What Makes a Transit Service Worth It?

Many planners often see ridership as the only metric to measure success of a transit route, but in today's video I want to argue otherwise - to see transit for more than its surface value.

Map Data © OpenStreetMap contributors

[darrenncanton]

This is particularly poignant for Louisville, as our city has taken a hatchet to our bus network due to "low ridership". Our buses are hideous - flat gray or blue paint with "TARC" stickers on the back windows. Our bus stops are often just placards nailed to utility poles - shelters are rare. The routes are inefficient. And yet leaders wonder why nobody wants to take the bus.

[VerWRLD]

If cities are serious about getting young people on transit, they need late night/24hr services on weekends at least. Going out to bars/clubbing and knowing that you never have to worry about expensive Ubers or designated drivers makes the night infinitely more fun.

I was in Montreal last winter and we’d be catching the last bus back from Saint-Laurent Blvd out to Hochelaga at 3:30 am! Such an easy experience and there was even a stop 50 ft from our front door.

The effects on reducing drunk driving is also massive.

[michaelkinsella]

A pro about night service is to reduce drink driving rates. There is not a great deal of research for this but it makes sense to give options for those who drink.

[ricequackers]

Had a good example of a small change to transit that made a big difference recently. My wife need to travel to a hospital in a larger town every couple of months for a check-up on her eyes, and the dilating droplets they give her means she cannot drive back from there for a few hours. So normally, I'd drive her to the hospital for the appointments, hang around or do some shopping, then drive her back. There is a bus service from near our house that goes directly to the town, but it stopped in the town centre and required a change to another bus to get to and from the hospital, which is tricky when your vision is limited. Very recently, they extended that bus service so it continues on to the hospital and turns around there. This was a massive benefit and means she can now take a single-seat bus ride to and from the hospital without stumbling around with blurry eyes trying to change buses, and without me having to take time out of my working day or even start the car at all. Small change at minimal cost, major win, at least one return car journey completely eliminated.

[j]

Night service is so important. It reduces drunk driving, provides a major boost for nightlife areas, and helps out people who work later hours have an affordable option to get home. Also, if you make transit easier for people to go to a bar, for example, or other non-normal hour activities, they are much more likely to consider using transit more during peak times. So while it may cost more per rider to have good night service, its benefits outweigh the cost and it actually augments regular hour service as well.

[cappuccino_please]

Problem is, CEOs and managers of public transport companies never ever ride any of those trains themselves, so they couldn't bother less. In Germany, oftentimes we don't even have air conditioning because no one of the managers care at all. Quite contrary, if they spend less, they get a bonus for increasing revenue (generally speaking). If they would use it themselves, they would never even think a second of ordering busses or streetcars without ac.

[RichardBlair]

I saw a study out of Australia on increasing bus service to low-income areas, and it found that a bus only needed to move *six people* per hour to provide a net economic benefit. With how low the bar potentially is for a positive public benefit, yeah it's absolutely worth going the extra mile to provide the little details and extra services that make even the least-sexy transit a better experience.

[DanChan-qbec]

I think China is one of the few countries that build their transit project regardless of capacity and stuff. Many metro lines (especially in Chongqing) are built along wasteland and farmland where no one would want to use transit. However these places ended up being a very transit orientated suburbs after a few years which makes the otherwise nonsense station to be quite awesome. (This happens in Japan too I think)

[barryrobbins]

Metropolitan areas don’t wring their hands over roads and highways. A road is built even if it has low traffic.

[sardu]

In the old days, when they had local trolley or Interurban service, night running was often enhanced by hauling revenue, or freight. It was often hauled during the day, as needed. Today, you could probably fill many trains cargo cars with just packages from Amazon for local drop off and delivery.

[bobainsworth]

I grew up in NYC . Where I live now only has bus service . If it runs at night, i don't know. I assumed all my life that everyone had night service. Why not? When in the Navy we went into Chicago to a club in So. Chicago to see Nancy Wilson and Flip Willson. The show was over at 1 AM . We walked a block and go on the bus.
Until i began watching your fabulous show I believed two wrong things.1) you can stay out to all hours no problem, just have to wait for bus or subway a bit longer .
2) New York City and maybe Toronto were the only ones with subways.
I must admit I was ohhh- dumb, to the facts. Im continually amazed by what im learning about transit from your show, and the world. Thanks. Oh, yes, my age, (81), might account for my misconcepsions .😂😂

[ix]

Your night bus example was spot on. The basis of strong ridership is having good service, which means balancing geographic coverage, service hours, and frequency. I think transit agencies and the cities they serve sometimes "miss the forest for the trees". Ridership and coverage aren't an either/or but a starting point to realize community goals and values like connecting students to campus, discouraging drinking and driving, or connecting transportation hubs.

[ybokors]

To the last point I really relate, as trains here in Germany (or at least my train route) stop at 1am till 5 am. I've had times when I wanted to go to parties in my nearby city but can't because I'd be uncomfortable not being able to go home at night, and even on long distance trips I have to make sure that I arrive before 11pm (as delays could make me wait hours on stations whilst there's nothing to do in the cities).

