There's a simple explanation for this that neatly fits the questions raised in the article: public transit sucks.
It's dirty, it's crowded, it's noisy.
I rode on BART a grand total of four times in my entire life, and don't really have any desire to do it again. Were I a native of the area, you bet I'd be willing to throw money at it to make it suck less. But in the meantime, I wouldn't be riding it because, as mentioned before, it sucks.
It is so much more than that: I rarely lived somewhere in the states that had public transportation outside of a cab service - in one city, that cab service was unreliable if you needed to make an appointment. No pre-ordering and service times could be 15-120 minutes. In addition, in-town mass transit often wouldn't be enough in places like Indiana - most cities need transport between cities as well. To actually serve the population that benefits the most initially from public transport, it should run nights and weekends as well. Most smallish (40-50k people) stop service during these times.
Add some mistrust in the government to design it correctly.. and it is no wonder people don't want to raise taxes for it. The solution, it seems, is to build it regardless because it is good for the nation.
The article says that people are willing to raise taxes for it. They're just not willing to use it.
> Recently, transit scholars Michael Manville and Benjamin Cummins analyzed 21 local transportation funding ballots from 2001 to 2003, and found that, on average, these tax increases were approved by 63 percent of the vote. Yet a decade later, the share of commuters who drove alone in these places had fallen just 2 points, from 87 to 85 percent, while the share of transit commuters had stayed the same, at 5 percent.
It takes a quite high level of traffic to make taking public transit—which usually, at rush hour, means standing in a hot uncomfortable crowded bus or train car. Compare that to your own private comfortable seat with noise isolation and entertainment. There seems to be very little support for increasing the number of busses to run every five minutes instead of ten, for instance.
Frankly, most cities in the US don't have that level of traffic in that many places. If it's not even going to make a difference to drivers in LA it's not going to be many current drivers' first choice in the relatively traffic-free (and much less dense) car-oriented cities outside of LA. (But then, there are network effects here too, and so the question is how much that changes as the LA network continues to be built out over the next 15 years. And LA is planning on also making road driving significantly more annoying in many areas too ("road diets") which is a probably-good but obviously controversial plan.
Unless, in the meantime, self-driving cars are the final nail in the coffin for non-NYC US mass-transit...
One of the aspects rarely mentioned is: navigating public transit is hard.
Have you ever tried to read a bus schedule? They are not the most user friendly documents and require some effort to parse correctly. Its certainly not something you stroll up and engage easily.
I suspect that "not user friendly" and "publicly funded" are correlated.
Keep in mind, BART is about ten times better than what usually passes for public transit.
-- Someone who was stuck on SF Muni's pathetic impersonation of a subway today for 30 minutes while next to a not good-smelling guy who was tripping out on something.
Although, as I mention when people rant about how no one will use California High Speed Rail when it's finished, BART carries 360,000 people a day. The standard response to that is usually pure denial.
What we have in the US is the result of under-funding public transportation for the last 75 years.
BART should be a massive success story, given its original objectives. The Transbay Tube is running at nearly full capacity and they cannot push any more workers into downtown SF if they wanted to. And the experience is ten times better average public transit, eg relative to local bum-mobiles.
Compare that to the local SF MUNI, which is primarily focused on enriching the corrupt union and corrupt vendors. And of course, service sucks, because nobody cares about it other that the political kickbacks.
Except! BART is exactly the same. Every few years the BART union threatens to shut down the San Francisco economy, and the politicians always, always fold.
So the conclusion should be: BART is actually only successful despite themselves because they control a key piece of infrastructure. Otherwise it is just your typical shitty corrupt government transit OP.
You want CA High Speed Rail to be run like BART. Check out the CAHSR blog. They have a very active poster in your corner.
What's least inconvenient depends dramatically on context. For example, I've lived in and more-or-less near New York City at various times. Living in the city, I didn't bother owning a car. Too much traffic! And impossibly expensive parking, unless I wanted to commute to my car ;) Whenever I actually had to drive somewhere, I just borrowed or rented a car.
Within the city, I almost always used subways. That was mostly back in the day when they were very grungy. And they're still horribly noisy, compared to those in Toronto, Moscow, London, etc. Or even Chicago ;)
Sometimes I lived near the city, with easy access to light rail. So I used that, because it was much less hassle, and less expensive, than driving. There is always the risk of missing the last train, of course. But hey, stuff happens ;)
When I lived near the city, with no easy access to light rail, I tended to commute to the train station. If there was one closer than the city, anyway. That was still less hassle than driving.
