http://www.theatlanticcities.com/commute/2014/02/far-beyond-rush-hour-incredible-rise-peak-public-transportation/8311/
By Eric Jafffe, February 6, 2014
Take a look at the above photo of a New York City subway platform and
guess what day and time it was taken. If your snap glance absorbed only
the crowd, you probably guessed a weekday rush hour. But look more
closely. You don't see grey-haired men in flannel suits with solemn
faces, you see All The Young Dudes in jeans just kind of slouching
there, dude-like. You don't see businesswomen striding for the stairs,
you see ponytails and a lime green T-shirt that wouldn't fly even on the
most casual of Fridays.
This is not the picture of a platform at morning or evening rush on a weekday in Manhattan. It's the picture of a platform at
half past one. In the morning. On a weekend. In Brooklyn. It's also a sign of things to come.
The growth of midday, evening, and weekend transit use is not unique to
this particular stop on the New York City subway. More critically, the
rise of off-peak ridership is not unique to New York City or to subway
systems, either. Metropolitan areas across the United States — whether
their primary mass transit system is a metro rail or a commuter train or
a bus network — are recognizing that city residents can't get by on
great rush-hour service alone. They need frequent, reliable transit all
hours of the day and long into the night.
"The growth in transit ridership is happening in the off-peak hours," says transportation planner
David King of Columbia University. "It's strange. You get on a train at five o'clock in morning and it's jammed."
Take the New York City subway in a broader sense. Since 2007, ridership
on the weekends has grown at a much greater rate than ridership on the
weekdays. During the period from
2007 to 2012,
weekday ridership grew at just under 7 percent. During that same
stretch, weekend ridership grew at just over 10 percent. A planning
director at the Metropolitan Transportation Authority told the
New York Times in 2011 that to find a similar explosion in weekend subway use you'd have to go back to a time when people worked six days a week.
"The New York City subway has seen tremendous growth on the weekends
over the years," says MTA spokesman Aaron Donovan. "Weekend growth has
outpaced regular growth."
Now head to the Midwest and take the bus system in Minneapolis-St.
Paul. There, too, off-peak service demand has outpaced rush-hour growth
along some bus corridors. In response, the Metro Transit agency in the
Twin Cities
expanded evening and weekend service last summer. Some off-peak frequencies
have tripled
— down to a bus every 20 minutes instead of one every hour. That puts
service ahead of where it was even before the Great Recession. In other
words, this isn't just the economy recovering, it's ridership surging.
"There's many routes where the off-peak ridership is growing faster
than the peak ridership," says John Levin, director of service
development at Metro Transit. "We're always going and finding where we
can free up resources and where we need to add resources, and it tended
to be that we've seen the most need during the off-peak, in terms of the
overall scale."
And go to Los Angeles, where even commuter rail — the transport mode
created specifically for rush-hour riders — has seen an off-peak and
weekend bump in some metro areas. Metrolink spokesman Jeff Lustgarten
says weekend ridership in May 2013 hit 21,315, a jump of nearly 30
percent on the year before. He says that while weekday ridership is
steady, weekend growth has been in the double digits. In response to
this off-peak demand, Metrolink began
promoting weekend rides and recently doubled
some Sunday service.
"Certainly commuter-based travel is always going to be a core component
of overall ridership, but people who have recreational trips … they're
taking advantage of the system on the weekends," says Lustgarten.
"Generally speaking, people are looking for alternative means of getting
around town."
Looking for it on a weekend. In spring and summer. In Los Angeles.
• • • • •
Transit experts have been
making the case for off-peak service expansion for years. It's often
cost-efficient.
(Many drivers needed for rush hour get paid to sit around during the
midday hours.) It's always great for society. (Lower-income people use
off-peak transit at much higher rates than wealthy people; a
2003 study
found that 60 percent of off-peak riders made under $40,000 a year.)
And there's enormous growth potential. (Two-thirds of transit trips are
not work commutes, as the
Commuting in America, 2013 chart below shows, making them strong candidates to occur outside rush hour.)
"There's long been a recognition here that frequency improvements —
especially off-peak frequency improvement — more than pay for themselves
in terms of ridership," says Metro Transit's Levin. "When we doubled
the frequency on one of our core routes a few years ago, we more than
doubled the ridership."
Commuting in America, 2013.
Best of all, the benefits of full-day service create a cycle that
perpetuates more transit use across the board. That's the main takeaway
of a recent off-peak service analysis made on the Pascack Valley line of
New Jersey Transit commuter rail. The agency introduced non-rush hour
trains on that line in October 2007 — seven inbound and six outbound
where there'd been no off-peak service before. In June 2010, Devajyoti
Deka of the Alan M. Voorhees Transportation Center began conducting
surveys and on-board focus groups with off-peak and peak riders alike,
to see how the service change had influenced their behavior.
Without question, the addition of off-peak service on the Pascack Valley line took cars off the road. In a
recent issue of Transportation,
Deka and coauthor Thomas Marchwinski of NJT report savings of at least
12 million vehicle miles a year. More fascinating was the way off-peak
trains affected rush-hour ridership. Roughly 5 percent of surveyed
riders started using more peak trains once the off-peak service was
introduced. And of all the passengers who said they'd go back to driving
if off-peak service were cancelled, three in five were peak riders.
Deka believes that there's a psychological element to off-peak service
that transit agencies fail to appreciate. If people know a train can
take you back anytime you need, they're more willing to take the train
in during rush hour in the morning. "They have this thing in the back of
their mind that if they have to come back early they can come back
early, or if they have to stay late they can stay late," says Deka. "So
there is this indirect benefit which you will not notice in ridership
data."
