[UPDATE: Part 2 of Matt's series here.]
In the DC transit blogosphere there’s a discussion on whether the Metro is “bad”, and if so, how bad. I grew up there and travel back quite a lot, and I adore it. Matt Johnson at Greater Greater Washington is trying a more systematic approach to answering that question:
Image from Greater Greater Washington
In this analysis, he’s comparing the 13 heavy rail operators in the U.S. It would be interesting to see a similar comparison of light rail systems; I’m guessing Central Link as a standalone would fare quite poorly because it doesn’t go enough places, and even then not the most obvious ones, but U-Link and the full ST2 buildout would do quite well. Once you get away from heavy rail, of course, headways and reliability become really important metrics.
Of course, the true utility of a system is largely determined by factors out of the transit agency’s control: land use policies, population of the metro area, chokepoints, competing highway capacity, resources of other interfacing transit agencies, and so on. There are three different questions you could try to answer with this kind of analysis:
- Is a city/metro area well-suited to transit use?
- Is the fixed investment of the system wisely designed and spent?
- Is the current agency administration competent?
With older systems the third question is hard to answer with the above criteria; with newer systems the first is impossible to blame on the transit system.
As someone who currently lives in the DC area I can attest that the system has become “bad.” People talk about the fact that up until around 3-5 years they felt the system was reliable. Now there are constant problems with the system. You need only look to local coverage in the WAPO over the last year to see the problems that everyday users experience. The metro board constantly threaten cuts to service or increased fees for a less and less reliable system. The degradation of the system have actually pushed people to drive. As a former Seattleite, I hope that its system will not degrade to such a state.
I’d agree, from what I’ve heard, that it’s become “worse,” but “bad” compared to what? I’d be delirious with joy if our system had the attributes of Metro, and even ST2 won’t get us there.
I guess if the question is, is something is better than nothing then, yes. I do not own a car and can get around the city, though I do own a scooter which helps.
I would say that having seen what the Link looks like, I cant help but worry. The reason being is that DC, as you likely know, has only two tracks. when something goes wrong in the system, it is single tracking time. Single traking slows the entire system down and there are only certain areas where a train can switch tracks. I have noticed that Seattle likewise only has two tracks which is fine for now as the system is new, but as trains begin to break down and tracks need to be fixed single tracking will become an all to common thing. This is likely the biggest complaint for metro: that when single tracking starts it can turn a 20 minute trip into an hour plus.
That is the case with a lot of modern metro systems. In gerneal modern systems are designed to bring people from the edge of they city into the center, thus you have a lot of branches that come together into a single section in the city center. BART, Metro and the Stockholm Metro come to mind. These branching systems aren’t redundent in the sense that if one part of it isn’t working you can use a different route. Problem is that isn’t going to change. It is just too expensive to the best thing agencies can do in prioritize operations through the shared segment.
What do you mean it isn’t going to change?
Of course redunant lines won’t be built tomorrow, but we SHOULD start thinking about them and tentatively planning for them today.
When a rail system is being run by “bus people” then what happened at WMATA is the result.
John Catoe jr., WMATA’s outgoing head, had as experience, prior to coming to DeeCee, being the Deputy in charge of buses at LA Metro, and then prior to that 9 years at Santa Monica Big Blue Bus, and had started his career with 17 years at the Orange County, California bus system.
I recognize that this is not all Catoe’s fault, but as Brandon said, up until he arrived in 2007, the Metrorail system at WMATA was reliable.
Questions I’d ask:
1. Whatever problems their system or their city hands them, how well do the drivers, supervisors, mechanics, and passenger information people deal with them?
2. How well do these workers treat their passengers?
3. What is the general spirit the public senses in these workers’ approach to their duties?
Based on these criteria, I like IT in Olympia, CT in Snohomish County, and San Francisco MUNI.
And if KC Metro and Sound Transit weren’t near the top of the list, we couldn’t bring off a day of joint rail and bus operations in the Tunnel, let alone a full year of joint ops on top of nineteen years Tunnel service with the Bredas.
Question: has anybody reading this ridden the forty-nine mile long trolleybus line over the Yaila Mountains between Yalta and Simferopol in Ukraine? From the pictures, that operation must take a hell of a workforce!
Mark Dublin
Those data points are available for our heavy-rail system (Sounder). How does it compare to those 13. I know we have some “quants” who contribute regularly here . . . maybe one of them could help out? :-)
He’s not comparing commuter rail systems. This is all about third-rail all-day subway-type systems.
A little tidbit. Barcelona’s metro actually uses an overhead power source.
Rome’s does as well, although the new C line will be driverless third rail (I believe).
Oslo uses both, with trains that switch between the two. I guess they don’t want people getting electrocuted when they ski over the tracks on the outskirts of the city.
Also note that there exist some commuter rail systems that use third-rail, provide all-day service, and run underground for extended periods.
