Improving transit

Two weeks ago, the front page of the Inquirer’s Sunday Currents section published a piece by Randall O’Toole entitled “SEPTA out of loop on transit needs.” A copy of the article is available on my website. The article starts out reasonably enough by pointing out that SEPTA is not serving suburban commuters very well. It continues by pointing out that because the Philadelphia suburbs have been developing in a sprawling low-density fashion, it will be difficult for public transit to meet the needs of those commuters.

These are reasonable points that any serious transit planner and advocate should consider. But the piece goes downhill from here. Even if you don’t know the author and his history, the article quickly reveals his ideological biases. It soon becomes evident that it is an analysis of public transit and urban planning from the standpoint of someone for whom sprawling suburban development and the automobile travel that goes with it is the ideal.

Libertarians Like Suburban Sprawl

One of the bizarre strands of American libertarian thought is its anti-transit, pro-car wing. These libertarians have convinced themselves that their anti-government agenda leads to the conclusion that suburban sprawl is the only form of life that is truly free This kind of libertarianism is not just anti-government but anti-social. These libertarians prefer single family houses, preferably on one acre lots, and office building and shopping malls surrounded by sterile lawns and parking lots, all of which one can only reach by car. It is as if they want to minimize any but the most anonymous and one-shot connection between human beings. It is as if the density of interaction found in real, multi-use neighborhoods that include both residences and commercial corridors that encourage walking is a threat to our individuality.

What is bizarre about this point of view is its assumption that suburban sprawl and commuting by automobile is the product of market forces, not government policy. But that is certainly not true.

The Real Costs of Commuting By Car

Like all transit, commuting by car receives a public subsidy. Highways are paid, in part, by the gas tax. But other direct costs of suburban sprawl come out of general revenues—the local share of major highways, local roads, road maintenance and snow removal, police highway patrol, traffic signals, accident clearance and emergency medical care. Similarly, suburban development would not occur as it does today if it were not for the heavily subsidized infrastructure spending—on water lines, sewers, sidewalks, parks—that make it possible.

There are also the enormous indirect costs of the suburban sprawl and our dependence on cars. Pollution is created both by cars and the paving of so much land. Regional economic growth is undermined by sprawl because workers cannot easily travel to jobs, businessmen cannot stay in touch with those who supply them with goods and services, and everyone wastes time in traffic jams. Lives are lost and damaged by accidents.

And then there are the costs to human well-being when families and friends are undermined by the distances people have to travel to see each other and by all those things that libertarians love because they keep people apart from one another.

If we include all the direct and indirect costs, the subsidy for cars is higher than that for transit. Yet wherever people can commute by frequent, fast, and inexpensive transit, they do so in large numbers. Transit oriented suburbs, in and outside the city, remain the most desirable—and expensive—places to live. The housing boom in Center City shows us that a life without cars is attractive to people.

Some Ideas for Improving Transit

More people are commuting by car but only because we invest more in roads than in transit. Imagine, however, the consequences of investing enough in public transit to adopt some of the innovative transit solutions found elsewhere in the world:

• We could convert our commuter rails to light rail. Light rail cars are more like subway cars. They have big doors and there is no step up from the platform to get into the car. As a result, people get on and off much faster and a conductor is not needed on every car. In addition, light rail cars accelerate and decelerate much faster. The time spent at each station is pretty small. But add up a small time saving for every stop on each train, and then add all the trains together, and the result is that the capacity of the train line has dramatically increased. Converting commuter rail to light rail would allow us to run much more frequent service than we do today. And that make all the difference. Imagine, the consequences if, say, the R8 to Mt. Airy and Chestnut Hill ran every fifteen minutes. Ridership would dramatically increase. No one would ever have to look at a schedule but would head to the train whenever they wanted to travel. If we run the trains on other lines every twenty minutes, we could also run express lines out to the suburbs. And we could reopen closed stations or create new train stations in the city. Operating costs per passenger would go down dramatically because we would need fewer conductors on each train although we would have more employees in the system as a whole.

• We could put wireless networks on all buses and trains. This is becoming commonplace in Europe. And, again, it leads to increased ridership.

