Streetcars are redolent things; they remind us of another time, even modern streetcars like Portland’s which functions like, while not resembling, the first mass transit systems.  Thompson is not alone in his nostalgia for them as evidenced in this publication and elsewhere by the growing number of systems completed, planned, or under construction.  In retrospect it is hard to imagine how we Americans could have collectively dismantled all but a small number of these once-common systems.

There are a few characteristics of auto infrastructure vs. rail infrastructure that explain the phenomenon.  As noted elsewhere on this site, a great advantage for cars was that the three parts of a transportation system (vehicle, right-of-way, terminal capacity) were shared by individual, the state, and private development (cars, roads, off-street parking) whereas the streetcar owners provided all three.  Auto infrastructure had another great advantage over rail in that it could be built incrementally.  Rail with one incomplete line is useless but having a single complete line is only a marginal improvement.  It takes multiple lines to make a true network.  With cars, each completed road improved the system and cars could—and did—still work on dirt roads. 

The deciding factor in the demise of the streetcar was not a conspiracy led by National City Lines or the above mentioned items, but rather the conduct of the Traction Trusts, the owners of the rail systems.  Equipment aged without being replaced, cities grew without the necessary expansion to serve new areas, and fares increased anyway.  They had alienated the riding public for too long before they threw the Hail Mary Pass of the President’s Conference Committee Streetcar, the PCC car.  This reminds me of something.

While reading a recent TIME Magazine story I realized there is a perfect analog to the Traction Trusts in Blockbuster Video.  Blockbuster, you may recall, once dominated the home video rental market with over 3,000 stores across the country.  I, for one, hated Blockbuster.   A friend who worked there told me they called Monday morning Black Monday because they did most of their “business” after the weekend when they started assessing those dreaded late fees.  As the TIME story tells it, Blockbuster had a policy of “managed dissatisfaction” whereby they under-ordered new releases which ran out quickly on Friday night.  That sent customers looking for slightly older recent movies and then finally to the middle of the store where the oldest pictures were kept.  Nearly 70% of Blockbuster’s sales came from less-popular rentals.  Remember those ads, “Go Home Happy”?  Right, sure.

In short, Blockbuster did not take very good care of customers and when something new came along—first Netflix by mail then Red Box rentals at Wal-Marts and grocery stores—the customer went elsewhere.  And they held a grudge.  Blockbuster tried to fix the problem with price by offering unlimited rentals for a flat fee, but they kept the late fees, certainly the most onerous part of their business model.  No dice.  Just like the PCC cars, it was too little too late.  Blockbuster tried movies by mail and box rentals at stores but the damage was already done to an unmoved public.  Blockbuster slid rapidly into bankruptcy. 

The familiar blue awning of a late Blockbuster store repurposed as a pet shop. As with the streetcars of old, new options sent customers elsewhere.

When Netflix came around I readily signed up and would never have considered going back to Blockbuster, no matter the price.  I can identify with the transit riding public of the 1920s.  The Trusts, like Blockbuster, got punished for their wicked ways.  Maybe someday we will look back fondly on the times we walked the aisles of the video store and then dug through the return box hoping to find just the right evening’s entertainment.  Blockbuster might enjoy a renaissance, but it wouldn’t surprise me if it took another 70 years.

“Owns a hybrid, but drives all around town alone. The kind of car you drive is just one part of the transportation equation. Walking, biking, carpooling, and taking public transportation when you can are also important. Try to drive the most fuel-efficient car in the class of car you need. That car doesn’t need to be a hybrid. Remember that driving less overall by making shopping lists and planning efficient routes saves gas and reduces emissions.”

As far as green hypocrites go there is another type that drives me to distraction: people who work in transit—especially those who spend their days talking to people about the wonders of transit—but don’t use their own services.  But that is a discussion for another day.  I was glad to see Bongiorno’s post because she makes an argument for not driving around by yourself, even in a hybrid and she connects that to transit.  What she omits is the reasoning; many of her readers took her to task for being a scold and at least on this point I think it was because she failed to make the argument.  Let me fill it in.

Prius ads notwithstanding, motorcars do not biodegrade. Photo Scheib

Automobiles are the largest non-point source of pollution (a factory is a point source but taken in aggregate motorcars are one of the world’s great polluters).  Motorcar manufacturers are naturally interested in pushing the green car image hence Subaru boasting a zero landfill factory (their cars?  Not so much) and Honda’s short-lived environmentology campaign.  A Toyota Prius advertisement shows an automobile made of sticks and leaves that eventually disintegrates.   In case you haven’t heard, real cars do not do this.

