain. I usually watch these early access videos around 10 00 in the morning.
I have become adicted to this channel
Greetings from Venezuela (we have only two working rail lines in our country :( )
Hey Reece, as you know, violence and crime seem to have increased on the TTC. I was wondering if you could make a video on transit safety, how it affects ridership and what are some of the best solutions around the world?
I'm surprised this major factor was decisively ignored in his narrative, especially considering how thorough he tends to be. Cleanliness and convenience all take a backseat if it's deciding between the comfort and safety of your own vehicle or being accost or assaulted. When you look at here in Seattle, you have to factor in the lack of fare enforcement that leads to large number of homeless individuals on the trains and stations, rampant and open drug use, and certain mentally unstable people that are dangerous to the public. It's important to consider this major problem when we wonder why people choose to drive vs ride public transit.
To translate it into carbrain-friendly terms: you know how sometimes you take different routes becsuse of traffic, construction, an errand you want to do on the way home, etc.? People do that with modes, too.
11:00 that's basically how the whole sector in Italy goes. No riders? (Because of lack of punctuality, slow service, lack of informations to the customer, antiquated service patterns, lack of fare integration and often maybe "no fares at all" because it's impossible to buy a ticket, and so on...) --> "there isn't enough demand, we should cut services, on demand Busses are the future"
That’s very concerning! But I don’t think Italy is quite that bad!
If you are at Oxford Circus in the evening peak, you quite often have to queue to get into the station. Not so bad now that the Elizabeth line Line station is just round the corner. I often ended up taking the bus because of that.
Can you do a breakdown of Toronto's mayoral candidates and their affects on transit
Very small add-on that I think could be an easy fix for when transit frequency is not adequate…. In NYC, bus schedules are so unpredictable, especially at the beginning and end of a route when the bus hasn’t begun it’s journey. Scheduled departure times/frequency are so unpredictable on major routes in the outer boroughs. If busses were more predictably scheduled and this info was available in apps with more reliability (maybe this isn’t always possible without bus lanes) people would use the bus more. But maybe that would be bad if the busses don’t add more capacity and frequency.
I live in a city of about 600,000 in the metro and there is a bus line that starts 1 mile away from my house and ends 500 feet away from my workplace, but it takes 90 minutes by bus but only 20 minutes by car. The infrastructure is there but the service isn't, and there are probably a lot of marginal users in this city like me.
You also have to convince everyone it's safe. In Mexico, India, the Philippines and Japan some lines have implemented female only cars to address rampant harassment and concerns about assaults. People have to veiw it as safer than hitchhiking, otherwise none of the people who wouldn't feel safe hitchhiking will do it and most of the people who would feel safe hitchhiking will probably just hitchhike.
This was a fascinating Video and delightful to watch!
Induce demand for RMTransit toques!
BUILD MORE TOQUES
They aren’t exactly RM transit toques haha
Great video.
Good to know about the Swiss city with metro for just 120,000 people
Absolutely!
At one point in your video you showed a rear cab view of Brentwood. Thats one area that really highlights what TOD does. Brentwood is a minor town center of Burnaby and the number of 40+ story towers around there is absolutely ridiculous. And its growing.
One fun thing to check out is Google Street View and the back in time feature around transit stations. Marine Drive station, No3 Road, Brentwood, Surrey Central, Metrotown are all areas that from 2010 to today go from low or medium density outside the city center to wall-to-wall skyscrapers.
When I lived in my old city (250.000 people) I lived right at a busy transit corridor, meaning that I had buses running every 6-8 minutes to the city centre, thanks to a very frequent line from the outskirts of my suburb, a line running from a very popular museum and golf course through my suburb and a line from a town outside my city, where a lot would commute by bus every day. That meant that I could basically walk 50 metres to a bus stop, and without looking at a schedule stand in the centre of the city in 15-25 minutes.
Buses in London and the rest of England had been on a death spiral since covid. Reduction in frequency, much longer journey times, and they very nearly axed a lot of popular long standing routes in London. This has resulted in even less ridership.
Fortunately the problem has been acknowledged and so the government have introduced a £2 cap on single journeys in England excluding London which started as a trial but has now been extended, nearly all the London routes that were originally planned to be axed were saved at the last minute, and much higher-comfort buses have been introduced, like on Route 63 in London.
