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Vancouver added a train service from downtown to the Airport and Richmond that was ready for the 2010 Winter Olympics. It was almost instantly running close to

Vancouver added a train service from downtown to the Airport and Richmond that was ready for the 2010 Winter Olympics. It was almost instantly running close to capacity (and still is). Along with a reasonably good choice of where the line would run, and where the stops would be, the city embarked on a rezoning project that would allow the space near the line to become medium (or in one case) high density. I am not saying it is a perfect system, but all it took to change peoples commuting behaviour was the availability of a good alternative to cars. There is more than just initial design, however: there are many design elements that add to its drawing power. These include accessibility, good "way finding" signs, frequency of trains (every 3 minutes in busy times), safety on platforms, and (for me anyway), signs that accurately show arrival times of the next three trains. Of course, there is still the problem of making the system useful for people who are not close enough to walk to a stop, the answer being good feeder bus service and car parks. In this respect, Vancouver has been less successful. For example, only a few bus stops have electronic signs showing the arrival times of the next bus, and bus frequency on all but the major routes is too low. My point is that good overall design is the almost certainly the most effective way to change people's commuting behaviour.

baybal2 7y ago
That's because Vancouver is a relatively small, and dense city, and has a lot of people with countries where people think of good public transport as something taken. It's important to make public transport good enough for people to use it. When public transport is an inferior option to owning a car, people would not use it. I think what urban planners in the West miss is that public transport scales non-linearly. The bigger the city, the more you gain from owning a car. For a public transport to be viable in a megacity, the network needs to be like much, much, better than in a smaller city. When planners miss that, you get both terrible car traffic, and terrible public transport
- ido 7y ago
  I disagree after having lived in 4 cities with metropolitan populations of 500k to 4.5m: In the smallest town driving was ok cause there wasn't as much traffic. In the largest driving anywhere central would usually mean getting stuck in traffic and parking was expensive and hard to find.
  - baybal2 7y ago
    Even if you get stuck in traffic, you still can get to more places quicker than on foot. Yes?
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
    - ido 7y ago
      Of course the alternative is not on foot- it's mostly mass transit, sometimes mixed with cycling.
    - bobthepanda 7y ago
      Depends on how long it takes to find parking, especially if you're not willing to stump the higher cost for a garage space. And wouldn't the alternative be transit? No one is walking all the way across Vancouver.
- beatgammit 7y ago
  I live near Salt Lake City and the train infrastructure that exists is well used and pretty well thought out, and we have a pretty big car culture here. Salt Lake City isn't a very big city in terms of population, and it spans a pretty big, flat area, yet the transit system is popular. My extended family lives near Seattle, which has more dense population and higher motivation to use public transport (lots of environmentally conscious people), yet I think most would agree that the train system is inferior to Utah's. I think this is because: - commuter rail doesn't link up very well with the light rail line (airport) - commuter rail only runs morning and afternoon The Trax (light rail) and Frontrunner (commuter) lines, however, are very well connected and both run all day. My main frustration is that the Frontrunner line doesn't run on Sundays, but it has a far more flexible schedule than the Seattle line. If you live anywhere along the Frontrunner/Trax system, you can rely on it to get you to the airport, work, or shopping, provided you don't need to travel late at night. That being said, I think Seattle's total transit system is better than SLC's, but I think that's because there's less of a stigma against riding the bus in Seattle as well as a higher budget (Utahns are very fiscally conservative). I think SLC has done a fantastic job of building a transit system that works for tourists and locals alike. Seattle built two separate systems that works okay for each, but doesn't work together very well. Drivers like flexibility, but the Seattle train system isn't flexible. So, in order to convince people to commute differently, that system needs to be useful for far more than just commuting. I don't want to rely on a commuter rail line of I'll occasionally need to stay late, which would cause me to miss the last train. I also don't want to rely on a system that's inconvenient to work into other plans, like going to the airport at lunch time or doing some shopping on the way home.
  - boring_twenties 7y ago
    > that system needs to be useful for far more than just commuting Isn't this the biggest problem with Trax? I'd love to take it downtown at night, but it stops running well before 1am.
  - bobthepanda 7y ago
    The main issue with the Seattle commuter rail, Sounder, is that the host railroad is not keen on giving more slots to run trains, so the schedule isn't very useful. The issue with the station is that the Union Station office complex and historical building are in the way of proper wayfinding, so that the path between the commuter rail and the light rail looks more like an out-of-the-way alley than an actual path you're supposed to take.
- scarejunba 7y ago
