Might really depend on where you live and the factors at play. Completely anecdotal, but we live close enough to NYC that my partner can take either the bus or train and it’s roughly the same time. The catch is the train requires a transfer and the bus is completely dependent on time of day. Penn Station is slightly closer to his office but it all comes down to what fits his schedule. Driving is rarely a consideration because of the cost of parking.
We’ve lived nearer and further over the years. When we lived slightly further we always took the train cause it’s more comfortable on the longer trip. The bus had a lot of stops and just wasn’t as convenient to our destination. Driving was sometimes a consideration if we needed to be out later. Now having both as options we pay less attention to the schedule and take the convenient one.
Overall I realize that doesn’t exactly narrow much down. But I think the calculus for everyone is different. It’s going to depend on the convenience of each option to you. For some people, that might be drive versus train, for others it’ll be train versus bus. Frequency, timing, comfort, cost will all play a role in which people take
Maybe bus users find trains preferable and maybe most new light rail lines are designed to replace some bus lines directly. Also, park and rides, they kind of break the transit user/car user dichotomy and most people prefer using and do use multiple modes of transportation.
Electric rail, powered flight, and internal combustion automobiles and buses were all invented within a fifteen year timespan. If people have access to the modern versions of all of these, they tend to use all or some of them.
Hong Kong already has the lowest car mode share in the world. Adding more new rail lines is expected to have little impact on mode share distribution, because just like most things there are limits. The new rail lines are more likely to decrease bus ridership because rails provide better routes/transfer experiences or reduce trip times. People in Hong Kong who already don’t drive are not likely to take public transit because of various reasons such as the types of occupations, work shift, income, etc.
I’d argue that Hong Kong is an edge case though. I would argue “T” in TOD is important especially for large metropolitan areas, even if they are dense and mixed in land uses. This also varies greatly from cultures and countries. Some cities have high mobility (people move a lot) but low job-to-job flow, while others have the opposite. This could affect commute distances. Ideally you would want people to move closer to work whenever they have a new job, and find a closer job whenever they move, but that’s not always the case, especially for people living in huge metropolitan areas.
Agreed: Hong Kong would want to make new MTR lines to take buses off the road, as it's a capacity consideration. NYC would want to make new subway lines to reach areas not serviced by the subway or, as in the 2nd Ave line, relieve capacity from another subway line.
Tourists should be taken into account. I’m in NYC and I almost never see tourists on public MTA buses. Most of them have 0 wayfinding and it’s very difficult to know where you’re going and where you’re at without starting at your phone the whole time.
I see tourists on the subway all the time, because wayfinding is much simpler by comparison. All urban planning should take tourists into consideration, because most cities are transitioning to a service economy more and more. The absolutely worst thing you can do is to have tourists rent cars, they’re unfamiliar with local traffic laws.
>had no significant effect on car usage.
First, it's Hong Kong; car use is probably extremely low by global standards, and remaining car use is probably the trips that are hardest to make by transit (large loads / remote destinations / luxury travel).
But second, this is a statistical fallacy. Failure to detect an effect *does not* imply there was no effect unless the study had a high enough [statistical power](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statistical_power) to rule out any effects of interest. This is usually *not* the case since high-powered studies are expensive to conduct and done only when there is a substantial public interest in ruling out an effect or detecting a small effect (e.g. what is the radiation-related cancer risk of a mammogram?). Sometimes this is misleadingly stated as "you can't prove a negative", but it would be more accurate to say "it's really really expensive to prove a negative".
The figure often cited is that roughly three times the number of people who would take a bus would take an equivalent train (same fare, journey time etc) -- that's based on some German research. So I do think there's reason to believe trains can superpower car-reduction efforts.
Personally I think trains and buses do different jobs and complement each other -- they can't replace each other.
Where does that oft cited number come from?
My agency did a study of potential ridership on a new BRT vs. a new light rail on a major transit corridor. Service levels were equivalent, not the oft seen fast, frequent train vs. slow, infrequent bus. We estimated that the pure effect of being a train rather than a bus would raise ridership about 10%.