Leaving aside the pollution involved in the manufacture and disposal of motorcars, and even the modest emissions from a Prius, automobiles, hybrids and all,  still greatly contribute to ecological degradation and the ruin of cities.  Donald Shoup established in The High Cost of Free Parking that there are 8 parking spaces for every car in the United States.  That means no matter what you drive some one out there right now is planning heat-reflecting surface parking spaces (likely built on greenfields) for you to park your car.  And Lincoln Navigators and Priuses get the same size parking space, with the rare exception of some garage compact car spots.  That’s a bad start.  But the automobile has a long tail that extends well outside the road and parking lot. 

Motorcars influence lifestyle.  For example, denser urban environments encourage frequent grocery shopping trips as part of a trip chain between home and work.  As a result urbanites are storing far fewer groceries than their suburban counterparts who make weekly shopping trips.  Grocery carts are a good indicator of this relationship.  If you look at the small carts found in urban grocery stores the basket will be about 4,700 cubic inches or smaller.  A medium-sized cart such as found in typical American grocery stores like Publix, Piggly Wiggly, or Kroger will be 8,700 cubic inches or larger.  I had just come back from Moscow the first time I saw a Sam’s Club cart and was stunned by its caricaturish girth.  These jumbo baskets measure in at a whopping 26,000 cubic inches!

It goes without saying that 10 or 20 thousand cubic inches of groceries are going to be carted home in a car.  Once they get there they will be stored in pantries, kitchens, and refrigerators far larger than needed in an urban home.  Or how about the extra refer/freezer kept in the garage, the hottest room in the home for much of the year, to hold extra meats and beer?   There is a siege mentality to suburbia:  once you get home from the jungle you are not going to want to venture out again.  Better stock up.

A few years ago Martin Wachs estimated that in most cities streets, highways, and parking lots cover from a third to half of the land area.  That is a bad atmosphere for pedestrians and transit and the mark of a huge carbon footprint.  Batteries ain’t gonna fix that.

The sticker price is a shocker, but on reading BART’s report you realize advertising dozens of meetings in the San Francisco market, hiring interpreters for those meetings and translators for all the relevent documents in Chinese, Khmer, Korean, Lao, Russian, Spanish, Tagalog, and Vietnamese can add up quickly.  And those weren’t senseless extras.  The point of this exercise was to reach users who were not necessarily affluent, native-born, white English speakers.

But let’s not allow the 800 large to distract us from the larger impact of the story.  That money was a drop in the bucket compared with what BART lost and could lose.  Because the agency had not officially considered the impact of a “major service change”  on Title VI populations (low-income, minorities, limited English proficiency) FTA had already killed $70 million toward a people mover line from Colisuem Station to the Oakland Airport and another $100 million for an airport line was in jeopardy.

 The language in question is descibed in Title VI Circular 4702.1A, May 13, 2007, Requirement to Evaluate Service and Fare Changes (page V-5): 

In order to comply with 49 CFR Section 21.5(b)(2), 49 CFR Section 21.5(b)(7) and Appendix C to 49 CFR part 21, recipients to which this chapter applies shall evaluate significant system-wide service and fare changes and proposed improvements at the planning and programming stages to determine whether those changes have a discriminatory impact.  For service changes, this requirement applies to “major service changes” only.  The recipient should have established guidelines or thresholds for what it considers a “major” change to be.  Often, this is defined as a numerical standard, such as a change that affects 25 percent of service hours of a route.  [emphasis added] 

 For my money, when FTA uses words like often it is like a teacher saying “You might want to remember this.”  That means its going to be on the test and it is not unreasonable to think FTA was dropping a broad hint that 25% might be a good standard.   That lesson was not lost on the good people at BART who did their homework and adopted 25% after reviewing other large agencies, to wit: 

To establish a threshold or “upper limit” for a service change, BART must first define these terms so they can be communicated to and discussed with the public. The term “major” relates to how BART proposes to measure its service.  In advance of soliciting community input, BART staff researched best practices from major transit agencies throughout the United States to inform its approach. The FTA Circular 4702.1A states that a numerical standard such as a change that affects 25% of service hours of a route can serve as a dividing line between minor and major service changes. Transit agencies in New York, Houston, San Jose, Portland, Chicago, Sacramento, and Atlanta have adopted this industry standard of 25% per line.  [from  BART Summary Report June 25 2010 Establishing a Major Service Change Threshold] 

 The number 25 cannot stand alone.   Transit agencies adopting a standard reading something like “Metro defines a major service change as 25%,” would be in real trouble.  BART says the 25% applies to new lines, line length, service levels (the amount of service operated on a line), service hours,  aggregate changes across all the Lines on the BART System: annual net increases or decreases to Line Length, service levels, or service hours which exceed 20 percent in aggregate when combined over all the lines on the BART system, or the cumulative changes within a three-year period.  BART is a large, well-run, and credible transit property but the language about major service changes was missing from their Title VI documentation.  It cost them big–and I don’t mean the $800,000–so take a moment to review your docs so you won’t repeat their mistake.

