We need to think in terms of total transit trips per capita instead of transit commute mode share. Work trips comprise only 20-25% of all trips and exclude even students traveling to school.
San Diego's University City is precisely the kind of suburban hub you mentioned, containing a university, hospitals, and a large mall, linked together by LRT and the city's busiest bus line.
Interestingly, institutional land use is spearheading San Diego's TOD boom. The biggest under-construction TOD in the city is SDSU's $4B satellite campus. The Navy will redevelop its cybersecurity facility into another TOD with several million sq ft of offices and up to 10,000 units.
TOD's like this are absolutely a good step, maintaining good attractive transit service needs to come along with them and you can have some great results!
I’ve learned much about my city by taking almost every bus route in the city for different reasons. (School, work, sports game, meet friends, exploration, etc). That when I started driving I practically memorized the the whole city, due to knowing where each bus goes on their route and where it would go when any detours were present.
Made me realize as well which corridors are great for any higher order of transit like BRT, LRT, Light Metro. Picked up where good hubs are in commercial zones, stadium district, neighborhood strip malls, and even our downtown transfer hub that was right in front of the mall got moved a block south to the park replacing the parking with bus made a better looking and inviting transfer point with nice large green space downtown.
Absolutely, so much of planning great routes can be actually diverting to hit major destinations, unless you can really justify a major route on every street, and still diverting can be wise!
Especially cities with a vibrant nightlife need good or at least adequate night-time transit service. We do not want people stumbling out of a bar into their car and drive home intoxicated because there is no viable transit to get them home safely (themselves and others). Not everyone can afford the drinks and the taxi (if there even is a good taxi service that is).
Which is essentially the reason why Berlin has a pretty solid night bus service, all night every night, not just on week-ends. Yes, headways are quite long at usually 30 minutes, but there are coordinated transfers.
Yep, I think its absolutely huge to social connection writ large, if you can't easily go out after work or in evenings a bit part of the potential time people have to be with friends and other people is lost!
I take Transpennine Express in the UK as an example, many people travel on this service, not just for work, but to the airport in Manchester, to football games in other cities, to go to school, to see friends and family or just to go to a city for shopping or anything else, as well as the many commuters on this service.
Many medical practices thrive in downtown Brooklyn, NY because it is a transit hub and because going there can avoid a longer trip to Manhattan.
Better off-peak service is important. A great advantage of NY City is the off-peak services. In places lacking reasonably frequent transit in the evening, people having a dinner or evening meeting will drive both ways. If you have a car, in order to do that, you are more likely to drive at other times.
A goal should be no less than 20 minute intervals, so the rider will wait 10 minutes on average.
Yes, NY subway off-peak should be better on many lines, at least until midnight. But some are pretty good. For example, #3 train is running 8x hour in each direction at 3 am!
When speaking of a goal of 20 minute intervals, I was thinking of suburban rail, now hourly. (That appears to be the standard for most NYC subway lines in early morning.
Thanks for bringing this up - I’ve followed your YouTube videos for some time and it’s nice to see you on here too. Poor transit services outside of rush hours is one of my biggest gripes with the way transportation in planned in North America. I’ve thought about this one a lot.
I think a lot of it comes down to politics and that influencing the culture. Politicians choose flashy projects that are designed in particular ways to win voters or entrench support. A lot of the desired supporters (for socioeconomic reasons) are in the suburbs, so investing in them is seen as a good. And while I don’t disagree with you that suburbs deserve good transit, the way these LRTs and such are designed arent in a way conducive to getting people to ditch their cars more generally. It’s just meant to make commuting to a very narrow subset of work - white collar downtown office work - easier (because these are the workers with money, to be blunt). The routing of these lines often miss things that could be major trip generators for suburbanites as it’s where they already coalesce - malls, schools, rec facilities, clinics, etc. And you can hear the commuter-centric suburban rhetoric in announcement speeches. Building a subway, BRT, or tram is never framed as getting to denser, better, more active cities, but always around getting people to work faster, with maybe a nod to sustainability.
I do think Canada is less bad at this. Even in major cities without true rapid transit, major malls, hospitals, and post-secondary institutions tend to have transit centres or major bus connections. The US is definitely much worse. Universities like CalTech and Stanford are totally disconnected from nearby rapid transit, Chicago’s L has zero crosstown routes, and major malls in most cities have terrible transit availability. But even Canada isn’t great compared to much of the world, though I think at least Toronto, Montreal, and Vancouver are trending in the right direction.
San Diego's Trolley is a notable exception to commuter-centric US transit. Their busiest corridor runs 7.5 minute off-peak frequencies--without interlining. Pre-Covid, the Trolley had similar total and per-mile ridership to Portland's LRT despite San Diego having less job density than Portland. Since COVID, the Trolley recovered faster than any other US/Canadian LRT.
The Trolley's Blue Line is anchored in the North by the city's largest university, two hospitals, a big mall, and the city's busiest bus line. After passing through Downtown, it ends at the busiest border crossing in the World outside Asia. The result is consistent, all-day ridership in both directions.
