The Transit Chicken-and-Egg Problem: Redux
The trips people make in your city depend on the transit available in your city, which depends on the trips people make in your city.
One of the most interesting things about transit is that many elements of it behave as dynamical systems, with things like ridership and travel time being unstable and self-reactive. High ridership can increase travel times, which can reduce ridership! Delayed buses pick up more passengers, leading eventually to bunching.
In many ways, this ever changing aspect of public transit makes talking about transit in a relative way make more sense than in a static one, because so many elements of any transit system are in flux at any given moment.
A month ago (which feels like a year ago) I wrote an article about Transit’s “Chicken-and-Egg” problem with regard to land use. The idea is that people often talk about an area not having land use that would support a certain transit project as a reason not to build a transit project, but of course to some extent this is backwards because transit is a huge driver of land use change! A better thing to question would be whether a given city has the capacity and demand for land use change that would make any given transit project a good idea, but I digress.
The reality of public transport systems is that they will always be changing — it’s inherent to their nature. Trying to coax that change in a certain direction to maximize benefit to the public is what a lot of transit projects and interventions aim to do.
Despite this, I still get an incredible number of comments, and come across a large number of posts from otherwise well-informed people saying something like: “the commuter train is designed for commuting, I would never use it to go for a weekend trip!” — which, put simply, means: “The thing you are suggesting is different from the thing today!”
These kinds of remarks can basically be generalized to “nobody would use X for Y”, where X is some transit service or project and Y is some thing that said service is not currently designed to be conducive to. The issue with this is that it ignores the point. Transit planners get to influence what transit can do, and so the question should generally not be “Does the current network/line/ service support a particular trip?”, and instead we should be asking “Are there modifications we could make to the current network/line/service that would make certain trips attractive? What would it cost? Is it technically feasible? How would it change the future development of the network?”.
The simple way of putting this is — there is little point discussing the future based solely on things that might change from the present.
I think that these comments, which are hardly limited to internet commenters and are common in the transit and urban planning field, betray both a lack of imagination and a poor grasp on the change that happens in cities, and the infrastructural networks that support them. What’s worse is that since the planning decisions made influence actual transit outcomes, if planners believe transit won’t succeed — which obvious happens a lot in North American contexts but also in others — then they might put a half-hearted effort into transit service and infrastructure, and then the poor results this delivers will confirm their initial beliefs.
For me, growing up in a city that was one of the fastest growing in the English-speaking world gave me a sense that things could change, and that includes people’s political views and behaviours, but I think the average person believes things are much more inevitable than they are.
Humans are an adaptable bunch (I realize this makes me sound like an android), and when you make things easy for us, we might do things differently! Just as the making driving easier induces more driving, making specific trips faster, or bringing destinations closer together, or growing capacity — helps sculpt not only the transit system, but people’s use of it.
That this is still a problem and that people still aren’t looking at transit networks and demand as the dynamic systems they are is something I was reminded of when I got a comment on yesterday’s video to the effect of:
Of course London gets all the transit money, it’s where everything is happening in the UK and the country is extremely centralized around it!
What this obviously misses is that the centralization around London in the UK (and I hope this highlights how this Chicken-and-Egg problem is far broader than just urban transit) was and is influenced directly by the infrastructure investments made in it. When no other cities are allowed that level of attention and funding, no other city can rise to fill anything but a backseat role.
I’m not sure how to end this article besides to suggest that everyone question their beliefs about whether the investments governments make and the infrastructure we build can change demand for those exact same interventions in the future. Our world is dynamic, and our view of what is possible should be too.
We have a great example of that in the Boston area. Assembly Square in Somerville used to be a Ford assembly factory. The orange line goes right through it, but didn't stop there. After the Ford plant closed, it redeveloped as strip malls surrounded by huge parking lots.
In 2014, the MBTA opened an orange line station in Assembly Square. Since then (and party in anticipation of it), the area has been sprouting housing, offices, and ground floor street facing retail. In this case, building the transit was cheap since it was already there. But the existence of the orange line stop induced massive changes.
Downsview Station in Toronto (referred to as a white elephant) is another great example. So much is density is currently planned around the station. If the they plan the network effectively it can become a major hub. They need to extend Sheppard line West to Downsview view and Finch East. Then you will get 4 lines connected at one major hub. The potential is there.