  Hmm, folks in my family commute from Burquitlam to the city all the time. I don't think you're right that it's small. The Millennium line runs to Lafarge Lake.
cogman10 7y ago
Boise has the problem of poor routes that pretty much serve nobody. The daily commute for a large portion of the population is from west to east. Driving, that commute takes ~15 minutes to 30 minutes depending on traffic. However, taking the bus takes anywhere from 1:30 to 2 hours! Why? Because every route ends up stopping at a mall that nobody really wants to go to for an extended period of time. https://goo.gl/maps/S4pdMvHzmQgZqJvk9 https://goo.gl/maps/S4pdMvHzmQgZqJvk9 <- See here It's simply unreasonable to want to commute by public transit for a huge portion of the population.
- bobthepanda 7y ago
  That's because Boise is not investing enough in transit. If you have bus routes every 10-15 minutes, you can operate them in straight routes forming a grid without major timed transfer centers, because a bus will more or less show up in the next 5-8 minutes in the average case and that's not the worst thing in the world. At lower frequencies, like half-hourly or hourly, agencies run something called a "pulse", where every half hour or hour all the buses meet in one location so that people can make their transfers, and it looks like that mall is a pulse location.
zdragnar 7y ago
The real challenge, as my nearby metro consistently forgets, is to factor in whether the train occupants are former car drivers or bus riders. Unfortunately for us, its mostly the latter.
- bobthepanda 7y ago
  This is real, but not the worst thing. Seattle is building out light rail to replace existing commuter buses because - there are not enough buses or drivers to fill demand - training more drivers is hard in a tight labor market - buying more buses would require an additional storage depot, and for various reasons people don't like being neighbors to a bus parking lot - buses are lower capacity per driver - buses suffer from traffic congestion as well even in dedicated lanes or streets, and the congestion requires allocating more hours to provide an equivalent amount of service So Seattle is railstituting to more efficiently provide transport service in the core, and redeploying saved resources to feeders of the rail in less congested suburbs.
munificent 7y ago
> all it took to change peoples commuting behaviour was the availability of a good alternative to cars. No, I think that's a fair conclusion to draw. The only data point you have is that the train is being used. But that can be explained by some combination of: 1. Users who changed jobs and taking the train as their new commute. In other words, they never changed their existing commute to the train. 2. Users who had a commute even worse than the train, like walking or taking bus service. The article is about getting people to change their commute for environmental reasons, which really means getting people to accept a less convenient commute because it's better for the world. As the article shows, it is really really hard to get people to do that. It's not enough to just give them an alternative and wait for the magic happen. Adding train service is good, of course, in large part because it offers a better commute for many people. But if you've already got free parking and are used to driving a single-occupancy vehicle every day, simply having a train become available is not very compelling.
Balgair 7y ago
I took the bus in LA for a few years. Mostly as parking was insanely expensive. So costs do affect behavior. Also, it was a wash in terms of time. But taking the bus was hell. I'm a larger than average human and was fairly fit at the time, but I still would not board a lot of those busses. There were a lot of not-so-savory people on LA busses. Also, it was never on time in the evenings and I had to do all my weekly out-of-house chores on the weekends, as busses would not cut it. But if I were an average-sized woman, there is no way in hell I would have taken those busses, they were just plain unsafe.
- AtlasBarfed 7y ago
  This is par for the course on almost all bussing systems I've seen in America. They are designed with the assumption that the people using them have no choice, are poor, and have ample free time to take inefficient routes. Busses are just too cumbersome. Once self driving actually is feasible through software and/or convergent infrastructure, bussing should be almost on demand with basically the equivalent of minivans self-driving groups of people between locations. Uber and Lyft are (currently) just dead end variants of this ideal.
  - esotericn 7y ago
    I mean, this is true of most public transport even in places like London. Why is sitting on a bus not as comfortable as being a passenger in a mid range car? It totally could be, but that would cost more than the bare minimum. So we have broken AC and uncomfortable seats. So it goes. It's not awful. It's actually quite good. But I really wish sometimes that public transport could be _nice_ rather than tolerable.
    - laurencerowe 7y ago
      Because that would take up more space letting fewer people fit on the bus. Most are designed to have half the people standing at peak times. Long distance train seats used to be really comfortable, but newer designs opt instead to fit more seats in each carriage. I've found buses in London to be better optimized for people trying to get somewhere than in San Francisco. There are far more bus lanes, no waiting for people paying a cash fare, and wheelchair transport tends to use black cabs. People often take buses by choice as the alternative can mean being packed in like sardines on the Tube at rush hour. (Driving isn't really practical anywhere in central London.)
m463 7y ago
> every 3 minutes in busy times That is extremely important and awesome.

