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How to stop the decline of public transport in rich countries

135 points by edward 8y ago

deleted 8y ago
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zepto 8y ago
I think it’s worth starting to question the term ‘Rich Countries’ when what we mean is countries with a richer elite.
- quasse 8y ago
  Specifically "rich countries with a contingent of multibillionaire ideologues actively working to destroy public infrastructure". https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/19/climate/koch-brothers-public-transit.html https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/19/climate/koch-brothers-pub...
  - kevin_b_er 8y ago
    Greed and selfishness based politics are the enemy of public transit. They stand against anything that is for the good of society unless it directly provides them profit.
  - jamesblonde 8y ago
    In contrast, the richest family in Sweden (Wallenberg) just contributed 100m Euro to a research programme on AI - http://wasp-sweden.org/ http://wasp-sweden.org/ Proper Noblesse oblige. The Koch family are evil, in contrast.
    - GW150914 8y ago
      From all available evidence there is no need to add the qualifier “by contrast” to that statement. The problem is that it seems about half of the American electorate support the Koch’s and others like them for ideological reasons. As a non-American it’s a really strange thing to see. Dirt poor families from generations of bad education and dirt poor seem to think distant billionaires have their best interests at heart. They all seem to think they’re about to join the ranks of those billionaires any day now, and they’d hate the idea of hurting their prospects. It’s so weird...
- oicu812 8y ago
  It's also a false premise to think "rich countries" need a lot of investment in public transport because they are rich. Investment should be tied to population density, not the ability of "rich countries" to shoulder more tax burdens.
Symmetry 8y ago
The Tokyo metro is doing fine, maybe try learning from Japan?
- seanp2k2 8y ago
  Public transit works great in other countries. People in the US don’t like it because of the “temporarily embarrassed millionaire” thing, so we make up all these reasons about why it can’t work while setting up all future public transit up for failure (defunding, not letting it pass through areas people would want to travel to/from, failing to maintain it, bike-shedding for decades instead of building something, etc). As much as I hate to say it, I doubt we’ll see any successful public works projects happen in the next decade or two, and only then if things drastically improve.
  - overcast 8y ago
    People don't like it in the US, because it's overwhelmingly a shit experience. Are there any other countries in the world with the vastness of the US, that have awesome public transit? Everyone here is waaaaay more spread out. No excuse for cities, but most of us don't live in giant cities. It's just easier to take your car.
    - beevai142 8y ago
      That is a consequence of failed premises in the city planning in the US.
      - overcast 8y ago
        People don't want to live on top of one another. We have a huge country, and we enjoy having our own land. I understand most people in this world don't understand that rationalization, but it is what it is. Murica.
        thesumofall 8y ago
        The trend towards urbanization is unbroken. Most young people want to live in the city - and not just because of jobs
WhompingWindows 8y ago
Why not have fleets of electric vehicles with varying sizes, from 2 person mini cars to 20 person vans for large parties? Where I live, there are no subways, and busses are very energy/money inefficient. You may have a nearly full bus here and there, but the majority of the time there are barely any people in the busses, probably because it's $2.50 and it's a poor service. You don't get door-to-door service, increased road surface damage (y=x^4, where y= road damage with x=vehicle weight), crappy diesel fuels spewing pollution onto pedestrians/cyclists, hitting sidewalks and causing cars to back up whenever they make turns. I don't believe in the investment path to useful public transport here when we can have decentralized, electric, personalized services in the near future.
- harikb 8y ago
  Road surface damage? In an utopia where all calls are self-driving, sure, then there is real life.
  - WhompingWindows 8y ago
    You don't even need SDCs for this though. You can have smaller, more personalized vehicles driven by municipal employees or by privately owned companies. The point is why have a MASSIVE bus carrying 1/4 capacity on average? You should only have massive busses when you need them, since their downsides are much higher than a van or a minivan.
- dorfsmay 8y ago
  My understanding is that road damage is linked to tire pressure and contact surface, and that bus and trucks with bigger tires have a larger contact surface hence the same pressure as a car and therefore don't do more damage than a car.
  - mamon 8y ago
    Regarding pressure/road damage: Polish roads in particular are marked with grooves created by heavy trucks. And we know for sure that it's because of trucks because it only happens on the rightmost lane, where they typically drive. Yes, trucks have more wheels and therefore bigger contact surface, but it only partialy compensates bigger mass. Pressure on road is still few times bigger than of typical car. Buses however, are big but not that heavy, so they are not as bad as trucks.
throwbacktictac 8y ago
Arrived in Singapore recently and I'm quite impressed with the public transportation system here. My base is the slow Metro transit in Los Angeles and the over crowded system in Manila.
Raphmedia 8y ago
One word: comfort. Riding the public transportation systems meant I would arrive at work sweaty (hot crowded train and bus), with a backache (inadequate seats) and a headache (noisy engine). Those issues made my life so miserable that I swore never to ride those again.
- protonimitate 8y ago
  All those issues can be fixed with more funding and better equipment. Not saying you're wrong, but the issues are not unsurmountable. In most cases people will have a handful of bad experiences and default back to their comfort zone.
  - jamesblonde 8y ago
    I prefer to travel by subway in Stockholm because of the comfort. It's a money issue, plain and simple. Jeff Bezos could fix the problem for the whole US all by himself. Will he? Will he, my ass!
    - rekado 8y ago
      Maybe it's a bad idea to let people get really rich.
      - coryrc 8y ago
        Sweden has more billionaires per capita than the US.
        rekado 8y ago
        I'm not talking about the US. I'm talking about the world. This is not a competition. Maybe it is generally a bad idea to concentrate financial means in few people. I don't want to depend on a billionaire's altruism.
        8y ago
collinf 8y ago
Somewhat interesting. I have a different reason for the declining weekday rates of the MTA (NYC's subway system). More and more companies every year seem to be alright with their employees being remote on a more regular basis, which would attribute for the _slight_ decline in weekday ridership.
- majewsky 8y ago
  How many factory workers, construction workers, waiters, barbers, etc. do you know whom work remote?
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
unicornporn 8y ago
It's not rocket science. Establish tax-switching policies. Make it less attractive to take the car by building automated car tolls and let the drivers pay. Subsidize public transportation to make it cheaper for the citizens. That's basically what has been done in Stockholm (even though I wish it had been done to a greater degree, public transportation needs to be even cheaper). Cars destroys our shared environment and expanding it's infrastructure costs plenty (space, money, pollution). Of course it should be heavily taxed so that cycling, bus and subway infrastructure can be financed.
- jamesblonde 8y ago
  I travel 40 mins daily across town in stockholm. Change subway once for each journey. I travel at 08.30 and home at 17.15. I always get a set both ways. I turn on my laptop, work on the 4g connection all the way home. Rarely is there any problem.
