Reece Martin

But more fundamentally, while vehicles are an important consideration that is too often dismissed, service — that is speed, reliability, punctuality, and frequency — still reigns supreme. What so often gets missed in discussions of all kinds of infrastructure is that sometimes the easy solutions — and often expensive ones (which are often “easy”), don’t fix fundamental problems. Organization is hard, concrete is easy.

You can see this on subway lines all across the US, where trains are often surprisingly modern; however, service is bad, stations are dirty, and trains are often poorly maintained. And you can even see this in Toronto, where the subway is in a better state than almost any rapid transit system in the US. Line 1, has modern trains and modern signalling — both expensive investments — and yet the actual service frequency run doesn’t require the better signalling, and in many ways the headways, dysfunctional next train screens, and service reliability feel worse than they did historically.

The truth is, spending on a nice piece of equipment or even nice infrastructure provides a much easier way for a city, state or province to promote its forward-looking nature and modernity than simply providing a high-quality service — which is hard to quickly take in. A lot of the function of things like public services such as transit depend on infrastructure, implementation and operation coming together, and that’s where the steel wheel hits the rail. No amount of bells and whistles you can purchase will completely fix bad operations and design (even if the underuse of technologies like rail automation that simplify this is unfortunate), which are less obvious and much harder to fix — they aren’t something you can just procure.

Of course, service isn’t the only less tangible element of a transportation system — land use is another frequently-raised example. This last week, Mexico’s Tren Maya project opened, with lots of attention given to the flashy infrastructure and trains and the environmental concerns — none of which are relevant to the service levels and land use, which make or break projects like this. When you look at the land use and station planning, things look pretty bad. That the Cancun terminus station was located at the airport as opposed to in Cancun was an unsurprising concession to me, since a lot of resort-dominated cities do not have strong centres. However, seeing that the station is not at the airport or even connected by a people mover and rather off to the side was pretty disappointing. Unfortunately, it seems a lot of the stations on the project will similarly be in the middle of nowhere — which is bad for transit and has lead to forests being levelled, which is bad for the environment! This is all at the price for an admittedly nice looking, but expensively priced train that might actually not provide a ton of transportation value.

Unfortunately, as someone who likes trains, their “charismatic” nature means that they are particularly susceptible to becoming boondoggles — politicians want to cut ribbons, and few ribbons are as high value as train ribbons (politicians could cut a lot more if they cared about getting costs down!).

And “shiny objects” are not always just physical things — I think policies can be shiny as well. Whenever I bring up the speed of North American streetcars or light rail online, I get tons of responses talking about how “banning cars” would fix all of the problems. This seems like a trained response where people have seen lots of urbanist writings and content decrying the real harm that cars continue to do, and naturally think that cars must therefore be the biggest problem in every situation. While I do think removing cars from rail right-of-ways would probably be helpful, it would require expending a lot more political-capital-per-unit benefit than just operating systems better.

I imagine advocates in Toronto for example would rejoice at the removal of cars from city centre streetcar corridors, and I probably would too. But, I doubt this would fix the underlying problems the system has — because they often have to do with operating the infrastructure and vehicles that already exist, not conflict with cars. The issue with this intervention is that it feels impactful and certainly looks impactful, but as my recent Berlin trip reminded me: trams can travel far faster in mixed traffic than they do in Toronto — all without expending that political capital. That’s not to say that we shouldn’t restrict cars, but it is bad when we aren’t fully taking advantages of opportunity for improvement within the control of transit agencies.

And that really brings us back to the top: a city that is bad at transit operations and policy like banning cars from streets, or buying new subway trains to try and fix transit is like a person who buys a $5000 camera that they don’t know how to use. Sure, they can take better pictures than they could with a crappy camera, but a good photographer can take better pictures with a bad camera than a bad photographer with a good camera. In much the same way, cities with far less shine on their transit systems can still often outperform their shiny peers.