The Trolley's Green Line is getting the city's biggest TOD: SDSU's $4B satellite campus, only 8 minutes by LRT from SDSU main campus.
Thanks for sharing this. I haven’t been to SD (just SF and LA) but Ive been intrigued with its light rail for a bit because it was at the forefront of that in the US much like my hometown of Edmonton was in Canada.
That off-peak frequency is, quite honestly, surprising. The only American city where Ive noticed the headways are generally good is New York (big surprise). But of course NYC kinda falls into the commuter-centric transit because of how Manhattan-centric it all is.
I remember being shocked by how poor the frequencies are in San Francisco and Portland in particular. They’re two American urbanist darlings but the transit feels mediocre compared to smaller/newer cities like Edmonton and Calgary. Which is, of course, not to elevate these cities too much because when you compare it to anywhere else in the world, the Albertan cities don’t hold up well in transit.
I wonder in San Diego’s case how much the proximity to Mexico influences transit ridership/patterns.
I think you've hit on something really important that highlights some of the problems with the modern urbanist movement. SF and Portland have pretty visible transit but, it's not very good transit!
It always amazed me how much track they have in PDX for the MAX and yet their ridership is low. But getting on the train from the airport you start picking up on the issues in frequency and speed. The streetcar is something I can actually see complementing the MAX because of how much of Portland was built for it but the routes and designs they’ve chosen really make it useless. Put a streetcar down Burnside, Hawthorne, Belmont, Alberta, etc. Even though Seattle was much later to the rapid transit game, I feel like they’re “most improved” and actually doing a lot to create more functional, everyday transit.
San Francisco is truly fascinating because it’s perhaps the West Coast city with the most “ingrained” transit culture. The buses aren’t bad and nor is the MUNI light rail, I’ll say that. But the city itself has the footprint of Paris and, although it’s not as dense, should really have more subways than it does. They’re finally expanding it but in such an incremental and slow-paced way. Meanwhile the BART is as sexy-looking as the Montreal Metro but it’s essentially trying to be a metro and commuter rail at the same time while failing at both. It zips past very obvious spots for stations and opts instead for stations in the middle of Interstates, while it’s frequencies are worse than the Edmonton LRT.
Do I want to go to the mall for SHOTS and services?
Malls tend to be fairly good sites to develop suburban hubs, because they tend to feature lots of useful shots and services, already have an established importance as employment centres
We need to think in terms of total transit trips per capita instead of transit commute mode share. Work trips comprise only 20-25% of all trips and exclude even students traveling to school.
San Diego's University City is precisely the kind of suburban hub you mentioned, containing a university, hospitals, and a large mall, linked together by LRT and the city's busiest bus line.
Interestingly, institutional land use is spearheading San Diego's TOD boom. The biggest under-construction TOD in the city is SDSU's $4B satellite campus. The Navy will redevelop its cybersecurity facility into another TOD with several million sq ft of offices and up to 10,000 units.
TOD's like this are absolutely a good step, maintaining good attractive transit service needs to come along with them and you can have some great results!
I’ve learned much about my city by taking almost every bus route in the city for different reasons. (School, work, sports game, meet friends, exploration, etc). That when I started driving I practically memorized the the whole city, due to knowing where each bus goes on their route and where it would go when any detours were present.
Made me realize as well which corridors are great for any higher order of transit like BRT, LRT, Light Metro. Picked up where good hubs are in commercial zones, stadium district, neighborhood strip malls, and even our downtown transfer hub that was right in front of the mall got moved a block south to the park replacing the parking with bus made a better looking and inviting transfer point with nice large green space downtown.
Absolutely, so much of planning great routes can be actually diverting to hit major destinations, unless you can really justify a major route on every street, and still diverting can be wise!
Especially cities with a vibrant nightlife need good or at least adequate night-time transit service. We do not want people stumbling out of a bar into their car and drive home intoxicated because there is no viable transit to get them home safely (themselves and others). Not everyone can afford the drinks and the taxi (if there even is a good taxi service that is).
Which is essentially the reason why Berlin has a pretty solid night bus service, all night every night, not just on week-ends. Yes, headways are quite long at usually 30 minutes, but there are coordinated transfers.
Yep, I think its absolutely huge to social connection writ large, if you can't easily go out after work or in evenings a bit part of the potential time people have to be with friends and other people is lost!
I take Transpennine Express in the UK as an example, many people travel on this service, not just for work, but to the airport in Manchester, to football games in other cities, to go to school, to see friends and family or just to go to a city for shopping or anything else, as well as the many commuters on this service.
Yep, this is something the UK is generally pretty good at!
Many medical practices thrive in downtown Brooklyn, NY because it is a transit hub and because going there can avoid a longer trip to Manhattan.
Better off-peak service is important. A great advantage of NY City is the off-peak services. In places lacking reasonably frequent transit in the evening, people having a dinner or evening meeting will drive both ways. If you have a car, in order to do that, you are more likely to drive at other times.
A goal should be no less than 20 minute intervals, so the rider will wait 10 minutes on average.
I think New York's off peak service is a weakness honestly. 15 minutes or ideally 10 is what I'd aim for as a maximum headway!