baybal2 7y ago

That's because Vancouver is a relatively small, and dense city, and has a lot of people with countries where people think of good public transport as something taken. It's important to make public transport good enough for people to use it. When public transport is an inferior option to owning a car, people would not use it. I think what urban planners in the West miss is that public transport scales non-linearly. The bigger the city, the more you gain from owning a car. For a public transport to be viable in a megacity, the network needs to be like much, much, better than in a smaller city. When planners miss that, you get both terrible car traffic, and terrible public transport

ido 7y ago
I disagree after having lived in 4 cities with metropolitan populations of 500k to 4.5m: In the smallest town driving was ok cause there wasn't as much traffic. In the largest driving anywhere central would usually mean getting stuck in traffic and parking was expensive and hard to find.
- baybal2 7y ago
  Even if you get stuck in traffic, you still can get to more places quicker than on foot. Yes?
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - ido 7y ago
    Of course the alternative is not on foot- it's mostly mass transit, sometimes mixed with cycling.
  - bobthepanda 7y ago
    Depends on how long it takes to find parking, especially if you're not willing to stump the higher cost for a garage space. And wouldn't the alternative be transit? No one is walking all the way across Vancouver.
beatgammit 7y ago
I live near Salt Lake City and the train infrastructure that exists is well used and pretty well thought out, and we have a pretty big car culture here. Salt Lake City isn't a very big city in terms of population, and it spans a pretty big, flat area, yet the transit system is popular. My extended family lives near Seattle, which has more dense population and higher motivation to use public transport (lots of environmentally conscious people), yet I think most would agree that the train system is inferior to Utah's. I think this is because: - commuter rail doesn't link up very well with the light rail line (airport) - commuter rail only runs morning and afternoon The Trax (light rail) and Frontrunner (commuter) lines, however, are very well connected and both run all day. My main frustration is that the Frontrunner line doesn't run on Sundays, but it has a far more flexible schedule than the Seattle line. If you live anywhere along the Frontrunner/Trax system, you can rely on it to get you to the airport, work, or shopping, provided you don't need to travel late at night. That being said, I think Seattle's total transit system is better than SLC's, but I think that's because there's less of a stigma against riding the bus in Seattle as well as a higher budget (Utahns are very fiscally conservative). I think SLC has done a fantastic job of building a transit system that works for tourists and locals alike. Seattle built two separate systems that works okay for each, but doesn't work together very well. Drivers like flexibility, but the Seattle train system isn't flexible. So, in order to convince people to commute differently, that system needs to be useful for far more than just commuting. I don't want to rely on a commuter rail line of I'll occasionally need to stay late, which would cause me to miss the last train. I also don't want to rely on a system that's inconvenient to work into other plans, like going to the airport at lunch time or doing some shopping on the way home.
- boring_twenties 7y ago
  > that system needs to be useful for far more than just commuting Isn't this the biggest problem with Trax? I'd love to take it downtown at night, but it stops running well before 1am.
- bobthepanda 7y ago
  The main issue with the Seattle commuter rail, Sounder, is that the host railroad is not keen on giving more slots to run trains, so the schedule isn't very useful. The issue with the station is that the Union Station office complex and historical building are in the way of proper wayfinding, so that the path between the commuter rail and the light rail looks more like an out-of-the-way alley than an actual path you're supposed to take.
scarejunba 7y ago
Hmm, folks in my family commute from Burquitlam to the city all the time. I don't think you're right that it's small. The Millennium line runs to Lafarge Lake.

