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The thing is, whether you like it or not, there are certain people that are very hesitant to ride buses but are more than willing to ride streetcars and LRT (I am willing to bet Bajan's theory from a few posts back has a lot of truth to it). However, these people tend to be upwardly mobile professional types that are highly desirable for a city to have a residents. To get them to move en mass into your city, it helps to have LRT connections or a streetcar running through it.
Many of those people may be willing to ride a streetcar (or LRT) but then still choose to drive. Why wouldn't you drive if you can park at all of your destinations? Atlanta took it a step further than LRT--the city built a real subway system. And its ridership levels are abysmal. Thousands of people drive past the MARTA park and rides everyday and then park at the cheap $5 (or free) lots across from their office towers in Midtown Atlanta. This obsession with "choice" riders is cute, but at the end of the day, 98 percent of public transit riders are going to be "captive" riders. "Captive" in the sense that the costs of driving substantially outweigh the costs of riding public transit.
It's funny that Donald Shoup receives so much praise for putting forward an elementary theory the basis for which should be obvious to anyone with eyes: free (or cheap) parking discourages public transit use and frustrates the goal of creating dense walkable communities.
Do you think the result would have been any different had Atlanta bulit a light rail instead of heavy rail?
And if you say, "Well, had Atlanta built TOD, then it's ridership would be higher," my response to that is, "Duh." You would be able to accomplish the same thing (people not using cars) by building the same housing in the downtown core.
Last edited by BajanYankee; 06-01-2012 at 12:43 PM..
Many of those people may be willing to ride a streetcar (or LRT) but then still choose to drive. Why wouldn't you drive if you can park at all of your destinations? Atlanta took it a step further than LRT--the city built a real subway system. And it's ridership levels are abysmal. Thousands of people drive past the MARTA park and rides everyday and then park at the cheap $5 (or free) lots across from their office towers in Midtown Atlanta. This obsession with "choice" riders is cute, but at the end of the day, 98 percent of public transit riders are going to be "captive" riders. "Captive" in the sense that the costs of driving substantially outweigh the costs of riding public transit.
It's funny that Donald Shoup receives so much praise for putting forward an elementary theory the basis for which should be obvious to anyone with eyes: free (or cheap) parking discourages public transit use and frustrates the goal of creating dense walkable communities.
Do you think the result would have been any different had Atlanta bulit a light rail instead of heavy rail?
And if you say, "Well, had Atlanta built TOD, then it's ridership would be higher," my response to that is, "Duh." You would be able to accomplish the same thing (people not using cars) by building the same housing in the downtown core.
There are lots of reasons people choose to use transit, and not all of them are the immediate convenience of traffic and parking. Personally I prefer to take transit because I would rather spend 30-60 minutes reading or zoning out on the bus/train than being stressed out and driving.
I'm not surprised sprawling, nearly exclusively low density city like Atlanta is having a hard time attractive ridership. They probably should have built grade-separated LRT because heavy rail seems like overkill. It's like building a subway in Orange County (but through even lower density neighborhoods).
Speaking of Shoup, his Express Parking program that worked well in SF is beginning next week in Los Angeles.
So let me get this straight: I can drive all the way from my house in suburban Atlanta to a lot directly in front of my job in Midtown and pay less than what I would pay in MARTA fare??? Granted, I'd have to pay for gas, but I'd also have the luxury of having my car with me. And I also don't have to park in a lot (which I'd have to pay for), walk up to the platform, and then wait for a train to come (which could prolong my commute up to 15 minutes). Unless gas goes up to $9 per gallon, or I lived directly on top of a MARTA station (and obviously only a limited number of people can live within walking distance of a station), I would opt to drive to work pretty much every day. No wonder why ridership is so low on MARTA.
Now let's look at Boston. Even if the "Park and Ride" parking costs $10, I'm still much better off taking the T than paying $36 for parking every day. That's simply not reasonable. Even if I didn't want to take public transit, I'm not much inclined to spend $720 per month on parking. So ride the train it is.
And that's basically what gets people to ride public transit. Not pretty light rails and streetcars.
Last edited by BajanYankee; 06-01-2012 at 12:43 PM..
There are lots of reasons people choose to use transit, and not all of them are the immediate convenience of traffic and parking. Personally I prefer to take transit because I would rather spend 30-60 minutes reading or zoning out on the bus/train than being stressed out and driving.
You can't project your own preferences onto other people. There may be some people who, like you, ride PT because they would rather zone out on a bus than be stressed out in traffic (as if riding PT is never stressful). But there are many more people who don't take it because the benefits of riding it do not outweigh the costs of driving. The decision to ride (or not ride) PT is based simply on an individual cost-benefit analysis. And the two most important factors in that analysis are (1) time and (2) money.
