Tag Archives: public transportation

U.S. transportation “wins” in 2025

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Bloomberg has an article on progress in U.S. transportation policy and technology in 2025. My thoughts in brackets.

  • New bus lanes in a number of U.S. cities. [This is really a big win, when modern cities around the world are expanding subway and light rail networks? This “win” represents tiny, incremental progress or holding the line in our current reactionary cultural and political climate. Calling this a win is a pretty good indicator of where this climate stands.]
  • New York City congestion pricing. [This is an evidence-supported, objectively very good policy that probably all major cities should be following. The fact that one major city is able to do it against massive external opposition is an indication of our current reactionary cultural and political climate. One thing that makes this work in NYC, I believe, is that they have one municipal transit agency in charge of roads/streets/bridges, public transportation, and parking, and they also have a successful and powerful interstate transportation commission that coordinates well with that agency. I’d like to see some journalism on what the legislative and institutional barriers are to achieving this in other major cities, even if we were to eventually emerge from the current reactionary cultural and political climate. For example, in Philadelphia we have a state-chartered regional public transportation authority that operates buses, subways and trains; another interstate commission that operates bridges and some trains; a neighboring state-chartered authority that operates some buses and trains; a municipal authority (which has been state-controlled in the past) that regulates street parking and parking garages, and a municipal transportation department that designs/constructs/maintains most streets, although some streets are designed/constructed/maintained by the state transportation department. All these entities are mostly uncoordinated and certainly do not share revenue. So it would be virtually impossible to use parking and bridge toll revenue to cover public transportation costs, even though this would make total sense if the objective were to move people from point A to point B efficiently, safely, and cheaply. (Would this not be the objective of any rational transportation policy?) Could all these agencies be reorganized to look more like the NYC system? Planning and implementing something like that would be a heavy lift, but again I would like to know if it would even be legally possible or if legislation at the state level in multiple states would be required. State-level legislation in Pennsylvania to rationalize policies in the major metropolitan areas is virtually impossible in the current reactionary cultural and political climate…]
  • Automatic speed controls in cars. There are some minor wins allowing judges to impose this on people who have speeding tickets. This makes sense to me, but seems fairly small and incremental. I might be the only one looking forward to automating as much vehicle operation as possible. Let violations of speed limits and intersection signals be matters for your vehicle warranty or insurance company, not decisions of human drivers to take reckless risks or not.]
  • Legalizing small cars and golf carts on public streets. [I’m mostly for this. Vehicles designed for highway travel are the wrong way to get around inside cities. The problem is that you put these lighter vehicles on the public streets, and human beings in them are going to be hurt and killed by other human beings choosing to irresponsibly operate highway vehicles inside cities. They will also hurt and kill pedestrians on occasion. You need to either have separate infrastructure for the light vehicles, or have vehicles regulated or controlled by computers or passive means (see above). Advances in street design, construction and maintenance in the U.S. are so slow I find it hard to hold out hope that there will be big changes in the course of a single generation of humans. But technology is moving much faster so I am going to put more of my hopes for near-term progress in the technology basket.]

So there it is. I don’t have much hope for seeing widespread progress in subway, light rail, and modern street design and construction (with separate infrastructure and signals for pedestrians, light vehicles, and highway vehicles) in U.S. cities in the next few years. We can hope for slow, incremental progress on congestion pricing, parking pricing and policy, and passive speed controls for some vehicles. The rollout of automated, electric vehicles has been slower than I might have predicted 5-10 years ago, but it is happening. It is uneven because the barriers seem to be more legal/institutional/cultural/political than technological and this varies by location. And it’s not a straight-up red/blue divide because pro-big-business forces on the right are favoring automated vehicles at the same time reactionary cultural/political forces on the right and pro-labor forces on the left are opposing them. So this tension will just play out state-by-state and city-by-city for some time to come. Very slowly, we may realize that the demand to devote so much of our urban space to parking and maneuvering inefficient vehicles has decreased. This feels like it might take a decade or more and be obvious to most people only in retrospect. Overall, when Americans travel I think we will increasingly get the sense that urban conditions in our country are continuing to stagnate while European and Asian cities march into the future. Those of us Americans who don’t travel will be cocooned in reactionary cultural/political propaganda and will not realize life is improving elsewhere while transportation in our cities is stuck at a 1970s technology and safety level.

May the streets of our cities be soaked with less blood in 2026 and beyond!

building public transit faster and cheaper

Haden Clarkin, in a blog called The Transit Guy offers a “four step playbook” for building public transportation infrastructure in the United States. I’ll summarize and offer a few of my own reactions in brackets.

