Making Public Transport Work 9780773571433

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making public transport work

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Making Public Transport Work mark bunting

McGill-Queen’s University Press Montreal & Kingston • London • Ithaca

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© McGill-Queen’s University Press 2004 isbn 0-7735-2607-2 Legal deposit first quarter 2004 Bibliothèque nationale du Québec Printed in Canada on acid-free paper that is 100% ancient forest free (100% post-consumer recycled), processed chlorine free. This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences, through the Aid to Scholarly Publications Programme, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. McGill-Queen’s University Press acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts for our publishing program. We also acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program (bpidp) for our publishing activities. The Kingston Transit Map reproduced on page 92 has been used with permission of the City of Kingston.

National Library of Canada Cataloguing in Publication Bunting, Mark Making public transportation work / Mark Bunting. Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 0-7735-2607-2 1. Urban transportation. 2. Local transit. 3. Local transit–Planning. I. Title. he305.b85 2003 388.4 c2003-903133-0

This book was typeset by Dynagram inc. in 10/13 Palatino.

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Contents

Preface

vii

Acknowledgments 1 Introduction

xi

3

2 The Last Bus Has Been Cancelled 3 “If Only They Would ...”

12

19

4 A World without Public Transport 5 Approaching the Problem 6 The Customer Relationship

33

46 54

7 Setting a Standard for Public Transport 8 A Public Transport Architecture

87

9 Wanted: A Public Transport Revolution 10 Making Public Transport Work

72

113

119

11 Taking Responsibility for Public Transport Further Readings Index

159

157

138

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Preface

In 1980, the cusp between the outward-looking 1960s and 1970s and the inward, self-serving 1980s and 1990s, Toronto hosted the first World Conference on the Future. Conferences come and go, as does much of what is expressed, but the theme – “Thinking Globally, Acting Locally” – survived as a guide and rallying point for its attendees. It renewed awareness of war, poverty, disease, and environmental abuse as common human concerns that transcend borders, while reminding us that these ills must be addressed in the particular places, economies, and polities where they arise. Since 1980 talk of globalism has continued, but its thrust has shifted from the pursuit of human and environmental well-being to a narrow interest in facilitating business and trade. Whatever the economic virtues of this shift, the new emphasis is underwriting a global corporate order in which the public interest plays second fiddle. For this reason (and perhaps others), those concerned with human and environmental issues have been unable to translate their globalism into an effective local agenda. Failing to find new ways to act, yet unwilling to accede to realities, some fell back on old ways, protesting against seeming inevitabilities (loss of old-growth forests, diminished social programs, etc.). But with this comes corrosion of motive: the rearguard defense works in small ways, largely through established concept and institutions, so that what begins as a well-intentioned desire for change slips towards acceptance of ways of thought and institutions that constitute and perpetuate the ills one hopes to address. This worry underlies what I have to say about public transport. The way we move, with cities or over longer distances, has much to

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viii

Preface

do with a society’s well-being, not only its environmental quality but its ability to function economically and promote social goals. I believe this is more likely achieved with a balanced transport system where public transport plays a major role, thereby reducing transport’s environmental impact, increasing mobility for the less well off, and providing more scope for highly developed urban economies. Yet public transport continues to decline, as the car, having dominated North America and much of Europe, is set to claim the rest of the world. While this has been happening, the well-intentioned have drifted into a benign relationship with business, labour, and government so that, far from building public transport, it has legitimized the automotive and road-building industry as the only credible form of surface transport. Perhaps this was inevitable. In a market hostile to public transport, labour leaders and transport manager, bolstered by well-meant but reactive lobbying from environmental and social advocacy groups, found it easier to hold fast to established positions than to embrace change. Faced with this confluence of petition, governments inclined to take the easy political course have accepted and sustained the status quo. It is not easy for advocates of public transport to live with its continued decline, thus it is not surprising that many are less active in advocating good public transport than in trying to remedy the ills of private auto transport, for example by pressing for more stringent safety and emission standards for automotive vehicles. Laudable as these efforts may be in their own right, their effect is to accept and promote an auto-dominated transport system. The automobile may be sufficiently cleaned up and humanized to justify its dominance of ground transport, but even if this view is correct (and I doubt whether it is), the risk of being wrong – of overstating the prospects for containing the car’s ills and understating longer-term health, social, and environmental consequences – warrants our seeking a less one sided transport system. That said, more public transport funding, as often advocated by public transport interests, would do little to improve matters. Indeed, a new round of ill-conceived spending, perhaps induced by an environmental emergency or transport “crisis”, would do much harm: bolstering outdated marketing and operating practices would, in due course, discredit public transport as a legitimate alternative. Over the last three decades, it has often been said that public transport would be “revived” or “resuscitated”, as if what is destined for the grave

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Preface

ix

could be put to good use. We now have sufficient experience with transport necrophilia to let the past be and get on with the future. If something useful is to be said about public transport, it must transcend our past: it is less disturbing to work gradually from what we have inherited from the past, but nothing short of a complete rethink of public transport will do. In pursuing this ambitious agenda, I take advantage of familiar ideas about the social, economic, and environmental context for transport, especially the interests of transport consumers. In availing myself of this common base, I may accept too much, but if I induce readers to examine the issues openly and skeptically, asking what they would do to make public transport work, perhaps I will have done some good.

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Acknowledgments

We would like specifically to thank the following for their help and support with this book: Peter Dawes, formerly with Alberta Transportation and Utilities; David Crowley, Tranplan Associates; Roger Williams, Oxfordshire County Council; Frank Trotter, Canac Inc., Montreal; Mark Segsworth, City of Kingston; Dr Dick Soberman, University of Toronto; Ian Heggie, The World Bank, Washington; Dr Ken Button of George Mason University (whom he knew at Loughborough U.); Dr Gerald H. Cooper of Merrickville, Ontario; Peter White, London, England; Gordon E. Tufts, Prince Edward Island Transportation and Public Works; the gang at Transport 2000 Canada and “Papa” Don Haire of Montreal. Mark always intended to acknowledge the contribution of a wide range of his friends and contacts on this page of the book. His death interrupted his correspondence suddenly and unexpectedly, before he was ready to prepare a list for the publisher. I have been able to recall only a few of the many colleagues who met with Mark, sent research material, read the first or second draft of the manuscript or corresponded with him about public transportation. I am sure that there are more who absolutely should be on this page and about whose contributions I am ignorant. To them, I offer my apologies and Mark's hearty “thank you”. Jennifer Bunting, Kingston, 2003

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making public transport work

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chapter one

Introduction

Among the prominent characteristics of the last two centuries is the achievement of extensive and routine mobility for large numbers of people. Humans have always moved from place to place, sometimes over long distances, but before the nineteenth century travel much beyond the periphery of one’s dwelling, beyond what could be walked in a day, was an infrequent and arduous undertaking. Even those traveling in elegant well-equipped carriages rarely escaped the inconvenience and discomfort that made travel unworthy of frequent repetition. Today, hundreds of millions commute daily between home and work, many over distances that two centuries ago called for advance planning and exchange of correspondence. Millions more each day take to the air, crossing continents and oceans for business or personal recreation. At one extreme, one may leave Paris in the morning for a day’s business in New York and a night on the town before retiring (albeit exhausted). Modern mobility began with public transport. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, urban and intercity railways made regular travel practical for the growing middle class. In the twentieth, improved roads allowed the motor bus to serve the less affluent and to reach smaller communities off the main routes. As the century matured, safe and efficient jet aircraft extended our reach across continents and oceans. However, despite its origin in public transport, mobility found full expression in the car: one could travel where, when, and with whomever one wished, and control the experience – adopting a hurried or leisurely pace, choosing the radio station or interior air temperature.

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Making Public Transport Work

Public transport would be hard pressed to match such advantages. As road building and mass manufacture made cars useful and affordable, and as incomes rose, especially after the Second World War, car ownership and use surged. By the 1920s roads had become dangerous for pedestrians and car users alike, and by the 1960s the full effects were apparent: thousands of accidents, with injuries and fatalities rivaling those of major wars; communities fractured by roads and flooded with traffic; social divisions born of car-dependent settlement patterns; and signs of deteriorating environmental and human health. So the stage was set for an intense debate on the proper roles of private and public transport. This debate engaged transport executives, planners, academics, technologists, industrialists, politicians, community groups, and the general public. And with the energy crises of the 1970s, the search for balance between public and private transport gained practical urgency. Indeed, for major oil importers such as Western Europe and the United States, rising oil prices and threatened shortages were seen as matters of national security. These were not cautious times. Postwar success in agriculture, medicine, energy, space travel, and other fields suggested that any challenge could be met, including the need for better public transport. If America could fly a man to the moon, surely we could build a transport system that would convince those who had abandoned public transport to give it a second chance. In religious tones, advocates spoke of public transport’s “revival” or “renaissance”: better services would assure the public’s return. The corridors of government filled with entrepreneurs – many from fledgling space industries – offering novel, even fantastic, technologies to invigorate public transport. Sensing public enthusiasm, governments opened the doors to their treasuries. With expanded public funding, costs raced ahead of revenues and deficits grew quickly. In Canada, by the end of the 1980s, fares covered less than fifty percent of costs, while operating and capital funding exceeded one billion dollars per year.1 Intercity buses got little or no direct subsidy, but trains attracted federal money, by the late 1980s absorbing more than half a billion dollars per year, with passenger revenue covering barely a third of costs,2 airlines have benefited from public investment and operating support for airports and navigational aids. In the United States, urban transit subsidies from all governments grew from $132 million in 1970 to over $10 billion in 1992.3

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Introduction

5

In the 1980s and 1990s optimism fell prey to reality. With the collapse of the Middle Eastern oil cartel, oil prices slumped, as did expectations of skyrocketing gasoline prices, which many had thought would force car users back to public transport. At the same time, responding to higher fuel prices and calls for safer, environmentally more respectable vehicles, the auto industry introduced modern fuelefficient designs that minimized cost, reduced accident risk, and improved comfort. Intended or not, the effect was to undercut attempts to renew public transport. Meanwhile, governments facing the results of fiscal exuberance and taxpayer resistance sought to escape the enlarging transport “money pit”. Sometimes, as in Britain, the tight money ”push” combined with a pro-market ideological ”pul” to produce radical policies. Elsewhere, moderate policies prevailed, but the direction was often to reduce support for public transport. The British example deserves further mention. In the 1980s Britain deregulated and privatized most intercity and urban bus operations and required that subsidized local services be tendered. The intent of these policies was to reduce subsidies, which they did, and to revive public transport, which they did not. The previously constrained intercity bus industry did better under relaxed controls and strong management, but the hoped-for resurgence of local bus transport failed to materialize. With higher fares and less well coordinated services, the continued trend away from public transport should not have been surprising. In the 1990s British Rail was divided into about one hundred distinct companies, which were then privatized, and rail services are now provided under twenty-five private franchises issued by the national government. Here the picture is promising: the number of passengers has risen, and franchise agreements provide for cuts in state subsidies, but it is too early to say whether these gains will be sustained and how far, if at all, a renewed rail sector will go to offset growing car usage. Other countries paralleled or followed Britain’s approach. The United States, for example, deregulated domestic airline markets and greatly reduced rail and intercity bus regulation. In Canada air industry controls were largely withdrawn and support for rail services scaled back.4 Although there is no clear consensus, many more governments now believe that the market, not policy, should decide what is provided, and support for public transport has softened accordingly.

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6

Making Public Transport Work

Of course, concerns about global climate change and renewed worries about the effect of automotive emissions on local air quality may revive interest in public transport. However, the experience of the 1960s and 1970s suggests that environmental gains are more likely to flow from automotive technology (fuel-efficient designs, emission controls, and alternative energy sources) and from reductions in non-transport sources (e.g. ., industrial emissions) than from increased use of public transport. Nonetheless, politicians may cut ribbons at new public transport facilities, buy new buses and trains, and underwrite fashionable technologies. This will not build the market for public transport nor reduce car use; instead, it will replicate past failures. As in the 1960s and 1970s, the unimpressed transport consumer will drive, and as this becomes clear, the case for public transport will be further weakened. For it has already failed twice: early in the twentieth century as a commercial enterprise, and at century’s end under public subsidy. What will the public thing of third demonstration that public transport does not work? If I seem pessimistic, I also believe that public transport can and should play a far greater role than it now does. Nor should we forget that public transport still plays a large role in part of the transport market – commuter travel to centres of large cities. This is not cause for complacency but a reminder that the public will respond where public transport works for them. However, public credibility is undermined by efforts and money wasted on unworkable transport policies or on facilities, vehicles, and technologies unrelated to market needs. Behind this is a diversion of professional and political energy from thoughtful analysis and debate to protection of established interests and promotion of expensive ventures of little value to consumers. Against this background, my book seeks the way forward, not with the wide-eyed enthusiasm for transport that often hampers intelligent discussion but with a more realistic view of public transport’s failings and future opportunity. We are not any less keen for public transport for seeing its deficiencies: these are reasons, not for despair, but to think more and harder. Realism does not mean clinging to present practices but basing changes in strategy on full and careful consideration of market and policy needs. Since what is presently done does not work particularly well, the realistic approach is more likely to be a complete overhaul than standing pat on the status quo. En route to a new public transport strategy, we seek answers to five questions. First, what is the problem? Chapter 2 shows its imme-

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Introduction

7

diate manifestation: public transport – buses, trains, urban transit – has lost its place in the transport market. Moreover, as chapter 3 explains, popular solutions will not save public transport from continued decline. Second, why solve this problem? For some, the problem seems beyond solution: we should accept that the demise of public transport cannot be prevented. Others see public transport as evidently necessary: its problems, no matter how difficult, must be solved. We reject both views – which deny the question – and instead ask precisely why public transport is needed (if it can be made to work). Chapter 4 addresses this question, briefly discussing the environmental, safety, cultural, and economic impacts of a world entirely reliant on cars for surface transport. Third, why is there a problem? What has gone so wrong that most people prefer to drive? Seeing this from the customer’s eyes, as we do in chapter 5, two faults are apparent: a failed relationship with the transport provider and deficient services. Chapter 6 explores the customer relationship, while chapter 7 proposes a new standard of transport performance reflecting the service expectations public transport now fails to satisfy. Fourth, how should this problem be solved? To hint at what might be involved, without imposing a solution (which should come from a close relationship between transport providers and customers), chapter 8 outlines a structure for public transport aimed at the performance standard proposed in chapter 7. This structure involves large – perhaps revolutionary – changes, as chapter 9 explains. So, the fifth question is: who would make such large changes? Chapter 10 argues that government is unlikely to take the lead and should not, but could help considerably by encouraging emerging private markets in public transport. This approach, despite its imperfections, is more likely to foster management excellence and higher-quality services.

k e e p i n g t h e f o c u s o n p u b l i c t r a n p o rt ’ s market challenge In seeking answers to these five questions we might draw on the many books, articles, learned papers, and other information sources found in libraries and bookstores, on the Internet, or in the offices of professionals and academics, transport carriers, government departments, and industry associations

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Making Public Transport Work

Figure 1.1 Areas of public transport expertise

• transport engineering and operations analysis – design, maintenance and operating practices for infrastructure (roads, railways, stations, airports, etc.) and equipment (buses, trains, aircraft, etc.); • transport planning – future public transport needs and service plans, including routes, networks, transfer and terminal points, quantity and quality of services; • transport economics – costs of building and operating public transport systems, fare types and levels, demand for public and private transport, economic and financial viability of existing or proposed services, or new technologies; • management/public polity – public transport organizations and management practices, private and public sector roles, policy issues concerning service levels and quality, fares, environmental impact, safety, etc. While acknowledging these sources of expertise, we face several difficulties in putting them to use. Much of what is written about public transport is too technical for the general public, who must be involved if public transport is to secure its future. With this in mind, my aim is to present issues and options as directly and clearly as possible, with minimum recourse to technical material. Some aspects of public transport are unavoidably technical, but we will trust other to address them, once we have defined a new direction for public transport. We may also be led astray by leaning on the public transport literature. There is much does not bear on our questions, and we may especially lose our way in the technical literature. In trying to bring rigour to transport studies, professionals and academics often lose sight of human concerns and desires that are not so easily defined and quantified. In my view, an important reason for public transport’s failure is inattentiveness to its human side. If we are to progress, we must keep our focus on this aspect and not allow ourselves to be diverted elsewhere. Finally, while important information and expertise should not be ignored, we must keep in mind that much of it is about past and

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Introduction

9

present practices. But our challenge is not to replicate public transport as it was or is. It is to define a new future – a break from the past – in which public transport finds a more useful place in the larger transport market. To keep the spotlight on public transport’s market challenge, I avoid detailed discussion of the present functions and operations of public transport. Nor do I cover all options for its improvement: I present one, which I consider most likely to work, given the customer’s observable transport priorities. There are other views, and I encourage readers interested in them to examine some of the readings listed at the end of this book.

i n t e r c i t y, u r b a n , a n d r e g i o n a l t r a n s p o r t Urban and intercity transport are often treated as separate entities. There are differences: urban transit usually is a high-volume service for regular short-distance trips, while intercity service caters to long irregular trips, usually to a higher standard. Urban transport usually is the charge of local government, while responsibility for intercity transport falls to national or other senior levels of government. This divided view of public transport has the effect of treating urban and intercity customers as distinct beings who merit quite different service standards. But there is only one customer, a person who makes short trips and longer journeys, and who may not be inspired by a transport system that sometimes treats him or her well and sometimes badly. There remain important differences between urban and intercity trips – the latter are made less often, usually for different purposes – but we should not make too much of the distinction, as more and more people are traveling quite long distances on a daily basis. This fact, partly a reflection of urban sprawl, and partly of increased mobility bred of growing incomes and faster transport, is seen as increased ”regional” travel, neither urban (within city) nor interurban movement. The terms urban, intercity, and regional tend to prompt discussion of issues that fit in these narrow compartments. Thus, we are diverted from the central problem addressed in this book: the failure of public transport, as a whole, to serve the customer’s interest. We will not easily correct the mistake – much of the transport literature relies on it – but we can at least be aware of it.

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p u b l i c t r a n s p o r t, p r i vat e a u t o m o b i l e s When I refer to public transport, I do not mean transport provided by a government or other public body, but transport for the public, provided by public or private entities. Nor should we think of public transport as mass transport; in a low-density subdivision, it might involve car pooling, or a service provided by small jitney buses, or shared rides in taxis. The small size of the vehicle does not make what they provide any the less public. When I speak of private transport or the automobile, I imagine a vehicle owned or hired for exclusive use by an individual (or that person’s family). One might call this personal transport. The transport unit (the car) is chosen for its usefulness to one or a few individuals, not, as in a public system, for the use of many people. This exclusivity extends to other vehicle types – light trucks, vans, recreational vehicles, etc.; when I use the term “automobile” or “car” I mean to include these. We should not expect a sharp distinction between public and private transport. A club that buys or charters a coach or aircraft for its members’ exclusive use could be said to engage in “private transport”, but the vehicle’s use in common would justify calling it public. In a car pool, private cars provide service to a wider public, and thus might be considered a form of public transport. In the end, our choice of words matters little, as long as it does not get in the way of sensible transport strategies. While air transport is part of a wider public transport system, this book concerns itself primarily with ground transport. With a growing market for long-distance and transoceanic travel, air transport has a secure economic foundation: individual carriers may fail, but the airline industry has an assured future. Unlike ground public transport, the question is not whether the airline industry is viable but whether it achieves its potential, a matter this book does not address, apart from brief mention of airport access in a discussion of transport integration (see chapter 7). This book is intended to go beyond a description of pitfalls and problems. Indeed, the title – Making Public Transport Work – stresses active pursuit of transport solutions. In chapter 8, the reader will find positive suggestions for improvement. Options for achieving greater success include more unified systems, working from the customer’s

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Introduction

11

perspective, and appropriate pricing. Chapter 8 contains detailed discussion of these and other suggestions for improvement. However, public transport will not rise like the phoenix from its ashes, nor from abstract market forces, but from people who accept the challenge to examine its problems, devise practical solutions, and put them into effect, or at least encourage others to do so. In this, we may be eager for solutions – to say right away how public transport can be made to work – but we must begin at the beginning by understanding its present failings, a matter to which we now turn.

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chapter two

The Last Bus Has Been Cancelled

Public transport does not work. Some operators are better than others, but most are appalling failures, and even the best look good mainly by comparison to the worst.5 To justify this claim, I’ll need a few statistics (which I promise to keep to the bare minimum). But before doing that, we need to be clear about what it means to say that public transport does not work. To a typical public transport customer, it means poor service: too few buses and trains, too often late or canceled, dirty and unattractive stations, surly drivers and ticket agents, inadequate provision for people with disabilities. To a taxpayer who pays for deficits racked up by public transport, it means revenues that are too low and costs that are too high. These are valid complaints to which we shall return, but for now I want to highlight the most evident problem: a failure in market position. With too few customer, public transport is of limited financial, economic, social, or environmental value: it fails to give society what it most values and, to that extent, undercuts efforts to maintain and improve services. So the failure is primarily a market failure, only secondarily a service or financial failure. If we can see how public transport lost its place in the transport market, we may see how to rebuild it, so that it fulfills our other interests by providing good service, social and environmental benefits, and sound financial results. As in any declining industry, some transport systems look better than others, and even the worst have a few ups mixed in with the more frequent downs. Yet if one stands back from this detail, as from an impressionist painting, one is better able to see the patterns, the longer-term trends affecting the industry as a whole. And three market patterns should concern us.

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Figure 2.1

Transport usage is usually measured as the number of passenger trips or passenger-kilometres, the latter obtained by multiplying trips by average distance. (So twenty 10 kilometre trips equate to 200 passenger-kilometres.) The passenger-kilometre measure allows for the fact that a long journey (eg., 2,000 km. by air) uses more transport capacity than a short trip (eg., 2 km. by bus). Pattern 1: Ridership Loss. An obvious sign of trouble is fewer customers, this has often been a problem for intercity bus carriers. Canada’s scheduled intercity bus carriers have steadily lost riders, dropping from about 120 million passengers per year in the early 1950s to about fifty million in the 1960s, and recently (1996) to ten million.6 While bus carriers often blame railway subsidies, the attractions of the car and airline competition are more likely causes.7 The British local bus industry, which in the early 1950s accounted for more travel than private vehicles, has declined from sixteen billion passengers per year in 1950 to just over four billion in the mid1990s8 As in other countries, increased automobile ownership and use is apparent, especially outside London.9 Pattern 2: Declining Market Share. Many intercity and commuter railways can claim stable or growing markets. British Rail has annually produced between thirty and forty billion passenger-km. Since the 1950s;10 until the 1990s, America’s Amtrak saw slow but steady growth from three to six billion passenger-km.11 Canadian urban transport ridership increased fifty percent in the 1970s and 1980s (but subsequently declined).12 This would be good news in a static market but not so in the rapidly growing transport market of the twentieth century. For example, between the late 1940s and 1990, Canadian intercity travel grew five times from thirty billion passenger-kilometres to 165 billion.13 More than eighty percent of this new travel arose from increased car use, the remainder from the growth in air travel. Consequently, most public transport systems, even those that grew, saw their share of this market sharply reduced. Canadian rail and bus systems, which commanded twenty to thirty percent of the intercity market in the 1950s, now claim less than three percent today. In America, between 1990 and 1995, transit trips rose by ten percent, but the overall travel market rose much faster (fifty-five percent increase in person trips): as a result, the proportion of travellers riding transit

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Figure 2.2

Readers should not be misled by impressively high market shares often cited for work trips to/from urban centres. In Toronto’s case, urban transit captures fifty-five percent of work trips to the central area, but only thirty-nine percent of the non-work trips. (Source: The Central Area Transportation Review, Metropolitan Toronto, 1996.) Outside the central area, where much of Toronto’s growth is taking place, transit shares are much lower. fell by fourteen percent.14 In most developed nations, the car now accounts for eighty to ninety percent of domestic travel.15 Even in densely populated Japan, where public transport is favoured, the car’s share of domestic travel rose from fourteen percent (1965) to over fifty percent (1980s). In North America, population growth and development seek the urban periphery, which is poorly served by public transport systems oriented to needs of traditional cities. In the Greater Toronto Area (gta), the 1970s and 1980s saw more people using Toronto Transit Commission (ttc) and go Transit, a regional operator providing commuter rail and bus services especially between outlying areas and downtown Toronto. But the dominant form of transportation in the gta remains the car, with only thirteen percent of regional trips moving by public transport.16 Why does this matter? Lost ridership is a clear sign of trouble, but if public transport is used by as many or more customers, why worry about a drop in market share? To answer, I must venture behind the numbers, to show what a decline in market share – which may seem a bit abstract – means in reality. The hopeful view is that those who drive are a distinct group of people from those who ride public transport, who can be seen as a base of loyal public transport customers. But what if they change their place of residence or work? Suppose a transit user moves to a poorly served suburb: suffer the bus, or buy a car? Or a committed car user moves to an area well served by transit. Use the bus or train? Maybe, but I doubt it. The implication is that a limited transit system focused on a central city will gradually “leak” transit-friendly customers to car-dominated areas, while those moving into that city from outside will likely arrive with a preference for cars. In the Greater Toronto Area, there is some

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evidence of a shift of Toronto residents to nearby areas (e.g., Mississauga, Oakville, York Region): this is seen in customer demand for go Transit’s regional bus and rail services to and from Toronto, which held steady or grew in the early 1990s, even though employment in Toronto was cut by a severe recession (as were trips on Toronto Transit Commission services). In this way, go Transit helped retain customers who might otherwise have been lost to public transport. But we must bear in mind that go’s services, good as they are, generally offer less transit coverage and frequency outside Toronto than is the ttc offers within the City of Toronto. So, while some people can continue to use transit after moving outside Toronto, others find it better to drive. Less happily, a fall in market share may mean that transit customers who both drive and use public transport are driving more often. Any business worries when customers increase their use of the competitor’s product, since it may be the prelude to being dumped. For public transport, that result is likely when customers use it so little that it is not worth keeping up on schedules and fares. Under such conditions, any stability in ridership numbers is the calm before the storm. A market share that is already quite low will largely comprise captive riders who can’t drive. If this share declines, it may be the effect of better times, which allow some to buy cars. Or it may reflect personal decisions to walk or cycle more or, despite the cost, to acquire a car. Where transit is seen as a form of welfare and provided at only a basic level, many customers will see it as part of a trap to be escaped as soon as possible. Falling market shares may be interpreted in other ways, but the above should suffice to show that a decline in market share is indeed a serious matter. While the accounts vary, the effect is much the same: a falling share sets the stage for later decay. This is not to downplay efforts to retain public transport’s present customers but to say that, unless operators seriously attempt to build market share, such efforts are pointless. Pattern 3: Unsound Markets. Ridership has fallen in some markets, market share in many more, but that is not the only bad news. Public subsidies, provided to maintain services and hold fares down, encourage more people to use public transport. Ridership numbers used to judge transport performance are thus an artifice of subsidy, not a true reflection of the market for public transport, as is usually evident

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when governments reduce or withdraw support. Operators who built their markets on subsidies and now face cuts in public funding are finding that they built on sand. Canadian operators did just that, gaining riders in the 1970s and 1980s, their executives basking in the glory of rising passenger counts. Now many barely keep services running. Faced with rising operating losses, the Toronto Transit Commission boosted fares by thirty-four percent between 1988 and 1992 (a fourteen percent rise above inflation).17 These increases, along with a recession, cut ridership by sixteen percent from 464 million trips in 1988 to a 1995 low of 388 million. go Transit is an example. With capital and operating funding from the provincial government of Ontario covering about half of costs, go built ridership from thirteen million passengers in 1975 to 33 million in 1996.18 In 1998 the Province of Ontario passed transit funding to the gta’s regional governments, the largest of which, Toronto, quickly complained about its share of go’s costs. The upshot is that it cannot be assumed that go will be as well supported in future. At worst, were funding withdrawn, fares which are already high – one commuter cited an annual cost of $2,000 to $3,000 to ride between Oshawa and Toronto19 – would increase substantially,20 perhaps exceeding the cost of operating a car. How many would then ride go Transit? Politicians – national, regional, or local – necessarily attend to political priorities and when money is short retreat to their most urgent priorities. North American public transport is low on the list and thus vulnerable in hard times. Europe accords public transport higher priority, but that support may not be as secure as one might be suppose. Operators who most rely on public funds rest on shaky ground, no matter how solid it now seems. Apart from subsidies, other factors may temporarily inflate public transport markets. Nations that experienced a postwar “baby boom” saw a large increase in their populations of young people, who are above-average users of public transport and thus boosted public transport ridership especially in the 1960s and 1970s. Of course, young people grow up, build families and, as their parents did, buy cars.21 In the 1990s fewer young people meant less impressive transit statistics; similarly, the growing population of healthy seniors tends to drive, where earlier generations were more likely to ride the bus. Perhaps we should not be surprised that the bloom is off the transit rose.

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problem or challenge? So where does public transport stand? Consider the success of the car. Often seen as a competitor for public transport customers, its achievement was to fill a huge unserved market for convenient shortor medium-length journeys. It succeeded less by displacing public transport than by expanding passenger travel as a whole. Equally, public transport’s failure was not that it lost riders to the automobile but that it did not sufficiently heed the public’s desire for mobility. Public funding has allowed many cities to maintain urban transit ridership by improving services and keeping fares down. But little has been done to rethink urban transit for suburban areas that developed around the mobility afforded by the car, a pattern of development that has been apparent for more than a half-century. Many suburban points are inaccessible to transit (or so poorly served as not to merit notice), and the suburb-to-city-centre orientation of many transit systems is decreasingly apt for suburb-to-suburb trips, a fast growing part of the urban travel market. Thus, it is hardly surprising that the car continues to rule suburbia. Many feel the suburbs are beyond transit’s capability altogether: transit cannot match the car, so might as well not try. If so, rising car use can only be prevented by putting the brakes on suburban sprawl, by imposing strict planning controls aimed at developing integrated communities that are less reliant on motorized travel, and at population and employment densities that can support public transport. But planning controls are hard to put into effect and maintain, even in densely populated countries, and especially where the rise of private individualism makes a moral offence of just about any kind of societal restraint. Similar weaknesses are apparent in intercity public transport. National railways serving traditional downtowns were subsidized while intercity bus carriers – which might have adapted more readily to changing patterns of urbanization – did not attract comparable support and were often barred from routes reserved to railways. At best, such policies held the status quo in an otherwise growing passenger market increasingly dominated by the car. Even the brilliantly successful aviation industry, with its decided edge in long-distance markets, does less well on short runs, where fast airfield-to-airfield times carry less weight with the customer than crowded disorganized airports and extended times for local ground access.

