WHY WE GET IT WRONG To build good public transit, which is transit that is useful to lots of people, we need to have the right conversations about transit. We need to talk about what matters—to focus on the quality of service, not the technology that delivers it; to talk about all kinds of transit riders, not just about a narrow target market; to understand that the transit experience depends on buildings and streets and sidewalks as much as it does on stations and trains; and, above all, to talk about getting transit in the right places. We also need to be willing to talk about where transit is falling short. It is remarkable how much of the public transit we build in the United States and Canada doesn’t go where people want to go or when they want to go there. Many cities have invested in transit that doesn’t maximize the zone of access—rail or bus-rapid-transit lines that miss the city’s densest residential areas, ignore major employment centers, or don’t serve major hospitals or universities. When we get transit wrong, it’s usually not because transit planners don’t know what they’re doing; it’s because of the larger political context within which transit agencies are operating. Each transit line represents a decision made by elected officials, agency staff, and the public. Some were good decisions, and some were bad decisions. All are lessons we can learn from. The measure of success in transit is not miles of track or ribbon cuttings, it is whether transit makes people’s lives better. Transit isn’t really about trains and buses; it’s about people. n
We tend to talk too much about modes of transit and not enough about where we build that transit. Statements such as “This city needs light rail” are not useful. Statements that identify the specific goal, such as “We need better transit connecting downtown, the hospitals, and the university,” are much more helpful. One example of where this went wrong is Cincinnati, where a
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plan to connect five employment centers became a plan to build a streetcar. When politics and funding constrained the project, the “streetcar” part of the project was kept but the “connect centers” part was dropped.
We hurry through system planning. Once a transit agency decides to build a transit project in a specific corridor, it does detailed analysis, following federal guidelines, of the exact alignment, the station locations, and what parts of the line will be elevated or at grade. But the earlier, and more important, decision to focus on that corridor often gets much less analysis. We don’t think about networks. No rail transit or BRT line exists in isolation; it is part of a network of multiple routes, both bus and rail. Many riders will use more than one of those lines. An effective line makes the whole network more useful. A good rail corridor will add ridership to connecting bus routes, and vice versa. We talk about infrastructure, not service. Tracks, bus lanes, and stations are easy to see and easy for elec ted officials to get excited about. But what transit riders actually need is service. It’s notable how much frequency and span is an afterthought in transit planning discussions. We plan single-purpose transit. Transit that does only one thing will never be as useful—or draw as many riders—as transit that meets multiple needs. Yet we tend to talk about really specific types of trips, such as 9-to-5 commutes to downtown or trips to the airport. Those alone won’t fill trains or buses all day long, every day. In places like New Jersey (below), for example, commuter rail has
