Commuters prefer origin to destination transfers
pedestrianobservations.com
pedestrianobservations.com
A) A short flight from your local airport to a nearby hub and then transfer to a long haul flight to the far away location
B) A long flight from your local airport to a far away hub and then transfer to a short flight to get to your final destination.
If something goes wrong, its likely to happen at the transfer point. If something goes wrong, you want to be in a place where you have the most resources available to you. Usually being close to home affords you the most resources/options. Stakes are much lower for commuter train travel, but it still rings true for me.
Even when it is, returning home is less stressful than leaving for a foreign place, so the effect is not cancelled out. Almost anyone would prefer being stranded in a different city in their home country than being stranded on anther continent.
For all my EU->US (and back) flights, if I have to transfer I always do it in Frankfurt/Zurich/Heathrow, rather than US. The fact the airports and lounges are nicer helps.
I’d take Indonesia and Heathrow during a lockdown over LAX on the quietest day of the year.
Maybe it’s different for non citizens, but I’ve had easy international transfers through SEA, SFO, ATL, DTW, JFK, and MCO.
Aside from that, at least you don't have to clear immigration to leave the US. I always thought it was super weird that you need "permission" to leave many other countries, which adds a bunch more unpredictable time to the airport experience, beyond what's already there with the security lines.
And LAX is not exactly a great example; it's one of the worst airports in the US. SFO, EWR, IAD, and even JFK (to name a few) aren't anywhere near as bad, and are just-fine to good at some of them.
And Indonesia... having to pay cash in the airport in order to be allowed to leave the country? And if you're out of rupiah by that point, they charge you much more in USD? Hell, I'd probably take LAX over that garbage.
And Heathrow! Oh man, Heathrow. It's been years since I flew into, out of, or through Heathrow, so maybe things have gotten better, but what a terrible airport it was! Transferring between terminals was a pain in and of itself, not to mention the need to go through security again if you need to make a connection between certain terminals.
They've had card payments since before 2019.
One thing I do find to be better, in general, in European airports is that they have thought more about how people will actually get to and from the airport; generally, you get there, you follow a sign, and you get on a bus, train, or get to a taxi rank. US airports (my sample's relatively small, but at least SFO and SEA) seem to enjoy making this awkward. For instance, when you get off the train to SEA, you seem to have to walk about a kilometre _through a parking garage_; bizarre arrangement. If you want to get an Uber/Lyft from there, you go to a random poorly signposted place in said parking garage.
Actually, now I think of it, last time I was in SF I got a bus to the airport, and that _also ended up in a random parking garage_.
Traveling is exhausting, and probably a factor is increased stress, and the stress of an upcoming transfer, and a transfer when exhausted just seems so much worse.
personally, I am primarily optimizing my commute for low average travel time and variance. I'll always pick the fastest option that allows me to walk out of my door at the same time every day and get to work on time for >90% of trips. practically, that equates to planning transit where the second leg has very short headways, regardless of where the transfer happens.
My company has fully embraced flexibility, so even though many do work in the office it is completely accepted that some days they just won't. Other people in my social circles seem to have similar setups, but I've got no idea how far that extends outside of my bubble - not even in the rest of my city let alone the country or wordlwide.
A couple potentially relevant sources for that:
https://bfi.uchicago.edu/wp-content/uploads/BFI_White-Paper_...
https://www.forbes.com/sites/traversmark/2020/04/24/what-per...
Does more than one route stop at that stop? If so, that's expected, surely?
The same kind of thinking for me applies to a lot of public transport too. I pick based on how annoying transferring is.
In scheduling a trip from Seattle to Tokyo, direct in the way there (as it should be!) but on the way back I have to transfer in Minneapolis. I don’t think I could have flown to Osaka or something to get direct at a reasonable price.
(though ETIAS might make this more annoying)
But I think it flips for me when commuting, in that a short local ride is easier for me to mentally discount as it's part of my routine. E.g. I used to live one MUNI stop from BART, and I came to see that first leg as negligible in the same way that walking to the MUNI station did.
