> Had this really not been done before? Apparently not on land. Ferries are an ancient idea, both for crossing water bodies and for traveling along them. They are fixed routes, of course, but that’s mostly because the shore is fixed.
Historically, not true for the “trekschuit” in 1632. For that, the shore didn’t exist before the route was envisioned. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trekschuit:
“The first trekschuit 'sailed' in 1632 between Amsterdam and Haarlem and could carry 30 passengers. The trekvaart or canal was dug in a straight line to facilitate an easy pulling process and to guarantee the shortest route”
My late grandmother once told me this is how she travelled longer distances on occasion as a youth/young woman. Was a good lesson for me in understanding exactly how much she had seen the world change in her lifetime.
We don't know yet, of course, but I have the impression that the century in which things changed most was the century from about 1865 to about 1965. Stuff seems to have slowed down a bit since then. But it's all subjective, really: it depends on what you think is important.
1969 is a big year due to man landing on the moon. Cars becoming ubiquitous (they certainly were a luxury item well into the sixties here). 1970s gave us the integrated circuit and arguably the start of modern computing. 1980s the collapse of the Soviet Union, genetic research. 1990s: well, I can go on :P
Agree. For the drama of it, I'd move the end-date up to 1969, just to catch the moon landing.
My great-grandfather learned to care for horses, and drive a wagon / buggy, and keenly remembered the first time he saw an automobile. He qualified as a doctor before antibiotics were invented, and then lived long enough to at least exist in a house with a personal computer - whether he ever used it is something I never thought to ask my grandfather!
Two things can be true at the same time. Pascal was certainly a prodigy, but he was also largely living off family wealth and could afford to not specialize.
I don’t think that there was much fixed scheduling for water transport prior to the the development of steam engines either, because you were usually at the mercy of the winds and the tides.
Rowing was common and well known. Many ferries cross rivers where tides and the wind are not concerns. Winds near shore are often consistent enough to have near fixed frequency routes.
Ancient Mediterranean maps often reveal ferries and such were not going vast distances but rather they would go from small settlement to small settlement. This would be much smaller boats that could be easily rowed and, in turn, have relatively fixed frequencies. The small boats could get into ports that would be impossible to put a large ship into. As ships grew larger and sailing became more popular, longer distances would happen and then winds and tides would be more important.
Scheduled sailings were common in the Roman world, and some medieval European economies. It helped keep ship sizes small when merchants could anticipate the fixed schedule.
Regarding public transport route design, I've long wondered how much efficiency current routes in a given country might be leaving on the table.
As in: if one collected sufficient anonymised travel data to offer a reliable understanding of the population's travel needs, and given the fixed constraints of the existing road and rail network, and the existing number of buses and trains, how much more efficient could the network be by varying routes, timings, stops, and interactions?
Imagine if such a dataset was made available, and a prize offered for the best solution.
The challenge could also be extended to explore optimal areas for investment in additional infrastructure - a wider road here, a new roundabout or branch line there.
Well, there is some of that. It's not near as much as you might guess. Predictable transit is very helpful because people plan their life around it. What the data you're looking at will show where the bottlenecks are, and yes, you can remove a few bottlenecks and make people's life a little bit better, but it's not going to be a major change because of major change will not show up in the data until well after it's made.
I don't remember the terms used, but I've seen data sets of where people live and work in Manhattan, and you do see people who live on subway lines take jobs on that same line, and they don't take jobs on a different subway line that while possible is overly inconvenient.
people have already arranged their life around the existing transportation that exists around them. They are not going to change their life because it is already in place. They want bottlenecks fixed but otherwise don't really need a change to their life. Even if a change would greatly benefit them, they often can't see that and wouldn't imagine themselves making the change to their comfortable life.
The real value of transportation experts is they can look at a map and all your data and say, if we make these changes, over 20 years, the city will redevelop in this way, and then we can ask questions. "Is that how we want the city to develop?" however, the data is never going to show that because the data shows what people are doing today, not what they're going to do in 20 years. Don't get me wrong, experts get this wrong too when they make predictions. However, there is a lot of things we can use to inform our predictions. even though we're not perfect, we can make predictions that are usually right.
Varying the route timing is the absolute worst thing you can do. People need to depend on your transport system. If they have to look at a schedule that's going to change by day to figure out when they can actually get somewhere, they're going to get frustrated and start looking up for an alternative that they control. If you vary your timing at all, it's only because you're changing between a train every minute to train every five minutes. You don't get to go any farther apart than that without losing writers because they no longer can trust that the system will get them there when they want to be there. Physics puts a lower limit on time. I believe the current record is a train every 90 seconds, and I'm not sure how much closer together you can get. The limit for a bus is three minutes apart and even that is extremely hard.
