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People frequently talk about how transit depends on dense land use, low car ownership and more. But the most important factor for creating a successful transit system is service! In fact, a good transit service can create demand where none existed before.
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Ever wondered why your city’s transit just doesn’t seem quite up to snuff? RMTransit is here to answer that, and help you open your eyes to all of the different public transportation systems around the world!
Reece (the RM in RMTransit) is an urbanist and public transport critic residing in Toronto, Canada, with the goal of helping the world become more connected through metros, trams, buses, high-speed trains, and all other transport modes.
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Today I was on a battery-electric New Flyer bus on the Ulster County Area Transit, as special event shuttle in mostly rural Ulster County, N.Y. and many on board were raving about how quiet and nice this bus was. Many of the riders had never ridden transit in this car-dominated area. But I overheard serveral conversations aboard about people saying they'd strongly consider the bus if only ran more frequently, like every 10-15 minutes, than the current at best one-hour headways on most runs with lunchtime breaks. Sadly I live where there isn't even a fixed route line within five miles of me. Like you've preached many times service is key.
A bus that comes once or twice an hour is almost worse than no bus at all.
Day #41 of asking RMTransit to play City Bus Manager on PC. I want to see how he would manage a Public Transport Company.
I'm in a city of 85k that had tram lines before the auto, when the population was 2/3 the size. Everyone's great-grandparents took the tram or walked. The rich people had horse carriages then switched to the auto, then eventually everyone switched. Now walking is very dangerous but there's a lot of poor people that have no choice. My great-grandparents lived through the Great Depression and were quite poor, yet they could get around on foot in the same city where I now can't.
It's like people believe the car means prosperity, and therefore it's required. I got dropped from the American Dream and wouldn't own a car even if I could afford one. If being poor is taboo, then why are we all getting squeezed? My great-grandparents walked. I'm not better than them. Plus I enjoy walking, when the cars aren't around.
3:34 why is there a bird on the train lmao
Sometimes they just can't hire enough bus drivers or unsure about demand. Or perhaps they just want to do the minimal by fulfilling the basic service-levels mandated in contracts with local governments, though this is more likely to be the preference of incumbents/monopolies.
Speaking of high frequency transit, are you considering talking/writing about yesterday's Via HFR announcement, Reece? Or is there not enough there to discuss 😅
This was a fascinating Video and delightful to watch!
At one point in your video you showed a rear cab view of Brentwood. Thats one area that really highlights what TOD does. Brentwood is a minor town center of Burnaby and the number of 40+ story towers around there is absolutely ridiculous. And its growing.
One fun thing to check out is Google Street View and the back in time feature around transit stations. Marine Drive station, No3 Road, Brentwood, Surrey Central, Metrotown are all areas that from 2010 to today go from low or medium density outside the city center to wall-to-wall skyscrapers.
Excellent video – particularly your closing remarks! In the UK, bus companies in particular seem to go straight for 'reduce the service', and lots of your suggestions about 'improve the quality' just go on the 'too much bother' heap – and these are mostly the supposedly 'customer-friendly', 'innovative', and 'enterprising' private companies… Terence Conran (a retail guru, back in the 1960s and 70s) pointed out that, for most organisations, 90% of sales are of only 10% of the range on offer; – but that, if you don't offer that range, people won't come to you to buy! Yet transport operations (in the UK at least) often cut back less-used services, on the grounds (as you quote) that 'they are not justified', forgetting that cutting them back will decrease the attractiveness of the whole transit network, and drive people back to car-travel.
A few years ago, the local government opened the light rail line and redid the public transport network. The "consultants" they used to plan the bus network don't live in the city and don't use public transport in the larger city they do live in.
The network changed from a system where it was possible to get between the extreme north part of the city to the extreme south part of the city with just 1 or 2 buses, to a system which required 3 or 4 buses to make the same trip.
During weekday morning peak, the local buses were 20 mins apart and 30 mins the rest of the day, and hourly on weekends.
There was not enough buses or drivers to operate the network, especially on weekends, which resulted in large amounts of cancelled services (which the riders were not told about). About a month into the new network, the weekend services were halved while they hired more drivers. After more then a year, they finally returned some weekend service, taking Saturday AM services back to hourly.
