Use Surveys to Give Courage to Public Officials

One of the real virtues of a public survey is to provide courage for public officials as they make politically charged decisions.

Being a public official is tough--constantly asked to make important decisions on a multiplicity of topics on which lack technical expertise, and so you are really reliant on: A) what you staff says, and B) what your personal network says. So, it is easy to get a skewed view of what the public supports or will at least accept, and how widespread opposition actually is.

Something to remember next time you design a rider survey--be sure to include a question that addresses political questions like coverage vs. frequency.

Most people also firmly hold a wide variety of beliefs based on anecdotal evidence. Empirical data, empirical data, when presented with a compelling narrative and selected representative anecdotes, can do a lot to change minds.

Hamish Cambell Gets it

"This is why transit agencies obsess over frequency and easy connections. The difference between trains every 3 minutes versus every 9 minutes is not three times worse. It is exponentially worse. At 3-minute frequency, a missed connection costs 3 minutes. At 9-minute frequency, that missed connection compounds into schedule disruption, late arrivals, and cascading delays through your day. Add capacity problems where you might not fit on the next train, and the costs compound again. You are not just waiting 9 minutes. You are waiting 9 minutes, then maybe another 9, while also managing stress about being late and uncertainty about whether you will even make it on. Research consistently shows riders will choose a slower direct route over a faster route requiring transfers. They are not being irrational. They are avoiding compounding costs that planners can measure but riders simply experience as too much friction."

Hamish Campbell "Why Distance Compounds Costs in Cities"; Cities + Transport 2026 February 2

Key point is the anxiety acts as a travel time multiplier. "If I miss this one, how long do I have to wait for the next one?" Riding the bus already includes anxiety of boarding. Add a transfer doubles that. Reliability overcomes the anxiety. If you can't afford frequency, then you've got to manage reliability. Clockface scheduling is great, but--if you promise a bus every 15 minutes, but can't deliver, that's worse than not promising anything. 

Transit supportive density is a bit of a red herring

"Transit supportive density" is a bit of a red herring. The Utah Transit Authority build a very successful transit system by destinations where parking was expensive to build (downtown, universities & colleges, hospitals) and using a mix of PnR and transit centers to aggregate origins. So for making transit work, what really matters is destination density--how much stuff is within a walkable distance (10m) of the transit station? 

Transit and Traffic Congestion

I hate to break it to you, but there is nothing that can be done to reduce traffic congestion. Some combination of the triple convergence and induced demand puts paid to any new highway capacity, and usually pretty quickly. 

The same is (sadly) true of transit. If my transit capacity reduces traffic congestion, the triple convergence still strikes: people divert from other times, other modes, and other routes, until traffic congestion reaches equilibrium again. 

Uber as Transit costs much more than Transit

Somebody tried it. A suburban muni with suburban muni problems (low density residential, poorly connected street network, distributed destinations, etc)

BUT

The article notes

Since the introduction of ride-sharing companies such as Uber, transit use has fallen in major American cities nearly 2%, and those losses are cumulative: since Uber first started in San Francisco in 2010, bus ridership has dropped by more than 12%.

If you weren't aware, transit service in San Francisco is not actually all the great. There is BART (flabby and run down), and Muni Metro, but most of the action is on buses. Which run on narrow streets, in mixed traffic. So the buses are slow, and unreliable. Which is what made UBER viable (and attractive) in the first place.

UBER is going to destroy all the low-quality bus routes. In San Francisco, and everywhere. The productivity (riders per route mile) for such routes is already low. If it drops a bit lower, then the service gets cut to lower frequency. And so fewer people ride it, in the classic transit death spiral. The only stuff that is going to be immune to this are the high-quality service, the bus routes good enough to attract bus riders. A frequent network route.

So my vision is this: A limited route network (about 1 mile between lines), running at very high frequencies. And UBER to fill in the gaps, with a subsidy based on distance from a frequent network stop. People nearby continue to have an incentive to walk to the stop, people far away can still get their. (With some fudge factor for the disabled/elderly). 

