Modes

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 fi rst reason is that transit is available to almost anyone, regardless of age, ability, or income. We tend to consider cars as universal, but a signifi cant 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 fulfi lling 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 traffi c fi gures 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 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 effi ciency of an ordinary bus, let alone a subway.

Space effi ciency 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 benefi ts from having them nearby. Moreover, it benefi ts 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.

cation desirable to talented employees. Even the tech industry—which actually makes its money by allowing people to communicate, shop, and entertain themselves anywhere—is highly concentrated not just in the San Francisco Bay Area but in specifi c neighborhoods. Cities work by physically bringing people together, and that generates commerce, ideas, and culture. Cities are vital to the nation as a whole. The ten largest US metropolitan areas, all of which have large transit networks, represent a third of the US economy. Some of the most economically productive places in the United States, from Midtown Manhattan to the Las Vegas Strip to Harvard University, are utterly dependent on transit. Around the world, every major economic center has a large and busy transit network.

Transit can be the mode of choice in a city. In Manhattan, getting around on the subway is faster and more convenient than driving. Even in famously car-oriented Houston, half of the suburban commuters to downtown take the bus because it is often faster, generally less expensive, and always less stressful than driving. But it is not just affl uent riders who benefi t from the high-quality transit that cities can support; time often matters even more to low-income riders.

But for transit to be a mode of choice, it has to be integrated into a walkable, mixed-use place. Every transit rider is either a pedestrian or a bicyclist for some part of their transit trip. Even people who drive to a park-and-ride lot have to walk to their job at the other end of the ride. Transit is only convenient if walking is convenient. And, once a rider is at their destination, they want to be able to do other things a well—get a coffee, eat lunch with their coworkers, shop, and run an errand. If they need a car to do any of those things, they will use a car for their entire trip.

Successful transit systems work because they serve places where many people want to go: commuting destinations like employment centers and universities; gathering places like sports stadiums, convention centers, and entertainment districts; and dense, walkable, mixed-use neighborhoods. Transit is not the best mode for everything, and there are many places where it will never play a large role. But there are some places where it not only works well, but becomes essential. In those places, transit still mattered after cars became widespread and the government invested billions in highways, and it will still matter no matter what future technologies come along.

At Westheimer and Post Oak in Uptown Houston (top), a car-oriented retail, offi ce, and residential area, roads and parking (above, shaded in black) take up over half the land.

In cities of all sizes, big employment centers have the highest transit use. Forty-seven percent of downtown Seattle (above) employees take transit, even though many of them have cars at home. Only 30% commute in a car alone. From 2010 to 2016, downtown added 45,000 jobs, but only 2,000 more car trips. In dense, walkable neighborhoods with a mix of uses, people can depend on transit for all trips. In central Toronto neighborhoods (below), a third of households have no cars.