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Public transport not only failed to reverse the trend towards private motorization but it is losing its status as mainstream transport. In developed nations, the affluent decreasingly see public bus and rail services as legitimate transport choices for themselves. As taxpayers, they support such services but mainly as necessary for others: the young, the old, the poor, those with disabilities. Transport managers who see this inevitably give priority, not to functional marketable transport, but to effective political management of the competing interests that circulate about the disadvantaged. This is the impact of a transport system that failed to secure its place in the transport market and holds its slender share mainly by artificial means. Such a system cannot have a future and cannot, in any reasonable sense, be said to work. The foregoing can be put in a more positive way by asking, not how public transport has failed, but what one must look for in a successful transport system. Has it retained its existing customer base? Has it a steady and respectable market share? Has it secured its position without heavily relying on public subsidy or on passing demographic or economic phenomena?22 Some may say I impose too strict a standard, but this standard is no more than the aspiration - some would say necessity - of most commercial enterprises. As a competitor in the transport market, and increasingly subject to fiscal constraint, public transport must be seen as a commercial undertaking, which achieves its public mission by claiming a respectable market share in a respectable financial manner. Of course, public transport’s environmental and social virtues may justify public funding, but only to the extent that it underpins the fundamentals of commercial success.

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chapter three

“If Only They Would ...”

We have seen the visible side of the problem: fewer customers in some instances, more generally a decline in market share and over reliance on public subsidy. To solve it, we need to see its less-visible side, to understand its underlying causes, a matter to which I turn later in this book. But for now, let us pause to consider what has already been tried or proposed. Over the years, I have spoken with many professional and lay people about public transport and rarely found opinions in short supply. Indeed, at social gatherings, bare mention of “transport” elicits a torrent, often of the kind that begins, “If only they would ...” followed by a favoured solution. I am encouraged by this interest, but the call for specific solutions presumes that the problem is clear. If that were so, however, one would expect less disagreement on solutions, or, if public transport is beyond repair – if the problem is unsolvable – a consensus that it be allowed to go the way of the horse-buggy. When trying to think about problems we are often diverted by ideas about solutions. For example, we might say that the problem with public transport is high fares, because we would like fares to be lower. We are not asking why public transport has failed in the market but beating the drum for a preferred solution. To focus on public transport’s true problem, we must set aside any thought of solutions. We cannot allow them to lurk round the mental corner, ready to jump out: we must have sufficient doubt about their value to put them away altogether. To do that, we must know why common solutions are not as good as they may seem. The solutions most often proposed are improved services and infrastructure, including new technology; low fares; more subsidies (to

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bankroll the preceding); heavier auto taxation; traffic restraint; and land use controls. Governments have tried such measures, but with limited effect on transport markets, in which cars continue to dominate. Yet we cannot dismiss the effort out of hand: the fault may lie, not with the solutions, but with a lack of nerve in applying them. In Europe, Asia, or South America, public favour or political hegemony permits bold moves on behalf of public transport; the same is less likely in North America. In assessing solutions, we should bear in mind differences of intent. Some proposals are persuasive: while encouraging public transport use, they respect our right to choose; examples include better service and lower fares. Other are coercive: by limiting private transport, they coerce us into using public transport by, for example, banning cars in designated areas or at certain times of the day. Some measures may be persuasive or coercive. A small increase in the auto fuel tax may encourage the use of public transport, but the choice is forced if a huge tax hike makes it impossible for all but the rich to drive. Other measures may be coercive and persuasive: land development may be regulated (coerced) to produce an urban form that makes public transport attractive to people who nonetheless are free to drive. At various times and in various cultures, the public may support persuasion or coercion, but coercive controls are notoriously susceptible to bureaucratic manipulation and rarely popular. The practical administrator or planner will always prefer to try incentives before resorting to authoritarian controls. With these matters in mind, consider the following ways to boost public transport, starting with the more persuasive.

i m p r o v i n g p u b l i c t r a n s p o r t s e rv i c e s It is often said that providing more buses and trains at more convenient times would attract more customers, thereby increasing market share, the added revenue improving public transport finances. This claim is half true – more people will ride – but it is also half false – the financial results are often disappointing. Where services are infrequent, more buses and trains may much increase patronage but not always and perhaps not often. Adding a train to a five-train-a-day service, a twenty percent increase, is unlikely to attract twenty percent more riders. If the popular departure times are

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21

covered by existing trains, it is likely that most people are already accommodated at the times they prefer. Another train might attract existing riders who find the departure a bit more convenient than the present offering, but there may be few genuinely new customers. If the extra train’s costs exceed new revenues, it runs at a net loss, hardly an attraction to private operators and only feasible for public operators with ready access to subsidy. Moreover, since the extra train’s economic value (revenue from new customers) is less than the physical and human resources required (e.g., the costs of buying the train and paying for fuel, crew, and maintenance), we might also say that resources are wasted. We should equally question other service upgrades, such as high speed rail and new transit lines (rail or bus) to suburban areas. Attractive to politicians seeking the public transport vote, these too often fail the acid test: do extra revenues cover extra costs? Of course, we should not ignore social and environmental gains that accrue from a more accessible and less-polluting form of transport, but these do not licence unlimited spending. If social or environmental values are important, it is equally important to pursue them in a financially sensible manner. Thus, one should ask how much emissions would be cut by adding bus and train services, what cost would be incurred, and how that cost compares with costs of alternative ways to reduce emissions. Answers to these questions are unlikely to be encouraging. The car dominates transport because its users see a huge difference in performance between the car and public transport. To make a material impact on the market, public transport must change drastically, not by small increment. Moreover, the required change is not just greater quantity of service but better quality – something distinctly new, not more of the same. Sometimes increased service is justified, but larger gains across all markets can only be had from a new strategy built on knowing why people prefer cars. Without this, ratcheting up service is no better than banging one’s head against a brick wall.

the technology “fix” Technology has played an enormous role in transport and may again. However, our fascination with science and its products often leads us in the wrong direction. This is especially so when what we really need

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is progress on marketing and organizational issues. These require thought, not hardware, but we are readily diverted by novel and concrete technologies: a faster train, an engine that burns a new fuel, or, for modernists, anything with a computers or “communications”. Technology makes organizations and operating practice in its image. Thus, if the wrong technology is chosen, the entire enterprise can be put at risk. As an example, a Vancouver-based company23 has developed a hydrogen fuel cell, a promising alternative to the internal combustion engine. This technology is being demonstrated on modified city buses. The next step may be to induce other Canadian cities to accept hydrogen-fueled buses in their fleets, perhaps with government subsidies, especially if it would help sell the technology to other countries. Since many operators are short of funds to replace buses, a subsidized bus could be attractive. So far, so good. But what does it mean for market strategy? The demonstration units are comparable to the standard forty-foot transit bus. If fuel cells are not easily adapted to smaller vehicles, operators induced to buy subsidized hydrogen buses will develop market strategy around larger vehicles. They might otherwise experiment with a wide array of services, using large and small vehicles, but be unable to do so once limited capital and technology-support resources are directed to large buses. The issue is not the value of large or small buses but the supplanting of market planning. Operating patterns and technology are properly decided once one has a handle on market needs and opportunities, but in the above example, these matters are partly fixed from the outset, leaving the carrier less room to develop a market-sensitive strategy. This distortion is apparent elsewhere. In recent decades, much talent, effort, and money has been directed to high-speed trains, starting with Japan’s bullet trains, continuing with the French TGV and other European projects, with others on the way, or under consideration in the United States, Canada, Korea, etc. There is nothing inherently wrong with speeding up service, but the emphasis on speed seems disproportionate given other factors that are important to the transport consumer. It seems odd for example, to spend vast sums on fast travel between city terminals, then present customers with Byzantine urban transport systems that eat time, often in the most insalubrious forms of conveyance.

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I am not a Luddite: indeed, I think public transport could use more technology to improve service quality and efficiency. But we should be constructively sceptical about technology and its promoters (who can hardly be blamed for overstating its value). We should ask: What do we want to achieve? How can a proposed technology help us achieve it? Does it do so at lower cost or higher quality than the alternatives?

l o w fa r e s Public transport advocates often call for lower fares to attract people to buses and trains. There is no room here to explore the complexities of transport pricing, but two basic ideas may demonstrate why low fares are unlikely to help. First, some travelers are less sensitive to fares than others. A businessperson on a tight schedule would fly regularly from Ottawa to Toronto despite the cost, while a pensioner traveling for leisure might consider the bus because it is cheaper. Second, fares are most influential where competing carriers or modes offer similar services. If several airlines offer roughly the same flight times, aircraft, and on-board service, choice of carrier will focus on fares: then, fare reductions can greatly affect customer choice. But public transport does not compare readily with its competitor the car. So, a driver considering riding the bus or train must not only consider the price but also differences in quality of service, which typically weigh more heavily than do fares. In other words, what will a fare cut do? It may attract a few pricesensitive customers, but if all customers get lower fares overall revenues will be reduced. For example, cutting commuter fares by ten percent across the board might draw three to four percent new riders, but extra revenue from this source is more than offset by fare cuts for existing riders: overall, revenue falls by six to seven percent. If extra riders force expansion of capacity (e.g., by adding more buses), costs rise, further worsening the operator’s financial position and increasing pressure for more subsidy, or for service cuts elsewhere in the transport system. The alternative is selective pricing, giving bargain fares only to groups that are likely to be influenced by low fares. Airlines have long practised this method, for example with seat sales aimed at price-sensitive travelers. However, selective pricing cannot produce large gains in ridership; in being selective, one foregoes the attempt to increase the market as a whole.

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Underlying the limited effect of low-fare policies is the poor quality of most public transport. No fare policy can alter this fact, indeed discounts underline it. Moreover, lower fares licence abuse of customers. If I pay ten dollars for a bus into town, I expect to be well treated, but if the fare is one dollar, I can expect little sympathy for my complaint that the service is inconvenient and uncomfortable (or that the driver was rude to me).

p u b l i c t r a n s p o rt s u b s i d i e s Few public transport systems make a profit: most require public subsidy. Moreover, building markets by adding service, bringing in new technologies, lowering fares, etc., often costs more than the extra revenues that are earned, thus adding to the demand for subsidies. Subsidy is often thought necessary for environmental, social, or other reasons. Getting people out of cars cuts pollution,, while good and cheap transport ensures widespread mobility. But to say this is not to prove it: to do that we must show precisely how much pollution is reduced or how specific groups gain from better access. Too often, the numbers needed to show this are not available or, if they are, won’t back up the pious words. It is also said that taxes, fees, and tolls paid by drivers do not fully pay for the roads they use: so they drive more than if they paid all road costs and use public transport less. Subsidies are thus needed to correct this bias towards roads by allowing public transport to offer better service and lower fares to secure the market it would otherwise have if roads were properly priced. The fly in this ointment is that many studies (though not all) show drivers pay more than their fair share of road costs.24 However, even if drivers pay all road and vehicle costs, they do not fully perceive them. In driving from Kingston to Toronto, a 500-kilometre trip, I incur a cost of roughly one hundred dollars, including fuel and a share of other costs (repairs, insurance, licensing, the car’s purchase cost). However, unless I bring these costs to mind, I perceive only twenty dollars (for a tank of gasoline). A thirty dollar bus fare seems a bargain against a one hundred dollar driving cost, but not against twenty dollars. Ideally, we should be made aware of all driving costs, but next best is to lower public transport fares (with subsidies covering lost revenue), to get us to use public transport as we would if driving costs were fully perceived. This has a certain economic logic to it but is un-

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likely to work in practice. For it might take quite sharp fare cuts, even free public transport, to have much effect, a move that would be hard to sustain politically. Subsidies may be defended as necessary to secure efficient use of high-capacity transport (e.g., railways, dedicated busways). If fares are set to cover all costs, there may be too few customers to use available capacity fully, but subsidized fares could attract more people, thus putting unused capacity to work. However, if this only “tops up” the present base of transport customers, the impact on overall public transport use may not be large. If the arguments for subsidies are uninspiring, those against are compelling. For one thing, subsidies tend to “leak” from their intended use. For example, governments have long subsidized the Toronto Transit Commission to improve services and keep fares down, thus boosting ridership. Since 1970, when there was a two-milliondollar operating surplus, the ttc has recorded operating losses (excess of operating costs over revenues), reaching $188 million by 1990 and $215 million in 1995.25 Between 1970 and 1990, the ttc increased service levels (as measured by the number of vehicle-kilometres) by sixty-eight percent. Costs naturally increased, but with passenger numbers also growing (by sixty-six percent), per-passenger unit costs (total costs divided by the number of passengers) should have followed general inflation. In fact, unit costs rose faster, from twenty-nine cents per passenger to $1.37 in 1990, a 374 percent increase. If they had increased only with inflation, the 1990 figure would have been $1.11; the loss would then have been $71 million, not $188 million. The difference, $117 million, sixty-two percent of the operating loss, did not go to improved services or lower fares, but was spent on excess cost. (The 1995 calculation shows eighty-eight percent of subsidy absorbed in this way.) It is not hard to see what happened: ttc’s operating costs are mostly spent on staff pay and benefits (the figure was seventy-seven percent in 1995) . If not the only culprit, this is the most likely. Nor is it hard to see how labour costs spiral. An unsubsidized company can hire staff and pay wages only so far as it earns revenue, but there is no such limit for a subsidized entity: governments can be pressed to pay extra costs. So, it is often easier to concede wage increases and less-demanding work rules than risk a strike, or sign off on an administrator’s request for staff and funding, than to insist on careful justification. Here, the main beneficiaries of subsidy seem to be ttc employees and managers, not riders.

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The ttc is by no means an isolated example. High costs and subsidies led the British government to cut bus industry support: thereafter productivity rose, while costs decreased sharply. The current vogue for transport privatization and service contracting reflects this concern about costs and subsidies, as well as the realization that subsidies have not bought large market gains. Subsidies also undermine management. If managerial mistakes are covered by government subsidies, top executives have little incentive to monitor and discipline lower-level management or reward good performance. If anything, hiring and promotion decisions will favour those who “go along” over those with the skill and moral fibre necessary to effective leadership. To this we add the political supervision that comes with subsidy. If limited to broad policy, this may not occasion concern, but politicians and bureaucrats are prone to interfere in details, pushing a pet idea or imposing outside requirements (e.g., to hire a favoured contractor). With this level of involvement, which limits managerial autonomy and discourages initiative, there is little scope for a creative marketdriven strategy. This not to blame individuals – employees, managers, or politicians – but to draw attention to the systemic negative effects of subsidies, which reward managers and employees for toeing political lines, rather than doing their best to control costs and provide the best possible service to the public transport customer.

increasing driving costs If travelers cannot be persuaded to use public transport, they might be coerced into doing so. In democratic societies, people do not lightly accept coercion, but milder forms pass muster, and severe controls are accepted under emergency conditions. The least-intrusive method is to increase driving costs, upping licence fees, fuel taxes, parking charges, etc. Some justify this as necessary compensation for road and environmental costs, but in many jurisdictions financial expenditures on behalf of drivers are largely covered by present fees and taxes, while adding environmental costs may not affect driving costs enough to induce many motorists to try the bus or train.26 One interesting option is increased use of road tolls, making drivers pay according to the length of each trip and perhaps time of day (with higher charges during peak periods). This is now practical,

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since electronic pricing systems eliminate the need for expensive and inconvenient toll booths. Moreover, road pricing would make drivers more aware of driving costs, motivating some to take a second look at public transport. However, road tolls are unpopular except where they are used to finance new roads: then, road tolls promote car use, further undermining public transport. If tolling were applied to existing roads, public transport might benefit, but this move is less-often proposed and likely to be strenuously resisted. Of course, taxes and tolls could be set high enough – and the increases would have to be huge – to force people out of their cars, but I doubt whether any government, democratic or other, would risk the political fallout. (Britain’s Labour government faces strong opposition to far less dramatic tax increases.) And we might consider the justice of such a move: low-income drivers would be priced out of their cars, turning the roads into the preserve of the well heeled. Taxation and road pricing are not intrinsically bad, but they are only effective where there is a plausible public transport alternative. Yet few car users see public transport as a viable choice, and with good reason. No amount of tinkering – persuasive or coercive – can disguise this fact.

restraining the car Many cities are experimenting with car restraints – traffic calming,27 limits on downtown parking, special lanes for high-occupancy vehicles, and, in the most polluted cities, car bans. Though coercive, these measures are more likely to be accepted since they target evident ills. The environmental value of high fuel taxes is not obvious, but most can imagine the value of directly cutting the number of cars: less air pollution, safer streets, etc. Restraints are not popular, however, and can be undermined by administrative arrangements that give scope for cheating and favouritism. As a result, restraints will have practical effect only where the ills they address are demonstrably horrific: high rates of mortality and an evident decline in quality of life. This seems an unlikely basis for a general policy favouring public transport. For another, if restraints are applied only in limited areas, development, and the car traffic that goes with it, goes elsewhere. This shifts a problem from one place to another: it does not solve it.

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controlling land use It has long been known that land use – the location, kinds, and density of development – affects travel activity and choice of transport mode. Travel is lightest in compact densely populated areas where public transport is favoured, while the reverse is true of sprawling low-density suburbs. So, land use control is often seen as a way to reduce car use and boost public transport. The chart opposite, taken from a study of public transport in Melbourne,28 shows that at a low urban density of ten persons per hectare, only five to ten percent of work trips are attracted to public transit, but at forty persons per hectare transit captures about thirty percent. Yet, this relationship is not an ironclad rule. Cervero29 notes that in 1991, only seven percent of commuters to Box Hill, a compact suburban centre, rode public transit, even though forty-five percent live near rail transit. In a planner’s utopia, land and transport facilities are developed together. Governments control the location, density, and mix of land uses to support desired travel patterns and transport mode choices, and provide for transport facilities (e.g., rights of way, stations in retail and commercial developments). Transport facilities are constructed either as land is developed or in advance, to encourage desired land use patterns.30 However, governments are less able to control land use and transport than they were in the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s, and more often than not they have used such authority as they do have to ensure accessibility for cars, not public transport. Many of the best planning examples reflect decisions made during this earlier period, when people accepted a more authoritarian style of governance. This is not to deny the theoretical value of land use and transport planning but to see the practical difficulty of making it stick in popular democracies, which have difficulty securing consensus on invasive controls and sustaining them over extended periods. Moreover, land use controls only apply to changes in use sought by developers. As long as properties meet basic standards, we do not ask that they be torn down to make way for new forms of development: we live with what is in place. Since most travel occurs in and between established urban areas, it takes decades, sometimes centuries, for land use controls to have significant effect on transport patterns. Yet we are often told that the decline in public transport is an urgent matter requiring attention now, not in the distant future.

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Figure 3.1 The Effect of Urban Density on the Use of Public Transport for Work Trips, Melbourne, Australia,1995

The weakness of land use c ontrols is most evident on the urban periphery. Here, one may hope to prevent further reliance on cars by controlling undeveloped land, but in the absence of a strong regional authority, smaller communities outside larger cities are ready prey to well-financed and organized developers, whose natural interest is usually short-term profit, not longer-term transport rectitude. One may bemoan this reality, but it remains so. Even where they work, land use controls do not fix transport activity for all time. The buildings may stand, but their use changes, as residents and businesses come and go. An office might host a large workforce one year, the next year banks of computers linked to employees and customers located hundreds of kilometres away. Large houses may be made into multiple-unit rooming houses or shops. So, while some control may be possible, one cannot fully “pre-wire” demand for transport. Nor should we presume without question that land use controls are desirable. What makes sense in many places may not do so everywhere: some communities have limited economic prospects, which

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may be exploited only by land uses inimical to public transport. It is easy to be condescending about such uses, but a sense of local reality should give one pause. So too, we might doubt the transport presumptions of land use planning. Planners see compact cities as a way to produce a market for high-volume mass transit on largely fixed routes, a transport form introduced in the nineteenth and early twentieth century and sustained (with public subsidy) to this day. The aim is not to improve public transport, but to induce us to jam into crowded buses and subways, in effect forcing us to put up with what we have already abandoned. This is not to reject land use planning. Intelligent, democratic planning is possible and often the only way to ensure functional and humane communities. Nor is it wrong to concentrate urban land uses: any public transport system requires a market, which will be greater in more densely populated areas. But land use control should not serve as a cover for transport failure, nor is it an obvious factor in public transport planning, which must largely take land use as it is, not as it might be. I later present a flexible public transport structure that adapts to land uses as they are, and as they change, with high-capacity service where justified by population and employment densities, and flexible low-volume services elsewhere. Whether this approach can work remains to be seen – we might doubt it given the limited market success of many experiments in low-volume transit – but for the moment we should not accept the conceptual knot that ties public transport’s structure (and performance) to land use strategies that, even if the public accepts them, will take many decades to shape urban form.

i n c r e m e n ta l a d j u s t m e n t s t o m a r k e t i n g o r o p e r at i n g p r o c e d u r e s Under this heading, I include modest, pragmatic changes to public transport arising from transport managers, employees, and customers, including measures already discussed, though often pursued more cautiously. Pragmatic measures are often better targeted at specific issues and opportunities, and thus may be more effective in attracting customers and improving operating performance. Periodically, researchers and public transport organizations assemble such ideas in “best practice” reports,31 providing other managers ways to improve. In this way, an industry might pull itself up by its bootstraps.

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However, valuable as incrementalism may be to local transport managers, it cannot much improve overall markets if the basic circumstances and assumptions of traditional public transport remain unchallenged. If we can identify public transport’s underlying failings and find a new direction appropriate to today’s transport market, incremental measures can help along the way. Without this guidance, managers may busy themselves with myriad pragmatic “fixes”, which give the appearance of productive activity but deliver little of real market value.

i n t e g r at e d t r a n s p o r t p o l i c i e s Most transport policies combine various of the above measures. A typical combination is a policy “catalogue”, a list of favoured solutions organized under headings, perhaps called a “balanced” plan or “integrated” policy. Often, the list is solicited from interest groups, the general public, and experts, then adjusted for political priorities (as influenced by backroom lobbyists). At best, one gets the added effect of several measures: if solutions conflict, one gets less. Over the years, it has often been said that transport should be better integrated or coordinated, but in nations where governance is divided (e.g., between national and local levels), clashing views, miscommunication, or ineptitude more often produce a divergence, not a coming together on a common theme. In this context, the call for integration is typically intended to clear a few obvious insanities without substantially changing the status quo. An integrated strategy thus reduces to incrementalism and equally suffers from its limitations. This said, there is some research and practical evidence of the value of combining mutually supportive transport measures.32 In particular, coupling car restraints with public transport improvements can do more to build public transport use than either measure worked independently: the stick or carrot alone may not motivate the donkey, but together they spur action. This is a more interesting, but still elementary, form of integration, and the combined effect can only be large where public transport meets market needs: failing that, no amount of integration or coordination will have much effect. A usefully integrated transport strategy thus begins with, and keeps its sight on, characteristics and aspirations of transport customers. Only by discovering what will find their favour, then devising institutional means to bring it about, can one hope for a marketable

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transport system. Seeking to “integrate” existing transport and institutional arrangements, with little more than a passing thought for their market relevance, will do little to reverse the fortune of public transport. Of course, most transport operators want to see themselves as market-sensitive and respectful of the customer, but this is not necessarily to see what must be done to make public transport work in a fully integrated way for its customers. That task calls for careful thought about market and operating conditions and the will to bend transport institutions to customer needs and wants. A demanding task indeed. Perhaps then, before accepting this challenge, we should pause to ask whether the rewards from doing so warrant the effort. If the task is not easy, we should have good reason to proceed. More specifically, we now ask whether the benefits of a transport system with a strong public transport presence warrant the required effort to move away from a transport system dominated by cars.

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chapter four

A World without Public Transport

Suppose we awoke to a world that had never had public transport. No trains or buses, no subways or streetcars: a world in which the personal-use vehicle – the car, minivan, sport utility, pickup truck, motorcycle – had always been the only mechanized means of land travel. What would that world be like? Would it be better or worse than a world with workable public transport? This imagined world is not ours, but future generations may know it as theirs.33 A public transport system can shrink to the point where it makes less sense to fund unused trains and buses than to improve access for private transport. As society adapts to the absence of public transport, the car becomes the natural way to move, public transport an historical curiosity. If unappealing, this scenario cannot be dismissed as unlikely. Even large cities with good transit accommodate the car to keep development that would otherwise move to open and less-regulated spaces at the urban edge. And what starts as a small accommodation can end in a settlement pattern and way of life in which there is no place for public transport. Nor is this world clearly unworthy. For many, the car means more and better jobs, more choice of shops and services, more social and recreational opportunities. The car has its bad side, but it is not an unmitigated evil. So, if we are to make public transport work – as the last chapter implies, not an easy task – we should know why it is important to do so. Or, to put it another way, what is so bad about a world that is reliant on cars? This question is not easily answered. It is one thing to show the car’s present ill effects, quite another to judge its future impact. To do

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so is not just to say how many cars we will drive, of what technology, and what emission outputs. It is to relate the car’s role and impact to a way of life – social, political, and economic relationships, cultural expression, self-identity – of which the car is part effect, part cause, and to see that future through the lens of an unstable present, an era of change and uncertainty. Since my main concern is how to make public transport work, I am tempted to avoid the tangle of issues involved in saying why this effort should be mounted. Yet if we are to take seriously the task of remaking public transport, we need some sense, however imperfect, of the importance of doing so.

four billion cars A world without public transport would have many more cars, not in America, where most people drive already, but in parts of the world that are gaining the economic capacity for wide private mobility. In America, 270 million people drive 200 million cars and light trucks, a slowly growing number that would not much increase if public transport were ended. However, replicating present American mobility everywhere would expand the world fleet to 4.52 billion. It will take time to reach this number, for it depends on a large rise in per capita income in “have not” nations. Nonetheless, the economic transformation of poor nations, begun in earnest after the last world war, is likely to continue. Earning power need not arrive at current Western levels: in America, the population of cars grew quickly in the 1920s and boomed in the 1950s on the strength of far less than present incomes. A huge increase in vehicles might be prevented by natural constraint, but this seems unlikely. The stock of cheap petroleum may disappear in a few decades,34 but the resulting rise in fuel prices will encourage development of alternative energy sources. Indeed, manufacturers would likely respond to any lack of material for automobile construction with new vehicle designs and manufacturing techniques. Some nations may resist the spread of cars by limiting access to cities, preventing car-oriented developments, heavily taxing car owners, and investing in public transport. But the public cannot be counted on to support policies that sacrifice mobility, and the alternative – political repression – is not likely to be sustained in a world that is opening itself to democratic ideals.

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settlement In a world that is untouched by public transport and reliant on private mobility, one would see not only more vehicles but different patterns of settlement. These patterns are not obvious: the relationship between transport and settlement is complex and not clearly shown by car-oriented developments that rely on the proximity of nearby cities that predate the automobile. What we now see in the developed world may not be what the future holds for our descendants. One part of the transport-settlement relationship is the effect of existing settlements on transport needs and choices. If the places where we live, work, shop, and play are close and linked by paths, trips on foot may predominate. A densely populated residential area far from workplaces and shops in the city might favour bus or train trips. A low-density subdivision with winding roads and cul-de-sacs would favour access by car. Of course, settlements change: vacant lots within and open spaces beyond are developed, while less-admired parts are redeveloped to contemporary tastes. Where the natural, historic, or familiar is honoured, modern deviations will be resisted, but the descendants of present generations may have other ideas. If private mobility is their priority, open country and the once-loved historical city will give way to the buildings, roads, and parking that make the car useful and meaningful. The other part of the relationship is the effect of transport on settlement. This influence need not be decisive. The narrow winding streets of European cities reflect a time when walking and the ox-cart were common, and geographic features, not transport, played a large role in settlement. Where avenues were wide, this was less for mass transport than for the majestic processions that reminded people of the powers, religious and secular, under which they lived. The influence of transport on settlement is more evident outside city centres. Stage services of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries encouraged the development of ribbon-like villages along roads radiating from a city or town, while suburbs formed in clusters about nineteenth-century railway stations. The car’s contribution was the labyrinthine subdivision orbiting a spacious retail and commercial complex. I have not spoken of the effect of land use controls, nor of economic relationships between settlement in larger regions. To do so would take

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us into a complex area, but I should at least say that what we observe (homes, offices, factories, shops, roads, railways, airports) reflects the joint working of diverse factors, often over a long period of time. Since settlements show the impress of many factors, we cannot see the developments that arose with the car as pure products of the car. Moreover, most established settlements change slowly, so it may take many decades, perhaps centuries, for the car’s full impact to be seen. Consider the paradigm car-dependent suburb: winding streets, single-family dwellings with neat lawns, shopping mall, schools, parks. The structure is simple, with a few immediately required functions; for other needs, the suburban dweller uses facilities in a nearby city: hospitals, universities, larger libraries, etc. The suburb outside the jurisdiction of a nearby city often has an extractive relationship with that city. Money earned downtown is spent in suburban shops, while city facilities funded by levies on city residents and businesses are used by suburbanites for free or at a low charge. The central city also absorbs more than its fair share of costs to help those requiring social assistance. The flow of benefits to the suburbs and costs to the city may be offset by lunchtime spending downtown, but not by much. The effects? With high city costs spread over too few taxpayers, taxes are high and investment in urban infrastructure limited. To avoid high taxes and find better surroundings, many city businesses and residents move to the less-regulated, less-taxed periphery. Where this leads may be debated: one possibility is that the centre hollows out and, if not abandoned, is redeveloped for new uses not unlike those at the periphery. Thus, the suburb’s relationship with the city is not stable, and it is likely to break down as the city adapts. Hence, we cannot be sure that the present car-oriented suburb is the ultimate settlement form. I leave further discussion to those better versed in such matters, but to give some sense of what might be involved, let me suggest the following possibilities. 1 Other things being equal, private mobility tends to disperse development. Urban forms reflect economic and other advantages of proximity and density, but the car’s need for space, for roads, parking, fuel and repair stations, limits what can be done in a given area. And with more awareness of the health effects of polluted air, people may avoid areas suffering from heavy traffic and stimulate development in outlying areas.