• We could create a personalized public transit system such as the Rufbus found in Friedrichschafen and Munich. By using flexible routes that are directed by computer aided dispatch and vehicle location systems that use the global positioning network, this kind of transit system can take passengers to and from their homes or locations within a short walk from their homes. Computer aided dispatch and routing can also reduce waiting times and travel times. This system is designed to increase transit use in low-density suburbs. And where employed it has been extremely effective in doing so.

• We could adopt electronic fare systems in which signals from smart cards are read as passengers walk onto train platforms or near bus stops. Such a system can have a number of good consequences. First, it speeds people on and off buses, trolleys, and trains. As I suggested above, even small reductions in time spent at a stop makes it possible to run transit vehicles more often. Second, it makes the personalized transit systems possible. Third, it makes it possible for an agency like SEPTA to adjust fares based upon the time of day people travel. This gives folks an incentive to take trains other than the one or two at the peak of rush hour and makes for less crowded trains and a more efficient and comfortable use of transit equipment. And, fourth, it would allow SEPTA to create special fare zones much more easily. SEPTA could, for example, create day passes for people who want to go up and down one of our commercial corridors—Germantown Avenue, 5th Street in the Olney area, Baltimore Avenue, Lancaster Avenue. These day passes would allow riders to get on and off a bus or trolley as many times as they want for just a little more than the cost of a round trip fare. This would dramatically increase business in these commercial corridors.

How this works in practice: An Example

Imagine how these improvements would work together. Suppose you are a lawyer who works in Center City but lives in the Horsham Area. You have a client late in the day and have to miss your usual train. Your client leaves and you head for the door. In the past, you would have had to stay 15 minutes later to write a brief memo about your meeting. But you know that, with the wireless technology on the train, you can do that on your way home and save it to your company’s server. You don’t bother to check the train schedule for the R2 to Willow Grove Station because the train runs run every 15 minutes during peak times. You walk over to Suburban Station. Your smart card is read as you walk down the stairs to the platform. A local train is waiting. You are not sure when the next express train to Willow Grove will pull into the station so you are not sure whether to wait for the express. But that problem is easily solved. You look up at a large plasma screen. The computers that run SEPTA has calculated that, taking into account any possible delays and the number of passengers going to each destination, anyone who wants to go to the Willow Grove station would get there faster waiting for the express. So on the screen, a light flashes telling you to wait for the express which will arrive in 7 minutes.

In seven minutes you hop on the R2 Express. You take out your computer and quickly write the memo about your meeting with your client. You finish just as the train pulls into Willow Grove Station. You walk through a gate that again reads your smart card. It quickly determines that you are traveling a little later than usual when the fare is lower and gives you a small discount on the fare. Your card is programmed with your home address—near the corner of Madison and Terrace Roads in Horsham— and the bus you take there—the 55. There are three 55 buses waiting in front of the station. You look up at a large plasma display screen. Based on an algorithm that takes into account the usual patterns of ridership at this time and the home addresses of the people who whose cards were read back in Suburban Station, the system tells you to take the second bus. All the commuters who live near you have been directed to that bus. Those who take the 55 all the way out to Warrington in Bucks County are told to get on the third bus. The driver in the second bus looks down at the screen in his bus which has a map of the route for today, which is optimized so that it enables him efficiently to drop everyone on the bus within three blocks of their house. You get on the bus and again take out your computer. With the wireless network you can download your favorite blogs and music and enjoy yourself as the bus takes you home. And you can also check the prices for condos at the new mixed use residential / commercial development going up in half of the old parking lot at Willow Grove Station. SEPTA decided to sell the parking lot because so many people were taking the new buses that most of the parking lot wasn’t needed anymore. The sale of the parking lot is just one of the ways SEPTA has raised money to pay for the improvements in transit.

Our Task

These transit improvements would dramatically increase transit ridership in the city and suburbs. They are within our reach, but only if we provide the capital funds. The costs of a dramatically improved transit system are not small. But they are not out of sight either. We could convert commuter rail to light rail for 400 to 500 million. An electronic ticketing system might cost 80 million. While expensive, these kinds of transit improvement are, in the medium and long term, far less costly than our dependence on the automobile.

If we want to improve our economy and our lives in the city and region as a whole we have to start building a movement for serious investment in public transit now.