To consolidate, disseminate, and gather information concerning the 710 expansion into our San Rafael neighborhood and into our surrounding neighborhoods. If you have an item that you would like posted on this blog, please e-mail the item to Peggy Drouet at pdrouet@earthlink.net
Passengers leave trains at the Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Station on New Year's Eve.
Ever since I started writing about urban transportation systems, I’ve
heard about how East Asia is one of the world's leaders in creating
efficient and effective public transit. Sure enough, this past winter, I
took a trip to Taiwan to visit my relatives and I was blown away by how
effective it is there.
While I’ve only been exposed to American transit systems all my life,
I’ve already come up with a huge list of problems I have with public
transportation, particularly with Los Angeles County’s Metro System. I
mean, when it’s forecasted to take 20 years to extend the Purple Line a
mere eight miles and Beijing was able to add 235 miles of track in just seven
years (that’s more track than the entire New York City subway), it
seems comical that local leaders were so excited during the Purple Line
Groundbreaking late last year.
A GIF with the history of the Beijing Subway. Pay attention to the rapid expansion during 2007-
It
may not be a fair comparison to make, due to cultural and legal
differences between the two countries. Ridership numbers are also
completely different, as Taipei handles around 1,656,700 daily while Los Angeles deals with 308,011. But it does make you question what the people at Metro HQ are doing - since they are funded by state taxpayers - and if they're actually using our money effectively. But Taipei's MRT system is
a glimpse of what’s possible in Los Angeles: effective, efficient and
reliable transportation that that can reduce traffic congestion and
improve air quality in one of the most car-clogged cities in
America. Why can't we adopt some of the Taiwanese practices and
implement them in Los Angeles?
Here’s just a few observations I made during my stay in Taipei.
Note: These are just observations based on my own personal
experiences. Your own observations may be different. Also, I’m a
Taiwanese-American and a public transportation advocate.
Safety:
Taipei’s MRT has platform screen doors at most stations. These are
basically panels that only slide open once the train has arrived and
opened its own doors. When the train leaves, the doors close to prevent
anyone from falling into the tracks, whether accidentally or
intentionally. Lights on top of the gates also flash when trains
approach and depart, and a loud warning tone is also played from
speakers above.
Here's an example of a train arriving at Taipei Main Station. The
warning sound at 00:14 is for the train on the other side of the
platform. Notice how people follow the painted signs on the ground
telling them where to stand and how door closing announcements are made
in four different languages at 00:42.
Some may worry that if there’s an emergency, it would be impossible
to get everyone off a train since the doors are designed to open only if
the train has stopped at the right spot. But the walls in between the
doors all have emergency release handles on the train side so passengers
can get out.
These gates are absent in Los Angeles and throughout transportation
systems throughout the the United States. Why? Officials say it’s
because these doors are too expensive to build. And these wouldn't be
too useful since Metro officials decided to build sections of the Expo,
Gold and Blue Lines at street level, so anyone can walk onto the
tracks. That's why the Blue line is one of the deadliest light rail
lines in the nation, where over 120 people have died in the past two decades.
But honestly, even putting a worker out on the platforms to watch
over everyone could decrease the number of deaths or incidents per year.
During rush hour in Taipei, there are security guards are both sides
of the platform to make sure trains run smoothly and immediately report
any issues that may arise. So if someone does fall in, they can
immediately alert MRT operators and stop trains to prevent deaths on the
tracks.
Cleanliness:
Time tables outside the gates at Shipai station.
This may primarily be a cultural difference but there are some design
choices that MRT planners in Taiwan have made that prevent dirtiness
throughout the system.
You know that lovely stench that hangs around busses and trains in
the United States? Yeah, that doesn’t exist in Taiwan because they use
plastic seats and flooring, instead of trying to make the seats more
comfortable with thin cushioning. Accidentally spill your coffee on the
train? No problem, it won’t seep into the seat and become impossible to
clean out.
Sure, you could say they're not as comfortable. But honestly, the
cushioning hardly does anything and what’s the point of public
transportation, comfort or getting people around?
Remember those platform screens I talked about earlier? They also
help prevent trash and dirt from getting sucked in and out of the
tunnels as trains come and go so platforms are considerably cleaner as
well.
As with Los Angeles Metro, it’s illegal to eat or drink on Taipei’s
metro system. And while I never saw any police officers or Metro
officials checking in on the trains, it’s socially unacceptable to eat
on the train. Basically, everyone will stare at you and give you
disgusting looks if you do, according to my friends who have
accidentally done so. It’s a sort of self-enforcement, so to say, and
something that’s mostly due to cultural differences between the two
nations.