Yep. It's Uber that's to blame.

Public transit ridership in major US cities has been flat or declining over the past few years. Several authors have attempted both to explain this trend and to offer policy recommendations for how to respond to it. Past writing on the topic is dominated by theoretical arguments that identify possible explanations, with the few empirical analyses excluding the most recent data, from 2015-2018, where the decline is steepest. This research conducts a longitudinal analysis of  the determinants of public transit ridership in major North American cities for the period 2002-2018, segmenting the analysis by mode to capture differing effects on rail versus bus. Our research finds that standard factors, such changes in service levels, gas price and auto ownership, while important, are insufficient to explain the recent ridership declines. We find that the introduction of bike share in a city is associated with increased light and heavy rail1 ridership, but a 1.8% decrease in bus ridership. Our results also suggest that for each year after Transportation Network Companies (TNCs) enter a market, heavy rail ridership can be expected to decrease by 1.3% and bus ridership can be expected to decrease by 1.7%. This TNC effect builds with each passing year and may be an important driver of recent ridership declines.  

But it's not JUST Uber/Lyft. It's the failure of transit agencies to respond TO the competitive pressures provided by Uber/Lyft. Providing 'circulation' on transit has largely been a myth (Chamber of Commerce dreams of shuttles and loops and circulators are just that). For 95% of people, it's not worth the wait to save the walk).

The idea that it's good for your bus to stop every block is stupid. Every stop costs time, and choice riders choose on time (and reliability). More stops also impair reliability: With so many stops, each stop has (on average) fewer people. But there is no way to predict which stops will have passengers to pick up and drop off at what times. 

To be successful, public transit agencies need to focus on what mass transit can do, that Uber/Lyft cannot: moving a lot of people very quickly. Focusing more on mobility, and less on access.

And how to identify WHERE to cut such services? Easy--just check the map of where the Uber pick-ups are.

source

Where the Uber pickups are, someone has gone wrong in transit provision: Maybe too much is being provided, maybe too little. Maybe it's at the wrong hours, maybe it's going the wrong place. (Uber is expensive, and people don't use it for kicks). 

Uber and Lyft are NOT transit

TNC are  not mass transit; it's a taxi. (There is no massification)

Shared ride _is_ transit. It's a jitney. Jitneys also follow routes. 

The idea that you can combine the 'on-demand' dial-a-ride of a taxi with a jitney is fallacious.

How much detour are you willing to tolerate? And when does it make sense to stop and add another person.

Massification relies not only on spatial convergence, but also temporal convergence: 

Same people in the same place at the same time. 

Which implies it will mostly take place during times of peak demand. 

Which becomes the classic transit agency problems: Sufficient peak capacity is excess off-peak capacity.

The real innovation of TNC's is not the 'dial-a-ride'. It's the ability to use 'surge' pricing to manage the match between supply and demand. It both reduces demand (through higher prices) and draws in additional drivers (through higher fares). 

This is core to the whole TNC model, as it draws in latent supply.

'Latent supply' is how the whole TNC thing works. Most cars are parked most of the time.

Commuting in the morning, the commute+shopping in the evening.

BRT vs. Traffic Lane, Part 3

Continuing our series on BRT vs. Traffic Lane (Part 1, Part 2), another exploration how how the two compare. Mike Brown observed that:

1. A 5-minute, fully loaded BRT would carry about as many people as a standard Arterial lane
2. Unless you can trust that you can fully load each bus for an hour, then a 5-minute BRT will not move as many people as standard cars would.
3. That's not necessarily a reason to go with cars.  Cars create car dependency, and they max out in what they can carry, but BRT can be increased to more than 5-minutes.
4. "BRT" need not be a single route. In many downtowns, some block segments have a bus each minute, and sometimes more often.  
5. Dedicating a lane exclusively to buses in these cases will result in more people per lane, assuming most buses are quite full.
6. If automated vehicles and vehicle sharing begin to overtake private ownership, it is possible to imagine lanes where auto occupancy might reach 4 or more passengers carried in "minivan"-type vehicles.  In this "jitney-like" transit scenario, lanes even outside downtowns can start to carry far higher numbers than 5-minute suburban BRT," which is very aggressive service for suburbs.