But if I compare the disappointment of having a problem when I'm almost there versus one where I've just started, I'd definitely take the former. In either case I've already gone to the trouble of starting a long trip. A failure at the 90% point means I'm almost there and just have the work of finishing it, and short trips have many more options than long ones (e.g., short-hop flight vs transit vs renting a car vs taking a Lyft). But a failure at the 10% point means that I've gone to a lot of trouble, gotten very little out of it, and will have fewer options for finishing.
I get people's preferences are different here, and maybe this is just me making use of whatever drives the sunk cost fallacy to keep momentum up and not get discouraged. But I'd definitely prefer B.
But I don’t think it’s about distance from home. I’ve got nearly as many options in Cincinnati as I do in Denver.
it is easier to sort out alternatives if i am already close to the destination. when i have transfers near the start i have to be very careful to ensure that i don't miss the main part of the trip. where as i often don't even bother to look up transfers at the destination until i arrive. i'll just take whatever is available.
on a recent long flight where i was in a different city than the airport i actually spent a night in the airport city to avoid troubles on the way to the city.
but the problem in the article seems to be just about this: very inflexible transfer options at the destination.
I don't have any "more resources" in a city that's a 2 hr flight from where I live vs. 10 hours away. I use the same app to find a hotel and the same credit card to pay for it. The only relevant thing is which one interrupts my sleep schedule more.
And in daily commuting it makes no sense to me either. Whether you drive 10 min to the train station and take it straight to work, or live next to the train station and then take a subway 10 min (including wait time) to the office, I find it hard to believe anybody cares much at all, or that people's random preferences don't cancel each other out.
Plus for a commute aren't you always doing the reverse as well? If you have an "origin transfer" in the morning it becomes a "destination transfer" in the evening. So wouldn't any preference become entirely moot?
Entering the EU at a smaller airport is probably smoother as well.
(Obviously not a rail or commuter example, but same principal.)
While an unplanned day in Amsterdam or Paris is a lovely start to your trip, just from the food and architecture alone! I don't know a lot of people who would complain about being stuck in Paris for a day. ;)
With extra time at JFK I could visit https://www.twahotel.com/
Not really, unless it's international rail, which is a bit of an edge case; it certainly exists, but the vast majority of rail journeys do not cross a national border.
When transferring I can do things like visit the restroom or get dinner or even update people I am meeting in my final destination. Those have far more value to me after I've been traveling for a while.
Meanwhile, I don't feel like I have "more resources" in a close location to a far destination.
This was very helpful this winter while Lufthansa’s ground handling was in full meltdown mode. On three separate occasions Lufthansa failed to get my luggage to its final destination on time so I was able to get reimbursed for replacement clothes and toiletries while Lufthansa tracked down my bags.
There is no such guaranteed compensation in the US.
Yes it's much stronger than the USDOT ones.
For the commuter example (at least in the US), often the first leg is a drive (in a car) to the train station. When the commuter-rail train gets to its destination, you don't have the car anymore, so you want to be as close to your destination as possible. Even then, if I have to take a local train from there, and something goes wrong with it, at least I can probably get a taxi or something.
Regardless, in your airline example, I would probably want (B), not (A). If I were to choose (A), and there was a problem with my short-haul local flight, I'm probably missing my long-haul connection, which will be more difficult to re-arrange. If I take the long-haul flight first, and something gets messed up with the short-haul connection at the destination, I likely have more options, possibly even including a train or car. Sure, the worst case might be worse (I get stuck at the connecting airport and need to get a hotel overnight), but I think the average case is probably better.
Sure, if I want to bail on my trip if anything goes wrong, the short-haul-first approach works better, but I don't think there are many situations where I'd want to bail rather than finding another way to get there.
But overall I'm not sure the main issue is when things go wrong. For commuting, there are still benefits to the happy path when the connection is closer to the origin. If the train station is next door to my house, but the station on the other end is 15 miles from the office, that's still a pain to deal with. The opposite is much easier.
Long flights are usually more expensive and require more advance booking. If you miss the transfer after the long flight, there are usually plenty of alternatives to get to your final destination.