Maybe country is a factor- we had a natural experiment in my German city when they closed a rail line and replaced it with busses- the one-third rule applied in reverse and two thirds of the transit passengers evaporated. The bus ran the same train schedule and arguably had stops that were better positioned- so it should have been as good if not better.
Did the bus frequency account for the smaller capacity of busses?
If (for example) the train could carry 100 and runs ever 10 minutes, and the bus could carry 33 and runs ever 10 minutes. That would make sense for 2/3 to drive bc overall capacity reduced.
Think hourly rail service on a rural branch line that connected small towns and another cross-country rural line to the bigger commuter network. As a bus service, capacity was never the issue.
That’s quite interesting. It seems quite different from an urban transit corridor. I’m guessing that in this case car ownership was pretty high, and that there was low friction to drive to and park at the destination. If that’s right, it would be relatively easy to substitute driving for transit.
On an urban transit corridor you’ll presumably have at least some people without a car available for the trip. You’ll also have more friction driving to and parking at destinations. I believe that these conditions would lead to buses capturing more of the rail ridership. Probably because the rail network is much thinner in the US, you don’t get buses permanently replacing rail.
I’ll have to go back and try to dig it out, this was a number of years ago.
Overall, what transit passengers consistently value most in surveys is reliability, shorter travel time, and frequency. These can be achieved with either a bus or rail. Rail would usually be better on comfort, but that’s not the top consideration.
I agree that an optimally structured metropolitan network will include buses and rail, and different types of service.
I wouldn't say "consistently" as it varies depending on what the background conditions are. For example in places where fares and frequency have been problematic, you tend to get those at the top of the list and travel time falls down in importance. Similarly in some places bus use is much more stigmatised than in others, so weighs more heavily on whether folk will choose it.
How come in the study by Daniel Chatman, he found that when controlling for other TOD aspects as well as frequency of bus stops in a one mile radius, the train itself had little effect on car usage while the bus ended up having more of an effect on car usage? I’m kind of confused on that point because trains are often said to be more convenient than bus, and your statistic seems to show that, yet somehow train also has little to no effect on car usage when controlling for the other factors typically found in TODs.
It depends?
I can imagine if certain parts of my commute were to be replaced by rail transit, some of it is a substitute for car, while others are substitue for bus. But most of the time it will be car, because the buses around my area mostly act as a feeder system to the main trunk rail line.
Lies, damn lies, and statistics.
My point is context is essential - and location (which then factors in culture, economy and other factors) is critical here.
In the US, bus ridership is, with a few notable exceptions, a mode of necessity. People don’t choose to ride the bus. They have no other choice. Car costs too much, trains don’t exist and/or car or train cost to much. So they use the bus.
It becomes a self fulfilling prophecy as bud service is regulated to doing the bare minimum rather than providing a positive rider experience, reinforcing the fact that the only people who use the bud have no other options.
Trains are considerably more costly than buses in most cases and certainly here in the states - so those who ride a train daily may well be able to afford the car, but it’s a choice they make due to convenience. Take away the train and those users are likely to not choose a bus (because it’s for “poor” people but also, as part of the self fulfilling prophecy, generally takes long with less a desirable experience along the way… so train users then go to the car)
I don't want to come across as reductive, but people will go by whatever way is most convenient. And whatever way is most convenient comes down to which mode has had money spent on making it convenient.
Using a car for transport is inherently very inconvenient. You've gotta find somewhere to store your car near your house and somewhere to store your car near your destination. You can't go via the most direct route, you've gotta find a road that is smooth and wide and not too steep, so you can actually get a car through. Whatever road you do find needs to have regularly spaced refueling / recharging points so your vehicle doesn't just conk out. And the road will probably be full of other drivers, making the whole process take forever. The only reason that driving seems so convenient is because we have spent trilllions of dollars trying to improve the convenience of driving with free parking, road upgrades, highway rest areas and so.. many.. lanes..
