The Transit Metropolis: A Global Inquiry

By Robert Cervero

Around the world, mass transit is struggling to compete with the private automobile, and in many places, its market share is rapidly eroding. Yet a number of metropolitan areas have in recent decades managed to mount cost-effective and resource-conserving transit services that provide respectable alternatives to car travel. What sets these places apart?
 
In this book, noted transportation expert Robert Cervero provides an on-the-ground look at more than a dozen mass transit success stories, introducing the concept of the "transit metropolis"—a region where a workable fit exists between transit services and urban form. The author has spent more than three years studying cities around the world, and he makes a compelling case that metropolitan areas of any size and with any growth pattern—from highly compact to widely dispersed—can develop successful mass transit systems.
 
Following an introductory chapter that frames his argument and outlines the main issues, Cervero describes and examines five different types of transit metropolises, with twelve in-depth case studies of cities that represent each type. He considers the key lessons of the case studies and debunks widely held myths about transit and the city. In addition, he reviews the efforts underway in five North American cities to mount transit programs and discusses the factors working for and against their success. Cities profiled include Stockholm; Singapore; Tokyo; Ottawa; Zurich; Melbourne; Mexico City; Curitiba, Brazil; Portland, Oregon; and Vancouver, British Columbia.
 
The Transit Metropolis provides practical lessons on how North American cities can manage sprawl and haphazard highway development by creating successful mass transit systems. While many books discuss the need for a sustainable transportation system, few are able to present examples of successful systems and provide the methods and tools needed to create such a system. This book is a unique and invaluable resource for transportation planners and professionals, urban planners and designers, policymakers and students of planning and urban design.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Island Press
• Release date: Apr 15, 2013
• ISBN: 9781597269315

Book preview

Directors

Preface

Across the world, mass transit is struggling to compete with the private automobile. In many places, its market share of urban travel is rapidly eroding. Critics charge that most mass transit systems are deficit-riddled, second-class forms of mobility out of step with the times. Some contend that because of poor ridership productivity, buses and trains even worsen air quality and environmental conditions in many settings. Although the reasons for transit’s decline vary, part of the explanation lies in the fact that its chief competitor—the private automobile—is often grossly underpriced. Rapid suburbanization has also hurt public transportation. Yet against this backdrop a dozen or so metropolitan areas have managed, in recent decades, to mount world-class transit services that are cost-effective and resource-conserving and provide respectable alternatives to car travel. In Singapore and Copenhagen, for example, urban development has been channeled along rail lines, producing built forms that are highly conducive to transit riding. In Ottawa and Karlsruhe, Germany, transit has been configured to efficiently deliver customers close to their destinations, absent a transfer.

What sets these places apart? Partly out of curiosity and partly because I felt this question sorely needed to be addressed, I decided to write this book. Early into the research, it became clear that what distinguished these places from others was a tight hand in glove fit between their transit services and settlement patterns. In particular, these places are highly adaptive—either their cityscapes are physically and functionally oriented to transit or transit is well tailored to serving their cityscapes. It is this harmony between transit services and urban form that makes them great transit metropolises.

Readers will find that sustainability themes pervade this book. And well they should. At no time in our history have finite resources, natural landscapes, and the social and economic well-being of our cities been more threatened than they are today. Part of the reason inescapably lies in our growing dependence on private automobile travel. As the new millennium approaches, we find ourselves on the cusp of some difficult choices regarding how cities and regions should grow. The transit metropolis, I believe, is a promising model for building sustainable pathways to the future. After reading this book, I hope you feel likewise.

Unfashionably, I had no sponsor for this work. No one seemed interested in paying an academic to ride trains and buses throughout the world in a quest to tell the story of the transit metropolis. The book was pieced together over a four-year period while I juggled this effort with other research projects. Much of the data collection and field work were conducted by making four- or five-day side trips while in some part of the world on other business. As patterns began to repeat themselves across the first several case studies, it became clear that there was a book to be written on the transit metropolis.