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Originally Posted by munchitup
I'm not surprised sprawling, nearly exclusively low density city like Atlanta is having a hard time attractive ridership. They probably should have built grade-separated LRT because heavy rail seems like overkill. It's like building a subway in Orange County (but through even lower density neighborhoods).
It's not about low density per se. It's more about land use. Los Angeles, while denser than Atlanta, has public transit ridership levels on par with Atlanta (perhaps a little worse actually). The reason people don't use public transit in Atlanta is the same reason people don't use it in Los Angeles.
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L.A. has the highest density of parking spaces in the world. “You can’t have the number of cars we have in L.A. without our parking lots,” says Shoup. “And you can never create urban density with the parking lots we’ve built.” They make driving too easy.
Speaking of Shoup, his Express Parking program that worked well in SF is beginning next week in Los Angeles.
The big difference between San Francisco and Los Angeles is that it was already ridiculously difficult to park in the former. That's not so in Los Angeles. While higher parking fees might force a few more people to take public transit (or carpool), nothing forces people to take transit like not having parking at all.
Last edited by BajanYankee; 06-01-2012 at 12:59 PM..
It's not about low density per se. It's more about land use. Los Angeles, while denser than Atlanta, has public transit ridership levels on par with Atlanta (perhaps a little worse actually). The reason people don't use public transit in Atlanta is the same reason people don't use it in Los Angeles.
Density does help. Note the ridership per mile of Los Angeles is much higher than Atlanta (yes, partly because LA is bigger so it has a larger area that's subway-friendly, but being denser helps a lot):
The current LA subway system has few if any park and rides, unlike Atlanta's, which is similar to commuter rail in function in some ways. With the Purple Line extension, LA total subway ridership would likely surpass Atlanta. Atlanta isn't terrible for a sunbelt metro, it has the best rail ridership of any sunbelt metro that's not Los Angeles, and Atlanta is low density even for the sunbelt. Haven't actually been in Atlanta all I know is MARTA stands for "Moving Africans Rapidly Through Atlanta".
Density does help. Note the ridership per mile of Los Angeles is much higher than Atlanta (yes, partly because LA is bigger so it has a larger area that's subway-friendly, but being denser helps a lot):
The current LA subway system has few if any park and rides, unlike Atlanta's, which is similar to commuter rail in function in some ways. With the Purple Line extension, LA total subway ridership would likely surpass Atlanta. Atlanta isn't terrible for a sunbelt metro, it has the best rail ridership of any sunbelt metro that's not Los Angeles, and Atlanta is low density even for the sunbelt. Haven't actually been in Atlanta all I know is MARTA stands for "Moving Africans Rapidly Through Atlanta".
It will be interesting to see if the ridership per mile is boosted with the Purple Line extension phase 1. It adds about 4 miles to the line, and would hit very jobs rich and population dense areas like the Miracle Mile (Fairfax, La Brea) plus tourist attractions like the La Brea Tarpits, Museum Row and CBS Studios.
Density does help. Note the ridership per mile of Los Angeles is much higher than Atlanta (yes, partly because LA is bigger so it has a larger area that's subway-friendly, but being denser helps a lot)
Actually, being denser does not help at all in this case. Atlanta is a city of 400,000. Los Angeles is a city of 3.7 million. Yet Atlanta has nearly 90,000 more heavy rail riders. Even if we were to cut Atlanta's line in half to make the comparison more even, Atlanta would only have about 30,000 fewer riders than Los Angeles despite having 11 percent of Los Angeles' population.
The Lexington Avenue express, on the other hand, has more riders alone than all of the other heavy rail systems in the U.S. combined.
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Originally Posted by nei
The current LA subway system has few if any park and rides, unlike Atlanta's, which is similar to commuter rail in function in some ways. With the Purple Line extension, LA total subway ridership would likely surpass Atlanta. Atlanta isn't terrible for a sunbelt metro, it has the best rail ridership of any sunbelt metro that's not Los Angeles, and Atlanta is low density even for the sunbelt. Haven't actually been in Atlanta all I know is MARTA stands for "Moving Africans Rapidly Through Atlanta".
But very few people are actually parking and riding. It's not like DC where the park and rides inflate the numbers to some extent. Most people drive to their jobs. My brother's job (and most of my friends' jobs) provide free parking for all employees.
For a city of LA's size, one single subway line should completely obliterate Atlanta's entire ridership (as the Lex Ave express in NYC does).
And yes, MARTA does move Africans rapidly through Atlanta. Ha!
Did Portland run its streetcar through a desert? I've never been to Portland, but my understanding is that the streetcar also runs through areas (such as downtown) that were already walkable. Yet the streetcar gets credit for all of the "development" in those areas. Why give the streetcar credit for stimulating projects in already walkable communities but not the bus?
