Why the Media Fixation on “Transit Is Failing” Stories? | Hacker News Reader

Why the Media Fixation on “Transit Is Failing” Stories?

humantransit.org

67 pointsanother66 comments

People love to hate public transit, and will click on any headline that promises to fuel their sentiment.

In particular, people who commute using single-occupancy vehicles are happy to read anything which externalizes and validates their views about the viability of transit.

This is very much an American thing to hate public transport though. Places in Europe, especially Switzerland for example, have much better infrastructure and taking a car can be a pain compared to a train which is faster and a lot more comfortable.

I don't hate it, but I do question if it is the best use of funds. The U.S. doesn't have the density required to support the transit systems we have built. Fare box revenue only covers 44% of operating costs in Boston; in Austin, the CMTA only covers 12.4%. And operating costs do not include the cost of capital, which must be massive [ref: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farebox_recovery_ratio].

-- Edit 's/costs do not cover/costs do not include/'

Do gas taxes cover the costs of road repairs and all other government spending that benefits car owners? Hell, even parking isn't self-supporting, why should transit fares cover all operating costs?

Wow, they sure don't. In fact, nationwide gas tax and tolls cover about 32% of highway costs. [http://taxfoundation.org/article/gasoline-taxes-and-tolls-pa...]

(But that just says to me our gas taxes should be higher. :)

Denying the problems with mass transit in America that lead most Americans to prefer single occupancy vehicles is not the way to get more people using public transit.

Mass transit has problems that lead me to prefer that single occupancy vehicle known as a bicycle. Even in the snow.

Can't you just use the same logic to make the opposite point?

"In particular, people who commute using public transit are happy to read anything which externalizes and validates their views about the viability of single-occupancy vehicles."

In general, it's not constructive to make arguments based on questioning the motivations of people you disagree with. I try to always assume rationality and good faith on the part of everyone, even when they appear to be brainwashed or just plain crazy from a distance. Trying to figure out why people might be irrationally disagreeing with you is a lot less useful than trying to figure out why people are rationally disagreeing with you, even when they are being irrational (because aren't we all, in one way or another?).

I don't know, with that kind of thinking your inevitably going to question your own rationale for believing what you do. And who knows where that could go.

I think the reason has to do with the perception that ridership should be rapidly increasing and it isn't. Population is up, urbanization, is up, but public transit isn't keeping pace. That's an interesting story because it is non-obvious. I don't think there much else to the media fixation than that.

Building good rail transit infrastructure takes a pretty long time, and it's very expensive. You can also have good bus service, but having it competitive with driving usually requires bus-only lanes, and that's a difficult proposition in America. If you look at Seattle, for example, people there are desperate for new transit, and they want it done as soon as possible, but the timelines for the upcoming ST3 package have most of it taking upwards of a couple decades to complete.

For most Americans, getting around means driving, and other modes are seen as either impractical (walking), a toy (biking), or just for the poor (transit). It's a relatively difficult culture in which to improve alternative modes of transport.

Self-driving cars will go a long way towards improving this. The focus needs to be on avoiding silly mistakes in the meantime, like sinking billions of dollars into new fixed-rail transit routes that will be obsolete the day they enter service.

Self-driving cars may lead to marginal improvements in road throughput, but shared-vehicle transportation will always be able to move more people in the same amount of space. If a transit route has sufficient ridership to justify investing in rail, it is already going to be very congested at commuting hours, and will remain so after self-driving cars become common.

Self-driving cars may lead to marginal improvements in road throughput, but shared-vehicle transportation will always be able to move more people in the same amount of space.

It's not useful to "move more people in the same amount of space" if those people are going to end up someplace other than where they need to be. Classic case of optimizing the wrong parameter.

You can't apply 19th-century rail route design to 21st century transit problems... well, you can, but it's never going to be optimal.

The whole roadway system can be a "transit route," with the proper planning. A fleet of autonomous vehicles is a train... but one that has none of the drawbacks of fixed routes.

