The usefulness of transit is still unpredictable.
Too often, a conservative approach to transit planning leaves us with less rather than more.
The story of public transit — and especially rapid transit — is often one of happy accidents. One of the most wonderful examples of this can be found in New York, where transit lines, sometimes built as much as 100 years ago, have in recent years become critical parts of ridership growth on the subway network. How could transportation planners have anticipated a century earlier that the hipsters and yuppies would move in, when the words “hipster” and “yuppie” hadn’t even been invented!
Of course, this isn’t something unique to New York: Go to almost any city (or make a YouTube video about it) and residents will tell you about neighbourhoods and commutes popping up that completely stump planners. This isn’t always in the form of a neighbourhood literally popping out of nowhere, and is often a matter of degree — sometimes extreme degree! For example, in London’s Canary Wharf, the government was only originally willing to build a very sad version of what became the DLR (this was rebuilt before Canary Wharf was even complete in its first phases). Since then, Canary Wharf has received a metro line and also a branch of the Elizabeth line in addition to the DLR system.
The perennial story here is that we are bad at predicting and modelling, but certainly not for a lack of trying! To be completely clear, this isn’t just an anglosphere thing — it’s pretty clear to me that Mexico City’s most significant modern neighbourhood, Santa Fe, wouldn’t completely lack rail transit if planners had been able to anticipate the growth.
Despite what it may seem, this article isn’t about our ability to plan and foresee the future, though that would make a lot of sense for a future article or video. This will instead be a reflection on our decisions, despite what we know to be broadly, true. The transit and planning literature and discourse is literally teeming with examples of similar serendipity as we see at Canary Wharf or what I would consider to be misfortune with what we see at Santa Fe. Despite knowing that when you provide reliable high quality rapid transit, development and demand usually follow, we seem to broadly take an approach of austerity and minimalism rather than one of abundance.
I think this topic will come back in the future in greater detail, but for now, let’s talk about three examples — grounded in Toronto (but still relevant to most cities!).
Station Connections
When I suggest the attitude above that we should simply “provide reliable high quality rapid transit (with the expectation that) development and demand usually follow”, it might sound like I’m suggesting that we should just endlessly build, but that’s not really the case. Of course you, need to be more measured when embarking in large bold projects that truly break new ground but, so often our attitude of austerity and disbelief in the power of transit and connectivity (despite being in the industry) is aimed at existing “markets”.
A great example of this pops up in cities all around the world, and notably at at least two major cases in Toronto where two major transit stations are close together but not well connected. One is in the city’s east: Main Street-Danforth, and the other is in the city’s west: Dundas West-Bloor, and both are cases of a TTC subway station, a GO regional rail station, and streetcar & bus services all being in close proximity.
In both cases, it’s obvious that there are people who might well want to go between the TTC & GO stations, but the lack of physical (not to mention fare and service) integration discourages this, especially in a city as hot & cold as Toronto. From my perspective, both the fact that the connection at Dundas West-Bloor still hasn’t been built (it seems it’s almost there) and that an underground connection between Main Street and Danforth still feels outside the Overton window suggests to me that we are significantly underestimating the connectivity benefits these projects would bring. Not only would they make combined trips faster and more consistent, and they would also feel much easier and more comfortable — and I think that isn’t appreciated enough. When new connections open between these stations, they will have a significant impact and will likely become very well used with time — but we haven’t built them yet, so we don’t know! These aren’t (or at least shouldn’t be) multi-billion dollar projects, and yet we still aren’t trying very hard.
More Suburban Rail Stations
The same underestimation of value happens with actual stations and ridership projections. When I see the projected use of most “modern” suburban rail stations, it surprises me that it’s usually only a small fraction of that seen at subway stations — despite the service and connectivity not being proportionally less. It seems that underperforming transit is sort of just built into our assumptions. What’s concerning is when these assumptions start to guide our planning policy — “surely, given the low demand, we can afford to make the platforms at this station fairly narrow?”.
Of course, if you believe that the new service won’t be impactful, everything you do and policies you enact will reflect this. You won’t demand that local transit better integrates, or that fares integrate, or that better pedestrian and cycling connections are made, or you will do so to a lesser degree. This will of course make the service less attractive and confirm your initial belief, and so the vicious cycle continues on.
Speaking of fares…
Integrated Fares
Integrated and rationalized fares are perhaps the best case of this “cynical” planning of transit. So often, the opposition to such systems comes from within the systems being integrated, who incorrectly assume that integrated fares means shrinking their slice of the transit pie rather than massively increasing the size of the pie itself. The truth is that integrating fares can have a big impact on the number of people who are willing to use transit, especially in places where taking transit is not easy.
So, why does all of this happen? Well, one explanation is an institutional conservatism and an assumption that Toronto is like American cities, where transit ridership and demand appears much more modest. There probably also isn’t a very good understanding of the existing service and the impact of better service and connectivity. Another concerning reason is that an overcrowded station probably looks much better from a communications and political perspective than a white elephant — which Toronto has its fair share of — but not dodging an overcorrection here really feels like a missed opportunity.
There’s of course also a painful lack of creativity. One of the most common retorts I hear when I bring up improved connectivity for example is “what trip would that serve?” It’s clear that in many cases people cannot easily imagine the utility of improved connectivity and service (and to be fair, nobody can perfectly predict this or imagine all the new trips that are made possible), even when it can often feel pretty clear. The complexity of transit makes it hard to model and predict, but our response here should not be to resort to minimalism but instead to better connectivity and service — These rarely have major negative impacts.
It’s also just generally easier to stick to the status quo. While growing the pie sounds great if your objective is to transform your city, massively increase transit ridership and move away from auto-mobility — I think it would surprise many to learn that transit agencies (or at least their management) often do not see this as an exciting opportunity. Sometimes it becomes comfortable to just keep doing what you have always done; redesigning routes, staffing up, and testing new initiatives requires a lot of work and energy that might not be sufficiently appealing, even if it could increase ridership and mostly pay for itself.
I think conversations about these common problems faced in transit planning are really important. From my years of watching transit projects move through the political machine, advocates try to get changes made, and conversations with those making decisions and policy, I really think there is a disconnect between the general sense of support that exists for transit these days and the real barriers that lead to transit being successful when implemented — if it’s implemented at all!