Transit systems that are running worse than 5 minute frequencies have large drops in ridership and as they increase frequency: ridership jumps because people start to use, they can always just go out when they're ready to go. If this wasn't so expensive, everyone in the world would be running 5-minute frequencies all day.
It is and it makes my point exactly. People have arranged their lives around the east west line they live on. They wouldn't accept a job on a different east-west line even though as a crow flies it's not far - Getting there is not easy.
The question that we cannot answer for Manhattan data is what if Manhattan added a few North South lines or I can think of hundreds of different things that Manhattan could do. I don't live there and I haven't studied the data in depth so I couldn't tell you what is a good useful thing for Manhattan to do. But I can tell you that there are lines that would over the next few decades greatly change how people in Manhattan and the rest of the city live. Unfortunately, Manhattan is particularly bad about the costs and so they can't even afford to remove the obvious bottlenecks much less a whole new line that would over time be make the city much better.
No wait - Manhattan only has N-S lines (well, Manhattan is tilted, so more precisely, only has "Avenue-parallel" lines). There are no E-W ("Street-parallel") lines because it is too narrow.
Pretty much all large public transit authorities already collect all sorts of data about requirements and usage, and have scientists/engineers on payroll to optimize the network within the economic and political constraints these systems operate in.
I know my city has that data, but it doesn't help if you optimize for the wrong thing. AFAICT the highest priority is that "everybody has to be within 3 blocks of a bus stop", resulting in serpentine routes the article decries.
"everybody has to be within 3 blocks of a bus stop" is a political choice. It might result in a system that is not optimal from the perspective of a different metric. If you think that different metric would serve people better, go advocate for it politically. But realize that whatever metric gets adopted will still be a political choice. There is no escaping that.
Of course, as you say in the OP, one can certainly encourage the public to use simulations based on publicly made-available data as a guide during these political discussions to convince people that a certain metric is better than others.
due to how hard it is to change the networks, I think there's a lot of inefficient route design. if you look at SEPTA in Philadelphia, they're in the middle of realigning a lot of their bus routes for the first time in 60 yrs and ridership has increased noticeably since they started.
Not much. People plan for the lowest common denominator. If service levels surge during certain days or hours that's great, but people don't want to get burned by a period of thin service. Imagine if Fedex said overnight mail could no longer be delivered on Thursdays in certain towns. You'd have to remember to check if today's Wednesday and if the recipient's town is a low service zone. Or you could just switch to a more consistently available network like UPS.
Most transit is already biased to the 9-5 with thin nighttime service. As such most people uber back from the bar than wait for the 30 min owl bus service.
I live in Helsinki, where there is a good tram and bus network. Every now and again a major road will be dug up, in the city center, and trams often get rerouted for a few months to work around that.
I've noticed that there are some diversions which are definitely beneficial to me. There are busses from my house to the city center, as well as a tram. If the tram diverts to a different destination that essentially doubles my available "travel destinations" in a way that's really useful.
So no doubt, for me personally, there are changes that could be useful. But perhaps they would be less useful for others.
The interesting thing with transit is that optimal may not be the most optimal. E.g. your model might suggest half mile stop frequencies. Seems good, until the public comment period and all the old folks who take the line show up and ask their particular stop not be displaced.
There is a reason why a lot of american bus networks basically follow the same old streetcar routes that were always there. People become used to existing patterns and build lives around them. New transit is a good opportunity to apply this model, but reworking old transit is tricky because some of your existing ridership will end up with a worse offering by definition, and they will protest. While the people who might benefit will not show up with equivocal advocacy in the public comment meeting.
The bus stop spacing problem is very real. Buses stop every other block in my area. The average speed end to end is no faster than riding a bike! If you suggest deleting some stops people scream about their own convenience or pretend to care about the disabled. By trying to cater to every single constituency, we've designed a bus route that serves no one's interest. A slow bus might not exist at all. People will just buy a car, going into high interest debt if need be.
Bus speed is also reduced by people scanning tickets etc. THe simple answer is to skip the charade about pretending public transport is a business and concentrate on moving people and safety.
Bus always has longer dwell time than rail in general. The biggest time sink I see is in disabled passenger operations. Ramp has to come down, passenger goes in, then the bus operator has to leave their cockpit to lift up the disabled area seats to be flush to the wall, and hook in the tiedown straps in the wheelchair, before returning back to the cockpit, closing their door, buckling in, raising ramp again, and finally going.
For trains there is of course no difference in dwell time between disabled and able bodied passengers. Not sure how this issue gets solved with bus if the issue is they are too rocky to not have the chairs strapped down. BRT platforms would solve the ramp issue with flush floor boarding but you still have the strapping down delay.
Ticketing systems slow both bus and trains. I remember the gov spent $500M on TownHall in Sydney just to rework the entrance/exit pathways to improve efficiency.