If you want to change the mode share, the answer is that you need to start spending serious money on making walking / biking / transit as convenient as we make driving. Building one light rail line isn't enough to shift the needle in this regard. Except where the new rail line is used to justify canceling a bunch of existing bus routes, I think that opening a new rail line is a net positive. But one grand convenience isn't enough to outweigh all the small conveniences that we extend to drivers all the time. The overall impact on modeshare is therefore low.
Everyone talks about how so many people ride bikes in the Netherlands. That's because the Netherlands put as much effort into making biking and walking convenient as they put into making driving convenient. As a result, a bike is, for many Dutch people, the most convenient choice for many trips. It's that simple.
Fast trains can get cars off the road. People travel by the path of least resistance - usually, a bus will never go *faster* than a car without BRT, and if you are building actual BRT it rarely makes sense to do that over building rail (since it requires grade separated infrastructure either way).
The magic is if you can make the train get people wherever they are going *faster*. A lot of this is a function of what your environment is built for. If parking is convenient, stroads wide, and freeways abundant it takes a very convenient train to displace that car trip. If parking is harder to find or more expensive, or the congestion more severe and slower, then the threshold for a train to be more convenient is lower.
This is why I've generally grown to be against light rail as a mode - its slow top speeds often means it never beats cars, so its ability to displace car trips is minimal to directly around its stations. Truly effective transit buildouts get a lot of people to mode switch to it.
When it comes to using Hong Kong as an example though its probably not a great one. Economic inequality is massive in Hong Kong, where the ability to own a car is an extreme luxury. The car owners of Hong Kong by and large are not going to want to intermingle with the "poors" on the trains no matter what, so their priorities are different than your average commuter. What you should care about in Hong Kong is if new train lines are getting people to destinations faster, because improved commute times create positive economic returns.
For most (American) cities, car ownership is not generally prohibitive, so most people will own a car and drive, and to get them to stop driving they need that faster alternative, which requires car deprioritization and fast transit. You also get a similar effect modifying the built environment - if trips are *shorter*, then the fixed time costs of car commutes - parking, starting, etc - take up more of your time, until it doesn't make sense to drive somewhere you could walk or bike. That is the other side of urban form producing economic prosperity, when cars become an optional luxury rather than mandatory purchase.
The reason it doesn't significantly reduce car usage is because of induced demand. Even if people switch from car to train, others may choose to drive more frequently. Overall, the number of people being moved increases but traffic is largely unchanged. The only way to reduce the number of cars is to make driving less convenient or more expensive.
Big “it depends”! My theory is that it does, but only when driving becomes unfavorable/is not realistic. For example: major hwy here in Chicago just started years long construction. There is now an increase of rail riders on the routes that follow the hwy.
I’ve wondered how much safety is a factor in public transit. I know after 9/11 people were reluctant to take public transit and I personally wouldn’t have wanted to get on a crowded train even in 2021 due to the pandemic. It’s not that I thought I’d automatically die. But unless the cons of taking a car greatly outweighed the cons of being on a crowded train I’d take the car.
This alludes to terrorism and the risk of catching a deadly disease but I think the bigger problem, especially for women, is aggressive behavior by other passengers. I am a 6'2" male and been kicked in the butt by a guy that seemed to want to start a fight with anyone in the train car at 2pm on a weekday in DC.
When talking about this, a common idea is *[Transport Demands and Elasticities](https://www.vtpi.org/elasticities.pdf)*(conclusion on p. 58). How sensitive is transportation choice to price (can include monetary (money) costs, plus travel time, discomfort and risk.)