As for induced demand, I’d love to see a video covering stations like Ebbsfleet International and Micheldever in England and Caojiawan Station in Chongqing, China that were basically built in the middle of nowhere, but the presence of a station attracted many homes and businesses to open nearby.
Here from Salt Lake City, UT. Just saw your Stadler post regarding your recent visit here.
The biggest barrier to reliability and frequency is the lack of automation. Drivers are limited and expensive due to unions - and they are unreliable - sometimes the bus is a big full up front so they skip stops, or they go off schedule, or they miss a stop, or they get lost - and they take breaks so the vehicles sit idle at the end of the line.
For example a quick google and every single bus arriving at the end of the line on the 1 hour route I looked up is arriving 8-15 minutes ahead of schedule, I'm guessing because the drivers normally get a 15 minute break but rush through their route as fast as possible to extend that break - and an early bus is way worse than a late bus because all along the route instead of waiting no time or a couple of minutes extra people have to wait for the next bus which could be 15, 20 or 30 minutes away.
Please consider doing a video on rethink I35 in Austin Texas
Unfortunately, highways are out of my ballpark :-)
the carpool/hov/express lanes instead of public transit has always bugged me here in the los angeles area. weve been through decades of freeway lane expansions and only relatively recently did we start putting rail lines in between as an alternative [2 so far]
its widened lanes, on converted lanes, on top of widened lanes, on top of widened lanes. we'd have to take lanes out at this point
Thank you. Cleveland RTA have Berenice in the death spiral since 2008
A few years ago, the local government opened the light rail line and redid the public transport network. The "consultants" they used to plan the bus network don't live in the city and don't use public transport in the larger city they do live in.
The network changed from a system where it was possible to get between the extreme north part of the city to the extreme south part of the city with just 1 or 2 buses, to a system which required 3 or 4 buses to make the same trip.
During weekday morning peak, the local buses were 20 mins apart and 30 mins the rest of the day, and hourly on weekends.
There was not enough buses or drivers to operate the network, especially on weekends, which resulted in large amounts of cancelled services (which the riders were not told about). About a month into the new network, the weekend services were halved while they hired more drivers. After more then a year, they finally returned some weekend service, taking Saturday AM services back to hourly.
Then, in August 2021, the city went into a covid lockdown. Within a week, they had to cut service in order to cover drivers off sick and created a new "interim" timetable with cuts to weekday peak services.
That "interim" timetable lasted much longer then the lockdown did. It was only replaced at the start of this month.
The timetable was meant to go back to what it had been, but they changed it all again. With, of course, more cuts.
They claim the cuts are due to work on the next stage of the light rail and related road works in the CBD, but they have cut services which go nowhere near that area by 30%.
They have also been complaining about lack of ridership, while doing nothing about the excessive fare evasion which is causing their ridership numbers to show much lower then they really are.
Our city has a large event hall that allows up to 30 000 people for shows, concerts,...
What I really like is that the public transport cost is included in the ticket price for any event.
And when the event is done, there are trams, buses,... waiting to carry everyone away.
While not very comfortable (since those first trams/buses are packed), it's the fastest way to get to and from those events.
In comparison, another city a bit further has an event hall (actually multiple) for more people, but with very limited public transport, so you basicly have to go by car.
When you go to on of those events, you need to add an extra hour to the normal driving time, because there will be lots of traffic and getting back will require queing in long lines to pay for the parking tickets and after that a lot of waiting in traffic again.
I always try to go to events in the first city, because of the public transport availability.
I can't stop rewatching the bird on the train at 3:33
I'd like to see an episode about Indian railways. An episode about India's main line railroad system would be a great follow-up episode for the episode about India's metro systems.
3:34, even the bids use the train
The reason that the Elizabeth line got more ridership than expected is because us Brits are the most pessimistic people in the world.
More service makes the cost of the fare more appealing. If you’re not attracting riders because some feel it’s too expensive, raising fares, or cutting service won’t help! Should they lower the fare? Sounds crazy but it might make transit more appealing to people. The MTA here in NYC claimed that Congestion Pricing would stop a fare hike, and well, they’re talking about a fare hike anyway. 🤦♂️
Note: I don’t mind standing on the subway for 45-60 minutes. I sit at my desk all day anyway.
For sure, on the subway, but buses are much less comfortable to stand on! That’s why I specified buses!