Saleswoman Deanna Droira-Garcia. Photo FPTA.

I have long been in the “We got ‘em” camp that thinks transit agencies spend too much time and effort surveying our existing riders to see what they think of our services (or as Jarrett Walker at Human Transit put it:  “In fact, one common sign that a transit agency is conceptually stuck is when they think and talk only about their present riders, not new ones they intend to attract.)  It does not take a survey to know a 1-hour headway is too long or that the buses should be clean and on-time and drivers should be polite.  I have never been surveyed in a business (even if I have filled out my share of comment cards) because businesses know customers=good job.  I tend to think if people are riding either they must do so or they find some value in transit already and our resources would be better spent in finding out why other people are not riding.  It is a given that service must be high-quality for existing riders because if it is not new passengers will quickly become former passengers.

I had not seen anything to challenge this belief until recently when I attended a workshop co-hosted by Florida DOT, FPTA, and the Center for Urban Transportation Research (CUTR).  A presenter showed a graph of ridership trends when there is 100% retention of existing riders, 90% of existing riders, and 70% of existing riders.  The 100% line is straight but with each lower percentage the line curves downward more quickly.  Basically, it is a lot easier to grow if people are staying.      

In Florida a driver’s license is suspended until the driver can demonstrate six months have passed without a seizure.  Droira-Garcia did so, had her license restored, and started driving again . . . until she had another seizure.  She is temporarily and intermittently transit dependent.  It is a curious choice for the top prize in this contest because she is not someone who has discovered the joys of using transit and wants to keep using it.  Rather she found it workable in the absence of a car but is eager to get back to driving. (She tells us “I am in the process of reinstating my license, and I am waiting for the decision from the Medical Board Review.  I am still taking public transportation until reinstatement of my license,” as she has already done once before.  How about a new slogan for Miami Dade Transit:  There for you in a Pinch!)

Droira-Garcia is not alone.  A county commissioner came to our transit agency to tour the facility.  All of the front office staff were gathered so the commissioner could tell us the inspiring story of how he had been a car-less college student in Chicago, waiting for buses and trains in the cold and swearing he would become a lawyer, buy an expensive car, and never use public transportation again.  That commissioner achieved his goal.  Yes, he came to our office to tell the transit staff that through perseverance and hard work anyone can avoid using the services we provide.  There was not a dry eye in the room.

There are signs at car lots in rougher neighborhoods around Atlanta reading, “Be Smarta, Get off MARTA,” and I have seen car cards on buses advertising car dealers with the likes of “Get off this bus for $700.”   There is a churning process in transit where new passengers come in to replace those who got ‘smarta and got off MARTA, CARTA, BARTA, DARTA, et al.  No rider is eternal; people get healthy, earn more money, or if all else fails, die.  But if getting away from transit is an aspirational goal of our passengers we have bigger problems than just finding new riders.  While we are doing surveys we might consider posing the question, “If you must use transit but tomorrow you suddenly had the option of not using transit, would you continue and if not, why?” If we had the answer to that then all those on-board surveys might seem brilliant after all.

On this congested New York street in 1916 pedestrians crowded the streets.

Congestion relief is nearly always listed as one among many benefits of using transit: reducing pollution, saving money, reducing VMT, providing mobility to disadvantaged populations.  These are all worthy goals but congestion relief is a chimera, something we transit professionals simply cannot provide.

To begin with, congestion is a product of success.  Country roads are quiet and bucolic, the exact opposite of city streets simply because city streets contain places people want to go.  In this context success does not imply that a place is well-planned and well-built, but rather that it is a place where there are jobs and things people enjoy doing.   

Where there is work, shopping, and entertainment, there are people and that is a good thing, but people inevitably lead to congestion whether with horse carts and pedestrians in ancient Athens, bicycles fighting for space on the streets of Beijing, or the automobile-dominated streetscapes of the United States.  In the annals of transportation history there has yet to be a vibrant city that did not experience congestion.  The uncongested city is not inconceivable—Frank Lloyd Wright produced a detailed scale model of exactly that in 1935 with his Broadacre City—just not buildable.  The notion that bigger roads provide for less congestion is specious.  If this were true Atlanta and Los Angeles would enjoy free-flowing roads all day.