But when I've lived way out in the suburbs, driving was often the only option. As others have noted, public transit just doesn't work for suburbs. People and their destinations are way too scattered. So there must be multiple transfers, and long waits.
Maybe one of the "pods on tracks" designs will work out. Or maybe people will just move back to cities.
If you drive everywhere, and everywhere you go has convenient parking, that'll be the case.
I find that often the best my car can offer is to take me from where I might be (home) to somewhere in the general area I want to go (where I have to pay for parking, if I can even find it), marginally faster than the bus and often slower than BART (unless traffic is clear). If I've walked to any of the many attractive destinations within 20 minutes of my apartment, it's then substantially faster to get on the bus at any of several nearby stops than to return home to get my car. (Generally, the need to return to where I parked is something that I find quite inconvenient in situations where interesting destinations are dense.)
I live in Oakland and currently work in SF; I grew up in Santa Cruz, and spent years in Ann Arbor. In all these places, I found many trips more convenient by public transit than by car (in no case was that all; currently it's close). I certainly recognize there are places where public transit is even worse, and even in these places there are people for whom it works out less.
> My car takes me from right where I am, to exactly where I want to go, exactly when I want it to, in a minimum of time.
There are ups and downs to both options. With public transit, someone else drives and you can get work done (or nap or whatever else you wnat to do), so the time cost arguably is less.
Personally its not the slowness that I mind so much. I spent a week in Japan and was never bothered by their train system times and whatnot.
The thing that really grinds my gears about BART is that every freaking time in their time table is +/- 5 minutes. I can't plan any sort of schedule around it to save my life, and thus I personally feel that I waste a ton of time waiting around for the next train. I never felt that in Japan. Every transfer and connection was exactly on time and there were plenty of trains where I was never sitting around waiting 20 minutes because I just missed the BART.
I live in a city with great public transit. I take the bus to work (~15 miles) every day. I don't have a car because it's expensive (car payment + maintenance + parking) and I can't justify the expense.
But cost aside, I'd much rather have a car. With a car, you go where you want when you want. No bus schedule to plan around, no multiple connections. You can play whatever music you want at whatever volume. You can easily transport items larger than a backpack. You don't have to sit next to a smelly or rude stranger. Much to the chagrin of social-engineering city-planner types, Americans value their freedom more than they care about some environmental cause. And let's face it, public transportation will not solve America's gas consumption and pollution problems. Most people live in sprawling suburbs that can never be adequately served by public transportation.
It's sad that instead of talking about what works best and how to solve problems, ideology is injected into the discussion by attempting to make it an issue of 'social-engineering' / 'environmental cause' vs. 'freedom'.
I always thought any ideology was dangerous, something to be shunned. It's a primary cause of wars and suffering, and of paralysis like the what we see in the US Congress now. Like anger, often part of current ideologies, it innoculates humans from thinking rationally by ruling out any discussion or thought, and thus it enables people to do dangerous, irrational, and bad things. (Often those effects are the intent of the ideological leaders, to manipulate their followers.) Once upon a time I thought we all learned that in school; if we did, many seem to have forgotten.
I always thought any ideology was dangerous, something to be shunned.
Same here. It's a great way of not having to think for yourself, though. The success of ideologies throughout history makes me think it exploits a mental vulnerability that exists in most of the human population[0]. How do we make that work in our favor, though? At one point is history, we built a great western civilization. There must have been great incentive to do that, despite the ideologies at play over the past several hundred years. How do we recreate those conditions?
> At one point is history, we built a great western civilization. There must have been great incentive to do that, despite the ideologies at play over the past several hundred years. How do we recreate those conditions?
The conditions were no different; likely they were worse (much worse depending on how far back you go). Read a detailed history of some past era and you'll see much that is similar to what you see today.
It's a very conservative notion that we are somehow worse today, and that our ancestors were somehow greater. That pessimism, which includes pessimism about our ability to act as a community (i.e., about government), keeps us from moving forward: Many people buy it and won't even try. We can't build mass transit because people are sure we can't do anything.
Our ancestors were very human (again, read that history), corrupt, confused, political, just like we are, but in many ways worse off because they didn't have the institutions they and their descendents built over the centuries, from democracy to civil rights to education. They did it; so can we. They had plenty of naysayers too.