[jacekwesoowski]

There's another dimension to this, and I didn't realize how big it was until recently. I live in Warsaw, a city of about two million people, so not exactly a cosy village. One day I realized that I, a 40+ years old person, don't actually know the entire city. There are whole districts I've never been to.
I begun to wonder why and quickly realized it's two things:
- when moving, I always pick places with good transit, because I don't have (and don't want) a car
- all my friends are people who live in places with good transit, and while some of them have cars, they don't use them much
Did I ever pick friends based on their transit preferences? Of course not. But I'm willing to bet transit choices correlate with lifestyle choices that make me and the other person a better match. And also: since I rely on transit, it's naturally easier to become friends with someone who also lives near good transit.

The bottom line is this: selective transit segregates people. Places with good transit grow apart from those without it, not just in terms of connectivity, but also in terms of social and cultural links. In Warsaw you can see this when you look at election results maps. Statistically speaking, people who live away from transit vote differently! I mean, they can vote whoever they like as far as I'm concerned, but the fact that people with different life choices are much less likely to meet each other, because they are literally NOT each other's neighbours - that's just dangerous.

[Kalash_FDG]

Another thing to have in mind when cities consider having night transportation services is the overall security rate or perception of the city, because it is well known that security levels tend to lower during night hours, and that is a very important thing to consider not only by transit administrators but also by the users of said night services.

[skrufff]

I live in Canada and the perception argument is one of the main reasons why I'm so excited for VIA's new Siemens rollout. They're capable of being faster but on our unoptimized tracks, they probably won't nearly reach their maximum. But, they're beautiful on the inside and outside, and someone seeing one pass by while on the highway might have a change of heart by seeing something so new and nice, compared to the ancient rolling stock from the 70's.

It might give them the impression that Canada is trying to improve its rail service, or even just remind them that it exists at all, and that might help shift the tides. Every time I see a new set ride by in the distance on my way home, it leaves a way bigger impression than the old ones ever did. It helps defeat the age old "trains are ancient technology" argument.

[fallenshallrise]

I agree with frequency driving ridership and trust in the system and I think it's an interesting point to think about the appearance of transit vehicles and how that can effect the perception of how often they drive past. For example if 10 bright yellow or orange busses go past the window while you're out at a restaurant do you notice more and think "that's a lot of busses" VS 10 boring grey busses going past.

[drdewott]

God as a Danish guy the fact that all of these little things are needed to make transit good needs to be said. Here, our politicans and other officials are hellbent on cost cutting and microscopic efficiency increases. Our buses may look alright on the outside but inside you wont find many creature comforts. Heck they often try to downsize buses and have almost exclusively 12m (40ft) buses in their tenders cause in their logic, because there are so many suppliers of 12m buses, the bidders to operate the routes can get lower prices for the vehicles, costing the transit agency less, whereas with larger or smaller buses, the market supply is lower, resulting in higher cost per vehicle.

And one place we especiall fall behind is our stations and transit hubs. Many are straight up awful with very few passenger facilities and basically nowhere to sit and wait for your bus or train, and often exposing passengers completely to the elements!

Combine all of this together with a extremely conveluted fare system and the high ticket prices which here are twice that of most North American cities and several European cities too, and you get a system which many think is very poor value and which ultimately leads to Copenhagen having a modal share which even American cities like the Twin Cities manage to beat.

Ultimately one cant run a good transit system by looking at just individual lines or even just the existance of lines in themselves. You need to be much more hollistic about it. How are passengers gonna get to the transit stop, is it safe for them to do so, is it gonna be a pleasant and or safe space they can wait at, is the vehicle gonna be comfortable and clean, are the schedules easy to follow, can transfers be made without making passengers uncomfortable, etc etc.

The most infuriating thing though is when you know all of the issues can be solved and that the funding to solve them exists, but is spent in other ways that are infuriating. Like the 3.5 billion canadian dollars (or about 18 billion Danish kroner) annually that the government spends on a tax rebate for commutes which inherrently in design benefits car drivers and car dependency most. One could double the amount of departures on all bus lines in the country and slash all ticket prices in half for just half of that sack of money! The other half could go for stuff like much improved train and bus stations, or overnight services, or anything else, and simplifying ticket systems.

[mathewferstl]

Went to work on a shift I hadn't worked before at a hospital I don't go to often only to realise at 10pm after my shift in the middle of car stroad hell that there's wasn't going to be any transport home. Live in Melbourne and at the time I thought the night services that I had caught in the past going clubbing ran all week, oh how wrong I was.

[Lucius_Chiaraviglio]

If you cut low ridership routes, you lose their service as feeders to the high ridership routes, which then lose ridership.

As for attractiveness of transit, the first priority is to get reliable service with decent frequency. Boston's MBTA is failing in these basics so much (and getting worse in the last few years even before the pandemic) that even during the day I often have to go to work (and even more often come back from work at night) using Fully Endogenous Express Transport.