Friday, 23 August 2013

Thoughts on public transport

Forgive me, Internet, for I have sinned. It's been four months since my last blog post...

Since the last post, I've moved into my new (and, frankly, astoundingly lovely) flat with (the even more lovely) Toni. I've discovered that Parkour is pretty awesome, I've become a (slightly) more competent and well-respected SDE, and I've actually become just-barely domesticated in terms of cleaning and tidying a house. And I haven't chronicled any of it - for shame!

I haven't had any techy ventures recently that I can write up - the revival of two of my Twitterbots is nothing to write home about, due as it was to an out-dated version of the Twitter api, and setting up our home media server with OpenELEC was so easy that it almost felt like cheating - so, allow me to share a little rant about public transport.

It's no secret that I'm always felt a bit puzzled by society's defaulting to travelling by car, when (for most journeys that I make, anyway) public transport is cheaper, easier, and comparably speedy - admittedly not quite so convenient, but the other advantages far outweigh the inconvenience of getting to a central dispatch point and waiting for the next scheduled transport. Plus, it's much better for the environment, if you're into that sort of thing.

The following piece of writing popped up on a discussion thread about this very topic. I don't agree with it 100% (the definition of independence in the last paragraph is a little sketchy, though I think it's only semantic and doesn't invalidate the argument), but it's a very well-reasoned explanation of a good approximation of my viewpoint.

The problem there is that “a car means independence” is a circular argument pre-supposing a car-based grid system. Yes, today a car will go places that public transit won’t, but that only matters to the extent that people have an overwhelming need to go to places that public transit doesn’t serve. If public transit served your needs as well as a car did today – if “public transit” had feature parity had “automobiles” – then this wouldn’t really be an issue. It’s fair to ask whether public transit can have feature parity with the automobile, but even there I think you’re getting into the weeds. The question is not and has never been “should public transit be able to do everything that a car does.” There will always be use cases for which a car is better, and those can be solved by rentals, sharing, and the occasional incident of private ownership. The question is whether a majority of people can use public transit to solve their usual needs?

Nobody is – or should be – expecting public transit to drive down every street and provide you with a door-to-door solution. That’s not only wasteful, but it’s vaguely insulting. Yes, there are specific instances where we might want that as a design goal – retirement homes, medical centers, other large-access areas with limited mobility – but on the average, you should be willing to walk, drive, or otherwise convey yourself to a specific transit point to take advantage of the system. If you’re not, then you’re not one of the people for whom we can or should be designing.

Nobody is – or should be – expecting public transit to be available at a moment’s notice. Busses and trains are not taxis, and we shouldn’t be thinking of them as such. Again, you should be willing and capable of waiting a certain amount of time for the arrival of the next transit opportunity. That duration should be smaller for heavy-demand routes, but it may grow long for infrequent destinations. If you’re expecting a bus every five minutes from Marysville to Tacoma, then you’re not one of the people for whom we can or should be designing.

If you’re arguing that “the bus doesn’t behave exactly like my car would” as a justification for your resistance to public transit, you’re missing the point. Public transit is not and should not be a drop-in replacement for all car use cases, and we shouldn’t be trying to argue that it will, or even that we want it to be. We should be saying, “busses, subways, and trains will cover the most common use cases in transit well enough that some percentage of people can get by without a car at all, and ridesharing systems will cover enough of the rest that owning a car can be a luxury, rather than a requirement.” The people arguing “having a car means independence” should not be taken as part of the design equation, because they’re fundamentally arguing that the current system should never change. Independence means “being able to get where you need to be when you need to be there.” If the only way to do that is with a car, then public transit can never succeed by definition. Only until we eliminate the false equivalence of car ownership and self-determination will we be able to design a public transit system that actually solves people’s transit needs.

All of that being said, I would buy the SHIT out of a Tesla, given half an excuse. So purty...

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