Yes, NY subway off-peak should be better on many lines, at least until midnight. But some are pretty good. For example, #3 train is running 8x hour in each direction at 3 am!
When speaking of a goal of 20 minute intervals, I was thinking of suburban rail, now hourly. (That appears to be the standard for most NYC subway lines in early morning.
My local surface "transit" service, effectively runs every 15 minutes, from 05.19 ( IN to the city ) until the last train OUT at 01.03
But that's in LONDON
I live in a decent sized city, we even managed to build a LRT and still have routes dropped in part or completely on Sundays. So frustrating.
Thanks for bringing this up - I’ve followed your YouTube videos for some time and it’s nice to see you on here too. Poor transit services outside of rush hours is one of my biggest gripes with the way transportation in planned in North America. I’ve thought about this one a lot.
I think a lot of it comes down to politics and that influencing the culture. Politicians choose flashy projects that are designed in particular ways to win voters or entrench support. A lot of the desired supporters (for socioeconomic reasons) are in the suburbs, so investing in them is seen as a good. And while I don’t disagree with you that suburbs deserve good transit, the way these LRTs and such are designed arent in a way conducive to getting people to ditch their cars more generally. It’s just meant to make commuting to a very narrow subset of work - white collar downtown office work - easier (because these are the workers with money, to be blunt). The routing of these lines often miss things that could be major trip generators for suburbanites as it’s where they already coalesce - malls, schools, rec facilities, clinics, etc. And you can hear the commuter-centric suburban rhetoric in announcement speeches. Building a subway, BRT, or tram is never framed as getting to denser, better, more active cities, but always around getting people to work faster, with maybe a nod to sustainability.
I do think Canada is less bad at this. Even in major cities without true rapid transit, major malls, hospitals, and post-secondary institutions tend to have transit centres or major bus connections. The US is definitely much worse. Universities like CalTech and Stanford are totally disconnected from nearby rapid transit, Chicago’s L has zero crosstown routes, and major malls in most cities have terrible transit availability. But even Canada isn’t great compared to much of the world, though I think at least Toronto, Montreal, and Vancouver are trending in the right direction.
San Diego's Trolley is a notable exception to commuter-centric US transit. Their busiest corridor runs 7.5 minute off-peak frequencies--without interlining. Pre-Covid, the Trolley had similar total and per-mile ridership to Portland's LRT despite San Diego having less job density than Portland. Since COVID, the Trolley recovered faster than any other US/Canadian LRT.
The Trolley's Blue Line is anchored in the North by the city's largest university, two hospitals, a big mall, and the city's busiest bus line. After passing through Downtown, it ends at the busiest border crossing in the World outside Asia. The result is consistent, all-day ridership in both directions.
The Trolley's Green Line is getting the city's biggest TOD: SDSU's $4B satellite campus, only 8 minutes by LRT from SDSU main campus.
Thanks for sharing this. I haven’t been to SD (just SF and LA) but Ive been intrigued with its light rail for a bit because it was at the forefront of that in the US much like my hometown of Edmonton was in Canada.
That off-peak frequency is, quite honestly, surprising. The only American city where Ive noticed the headways are generally good is New York (big surprise). But of course NYC kinda falls into the commuter-centric transit because of how Manhattan-centric it all is.
I remember being shocked by how poor the frequencies are in San Francisco and Portland in particular. They’re two American urbanist darlings but the transit feels mediocre compared to smaller/newer cities like Edmonton and Calgary. Which is, of course, not to elevate these cities too much because when you compare it to anywhere else in the world, the Albertan cities don’t hold up well in transit.
I wonder in San Diego’s case how much the proximity to Mexico influences transit ridership/patterns.
I think you've hit on something really important that highlights some of the problems with the modern urbanist movement. SF and Portland have pretty visible transit but, it's not very good transit!
It always amazed me how much track they have in PDX for the MAX and yet their ridership is low. But getting on the train from the airport you start picking up on the issues in frequency and speed. The streetcar is something I can actually see complementing the MAX because of how much of Portland was built for it but the routes and designs they’ve chosen really make it useless. Put a streetcar down Burnside, Hawthorne, Belmont, Alberta, etc. Even though Seattle was much later to the rapid transit game, I feel like they’re “most improved” and actually doing a lot to create more functional, everyday transit.
San Francisco is truly fascinating because it’s perhaps the West Coast city with the most “ingrained” transit culture. The buses aren’t bad and nor is the MUNI light rail, I’ll say that. But the city itself has the footprint of Paris and, although it’s not as dense, should really have more subways than it does. They’re finally expanding it but in such an incremental and slow-paced way. Meanwhile the BART is as sexy-looking as the Montreal Metro but it’s essentially trying to be a metro and commuter rail at the same time while failing at both. It zips past very obvious spots for stations and opts instead for stations in the middle of Interstates, while it’s frequencies are worse than the Edmonton LRT.
Do I want to go to the mall for SHOTS and services?
Malls tend to be fairly good sites to develop suburban hubs, because they tend to feature lots of useful shots and services, already have an established importance as employment centres
Fixed thanks