Mike came up with the following numbers:

I'll add a few comments to what Mike has said.

1) I don't think it's physically possible to run 60 buses an hour, even dedicated bus pullouts. That would require a bus to decelerate, board, rejoin traffic, and accelerate. Even with elevated platforms, off-board fare collection and multi-door boarding, I think that would be a hard standard to achieve. And even one late bus would make all the buses in the queue later, and congestion would ripple down the line.

 The really serious BRT routes (Gold Standard) have four lanes: A curbside lane (to reduce time spent re-entering the travel lane) used for boarding, and a bypass lane. This seems to permit operations at headways as low as a minute and a half. But that would be four lanes, and outside our scope of analysis. Hit with capacity constraints, the current solution is to make a bus more train-like, but adding another unit, using double-articulated buses rather than just articulated buses. Double-articulated buses with capacities up to 180 are currently in use in Utrecht. Volvo has a 300 person capacity bus that is being tested on the TransMilenio.

2) Rare is a system that could load such a bus so heavily. But it might be possible. Daily ridership on route 830 (the route that the Provo-Orem BRT is to replace) reached 3,000 per day. The BRT was projected (in 2011) to have 12,900 daily riders. Assuming 10% of ridership takes place in the hour of the morning peak., that's 1,290 riders. Assuming the planned five minute headway is used, that's about 107 riders per bus. Or course, they won't all be on the bus at the same time. But it does suggest that the Provo-Orem BRT will be pretty heavily used. In 2030, the BRT is projected to have 16,100 daily riders, or about 137 riders per bus. Again, they won't all be on the bus at the same time.

3) BRT does scale better. Moving to a double-articulated bus would boost capacity to 120. At five minute headway, such a bus could carry 1400 persons per direction per hour , greater than a major arterial at 5pm. Alternately, just adding 3 more buses (to boost headway to once every 4 minutes an hour) increases it to 1400 persons per direction per hour. A bus every four minutes seems like something a single lane could manage. TRAX puts a train through an intersection every 5 minutes regularly (400 S. and Main). On 'crush load' (game) days, it might be as high as double that.

4) Branded Bus Corridors are a great idea. But they are only as long as the 'rainbow' portion of the corridor, where multiple lines overlap. Beyond that, you have to transfer. TRAX is a 'rainbow' corridor from 2100 South to Courthouse station. For trains with limited amounts of guideway, service laps are almost inevitable. But for buses, I'm not sure about inter-lining services: Does it just add more confusion? I think it only really works when buses are converging on a termini. I don't see it on the Salt Lake County or Utah County map, but you can see where one should be branded on the downtown Salt Lake Map: State Street from 5th South to North Temple, and thence west along North Temple to 300 West. All of North Temple could be branded, and both 200 South and 400 South might also be candidates.

5) The key question is not "Will the buses be full?" but "When will the pavement carry more people as a bus lane than as an automobile lane, during the peak hour." Not at five minute headway and 90 person loads, but at 100 persons/bus (at 5 minute headway) or 80 persons per bus (4 minute headway), a bus edges ahead. Based on the 2030 numbers, it seems likely that a BRT is a better long-term investment than a traffic lane.

6) A full discussion on automated vehicles is going to require a full blog post.

SLC Transit Master Plan: Executive Summary Comments

Good day to you.