A work of this scope would not have been possible without the help of many individuals and organizations. I owe a particular debt of gratitude to several friends and colleagues whose work on related topics helped me immensely in conceptualizing and carrying out this research. Jeff Kenworthy of Murdoch University in Australia was a source of fresh ideas on transit’s role in the city as well as some great photographs used in this book. Carsten Gertz of Technische Universität Berlin provided helpful comments and suggestions on the draft chapters of the Munich, Karlsruhe, and Zurich cases. Others whose ideas, suggestions, and encouragement influenced this work were John Pucher, C. Kenneth Orski, Allan Jacobs, Peter Hall, and Melvin Webber. And then there were the dozens and dozens of people who helped during my field visits, sharing their insights, providing background materials, and sometimes playing tour guide, showing me firsthand why transit works so well in their communities. I particularly thank: Per-Olof Wikström, Magnus Carle, Åke Boalt, and Stig Svallhammar of Stockholm; Ib Ferdinanansen, Faust Bovenlander, Peter Andersen, Jes Møller, Hans Jørgensen, Thomas Pedersen, Ernst Poulsen, and Jan Gehl of Copenhagen; Bruno Wildermuth, Anthony Chin, and Pannir Ramaza of Singapore; Katsutoshi Ohta and Masaharu Fukuyana of Tokyo; Herbert König, Dieter Wellner, Otto Goedecke, Beate Brennauer, Ulrich Zimmer, and Hartmut Topp of Munich; Colin Leech, Nick Tunnacliffe, John Bonsall, Ian Stacey, and Carol Christensen of Ottawa; Carlos Ceneviva, Norberto Stavinsky, Jaime Lerner, and Jonas Rabinovitch of Curitiba; Ernst Joos, Marcel Wildhaber, Gabby Lenggenhager, Paul Huber, and Ruedi Ott of Zurich; Paul Mees, David Yencken, Victor Sposito, Evan Walker, Ross King, and Elaine Herbert of Melbourne; Deiter Ludwig, Axel Kühn, Werner Zimmerman, Bastian Chlond, Werner Rothengatter, and Dorothee Schäfer of Karlsruhe; Stephen Hamnett, Thomas Wilson, Joe Mastrangelo, and Lindsay Oxlad of Adelaide; Sonia Lizt, Jorge Aguilar, Manuel Perlo, Jose Mirabent, Hector Antunano, and Miguel Geraldo of Mexico City; John Gartner, Rob Pringle, and Brendon Hemily of Toronto; G. B. Arrington, Rodman Monroe, William Robertson, and Andrew Cotugno of Portland; and Thomas Larwin, Jack Lambert, Nancy Bragado, and Bill Lieberman of San Diego.

My students at Berkeley, most notably Jodi Ketelsen, Keiro Hattori, Tom Kirk, and Alfred Round, also deserve thanks for assisting with everything from translations to literature searches. Jane Sterzinger capably prepared some of this book’s maps. Cheerfully helping with some of the drawings and artwork was Chris Amado. Thanks also to Miho Rahm, Carey Pelton, Elizabeth Deakin, and Barbara Hadenfeldt for their help over the years at Berkeley’s Institute of Urban and Regional Development. For aural inspirations during long journeys and wee hours at the computer, I thank Fruupp and Crimso.

I am blessed with a loving and understanding family who endured my absences while I conducted field work and holed up in my study pounding out this manuscript. Without their support, this book would have never been completed. To Sophia, Christopher, Kristen, and Alexandria, my heartfelt thanks.

Robert Cervero

Oakland, California

PART ONE

THE CASE FOR THE TRANSIT METROPOLIS

A transit metropolis is a region where a workable fit exists between transit services and urban form. In some cases this means compact, mixed-use development well suited to rail services, and in others it means flexible, fleetfooted bus services well suited to spread-out development. What matters is that transit and the city co-exist in harmony.

Part One of this book introduces the transit metropolis as a paradigm for sustainable regional development. Four classes of transit metropolises are identified, as are international case studies in each class. The case is made for the transit metropolis in light of the serious threats posed by increasing worldwide automobile dependence. People prize the mobility and freedom of movement conferred by the car. Because individual choice behavior—the desire to drive when and where one wants—is accompanied by increasingly high social and environmental costs, however, a change in course is more imperative now than ever. The transit metropolis, when complemented by other initiatives, such as the introduction of hefty motoring surcharges and smart technologies for transit, can help contain traffic congestion, reduce pollution, conserve energy, and promote social equity. This proposition is supported by the twelve case studies from around the world presented in this book. Part One’s purpose is to build the case that alternatives to contemporary patterns of urbanization and mobility are very much needed, and that as a model for how to plan and design future cities and transit systems, the transit metropolis holds considerable promise.

Chapter 1

Transit and the Metropolis: Finding Harmony

Public transit systems are struggling to compete with the private automobile the world over. Throughout North America, in much of Europe, and even in most developing countries, the private automobile continues to gain market shares of motorized trips at the expense of public transit systems. In the United States, just 1.8 percent of all person trips were by transit in 1995, down from 2.4 percent in 1977 and 2.2 percent in 1983.¹ Despite the tens of billions of dollars invested in new rail systems and the underwriting of more than 75 percent of operating expenses, ridership figures for transit’s bread-and-butter market—the work trip—remain flat. Nationwide, 4.5 percent of commutes were by transit in 1983; by 1995, this share had fallen to 3.5 percent.

The declining role of transit has been every bit as alarming in Europe, prompting some observers to warn that it is just a matter of time before cities like London and Madrid become as automobile-dominated as Los Angeles and Dallas. England and Wales saw the share of total journeys by transit fall from 33 percent in 1971 to 14 percent in 1991.² Since 1980, transit’s market shares of trips have plummeted in Italy, Poland, Hungary, and former East Germany. Eroding market shares have likewise been reported in such megacities as Buenos Aires, Bangkok, and Manila.

Numerous factors have fueled these trends. Part of the explanation for the decline in Europe has been sharp increases in fares resulting from government deregulation of the transit sector. Public disinvestment has left the physical infrastructure of some transit systems in shambles in Italy and parts of Eastern Europe. However, transit’s decline has been more an outcome of powerful spatial and economic trends that have been unfolding over the past several decades than of overt government actions (or inaction). Factors that have steadily chipped away at transit’s market share worldwide include rising personal incomes and car ownership, declining real-dollar costs for motoring and parking, and the decentralization of cities and regions. Of course, these forces have partly fed off each other. Rising wealth and cheaper motoring, for instance, have prompted firms, retailers, and households to exit cities in favor of less dense environs. Spread-out development has proven to be especially troubling for mass transit. With trip origins and destinations today spread all over the map, mass transit is often no match for the private automobile and its flexible, door-to-door, no-transfer features.