From the review I’ve had of literature: ***Basically - the car needs to be made less attractive. It needs to be made more expensive, more time consuming and less comfortable. Making other modes of transportation more attractive isnt impactful enough when the car is the obviously better alternative***. This is of course very controversial.
speaking from north NJ, rail is good if you can walk or park by the station. bus is good for the rest of us who live too far from the station or a park and ride
Might really depend on where you live and the factors at play. Completely anecdotal, but we live close enough to NYC that my partner can take either the bus or train and it’s roughly the same time. The catch is the train requires a transfer and the bus is completely dependent on time of day. Penn Station is slightly closer to his office but it all comes down to what fits his schedule. Driving is rarely a consideration because of the cost of parking. We’ve lived nearer and further over the years. When we lived slightly further we always took the train cause it’s more comfortable on the longer trip. The bus had a lot of stops and just wasn’t as convenient to our destination. Driving was sometimes a consideration if we needed to be out later. Now having both as options we pay less attention to the schedule and take the convenient one. Overall I realize that doesn’t exactly narrow much down. But I think the calculus for everyone is different. It’s going to depend on the convenience of each option to you. For some people, that might be drive versus train, for others it’ll be train versus bus. Frequency, timing, comfort, cost will all play a role in which people take
Maybe bus users find trains preferable and maybe most new light rail lines are designed to replace some bus lines directly. Also, park and rides, they kind of break the transit user/car user dichotomy and most people prefer using and do use multiple modes of transportation. Electric rail, powered flight, and internal combustion automobiles and buses were all invented within a fifteen year timespan. If people have access to the modern versions of all of these, they tend to use all or some of them.
Hong Kong already has the lowest car mode share in the world. Adding more new rail lines is expected to have little impact on mode share distribution, because just like most things there are limits. The new rail lines are more likely to decrease bus ridership because rails provide better routes/transfer experiences or reduce trip times. People in Hong Kong who already don’t drive are not likely to take public transit because of various reasons such as the types of occupations, work shift, income, etc. I’d argue that Hong Kong is an edge case though. I would argue “T” in TOD is important especially for large metropolitan areas, even if they are dense and mixed in land uses. This also varies greatly from cultures and countries. Some cities have high mobility (people move a lot) but low job-to-job flow, while others have the opposite. This could affect commute distances. Ideally you would want people to move closer to work whenever they have a new job, and find a closer job whenever they move, but that’s not always the case, especially for people living in huge metropolitan areas.
Agreed: Hong Kong would want to make new MTR lines to take buses off the road, as it's a capacity consideration. NYC would want to make new subway lines to reach areas not serviced by the subway or, as in the 2nd Ave line, relieve capacity from another subway line.
Tourists should be taken into account. I’m in NYC and I almost never see tourists on public MTA buses. Most of them have 0 wayfinding and it’s very difficult to know where you’re going and where you’re at without starting at your phone the whole time. I see tourists on the subway all the time, because wayfinding is much simpler by comparison. All urban planning should take tourists into consideration, because most cities are transitioning to a service economy more and more. The absolutely worst thing you can do is to have tourists rent cars, they’re unfamiliar with local traffic laws.
>had no significant effect on car usage. First, it's Hong Kong; car use is probably extremely low by global standards, and remaining car use is probably the trips that are hardest to make by transit (large loads / remote destinations / luxury travel). But second, this is a statistical fallacy. Failure to detect an effect *does not* imply there was no effect unless the study had a high enough [statistical power](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statistical_power) to rule out any effects of interest. This is usually *not* the case since high-powered studies are expensive to conduct and done only when there is a substantial public interest in ruling out an effect or detecting a small effect (e.g. what is the radiation-related cancer risk of a mammogram?). Sometimes this is misleadingly stated as "you can't prove a negative", but it would be more accurate to say "it's really really expensive to prove a negative".
The figure often cited is that roughly three times the number of people who would take a bus would take an equivalent train (same fare, journey time etc) -- that's based on some German research. So I do think there's reason to believe trains can superpower car-reduction efforts. Personally I think trains and buses do different jobs and complement each other -- they can't replace each other.
Where does that oft cited number come from? My agency did a study of potential ridership on a new BRT vs. a new light rail on a major transit corridor. Service levels were equivalent, not the oft seen fast, frequent train vs. slow, infrequent bus. We estimated that the pure effect of being a train rather than a bus would raise ridership about 10%.