How many years will it take to get the money from tickets to payback the renovation costs ?
Like many things public transport, stop trying to make it a business and make it a service for the public.
You might explore "gray" semi-formal bus networks. Where the on-the-table gap is sufficient to fund businesses. And where the efforts to shut them down, provide insights into mechanisms, incentives, and players, around in that inefficiency.
The best answer for many problems, is to avoid the action in the first place. Just because you can do it doesnt mean you should do it, and public transport is mostly thought to serve commuting.
A lot of people commute for hours to sit at a computer...which means they could work at home.
(source, 20+ years experience working in traffic planning software industry).
Such data do exist. But they won't avail you (much).
You have similar problems as when you optimise the energy sector, or economy in general.
The "actual" problem you will be optimising on/for, has a lot of conflicting needs and interests, and choosing your trade-offs resemble the 'trolley problem'. I will just enumerate a random list of things that affect and collide with your optimisation.
- your vehicles and vehicle fleets (and road networks, with congestion) provide one part of the problem.
- your vehicle drivers etc., have other needs and union rules; they need to sleep, have breaks, go to the bathroom, eat; swap places on the road, they need to arrive and get home.
- once you are on the road 'you might as well continue driving': There is a huge startup cost each time you pull into traffic.
- you have two peak hours (morning, evening); what should your drivers and buses do in the lull in the middle of the day? (spoiler: they reasonably hate sitting idle for 3 hours, with or without pay).
- lots of politics related to how it is funded and votes, who is paid for operating it. These are the shameful parents for things like frankenstein bus-routes, where 2-3 cancelled budget-cut bus-routes are merged into a single meandering remaining bus-route that makes all its passengers miserable.
- a lot of it is probablility-based/spontaneous; only some traffic patterns are regular (children to school); to service the probability-need, you need a regular service that may run empty/low half of the time, until people need a hair-cut.
The whole thing is handled on a sliding-scale/spectrum, ordered by how short/far into the future, the travel is/can be planned.
On one end, you have taxi/uber, which is on-the-spot travel.
The other end is planned year-service, e.g. a summer schedule of a bus.
In between, with computers we have a lot of "urgent-but-planned" flexi-flexible traffic, where people book on the day or the week,
and a number of bookings are then weaved to be driven like a pearl string
(so e.g. a number of people will share a ride in a medium sized bus, that does pre-planned pseudo-taxi-service.)
(source, 20+ years experience working in traffic planning software industry).
Such data do exist. But they won't avail you (much). You have similar problems as when you optimise the energy sector, or economy in general. The "actual" problem you will be optimising on/for, has a lot of conflicting needs and interests, and choosing your trade-offs resemble the 'trolley problem'. I will just enumerate a random list of things that affect and collide with your optimisation.
- your vehicles and vehicle fleets (and road networks, with congestion) provide one part of the problem.
- your vehicle drivers etc., have other needs and union rules; they need to sleep, have breaks, go to the bathroom, eat; swap places on the road, they need to arrive and get home. - once you are on the road 'you might as well continue driving': There is a huge startup cost each time you pull into traffic.
- you have two peak hours (morning, evening); what should your drivers and buses do in the lull in the middle of the day? (spoiler: they reasonably hate sitting idle for 3 hours, with or without pay).
- lots of politics related to how it is funded and votes, who is paid for operating it. These are the shameful parents for things like frankenstein bus-routes, where 2-3 cancelled budget-cut bus-routes are merged into a single meandering remaining bus-route that makes all its passengers miserable.
- a lot of it is probablility-based/spontaneous; only some traffic patterns are regular (children to school); to service the probability-need, you need a regular service that may run empty/low half of the time, until people need a hair-cut.
The whole thing is handled on a sliding-scale/spectrum, ordered by how short/far into the future, the travel is/can be planned. On one end, you have taxi/uber, which is on-the-spot travel. The other end is planned year-service, e.g. a summer schedule of a bus. In between, with computers we have a lot of "urgent-but-planned" flexi-flexible traffic, where people book on the day or the week, and a number of bookings are then weaved to be driven like a pearl string (so e.g. a number of people will share a ride in a medium sized bus, that does pre-planned pseudo-taxi-service.)
UPDATE: an example of the differences in the setups:
Typically, Europe and US will fund/run buses/public transport differently.
in US, traditionally, you would task a company with running the whole
operation: Both plan the services to be provided,
and then implement/deploy/operate them.
So they would both decide the structure of the bus services to be offered,
and then do the actual operations of the same plan.
in Europe/many parts, they instead divide like this:
A public transport authority designs the structure of the services to be operated
(this many buses, running these roads, at these intervals,
and ALSO _at these times_).
The 'times' part is important, because it determines which transfers are possible
(between two lines).
That package will then be tendered to private companies, who bid on running those planned operations;
they are then paid by the public transport authority, what they offered to operate for in the contract.