A fleet of autonomous vehicles transporting people from disparate point to disparate point still requires a lot of roadway space per human being transported, which is the root cause of road congestion. That is as true in 2016 as it was in 1916, and will remain true in 2116.

Fixed-route rail transit requires compatible land use to be successful, but most of our most economically successful areas are already very dense— and the only reason than Silicon Valley isn't is that such density is illegal, with the absurd result of $2M ranch houses. A bilevel rail car can comfortably transport 160 people in the footprint of four Honda Civics cruising as an autonomous car-train.

The thing is, though, the roads already exist. And we know we're using them suboptimally now.

Self-driving is also a long way off in terms of the entire fleet. Poor people aren't driving new teslas. Even if every new car sold is non-human drivable, it will take a couple decades before the entire fleet is wholly autodrive. It would also be naïve to assume that any future tech will dominate the market when there isn't even a product yet in the market. City planners cannot take autodrive for granted.

(imho it won't ever happen. People like driving cars, but that is a different debate)

Even if every new car sold is non-human drivable, it will take a couple decades before the entire fleet is wholly autodrive.

Coincidentally, that's about how long a typical urban rail transit project takes these days. Here in the Seattle area, we're looking at a 30+ year timeline for light rail construction. In military parlance this is known as "fighting the last war."

It would also be naïve to assume that any future tech will dominate the market when there isn't even a product yet in the market. City planners cannot take autodrive for granted. (imho it won't ever happen. People like driving cars, but that is a different debate)

I like to drive, too, and I spend an unreasonable proportion of my own money on cool cars. But the fact is that self-driving tech will turn driving into a hobby rather than a necessity. Right now, our "hobby" kills about 30,000 people per year in the US alone.

The transition away from human drivers will look like an example of punctuated equilibrium. It may seem like little progress is being made, but we'll all wake up one morning and discover that the status quo has become impossible to justify. Life (and death) on the roads will change faster than almost anyone can imagine.

Poor people aren't driving new teslas.

Not a problem, because the idea that everybody has to own one or two cars to be a full-fledged adult is going to become obsolete at around the same time.

Perhaps Uber/Lyft lobbyists doing ground-level work? /tinfoil

In Washington DC it has taken over ten years of crashes, worker and passenger fatalities, and awful service for the press to start telling "Metro is failing" stories. Up until then the stories generally were positive.

I think Metros problems are relatively recent though. There were some crashes before (inevitable in a large transit system). But it's only in the last few years that service has totally gone off the rails.

Out of curiosity - per day or week: how many people ride the DC Metro, how many people die on the Metro, how many people drive, and how many people die driving? Metro services have the same issue as airlines in that a non-issue failure rate ends up reviled in the news because there's the same name attached to every single incident and everybody is completely failing to group up the alternatives to examine them.

Bad service I can agree with - that's something that needs to be fixed. More money, supportive legislation that makes it easier for them to acquire capability, etcetera. But unless the Metro is killing someone literally every day I doubt its fatality rate approaches cars.

It's definitely safer. The problem is that it was even better during the period where they skimped on maintenance and so part of what drives the reaction are the million people who remember when you never heard of things like this happening.

Metro's problem is gross and chronic mismanagement. Not a single fatality or injury on Metro has been attributed to lack of money. So they do not need more money or legislation to make it easier for them to acquire anything. A common bogeyman among Metro apologists is "lack of dedicated funding," even though no one has shown any link between this lack of dedicated funding and any of the problems Metro is facing.

The airlines are an excellent example of how regulation and safety consciousness can succeed in creating an extremely safe means of transportation. Causes of mishaps are tracked down and fixed. Meanwhile Metro kills people due to gross mismanagement.

I do not think "more people die driving" is an excuse for gross mismanagement in a government agency.

I ran the numbers on this a while ago, and Metro averages about one fatality per year (looking at the last ten years, but they're clumped, so this is not necessarily accurate) and that makes them about 10x safer than cars for the equivalent number of passenger-miles. So yes, they're safer, but they wouldn't need to be killing people every day to approach the level of cars, once a month would do it.