  • Develop a comprehensive vision, goals, and plan. [Yes, a lot of times people – especially my fellow engineers but also politicians trying to be helpful with funding – want to jump directly to “projects”. A “project” is a specific thing you want to build in a specific place. But it needs to be part of a larger plan to serve a larger purpose in the long term. This planning needs to be firmly in place when the “project” ideas come up and people are pushing for quick decisions on them. And you need a critical mass of people inside the organizations making the decisions, from senior management down to at least mid-level management, to really understand and buy into the plan. And you need to bring new people on board with the plan as you gradually lose institutional knowledge to political churn and attrition.]
  • Approve the plan through a voter referendum. In Haden’s vision, this cuts through a lot of the regulatory red tape later, because all the regulatory requirements tend to have extensive public buy-in and outreach requirements. A state-level referendum may also cut through some of localized NIMBY issues. [He’s writing in Rhode Island, and this may work there. We don’t really have state-level referenda in Pennsylvania, and I assume there is probably some constitutional reason for this. There are mechanisms for updating the constitution, and maybe we should work on this. We do have a big urban-rural divide issue in the state though, like many larger states. This might make it difficult to pass a state-level referendum focused on a metro area. It may be worth a try though.]
  • “Design and Plan it In-House”. [This is consultant hate. I happen to be a consultant who has worked with and been embedded within public agencies, and I think this is hogwash. Well, mostly hogwash. Sometimes public sector people mistakenly compare the hourly direct labor cost for their own people to the hourly cost of labor+benefits+overhead+profit of private sector consultants. Yes, there is a small profit in there, theoretically set by market competition. Competition for public-sector contracts is pretty ferocious, at least outside of the military-industrial complex. The true overhead and benefits cost to the public sector is often hard to define, but if you do an honest accounting of it, it is almost certainly higher than the private sector. Now, you want a public agency firmly in control of design, procurement, and construction of its projects. So it probably makes sense to set some benchmark like the majority of people working on a project should work for the public agency. But then it can make a lot of sense to bring in consultants both for their expertise and because they are a flexible work force you can surge in when needed and then scale back when no longer needed. You let them deal with those overhead and benefit costs so they don’t get out of control on the public side. You want strong technical people on the public side of course, but it is also really important to focus on strong project management, procurement, finance and accounting, and construction management expertise so you can make the best use of the private sector.]
  • Prioritize high impact and publicly visible projects first. [This makes total sense. I especially like the idea of building bus rapid transit lines early and converting them to light rail or even subway over time.]

There’s lots more, of course. Land use, housing, and zoning policy all play a role in building communities where there will actually be demand and support for public transportation. You probably need metro-scale and often multi-state authorities for design, construction, operation, and financing. That is big picture, long term context for the planning process. In my fantasy world, we wouldn’t just have a transportation plan for one municipality, but a comprehensive infrastructure plan (how about transportation, energy, water, communications, green infrastructure and food) at the metropolitan area scale.

Philadelphia transit cuts

It’s sad – Philadelphia’s public transportation, which was already creaky and unreliable due to decades of deferred maintenance and capital investment, is being financially starved due to dysfunctional politics at the state level. At the heart of the political game is a willful misunderstanding of a fundamental truth – most economic activity occurs where the most people are. Is this really not so obvious that we need to debate it? And this means that most taxes in a state like Pennsylvania are paid in its metropolitan areas. It makes sense to spend some of that money disproportionately in rural areas which by definition can’t generate the net economic activity to support themselves. But people and politicians in these rural areas not only do not appreciate this, they believe the exact opposite thing to be true – that they are subsidizing metropolitan areas. Which is logically, financially, and physically impossible. But mirroring the larger country, these irrational rural politicians have disproportionate political power relative to the number of people they represent. I have no political answers to this political problem, and I am getting closer to considering leaving the state. Delaware and New Jersey have their own problems but are much more rationally governed.

Anyway, having said all that, Philadelphia’s public transportation is not exactly cutting edge or visionary. It’s dirty, old, slow, and communication is poor. And it’s not cheap – one person riding a bus can save money relative to Uber, assuming they don’t place a high value on time. But several people traveling together will not save money. Tourists and business travelers have no hope of understanding it, if they were willing to brave the urine and feces and garbage and rats in the stations and bus stops and on the vehicles themselves. A system like this is at risk of losing out to more innovative competition, even if that innovative competition is bad for the environment and dangerous for people. So let’s look at some of the alternatives mentioned in this ABC article.

