Transit Services are Complementary
Time to address a very weird transit service planning habit.
One of the strangest habits I see in cities around the world is the tendency to treat rapid transit as a one-directional upgrade from, say, well-used buses. This is part of a broader, unfortunate trend of transit operators and planners managing their transit networks in an unsophisticated way that treats all coverage and access as being the same.
I talked about it in this video to an extent. Essentially, there is a commonly held viewpoint (even among people in the transit industry) that focusing on coverage is sufficient, and that service and people’s actual trip options are of minor concern.
I’d argue the first principle’s logic at hand here is the idea that as long is the trip is possible it does not matter if it is particularly attractive. It’s providing for capacity in the broadest sense without actually asking if the capacity is for things people actually want.
Now, perhaps in places where people truly have no other option, this type of basic analysis and approach to transit will work. But in many cities particularly in North America, if transit is slow or inconvenient, people will just drive — or, increasingly in urban areas, cycle!
An excellent example of this exact situation frequently occurs when a city “upgrades” a service formerly provided by buses to trains. Frequently, when there is congestion on an existing bus service, a helpful approach that is taken is to introduce new parallel services with different service patterns; this not only allows for more capacity, but also provides for faster trips and thus improving the experience for riders.
Now, it’s certainly the case that rail often provides a faster and better experience for the vast majority of riders. But far too often — especially when a lower-speed scheme like a tramway or light rail is implemented — it essentially amounts to a service reduction, whether that be due to slower travel time because there are more stops than a previous express service (which ideally benefits from things like bus lanes), or due to longer time taken to access more widely-spaced stops.
Now, some systems truly do exceed basic bus service in pretty much every way. For example, the New York City subway manages to frequently provide both a fairly fast and reliable service and lots of local stops, even where express tracks aren’t present. But as cities try to optimize rail projects that don’t benefit from high-speed operation and where stations can’t be inexpensively plopped down every few hundred meters, the room for additional services that fill a niche between rapid transit and cycling & walking grows. Of course, most people understand this on a basic level, since the Local and Express services of a system like the New York City subway are so well loved — even outside of the city. It just makes sense: you can have some services that are focused on landing you closer to your final destination, and others that go faster, and of course passengers can combine both in a single trip!
One way this effect seems to materialize can be clearly seen in Toronto. The Sheppard Subway is a (in my view) under-appreciated and useful service that heavily suffers from connecting few destinations given it only has 5 stations. However, you can really see a problem if you walk the corridor and travel on it via transit and other modes, as I frequently did when I lived nearby at North York Centre. While the subway is great if you live right near a station, the gaps between stations are fairly substantial — over a kilometre on average, which is actually a little above the typical inter-station distance on a modern metro line. Even though the Sheppard service is fast and even fairly frequent, if you happen to be going somewhere that is even a little distance from a station (more such destinations exist with a wider stop spacing) you are almost never going to get a faster trip than in a car.
This is of course made worse by the absolutely nonsensical practice around stations like Bessarion and Leslie of putting the high-density development away from the station, building in enough additional access time to the stations themselves that a resident who just drives could get some distance away before a resident who takes transit even gets to the station.
You might imagine that because of this that there would be a great local bus service on Sheppard Avenue to serve the interstitial space and to speed up a lot of trips, but while the service does exist — it’s hardly very useful.
This type of bus service is designed for people who have no other choice than to take it, and that’s unfortunate: It’s virtually always faster to get on a subway train and start walking to your final destination, so the ridership of this route is unsurprisingly not great!
Now, some (in Toronto at least) argue that this is a fundamental flaw with subways, as if a tighter stop spacing just isn’t possible. The truth is that drivers don’t suggest that local streets no longer need to exist when a parallel highway opens, and the same logic applies to public transit: There can and actually should be multiple services along a corridor. This is a sign that there is substantial demand along said corridor, and individual services can niche down and provide even more convenient travel options — that’s what good transit looks like.
Instead, in cases such as Sheppard, the removal of local service is sometimes encouraged by both bean counters and transit-supportive folks (who may not like subways) alike — on one hand, running a “redundant” service seems wasteful to a casual observer, and on the other hand, the lack of a local service is great way of “highlighting” the flaws supposedly inherent in all rapid transit.
To be clear, I’m not of the nostalgia-based persuasion that the faster services should not take precedent. The reality is that by being faster, a rapid transit line has an expanded catchment, and so you usually need to provide more capacity on a rapid transit line than on say a tram or streetcar. However, I don’t see the point in running a crappy “gap filler” local service either. If we don’t believe people will ride a bus on a corridor without rapid transit if it doesn’t run frequently, how does having rapid transit (that quite possibly does not serve the trips in question) change that?
This sort of needless attitude towards transit services being redundant with one another often gets ossified in completely non-pragmatic policies. For example, in some places, buses are not allowed to use dedicated right-of-ways used by trams, even when it would allow non-tram riders to benefit from faster travel and better stops: In the case of Toronto, it even seems like some streetcar right-of-ways are especially designed to make used by buses challenging. This attitude is self-defeating: rather than trying to grow the pie, it’s arguing over small slices of it, incentivized by a management structure that sees a loss of even a few riders from one service to another as a bad thing. In reality, such passengers are simply choosing the service they feel serves them best.
This siloed, self-harming approach reminds me of how many approach Uber, Lyft and other ride hailing services: Clearly, these services can be very successful, but if they are doing really well, it probably represents bad policy, such as a lack of fast or accessible service transit or extremely high fares. The same is true with transit: surely you should not try to create two services that are trying to do the same thing — a rapid bus above a subway making identical stops for example — but a local bus on the same corridor is not providing the same service, and is additive.
I think this is driven by a fear of cannibalization, but transit is more likely to grow than shrink with more service, especially in places with relatively low transit mode split. We just need to be much more practical.
Seattle will run into the same issues with Link to Tacoma.
Reliability will be better but with a top speed of 55mph, the existing express buses and insanely infrequent commuter rail will be faster to Seattle than the Link extension.
The NYCT Select Bus Service system, despite many flaws, is another example of a service pattern that combines BRT-lite stations, frequency, and branding (the B44-SBS, for example) with local service patterns (the B44) that offer more frequent stop spacing.