We've been given all that; handed it on a silver platter. What are we building for our descendents?
We built a great western civilization largely on the basis of ideology. Chief among them, natural rights. The most beautiful and famous declaration of this ideology is in the Declaration of Independence: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. [...] But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security."
This itself is an evolution and addition to much older Christian ideas about human dignity, care for the poor, love of fellow man, and duty to do good.
Social engineering, environmental causes, and freedom are exactly what this is about (as well as congestion, which I forgot to mention earlier). How should decisions about a society be made? If public transit is a social good, is it okay to encourage it by taxing people out of their cars? Even though people clearly prefer their cars for all of these reasons? What if city planners fail to foresee a technological innovation (like fleets of self-driving cars) and end up spending billions and inconveniencing millions over an ultimately unnecessary cause?
Let's use another issue for example. If we wanted to end Cosa Nostra (the capital-M Mafia), and didn't care about freedom, the cops could tomorrow round up all of the known members and throw them in jail forever. Or better yet, execute them. That would end the whole ordeal. We don't do that because we think there's a greater good in freedom from arbitrary arrest and detention. We believe in due process and the rule of law. There's in fact good logical arguments underpinning and supporting the utility of these ideas, but we don't need to trot them out every time we invoke the ideas themselves. They are cornerstones of our very successful civilization.
By discussing these issues and being open-minded, pragmatic, and rational, and by evaluating them on a cost/benefit basis. We might learn something new; I don't see the intelligence in pursuing close-mindedness.
A comparison between a government-built mass transit system and government murder of citizens is a good example of how ideology undermines the ability to intelligently discuss issues.
>By discussing these issues and being open-minded, pragmatic, and rational, and by evaluating them on a cost/benefit basis.
And that's exactly what I'm doing. It sounds like you just want to discount all of the arguments of one side for being 'ideological'. That's a specious argument. Freedom is as much a good as environmental cleanliness and the lack of congestion. Why should it be excluded from your cost/benefit analysis?
The way they've always been made: a combination of social and economic pressures. "Social engineering" is a misnomer. The phrase makes us think we can engineer humans into creating a group of humans (ie: a society) that values what we want them to value and behaves the way we want them to behave. Never once in the history of man has this succeeded.
What if city planners fail to foresee a technological innovation (like fleets of self-driving cars) and end up spending billions and inconveniencing millions over an ultimately unnecessary cause?
That's how the nonsense of suburbs and extensive car culture began: city planners following an ideology. Instead of selling what was practical for the individual, they coined and sold the american dream.
Being a native of New York City I didn't own a car until I was 30 and my wife and I bought our first house north of the city. It gets about 3 miles a day between Metro North and home.
I'm still taking mass transit everyday and probably will be until I retire some decades from now. To me NOT taking public transit is abnormal.
When I lived in the Chicago area as a poor student, I had a dilapidated car with over 200k miles on it that was always costing me money, breaking down, got broken into, got rammed by a drunk driver while parked, etc. When I moved to NYC, the most incredible feeling of relief was selling that car to the scrap man just before leaving town. It's so liberating and care-free not to own a car anymore. The occasional Uber and Zipcar suffice at a fraction of the annual cost. Plus I'm less likely to die violently.
For the rest of us across the US, the opposite is abnormal. I bike primarily and use the bus the rest of the time, so I'm definitely abnormal. It probably has a lot to do with the costs of owning a car as well as the insane traffice in NYC vs. the rest of the US
I don't agree. Other cities have good public transit, and especially other countries have shown it to be viable. I don't think NY's traffic has as much to do with it as their excellent public transit.
By "excellent" I'm assuming you mean timely and pervasive. I didn't find it very welcoming or clean vs., say, Singapore's public transport. Both are well used...so here, I claim that this is not due to quality as much as it is due to the cost/convenience of using it.
I live in Columbus, OH. It's pretty much one of the most poorly dense, large (800K) cities in the US. COTA, the public bus system, I use frequently because I pay for a bus pass in my tuition. Their buses are generally clean, drivers are friendly, and I feel safe for the most part (people in Columbus are pretty friendly). However, given the poor density the service times are terrible if you're traveling to somewhere other than along the main street. The city is so large for its population that most stops are far and in between. As a result, ridership isn't high at all.
I think convenience...and cost have a lot to do with it.
