How do you fix American public transportation?

[Suburbia]

Outside of NYC, Los Angeles, DC, and New Jersey, public transportation is in big crisis mode.

The pandemic is going to cut a lot of public transportation service.

What do you think?

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/06/nyregion/mass-transit-service-cuts-covid.html

[HillGoose]

Give everybody their own private helicopter lmao

[Sol]

Give it lots of money--make it the main infrastructure priority over highway expansion in urban and suburban areas. Supplement that with Oregon-style urban growth boundaries designed to encourage high density development and discourage sprawl.

Obviously this stuff is f***ed up enough to be hard to fix, but that's the starting point.

[Former President tack50]

Well like others said, funding it properly would be a good start.

However, the way American cities are built makes it much harder to build "good" public transportation because of the incredibly low residential densities; especially in the cases of cities in the western US.

This comparison is super old (dating to the 1990s); I've posted it several times in Atlas and Barcelona is an outlier even when compared to other European cities as it is boxed in by mountains (it literally has the densest square km in all of the EU) so it can only grow upwards, but it is a good example still:



A long term solution for the US would be to dramatically change zoning so that appartment buildings; or even just row houses (like those found in London, a city with good transportation that isn't appartments everywhere either) are much more common and so that building the "classic American house", with a yard and what not is much harder, if not impossible.

Making housing developments more dense means more people can go to a single station, which makes public tranportation easier to create. After that you only need to fund it and make new lines and you have a good transit system.

[Samof94]

A lot of white people don’t want to live near brown and black people. Can you really imagine a “MAGA type” living near Latinos.

[Hope For A New Era]

We need trains in general. Long distance too. It's absurd that you need to go by plane or car to travel long distances in a supposedly wealthy and developed country.

The really obvious ones are a Cleveland-Columbus-Cincinnati rail in Ohio (hey #populist Ohio Dems, want an unorthodox platform to appeal to Obama-Trump voters who feel "left behind" and "disconnected?") and a Cheyenne-to-Pueblo rail in Wyoming and Colorado (seriously, why has this not been done already? Utah did it for their urban corridor and it's great)

[pikachu]

Adding to the people saying more funding, American cities which build public transit need to do it more efficiently – Alon Levy constantly makes the point that American transit construction costs are ridiculously high compared to peer cities in Europe and East Asia, so we’re not getting our bang for the minimal buck we spend. (Per his data, an NYC subway extension cost 8x per station than one in Paris.) And idk if this is as much of a national problem vs a metro NYC issue, but construction delays on new projects can be insane. The East Side Access giving the LIRR access to Penn Station is scheduled to be opened 13 years past schedule and Phase 1 of the Second Avenue Subway (literally just three stations) was delayed five years. You also need to focus on the less sexy things like dedicated bus lanes and higher frequency service. A lot of agencies kind of just fail at that.

Though ofc, what’s most important is a state and local aid bill so that services don’t enter a death spiral.

[Suburbia]

A lot of white people don’t want to live near brown and black people. Can you really imagine a “MAGA type” living near Latinos.

It's vice versa as well. You think that is why the MTA, NJ Transit, SEPTA, MARTA get cut, because of racism in public transportation? It's possible.

Some of the white suburbanites in Cobb County call MARTA nasty names.

[Never Made it to Graceland]

We need trains in general. Long distance too. It's absurd that you need to go by plane or car to travel long distances in a supposedly wealthy and developed country.

The really obvious ones are a Cleveland-Columbus-Cincinnati rail in Ohio (hey #populist Ohio Dems, want an unorthodox platform to appeal to Obama-Trump voters who feel "left behind" and "disconnected?") and a Cheyenne-to-Pueblo rail in Wyoming and Colorado (seriously, why has this not been done already? Utah did it for their urban corridor and it's great)

It's ridiculous you can't get a direct train ticket from Philadelphia to Pittsburgh anymore. Western Pennsylvania is basically a different country from the East Coast megalopolis.

[Starry Eyed Jagaloon]

Fun! I could wonk out about this stuff all day.

I'm assuming this question is about systemic flaws in American public transportation--not the current funding shortfall from decreased ridership during the pandemic which should be fixed through direct stimulus funds to transit agencies. A few flaws come to mind:

1. We need to bring down construction costs (shout out to Alon Levy already being mentioned).
This is the most important issue facing American transportation today, but it's also a pretty easy concept to understand. Compare how much we spend per mile on the Second Avenue subway against similar metro projects (Madrid Metro, Hong Kong MTR, Grand Paris Express, even Crossrail.) It's obscene and is really diminishes political willingness to fund viable rail projects. We should be building dozens of new subways in New York, Los Angeles, DC, and San Francisco but all the money available for it is locked-up in a few gold-plated projects. A lot of factors contribute to this: bureaucratic incompetence, corruption, the "contractor-industrial complex", lawsuit-happy nimbys, extortionary unions, a convoluted planning process, and generally inefficient construction choices.