A crowded New York City subway platform.
(As for that ridership data, Pascack Valley weekend ridership was up
more than 20 percent in the first quarter of 2013 over the year before,
while weekday was up 8 percent [
PDF]. That trend held true across the whole NJT system: weekends up 12 percent, weekdays 3 percent.)
Considering the rationale for off-peak service has been around for
years, the big question is why transit agencies are only now seeing
enough fresh demand to do something about it. Some agencies point to
changing travel habits
among Millennials. Some experts see a broader but related shift in American auto dependency, with an increasing number of urban households
living car-free.
That's true even in places without great transit systems — Detroit
experienced a 5 percent increase in car-free households from 2007 to
2012 — suggesting economic roots.
Immigration might play a role in off-peak demand, too. Last year,
Governing reported
that immigration had surpassed domestic population growth in 135 U.S.
metro areas, according to Census data. Such demographic shifts could
have a big influence on the nation's transport network, because
low-income immigrants are much more likely to commute off-peak than
their American-born counterparts (see evening rates below), says
planning professor
Michael Smart of Rutgers, who studies
immigrant transportation patterns.
They're also more likely to use transit for the types of non-work trips
that often occur off-peak; for instance, says Smart, they're five times
more likely to take transit to get groceries.
"It's definitely true that immigrants are more likely to be using
transit to get to work in odd hours," he says. "But even more than that,
they're much more likely than the U.S. born — particularly low-income
or low-skilled foreign-born people — to use transit for things that are
not about a job."
Courtesy Michael Smart.
Then there are changing work patterns themselves. The
rise of telecommuting
means people traveling at non-traditional times for both labor and
leisure. Such shifts, in turn, mean service workers must travel at off
times to get to their jobs. The result, says David King, the Columbia
planner, is a bifurcation of the labor market in which neither
high-skill nor low-skill workers are tethered to a 9-to-5 workday — or a
9-to-5 transit system — as strongly as they used to be.
"That will dramatically change how we travel," says King. "What that means for future investment priorities is also important."
• • • • •
Bay Area Rapid Transit is already weighing what off-peak demand might mean for
tomorrow's transit investments. BART has long been
considered a hybrid
commuter rail and metro core system: serving downtown San Francisco but
also the suburban Bay area. The plans for 2025 and beyond, dubbed
"Metro Vision," call for tipping this balance toward the core end [
PDF]. That means trains running every 15 minutes or better middays, late nights, and weekends — true "show up and go" service.
"That gets us less out of the commuter rail mindset and more to the
metro mindset of frequent service for 18 hours a day, rather than just
frequent service during the peak," says
Tom Radulovich,
head of the BART board of directors. "Metro Vision, just the name of
the project implies that at least the BART planners think we're more of a
metro than commuter rail. And this is what metros do — run frequent
off-peak service."
The ridership trends certainly point in that direction. Off-peak
ridership on BART has grown steadily since mid-2011, often outpacing
rush-hour rates. In October 2012, for instance, peak ridership grew 10
percent on the year before while weekday off-peak grew 14 percent,
Saturday grew 21 percent, and Sunday grew 13 percent. The agency made
off-peak expansions several years ago only to cut them
during the recession,
but it's started making them again on what Radulovich calls the
"shoulders of the peak." Those first few trains after rush-hour service
ended were just too crowded.
Radulovich sees a number of reasons for the rise in off-peak demand.
Tech companies keeping unusual hours. Service workers returning to the
job market on swing shifts. A declining rate of car-ownership among
riders. Perhaps above all, a rise in residential and business
development in and around BART stations — and not just those located
downtown. Altogether it amounts to a culture of residents less reliant
on the automobile for whatever trip purpose, at whatever trip time.
"I think those folks are going to want BART to run more frequently and
be more convenient at more hours of the day," he says. "They're going to
be interested in off-peak trips, they're going to be interested in
Saturday and Sunday frequency, they're going to be interested in evening
frequency, they're going to be interested in late-night service, in a
way that our traditional park and ride suburban constituency is not."
Of course, if it were easy to build a full-scale all-day transit
system, more cities would have done it. The challenges generally break
down into money and politics (what doesn't?). On the economic side,
there's a reluctance to shift resources away from rush-hour because
that's where ridership, and thus revenue, is more certain. Off-peak
service means new operating costs, in the form of drivers and
maintenance, and perhaps even new capital expenses. Since most fleet
maintenance is done on weekends and nights — in a word, off-peak — some
systems will need more vehicles to expand service into those periods.
At the cultural end, the low-income riders who stand to benefit most
from increased off-peak service often have the weakest political voice.
Some politicians carry a vehicle bias: they will see empty midday buses
and trains and blast off-peak expansion as wasteful, even as they
endorse highway lanes full of single-occupancy cars. Others have a
rush-hour mindset: they come to work at that time, so everyone else
must, too. These counterarguments aren't always off-base. Most people
do drive most places, and the biggest commute shares
do occur at the peaks [
PDF].
"The peak tendency has been amazingly consistent," says Steven Polzin of the University of South Florida, co-author of the
Commuting in America, 2013
series on commute trends. "One of the intriguing things is there's been
a decline of the 'peak of the peak' commuting, but not a lot."
What that means is that the early adopters of tomorrow's all-day
transit systems are likely to be big agencies in major cities. That's
not to say smaller areas lack the popular demand or the institutional
desire to go off-peak. Just recently Jacksonville, North Carolina,
population 70,000,
expanded bus service
to the shoulders of the peak so more commuters could get to and from
work. It's more to say that "somebody has to change the tradition," as
Deka puts it, "and the big agencies are in a better position, I think,
to change the tradition."