That's because it is. I had to take the metro in Montréal to get to work this week, hadn't taken it in months because I usually bike, it's such a shitty experience. It smells bad, it's hot, it's filled with tired people that don't feel like going to work (you feel it in the air), beggars harass you, it's slow (it can take 3x as much time as riding a bike to get where you want to) and it's operating past maximum capacity during rush hour. I haven't even gotten started on when service is interrupted and you show up over an hour late to work or class. Anybody who can afford a bit more for reliability and comfort will spend it without looking back.
New York, Chicago, Tokyo, Taipei, London, Berlin, Munich come immediately to mind.
And as sibling commenters have pointed out, in some places even smaller cities and towns have excellent public transit networks that pretty much everyone uses (maybe not always, but when convenient). Freiburg, Germany is one example I've seen.
NYC... altright, better than 15 years ago but still not great at all. Not as good as Germany or DC.
Tokyo... lol, no! While clean and efficient, it’s a joke that you have different rail stations owned by different companies, different cards that may work on each other but probably not. The ticket machines are almost all cash only. And instructions in other languages might have well used Google translate. Tokyo was one of the more difficult public transport systems I’ve used and I’ve been around the world a bit.
I was surprised that the machines only took cash, but it was annoying as hell that we were 10yen short and the nearest ATM was 2 blocks away under the street then back up again.
The rush for the 11-11:30pm trains are nuts. I've never seen so many black suits filled by unsmiling faces than the last train out near Tsukiji.
Did you just claim DC public transit is good? Wow. Coherent bus lines are few and far between. Light rail is non-existent. And the Metro is falling apart at the seems... Prone to excessive delays. Entire lines are brought down for extended periods to perform decades of deferred maintenance. There's no ring routes - to get from Dulles to Rockville, you have to go all the way downtown and back out again. The system was built without consideration for express lines. And neither of the DC airports are on the same line as Union Station.
My wife tried to use Metro for her Reston->downtown commute. It was a disaster - rail delays made it completely untenable. Then she tried the bus. It was more consistent, but overcrowded. She ended up driving 4/5 days because it was faster, cheaper, and more consistent.
That's probably only hold true for (Western) tourists. And I don't think it is fair to compare on that. Tokyo (and Japan in general) rail system can be really intimidating but that's just because its sheer size, but once you know your way around it, it's gotta be among the best rail system in the world.
So for the two of us, a Muni trip is
- total cost: $5
- usually takes 30-60 min to get wherever we want to go in the city.
- we need to to figure out the optimal route, schedule, and entry & exit stops.
- we need to make sure we will arrive at the stop on-time.
- we need to walk 5-10 min to closest stop on either end
However... a low-cost Uber or Lyfts pool ride for two is
- total cost: $5-12 (same serice area as Muni)
- duration: 15-45 min
- we don't have to plan the route or schedule
- we don't have to worry about going to a remote pick-up stop on-time
- we get dropped off directly at our destination
Of course, here in SF ride share vehicles are definitely not allowed to use the special public-transportation-only lanes of some of the major roads, which remain reserved for the exclusive use of Muni buses and taxis to improve their transit times.
(edited to fix indentation)
Sure there are worse systems that don’t have any coverage (El Paso for example) but they are not functioning so I don’t count those.
Problems with muni include:
- To many stops (like every two blocks).
- Hardly any dedicated bus lanes, bus gets stuck
in traffic too many times.
- Slow and un-intuitive routes.
- Small and overcrowded busses.
- No transfer to BART or ferries.
[1]: Sometimes too frequent, I sometimes see the 14 being stuck in congestion of other 14s
If public transit i.e. Muni serves 10x or 100x riders each day vs ride sharing than I see your point... I think.
Wait. Maybe you could spell it out?
On the other hand, 99% of vehicle trips in SF are either private cars or TNCs.
Neither of these was my point, though. My point was that comparing cost between a per-trip price and a per-person price will always favor the former when there are multiple people. But most trips don't involve multiple people, which is why such an analysis is besides the point.
