Or why even people who theoretically support public transit often don’t use it.
I spent three weeks in Southern Europe last month backpacking from city to city checking out the architecture and the city design and the different ways that different places interact with their surroundings. I call this a vacation.
Several things about my trip really helped clarify for me the hurdles facing public transportation in America. I was able to go pretty much everywhere I wanted to go by train, subway, or bus – and I did it without speaking the language or getting lost. In fact, it was the opposite. When I got lost on the surface streets, I would use the subway, and in some cases, the bus routes to find my way back to where I was supposed to be. Using public transportation – all modes of public transportation in a wide variety of cities with a variety of methods of displaying information – gave me a lot of insight about just what it is that might be keeping Americans off of busses and light rail lines at home.
1. Tickets. Europeans take their tickets seriously. Subways have gates that require ticket or paid badge swipes to open. I’m sure there are some freeloaders who work the system, but for the most part, if you want to ride the subway or the metro or whatever that particular city calls it, you buy a ticket. Busses are papered with signs warning, in a variety of languages, riders of what will happen if they don’t have a valid time-stamped ticket. While I did see more people riding the bus without stamping during the rush hour – I also saw them passing tickets around the crowded bus to make sure that everyone got stamped even when they couldn’t get to the stamp machine themselves.
The last time I rode light rail in my city I shared a car with a homeless woman who had been riding the train all day as a way to stay out of the heat. Nobody checked her ticket – she didn’t have one. She had been hopping from one train to the other at each end of the line. While I understand the desire to get out of Sacramento’s summer heat, setting up camp on a light rail car is not the most effective use of the public transit. More recently I sat in on a meeting with the local police department who was discussing ways to address the inter-jurisdictional drug trade that was happening on the light rail. Dealers were hopping on and off of the train at different stations to create a sort of “mobile retail” where buyers could use the train schedule to meet up for a purchase.
Restricted access to ticket-holders and enforced ticket purchases would go a long way to eliminating the freeloader and criminal activity problems.
2. Accessibility. I have long found it fascinating that the light rail in Sacramento does not directly link up to the train station. Even though the train station is fairly well located in an area immediately adjacent to the downtown, the neighborhood feels less than inviting at night – with big empty corporate buildings on the one side and the freeway and industrial rail yards on the other. To get to the train station from the nearest light rail stop is 8 blocks. There are busses, but I’ll get to the issue with busses in a moment. European cities, for the most part, use their train stations as a transportation hub. Not only are they usually located close enough to the central city to be pedestrian friendly, but the busses, the subways, and the taxis all operate in conjunction with the train station. It is a great way to leverage the facility. Stations in the larger cities have extensive shopping and dining options too – with far fewer empty storefronts than most American malls I’ve been to lately.
3. Choice. The difference is between the hub system, where a main location offers a variety of transportation options to get you to where you need to go, and the daisy-chain system, where there is one choice – one path of travel that may or may not get you to where you want to be – and where a weak link – say, a delay – doesn’t just impact that one mode or that one line, but has a ripple effect along the whole route.
While in Florence I witnessed a car accident between a compact sedan and a scooter. The rider on the scooter was stunned, but he wasn’t badly hurt. Traffic, however, snarled up quickly, and the bus I had planned to take to the train station was caught in it. I followed the other people waiting at that bus stop to a trolley stop three blocks away, caught the trolley to the station and made my train with time to spare.
4. Usability. You know your transportation system is usable if people who do not speak the language and who do not know their way around the city are able to effectively get to where they want to go without a lot of backtracking.
Trains are incredibly user-friendly. Though the initial encounter with the bustling station and the different platforms and numbers and time-tables can be daunting, the whole system is actually pretty straightforward and standardized, and the learning curve is quick. The biggest challenge is ensuring that you get on the correct train – and if the seats are assigned, figuring out which one is yours.
The metros and subways are a little more complicated, but it seldom took me more than a couple of minutes with a map to figure out what line went where and which platform was the right one for that particular line. The biggest struggle with subways, for me, is figuring out which exit back onto the street to take and then reorienting myself to the street layout. And that happens in every country – my north-south detector is defective. The best thing about the subway – if you go the wrong way, you get out at the next stop, walk over to the other platform, and get on the next train. When trains run every 3 to 7 minutes, it isn’t that big of a deal. Again the learning curve is quick and relatively painless.
Then there are the busses. I do not know if it is some unspoken rule or some sacred cow of standard operating procedure, but bus systems are inherently more complicated to understand. A huge part of the problem is the actual bus stop layout. The stops will often provide a wealth of information about time tables. What they frequently don’t share is which busses stop there, and which direction they are going. Sure, there is a line map, but until you ride that line, it is often impossible to know which way it goes. And if you actually want the bus in the opposite direction, the stop is not across the street. Sometimes it is not even on the same block. Which means that riders have to remember twice as many pick-up and delivery points.
This is where the value of the hub system becomes readily apparent. If the train station is your hub (or some other central transportation feature) then it greatly increases your chances of figuring out a bus route that will work – even if it isn’t the most direct. But when the buses are daisy-chained the trip means figuring out which stops connect where and which busses to take at which stops – all of which must be done twice – once coming and once going. I could learn the subway for a new city in two rides. In some cities I stayed for three or four days and never quite got the bus system figured out enough that I was confident that I was going where I wanted to go. The learning curve is steep and slow going.
This isn’t a language barrier thing. I’ve had the same problem with busses in the U.S. – which is why I try to omit them from my public transportation trips. If something is going to throw off my schedule, it is going to be the bus – not necessarily because it was late, but because it was so darn hard to figure out.
Busses are the most efficient and flexible means of public transportation available, and in reality, a comprehensive bus system could be a major asset to any city. But even the best laid-out bus system is going to have poor ridership support if the initial learning curve feels more like a wall than a slope. What can be done to improve bus usability? Improving the amount and presentation of route information is a great place to start. Make it clear where the stops are and which direction and which routes are supported at each stop. Correlate each stop with the corresponding stop going to opposite direction. Time tables are nice, but an electronic sign that says which bus is arriving next and how long it will take before it gets there is even better. Present the route for each bus in a way that clearly shows which direction that bus goes and which stops are supported. This isn’t info that can be squeezed onto a bus-post sign. This requires a well-organized information board.
The advantage is that if a system is convenient, easy to understand, and easy to use, then it will attract riders. If a system is well supported with a variety of options – routes and means of transportation – then people will be more likely to trust the system and will feel more comfortable using it. And if a system is safe and freeloading is not tolerated, then people will feel like their public transportation system has value.
Of course, we’d have to stop cutting public transportation budgets and eliminating routes and increasing wait times before any of this other stuff will do any good. I don’t care how usable or safe a bus or train is – if I regularly have to wait half an hour for the next train because my bus got caught in a little traffic or was some other delay, I’m going to skip the system and stick to my car.
Even though I’m a big proponent of public transportation.
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