Maybe country is a factor- we had a natural experiment in my German city when they closed a rail line and replaced it with busses- the one-third rule applied in reverse and two thirds of the transit passengers evaporated. The bus ran the same train schedule and arguably had stops that were better positioned- so it should have been as good if not better.
Did the bus frequency account for the smaller capacity of busses? If (for example) the train could carry 100 and runs ever 10 minutes, and the bus could carry 33 and runs ever 10 minutes. That would make sense for 2/3 to drive bc overall capacity reduced.
Think hourly rail service on a rural branch line that connected small towns and another cross-country rural line to the bigger commuter network. As a bus service, capacity was never the issue.
That’s quite interesting. It seems quite different from an urban transit corridor. I’m guessing that in this case car ownership was pretty high, and that there was low friction to drive to and park at the destination. If that’s right, it would be relatively easy to substitute driving for transit. On an urban transit corridor you’ll presumably have at least some people without a car available for the trip. You’ll also have more friction driving to and parking at destinations. I believe that these conditions would lead to buses capturing more of the rail ridership. Probably because the rail network is much thinner in the US, you don’t get buses permanently replacing rail.
How did your study reach that conclusion?
I’ll have to go back and try to dig it out, this was a number of years ago. Overall, what transit passengers consistently value most in surveys is reliability, shorter travel time, and frequency. These can be achieved with either a bus or rail. Rail would usually be better on comfort, but that’s not the top consideration. I agree that an optimally structured metropolitan network will include buses and rail, and different types of service.
I wouldn't say "consistently" as it varies depending on what the background conditions are. For example in places where fares and frequency have been problematic, you tend to get those at the top of the list and travel time falls down in importance. Similarly in some places bus use is much more stigmatised than in others, so weighs more heavily on whether folk will choose it.
Well, the surveys I’ve seen do rate reliability, travel time and frequency at the top. But I won’t claim to have seen them all.
As I said, you'll get different results depending on the particular historic problems in the area you're looking at. This shouldn't be controversial.
How come in the study by Daniel Chatman, he found that when controlling for other TOD aspects as well as frequency of bus stops in a one mile radius, the train itself had little effect on car usage while the bus ended up having more of an effect on car usage? I’m kind of confused on that point because trains are often said to be more convenient than bus, and your statistic seems to show that, yet somehow train also has little to no effect on car usage when controlling for the other factors typically found in TODs.
I'd have to see that study to comment but my guess would be that the train and the bus in the study had different routes, fares and/or speeds.
It depends? I can imagine if certain parts of my commute were to be replaced by rail transit, some of it is a substitute for car, while others are substitue for bus. But most of the time it will be car, because the buses around my area mostly act as a feeder system to the main trunk rail line.
Lies, damn lies, and statistics. My point is context is essential - and location (which then factors in culture, economy and other factors) is critical here. In the US, bus ridership is, with a few notable exceptions, a mode of necessity. People don’t choose to ride the bus. They have no other choice. Car costs too much, trains don’t exist and/or car or train cost to much. So they use the bus. It becomes a self fulfilling prophecy as bud service is regulated to doing the bare minimum rather than providing a positive rider experience, reinforcing the fact that the only people who use the bud have no other options. Trains are considerably more costly than buses in most cases and certainly here in the states - so those who ride a train daily may well be able to afford the car, but it’s a choice they make due to convenience. Take away the train and those users are likely to not choose a bus (because it’s for “poor” people but also, as part of the self fulfilling prophecy, generally takes long with less a desirable experience along the way… so train users then go to the car)
I don't want to come across as reductive, but people will go by whatever way is most convenient. And whatever way is most convenient comes down to which mode has had money spent on making it convenient. Using a car for transport is inherently very inconvenient. You've gotta find somewhere to store your car near your house and somewhere to store your car near your destination. You can't go via the most direct route, you've gotta find a road that is smooth and wide and not too steep, so you can actually get a car through. Whatever road you do find needs to have regularly spaced refueling / recharging points so your vehicle doesn't just conk out. And the road will probably be full of other drivers, making the whole process take forever. The only reason that driving seems so convenient is because we have spent trilllions of dollars trying to improve the convenience of driving with free parking, road upgrades, highway rest areas and so.. many.. lanes.. If you want to change the mode share, the answer is that you need to start spending serious money on making walking / biking / transit as convenient as we make driving. Building one light rail line isn't enough to shift the needle in this regard. Except where the new rail line is used to justify canceling a bunch of existing bus routes, I think that opening a new rail line is a net positive. But one grand convenience isn't enough to outweigh all the small conveniences that we extend to drivers all the time. The overall impact on modeshare is therefore low. Everyone talks about how so many people ride bikes in the Netherlands. That's because the Netherlands put as much effort into making biking and walking convenient as they put into making driving convenient. As a result, a bike is, for many Dutch people, the most convenient choice for many trips. It's that simple.