A fare decrease, is only going to help a lot if service is above a certain threshold
I live near a bus line that has been consistently overcrowded in the morning on school days for years since it connects directly to the nearest middle/high school. It’s not uncommon for students to have to take a much later bus or have to be driven by car because they just can’t fit in anymore at the stop. Not once in over ten years has the company that runs those buses increased capacity and I think it’s because most students have a ticket for the whole year anyways, so simply not serving them doesn’t lose the company any revenue from fares.
I'm wondering how you think the eventually (maybe decades away) arrival of self driving street vehicles will change the calculus? Depending on how they are implemented, they could make new capacity opportunities, but they also could easily send us into the same traps as car culture.
Private vehicle ownership would make less sense, freeing essentially all on and off street parking areas for other uses. There would still be a need for maintenance yards and storage for when demand is low. Different sized vehicles could dynamically serve different trips, depending on demand for start and end stops along a general route. There could be aggregation points, where you are made to transfer to larger vehicles to continue your journey.
So there could be this dream of a dynamically scaling network based on existing roads. What might that do to existing transit specific infrastructure? Would it reduce demand for building more density? How would it all be funded and capacity balanced?
I have a vague hypothesis at how to predict demand. You need to recognize the two forces: commuting force and stochastic force. Commuting force is just an arbitrage of the difference in how much you can earn at X and how much it costs to live at Y. We can measure this difference by looking at rent prices and employment stats, then treat the difference as a literal voltage in an electrical circuit. The time and cost are both resistors in the circuit and the transit map is literal wires. You can model the demand as the literal current flowing in the circuit. The stochastic force is just the random probability that someone at X takes a one off trip to meet someone at Y. This force is going to be roughly proportional to the fraction of the city living in X and Y respectively. Assuming you can tune some parameters in what I've outlined, it should be possible to do for transit what Newton did for Gravity.
I like this, I think outside of financial forces you also have to consider the emotional/environmental factors people consider when choosing where to live. A more desirable neighbourhood (be it for vibes, or safety, or access to parkland) will also drive demand for trips between said neighbourhood and employment zones. Pretty much 2 factors that are easily predictable on a population level that affect the commuting force you mentioned
It’s an interesting idea, but the models used for transportation demand modelling are already far more sophisticated!!
Great one! Love myself some bad hair day Reece content
It was certainly bad!
Talk about the Riyadh metro next please
Were I live, in a suburb of Stockholm, there's rarely more than 10 minutes between buses to the train station, where the commuter trains into Stockholm leaves every 7-8 minutes., the 25 km ride to work takes slightly over half an hour. It's far from perfect, but clean, reliable, safe, frequent, quick and cheap enough that I've never even considered getting a car.
In my dad's neighbourhood the buses go every 30 minutes, and most people drive instead.
That last sentence is the most important one of the entire video.
Service cuts? Shouldn't transit be expanding? We used Italy's excellent high speed rail from Milan to Rome few years ago. It was great and their network continues to expand.
Didn't the premier Doug Ford cancel high speed rail? He never understood why it's needed and how it develops growth. But we are getting a new highway, somewhere.
So true! thank you!
Thanks for watching!
In Athens, in 2009 there were trains every 15 minutes in the SKA-airport section of the suburban railway. Now there are every 20 or 40 mins (and sometimes there's an extra train 10 minutes before the first train of each hour
That's about as efficient as a train every half hour
The government and dilettante anti-public infra crowds says one thing for private business, and another for public service.
When we talk about why A380 isn't a success, or why 747 is dying despite being updated, the reason is simple: frequency & schedule flexibility generates better route demand, load factor, and thus flexibility - it is proven to be better to "flood" a route with 10 x 787 flights than 4 x A380 flights, despite not exactly better for the environment and infrastructure capacity. The "low cost airline" model also works: you spam 5 x A320 / 737-800 a day flights into a new route, stimulating demand that wasn't there in first place.
The same approach should also work for transit service: nobody would hop into the bus' own schedule. Unless you are in non-English speaking west, business will abuse their allocated meeting time and worker's hours. You won't make it in time or "every 20 minutes service". "Market size argument" is also nonsensical, like yes, even a city of 10,000 can still be served with integrated public transit service when there is an airport serving a town of just 50,000.
Agreed with you.
My city reduced frequencies across the board. Busses used to be FULL, to the brim. Now They're useless :D . More likely to be seated, sure, but it takes longer than going by foot on most routes up to 1 hour.