- pc86 8y ago
  Out of curiosity how do you finance all this public transport when driving is so expensive you lose money with each tax increase?
  - unicornporn 8y ago
    It's a balancing act I suppose. People still find that it's worth paying to take the car, but not to the same extent as without the tolls (it only costs between $1 and $4 depending on the time of the day). I'd guess there's still some headroom for increasing the tolls without decreasing the car traffic too much. If it were too expensive there'd be less money to finance public transportation which, I guess, creates a strange dependency. It somehow works, but there's still of course far too much car traffic.
- salmon30salmon 8y ago
  This is an absolutely terrible idea, and really hurts the lower class, especially in sprawled out places like the US. Often times, housing that low-income people can afford are not near their jobs or places of business. Sometimes, owning a personal use automobile is the only reasonable way to get across town to their jobs, or back to their home in time for an evening with their kids. Raising the cost of driving artificially directly impacts the lower income groups at a far more impactful rate than the higher income groups. Long story short, a flat toll is an incredibly regressive tax and directly damages lower income communities.
hkon 8y ago
Hey, if I lived in the city centre and worked a few blocks a way, I too would probably want to hate on the car. Same people get families, move out of the centre, get car, regret they voted for politicians who put in place huge tolls on roads.
- jopsen 8y ago
  Yeah, for starters the right fix is probably to make public transit free. Just reducing traffic would payoff in terms of less wear and tear on the roads, and less need to expand the roads. And with any luck, free public transit would help poor people the most. Allowing more people to find work.
  - hkon 8y ago
    Ok, so the ones with jobs should pay for those without a job? I have a better solution, why not let the unemployed drive the busses without pay. Then they get to do something, I get free transportation. Win-win?
    - jopsen 8y ago
      > Ok, so the ones with jobs should pay for those without a job? Yes. And if by some miracle we can help people get jobs, by making transportation cheaper then we call it a win-win. Note, even if public transit was free that wouldn't make everybody use it all the time. But it might reduce the number of cars on the road, and help a few people out of poverty.
      - hkon 8y ago
        How much of your salary do you donate today? This is not something the government has to enforce. You are free to do it by yourself.
Proven 8y ago
Privatize it
IanDrake 8y ago
Only my limited personal experience here. In the last 20 years I’ve used the following public transport: - One bus ride in western mass with crazy drug head yelling crap. - Six T rides in Boston, one ended with some drunk dude yelling and cursing at me. Another with some bum hassling a woman and then pretending to have a gun when my buddy stepped in. - Four Metro train rides from CT to NY. Not too bad. Only saw two fights that didn’t involve me. - A few metro rides in Paris, nothing bad, just a few harmless beggars. - A few time in the Tube in London. Jolly good there. So, my personal answer to this question is safety. Fewer crazy passengers and more security.
- wccrawford 8y ago
  I rode the train in Boston in the subway in NYC a few times each and saw nothing odd at all. I also rode the trains and subways in Tokyo for a week and a half and saw nothing odd, except the odd looks my wife got for wearing a shirt with the wrong date on it. (It was a shift from a marathon and just happened to coincide with Pearl Harbor Day, IIRC.) I think you had a lot of bad luck in the US, and I don't think the percentage of craziness you experienced is the norm. I know it happens, and it absolutely discourages people from public transit, but I just don't think it happens that much.
- kylehotchkiss 8y ago
  I live next to a train station in San Diego (one of those high-density near public transport setups, in a comfortable/safe apartment). Safety is what prevents me from taking it anywhere, I see fights at the station on a worryingly more regular basis, arrests every few weeks, and yelling almost daily (all witnessed from my apartment window). I've seen in the news that teenagers have been victims of an armed robbery on or near the train station just after mine (amaya) last summer. The San Diego trolley really needs a transport police officer on every station and in every train. I feel bad for the people whom this this the only transport option for. The system actually seems well designed as far as the trains, station location, and future growth plans go. But with no ticket based access-control on trains (seriously just walk on) and pretty limited police coverage, it just doesn't seem able to reach its potential.
- jopsen 8y ago
greggman 8y ago
it's not declining in Tokyo afaict. I believe that's because they privatised it? https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2011/10/why-tokyos-privately-owned-rail-systems-work-so-well/389/ https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2011/10/why-tokyos-pr...
ryandrake 8y ago
If I were to take public transportation to work Google maps says it would look like this: 2 min: Walk to bus stop 15 min: Bus to transit center 35 min: Bus to rail 20 min: Train 1 then switch 15 min: Train 2 45 min: Bus to transit center 20 min: Another bus 15 min: Another bus 3 min: Walk to work Including wait times, we are at 3 hours 45 minutes. Compared to 1.5-2hrs by car depending on traffic. I don’t think more funding can realistically fix this. People are spread out and the USA is a big place.
- JumpCrisscross 8y ago
  > I don’t think more funding can realistically fix this When public transit is built, residential and commercial properties spawn up around its stops. This is why my Manhattan commute is 15 minutes door to door. TL; DR The lack of public transit, and public subsidies for parking and roads, drives density within America’s metropolitan areas.
  - Shivetya 8y ago
    Manhattan is in a very unique situation that does not apply to many other cities. even its transit system is beset by thirty four billion dollars of debt even with taxes on tunnels that cars use to support it and money from the state government. plus there are too many stories about service woes and when you pay out more in salaries alone than rider fees how can you expect to stay ahead of the game. the state of many metropolitan transit systems is very similar, tens of billions in deferred maintenance, high payroll costs, and even worse is not keeping up pensions. the folly many cities fell into was trying to make light rail work, the idea of build it and they will come did't pan out and some expansions that a few networks have tried were more expensive than the original build. to make up for money short falls and force ridership some agencies resorted t cutting bus service. can we save transit, sure, but it has to be adapted to how people live and not be built out to change how people live. it needs to be taken out of the hands of politicians who love cutting ribbons on expensive projects that don't deliver. any good transit solution will need to involve better road planning, fully integrated traffic signaling, and pushing to provide better service that earns riders instead of passing laws to try to coerce them
temp-dude-87844 8y ago
