I didn't want to have to make this video... | Frequency Matters

i see a lot of commentary on various issues talking about transit and i literally talk about transit in these videos every single week but i still think the most important issue with our transit systems around the world still isn't seriously discussed nearly enough i've talked about it in videos i've tweeted about it other advocates have talked about it lots and yet i still hear the same thing about city x not having enough transit ridership because the buses don't have wi-fi or because they don't have a subway line on this corridor or a light rail line most likely if we're talking about north america or because there isn't appropriate transit-oriented development and because there are too many park-and-rides and yet i don't think any of these issues are actually at the center of why so many transit systems out there and yes many in north america don't get nearly as much use as they would otherwise let's talk about why [Music] you know what sucks waiting on a cold or hot day for a bus without a shelter no shade no protection from the elements rain snow sleet hail whatever it be low frequency transit is the absolute worst and so it always surprises me that so little of our energy as transit advocates or as people in the transit community just goes and focuses on talking about higher frequency transit if you look across a lot of the world transit exists all over the place but so often transit exists but is completely unusable because the bus maybe shows up once an hour maybe frequency is the most important thing for transit i recently saw a post on instagram from a friend who was visiting los angeles and they appeared slightly disturbed to see that the subway was running every 10 minutes and it wasn't even 9pm this is la's highest capacity transit corridor going between the downtown which isn't super dense but which is still the downtown of a city of literally millions of people and yet the subway is running every 20 minutes on each of the branches at 9pm now i see all kinds of different critiques of la and its transportation network and there are a lot of 100 valid critiques to be made about highway-oriented transit and about poor land use and about a lack of density and a just sprawling urban form that's super polycentric and i could go on potentially building a monorail for a very important transit corridor building this enormous station that's nicer than many central stations in europe surrounding it with parking lots and maybe running about one train every hour but if los angeles just ran its existing transit system and yes i am talking about adjacent communities not just the city of los angeles itself two to three times more often it would suddenly be a transit paradise at least compared to today los angeles has a lot of rail lines and it has an incredibly comprehensive bus network but because the transit isn't frequent enough people have to needlessly wait for transit vehicles i mean seriously this is nuts 20-minute headways at 8 30 pm on a rail line another place that comes up a lot in popular discussion is denver because it's a city that's grown a lot in the recent decades and also a city that's built a lot of rail transit in recent decades and there's been lots of talk about why denver system isn't successful we built train lines why aren't people riding them often it seems like the conclusions people come to with denver's network is that there isn't enough ridership because there's not enough transit-oriented development and i don't think that's right if you look at denver it is not tokyo there aren't high-rise apartments on every corner but at the same time if you look at the rail network there is respectable tod especially for a north american city you've got some new condos here you know a five over one here some new townhouses here all near rail stations this should be a network that can be really successful but then you see the service frequencies you have light rail lines and electric regional rail lines that run maybe once or twice an hour and of course with that level of frequency even people living next to the transit probably won't want to take it you have basically all of the conditions for success in denver a pretty big rail network a comprehensive bus network a pretty strong downtown and a decent amount of tod and people are honestly willing to ride slow service here in toronto i have ridden slow bus service almost every single day and as long as it's frequent that's okay because once you get on the bus you can conk out and forget about your ride until you actually arrive at your destination but if the bus doesn't come you're sitting at the curb waiting and waiting and waiting potentially getting rained on and just dealing with staring at probably a strode and you know what this can be seen right in denver one of the best used routes in the entire denver transit network is the colfax bus and this shouldn't be surprising colfax is quite strode for much of its length it's not necessarily the dream of paris or tokyo style tod but the bus runs frequently and lots of people use it every single day and you know what these issues with frequency are true at the high end as well look at seattle's link light rail the system tends to run every eight to ten minutes at the best periods during the day and trains are often really busy two hours to the north of vancouver the city itself is not that different but way more people use the translink skytrain network than use the link light rail and that's in no small part because translink's network runs so much more frequently there is a concerted