2. We need to plan an integrated transportation system, not bits and pieces.
Too often, transit projects in America are planned without thought for how they fit into city, state, and nationwide networks. Additionally, projects are usually planned one-by-one instead of as part of a comprehensive, decades-long plan to create a full-build transit network. This results in balkanized transit agencies with awkward connections, missed destinations on metro routes, and under or overserved commuter flows. Transit agencies should plan for exactly how they want their networks to look 3-4 decades out instead of planning these piecemeal (and frankly, useless) expansions. Moreover, there is often very little schedule and fare coordination between busses, metros, regional rail, and intercity rail which is just bad for passengers. At times (see Lori Lightfoot's treatment of Metra Electric) this can verge into agency turf wars. In a natural monopoly like transportation, this leaves riders worse off. At a minimum, services should connect efficiently. Ideally, we'd have regionwide integrated timetables and takts--see Switzerland's Bahn 2000 project for more.

3. We need to leverage network effects when planning transit.
As you link each new station to a transit network, the value of the network increases exponentially. For example, if a high speed rail line was built from Pittsburgh to Baltimore, it wouldn't just add one city pair to the network. It would add Pittsburgh-New York, Pittsburgh-Hampton Roads, Pittsburgh-New Haven, etc. Add a short extension to Cleveland for 20% more and you double the usefulness of the line. Spend another 20% to get to Columbus and you triple the usefulness of the line. The implication of this is that transit is most useful when it attaches to an already heavily used route with many station pairs. In the United States, that's the Northeast Corridor. Once CAHSR completes, a similar effect will appear in the West. This is particularly relevant in cities with weak internal transportation. Take the famed 3 C's HSR line. By itself, it may not be worth building because Cleveland, Columbus, and Cincinnati have small CBDs and weak internal transportation networks. This rail line isn't really useful for getting from Shaker Heights to Hamilton County, for example. The magic is in connecting to the Northeast Corridor. Suddenly, the fastest way to get literally anywhere on the transit-heavy East Coast is from a station in the downtowns of these cities. This draws offices and residents to the CBD and away from highway and airport oriented development. This in turn makes constructing metro networks centering on the CBD actually useful. Basically, by attaching to the already-existing transit hubs of America, new hubs can develop and networks become more useful than if they were connecting two or three random points in isolation.

4. We need to rezone for higher densities, particularly near transit hubs.
There really isn't any point in building expensive, high-capacity transit in low density suburbs. If all that's in walking distance of a suburban station is a big parking lot and a few single family homes, nobody is going to use the network--aside from a few park-and ride Downtown commuters. Most trips aren't like this. Ideally, transit would be useful for seeing friends, going shopping, getting to school (which would save millions on school busses), and everything else. If there's nothing near the station and most people aren't walking distance from one, what's the point of transit? The great thing about density near stations is that it begets more development and density. If a grocery store pops up by a station, even more people will want to live in walking distance, which prompts more specialty retail, which prompts more housing, and you get a network-effect positive feedback loop. It would boost ridership, cut overall emissions, and make life more convenient for nearby residents because of the additional amenities. It's good economics and it's good for people.

5. We need to fix federal funding and planning regarding transit.
Transit is too often planned at the state level. For something that is often about national networks, this leaves too much discretion in the hands of state DOTs which create suboptimal projects and then get blank cheques to build them from the federal government. It wastes money and produces poor infrastructure. Second, federal funding has long followed the failed 80/20 model. This allocates 80% of federal transportation funds towards highways and 20% towards public transit. This may seem reasonable considering the comparative use of each network but it ignores three fundamental facts: a) Extensive highways make transit less usable. b) Extensive highways increase cost-of-living. c) The network effects (and therefore marginal costs) of highways and transit are opposites.

a) Highways do not complement transit because they thrive in completely different built environments. Highways don't work in dense cores because of reasons of geometry; you just can't fit enough cars onto a road if everyone drove into Manhattan. The opposite is true for transit. The denser the transit hub, the more useful transit is because it connects an exponentially higher number of destinations. Meanwhile, sprawling cities work fine with highways because you can be miles from an onramp and cars are still useful while transit is completely irrelevant if you're miles from a station. A city can only have one built form or the other and spending on highways clearly induces a sprawling city. Interestingly, Kamala Harris is the only politician I've ever seen say/do anything about this.

b) The aforementioned sprawling cities created by highways--all else being equal--make life more expensive and hit poorer people hardest. They force everyone to spend thousands on a car, gas, and insurance. For some families, this can be around one fifth of their total income spent just to get around. Building for cars increases the cost of doing business and makes everyone worse off. Plus it costs the taxpayer more--building the equivalent amount of freeway lanes to a rapid transit line is way, way more expensive. Spending on automobiles uses up an unconscionable share of our GDP which should go to more useful things. Considering the median income in America, there is no reason we shouldn't have a standard of living miles ahead of Western Europe--but we don't because we all waste so much money driving around.

c) Building a single transit line isn't very useful for most people. Only once a complete network is built--with a dense city to match--is transit useful. This requires massive up-front capital expenditures but produces an efficient and affordable system that can last forever. The opposite applies to highways. An individual road project is useful on its own because it's still connected to every other road. If we choose to build transit (which we should) we need to go all in. Piecemeal doesn't work when it comes to trains. Similarly, this makes the marginal benefit of a single road project appear higher than the marginal benefit of a new train line. A new road can usually cut journey times between two preexisting points than a brand new rail line. However, the affect of a transit-based city is shorter journey times in aggregate than in a sprawling highway-based city where people must travel three times as far to go anywhere.