Commuter trains are different because they usually don't require booking in advance. And in this case, I think I prefer origin transfers, because if there is a big problem, I would just go back home and take a day off, work remote, take the car, ...
Especially across countries, where there may also be visa/document shenanigans.
E.g. going to Venice from Seattle, in terms of getting there it's much better to be stranded in Amsterdam or Paris than in I dunno, Atlanta.
"Commuters Prefer Origin to Destination Transfers" would mean they prefer home->destination over destination->home? Does origin mean home?
"much more likely to make the trip if it’s near their home than near their destination" would mean they prefer the trip if the station is close to home, but it's ok for the other station to be far from destination?
"reluctant to take the train if they have any transfer at the city center end" would mean the exact opposite, they prefer station close to the destination?
Which one is it now? home->destination, station close to home, or station close to destination preferred?
station close to destination preferred
Imagine if you can drive 3 miles, park your car, and get on a train that goes all the way to your office. You'd probably do it.
Now imagine instead that you live right near a station but, once you get to the other end, it's 3 miles to your office. You probably wouldn't take the train at all.
Part of the issue is that, once you get to the other end, you don't have a private vehicle, so you're subject to a bus schedule or whatever.
Suburban Americans, with exceptions, consider the "origin" of a trip on public transit not where they originate from, but where they get out of their car, because the sparse urban transit systems and job locations are oriented around extending car capabilities. It is easier and less stressful for an American to drive part of a commute and ride one train than to drive none of it and risk missing an infrequently operating transfer that strands them far from home.
Suburban Europeans, with exceptions, do not do this, because their denser urban transit systems and job locations are built around foot or transit access. It is easier and less stressful for a European to ride the train all the way because, even if a transfer is required, it is more likely to occur closer to home and with a more frequently operating service.
So, transit proposals in the United States that propose solutions based on European models without recognizing this American trait – often deeply rooted in experiences over years of bad transfer experiences in places that have transit, and operating against a cultural car-friendly bias in places that don't – are less likely to succeed.
Or, as the article puts it:
> To the extent that this relates to American commuter rail reforms, it’s about coverage within the city: multiple city stations, good (free, frequent) connections to local urban rail, high frequency all day to encourage urban travel (a train within the city that runs every half an hour might as well not run).
It's just about how a car leg compares to a train leg or a bus leg. Of course the car-to-train transfer will seem relatively frictionless compared to the other options. It's the easiest of them. That the car leg is first when leaving in the morning is more about the circumstances of suburban commuting than the transfer point's distance from home/dest. Of course the car leg is closer to home, your car is at home. If you already lived in the city with better train access you wouldn't even be using a car.
On top of that, usually the whole idea of using a car is to make it a car+train commute, rather than a bus+train commute. Usually these distant car+train commuters aren't taking a bus as the last step, because then they would probably just drive the whole way (instead of bus+train+bus just do car). And they wouldn't take a bus as the first step because that was the whole point of using the car, and the only place than can use the car as part of a multi-mode commute anyways.
It really weakens the claim that it's about the transfer being closer to home that determines the decision.
America is too spread out, and where public transit exists, it’s unreliable or significantly slower than travel by car.
There are only a few exceptions in the US.
What doesn't work is the bad service we get. Cars are expensive, but better than what passes for transit so of course we drive.
IMHO what the California High Speed Rail got wrong was their ambitious attempt to build the main line from SF to LA where they should have stated in the North by connecting San Francisco, Sacramento, and Stockton and/or in the south by linking LA with San Diego. These corridors are going to be more used by commuters and it’s usage would drive the will to connect them.
If only CA could build fast for reasonable prices. Their inability to do either gives transit haters plenty of ammo to show transit shouldn't be built. And if transit keeps doing things like second ave subway and cahrs the haters are right.
This is a very common talking point, but it's not _as_ true as people think, depending on state. California, for instance, has a population density similar to France, though almost infinitely worse public transport _infrastructure_. The infra problem is likely more of a factory than the density thing, at least in the US's more populous states.