Bicycle, bikes and cars are 2-3x last years' price, so, We've been trown... under the non-existing buses.
GO and TTC both exceeding pre Covid ridership, and yet TTC is seeing service cuts while GO is seeing expansion of infrastructure.
You should tell that to OC Transpo.
Love the videos. Curious what mic you use for them? I've been building out content recently, looking for a new mic, and I've always enjoyed your quality + setup. No rush. Thanks!
I notice you didn’t once mention Toronto and the TTC, but I feel like the subtext was there. . .
Now if I can somehow convince the city councle of Beckley, WV that having a regular frequency from 65 to 85 minutes (because they are too sorry to have more than one bus on any of their five routes) is not a "good thing".
I'm in a city of 85k that had tram lines before the auto, when the population was 2/3 the size. Everyone's great-grandparents took the tram or walked. The rich people had horse carriages then switched to the auto, then eventually everyone switched. Now walking is very dangerous but there's a lot of poor people that have no choice. My great-grandparents lived through the Great Depression and were quite poor, yet they could get around on foot in the same city where I now can't.
It's like people believe the car means prosperity, and therefore it's required. I got dropped from the American Dream and wouldn't own a car even if I could afford one. If being poor is taboo, then why are we all getting squeezed? My great-grandparents walked. I'm not better than them. Plus I enjoy walking, when the cars aren't around.
It drives me up a WALL when agencies or developers (specifically TOD developers) project ridership for lines simply based on density.
How do they account for mode choice?
What headways are they assuming?
What fluctuations are expected? Etc.
Fuller buses are often slower than buses that are less full, especially for local routes. They end up making more stops and more time is spent boarding passengers.
Depends on the route. If it's an express route, once the bus hits the freeway, it drives at the same speed if it's full vs. if it's empty. For local routes, it depends greatly on the the bus itself. If the bus has lots of doors and off-board fare payment, lots of people can get on and off at the same time, and increased passenger load doesn't slow down the bus much, if at all. On the other hand, if the bus has only a single door and every single passenger getting on has to, one by one, insert cash into a machine while the bus sits there, and every single person getting off has to squeeze to the front, then the bus is going to be much slower if it's full vs. if it's empty.
A lot of the improvements that are often categorized as "BRT" simply involve reconfiguring the bus to improve its scalability so that increased passenger loads delay the bus less than before. During off-peak times when the bus is empty, it runs at essentially the same speed as before the improvements, but during peak times when the bus is full, the improvements make a huge difference.
7:52
Not really. Vancouver has higher overall living costs. Its supposedly higher transit fare is just a reflection of that.
Definitely agree. I think one of the traps we find ourselves in is to pretend we are being objective by using data, when we may not have all the data.
Sometimes planning (transit and urban) is a better option.
I think we also need to take account 'relative' budgets in order to help with risk.
For example, we've had a major Go transit expansion in recent history. I know the line by my home is basically hourly off peak.
Would i like it to be more? Of course, but it's also not unreasonable. I can plan my trips on the hourly.
That said, I've heard some people say that with increased work from home... that we've overly invested here. I think the last thing you want to do is cut service here, even if it is not 'used' as much.
What is the relative cost of providing this transit? To keep say hourly service as a kind of 'base service' level on a major go train line is going to cost tens or millions per year. When you think about how large an area that gives people access, it is literally dirt cheap. Compare that to the billions and billions and billions we spend on healthcare and education. That way people can count on it and as you fix your urban planning by putting places of work, residence, play... closer to transit stops, things can be better used. We don't 'close' down roads if they're not used as much.
I don't know if its cheaper to run shorter trains but more often. If it is, that could also be better and even encourage more transit.
And we need to have connectivity stops just so we can discover the unexpected trips. Yes, i know transit is not 'drawing' lines on a map. But if it's cheap and connects, we absolutely should.
Thanks for a great video as always.
I am wondering if it is to get you to design an alternative transport system for Funen, Denmark. What we have right now does not always work well. Fynbus run the buses on the whole island and the light rail in Odense and the local trains are currently run by Ariva.
p.s. Fynbus is also obliged by law to be responsible for part of the school bus operation.
Hong Kong is just heavily railway-oriented, when a new line opens, the transportation authority has to reduce the frequency of some buses or even cancel them. Many people then get crazy over the decision.