Train Design:
A man waits on the Taipei MRT during New Year's Eve.
Train
doors have four doors on each side instead of the typical two in
American systems. This means it's easier and faster to get on and off
trains at platforms and in emergency situations as well.
Most seats also face toward the aisle so you don't have to climb over
someone to get out. This design also allows for wider aisles and thus,
more standing room for passengers during peak hours. Sure, you have
fewer seats but remember, this is a mass transit system designed to move
tens of thousands of people around per day. Would you rather miss a
train because it’s too full or get a place to stand on the train?
It’s also possible to travel the entire length of the train without
having to open a single door. No only does it make it easier to travel
from car to car, but it also decreases congestion in each car as riders
can easily move from a heavily congested car to one with more room.
Ground to ceiling support beams split into three different poles so
there’s more things to hang onto when the train is travelling. There are
also never-ending lines of handholds around an inch away from each
other hanging from horizontal support beams.
You'll
always know which station is next in Taipei's MRT system. The displays
alternate between Chinese and English displays.
One of my pet peeves with the Los Angeles light rail
is that there is absolutely no internal display that tells you what the
next stop actually is. Sure, the train operators announce it on
loudspeaker. But trains are loud, especially through tunnels and it’s
often difficult to hear the announcement.
You’ll never have that problem in Taipei. First of all, there’s a
display above each door that tells you which station you just left, the
next station and the station after that. So you’ll know two stations in
advance when to prepare to get off. The display also has an arrow for
direction of travel that corresponds with a map above.
Instead of having a train operator make the announcements for each
station, destinations are made by a relatively loud recording in case
train operators speak too softly (I can’t even remember how many times
train operators are so soft I can’t understand anything they’re saying).
They’re also made in four different languages: Mandarin, Taiwanese,
Hakka and English.
Line Layout:
Taipei on the left, Los Angeles on the right.
This
is difficult to compare. One of the struggles with creating a transit
system for Los Angeles County is the fact that it’s so massive that it’s
hard to cover every part of the region. But let’s take a look at how
lines are laid out in the two systems.
In Los Angeles, most of the lines converge downtown, whether at 7th
Street/Metro Center or Union Station. This means if you’re trying to get
from say, LAX/Aviation Station to Culver City Station, you would have
to take the Green Line to the Blue Line into downtown, transfer onto an
Expo Line train and then wait until you get to the end of the line. This
trip would take around an hour and a half, according to Google. And the
two stations are only around seven miles apart. Why does it take so
long? By putting most transfer stations in Downtown, a lot of time is
wasted headed east or west toward them if you’re just trying to travel
north or south.
Taipei on the other hand, has so many lines intersecting one another
that transfer stations are scattered throughout the city. So there’s
less time wasted traveling toward a transfer station instead of to your
actual destination.
Each line also runs on its own tracks instead of sharing them with
other lines. As a result, there are more trains running in each line and
thus, less congestion on each platform and shorter wait times for each
train. So if you miss a train in Taiwan, it’s not a huge issue since
there will be another one arriving within two to five minutes. But if
you miss a train in Los Angeles, it’s not uncommon to have to wait more
than 10-15 minutes for the next one to come.
Station Design:
Some of the services offered at most stations in Taipei.
Most
stations have a little snack bar or two outside the station gates where
you can grab a small meal once you leave the station. Very convenient
for someone who’s just gotten off of work or a student coming back from
school and wants something like a red bean cake to munch on.
Some stations are also integrated directly into shopping centers,
tourist destinations or restaurant areas. Take Taipei Main Station for
example. You can transfer to another line there, get on the high-speed
rail, transfer onto bus lines, go shopping in the underground malls or a
Shin Kong Mitsukoshi department store across the street, or grab a meal
at one of the restaurants on the second floor. Basically, stations
aren't simply just something you pass through on your journeys. They're
well lit, clean, inviting and promote not only the Metro system itself
but also the community around it.
The stations and systems as a whole are also very friendly for
non-Mandarin speakers. All signs are in Traditional Chinese, of course,
but also have English directly underneath. And there’s so many signs
everywhere that clearly direct you towards exits, restrooms and other
parts of the station that it’s really hard to get lost.
An example of an underground mall connected to Taipei Main Station.
