What is rational public transit?
In my piece asking, “What if we can’t fix 380?” I talked about induced demand, where if you build or expand roads you just encourage more people to drive. Induced demands works for other modes of transportation as well, notably bike lanes. More bike lanes and bike facilities leads to more bikers. Better pedestrian facilities means more pedestrians. Induced demand doesn’t work for public transit though, and it’s worth exploring why.
Think of the Cedar Rapids bus system. Bruce Nesmith called it irrational on his blog. I don’t think that’s exactly fair, it works how it’s supposed to. It has wide coverage, it can take you almost anywhere in the city, but it has low frequency, meaning busses don’t show up that often. Frequency is how transit nerds refer to how often busses or other public transit shows up at a stop. Coverage is how much of a city, or town, or metropolitan area has access to public transit. Here’s how Cedar Rapids bus system works. The routes all funnel through the Ground Transportation Center downtown, from there they spread out all over town (wide coverage). The busses show up once an hour (low frequency). It’s designed to get a small number of people anywhere where they need to go slowly, rather than a large number of people a few places quickly. Transportation planner Jarrett Walker has a great post where he breaks down why transit planners design public transit this way.
Generally how we do public transit is by focusing on coverage. We assume that everyone who can drive will, and the only people who are taking public transit are doing so because they don’t have any other choice. So we build a system that works at making sure people who have to use the bus can get everywhere, instead of building a system that services less of the city but gets a lot of people to a few destinations quickly. This is really great for people who have to use the bus, but not so great at getting a lot of people to ride the bus. When you only have a limited pot of money this is a rational concession to make.
So we have low bus ridership because we designed a system that is supposed to have low bus ridership. We didn’t build a system designed to increase demand and gain a whole bunch of public transit users. What does a system that does support high transit ridership look like?
Let’s take a look at the bus line in Cedar Rapids with the highest ridership, the 5. The 5 travels from the GTC downtown up 1st Ave to Lindale Mall, and then splits to service Marion (routes 5S and 5N) and Hiawatha and the Boyson neighborhood (5B). I’m only talking about the 5 between downtown and Lindale Mall. The 5 has the highest ridership of any of the lines, and the highest frequency, hitting each stop along 1st Avenue every half an hour, instead of every hour. The busses also fill up. This makes sense, because beyond frequency, the 5 has a lot of the characteristics that encourage high ridership.
The five passes through neighborhoods that have the density that high frequency transit requires, including Wellington Heights, Moundview, and Kenwood Park. It passes a bunch of stuff — a mall, downtown, hospitals, two grocery stores, shopping, and more — that people want or need to go to. And, just as important, it travels a simple, logical route. A lot of people can get to a lot of places with the 5, without thinking too hard about when it comes or what route it takes. Those factors are the keys to high transit ridership numbers. Let’s break them down.
- High frequency, when public transit comes often you don’t have to worry about how long you’ll be waiting. Waiting times are part of travel time on public transit and have to be included. It doesn’t really matter if you’ll only be on the bus itself for ten minutes if you have to spend twenty minutes waiting for it to show up, the trip still took half an hour.
- Diversity, which has a lot to do with density. A lot of people near transit means a lot of potential riders. A lot of places to go along a transit lines means a lot of reasons to use that transit line. If a transit line makes a lot of places accessible to a lot of people it gets used more.
- Linearity, a public transit has to make sense as a logical route. When you see a squiggly transit line you know that it’s going to take you out of your way compared to where you want to go. A direct line from where you are and where you want to get to means that a transit line is going to get you where you want pretty quickly.
These are the keys to high transit ridership, but they’re not the way Cedar Rapids designed it’s public transit system.