If so many people support government regulation of the drug industry, why aren't more people taking drugs?
If so many people support the government regulation of debt, why aren't more people running up debts?
If so many people believe our society should have hospitals, why aren't more people going to hospitals?
If so many people support national parks, why aren't more people hiking in national parks?
If so many people support government regulation of the radio spectrum, why aren't more people listening to radio?
If so many people support conservation efforts for lobster, why aren't more people eating lobster?
If so many people support the public good known as _______, why aren't people making use of ________.
The reality is most sane people support a very broad range of policies which do some public good, even if the people themselves don't expect to directly benefit from that good, especially over the short-term. We can all support the existence of hospitals, even if we have no plans to go to a hospital this year. But we want hospitals around just in case we might need them, this year or at some future time.
Likewise with mass transit. I bike to work whenever I can, but if the weather is especially awful, I take the subway.
I live in Los Angeles and would have seriously undervalue my time for a bus to compete with the costs of driving (or even Uber). And I live near a stop.
Depends on where you live. In Europe, tons of people ride. In NY's or Chicago subway too.
If your city has crappy mass transit, and is designed for car driving with office areas and places of interest being several miles apart each, it's no wonder people don't ride mass transit.
Hence the "with office areas and places of interest being several miles apart each".
That's of course a design decision (urban planning). The average US city prioritized cars over efficiency, the environment and people actually having a chance to connect and build an urban culture (like NY or Chicago or SF has -- or had) outside of strip malls.
I totally agree. It all depends (1) where you live (2) how public transport is organised. I live in Melbourne, AU and to get to work (CBD) by car would cost my on an average 2.5 times more and take twice as long then sitting on the train (not including car purchase and maintenance costs).
It's a godsend compared to being stuck in the traffic (can work/play on laptop/tablet), sleep or talk to someone if I'm bored (usually same people travel regularly on the same line during the same time and in the same carriage). All in all I can have a good 1.5 hours of semi-productive time when using PT. The opposite is true if I were to use a car. Utter waste of time/money.
PT is the only way to go but this heavily relies on the infrastructure in place and how reliable the system can be. I used PT in Chicago and Boston for 3 years and hated it. By the same token living in Asia (Singapore for example) where timetables don't even exist on some lines because the trains run so often and regularly was fantastic. Melbourne falls somewhere in the middle, good services hampered by old infrastructure (some signal stations have been operational without an upgrade for the last 100 years!!!) and frequent air-conditioning breakdowns in hot weather.
The problem with PT is that most of us associate it with smelly, crowded, unreliable and expensive alternative to car ownership. But it does not have to be that way. Once you try a well designed and reliable PT solution there is no going back, trust me!
Also, IMHO buses are way worst then trains as a mean of transportation (may be why some many people hate PT). Every time there is maintenance work on my line and buses replace trains temporarily I prefer to work from home. Can't imaging a two hours bus commute (which heavily depends on the traffic conditions) with a shaky laptop on my lap.
I take BART quite a bit in the bay area (California). I find it timely and reliable - I've never been inconvenienced by the few moments where operators strike. It's just happened that I didn't need to ride BART that day.
My best experience was when I got on the wrong BART train (to Richmond) and had to double-back to a transfer station to go to Livermore. I was only late by 10 minutes. I got off the from-Richmond train and transferred to the train I wanted and it was off in literally less than 15 seconds. BART is incredibly efficient (imo).
That said - it would be a much better experience if it were cleaner, people could eat on it (and not be dicks with their garbage), and if we had a guard in every car to keep aspiring artists from performing and then asking you for money for their impromptu show.
I guess I have perfected my resting bitch face - I don't get asked for donations that often. :-)
In college I also rode the RTD buses out of Stockton. Now that was a poor experience. Frequently late drivers, and I witnessed 3 homeless men stand up and urinate on the floor - on separate days over the same semester. Oh and the bus they usually sent was too small for the neighboring town I'd get picked up at - I'd often have to stand for the hour-long ride on that route. (think short-bus for special education - standing + no room)
the end of the article gets it right: make driving more expensive. I started seriously choosing the train over driving during the Bush gasoline shortages where taking the train was, roughly, about the same cost as gas + toll for a round trip.
I would advocate for massive tax breaks on commercial development locating a door within 1/2 mile of a train station's walking exit for office space. The residential developments will follow suit.