[Samof94]

A lot of white people don’t want to live near brown and black people. Can you really imagine a “MAGA type” living near Latinos.

It's vice versa as well. You think that is why the MTA, NJ Transit, SEPTA, MARTA get cut, because of racism in public transportation? It's possible.

Some of the white suburbanites in Cobb County call MARTA nasty names.

Exactly. One appeal of the exurbs for some white people is not being around minorities.

[darklordoftech]

A lot of white people don’t want to live near brown and black people. Can you really imagine a “MAGA type” living near Latinos.

Do people become more racist when they have kids? Plenty of people live in NYC until they have kids.

[beaver2.0]

Realistically: convince middle class people to take the bus/metro.  In my area we have a lot of public transportation.  You rarely see middle class people on there with the exception of weekday commutes.

If people have a car, they take the car.  It's a cultural thing that needs to be broken.

[SevenEleven]

Stop electing Republicans would be the first step.

[RINO Tom]

Uh, this obviously depends on the place, lol.  In general, places (i.e., cities and maybe counties) that utilize public transportation should pay for it at the local level, ideally in a perfect world through something like a progressive city-level income tax.  Use of this public transportation should then be offered to residents at a lower rate through a sort of "pass" and cheaper (or even free) for the lowest income residents.  People who do not get the pass at a discounted price will have to pay a significantly higher fee for use, ideally charging those from out of town even more.  I am not sure the best way to do the geography-based elements, but I think there are certainly some creative ways ... something in the same vein as tolls.

[Sol]

A lot of white people don’t want to live near brown and black people. Can you really imagine a “MAGA type” living near Latinos.

Do people become more racist when they have kids? Plenty of people live in NYC until they have kids.

Yeah, but such people still have the option to live in an integrated suburb or in one which is not.

[Former President tack50]

Realistically: convince middle class people to take the bus/metro.  In my area we have a lot of public transportation.  You rarely see middle class people on there with the exception of weekday commutes.

If people have a car, they take the car.  It's a cultural thing that needs to be broken.

To be fair, it is kind of a feedback loop cycle in that, when traffic is good or even just decent, the car will beat the public transit most of the time.

[PSOL]

Nationalization and expansion under a nominally left supermajority in government, similar to the happenings with British Transport infrastructure during the Atlee Era.

[AlterEgo]

A lot of white people don’t want to live near brown and black people. Can you really imagine a “MAGA type” living near Latinos.

Do people become more racist when they have kids? Plenty of people live in NYC until they have kids.

Yeah, but such people still have the option to live in an integrated suburb or in one which is not.

Not necessarily. Those kinds of decent middle-class+ integrated neighborhoods may exist around larger cities like Atlanta, Charlotte, NoVa, NYC, etc. There aren't a whole lot, if any, in say Sarasota, FL or Appleton, WI.

[Sol]

A lot of white people don’t want to live near brown and black people. Can you really imagine a “MAGA type” living near Latinos.

Do people become more racist when they have kids? Plenty of people live in NYC until they have kids.

Yeah, but such people still have the option to live in an integrated suburb or in one which is not.

Not necessarily. Those kinds of decent middle-class+ integrated neighborhoods may exist around larger cities like Atlanta, Charlotte, NoVa, NYC, etc. There aren't a whole lot, if any, in say Sarasota, FL or Appleton, WI.

I was talking about NYC in response to Bronz's comment, but actually Sarasota is fairly diverse.

[AlterEgo]

A lot of white people don’t want to live near brown and black people. Can you really imagine a “MAGA type” living near Latinos.

Do people become more racist when they have kids? Plenty of people live in NYC until they have kids.

Yeah, but such people still have the option to live in an integrated suburb or in one which is not.

Not necessarily. Those kinds of decent middle-class+ integrated neighborhoods may exist around larger cities like Atlanta, Charlotte, NoVa, NYC, etc. There aren't a whole lot, if any, in say Sarasota, FL or Appleton, WI.

I was talking about NYC in response to Bronz's comment, but actually Sarasota is fairly diverse.

Maybe...but it's not real integrated.

[tschandler]

A lot of white people don’t want to live near brown and black people. Can you really imagine a “MAGA type” living near Latinos.

They regularly do?  When is the last time you were in the Rural Sun Belt?

[Samof94]

They still tend to live in different parts of cities and stuff.

[Samof94]

Stop electing Republicans would be the first step.

True. Also, you’d need to change the attitudes towards cars, especially in the South.

[SevenEleven]

Stop electing Republicans would be the first step.

True. Also, you’d need to change the attitudes towards cars, especially in the South.

Even CA still struggles here, it's a sunbelt problem as most of the eastern seaboard has fairly decent transport (though still largely inadequate outside of DC, NYC, and maybe Philly).