effort on the skytrain to run frequent service over big trains and so you'll often see a two-car train running every three minutes instead of a four-car train every six minutes and vice versa and seattle could learn a lot from taking that approach running smaller trains more often it's not unusual in vancouver to see a skytrain line running every three minutes at 11 pm on a sunday my point here isn't that seattle isn't doing the right things it's building a pretty big rail network the service is decently frequent i'm just suggesting that things could be even better if frequency was an even bigger priority if you think a lot of people are writing linkedin a 10 minute or an eight minute headway imagine at a five minute headway it would be even more convenient and people's trips especially short trips would be comparatively faster and of course this isn't just an american problem recently my local bugbear york region transits viva brt system was tweeting out about how it's won all of these design awards and i'm not gonna lie viva has beautiful infrastructure and beautiful stops and the architects and engineers who worked on the design should be commended for it but it's hard for me as someone who doesn't live with a car to be proud of a transit system that has beautiful infrastructure but barely runs any buses on it and i think this can be a problem when we focus too much on the aesthetics of our urbanism transit should be pretty for sure but if your transit is pretty but it isn't frequent that's a hundred percent worse than completely ugly hideous transit that runs very frequently there are typical city bus lines with basically zero priority in toronto that run really frequently that move literally multiple times more people than york region's brt routes simply because they run frequently and thus people can rely on them and honestly not everyone is so bad either there are great examples here in north america i remember looking at bart's schedules during the pandemic and being a little concerned because service frequencies were crazy something like every 30 minutes on some of the lines but when i looked at a schedule recently good work part very good work the ttc had also cut service frequencies on its subway network during the pandemic it wasn't uncommon to see a frequency of every six or seven minutes at some times during the day but now service is back to every three minutes on the subway and that makes me happy bad frequency is problematic for so many reasons waiting around even in the age of phones always feels like a waste of time and at least getting into motion feels like you're making some progress at the same time wanting to go somewhere that isn't on a single transit route means you have to transfer and if service frequencies are low you don't just have to wait once but you might have to wait two times of course at the same time if your vehicles aren't driving around providing a high frequency service transit isn't very visible you might not even know that there's transit running in your neighborhood i know that's been the case for me in the past when i was growing up in my suburban vancouver neighborhood i wasn't even aware that there were buses that came there because they came like once an hour and i almost never saw them of course low frequencies also make a lot of trips completely impractical if i want to go down the street a few miles or kilometers to the local mall and i have to wait 30 minutes and i have a car at my disposal i don't care that transit is going to be a little bit cheaper i'm gonna get in my car and just go to the mall right then in a couple of minutes making people wait so long to do even basic trips doesn't make sense and it will never attract people to transit people value their time a lot at the same time while i poke fun at systems that are gadget bonds or that use some sort of weird technology or strange vehicles at the end of the day if they provide a frequent transit service that's reliable i don't really care what the technology is because the service is the most important thing sure using a better technology might make it easier to provide a frequent service but i find it hard to complain about some random japanese city that has a monorail or a people mover and runs it every few minutes because ultimately people can rely on the transit of course frequent transit with nice trains is also nicer than frequent transit with bad trains but if you have to choose between nice trains and frequent transit any regular transit rider is going to choose the frequent transit and this isn't something you should blame on your local transit agency sure to some extent transit agencies aren't optimistic enough they don't push for more frequency even if it means that they'll have more to do by providing more service most transit operators maintainers schedulers and planners would love to have more runs to plan we need to push our governments to create transit systems that are actually worth using because the real waste of taxpayers money is having a big transit system that not many people can use because it's not frequent there's that perfect idiom for almost any question about why a transit service doesn't get used enough when it's infrequent you can't judge the amount of people who want a bridge based on the amount who swim thanks for watching [Music] you

Channel: RMTransit

Views: 141,236

Keywords: transit, transportation, rail, railway, railfan, public transit, public transport, public transportation, train, subway, metro, underground, rail transport, urban planning

Id: DzofaSm8pSw

Length: 10min 30sec (630 seconds)

Published: Tue Sep 20 2022