These two structures give wildly different transport structures and operations structures.
In the european model, it leads to very complex timetables,
where bus services are trimmed to the perceived demand - every week, hour, day where
the demand is perceived to be less, is cut from the planned timetables.
So when you look at the time tables, you need to check complex date periods
for whether the bus you want is operating today or not.
The reasoning is of course, that since the transport authority must pay for each trip serviced,
they try to cut any trip they don't "need".
Contrast that to the american, "older" model, with a full-service operator.
They already have their money, and are already running and out on the roads with their equipment.
To them, it does...
> Frequency ranged from 7.5 minutes to 15 minutes, so these came often enough that people could just go out and wait for them, not worrying about a schedule'
If I were to speculate, I'd say that perhaps it might only be feasible in small & dense cities with low traffic, as such high frequency requires a lot of resources.
Was born in a small city with frequent public transportation (5-10 minutes for most routes). As I moved to larger & more congested cities, public transport became less convenient and the schedule more erratic.
Tokyo manages a very tight schedule and they're enormous, so it can't only be scale that matters. And how do you fund effective transit in a smaller city with less of a tax base?
I haven't visited Tokyo, but I definitely plan to.
Regarding your question, if the city is made up mostly of apartment buildings & parks, with limited parking space available, almost everyone uses public transport.
There is obviously a trade-off between how pedestrian-friendly or car-friendly a city can be, thus if a city goes hard in the pedestrian-friendly (removing parking spaces, narrowing streets in the center etc.) direction, public transport becomes very attractive & convenient. Having a car becomes a burden.
Definitely not only small cities. Only dense cities maybe, but I'm not sure that the causality link is in the direction you present: big european cities are dense in part _because_ of public transport. They couldn't be so dense without it, you'd need much more car infrastructure (roads, parking lots) which already decreases density, and people would more readily live further out given they'd already need a car anyway.
It's obviously a virtuous cycle, but in the case of European cities, they are the way they are because they began when walking was the preferred mode of transport ("preferred" is doing a lot of heavy lifting in this sentence, I know). The most luxurious transport option back then was a horse carriage, which is not much faster than walking. Everything had to be close to everything, streets had to be narrow.
Another important feature that makes public transport suitable is that they developed concentrically, having only one city center.
With such city planning in mind, public transport is the only rational way to move around lots of people on narrow streets.
European cities, geographically at least, are a lot smaller than american cities. A dozen or two miles across only for the urban area before you get to the rural parts generally. Berlin has a smaller footprint than a lot of rust belt cities for example. Amsterdam is downright tiny by american standards, maybe even smaller than Toledo, OH. What is more is the road capacity is significantly overbuilt in the US, even in cities like Toledo. A lot of americans have a car based frame of reference where they expect to go arbitrary 30 mile distances in about 30 mins.
Better doesn’t always follow. Nyc has had constant public transit demand but there’s been barely any expansion since public takeover of the private subways.
Most European and East Asian major cities do have that. A train every 2-5 minutes during busy hours. In smaller cities (below one million people or so), a train / bus / tram every 10 minutes is probably most common.
In Dallas TX our lightrail runs about every 15 min too. It's works pretty well and is big enough to be actually useful. I like to use for big events when you know parking is going to be a nightmare or expensive. It's slower than a car though, the trip about doubles in terms of time taking the train vs driving.
Judging by the rest of the replies (most of which I'd agree with), it seems more uncommon that they do not, than they do :) I think this heavily depends on how friendly your government in general is to public transport, which can vary heavily if you're in some specific places in the world.
You need some combination of high-ridership and low-personnel-cost. You can get that in most of Europe and Asia, but incomes in North America are quite high and labour capture is high too. Most jurisdictions cannot afford the drivers necessary at high frequency because there isn’t enough density for it.
Skytrain bypasses this by not having drivers and perhaps as buses become AVs we could add many more of them here in the Bay Area with much higher frequency.
People conservative enough to drop the required nuclear bomb on the transit workers union to be able to deploy something like this won't pay for it, and vice versea.
The only thing true about that is that they built a building. It didn't cost $100M and they didn't fill it with software engineers, and there are 45 trains, not two! If you want to view the world through a lense of "everything sucks and there's no hope for the future", I mean, I'm sure you can find enough examples, but at least choose ones that are true wouldya?
> This would require employing about 100 drivers, allowing for normal working hours, holidays and other leave. Based on the cost of employing a driver, including administrative overheads, being about $150,000 a year, the savings from replacing drivers on this line is about $15 million a year.
...
> Assuming a 5% rate of return on the $500 million cost to automate the line, this saving is offset by the $25 million a year in opportunity costs on the $500 million line conversion.
Spend $500M to automate to save $15M on driver wages.
