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Not mentioned in the OP, but something that I have some experience with: Not-quite-mass-transit Probably 95% of American transit riders are in really big cities or counties, or in cities and counties that are within 10-20 miles of a major city. But there is a pretty large suburban/exurban population that uses (when it uses at all), little transit systems that are put together without much resources and planning. What constitutes a "little" transit system can vary quite a bit, there are towns that have literally a single van sized bus that runs twice a day, while larger cities have regular buses and transit center and passes and websites and the like. For example, the Portland area is famous for Tri-Met, which has a big light rail system, frequent buses, sophisticated IT, lots of transit centers and its own transit-only bridge. Outside of Portland, you have C-Tran: which serves Clark County, the county in Washington State that lies across the Columbia River from Portland. Clark County is big, relatively affluent, and has a transit system that is more or less an urban transit system: busses that run around 18 hours a day, frequent service on busy routes, transit centers, and the like. YCTA: Serving Yamhill County, to the southwest of the Portland metro area, with 100,000 residents, and which is exurban/rural. Tehre are five lines, and they run several times a day, but not beyond rush hour. These transit systems are good for taking trips for occasional appointments (and these transit systems are often made with seniors in mind), but don't really work for people who are commuting. Cheeriots, serving Marion County (the home of Salem, Oregon's capital, and either a separate city/exurb of Portland. Buses in Salem se serve major areas, and run until around 9 PM. There is also a semi-separate system that runs out to the smaller towns. Inside of Salem, the buses can be used for commuting. Outside, not so much. There are buses that connect to Yamhill County, and to the Tri-Met commuter rail to Wilsonville. There are actually a half-dozen other lines, but I realized I shouldn't describe them because...its not really relevant. The point was more than there is a lot of transit in areas outside of urban cores, but that that transit often doesn't reach the critical mass that transit needs, where people start riding it because it is convenient, which creates more lines, drawing more people in, and then people stop being car-dependent. Instead, those transit systems are often created to serve the needs of the poor and seniors (who are an influential voting block), and are seen as distant second options. The other thing about this is that the difference between a fully functioning urban transit system and a suburban transit system does not scale linearly with population. For example, Tri-Met has about 1.5 million people in its service area, and has one of North America's larger light rail systems. Across the river, C-Tran has around a third of that, and has a decent transit system. Salem, with a population of around 300,000, has a transit system that is barely workable for commuters. Yamhill County, with a population of 100,000, has a transit system that isn't designed for commuters. There is a logarithmic relationship between population and transit size.
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Apr 3, 2016 21:35
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The Maroon Hawk posted:
These services/areas might be keyed to the needs of a senior population, whose needs might be rather mysterious to younger people, but also have a disproportionate say in local issues because they vote and show up to 9 AM meetings at the community center.
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Apr 3, 2016 23:27
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Curvature of Earth posted:I'm bus-dependent in one of these cities. Albany, Oregon is a smaller more blue-collar suburb of the larger white-collar suburbs of Salem and Eugene. We have a bus system running from 6am to 6pm, and each stop gets visited only once an hour, with several gaps due to lunch breaks and the schedule shift when it splits from the single-line morning route to the two-line daytime route. Even the most minor errands eats three hours out of my day. We also have an inter-city bus loop that has a surprisingly large middle-class clientele (as in, "engineer at Hewlett-Packard" middle-class), but that's because it runs at the right times and goes to the right places (the university the next town over and the aforementioned HP campus). Also, there is no public transit between the Salem area and Albany. You can get a bus from Salem to Stayon, but not from Salem to Albany. You can take Amtrak or Greyhound, but that is not the same thing! (I am sure that the many people who are reading this thread to read about high speed rail in Chicago or New York are fascinated to learn about the bus from Salem to Stayton) quote:Albany's population is a little over 51,000, and when I last checked in 2014/15 our transit system's daily ridership was something like 350ish. Most of that is students going to the local community college, seniors, adults like me who can't afford a car, and a surprising number of teenagers. That seems low, but checking numbers, I guess it checks out. But it does show how it scales, and someone with more data might be able to scatterplot a graph between area served and ridership, and figure out the exponential relationship.
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Apr 3, 2016 23:45
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Warcabbit posted:http://transportation.westchestergov.com/bee-line Westchester County is a rich, populous and pretty urbanized area, next to one of the world's largest and most important cities, so it having good transit isn't that surprising.
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Apr 4, 2016 01:56
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Follow up to my post earlier about smaller transit systems. One of the problems with getting attention and funding to smaller transit systems is that their constituency is diluted in suburban districts where transit isn't an issue for most people. Its very similar to what happens in congressional elections, where you have a lot of liberal voters concentrated in a small area, and then have smaller conservative minorities in adjoining districts. With simplified numbers, lets say you have an urban area that is 80 percent Democratic and 20 percent Republican. Its between two districts that are 60 percent Republican and 40 percent Democratic. Overall, the region is over 50% Democratic, but has two Republican Representatives and one Democratic one. So instead of party affiliation, switch those numbers to be transit ridership. Inside the urban center, the majority of people use transit, at least some of the time, and are comfortable with the idea. In parts of the surrounding suburbs, there is still a transit ridership, but just as it lacks the critical mass to get more buses and therefore more riders, it lacks the critical mass to become an issue that politicians worry about. A great example of this (and one I am familiar with), is Vancouver, Washington, which is a suburb of Portland. Its in Washington's 3rd District, which is represented by the sometimes Tea Party representative Jaime Herrera Bueler. Many people in the inner part of Vancouver would like to have light rail from Vancouver, and there central area of Vancouver has pretty good transit. The suburban areas around Vancouver, however, are anti-lightrail for a number of reasons, and most of the mass transit options there aren't really good enough for working commuters. So the area has gone on for about 20 years with the 40% or so of people who live in the city being outvoted by the 60% of people who live in the suburbs. I think this is a pretty common story.
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Apr 12, 2016 02:51
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Curvature of Earth posted:I can't speak for why BRT didn't work in Chicago. I wanted to know more about the BRT vs. Light Rail debate, so I did a quick read of the Wikipedia page and it seemed to say that BRT is usually better than light rail, which is itself a bad sign. Most of the information seemed to come from one study by one organization, iptd.org, which seems to be a consulting company for cities building BRT. So I think I would need more data on why BRT is better/cheaper than lightrail, which doesn't seem like it makes a lot of sense by itself.
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Apr 15, 2016 18:17
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