Public transit works if large amounts of people move along predictable routes at predictable times, and the immense cost of infrastructure and operation is spread among a large pool. People desiring additional control and comfort can use personal vehicles, and use publicly-subsidized roadways, but fuel taxes, licensing fees, and tolls recoup a small portion of this cost from the operator. As the article points out, newer car-hire services mount the most unfortunate competition, because they take advantage of the low costs of private vehicles' road use, and then turn around to collect a fare from each user, which, depending on market conditions, may or may not even result in an operating profit. While these are comfortable for their occupants, they clog up the streets more so than personal-use vehicles, which don't need to patrol the town when their driver is occupied. The fact that the likes of Uber notoriously ignore local regulations hurts even more. These car hire services pay the same way as private vehicles do, but the marginal difference between their usage goes not to the government's coffers, but to private operators.
NedIsakoff 8y ago
Money. QED.
booleandilemma 8y ago
For the NYC subway trains: get rid of the dance troupes, musicians, beggars, and crazy people. I would pay extra for the NYC subway user experience to be like the LIRR user experience. Why can’t it be? Why do I have to dread getting on the subway after 10pm? Why do I have to put up with mariachi bands playing in my ear at 6am? Why do I have to worry about my face getting kicked by a dancer during my commute?
- haskellandchill 8y ago
  I like it though, so let’s get separate cars.
NedIsakoff 8y ago
My commute: * driving: 10 minutes * biking: 24 minutes * bus: 12 minutes walk + 20 minutes on bus 1 + 11 minute wait for transfer + 29 minute bus 2
criddell 8y ago
I was in London a couple of weeks ago and used the subway extensively and it was, overall, an excellent experience. It made me wonder if there are cities that have made big investments in subway or other light rail systems and then later regretted it.
- pjc50 8y ago
  Interesting. The London system is ancient, creaking, lacks modern conveniences like mobile coverage/wifi/aircon, and has comparatively small trains that get horribly overcrowded at peak times. It it probably a worse experience than most European metros (unless you're using one of the few new lines). But it does get a decent amount of investment and fundamentally it works. If only we could get a comparable level of investment in the rest of the UK. Regretted systems: guided buses. Both Edinburgh and Cambridge regret theirs and Edinburgh built trams over it instead (with massive disruption and cost overrun, but not actually regretted yet).
- megy 8y ago
  > It made me wonder if there are cities that have made big investments in subway or other light rail systems and then later regretted it. There are people who regret it. There are always people who only want roads and cars. It just depends who is in power.
bischofs 8y ago
Where i'm at in Michigan, they always put any kind of transit funding proposal on the ballet. This obviously gets voted down because most people don't want higher taxes for system that will only benefit urbanites in the short term. And the politicians who don't want transit know this. It becomes obvious what they are doing when more funding for freeway expansions just gets rubber-stamped. That is "an executive decision" by the politicians for "long-term success of the region". The entire funding model is aligned where they can move money around for more roads, but any public transit funding should be "up to the people to decide"
- xienze 8y ago
  > This obviously gets voted down because most people don't want higher taxes for system that will only benefit urbanites in the short term. There's more to it than that though. In cities not named Chicago, DC, and New York, these stupid light rail measures inevitably end up with trips that take waaaay longer than driving, and still involve driving to a bus station. Patronage is predictably low and the system loses money per passenger in perpetuity. No, that can't be why people vote these down, they're just hating on them fancy downtown folks.
  - bischofs 8y ago
    I recently took a trip to Bochum, Germany. They have a light rail system that goes to every small suburb, the university, and is centered at the Bochum city train station where there are cabs, bus lines and connections that get you to any surrounding city. It is maybe 6-8 lines total and was incredibly useful because it was designed to be, I didnt need a car to get anywhere and it was clean and cheap (2 euros per trip) . The new Q-line in Detroit is 1 line that is three miles total and is more designed as a tourist trap, most people dont work three miles away from where they live. You need to connect it to other systems like an airport or a bus station, and you need more than 1 line (duh). If you gave everyone horses and only build a three mile road you wouldn't say that "cars are a failure, and roads lose money". For some reason in the States we build out a tiny one line system and then throw our hands up in the air when nobody rides it.
acover 8y ago
What Chinese electric bike is worth buying? Electric bike review seems to point to Western brands costing several thousand dollars. Any recommendations on where to start looking?
- deleted 8y ago
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- davidgould 8y ago
  I don't have a brand recommendation, but if you are handy, it is possible to convert an existing bike by adding a motor and batteries. For a bike like experience (as opposed to a light electric motorcycle experience) the components can be had for between $500 to $800 depending on how much battery you need. Some resources: - ebikes.ca - Informative website, sell high quality items with a lot of the problems worked out and with support. Prices are fair given the added value. Motor and trip simulators for calculating speeds and feeds etc. - bmsbattery.com - Chinese vendor of cheap but mostly functional components. Not much support and shipping will add 30% to prices, but very inexpensive if you can make it work. - lunacycle.com (US), e3emv.com(China) - Sell high quality battery packs - endless-sphere.com - massive discussion board full of good information leavened with the usual opinionated know nothings, but mostly civil. Assuming you need to go less than 25 miles and don't need to climb long steep hills and intend to pedal lightly I'd say you are looking for a small front geared hub motor rated for 250-350 watts and a small controller rated for 20A or less along with a 48v battery between 350-600 watt hours capacity. Target speed should be around 18 to 20 mph. Start with a nice used practical commuter bike, older mountain and road bikes and hybrids will all work. Get something that started out as a decent bike, not big-box store "bike shaped object". I've built a few now and am pretty happy with the process and results.
  - acover 8y ago
    Thanks for the reply. I'm considering the BBS02 but I really like the torque sensors. I was hoping that there was some mass produced Chinese model T but couldn't find it.
sandover 8y ago
I don't think it's wild Silicon Valley chatter to say that public transportation along fixed routes WILL decline as a result of new technology, and this is a great thing. Fixed-route 19th-20th century public transportation networks are inefficient because most of the vehicles are pretty empty most of the time. This makes these systems expensive on a passenger-per-seat-mile basis. Not to mention the colossal waste of people's time spent trying to accommodate their journeys to those fixed routes (and schedules). Example: LA's Metro system is subsidized to the tune of about 50 cents per passenger seat/mile, or was as of 2009 (http://www.newgeography.com/content/002361-los-angeles-metro-bus-system-compares-favorably-with-its-peer-group http://www.newgeography.com/content/002361-los-angeles-metro...) In 10-15 years, transport companies like Lyft/Uber/Didi will be able to offer municipalities a much better deal than that. An electric car or van without a driver in it, with an operating lifetime of a million miles, will cost on the order of 20-40 cents a mile to run. Get 3-8 paying customers into the vehicle, and there is absolutely no need for a 50 cent per passenger seat mile subsidy.
- s73v3r_ 8y ago
  How does that affect those who have to take public transit due to finances?
  - ghaff 8y ago
    Personally, I expect there will always be a need for high throughput fixed line transit in some areas. But, to answer your question, if some portion of the population requires transportation subsidies to participate in society then the best policy answer would seem to be to provide them with subsidies directly.