  • ride sharing databases – The local one is run by our metropolitan planning organization. Basically just a message board for people to find each other who want to carpool. Makes sense, just seems low tech and clunky. Enterprising individuals could probably build a business around this, which may or may not be against the rules.
  • Rideshare (Uber, etc.) – Sure they’ve been around for awhile, but they have some new ideas. With “Group Rides”, you can invite specific friends to share your ride. “The company’s latest option, Route Share, is designed to function like a commuter shuttle running every 20 minutes during peak times from 6 a.m. to 10 a.m. and 4 p.m. to 8 p.m.. with designated pick-up and drop-off points.” … “For even more significant savings, try Uber Transit, which provides a public transit route, sometimes combined with an Uber ride.”
  • van pools run by rental car companies – “The rental car company teams up with companies to match employees who live near each other, then provides them with vehicles to use… Each ride consists of 4-15 riders who live near each other or along a route, and share rides to and from work. Enterprise takes care of maintenance and vehicle liability insurance.”
  • New Jersey and Delaware also have “Transportation Management Associations” which seem vague to me but again have something to do with organizing carpools and vanpools.

A couple thoughts. First, we see tech solutions like Uber adapting to public transportation, and starting to cover the gap between whatever public transportation can provide and what people actually need to get from Point A to Point B. This is basically good, although if public transportation can’t compete on cost it may eventually disappear. Governments might do the math and decide to subsidize the more flexible private options instead. Self-driving and self-parking wheeled vehicles may change the dynamics of how all this works, and relatively soon. All of this is likely to exacerbating sprawling land uses rather than the more compact urban areas we know are best for economic growth, innovation, human health, and the environment. But that has been the trend for a century at least.

I have some hope that self-parking vehicles may enable less waste of the most economically valuable land for parking. Because the point of parking is to make transportation easily accessible where you are working/shopping/recreating, and a self-driving vehicle can park efficiently farther away but still show up when and where you need it. Instead of a store having to have a parking lot that is bigger than the store, you can now have two stores next to each other and a large parking lot/garage out of sight on the edge of town. And that garage or lot won’t have to be as big because the self-parking cars will be able to maneuver more efficiently not to mention infinitely patiently compared to human drivers.

Tokyo train stations

I have never been to Tokyo, unfortunately. I had a trip planned there in 2011, but the earthquake and nuclear meltdown that year intervened. My condolences to everyone who lost loved ones or was otherwise directly impacted by that event, and I am not suggesting the minor disruption to my vacation plans that year was comparatively important.

Anyway, I was looking forward to seeing Tokyo firsthand and I didn’t get to. But I guess pictures are the next best thing. This article has some nice pictures of railway stations. Now, I spent some time in Singapore recently, and the railway stations there are pretty new and very modern looking. The first thing that strikes me about these Tokyo stations is they are not brand new, and they look pretty similar to older train stations here in the U.S. But the comparison ends there, because they are clean, well maintained, the service is reliable and the population is proud of their public transportation system. I also note that these older stations have been successfully retrofit with barriers so that people can’t fall/be pushed/intentionally jump onto the tracks and die. In the United States, at least here in my home city of Philadelphia, we “can’t afford” these barriers. Meaning of course that human life is not worth enough to us to make this a priority compared to other things we spend enormous amounts of money on, like highways and bombs.

https://www.nippon.com/en/japan-topics/b11302/
https://www.nippon.com/en/japan-topics/b11302/

problems with electric buses

Electric cars might have arrived, technologically speaking, but electric buses are having some problems. The Austin metro area recently committed to going to an all-electric bus fleet, but the early results are that the buses are breaking down and just generally not as reliable as the proven diesel technology. Suppliers are limited, having supply chain issues, and financial problems.

This just sounds like a technology having growing pains in the early implementation stage. Implementation of an emerging technology is a chicken-and-egg problem, where issues need to be solved through “learning by doing”, but if nobody is willing to take the risk to work through those issues the technology never gets scaled up. If you really want it to happen, the federal government might need to share some of the risk in the early stages. Or here’s an idea: pilot the technology with school buses?

SEPTA tries micro-transit

The Philadelphia-area Southeastern Pennsylvania Transit Authority (SEPTA) is experimenting with micro-transit. I have heard that the idea of micro-transit, including semi-fixed but flexible bus routes people can schedule with apps, has not worked all that well in trials elsewhere. And SEPTA has a history and tendency of underwhelming. Nonetheless, I think that if the U.S. remains committed to its low-density sprawl land use preferences, traditional fixed bus and rail routes are just not going to work. Something more flexible is needed, and if public agencies can find ways to do it more efficiently or cost-effectively than the private sector then it’s worth a try. If we are tempted to say it is unfair for a subsidized government agency to compete with the private sector in this area, we should remember the enormous public funding that has gone into building and maintaining our enormous public road network over the past 70 or so years at the expense of nearly all other types of public infrastructure.

I’m still skeptical of you though SEPTA. You have never exceeded my low and steadily declining expectations. Prove me wrong.

what we think about paying for transportation

Is this hypocrisy or ignorance?