Each
station entrance is also numbered, which makes it easier to identify
which ones to use when you’re entering and exiting the station. And
there are display boards that display when trains are enterting and
leaving the station outside the station gates so you know if you have to
scramble for your train or not.
Ticketing and fare collection is just so much easier as well. Instead
of forcing everyone to buy something like a TAP card that you might
forget at home or not know how much value you have, you purchase a
little one-use token that you scan to enter the gates and deposit in a
slot to exit. And when you do buy the tokens, the ticketing machines
have a map with how much it costs to travel to each station so you don’t
have to spend time calculating how much you’ll have to spend on each
trip.
This video shows the token system in Kaohsiung, a major port city in the south of Taiwan. Taipei follows a similar system.
Alternatively, there is the EasyCard for more frequent riders, which
is basically a better TAP card that works with Metro and bus systems in
Taipei, along with many more around the country. You can buy them at any
station or convenience store like 7-11 and refill them there as well.
Conclusion:
A train arrives at Shipai station in Taipei's MRT system.
While
comparing the two systems definitely isn’t fair, looking at the two
side by side does reveal a lot of the shortfalls that Los Angeles Metro
currently faces. And Taipei affords a look into how a
transportation system should really run. Perhaps the most obvious
difference is the fact that Los Angeles Metro attempts to tackle the
transportation needs of multiple cities within Los Angeles County
whereas Taipei MRT just needs to deal with Taipei City itself, which is a
smaller and denser area.
Taipei MRT is also run by the Taipei Rapid Transit Corporation, a
private company, while Los Angeles Metro is run by the Los Angeles
County Metropolitan Transportation Authority, a public company that also
oversees bus and other transportation operations in the region. So TRTC
can focus on just perfecting its metro system in Taipei while LACMTA
has to focus on multiple systems across a massive land area and through
multiple cities, which has stirred up quite a bit of controversy before.
There’s also a huge cultural difference between Taipei and Los
Angeles. If Taipei’s complex and innovative system was implemented in
Los Angeles, I wouldn’t be too surprised to see rampant vandalism
throughout the system. It already happens on basically every train and
station - imagine what would happen if vandals had new things to break
and destroy. Would it be cost effective in this case? And in Taipei,
people don’t see public transportation as a nuisance. The car isn’t king
and people actually understand that not every single one of them can
drive a car every day and actually get around efficiently. Even the mayor of Taipei takes the MRT to work
instead of the typical limo that politicians are so fond of. People
don't play annoying music or talk loudly on the trains, making the
overall experience onboard much more peaceful than how it is in Los
Angeles. I feel like this is because in Taiwan, there's more of a focus
on maintaining societal order and doing what's best for society over
pursuing individual endeavors. At least, that's what I've noticed during
my upbringing in a Taiwanese family.
There’s a near limitless list of conditions to consider but I’ll leave you with these for now.
The Central City Association — which represents downtown Los Angeles
businesses — is holding a half-day summit on Feb. 19 about growth in
DTLA and the future of transit. The flier is below; you can register to attend here
(it’s $125 for those who aren’t CCA members). Metro CEO Art Leahy and
Metro Board Chair Eric Garcetti are both on the docket to speak.
It should be an interesting topic, given that DTLA is already the hub
of the regional transit system with more projects on the way. The
Regional Connector to link the Blue, Expo and Gold Lines is under
construction, as are both the second phase of the Expo Line and the
Purple Line Extension, both of which will link DTLA to Westside jobs and
residents.
The Metro Board of Directors held their January meeting this morning. It wasn’t a very busy agenda but some of the actions taken included:
•Item 72. The Board approved a 12-month pilot program with Google to
place advertising on the Metro.net website while also asking staff to
study issuing a request-for-proposals for a longer-term contract. The
ads are expected to generate about $350,000 in revenue to Metro during
the pilot period with no cost to Metro. Ads must adhere to Metro
standards and will mostly appear in sidebars of web pages or at the
bottom of the page (no pop ups). The ads are expected to appear on the
website within 30 days. Metro staff report
•Item 79. The Board voted 7 to 5 to approve a one-year contract
extension option with Outfront Media (formerly CBS Outdoors) to place
advertising on Metro buses, trains and facilities as offered in a
substitute motion by Board Member Michael D. Antonovich. The approval
canceled consideration of the original motion to instead issue a new RFP for an advertising contract.