If there is truly redundancy, that might be OK, but doing it immediately probably doesn’t make a lot of sense!
@@RMTransit Same thing happens in İzmir, but the bus and the rapid transit are not redundant, they just travel along the same corridor. 7 bus stops to 1 rapid transit stop.
It's not often that you see Reece sporting that beanie look 😂
Hopefully LA doesn’t cut service at all. I saw what Denver did and it’s sad to see that a decent light rail system gets severe cuts.
Hey, have you submitted your bid to run for mayor of Toronto to yet? I'd vote for you. Nobody else can make sense of our transit system! 😊
@RMTransit Im The Netherlands NS and regional transit operators try to increase frequence but ubvliously due to staff shortage they had to lower the frequence and scrap some services most are rush hour services and the 10 minute trains from Eindhoven Centraal/Arnhem Centraal to Amsterdam Centraal/Schiphol Airport and Rotterdam Centraal however they brought that trainservice back ubvliously now 3 days in the week but it is better then nothing
@Zaydan Alfariz uhm NS=Nederlandse Spoorwegen the NS where you are talking about is Norfolk Southern
@Zaydan Alfariz yes i find the dutch NS better even if they do some things we don't like in The Netherlands like shortening frequencies because staff shortage but they are schooling new staff and they scrapped for example the IC Direct train from Amsterdam via Rotterdam Centraal to Breda so the only highspeed trains to Breda are the Intercity from Den Haag Centraal via Rotterdam Centraal the HSL Zuid and Breda to Eindhoven Centraal and the IC Brussel
I definitely find a concerning that they are having operator shortages!
@@RMTransit yeah but they are working on it but they got critic of what they did because the shortage from the dutch travel organisation ROVER and from the dutch minister of Infrastructure
You lookin drippy Reece 🔥
Have you ever played Simutrans-Extended? It simulates nearly all of these things (and it's open source).
I know it's not possible to enforce this, but I believe anyone in a position of power over transit decisions should be forced to commute by public transit for a month before getting a vote. So many of these concepts are very clear to anyone who uses the system regularly.
For example, I live in an area where bus service is quite good - every 15 minutes, 3 different routes within a block of my home, all can be used for my commute. Watching this makes me realize how it would be even easier if the busses were more frequent ... especially on weekends for errand running and exploring. There are also some destinations I just can't get to; there are either no bus routes at all, or a trip that would take 20 minutes by car takes 90 due to infrequent service and transfers.
Halifax Nova Scotia is considering a 25¢ raise in fare while simultaneously reducing service due to lack of staff. And of course raises in salary of employees is not an option. 😮💨
I get that cutting services is a death sentence for transit but expecting unprecedented levels of funding for a service that is currently only operating at 60 to 70 percent prepandemic is not entirely realistic either. Transit was already subsidized before the pandemic anyways.
I get that transit has economic benefits beyond farebox recovery but those don't actually fund it. Short of development charges.
Transit needs to find away to one find sustainable funding (not suggesting profitability) and the ridership needs to recover to at least 80 to 90 percent pre covid by the end of this year
Otherwise the funding model needs to be reviewed and the service levels
I dislike the concession areas for public transport in my country. I live on the edge of a concession area and this means that all our bus lines go into the concession area and not to the nearest city. I live 20 km from the capitol, but is is in a different concession area, so no direct bus line to the capitol. The national airport is also 20 km away, but also in a different concession area, going to there (my work is there) means three different busses (three different operators), so two transfers and a commute of 1:07 hours. Going by car means 25 minutes. Going out or shopping in the capital (the closest city) by public transport isn’t an option either, two different busses (two different operators) so one transfer and a 0:58 hour journey. That is if I have a good connection at my transfer. I have two minutes for this transfer, if I miss my transfer it means 30 minutes more journey time (waiting for the next bus). The bus lines in my province/concession area are good though, but not for me, it won’t bring me to places I wanna go or need to go.
What country is this? Sounds like pre-UERL London or early NYC subways/pre Dual Contracts era NYC.
@@douglasgraebner1831 Sounds like England and Wales outside London.
@@douglasgraebner1831 Sad to say it is The Netherlands. A country often mentioned by foreigners for good public transport. Which we have, but only inside the concession areas. The good thing about our public transport is that we have a decent train system with very high frequency and most important, one card for all kinds of public transport in the whole country. My wish for better public transport is better transfers/connections between concession areas.