Then, in August 2021, the city went into a covid lockdown. Within a week, they had to cut service in order to cover drivers off sick and created a new "interim" timetable with cuts to weekday peak services.
That "interim" timetable lasted much longer then the lockdown did. It was only replaced at the start of this month.
The timetable was meant to go back to what it had been, but they changed it all again. With, of course, more cuts.
They claim the cuts are due to work on the next stage of the light rail and related road works in the CBD, but they have cut services which go nowhere near that area by 30%.
They have also been complaining about lack of ridership, while doing nothing about the excessive fare evasion which is causing their ridership numbers to show much lower then they really are.
I lived for a couple of years in the Swiss countryside, and the approach to public transport in rural areas compared to Germany and the UK couldn't be bigger. Whilst, e.g. in Germany, many small railway lines have been closed down since the 60s and 70s, due to "low demand" and replaced by cheaper bus routes, this has hardly happened here. But even more striking is the difference, when it comes to bus frequencies: In Germany most villages are served by a bus about 3 or 4 times a day, providing the bare minimum of transport for those people who really don't have the choice of driving, here buses usually run from the early morning to the late evening (like 11pm) every 60 or even 30 minutes. In some areas, villages are even served by night services (usually mini buses or contracted taxis) on the weekend.
Of course, at certain hours, there are hardly any people travelling, but at the peak hours it makes a huge difference. You are far more likely to use public transport for going to work, shopping or meet friends if you know that you will have a transport, even if you're coming back early or running late. So, even if you own a car, people do often prefer to use public transport for regular trips. This also allows for having a drink or two after work with your colleagues, improving workplace relationships. Win-win.
I lived in a city, Calgary, that used express bus services to build usage in advance of planned light rail lines, and used small fifteen person buses to provide frequent service to sparser neighborhoods and in off peak times elsewhere. And I've lived near a city half as big that just jumped in with full size buses with a transit center at a poorly used mall, with low frequency, and never got demand up.
To translate it into carbrain-friendly terms: you know how sometimes you take different routes becsuse of traffic, construction, an errand you want to do on the way home, etc.? People do that with modes, too.
I live near a bus line that has been consistently overcrowded in the morning on school days for years since it connects directly to the nearest middle/high school. It’s not uncommon for students to have to take a much later bus or have to be driven by car because they just can’t fit in anymore at the stop. Not once in over ten years has the company that runs those buses increased capacity and I think it’s because most students have a ticket for the whole year anyways, so simply not serving them doesn’t lose the company any revenue from fares.
Can you do a breakdown of Toronto's mayoral candidates and their affects on transit
The government and dilettante anti-public infra crowds says one thing for private business, and another for public service.
When we talk about why A380 isn't a success, or why 747 is dying despite being updated, the reason is simple: frequency & schedule flexibility generates better route demand, load factor, and thus flexibility – it is proven to be better to "flood" a route with 10 x 787 flights than 4 x A380 flights, despite not exactly better for the environment and infrastructure capacity. The "low cost airline" model also works: you spam 5 x A320 / 737-800 a day flights into a new route, stimulating demand that wasn't there in first place.
The same approach should also work for transit service: nobody would hop into the bus' own schedule. Unless you are in non-English speaking west, business will abuse their allocated meeting time and worker's hours. You won't make it in time or "every 20 minutes service". "Market size argument" is also nonsensical, like yes, even a city of 10,000 can still be served with integrated public transit service when there is an airport serving a town of just 50,000.
It's not often that you see Reece sporting that beanie look 😂
Very small add-on that I think could be an easy fix for when transit frequency is not adequate…. In NYC, bus schedules are so unpredictable, especially at the beginning and end of a route when the bus hasn’t begun it’s journey. Scheduled departure times/frequency are so unpredictable on major routes in the outer boroughs. If busses were more predictably scheduled and this info was available in apps with more reliability (maybe this isn’t always possible without bus lanes) people would use the bus more. But maybe that would be bad if the busses don’t add more capacity and frequency.