In a presentation, Outfront Media showed some ways that up to $1
million in additional annual ad revenue could be raised, including
placing ads on the front of buses, putting more posters in rail
stations, adding digital signage to rail stations, expanded coverage of
bus and train windows with ads, selling line and station naming rights
and putting ‘media streamers’ in trains (i.e. video monitors).
During the discussion, Board Chair Eric Garcetti said some
of those ideas may be considered but he had concerns about some of them
— specifically mentioning that certain type of ads (such as those
promoting alcohol) should not be on the Metro system.
•Item 77. The Board approved a resolution supporting a bid for Los Angeles County to host the World Fair from 2022 to 2024. Resolution
•Item 54. The Board approved an $8.2-million contract
increase to replace five of the nine escalators at the Red/Purple Line
Pershing Square Station and bring them up to the new standards of the
American Public Transit Assn. Staff report
•Item 22. The Board approved revising a joint development
agreement with MacArthur Park Metro, LLC, which is trying to build 81
units of affordable apartments and 6,00o to 12,000 square feet of retail
on 1.8 acres above the Red/Purple Line’s Westlake/MacArthur Park
Station. If the developer can secure the money to build the project, the
north portal would be relocated as part of the deal. Staff report
Safety is often celebrated as the biggest benefit
of a world full of driverless cars, but two other presumed social
improvements follow closely behind. One is that the technology could
reduce traffic congestion, since shorter gaps between cars means more
cars per lane. The other is that car travel will become more productive
time for either business or pleasure—the way riding a train is today.
To wit: the way Mercedes envisions driverless interiors (top) isn't
much different from the set-up already used in Amtrak's Acela (bottom): A new simulation-based study
of driverless cars questions how well these two big secondary
benefits—less traffic and more comfort—can coexist. Trains are conducive
to productivity in large part because they aren't as jerky as cars. But
if driverless cars mimic the acceleration and deceleration of trains,
speeding up and slowing down more smoothly for the rider's sake, they
might sacrifice much of their ability to relieve traffic in the process.
"Acceleration has big impacts on congestion at intersections because it describes how quickly a vehicle begins to move," Scott Le Vine of Imperial College London,
who led the research, tells CityLab via email. "Think about being stuck
behind an 18-wheeler when the light turns green. It accelerates very
slowly, which means that you're delayed much more than if you were
behind a car that accelerated quickly."
For their study, Le Vine and colleagues simulated traffic at a basic
four-way urban intersection where 25 percent of the vehicles were
driverless and the rest were standard. In some scenarios, the driverless
cars accelerated and decelerated the way that light rail trains do—more
comfortable than, say, riding in a taxi, but still a little jerky at
times. In other scenarios, the cars started and stopped with the premium
smoothness of high-speed rail.
Within these broad scenarios the researchers also tested alternatives
that reduced speeds but improved smoothness, such as longer yellow
lights or following distances. All told they modeled 16 scenarios
against a baseline with all human-driven cars. The researchers then ran
each simulation for an hour, repeated it 100 times, and calculated the
average impact that scenario had in terms of traffic delay and road
capacity.
In every single test scenario, driverless cars designed to create a
comfortable, rail-style ride made congestion worse than it would have
been in a baseline scenario with people behind every wheel.
The final traffic tolls ranged from annoying to frightening. In the
baseline situation, without any driverless cars, each vehicle
experienced a delay of 20 seconds at the intersection. When driverless
cars accelerated and decelerated in the style of light rail, the
congestion worsened from 4 percent (21 seconds) to 50 percent (30
seconds). The number of cars traveling through the intersection—at 1,793
in the baseline scenario—also fell between 4 percent (1,724 cars) and
21 percent (1,415 cars).
The HSR-smoothness scenario was even scarier. Against the same
baseline, autonomous cars that started and stopped like high-speed rail
increased delay anywhere from 36 percent (27 seconds) to nearly 2,000
percent (6 minutes and 44 seconds!). Meanwhile, intersection capacity
fell between 18 percent (1,469 cars) and 53 percent (850 cars).
In other words, if we want riding in a driverless car to be as
comfortable as riding in a train, we need to consider the possibility
that more traffic will be the result. Le Vine and company conclude:
Our findings suggest a tension in the short run between these two
anticipated benefits (more productive use of travel time and increased
network capacity), at least in certain circumstances. It was found that
the trade-off between capacity and passenger-comfort is greater if
autonomous car occupants program their vehicles to keep within the
constraints of HSR (in comparison to LRT).