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2 Over time, traditional developments may give way to those devised with the car in mind and integrated with it. Mobility favours buildings with internal parking and direct road access, such as an office complex with its own ramp to a nearby highway. Buildings would be accessed from their interior, outside openings being for cars. Contrast this with the exterior orientation of homes and businesses where people walk or catch a passing bus. 3 If more driving means less walking, public spaces may be less highly valued and, if provided at all, more likely to become “club” spaces. A society that values the privacy of the car might appreciate the interior courtyard of an office development, or the gated garden/playground accessible to those with keys. Our thinking about these influences is conditioned by the familiar: a concentration of people and business that we call a city and distinguish from the rural; public institutions and open spaces where people recreate or assemble; architectural links between homes, shops and streets that make neighbourhood meaningful. In this context, the noise, pollution, and blight of the arterial road or expressway is seen as an external imposition. However, the car will not for long remain a skin to the sloughed if unwanted: it will become part of, internal to, an organic whole. Having accepted this, we will make settlements that are both for the care and reliant on it. I am not sure what this new pattern might be, nor how it would compare with the product of a good public transport system, but I suggest it will be far from what we now take for granted.

l o c a l e n v i r o n m e n ta l i m pa c t s While vehicle numbers may greatly increase globally, air pollution in particular locales might not differ much from places where private transport already dominates. America without public transport might have more traffic to and from city centres, hence more carbon monoxide, nitrogen oxides, volatile hydrocarbons, and smog, but not much more,35 and this rise could be offset by relocations to the urban periphery induced by congestion. This is not to say that air quality will not worsen, but to make the obvious point that where public transport carries few people, its loss will not much affect car numbers and their emissions. As private motorization spreads to developing nations, their local environments will undoubtedly worsen, particularly if manufacturers

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are allowed to sell vehicles with few or no emission controls. Some areas may suffer more than others due to geographic or climatic factors that slow pollutant dispersion. Yet on the whole and assuming that cleaner cars eventually arrive in the developing world, matters might be no worse than in heavily traveled parts of America.36 Of course, conditions could worsen greatly. Efforts to cut emissions and introduce new energy forms (batteries, fuel cells, etc.) could fail. The car fleet could exceed six billion. The auto industry could continue promoting vehicles and driving practices that are harmful to the environment, as it now does in advertisements depicting overpowered cars recklessly driven on roads and across open country. The foregoing does not account for other pollution sources such as industry, office and shops, residences each of which adds pollutants to the air we breathe. If growing car emissions were offset by cuts in these sources, matters might not be so bad, but significant cuts are unlikely, especially when many developing nations are industrializing. Whatever the outcome, poor air quality does not automatically make a case for public transport. In 1998 the government of Ontario, Canada accepted the finding that eighteen hundred Ontarians die prematurely each year from smog-related causes but saw little need to act. This government has cautiously moved to curb the dirtiest cars by enforcing emissions standards but has no serious interest in public transport. Political laxity reflects an enduring public tolerance for ill health and risk. In medieval cities, unsanitary conditions were tolerated for centuries. Londoners suffered killer smogs until four thousand deaths in 1952 led Britain to curb domestic coal burning. So too, today’s urbanites accept air pollution and highway death tolls as part of life’s burden, as their forebears took for granted the open sewer in the middle of the street. This does not mean that one should give up the fight for better conditions, but one must be prepared for the public to judge that they would rather put up with the consequences of the car than lose what it offers in mobility. Moreover, if public transport is to be offered as a public health solution, it must be shown to be a match for the problem, and that cannot be done with the half-measures described in the preceding chapter.

g l o b a l c l i m at e c h a n g e Automotive combustion of gasoline and diesel fuels produces carbon dioxide, a large contributor to the greenhouse effect, which many sci-

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entists believe is increasing global temperatures and causing climatic disruptions. This is often seen as an important reason to curb our appetite for cars. In the early 1990s, industrial sources emitted twenty billion tonnes of carbon dioxide annually,37 compared with four billion tonnes from transportation sources,38 of which perhaps half (two billion) was due to cars.39 So, even a large shift of present car users to public transport would not much affect overall emissions. For example, a twenty percent shift (in North America increasing public transport use about tenfold) would cut world carbon dioxide emissions by less than one percent. However, a future world fleet of 4.52 billion cars is quite another matter. This fleet would produce as much carbon dioxide as we now generate from all forms of human activity, not to mention other greenhouse gases emitted by cars. Combined with industrial growth, the result could be further, perhaps faster, rises in atomospheric carbon dioxide and dramatic climate changes. Despite political sideshows, such as Rio and Kyoto,40 climate impact would escalate. Will climate change affect us severely enough to trigger meaningful changes in transport policy? Inland nations far from rising oceans and northerners who might anticipate relief from the biting cold may not sympathize with the plight of coastal or tropical nations. Moreover, unlike local environmental issues which, to a degree, lend themselves to local action, global issues are not so readily approached.

motor accidents and danger Most people know that road accidents are part of the price we pay for private mobility. Vehicle and road standards, driver education and regulation have limited casualties, but the car user is still at far greater risk of death or injury than the public transport user. Of course, accidents happen to other people: so, as with poor air quality, frequent accidents are tolerated. Less appreciated is the pedestrian’s sense of danger, which is so common as to seem normal. If danger is not meaningful to all, most know that contact with a speeding car means serious injury or death. So parents anxiously watch their children and the walk to school frequently replaced by a car trip. The basic freedom to walk is curtailed: one walks, but awareness of one’s surroundings is diminished by the need to watch for traffic, and one walks less often, for walkways by busy roads are no longer inviting.

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Of course, the car is not a threat everywhere, and a world fully adapted to the car might provide more safe car-free areas. But the point of the car is instant accessibility: for it to work, it must have intimate contact with human life. Given the large amount of space required for the car’s functions, car-free areas will be at a premium payable only by the better off.

the unsociable car Environmental and safety issues are often given as reasons for promoting public transport and curbing the car, but they are only part of a much larger problem. Cause or effect, the car is one with an emerging culture with its own settlement patterns, personal outlook, social forms, and economy. With this new culture be better or worse than one with good public transport? Easy to ask, but not to answer With new cultures come new values: what we may call bad others might see as unimportant or good. Nor is there a clear relationship between transport and a way of life: does transport influence culture, or is it the other way round – does culture shape transport? In a short space I can only briefly explore these matters, but at least I have issued the warning: the issues are complex and easily misinterpreted. Apart from convenience, the attraction of the car is that it allows its owner to control an important part of his or her life. For those put off by the press of humanity or anxieties of modern family life, the car is a welcome respite. Knowing this, car makers put this aspect forward in advertisements and go out of their way to make their product as comforting as possible: power locks, noise insulation, and air conditioning (to keep the outside out), well-designed seats and rests, superior music systems, and so on. Only sadists or masochists object to comfort (and we might wish fewer such people worked in public transport). However, we should also see the car as one with a culture that favours the individual over the social and public. Public good has given way to self-esteem and self-gratification, material success is honoured over contribution, private rights substitute for morality and duty. The car does not cause less-noble sentiments: it facilitates them. By placing people in private units, the car subdues awareness of the unmet needs of others beyond one’s circle of family and friends. The closing car door also closes the mind to the public spaces that make

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settlement unique and human, and that provide a spiritual and practical context for cooperative endeavour. In this way, one comes to prefer people with agreeable characters and like views and one is distracted from the obligation to seek out and cooperate with others on matters of joint importance. Our sociality may be restored by interactive media such as the Internet. The popularity of e-mail is remarkable and perhaps a precursor to a new social form. But if the history of the telephone is repeated, the Internet will increase the impetus for direct interaction: contact by electron does not make the grade. Thence we return to physical transport, and its virtues or vices. Of course, we can’t force social sensibility by making people use public transport: the point is rather that the car is not a benign social force. And if public transport supports sociality, it does so only if people want to use it. Where the public domain no longer is a respite from substandard houses, unsafe factories, and general blight, public space will be used only if it is positively welcoming. Would that public transport were so!

economics undone? Economic activity is an outcome of civilization, not its cause, as some economists may think. Economies that meet needs, advance social and moral ends, and provide inspiration may do good and elevate society. However, economic gain is not necessarily positive: it can equally arise from destructive self-gratification and wrongdoing. To say that economic gain is an unqualified good is to licence the weak, perverse, and peripheral, which together undercut the very basis of civilized society. Thus, we ask two questions. First, are the ends of a car-dependent economy better or worse than ends favoured by an economy based on a diverse transport system that includes public transport? From what has been said so far, it appears that different transport forms do not forward the same ends, and the car seems not to favour especially admirable ends. Second, are favoured ends pursued effectively? Will a car-reliant economy use the least physical and human resources to accomplish its valued ends? As we are unsure about the nature of a future carreliant society, an answer will depend on some guesswork, based on present experience.

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The high costs of car-dependence are an obvious concern. Polluted air and accidents increase the costs of health care, cause property damage, and generate other human costs. We bear a financial burden for car-oriented infrastructure, not just roads but sewer and water, schools and other public amenities in sprawled housing and business developments. These costs – ultimately paid by road users or general taxpayers – are an economic drag. Resources used to support the car and repair the damage done by cars are not available to produce other valued goods and services. Since governments and private agencies rarely keep up with the car’s insatiable demand for space, roads are more congested. Short trips become expeditions, and time (our most valuable and finite resource) is wasted. For commerce, time waste means more cost, less profit, perhaps reason to relocate. As with other costs, losses are measured in billions.41 Yet these effects are only the tip of the iceberg. They are external, imposed on an economy from the outside, but the car also alters economies from the inside, for example by allowing manufacturers to locate outside urban centres. While it is not easy to spot these changes, and therefore hard to say whether the car helps or hinders economic activity, consider the following. An economy serves our ends through organization. Labour, material, land, and capital are important but have productive effect only as organized in a specific way. Organization may be the mindset of a labourer, craftworker, or professional. It may be the structure of an enterprise (or many enterprises acting in concert). It may be social patterns and institutions established by law or regulation. Organization is not an intrinsic good: too much of the wrong sort stifles innovation and blunts responsibility. However, the capacity to organize (individual, corporate or societal) is vital to economic activity. If this were not so, there would be little need for higher education, and businesses would spend less time organizing complex production and delivery systems, or establishing global networks and alliances. What does reliance on cars mean for organizing ability? To start, without public transport, those who cannot afford cars are lost to the workforce. In effect, the car makes an economy of the better off: its producers are people with cars as, for the most part, are its consumers. Apart from the fact that this is unjust such an economy has access to a smaller, more costly labour pool. The ability of an employer to organize resources is thus curtailed in an car-dependent economy.

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If, as earlier suggested, a car-reliant world tends to disperse, it also tends to isolate, at least in geographical terms. This seems less convenient for organization: while dispersed functions at a distance can be linked by transport, costs are higher and formal planning a necessity. Organization is not prevented, but it is perhaps more difficult, hence less attractive. Businesses in established markets may be less affected than those in emerging markets (e.g., technology services), which gain from local contact. In a dynamic industry, related, even competing, businesses may cluster, all gaining from contacts facilitated by proximity. Consider a lively downtown coffee shop patronized by workers from local stores and offices. Then a basement lunchroom in an isolated suburban office: the same people from the same business with the same ideas. One has scope for new economic linkages, the other has none. There is some evidence that car-oriented settlements are less efficient than compact forms favourable to public transport,42 though matters are obscured by direct and indirect subsidies. Tax breaks and preferential financing are readily attracted to new construction, less so to small or complex redevelopments: politicians like to cut ribbons for new roads or bask in the statistics of building booms on “greenfield” sites. To this we add the government subsidy implicit in the facilities provided by the central city including a pervasive road network. At the same time, the car provides more options for production and consumption. Mobile workers who are able to drive fifty kilometres or more to work allow businesses to locate for market access or convenience of material supply. Cars allow workers to translate their earning power into a higher material standard – a better house than could be afforded in the city, with money left over for recreation and other goods. The foregoing speaks to regional and corporate effects, but we must not forget individual workers. Will reliance on cars positively or negatively affect their work capacity and motivation? On the positive side, individualism promoted by private mobility might be credited with popular pursuit of higher personal goals. With individualism comes a desire to better oneself, leading to education and pursuit of work. To the extent that work is of value (ie., not demeaning or immoral), we would perhaps agree that something has been gained.43 Against this, the health effects of poor air quality appear as lost time, diminished physical and mental function, and thus reduced motivation. And lengthy car commutes from distant suburbs subtract

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time from the day: if this loss occurs outside working hours, it nonetheless has economic bearing, for it takes a toll in personal stress, ultimately reducing the employee’s willingness to tender time and enthusiasm for the employer’s benefit. We might also question the consumption aspect of a car-oriented society. Unlike the bus, the car is more likely to be used for shopping, recreation and escape (consumer activities) and is itself a consumer item, especially because choice of car expresses individuality and material success. Whatever might be said for or against materialism, the question is whether a car culture that urges consumption is one that also promotes production, with workers who work hard and well. In the best situation, motivated workers are not produced simply by training or by threats, but by fostering a personal commitment to good work. I raise this issue partly because productivity has become a topic of much interest in my country, and because businesses facing competitive international markets will need motivated workers. Of course, replacing cars with public transport won’t boost productivity, but we should ask whether abandoning public transport for a car culture would either. A complex culture supported by a mix of private and public transport offers choice. Choice fosters individual lifestyles and diverse motivations, including personal models of work that will nourish a vibrant and growing economy. Perhaps before committing fully to the car, we should ask whether the culture and motives that underlie it can sustain a healthy and productive society.

why public transport? The preceding focuses on the implications of a world in which the car is the only form of land transport. Now we must turn this around, to state the case for public transport. If relying entirely on the car is not ideal, we must still say why we must go to the trouble of producing a public transport alternative, especially given its past market performance and several decades of failed rescue attempts. In doing so, it would be better to quantify the pros and cons of private and public transport: thus, the economic loss due to air pollution and road accidents might be given in money values, to help decide how significant this loss is. But to do so would lead us into more detailed analysis than is appropriate here, and I think we can progress without taking this additional step. So, with this limitation, let’s consider why public transport should be made to work.

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1 An effective public transport system that greatly reduces car use can improve air quality and health. 2 Without highly attractive public transport, economic advances in the most populous nations will be translated into car use and huge increases in greenhouse gases. 3 While driving can be made safer, the most effective way to ensure public safety is through greater use of public transport. 4 The car induces settlement favourable to its use. Unless public transport is seen as a viable option, housing and commercial developments will continue to stress car access, to the point of locking out public transport. 5 Public transport, when welcoming, favours positive social interactions that help build a strong, economically potent society. The car privatizes individuals, encouraging an interior culture that is less favourable to cooperative endeavour. 6 By ensuring mobility for all social strata, good public transport brings active social and economic engagement. Low-income families in low-quality car-oriented suburbs with few community facilities are often isolated from the social mainstream, with inevitable ill effect on material and psychological well-being. The social price to be paid for this isolation is ill health, resentment, and criminality, not to mention loss of economic product. 7 The car offers economic and other benefits to its user, and to employers but imposes economic costs on society (health care, property damage, infrastructure costs) and may reduce productivity by fostering settlement patterns that are less conducive to innovation, and possibly a culture that is more focused on consumption than production. Public transport thus promotes the physical health, safety and wellbeing of the population, a cohesive and stable society, and a productive economy based on the diverse organizational opportunities afforded by a complex and inclusive society. To me, these seem good reasons for wanting public transport to work – but only if we can make it work. To do that, we must understand the public transport problem better: we need to know why public transport does not work.

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chapter five

Approaching the Problem

Time to take bearings. Public transport has failed to secure its place in the market – the failure is the effect, not the cause. Finding that cause, learning why public transport has failed, may not be easy: the reasons may be many and not readily apparent. In this task, we are as lost hikers, our way obscured by the forest’s dense undergrowth. To see why public transport has failed we must see beyond its undergrowth – its particular character, its intricate operations, finance, administration, and planning. By climbing a tree to get the lay of the land, we may find a way out and return to the ground ready to cut through the brush with steady purpose. From our perch, with the market failure of public transport clearly in view, the striking fact is that it attracts too few customers – a seemingly trivial point, but a reminder that people are public transport’s market. That is, poor market numbers originate, not with dark economic forces, but with individuals who choose not to use public transport. Whatever the reasons for their choice, the point is that public transport can be revived only by re-gaining their favour. To do so, we must know transport’s human aspect and respect it. That is, we will not coerce or manipulate people into using what they don’t want: we will not force public transport on them. We will make it work better, so that they come to prefer it. To do this, we must see through the customer’s eyes, especially the eyes of those who do not use public transport. Who are they? What is their experience of public transport and their attitude toward it? What are their transport needs and wants, seen in the light of family, work, commitments, and their personal traits and ambitions? Then (and only then), what must be done to secure their custom?

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One might seek answers in the technical literature on consumer psychology, economics, and transport marketing, planning, and operations. But this is not an easy tree to climb: getting through the tangles takes time and may take us away from the customer’s view. My approach is more intuitive and, I hope, more directly to the point. I might say that I climb a different tree. In doing so, I sometimes use technical material (statistics and charts), but sparingly, and only when it suggests plain answers. This is not to deny technical rigour but to see the problem in another way. Nor is it intended to substitute untutored opinion for expert knowledge of transport systems: if our intuitions do not measure up to the reality, they must be set aside.

customers as people Customers are not the numbers counted by transport turnstiles, nor are they the “average consumers” of market reports: they are people with thoughts, feelings, and desires. Statistics help us understand market issues but we need a more direct sense of this personal aspect of transport, not to know particular persons, but to have a general concept of the person as it affects transport choice. I am tempted to duck this well-worn topic of philosophy (more recently of psychology, anthropology, and other disciplines), but it is not to be avoided. We cannot say how to get more people to use public transport without an explicit or implicit view of human motivation. And if that view is unrealistic, a strategy based on it will fail. Therefore, I offer the following brief remarks but warn that I greatly simplify complex issues. People as Thinking and Feeling Beings Actions arise from a complex mentality with cognitive (thinking) and emotive (feeling) aspects: if not entirely separable, each has a distinctive character. Roughly, cognition is an awareness (of ideas and of the world around us): riding a train, I am aware of the scenery rushing past, of other passengers, of the fact (which the conductor just passed on) that the train is a half-hour late. My awareness induces emotion (a distinct experience): seeing open fields, I feel pleasure, but a young child’s whining irritates me, and I feel anger towards the railway for running trains late, and perhaps anxiety about being transported at high speed.

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We see these aspects in the way people talk about transport. First, imagine a technical presentation on transport functions and problems – all cognitive, enough to put one to sleep. Then, imagine someone recalling a past trip, not just the facts but the passion that gives it life: the joy of escape or unplanned discovery, the uneasiness that comes with transport uncertainties, or the frustrations of failed expectation. Indeed, that people react in this way should alert us to transport’s unique emotive aspects. To know why people reject public transport, we must be aware of these twin aspects. This is not the place for a theory of cognition and emotion, but before I leave this matter, I want to show how our view of issues can be distorted by stressing one aspect over the other and suggest a balanced middle view. Stressing our emotive side implies that we act without thinking. That we don’t ride buses is then seen as the working of impulse. The evident solution – manipulation or coercion – is, in my mind, neither morally acceptable nor especially effective. Nor does this view accord with the consumer’s observable skill in handling demanding market situations: complex choices are made quickly with little hard information. That people daily cope well with many such decisions is remarkable. Moreover, once the particulars of a consumer’s situation are known, what at first seems a bad choice (spending five thousand dollars a year for a car when a bus pass costs less than one thousand dollars) may now seem highly intelligent. Then there is the other extreme – the “rational man” motivated entirely by the cognitive side. This view assumes omniscient beings who know their needs as well as the price and quality of their transport options, and choose strictly on that basis. It makes customers into unfeeling machines; whereas real people react viscerally: ask anyone who has been left behind at a bus stop. Nor are we omniscient: I suspect for example, that few people have any idea how their local buses work. A more realistic middle view sees practical decisions as the result of close cooperation between our emotive and cognitive sides in response to highly imperfect situations. To see matters this way is to respect choice and to give credit for common sense, while seeing its practical limits. This complicates matters – public transport choices will not be readily diagnosed nor altered – but we must accept this complexity for its greater realism and humanity.

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People as Active Beings We have moments of treasured passivity, quietly absorbing what is around us or disengaging altogether, but much of our lives involves active engagement with the world. This point may seem obvious, but it is heavy with implication for transport. Outside of science fiction, people do not travel in suspended animation: they live in a place that happens to move. When it comes to lifeless cargo, the purpose of transport is to move it from A to B expeditiously, economically, and with minimum damage, but aware and active passengers require something more. Cargo cannot care about comfort and security or about the active quality of time in transit, but passengers do. A trip may provide a chance to relax, a moderation of life’s pace, during which we may nonetheless be quite active, preparing for a meeting or coping with several cranky children. We should not then be surprised if people judge transport by how well it provides for life in transit and reject attempts to move people as cargo. People as Moral Beings A person is much more than a creature driven by its own needs. A person is a moral being committed to stable social norms. Indeed, when we say people are rational, we mean not just that they are quick of mind but also that they respect moral norms. The nature of these norms need not occupy us. The key fact is that morality shapes behaviour. Some behaviours are rejected, others accepted, yet others given priority. This contrasts with the economist’s notion of consumer preferences as behavioural atoms undifferentiated between the moral, non-moral and immoral: economic theories built on this premise fail to preserve significant structural features of human conduct. An important manifestation of morality is the formation of stable relationships in personal lives and commercial dealings, including customer relationships with transport providers. In at least some markets, people need a degree of trust or faith in the supplier, the implication being that an enduring relationship is necessary to the exchange process and (as I will later argue) particularly important for public transport.

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Figure 5.1

An underlying assumption of economics – which we question – is that consumer choice arises solely from an ordering of preferences for goods and services. The customer is assumed to act only on the value of what is for sale, not on an independent judgment of its seller. If the latter judgment acquires economic significance, it only does so as an indirect assessment of the product or service. People as Habitual Beings with a History As rational beings, we can decide and act on a case by case basis, according to present conditions and opportunities. However, most behaviour is habitual and thus an historical artifact. We think, feel, and act in the here-and-now, but the content of our thoughts, feelings, and decisions is shaped by the accumulated effect of education, personal experience, and acquired prejudice. This reinforces what was just said about customer relationships. These are not ephemeral market exchanges that live only in the present. Consumer choice is integral with, and affected by, personal history. Since a living history is not readily diverted, we should not expect problems to be corrected easily. There will be no quick fixes.

approaching the pub l ic transport problem Our view of the customer is of a thinking, feeling person acting from within a personal history, motivated by the moral and non-moral (and sometimes immoral). Why has public transport failed to gain this person’s favour? We begin with the chart below, which shows a significant pattern of transport use. This chart, from a 1991 report prepared for the Canadian Urban Transit Association, reflects data from several Canadian cities showing how often public and private transport is used by people of various ages.44 Details vary from city to city, and charts for other countries and for intercity travel might differ considerably, but the broad pattern should be similar. The top line shows trips by all vehicular modes of transport, public and private, for each age group. Teens travel more than youngsters and middle-aged adults travel most, reflecting work and family commitments, while retirement (or disability) reduces travel. The lower

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Figure 5.2

line, trips by public transport, shows that young people actively use public transport but drop it in the late teens and early twenties. Beyond this age, most public transport riders are poorly paid people who are unable to buy a car, many of them women or minorities who face educational, social, or employment inequities. The chart may be seen as evidence of a fixed relationship between transport choice and stages in the human lifecycle. Younger people, having neither the resources nor the legal authority to drive, take the bus, but the mobility needs of work and family dispose adults to cars. Once one has a family with kids and a dog, it makes more sense to drive than ride the bus. Car-oriented lifestyles reinforce this relationship. Comforting but circuitous subdivision streets exclude transit and make walking a leisure activity, not a way to get from place to place or to reach distant bus stops. In such subdivisions the car is preferred, as well as the fastpaced lifestyle that goes with it: auto commutes, regular trips to shops and fast-food outlets, outings to open country or camping ground: not activities conducive to the slow bus. This scenario offers little hope for increase in use of public transport. In nations with slow-growing populations which are also aging, youth are a shrinking proportion of the market and (if discounts are offered) also a low-yield revenue source. Other riders held only by their inability to buy cars will be lost as their income levels rise (an

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important factor in developing nations). And while the market for public transport might be boosted by a future lifestyle change among adults now are now wedded to cars, it is not a change we should expect any time soon. Seeing the market as largely fixed – the affluent lost to the car, the poor and disabled comprising the main market for transit – we cannot help but favour cheap basic service. As riders become yet more eager to drive or decide to walk or bicycle the market for public transport will shrink. In effect, by projecting the present into the future we plan for failure. With apology to Oscar Wilde,45 worse than planning for something is getting it. However, we need not see the coming-of-age rejection of public transport as immutable, nor lifestyle changes as precedent to market success. These factors make for a challenging market, but public transport’s failure cannot be ascribed entirely to their influence. To see this, we need only look to better transit systems that have done much to develop customer interest. Indeed, the graph presented above, which depicts public transport’s generality, hides an important detail: among the many who make up that generality are the few who offer higherquality services – such as comfortable express coach or rail service from the suburbs to downtown, or between two nearby cities – thereby attracting a more diverse customer base, including high-income middleaged males and females so often lost by conventional transit. Bearing this in mind, I now want to shift the focus from external forces that impinge on public transport to matters more within our control. Which of public transport’s failings if corrected could make a difference in the market? Here, we should consider two distinct possibilities. An obvious possibility is product deficiency: adults do not ride public transport because the transport product fails to meet their requirements; it is too slow, too uncomfortable, etc. Indeed, that young people stop using public transport soon after reaching legal driving age suggests it did not meet their needs either. Aware of public transport’s many individual faults, we might see product deficiency as the primary issue, perhaps as the only source of customer disfavour. Then, the remedy follows with seemingly logical force: improve the product. Buy better buses and trains, keep them clean, run them often and on time, make better connections. Do this and the problem will be solved.

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But there may be another more obscure failing: a deficiency in the relationship between transport providers and their customers. Even the best product cannot be sold if the seller is disliked or distrusted. Perhaps, instead of abandoning buses because of their poor service, young people don’t like those who operate them and, given the alternative, are pleased to see the back of them. This version equally fits the observed rapidity with which young adults abandon public transport.46 Product and relationship issues are not unrelated. If customers do not relate well to transport providers, they may not accept new products as readily as might be hoped. Nor are they likely to be forthcoming about their preferences and thus will be less helpful to market researchers and product developers. In addressing customer relationships, I run somewhat against a tradition of analysis focused on transport characteristics as motivators of customer choice. In many transport studies, once external factors (e.g., demographics, economics, political aims) are set out, attention shifts to the regularity, speed, or other attributes of transport. These greatly influence customers but are better approached from the human side, to see the complex dynamic that shapes preferences, and that either supports or works against efforts to identify worthy service improvements. I claimed earlier that the customer’s reaction to public transport arises from a personal history: our thoughts and feeling about transport and its providers come from past experience. So, to understand how public transport fails, we had best see how this history plays out. We start with the customer’s first brush with public transport, for it seems that what is lost is lost early.

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chapter six

The Customer Relationship

Our first acquaintance with public transport is often with a bus, a trip to the shops with a parent, or daily school travel. Longer trips – vacations or visits to distant family – give the young child experience of intercity coaches, trains and airlines. Later, the emerging adult, having gone far on foot or cycle and not ready to drive, extends his or her reach by using public transport. Young minds are instantly attracted by the idea of travel to new places, even if it is only a few kilometres down the road and early transport encounters often are occasions of personal growth. So, one might anticipate a positive lifetime relationship with public transport born of familiarity with it, and of the imaginative and romantic possibilities it holds out. But public transport’s inspiring aspects are offset by the less endearing qualities. I recall – indeed still feel – the endless wait in the biting cold at a lonely suburban bus stop in 1960s Toronto. Others may remember a driver’s scowl, cramped seats, or no seat at all, or the queasiness some feel when seated at the back of the bus. Where I live, most young people experience the yellow bus for daily trips to school or for periodic educational forays. Later, they recall the turmoil playing itself out just beyond the driver’s rear-view glance, or perhaps the keenly-felt social wins and losses that now occasion nostalgia or amusement. Less well remembered are narrow, hard seats, rough suspension, and primitive ventilation, but our early impressions of public transport nonetheless bear their imprint. Equally important is a presumed relationship with the operator that is inferred from early experience. This is not the economist’s ideal of buyers and sellers dealing as equals in a transport market: in the for-

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mative years, the parties are hardly equals with choices. The relationship has more of dependence, captivity, being beholden, perhaps a sense of real or imagined abuse. A person burdened with this heritage does not anticipate good service but basic provision at the operator’s discretion. The underlying understanding is that we ride as long as we behave ourselves and acknowledge the authority, usually a government, that lets the bus or train run.47 In this take-it-or-leave-it atmosphere, the response is often to leave it when one can. Transport operators may not intend to project such an atmosphere and may say I have the psychology wrong: people do not feel that persecuted on public transport. However, we don’t know, for early experience seeps into a psychic backdrop that is only revealed under close probing. Such probing is hardly the approach of most transport studies. Imagine a market survey in a shopping mall, a grocery-laden subject on a couch at Centre Court, recounting childhood transport memories to a bearded psychologist. If this seems unusual, it is because we expect surveys not to probe deeply: it they are too personal the results too open to interpretation. Of course, many public transport patrons like their services.48 If they did not and if they could drive, they would not ride. But they are a modest part of the transport market, except in large cities. The larger part comprises those who reject public transport, and to whom we must look for a new direction. The personal history that shapes our disposition for or against public transport is not a rigid determinant: begun in childhood, it develops through adulthood. This provides hope, for capable operators (if unable to change the past) can improve current perception. Even committed drivers use public transport in distant cities or when the car is being repaired and may be influenced by a good experience. Too often, though, the inclination to prefer the car is reinforced. The process of discovering transport might be described in other ways. Transport preferences are early conditioned by positive experience of the car – outings with friends, sexual adventures, exploration, thrill seeking. While adults have other experiences and needs, they often heed the child inside: “Cars are fun, buses are not”. More austerely, we describe this as being raised in a lifestyle that grants fulfilment to those with cars. However, when we describe our emerging relationship with transport, the point is that the past imposes patterns on future behaviour.