If there’s a failure on the other end, you’re not exactly near work, and you’re much further away from your home now. Part of dealing with public transit on a regular basis is dealing with it failing: bus came 5 minutes early and you missed it and the next one is 25 minutes away; bus gets taken out of service; bus is too crowded to take new passengers; somebody jumps in front of a train. Whatever it is, you’re now subject to depending on a system that has failed you. There’s some psychological comfort in being able to just go home.
And unlike with the office, there’s less pressure to get home on time at a time when you would normally be out anyway. You just call in and make the walk back if you have to, or maybe get on the bus back if one is available.
Honestly, if we could make routes served by buses more reliable, this would all be much less of an issue.
You can bring a bike onto many trains
The legal alternative: last-mile bike rental, there's a scheme from the railways where you can rent a bike for the day, it was about €6 for the day.
Another alternative is to buy a cheap bike and just leave it at the train station overnight. That's allowed as long as the bike isn't abandoned for a month or so, after which it'll be removed.
Consider UK- allowed on some metro lines, banned on others. Allowed on some trains, banned on others, requires booking on yet other trains. Suppose you got a full sized bike on a train, it often needs to be held for the entire hourney because acceleration of the train will overpower the kickstan and make it roll of fall over
I do this occasionally, but ita bothersome
In Holland foldable bikes were the main way to solve that for a long time. Last years on-demand ov-fiets (public transport bike) were created to solve that. Around 4,8 euros for 24 hours. Really impressive and great system and most larger station have enough to serve most people.
However I think at least in Holland the electric scooter (step) will transform this market. Beyond easy to take. Only 200-300 euros. Goes 25 km per hour.
Main issue is Dutch law got strict after few incidents with new vehicles. But e-scooters are amazing vehicles for this. Although bikes are better for health. New e scooters are coming to the marketing and I think will transform the way we transport.
If you are a long term commute, it’s cheaper to buy a second hand bike for 100-200 and a good lock for 40. Will take around 10 weeks to get it back.
I don't know about that. Where I live[0] it's US$4 for 30 minutes.
As such, I think 4.8 for a whole day is pretty good. I don't use them, as I have my own bicycle, but people seem to really like them.
From the Citibike website[0]:
$17.08/mo ($205 billed annually)
Access to 1000s of bikes in NYC, Jersey City, and
Hoboken
$0 unlocks ($4.49 value)
Unlimited 45-min rides on classic bikes
$0.17/min ebike rides ($0.26/min value)
3 free guest passes per year
Eligibility for our Bike Angels rewards program
Single ride - $4.49/ride -- 30 minutes on a classic bike.
$0.23/min thereafter.
Edit: Fixed formatting.
I love bikes, I have 4, but they do not integrate with public transport - even folding ones require 3 folds, then fold of the pedals. The full sized ones take up loads of space on trains, and must be constantly held or they will fall over.
There are also rental bicycles for 4 euro / day to use on stations where you don't have your own stored.
(They parking buildings become really massive, but still much smaller than the same for cars would be: https://bicycledutch.wordpress.com/2019/08/20/finally-fully-... ).
As someone else pointed out, any additional friction (multiple transfers, etc) results in a direct all car route.
Most people are somewhat emotionally rational, but the models for calculating the emotional cost (friction) get everything wrong.
Delays past about 5-10 min increase the emotional cost exponentially. Stacking delays (multiple not-user controlled) legs grow even faster. Any uncertainty in the route also massively increases the emotional cost, more so if there's nothing the commuter can do. Contrast Japan's famously well run trains that will even issue an apology the commuter can take to the office of someone else being at fault (I remember this offhand, don't have proof offhand).
Also, the car is more than just getting the person there; it takes their stuff. Abandoning that car leaves behind the potential to move larger items or stacks of things. Plus the car might be critical for visiting friends, stores, etc after work.
All of that factors into the commuter cost.
Almost every MBTA garage/lot in Massachusetts charges something. BART parking in the Bay Area also does. It's a pittance, though.
My local train station has a parking capacity of well over 20.000 bikes, and that still isn't enough.
Many of the lots at train stations in the Chicago suburbs charge fees to park for the day, usually a couple bucks, and there are annual parking passes that you have to wait years to get at some of the stations (I think Naperville is a 5+ year waiting list at this point).