  - albertgoeswoof 8y ago
    They’ll save money because they can now afford cheap self driving transport. Also if you’re subsidising mass transit only for the poor, why not just give them subsidy directly?
- lev99 8y ago
  > I don't think it's wild Silicon Valley chatter to say that public transportation along fixed routes WILL decline as a result of new technology, and this is a great thing. I do. People are leaving rural and suburbs for cities. Cities are becoming more dense. Fixed line transportation offers significantly more passengers/area/hour than roads. Tokyo supplies 40M daily train rides. Nothing Lyft/Uber/Didi is doing suggests anything close to that amount of density. Hyperloops are going to push maximum passenger density of fixed route paths even higher.
hackerpacker 8y ago
FWIW, as an avid hypermiler (who also owns an EV and pays for wind power), and works from home, the mpg per person of public transport isn't that great, I have no problem exceeding it, even without passengers (though I usually have passengers when I go somewhere). https://www.afdc.energy.gov/data/10311 https://www.afdc.energy.gov/data/10311 Certainly there are plenty of motorcycles that beat it without much effort/technique as well. So, what am I supposed to be taxed for again? The environment inside a moving box full of strangers, and the scheduling headaches, doesn't excite me much as an alternative. I wonder how much of the "decline" is because of people who work from home. I don't think uber is entirely the cause, more like uber displaced taxi drivers.
- crooked-v 8y ago
  > So, what am I supposed to be taxed for again? The societal benefits of poor people being able to get to work every day.
- ghaff 8y ago
  The article does mention home work. It's probably a combination of factors as the piece suggests. There are certainly enough anecdotal stories of people switching to UberPool from transit because the price works out to be about the same. And biking infrastructure has tended to get better however incrementally. And you have bike share services too.
- st26 8y ago
  It isn't about mpg, it's about use of space & everything that falls out of that. Less money building roads, parking lots, etc. Sidebar, I wonder how an EV car stacks up to an EV bus.
- JanisL 8y ago
  > the mpg per person of public transport isn't that great The point is that it gives an opportunity to reduce the "m" in the mpg.
AtlasBarfed 8y ago
Self driving vehicles will solve all of this. You don't need centralized routes, it can be door-to-door, it can be tiered for comfort, it can be high density transport, it can be on demand, it can be safe and secure, it can be automated, it can be taxed to incentivize density or usage patterns or demand as needed.
- f_allwein 8y ago
  Serious question: how would it be door to door and high density at the same time? So far, all self driving car proposals I saw looked just like cars, or vans at best. Compare this to a fully loaded double-decker bus in e.g. London. So much more efficient use of road space.
  - AtlasBarfed 8y ago
    Let's look at a traditional bus route in an urban area: Scheduled set of stops between basically two places. Each of those stops rely on people walking a couple blocks or more to a stop for the route. Basically, you deconstruct and make on-demand the route. As people register for a trip, you combine a set of origination and destination points into closely grouped numbers, pick up a set of people in close proximity, and drop off them off. At high density times, there will be opportunities for substantial "rideshare" efficiencies. At less high density times, you save overhead of the busses with a couple riders. If you've ever taken the cheaper alternative airport -> city hotel van that goes to all the hotels in a downtown from an airport, that is basically the idea. It isn't as convenient as 1:1 taxi transport, but it's a lot better than the vagaries of train/bus hopping. It seems strange that with all the graph and NP-complete interview-ready people on this site that this isn't completely obvious. Self-driving vehicles will obviate all but the highest density mass transport. And then if you get self-flying drones going...
phobosdeimos 8y ago
The rich country I live in is investing billions in public transport. Its also investing heavily in cycling. Trying to meet the Paris climate accord and making sure people don't die from poor air quality makes this a legal requirement. Ofcourse the US has Trump so there is no such pressure to get people out of their SUVs.
borgmeister 8y ago
The real problem that no one wants to admit is overpopulation. If every couple had only 1 child, the problem would gradually go away as the population shrank.
- j7ake 8y ago
  Hong Kong has one of the highest population densities in the world and their transportation is excellent. Your argument isn’t supported by data.
- albertgoeswoof 8y ago
  Yes the problem would go away. Along with the economy and all standards of living.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
gaspoweredcat 8y ago
in this town there would be simple solutions, first is that here if you need to get anywhere generally you have to take not one but two buses, this makes it petty expensive, but thats not the biggest flaw. oh no, the main problem is one of time, none of these buses match up so despite being a mere 3-4 miles an average commute via public transport is well over an hour, not only that but the timetable is not even close to accurate, youll often wait for a bus marked on the digital info boards as coming any min only to find that bus actually never existed and you have another 30 min wait basically if you want to get to work on time be prepared to leave at least 2 hours early. you may be thinking "hey its only 3-4 miles, just walk you lazy bastard!" but sadly again this town does not lend itself well to things such as walking or cycling because there is no such thing as flat roads here, youre either going up a steep hill or down one a reasonably priced tram system or even a properly organised and reasonably priced bus service could fix these issues easily but sadly that will never happen
fma 8y ago
We can start by stopping the political influence of those who benefit from declining public transportation. How the Koch Brothers Are Killing Public Transit Projects Around the Country https://nyti.ms/2lmrvVP https://nyti.ms/2lmrvVP
Tiktaalik 8y ago
Vancouver has never legalized Uber/Lyft. Vancouver has the highest gas prices in NA. Vancouver's transit operator Translink is enjoying a big influx of funding from the government and is increasing service hours. Unsurprisingly Vancouver transit ridership is experiencing record growth. > Average weekday boardings on buses were up 9.5 per cent. Expo/Millennium Line average weekday boardings were up 9.2 per cent, while Canada Line’s boardings grew 8.1 per cent. On SeaBus, average weekday boardings increased by 13.1 per cent, thanks in part to increased sailings. Even West Coast Express ridership is on the rise, up 6.7 per cent. http://vancouversun.com/news/local-news/transit-ridership-hits-a-high-in-metro-vancouver http://vancouversun.com/news/local-news/transit-ridership-hi...
hitekker 8y ago
Meanwhile in Singapore: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_Rapid_Transit_(Singapore)#/media/File%3AEvolution_of_the_MRT.gif https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_Rapid_Transit_(Singapor... Best city public transport ever and getting better every day. For the most part.
paulddraper 8y ago
> rich counties I am unaware of this trend across multiple rich countries of less public transit. Anyone have actual numbers instead of hersay? I could believe that people travel longer distances than they used to, in ways that transit never served. But less public transit itself? Is love to learn more.
eqdw 8y ago
How to stop the decline of public transport in rich countries: 1) Allow transit systems to provide a luxury tier of service with no upper limit on price 2) Mandate that 100% of the money that comes from (1) has to be pumped back into expanding transit infrastructure