Suburbanization has not crippled transit systems everywhere, however. Some cities and regions have managed to buck the trend, offering transit services that are holding their own against the automobile’s ever-increasing presence, and in some cases even grabbing larger market shares of urban travel. These are places, I contend, that have been superbly adaptive, almost in a Darwinian sense. Notably, they have found a harmonious fit between mass transit services and their cityscapes. Some, like Singapore and Copenhagen, have adapted their settlement patterns so that they are more conducive to transit riding, mainly by rail transit, whether for reasons of land scarcity, open space preservation, or encouraging what are viewed as more sustainable patterns of growth and travel. This has often involved concentrating offices, homes, and shops around rail nodes in attractive, well-designed, pedestrian-friendly communities. Other places have opted for an entirely different approach, accepting their low-density, often market-driven lay of the land, and in response adapting mass transit services and technologies to better serve these spread-out environs. These are places, such as Karlsruhe in Germany and Adelaide, Australia, that have introduced flexible forms of mass transit that begin to emulate the speedy, door-to-door service features of the car. Still other places, like Ottawa, Canada, and Curitiba, Brazil, have struck a middle ground, adapting their urban landscapes so as to become more transit-supportive while at the same time adapting their transit services so as to deliver customers closer to their destinations, minimize waits, and expedite transfers. It is because these places have found a workable nexus between their mass transit services and urban settlement patterns that they either are or are on the road to becoming great transit metropolises.

What these areas have in common—adaptability—is first and fundamentally a calculated process of making change by investing, reinvesting, organizing, reorganizing, inventing, and reinventing. Adaptability is about self-survival in a world of limited resources, tightly stretched budgets, and ever-changing cultural norms, lifestyles, technologies, and personal values. In the private sector, any business that resists adapting to changing consumer wants and preferences is a short-lived business. More and more, the public sector is being held to similar standards. There is no longer the public largesse or patience to allow business as usual. Transit authorities must adapt to change, as must city and regional governments. Trends like suburbanization, advances in telecommunications, and chained trip-making require that transit agencies refashion how they configure and deliver services and that builders and planners adjust their designs of communities and places. In the best of worlds, these efforts are closely coordinated. This will most likely occur when and where there is the motivation and the means to break out of traditional, entrenched practices, which, of course, is no small feat in the public realm. Yet even transit’s most ardent defenders now concede that steadily eroding shares of metropolitan travel are a telltale sign that fresh, new approaches are needed. Places that appropriately adapt to changing times, finding harmony between their transit services and urban landscapes, I contend, are places where transit stands the best chance of competing with the car well into the next millennium.

This book tells the story of how twelve metropolitan areas across five continents have become, or are well on their way to becoming, successful transit metropolises. Each case study tells a story of the struggles, strides, and successes of making transit work in the modern era. Together, the cases offer insights and policy lessons into how more economically, socially, and environmentally sustainable transit services can be designed and implemented.

It bears noting that a functional and sustainable transit metropolis is not equated with a region whereby transit largely replaces the private automobile or even captures the majority of motorized trips. Rather, the transit metropolis represents a built form and a mobility environment where transit is a far more respectable alternative to traveling than currently is the case in much of the industrialized world. It is an environment where transit and the built environment harmoniously co-exist, reinforcing and enhancing each other in the process. Thus, while automobile travel might still predominate, a transit metropolis is one where enough travelers opt for transit riding, by virtue of the workable transit–land use nexus, to place a region on a sustainable course.

It is also important to emphasize that this book focuses on the connections between transit and urbanization at the regional scale versus the local one. While considerable attention has been given to transit-oriented development (TOD) and the New Urbanism movement in recent years, both by scholars and the popular press, much of this focus has been at the neighborhood and community levels. Micro-scale designs that encourage walking and promote community cohesion have captivated the attention of many proponents of TODs and New Urbanism. While good quality designs are without question absolutely essential to creating places that are physically conducive to transit riding, they are clearly not sufficient in and of themselves. Islands of TOD in a sea of freeway-oriented suburbs will do little to change fundamental travel behavior or the sum quality of regional living. The key to making TOD work is to make sure that it is well coordinated across a metropolis. While land use planning and urban design are local prerogatives, their impacts on travel are felt regionally. In part, this book aims to focus attention on the importance of coordinating transit-supportive development at a metropolitan scale. However, it also seeks to give balance to the equation, examining legitimate approaches to forming sustainable yet low-density transit metropolises, namely through the design of more flexible forms of mass transit.