However, all of the park n'rides for buses in the suburbs, at least those that I'm aware of, have free parking. And at least in my experience there's usually enough parking spaces for everyone who's taking a bus.
But the train system is much more desirable than the bus system here, so the demand for parking there is much higher. I live in a suburb that's like 25 minutes from all train stations, so I take the bus from a park n'ride just a few minutes from me, when it's on time it's pretty great, but it's not super reliable...I had to wait an hour at the bus stop downtown last Friday before my bus showed up (with another one for the same route directly behind it, they got that backed up) and once I was on it took an extra 30 minutes just to drive down one street in downtown Chicago, the traffic was so bad.
EDIT: While double-checking a few things, I discovered that Naperville is getting rid of its parking permits this fall and going to daily fees only[1].
[1]: https://www.naperville.il.us/about-naperville/transportation...
I'm afraid you just lost all the Europeans. Why would you take the car for a 3 mile ride? Just hop on your bike!
As to the other end: public transport near train stations is usually dense enough that there will be a bus line - of course with a schedule matching train arrivals. Or just store your second bike there, of course.
Just from the start:
> Garrett Wollman is giving an example, in the context of the Agricultural Branch, a low-usage freight line linking to the Boston-Worcester commuter line that could be used for local passenger rail service.
Imagine, just for fun, that a reader might not know who the famous Garrett Wollman is, what the Agricultural Branch is, or where the Boston-Worcester commuter line is? (Isn't Worcester in England and Boston in North America? Is there a transatlantic train service I'm ignorant about?) What do you think the above paragraph communicates to the reader?
> The more typical example of residential sprawl involves isotropic single-family density in a suburban region
Ah yes, isotropic density, that perennial scourge! The word isotropic of course means: “exhibiting properties (such as velocity of light transmission) with the same values when measured along axes in all directions”, which I didn't need to look up in a dictionary because it's such a common English word, and the meaning in the above sentence is self-explanatory, really.
Anyway, I think you get the point. This article is written in a way that's inscrutable to a general audience. That's fine if the blog is targeted at traffic nerds who talk about the isotropic density of the Agricultural Branch on the daily, but then why post it on Hacker News?
Nothing, really. I read the whole article and was constantly having the feeling that they were only a random sequence of overly technical words which after the fact hadn't conveyed any information. What an obtuse way of structuring ideas. I was thinking my English comprehension was nonexistent (which might be the case), until reading these comments here kind of confirmed me that "it's not me, it's them".
Transit agencies want to attract riders traveling suburb-to-suburb on regional / commuter trains. These trains are lower frequency services mostly focused on moving people from suburban areas to city centers.
The reason these trains don’t work for suburb-to-suburb commutes:
Suburban offices aren’t close to suburban rail stations. This means making this trip requires a transfer to a bus. A car-train-bus trip isn’t more attractive than just driving your car the entire way because suburban traffic is lighter and you can route around the city. The author notes that driving to a commuter station is usually done to avoid city traffic and parking fees. The author thinks companies would need to site jobs near train stations to make suburb-to-suburb commutes work. However, US suburban density and land values favor residential property and companies would pay a high price for property near a station. With that prospect, they’d rather rent space downtown.
The author jumps into issues with topology and connections midway through that point:
US commuter lines don’t run through the city center to other suburbs and even when they do, it’s only ever possible to get to one other line without transferring. Moreover, the frequency of trains in the reverse direction (reverse peak) is lower meaning longer trip times when you transfer.
US commuter trains often serve only one station in the city and require a transfer to one or more extra services. For example, in Boston there are metro job centers which are far from the two commuter train stations. The locations listed require multiple metro transfers to reach from the commuter rail stations which aren’t served by all lines. European systems like the German S-Bahn avoid this by having many stations throughout the downtown core that are shared between lines and metro services. The closest example to the S-Bahn in the US would be BART and SEPTA. (The author doesn’t get into discussing those lines and focuses on Boston as it had the lowest share of work commuters on its commuter rail lines.)