What's worrying is that there are a lot of non-fatal incidents (fires and such) which avoid killing people purely by luck. If they don't take action, those are going to start killing people more frequently.

Thankfully they are taking action, finally. Unfortunately that action is going to involve some pretty major shutdowns over the next year.

DC's Metro really is in a uniquely bad position, though: https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/federal-agency-orders-n...

I hate to break it to you but people, they tend to die. Trying too hard to avoid that simple fact is silly.

Public transit is a very visible part of government for people who live in cities that have it, and it's controversial because it's partially financed with taxpayer money whether you use it or not.

I feel like especially in southern California, there are a lot of people in the suburbs who don't use public transit and who feel like the money spent on transit ("moving poor people around") should go to road projects instead which benefit them.

I was recently in Miami, and my friend who lives there said to use Lyft instead of taking the bus or the metro, because "it's only used by poor people". I compare this to Boston, where people complain about MBTA crowds and management, but in general if you're near a subway stop you'll take the subway over Uber of Lyft (when it's running).

You may be paying for it even if not using it, but you have to account for the environmental savings. But people care less about stuff that's harder to measure.

Remember that every bus full of 'poor people' is 10 or 12 cards not on the road. It already benefits everybody. As public transportation increases, so do road conditions for all. This is an example of a win-win situation.

Only 12? Maybe at off-peak hours. In my city at peak hours, an articulated bus can have as many as ~70 people in it. At an average private vehicle occupancy of 1.67 [2] that's over 40 cars less on the road.

People also need to realize that before bitching about cyclists. Would you really rather have one more car contributing to the traffic jam you're stuck in?

[1] https://www.ttc.ca/About_the_TTC/Projects/New_Vehicles/Artic... [2]http://nhts.ornl.gov/2009/pub/stt.pdf

Likewise, bike users are tired of paying for either 12 feet lanes, the war that petrol-dependent citizen make in Irak, or their contribution to global warming.

> it's controversial because it's partially financed with taxpayer money whether you use it or not.

This is true of every form of transportation. It's just that motorists are frequently unaware of how their preferred mode is subsidized by the government.

I would argue that when people read articles critical of transit, they aren't necessarily thinking of the environmental benefits or the fact that the transportation they use gets a subsidy. And newspaper articles on transit don't put it into context by saying "the interstate next to the railroad costs about as much". Controversial subjects get eyeballs, and that's what the papers want.

Actual cash subsidies for roads are minimal relative to the economic benefit.

This is another way to say that you could eliminate all subsidies on road construction/maintenance, make everyone pay a sufficient per-mile tax, and the system would continue successfully more-or-less as it exists today

The same is not true of most public transit systems.

Now you can start arguing about implicit and explicit subsidies for suburbanization over the decades, but in the here-and-now, public transit is directly subsidized in a way that roads are not.

How can you seriously claim that roads are not subsidized? With the exception of a few toll roads, there is no fee to use them. Gas taxes are the only tax that can be connected to road use and those only cover about half of the cost of road construction and maintenance. In addition to the subsidy of half of the cost of the roads themselves, there is no tax to cover the cost of the environmental damage that cars cause. Added together, that is an enormous subsidy for car travel.

The important distinction is that gas taxes could pay for the whole thing: Federal, state, local...

3T miles driven a year, $90B in annual public spending. It works out to about a $0.60/gallon cost. Even adding in a surtax for CO2 and other emissions, it wouldn't represent a premium over gas prices of a few years ago that certainly didn't destroy the system.

It's just easier to pay for local roads with local property taxes. Everyone uses them even if they don't have cars.

But most public transit systems could never imagine charging full fare to their riders. They'd go into a death spiral. AFAIK, most can't even cover their maintenance costs, let alone capital expenditures.

If you really wanted to quantify the impact in a completely market-oriented way, you'd have factor in not just the road construction and maintenance and environmental impact, but also the negative value of the road noise, high danger to others (much higher per mile traveled per person than other modes), worsening of each other mode (car-dominant street design makes other modes slower and less safe), and value of the land (car infrastructure takes up far more space per traveler than other modes).