In Sydney we are very close to Asia so the shame of our rotting train system finally caused the city to invest in modern driverless underground transit, termed 'the metro'. I believe planning began in the 1990s and it only really launched about 5 years ago, so 20 years or so in the making. This system is much faster, cleaner and more modern than the older surface rail, largely helped by the fact it's way underground in most sections due to a lack of surface land availability. However, it frequently stops or requires maintenance and is run by a totally separate bureaucracy than the rail system, who apparently refuse to communicate despite having shared stations. This leads to situations such as one encountered this weekend whereby the rail operator had track work scheduled on a major section of their route, and simultaneously the metro system had disrupted service, such that a great number of passengers were stranded. More importantly, even when it is working they do not coordinate arrival times, such that it is exceptionally common to arrive on one mode, where the platform faces directly the other mode, but it has just departed. 30 seconds of scheduling either side would greatly increase efficiency, but it's nobody's department. This is the sort of thing they do perfectly in Japan, but Australia is a country of 1000 little scams with everyone fervently minding their own scam. We urgently need to replace corrupt humans with AI.
"More importantly, even when it is working they do not coordinate arrival times, such that it is exceptionally common to arrive on one mode, where the platform faces directly the other mode, but it has just departed. 30 seconds of scheduling either side would greatly increase efficiency, but it's nobody's department."
Where and in which case? I'm referring to mode-change connections. Of those, two of the last two I've had failed. That's a 100% failure rate. When queried, the station staff said the metro don't communicate with them so adaptive schedules are impossible.
> This is the sort of thing they do perfectly in Japan, but Australia is a country of 1000 little scams with everyone fervently minding their own scam. We urgently need to replace corrupt humans with AI.
Have you even see how sad people in Japan are ?
Go watch a few youtubers travel around Japan and tell me what you see ?
I only see kids to adults to seniors ALL going to school or work.
Why are tehre almost no people having a day off ?
Now you know why they have those gates on trains, they are too stop people jumping...
Specific to the context of proving there is no insurmountable challenge in having multiple disparate mass transit operators provide combined services in an efficient fashion, they are the obvious poster child. This may be true even while I share similar conclusions to your own analysis when considering the broader failures in their society.
The public transport system in JP makes the work culture possible.
Since the trains stop at midnight, that also means workers who are delayed by work, also end up sleeping in the streets because no service would take them all the way home.
Having a train system that enables very long trips also means people are forced might be a hard word but they are expected to travel becaue trains are tehre.
The map seems to be under heavy load, so I couldn't see it all. But it seems this map only contains city networks, and not regional networks. The regional bus networks in France are really quite weak, infrequent and don't connect well.
> Had this really not been done before? Apparently not on land. Ferries are an ancient idea, both for crossing water bodies and for traveling along them. They are fixed routes, of course, but that’s mostly because the shore is fixed. Pascal’s idea was that even though carriages could go from anywhere to anywhere on Paris’s street network, a special kind of usefulness would arise if they didn’t do that, but instead followed paths that people could remember and plan around.
While not exactly a transit system, there were fixed trade and courier routes before this where the dependability and consistency induced build up and improvements around the route. There were probably even times and places you could hitch a ride on someone's cart or group up with others for safety because of how well the routes were used.
Yes, the whole concept of an inn is to have a rest stop along a trade route. Well-trafficked routes would have inns spaced extremely regularly so that even travellers on foot could rest and eat (and drink) at least once per day.
If you're traveling to or interested in Paris and its history, I really enjoyed "Parisians: An Adventure History of Paris" by Graham Robb. Has some good, accessible and entertaining history relating to (among other things) the construction of the metro.
That's not a surprise. People orient their lives around what they can do. Thus, things like this become self-fulfilling prophecies. You build it, they come, they add the demand, so you keep it running. It certainly does and has happened that cities have changed majorly at various times because of changes in transit, but it's not particularly common. In most cities even where transit has been torn out, you can see where the lines used to run because that's still a high demand corridor today.
about ferrys. Douglas Adams let one of his protagonists in Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency postulate that the book of revelations was the product of despair waiting for a ferry
The Carosses à cinq sols was not just an idea but a startup proper; Pascal invested most of what he owned for a sixth of the business, which turned out to be a great investment.
The main idea behind it was a kind of time share. At the time, only the (very) rich could afford to own and maintain carosses and stables with 6 to 10 horses in crowded cities like Paris; it was a truly revolutionary idea that a company would own the cars and the horses, and the general public would pay only for the time traveled.
Then the other genius idea, of course, was fixed routes and predictable schedule, as explained in the post. People actually objected at first that it would be stupid (and ruinous) to have empty carriages going from one place to another instead of chasing customers like a modern cab. But that was the whole point.
As an aside, the book "How Paris Became Paris" mentions Pascal's invention among many other that Paris was first with: elevated sidewalks, city lights, and more for any urban geeks.