1: http://tncstoday.sfcta.org/ 2: https://www.bart.gov/about/reports/ridership 3: https://sfgov.org/scorecards/transportation/ridership
I think what’s actually happening is Uber drivers are paid peanuts and provide and maintain their own vehicles. There’s a technology innovation (eg the efficiency of knowing if and where someone needs a ride) coupled with a labor innovation in paying drivers less than minimum wage.
Huh. This is interesting. The "Learn More About TNCs" button on the page you linked to leads to some more facts, including:
> "On a typical weekday, TNCs make more than 170,000 vehicle trips within San Francisco, approximately 12 times the number of taxi trips, representing 15% of all intra-San Francisco vehicle trips." - https://www.sfcta.org/tncstoday
So: 1,333,333 intra-San Francisco vehicle trips each day, including Transportation Network Companies (TNCs), and from your other links, 1,165,000 MUNI+BART trips per day, for a total of 2,498,333 rides per day
The population of the city during business hours is ~1,100,000... Oh of course, most people make round trips so it makes sense for the total number of rides to be >2x the city population.
> "On an average weekday, more than 5,700 TNC vehicles operate on San Francisco streets during the peak period"[sfcta.org/tncstoday]
So if TNCs provide ~30 trips a day, and all 1,165,000 MUNI+BART passengers switched to TNCs, there would have to be an additional ~40k TNC vehicles in the city :).
Maybe it would work if they were really, really small.
In cities that were designed or entirely remade to support the automobile, the automobile works better than everything else. This is almost a tautology, but it's remarkable how often it's overlooked in this discussion. If cities were re-designed around transit (with more density, smaller roads, and more space for alternative transportation modes), then transit would work better and cars would be worse. †
In summary, yes, obviously cars work better in cities designed for cars! But cities that work well for cars aren't a natural feature of the universe. It took a lot of work to get them to look like that.
† An important implication of this is that transit will never overtake the automobile in low-density, sprawl-heavy cities. Transit use is high where the transit infrastructure is good and driving is painful. Both things have to be true. ††
And the tension here is direct. Sprawl-heavy areas can't support good transit infrastructure and high-density, pedestrian-friendly areas are awful to drive in. A choice for one is a vote against the other.
†† This is why arguments about the superiority of cars based on revealed preference are usually spurious. If you put a light rail system in a town built for cars, then people will keep using the thing the town was built for. But those people are revealing their preference for cars in an environment built for cars. Where the built environment is different, people behave differently.
It largely depends on the country or even city. Me and my gf went to Switzerland by car a couple of years ago (we live in Eastern Europe) and I’d had expected that we’d visit different parts of the country by car. What happened once we got there is that we “forgot” the car in the hotel’s parking lot for a week and we did all our travel by train, it was wonderful. Even traveling inside the city itself (we were based in Lausanne) was a very nice thing, I’ve started building a soft spot in my heart for the city’s trolley-buses (electric public transport rocks, btw, always has, alwsys will).
While the electrification of the mass transit systems is super nice, unfortunately it came about because of the World Wars. Switzerland was hit really hard, and no one wanted to trade their precious coal away (Switzerland had no coal mines). Thus out of sheer necessity they began electrifying all the trains. So unfortunately there's not replicable policies other countries can use to achieve what Switzerland has achieved in terms of electrification, so it'd take some creativity.
Well that's because it's actually true for a lot of people. Sure, there's no freedom in commuting between SF and south bay by car, or navigating the most dense downtown environments. But I definitely use my car on a daily basis for things that would be impossible or incredibly time consuming by transit. And yes, many of the transit patrons around here would probably prefer a car if they could afford it. Most places are not like NYC where the subway is often the most effective option regardless of wealth.
I don't think it's really feasible for more spread out suburban environments to implement effective mass transit. The anti-car idealists often seem to forget that there are a lot of people living outside of dense city centers.
If self driving cars are terrible at coping with the chaos humans grit their teeth and deal with, maybe software for engineering cooperative bumper-to-bumper traffic jams involving clogs of slow-moving self driving cars, that reduce the road speeds to constant 20 MPH (the /constant/ part being important), and eliminate chaotic lane changing to near zero for the group, is one way to bootstrap self driving cars.
In other words, low-performance self driving cars might work fine, and since people can lounge about, and disengage from the guidance and navigation tasks, why not go slower?
