The Transit Chicken-and-Egg Problem
The transit your city needs depends on the built form and scale of your city, which depends on the transit your city has.
When talking about a city’s higher-order transit prospects, I’ve often heard people say that their city simply isn’t big enough or doesn’t have the density for a particular form of transit.
For example, I was recently musing online about the idea of a Metro System for Melbourne — something that I think would go a long way towards filling the obvious gap that exists in that city between the tram system and the suburban trains. While the suburban trains are decently fast, they don’t run all that frequently and are extremely radial; and while the trams do serve some crosstown journeys, they are slow (and also often pretty infrequent).
I’ve also covered the idea of adding rapid transit systems to cities that have basically no higher order transit such as Las Vegas, and no — a back entrance monorail and cars in a tunnel do not count.
However, in both cases I got a lot of pushback, because in both cases some people felt that the built form did not closely match the rapid transit routes. For example, in Melbourne, trams and suburban trains are mostly surrounded by low-density uses that do not traditionally scream subway.
Now, it certainly can be the case that a city really does not justify a certain type of higher order transit: small towns do not need high capacity subways! But far too often, the problem seems to be a lack of imagination.
That’s because building higher-order transit — and even more so building rapid transit (transit which is not just permanent but also fast) — can be an excellent vector for urban change, as you can see in this famous picture of New York’s 7 train shortly after construction.
Of course, not every city is New York or even Melbourne, but you don’t need millions of people to support a tram — or as Rennes and a number of other modest European cities show, a metro system. You simply need some amount of growth or critical mass of people who can organize themselves and the built form around rapid transit.
And even a city’s size is not something that comes about in a vacuum. When I look at Kitchener-Waterloo and London in the Canadian province of Ontario (Kitchener-Waterloo is the smallest North American city with a modern electric tram system!), these are two cities that have made vastly different choices with regard to their implementation (or lack thereof) of higher-order transit. As a byproduct of this, I would expect to see K-W overtake London in size and importance in the coming years as it attracts more development and people from various backgrounds who appreciate urban amenities and transit. The impact of a virtuous cycle is also already obvious here: Grand River Transit, who runs ION and the K-W bus system, is seeing huge ridership growth, and K-W is seriously talking about a major ION extension while London isn’t even seriously considering a real BRT system. My expectation is that further investments in public transit will only accelerate the gap between these two cities’ economies and populations.
Ultimately, the classic quote that “you can’t judge the number of people who would use a bridge by the number of people that swim” rings true here. The land use patterns that support transit are often created as part of a virtuous cycle that starts with transit and infrastructure investment. Claiming that a place doesn’t support something that it hasn’t been shaped by misses the point of rapid transit in structuring our cities.