Types of Transit Metropolises

The cases reviewed in this book illustrate cities that have successfully meshed their transit services and cityscapes in a contemporary urban context, namely one of post-World War II decentralization. There are cities—New York, London, Paris, Hong Kong, Moscow, and Toronto, for example—that certainly qualify as great transit metropolises but that are not included in this book, either because their principal transit investments date from a much earlier period (e.g., London), or their experiences are viewed as either extreme (e.g., unusually dense Hong Kong) or well chronicled (Toronto).³ Since the book focuses on cases from free-market economies, examples from China and other communist or socialist countries, either current or former, are not included. What are presented, then, are the best cases of contemporary transit metropolises—ones whose co-planning and co-development of transit systems and cityscapes occurred under largely free-market conditions during the past half-century of rapid automobile growth and ascendancy.

The twelve cases examined in this book sort into four classes of transit metropolises:

Adaptive cities. These are transit-oriented metropolises that have invested in rail systems to guide urban growth for purposes of achieving larger societal objectives, such as preserving open space and producing affordable housing in rail-served communities. All feature compact, mixed-use suburban communities and new towns concentrated around rail nodes. The book’s case examples are Stockholm, Copenhagen, Tokyo, and Singapore.

Adaptive transit. These are places that have largely accepted spread-out, low-density patterns of growth and have sought to appropriately adapt transit services and new technologies to best serve these environs. Included here are technology-based examples (e.g., dual-track systems in Karlsruhe, Germany), service innovations (e.g., track-guided buses in Adelaide, Australia), and small-vehicle, entrepreneurial services (e.g., colectivos in greater Mexico City).

Strong-core cities. Two of the cases—Zurich and Melbourne—have successfully integrated transit and urban development within a more confined, central city context. They have done so by providing integrated transit services centered around mixed-traffic tram and light rail systems. In these places, trams designed into streetscapes co-exist nicely with pedestrians and bicyclists. These cities’ primacies (high shares of regional jobs and retail sales in their cores) and healthy transit patronage are testaments to the success of melding together the renewal of both central city districts and traditional tramways.

Hybrids: adaptive cities and adaptive transit. Three of the cases—Munich, Ottawa, and Curitiba—are best viewed as hybrids, in the sense that they have struck a workable balance between concentrating development along mainline transit corridors and adapting transit to efficiently serve their spread-out suburbs and exurbs. Greater Munich’s hybrid of heavy rail trunkline services and light rail and conventional bus feeders—all coordinated through a regional transit authority—has strengthened the central city while also serving suburban growth axes. Both Ottawa and Curitiba have introduced flexible transit centered around dedicated busways, and at the same time have targeted considerable shares of regional commercial growth around key busway stations. The combination of flexible bus-based services and mixed-use development along busway corridors has given rise to unusually high per capita transit ridership rates in both cities.

The modus operandi for drawing policy lessons and insights from the cases involves identifying similarities in approach within the classes of transit metropolises, as well identifying differences in approaches and experiences across the four classes.

Diagrams are useful for conveying some of the fundamental differences in approaches to marrying transit and the urban landscape across these four classes. Schemas for thinking about the different classes of transit metropolises are provided below.

Adaptive Cities

Figure 1.1 portrays the relationship between regional transit services and urban form for adaptive cities, in both one and two dimensions. The two-dimensional bird’s-eye image at the bottom of the graph is a representation of radial rail lines that connect outlying communities to a central business district (CBD). Metropolises with strong, dominant CBDs and outlying communities and subcenters connected to their CBDs via rail, like pearls on a necklace, are the archetypal adaptive cityscapes. The clustering of development at nodes along the railway, and the resulting confinement of trips along the radial axes, are what makes the arrangement highly efficient from a mobility standpoint. The combination of a large CBD, concentrated mixed-use development around outlying stations, and long-haul radial links that invite balanced, two-way flows is the rail-oriented, adaptive city’s formula to success.

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FIGURE 1.1. TRANSIT AND URBAN FORM RELATIONSHIPS IN ADAPTIVE CITIES.

As implemented in Stockholm and Copenhagen, this book’s two Scandinavian cases, rail transit lines were combined with protective greenbelts to form a suburban landscape of compact satellite communities that are efficiently interlinked and connected to their regions’ historical centers. Regional master planning was pivotal to creating this built form. Plotting densities and land prices on the vertical axis and distance from the CBD on the horizontal axis, as shown on the top half of Figure 1.1, conveys the kinds of density/price gradients found in master-planned, rail-oriented metropolises. Densities and land prices are the highest in the CBDs and spike near suburban rail nodes. They taper rapidly with distance from the nodes and fall to zero within the protective greenbelts themselves.

It is important to recognize that the challenges of building successful rail metropolises go well beyond physical planning and the formation of nodes of development. In particular, considerable attention goes into the design of new towns and communities themselves. In the case of Scandinavia’s rail-served suburbs, town centers with public squares and outdoor marketplaces abut the train depots. Care is given to creating a milieu that is attractive to pedestrians and cyclists. The accent on livability is showcased by public amenities—park benches, newspaper kiosks, bus shelters, sidewalk cafes, open-air markets, flower stands, and arcades designed to protect pedestrians from the elements. In several of Stockholm’s rail-served satellites, underground stations share space with supermarkets to allow returning commuters to do their daily shopping on the way home in the evening. Adjacent to the stations are car-free village squares lined with more shops and service establishments, including day-care centers (so moms and dads can consolidate the child-care trip with their own journey to the rail station). Despite both greater Stockholm and Copenhagen having high per capita incomes and vehicle ownership rates by global standards, public transit carries upward of 60 percent of commute trips made by employed residents of rail-oriented new towns.