Build it and they will come. Public transit is one of those things you need to build ahead of demand, which is why it's so hard. The only thing you should be reactive about is if a line turns out to be at max capacity, which is an excellent time to upgrade. Ridership will follow the specific qualities of the line and the area it lives in. Sometimes getting a line more popular means just more frequent service, sometimes it means connecting it better with other lines, and sometimes it's about getting a better overall ride quality.
Transit systems really needs to progressive & be high-quality like yrs ago.
Have you ever played Simutrans-Extended? It simulates nearly all of these things (and it's open source).
I get that cutting services is a death sentence for transit but expecting unprecedented levels of funding for a service that is currently only operating at 60 to 70 percent prepandemic is not entirely realistic either. Transit was already subsidized before the pandemic anyways.
I get that transit has economic benefits beyond farebox recovery but those don't actually fund it. Short of development charges.
Transit needs to find away to one find sustainable funding (not suggesting profitability) and the ridership needs to recover to at least 80 to 90 percent pre covid by the end of this year
Otherwise the funding model needs to be reviewed and the service levels
I'm wondering how you think the eventually (maybe decades away) arrival of self driving street vehicles will change the calculus? Depending on how they are implemented, they could make new capacity opportunities, but they also could easily send us into the same traps as car culture.
Private vehicle ownership would make less sense, freeing essentially all on and off street parking areas for other uses. There would still be a need for maintenance yards and storage for when demand is low. Different sized vehicles could dynamically serve different trips, depending on demand for start and end stops along a general route. There could be aggregation points, where you are made to transfer to larger vehicles to continue your journey.
So there could be this dream of a dynamically scaling network based on existing roads. What might that do to existing transit specific infrastructure? Would it reduce demand for building more density? How would it all be funded and capacity balanced?
Hey Reece, as you know, violence and crime seem to have increased on the TTC. I was wondering if you could make a video on transit safety, how it affects ridership and what are some of the best solutions around the world?
Talk about the Riyadh metro next please
What would you do if you were in charge of JR, say JR Hokkaido, and had to prevent the ridership death spiral from depopulation, etc.?
There is lots of tourism & local industry, and the lines have become extremely popular for train cruises almost every day you can see one leaving Hakodate to loop around Hokkaido, which soon won't be possible anymore as they are going to close most of the lines…
If you go in summer, fall, or winter there are lots of tourists everywhere even the abashiri-Kushiro line trains, pre-pandemic, had 10-20 tourists on them…
Previously you did a video on the Sapporo metro where you covered the elevated, yet still covered, part of the lines also
Can these covers be used over most train lines?
Like the Sapporo -> chitose -> Hakodate or Sapporo -> Asahikawa main lines, the busiest in Hokkaido.
Can you integrate solar panels into them?
I've seen proposals for solar panels over the train line but not as part of a shelter for the train line.
It strikes me that if they decided to build the Sapporo metro snow shelters along the main line using solar panels, which can be translucent and structural, as the infill panel for the frames they could, assist with line electrification, save on snow & leaf clearing, prevent animals from getting on the line, produce electricity (when not covered in snow), the cost savings & revenue generation would seem to pay for the shelters pretty quickly…
So why not?
As I said translucent & transparent solar panels exist, so depending on the panel type you use at eye level it wouldn't affect the view,
the payback period for this kind of light weight structure would be around 10-15 years out of a 25-30 year period where the panel retains over 80% of its performance, and that's before you subtract snow cleaning & other costs it would stop.
Thanks for a great video as always.
I am wondering if it is to get you to design an alternative transport system for Funen, Denmark. What we have right now does not always work well. Fynbus run the buses on the whole island and the light rail in Odense and the local trains are currently run by Ariva.
The more I watch your great videos, the more grateful I am to live in London. Crossrail was in the news a lot when it was delayed and over budget but now that it’s providing an incredible service to the city, it’s quickly becoming taken for granted. I suppose that’s life!
You also have to convince everyone it's safe. In Mexico, India, the Philippines and Japan some lines have implemented female only cars to address rampant harassment and concerns about assaults. People have to veiw it as safer than hitchhiking, otherwise none of the people who wouldn't feel safe hitchhiking will do it and most of the people who would feel safe hitchhiking will probably just hitchhike.