cogman10 7y ago

Boise has the problem of poor routes that pretty much serve nobody. The daily commute for a large portion of the population is from west to east. Driving, that commute takes ~15 minutes to 30 minutes depending on traffic. However, taking the bus takes anywhere from 1:30 to 2 hours! Why? Because every route ends up stopping at a mall that nobody really wants to go to for an extended period of time. https://goo.gl/maps/S4pdMvHzmQgZqJvk9 https://goo.gl/maps/S4pdMvHzmQgZqJvk9 <- See here It's simply unreasonable to want to commute by public transit for a huge portion of the population.

bobthepanda 7y ago
That's because Boise is not investing enough in transit. If you have bus routes every 10-15 minutes, you can operate them in straight routes forming a grid without major timed transfer centers, because a bus will more or less show up in the next 5-8 minutes in the average case and that's not the worst thing in the world. At lower frequencies, like half-hourly or hourly, agencies run something called a "pulse", where every half hour or hour all the buses meet in one location so that people can make their transfers, and it looks like that mall is a pulse location.

zdragnar 7y ago

The real challenge, as my nearby metro consistently forgets, is to factor in whether the train occupants are former car drivers or bus riders. Unfortunately for us, its mostly the latter.

bobthepanda 7y ago
This is real, but not the worst thing. Seattle is building out light rail to replace existing commuter buses because - there are not enough buses or drivers to fill demand - training more drivers is hard in a tight labor market - buying more buses would require an additional storage depot, and for various reasons people don't like being neighbors to a bus parking lot - buses are lower capacity per driver - buses suffer from traffic congestion as well even in dedicated lanes or streets, and the congestion requires allocating more hours to provide an equivalent amount of service So Seattle is railstituting to more efficiently provide transport service in the core, and redeploying saved resources to feeders of the rail in less congested suburbs.

munificent 7y ago

> all it took to change peoples commuting behaviour was the availability of a good alternative to cars. No, I think that's a fair conclusion to draw. The only data point you have is that the train is being used. But that can be explained by some combination of: 1. Users who changed jobs and taking the train as their new commute. In other words, they never changed their existing commute to the train. 2. Users who had a commute even worse than the train, like walking or taking bus service. The article is about getting people to change their commute for environmental reasons, which really means getting people to accept a less convenient commute because it's better for the world. As the article shows, it is really really hard to get people to do that. It's not enough to just give them an alternative and wait for the magic happen. Adding train service is good, of course, in large part because it offers a better commute for many people. But if you've already got free parking and are used to driving a single-occupancy vehicle every day, simply having a train become available is not very compelling.

Balgair 7y ago

I took the bus in LA for a few years. Mostly as parking was insanely expensive. So costs do affect behavior. Also, it was a wash in terms of time. But taking the bus was hell. I'm a larger than average human and was fairly fit at the time, but I still would not board a lot of those busses. There were a lot of not-so-savory people on LA busses. Also, it was never on time in the evenings and I had to do all my weekly out-of-house chores on the weekends, as busses would not cut it. But if I were an average-sized woman, there is no way in hell I would have taken those busses, they were just plain unsafe.

AtlasBarfed 7y ago
This is par for the course on almost all bussing systems I've seen in America. They are designed with the assumption that the people using them have no choice, are poor, and have ample free time to take inefficient routes. Busses are just too cumbersome. Once self driving actually is feasible through software and/or convergent infrastructure, bussing should be almost on demand with basically the equivalent of minivans self-driving groups of people between locations. Uber and Lyft are (currently) just dead end variants of this ideal.
- esotericn 7y ago
  I mean, this is true of most public transport even in places like London. Why is sitting on a bus not as comfortable as being a passenger in a mid range car? It totally could be, but that would cost more than the bare minimum. So we have broken AC and uncomfortable seats. So it goes. It's not awful. It's actually quite good. But I really wish sometimes that public transport could be _nice_ rather than tolerable.
  - laurencerowe 7y ago
    Because that would take up more space letting fewer people fit on the bus. Most are designed to have half the people standing at peak times. Long distance train seats used to be really comfortable, but newer designs opt instead to fit more seats in each carriage. I've found buses in London to be better optimized for people trying to get somewhere than in San Francisco. There are far more bus lanes, no waiting for people paying a cash fare, and wheelchair transport tends to use black cabs. People often take buses by choice as the alternative can mean being packed in like sardines on the Tube at rush hour. (Driving isn't really practical anywhere in central London.)

m463 7y ago

> every 3 minutes in busy times That is extremely important and awesome.