The seeds for creating master-planned, rail-oriented metropolises were planted in the writings of such visionaries as Sir Ebenezer Howard in England and Edward Bellamy in the United States; both advanced the idea of building pedestrian-oriented garden cities more than a century ago. Howard and Bellamy saw the formation of new communities separated by green pastures and interconnected by interurban railways as means of relieving cities from oppressive overcrowding and producing socially diverse and economically sustainable suburban settlements.⁴ Importantly, the rise in land values around rail nodes, as represented in the top half of Figure 1.1, would provide a means of recapturing the value added by public railway investments, allowing land price windfalls to be channeled into the finance of other supporting community facilities and services. As reviewed in Chapter 7 of this book, private railway consortia in greater Tokyo are today practicing this form of value capture, bundling together suburban rail investments and new town development in mutually profitable ways.

Adaptive Transit

Adaptive transit represents a polar-opposite response to decentralization. Here, spread-out, low-density development is accepted as an outcome of rising affluence and the preferred lifestyle of many; accordingly, transit services are adjusted and reconfigured to best serve this environment. In keeping with this approach, Melvin Webber has called for future mass transit to mimic the service features of its chief competitor, the private automobile. In a piece titled The Marriage of Autos & Transit, Webber writes:

If it’s true that the automobile owes its tremendous success to its door-to-door, no-wait, no-transfer service, and if it’s true that the structure of the modern metropolis is incompatible with large-vehicle transit systems... I suggest that the ideal suburban transit system will take its passengers from door-to-door with no transfers and with little waiting.⁵

Schematically, Figure 1.2 represents the challenges of designing mass transit in the extreme of thinly spread development with origins and destinations distributed nearly evenly throughout a landscape. Such settings produce almost random patterns of trip making akin to Brownian motion—trips seemingly go from anywhere to everywhere. The ongoing decentralization of jobs and retailing to the suburbs over the past few decades in many parts of the world has been largely responsible for the sharp growth in crosstown and lateral trip making. Instead of traveling radially along well-defined corridors between suburbs and CBD, more and more commuters want to move tangentially and are often forced onto facilities that were never designed or oriented to serve these movements. In the United States, the share of work trips both beginning and ending in the suburbs increased from 39 percent in 1970 to 52 percent in 1990.⁶ In greater London, suburb-to-suburb commutes have similarly eclipsed radial journeys to the central city as the dominant commute pattern.⁷

Adaptive transit generally falls into three groups. One is technology-based responses. An example is track-guided buses, first introduced in Essen, Germany, and more recently applied in Adelaide, Australia. Also called O-Bahn, this technology relies on buses equipped with guide rollers that steer the vehicles along dedicated tracks to achieve high speeds and efficiencies along mainline corridors. In the suburbs and CBD, vehicles exit the guideway and operate as regular surface street buses, functioning like distributors and circulators. The marriage of mainline and feeder functions in a single vehicle helps to eliminate transfers.

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FIGURE 1.2. TRANSIT AND THE SPREAD-OUT METROPOLIS. A seemingly random pattern of movements (represented by lines) connected to a vast array of places (represented by circles).

A second type of adaptive transit involves service reforms aimed at dramatically reducing waits and transfers. An example is timed-transfer systems, first pioneered in the two largest cities of Alberta, Canada—Edmonton and Calgary—and since adopted by many large bus transit systems in North America, including Ottawa (Chapter 9). In Edmonton, the regional bus system was completely overhauled in the mid-1970s to mimic the area’s emerging crosstown and lateral commuting pattern. All services were reorganized around some two dozen transit centers, in addition to the main downtown terminus, with routes blanketing the city in a combined crisscross and radial fashion. Today, anywhere from five to ten bus routes converge simultaneously on one of Edmonton’s outlying transit centers every twenty to thirty minutes. Transit patrons scramble from one bus to another to make their connections, and almost like clockwork, buses depart three to five minutes later. Many U.S. and Canadian cities have since tried to emulate Edmonton’s successes. A recent survey of eighty-eight U.S. transit operators found that 68 percent had some form of timed-transfer services; among properties with more than 350 buses, almost 90 percent used timed transfers.⁸ Tidewater, Virginia’s direct transfer network, was modeled after Edmonton’s, using shopping centers as bus transfer points; among Tidewater’s refinements have been the use of feeder vans that operate within cellular zones and radio-coordinated pulse scheduling (wherein buses converge and depart at regular intervals akin to .a pulse beat). Seattle has combined timed-transfer networks with fixed in/flex-out services, involving vans that depart transit hubs at scheduled times, delivering passengers to any location within a service zone (the flex portion). After dropping off passengers, vans return to the hubs along a fixed route on local streets (the fixed portion). Other forms of flexible bus services now being tried in North America include route deviations (where bus drivers are allowed to make small detours when requested by customers paying a fare premium) and rapid bus (involving a mix of strategically located dedicated streets, interlining, checkpoints, and real-time scheduling).⁹