——
My thoughts on the main development point: A more attainable goal would be to encourage development that allows employees to afford to live near their work or at least on the same train line. People shouldn’t need to live many miles from their job but they often do because property prices are sky high. Companies should locate offices near where their employees can afford to live.
"It’s an empirical observation that rail riders who are faced with a transfer are much more likely to make the trip if it’s near their home than near their destination."
Rewritten and removed the introduction part:
"Rail riders who need to do a transfer are much more likely to make the trip if the transfer is near their home than if the transfer is near their destination.
Of the two options below, first one is more liked.
Home -> 3 minute train -> station -> 15 minute train -> destination
Home -> 15 minute train -> station -> 3 minute train -> destination
I walked 10 minutes to the train station, rode the train for 20 minutes, and then the shuttle for about 15 minutes. The shuttle waited for the train to arrive. In the evening, I did the reverse.
Interestingly, there was a core of about 10 other riders who started their journey in a different suburb. They drove to a train station, rode it downtown, switched trains, and then rode out to the suburb. The key for them was that it was time competitive with driving and the transfer didn't add nuch time. The conductor for the outbound train would hold it if the inbound was late.
It worked well for everyone, at least until the suburub stopped funding the bus. I was able to find a less convenient transit alternative, but it was slower and added a 1 mile walk on the end though a not quite pedestrian friendly environment. Everyone else ended up switching to their cars.
I bought a cheap car and cut my commute time in half, since I could take a much more efficient route to work than the bus could. The rail portion of my commute had been great. The shuttle worked well too, since all the jobs in that area were concentrated in a couple industrial parks. The only problem was the bus that took me out of the city, and to the shuttle. I'm left with many "what ifs" about commuter rail in small cities.
Jesus. Who wrote this?
Clearly, Alon's title uses wonkish terminology and would have benefited from a title that was more easily understood by people unfamiliar with the field. I think it's fair to say that you're not the target audience.
I would say that those (together with very few other largish cities) are the exception and not the rule in Europe.
Edit: The article does mentions that’s it’s different over here :)
Whenever we have a public transit thread on HN, I observe people having totally unrealistic image of Europe, probably based on hearsay or being a tourist in some of the top metros. Thus, let’s make a few facts about commutes in Europe very clear:
* European mostly commute by car, not by public transit, and the disparity is big, with something like 3-5 times as many people driving than riding public transit, depending on a country.
* Out of those who ride public transit, many if not most would prefer to drive, they just can’t afford it (regular Europeans are much poorer than regular Americans, most Americans have no idea how poor average European is, and vice versa)
* Most people don’t live in transit-heavy places like London or Paris. Most Europeans have little to no practical public transit around where they live.
* By far, biggest user of public transit are students and retirees.
* Finally, average European commute is much longer than average American commute, and in transit-heavy places like Paris or London, average commute is very long, something like 45-55 minutes one way.
Commuting in and out of Rennes takes about 40 minutes (by car), double that during rush hour.
> European mostly commute by car... In France ~4 times as many people commute by car
Yeah, because there's effall transit outside major cities? This is kind of a pointless statistic because overwhelmingly when we talk about this it's in the context of major cities. And the fact that smaller cities don't have transit isn't something desirable, it's a sad failure that those cities are trying to address.
> Even in Paris, something like a third of all commuters drive a personal car
Now we're talking - in major cities, the overwhelming majority of people do not commute by car. It would literally by physically impossible for everyone to commute by car.
> many if not most would prefer to drive, they just can’t afford it
> biggest user of public transit are students and retirees
this is pure bs
Most people I know commute by bike. Trains are used wherever practical, and proximity to train stations is a major consideration in choice of job and home. At least in my bubble, commuting by car is only used as a last resort--necessary for many, but they'd use an alternative if there was one.
If you live in place like central Amsterdam, then sure, you and most of your friends and colleagues likely cycle, especially if you are young and childless. However, living in central Amsterdam is very unrepresentative lifestyle for Dutch people, and even less so for Europeans at large.
My daughter's daycare is 1300m from my apartment, so I walk pushing her stroller, but the building is swamped with cars belonging to people coming from a distance of 5km+, and that's just the first leg of their journey.