The work is a reminder that the full benefits of a driverless-car
world might take quite some time to materialize—and that we should prepare for the challenges,
too. Le Vine acknowledges that congestion might very well clear up once
every vehicle in the fleet is autonomous, or even once there are enough
to create driverless platoons. Until then, however, the traffic
outcomes are much less predictable and very possibly negative.
Consider, for instance, that these simulations didn't include
pedestrians. Doing so no doubt would have led to even more starting and
stopping, and thus more delay. And if seatbelts remain mandatory in
driverless cars, that might require smoother acceleration and
deceleration; much of the comfort of a train ride, after all, is the
lack of seat restraints. Traffic behavior would also change if
manufacturers offer people several driving profile options—say, from ultra-smooth to aggressive.
All the more reason to think driverless cars will complement, rather than immediately replace, public transportation in cities.
A love of cars seems as fundamentally American as George Washington
eating apple pie in a suburban McMansion financed with a subprime
mortgage. But the chart below,
which tracks the phrase "love affair with the automobile" in books
across the 20th century, makes us wonder if this love was ever truly
timeless. Though Americans drove and owned cars for the entirety of this
period, there's no mention of a "love affair" in the public discourse
until roughly 1960: University of Virginia historian Peter Norton offers a more precise date for your consideration: October 22, 1961.
It was on this Sunday night when NBC aired a program called "Merrily
We Roll Along"—promoted as "the story of America's love affair with the
automobile." During the show, host Groucho Marx introduced the "love
affair" metaphor to millions of viewers, casting cars as "the new girl
in town." To make this love work, Marx explained, Americans were willing
to overcome intrusive regulations, endure awful traffic jams, and if
necessary, redesign entire cities.
"We don't always know how to get along with her, but you certainly
can't get along without her," said Marx. "And if that isn't marriage, I
don't know what is."
To Norton, "Merrily We Roll Along" was less a story about America's
existing love affair with the car than the invention of that very idea.
The show's sponsor, DuPont, had an obvious interest: it owned 23 percent
of General Motors at the time. Norton calls the show a "masterstroke of
public relations" manufactured by the car industry to counter the likes
of Jane Jacobs, Lewis Mumford, and other critics who, at the dawn of the interstate highway era, questioned the wisdom of dedicating every inch of urban street space to personal vehicles.
"This is the beginning of the 'love affair' thesis," said Norton earlier this month, during a talk
at the annual meeting of the Transportation Research Board. "It was
after this show that the word becomes part of mainstream discussion.
Although nobody remembers how it entered the discourse. I'd suggest to
you that these are re-writers of history."
The phrase has become so entrenched in American life that the premise
itself rests high above questioning. (Today Google autocompletes a
search for "American love affair with—" to "cars," producing 21.8
million results as of this writing; the second-most common ending, at
5.31 million pages, is "guns.") On the contrary, Norton's work has documented that for most of the early 20th century there was no clear consensus over whether cars or other users had more of a right to city streets.
"This story's success is apparent in a powerful governing assumption: streets are for cars," writes Norton in a chapter about the love affair thesis in the 2014 book Incomplete Streets: Processes, Practices, and Possibilities.
"Drivers accept that streets are for cars and don't have much to say
about it—until another street user behaves as if streets are for
anything else."
During his TRB talk, Norton argued that historical revision like the
love affair concept is often used to "justify the assumptions" that
guide urban planning today. If you believe America's love affair with
the automobile was a natural outcome of free choice, then it's easier to
rationalize the idea of rebuilding cities to accommodate car travel.
But if that underlying assumption is flawed—and the "love affair" is
artificial marketing lingo—then its outcomes may not reflect true public
preference after all.
Here's Norton talking to Wonkblog's Emily Badger about how America's car reliance is not necessarily the result of people choosing the car over all other modes:
"If you locked me in a 7-Eleven for a week, and then after the end of
the week unlocked the door and you studied my diet over the previous
seven days, then concluded that I prefer highly processed, packaged
foods to fresh fruits and vegetables, I would say your study is flawed,"
Norton says.
A big problem with Norton's case is that many Americans obviously do
love automobiles, and with good reason: a car is an extremely
convenient way to get around. Motorization was increasing well before
1961 in the United States, which suggests the love affair might have
already existed, if perhaps gone unspoken. So does the fact that car use
increased with economic growth in countries around the world, many of
which wouldn't know Groucho Marx from Karl.
