Kansas City Streetcar, fixed guideway transit, and marginal pricing.

Wikipedia tells me that the OKC streetcar, post-pandemic, was costing $420k a year, collecting $60k a year in fares, for a net loss of $360k a year. With perhaps 15k riders, that's about $23 dollar per rider, which is absurd. So, I hope the areas it is serving are experiencing a whole lot of additional economic activity and new development, because that's a lot. 

More absurd is that a few years earlier, it was free to ride but had 75,000 riders. So the math says $420k a year, collecting $0k a year in fares, for a net loss of $420k a year, for a cost of about $6 per rider. So running things fare-free, they were getting 4x the benefit! 

The case for 'free buses' is often questionable--is the reduced travel time reduced stop times worth the reduced fare? But for fixed guideway transit, the calculation is different, because a fixed guideway transit system already represents millions in fixed costs investment. The OKC streetcar was built on the cheap, for $23m. So assuming a (SWAG) of 4.35%, they are already paying a million dollars a year of interest on the debt to build the thing. So its not $420k to operate, it's 1,420k to operate. Which, at 15k riders, is ~$94 a rider. BUT! At 75k riders, that's ~$19/rider. 

Once you've built a thing, your best option is to maximize the service you are providing. And the way to do that is to make the marginal cost of people using the service as close to zero as possible. And the way to do that is a pass system. My yoga studio runs $150 a month or $30 a class. And when I'm on a per-class basis, it makes me reluctant to take a class. But while I'm on the monthly pass, I've got every incentive to maximize my use. And that's exactly the logic every fixed guideway transit system should be exploiting, because their marginal cost of additional trip is very small, and their fixed costs very large. 

Of course, during the commute peak, transit capacity actually matters and its standing room only. But that's a fraction of the day, and the rest of the day should have discount pricing. Restaurants don't have 'happy hours' because they want you to be happy--but to draw people in during a slack time where they have to 'staff up' prior to the peak, and so they suffer the costs regardless. 

From Human Transit:

  Ridership at different times of day is interdependent, if only for the obvious reason that most transit trips are round trips.  If you cut service and thus reject a customer at one time of day, you'll likely lose their business in the other direction as well.  The most obvious "time of low demand," the late evening, is also a "guaranteed ride home," which means it affects the overall attractiveness of the product. 

More important, a consistent pattern of all-day service (including "times of low demand") is a powerful tool for..<making low vehicle ownership possible>  That's is why many transit agencies are now committing to a policy "Frequent Network" that guarantees service over a certain span regardless of trip-by-trip ridership.

And from the comments:

It is hard to build up a transit system when most people only look up on it as a necessary evil for the "less fortunate." For a transit system to be useful it has to run when and where it might be needed and not just when it can maximize revenue. Since most transit line recover less than 50% of their cost from the fare box it is probably perceived to be an advantage to run the minimal possible service rather than try to build up ridership to maximize benefit.

Human Transit continues to be profoundly thoughtful about transit.

Schedule Span

Catching up on Wikipedia transit updates, I happened across this chart of annual ridership, and ridership on a per-mile basis.  While I was pleased as punch about TRAX's success (#9 in the nation), I was less psyched about the ridership per mile. Reading up on other systems, something about the Seattle's 'Central Link' struck me--"Service operates seven days a week, from 5 am to 1 am Monday through Saturday and from 6 am to midnight on Sundays".

I spent most of last night reading chapter 3 of the 'Transit Capacity and Quality of Service Manual, 2nd Edition'. One of the ideas it brought to my attention was the idea of 'schedule span', which is the transit equivalent of hours of operation. The Central Link is operating 20 hours a day. TRAX calls it quit at about 10:30-11, and it starts later! I think that's reflected in the per-mile ridership numbers--almost 2000 vs. just over 1500 daily riders/mile. Central Link is 33% higher than TRAX, for ~33% higher hours.

I've previously commented on the lack of late-night service for TRAX, which (as one commenter noted) has actually been declining over time. Anyone who has read the history of transit is familiar with the ridership sabotaging effects of reducing service. Less service means fewer riders, which means less money, which means less service---it's a downward spiral.

Miles of track are expensive, running between $60m and $100m per mile. We should make as much use of it as possible.

Bus vs. Trains

I was reading Human Transit today, and thinking about the rail map. SLC has a similarly complex bus system. Why is not possible to have a similar map? Jared Walker has the right of it when he says 'many transit services that are stuck in mixed traffic'. This is the fundamental divide--not bus vs. train, but dedicated right of way vs. mixed traffic. Trains, being heavier and slower to stop, frequently get their own. Buses do not, and that makes all the difference.  Effective BRT means dedicated right of way

Transit Benchmarks

Mountain Line Transit in Missoula, Montana has a benchmark that a bus trip should be "no greater than 200% of automobile trip time". While I initially found the idea ridiculous, I came to recognize while the benchmark may be set low, the idea of benchmarks was an excellent idea.

A co-worker once told me that the purpose of accounting is not fairness or equity in distribution, but a technique for detecting what produces value. There are a raft of possible improvements that transit agencies can spend their funding on. Many transit agencies spend far too little on tracking their own performance, and as a result are unable to assess the success or failure of their own efforts. Without rigorous accounting, there is a danger that transit improvements will be limited to what is politically palatable, or the 'flavor of the week'. Worse still, without metrics, when program and policy efforts prove ineffective, transit agencies have little justification for cutting them when faced by an active and vocal campaign by a narrow interest group.

How good is your transit? Has it gotten better? How will you know when it does?

Limits on Connections

Jared Walker talks about connections here. He's established a 'floor' for connections, demarcating when it becomes useful to use connections and avoid the spaghetti overlay. What about the ceiling? How often is is reasonable to ask people to make a connection, in terms of a) Connections per trip, and b) distance between connections?

Regarding a): Personally, if a transit trip involves more that one connection, I either find an alternate that involves a greater than half mile walk, or don't make the trip.

Regarding b): The urban* heuristic is: "Is it faster to walk"? is always a good metric. Ie, if the wait time+transit travel time > walk time, walk. Assume urban Salt Lake City conditions (15 minute headway, 8 blocks/mile). Assume 'random' wait times, so that connections have not been timed, any connection imparts a 7.5 minute wait time. At 3 mph walking pace, you can walk 3/8ths of a mile in that time--3 SLC blocks. At an average 12 mph bus speed (time spent at stops included). Thus, a bus will carry you 12 blocks in the time it takes you to walk 3, once you get on it.

This implies that it is worthwhile for the average person to make a connection, if it will save three blocks of walking. But this analysis presumes a time-only comparison, where real connections have other factors to be considered.

*At the suburban scale, it's almost always faster to wait, simply because the distances you are taking transit is measured in miles, not blocks.