With two preschoolers you either invest in a proper type of cargo bike, which costs as much as a used car, or drive all the way.
> Even in Paris, something like a third of all commuters drive a personal car.
See [1]: to get to their work place, 72% of Parisians and 75% of Franciliens (residents of Ile-de-France, excluding Paris) use public transit. It's at most 1/4 using a car (number not quoted in the study). The "a third" number is quoted for people going from Paris to suburbs during the week by car (which I think includes off-peak trips)
> Out of those who ride public transit, many if not most would prefer to drive, they just can’t afford it
Sorry but that's just an opinion. I'm not aware on a study of that, but I and a lot of people I know would rather not drive. Driving in Paris is a terrible, slow and costly experience.
[1] https://www.insee.fr/fr/statistiques/fichier/1293788/alap368...
And yes, driving in transit-heavy places like Paris or London is in fact often quite miserable. I probably overstated my case suggesting that maybe even most public transit users would prefer driving. However, in places outside of top metros like Paris or London, driving is relatively less painful, and public transit relatively more so (due to lower density of stops and lower frequency of schedule).
I grew up in an exurb of Warsaw, which is quite transit-heavy city, and a lot of people I knew commuted from the exurb to the suburb, which was halfway to the core of the whole metro. There was train line available, but driving was much preferable, because it was faster than commuter train, and was door-to-door, unlike the train. However, most people still took the train because driving every day was too expensive.
* Europe is a diverse place and such statistics vary a lot by country. You can't talk about the Netherlands and Romania in such a generalized way, you'll gloss over a lot of details.
I have serious doubts about that one. Take Dublin as an example. Traditionally, going back decades, about 35% of people working in Dublin City commuted in by car. This peaked in 2010 at 40% and has since been on a slow decline hitting 29% in 2019 (it _appears_ to have kept declining after that, but given that Ireland didn't really end covid restrictions until early 2022 the stats are a bit all over the place). It's not credible that this is due to people getting poorer; however it does coincide with improvements to the public transport system.
Meanwhile, in the rest of Ireland, which _is_ generally poorer than Dublin, and often quite a lot poorer, outside a couple of other urban centres, almost all commuting is by car; outside Dublin Ireland's commuter public transport story is not good (honestly it's not great in Dublin either, but it's better than elsewhere).
In Dublin, a lot of people would have a car, but not necessarily use it to commute to work. There does seem to be a cultural aspect to this; IME people who've recently moved to Dublin from a rural area are far more likely to commute by car even where it makes no sense (I know someone who lives in an apartment beside a tram stop, works in an office beside a tram stop on the same line, and _still drives to work_).
Since they built the "o-train" (Ottawa's subway line) it's actually much easier to get into town from the station, but it's still an annoying extra destination transfer.
I live in Montreal and I do take the train to Ottawa sometimes but often driving makes more sense because the train doesn't get me anywhere useful. I'm sure lots of other people are making the same decision.
Also, what does "destination" mean in the context of the commute? The workplace, or does it mean home in the evening? Is he talking about people living in the city and working outside or the other way around?
To me, it's more about the number of transfers instead of where the transfer is. If I'm traveling from mountain view to the mission, I have 3 options: drive whole way, drive short distance to Caltrain then switch to BART in Millbrae, drive long distance to Milpitas BART.
Transferring at Millbrae seems like the worst option just because I have to pay attention at intermittent intervals which feels more stressful.
It's not just the shorter intervals, but the fact that there's 50% more points of possible failure with one additional transfer. For example, maybe there are no parking spots available, or the Caltrain is delayed.
That the above is not reasonable is something to fix. (Either that or get the Swiss to plan your transfers so you can't possibly miss them)
This feels like a huge "besides"; I'm not sure they've _really_ demonstrated their thesis that customers _universally_ prefer origin to destination transfers. How well the system works makes a huge difference; if either (a) you're virtually guaranteed that it'll be on time or (b) frequency is high enough that it doesn't really matter, this sort of journey becomes much less fraught.