The measures I’m seeing on the table are disappointing. The number of service hours or even ridership isn’t meaningful without considering the size and population of the service area, for example. I’d be interested in outcome measures, like annual rides per capita, for example, or accidents per million miles or service reliability. A lot of the concerns I’ve been hearing about from DC are things like service quality, crowding and safety – which also gets into questions about how well the agency takes care of its assets and how well they listen and respond to customers – things that are harder to compare quantitatively.
The biggest challenge in providing peer comparisons like these is that – despite there being a national transit database that requires people to supply the same comparative information – there are always vast differences in the way agencies assess these measures, and there are always differences between the missions, assumptions and context that the agencies operate within that you need to know to interpret the results. Many performance measures (including those on the table) have benefits that are non-linear, so it’s not always true that a higher number is better; there’s an optimal value, and a more meaningful measure would assess variance from the optimum. Until the industry (probably through APTA) makes meaningful peer comparisons a priority – by providing the meaningful interpretation that’s needed – I’m not sure it’s helpful to take this approach unless one is able to dig a lot deeper to understand what’s behind the numbers.
The DC metro is full at 10:30pm. (Not at-capacity full, but most seats have at least one person in them.) That means many people are using it for most of their daily trips, not just for work. A significant number of people are not buying/renting a car, or are driving it only occasionally, because the Metro is there. To me that’s the biggest sign of success: that it has enough relevant destinations and enough frequency and speed to be the central form of transportation in the region. The fact that it’s capacity-constrained and has reliability problems doesn’t negate this.
As Martin said, “worse than what?” Britons complain that their train system is the worst in Europe. But it’s still ten times better than Amtrak.
I agree – seems that a good chunk of people in DC don’t own cars at all. I know that DC is one of the few cities in the United States that if I lived in, I most likely would choose not to even own a car. I hear the red line is a disaster these days, but the surface streets in DC seem like they would be even worse.
At yesterday’s talk, Jarrett Walker put up a piece of a system map from Sidney and a piece of a system map of Portland to show how complex and terrible the Sidney transportation system is. It turns out that Sidney’s system is based on trying to run one-seat buses from every point in the city to every other point. This turns out to be a terrible strategy, and it’s much more efficient and can even be faster to have multiple transfers thanks to the frequency that provides. Transfer-based systems are also much better at getting you anywhere in the city, not just to work and back.
I couldn’t help thinking that the map of Sidney looked just like a Seattle bus map.
My point? Be careful about using metrics like “unlined trips”. You could end up favoring this type of terribly inefficient system.
Oh, and as a side note: I personally could take the 2X almost directly from my work to directly to my house. It was set up for that very reason (of course not with me specifically in mind). However, I still find it faster and more convenient to transfer once or twice to get home. Imagine how much faster and less complex* my commute would be if they had this goal from the start.
*current best system:
1.hop on the 11, 15, 18, 15X, or 18X
2..if either of the X’s, transfer at Denny to 15, 18, 1, 2, 8, or 13
3…if 1, 15, 18, or 8 get off at Seattle Center and walk to the Met
4….transfer to 2, 2X, or 13
5..else if 15 or 18 get off at Seattle Center and walk to the Met, GOTO #4
6..else if 11, hop off near 3rd and Pine and walk to the bus stop there
7…transfer to 1, 2, 2X, 3, 4, or 13
8….if 1, get off at Seattle Center and walk to the Met, GOTO #4
9….else if 4, ride to what used to be Blockbuster, walk home
10…else if 3, ride to Starbucks at the top of the hill, walk a bit further home
11…else, ride home
12.end
Oh, and that’s for a commute that’s < 3 miles long.
I don’t know if it’s a possibility for you, but if I had a bus commute that complex for only three miles I’d either walk or cycle. Of course, I say that as someone who cycles daily for my 12.5 mile one-way suburban commute because it’s faster than taking a bus.
I bike when the weather’s nice. And as I said – I could take exactly one bus home.
My point is that a low-transfer system like KC Metro’s can be massively complex. I’m very comfortable with my bus transfers, and know it’s the fastest way home on a bus. But I figured out this system after months of commuting, and if I ever wanted to figure out the fastest way to any other point in the city… I’d be screwed.
Using a transfer-based bus system is not only more efficient, but easier to understand. It would be something like: I take the 1st Ave line to the Counterbalance line. Done. Not only that, but the 1st Ave line could be a very frequent trunk line. Why KC presumably doesn’t do this is because they think I don’t want to transfer.
Matt, you completely nailed this explanation!
And of course none or few of these permutations would show up in Google Transit.
“I couldn’t help thinking that the map of Sidney looked just like a Seattle bus map.”
From what I understood, Sydney has five routes on every street, going to the five destinations considered important. Seattle has only one route on a street except where multiple routes happen to overlap (43/48), or where a group of routes provide an aggregate headway (71/72/73, 23/124, 26/28).