Just a few comments on the executive summary:

1. Competing with the automobile for travel times requires rapid transit (BRT or LRT). Any transit vehicle has 'terminal time' associated with stopping to pick up/drop off passengers. Hence, a bus will always be slower than a car. The only way a transit vehicle can make up the difference is if it can avoid automobile congestion with dedicated right of way. UTA requires 26' of ROW for a light rail, and something like 20' for a BRT.  The only road on the east bench that can support that is Foothill Drive. 
2. By your own analysis, most of your riders are Millennials. They walk a lot, and don't mind doing it. Suit stop spacing to them. 
3. Everyone walks to transit. You can increase walking distances to stops if you make the walk to transit easier (sidewalks in good repair, crosswalks striped) and have someplace to sit down while waiting. This is especially critical for the elderly.
4. Speaking of waiting at stops, the part of the transit trip riders hate the most is waiting for the bus. The literature suggests that transit equate 1 minute of wait to four minutes in in-vehicle time. Please prioritize reductions in wait times through increased frequency.
5. The main trouble with current east-west connections is that passing through downtown stinks. There is no good way to get from University to Gateway/Farmers Market area by transit. (And believe me, I have tried). The 400 South TRAX is never going to happen, so please prioritize investments on 200 South. Greater frequency on Saturday would be very welcome. 
6. Please stop using 'Journey to Work' data aggregated to the city level. It's a very serious methodological error: First, there is Modifiable Areal Unit Problem: The average of all the census tracts is very very different from the average of census tracts. Secondly, it's geography of aggregation is the place of residence, not the place of work. So it only refers to workers who live in SLC, not those who commute TO SLC.
7. The talk of shuttles on page 17 really concerns me. Shuttles are really expensive to run, and there are only three cases where there implementation is successful: Connecting peripheral surface parking lots to high density activity centers, hospital/university campuses, and 'Google Buses'. Uses them as 'transit extenders' is nonsense.
8. Last I heard, UTA had bought the spur-line on 400 West, to deal with the capacity issue. This is not discussed, and is a glaring omission.
9. The lack of discussion on UTA's proposed 'Central Bus Hub' at 200 South and State is another glaring omission.  

It would be nice if Randal O'Toole could do more than take cheap shots.

It would be nice if Randal O'Toole could do more than take cheap shots. We would have better transit if we had thoughtful criticism of it. Instead, we have thoughtless criticism and uncritical boosterism.

This bit is mostly rhetoric--although he makes a few good points:

• Trip chaining on transit is misery. 
• The more kids you have, the more trip-chaining you have to do. 
• The more time-sensitive 'emergency' trips you have to make.
• Running errands to arterial strip malls is misery.
• Getting groceries is tough.  
• A wheeled shopping basket is really useful. 
• Bike baskets are great
• Being able to Uber home is so worth it.
• Big suburban shopping malls are great to take the train to. 
• Lots of shopping within a walkable distance.  

• For less than half a mile, walking is usually faster. 
• Putting transit stops too close together is stupid. 'Too close' is 400m, which is about 2 Salt Lake City blocks. Personally, I'd prefer 600m (3 blocks) because I think the 600 East and 900 East Trax stations are too close together. But I recognize not everyone is young and healthy. 
• For any distance shorter than two miles, it's faster to bike. 
• Weather matters. Rain, snow and ice can all be dealt with, but they do suck. 
• Bikeway quality matters. I'll bike on anything, but my wife loves the protected bikeways. And with a kid in tow, so do I. 
• "For most Americans, transit doesn’t serve the complexity of most of their adult lives"
• Nor does it need to. Transit doesn't have to be for everyone, all the time. 
• It does offer a chance to cut down the miles that have to be driven, the cars that have to be owned, and the 'trips to fetch' that have to be made. 
• Living in suburban Sandy, my mom took the train to work downtown for years. Saving (30 miles a day at 50 cents a mile) $15 a day, every day. 
• My brothers and I took the train to University for years.
• My wife and I owned two cars, then one car, then no cars.  I estimate that means we have 15% more of our income to spend on other things. 
• No more sudden thousand dollar bills for car repairs.