The key to promoting growth with streetcars is to put one end where people already are, and the other end where you want to encourage growth. Downtown Portland was already walkable, but underutilized because parking was limited and there weren't a whole lot of transit alternatives (although there were buses.) The other end of the streetcar line went into a redeveloped industrial area that had a population density of about 1 household per acre when the streetcar came in, and is one of the most densely populated areas of the city now. Why? They didn't provide enough parking--but they also provided an alternative to the automobile. Yes, in a way, they did run the streetcar (that end of it, anyhow) through a desert. But they provided a stream!
If you're developing a one-block apartment building within an already-walkable neighborhood, you don't necessarily have to provide direct connection to a streetcar line--because there may already be nearby transit. But if you're developing a whole neighborhood in an area where people don't already live, you have to take into account the need for mobility both within that neighborhood and connecting it to the rest of the city. If you just don't provide parking and don't provide transit, then it's going to be hard to convince people to move there in the first place. If you don't provide transit and leave it up to the private sector to provide a transportation network, they will build parking lots (or will leave lots vacant for parking) and you'll end up with a low-density auto-centric neighborhood, which will impede walkability.
The key to promoting growth with streetcars is to put one end where people already are, and the other end where you want to encourage growth.
The key to promoting growth is to provide all of the special treatment for any mode of transportation that's provided for streetcars. As this commenter astutely noted:
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Take two redevelopment project areas with similar characteristics, market conditions, etc. Provide one WITH a street car project and the other WITHOUT a street car project. Give the one without the street car the same level/amount of development subsidies, friendly policies and bureaucratic attention as the one with the street car. If the area with the street car attracts more development than the one without, then perhaps it is reasonable to claim "streetcars facilitate development." But I don't see anyone suggesting that, nor I have read any study that proves that.
The actual author of the blog, a transportation expert, made this observation:
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A proponent of the "redevelopment requires streetcars" thesis has a lot of successful streetcarless redevelopment to explain. Even in Portland, plenty of terrific inner-city redevelopment happened in the 1980s and 1990s, before they discovered that redevelopment requires streetcars. Yes, the Pearl District development tied to the Portland Streetcar is particularly intense and rapid, but we'll never know how much of it would have happened anyway even if they had just built, say, a really frequent bus route with sexy buses and permanent-looking stops.
Again, why spend $100 million on a streetcar when you can get the same scale of development with $10 million in bus improvements?
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If you're developing a one-block apartment building within an already-walkable neighborhood, you don't necessarily have to provide direct connection to a streetcar line--because there may already be nearby transit. But if you're developing a whole neighborhood in an area where people don't already live, you have to take into account the need for mobility both within that neighborhood and connecting it to the rest of the city. If you just don't provide parking and don't provide transit, then it's going to be hard to convince people to move there in the first place. If you don't provide transit and leave it up to the private sector to provide a transportation network, they will build parking lots (or will leave lots vacant for parking) and you'll end up with a low-density auto-centric neighborhood, which will impede walkability.
First of all, why do you keep saying that I'm not accounting for "the need for mobility?" I never said that there would be no transit because the reality is that all major American cities have transit. I just said that streetcars (and light rail in many cases) are an inferior mode of transit because of their costs and lack of mobility vis-a-vis a regular bus system.
Second, if you really need mobility, a streetcar is not the way to go. Jarrett Walker discusses this topic in the blog entry posted below. Funny enough, people have also labeled him a "rail hater" because he points out inconvenient facts about rail service (streetcars in particular) that advocates gleefuly ignore.
Walker makes an interesting point here:
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But I do not "dismiss the mode debate as political or emotional." I simply observe that emotional factors play strongly in technology debates, and that while these factors have their place, it's risky to let them get out of control when you're building long-term infrastructure.
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Look around your city and I bet you can find some long-term infrastructure that's not at all what you would build today, and that presents obvious practical problems for the life of the city now. Those facilities were designed to meet the emotional needs of a past generation, and some of these were built in spite of obvious mathematical or geometric absurdity because of the passion of the moment.
DC will always have a lower class riding the bus rather than the Metro. The difference in price is substantial. Many of the "lower class" people on the train are students that ride for free to and from school.
This all depends on which bus and train lines you're talking about.
You can ride the Circulator in Georgetown or the 42 bus line (serving Mount Pleasant, Adams-Morgan, Georgetown and Dupont) and ride the whole route with people wearing Stanford and Yale sweatshirts and surfing the web on their $700 iPads.
You can also ride the Green Line out to Branch Avenue and ride the whole route with a group of kids shooting dice on the floor.
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