In Seattle, there are essentially three destinations: downtown, the U-district, and Northgate. Almost everywhere has a downtown route, except a few stops that have only U-district or Northgate buses.
A grid system would replace many of these downtown routes with crosstown routes. That works well in San Francisco and Vancouver, where many people want to go crosstown. It may work less well in Seattle where topographical barriers have prevented the growth of more destinations. (E.g., Beacon Hill and Delridge are downtown-centric, and don’t have many regionally-famous businesses to attract non-residents.) It works better in north Seattle, which has fewer barriers and more attractions in every direction, and also has at least some crosstown service.
(sorry for the late response, if anyone’s even here reading anymore)
Yes, a grid system would be ideal. But let’s not give up just because we don’t live on a hill-less plane. What we do have is major corridors that were created by geography. Here’s one solution (I’m sure of many): let’s run frequent transit down these corridors*, and connect local buses to these lines to serve neighborhoods. For my example, we’d have the 1st Ave line that runs to the Seattle Center. There you branch up the hill with one line (or several, each line designed appropriately balancing frequency with distance and reliability). At Denny you branch off to Ballard with another line, and head east with a third line. The 3rd Ave line would do something similar, either connecting with this Denny line or also running to Seattle Center. Etc.
* start with buses, move to electric BRT, someday change them to light or heavy rail
Sidney, B.C.? ;-)
Maybe it’s the simple fact that people get used to a system running smoothly and then when it ages and issues start cropping up, they start getting upset since they’re used to the way the system was?
Case in point, my friend who is a native of Singapore…he lives 5 minutes from an MRT station and thinks the Singapore subway is terrible. He says it breaks down too much, it’s packed at all times and most people can’t board the trains (even in non-rush hour times), the trains aren’t clean anymore, the trains end too early and so on. He gives the Singapore light rail even worse ratings…way too long, breaks down all the time, very dirty and so on. He just bought a new car and likes driving now and won’t use the metro, light rail or bus ever again.
A town with amazing transit options and he gives up transit for a car. :-/
Maybe Singapore should start taxing drivers to pay for train operations.
If a system is “terrible” because it’s packed at all times, I’m not sure that’s a problem for the rest of us. Nobody goes there, it’s too crowded.
A good transit system gets one to work 95% on time, using the same schedule, regardless of the weather.
I don’t think these metrics are very useful for judging a transit system. Things like annual trips , fares, routes, operating costs don’t really get at the core issue. I would say the real question is:
1. What percentage of trips are performed on transit, versus automobile and other modes (walking, biking, etc…)?
And another question that I think would inform that is:
2. What is the average time delta between transit as a mode and automobile as a mode?
1. will tell you how much it’s being used, and 2. will tell you how usable your system is. All of the other metrics are ancillary i think.
Martin, thanks for linking to my post. I’m happy to see that I’ve stimulated a discussion here.
I want to point out a few things:
As Martin noted in an update, the second installment of the analysis went up on Thursday. You can find it here: http://greatergreaterwashington.org/post.cgi?id=6688
I would also point out that these two posts were specifically in response to a post on the Matt Yglesias blog whose thesis was that the Washington Metro was the worst of the big 4. The post’s author, Ryan McNeely only compared the DC Metro to the New York Subway, Chicago L, and Boston’s heavy and light rail lines. You can find McNeely’s post here: http://yglesias.thinkprogress.org/2010/07/how-bad-is-the-dc-metro/
I am a daily Metro user. I take a Metrobus and two trains on my way to work everyday. By and large my trains are on time and delay free. And I live without a car in Washington’s suburbs. Metro makes that possible. Having grown up in rural north Georgia, and spent several years in Atlanta, I have a quite different perspective than most Metro riders.
In Atlanta, rush hour headways are 15 minutes on the rail system. That’s less frequent than DC Metro’s midday headway! There are lots of things to complain about regarding the DC Metro. But there are lots of things to complain about in every transit system. And I think we have it pretty good in DC, personally.
At any rate, I took issue with McNeely’s hypothesis. Metro scores pretty well when it is compared with other heavy rail systems, but I will grant that I couldn’t consider every metric.
Thanks to all of you for taking part in the debate.
” http://yglesias.thinkprogress.org/2010/07/how-bad-is-the-dc-metro/ ”
I’m surprised the Chicago L is so far behind. I thought it was the second most-used in the country. But it does seem surprisingly empty sometimes, only two or three people in a car. Does the L really have so much less ridership, or is it just an artefact of the length of the lines or something?
ARGH! And people wonder why I use a handle instead of my name.
Fellow Matt Johnson, where in North Georgia? Went to school in Rome Ga for 4 years. And yeah, have to agree about the suckyness of MARTA.
@Anc
I grew up outside Canton in Cherokee County. I’m not surprised to meet another “Matt Johnson”, we’re pretty common.