Transit Phases

Urban Transit in the United States has six major phases**:

1. Street Railroads
2. Subways/Elevated
3. Street rail
4. Bus-titution
5. M/ART
6. Light Rail

Street Railroads is exactly as advertised: Railroads reaching the city center, run on city streets. Noisy and dangerous, they are largely extinct. Most cities relocated several of them to a common corridor (typically as part of a Union Station effort). Building a 'viaduct' over them was a popular addition after WW2. Never electrified, they belched smoke and scalding steam as they traveled

Subways/Elevated were the first round of solutions to street railroads. Two solutions emerged: elevating them, and under-grounding them. As elevating is cheaper than excavating, it was the preferred alternative. (And railroads already knew how to build viaducts). Manhattan once had elevated rail-lines running down second and 9th avenue (of which the High line is the remainder). London forced another solution. The 'City of London', the original Roman square mile inside the greater metropolis of London has its own municipal government. Disliking the nuisance effects of railways, they simply banned them on city streets. (And now you know why London has so many railroad stations). But the value of bringing a rail-line INTO the center of London was simply too great, and so the Under-grounding began, in 1863. Chicago, with it's plethora of railways, still maintains its elevated stations ('The El').

Street rail: Everyplace with even a presumption of being a 'city' built a street railway. Using railroad track, these were smaller, lighter vehicles called 'trolleys'. There were a handful of attempts to draw them using engines, but electrification (using the pantograph) became endemic.* 

Inter-Urbans: A hybrid streetcar/railroad deserves a passing mention, if only for it's later importance for light rail. Combining street-running sections in urban centers, and railroad right of way between cities, they filled a niche market, typically by connecting urban destinations to entertainment or educational institutions. Some used trolleys, and some were special 'school trains'. 

Bus-stitution represents the dark age of urban transit. (To those who love trains, at least). Worn out trolleys were replaced were shiny new buses. (Cue Roger Rabbit). Streetcars were already in decline beforehand. The only rail routes to survive were underground/elevated systems, or places with awkwardly narrow tunnels. 

M/ART refers to the period between WW2 & the advent of light rail in the United States.  But in 1970, we recognized we had 'an urban transportation problem', which is the preferred euphemism for the explosive growth in traffic congestion.
Transit was the clear solution. But even the solution was a problem. Private companies had built most of the transit infrastructure before 1928, and municipalities getting into the game only in response to their failure. But no private entity was willing to build transit in 1970--competition from the automobile was just too fierce. Conservative pundits love to argue that this reflects the innate attractiveness of the automobile. They also love to ignore the billions of dollars in Federal subsidy provided for the Interstate Highway system. So, it order to compete with the automobile, transit projects required a subsidy. Given that the 70's were sort of the high-water mark of 'big government' and centralized planning, it became a Federal project.


None of them did terribly well, at least at first. They had very high costs per rider. For some of the systems, for some years, it would have been better to either a) buy everyone a cheap car, or b) put all of the money into buses. They've done better over time, as traffic congestion has worsened, and developers have responded to the accessibility premium of locations near them, so more things are near them. BART won its spurs when the Bay Bridge collapsed. The DC metro has become the most-ridden transit system in the US.

Light Rail The return of the inter-urban! Known as 'City-Rail' (Stadtbahn) in Germany, it made use of freight right of way, with street running portions in the center of cities. APTA called them 'light rail' so suburbs would accept them. Successful, at least judging by their popularity.  They make use of a variety of types of running-way.

Streetcars are history repeating itself. They are street-rail come again--trolleys operating in mixed traffic.  Portland has made them famous, and their use as a successful economic development project means that every major city in America is either building one, or planning to. The dividing line between street cars and light rail is not a clean one. (Salt Lake has a 'streetcar' in its own railroad corridor, and a 'light rail' on a city street'.)
Both make use of all types of running way. Streetcars generally have shorter lines, smaller vehicles, lower speeds, and more frequent stops. My analysis showed that average stop spacing is most distinctive. Portland, Tucson and the Tacoma Central Link all have an average stop spacing about half that for other systems. 

