Radial rail

[mmcirvin]

Matthew Yglesias argues that, in metropolitan areas with good mass transit, demand for gasoline is more elastic than you think, and says something about Boston:

The kind of situation we have here in Greater Washington where for many suburbanites a brief drive to Metro station followed by a ride downtown is a viable alternative to commuting by car all the way downtown would accomplish a lot. I recall that Boston's commuter rail system was set up to work pretty smoothly in this fashion for a large number of suburbanites but the trains and parking lots were, in practice, usually operating well below capacity because people preferred to drive.

That's part of it (though I am definitely not one of those people), but there's something else as well that I've become acutely aware of. Boston's commuter rail system, like the Green Line streetcars before it, is set up entirely for radial travel in and out of the city center. In some industries, though, the employers have all relocated out of the city to office parks in ring suburbs; the workers are assumed as a matter of course to be capable of driving there.

If you don't live downtown, and you're not lucky enough to live near the same radial line as your workplace (as once happened to me by accident, but only for about a year), the commuter rail system is essentially useless for getting between your home and your workplace. You'd have to ride into North or South Station, transfer from one to the other by subway in some cases (which itself involves changing subway trains), and then ride back out again on another train; that's likely to be a multi-hour trek to get to a spot fifteen or twenty miles from where you started. The alternatives would have to be pretty amazingly expensive to make that seem worthwhile.

Buses help fill up the gaps in the inner part of the network, but in the suburbs they're often scarce and unreliable. I also rode a bus to work for years, but even that line was mostly radial; it would have been much harder to do otherwise. (Some people also associate a social stigma with riding the bus, but they are stupid, so I won't say any more about it.)

Transit planners like to talk about the problem of circumferential mass transit, but I'm not sure it's all that solvable. More likely we'll have to see land-use patterns, especially for commerce and offices, change back toward greater centralization as a result of rising oil prices. That will just make rent in the city even more expensive, but at some point employers may see urban locations as worth the price again.

Comments

[purgatorius.livejournal.com]

That's like Seattle, where you can get anywhere you need to be on the Metro (bus) -- so long as it's downtown. Columbia City district, where we live, is relly close to West Seattle... and you (generally) have to take the bus north to Downtown, and then south to West Seattle if cars ain't yr. thing.

[sunburn.livejournal.com]

Exactly, and some of the slack is picked up by Sound Transit, which as far as I can tell (as a resident near downtown Seattle, heh) that covers those who move between most two points on the East Side [of Lake Washington and hence off the I-5 corridor] or between major cities in counties adjacent to Seattle's King County. Despite that, there are certainly lots of people who have to make rather complicated maneuvers in order to get from A to B if downtown Seattle isn't one of those points.

Sound Transit is also in the commuter-train business, but it's hard to tell if the busses augment the trains or vice versa. Furthermore, these two major transit systems, though their busses peacefully coexist, think nothing of competing quite expensively when it comes to being the #1 Transit Solution for the area. This includes competing projects for light-rail, monorail, and every other blue-sky solution for a traffic problem that's largely caused by geography.

[pentomino.livejournal.com]

That's one of the problems of living in Phoenix, or any number of west-coast cities. There's a downtown -- in my case, at least two downtowns. But since there's no hub, we instead have dozens of routes running parallel to each other north and south along the grid. There are also some colored-line routes that go from one corner of the metropolitan area to the other, and a few wonky routes that make many many turns. And there are transit centers sprinkled throughout the city that ostensibly make transferring easier, but if you're not transferring, then you're essentially adding ten to twenty minutes to your trip by making the bus detour a mile or so.

The airport is not one such transit center -- only two buses reach it. One of them is the Red Line, which goes to both downtown Tempe and downtown Phoenix, to Metrocenter, and it was moderately convenient to my neighborhood growing up. The other is a weenie little local route that goes seven miles west, turns around and comes back to the airport.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

New York has the problem that the airports all sprang up after the major lines of the subway system were established, and their public transit accessibility is remarkably bad. I guess the PATH serves Newark pretty well.

[pootrootbeer.livejournal.com]

Nah, PATH only goes as far as Penn Station in Newark. To get to the airport, you have to make a connection from the PATH to a NJ Transit or Amtrak train at Penn Station, go one stop, and then transfer again to the airport's AirTrain monorail to get to the terminals.

(There is also NJ Transit and charter bus service to the airport.)

[davetheinverted]

Plus there's just the sheer scale of the place. At first glance, our bus grid (warning, 600kb PDF) seems to offer wide coverage. But realize, that map is forty miles wide and thirty miles high and that (except in a few places) bus lines run a full mile apart from each other, and you begin to see the difficulties.

Dav2.718

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

I hope we'll also see more use of ways of organizing work that don't require physical presence. For energy efficiency, nothing beats not going there. It's true that you still need to run the computers, but these days you probably need to run them anyway.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

...Commenter "artappraiser" also points out the big thing to watch out for in proposals for high gasoline taxes: how to keep this from devastating the rural and suburban poor during the social transition.

[pantom.livejournal.com]

High gas prices would still favor denser settlements, since trips are shorter in a dense area. A self-reinforcing cycle of denser land use leading to more transit leading to more density, and so on, would become possible again if prices stay high, so land-use patterns would change simply because the economics dictate it.
Further, paradoxically enough, as just about everyone's become aware by now, the right-wing tax cut policy is very good for the metropolises, since high income goes with big cities. Tax high earners less, and you're favoring the big metropolises. It's no accident that NYC was down in the dumps in the late seventies, and now is gradually getting better, from the subways being free of graffiti to the cleanup of 42nd street to the huge drop in crime. Lately, even the school system is beginning to improve. Employers won't move back in, but they won't have to, since if you let a city be itself it will create its own economy and its own middle class on its own. This is what is beginning to happen again in NYC now, and may be happening elsewhere, for all I know. If gas prices stay high, all it will do is accelerate a trend that's already in place, especially for NYC: over here in a nearby suburb of NYC, revival of some abandoned commuter rail lines is being considered, simply because more people are living here again, as population in and around NYC has stopped declining and begun a gentle rise. This had nothing to do with gas prices, but high gas prices will definitely help the trend.
BTW, take a look at this diagram that takes in not just the subway, but most of the commuter lines too, to get an idea of just how comprehensive mass transit is for the entire NYC metro area (it's still radial, of course, but the area taken in is massive and very well covered):

The map. (http://www.columbia.edu/~brennan/subway/SubwayMap.gif)

The home page for the map and other useful transit stuff. (http://www.columbia.edu/~brennan/subway/subway.html)

Some people see things as they should be

[http://users.livejournal.com/erasmus__/]

I worked years ago as a volunteer to improve the Boston transit system, and one of the things I saw in a planner's office was an old and fading poster done by some "transit radicals" in 1970: a professionally done map of what the system should look like.

I wish I had taken a photograph of it.

BTW, I saw the video "The End of Suburbia" a few weeks ago, which deals with this situation.