Norton acknowledges that the "love affair" may well be real for some
people. He just wants everyone to appreciate the careful craftsmanship,
by vested interests, that went into making it the dominant theory. At
the close of his recent chapter in Incomplete Streets, he takes
the additional step of suggesting to advocates of alternative transport
that they can learn a key lesson from this history about the power of a
strong narrative:
Motordom did not believe Americans loved cars enough to bring about
the motor age unaided. Rather, it so feared the hostility to
automobiles, especially in cities, that it organized perhaps the
greatest private-sector public relations effort ever undertaken. It
could not have succeeded if the car had not held powerful attractions,
which it certainly did. But motordom knew that it would take more than
that to convince Americans to recommit their streets to the almost
exclusive use of motor traffic, and to rebuild their cities around cars.
Advocates of alternatives have much to learn from their success.
About 500 subway riders in Stockholm have an ingenious
scheme to avoid paying fares. The group calls itself Planka.nu (rough
translation: "dodge the fare now"), and they've banded together because
getting caught free-riding comes with a steep $120 penalty. Here's how
it works: Each member pays about $12 in monthly dues—which beats paying
for a $35 weekly pass—and the resulting pool of cash more than covers any fines members incur.
As an informal insurance group, Planka.nu has proven both successful
and financially solvent. "We could build a Berlin Wall in the metro
stations," a spokesperson for Stockholm's public-transit system told The New York Times. "They would still try to find ways to dodge."
These fare-dodging collectives' egalitarian dream happens
to align with some hopes of U.S. policy makers. There's an intuitive,
consequentialist argument that making public transit free would get
drivers off the road and reduce greenhouse-gas emissions. In the U.S.,
where government subsidies cover between 57 and 89 percent of operating costs for buses and 29 to 89 percent of those for rail, many public-transit systems are quite affordable, costing in most cases less than $2, on average.
If it might make transit more accessible to the masses and in the
process reduce traffic and greenhouse-gas emissions, why not go all the
way and make transportation free?
The earliest urban experiment in free public transit took
place in Rome in the early 1970s. The city, plagued by unbearable
traffic congestion, tried making its public buses free. At first, many
passengers were confused: "There must be a trick," a 62-year-old Roman
carpenter told The New York Times as he boarded one bus.
Then riders grew irritable. One "woman commuter" predicted that "swarms
of kids and mixed-up people will ride around all day just because it
doesn't cost anything." Romans couldn't be bothered to ditch their
cars—the buses were only half-full during the mid-day rush hour, "when
hundreds of thousands battle their way home for a plate of spaghetti."
Six months after the failed, costly experiment, a cash-strapped Rome reinstated its fare system.
Three similar experiments in the U.S.—in Denver, Colorado,
and Trenton, New Jersey, in the late 70s, and in Austin, Texas, around
1990—also proved unfruitful and shaped the way American policy makers viewed the question of free public transit. All three were attemptsto
coax commuters out of their cars and onto subway platforms and buses.
While they succeeded in increasing ridership, the new riders they
brought in were people who were already walking or biking to work. For
that reason, they were seen as failures.
A 2002 report
released by the National Center for Transportation Research indicated
that the lack of fares attracted hordes of young people, who brought
with them a culture of vandalism, graffiti, and bad behavior—which all
necessitated costly maintenance. The lure of "free," the report implied,
attracted the "wrong" crowd—the "right" crowd, of course, being
wealthier people with cars, who aren't very sensitive to price changes.
The NCTR report concluded that eliminating fares "might be successful
for small transit systems in fairly homogenous communities, it is nearly
certain that fare-free implementation would not be appropriate for
larger transit systems."
Another report
followed up 10 years later, revisiting the idea of a fare-free world.
The report reviewed the roughly 40 American cities and towns with free
transit systems. Most of the three dozen communities had been greatly
successful in increasing ridership—the number of riders shot up 20 to 60
percent "in a matter of months." But these successes were only to be
found in communities with transit needs different from those of the
biggest cities; almost all of the areas studied were either small cities
with few riders, resort communities with populations that "swell
inordinately during tourist seasons," and college towns. In other words,
slashing fares to zero is something that likely wouldn't work in big
cities.
Despite that, one big city has tried. In January 2013,
Tallinn, the capital city of Estonia, announced that it was making
public transit free to all of its citizens. A study released a year later
revealed that the move only increased demand by 1.2 percent—though it
did inspire Estonians that year to register as Tallinnian citizens at three times the normal rate.
The authors of the Tallinn study reached the same conclusion as the
NCTR: Free subway rides entice people who would otherwise walk, not
people who would otherwise drive.