Another part is that most cities do not place jobs or residences near public transit. In atlanta you get off the train and walk through parking lots to get to your office building, which is located on its own little island of parking, water features, and roads. It's ridiculous and the situation I describe is practically a best case since many (most?) job centers are located miles away from the train.
Taking the subway and not driving to work is one of the best parts of living in nyc. You don't really realize how much commuting in traffic sucks out of your until you just don't do it for a few years and then try to do it again.
People don't like the bus because it's slow, often comes to your stop very infrequently/unpredictably and is stuck in the same traffic as your car.
I'd love to be able to use more public transit. After all, I'm
blind, in case the username didn't give away my secret.
However, my city does not offer bus service on nights and weekends,
and frequently places that I wish to go are not even served by the bus
system, even though they are definitely within my city.
I try to walk to as many places as I possibly can. For the rest, if I'm
going somewhere during the day and it is reachable by bus, I do that.
Otherwise, I'm stuck taking a cab.
In reality, what this means is that I try to limit the things I do outside
of my home. That's kind of easy for an agoraphobic anti-consumerist nerd.
But still, I'm grateful for online shopping when I need it.
As an aside, the ideal city for a blind person in the United States is
Portland Oregon. I don't live too far from there, and I visit it
occasionally. The Max is beautiful. Portland has obviously made
a huge effort to provide great mass transit, and from what I saw, it was
very heavily used.
The easy solution to all this is to start encouraging companies to promote work-from-home days. If you do the bulk of your work on a computer, there's no reason you absolutely need to go into the office every single weekday to get your job done. If every company that allowed their employees who could work from home to do so at least once per week and worked together to evenly distribute those days throughout the work week, we'd see a massive drop in traffic. This could easily be done by providing tax incentives for doing so, and the money saved on road maintenance alone would likely pay for it. I can't get over how insane it is that we all insist that we need to work face to face when our faces are buried in a computer screen for the vast majority of our work days. It's absurd.
I have lived without a car for several years. When I gave up my car, there was a bus stop on my street and a bus stop in front of my office. It was a 7 minute trip by car. It would have taken two hours by bus to go to the down town central transit center and switch buses and come back. Walking to my office only took an hour and did not involve paying a fare. With walking daily, I rarely walked more than 15 minutes before being offered a ride to work.
I now live in Califoirnia where public transit is substantially less crappy. I don't use it frequently, but I do use it.
Maybe a better question would be about why the hell you can't get there from here when so much money is apparently being thrown at the problem.
"Maybe a better question would be about why the hell you can't get there from here when so much money is apparently being thrown at the problem."
Very often the people who make decisions about where the transit goes have different agendas from the people who will be riding it.
For instance, the city where I currently live has expanded southward in a big way. What used to be the city center 60 years ago is now on the northern edge. Yet, for decades, just about any bus trip that required you to change buses involved traveling all the way north to the old downtown area, even if you were going from (say) the southeast side to the southwest side.
Yes, it was political. The downtown merchants had a lot of clout.
This has improved a lot in recent years, with transfer stations opening up in several other areas of town.
Another example would be the alleged manipulation of the Chicago transit system and locations of public housing projects by Mayor Daley (the original one) so that minorities would have a difficult time traveling to the "nice" parts of town.
I'm amazed you would walk an hour to work for any significant time, and not buy a bicycle. You would have been at work in fifteen minutes, no hitchhiking necessary.
I wasn't hitchhiking. I did look into getting a bike and, in fact, bought a skate board at some point. It didn't pan out that way. Those details are not at all relevant to my point. The point is that even if you choose to live without a car and are willing to use public transit, the system can be so broken as to be functionally useless to you. Even saying "Well, you should have gotten a bike." as some kind of completely unnecessary personal criticism of me lefthandedly acknowledges that the bus system was functionally useless to me. So, build a better system and you may see ridership go up.
In most cities, driving -- although it comes with its own frustrations -- is a completely viable way to commute. Sitting in traffic and maintaining a car are negatives, but being able to travel whenever you need to and going directly to your destination are huge pluses. So public transport must be competitive with driving. It must win in convenience or value or both. In some places like Manhattan, driving is so painful that public transport usually wins out. But, in many cities driving is more convenient and sometimes even cheaper. Of course, comparing cost is not easy since roads and buses and rail are usually all funded by an amount of general tax revenue.