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These patterns are not mere habits that might easily be broken but entrenched dispositions that are resistant to change. So, if market theorists imagine consumers weighing transport choices, it rarely happens in reality: indeed, people strongly disposed to one mode (often the car) may never consider the alternative. This patterning is inconvenient for our attempt to make public transport work, for even if services are much improved, most people will continue to drive. This may be seen as a sign of public irrationality and thus cause for intervention, say to restrain car use. However, if patterning has a non-rational character, it is far from irrational. Patterning is a normal and rational part of everyday life. Before rushing out the door in the morning, we do not pause to decide whether the car or the bus is better: with little time, we drive, according to our usual pattern. If this behaviour is sometimes inexpedient, it is rarely so, and time saved by not deciding on each occasion more than compensates. By contrast, hovering on the doorstep wondering what to do, signifies not rationality but its loss. But suppose public transport has been improved so that it is far and away the fastest and cheapest alternative. Surely to ignore this and drive anyway is seriously irrational. Perhaps, but let’s not judge too quickly. For one thing, factors other than speed and cost may be at work: a saleswoman needs her car to carry samples, or an office worker works late, beyond the times when there is frequent public transport service. For another, even when public transport is the best choice, customers are not unreasonable in preferring cars. If they were poorly served in the past, it does not suffice to improve service: operators must do more to regain their favour. The burden of proof, as it were, lies with operators, not customers. This is the effect of a strong disposition to drive, which by blocking thought of public transport, places that burden where it belongs – with its provider. We will achieve more by assuming that drivers make sensible decisions than by writing them off as idiots. This is not to say that transport choices are always rational – some are strange indeed – but that our general and firm patterns of choice should be assumed to reflect the respective strengths of the car and public transport. So, if the market for public transport is weak, we should attribute this not to people who insist on driving, but to deficiencies in public transport. Moreover, if car use is well-engrained, we will see this as evidence not of stupidity or stubborness but of fundamental faults in public transport. The last chapter spoke of two such faults, deficient service

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and unsupportive customer relationships, both evident in our account of the formation of attitude towards transport. Young people and adults are both put off by bad service and bad relationships. We will explore the customer relationship and say what might be done to improve it, then (in the next chapter) what is wrong with services provided by public transport, and how they might be improved. I proceed in this order because I believe we will have better ideas about services in the context of a strong customer relationship, which I thus approach first.

w h y i s t h e c u s t o m e r r e l at i o n s h i p i m p o r ta n t ? If I were to communicate just one idea in this book it is this: the priority of the relationship between transport customers and transport providers. By that I mean not just that we should consider this matter before others but that it has the greatest bearing on public transport’s success. This will be obvious to most business people, but many public transport operators seem to live in a rather different world. So, I had best explain. A strong relationship allows enterprises to learn directly about customer attitudes, needs, and wants. Information from formal consumer surveys can help detect broad market patterns, but a more direct and up-to-date, if less rigorous, sense of customer interests and concerns is obtained from these daily contacts. Formal market research is inevitably limited in scope: it studies the client’s issues, not necessarily the customer’s, and the need for technically valid results calls for narrowly phrased questions that limit responses. By contrast, unvarnished comments offered in an informal relationship between customers and transport operators know no such bound and, if not always germane, often provide insight on ways to improve. This is why I begin with the customer relationship. Properly conceived, with respect for the customer, it is a pathway to a better understanding of needs and to the spontaneous input that may help public transport break from its incestuous lethargy. The customer relationship also prepares the way for product acceptance. Our first contact with any business is tentative: not being sure, we check product claims and the seller’s reputation. But later purchases are easier; a satisfying first experience, by building confidence, facilitates future transactions. Even if an entirely new product

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is involved, a growing belief in the seller’s reliability allows for purchasers to buy on faith. These are general virtues of customer relationships, applicable to any business. However, relationships demand special attention in the case of public transport because of its unique character. First, regular contact with transport operators – say a commuter operator – gives rise to a presumed relationship that brings with it related expectations. Contrast this with infrequent purchases (e.g., appliances): if the buyer-seller relationship is important, it does not bear the same weight, as compared with the product’s objective attributes. Second, if much travel is routine, much also is non-routine. We have established travel patterns for work or school but make periodic local forays for shopping or recreation, and occasional longer trips for business, vacations, or family visits. Moreover, these trips are unique as each of us starts from a different address and has a different itinerary. In order to make choices, the potential public transportation client needs information. Cost, safety, itinerary, and availability are among the factors to be considered. The potential client needs to consult the transportation provider about particular needs. This nonroutine aspect calls for more individualized attention than would be required for other purchased goods or services. Third, as a service, public transport is ”produced” in the customer’s presence: production (transport operation) is thus part of the customer relationship. Apart from smiling ticket agents, we meet bus drivers, train conductors, baggage handlers, and on-board service personnel. These many points of contact increase the chance of unhappy encounters: thus, it is both highly important and challenging to develop a strong customer relationship with the transport organization. Fourth, the travel experience varies from trip to trip. Even well-run transport operators suffer failures: the bus breaks down or it is delayed by congestion, or it has an accident. Unlike the pile of rejects in the factory corner out of customer sight, when transport goes wrong, it does so for all to see. Also, with each trip the customer’s experience changes. On one occasion, the passing landscape is screened by fog and drizzle, while one’s seat companion snores loudly. Another occasion brings sun-streamed glades and busy streets in passing towns and an animated yet courteous conversationalist at one’s side. This inherent variability makes it hard to judge a trip’s value in advance. We cannot inspect trips in a shop as we might toasters in an

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appliance store: we may consult travel agents or friends, or read travel guides, but these sources cannot give assurance of future performance. Even the well traveled customer cannot be sure what the next trip will be like. Travel thus involves a distinctive leap of faith. If we know the operator cannot deliver an entirely consistent experience, we travel in the belief (warranted or not) that the operator will do what can be done to make the journey useful, safe, and pleasant. To summarize, as with any business, a sound relationship is key to an awareness of customer needs and to customer acceptance. Public transport’s special attributes uniquely highlight this relationship, while its operating conditions make performance uncertain and failures likely and visible. If the relationship is weak, customers will neither have faith in public transport nor make allowance for its failures. Simply put, public transport lives or dies on its relationship with customers.

t h e l a n g ua g e o f p u b l i c t r a n s p o r t An important clue to the nature of failure of public transport is the way people speak about it. As I have already said, adults are often eager to talk about public transport and with little provocation will recite the litany of sins: infrequent slow unreliable travel; poor connections; gaps in night or weekend service; uncomfortable dirty crowded vehicles; unpleasant, unclean stations; surly and bureaucratic staff; insufficient or unclear information. What is significant is not what people say about public transport but how the say it, and with what intent. Even if complainants offer remedies (as they often do), they are not saying that improvements will induce them to ride public transport. What they mean (and the clue is the spirited manner in which the ills are pressed) is that they detest public transport and won’t use it, no matter what is done with it. Not everyone feels this way about public transport, and perhaps I overdramatize the emotive character of people’s rejection of it, but we need to see that most people have not the slightest interest in riding buses or trains on a regular basis.49 We will not make headway with such people by treating their reaction as a polite weighing of the good and bad of public transport. With this background, to work down the list of sins is the wrong way to proceed. The problem is not the faults individually but some-

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thing much more basic that infests public transport as a whole. My suggestion is that this systemic evil is a breach in the customerprovider relationship, and that it lies not in any fault of the customer but in the attitude of the operator. This is not meant to “tar and feather” individual transport professionals but to focus the spotlight on a way of thinking that licenses systematic indifference to the customer’s real needs. To document this mode of thought, sometimes referred to as an ”operations mentality”, would occupy an entire book, but we may get a sense of it and see how embedded it is, by examining the language transport people use in talking about their business. For instance, public transport is often called “mass transit,” as if people were a volume or quantity, not individuals. This way of speaking allows us to see transport as efficient when it operates at or beyond a reasonable capacity, even if it begins to feel like a rolling Black Hole of Calcutta. To add insult to injury, the victims may be referred to as “carryings” or “handlings,” as if they were cargo. Another example: passengers are sometimes referred to as “transport users.” But in the twenty-first century the term user, when applied to people implies moral deficiency. Users are weak willed, with little self-control, as in “drug user.” Users are people who claim our condescension and help, but not our respect. In another connotation the user takes without giving something of value in return. The term “customer” is different. A customer offers value (ie., pays) for service. These terms – mass transit, user, etc. – may be used without malicious intent: they merely reflect a blindness that grants transport functions more reality than the people served. However, it is also possible that they signal morally questionable attitudes, particularly condescension by those who provide public transport, but don’t use it toward those who do, who are presumed inferior. This language also treats customers as passive objects: witness the cargo terminology or perhaps too the term “riders.” Even the timehonoured “passenger” suggests inertness, a passive object in an otherwise active process. The train moves, the conductor collects tickets, the steward delivers coffee, the passenger sits (or stands). Sometimes we value travel for its passive moments which allow us to disengage from the world’s hubub, but not always, and some people abhor the idea of idly watching life pass by. Are those who want activity, want to control and direct their life in transit, to be satisfied only by driving?

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Though operators do provide for activity en route, especially for better-off travelers, the operational focus on mass movement obscures the fact that what is transported is an active agent. The passenger, in suspended animation, is moved under the ticket’s terms and conditions but otherwise merits only a passing glance. The airline industry, which early saw the importance of customer relationships, is now emerging from its three-decade pursuit of mass market and seeing (notably in business travel markets) that low fares and cramped airplanes are not necessarily the route to a secure and profitable future. The common thread in the foregoing is a failure to appreciate the customer. This neglect is so embedded that it seems odd to speak of a “transport customer” when terms like user, rider, passenger, and mass transit spring so readily to mind. It has even been said (but not by me) that public transport would work better were it not for those who use it. Selling tickets takes time. Picking us up takes time. Once aboard, customers ask questions, make noise, eat food, deposit litter. Were it not for us, buses and trains would run faster and cleaner at less cost. This transport whimsy, while not serious, reflects ambivalence towards customers and an inclination to operator convenience. Indeed, with governments willing to pick up the tab for public transport, perhaps it is easier to run buses and trains as if customers do not matter. Recently, much has been said about airline failings and the “air rage” phenomenon which is perhaps due to declining civility, overcrowded aircraft, and inattention to service standards. That private carriers functioning in largely competitive markets should suffer such lapses reminds us that abuse of customers need not be restricted to traditional public transport.

s u r r o g at e s f o r c u s t o m e r r e l at i o n s h i p s Public transport operators may be appalled by the suggestion that they neglect customers, and indeed it would be unfair to chastise all operators in this way. However, while some relate well to their customers, we should not pretend that all is well when it is not: if it were, there would be no need for this book. We should be particularly sceptical of practices that give the appearance of a customer relationship but not the reality. The veneer of customer sensitivity is evident in TV clips and print ads that make the bus driver or train attendant seem like our closest

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friend, while charity photo-ops put executives forward as pillars of the community. These presentations invite us to suppose the existence of a relationship, even where there is none. We should be equally sceptical of formal customer relations and training functions. These can have enormous value50 but too often substitute for genuine relationships, presenting a masked face to insulate operators from grumpy travelers. As evidence that they listen to customers, businesses often point to their market research: surveys, focus groups, etc. These are useful, but they are no substitute for the real listening that builds relationships. We see this in the interviewer’s friendly but detached manner, which is intended to elicit a frank response to a specific question, not to open a relationship.51 Some of the foregoing practices have merit but they cannot replace frequent informal contact with marketing and operating staff. In a well-run organization, these contacts are prized and employees are rewarded for attentiveness to customers and for bringing forward ideas prompted by customer encounters.

d e f i n i n g t h e c u s t o m e r r e l at i o n s h i p Before saying how to improve the customer relationship, we should be clear about its nature. We start by clearing away unhelpful connotations of the term “relationship.” I do not speak of relationships with spouses, lovers, family, or friends,52 even if one might say that businesses should “love their customers.” Providing transport is not that intimate. The relationship could be seen as an exchange of goods or services for money or material consideration – in economic parlance, a transaction. This is part of what we mean, but a transaction is a relationship only in a logical or mathematical sense, not a human relationship between customer and supplier. Human motives and relationships are logically prior to, and causative of, preferences (e.g., for cars over public transport) and economic exchange. The economist puts much stock in preferences but we want to know the motivations behind them. To know why public transport has failed, we must know not that we prefer cars – we already know that – but why. If relationships have a personal dimension, we should not overemphasize it. We expect to be treated with openness, courtesy, and fair-

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ness, but more than that brings trouble. The friendliness of a car salesperson may put a showroom newcomer at ease, but an approach that is too personal will impress only the most gullible, while repulsing the rest. Apart from the fact that money changes hands, the relationship involves reliance: people depending on the help of other people, as when I ask a passing motorist to help me start a stalled car, or when family members help one another in times of need. Thus, in hailing a cab, I request help in meeting my transport needs and rely on the driver to deliver me safely to my destination. Of course, paying makes a difference. I thank my friend for a lift and return the favour later, but it is not strictly necessary to thank the taxi drive or to offer a lift in return. The relationship is not just one of reliance, but of reliance within the legal and moral framework that applies to help for monetary consideration. But payment does not entirely eliminate the personal nature of the transaction. While not obliged to do so, I often do thank cabbies for their service. Taxi drivers are not mere mechanisms to get us from place to place; they are persons who have entered into a temporary helping relationship and deserve recognition for doing so. This personal aspect is present in all market transactions, even if there is no direct contact. I can e-mail a book order to a remote computer that processes it mostly by electronic means. Not much human content here. But the transaction relies on me (a person) placing the order, and other persons who, even if not directly involved in filling it, develop and maintain a functioning production and delivery process. If something goes wrong I won’t blame the computer but those (persons) who programmed it. No matter how mechanical the service process, the commercial relationship retains its personal character. This human aspect is crucial to robust economic behaviour. All transactions involve uncertainty. I thought the toaster I bought from a local store would toast bagels but bagels didn’t fit, so I returned it, asking for one with wider slots. The salesclerk might have refused, but we could at least hope that she has the ability to analyze the situation, come up with a solution, and, if necessary, make a decision that went beyond established practice. When it works, human intervention allows for unwanted surprises, minimizing dissatisfaction and thus maximizing economic value. Given transport’s uncertainties, we should value this human side.

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the emotive character of commercial r e l at i o n s h i p s I earlier alluded to the emotive side of human behaviour. There is such a side in commercial transactions as well. If we know that transport choices are not entirely rational, practitioners may wonder why they should consider such matters. What do they have to do with running buses? How can we plan transport services objectively if we must account for subjective emotional influences? Many clients of public transport are young people. Why cater to unstable affections of the young that we adults have thankfully left behind? We distinguish between being emotional – which is to be avoided – and having emotions, which is essential to our humanity. To be rational is to direct emotions to useful ends, not to be free of them. To lack emotion is to be a psychological monster. Moreover, we are more likely to feel emotion about transport as adults than as young people. In youth, we react to parents, friends, teachers, rock stars, but transport is far down the list. Early years build an emotive framework for transport choice, but we are not “hung up” (i.e., emotional) about this part of our life. For this reason, if young people have something to say about transport, it is often direct and can be quite sensible. Adults who depend daily on transport may feel strong emotions. Those stuck with bad public transport feel anger (at its faults), while drivers barraged with talk of the evils of automobiles may feel guilty and defensive. If adults have much to contribute and may offer mature judgment, they also feel more strongly and may not see things in a neutral light. If there is something uncontrolled about emotions it does not follow that we can ignore emotional comments as irrational. Where public transport is found wanting, our dislike (an emotive response) is soundly based. Indeed, if bad enough, public transport might elicit an even stronger emotion (hate), so that one refused to contemplate using a service even after it had been improved very much. This is not beyond reason. The provider of bad service deserves to be ignored. Such strong emotions rarely arise out of the blue, but mostly are the product of long experience and acquired attitudes, which have an enduring emotive influence. This may not be entirely rational, but often enough it is well grounded.

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m o r a l at t r i b u t e s A reliance relationship brings to bear moral duties to render aid, to promote the welfare of those in one’s charge, etc. As with other relationships, we expect to be treated honestly and fairly. Thus, while confused and fearful tourists might pay the taxi driver who extracts “what the market will bear” or might accept poor service from a railway or bus company, their moral sense is offended by the unfairness of such treatment, and the relationship suffers accordingly. Good relationships entail respect and trust. To respect people is to see them as persons, not objects to be manipulated by advertising or mere items of cargo but active humans able to form views and preferences, to decide and act, and to have obligations.53 In respecting them, we need not agree with them but are at least open to their views and preferences. Nor need we think of them as good or noble. Where intimate knowledge gives us a sense of a person’s intellectual and moral worth, there can be a deep sense of respect. But that is not what we expect of a commercial relationship (though it may serve to deepen such a relationship). A respectful attitude can open a relationship between people with little advance experience of one another. A business that is genuinely open to potential customers is more likely to make the first sale. Subsequent sales, based on that first trial, may give rise to trust, both confidence in the product or service and the belief that its provider will work on the customer’s behalf. Public transport is a classic trust enterprise: our very lives are in the operator’s hands. Travel is an uncertain undertaking in which customers take it on faith that the provider will deal with unforeseen contingencies forcefully and honourably. If an appearance of respect and trust may be manufactured by sophisticated advertising and public relations, the soundest base is experience with the provider over an extended period of time. If customers do not really trust the operator’s competence and moral integrity, the only basis for commerce is desperation, a poor basis indeed and hardly conducive to market growth. In declining markets, operators may try to cut losses or increase profits by raising fares and cutting services, moves that may be seen as breaching trust with customers. Weak carriers may also attract competitors, among them inexperienced fly-by-nighters with little

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understanding of the market, who nonetheless hope to profit from services aimed at popular routes and departure times. As these carriers come and go, customers lose faith in public transport and are more persuaded of the advantage of the car. In this way, a breakdown in trust weakens an already soft market.

f o u n d at i o n s f o r f o r g i v e n e s s The uncertainty inherent in transport means there will be failings. Moreover, the “product” cannot be replaced: we can’t turn back the clock and take the trip again. However, the operator can minimize distress at the time and make amends. From this arises an expectation of care and correction, which best comes from a sense of duty to customers, not a procedures manual.54 Yet no matter what correctives are applied, the fact remains that the customer has been disappointed. Therefore, if there is to be a healthy continuing relationship, the customer must forgive the operator. This doesn’t mean saying “I forgive you” as we get off the bus that is two hours late. (Of course, if the driver says, “I’m sorry about the delay,” I might say, “That’s OK, Bob.”) More important is an underlying attitude of acceptance of what cannot be avoided. This attitude is implicit in many services. My barber may have argued with his spouse and cut my hair too short but we get on well (though I’m not sure about his politics) and I have faith in his ability. So, while I might grump a bit, I let the matter drop and give him another chance. Transport’s unique contingency thus requires a relationship that allows for forgiveness and amends. In a weak relationship, the operator makes amends grudgingly: the customer nurtures hard feelings, eventually taking to the competitor – the automobile.

the social context for customer r e l at i o n s h i p s Our moral reactions extend beyond our treatment by a transport provider to its impact on a wider community. I will think twice about traveling with a bus company that not only deals with me unfairly, and also dumps waste oil in a nearby river and mistreats its employees. Not all customers worry about such matters, but some do, and most expect companies to fulfil at least some moral duties. Moral norms are one form of social imposition on the customer relationship but not the only form; for society also influences relation-

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ships through the customer’s desire for social acceptance. For most of us, a sense of security and worth arises from the belief that we belong to a group. This belief favours behaviour that is in line with group expectations and excludes conduct that is out of line with the group ethos. The group’s customs or rules may not be articulated; indeed are more powerful if they are not. The market effect of a group ethos is seen in the large amount of non-utility spending to mark group membership (e.g., special personal adornments), and also in choices of utility goods and services. In the case of transport, our utility need must be satisfied – to get from a to b – but the way this is achieved is subject to group influence. So a North American buys a new bmw or Volvo for its quality, and also to signal membership with those who have achieved a certain economic security, while a more subtle group identification is made by people who buy these vehicles in used condition at a price which is more than the cost of a new economy car. To gain entry to the “party animal” set, something much sportier is called for. That said, our relationship with cars is rarely seen in group terms. We are said to be in love with our cars, a metaphorical appeal to romantic love that, in ideal form, functions outside, even in conflict with, the group. Equally, the idea that we express individuality through our cars is not an appeal to group. However, these depictions are not convincing. The lovingly tended car driven on open roads long ago succumbed to mass-produced vehicles jammed by anxious motorists onto crowded streets and superhighways. We may be attached to cars and expressive in our choice of model and fittings, but we miss much by seeing our relationship with cars strictly in these terms. If shaped by group attachment, the customer relationship is also influenced by a more general pattern of conformity. Apart from diehard individualists, people want to be accepted at a broader societal level, to be part of the mainstream. This is evident in celebrity worship, where individuals may be admired, not for particular accomplishments but because they are famous. In Western society, where it is less clear what specific behaviours gain us acceptance, the need to conform may lead to following the herd, whatever the fashion of the herd may be. The distinction between those accepted and those not accepted lends support to established products and services closely identified with a society’s sense of the “normal” way of doing things. So it is

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with transport. The success of the car has made it the normal way to travel, so that people motivated by social acceptance do not want to be seen riding the bus. Of course, road congestion and the high costs of downtown parking may force the use of public transport. In such situations, there may be little shame in riding the bus or subway, though where there is a choice, one’s status may better be served by riding a commuter train. Even then, social acceptance and status are rarely forwarded by patronizing public transport: at best, one is excused for it.

t h e d y n a m i c c h a r a c t e r o f r e l at i o n s h i p s Having spoken to the emotive, moral and social background of the customer relationship, I would like to give a sense of its reality, of the complexity of actual interactions between customers and providers. To avoid being diverted by transport details, I consider a hypothetical non-transport example, one that especially highlights relationships. Jason, sales agent for a small-appliance manufacturer, is making a routine visit to Karl, buyer for a department store chain that sells large numbers of toasters.55 The visit’s purpose is not to take orders (a computerized function) but to assure satisfaction and open up new sales opportunities. Jason is unaware that the store has received many complaints about defective toasters. The occasion calls for more than communication of product information. Karl greets Jason with a restrained smile, thinks better of his impulse to speak angrily faulty toasters, and opens with a story he heard on the golf links and an update on the illicit affair of a shared acquaintance. They turn to the toaster problem. Almost half the toasters in the last shipment were defective. Jason knew this – last month, sky-high defect rates led to firings in Quality Control – and he could have warned Karl. Jason confesses, apologizes, seems relieved. Karl, still annoyed, demands compensation and another toaster model but softens the blow with an anecdote. Jason offers a return joke. They then explore options. Karl has had a bad week. Quality issues arose with two other suppliers, and a strike at a third cut supply of a popular brand of microwave – this as Karl faces an annual performance review. Karl says nothing about this but Jason senses that Karl needs help. Jason promises to look into using Karl’s store as the launch venue for a muchanticipated new product, thus boosting Karl’s credit with his boss. They agree to follow up within the week.

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This interaction works in both directions, with much empathic interplay between the parties. The customer (Karl) does not reactively respond to preset questions, as to a market survey. He tells jokes, complains, and (being under stress) is not overly organized. Nor is Jason a passive recipient of this stream of consciousness: he joins in the fun (while keeping an eye on his watch), asks questions, tests options, arranges follow-up. The outcome is short of conclusive, and those comforted by predictable formal communication won’t like the disorder of the interaction. However, the relationship is maintained, the channel kept open for further work on the customer’s behalf. Over many interactions, this openness can produce ideas that show the way to important market developments. Also apparent is an indirect approach to difficult issues. We rarely expose to public view our closest (often most important) wants; these are not stated but inferred. This presents market researchers with a large challenge: often one cannot find out what they most want by asking them directly. I recall complaining as a teen to a parent about something that deeply affected me (which I have long since forgotten), to which the response was, “What do you want?” But I didn’t know what I wanted; I felt something was wrong, but how this was to be corrected was undefined (perhaps undefinable). Being asked what I wanted only added to my frustration. Most customers know what they like or dislike and may record it on a survey form, but to say one wants something one has not experienced, or that does not exist, requires a huge imaginative leap. This may arise from loosely ordered interaction in the context of a strong relationship, but rarely by direct questioning. Clearly, we need not always look behind what customers say: often they know what they want and should be taken seriously. But not all we say should be taken at face value, especially when deeper concerns are at stake. It is in detecting this unarticulated content that marketers show their worth, and companies gain their competitive edge.

t h e c u s t o m e r a s pa r t n e r i n p u b l i c t r a n s p o rt To say customers are “Number one”, or words of like effect, is to trivialize what must be done. The challenge is not just to correct the many abuses that draw our resentment but also to displace a mode of thought, reflected in language and in overformalized customer

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relations, that builds a psychological wall between public transport and its markets. Customer service training has its place but may do little to change the deeply held beliefs and attitudes of many employees and managers, and the politicians and bureaucrats who regulate and maintain their enterprise. Only by seeing how entrenched and flawed is their mode of thought can we begin to build a new awareness place of the customer in public transport. Then we may leave behind the present minimalist view, which sees customers as passive recipients of basic transport, for a maximalist view, which respects them as active persons having legitimate service expectations and wants. This view calls for less remote hands-off marketing and for more direct dynamic interactions that make customers partners in their transport. The latter favours transport operators with corporate forms that are especially conducive to close customer contact. This is not to counsel mindless obedience to customers’ passing whims. In listening, we seek important concerns, a difficult interpretive task aimed at making improvements of enduring value. The customer-as-partner is a source of ideas and market confirmation, not an external stakeholder to be placated once the powers-that-be have decided what they want to provide. Now are customers to be consulted on all matters: for the most part, they are happy to leave the running of the enterprise to the professionals, whom they expect to do their job well. But they will appreciate a say in matters that are important to them and may surprise us with their contribution. If relationships with customers are sometimes awkward, a new way of thinking sees them as predominantly positive. Given a chance, most customers try to respond in a helpful way. What is more, we may, if attuned to the character of relationships, find new opportunities to put public transport’s best foot forward. For example, emotions that now work against public transport equally apply to the car: our reaction is not unmixed (the car’s dangerousness comes to mind) and may prompt us to consider options if we receive good service and are decently treated. In another example, the auto industry has a weak spot in its reputation for manipulative advertising, dishonest dealing, shoddy workmanship, and other dubious practices. The industry has improved over the years, but an aura or moral doubt remains.56 This weakness should not be ex-

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ploited (e.g., in “attack” ads), but public transport may gain its edge with reliable service and by dealing with customers positively and honestly. The nature of relationships assures that we will not soon see large changes. Most people have a lasting relationship with the car, to which they are disposed by experience, social pressure, and moral norms. Indeed, our disposition to drive is often so strong that the public transport option does not even come to mind. The rigidity call not for small adjustments but for a sea-change in the public’s view of its relationship with transport operators, requiring aggressive pursuit of a culture that takes customers seriously. And if we must work hard and fast, we must also be patient: for if the trouble lies in a history of neglect, it will take years to bring about personal histories in which customers feel they belong on public transport.

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chapter seven

Setting a Standard for Public Transport

A strong relationship makes it easier to deal with the other side of public transport’s failure: the service deficiencies that make the automobile preferable. If operators make it clear that they really want to hear from customers and will act in their interest, customers will be more forthcoming about what is wrong with public transport and what would suit them better. In their diversity and spontaneity, customers can be important catalysts for innovation. Speaking to them as they would be spoken to and listening to their ideas can release a torrent. If much of the flood washes over as impractical or unoriginal, an open mind will find much that stimulates and, occasionally, the prized insight that shows the way forward. A good customer relationship also can open dialogue with noncustomers. Those who drive may dislike buses and trains, but will be approachable and honest with an operator that is known for the way it handles its customers. To get non-customers to say what would induce them to try public transport, the first move is to build a solid relationship with one’s present customers. That said, we cannot make public transport work only by asking customers what they want and providing it. Customers respond with fragments of a whole transport experience: we get only a partial picture of their concerns and wants. If experience of public transport is uniformly one of bad service, as seems implicit in its low market share, customers may have no idea what good service might be, and thus be unable to say they want it. Moreover, one cannot translate customer views directly into a working transport system. To secure a sufficiently stable market focus to

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plan transport operations and make longer-term investments, one must look beyond the diverse views expressed by customers on a dayto-day basis, and seek an underlying firm current of need or interest. So, while much may be gained by improving relationships with customers, we cannot expect them to say, at least not directly, what form of transport will gain their favour. Here, we require the transport planner to show leadership. The planner must extrapolate from what is known of the customers’ interest, searching for the wider pattern of market interest, and advance new transport ideas, not to impose on the market but to submit an offering for the customer’s approval. I offer the following in that spirit. In this chapter, I propose a market-oriented standard, a set of performance goals for public transport. Then in chapter 8 I show how this standard might be given life in an actual transport system. In chapters 9 and 10, I outline the large changes in transport organization and public policy that are necessary to market success.

g a i n i n g p u b l i c t r a n s p o rt ’ s b e a r i n g s Earlier, I likened our task to that of the lost hiker who climbs a tree to find a visual reference. In the present instance, the reference is a standard of transport performance, a new heading for public transport, and a way to measure progress. The wrong reference point is the status quo. At its best, public transport now attracts a decent share of work travel to and from city centres and intercity travel in heavily congested corridors, but a much lesser share of non-work travel and travel in less-populated areas. At its worst, public transport has become the last resort of the transport disadvantaged, so run down as to repel most potential riders. If public transport is to appeal more widely, we must aspire beyond its presently limited roles. Without vision and direction, proceeding by increment holds us to the status quo. More service, new buses and trains, cleaned-up stations – all fall short of what is needed and much is wasted. Incrementalism is a seductive but disappointing mistress: small changes, though safe and easily understood, seldom satisfy. If Canada’s public modes of intercity and urban ground transport gained an impressivesounding twenty percent in traffic (say, by adding service), the present three percent market share to less than four percent.

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Equally dubious are “feel-good” targets found in studies aimed at political audiences. A lofty target is proposed, say a forty percent share of commuting to a city’s centre, to be had by means such as those seen in chapter 3. Often, little attempt is made to prove the strategy will work (perhaps because careful analysis might show the opposite). These studies allow politicians to score points by extolling targets, while blessing transport programs that will not unduly disturb the operator’s peace. Beyond these, we may look to planning studies that attend more rigorously to market and operational conditions, yet even here we can be led astray. The planner’s task is often seen as the preparing of transport plans satisfying both customer criteria (speed, regularity, etc.) and wider societal priorities (e.g., environment and health). So, for example, Wright’s list of urban transit characteristics shows nine items relevant to individual customers along with ten of societal import.57 This mixing of customer and societal criteria is especially problematic where criteria conflict. A crowded bus, socially efficient as it may be (low in cost and fuel use per passenger), is a marketing disaster. Its customers long for the day when they can travel in a more civilized way (likely by car), while passing motorists, seeing their bus brethren cheek-by-jowl, are reminded of the cars’ virtues. Even where planners seek balance between customer and social priorities, the inevitable result if half-hearted wishy-washy transport plans, which may do something for customers but not nearly enough to have much impact in the transport market. If we are seriously to attend to public transport’s loss of favour with its customers, we require an approach more directly and aggressively focused on their transport interests. So, where might we find our reference point for public transport? What standard or benchmark will guide us to a system of public transport that really works? In my view, the answer is simple, the car. Nothing complex. Match the competition.58 Indeed I would go further. Because public transport has lost its place in the hearts of most transport consumers, to regain their interest and confidence public transport must exceed the car’s performance. Find what the car offers and go one better. This proposal may seem wildly impractical. Yet if we do not pursue it, we cannot say whether public transport can be made to work. We already know that the status quo does not.

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It is not necessary for public transport to best the car everywhere or in all respects: in rural areas and on some intercity routes, the car’s speed or convenience is hard to beat. However, we can expect public transport to do better in some aspects (such as safety and cost), while approaching the car’s virtue in other respects. We do not seek a transport ideal but a transport alternative that in most markets offers more, on balance, than the car. Let’s begin by seeing what the car has to offer. Immediate Transport The car’s greatest edge is its presence where and when transport is wanted. Whether for trips from home to factory or office, or to a nearby shopping centre, or homeward after a few day’s camping, the car is ready to hand. Of course, it is not instantly available. In a large city, walking to a parking lot might occupy ten minutes, with another five spent extricating oneself from a multistorey garage. In Canada, where it snows, one may spend as much time getting the car out of the driveway as using it on the road. But these are minor impediments, given a mediocre public transport alternative. Immediate transport makes detailed trip planning unnecessary: no need to pore over opaque schedules to avoid being stranded in an unseemly part of town at 2:00 a.m. Indeed, we need not plan at all. Or trips may be partly planned: after breakfast, we’ll drive to the a&p for bread and meat, get a coffee and donought at Tim Horton’s, then decide where to go. Trips may also be conditionally planned: we’ll get bread at a&p, see what else they have, then if necessary, stop at Basics on the way home. Integrated Transport It seems odd to see cars as integrated transport, but they get us where we want to go with little fuss en route: the “seamless” transport of which public transport planners can only dream. To illustrate the alternative, the table below shows several steps in a trip to a major airport, involving a one-hour intercity coach journey followed by local trip on an airport bus, along with issues that may arise for the customer.