Im sorry i disagree, boats have been running up and down rivers or seas and oceans for thousands of years if not longer. The river is the route, its fixed.
Pretty sure if we went back in time with a time machine, Egyptians and others have been buying passage up or down or maybe both ways the Nile.
This is something so obvious it cant possibly be true.
A controversial idea, perhaps, but I think that fixed routes have outlived their usefulness.
Yes, travelling salesman problem is NP-hard, but approximate solutions are good enough. I think that nowadays it is very possible to dynamically find more optimal way to gather together passengers who travel in the same direction, than fixed routes provide.
This is so interesting. I'm living in a country where casual, app-based transit far far outweighs publicly funded routing. I can't really say what works better from either an efficiency standpoint or an economic standpoint (from the side of funding mass public transit projects) but the result on the street is essentially chaos and a pretty precarious working situation for the people that operate it.
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[ 9.5 ms ] story [ 291 ms ] threadHistorically, not true for the “trekschuit” in 1632. For that, the shore didn’t exist before the route was envisioned. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trekschuit:
“The first trekschuit 'sailed' in 1632 between Amsterdam and Haarlem and could carry 30 passengers. The trekvaart or canal was dug in a straight line to facilitate an easy pulling process and to guarantee the shortest route”
For some of us; that's dial-up, to AI, to who knows what.
My great-grandfather learned to care for horses, and drive a wagon / buggy, and keenly remembered the first time he saw an automobile. He qualified as a doctor before antibiotics were invented, and then lived long enough to at least exist in a house with a personal computer - whether he ever used it is something I never thought to ask my grandfather!
Or, he could have been just that much smarter than you you, dismissive author.
Ancient Mediterranean maps often reveal ferries and such were not going vast distances but rather they would go from small settlement to small settlement. This would be much smaller boats that could be easily rowed and, in turn, have relatively fixed frequencies. The small boats could get into ports that would be impossible to put a large ship into. As ships grew larger and sailing became more popular, longer distances would happen and then winds and tides would be more important.
As in: if one collected sufficient anonymised travel data to offer a reliable understanding of the population's travel needs, and given the fixed constraints of the existing road and rail network, and the existing number of buses and trains, how much more efficient could the network be by varying routes, timings, stops, and interactions?
Imagine if such a dataset was made available, and a prize offered for the best solution.
The challenge could also be extended to explore optimal areas for investment in additional infrastructure - a wider road here, a new roundabout or branch line there.
I don't remember the terms used, but I've seen data sets of where people live and work in Manhattan, and you do see people who live on subway lines take jobs on that same line, and they don't take jobs on a different subway line that while possible is overly inconvenient.
people have already arranged their life around the existing transportation that exists around them. They are not going to change their life because it is already in place. They want bottlenecks fixed but otherwise don't really need a change to their life. Even if a change would greatly benefit them, they often can't see that and wouldn't imagine themselves making the change to their comfortable life.
The real value of transportation experts is they can look at a map and all your data and say, if we make these changes, over 20 years, the city will redevelop in this way, and then we can ask questions. "Is that how we want the city to develop?" however, the data is never going to show that because the data shows what people are doing today, not what they're going to do in 20 years. Don't get me wrong, experts get this wrong too when they make predictions. However, there is a lot of things we can use to inform our predictions. even though we're not perfect, we can make predictions that are usually right.
Varying the route timing is the absolute worst thing you can do. People need to depend on your transport system. If they have to look at a schedule that's going to change by day to figure out when they can actually get somewhere, they're going to get frustrated and start looking up for an alternative that they control. If you vary your timing at all, it's only because you're changing between a train every minute to train every five minutes. You don't get to go any farther apart than that without losing writers because they no longer can trust that the system will get them there when they want to be there. Physics puts a lower limit on time. I believe the current record is a train every 90 seconds, and I'm not sure how much closer together you can get. The limit for a bus is three minutes apart and even that is extremely hard.
Transit systems that are running worse than 5 minute frequencies have large drops in ridership and as they increase frequency: ridership jumps because people start to use, they can always just go out when they're ready to go. If this wasn't so expensive, everyone in the world would be running 5-minute frequencies all day.
It sorta works for going into the nearish big city for a 9-5 event. But it’s worthless for the evening because of infrequent trains.
The question that we cannot answer for Manhattan data is what if Manhattan added a few North South lines or I can think of hundreds of different things that Manhattan could do. I don't live there and I haven't studied the data in depth so I couldn't tell you what is a good useful thing for Manhattan to do. But I can tell you that there are lines that would over the next few decades greatly change how people in Manhattan and the rest of the city live. Unfortunately, Manhattan is particularly bad about the costs and so they can't even afford to remove the obvious bottlenecks much less a whole new line that would over time be make the city much better.