Bettina Jarasch, a Green party politician who also serves as the city’s deputy mayor, suggested the implementation of the measure after the apparent success of a recent summer scheme that saw Germans charged only €9 per month for public transport in order to help curb the impact of inflation during the summer months.

According to a report by Bild, Jarasch believes that a mandatory charge of between €15 and €20 ($16-$21) for public transport will further to bump revenue for public transport services while keeping prices low for individual users.

“I’m increasingly thinking about a solidarity levy of 15 to 20 euros a month for all Berliners,” the politician remarked, while also noting that the reduction in the price of public transport has seen a significant uptick in usage across the country.

Breitbart

Meanwhile, here in the USA, we are all forced to pay a fortune for driving and parking infrastructure, whether we use it or not. We accept this partly because it has been the status quo for so long we don’t remember anything different, and partly because of the endless propaganda hurled at us by the auto-highway-oil industrial complex.

Meanwhile, we have a double standard for transit for some reason where we expect it to be paid for 100% by user fees. Then we disincentivize people from actually using it by providing heavily subsidized car infrastructure.

There may be a few corporate executives and marketing types that understand the hypocrisy of this arrangement, but overall I’m going to go with ignorance.

micro-transit

A number of public transportation agencies have been experimenting with micro-transit, where buses (or sometimes smaller vehicles) operate on-demand and are dispatched by algorithms. I like the idea – it seems like a possible way to provide service in low-density suburbs, unless we are going to start building differently. However, this op-ed from WHYY says it hasn’t gone well. Keep in mind the author is an advocate for transit riders and transit unions. It’s possible the person is cherry-picking examples or that the pilots in question for poorly implemented and managed.

On average, microtransit pilots across the U.S. have a ridership of zero to three riders per hour, with most pilots operating much closer to zero than three. For comparison, the Route 127, one of the most confusing and infrequent buses in SEPTA’s network, still moves an average of 13.9 passengers per revenue hour. When AC Transit in Oakland, Cal. replaced one of its  low-performing fixed-routes with microtransit, the per passenger subsidy more than doubled. And when Kansas City attempted microtransit, the ridership was so low that by the end of the pilot, they ended up paying $1,000 per passenger to operate the service.

WHYY

To be fair, this article is specifically arguing against implementation of this option by SEPTA (Southeast Pennsylvania Transportation Agency), which is not known for above-average implementation or management. The currently have an app which provides real-time data on bus and train arrival, but the data seems to be supplied by a random number generator. So I would not be too hopeful that they would be the first to pull this off successfully. Maybe they should just give everybody a pre-paid card to use Uber, or hire small-time taxi drivers who lost their life savings when that industry was upended a few years ago.

driverless taxis in San Francisco and Arlington, Texas

Driverless taxis are already operating on public streets in these two places, although for now their range is limited and they still have “safety operators”. Once this catches on, I have a hard time imagining how fixed-route bus services could continue to compete. If I ran a public transportation system I would be trying to get innovative on flexible routes right away.

the stats on Uber and Lyft

A new report provides interesting data on ride sharing nationwide. We all knew they were shifting rides away from the traditional taxi industry, but they are also resulting in more traffic on the road for a few reasons. First, they are taking trips away from traditional public transportation and from walking in major, high-density cities. And second, people are taking trips they otherwise wouldn’t have taken. The evidence that they are putting downward pressure on car ownership rates does not appear to be strong, at least so far.

I have a few reactions. From a purist economic perspective, if people are choosing to take trips that were too expensive or too inconvenient before, that is a positive improvement in those people’s lives. If the traditional taxi and public transportation models are too slow, dirty, inconvenient and/or expensive to compete, they need to figure out how to step up their games. My sympathy is limited, but I would rather see traditional public transportation adapt than disappear. I have no love for taxi dispatch companies, but I do have sympathy for the small-time owner operators that borrowed large sums of money to invest in a regulated taxi medallion. Governments really ought to buy those medallions back at the market price before Uber and Lyft came on the scene (and then throw them away forever). Fewer walking and/or biking trips is not good for people’s health for both physical activity and air quality reasons, but there city governments need to step up their infrastructure and planning games if they want walking and biking to be truly safe and inviting ways to get around. A final note is that even if traffic does not go down in the near term, any decrease in parking demand will be a positive for dense cities.

Ride sharing has improved my life immeasurably. I choose to live in a dense city and choose not to own a car. Before ride sharing was available, I often had trouble getting a taxi home from certain neighborhoods when I needed it, got cheated by drivers who pretended not to understand where I was going or refused to give change for cash-only payments (which were the only option). Taxi service has improved a lot now that they have some competition. Buses and commuter trains too are slow, dirty, and unreliable, although they too have improved recently. So I think a lot of people’s lives are better and I think the public will continue to demand this technology.