WHAT TRANSIT DOES WELL Transit is not the primary mode of transportation in the United States. Seventy-seven percent of Americans commute in a single-occupant car, and only 5 percent by train, bus, or ferry (the rest carpool, walk, or bike). Improving transit options and ridership is essential for two reasons. The first reason is that transit is available to almost anyone, regardless of age, ability, or income. We tend to consider cars as universal, but a significant portion of Americans are not able to drive because they are too young, because they have physical or mental disabilities (which get more common with age), or because they cannot afford a car. This alone is reason to have transit. Transit allows everyone to get around, to have interesting and fulfilling lives, to be full and productive members of society. Countries like Switzerland and Japan, as a matter of national policy, provide transit everywhere, regardless of how many people will ride it. This is what transportation expert Jarrett Walker calls “coverage service.” In the United States, we take this approach to roads. Cities generally pave every street, regardless of how many houses it has on it. They don’t do cost-effectiveness calculations to see if the property taxes collected on the adjoining properties will cover the cost of pavement, or project traffic figures to see if the use of the road will meet minimum standards. They simply pave a street to every house. State highway departments do the same. Every town, no matter how small, is on a network of highways. Transit is not as universal, but it is still widespread; nearly every town of meaningful size has some bus routes, and even rural areas have “dial a ride” services for seniors and the disabled. But if transit is only a lifeline service, it will be limited in quality. Even in Switzerland, rural bus service is hourly or less. There is simply not enough travel demand in small alpine villages to justify running a bus any more often. In areas with a low level of transit service, from an Alpine village to a US suburb, people who can use and afford a car are likely to drive. In these low-density places, roads are less congested and every building has a parking space in front if it. Someone driving can park right in front of their destination in plentiful and free 2
parking spaces, but someone arriving on a bus must navigate that parking lot on foot to get to their destination. Lifeline transit is a necessity for some people, but it is never as good as driving. But the majority of the global population lives in cities, which makes transit essential for a second reason: it moves a lot of people in very little space. A transit bus seats 40 people (and can handle another 40 people standing) and takes up about as much space on the street as two to three cars. Thus, 80 people can travel in the space it takes to move three people in single-occupant vehicles. Transit also requires no parking space at the destination—the vehicle simply keeps going and makes another trip. Consider Manhattan: 2.4 million people work on the island. Getting them all to work in cars would require several hundred lanes of bridges and tunnels and 2.4 million parking spaces, which, built as surface parking, would cover the entire 30-squaremile island, leaving no space for the workplaces those commuters are traveling to. This space advantage is a matter of geometry, not technology. Taxis, whether hailed at the curb or summoned via an app, still take up as much space as a car. In fact they take more, since they circle empty as they wait for a rider. Autonomous cars may be able to travel closer together than cars, but they still cannot approach the space efficiency of an ordinary bus, let alone a subway. Space efficiency is vital because cities succeed by crowding things together. A company works by bringing together its employees, with their various skills and functions, into one place. It also depends on other businesses, from lawyers to reprographics services, and benefits from having them nearby. Moreover, it benefits from being near its competitors, so it can draw from a larger talent pool, and from being near restaurants and stores and cultural institutions that will make its lo-
The Swiss Post bus system (above) is classic coverage transit. The 213 bus (like the Salginatobel Bridge it is crossing) links a village of fewer than 30 houses to Schiers, a town of only 2,600 people, and its train station.