Of course, as you say in the OP, one can certainly encourage the public to use simulations based on publicly made-available data as a guide during these political discussions to convince people that a certain metric is better than others.
I've noticed that there are some diversions which are definitely beneficial to me. There are busses from my house to the city center, as well as a tram. If the tram diverts to a different destination that essentially doubles my available "travel destinations" in a way that's really useful.
So no doubt, for me personally, there are changes that could be useful. But perhaps they would be less useful for others.
There is a reason why a lot of american bus networks basically follow the same old streetcar routes that were always there. People become used to existing patterns and build lives around them. New transit is a good opportunity to apply this model, but reworking old transit is tricky because some of your existing ridership will end up with a worse offering by definition, and they will protest. While the people who might benefit will not show up with equivocal advocacy in the public comment meeting.
For trains there is of course no difference in dwell time between disabled and able bodied passengers. Not sure how this issue gets solved with bus if the issue is they are too rocky to not have the chairs strapped down. BRT platforms would solve the ramp issue with flush floor boarding but you still have the strapping down delay.
How many years will it take to get the money from tickets to payback the renovation costs ?
Like many things public transport, stop trying to make it a business and make it a service for the public.
A lot of people commute for hours to sit at a computer...which means they could work at home.
- a lot of it is probablility-based/spontaneous; only some traffic patterns are regular (children to school); to service the probability-need, you need a regular service that may run empty/low half of the time, until people need a hair-cut.
The whole thing is handled on a sliding-scale/spectrum, ordered by how short/far into the future, the travel is/can be planned. On one end, you have taxi/uber, which is on-the-spot travel. The other end is planned year-service, e.g. a summer schedule of a bus. In between, with computers we have a lot of "urgent-but-planned" flexi-flexible traffic, where people book on the day or the week, and a number of bookings are then weaved to be driven like a pearl string (so e.g. a number of people will share a ride in a medium sized bus, that does pre-planned pseudo-taxi-service.)
Such data do exist. But they won't avail you (much). You have similar problems as when you optimise the energy sector, or economy in general. The "actual" problem you will be optimising on/for, has a lot of conflicting needs and interests, and choosing your trade-offs resemble the 'trolley problem'. I will just enumerate a random list of things that affect and collide with your optimisation.
- your vehicles and vehicle fleets (and road networks, with congestion) provide one part of the problem.
- your vehicle drivers etc., have other needs and union rules; they need to sleep, have breaks, go to the bathroom, eat; swap places on the road, they need to arrive and get home. - once you are on the road 'you might as well continue driving': There is a huge startup cost each time you pull into traffic.
- you have two peak hours (morning, evening); what should your drivers and buses do in the lull in the middle of the day? (spoiler: they reasonably hate sitting idle for 3 hours, with or without pay).
- lots of politics related to how it is funded and votes, who is paid for operating it. These are the shameful parents for things like frankenstein bus-routes, where 2-3 cancelled budget-cut bus-routes are merged into a single meandering remaining bus-route that makes all its passengers miserable.
- a lot of it is probablility-based/spontaneous; only some traffic patterns are regular (children to school); to service the probability-need, you need a regular service that may run empty/low half of the time, until people need a hair-cut.
The whole thing is handled on a sliding-scale/spectrum, ordered by how short/far into the future, the travel is/can be planned. On one end, you have taxi/uber, which is on-the-spot travel. The other end is planned year-service, e.g. a summer schedule of a bus. In between, with computers we have a lot of "urgent-but-planned" flexi-flexible traffic, where people book on the day or the week, and a number of bookings are then weaved to be driven like a pearl string (so e.g. a number of people will share a ride in a medium sized bus, that does pre-planned pseudo-taxi-service.)
UPDATE: an example of the differences in the setups: Typically, Europe and US will fund/run buses/public transport differently.
in US, traditionally, you would task a company with running the whole operation: Both plan the services to be provided, and then implement/deploy/operate them. So they would both decide the structure of the bus services to be offered, and then do the actual operations of the same plan.
in Europe/many parts, they instead divide like this: A public transport authority designs the structure of the services to be operated (this many buses, running these roads, at these intervals, and ALSO _at these times_). The 'times' part is important, because it determines which transfers are possible (between two lines). That package will then be tendered to private companies, who bid on running those planned operations; they are then paid by the public transport authority, what they offered to operate for in the contract.
These two structures give wildly different transport structures and operations structures. In the european model, it leads to very complex timetables, where bus services are trimmed to the perceived demand - every week, hour, day where the demand is perceived to be less, is cut from the planned timetables. So when you look at the time tables, you need to check complex date periods for whether the bus you want is operating today or not. The reasoning is of course, that since the transport authority must pay for each trip serviced, they try to cut any trip they don't "need".