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Figure 7.1 Airport access from a nearby town Activity

Cost

4

Book taxi Waiting time Taxi to terminal

Time (Min.)

$15

Customer Issues Which company?

5-20

When will it come?

15-30

Comfort, safety, delays?

Pay taxi

2

Lug bags

2-4

Where to? Can I manage?

Buy coach ticket

5-15

How much? Long queue?

Wait

5-15

What facilities? Clean?

Intercity coah

$20

Lug bags Bus to airport

$10

Lug bags

60

Enough cash?

Reliable? Seat companion?

5-15

Where to? I’m tired!

20-30

Will it get there on time?

2-10

How far? too crowded!

Check-in

5-15

Takes how long?

Wait

20-60

Facilities? Comfort?

overrall

$45

150-280

Complex, uncertain process

This is only part of the overall trip. Having flown to a distant airport and escaped its terminal, a similar process is required to reach one’s destination. If excess cost, time, and complexity seem properties only of intercity trips, consider an urban trip comprising two separate bus rides to get to a transit terminal, a ride downtown on an overcrowded train, then a walk to the final destination. If cheaper, shorter, and perhaps more predictable, it seems almost as complex and hardly more inviting. Some operators try to remedy the common miseries but rarely do enough to coordinate diverse transport services, assure an overall standard of service quality, or ease transfers. Thus it falls to customers to find their way through the mess, portering their own bags and enduring excess time waste. Naturally, most customers reject this imposition, preferring to drive long distances and put up with snarled traffic. A planner who, free of all constraint, devised such a labyrinthine structure would be thought incompetent or mad. Yet this dysfunctional structure is now so familiar that it feels right: that’s the way we’ve always done it. Even its victims, the public transport custom-

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ers, often accept what they should actively resist, while others, who those who drive hardly think of it at all. As the airport-access example indicates, fragmentation is as much an issue for air transport as for ground transport. The airline industry has a growing market ands thanks to its edge in long-distance and overseas markets, but fierce competition is paring profit margins to the bone. The answer to the latter challenge is to improve value for the customer, and one way to achieve this is to grasp the nettle of transport integration. A Comprehensive Transport Solution Driving is a plausible choice for almost all journeys. There are exceptions: overseas or long land trips, for which airlines are the logical choice, or travel to congested cities served by fast transit on dedicated routes (rail or busway). However, the vast majority of trips, ninety percent or more, are driveable, if not direct to destination, at least to a parking space within an easy walk. As a comprehensive solution for most travel needs, the car is hard to beat, especially given the alternatives. The commuter train or express bus gets me to work, but what if I stay late at the office, or work a nightshift, or meet a friend to take in a show? In larger cities, transit services often run late, though not as frequently as in daytime, but in smaller cities transit is often focused on an assumed “normal” pattern of work, with little provision for late service or non-work travel. In the 1990s many transport operators cut service to stay within tight budgets, focusing on core routes in, to, and from densely populated areas, while paring night and weekend service in the suburbs. For an already fragmented pattern of transport, the effect is to reinforce the idea that public transport is a part response to travel needs, and a small part indeed. Easy to Use My car is outside my home, in plain view. To use it, I pull on shoes, walk out the door, get in, and drive off. The bus stops just across the street, but I don’t know when it comes or where it goes. Not having a schedule to hand, I must call Transit Information, laboriously working through its automated voice system. My car is before my mind in a way the bus is not.

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Regular public transport customers get to know their routes and schedules, but what about occasional trips across town? Which bus to take? Must I transfer and if so, where? Do buses run on Sunday? The transport enthusiast may see this as a worthy challenge, but most prefer the car’s simplicity. The car’s ease of use gives it an edge for quite long intercity trips (though the periods of winter driving may persuade some to the public transport alternative). The table shown a few pages earlier indicates the complications customers face in accessing air services, which often make it attractive to drive even when air travel might seem faster and cheaper. Door-to-Door For most trips, the car gets us from actual origin to actual destination, not from bus stop to bus stop. In crowded cities, one walks to and from parking, but driving still better approximates door-to-door travel than public transport.59 Moreover, the car allows us to drive by our destination, thus fixing its location in our mind. Once parked, we know where to go. In comparison, public transport drops us at its stop and leaves us to find our way to the ultimate destination. What You See Is What You Get (Transparency) The quality of travel, public or private, cannot be guaranteed: weather and traffic are never the same, while a breakdown can convert a pleasant outing into a nightmare. However, the car in the driveway leaves less to the imagination. As its owner, I know more or less what to expect and (by selecting a good make of car and maintaining it) I have some control over its performance. Some public transport carriers attain reliably high standards. Airlines have done well, though failures are common, especially where they cope with large traffic volumes. Urban transit and passenger trains are less consistent, the latter especially so where they are reliant on the good graces of private railways whose main business is freight. Public transport’s fragmentation adds to the problem: the reputation of the system overall is undermined by carriers that are less scrupulous than others about service standards. Apart from actual variations in quality, we must contend with the customer’s perception. A complex public transport journey gives

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more things to worry about, hence more cause to expect trouble, than a direct trip. And what could be less worrying than a direct door-todoor trip by car? Carrying the Bags Most trips require carriage of cargo: grocery and shopping bags, family paraphernalia (toys, diapers, etc.), luggage for longer trips, camping and fishing gear, the salesman’s sample case and laptop computer. Car designers responded long ago to this need, and contemporary vehicles, notably the passenger minivan and pick-up truck, aim at convenience of carriage. On public transport, accompanying cargo, once handled by armies of underpaid porters and personal servants, is now lugged through endless corridors and up and down stairs by hapless customers. The operator’s response is to provide a modicum of at-seat space, with communal space for larger parcels and bags, usually beyond the customer’s sight and supervision. At points of connection customers are largely on their own. Customer Groups Transport markets are often seen as aggregates of individual trips, but people also move in groups. The car is well suited to smaller groups, though public transport may have the edge for larger groups (of, say, more than four). Moreover, if a car with a single occupant is an environmental evil, for a group of three or four, the car may not be any more wasteful of fuel or harmful to the environment than public transport.60 Speed, Useful Time, and Little Waiting Sometimes public transport is the quickest way, but more often driving is faster, sometimes much faster. Even in large cities with good transit, many trips are best driven or walked. In my home city, which has basic bus service, it can require much of an hour for a trip by bus that would take ten or fifteen minutes by car. Against this, time spent driving is only moderately useful: one can listen to the radio, make a few business calls on the cellphone (though at increased risk of an accident), etc. At the same time, many say that they like to drive, because it provides private time unfettered by the claims of office and home.

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Time on public transport may be put to good use: one may work, read, relax. etc., though less so on short urban commutes in the rush hour, when many customers must ride standing. And waiting time at stops and transfers is largely dead time, sometimes in unclean places that attract unsavoury characters. In most societies, waiting is a measure of status. Superiors wait less in better surroundings: inferiors wait for them, even unnecessarily. So, instant access to a car conveys status, as does a comfortable interior in which to wait out traffic jams. By contrast, excess waiting is the hallmark of public transport: I wait at my bus stop, at other stops en route, and at transfer points. Perhaps public transport’s leisurely pace develops patience and humility, but those who are in a hurry or motivated by status will not be impressed. Convenience of Payment: Once It’s Paid for It’s Free Paying for a car and using it are quite separate phenomena. Monthly, the bank deducts a car-loan payment; twice a year, I pay for insurance; once a week, I buy gasoline; a few times a year, I arrange for servicing or repair. But I do not pay as I drive and thus do not directly perceive the price of individual trips. We may see the cost of a longer intercity trip as the price of one or more tanks of gasoline but have little sense of the cost of short trips to work, shops, etc. Generally, the car’s costs are seen as an overhead or sunk investment, a charge to belong to the club of car owners, which, once paid, entitles one to free use of clubhouse facilities. Paying for public transport by cash or ticket makes us more aware of costs and less likely to travel. This is a good thing so far as it discourages wasteful use of costly transport facilities,61 but it tilts our choice of transport mode towards the car, which seems free of charge, even though the consumer’s real financial interest, all costs considered, might be better served by public transport. Not having to pay at time of use makes the car convenient. Decades ago, when cash was used for most purchases, I would carry bus fare in my pocket: today I check not to see if I have change, but if I have exact change. If not, I must visit a corner store and buy a newspaper to get change. On most transit systems, I can buy a pass that allows access for a defined period say, a month, and some commuter services are funded by quarterly, semiannual or annual subscription. This goes some way

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to achieving convenience, but only part way. For example, while passes are readily available in some cities, in others there are too few outlets, or not too few are open at hours convenient for the customer. Though transport payment issues should especially interest economists, they are often overlooked. Many years ago, the Greater London Council (abolished in the 1980s, now reviving) brought in system passes on London area services, after which public transport use increased. To the extent that the increase arose from convenience of payment, passes seemed to be promoting an efficient balance between private and public transport. A potential objection to passes is that they result in overuse of costly transport capacity, since individual trips, for which no charges are made, are perceived by the customer as costless.62 Yet if we insist, following this argument, that public transport trips should be individually priced, why not also car trips? Why not insist that each car be equipped with a device that prevents engine start-up until a destination is specified and payment made? That most of us would resist such a proposal indicates the importance of payment convenience. Personal Security and Privacy Unsupervised walkways, stations, and vehicles, if not unsafe, are often a source of concern, especially to women. In Canada, the issue has received belated attention now that the first cohort of women to obtain well-paying jobs in any significant number has abandoned public transport for the car. Even where safety is not at issue, perception is key. Years ago, while touring Philadelphia, my wife and I were advised not to ride its buses. One day, to avoid paying cab fare (and having left our car at the hotel), we took a bus only to find we were the only whites passengers. Apart from the mild amusement of other riders, we sensed nothing unusual. On another occasion we drove but felt decidedly insecure when a wrong turn put us in a lonely and insalubrious part of town. Where individuality is prized, so too is privacy. We want to be with others but on our terms, with due respect to our “personal space.” We often prefer the privacy of even the cramped subcompact car to the forced intimacy of crowded buses and trains. The road rage phenomenon, not to mention other tensions of modern driving, may cause some to reconsider public transport (safety in numbers?), though only where it reasonably meets their transport needs.

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Control and Independence The car allows for interruptions in the trip: usually one can pull over, and even when drivers are stuck in expressway traffic they can at least imagine (contrary to good sense) stopping and fleeing the car. This would strike most people, perhaps, as preferable to being stuck in a subway tunnel with the lights out, as I have occasionally been on older parts of London’s Underground. The car emphasizes control: I decide where and when to go and can imagine what will happen en route. Even if I don’t plan the entire trip, I have a definite sense of how things will work out. This determinacy is partly replicated in transport schedules (if one can fathom them), but it fails at transfer points. Not only do transfers waste time and effort (walking and climbing stairs) but the occasional traveler is unsure where to go since directions are rarely obvious, and possibly anxious about ending up at the wrong platform. Like waiting, indeterminacy weighs heavily on the customer’s mind, as is apparent in a marked aversion to services requiring transfers.63 The instant availability of the car allows independent responses to meet unexpected needs or opportunities. One’s teen-aged son or daughter calls, wanting a lift to a downtown job interview or to an after-school activity. A friend passing through town rings up to arrange a meeting over coffee before continuing on his way. If infrequent, these eventualities may be accommodated by taxis; otherwise, it may be better to have a car ready to hand. Comfort Nowadays, the middle class can afford cars with advanced suspension and more comfortable seating than might be found in the average livingroom. Conditions are further improved through accessories: air conditioning, power windows and doors, audio and television, car phones. The list is long and growing. In contrast, most (but not all) public transport offers insufficient seating, hard, narrow seats, recirculated air, and unclean interiors. Vehicles with basic suspension and imprecise motor controls stop with unnerving suddenness, then jerk forward, leaving just-embarked passengers reeling. Readers may have other reasons for preferring the car, but the foregoing list should suffice to show the car’s advantages, of which there are many. We now consider where public transport has the advantage, or could without too much of a stretch.

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Cost Savings Public transport is often the least costly form of conveyance, especially for trips by individuals. Given plausible public transport that represents a real alternative to the car and a campaign to education people about the cost implications of maintaining and using cars, the economic advantages of public transport could be effective in attracting more public transport clients. At present, though, such a campaign would only draw attention to public transport’s deficiencies. Travel Time Public transport is not always the slowest means of travel. In crowded cities, rail or busway-based services can outdo the car, if customers do not face long walks or complex connections. In populous countries that are able to support high speed trains, cars are easily bested. Nor should we ignore air travel: on some routes, flying is the only practical alternative to the car, much faster and perhaps for some trips less consumptive of fuel. Travel time is of special interest to planners: not only is time readily measured but we may assume that travelers want it kept to a minimum. So, more roads are built to cut congestion and faster transport forms are sought. Yet having asked why cars are preferred to public transport, we did not answer simply that cars are faster. Speed is important, but cars have other virtues. We must bear this in mind as we re-examine public transport; for if it should be faster, that is not all that we expect. Value of In-Transit Time If driving time is valued as a respite from work or other pressure, it provides little scope for en route activity. A public transport system could build on the fact that its customers are spared the task of driving (especially in congested areas), and are thus free to engage in en route work, recreation, or relaxation. Railways have a special edge in that extra space can be added to a train at a relatively low cost. It may be put to use as dining, sleeping, or lounge facilities, or or it may serve to less traditional purposes in tune with contemporary tastes and interests. The same may not be said for buses, but higher-quality services may provide improved comfort and work facilities, such as tray tables on seat backs, onboard telephones, etc.

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Safety The prospect of death or injury is roughly ten times greater for car occupants than for public transport customers.64 People often misjudge the risk but few are entirely unaware of it. Thousands of road fatalities and injuries do little to encourage public transport ridership, but that may reflect the performance chasm between private and public transport. If the latter approached the former, public transport’s safety advantage might be promoted more effectively. We have seen where the car excels, and areas in which public transport does well. We now bring this material together to show how a typical customer might conclude that the car is better overall, and what must be done to tilt this judgment in favour of public transport. The scorecard on the next page is an illustration. The left-hand column lists service attributes,65 while the second and third columns score the car and public transport (up to 5) for each attribute. Thus, for “security and privacy” the car scores 5 (top marks) in this customer’s mind, while public transport scores 3 (fair). The bottom row totals scores for all attributes, giving a measure of the customer’s overall view of each mode. While the third column reflects public transport as the typical customer sees it now, the far-right-hand column shows the scores needed to best the car; that is, a performance standard to which public transport might aspire. Asterisks (*) signal scores under 3. Three is an assumed threshold equal to “fair” or “ok” in the customer’s opinion. A score below 3 would be equivalent to “bad” or “very bad,” degrees of “unacceptable.” I would argue that, with the private automobile providing a seductive alternative a transport mode that scores less that 3 for any attribute would be rejected by that customer as unacceptable. Remember, we are rating public transport against the car. We are trying to match the competition. So, the car’s high acceptance appears as scores of at least 4 for all attributes except safety.66 With this in mind, the public transport standard (column four) should also have all scores at 4 or more; reflecting the minimum target standards we should expect of public transport if it is going to compete with the car. For the customer who filled in this scorecard, driving is easily the best bet, with public transport ruled out for its substandard performance in several important areas. The scorecard reflects one person’s judgment but I think it can be argued that it is typical of a segment of the market. Granted, other scorecards could represent customers who

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Therefore, on the transport scorecard, “fast/little waiting” is best seen as referring to overall timeliness. So if the car gets a higher score than public transport, it means that the car is faster, not for a particular trip but for a wide range of trips. Sometimes public transport is faster, but we focus not on those specific instances but on an overall reaction. This seems a natural interpretation: we buy cars not for specific trips but under a more general appreciation of their performance advantages. My view of transport choice diverges from that underlying most transport planning models. Most models account for only a few service attributes, sometimes as few as two (travel time and service regularity, for example, the latter a poor surrogate for immediacy), compared with the fourteen attributes shown on the scorecard. Moreover, the intent of most models is to depict choices for specific routes or trips, not to show how customers compare entire transport systems. Nor, for that matter, do they offer much insight into the all-important historical patterning of transport choices. If I am sceptical about transport models, I accept that they may be useful in studies that are narrowly focused on adjustments in service levels and prices and may even supply clues about wider issues (though not many). However the key point is that much of what is said about public transport on the basis of such models offers little help on the issues raised in this book. We may find more of value in the results of customer surveys and focus-group studies, which are not being bound by the mathematical necessities of transport models and may thus be potentially more responsive to customer concerns. But heed this warning. As with any paid work, market research is guided by its paymaster. An operator who only wants to know how the market will react to a narrow range of service changes will not spend more to discover our broader transport interests. For instance, a study that is designed to collect customer opinion on bus seating will not reveal growing customer discomfort about long waits at lonely bus shelters. If clients who commission studies have pedestrian objectives, the market studies they commission will have pedestrian outcomes. For now – until market research, perhaps new transport models, give us a better idea of how we make transport choices – I must rely on readers to judge if my view is reasonable. Assuming that it is, and having said what performance standard public transport must achieve – what it must do to build its market – I now ask how that might be done.

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chapter eight

A Public Transport Architecture

We see a distant opening in the forest: a new performance standard for public transport. But how to get there? How to achieve this standard? We cannot follow public transport’s beaten path – Chapter 3 showed that it leads nowhere. What new route shall we take? Having seen the problem in a new light and found a new direction, we hope for success, but public transport’s history of failed attempts is a warning that our chosen way may not turn out to be the best. So, while this chapter pursues one conception for public transport, we should not close our minds to other ideas, such as those found in better public transport operations67 or gleaned from listening carefully to customers. We recall from chapter 7 that many factors contribute to our judgment of public transport’s performance. Failure on any count may lead us to reject public transport outright. Improving in a few areas won’t work: public transport must perform well in all areas of importance to the customer. Most businesspeople would see this as plain sense: effective marketing requires a complete business system that ensures that all aspects of service meet expectations. If the hamburger and fries are good but the coffee is cold or washrooms unclean, we may not be back. We expect management to address all our significant concerns, not just some of them. If this seems obvious, it is not so in public transport. I once spoke to a city planner who was all for good transit marketing, which he reduced to three factors: speed, comfort, and few transfers. Others planners might have other ideas, but I think that most would likely agree with this fellow and prefer to target a few factors. This makes it

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easier to talk to the media and politicians (who historically have little time or tolerance for complex issues) but makes public transport look simpler than it really is. That said, I too must simplify: a complete system design aimed at the customer’s interest, fully detailed in all its operations, would fill many volumes. But I do not reduce the task by neglecting important aspects; rather I seek a framework for transport in which all such aspects are properly addressed. We might liken this to the architect’s schematic, which lays out spatial and functional relationships between building elements. The architect relies on the mason and engineer to ensure the quality of materials and construction, structuring a whole to meet functional or aesthetic goals is the architect’s job.

t h e p r e s e n t p u b l i c t r a n s p o rt a r c h i t e c t u r e Before saying what new transport structure is required, consider what is in place. While there are variations in public transport systems, many have the following features: 1 With a mass market in mind, transport elements are chosen for capacity: large buses, trains, high-volume stations. All else is peripheral and subordinate to a high-capacity network, as add-ons for travelers with special needs or as minor extensions to a “core network.” 2 Individual transport services follow fixed routes, on fixed schedules for departure and arrival. 3 Within cities, services may be coordinated, but not always. Intercity services are provided on modal lines (separate rail, bus and airline companies), rarely co-ordinated, and often poorly linked to urban transport. 4 Service gaps are inevitable with high-capacity transit. Major routes have frequent service, but others receive spotty service (say, hourly or, for intercity service, daily). In rural areas, or at night in cities, service may disappear altogether. To minimize gaps in geographic coverage, buses may be snaked through residential or commercial areas, increasing travel times and operating costs. 5 In a fragmented, incomplete public transport system, customers risk being stranded if they do not pay heed to timetable information. Access to service information is better than it once was but not

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readily understood by people “on the go,” and not especially visible where and when transport decisions are actually made. 6 Urban transport offers few choices. Basic transport is offered to all comers at low prices, with concessions for special classes of customer, or volume purchases, or off-peak use, but rarely can we choose to pay for better service. Pay two dollars for transit, take a cab for twenty dollars, or drive. 7 Prices are set at a low level, with the low incomes of the disadvantaged in mind. With less revenue, little can be done to improve service, and thus little is done for the better off, whose custom is lost to the automobile. 8 Public transport’s inflexibility, incompleteness, and low quality fragments markets and spawns parallel transport. Many cities subsidize conventional transit, school buses, and paratransit for people with disabilities, thus dividing limited public resources that might better be applied to a more comprehensive transport system. This Byzantine structure makes poor use of costly high-capacity transport. Its parts are ill connected and offer few choices, while its diverse schedules are unintelligible to most, including the occasional users we most need to impress. This is a rickety structure, that should not be built on, but demolished for something new.

a n e w s e rv i c e at a n e w p r i c e The foregoing implies that service must greatly improve, if need be at higher fares, to reach those who drive because they prefer to pay more for better service. This is shown in the following chart, which depicts combinations of transport service and price. Better service is represented by points higher on the chart: a higher price is represented by points further to the right. Thus, point “pt1” represents basic service at low price, while “Car” and “Taxi” designate highquality services at higher prices. Below the curved line, service quality is too low for the price charged; above this line, service quality is worth the fare but not to everyone. Basic bus service sold at a two-dollar fare (pt1) is accepted by people with low incomes but not by the affluent. Some of the latter may be attracted by better service (faster, more frequent), as depicted by pt2, but not many until service quality approaches that of the car (as depicted by ptx).

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Figure 8.1 Acceptable and Unacceptable Combinations of Transport Service and Price

Our aim is a wider range of public transport services, including better service at a higher (but still moderate) price (i.e., ptx). That is, we hope to reach a larger market by filling a gap in service quality and fares between public transport as now (pt1 and pt2) and the costly car or taxi.

r e s h a p i n g u r b a n p u b l i c t r a n s p o rt In semiurban regions, the places where we live, work, shop, and plan are widely separated: here, traffic is too dispersed for high-capacity transport. Even populous inner cities disperse traffic by land-use policies that separate homes, businesses, and shops. In future, we may build settlements that are less reliant on private cars and more conducive to high-capacity public transport, but for now we deal with the transport realities of settlement as it is. One happy reality is the ease with which we travel where and when we want – by driving. That is what public transport must be: immediate, comprehensive, and easily used. Given the choice, we

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may take it, especially when the old clunker’s expiration presents the alternative of spending $30,000 for a new car.68 But traditional public transport cannot do what we want. High-capacity bus or rail may work well in urban centres or on major transport corridors but cannot cover less populous semiurban areas at acceptable service standards. Governments have tried, spending vast sums on suburban bus and rail while neglecting core area services, which often bear the added indignity of high fares to offset losses elsewhere. In semiurban areas, public transport should be provided as needed by demand-responsive (as opposed to scheduled) services. Where customers are dispersed, their needs diverse and changeable, it makes little sense to preplan and fix routes and schedules. Services should ebb and flow with customer need. This is hardly a new idea: many cities have flexible demand-responsive transport – jitneys, dial-a-ride, shared-ride taxis, etc. But these operators are usually assigned secondary roles, filling gaps in conventional high-capacity bus and rail networks. Instead, we see the flexible transport operator (fto) playing the lead role in public transport, as the main contact for the customer, as organizer of trips that combine expensive flexible transport with lowcost stop-to-stop moves on conventional bus and rail routes, and as the primary market strategist.69 Bus and rail operators would supply service under contract to the fto, only secondarily selling transport direct to the customer. I leave the institutional implications of this move to later chapters. For now, we state the proposal – that ftos take the lead in transport operation, marketing, and strategy, with the support of conventional public transport operators. How would this work? As a modest example, my home city – Kingston, Ontario, population 120,000 – has seventeen transit routes operated with about thirty buses mostly on half-hourly or hourly intervals (one route has service every twenty minutes) and including one dial-a-ride service.70 (This is apart from skeletal Sunday service, school transport and buses for persons with disabilities.) On the map, which shows Kingston’s bus routes, readers will see that routes snake through subdivisions to assure wide coverage. This system serves about three million trips a year, roughly five thousand round-trips a day: less than five percent of the community

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Figure 7.2 Transport scorecard Attribute

Car

Public Transport Present Quality

Quality Standard

Immediate

4

*

5

Comprehensive

4

*

5

Integrated

5

*

4

Easy to use

4

*

4

Door-to-door

4

*

5

Transparent

5

*

4

Easy baggage handling

5

*

5

Suited to group travail

4

4

5

Fast/little waiting

4

*

4

Convinient payment

4

*

4

Secure/private

4

3

4

Can control travel

5

*

4

Comfortable

5

3

4

Safe

3

5

5

60

*

62

all attributes

found public transport more acceptable given their circumstances. (The market divides, with many driving but some riding public transport.) It may be more enlightening, however, to look at the opinion of the passenger lost, rather than the passenger won. While the scorecard may seem to describe choices for individual trips, it is properly seen as an all-round assessment of entire transport systems. Two attributes (immediate, comprehensive) refer strictly to the performance of the transport system as a whole: they have no bearing on individual trips at all. The twelve other attributes could refer to individual services, but even they are best seen as qualities of transport as a whole. Of course, we sometimes weigh choices for particular trips. In planning a trip to Florida, I will consider the pros and cons of flying or driving. But the more important judgment is the one that disposes us to a transport system. This judgement not only decides how I travel most of the time but also influences my thinking when I do consider options for individual trips.

Map of Kingston Bus Routes, Courtesy City of Kingston

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regularly use transit. This is understandable: services are limited and too slow. From my suburban home I can drive downtown in ten minutes, but to take the bus, I must wait up to an hour, ride for twenty to thirty minutes, then walk. Matters are worse if I must transfer. To rework Kingston’s transit system properly, we should start with accurate market information, for present transit customers and for those who drive, preparing a detailed plan of operations based on their needs and preferences. At time of writing, little such information was available, so what follows must be seen as a conceptual plan, not a detailed operating plan. This suffices to show how a broad strategy might work, but we must recognize that more must be done to produce a workable operation. Kingston’s new transit system would run buses on major routes as fast high-capacity connectors between key locations. On figure 8.2, buses would run regularly between points 1 (downtown), 2 (a mall, the Kingston Centre), and 3 (Cataraqui Town Centre, another mall); along Front and King streets (serving points 5 – St. Lawrence College – and 6 – Queen’s University and Kingston General Hospital); and on Division Street to Highway 401 (7). These routes currently show reasonable financial results, as measured by the ratio of revenues to operating costs. The link between point 3 (Cataraqui Town Centre) and point 4 is a new route serving Kingston’s western suburbs and opening the possibility of a short-distance airport shuttle (from point 4, which is near the airport). Other routes might be justified in a more heavily patronized transit system but perform poorly at present. These appear as dotted lines, a route between 2 and 3 following two urban arterials (Bath and Gardiners roads) and serving 8 (Gardiner Town Centre) and 9 (Frontenac Mall), and a route to point 10 crossing a limited-capacity causeway over the Cataraqui River to Kingston’s eastern suburbs. With thirty existing buses, this core network might run on five to ten minute intervals, effectively a continuous service, which would not require a published timetable. Customers near stops on this network might access these buses directly, but most would call an fto. The fto would use small buses, minivans, or taxis to connect them with the network or, at their option (and a higher fare), take them directly to their destinations. Customer calls would be grouped, with vehicles dispatched, much as taxis now are, on short local routes to pick up a few passengers at a time.

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Figure 8.2 High-Capacity Urban Transit Network

Figure 8.3 shows a shared-ride taxi collecting customers at locations A1, A2 and A3 for delivery to bus terminal 3. At bus terminal 6, a similar shared-taxi service delivers customers to destinations B1, B2 and B3. In a fully-automated system, the customer could prearrange the entire trip, say from A3 to B1. Likely, the same operator (fto) would both collect customers and deliver them to their destination. The fto would charge customers one fare covering pick up, the intermediate bus trip, and delivery to destination, in turn remitting an agreed charge to the bus operator for its part of the overall trip. With the operator of flexible transport as the customer’s point of contact, choices may be offered. For example for a trip from A1 to B3, the customer could: 1 walk to bus terminal 3, take the bus to terminal 7, then walk to destination B3; or, 2 take shared taxi to access terminal 3, the bus to terminal 7, then shared-taxi for the final leg to destination B3; or, 3 use a taxi (along or with others) direct from A1 to B3. One other point about Figure 8.3: where customers access distant bus or rail stops, transit systems must be largely fixed (to minimize customer confusion), but where customers deal with flexible transport operators (ftos) who ensure they get where they want to go by whatever flexible and conventional services make sense, details of the transit system can

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Figure 8.3 Urban System with Door-to-Door Option

be changed at will. As land use or traffic changes, so does transport: the approach is not to assign fixed routes to some areas and flexible transport to others but to adjust the entire system as needs dictate.

the dreaded transfer Among the despised features of public transport are its terminals and transfer points. We suffer crowded stations and airports, walk too far with heavy bags, climb stairs, lose our way, curse dirty washrooms, stand in the cold and wet, wonder whether the bus will come. It is not surprising that transport studies show that time spent at transfer points weighs as much as six times more heavily on the customer’s mind than time spent on vehicles.71 In urban transport, the transfer problem is often avoided by running buses on extended circuitous routes: customers spend more time on the bus as it snakes through miles of subdivision but need not transfer to get to their destination. This involves longer travel times, however, which are unacceptable to those who can afford the higher operating costs of the car.