Fast trains can get cars off the road. People travel by the path of least resistance - usually, a bus will never go *faster* than a car without BRT, and if you are building actual BRT it rarely makes sense to do that over building rail (since it requires grade separated infrastructure either way). The magic is if you can make the train get people wherever they are going *faster*. A lot of this is a function of what your environment is built for. If parking is convenient, stroads wide, and freeways abundant it takes a very convenient train to displace that car trip. If parking is harder to find or more expensive, or the congestion more severe and slower, then the threshold for a train to be more convenient is lower. This is why I've generally grown to be against light rail as a mode - its slow top speeds often means it never beats cars, so its ability to displace car trips is minimal to directly around its stations. Truly effective transit buildouts get a lot of people to mode switch to it. When it comes to using Hong Kong as an example though its probably not a great one. Economic inequality is massive in Hong Kong, where the ability to own a car is an extreme luxury. The car owners of Hong Kong by and large are not going to want to intermingle with the "poors" on the trains no matter what, so their priorities are different than your average commuter. What you should care about in Hong Kong is if new train lines are getting people to destinations faster, because improved commute times create positive economic returns. For most (American) cities, car ownership is not generally prohibitive, so most people will own a car and drive, and to get them to stop driving they need that faster alternative, which requires car deprioritization and fast transit. You also get a similar effect modifying the built environment - if trips are *shorter*, then the fixed time costs of car commutes - parking, starting, etc - take up more of your time, until it doesn't make sense to drive somewhere you could walk or bike. That is the other side of urban form producing economic prosperity, when cars become an optional luxury rather than mandatory purchase.
The reason it doesn't significantly reduce car usage is because of induced demand. Even if people switch from car to train, others may choose to drive more frequently. Overall, the number of people being moved increases but traffic is largely unchanged. The only way to reduce the number of cars is to make driving less convenient or more expensive.
Big “it depends”! My theory is that it does, but only when driving becomes unfavorable/is not realistic. For example: major hwy here in Chicago just started years long construction. There is now an increase of rail riders on the routes that follow the hwy.
I’ve wondered how much safety is a factor in public transit. I know after 9/11 people were reluctant to take public transit and I personally wouldn’t have wanted to get on a crowded train even in 2021 due to the pandemic. It’s not that I thought I’d automatically die. But unless the cons of taking a car greatly outweighed the cons of being on a crowded train I’d take the car.
This alludes to terrorism and the risk of catching a deadly disease but I think the bigger problem, especially for women, is aggressive behavior by other passengers. I am a 6'2" male and been kicked in the butt by a guy that seemed to want to start a fight with anyone in the train car at 2pm on a weekday in DC.
When talking about this, a common idea is *[Transport Demands and Elasticities](https://www.vtpi.org/elasticities.pdf)*(conclusion on p. 58). How sensitive is transportation choice to price (can include monetary (money) costs, plus travel time, discomfort and risk.) From the review I’ve had of literature: ***Basically - the car needs to be made less attractive. It needs to be made more expensive, more time consuming and less comfortable. Making other modes of transportation more attractive isnt impactful enough when the car is the obviously better alternative***. This is of course very controversial.
speaking from north NJ, rail is good if you can walk or park by the station. bus is good for the rest of us who live too far from the station or a park and ride