A third type of adaptive transit involves the use of flexibly routed paratransit services, such as shuttle vans, jitneys, and microbuses, that provide door-to-door service, or something close to it. Privately owned and operated jitneys and vans have become vital mobility options in many developing countries, filling in gaps left unserved by public transit systems and providing efficient feeder connections into rail stations. Mexico City’s paratransit sector, discussed in Chapter 15, is one such example. Of particular promise for the future is the marriage of information technology and small-vehicle service to form a type of smart paratransit. Germany has experimented with automated forms of demand-responsive transit using centralized computers to link waiting customers with flexibly routed buses and vans.¹⁰ In Winston-Salem, North Carolina, vans equipped with automated vehicle locator (AVL) transmitters and on-board terminals are today used to provide door-to-door, real-time services for elderly clients. And in Prince William County, Virginia, similar types of smart paratransit provide feeder links to commuter rail stops for the general population.

What all these forms of adaptive transit have in common is the ability to reduce and perhaps marginalize what has become the scourge of mass transit in the modern suburbs—the transfer. It is well known within the transportation field that transferring is much despised, with some studies suggesting travelers perceive transferring as taking three times longer than it actually does—it is as if one’s body clock slows down by a factor of three when sitting idly in anticipation of a coming bus or train.¹¹ As much as anything, adaptive transit aims to both expedite the process and reduce the perceived burden of making connections and switching vehicles. The challenges facing transit in suburban markets is analogous to those of goods movements in the global marketplace. The emergence of just-in-time (JIT) stock policies in manufacturing and trade has demanded that a near 0-error system of transfers be introduced.¹² With the in-sourcing and out-sourcing of goods and raw materials from all corners of the Earth, trans-shipment between highways, railways, seaports, and airports must today be as efficiently and tightly timed as possible if multinational companies are to remain competitive. Increasingly, urban transit services are being held to similar standards.

A criticism of adaptive transit strategies is that by catering to low-density development, they reinforce and perhaps even perpetuate sprawl and unsustainable patterns of growth. While there is likely a certain truth to this, in the final analysis, this criticism is misplaced. To suggest that all urban growth should be compact and transit-oriented is to ignore political realities and market preferences. A universal truth seems to be that as people accumulate more wealth, they seek out roomier, more private living environs. Consumer preference surveys and buying habits, worldwide, demonstrate a strong preference for single-family, detached living. While such behavior might indeed press the limits of sustainability over the long run, the preferred way to attack the problem of sprawl is to pass on true social and economic costs to developers and consumers who build and live in these settings—in the form of sprawl taxes, higher fuel prices, and the like. Of course, exacting such charges can be even more elusive than containing sprawl. As long as there is underpricing of scarce resources, including land, and spread-out settlements as a consequence, a sensible option for some regions will be to adapt transit to better serve this pattern.

It is important to keep in mind that what matters most about cities is people and places, not traveling. If anything, travel is something most people want to avoid—so they can spend more time at their intended destinations rather than on the road. Our planning challenges lie with making cities and regions healthier, safer, and more enjoyable places in which to live, work, shop, and socialize. Accordingly, transportation planning should be subservient to the broader goals of comprehensive land-use planning—i.e., the planning for people and places. Thus, we should not be creating urban environments to promote transit—this puts the transportation cart before the land-use horse. Rather, transit should be serving land-use visions and realities, which in many cases means and will continue to mean spread-out development. In the United States, dozens of regions have opted to build light rail transit (LRT) systems in recent years based on the belief that rail transit, in and of itself, provides for a more sustainable future. Unfortunately, most have allowed suburban growth—in the form of shopping malls, campus-style office parks, and large-lot residential tract housing—to turn its back on the LRT investments. The blunder of letting a vision of transit rather than land use dictate investment policy inevitably gets translated into poor ridership results. Transit investments that fail to lure motorists out of cars and into trains and buses will do little to conserve energy, reduce pollution, or relieve congestion.

The Hybrids

Regions striking a middle ground between adapting their landscapes and their transit services can be thought of as hybrids. Their development patterns are partly transit-oriented and their transit services are partly adapted to the lay of the land. Between the extremes of a strong-centered metropolis (Figure 1.1) and a thinly spread, weak-centered region (Figure 1.2), the settlement pattern of many hybrids tends toward polycentrism, as represented in Figure 1.3. That is, orbiting the dominant center, or CBD, are secondary and tertiary centers and their surroundings. The centers, comprising multiple land uses and pedestrian-friendly design, form potential building blocks of a highly integrated regional transit network. They are normally interconnected with one another via dedicated guideways, either railways or busways. Feeding into the trunk services, often on synchronized schedules, are buses, trams, and vans that connect residents of outlying neighborhoods to the subcenters. The cases of Munich, Ottawa, and Curitiba examined in this book are representative of such hybrids.

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FIGURE 1.3. TRANSIT AND THE POLYCENTRIC CITY. A hierarchy or urban centers (represented by circles) interconnected by main line (represented by long lines) and feeder (represented by short lines) services.