By the time you're done factoring those in, driving would be expensive indeed, probably similar to the gas prices in Europe.

> Actual cash subsidies for roads are minimal relative to the economic benefit.

Sure, but that's true of every mode of transportation, that's why we use taxes to also build sidewalks, light rail, bike lanes, etc. On an absolute level, subsidies for roads are still very large. And while some level of available roads is obviously necessary, we really overbuild to support our sprawly development style.

> This is another way to say that you could eliminate all subsidies on road construction/maintenance, make everyone pay a sufficient per-mile tax, and the system would continue successfully more-or-less as it exists today

Well, except that poor and working class people would probably not be able to use it much anymore. Paying for infrastructure via most taxes is inherently redestributive (exception for gas tax, obviously).

I'm actually generally for some more market-oriented policies around cars though. Congestion charges and parking fees are a great idea.

> The same is not true of most public transit systems.

I mean, the poor make up a larger % of transit riders, particularly in the US, so looking at it that way yes the impact would be larger.

> Now you can start arguing about implicit and explicit subsidies for suburbanization over the decades, but in the here-and-now, public transit is directly subsidized in a way that roads are not.

No, you're simply wrong. Road construction and maintenance is heavily subsidized by taxes other than the gas tax (which of course works more like a user fee).

No, you're simply wrong. Road construction and maintenance is heavily subsidized by taxes other than the gas tax (which of course works more like a user fee).

You're missing the distinction I'm drawing: If all funding for all transportation schemes was entirely user-derived, roads would survive (as you admit in your other comment they do in Europe at much higher rates). Very few public transportation systems would.

If your definition for "subsidized" is "receives some amount of funding from general revenue, or forbearance for hard-to-capture externality", then just about every commercial aspect of our lives is "subsidized" in one way or another and the term fails to have much meaning.

> You're missing the distinction I'm drawing: If all funding for all transportation schemes was entirely user-derived, roads would survive

That's very intellectually disingenuous. Whether one form of transport could survive sans subsidy is orthogonal to whether they're receiving large public subsidies right now. You said

> public transit is directly subsidized in a way that roads are not.

which is flat out wrong. Yes, roads probably do not have to be subsidized, and they'd still be around at least for freight transport and the affluent, but right now, they are still heavily subsidized.

Is it just me or does the type of chart used only make it harder to interpret things?

Why not plot actual numbers for population and ridership on a chart instead of % change relative to 2001? It seems deceptive.

Maybe I need to take off my tin-foil hat - but I think this reads exactly as if somebody paid the newspaper to write a story about the "failure of mass transit", and the writers/editors snuck in this graph as a hidden message.

I'm interpreting that chart as tracking the year on year percentage increase/decrease of the population and ridership.

So the population has more or less been increasing year on year since 2005, with a near zero decline prior to that.

The ridership has gone through a steep decrease which bottomed out at -35% in ~2005. Sure it's been decreasing less, but isn't it still decreasing? The ridership line is flat near the end, but isn't it still decreasing at more than 20% year on year?

How else can the chart be read? How am I reading it wrong?

The chart label of "% change since 2001" is pretty unclear, but based on the quote "ridership...has dropped a staggering 23 percent since 2001", it seems to mean "% difference from 2001", not "% change year-to-year, since 2001".

It may have to do with for example, the VTA expanding service (in miles of track) but the ridership not going up to match. Also, rail in places like the bay area, or even buses, just can't justify the opex given the relatively light ridership. Mass transit is rarely profitable (financially self sustaining) but many transit systems, given housing density and commercial/residential patterns, in the US, are woefully in deficits.