135 points by edward 8y ago

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

zepto 8y ago

I think it’s worth starting to question the term ‘Rich Countries’ when what we mean is countries with a richer elite.

quasse 8y ago
Specifically "rich countries with a contingent of multibillionaire ideologues actively working to destroy public infrastructure". https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/19/climate/koch-brothers-public-transit.html https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/19/climate/koch-brothers-pub...
- kevin_b_er 8y ago
  Greed and selfishness based politics are the enemy of public transit. They stand against anything that is for the good of society unless it directly provides them profit.
- jamesblonde 8y ago
  In contrast, the richest family in Sweden (Wallenberg) just contributed 100m Euro to a research programme on AI - http://wasp-sweden.org/ http://wasp-sweden.org/ Proper Noblesse oblige. The Koch family are evil, in contrast.
  - GW150914 8y ago
    From all available evidence there is no need to add the qualifier “by contrast” to that statement. The problem is that it seems about half of the American electorate support the Koch’s and others like them for ideological reasons. As a non-American it’s a really strange thing to see. Dirt poor families from generations of bad education and dirt poor seem to think distant billionaires have their best interests at heart. They all seem to think they’re about to join the ranks of those billionaires any day now, and they’d hate the idea of hurting their prospects. It’s so weird...
oicu812 8y ago
It's also a false premise to think "rich countries" need a lot of investment in public transport because they are rich. Investment should be tied to population density, not the ability of "rich countries" to shoulder more tax burdens.

Symmetry 8y ago

The Tokyo metro is doing fine, maybe try learning from Japan?

seanp2k2 8y ago
Public transit works great in other countries. People in the US don’t like it because of the “temporarily embarrassed millionaire” thing, so we make up all these reasons about why it can’t work while setting up all future public transit up for failure (defunding, not letting it pass through areas people would want to travel to/from, failing to maintain it, bike-shedding for decades instead of building something, etc). As much as I hate to say it, I doubt we’ll see any successful public works projects happen in the next decade or two, and only then if things drastically improve.
- overcast 8y ago
  People don't like it in the US, because it's overwhelmingly a shit experience. Are there any other countries in the world with the vastness of the US, that have awesome public transit? Everyone here is waaaaay more spread out. No excuse for cities, but most of us don't live in giant cities. It's just easier to take your car.
  - beevai142 8y ago
    That is a consequence of failed premises in the city planning in the US.
    - overcast 8y ago
      People don't want to live on top of one another. We have a huge country, and we enjoy having our own land. I understand most people in this world don't understand that rationalization, but it is what it is. Murica.
      - thesumofall 8y ago
        The trend towards urbanization is unbroken. Most young people want to live in the city - and not just because of jobs

WhompingWindows 8y ago

Why not have fleets of electric vehicles with varying sizes, from 2 person mini cars to 20 person vans for large parties? Where I live, there are no subways, and busses are very energy/money inefficient. You may have a nearly full bus here and there, but the majority of the time there are barely any people in the busses, probably because it's $2.50 and it's a poor service. You don't get door-to-door service, increased road surface damage (y=x^4, where y= road damage with x=vehicle weight), crappy diesel fuels spewing pollution onto pedestrians/cyclists, hitting sidewalks and causing cars to back up whenever they make turns. I don't believe in the investment path to useful public transport here when we can have decentralized, electric, personalized services in the near future.

harikb 8y ago
Road surface damage? In an utopia where all calls are self-driving, sure, then there is real life.
- WhompingWindows 8y ago
  You don't even need SDCs for this though. You can have smaller, more personalized vehicles driven by municipal employees or by privately owned companies. The point is why have a MASSIVE bus carrying 1/4 capacity on average? You should only have massive busses when you need them, since their downsides are much higher than a van or a minivan.
dorfsmay 8y ago
My understanding is that road damage is linked to tire pressure and contact surface, and that bus and trucks with bigger tires have a larger contact surface hence the same pressure as a car and therefore don't do more damage than a car.
- mamon 8y ago
  Regarding pressure/road damage: Polish roads in particular are marked with grooves created by heavy trucks. And we know for sure that it's because of trucks because it only happens on the rightmost lane, where they typically drive. Yes, trucks have more wheels and therefore bigger contact surface, but it only partialy compensates bigger mass. Pressure on road is still few times bigger than of typical car. Buses however, are big but not that heavy, so they are not as bad as trucks.

throwbacktictac 8y ago

Arrived in Singapore recently and I'm quite impressed with the public transportation system here. My base is the slow Metro transit in Los Angeles and the over crowded system in Manila.

Raphmedia 8y ago

One word: comfort. Riding the public transportation systems meant I would arrive at work sweaty (hot crowded train and bus), with a backache (inadequate seats) and a headache (noisy engine). Those issues made my life so miserable that I swore never to ride those again.

protonimitate 8y ago
All those issues can be fixed with more funding and better equipment. Not saying you're wrong, but the issues are not unsurmountable. In most cases people will have a handful of bad experiences and default back to their comfort zone.
- jamesblonde 8y ago
  I prefer to travel by subway in Stockholm because of the comfort. It's a money issue, plain and simple. Jeff Bezos could fix the problem for the whole US all by himself. Will he? Will he, my ass!
  - rekado 8y ago
    Maybe it's a bad idea to let people get really rich.
    - coryrc 8y ago
      Sweden has more billionaires per capita than the US.
      - rekado 8y ago
        I'm not talking about the US. I'm talking about the world. This is not a competition. Maybe it is generally a bad idea to concentrate financial means in few people. I don't want to depend on a billionaire's altruism.
        8y ago

collinf 8y ago

Somewhat interesting. I have a different reason for the declining weekday rates of the MTA (NYC's subway system). More and more companies every year seem to be alright with their employees being remote on a more regular basis, which would attribute for the _slight_ decline in weekday ridership.

majewsky 8y ago
How many factory workers, construction workers, waiters, barbers, etc. do you know whom work remote?

deleted 8y ago

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unicornporn 8y ago

It's not rocket science. Establish tax-switching policies. Make it less attractive to take the car by building automated car tolls and let the drivers pay. Subsidize public transportation to make it cheaper for the citizens. That's basically what has been done in Stockholm (even though I wish it had been done to a greater degree, public transportation needs to be even cheaper). Cars destroys our shared environment and expanding it's infrastructure costs plenty (space, money, pollution). Of course it should be heavily taxed so that cycling, bus and subway infrastructure can be financed.