Needs a better clockfaced timetable!
Sometimes they just can't hire enough bus drivers or unsure about demand. Or perhaps they just want to do the minimal by fulfilling the basic service-levels mandated in contracts with local governments, though this is more likely to be the preference of incumbents/monopolies.
Previously you did a video on the Sapporo metro where you covered the elevated, yet still covered, part of the lines also
Can these covers be used over most train lines?
Like the Sapporo -> chitose -> Hakodate or Sapporo -> Asahikawa main lines, the busiest in Hokkaido.
Can you integrate solar panels into them?
I've seen proposals for solar panels over the train line but not as part of a shelter for the train line.
It strikes me that if they decided to build the Sapporo metro snow shelters along the main line using solar panels, which can be translucent and structural, as the infill panel for the frames they could, assist with line electrification, save on snow & leaf clearing, prevent animals from getting on the line, produce electricity (when not covered in snow), the cost savings & revenue generation would seem to pay for the shelters pretty quickly...
So why not?
As I said translucent & transparent solar panels exist, so depending on the panel type you use at eye level it wouldn't affect the view,
the payback period for this kind of light weight structure would be around 10-15 years out of a 25-30 year period where the panel retains over 80% of its performance, and that's before you subtract snow cleaning & other costs it would stop.
Claiming Vancouvers greater density is do to transit and not its much more constrained Geography compared to Portland seems to be a big stretch. Not to mention something that has developed over centuries.
I think there is another factor that planners can be looking at to improve transit use. That is zoning. Transit planing must be supported by zoning that gets people to work in more centralized areas so then transit will be more effective. Big flat business parks are never well served by transit since most times it's too far to walk to your building. Also people need to come from many different areas usually not well severed by transit taking people downtown.
Do video on Indian cities urban planning of Mumbai whole city is mixed used commercial and residential.
metro connects all major malls, colleges, hospital plus i walk daily 5km and if required i use auto rickshaw or bikes for far distance.
Mumbai is best
no single family bungalow, all in to condos and trains bus
Here in Denmark many transit agencies and municipalities are being forced to cut a lot of bus services and not really so much by choice. It mostly boils down to the previous and current national government not providing anywhere near enough of the requested relief funding for lacking ridership during covid, alongside the rise in fuel costs due to the inflation, energy crisis, and subsequent war in Ukraine limiting energy supply further.
In many places cuts are being forced in whether the authorities in question like it or not. They simply don't have the finances, and dont have the lawful means to find more in many taxes since municipalities have imposed spending caps, and the regions cannot collect taxes.
Still many agencies are trying. Nordjyllands Trafikselskab in Northern Jutland, is certainly trying. They've seen a lot of success with increased investment in their Express bus network in recent years, and are as such trying to improve their fast express buses with higher and more consistent frequencies, but cutting and reducing several slower services in the process, and replacing them with Demand Responsive Transit like bookable shuttles to take you from your village to an Express bus stop. All in all trying to make the best of what they have and make a solid network that can keep them going for longer.
And then theres Midttrafik who are cancelling services left and right and who have already removed almost the entirety of their express bus network over the last 6 years due to low ridership, hurting their finances even more on top of a 15 year long passenger decline in this really car dependent region with rather little political will for transit.
The point about transit quality and ticket price is also really good. The transit here in Greater Copenhagen is pretty good. Not amazing but pretty good. But we have some of the most expensive ticket prices in the whole world too and still rising. To most people its just not a good proposition to pay for transit as the ticket prices are too high for them compared to the value they get, and we're far away from any big improvements that woule fix it and gain ridership. But the investments needed to make the neccesary changes viable would require a state level political will, who won't support it much as of now due to transit not being attractive as of now. It's really a Chicken vs the Egg situation. What comes first before we can get better value transit? The investment, or the ridership?
Well he's back with a part 2 on what transit needs to be successful! In New York's case, it's due to politics and budget, but transit is about people so of course less service makes no sense. Less service is never about people, it's about other things.
Not just budget, cost control
Can we get videos where you pick a city or region and talk about what the most useful transit to add would be?
I already did one on Las Vegas and I plan on doing more!
Speaking of high frequency transit, are you considering talking/writing about yesterday's Via HFR announcement, Reece? Or is there not enough there to discuss 😅
We have entered beanie era Reese