When I moved to the Bay Area (Berkeley), I had to take the bus to work, and I hated it because it was so unreliable. The AC Transit bus was never on time. A bus was supposed to arrive at my stop at around 8:15 AM, but instead it arrived anywhere between 8:00 AM and 8:30 AM. It also was supposed to pass once every 30 minutes but oftentimes I waited a full hour before another bus came. The last straw came when AC Transit went on strike in August 2010 - that's when I decided to buy a car.
When I had to commute into San Francisco from Berkeley a few years later, I took BART into the city, and didn't fare much better. While the trains were on time more often than not, there were way too many delays when we were en route. Since the underwater tunnel between Oakland and SF is a choke point - just two tracks - whenever there's a delay in there and you were behind it, it would take at least an extra 15 minutes to get us moving again. The BART strike from 2013 was also pretty bad for commuters.
I lived in New York and have been to Osaka, Japan many times, and I don't mind public transportation at all in those cities - they cover a lot more ground than the Bay Area, have plenty of trains and buses and aren't too affected by delays when it happens.
1) Maybe this is a conversion problem, as in converting shoppers into customers. In my experience, public transit is difficult to grasp the first few times you use it, and complex even after that. Think of all the steps involved, and the uncertainties. Think of running out the door and using mass transit in a new city (NY if you haven't been there, or DC). Mass transit systems require users to acquire expertise to use. Signage, just as a start, is awful; identifying routes based on their endpoints is meaningless information. It's not hard to imagine how the user's interface with the system could be made much simpler, so no matter where I am I can easily and confidently learn the fastest way to get someplace else, and pay and use the system simply.
2) People deriding public transit as impossibly unpleasant or who say government couldn't possibly execute it should see how well it works in places where it's funded. New Yorkers generally love their mass transit. European cities have much better and more popular systems. It's widely done; the question is why you think the U.S. so much less competent to do it than all these other countries.
I think that's a bit overly cynical. Most people that support public transport support the 'idea' of public transportation (I don't) and mass transit generally (I do). They do not support it on the basis that they'll have a clear road to drive their own cars; a few may, but most aren't even thinking of their next trip anywhere.
However once you need to go somewhere, the more immediate practical effects take over: reckoning with the inconvenience, inefficiency, and terrible service offered by most public transit organizations becomes the present concern and you take the best, fastest, and most efficient path for themselves in that moment.
I've seen a couple notes about the San Francisco Bay Area's BART. I actually take BART and might more often if it were closer. While I don't agree with how they exist, that they do and do a reasonable job makes them viable for me. Now there is a light rail/trolley thing run by San Francisco that stops directly outside my house. I won't take it. The service sucks. It's not worth it even compared to the horrible traffic in SF. If I have to take MUNI, I will walk a mile to BART, drive, or just not go.
Buses are the dumbest idea on earth, and we all know this intuitively, because we rode them to school as children, and something inside us swore to never let that happen again.
Have you tried riding the bus as an adult? Is their a slower form of suicide?
First, most U.S. public transit, particularly in the west, is inconvenient. Cars have dictated our urban layout and it's almost impossible to build a city that works well for both modes of transport. (e.g. cars mean large parking-lots and, therefore, spread out establishments, which means public-transit stops cannot be located near a walkable area and must drop you off in a concrete desert, with a quarter-mile walk to anything.)
Second, the behavior of riders on U.S. public transit is nearly always uncivilized and frequently atrocious.
> People believe transit has collective benefits that don't require their personal usage
People with cars still want to live close to the subway station so they can use it on Sunday afternoons when there's no parking 5 kilometers up the road. When new subway lines and stations open, the property developers build apartment complexes over them with 2 carparks per apartment and sell them to the rich. The people without cars have to catch a bus to the subway station.
People want door-to-door personal transportation (car), not fixed mass transit along select major routes (bus, rail), and they have ever since the car was invented.
My commute in is about 40 minutes by car and 80 by bus with walking from the stop. Double that for the return trip, and my bus commute is almost 3 hours out of my day. And the bus pass costs $130. So it's not even saving me a lot of money. It works out to just shy of 2 weeks of my life that I loose per year taking the bus. That's not insignificant.
It's impossible to design a community at any reasonable cost where a large fraction of people are expected to drive cars unless you make all other forms of transportation impossible or impractical.