What makes more sense than implementing free transit on a
grand scale is deploying it as a specialized tool. By the summer of
2013, officials in Singapore, for example, noticed that the city's
subways were getting unsustainably crowded during peak hours, between
8:15 and 9:15 in the morning. In response, the city comped rides for anyone who got off the train in a city center before 7:45.
The shift made a significant difference. Before the rule change,
peak-hours riders outnumbered off-peak riders about three to one; after,
that ratio was closer to two to one.
Getting people less frustrated with the concept of paying
for public transportation, though, might just be a matter of telling
them about its operating costs. Public transit is wildly expensive, but
also, as noted above, heavily subsidized. A 2014 study in Transportation Research
found that simply telling people just how heavily subsidized their
subways and buses were made them willing to pay more money to ride.
(Perhaps the recent price hike in New York's public-transit system would have gone over more smoothly had the system's subsidies also been publicized.)
Perhaps the cost of public transportation shouldn't be
looked at from an angle of reducing traffic and emissions. Sure, that's a
noble question, but those turnstile-hopping Swedes might have a point.
Maybe free public transit should be thought of not as a behavioral
instrument, but as a right; poorer citizens have just as much of a
privilege to get around conveniently as wealthier ones. If the debate
shifted from means-to-an-end thinking to pure egalitarianism, the hope
of free public transit might actually be realized. Until then, there's
always Planka.nu.
Jim Saksa, transportation reporter for the website PlanPhilly, has crunched some numbers and found that Philadelphia leads the nation in this department: according to a recent survey by SEPTA, the city's transportation agency, a remarkable 64 percent of the people riding Philly’s subways and buses are women.
Chicago was second in his accounting, with a 62 percent female
ridership on the MTA, while Washington, D.C., New York, and Boston all
came in at 60 percent.
While differences in methodology mean the results aren’t strictly
comparable (as Saksa writes, it isn’t so much apples to oranges as
“mandarins to tangerines”), the numbers are striking. The most recent
tally of self-reported female commuters from the American Community Survey again shows Philly in the lead, with 58.5 percent (Baltimore is close behind). Nationwide, 50.5 percent of transit commuters are women, even though they comprise only 47 percent of the workforce.
There's likely no single answer to why women take mass transit more
than men, or why Philadelphia has a particularly female transit
ridership. “There are a dozen things going on,” says Saksa, who says the
big number of women riders jumped out at him when he began reviewing
SEPTA data soon after starting his PlanPhilly job. “It’s a perfect storm
of sorts. Our largest employers are industries that are particularly
dominated by women—clerical, retail, health. Wage inequality probably
plays a part. We can only just point out a bunch of correlations here.”
A woman wheels a baby stroller onto a New Jersey Transit train at Penn Station in Newark, New Jersey. According
to Anastasia Loukaitou-Sideris, a professor of urban planning at UCLA,
women predominate on mass transit around the globe. It’s a phenomenon,
she says, that is mostly not a matter of choice. “I don’t know about
Philadelphia, but there are many studies that indicate there are women
who are riding transit out of necessity,” she says. “Women are captive
transit users. If there is one car in the family, it is often driven by
the man in the household. Men are much more likely to use motorbikes or
mopeds than women. Taking a taxi is often too expensive to be an option.
For many of these women [public transit] is the only transportation
mode.”
Yet Loukaitou-Sideris, along with many other researchers, has found
that as much as they are compelled by circumstance to use transit, women
are also often wary of it for reasons of personal safety.
“Women are more frightened to use transit,” she says. “For many of
them this is always in the back of their minds, safety, being on my own
at night. Even in taxis. If it is a woman alone, it is always a kind of
consideration.” As she and co-author Camille Fink wrote in a 2008 paper
published in Urban Affairs Review, “fear has some significant
consequences for women and leads them to use precautionary measures and
strategies that affect their travel patterns.”
Those concerns are something that women are often left to cope with on their own. As Ann Friedman wrote here last year,
despite the persistent worries of women about transit safety, those
concerns are rarely directly addressed in the United States.
In her 2008 paper,
Loukaitou-Sideris reported that “[f]ew researchers, transit agencies,
or policy makers have directly asked women passengers about their safety
needs or sought to identify women’s proposals and preferences regarding
safe and secure travel.” She and her colleagues surveyed U.S. transit
agencies to find out what, if any, strategies they employed to address
the particular safety concerns of women.