Edit: To add, I mean this in terms of more than just the high density corridors and terminus to terminus lines. I mean if you live in Almaden Valley and want to get to East San Jose or you want to get to Milpitas. Or if you want to get from The Marina in SF to the Outer Sunset. Most SF transit is designed to pull people in and out of the old downtown core (even MUNI uses the terms "inbound" and outbound" which tell you a lot about the passenger flow they had in mind. There is no "ring" line or N-S LRVs in SF.

As someone who uses the Caltrain every week 3-4 times , I can say the ridership at commute times is very healthy. The housing prices in SF and the concentration of a decent number of large companies (AirBnB, Pinterest, Atlassian) in the SoMA area is probably the chief reason for this trend.

Public transit has huge positive externalities in terms of reduced traffic. I think that in Europe on average tickets cover only 25% of expenses.

It really depends. Many large metro systems in Asia do better than 100% farebox recovery. Europe hovers between 30 to 60%. In the US anything above 35% is pretty remarkable -and there are a few over 50% but not many. Most recover less than 30% from their boxfare. And that's mostly due to being too "diluted". You have lines in suburban-like areas who cannot sustain the lines via ridership.

I'm a fan of public transit I love punctual, clean, timely, dependable mass transit, but I realize it may not be the best answer for agglomerations like we have in San Mateo and Santa Clara counties in the Bay area or Dallas-Ft Worth, TX.

I'm hoping the failure of transit leads into a 32-hour/4-day work week media fixation... Overnight 20% reduction in load = dramatically faster service and reduced congestion.

Plus basic income bitcoins as a service and uber, but for light rail. Am I right, guys?

It plays into the "ridesharing is the future" narrative that pulls in the big bucks.

Don't forget the self-driving cars!

Reminds me of Paul Graham's article about newspapers shilling for suit companies: http://paulgraham.com/submarine.html

As a long-time rider, the VTA infrastructure is excellent, and the route coverage is good. It even has wifi.

In the short-term, if buses left and arrived on time, that would be a helpful improvement. Longer-term, ride analysis from Clipper data could optimize routes and frequencies.

When looking at farebox recovery numbers, remember that the bloated bureaucracy, driver salaries and pensions have to be paid from that.

Doubling the speed of the light rail would make it much more usable.

I have zero evidence of this, but having witnessed Uber and Lyft spending over $8 million dollars trying to pass pro-ridesharing legislation here in Austin (which failed, thankfully), I can't help but wonder if these types of "Transit is Failing" stories might be their astroturfers/PR agencies at work.

Think about it: as a ridesharing company, the more you convince people that public transit is in bad shape and getting worse everyday, the more they will clamor for your ridesharing service.

The real winner with anti-ridesharing legislation isn't public transport. It's car ownership.

Uber doesn't let you avoid taking the bus/train. It lets you rely on public transport 95% of the time, and use ride sharing the rest of the time.

Fighting uber/lyft means forcing people to own a car, and if they already own a car - they aren't going to be riding the bus.

As I mentioned in my other comment, I'm not against Uber, Lyft or ridesharing in general. I'm against letting them self-regulate with regards to running background checks on their drivers. They have zero incentive to do so, because it makes hiring drivers more expensive and (more importantly) brings them closer to employee status, which would sink both companies.

> which failed, thankfully

Why are you opposed to Uber & Lyft?

OP implied he was opposed to the ride-sharing legislation and related initiatives. Not Uber and Lyft.

I'm not opposed to Uber and Lyft. I'm opposed to letting them regulate themselves.

This is California specific. Don't bother reading if you thought the title was about larger scale trends.

Please don't post any comments about how you live in Montana, then.

In the meantime, I thought that it was not merely an interesting article about a particular newspaper in a particular place, but an interesting observation about how to lie with graphs and what interests newspapers really serve.

If it's interesting local commentary then it certainly has a place on HN.

This place is full of local commentary. News doesn't have to be global to qualify.

I don't get the downvotes on this one. The article headline makes assertions about the press generally, and then discusses only California anecdotes. There is absolutely nothing in the article to support anything about a "media fixation on 'transit is failing' stories." More accurate would have been "why do a few California news sources have some stories asserting that some local California transit systems are failing?"

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