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Making Public Transport Work Figure 8.4 At-Grade Transfers

Behind this is accepted practice in the design and management of transfer facilities and terminals, which waste our time in unpleasing locations and inject doubt (whether we will make or miss our connection). While I do not claim expertise in this field, something seems badly wrong. In any normal enterprise, people who make customers go through hell would be fired. I hope that future transport planners and designers will give more priority to civilized transfer facilities combining the best of current practice with innovations in transfer design and technology. For now – only to show that something might be done – I offer the following. In our proposal, there will be frequent transfers. We accept this because the alternative does not work: avoiding transfers produces an infrequent, slow, and costly service. However, we can at least make transfers as innocuous as possible. In suburban and ex-urban regions, where public transport must find new customers, land can be had more easily and more cheaply than in city centres. Here, transfers can take place “at grade” (no stair climbing) between adjacent vehicles. Figure 8.4 shows two simple arrangements, one a central platform allowing “cross-platform” transfers, another with transfers along its length.72 The aim is to minimize, if not eliminate, time spent on transfer platforms, reduce waiting, and give reassurance: seeing our next vehicle as we pull into the transfer station, we are less worried about being stranded. Moreover, fast transfers, by reducing customer numbers on platform facilities, cut space requirements and costs. At an absolute

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minimum, the desirable “no waiting” cannot be achieved, riders should be offered the comfort of knowing exactly when the needed vehicle will arrive.73 Customers accessing public transport through flexible transport operators may care little where transfers take place, so long as there is no waiting. This is important: if transfer locations matter little to customers, they can be moved – perhaps often – to suit operating needs. Some transfer points might remain in one place for many years, but much of the network in a growing urban region could “float”, with routes and transfers regularly adapted to emerging travel patterns. In such a network, there may be little transport value to traditional fixed terminals, which might better be turned to other uses.

t r a n s p o rt i n l a r g e c i t i e s a n d u r b a n i z e d regions We saw how more complete and flexible transport might work in a small city, but what about densely populated cities and diverse urban regions? This diversity and the greater diversity of customer needs and wants argue even more forcefully for adaptive transport. And cars pervade even the most built-up areas: here is the same interest in ready mobility. Of course, it is harder to adapt transport in built-up cities, especially where an efficient transport architecture calls for high-volume facilities, such as urban rail lines or dedicated busways, which are not easily introduced to established urban areas, nor quickly developed. These facilities require careful planning for use over many decades and thus present a degree of fixity not faced by smaller cities. Even so, we might put the emphasis on facilities adaptable to varying transport needs, while short-term changes in travel patterns are accommodated by alterations in surface bus and paratransit operations. In recent decades, the trend in large-city transport has been towards monolithic regional systems, local and regional bus/rail systems being coordinated within a unified transport network. This may seem to meet the customer’s need for comprehensive integrated transport, but a monolithic planning framework and its associated bureaucracy often work to fix transport, when it should regularly

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adapt to new travel patterns and preferences. If less tidy from the planner’s viewpoint, it may be more to the customer’s interest to have several adaptive transport systems that perhaps make common use of costly fixed facilities (e.g. , metros, busways, large stations) but otherwise diverge in the ways they address customer needs for local access. The brevity of these remarks is not to minimize the immense challenge of developing effective transport in large complex urban regions. Indeed, I chose to illustrate our approach for a smaller city to avoid being diverted from basic principles by the intricacy and diversity of large cities. The approach may not be so easily applied in complex urban areas but is no less relevant for having been exemplified “in the small”.

transport in rural areas If conventional public transport fails in sprawling suburbs, it makes even less sense in rural areas. If there is a bus, it is irregular and subsidized. Demand-responsive service may work in areas near cities, but not elsewhere. This market is best served by the car, but many cannot drive – they may be too young or too old, or they may be disabled – while others are stranded when a wage earner uses the only car to get to work. How might they be served? At present, there is a partial solution: neighbours or family members give shut-ins lifts to nearby towns for shopping or medical appointments. This informal system of public transport only goes so far, being reliant on the good graces of others and on the particulars of their transport movements. An alternative is a ride-sharing board like those found on university campuses, where students offer and seek transport by car, perhaps set up as an Internet web site. Neighbours can also form a carpool for routine commuting, freeing up vehicles for other trips. However, these solutions depend on voluntary action, which is not always forthcoming. Better yet would be a commercial market for rides in private vehicles,74 with provision for payment (to motivate drivers to offer rides) and a mechanism to match offers of transport with requests. This would only work if drivers were prequalified and customers registered, to assure customers of their driver’s safety and reliability, and

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Figure 8.5 Rural Connect to Urban System

if vehicles were tracked, to assure customers and drivers of their personal security. To obtain rides, customers would call a central dispatcher, where requests from the customer’s vicinity would be matched with registered drivers who have just called in to announce an impending departure and indicate willingness to divert to pick up and deliver customers. The fare, which would be paid to a ride-market administrator, would cover dispatching and other functions, and payments to drivers. The driver’s cost to fill empty seats – extra driving to pick up and drop off customers – would usually be minimal, so fares in a well-managed competitive ride market should be modest. Of course, fares must also cover dispatching and administration costs, which should not be high if key functions are automated. This ride market functions best within a wider regional system, allowing integrated access to nearby cities. Figure 8.5 shows a trip starting at A1 – a rural location – and ending at B1, B2 or B3. Here, a private rural ride provides connection to the urban system. (The driver could also offer a ride direct to final destination.) To rural customers, public transport would be just as available (if not as immediate) as for their urban neighbours. The ride-market model could also work in the suburbs. If

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fares in a competitive ride market are lower than those for demandresponsive operations, public use or private car movements might be an important addition to urban public transport.

i n t e r r e g i o n a l a n d i n t e r c i t y t r a n s p o rt Over extended distances between regions or cities, rail and air services can exceed the car’s speed but operate between fixed terminals far from the customer’s desired point of origin and destination. Intercity buses are somewhat more adaptable, but most run between a few fixed terminal and wayside stops, the customer being left to arrange local access. This may be accepted for longer journeys but not for shorter trips (five hundred kilometres or less), which are far more common. Unuseful, time-wasting, and costly local access often makes it better to drive, even for quite long trips. However, if more immediate and affordable local transport is integrated with intercity services, the latter should attract a much larger market. A flexible operator (fto) active at origin and destination could offer door-to-door service by combining station-to-station trips of intercity carriers with local service (see Figure 8.6). Thus, abc Inc., an fto with local operations in Kingston and Toronto, offers direct service from my Kingston home to an office in suburban Toronto. As with urban transport, my first contact is with the fto: the intercity carrier then plays a support role as contractor to the local operator. As an alternative, an independent organization – neither fto nor intercity carrier – could provide a facilitation service.75 Calling xyz Inc. (whose call centre is in New Brunswick or Texas), I buy the same Kingston-Toronto trip: xyz arranges the entire trip, using abc Inc. (local Kingston service), an intercity railway, and def Inc. (local service in Toronto). The financial viability of this arrangement, which involves xyz drawing a commission to cover its costs and profit, depends on the added value to customers of a fully integrated service, and their consequent willingness to pay a somewhat higher fare. Where an fto is present throughout a large region, intercity rail, air, and bus carriers could re-structure operations to advantage. For example, a bus company could reduce service to city downtowns, in favour of highway-only services, with passengers using local services to and from highway stops (which might be at highway service centres or transfer facilities at highway interchanges). Not having to cope

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Figure 8.6 Intercity Trip with Rural Connections

with congested city routes and expensive bus terminals, highway services would be more productive and much less costly. A regionwide transport network can increase customer choice. With contact through a local transport provider, customers can be presented with alternatives. Apart from linking local access with conventional air, bus, and rail transport, customers may opt for intercity shared-taxi trips, often an economical option for small passenger groups, or for intercity trips purchased in the private ride market (as for rural trips). With expanded travel options, there is less need to book travel in advance: if the train is full, I pay more (but not much more) and take a shared-ride intercity limousine. This allows me to make travel arrangements for more trips “on the fly,” making public transport as convenient as the car.

t r av e l t i m e We have considered ways to make local and intercity public transport more immediate, comprehensive, and direct. But this would be all for nought if public transport did not approach the speed of the car, for the vast majority of current car users will not give up their cars for a

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public transport system that takes an hour or more to do what they now can do in twenty minutes. In some markets, the car is the best option. There, public transport is only required, on a demand-responsive basis, to assure comprehensive network coverage. Indeed, there will be areas in which no form of public transport is practical. Beyond this, the aim is to beat the car’s speed in some markets while approaching it elsewhere: public transport need not better the car everywhere if it has other strengths, but it must do well enough that customers are not put off (say by a trip that takes twice as long by public transport). Assured of reasonable travel times, customers may consider public transport’s virtues: the value of time spent reading or relaxing instead of driving, lower cost (if it is lower), and personal safety – a plus for public transport. In seeking ways to cut travel time, we should remember that the aim is to reduce time taken for an entire trip, not just to cut time between fixed terminals. High-speed trains, rail transit, and urban busways may cut station-to-station times but are of little use if people spend large amounts of time getting to terminals and waiting for their trains or buses to depart. Among the many areas in which time savings might be found are the following: 1 demand-responsive service, obviating waits at bus stops; 2 fast transfers, cutting time waste at transfer points; 3 fewer stops on high-capacity systems (the fto providing local access), speeding service between major points; 4 priority schemes, assigning road space and traffic-light priority to high-occupancy vehicles, thereby cutting time spent in traffic jams. Nor do we forget public transport’s other time wasters. Who has not tangled with a transit information line for most of twenty minutes? Or driven to a rail station or travel agent to buy a ticket that should be available over the phone or Internet, or at a shopping mall? Cutting wasted time on public transport may pay quicker and larger dividends than billions spent on flashy transport technologies. This underlines the importance of methodical system design. Too much time and money is directed to aspects of transport that capture the public imagination, often the hardware of individual modes,

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while little is done to improve transport’s overall timeliness, where we may find savings for the customer faster and at least cost.

p u b l i c t r a n s p o rt ’ s e l e c t r o n i c a r c h i t e c t u r e Most carriers have an internal electronic architecture: the computer and communication systems used to organize and control operations. Our need is for a wider architecture to organize and market an entire transport system, drawing diverse transport operations together and presenting the result to customers in an appealing, easily used format. This is not a technical challenge: if one carrier dominated local, regional, and intercity transport, an electronic architecture would arise naturally as the internal controls of an integrated carrier. However, it is a management challenge, especially where several carriers must cooperate on common service standards, operating protocols, and customer facilities. Against this, developing electronic hardware and software is child’s play. If there is much work to do, the transport industry need not start from scratch. Cooperative arrangements, if less common in passenger than freight transport, may supply useful models for wider efforts at operational coordination. And much has been done to improve the presentation of transport information to customers. For example, airline reservation systems contain information and booking facilities for air and ground transport, hotel, and related services. Most such systems are aimed at travel agents, but there is a clear trend to direct customer access (for example, on the Internet) and to full integration of information provision, transport requests, and payment. The significant next move, aided by more powerful and cheaper computer/communications capacity, is to rework an intercity electronic architecture for use in a comprehensive transport network that includes local movement. This demands electronic systems that are able to handle huge volumes of local service requests (and less frequent calls for longer trips). For this to work efficiently and cheaply, transactions must be processed, not as they are at a travel agency but as bar-coded groceries are checked-out at the local supermarket. For example, customers with personal swipe-cards might access transport from request points located in urban areas. Having identified myself (by swiping my card), I enter a destination and choose from three options – the fastest, a slower but cheaper option, and the

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least-cost choice. Once the fare is charged to my account, the operator dispatches a vehicle to collect me. (These functions might also be performed from a telephone.) A new electronic architecture for public transport calls for a large investment of effort and money but promises a huge leap forward in customer service. A simple request point might offer choices in a text format, while a more elaborate system at a shopping mall (or at home) would allow further exploration, say, previewing a cross-town trip, or an extended vacation, calling up images and sounds regarding facilities en route and at one’s destination. It remains to be seen whether a new electronic architecture is best provided competitively by individual transport enterprises or as a common public architecture, open to all carriers. The latter could result in more diverse transport offerings, and more opportunity for smaller carriers, while competitively developed systems may be more innovative and more quickly adapted to market or technological developments. Transport enterprises and suppliers of electronic systems may profit by moving early and steadily in this area. The hardware and software market is global, not to mention development and updating of graphic/video/audio depictions of travel processes. Nations with organized, well-presented transport systems will gain a marketing edge over those content with fragmented transport services. I leave it to others to decide what electronic methods will best present public transport to its customers, except to say that public transport must be much better presented. Currently, we must act as our own travel agents, poring through timetables or coping with carrier information lines. Why would one do this when the alternative is parked in the drive?

q ua l i t y s ta n d a r d s So far we have considered public transport’s functionality – the physical and electronic structures that can make it useful and intelligible. But these are not the only matters important to customers: in judging quality of service they consider many other factors, of which several were mentioned in the preceding chapter: ease of use, security and privacy, comfort, value of in-transit time, control and independence, and provision for cargo. Even this list barely touches the service quality challenge. Travel quality is not reducible to a few items but arises from an attitude that

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gives urgency to all aspects of the customer’s experience. To give a sense of what is involved, consider the following expanded list of customer interests: •

• • • • • • • • • • • • • • •

ready availability, intelligibility and accuracy of information relevant to the customer’s specific transport needs; availability of choices, including flexible itineraries; simple ticketing/payment mechanisms; easily found service points (where services are not at-door); easily accessed facilities (such as adequate parking); safe, comfortable, appealing transfer facilities and terminals; direct access to vehicles (no queuing prior to embarkation); ease of access to vehicles (adequate entrance doors, etc.); assured availability of a seat and perhaps workspace; helpful and courteous staff; clean, bright, comfortable, and quiet vehicle interiors; useful and appealing on-board goods and services; service reliability (e.g., getting there on time); adequate space and assistance for accompanying cargo; provision for special needs (children, disabled persons); availability and quality of ancillary goods and services.

Several points must be made about service quality. First, there are many quality issues: properly expanded, the above list would extend to several pages. Thus, quality cannot be addressed in summary fashion: it requires meticulous attention by able and motivated service providers who know their customers’ interests and are committed to their satisfaction. Second, customers do not judge quality “on average”. No matter how well most issues are addressed, if one or more are badly handled, customers will give the “thumbs down” to public transport as a whole. Quality attributes have thresholds: acceptable quality must be achieved on every count. While memory of acceptable service fades, “horror stories” are engraved on our minds: unclean toilets, late trains, surly on-board staff. So too the grizzled bus patron with brown bag, or foul-mouthed cabbie, whose driving, in a vehicle destined for the scrapyard induces fervent prayer. These wrongs are not balanced against the good side of public transport but weigh on our minds, disposing us to anything but public transport.

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Third, public transport is as strong as its weakest link. So, the challenge is not just to deal with individual quality issues but to assure customers of consistently high standards in all aspects of their travel experience. At present quality varies widely, partly because so many diverse carriers are involved but also because of slack attitude of many operating staff and managers. Applying a quality standard to an entire transport system calls for disciplined planning and management. This is not a plea for authoritarian control. Rather, the need is for strong leaders committed to high standards and supportive of employees who care about customers and are meticulous in their duties. If important to customers, quality is a dark area in transport planning, a field influenced by postwar enthusiasm for “scientific management”, notably involving the use of mathematics and computers to analyze transport operations and market behaviour. Discipline is a welcome counter to prejudice and hunches, but the urge to quantify sometimes diverts attention from key quality issues. I am critical of the generalized use of conventional mathematical models to study public transport on two grounds. First, most models account for only a few service attributes, specifically those that are most readily quantifiable. To illustrate, mathematical models that estimate effects of quality variables on customer demand usually include measures of travel time and frequency of service. These influences are readily quantified, though their precise effect on customer demand is a matter of debate among transport researchers. But what of all the other quality issues we just raised? The glib answer is that other issues are handled in other ways. But are they? Most managers, especially in the public sector, worry about credibility: here, safety lies in the mathematical model’s objectivity. Thus, strategy focuses on variables expressable in numbers: speed and frequency of service are measurable, so strategy turns on changes in these variables. Buses and trains are added (or dropped) and ways sought to cut travel time, often with expensive technology. The corrective is not to dispense with mathematical techniques but to put them in context. Other market research techniques may help, but the strongest corrective is a strong and intimate relationship with customers, backed by an awareness of the complexity of the customer’s response to transport. My second objection to the use of conventional mathematical models is that they depict choices for specific routes or trips. Yet the natu-

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ral unit of transport consumption is not the individual trip but rather the ability to travel as desired. We do not perceive the cost of owning an automobile as a cost per trip but rather as a cost maintaining a lifestyle, which includes personal control as well as convenience, comfort and other attributes. Common mathematical models that study route or trip behaviour will miss vital market information about mode selection – information that could be critical to planning for public transport that will compete with the automobile for a greater market share. More about this later.

public transport’s economic architecture A high-quality transport system able to compete with the car may cost more than public transport as it now is. How is this new system to be paid for? Governments currently pay much of the bill, covering operating deficits and providing capital for equipment, facilities, and technology development.76 City transit and passenger railways benefit most,77 but airlines and intercity bus companies sometimes attract direct or indirect support. Public funding helped larger transit authorities secure their place in centre-city commuting but did little to build market share elsewhere (suburban/exurban areas, intercity rail and bus, etc.). There, most customers saw little benefit from government aid: if services improved, they still fell far short of a useful alternative to the car. If the Toronto example (chapter 3) is indicative, public funding most benefits transport employees and managers, who get better pay and working conditions and more flexibility with respect to staffing and spending. If government aid sometimes helps, too often it shores up ill-managed, inefficient operations while shifting the focus from customers to the political realm. Nor have subsidies proved a reliable prop: governments with new priorities, such as social programs, are not as keen to fund public transport as they once were. Some say these priorities should change, but why fund public transport if customers gain little from it? Accepting that state aid is sometimes required, we should aim at a public transport system as free of subsidy as possible. Public transport’s bills should be paid by customers. Those needing help to pay higher fares should receive it directly from publicly funded social programs, not indirectly through subsidies to transport enterprises.

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If customers pay all costs – for wages and salaries, material and equipment, infrastructure, financing, etc. – fares would be much higher, but some relief may be had by cutting costs. In Britain, bus costs (per mile operated) have been cut almost in half since the bus industry was deregulated and privatized, the largest part of this cut coming from productivity gains, but part also coming from wage concessions.78 Less dramatic but still significant cuts are being achieved in Britain’s newly franchised rail industry. Cost control is especially important where fares exceed or approach driving costs,79 but should not be overemphasized. The aim is not to provide, cheap basic transport, but a high-quality service: other things being equal, lower costs mean lower fares, but nothing would be gained if mindless cost-cutting compromised essential service standards. I will not say how to cut costs without impairing quality – that is best left to transport operators – but it is notable that many industries are simultaneously cutting costs and improving their products, for example through high quality iso-9000 management system programs generated by the International Organization for Standardization. This is by no means a easy task, but I see no reason why public transport should not take on the challenge.80 Where service quality is markedly improved, as proposed in this chapter, customers should expect higher fares. Thus, in a large city where the alternatives to driving are public transport at, say, two dollars per trip or taxi rides costing twenty dollars or more, a third option might charge five to ten dollars for an intermediate standard of service. Rather than flog cheap transport that few want, offer affordable service aimed at, and priced for, a wider customer base. This runs against a common view that public transport’s overall fare level should be kept low, with discounts for groups that are considered especially needy (young people, seniors, etc.). Boosting public transport fares – more than doubling them in the above example – would especially hit the least well off. Or would it? If a new transport system offers choices, low-income travelers can choose the lowest-cost option. In the urban system earlier described, a fit customer could walk to the nearest major stop on a high-volume transit corridor, avoiding charges for door-to-door transport. The longer walk in this new system would be rewarded by more frequent and faster corridor service. What about those who are unable to walk to distant stops? I think this question misses the real issue, which is not how far the bus stop

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is but whether the frail can cope with basic transit at all. I suspect that many cannot and, failing a decent alternative, resort to family or expensive taxis. Conventional transit, if it serves the frail elderly at all, does so poorly. As noted before, many cities respond to deficiencies in public transport with parallel services. For those with serious physical or mental limitations, there is paratransit. For children, there is school transport. For many other transport gaps, there are a myriad formal and informal transport services. A comprehensive transport system that adapts to a diversity of transport needs could make much of the foregoing irrelevant. In that event, resources wasted on duplicate services could be translated into a subsidy paid directly to customers requiring special services, so they can afford to pay for better-quality service. This also puts transport choices where they belong, with customers, who would decide what service standard meets their circumstances and needs. Those with special transport needs would choose the service standard they need or wish for and, by paying full fares, would avoid the social marking implicit in the receipt of special fare discounts. By contrast, a low-fare transport patchwork earns low revenues while generating high costs and escalating subsidies, which in due course are cut by paring services. As revenues decline – as more customers abandon public transport for cars – the stage is set for yet more cuts. This presents the poor and those with disabilities with a choice between substandard (and declining) public transport or expensive taxi service. While higher fares will undoubtedly attract adverse comment from public transport interest groups, the public’s preference for cars over cheap low-quality transit indicates that most customers would rather pay more for better service. Customers will feel less burdened by higher fares if these are conveniently paid, including electronic payment (such as credit/debit card payment, which is the practice of many taxi operators and longer-distance rail, bus, and air carriers) and a variety of travel passes.

t h e u n i t o f t r a n s p o rt c o n s u m p t i o n a n d public transport pricing An underlying assumption of much writing on transport is that passengers buy trips, the cost and price of which are thus apt topics for market, operations, and economic studies. However, as noted in

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chapter 7, we do not pay for individual trips by car but buy fuel periodically and, less often, pay other costs of car ownership. This not just a matter of convenience: it reflects the customer’s desire to maintain a travel facility, a capacity to make trips. Put another way, the natural unit of transport consumption – what customers want and will pay for – is not individual trips but an ability to travel as desired. This may seem an abstruse technical point, but it is crucial to public transport’s success. To compete, public transport must provide a comparable travel facility, a way to get about that mirrors what the car and its supporting road and expressway networks offer. Consistent with this, fares should encourage us to buy into public transport as a system, based on its capacity to meet year-round travel needs. The implication is that longer-term system passes or subscriptions should be the primary fare type, with tickets for individual trips or shorter term passes offered as a supplement.81 This does not mean that the numbers and types of trips are irrelevant. Knowledge of travel patterns is essential to good transport system design and pricing. For example, a variety of system passes might be offered, the price of each tailored to the customer’s expected usage in a year, perhaps a higher charge made for regular access to a large network, including longer-distance commuting routes, and a lower charge for access to a more restricted network at off-peak times. This way of thinking may not sit well with those accustomed to trips as the basic unit of transport analysis: in the world where transport is bought trip by trip, passes are an economic evil. Suppose I take the bus to a local shop, saving a half-hour walk: if the fare was one dollar I would walk, but I use my pass to ride “free”. But analysis of the operator’s books shows the trip costs three dollars. I have induced the operator to spend three dollars for something worth less than one dollar, a decided economic waste. This reasoning makes sense for markets in irregular travel (such as vacation trips) but not in markets for regular travel, where the trip is the wrong unit of consumption. In pricing cars, dealers do not charge for trips to be made with them but price a travel facility – the car – as the natural unit of sale. Thinking about public transport this way, we would estimate overall system cost, putting a price on the system facility per customer, not per trip. In current practice, passes are often priced as a multiple of singletrip fares, based on an assumed or estimated number of rides per

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pass. This would not be an appropriate method for a transport system financed mainly from passes. Rather, passes should be priced independently based on the cost of providing a comprehensive transport offering and on anticipated longer- term customer usage. In this approach, single-trip fares are a source of incidental revenue, which helps keep pass prices down but is not the dominant pricing form.

a n i n t e g r at e d s y s t e m o f p u b l i c t r a n s p o r t We now see what a complete system of public transport entails. First, it deploys at least four distinctive transport elements: 1 conventional bus, rail and air services as high-capacity, high-speed connectors between major terminals, not as self-standing transport but as part of a larger network; 2 demand-responsive transport to reach high-capacity services and major terminals, or, if the customer wishes, to bypass terminals with direct door-to-door service; 3 individual transport by taxi or rental car; 4 commercially negotiated rides with drivers. Second, a unified transport system does not separate urban, rural and intercity travel, or require customers to do the hard work of assembling services to meet travel needs. Third, quality standards are established with close attention to a host of customer concerns, creating a predictable and reliable transport system in which customers may have restored faith. Fourth, fares are matched to customer travel behaviour, notably to the customer’s commitment to a travel facility. And whether we pay for a travel facility or for individual trips, fares must be competitive. Where fares are already high relative to the car, operators must aggressively seek cost reductions. This is a large task but no more than is expected of any commercial enterprise: a business system that meets customer needs in an organized and cost-effective manner. We must expect no less of public transport. We might take a leaf from the freight hauler’s book: cargo is moved door to door within regions, and across entire continents and oceans, by various transport forms. Many factories demand an integrated

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“just-in-time” transport system that delivers as needed, to reduce storage at the factory site. What if passenger transport worked “just in time,” each part coordinated to eliminate useless waiting and speed passengers on their way? In freight transport, integration has its own term: logistics, the science of planning and organizing transport with the shipper’s interest in mind. We need the public transport equivalent, the commitment to produce a complete systematic response to the customer’s need.

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chapter nine

Wanted: A Public Transport Revolution

Time for a breather, and to collect our wits! We see a new way for public transport: a new relationship with customers, and a pattern of service suited to their transport interests. Before setting off, let’s pause to size up the journey ahead and fix on a few landmarks, to keep us headed in the right direction. Getting through the undergrowth won’t be easy: the current aims, attitudes, operating methods, and institutions of public transport present a formidable ideological and bureaucratic tangle that by its familiarity, makes the worn path feel right – makes continued failure seem rational – while making new ideas and practices seem wrong. We must cut through this tangle, ever conscious of the conceptual landmarks that will keep us straight. Of these, five particularly stand out. Customer-as-partner. Whatever is said about the design of transport services, we may not progress without the customer’s support: the customer is the market arbiter for any transport solution. So, if we had only one reference point for public transport, it should be respect for customers. That is, we will not see customers as objects – not as items passively carried, nor as inferiors to be manipulated by crude advertising, customer relations or politically oriented public relations. We will see them as partners, as having an interest in public transport’s success in common with its operators. We do not propose that customers take over public transport’s offices and boardrooms – though this might bring welcome fresh air! – but argue for a more intimate day-to-day relationship, to understand the customer’s interests and how best to serve them. Customers-aspartners do not dictate marketing and operating details – these belong

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to people trained in those areas – but bring a crucial exterior perspective to the business. This relationship gives importance to the flexible transport operator. We portrayed the FTO as a transport function – local pick-up/drop-off and trip organization – but its local presence and role as primary contact allows it to develop the close contacts necessary to positive customer relationships. Even large FTOs, serving a large region, would best function as an assemblage of small local units, whose employees and managers are locally known and approachable. Satisfying customer preferences. At present, much of public transport is in the public domain, publicly-funded and directed to public goals, primarily to meet mobility needs. The intent, to provide the less well off with access to education, employment, health care, and other amenities of civilized society is laudable. Public transport should still meet needs but, to build its market, must do more. Those who drive have met their needs: they don’t need public transport, but they might prefer it if offered better service, or lower cost, or both. Getting people to ride public transport because they prefer it is quite different from meeting the needs of people without choices. Those who cannot exercise a preference accept whatever service the operator chooses to provide. But not car uses: they must be persuaded. This makes the operator ever mindful of public transport’s competition (the car), but not so the operator concerned only to meet needs. A need-based transport system invariably offers minimal service. The bus runs regularly in normal working hours,82 less often at other times, if at all, and equipment is chosen for operating convenience and economy, not comfort. Some public transport systems operate to a higher standard but when public money is short, will gravitate to a “core network” and basic services. In re-forming public transport, we will often be urged to meet needs (and only needs), which is seen as responsible use of public funds. This is an important reason for public transport to break from its dependency on government, so that it may freely ask what the customer wants of transport and provide it. Offering choices. Mostly, public transport offers no choice: one takes or leaves a standard service. There is, of course, the choice between public transport and the car, but that is a lifestyle commitment made once or twice in a lifetime, not the garden-variety choice that ani-

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mates day-to-day commerce. Choosing public transport over the car is not like picking a brand of cereal. In the auto industry, the standard low-cost product died with Henry Ford: buyers now choose from a dizzying array of models and accoutrements. Apart from better matching products to customers, choices invite customers to form preferences, an invitation that engages them in the car-buying process. The prospect of choice helps get them in the car dealer’s door. The preceding chapter advanced a public transport system that also offers choice – fastest service, least cost, etc., and other choices might be provided (various comfort standards, ancillary services, and so on). In this way, we can encourage customers to give public transport a closer look. If public transport does not invite choice, how can we expect customers even to begin forming preferences in its favour? Organizing transport. Most transport operators would bridle at the suggestion that they are not organized. Transport operations call for a high level of organization, without which airplanes, trains, and buses would not run. But that is not the question. The question is how these finely tuned transport operations are organized from the customer’s viewpoint. The answer: not well at all. Public transport’s present operating concept is the movement of vehicles from station to station, often with a distinct carrier running each kind of vehicle. Railways run trains between rail stations, bus companies run between bus stops and terminals, airlines fly between airports. In tough times, when bosses call for a return to basics, staff hired and advanced for competence in this “core” task keep their jobs while others are laid off. Multimodal operators in large cities may run local buses, rail transit, etc., within one urban or regional system of transport. This is better, but the veneer of organization conceals the same operating concept: move vehicles between stops. This puts the burden of arranging transport on customers, not carriers. Having decided where to go, they select and combine vehicle trips, aided by schedules that say where vehicles go, not how to get from A to B. Sometimes one is lucky. Phoning transit information, I reach an empathic human being who knows the system well and can say how best to get from A to B. But this moment of sanity only mitigates a problem: it does not solve it. Transport access equally reflects an emphasis on vehicle-movement. Public transport does not come to me: I must find it. So too when

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transferring: even the transfer this takes place in the same terminal, I walk long distances, climb stairs, and wait. The vehicles do not come to us, we must come to the vehicles. To attract customers with choices, public transport must be organized to serve them as they want to be served, including those who will happily walk to a nearby bus stop and those who prefer convenient door-to-door service. If customers are to make a longer-term commitment to public transport, it must also be organized as a general travel facility suited to many travel wants, not as a few limited services aimed at basic needs. Getting transport operators to organize for passenger (as opposed to vehicle) movement would be an achievement, but a fully organized transport system would do much more. It would: 1 fully integrate physical transport functions with related services and electronic facilities, allowing customers to access and use transport as and when they want; 2 maintain consistent quality standards across the transport system in line with customer expectations (and meeting or exceeding what is offered by the automobile); and, 3 tie pricing and payment methods to the way customers want to use and pay for transport. This is far from the sporadic linking of vehicle movements that passes for public transport “coordination”. The requirement is not for partly organized transport but a rigorously organized system that subordinates vehicle movements and related functions to the customer’s mobility interest. For the customer, the best-organized transport is barely visible, apparently working effortlessly, its intricacies far from view. Achieving it will take a huge investment in system planning, far beyond the last chapter’s modest proposals. But without it, public transport will make little headway in the market. Inverting the public transport hierarchy. At the centre of public transport’s ideology is high-capacity transport whose aim is the efficient movement of large numbers of low per – passenger costs. To make it work, customers must be concentrated on a few routes which may be areas of high residential and commercial density, or transport corridors into which are fed customers from elsewhere.