jamesblonde 8y ago
I travel 40 mins daily across town in stockholm. Change subway once for each journey. I travel at 08.30 and home at 17.15. I always get a set both ways. I turn on my laptop, work on the 4g connection all the way home. Rarely is there any problem.
pc86 8y ago
Out of curiosity how do you finance all this public transport when driving is so expensive you lose money with each tax increase?
- unicornporn 8y ago
  It's a balancing act I suppose. People still find that it's worth paying to take the car, but not to the same extent as without the tolls (it only costs between $1 and $4 depending on the time of the day). I'd guess there's still some headroom for increasing the tolls without decreasing the car traffic too much. If it were too expensive there'd be less money to finance public transportation which, I guess, creates a strange dependency. It somehow works, but there's still of course far too much car traffic.
salmon30salmon 8y ago
This is an absolutely terrible idea, and really hurts the lower class, especially in sprawled out places like the US. Often times, housing that low-income people can afford are not near their jobs or places of business. Sometimes, owning a personal use automobile is the only reasonable way to get across town to their jobs, or back to their home in time for an evening with their kids. Raising the cost of driving artificially directly impacts the lower income groups at a far more impactful rate than the higher income groups. Long story short, a flat toll is an incredibly regressive tax and directly damages lower income communities.

hkon 8y ago

Hey, if I lived in the city centre and worked a few blocks a way, I too would probably want to hate on the car. Same people get families, move out of the centre, get car, regret they voted for politicians who put in place huge tolls on roads.

jopsen 8y ago
Yeah, for starters the right fix is probably to make public transit free. Just reducing traffic would payoff in terms of less wear and tear on the roads, and less need to expand the roads. And with any luck, free public transit would help poor people the most. Allowing more people to find work.
- hkon 8y ago
  Ok, so the ones with jobs should pay for those without a job? I have a better solution, why not let the unemployed drive the busses without pay. Then they get to do something, I get free transportation. Win-win?
  - jopsen 8y ago
    > Ok, so the ones with jobs should pay for those without a job? Yes. And if by some miracle we can help people get jobs, by making transportation cheaper then we call it a win-win. Note, even if public transit was free that wouldn't make everybody use it all the time. But it might reduce the number of cars on the road, and help a few people out of poverty.
    - hkon 8y ago
      How much of your salary do you donate today? This is not something the government has to enforce. You are free to do it by yourself.

Proven 8y ago

Privatize it

IanDrake 8y ago

Only my limited personal experience here. In the last 20 years I’ve used the following public transport: - One bus ride in western mass with crazy drug head yelling crap. - Six T rides in Boston, one ended with some drunk dude yelling and cursing at me. Another with some bum hassling a woman and then pretending to have a gun when my buddy stepped in. - Four Metro train rides from CT to NY. Not too bad. Only saw two fights that didn’t involve me. - A few metro rides in Paris, nothing bad, just a few harmless beggars. - A few time in the Tube in London. Jolly good there. So, my personal answer to this question is safety. Fewer crazy passengers and more security.

wccrawford 8y ago
I rode the train in Boston in the subway in NYC a few times each and saw nothing odd at all. I also rode the trains and subways in Tokyo for a week and a half and saw nothing odd, except the odd looks my wife got for wearing a shirt with the wrong date on it. (It was a shift from a marathon and just happened to coincide with Pearl Harbor Day, IIRC.) I think you had a lot of bad luck in the US, and I don't think the percentage of craziness you experienced is the norm. I know it happens, and it absolutely discourages people from public transit, but I just don't think it happens that much.
kylehotchkiss 8y ago
I live next to a train station in San Diego (one of those high-density near public transport setups, in a comfortable/safe apartment). Safety is what prevents me from taking it anywhere, I see fights at the station on a worryingly more regular basis, arrests every few weeks, and yelling almost daily (all witnessed from my apartment window). I've seen in the news that teenagers have been victims of an armed robbery on or near the train station just after mine (amaya) last summer. The San Diego trolley really needs a transport police officer on every station and in every train. I feel bad for the people whom this this the only transport option for. The system actually seems well designed as far as the trains, station location, and future growth plans go. But with no ticket based access-control on trains (seriously just walk on) and pretty limited police coverage, it just doesn't seem able to reach its potential.
jopsen 8y ago

greggman 8y ago

it's not declining in Tokyo afaict. I believe that's because they privatised it? https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2011/10/why-tokyos-privately-owned-rail-systems-work-so-well/389/ https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2011/10/why-tokyos-pr...

ryandrake 8y ago

If I were to take public transportation to work Google maps says it would look like this: 2 min: Walk to bus stop 15 min: Bus to transit center 35 min: Bus to rail 20 min: Train 1 then switch 15 min: Train 2 45 min: Bus to transit center 20 min: Another bus 15 min: Another bus 3 min: Walk to work Including wait times, we are at 3 hours 45 minutes. Compared to 1.5-2hrs by car depending on traffic. I don’t think more funding can realistically fix this. People are spread out and the USA is a big place.

JumpCrisscross 8y ago
> I don’t think more funding can realistically fix this When public transit is built, residential and commercial properties spawn up around its stops. This is why my Manhattan commute is 15 minutes door to door. TL; DR The lack of public transit, and public subsidies for parking and roads, drives density within America’s metropolitan areas.
- Shivetya 8y ago
  Manhattan is in a very unique situation that does not apply to many other cities. even its transit system is beset by thirty four billion dollars of debt even with taxes on tunnels that cars use to support it and money from the state government. plus there are too many stories about service woes and when you pay out more in salaries alone than rider fees how can you expect to stay ahead of the game. the state of many metropolitan transit systems is very similar, tens of billions in deferred maintenance, high payroll costs, and even worse is not keeping up pensions. the folly many cities fell into was trying to make light rail work, the idea of build it and they will come did't pan out and some expansions that a few networks have tried were more expensive than the original build. to make up for money short falls and force ridership some agencies resorted t cutting bus service. can we save transit, sure, but it has to be adapted to how people live and not be built out to change how people live. it needs to be taken out of the hands of politicians who love cutting ribbons on expensive projects that don't deliver. any good transit solution will need to involve better road planning, fully integrated traffic signaling, and pushing to provide better service that earns riders instead of passing laws to try to coerce them

temp-dude-87844 8y ago

Public transit works if large amounts of people move along predictable routes at predictable times, and the immense cost of infrastructure and operation is spread among a large pool. People desiring additional control and comfort can use personal vehicles, and use publicly-subsidized roadways, but fuel taxes, licensing fees, and tolls recoup a small portion of this cost from the operator. As the article points out, newer car-hire services mount the most unfortunate competition, because they take advantage of the low costs of private vehicles' road use, and then turn around to collect a fare from each user, which, depending on market conditions, may or may not even result in an operating profit. While these are comfortable for their occupants, they clog up the streets more so than personal-use vehicles, which don't need to patrol the town when their driver is occupied. The fact that the likes of Uber notoriously ignore local regulations hurts even more. These car hire services pay the same way as private vehicles do, but the marginal difference between their usage goes not to the government's coffers, but to private operators.