Strong-Core Cities

An offshoot of these hybrids is a handful of places whose most noteworthy transit accomplishments have been to tie rail improvements to central city revitalization efforts. The two cases reviewed in this book—Zurich and Melbourne—highlight successes at using tramways both to enrich the quality of urban living and to provide efficient forms of circulation in built-up areas. In both instances, tramways have been used to reinforce established development patterns (i.e., adaptive transit) while inner-city revitalization has sought to achieve more compact, transit-supportive built forms (i.e., adaptive cities).

Case Organization

The four classes of transit metropolises outlined above form the basis for organizing the case materials presented in this book. Chapter 2 is a policy setter—a chapter that reviews the motivations for closely coordinating transit and urban development, framed mostly in terms of the automobile’s threat to global sustainability. Chapter 3 examines public policies that, when introduced in combination with the model of a transit metropolis, offer some of the best hope for a more sustainable future. The third chapter also reviews evidence on how transit and urban form have shaped each other over time. Part Two presents the case materials for adaptive cities—Stockholm, Copenhagen, Singapore, and Tokyo. Part Three reviews experiences from the three hybrids—Munich, Ottawa, and Curitiba. This is followed by Part Four on the two strong-core cities—Zurich and Melbourne. Part Five rounds out the coverage with materials on the three adaptive transit cases—Karlsruhe, Adelaide, and Mexico City. Part Six closes the book, with a penultimate chapter that summarizes the lessons learned and their implications for transit systems and cities of tomorrow. Longstanding myths about transit and the city are also taken on (and hopefully put to rest), based on the collective evidence from the twelve case transit metropolises. The book closes with a chapter on North America’s aspiring transit metropolises (Portland, Vancouver, San Diego, and others), reviewing the challenges of trying to emulate international success stories in the world’s two most auto-dependent nations.

Transit Services and Technologies

Given the international scope of this book, it is helpful at the outset to sort through and clarify the many terms—interpreted differently in different places—used to describe transit services. I have opted for the term transit to describe generically the collective forms of passenger-carrying transportation services—ranging from vans and minibuses serving multiple origins and destinations (many-to-many) over nonfixed routes to modern, heavy rail trains operating point to point (one-to-one) over fixed guideways. Transit is the catchall used in the United States and Canada; however, almost everywhere else, public transport is the vernacular. And while in much of North America, public transport or public transit is associated with mass transit services provided by the public sector, almost everywhere else it means services that are available to the public at large, whether publicly or privately deployed. It is this broader, more inclusive definition of public transport that is adopted in this book.

Types or classes of transit services can be defined along a continuum according to types of vehicles, passenger-carrying capacities, and operating environments. The following sections elaborate on the forms of common-carrier transit services—i.e., those available to the general public—that are found among the case studies reviewed in this book.

Paratransit

The smallest carriers often go by the name of paratransit, representing the spectrum of vans, jitneys, shuttles, microbuses, and minibuses that fall between the private automobile and conventional bus in terms of capacities and service features. Often owned and operated by private companies and individuals, paratransit services tend to be flexible and highly market-responsive, connecting multiple passengers to multiple destinations within a region, sometimes door-to-door and, because of multiple occupants, at a price below a taxi (but enough to more than cover full operating costs). Driven by the profit motive, paratransit entrepreneurs aggressively seek out new and expanding markets, innovating when and where necessary. Much of their success lies in their flexibility and adaptability. Unencumbered by strict operating rules, jitney drivers will sometimes make a slight detour to deliver someone hauling groceries to his or her front door in return for an extra charge. Besides being more human-scale, jitneys and minibuses can offer service advantages over bigger buses—often, they take less time to load and unload, arrive more frequently, stop less often, and are more maneuverable in busy traffic, and, studies show, passengers tend to feel more secure since each one is closer to the driver. ¹³

In many parts of the developing world, jitneys and minibuses are the mainstays of the transit network. The archetypal service consists of a constellation of loosely regulated owner-operated collective-ride vehicles that follow more or less fixed routes with some deviations as custom, traffic, and hour of day permit. Jitney drivers respond to curbside hails pretty much anywhere along a route. Every paratransit system, however—whether the 2,000 matatus of Nairobi, the 15,000 carros por puesto minibuses in Caracas, or the 40,000-plus jeepneys of Manila—differs in some way. Some load customers in the rear of vehicles and others on the side; some are governed by federations of jitney owners while others engage in daily head-to-head competition; some have comfortable padded seats and others have hard wooden benches. Manila’s jeepneys (converted U.S. army jeeps that serve up to twelve riders on semifixed routes) carry about 60 percent of all peak-period trips in the region. They cost 16 percent less per seat mile than standard buses and generally provide a higher quality service (e.g., greater reliability, shorter waits) at a lower fare. Jeepney operations have historically been the last to petition for fare increases.¹⁴

Although banned in most wealthy countries, a handful of U.S. cities today allow private minibus and jitney operators to ply their trade as long as they meet minimum safety and insurance requirements. New York City has the largest number of privately operated van services of any American city—an estimated 3,000 to 5,000 vehicles (seating fourteen to twenty passengers) operate, both legally and illegally, on semifixed routes and variable schedules to subway stops and as connectors to Manhattan. Surveys show that more than three-quarters of New York’s commuter van customers are former transit riders who value having a guaranteed seat and speedy, dependable services. Miami also has a thriving paratransit sector that caters mainly to recent immigrants from Cuba and the West Indies who find jitney-vans a more familiar and congenial form of travel than buses. Today, virtually all U.S. cities allow private shuttle vans to serve airports.