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This framework usually requires that customers be denied travel options. Given the choice of direct door-to-door service or a comfortable vehicle (say, a highway coach versus a standard transit bus), many customers will be lost to conventional high-capacity services. To prevent this, operators rely on governments to regulate against the entry of alternative transport. This makes the high-capacity operator the dominant player in a public transport hierarchy. If flexible transport operators are allowed, they are rigidly subordinated as suppliers of fill-in service in outlying areas or during “off hours”. The customer’s interest falls somewhere near the bottom of the hierarchy. To put customers first and give effect to an integrated transport system, this hierarchy must be turned upside down, with flexible operators prominent as lead organizations for transport system design and management. If high-capacity operators still serve some customers directly, their primary role is to support flexible operators as suppliers of transport capacity in major corridors. This calls for entirely new institutions, with the management and technical capacity to take on complex systems design, and to negotiate with traditional high-capacity operators. These entities may be organized into local units, for proximity to customers, but may need a wider presence to assure consistent quality on longer trips. This and other advantages of size mean that ftos may evolve into large national or multinational carriers, offering integrated transport over large areas. As an alternative, a network of ftos might coordinate services within a franchise system, each franchise specifying operating and quality protocols to ensure high-quality trips between and within locally-held operations. Franchising is common practice in retail marketing, though not without complication here: on longer trips, for example, customers must be passed from one franchise to another, and franchise holders would require common information and payment systems. Evolution or revolution? The foregoing involves a huge shift in thinking: from customer-as-object to customer-as-partner; from meeting needs to servicing preferences; from standard transport to an array of service choices; from moving vehicles to organizing transport; from an operator fixated on “mass transit” to one focused on the customer’s range of transport wants.

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The agenda seems radical, but is a revolution really necessary? If there is a better way for public transport, can it be reached by gradual evolution from its present form? With new ideas, can old organizations make steady and substantive progress? Revolution is nasty and unpredictable, best avoided if possible, but I don’t see an alternative for public transport. Practitioners with jobs at stake naturally prefer gentle change but can’t make steady progress: any discernible move from established practice will draw censure and resistance from those who profit from public transport’s failure. The problem will be ignored and new ideas will be ridiculed or blocked, or diverted by variants on old solutions that do not unduly disturb the operator’s peace. This industry won’t change from within: change must come from without, from people uncommitted to its shibboleths. In a dark moment, the physicist Max Planck remarked: “A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but ... because its opponents eventually die.” To get new ideas, sometimes one needs new people.

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chapter ten

Making Public Transport Work

If it will take a revolution to make public transport work, whose revolution is it? Where will we find the people or organizations with the ability and staying-power to remake public transport? For much of the twentieth century, we looked to government for public transport solutions. In the early years, worries about “wasteful competition”, high fares in uncompetitive markets, and public safety prompted governments to regulate transport. Market entry was controlled, fares subject to government approval, and operating standards imposed. As the century passed, government became public transport’s operator and funding source, as carriers unable to cope in a car-dominated market were brought within the public sector and subsidized. Apart from propping up failed carriers, governments had the positive aim of helping those who were unable to drive and halting the slide from public to private transport. This experiment in public regulation, operation, and funding, well meant as it may have been, has failed: even with subsidy and other public encouragements, public transport attracts a diminishing share of passenger travel. There are exceptions – public transport sometimes impresses83 – but these are the few survivors, close by the vortex forming round the sinking ship. Even so, many want governments directly involved in public transport. Iindeed, some identify “public transport” so closely with “publicly-operated transport” that no other way can be imagined. If change must occur governments must do the changing: we’ll ask the hapless captain of the lost ship to save the day.

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If governments have failed to save public transport, they need not be blamed for its demise. Perhaps no one could have saved the day given the attraction of the car. Nor is blame particularly relevant: we are not interested in past wrongs but in whether today’s governments could bring about a new form of transport. Pro-market advocates have two answers. First, since public operations are inefficient and costly,84 new ventures aimed at market gains will be excessively expensive. Without incentive of profit or fear of insolvency, perhaps lacking skill, public operators over-spend on equipment and facilities and hire too many overpaid and unproductive staff. Second, public management stultifies the market, discouraging innovations that are necessary to build market share. This will be so whether governments operate transport or regulate privately run services. If market entry and exit, operating details, and fares are publicly-supervised, private carriers will avoid unfamiliar innovations that could draw unfavourable political attention. Supporters of public operations quickly provide the counter examples. If many badly run public operations can be found, there are others, if not many, that are well run.85 These spawn hope: if some do well, their sterling examples may inspire their less-efficient brethren to do better. For those keen on public control but worried by high costs, there is the option of contracting or franchising services to private carriers. That allows governments to call the shots on market strategy while keeping spending down. The above rather simplifies a complex debate between those favouring substantive public sector roles and advocates of unregulated private markets, but is should be clear that there is argument on both sides, which gives rise to a policy see-saw. Disappointed by failed left-wing policies, we swing right, to privatization and deregulation. As the latter fail to produce quick solutions, we swing back, if not to regulation and public operation, then to less direct interventions such as the currently popular public-private partnership. These policy swings won’t get us far: striking off one way, then another, we thrash about in the bush, wasting energy, wondering if a way out can ever be found. But we need not lose hope: the way will become clearer if we look beyond the general reasons for or against public operations to the specific requirements for a public transport revolution.

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Now that we see the specific requirements for success – higher quality standards (see chapter 7) and changes in transport architecture (see chapter 8) – we are able to explore whether these changes are best effected by public or private means. We need not rely on general debates about public versus private sector but can make a more precise judgment. My view, explained further in this chapter, is that government will not make a public transport revolution: for large changes, we must look to a free market of private carriers. This is not to ignore the imperfections of transport markets. They will not produce neat or quick, solutions to public transport’s problems, though in time they can produce useful solutions. Nor is this to deny governments their role: short of running it, they can do much to promote effective public transport. To begin, let’s revisit the public transport challenge, as outline in chapter 9.

needs, preferences, and choices To succeed in the market, public transport must do more than meet needs: it must respond to mobility preferences. This requires an array of transport choices, including services offering a higher standard of service than is now typical. An important question is whether governments should cater to preferences at all. A twentieth-century populist might say a government should do whatever its electors want, but the twentieth century also taught the impracticality of an ever-present welfare state charged with all aspects of well-being. While we want responsive government, our electoral behaviours also indicates a desire for limited government focused on key needs, such as defense, crime control, health, and education. When it comes to public transport – well down on the priority list – we may support basic service, to get the poor to work and meet the travel needs of the disabled, but not a higher standard. Nonetheless, suppose the public, perhaps influenced by an environmental crisis, wanted their governments to provide high-quality transport. Could the public sector deliver it? We might think so, since some public operators already provide a high standard of service, but these do not make a general case. Indeed, the inappropriateness of public operations will be apparent once we consider what satisfying preferences involves.

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First, transport must adapt regularly to changing preferences. There are stable underlying patterns of customer interest, as we assumed in advancing a transport performance standard (chapter 7), but particular preferences are shaped by passing fashions, and by changing situations of individual customers. A public carrier subject to the tortoiselike process of democratic governance cannot adapt to rapid market changes. This process can be circumvented by vesting operations, under broad mandates, with agencies, authorities, state companies, or other enterprise units. Yet as they recede from politics, these arms-length units bear less on a public mission. Or, if a tight rein is maintained, their managers become so solicitous of their political bosses as to be ineffective in the market. Second, to cater to preferences is to provide different levels of service according to the customer’s ability to pay. I can only afford a low-cost bus, requiring a half-mile walk to the nearest stop, but my wealthy neighbour pays for at-door pickup. While vital to market success, this runs against a public service ethos requiring that public goods be provided to all on an equitable basis. Some publicly run services, such as public railways, already offer diverse service standards and fares without raising equity issues. But would a comprehensive transport system escape question? Would we agree, for example, that a public authority in a large city should provide high-quality personalized service to the wealthy while offering only basic transport to the poor? While many governments give priority to providing transport according to need, some are responsive to preferences. But to make public transport work, preferences must have priority with many operators, not just a few. Not only is this sharp turn in practice unlikely but I question whether it is a proper exercise of public authority.

organizing a fragmented transport system An organized transport system subordinates all aspects of its operation to the customer’s transport interest. This interest has no jurisdictional bound – a customer may wish to travel to any part of the planet – and is inseparable from other life interests that customers would like to pursue while traveling. The car’s success reflects this. To facilitate highway travel, governments cooperate to provide a complete road network, seamlessly connected across jurisdictions. To ensure a high-

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quality travel experience, they impose road construction and use standards and provide, or encourage others to provide, related facilities. Automakers, mindful of customer preference and road standards, offer vehicles comprehensively designed for ride quality, interior comfort and on-board activity. Seldom is public transport as organized. Every jurisdiction has distinctive policies and rules for each transport mode, rarely cooperating on transport as a whole. Facing this patchwork, bus, rail, and air carriers often find it best to function independently, and often to partition transport into city, regional, or intercity services to simplify interaction with bureaucracies. Even where coordination is seen as important (as in Europe), it rarely approaches the standard proposed in this book (see chapter 7). Public transport’s fragmentation reflects its low standing with governments, most of which accord private road transport high priority. Roads are important, hence every effort is made to ensure that they are of acceptable standard and easily used: the same devotion is rarely extended to public transport. Of course, priorities can change, but not easily. Governments have been building roads for centuries and will continue to do so as long as the public demands high levels of private mobility. Both politicians and bureaucrats are under the sway of the politically potent roadbuilding, auto-making, and auto-servicing industry. Future careers depend on happy dealings with private-sector counterparts. There is little scope here for public transport. Even if governments became seriously interested in public transport, we must reckon with their inherent weakness in transport system design and management. This is inevitable where hiring and advancement are decided by political or other non-technical criteria (such as equity hirings to redress workplace imbalance). As for private corporations, strategic and technical skills may be valued, but if they are not highly and consistently prized, they gravitate elsewhere. Short of skilled staff, governments would move slowly on the complex task of organizing the operations and infrastructure of diverse transport forms across jurisdictions. However, to gain ground against the car’s rising tide a new public transport system must be organized expeditiously, a task requiring a technical and strategic focus that would be unusual in government but may be found in better-run private corporations.

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More fundamentally, government priorities and structure mitigate against comprehensive planning. Priority goes to matters in a government’s jurisdiction: one cooperates with others, but when pressed on all sides, the public official asks, For what am I politically or legally accountable? A government’s structure affects its perception of problems: a transport department divided into modal units does not address transport, but deals with rail, bus, air, or transit issues. So, an insolvent passenger railway draws rail solutions – cut rail services, regulate competitors, spend on rail facilities and equipment – not a larger transport strategy. In centrally governed nations, intergovernment cooperation is less necessary, and a measure of internal coordination can be had with special functions, such as cross-department task forces. Elsewhere, regional coordinating units can be established to harmonize policies between several governments. But these are of no value if their functioning units are staffed with people of the wrong mind set who see only rail, bus, air, or transit problems where they should see transport challenges.

t h e p u b l i c t r a n s p o rt h i e r a r c h y A responsive transport system demands a new operator close to customers and adaptable to their preferences. To organize trips that use various services and functions, including high-capacity station-tostation transport supplied by conventional operators, this operator must have standing as the lead player in public transport, with bus companies, railways, airlines, and transit operators accepting less-exalted roles as transport suppliers. Where governments dominate as operators or regulators, this transformation will be hard won. Senior officials, among them public transport managers, are not known for humility. Can we expect those who see themselves atop the social scale happily accepting the subordination of their activities and interests to the vision and direction of independent transport organizations? Nor are governments inclined to sponsor revolutions in their own backyards; indeed, it would be naive to expect change that greatly and unpredictably affects the careers of government employees and senior officials. In this regard, privatization – a recurrent theme of transport policies of the 1980s and 1990s – has value as a way to give

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others a chance to make changes that would not be easily secured within the public sector. The public sector is not qualified to make public transport work. Apart from costly operations and regulation’s stultifying effect, its focus is public need, not customer wants, while its political/bureaucratic style is inimical to effective transport organization. There is more to say about public sector roles but for now, suppose public transport is provided by private carriers competing in a free transport market. What then?

a f r e e m a r k e t i n p u b l i c t r a n s p o rt The market advocate answers: if there is a market for good public transport – if customers would happily pay for better service – a free market in transport will induce carriers to provide it. If established operators fail to serve customers, new market entrants will entice their customers away with quality service: in this Darwinian process, strong responsive carriers thrive while weak “stand-put” carriers die. Of course, customers may be unwilling to pay for good service: their real preference may be for cheap basic transport. This seems counterintuitive, given the price we now pay for private mobility, but we accept the possibility. A free market would then favour providers of low-cost basic service. If customers want revolution, the market will make it; if not, it won’t. However, this is an idealization of an arena in which many transport gladiators fight, often changing their weapons – new services to keep up customer interest – in hopes of prevailing over the competition. Real transport markets are far from this ideal: competitors are few, sometimes only one operator, and large changes occur slowly. So, before asserting that free markets will produce a revolution, we had best see how they really work.86 This is not easy to do, for there are few genuinely free markets to study, at least not large markets. For example, the US, a leader in market reforms, deregulated interstate air services, but local airport authorities influence air operations when allocating space at airports and setting related terms. While interstate bus services are deregulated, some states still regulate intrastate operations. A much larger part of the passenger market, urban transit, is largely controlled by local government.

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Britain took the aggressive step of deregulating local buses in areas outside London, but with residual controls and provision for local authority subsidies. In the intercity bus market, most controls were dropped and the public national carrier sold, but in the passenger rail market, the British government chose to franchise services, with controls on services and fares. So, if we look to privatized and deregulated markets for clues about the workings of free markets, we won’t get an entirely clear picture. With this warning, I offer the following remarks on the prospects for a market-driven transport revolution.

t r a n s p o r t m a r k e t s t e n d t o m o n o p o ly o r o l i g o p o ly In the 1970s and early 1980s, many economists and policy analysts, especially those in the pro-market camp, thought opening markets to new entrants would bring in many new carriers eager to compete with established carriers for the customer’s attention. The reality was not quite as expected. In Britain’s intercity bus market, deregulated in 1980, National Express (ne) easily defended its dominant position. This might be put down to ne’s status as a publicly owned carrier, which might have given it a financial edge over smaller competitors, but a subsequently privatized ne established an even firmer grip on the British coach market. In local bus markets outside London, deregulated in 1986 and mostly privatized by the early 1990s, there was little direct competition (perhaps ten percent of the market actively contested). For the most part, after a period of uncertainty and some market entry, carriers accepted each others’ hegemony over public transport “territories”. Meanwhile, the many privatized bus companies are being absorbed into a few holding groups, much reducing the prospects for future market competition. In the United States, two national bus lines, Greyhound and Trailways, squared off when interstate markets were opened in 1982. After years of turmoil for both companies, Greyhound has emerged as the sole national carrier. The domestic airline market, deregulated in 1980, was an early model of competition and innovation but is now settling into a more stable pattern in which a few airlines dominate larger markets, supported by local and regional carriers on less-traveled routes.

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International air markets, which have seen some liberalization (for example on North Atlantic routes), are showing a similar tendency to consolidation around a few larger international carriers. These few instances suggest that, after a period of adjustment, sometimes featuring fierce competition, transport markets fall to a few carriers (an oligopoly), and often to a single monopolist. Further study would be instructive. That this outcome was not clearly anticipated is partly due to a preoccupation among economists with effects of costs on carrier competition. Studies showed that large air and bus carriers had no cost advantage over their smaller brethren. This result gave policymakers faith that free markets would be competitive, with larger carriers readily challenged by smaller upstarts. Competitive conduct, however, arises from customer priorities. If the highest priority is low fares, transport costs are key factors: then, many carriers may compete. But customers are equally, if not more, keen on service attributes found only in larger transport systems. This puts small carriers with a few routes at a great disadvantage against carriers that are able to mount networks and provide systemlevel services (including frequent traveler programs to encourage carrier loyalty). We should therefore expect free markets to favour large integrated carriers – in limited markets, perhaps only one – with small carriers relegated to routes where network/system facilities are not at issue, as in some commuter markets. A market in public transport will generate competition only where it is large enough to justify several parallel systems of transport. By large, I mean far beyond most present markets.

competition arises in many forms As in any industry, transport competition takes various forms, some more constructive than others. In Britain, deregulation caused local bus operators to defend markets by flooding routes with buses: more service would secure customers, thus driving off competitors and discouraging would-be entrants. In the worst cases, bus drivers raced between stops to scoop customers, or schedules were timed to place buses just ahead of a competitor’s planned departure. Some carriers sought an edge with fare cuts, which were quickly matched by others.

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This tit-for-tat fighting or tactical competition soon settled into armed truce, with each carrier accepting the established markets of its competitors. With the truce, service levels have remained higher than before competition, but fares have increased and customer numbers have fallen. Tactical competition may, in stronger industries, create useful tension, but in Britain it weakened an already sick industry. While most operators saw the market challenge as one of day-today survival, some saw strategic opportunities. This was sometimes seen on the road, as new services (new buses, better timings, new fare types) marked a departure from established practice. It was seen in corporate acquisitions: in a declining market, one grows mainly by absorbing others. This strategic competition, a search for unique market positions or corporate forms, involves large, risky investments. However, by avoiding paths worn by others, one may secure a customer base requiring little ongoing defense. To put it militarily: why fight on the plain when one can command from the heights? While Britain’s local bus market exhibits some strategic competition, a better example is the intercity market, now dominated by National Express. Before deregulation, ne studied its market and defined an entirely new service pattern. Its practice of contracting operations to other carriers kept its organizational focus on system functions: market analysis, network planning, quality standards, information/reservation systems, national advertising, corporate planning, and finance. ne’s monopoly may reflect artificial barriers. For a time ne had privileged access to bus terminals and state ownership may have helped, but these factors are no longer relevant. More to the point, ne focused on system issues, a matter of significance for customers that gave ne the strategic advantage, a natural lock on the market. In future, there may be other competitors, but only if ne’s standards slip or a new entrant secures higher ground by providing an even better organized transport system. That success may lead to monopoly, however, does not mean that success can be had by arbitrarily forming a monopoly. Far from inducing strategic behaviour, that would lock in the status quo. If there must be a monopoly, it must arise by nature, not artifice. Nor is monopoly inevitable: a successful transport system may increase the market enough to attract competing systems. There is no intrinsic bar to competition in transport.

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t r a n s p o r t m a r k e t s ta k e t i m e t o a d j u s t Change takes time (revolutions somewhat longer), a fact often overlooked by economists who study markets after changes have had their full effect. In neglectful or dishonourable hands, failing to say how markets get where they are going can give the impression that change can be had quickly and painlessly. In Britain, the local bus market is still adjusting long after its deregulation and privatization in the mid-1980’s. Divided into many small carriers, under a rather naive view of the workings of transport markets, this industry found itself ill organized to mount a new strategy and wasted itself in tactical competition. As markets declined and finances worsened, carriers were steadily absorbed by the emerging bus conglomerates. There are bright spots: some carriers show entrepreneurial spirit and in time may reverse the industry’s decline. However, large gains for the industry as a whole may be a long way off. Extended misery was not foreseen, at least not widely admitted, and its causes are not fully understood. Some may see it as the outcome of rising car ownership, or of cuts in public funding (which weakened carrier finances, thus making strategic action a practical impossibility). However, an equally important factor may have been entrenched management and operating staff. In any business, change arises in two ways: incumbent managers and staff embrace new ideas and practices or, if they do not, are replaced with new personnel ready to take on contemporary challenges. The latter path is evident in daily news reports of corporate overhauls and boardroom bloodshed. Yet a business reliant on special skills may have little scope for replacement. One can hire staff from other carriers, a prospect that may induce present staff to work harder or accept lower pay. However, this game of musical chairs may not alter industrywide views and practices. Moreover, if entrenched managers hire and advance those of like mind, a culture of outdated practices can be perpetuated far into the future. Embedded practice may be behind the results of a 1994 study of British local bus strategy,87 which showed a preoccupation among managers with corporate survival. This result is hardly surprising in an industry beset by hostile markets and funding cuts, but the lack of strategic initiative is disturbing: in the teeth of the storm, the instinct

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was not to head into the wind but to batten down the hatches and hope for the best. I doubt whether things are much different elsewhere. Too often, when transport professionals call for a “back to basics” or “core business” strategy, they offer not a new corporate heading but a reassertion of old ways. Luckily, there are exceptions, the few carriers who are able and willing to take on a challenge. In an open market, at least some succeed and grow, inspiring up-and-coming managers and staff to adopt new practices, in time transforming an entire industry. So, if markets are slow and awkward, as exemplified by the British experiment in market competition, we might give them time to work, especially if the alternative is failure under public control. We may wait quite a while, but best to wait.

financing publ ic transport How can a privately run public transport system be financed without government subsidy? If fares are raised to cover all costs, surely customers will defect in even greater numbers to the car. If public transport must be improved to open new markets, who, other than government, would provide money to improve it? Who would invest in public transport, given its past unprofitability and the strength of its market competitor? Let’s begin with fares. In Britain, where bus costs (that is, costs per bus kilometre) fell almost fifty percent after the market reforms of the1980s, intercity coach fares fell on competitive routes but held steady or rose elsewhere. In urban areas, many local bus fares rose because local subsidy was cut, and because cost savings were offset by more bus services, which were added to meet competitive threats. (Britain’s railway market is less indicative of open-market fares because many fares are controlled by franchise agreements.) So, in an open private market, some public transport fares may rise (perhaps not as drastically as may be imagined), while other fares hold steady, and yet others decrease. The key question is not whether fares will go up or down but whether customers will pay for something better than basic transport. Can premium services, as operated in some markets or as outlined in this book, command high enough fares to pay for themselves without subsidy? Since the majority (some of whom we hope to attract to public transport) pay to drive the answer seems clear: most

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will pay for high-quality service. Even low income travelers may gladly pay for more regular and reliable transport if it provides wider access to employment and other mobility benefits. Higher fares will not necessarily drive customers away, if they get much better service. If customers can be persuaded to pay more for better public transport, we are much of the way to answering the funding question. At present, little private capital flows to public transport without government guarantee. If fares are held to unprofitable levels or investors fear future fare regulation, capital will only be committed if future returns are assured. It is mere fancy to expect private investors to behave in any other way. However, if public transport fares are sufficient to cover operating costs, repay capital spending, and pay a market return on investment, private investors will not be in short supply. Indeed, this is apparent in the few public transport markets offering scope for private profit. In the 1980s, many British bus companies, facing uncertain markets, chose not to replace aging buses, but some chose to invest in new equipment, thus staking a market position as high-quality operators. In the rail market, most investment is driven by franchise agreements with the British government, but some operators have independently invested, hoping to position themselves as market leaders. Whether customers will pay for high-quality public transport remains to be seen. (Existing premium services may supply clues.) But we should be clear on one point: there is nothing inherent in public transport that drives off private investment. If more customers see value in better public transport and thus willingly pay its bills, investors will happily invest in it.

promoting competitive solutions If a private market in public transport offers the prospect of future change, it does not follow that governments have nothing to do but observe its imperfect and slow proceedings. If (and this is a big if) governments can resist the urge to meddle in corporate strategy, they may help markets towards useful public transport outcomes by correcting its more obvious weaknesses. Let’s consider an example. Suppose, following the framework of chapter 8, a small carrier, say a taxi company, wants to expand its operations to provide a complete local or intercity network, its own services knitted with other carriers’ high-volume services and facilities. At present, this would be laughed

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off: large carriers won’t go for a scheme in which they play second fiddle. If a new network depends on access to their facilities (stations, rail lines, airport slots), there can be no hope of it getting off the ground. In a free market, this problem eventually resolves itself: as old-style carriers fail, their fixed facilities are released to new enterprises at knock-down prices. Moreover, a public transport network could be designed with many potential interchange points, much as the Internet functions in electronic “space.” In this form, it is less easily held hostage by owners of fixed facilities: one simply reroutes traffic through other places. A new public transport system might arise faster, however, if new entrants had ready access to high-capacity facilities and services, aided by public regulations requiring expeditious and fair access. For example, some nations already require railways to grant third-party access to their lines, though these policies only go part way to genuinely open access. Fixed facilities may be placed in a non-operating unit (in the public or private sector), available to all operators on the same basis. In Britain, it was felt that control of London’s Victoria Coach Station by National Express helped the company dominate the intercity coach market, a concern that led to Victoria’s establishment as a separate entity to ensure fair access for all coach operators. Access is important in places other than traditional transport terminuses: if public transport is to be widely available, it must reach us where we are, for example in large private or public developments. Sometimes developers see commercial value in proximate access to public transport, and provide it without prompting. If they don’t, or if they restrict access to selected operators, governments may properly intervene to ensure fair access. Intervention might take the form of planning standards for transport access at major developments, or regulation of competitive behaviour to prevent or remedy market abuses.

t r a n s p o r t s a f e t y a n d e n v i r o n m e n ta l r e g u l at i o n Where the public has endorsed market reforms – privatization, deregulation, etc. – they have often called for stringent safety controls. With good reason: in an open market, operators can cut costs with substandard equipment, skimpy maintenance and underskilled staff, thus increasing accident risk. With low costs, they can drive responsible operators from the market.

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If safety regulation is important, however, the wrong kind can bring back-door market control. For example, transport carriers are often required to carry out prescribed maintenance checks and repairs, use approved equipment, and employ staff certified for competence. This seems reasonable, but the detail required to make operating prescriptions work calls for close relations between carriers and government officials. This invariably gives rise to regulations that are favourable to established operators known to politicians and bureaucrats. If only by neglect, the effect is to discriminate against new entrants who wish to try something new. The corrective is to focus regulation on results, to prescribe a standard of safety performance while ensuring accountability for failure, for example through prompt withdrawal of operating authority. If governments simultaneously insist on adequate insurance, carriers and insurers will have a common interest in defining realistic operating practices. In that way, a politicized regulatory system can be replaced with one that is more open to innovative but responsible transport carriage. Much the same might be said for environmental regulation, but here a performance focus is already evident: car makers must meet new vehicle emission standards but may decide how to do so. Even so, governments may impose favoured strategies: to illustrate, California requires that future automotive fleets have a specified proportion of “zero-emission” cars.88

p u b l i c / p r i vat e pa r t n e r s h i p s In recent years, public discontent with market imperfections in transport and other sectors has brought a new round of state intervention, but most governments can ill afford major spending. Moreover, few socialist thinkers favour a return to policies that proved economically and socially disastrous (and bad for socialist politicians). Thus, credence accrued to a middle ground between open markets and state run economies – what Britain’s Labour Party calls a “third way”. We see this in transport partnerships between the public and private sectors: governments, having decided what they want, arrange it with private entities. So, governments get roads built by granting concessions to companies that build and operate them, charging tolls to pay costs and make a profit. Transport services are franchised under agreements specifying service standards and state support. Or, to

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avoid up-front capital costs, private lessors are engaged to supply equipment under lease. With few exceptions, these arrangements do little to forward public transport. First, they reinforce the public sector’s involvement in market strategy. We should not see public-private partnerships as comparable in discipline or creative capacity to a private and free market in transport services. Second, agreements between governments and private entities invariably constrain market competition. A private company would be foolish to risk money on facilities that return investments over a long period of time unless governments protect markets to assure a steady stream of income. Third, no matter what their political stripe, governments are invariably conservative in practice and will favour known transport forms. Private-public partnerships, far from making a new transport architecture, will finance traditional high-capacity facilities. Even where these facilities incorporate the latest technology (computer design, advanced materials, and electronic systems, etc.) they can do no good if they reinforce outdated marketing and operating concepts.

disciplining road use The vision of a transport market in which roads are privately owned and free of market controls is far from the reality with which public transport must contend. Governments will have a large role in road provision and regulation into the far distant future. The role is usually one of support and promotion of private mobility, but it could take a turn in favour of a more balanced transport system. The key conceptual turn is to see roads as ways to move people, not vehicles. If vehicles were given priority according to the number of people they carry, public transport vehicles would be expedited, making them more useful and marketable. This way of thinking, evident in progressive cities, needs to be extended further and applied more rigorously. For example, flexible transport operations can be facilitated by setting aside ample curb space for customer embarkation and disembarkation and protecting it from illegal parking.89 This would reduce availability of on-street parking for a few drivers, but to the benefit of many more public transport customers.

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Road use should be disciplined in other ways, such as through the use of businesslike road prices and equitable safety standards. Car users pay for roads through taxes and licence fees, but the way they pay makes driving seem cheap (see chapter 7). Governments could do more to promote road tolling, not just to finance roads but to ensure drivers are aware of road costs and thus more inclined to balance them against public transport fares. A professionally designed road pricing system would influence road use in the same way that demand for privately produced goods and services is influenced by the prices charged for them. That is, a road system should be subject to the same market discipline as any other product or service. To do otherwise is unduly to favour one form of transport over all others. Road pricing proposals will be resisted by lobbyists inside and outside government, whose pleadings naturally find favour with travelers who see no plausible alternative to driving. We may hope that, armed with a new vision for public transport, a few politicians and bureaucrats will take the bit in their teeth, presenting road pricing more forcefully to their public.90 Apart from traffic and pricing biases that favour private cars, governments often impose stricter safety standards on public transport than on motorists. In Canada, cars are subject to few checks (usually at point of sale), dangerous driving is often overlooked, and drivers who are unable to cope with fast traffic by virtue of physical or cognitive infirmities are tolerated, partly because public transport is limited. Public transport standards should not be lowered, but all road users should face equivalent safety requirements, a move that would not only improve road safety but also help build public transport’s market. By direct or indirect means, governments promote road use while neglecting public transport. A balanced approach to roads is not an alternative to correcting public transport’s deficiencies but could help a new transport system find its proper place in the market.

fa c i l i t i e s f o r wa l k i n g a n d c y c l i n g As I explained in chapter 1, this book focuses on motorized public transport, but we should at least mention the important role governments could play in enhancing non-motorized movement of people

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especially in developed and developing urban areas. While twentieth century governments have invested vast sums to support motorized transport, only rarely have they worked systematically to improve the quality of urban areas for pedestrians, or to improve access and safety for cyclists. There is now greater appreciation of the need at least for measurement of pedestrian and cycling activity, but many transport studies still ignore this important part of urban movement, and political administrations are still largely committed to other (and more expensive) transport forms. Walking (cycling to lesser extent) is an important means of access to motorized public transport and should be of special interest to operators and government agencies. As governments come to see little advantage in propping up failing public transport operations, we may hope that they will turn their considerable energy to developing standards and facilitating (or providing) required infrastructure for pedestrians and cyclists.

i n t e g r at i n g t r a n s p o r t p o l i c y Far from intervening in public transport, the largest task of government is to get its own house in order by unifying its framework of policies to allow public transport to find its market level. Governance is usually divided between national and local levels, each pursuing distinctive transport policies. Canada’s federal government privatized most transport holdings and reduced regulation, and several provinces have followed its lead, but other provinces hold to a public sector agenda, and most municipalities closely control transport within their boundaries. Jurisdictional divisions do much harm to public transport, producing small artificial markets for travel within politically defined areas, each requiring a distinct operating style, often distinct operating entities, to suit local governance. Since the real market does not divide in this way, customers are poorly served and naturally gravitate to the one transport system – private road travel – that functions as a whole. Apart from reconstituting as a centralized state which is neither easy nor necessarily desirable, governments may establish special agencies to orchestrate actions among governments, but these inevitably founder on quarrels between their political parents. The more likely route, if not easily traveled, is a public consensus on public transport

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strategy: if it is widely agreed that public transport does not work and that there is a way to make it work, government may see political value in more harmonious actions for the benefit of their citizens. Senior governments could help by promoting a new vision for public transport. We may not see this any time soon: in our populist era, genuine leadership is rare. But it only takes one nation with courage and focus to take the first step. If it succeeds, others will fall in line, as the economic and other values of effective public transport become apparent.

