Two sprawling sunbelt cities are making their transit systems work, even while ridership in the big 7 is falling

Phoenix and Houston redesigned their bus networks, and it WORKED. 


"Transit ridership fell in 31 of 35 major metropolitan areas in the United States last year, including the seven cities that serve the majority of riders...(New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, D.C., San Francisco, Boston and Philadelphia)

Exceptions to the trend: Seattle, Phoenix and Houston, which either expanded transit coverage and boosted service or underwent ambitious network overhauls, as in Houston’s case."

More service, more riders? Who'da'thunk? 

Not saying more service is the cure: Service in the right amounts, in the proper places is what is proper. 

Transit Ridership History in the US

From here

Puts things in context, eh?

Heavy rail remained remarkably constant across all time periods, though. In many cases, for many destinations, heavy rail transit is simply better than the personal automobile.

One issue I have with this graph is that it lumps 'light rail' in with trolley. They aren't quite the same animal. Trolleys are uniformly street-running, in mixed traffic. What APTA calls 'light rail' (post 1980) typically uses that type of Right of Way for only a portion of it's running-way. Most light rail systems use a mix of separated, exclusive, and mixed. A portion of freight railway, or the median of a freeway provides separated part, and exclusive and mixed right of way on public roads provides the rest.

 As Meyer/Kain/Wohl pointed out in the Urban Transportation problem (50 years ago), using a freight line with railroad gates is functionally equivalent to a heavy rail. The big different between the two is that heavy rail systems use tunnels and light rail doesn't.

Old Greek Town Station needs to go

Currently, SLC has a problem: It's kind of an open secret that the TRAX ridership between the Arena Station and the Salt Lake Central Station kind of sucks. And I think I know why: Old Greek Town station is FAR too close to both Salt Lake Central Station and Planetarium Station. Salt Lake's blocks may be 660' long, but stop spacing for transit should be about 1200', and the station is within 1000' of both. I know WHY it's there--SLC's former Mayor, Rocky Anderson, demanded it as a nexus for additional 'Transit Oriented Development' in downtown. It was a bad idea at the time, but UTA permitted it because Salt Lake City was paying for the line. 

Along the Sandy line, each additional TRAX stop adds about 3 minutes to the journey. Downtown, I'd estimate it's greater. The Sandy line has dedicated Right of Way, and so never needs to deal with traffic lights. Downtown, making the stop at Greek town means the train has to match up with the traffic light. When it fails to do so, that requires waiting for the light to cycle, adding another minutes worth of wait time. 

Adding the 9400 South TRAX station cost about $2.1, so closing a station represents a pretty blatant waste of funds, plus the additional political cost of confusion by riders attempting to board or disembark at a non-functional station. 

Consistency Matters

I have friends who would never willingly ride a bus who will eagerly take a ride on TRAX. I cannot blame them. TRAX was the start of my love affair with Salt Lake City transit. The fundamental difference between TRAX and a bus is reliability--TRAX can keep a schedule. When I was commuting to the University of Utah from Sandy, I knew, to the minute, when TRAX left Sandy station and arrived at the University of Utah.

Much as I support buses, I cannot muster any love for them. Because I cannot trust a bus. By its very nature, a bus is an unreliable beast. No bus can keep a schedule, and the sheer uncertainty of that is maddening. Even when I rode a bus daily to work, I still found myself doing the 'bus bob', craning my neck down the street to look and see if the bus was coming yet. When the bus actually came varied by weather conditions, by time of day, and by individual driver. It was actually pleasing when a regular driver was consistently ten minutes late every day.  I knew exactly when I had to be at the stop and I no longer had to stand in the cold for ten minutes every morning, waiting for a bus that the schedule claimed had already arrived. 

The bus schedule was worse than useless. It only shows what time the bus is supposed to come, not when it actually will. It is possible and even likely to arrive ten minutes before the schedule time, and wait 20 minutes to catch a bus. But with 15 minute headways between buses or trains, there is only one chance to catch the right bus, so everyone is forced to be early, just to be sure. Thus, irregular arrival times vastly increasing their door to door travel time, to the enormous detriment of ridership.