Anecdotally, in Dublin, a few years back, I'd rarely make a journey involving connections unless there was no choice, and I'd usually be willing to walk up to about 40 minutes to avoid it. This was because it never worked (unless it was train-to-train, though even that was optimistic); the bus timetables were just too unreliable and the buses too frequent. However I'd think nothing of making a journey involving multiple connections in, say, London or a German city, because there was a high probability it would more or less work. Due to improvements in the Dublin bus system (Dublin City Council seems to have taken the opportunity to put in bus lanes everywhere during the pandemic while no-one was looking; it's really improved a lot), I'm now way more willing to make connections in Dublin, because _it is more likely to work_.
EDIT: Another big factor in making this more attractive was the simplification of the fare system. Today, you tap your card, you're charged 2 eur, and provided the last leg of your journey is started within 90 minutes of the first, you don't pay anything more. A few years back, for buses in particular you had to deal with arcane staging-based pricing.
It is like the bay area built a BART to nowhere. You can get there, but then what do you do? It seems to me that a transportation system must either allow you to control it - a car - or be utterly predictable and efficient once you enter the system. In Europe it is the last case. You can get on a train, then take a tram. They run. They don't sit there making you wait. Once you get to the train you know you are going to get to your destination X time later. I wonder if you put electric scooters that could be checked out for a day at BART stations what would happen to ridership? Or something like that.
Sorry, but what a nightmare of an opening sentence! What is "the trip"? What is "it" in "it's near"?
U.S. commuter rail is traditionally entirely oriented towards bringing people from suburbs downtown, but some American cities are getting less downtown-centric in their employment patterns, with various secondary job centers in the suburbs. Some cities' transit planners are trying to find ways to serve those commute patterns. A few European cities are able to do that successfully, and the article looks at whether their approaches are applicable to the U.S. The answer is mostly no, due to the American suburban jobs being more sprawling rather than built on top of / near train stations. People are willing to drive from their house to a park-and-ride for a train to downtown, but doing that in reverse is inconvenient and unpopular. But it might work in a few cases where the suburban job centers are in a compact cluster, like a few examples the article gives in the Boston area. To the extent the article has a take-away recommendation, it's basically, "planners should focus on better serving existing compact suburban job centers like those". One problem mentioned is that even where new transit-oriented development is built in the U.S., there is usually more economic demand for it to be residential rather than commercial, so it generally doesn't make economic sense to put offices on top of suburban train stations.
Americans and Canadians apparently don't do this, since the 'new' just-out-of-the-centre development has residential buildings near the station, unlike Canary Wharf where the nearest buildings to the station are offices.
The suburban trains also run frequently and all day, so Brixton to Wembley is a reasonable journey by train. This would not be the case in the USA.
> American and Canadian commuter rail riders drive long distances just to get to a cheaper or faster park-and-ride stations, but are reluctant to take the train if they have any transfer at the city center end.
Are they saying that people prefer 2 long legs over 3 shorter legs?
That's very different than the headline!
But the EV revolution isn't "just cars, but electric". EVs are much more flexible as a platform because the batteries are already manufactured in a highly scalable flexible form factor: the cell.
Ultimately an ebike, escooter, e kei car, are going to be cheaper, faster, more convenient, environmentally better, and less infrastructure intensive.
So the article seems to reflect an old battle mindset: ice cars vs rail. Imo both are obsolete already, pending scale up of high density sodium ion and lfp cells. And if sulfur gets commercialized at 2x the density?
This doesn't even account for convergent infrastructure and self driving tech which has the ability to utilize transportation infrastructure to a higher degree than is possible now.
Small e vehicles can do 30mph, which is likely effectively the same speed as a train when you consider lack of waiting, fare payment, intermediate stops, delays, transportation to/from the station.
EVs are much more flexible for modes and platforms than ices because all the motor form favors exist, they are simple (motor battery brakes) modular (removable batteries) and don't involve smelly gas and oil.
Trains still have a greater capacity (see the Lexington Avenue line in NYC - 1.3 million riders per day, pre covid).
They’re also way better in bad weather, more accessible for people with disabilities, better for families, allow you to do other things while commuting, and way better for long distances.
But e-bikes > cars. 100%