*Yes, cable-cars existed. Yes, a number of hilly places used them, most notably San Francisco. But even more places used funiculars, and I'm not mentioning them. Today, they are both simply exotic survivals. 

**BRT will require discussion elsewhere

**CRT too. 

Crossings

Offhand, there are bare handulf ways for a transit line to cross a roadway.

• Grade-separated
• Overpass/viaduct/elevated structure
• Underpass/tunnel/escavation
• Level-crossing
• Time separated
• Railroad Gates
• Traffic Signal

• A metro is a system where both the running way and crossings are grade-separated. 
• A pre-metro is a system (or line) where only the crossings are grade separated. 
• 'Rapid Rail' is the pupae form between metro and pre-metro, where the most urban sections have all their right of way grade separated. The M/ART systems did this.
• 
  

Both tend to be heavy rail systems. Or rather, heavy rail systems tend to be either metros. While its well known that 'you can't steer a train', it's less well known 'You can't stop a train' (at least in any reasonable period of time. Ie, if you park a vehicle on the tracks, by the time the driver sees it, it is too late to stop. "With so much steel and steam, I won't slow it down at all". This has been the cause of a number of memorable train crashes, and much conductor trauma. 

And that is the problem with level crossings. Grade-separated crossings remove the 'conflict' between things, with certainty, but are costly to construct. (They have to be able to support a bridge filled with full-loaded semi-trailer trucks, while never exceeding a 5% grade, and being as wide as the roads leading to them). 

Level crossings are much much less safe. Rather than being grade-separated, they are time-separated. When two moving vehicles could be in the same place, this is known as a 'conflict'. When two vehicles attempt to be in the same place, this is known as a 'crash'. Playing 'chicken' with a train ends badly--the train is never going to swerve. Yet drivers managed to run red-lights, and drive around lowered freeway gates with depressing frequency. (It is rare for the driver to survive). 

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.

Density is an areal measure; Intensity is the point measure.

 Essentially, Any county-level estimate of population density is trash. What is needed is a continuous measure of density, rather than an areal unit of density. The pixel maps of employment density generated at <http://onthemap.ces.census.gov/> represent such a method. It would be difficult but feasible to generalize such a method to GIS. It would require assuming population uniformity at the block level, but doing so would certainly be better than doing so at the County level.

If you aren't familiar with them, I recommend Jarrett Walker's (Human Transit) blog; specifically, the blog posts on 'The Perils of Average Density' and 'Portrait of a City as a Squiggly Line'.

Gets My Goat

Articles like this never fail to get my goat:
"Your city bus costs more per mile than a first class overseas flight"

...it claims.

But the devil is in the details:

PUBLIC TRANSPORTATION:
These public transit systems charge a flat cash fare to go one mile within the center of their cities. So if you're using one for a quick trip, you'll pay the following:
New York Subway, Boston T: $2 per mile
Chicago El: $2.25 per mile
Atlanta MARTA: $1.75 per mile
Los Angeles subway: $1.25 per mile
San Francisco MUNI: $1.50 per mile
London Tube: £4, or $5.63 per mile (plus more if you travel beyond the central city)
Paris Métro: €1.60, or $2.01 per mile
Cairo metro: 1 Egyptian pound, or 18¢ per mile
Hong Kong MTR: HKD$7.7 or 99¢ per mile

The author assumes that the default fair is for ONE mile of travel. Nevermind who uses that same transit fare to travel much further. UTA's default fare was $2.50 for a bit...but that provided 2.5 hours of travel time, enough to get from one end of the system to the other. Which takes 2.5 hours, and covers (fully) 83.1 miles of distance, or 0.03008423586 cents per mile. Given that the IRS allows you to deduct 57.5 cents per mile for driving.