The space needed for most people at an office or business to park free is greater than the total space the buildings will occupy. The buildings need to be father apart to limit traffic density. The roads need to be wider and run faster and therefore be louder and more dangerous than pedestrians will like. the walking distances increase and increase to accommodate the buildings farther apart and the empty space needed to control traffic. Transit routes and stops cannot get close enough to destinations in those conditions and transit times explode. Denser centers surrounded by less dense land uses become impossible when parking is necessary; density has to even out and that makes efficient transit routing impossible while hub-and-spoke systems drastically increase wait times.
Transit stinks in America and it's not the result of bad transit planning or lack of effort to build more or bad maintenance and operation practices. (Though we do also have those problems.)
On the other hand, a transit oriented community will have land values to high anywhere you want to go that ordinary people will never be able to afford to pay to park even with massive parking subsidies. The transit community makes widespread driving as impossible as individual car-oriented design makes transit.
In the USA, personal motorcars are the rule everywhere because it's the law. The (second) Roosevelt administration propagated rules to the banks and communities that required car-oriented development everywhere in the nation. Then traffic engineering and urban planning and zoning 'professions' emerged to implement and force those rules on every property developer. It became an iron triangle: drivers won't pay for parking, city planning councils won't upset drivers, engineers force pure car-oriented development on both to keep the peace, and transit users don't have political power by definition or they'd have used it to get themselves cars already. Today you can't build in America unless you can prove that even on the busiest hour of the busiest day, there will be extra free parking for every person that might want to use or visit the property. You can't build unless you can prove that the roads are big enough to accommodate every single person who might come in a car or pay to expand the road.
The result is that quality transit, outside areas built up before Roosevelt, is impossible and cannot develop.
This is the essential reason that San Francisco and New York are so expensive. Car oriented space is awful to live in. [0] There is a limited amount of legacy walkable urban space grandfathered in America. They aren't making any more of it. Millions more people want to live there than ever can.
If it were allowed to redevelop Peninsula or East Bay cities at low urban density like SF (75 people per hectare), then developers would do it and it would be possible to rent a spacious apartment for US$1500. At medium urban density like Tokyo (150) or high urban density like famously liveable Paris (300), you'd only need one or two cities to change the rules to relieve the regional problem. You'd have to build a transit system and accept the lack of free parking, of course.
The reason most of the world doesn't have the same problem is that the American system demands extreme Soviet-style centralized command-and-control dictation of land development. Parking minimum requirements are the most powerful rules making things bad [1] but floor-area-ratio maxima, separate use zoning, wide feeder streets and traffic engineering, and 'green area' buffers hurt, too. More free-market oriented development patterns prevail in less regimented societies without such dense thickets of rules and car-oriented development cannot gain a foothold against free organic urbanity.
I live in Los Angeles. Where is this mass transit they speak of? There are exactly zero mass transit options for me to use to get to work (San Fernando Valley to Santa Monica) within a reasonable time.
Public transportation is one of those 'if you build it they will come' type of things. But as it requires massive, long-term infrastructure investments that disrupt the city and can bankrupt companies or even municipalities if it goes wrong, it's usually built in a subpar manner on a small scale trying to fit into an existing city, and then tries to iterate on that every few years by scaling it up and modernising it while having to work with old permanent structures. So a lot of public transport really sucks, either they're buses that are less flexible than your car but adhere to the same space and speed limits, thus making a car a better idea, or they're small rail projects that don't get much coverage or frequency.
But now imagine the corollary... a city with just small sidewalks, bicycle lanes and public transportation lines, and absolutely 0 roads for cars, and no real local car industry. Now imagine the cost of breaking down buildings, laying massive amounts of road, manufacturing new cars and teaching everyone to drive. It'd be just as tricky.
There's nothing inherently wrong with public transportation but implementing it right into existing cities isn't trivial. It's supported so much because we long for a good implementation, public transportation done right is cheaper, more efficient, reduces congestion, improves equality & access to affordable transport, is safer and more environmentally friendly, while also giving all of its occupants the ability to do something else than paying attention to not getting into an accident. We long for that and support public transportation not because it's so fantastic but because it could be better than what we have, and should.
It's not like that everywhere. Take Belgium for example, expanded its infrastructure and its public transport use doubled between 2000 and 2012, doubled (!) in half a generation. Beijing's subway alone, a city of 12 million, delivers around 9m trips per day, forget the bus lines. There's already a ton of congestion, the mass transit system is hugely popular and hugely important.