Studies consistently show that jitneys and minibuses, whether in the United States or Southeast Asia, confer substantial economic and financial benefits, both to the public sector and to private operators—namely, they are more effective at coaxing motorists out of cars than conventional transit in many settings, and do so without costly public subsidies.¹⁵ However, as passenger volumes rise above a certain threshold (usually 4,000 or more per direction per hour), the economic advantages of paratransit begin to plummet, reflecting the limitations of smaller vehicles in carrying large line-haul loads. In both the developing and developed worlds, paratransit best operates in a supporting and supplemental, rather than substituting, role.

Bus Transit

Urban bus transit services come in all shapes and sizes, but in most places they are characterized by forty-five to fifty-five-passenger pneumatic-tire coaches that ply fixed routes on fixed schedules. Buses are usually diesel-propelled, though in some larger metropolises (e.g., Mexico City, Toronto), electric trolley buses powered by overhead wires also operate. Because they share road space, buses tend to be cheaper and more adaptive than rail services. However, on a per passenger kilometer basis, bus transit is generally a less efficient user of energy and emits more pollution than urban rail services. It is partly because of environmental concerns, as well as image consciousness, that some cities have sought to trade in their bus routes for urban rail services.

Bus transit is particularly important in developing countries, such as India, where some 40 percent of all urban trips are by bus. In the Third World, the private sector serves more than 75 percent of bus trips. In Karachi, Pakistan, private enterprises operating medium-size buses handle 82 percent of transit journeys.¹⁶ Because they are highly vulnerable to traffic congestion, buses are notoriously slow in megacities such as Shanghai, China, where it is generally faster to pedal a bike for trips under 14 kilometers in length.¹⁷ One remedy is to reward high-occupancy travel through preferential treatment, such as reserved bus lanes and traffic signal preemptions. Bangkok, Thailand, has opened some 200 kilometers of reserved, contra-flow bus lanes to expedite bus flows in a city where rush-hour speeds often fall below 10 kilometers per hour.

In most developed countries, bus transit falls largely under the domain of the public sector, though concerns over rising subsidies have prompted more and more public transit agencies to competitively tender services to private contractors. In much of the United Kingdom and Scandinavia, public bus services have been turned over to the private sector outright. For many small to medium-size metropolitan areas of the United States, Canada, and Europe, conventional coaches (operating over fixed routes on published schedules) are the predominant transit carriers; in larger areas, buses often function mainly as feeders into mainline rail corridors. Providing exclusive busways can allow buses to integrate feeder and line-haul functions in a single vehicle. In two of the cases reviewed in this book, Ottawa and Curitiba, dedicated passageways are provided for buses, enabling rubber-tire vehicles to emulate the speed advantages of conventional steel-wheel trains on line-haul segments, yet perform as regular buses on surface streets as well. Guided busways, or O-Bahns, introduced so far in Essen, Germany; Adelaide, Australia (Chapter 14); and two British cities, Leeds and Ipswich, are particularly suited to corridors (such as freeway medians) with restricted right-of-ways. Because of faster operating speeds, the theoretical maximum passenger throughputs of busways are as high as 20,000 persons per direction per hour, more than twice that of conventional surface-street buses.¹⁸

Trams and Light Rail Transit

Rail transit systems are mass transit’s equivalents to motorized expressways, providing fast, trunkline connections between central business districts, secondary activity centers, and suburban corridors. The oldest and slowest rail services—streetcars in the United States and tramways in Europe—functioned as mainline carriers in an earlier era, but as metropolitan areas grew outward, those that remained intact were relegated to the role of central city circulators. In cities such as Zurich, Munich, and Melbourne, aging tramways have been refurbished in recent times to improve vehicle comfort, safety, and maneuverability. Trams are enjoying a renaissance in a number of European cities because their slower speeds, street-scale operations, and Old World character blend nicely with a pedestrian-oriented, car-free central city.

The modern-day version of the electric streetcar, light rail transit (LRT), has gained popularity as a more affordable alternative to expensive heavy rail systems, particularly in medium-size metropolitan areas of under 3 million population. Compared to tram services, LRT generally operates along exclusive or semi-exclusive right-of-ways using modern, automated train controls and technologies. The LRT vehicles tend to be roomier and more comfortable than tram cars, with more head clearance and lower floors. In the United States, where the most LRT trackage has been laid since the early 1980s, costs are often saved by building along disused railroad corridors. Medium-size U.S. cities with fairly low densities, such as Sacramento, California, have managed to build LRT for as low as US$10 million per route mile; in Sacramento’s case, costs were slashed by sharing a freight railroad right-of-way, building no-frills side-platform stations, and relying predominantly on single-track services. Light rail transit is generally considered safer than heavy rail because electricity comes from an overhead wire instead of a middle third rail. There is thus no need to fence in the track, not only saving costs but also allowing LRT cars to mix with traffic on city