Long story short, this points out two things:

FIRST: Short trips are more expensive than long ones.
Airplanes are different than buses.  Air resistance increases with the square of velocity. The faster a vehicle travels, the more air resistance opposes it, and the more power is needed to overcome it. An airplane traveling at 640 mph generates 16 times as much air resistance as an airplane traveling at 160 mph, despite the fact that it's only going four times as fast. To minimize this effect, airliners fly very high (39,000 feet) where the air pressure is much lower. (For reference, Mt. Everest is 29,000 feet at the peak). For a flight, all the cost is in getting up in the air, to cruising altitude (after which, the plane largely just maintains a semi-ballistic glide through the thin air of the upper atmosphere, all the way down. Most of the flight is spent at 'cruising altitude'. The cruising altitude is selected on the basis of algebraic equation containing the costs per unit of vertical travel at a given height, and the cost of getting to that height. The way the math works out, its always cheaper to go to where the air is thin, so the cost of a flight is largely invariant to the distance traveled.

SECOND:
It's not how good something is, it's how good it is compared to its alternative. Every trip takes time, and costs money. The default alternative for short trips is walking, which can be very time consuming, but costs (effectively) nothing. Whether it's worth spending money for higher speed depends on your own personal cost of time. If your time is worth $10 an hour, saving 1/2 hour is the same as saving $5. So every 6 minutes of your time is worth a dollar. If the bus fare is $2, take the bus anytime doing so will save you 12 minutes, or anytime you have to walk over 6/10 of a mile.

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.

Great Cities and Their Traffic

Thomson* notes an inverse relation between the number of center city jobs and the number commuting by car. The implications of Thomson's data are significant because of it's age. Most of it is drawn from 1963 and 1973. Detroit had only 80 thousand jobs (Thomson 35). That makes some of the  'center cities' of Thomson's age are equivalent in size to Garreau's 'Edge Cities' of today. Automotive sprawl had become the dominant land use pattern by 1970, and the public tram-ways were long since replaced by buses. Yet the relationship remained...the question remains--is it a matter of share of total regional jobs, or merely the geographic concentration of jobs?

*Thomson, Michael, J. Great Cities and Their Traffic. London: Victor Gollancz ltd. 1977

Growing a Transit Network

As far as I can tell, building a good rapid transit system is pretty simple: Good planning and incremental investment. That seems to be why San Diego has done well, Salt Lake has done well, and Denver's Fast-Track is a bit of a boondoggle. Doing it incrementally makes it possible to apply 'lessons learned' to subsequent expansions. It could be argued that SLC's last expansion (4 lines at once) 'overdid it', but I don't think so. While it was funded as a package, UTA has been pretty clever in phasing the construction time of the different lines so that everything hasn't been happening all at once. The South Jordan and West Valley lines started service on the same day, but neither the Airport nor Draper lines have completed construction. I suspect that made it possible to re-use construction equipment/staff time on the different lines.

Rapid Transit Office Index

Reading up on the Rapid Transit Office Index, which basically says 'Be within 500m or don't bother'. 500m is a about a third of a mile. Which has implications for TOD design. I think SANDAG nails is pretty well with this graphic.

Thinking on Cottonwood Corporate Center, on I-215 in SLC, UT. It's a large office complex with a lot of skyscrapers, basically in the middle of nowhere. It has good visibility from I-215 (on the hill) and a freeway exit, but it's hardly the only place with one. According to Christine Richman, the whole place got started with a build to suit developed for a specific tenant, and the whole cluster grew up around that.

Now, thinking of the RTOI, I wonder if it might not be possible to establish an office cluster around FrontRunner on that same basis. If you are going to work, Rapid Transit is certainly a plus. Sit down, read the paper, read a book, go over some documents. But it's difficult to get any work done on TRAX because there is nothing to write on. So, instead focus development around FrontRunner, which has a) Some seats with tables, and b) Wifi. Effectively, it becomes possible to treat FrontRunner as a rolling office. Roadway access would of course still be key, so a not too distant interchange seems like a good idea. To me, this suggests the otherwise abominable Station Park in Farmington. The only trouble is getting that first tenant...

Embark

http://letsembark.com/
"Free, fast and simple mobile apps for mass transit riders worldwide"
Pretty please, UTA?!