I’ve been thinking a lot about a recurring problem I’ve come across with the way people sometimes look at new transit projects.
One of the major topics of both my writing here and my videos on YouTube is transit modes. Growing up in Metro Vancouver, there was a lot of debate about whether SkyTrain (effectively subway or metro) or light rail was the right solution for various expansion projects, and every single time, SkyTrain was the preferred option.
Seeing these debates made me surprised that they weren’t happening in more cities — in the case of Vancouver’s projects, light rail was often swapped to SkyTrain sometime in the planning process without unacceptable cost increases, and SkyTrain is really nice, so why were more cities not building something like it? So often you see mid-sized US cities building light rail with what appears to be little consideration for any alternative besides some form of bus service.
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When such discussions happen in Toronto (which thankfully they do to an extent), I often run into people saying something along the lines of “there aren’t enough transit riders for mode X in corridor Y”, and similar things do get said in discussions around the world. The attitude is roughly that there is a set number of transit riders that exist along any given corridor, and the problem of transit planning is simply about identifying the technology and alignment which will best accommodate them.
Unfortunately, this way of looking at transit would only make sense if transit was the only way people got around. Of course, this is not the case, even in cities with very high transit mode share many people still drive, and of course people also walk and cycle! Thus, actual transit demand is in flux — if fuel (or parking) becomes more expensive, road tolls are implemented, or the economy goes into recession, people will often be pushed to use transit.
At the same time, the transit itself impacts the demand to ride it. Imagine if transit along a street is slow and infrequent and so few ride it — would anyone say that this is because people don’t want public transit? Of course not, the issue is that transit is not meeting their needs! Herein lies the problem with building transit to meet existing and projected demand — these estimations are highly fraught with assumptions about what it might take to get more people on transit. For example, consider the attitude of some Metro Vancouver politicians before the SkyTrain Canada line opened in late 2009: they believed that 100,000 daily riders was unrealistic (pre-Covid the line was already over 150,000 a day), and that such numbers were not going to happen if people didn’t already ride the bus.
But unsurprisingly, people care about the transit; a faster, more frequent service will get more people out of their cars, and potentially even induce entirely new trips.
This is the fundamental issue with looking at transit like a static utility that you simply provide to sites and wash your hands of. The transit you choose to build and to run has huge implications regarding how much ridership you not only expect to attract on opening day, but also how important the corridor will be in the future. Investing in rails and their permanence for example really does signal to people that transit will be there in the long term (even if, yes, we’ve ripped rails out of streets before), and subway tunnels signal that it will also be fast even as areas develop and congestion grows. With the right supporting land use and transit use policies (fare integration, frequent feeder services, etc.) you can really build transit not for a static demand, but for a projected long-term level of ridership far in excess of today.
So when people talk about low demand for transit, ask them what kind of transit, and how that demand could be changed!
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