Anyway I feel it's distinctly an American (and say an Australian) issue. Most of the developed world (take Europe or say Japan) consists of very dense urban areas, and a whole bunch of nothing. The US is like that, too, but there's still a ton of urban sprawl and even extremely urban areas like LA have lots of low-density living. Public transport's economics are essentially usage / investments, and building infrastructure to reach large areas of low-density (and thereby low-usage) living is not really worth the expenses. So you get this sub-par network where you have to wait half an hour for a bus that takes you to the centre where you have to move to a different one, it just isn't feasible. But take New York City, 8 million people and more than 5 million daily trips on the subway alone. It's extremely well used and hugely important, just like it is in Beijing, or in London or Paris. I've either visited or lived in all those places and the subway was indispensable, a part of life. But most people in the US or say Australia don't live in density like that.
Anyway the article felt a bit thin... It spends about an entire page on the notion that 'despite a half-cent sales tax increase to pay for transport [doesn't mention this money goes to both public and non-public transport and isn't necessarily always earmarked, either] public transport actually declined by half a percentage point'. I mean that's not analysis, it's just a tiny little fact that could mean anything. Again, for one we don't know how those funds are spent. And secondly, those funds may be a tiny fraction of the necessary budget for maintenance and scaling infrastructure with a growing population.
Anyway I think self-driving cars will nail public-transportation first. The type of investments necessary to set up rail, tram, rain or even bus service aren't trivial, but a fleet of self-driving cars and people inside working in privacy and comfort on their laptops in comparison is. For new cities, or countries where insane projects can still get done without decades of bureaucracy (I'm looking at you Beijing metro line) massive public transportation is a huge deal. But trying to reinvent the American city to accommodate public transport (and cycling infrastructure) done right (which in a dream world would entail destroying a city like LA and magically spawning a denser version of it in its place so that public transport works), in the context of American politics... I give self driving vehicles a much better shot of working around that problem.
Depending on which city you live in, the other passengers can be a threat to your life. For that reason alone I don't think public transportation will ever be very popular in the US. It might work in a few places, but most places the threats of random violence just isn't worth it.
I find this fear of city denizens exists almost exclusively in people in rural areas, who spend little time in cities. People in cities generally are pretty cool about any risk and used to rubbing shoulders with all types. Also, having spent a lot of time with those people, they know the risk is very small. (Of course both groups are self-selected to an extent.)
To go off on a tangent, but it's ironic that gun control is the same way: People in much safer rural areas insist guns are necessary for self-defense; people in higher-crime cities generally favor gun control.
"I find this fear of city denizens exists almost exclusively in people in rural areas"
I saw Deliverance, a documentary about life in rural America, and have the same worries about that part of the country. I don't want to squeal like a pig.
Total homicides (i.e. ANYWHERE in the US, not specifically on a subway which is probably a tiny fraction below 1%) are roughly double the total deaths in motorised traffic accident. So I'd say it's a safe bet to take the subway over a car.
There are other threats of course, pickpocketing etc... but threats to my life specifically on a subway would be a total non-concern for me.
> You mean, the total homicides (the violent crime ones) are about half the rate of motor vehicle deaths. Actually closer to a third.
Whoops yes I accidentally flipped it around incorrectly weakening my own argument :p
> It's about 10-15k homicides v 40-50k car crash deaths per annum in the past decade.
I'd still say it's closer to double though, there haven't been as few as 10k murders since 1965, and as the population was much smaller then (about a third smaller) the rate of homicide per capita wasn't much different from the average of the past decade. Meanwhile car deaths haven't been 50k since 1980 so 10-15k and 40-50k would include numbers going back 3 to 5 decades.
For 2005-2015 though the motor vehicle deaths average about 11 per 100k[0], for murder it's about 5 per 100k.[1]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_motor_vehicle_deaths_i... (doesn't include 2014 and 2015 but they're estimated at roughly the 2013 numbers. Notice the substantial dip right around the recession, I wonder how much of the drop can be explained by fewer miles driven rather than improved safety).
It's dirty, it's crowded, it's noisy.
I rode on BART a grand total of four times in my entire life, and don't really have any desire to do it again. Were I a native of the area, you bet I'd be willing to throw money at it to make it suck less. But in the meantime, I wouldn't be riding it because, as mentioned before, it sucks.