A new or wider road may not relieve congestion, but why not a transit project?  There is the matter of scale. The 2001 National Household Travel Survey reported 91.2% of trips to work were in personal vehicles while transit captured only 4.9% of the mode share—and this including New York, a city that accounts for roughly 25% of all transit trips in the nation.  Even a 100% increase in transit use would still account for fewer than 10% of work trips.  The gains in auto efficiency caused by such an increase in transit (or by a widened road or new interstate for that matter) would soon be consumed by triple convergence and latent trips, an idea popularized by Anthony Downs in his books Stuck in Traffic and Still Stuck in Traffic.  Commuters who would have otherwise traveled at a different time (time shift), on a different path (route shift), or by some other vehicle (mode shift) will take advantage of the new capacity by driving to work during rush hour on the most direct route.  If you ever delayed a trip to the store to avoid rush hour traffic, you made a latent trip and those become real trips when additional capacity becomes available.

There is a nasty piece of circular logic at work in the idea that transit makes room on the road: if more people took transit to work, then more road capacity would become available, encouraging more people drive to work.  This is the great fallacy of congestion relief, that some drivers will opt to take transit to work so that other drivers will have an easier time driving to work (a concept brilliantly explored by the satirical newspaper The Onion in a piece called “98% of U.S. Commuters Favor Public Transportation for Others”).  There are many great reasons to use transit but altruism must rank as the least compelling.

Congestion is about perception, and transit can't fix that.

Another reason to shy away from singing the praises of traffic relief is that there is no statistical relationship between transit ridership and congestion.  Looking at the 65 most populated cities in the U.S. (excluding NY as an outlier) the Texas Transportation Institute ranks L.A. as the most congested (93 hours of annual delay per driver).  L.A. has the most passenger trips in the data set.  The second highest number of passenger trips belongs to Chicago, ranked 7^th in delay in this set.  The third most trips are in Philadelphia, 23^rd in delay, then Washington D.C., ranked third in delay.  Accounting for population, Philadelphia (23^rd in delay) has the highest number of passenger trips per capita with Honolulu coming in second (ranked 43^rd in delay).  L.A. is 12^th in per capita passenger trips.

The utter lack of consistency means that the affect transit has on congestion cannot be measured.  In Houston, for example, all the measures TTI uses to index congestion showed an increase in congestion from 2002 to 2007 except the number of rush hours (steady at 7.8).  During that same period transit ridership increased from 81.3 million passenger trips to 97.4 million, no doubt in part because of the addition of light rail in 2004.  Even with a 20% increase in transit ridership, the congestion indices for Houston remained constant or got worse.  There is simply no evidence to support the claim of transit as congestion relief, a notion on which countless transit projects are based.

The houston light rail next to interstate 75.

By touting congestion relief, transit providers are handing our severest critics potent ammunition to use against us.  To wit, a certain anti-rail crusader has used a comparison between Atlanta and Portland as strong evidence against light rail.  He wrote in 1999 that since 1982 congestion in Portland increased 33 percent compared to 36 percent for Atlanta.  He failed to mention that Atlanta’s congestion increased three percentage points more than Portland’s despite Atlanta’s insistence on building roads and Portland’s insistence on building transit projects, but what he said was true.  As congestion worsens, transit will not provide relief.

If San Francisco suddenly lost its wonderful BART system and its 300,000 daily trips, arguably some or most of those passengers would drive alone on the most direct path at the most convenient time (peak hour).  Those additional trips would certainly, absolutely, add to the congestion of San Francisco’s roads and that if BART then reappeared transit trips would again replace some automobile trips.   Similarly, if L.A. had one-quarter as many highways as it does it would be far more congested than it is now.  But no one would say that L.A. is not a congested city, nor could this be said of San Francisco despite the presence of an outstanding transit agency.

Transit does have the ability to remove cars from the road and that can be measured by vehicle miles traveled (VMT).  That may seem to contradict my previous argument, but VMT and congestion are not interchangeable because congestion is not about cars but rather about perception.  A planning professor I know moved to Tallahassee from L.A. and was pleased to find there was no traffic congestion—and surprised to find that his neighbors and colleagues complained about traffic congestion all the time. 

All cities with great transit systems—New York, Portland, San Diego, San Francisco, Chicago, Moscow, Paris, London, etc.—also have streets glutted with automobiles during peak travel times.   When transit projects are based on the ability to relieve traffic congestion the proponents of the project are setting themselves up for failure because whether or not there is a significant reduction in the number of vehicle trips people view delays during peak travel times as congestion whether in LA or Tallahassee.  Transit simply cannot remove enough cars from enough roads to remove the public’s perception that there is traffic congestion.  Transit can give people time to read, work, or catch a catnap.  It aids the transportation disadvantaged.  Most importantly, transit offers commuters the choice not to have to sit, white-knuckled, in traffic, and that is a promise transit can keep.