NedIsakoff 8y ago

Money. QED.

booleandilemma 8y ago

For the NYC subway trains: get rid of the dance troupes, musicians, beggars, and crazy people. I would pay extra for the NYC subway user experience to be like the LIRR user experience. Why can’t it be? Why do I have to dread getting on the subway after 10pm? Why do I have to put up with mariachi bands playing in my ear at 6am? Why do I have to worry about my face getting kicked by a dancer during my commute?

haskellandchill 8y ago
I like it though, so let’s get separate cars.

NedIsakoff 8y ago

My commute: * driving: 10 minutes * biking: 24 minutes * bus: 12 minutes walk + 20 minutes on bus 1 + 11 minute wait for transfer + 29 minute bus 2

criddell 8y ago

I was in London a couple of weeks ago and used the subway extensively and it was, overall, an excellent experience. It made me wonder if there are cities that have made big investments in subway or other light rail systems and then later regretted it.

pjc50 8y ago
Interesting. The London system is ancient, creaking, lacks modern conveniences like mobile coverage/wifi/aircon, and has comparatively small trains that get horribly overcrowded at peak times. It it probably a worse experience than most European metros (unless you're using one of the few new lines). But it does get a decent amount of investment and fundamentally it works. If only we could get a comparable level of investment in the rest of the UK. Regretted systems: guided buses. Both Edinburgh and Cambridge regret theirs and Edinburgh built trams over it instead (with massive disruption and cost overrun, but not actually regretted yet).
megy 8y ago
> It made me wonder if there are cities that have made big investments in subway or other light rail systems and then later regretted it. There are people who regret it. There are always people who only want roads and cars. It just depends who is in power.

bischofs 8y ago

Where i'm at in Michigan, they always put any kind of transit funding proposal on the ballet. This obviously gets voted down because most people don't want higher taxes for system that will only benefit urbanites in the short term. And the politicians who don't want transit know this. It becomes obvious what they are doing when more funding for freeway expansions just gets rubber-stamped. That is "an executive decision" by the politicians for "long-term success of the region". The entire funding model is aligned where they can move money around for more roads, but any public transit funding should be "up to the people to decide"

xienze 8y ago
> This obviously gets voted down because most people don't want higher taxes for system that will only benefit urbanites in the short term. There's more to it than that though. In cities not named Chicago, DC, and New York, these stupid light rail measures inevitably end up with trips that take waaaay longer than driving, and still involve driving to a bus station. Patronage is predictably low and the system loses money per passenger in perpetuity. No, that can't be why people vote these down, they're just hating on them fancy downtown folks.
- bischofs 8y ago
  I recently took a trip to Bochum, Germany. They have a light rail system that goes to every small suburb, the university, and is centered at the Bochum city train station where there are cabs, bus lines and connections that get you to any surrounding city. It is maybe 6-8 lines total and was incredibly useful because it was designed to be, I didnt need a car to get anywhere and it was clean and cheap (2 euros per trip) . The new Q-line in Detroit is 1 line that is three miles total and is more designed as a tourist trap, most people dont work three miles away from where they live. You need to connect it to other systems like an airport or a bus station, and you need more than 1 line (duh). If you gave everyone horses and only build a three mile road you wouldn't say that "cars are a failure, and roads lose money". For some reason in the States we build out a tiny one line system and then throw our hands up in the air when nobody rides it.

acover 8y ago

What Chinese electric bike is worth buying? Electric bike review seems to point to Western brands costing several thousand dollars. Any recommendations on where to start looking?

deleted 8y ago
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davidgould 8y ago
I don't have a brand recommendation, but if you are handy, it is possible to convert an existing bike by adding a motor and batteries. For a bike like experience (as opposed to a light electric motorcycle experience) the components can be had for between $500 to $800 depending on how much battery you need. Some resources: - ebikes.ca - Informative website, sell high quality items with a lot of the problems worked out and with support. Prices are fair given the added value. Motor and trip simulators for calculating speeds and feeds etc. - bmsbattery.com - Chinese vendor of cheap but mostly functional components. Not much support and shipping will add 30% to prices, but very inexpensive if you can make it work. - lunacycle.com (US), e3emv.com(China) - Sell high quality battery packs - endless-sphere.com - massive discussion board full of good information leavened with the usual opinionated know nothings, but mostly civil. Assuming you need to go less than 25 miles and don't need to climb long steep hills and intend to pedal lightly I'd say you are looking for a small front geared hub motor rated for 250-350 watts and a small controller rated for 20A or less along with a 48v battery between 350-600 watt hours capacity. Target speed should be around 18 to 20 mph. Start with a nice used practical commuter bike, older mountain and road bikes and hybrids will all work. Get something that started out as a decent bike, not big-box store "bike shaped object". I've built a few now and am pretty happy with the process and results.
- acover 8y ago
  Thanks for the reply. I'm considering the BBS02 but I really like the torque sensors. I was hoping that there was some mass produced Chinese model T but couldn't find it.

sandover 8y ago

I don't think it's wild Silicon Valley chatter to say that public transportation along fixed routes WILL decline as a result of new technology, and this is a great thing. Fixed-route 19th-20th century public transportation networks are inefficient because most of the vehicles are pretty empty most of the time. This makes these systems expensive on a passenger-per-seat-mile basis. Not to mention the colossal waste of people's time spent trying to accommodate their journeys to those fixed routes (and schedules). Example: LA's Metro system is subsidized to the tune of about 50 cents per passenger seat/mile, or was as of 2009 (http://www.newgeography.com/content/002361-los-angeles-metro-bus-system-compares-favorably-with-its-peer-group http://www.newgeography.com/content/002361-los-angeles-metro...) In 10-15 years, transport companies like Lyft/Uber/Didi will be able to offer municipalities a much better deal than that. An electric car or van without a driver in it, with an operating lifetime of a million miles, will cost on the order of 20-40 cents a mile to run. Get 3-8 paying customers into the vehicle, and there is absolutely no need for a 50 cent per passenger seat mile subsidy.