Contrast that to the american, "older" model, with a full-service operator. They already have their money, and are already running and out on the roads with their equipment. To them, it does...
If only most cities could have this today
Was born in a small city with frequent public transportation (5-10 minutes for most routes). As I moved to larger & more congested cities, public transport became less convenient and the schedule more erratic.
Regarding your question, if the city is made up mostly of apartment buildings & parks, with limited parking space available, almost everyone uses public transport.
There is obviously a trade-off between how pedestrian-friendly or car-friendly a city can be, thus if a city goes hard in the pedestrian-friendly (removing parking spaces, narrowing streets in the center etc.) direction, public transport becomes very attractive & convenient. Having a car becomes a burden.
Another important feature that makes public transport suitable is that they developed concentrically, having only one city center.
With such city planning in mind, public transport is the only rational way to move around lots of people on narrow streets.
The US auto companies paid for the destruction of tram lines with the long term goal of selling more cars.
"If only most cities could have this today"
Seattle has this. No one claimed or required it to be universal within the city.
"But it's old!"
Okay - that's why it's unreliable, not an excuse for it.
Yeah it sucks, making car commutes the way better alternative.
Judging by the rest of the replies (most of which I'd agree with), it seems more uncommon that they do not, than they do :) I think this heavily depends on how friendly your government in general is to public transport, which can vary heavily if you're in some specific places in the world.
Skytrain bypasses this by not having drivers and perhaps as buses become AVs we could add many more of them here in the Bay Area with much higher frequency.
Driverless (GoA3) and completely unattended (GoA4) rail operation is possible, which could help with personnel costs:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_train_operation
In sydney they built a building which cost $100M to be filled with software engineers just to watch and monitor one and now two driver less trains.
Guess which cost more, the building and 100s of software technies and managers or a few dozen drivers ?
Its a very large building, theres no way that could cost tens of millions.
google: metro OCC building cost how many millions
> Depending on which specific transit control facility you are referring to, the construction cost ranges from $72 million to nearly $300 million:
The OCC in Tallawong is only for metro, all other trains are run from Alexandria.
https://www.smh.com.au/national/nsw/bigger-and-better-than-n...
Thats the Alexandria HQ which runs non metro services.
> This would require employing about 100 drivers, allowing for normal working hours, holidays and other leave. Based on the cost of employing a driver, including administrative overheads, being about $150,000 a year, the savings from replacing drivers on this line is about $15 million a year.
...
> Assuming a 5% rate of return on the $500 million cost to automate the line, this saving is offset by the $25 million a year in opportunity costs on the $500 million line conversion.
Spend $500M to automate to save $15M on driver wages.
Is that a sensible trade ?
This worked perfectly when I was in Sydney.
Have you even see how sad people in Japan are ?
Go watch a few youtubers travel around Japan and tell me what you see ?
I only see kids to adults to seniors ALL going to school or work.
Why are tehre almost no people having a day off ?
Now you know why they have those gates on trains, they are too stop people jumping...
Since the trains stop at midnight, that also means workers who are delayed by work, also end up sleeping in the streets because no service would take them all the way home.
Having a train system that enables very long trips also means people are forced might be a hard word but they are expected to travel becaue trains are tehre.
Each blue polygon is a network. Zoom to see the lines.
Of course we should do way better, and unify all that with a single ticket and single website for route planning.
You can see regional coach networks by clicking "car", it means coach bus in French.
While not exactly a transit system, there were fixed trade and courier routes before this where the dependability and consistency induced build up and improvements around the route. There were probably even times and places you could hitch a ride on someone's cart or group up with others for safety because of how well the routes were used.
That thought also made me wonder how central Paris' modern metro system overlays onto this. Here's a quick little visualization: https://stirring-biscotti-a978fa.netlify.app/
If you're traveling to or interested in Paris and its history, I really enjoyed "Parisians: An Adventure History of Paris" by Graham Robb. Has some good, accessible and entertaining history relating to (among other things) the construction of the metro.
The main idea behind it was a kind of time share. At the time, only the (very) rich could afford to own and maintain carosses and stables with 6 to 10 horses in crowded cities like Paris; it was a truly revolutionary idea that a company would own the cars and the horses, and the general public would pay only for the time traveled.
Then the other genius idea, of course, was fixed routes and predictable schedule, as explained in the post. People actually objected at first that it would be stupid (and ruinous) to have empty carriages going from one place to another instead of chasing customers like a modern cab. But that was the whole point.
Pretty sure if we went back in time with a time machine, Egyptians and others have been buying passage up or down or maybe both ways the Nile.
This is something so obvious it cant possibly be true.
Yes, travelling salesman problem is NP-hard, but approximate solutions are good enough. I think that nowadays it is very possible to dynamically find more optimal way to gather together passengers who travel in the same direction, than fixed routes provide.