Then, add swarming to the mix, such that cars going to the same place, all travel slowly in a single group.
It's against the law to obstruct traffic, or violate minimum speed requirements, so certain laws would need to change. For example, zero emission vehicles can idle indefinitely, and software-controlled vehicles can interface with an external control network, approved to operate in such ways, with points of contact at operations centers for resolving problems, technical or otherwise.
So change laws to permit idle electric vehicles (in more places and controlled, desginated places, not just anywhere), and permit large slow moving groups to occupy certain corridors, at certain times, when jammed traffic is a known quantity, that driverless systems aren't the cause of. Driverless networks can cut into a slice of the jam, and possibly improve outcomes for members only at first, and eventually boost efficiency within the jammed system by augmenting flow through expert participation.
Mass transit is expensive, boring, and thankless. How many bus companies have ever applied to YC?
Does Remix (https://www.remix.com/) count?
The thing is, if there were a bus, it would have to stop to pick up / drop off passengers along the way, which would make it so much slower than driving that it really would be for the poor. I've been on such buses as a kid. Even when traffic is bad, bumper-to-bumper in a car (taking the fastest route) is going to be faster than bumper-to-bumper in a bus (taking a more circuitous route and stopping frequently along the way)
I think the only way buses will stop being for the poor, is when they stop become faster than more expensive alternatives. (Or at least nearly as fast and significantly cheaper.) If you can save a lot of time by spending a little bit of money, which would you choose? What if you could spend a lot of money but it wouldn't save you any (or much) time?
In cities where congestion is a major problem, dedicated bus lanes/roads can help balance the equation in favor of buses. Usually there aren't enough dedicated bus routes though. (I might point out that the people deciding how to balance bus/car traffic are not the people who ride the bus.)
I still think self-driving cars are far in the future, but I find them appealing because they would make "buses" more efficient. A lot of the cost of operating buses is paying the drivers. To maximize economies of scale, buses are large, which means they have to make a lot of stops to pick up and drop off passengers, which in turn makes them slow. Self-driving buses could be a lot smaller and wouldn't need to make as many stops. If they could tell that no one will be boarding or deboarding at a given stop, they could skip it entirely and take a shorter path instead. At some point, the lines between bus/ridesharing/taxi get pretty blurry.
> If they could tell that no one will be boarding or deboarding at a given stop, they could skip it entirely and take a shorter path instead.
Everytime selfdriving tech comes up people say things similar to this, this problem is 100% solvable now. Why are we waiting for self driving cars to solve this problem?
What the hell is going on in Austin?
Bumper-to-bumper traffic happens mostly at commute hours in commercial zones and during special events. It's very much not the norm for driving at other times. To wit, I live in San Francisco, one of the densest and least car-friendly cities in the U.S., but the last time I returned from a road trip, I traversed the whole city corner-to-corner -- from crossing the Bay Bridge to arriving at my home near the zoo -- in less than fifteen minutes. Why? Because it was midnight! Cars provide unparalleled mobility for irregular trips outside of peak commuting times, even in the largest cities.
I wholeheartedly support deprioritizing car infrastructure and working towards a norm where most people do not drive to work, but I nonetheless believe that car ownership provides a lot of independence and ought to be accessible to the modal citizen, at least outside of the very dense coastal cities (SF/LA/NY). Cars work really well for irregular trips outside of rush hour. They work terribly when large amounts of people need to go to the same place at once.
I can count on 1 hand (ok, maybe both hands) the number of times I've been in bumper-to-bumper traffic in my life. One of those was in Austin. There's lots of places to go that aren't big cities.
<Insert obligatory Portal reference.>
While I completely agree with you, the cultural barriers to this are petty much a non-starter in much of the country. I love not owning a car and being able to rely on mass transit where I live (Austin, TX), but Texas is so culturally opposed to anything like this.
A lot of people think that mass transit is for the poor, and the car represents independence and freedom. Go where you want, when you want (but you're gonna be bumper-to-bumper most of the way there.)
I hate that mentality, but driverless cars represent the "have your cake and eat it too" solution. It more closely aligns with the culture of driving here in the US, while also claiming numerous commercial and infrastructure benefits.