Mass Transit and Happiness

Egads lgl!! You sure do give it the good fight here, but that explanation is laughable.

This is just a graph theory problem. For mass transit to work, it has to pretty much saturate the nodes of the graph (starting points and destinations) with paths that are fairly direct. This turns out to be a fairly easy task in densely populated areas and totally impossible in sprawl. Even regional mass transit, such as BART in the SF Bay Area, suffers from the problem of if your endpoint isn’t near the BART station, it’s probably more convenient to drive and negotiate/find partking.

You might imagine this problem as the Internet with a few modifications. Let’s say that for you to browse an arbitrary web site, your request had to wait for a periodic critical mass of requests along one leg of the route of your destination (i.e. a bus that is filled to capacity with passengers). Except there are lots of legs on this route, so you wait and wait and wait. The Internet usually does not work that way, and except in very particular applications (e.g. low speed, high latency endpoints like dialup or satellite), we don’t put up with such behavior.

You could all learn a lot from computer scientists. We have had this stuff figured out and modeled for years ;-). For moving people around, we are much better off providing capacity (traffic flow, parking, etc.) the way people choose to use it than shoehorning them into public spending boondoggles. Think about how the Internet works. That is how you make people happy.

I agree with Brad that mass transit is a network. Thus, its value increases rapidly as more endpoints are added.

Relative failure of mass transit may be a result of success of freeways and road network. Because, roads and freeways are well-connected, it is much easier to drive personal car than to take rail-based mass transit.

Bob,

If you can model the costs right, you can just use standard graph (network) algorithms to find things like shortest (least costly) path, etc. Assuming that people are rational actors and sufficient capacity exists, you can expect them (over time and en mass) to settle on the most efficient routes.

When I was growing up in the SF Bay Area (Danville) and my Dad was working in San Francisco, it was really interesting to watch his commute choices. He could have walked to the end of the street and taken a bus to the BART station in Walnut Creek then BART into the city, then walked two blocks to work. Bear in mind this was before cell phones and laptops, so he couldn’t really do much work during his commute if he wasn’t driving. When he had his small-ish motorcycle, he usually rode to the Oakland West station. When he had his Honda Gold Wing (which was stable on the Bay Bridge), he found a guy in the city who let him park in the corner of his garage. When he had a car, he usually drove to the Orinda BART station, bypassing all the other stations east of the tunnel. I guess you’d have to know the freeways and BART lines up there for it to make any sense, but when his long term incentive was to find the most efficient commute so he could spend more time at home, he was pretty good at doing that.

I suspect that all of us who have to go from point A to point B a lot (commute, favorite place, etc.) are a lot better at maximizing efficiency than central planners devising routes and schedules. The reason mass transit can work effectively in NYC, for example, is that it saturates, so there is little incentive to search out a better route for marginal gains.

-Brad

You all insist the problem is finding the quickest commute, but I have lived in the less densely populated States most of my life. People build in the Country, though it quadruples their commute time. No one carpools! One-third drive their kids to school, ignoring the school bus system. My current location leaves the major shopping areas either 30 or 70 miles away. Most of my neighbors go shopping three or four times a week. No one carpools. Your statistical graphing means nothing. The American is addicted to getting out on the open road in his own personal vehicle. lgl

What factors account for the decline in mass transit use? Is it due to flaws in public policy or to consumer preference? The obvious answer is “both”.

Agreed. It’s not just about networks and nodes, or even time. In New York and other cities with successful mass transportation, the cost of driving yourself around (time spent in traffic jams, paying for parking, owning a car in the first place, etc.) exceeds the cost of riding the subway or bus (limits on destinations, loss of privacy and personal space, personal safety, etc.). In most cities, that is not the case.

I lived in and around DC and its successful Metro for four years, two of those years within 20 yards of an express bus stop that went directly to a Metro station, and two years within two miles of a Park-and-Ride Metro station. While the Metro was clean, safe, and fairly time-efficient, I took it to work only in bad weather, or when some mass protest or another was reported to be snarling traffic. I drove because (a) I liked the time alone to think and relax before a stressful work day, (b) I had more control over my movement, and (c) I had a parking space waiting for me. However, I often took the Metro to get to entertainment districts, mostly because (c) did not apply.

…but when compared to the fact that most spending, even that directly on maintenance and construction, has no link at all to the decision to drive that day… it’s fairly obvious why driving increases.

Hmmm. At least where I’m from, about half of the road budget comes from state gasoline taxes, and another half from the federal goverment’s gas-tax-funded highway trust fund, so there is a pretty direct link. Now, whether drivers think of that every day they choose to drive is another matter, but the fact is that consumers do pay to drive on public roads.