s73v3r_ 8y ago
How does that affect those who have to take public transit due to finances?
- ghaff 8y ago
  Personally, I expect there will always be a need for high throughput fixed line transit in some areas. But, to answer your question, if some portion of the population requires transportation subsidies to participate in society then the best policy answer would seem to be to provide them with subsidies directly.
- albertgoeswoof 8y ago
  They’ll save money because they can now afford cheap self driving transport. Also if you’re subsidising mass transit only for the poor, why not just give them subsidy directly?
lev99 8y ago
> I don't think it's wild Silicon Valley chatter to say that public transportation along fixed routes WILL decline as a result of new technology, and this is a great thing. I do. People are leaving rural and suburbs for cities. Cities are becoming more dense. Fixed line transportation offers significantly more passengers/area/hour than roads. Tokyo supplies 40M daily train rides. Nothing Lyft/Uber/Didi is doing suggests anything close to that amount of density. Hyperloops are going to push maximum passenger density of fixed route paths even higher.

hackerpacker 8y ago

FWIW, as an avid hypermiler (who also owns an EV and pays for wind power), and works from home, the mpg per person of public transport isn't that great, I have no problem exceeding it, even without passengers (though I usually have passengers when I go somewhere). https://www.afdc.energy.gov/data/10311 https://www.afdc.energy.gov/data/10311 Certainly there are plenty of motorcycles that beat it without much effort/technique as well. So, what am I supposed to be taxed for again? The environment inside a moving box full of strangers, and the scheduling headaches, doesn't excite me much as an alternative. I wonder how much of the "decline" is because of people who work from home. I don't think uber is entirely the cause, more like uber displaced taxi drivers.

crooked-v 8y ago
> So, what am I supposed to be taxed for again? The societal benefits of poor people being able to get to work every day.
ghaff 8y ago
The article does mention home work. It's probably a combination of factors as the piece suggests. There are certainly enough anecdotal stories of people switching to UberPool from transit because the price works out to be about the same. And biking infrastructure has tended to get better however incrementally. And you have bike share services too.
st26 8y ago
It isn't about mpg, it's about use of space & everything that falls out of that. Less money building roads, parking lots, etc. Sidebar, I wonder how an EV car stacks up to an EV bus.
JanisL 8y ago
> the mpg per person of public transport isn't that great The point is that it gives an opportunity to reduce the "m" in the mpg.

AtlasBarfed 8y ago

Self driving vehicles will solve all of this. You don't need centralized routes, it can be door-to-door, it can be tiered for comfort, it can be high density transport, it can be on demand, it can be safe and secure, it can be automated, it can be taxed to incentivize density or usage patterns or demand as needed.

f_allwein 8y ago
Serious question: how would it be door to door and high density at the same time? So far, all self driving car proposals I saw looked just like cars, or vans at best. Compare this to a fully loaded double-decker bus in e.g. London. So much more efficient use of road space.
- AtlasBarfed 8y ago
  Let's look at a traditional bus route in an urban area: Scheduled set of stops between basically two places. Each of those stops rely on people walking a couple blocks or more to a stop for the route. Basically, you deconstruct and make on-demand the route. As people register for a trip, you combine a set of origination and destination points into closely grouped numbers, pick up a set of people in close proximity, and drop off them off. At high density times, there will be opportunities for substantial "rideshare" efficiencies. At less high density times, you save overhead of the busses with a couple riders. If you've ever taken the cheaper alternative airport -> city hotel van that goes to all the hotels in a downtown from an airport, that is basically the idea. It isn't as convenient as 1:1 taxi transport, but it's a lot better than the vagaries of train/bus hopping. It seems strange that with all the graph and NP-complete interview-ready people on this site that this isn't completely obvious. Self-driving vehicles will obviate all but the highest density mass transport. And then if you get self-flying drones going...

phobosdeimos 8y ago

The rich country I live in is investing billions in public transport. Its also investing heavily in cycling. Trying to meet the Paris climate accord and making sure people don't die from poor air quality makes this a legal requirement. Ofcourse the US has Trump so there is no such pressure to get people out of their SUVs.

borgmeister 8y ago

The real problem that no one wants to admit is overpopulation. If every couple had only 1 child, the problem would gradually go away as the population shrank.

j7ake 8y ago
Hong Kong has one of the highest population densities in the world and their transportation is excellent. Your argument isn’t supported by data.
albertgoeswoof 8y ago
Yes the problem would go away. Along with the economy and all standards of living.

deleted 8y ago

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gaspoweredcat 8y ago

in this town there would be simple solutions, first is that here if you need to get anywhere generally you have to take not one but two buses, this makes it petty expensive, but thats not the biggest flaw. oh no, the main problem is one of time, none of these buses match up so despite being a mere 3-4 miles an average commute via public transport is well over an hour, not only that but the timetable is not even close to accurate, youll often wait for a bus marked on the digital info boards as coming any min only to find that bus actually never existed and you have another 30 min wait basically if you want to get to work on time be prepared to leave at least 2 hours early. you may be thinking "hey its only 3-4 miles, just walk you lazy bastard!" but sadly again this town does not lend itself well to things such as walking or cycling because there is no such thing as flat roads here, youre either going up a steep hill or down one a reasonably priced tram system or even a properly organised and reasonably priced bus service could fix these issues easily but sadly that will never happen

fma 8y ago

We can start by stopping the political influence of those who benefit from declining public transportation. How the Koch Brothers Are Killing Public Transit Projects Around the Country https://nyti.ms/2lmrvVP https://nyti.ms/2lmrvVP

Tiktaalik 8y ago

Vancouver has never legalized Uber/Lyft. Vancouver has the highest gas prices in NA. Vancouver's transit operator Translink is enjoying a big influx of funding from the government and is increasing service hours. Unsurprisingly Vancouver transit ridership is experiencing record growth. > Average weekday boardings on buses were up 9.5 per cent. Expo/Millennium Line average weekday boardings were up 9.2 per cent, while Canada Line’s boardings grew 8.1 per cent. On SeaBus, average weekday boardings increased by 13.1 per cent, thanks in part to increased sailings. Even West Coast Express ridership is on the rise, up 6.7 per cent. http://vancouversun.com/news/local-news/transit-ridership-hits-a-high-in-metro-vancouver http://vancouversun.com/news/local-news/transit-ridership-hi...

hitekker 8y ago

Meanwhile in Singapore: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_Rapid_Transit_(Singapore)#/media/File%3AEvolution_of_the_MRT.gif https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_Rapid_Transit_(Singapor... Best city public transport ever and getting better every day. For the most part.

paulddraper 8y ago

> rich counties I am unaware of this trend across multiple rich countries of less public transit. Anyone have actual numbers instead of hersay? I could believe that people travel longer distances than they used to, in ways that transit never served. But less public transit itself? Is love to learn more.

eqdw 8y ago

How to stop the decline of public transport in rich countries: 1) Allow transit systems to provide a luxury tier of service with no upper limit on price 2) Mandate that 100% of the money that comes from (1) has to be pumped back into expanding transit infrastructure