Of the 131 operators that responded to the survey, only three said
they had any safety efforts that were specifically tailored toward
women, although two-thirds of respondents expressed the opinion that
women had special vulnerability when riding transit. (A spokesperson for
SEPTA said that agency did not have any specific safety policies
tailored to women, but that the agency had safety as a general priority
for all passengers.)
By contrast, Loukaitou-Sideris says, transit agencies in several
European countries, as well as Australia, Canada, and Japan, have
launched programs specifically targeted at women’s safety, based on the
concerns expressed by women themselves as assessed by safety audits and
surveys of female passengers. “Since our survey covered more than half
of all the large and medium-sized transit operators in the United
States,“ writes Loukaitou-Sideris, “we have to sadly conclude that the
United States is considerably behind other countries on the issue of
transit safety for women.”
Of course, safety from crime is not the only consideration for women
on transit. One of the reasons that women predominate on transit,
researchers believe, is that they are most often the caretakers of
children and responsible for many of the household errands. Better
accommodations for strollers as well as other measures to increase the
ease of traveling with children could no doubt dramatically improve
their lives.
The lack of such accommodations can have tragic consequences, as the
case of Raquel Nelson showed. Nelson, a young mother with several
children in tow, was coming home from a long and arduous bus journey in
the Atlanta area in 2010. After getting off the bus directly across the
street from her building, three children and her grocery shopping in
tow, Nelson crossed the street to get home,
traveling with other pedestrians across several lanes in a spot where
there was no crosswalk. Her four-year-old son was hit and killed by an
impaired driver who then fled the scene.
Nelson was prosecuted and convicted of vehicular manslaughter because
she didn’t use the crosswalk, which was located a third of a mile away
(none of the members of the all-white jury were regular users of public
transportation). After years of legal battles, Nelson’s conviction was eventually dropped
and she ended up with a ticket for jaywalking. But similar
life-threatening conditions for people traveling with children—usually
women—remain common across the United States. A similar case occurred, also in the Atlanta area, late last year.
Marketers of many, many consumer products focus on women—quite
naturally, because women are the ones doing most of the buying for
families. Imagine if more transit systems in the U.S. started doing the
same. The result would no doubt be transit systems that would be better
for, and more attractive to, everyone.
It
may not be a fair comparison to make, due to cultural and legal
differences between the two countries. Ridership numbers are also
completely different, as Taipei handles around 1,656,700 daily while Los Angeles deals with 308,011. But it does make you question what the people at Metro HQ are doing - since they are funded by state taxpayers - and if they're actually using our money effectively. But Taipei's MRT system is
a glimpse of what’s possible in Los Angeles: effective, efficient and
reliable transportation that that can reduce traffic congestion and
improve air quality in one of the most car-clogged cities in
America. Why can't we adopt some of the Taiwanese practices and
implement them in Los Angeles?
This may primarily be a cultural difference but there are some design
choices that MRT planners in Taiwan have made that prevent dirtiness
throughout the system.
Train
doors have four doors on each side instead of the typical two in
American systems. This means it's easier and faster to get on and off
trains at platforms and in emergency situations as well.
One of my pet peeves with the Los Angeles light rail
is that there is absolutely no internal display that tells you what the
next stop actually is. Sure, the train operators announce it on
loudspeaker. But trains are loud, especially through tunnels and it’s
often difficult to hear the announcement.
This
is difficult to compare. One of the struggles with creating a transit
system for Los Angeles County is the fact that it’s so massive that it’s
hard to cover every part of the region. But let’s take a look at how
lines are laid out in the two systems.
Most
stations have a little snack bar or two outside the station gates where
you can grab a small meal once you leave the station. Very convenient
for someone who’s just gotten off of work or a student coming back from
school and wants something like a red bean cake to munch on.
Each
station entrance is also numbered, which makes it easier to identify
which ones to use when you’re entering and exiting the station. And
there are display boards that display when trains are enterting and
leaving the station outside the station gates so you know if you have to
scramble for your train or not.
While
comparing the two systems definitely isn’t fair, looking at the two
side by side does reveal a lot of the shortfalls that Los Angeles Metro
currently faces. And Taipei affords a look into how a
transportation system should really run. Perhaps the most obvious
difference is the fact that Los Angeles Metro attempts to tackle the
transportation needs of multiple cities within Los Angeles County
whereas Taipei MRT just needs to deal with Taipei City itself, which is a
smaller and denser area.