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chapter eleven

Taking Responsibility for Public Transport

In 1956, almost a half-century ago, the first freight container of standard dimensions made the sea passage from Puerto Rico to New York City. The immediate import of this development and the subsequent boom in container transport was that a variety of cargo could be moved from origin to destination without repeated handling en route,91 thus speeding its delivery, cutting costs, and minimizing risk of theft or damage. More importantly, a way of thinking about cargo had begun to change, affecting transport organization, pricing, liability, and other functions. In particular, the standard container forced a reappraisal of the carrier’s responsibility to its customers, the shippers and receivers of cargo. Previously, responsibility for transport, as distinct from its elements (ship, rail, truck, etc.), lay mostly with customers or their agents (forwarders). If the carrier helped organize transport, this was incidental to its core mission, moving cargo between the railway stations, ports, and other places at which it operated. With the coming of the container, the focus shifted from sea, air, rail, and truck movement to operational and institutional means to move cargo from origin to destination. The realization that the market was not for particular modes but for a coherent transport system responsive to shipper interests brought a new understanding of carrier responsibility. Someone other than the customer had to be responsible for entire movements, not just for reasons of liability (though that was part of it) but to assure shippers of a single standard of transport performance. This new focus expanded transport logistics, a professional practice whose aim is to organize transport for those who ship and receive

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cargo. This development has brought transport and industry functions closer. “Just-in-time” delivery for example, ensures that raw materials and other goods arrive precisely as needed, reducing the need for costly inventory. Thus, transport is integrated with production and marketing, knitting dispersed facilities into a corporate whole efficiently linked to its market.

t h e r e s p o n s i b l e p u b l i c t r a n s p o rt c a r r i e r We too seek a new way of thinking about public transport. It is no longer acceptable, if it ever was, to make customers conform to transport: transport must conform to its customers, to their needs, wants, and idiosyncracies as human beings and as commercial prospects. That can happen only if carriers take full responsibility for the customer’s complete travel experience: for the initial point of customer contact, for the journey (by all transport forms), and for the ancillary functions that make travel easy, useful, and satisfying. Better travel experiences give us a glimpse of this responsibility: on a flight from Toronto to Kingston, the flight attendant calls ahead to arrange taxis, helping the weary traveler home. But if the natural impulse to help allows us to cope with problems of an ill-conceived transport system, it is not a solution. It is not a remedy for unintelligible or inaccessible information, uncoordinated services, cramped vehicles, crowded and dirty places of departure and arrival, harried and unresponsive staff. This book argues for better customer relations, for new public transport structures, and for higher standards, but these are secondary to the carrier’s responsibility. A carrier dedicated to customers will see these matters as urgent, to be pursued with all its experience and vigour, while carriers that pay lip service to customers produce inspiring statements, but little else. Here, we must make a distinction. Carrier responsibility is institutional: the carrier’s duty is to ensure that customers are well served. Yet there is also personal responsibility: to give life to an institutional duty, a carrier’s employees must feel responsible for their part. It is one thing for an organization to accept responsibility. It is quite another, and not so easy, for its managers and staff to take that responsibility to heart. This point may seem obvious but it has wide implications. Over the years, I have spoken to many people in public transport, people who operate buses, trains, airplanes, and transit systems, make transport equipment and build facilities, develop policies to support or control

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them, and seek to influence the industry’s direction. Among these people are many who genuinely want public transport to succeed and would welcome a chance to take it in a more positive direction. Others are mired in a time-honoured way of doing things, not just older employees accustomed to industry practices but newer people chosen for their acceptance of old ways. Few of these will adapt, fewer still with enthusiasm. Then there are those who profit from public transport’s decline: profit can be had by tailoring service to shrinking demand while maximizing fares extracted from captive customers. Moreover, where the public purse can be tapped by reason of public need or market hope, profit accrues to those most solicitous of public officials. This unfortunate side to public transport may be obscured by buzz management phrases, pro-forma customer consultation, and strategic plans, soapy media releases, and the many other ways in which managers elicit a sense of forward progress. But we should not be distracted from the underlying malaise. If correcting the problem is difficult (and likely unpleasant), it cannot be ignored. Nothing would be gained by planning a new system of public transport if its development is assigned to people who care little whether it succeeds or fails. For public transport to work, it must fall to people dedicated to its success. To my mind, this is the strongest argument for a free market in public transport. In recent years, the market’s economic virtues have been debated at length, its advocates saying it will lead to lower costs and fares, better services, and more traffic, while its opponents point to cases where this is not so. However, behind economic abstractions are the people who work in transport: if their ideas are wrong, if they care little for customers, if their attitudes and institutions obstruct intelligent practice, it matters little whether a private or public entity calls the shots. When the chips are down, as they are for public transport, the solution is not to go back to the same people whose instinct is to continue as before but to put out the call for new talent. That, not the economic virtues, is the reason why the market for public transport must be opened to all comers. A newly opened transport market might be quickly dominated by one carrier, or a few carriers. Operations and personnel might then be little changed, and customers might well wonder what was gained. But a stable monopoly or oligopoly may be reached only after years of active competition, during which carriers would have to change

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organizations and personnel to survive a demanding environment. In this context, people with useful marketing, operating, and business skills, especially those able to respond positively to a new challenge, would be actively sought, while those content with the status quo would be encouraged to retire from the field. In this, educational institutions – universities, colleges, training schools, etc. – could help prepare students for the intellectual and practical challenges of public transport’s new way. A new market environment and operating strategy now only demands operations and engineering personnel but places a premium on marketing and business skill. This may require considerable adaptation of curriculum and teaching style: certainly, no graduate will do well whose academic preparation presumes a static market and operating environment for public transport.

responsible government If the primary responsibility for public transport lies with carriers, governments must do their part. For safety and other reasons, transport will not be fully free of public control. Moreover, governments genuinely interested in public transport may act positively to encourage healthy market competition and developments that are helpful to all carriers. Governments breach their responsibility when their spending and regulatory powers are used to back the status quo, shielding public operations from change while erecting regulatory barriers for the benefit of established private operators. It is a government’s duty not to intervene where it does no good and, when it must intervene, to ensure that genuine public values are served. Many governments are oversolicitous of the automotive and highway development industry. In its infancy, this industry perhaps merited public encouragement, but as a mature industry it should stand on its own economic feet. If we value the car’s convenience, we need not give it special public privilege, any more than we privilege other goods and services. This means that a responsible government will expect public facilities provided for road transport to pay their way – perhaps even to return a profit as do other goods and services – and to meet similar standards of safety, health, and environmental rectitude. Unfortunately, there are those government officials, consultants, lobbyists, etc. on the public side of transport whose well-being lies with the status quo – the decline of public transport and the entrenchment of the

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car. Their strategy is to avoid issues and construct narrow choices so that the public is induced to accept more of the same. Politicians and administrators true to their responsibility and well advised on transport matters will see through this to the public interest, but others who are less able or less honourable, are taken in by self-interested representation. One should perhaps be philosophical about such lapses but they seriously affect public transport’s future. Too often, governments enter the fray carelessly, with narrow purpose and inattention to practical details. The resulting failures leave a sour taste with customers and taxpayers alike. What, then, might induce government to act responsibly with respect to public transport? By what sanction is a government to be corrected for not taking its public transport responsibility seriously? The ballot box is an obvious answer: as consumers favour or discipline companies by buying their goods or not, voters support or punish governments by voting them in or out. But a democratic vote applies to a government’s whole range of programs (and political personalities). Unlike the precise message companies get when sales of individual goods rise or fall, our votes rarely tell governments what we think of individual policies, such as those for transport. Advocacy groups may help by bringing transport issues forward, during and between elections, to promote needed improvements and bring public institutions to account for bad policies. The best are well informed and keep their distance from private or bureaucratic interests, while the worst are easily diverted from the real issues or are reliant on special interests for funding or access to information.92

the responsibility of the professional This brings me to the many professionals engaged in transport planning, management, and operation. These include engineers, economists, transport and land-use planners, operations specialists, business planners and managers, market analysts, and many others who apply knowledge and skill as employees of, or contractors to, transport carriers, governments, and other transport organizations. As educated and experienced people directly involved in transport, they are well placed to comment intelligently on transport proposals and urge practical reforms. Most formally recognized professions aspire to ethical codes that defer to the public good, so we might expect professionals in public

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transport, where much is to be done, to speak out for change and against narrowness of conception and self-interest. Yet few accept this duty: when professionals speak to the public interest, if they do at all, too often they do so at the behest, and for the benefit, of private or public employers, or to reinforce standing professional practices. This is hardly surprising. Few professionals will put their livelihood at risk, knowing the consequences of crossing their employers (or potential future employers). Nor can they count on support from colleagues or professional associations where the issue is not an acknowledged and serious threat to public safety but an arguable public strategy. Professionals, as much as they may want to adhere to high standards of public service, know that they risk ostracism by colleagues who defer to mainstream practices and relationships. It will take professionals of integrity and courage to challenge public transport’s established order and to resist unsound proposals for its reform. They can only succeed by working together: the lone voice senses rectitude but rarely has effect. Moreover, professionals must learn to speak more fully and honestly with the public. Public views, untutored, unpredictable, and even aggressive, constitute a repository of common sense and are perhaps the professional’s strongest ally. It may take some urging to draw professionals into the search for a new form of public transport, but we ought not to underestimate their importance or potential enthusiasm. Given their key roles in public transport, we cannot expect success without their active support for major reforms.

the public’s responsibility If carriers, governments, and professionals are directly responsible for making public transport work, the public has indirect responsibility. We have a double interest as transport customers and as citizens who pay taxes for inefficient and ineffective public transport and suffer the social, environmental, and economic ills of a transport system dominated by cars. This interest and the power vested in the public by democratic governance bring a responsibility to direct governments to public ends, and this inevitably calls for interaction with those with special expertise. Members of the public (and responsible advocacy groups) can do good by being receptive to carefully researched and well-explained ideas for reform, while equally challenging obscure or poorly supported arguments for the status quo.

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A new dialogue on public transport – a new testing of transport problems and solutions – requires that, without ignoring public transport’s history and achievements, we look beyond its present form to something new. While presenting our ideas, we must remain receptive to ideas from elsewhere. In this vein, I do not claim that this book solves the public transport problem. If I have captured aspects of the problem and something of its solution, so much the better, but there is always room for study and debate. Of course, no significant problem is ever so fully understood that its solution is plain: what makes the public transport problem significant is its complexity and ambiguity. So, we do not expect an ideal system of public transport any more than we expect to find the Holy Grail. Instead, we seek ideas that make reasonable sense given what we know of the problem: in this, academics, consultants, transport operators, government commissions, and others may greatly add to our understanding. But eventually we come to the point when studying must stop and action start. It is one thing to have ideas, another to act: if many are eager to exchange and debate ideas, far fewer are keen to act. Public transport will not work by magic, rising like a phoenix from its ashes. It will work because people – transport managers and employees, professionals, public officials, and the general public – accept the responsibility to make it work.

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Notes

chapter one 1 In 1989 urban transit passenger revenues of $1.2 billion fell far short of operating expenses of $2.5 billion. By 1995 urban transit carrier revenues, including operating and capital subsidies, were $3.6 billion, of which only $1.5 billion came from passengers. (Source: Statistics Canada, Urban Transit, Cat. 53-216). 2 via Rail Canada, 1989 Annual Report. In 1989 only 31.5 percent of operating costs were covered by passenger revenue, resulting in a $531 million operating deficit. Subsidies have since been cut to less than $200 million, by cutting services in half and making other economies. In 1998 passenger revenue covered 52.3 percent of cash operating costs: a more realistic figure that allows for replacement of aging equipment and future track charges would likely be under 40 percent. 3 Cervero, Paratransit in America, 9. 4 Canada’s intercity bus industry is regulated by federal and provincial governments, which have yet to agree on a coordinated approach to deregulation. Some provinces have deregulated their internal markets, and the federal government favours removal of most federal controls (in tandem with improved safety standards), but other provinces and some industry players oppose deregulation.

c h a p t e r tw o 5 For example, Toronto, hailed as a leader in North American transit, provides a high level of service that assures wide accessibility and, by attracting more than a million riders each day, reduces the need for urban highways. This success story, built on thoughtful planning and invest-

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6 7

8 9

10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17

18 19 20

21

Notes to pages 13–16

ment in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s has not been matched by equivalent efforts in the 1980s and 1990s, with the consequence that transit has not adapted well to growth in non-traditional travel patterns (e.g., suburbto-suburb trips), nor to fast-growing populations outside the historic boundaries of Metropolitan Toronto. In the Greater Toronto Area, transit market share has declined, from 16.5 percent of trips in 1986 to 13.3 percent in 1996. Statistics Canada, Passenger Bus and Urban Transit Statistics, catalogue no. 53-215. These figures include some commuter traffic. If all rail passengers went by bus, the downward trend would not have been reversed. Moreover, without a drastic change in bus service standards, few rail passengers would make this shift. See the annual Bus and Coach Statistics Great Britain, ( London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office [ hmso]). Between 1985–86 and 1995–96, bus patronage slightly increased in London but declined elsewhere (by about 30 percent). Source: Transport Statistics Great Britain, 1997 (London: hmso). See Bulletin of Rail Statistics (quarterly) United Kingdom Department of the Environment, Transport and the Regions, various years. United States Bureau of Transportation Statistics, Annual Report, 1994 (Washington, dc: us Department of Transportation). Statistics Canada, Urban Transit annual reports, Cat. 53-216. Canada, Royal Commission on National Passenger Transportation, Directions, vol. 2: 46. Centre for Urban Transportation Research, Public Transit in America. Canada, Royal Commission on National Passenger Transportation, Directions, vol.2:59. 1996 – Transportation Tomorrow Survey, 1997 (Toronto: University of Toronto, Joint Program in Transportation). Source: Toronto Transit Commission Annual Report 1995. Revenue per trip increased by thirty-four percent, while general price inflation for the same period was eighteen percent. Source: go Transit, personal communication, October, 1997. “go Transit Costs Should Be Shared By All,” Toronto Star, 1 June, 1998. (A one month pass for this service cost $201 in 1999.) go Transit recovers roughly eighty percent of its operating costs from passenger fares: operating subsidies cover the remaining twenty percent, while additional funding is required for major capital expenditures. For more discussion of demographic and socioeconomic factors, see Crowley and Watson, The Implications of Demographic and Socioeconomic Trends.

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22 I offer no list of public transport systems that are able to answer these questions positively. Those of a sadistic or masochistic leaning might like to construct such a list, which I suspect would be depressingly short. In any case, a study of world urban transit systems (P. Newman & J. Kenworthy, Cities and Automobile Dependence: An International Sourcebook, Aldershot, UK: Gower Publishing, 1989) showed that, between 1960 and 1980, ridership grew in roughly half of the thirty-one cities studied, but transit market share increased in only four cities (for work trips in Copenhagen, Munich, Toronto, and Vienna). Robert Cervero (The Transit Metropolis) provides a valuable snapshot of twelve leading transit systems, though with little historical data to show trends in market share. Cervero’s work suggests that Stockholm, Munich, and Curitiba are gaining market share, while Copenhagen and Melbourne have lost ground in regional transport markets (though they still command impressive shares of trips to central areas). Cervero’s study also shows the industry’s reliance on active government roles in land use planning, transit development, and subsidy.

c h a p t e r th r e e 23 Ballard Power Systems 24 High vehicle and fuel taxes in Europe usually produce revenues in excess of road expenditures, as in the United Kingdom, where road taxes (about cdn $49.6 billion in 1996–97) far exceed costs, which were about cdn $14.5 billion in direct expenditures in 1994–95. uk data are from Transport Statistics Great Britain, 1997 (London: hmso). North American road taxes are much lower and, depending on the representation of road costs (whether indirect costs are included, use of current or replacement values, etc.), may fall short of costs. Even then, the shortfall is less likely due to drivers than to heavy trucks, which account for a large part of road wear and tear. The picture changes if one accounts for social and environmental costs of auto and truck traffic. Cervero (Transit Metropolis) cites US studies showing hidden subsidies of road use (financial, social, and environmental costs not covered by charges to motorists) ranging from $370 billion to $1,000 billion. 25 These and other ttc statistics are taken from annual reports of the Toronto Transit Commission. Estimates of general inflation are based on Canada’s consumer price index. 26 R. Soberman and E. Miller, in Full Cost Pricing and Sustainable Urban Transportation: A Case Study of the Greater Toronto Area (prepared for Ontario’s Ministry

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27

28 29 30 31

32

Notes to pages 27–39

of Transportation, November 1997), used travel models for the Greater Toronto Area to show that large increases in auto costs would little affect car use. Typically applied in residential districts and areas of heavy pedestrian activity, traffic calming, whose aim is to reduce speeds and increase driver care, includes such measures as narrowing streets, reducing speed limits, and adding pedestrian-oriented street furniture. R. Ellison., “Melbourne’s Public Transport Service,” Urban Futures, no.20 (1995), cited in Cervero, The Transit Metropolis, n.p. Cervero, The Transit Metropolis n.p. Examples of cities that approach this ideal are found in ibid. For example, Center for Urban Transportation Research, Lessons Learned in Transit Efficiencies, Revenue Generation, and Cost Reduction. As another example, the Canadian Urban Transit Association’s Modal Shift to Transit report (Toronto, July 1992) assesses measures to build transit markets, with reference to the academic and professional literature, as well as practical experience. For example, see A.D. May and M. Roberts, “The Design of Integrated Transport Strategies,” Transport Policy 2, no.1, (1995): n.p.

chapter four 33 We see hints in our present world, as in Los Angeles, which is developed largely around the automobile, though even here I doubt whether we see the car’s full impact. 34 C. Campbell and J.H. Laherrère, “The End of Cheap Oil,” Scientific American (March 1998): 78-83. 35 The assumption behind this claim is that any increase in numbers or use of cars will be offset by new automotive technologies to reduce emissions. 36 Without parallel development in urban roads and traffic controls, increased motorization, even with cleaner cars, means congestion and diminished air quality, as is now experienced in such cities as Bangkok and Mexico City. 37 World Bank, World Development Report 1997: The State in a Changing World, June 1997, statistical appendix, Table 8. 38 Transport Canada, Transportation in Canada 1996: Annual Report, Report tp 13012E, 1997, 150. 39 J. Lawson, “Canada’s Commitment on Greenhouse Gas Emissions under the Kyoto Protocol and the Potential for Reductions in Transport,” Canadian Transportation Research Forum 33, Annual Conference, Edmonton, May 1998. In 1995 Canadian transport sources emitted 150 million tonnes of greenhouse gas, of which 82 million tonnes were due to intercity and urban cars and light truck.

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40 In June 1992 a United Nations framework for dealing with global climate change was presented at a conference held in Rio de Janeiro. By 20 June, 166 nations had ratified the Rio Convention. The Kyoto Protocol, which built on the Rio Convention, was adopted at the United Nations Conference in Kyoto, Japan, at the “English Conference of the Parties, Third Session,” 1-10 December 1997. Parties to the Kyoto Protocol agree to reduce greenhouse gas emissions (mainly by moving away from the use of fossil fuels) and to implement other changes to slow unnatural climate change. There has been considerable resistence to the Kyoto Protocol by commercial interests and by governments with a stake in the fossil fuel industry. As of 13 March 2003, eighty-four countries had signed the Kyoto Protocol. 41 Cervero, in The Transit Metropolis, cites studies that put congestion costs at two to three percent of gdp in most industrialized nations. 42 The Report of the Greater Toronto Area Task Force (Government of Ontario, January 1996) estimated that, compared with a sprawled urban form, more compact development in the gta could produce a twelve-billiondollar saving in hard infrastructure costs over a twenty-five year period. 43 Of course, individualism has other effects – to mention one, a transformation of family life – that we might view less favourably.

chapter five 44 Crowley and Watson, The Implications of Demographic and Socioeconomic Trends. 45 The actual quote, from Lady Windermere’s Fan (1892): “In this world there are only two tragedies. One is not getting what one wants, and the other is getting it. The last is the real tragedy.” Cited in B. Stevenson, The Home Book of Quotations, 10th ed., New York: Dodd, Mead, 1967, n.p. 46 In a 1995 survey, failure of relationship may have been behind responses from people who don’t use transit for commuting. Asked to identify their reasons, the most frequent response (39 percent) was “I don’t like to use it,” as compared with other responses that identified particular weaknesses in the public transport product. Center for Urban Transportation Research, Public Transit in America, n.p.

chapter six 47 Here, the bias of my gender is evident! My wife had a rather different view: “The problem is lack of authority, transport employees who ignore my being victimized by other passengers. It is more important to me to feel safe than to worry about behaving myself.”

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48 In 1995, sixty-four percent of American transit customers rated bus and rail services as “excellent” or “good.” Center for Urban Transportation Research, Public Transit in America. University of South Florida, September 1988. 49 Interestingly, people who would not be caught dead on regular public transport, happily use it during vacations. This partly reflects higher standards maintained by tour operators, but also the public’s willingness to tolerate public transport for short periods, especially if it is the only way to get to a desired destination. 50 For example, the “Ambassador Training Program” developed by the Canadian Urban Transit Association, which emphasizes the role played by transit operators/drivers in ensuring customers choose to repeat their experience with public transport. 51 Indeed, market research presupposes a strong, pre-existing customer relationship, without which customers will respond indifferently and imprecisely to information requests. 52 Ancient philosophers had useful ideas about the ethical content of love between friends, which have a bearing on notions of ideal commercial relationships. Since these ideas can be put more directly, without the unfortunate association with our modern sentimental notions of romantic love, we need not consider them in this particular context. 53 We might say that to respect people is to accept their rights. This captures part of my meaning, but the moral status of rights is far from clear, and the loose way most people talk about rights often makes it hard to know what is being said. This is too large a topic to tackle here, so I use other language. 54 Union work rules, a legacy of decades of labour-management confrontation on wages and conditions, are particularly problematic. Rigid rules can make it difficult or costly to direct staff to areas of customer need or preference. Moreover, with such rules in place, managers have an excuse not to work towards better customer service. 55 The male-male interaction is intended not to rule out other possibilities, but to avoid an arid gender-neutral account. Stories for other gender pairs (female-female, female-male, male-female) could differ greatly, highlighting other aspects of relationships. But not all relationship attributes are gender based: the case should reveal patterns for constructive behaviour that apply regardless of gender identification. 56 This is not just a matter of perception. Despite the moral outrage invoked by the Pinto case, in which cost/benefit procedures were used to justify an unsafe vehicle design, the industry still suffers from periodic revelations of disregard for public safety. Matters are not helped by car ads featuring dangerous or antisocial driving practices.

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Notes to pages 74–82

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chapter seven 57 Wright, Fast Wheels, Slow Traffic, 126. 58 Others share this opinion. See M.M. Webber, “The Joys of Automobility,” in The Car and the City: The Automobile, the Environment, and Daily Urban Life (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992), 274-284. Klein et al. reach a similar conclusion. 59 Research has shown that public transport use declines rapidly as walking distances to stops increase, particularly for seniors and for those with access to a car. See uma Engineering Ltd., Modal Shift to Transit, (Toronto: Canadian Urban Transit Association, July 1992). 60 An intercity bus carrying twenty passengers and using one litre of fuel for every two to three kilometres has a fuel efficiency of forty to sixty passenger kilometres per litre. With one occupant (the driver) an economy car that burns one litre of fuel every fifteen kilometres has an efficiency of only fifteen passenger kilometres per litre but with four occupants (driver and three passengers) achieves sixty passenger kilometres per litre. 61 If eliminating a one-dollar fare resulted in one hundred more trips by public transport, we may infer that travelers value these extra trips at less than one-dollar each. If the cost to serve these extra trips is more than onedollar each, resources are wasted: it costs more to “produce” these trips than they are worth to the traveler. 62 A trip costing the operator one-dollar but taken “free” by using a pass involves waste if I would not pay at least one-dollar for a separate ticket and thus value it at less than its cost. The argument is less clear if transport choices are made for groups of trips. If the key choice is between a year’s worth of driving versus a year’s worth of public transport, a tripby-trip comparison is of little relevance. 63 A study by Soberman and Hazard concludes that time spent transferring is considered five to six times as burdensome as on-vehicle time. See R. Soberman and H. Hazard, eds., Canadian Transit Handbook (Toronto: University of Toronto-York University Joint Program in Transportation, 1980), p.392. It should be mentioned that other authors have arrived at a figure of two to three times the value of in-vehicle time for waiting and walking. See, for example Nils Bruzelius, The Value of Time Travel: Theory and Measurements (London: Croon Helm, 1979), p.152. However, there is some agreement to disagree. See Kenneth A. Small, Urban Transportation Economics (Reading: Harwood Academic Publishers, 1992), 44: “There is considerable dispersion in the reported estimates of these relative valuations ... consistent with my speculation .... that the onerousness of transfers (which entail waiting) is poorly understood.”

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Notes to pages 84–97

64 In Britain the 1996 fatality rate per billion passenger-kilometre was 3.85 for drivers and passengers in road vehicles, 0.25 for buses, and 0.4 for passenger railways. See Facts ’98: The Passenger Transport Industry in Great Britain (London: Confederation of Passenger Transport uk) 65 Transport costs are omitted: these are usually judged in relation to overall service quality, not as an independent transport attribute. 66 Safety – where score of 3 reflects the fact that accident statistics seem to have done little to discourage the love affair with the automobile.

chapter eight 67 For a survey of highly successful metropolitan systems, see Cervero, The Transit Metropolis. (Island Press, 1998). Examples can also be found in smaller cities, such as Oxford, England, where bus ridership almost doubled in the 1990s, partly due to good service, partly to measures to reduce downtown car use. 68 Customers might rent cars or hire taxis for some trips, but if public transport has large gaps, they will be better off owning cars. 69 Robert Cervero says, “paratransit best operates in a supporting and supplemental, rather than a substituting role” (The Transit Metropolis, n.p.). This glosses over a key distinction between operational functions and transport management: flexible transport operators may provide secondary transport functions (connections to high-capacity bus and rail), yet play the dominant role in organizing urban transport. 70 This example is based on Kingston’s transit system as of September 1999. Services have since been focused more on higher-volume routes, and Kingston Transit is seeking a broader strategy more oriented to contemporary market conditions. 71 R. Soberman and H. Hazard, eds., Canadian Transit Handbook. 72 As an example, in Curitiba, Brazil, transfer stations facilitate ready movement between express and local buses. Cevero, The Transit Metropolis, 290 (diagram). 73 So-called “Advanced Public Transportation Systems” are supposed to be available. See Bin Ran and David E. Boyce, Modeling Dynamic Transportation Networks (Berlin: Spring Verlag, 1996) 3. This equipment uses advanced technology that makes it possible to provide information about the arrival time of the next vehicle. In theory, this reduces uncertainty and may also reduce the high disutility attached to transfer time. Hans Ouwersloot, Peter Nijkamp and G. Pepping, “Advanced Telematics for Travel Decisions,” in Environment and Planning A, 29, no. 6 (1997): n.p.

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Notes to pages 98–110

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74 This idea, which I advanced in a discussion paper for Ontario’s Ministry of Transport (P.M. Bunting, Ontario’s Passenger Transportation Challenge, April 1993), has appeared elsewhere. See for example Melvin Webber’s proposed shared-ride co-op, in “The Marriage of Autos and Transit: How to Make Transit Popular Again,” Access 5 (1944) 26-31, 1994, cited in Cevero, Paratransit in America, n.p. 75 These organizations would not be involved in the actual operation of any transit systems. As Klein et al forcefully argue, transit systems should be operated by those with knowledge and expertise of local circumstances. See D.B. Klein, A. Moore and B. Reja, Curb Rights: A Foundation for Free Enterprise in Urban Transit (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution, 1997). 76 Governments also assist with tax breaks and market controls. For example, bus carriers may be granted exclusive rights to popular routes, on which they can charge higher fares, in exchange for operating unprofitable services elsewhere. In this way, customers using popular services are made to support (“cross-subsidize”) operations in less-populated areas. In practice, competition from rail and air services, not to mention the car, limits fares on well-traveled routes, so there may not be much surplus revenue with which to support services on “thin” routes. 77 Governments spend far more on roads but also collect revenues from fuel taxes, licence fees, and other sources. The balance between road costs and road revenues varies with location and with methods used to estimate costs and revenues, some studies showing that roads are subsidized, others showing that roads earn more than the amounts spent on them. 78 See Peter White, “Bus Deregulation: A Welfare Balance Sheet,” Journal of Transport Economics and Policy, 24, no.3, (1990): 322-3. 79 Public transport fares should be compared with car costs divided by the number of occupants. For a trip costing sixty dollars by car, one occupant (driver) might prefer a thirty-dollar bus trip, but it is cheaper for a group of three to drive. 80 That large savings are possible is suggested by the twenty-three percent decrease in unit operating costs (per passenger kilometre) achieved by Canadian air carriers between 1980 and 1994. Subsidized urban transit, under less pressure to limit costs, showed an increase in unit operating costs (per passenger) of fifty-three percent over this period (adjusted for inflation). Sources: Statistics Canada, Canadian Civil Aviation, Cat. 51-206; Air Carrier Operations in Canada, Cat. 51-002; Urban Transit, Cat. 53-216. 81 This means of pricing could be implemented electronically though the use of “smartcards” that confer various advantages, including flexibility in setting prices, easy tracking of revenues, reduced fare abuse, and the

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Notes to pages 114–29 added convenience of being able to use the card to pay for other goods and services.

chapter nine 82 With many people working shifts, part-time and on weekends, it is hard to know what a “normal” working period is, yet this dated notion still influences some transit managers and politicians.

chapter ten 83 Examples mentioned in chapter 2 (note 22) include Copenhagen, Munich, Vienna, Stockholm, Curitiba, and Toronto, though some like Copenhagen and Toronto have not done well in markets outside central urban areas. 84 For example, in Buses (White paper, Cmnd. #9300, London: hmso, 1984), Britain’s conservative government cited a fifteen to thirty percent rise in real unit costs in public sector local bus operations between 1972 to 1982, and a thirty to forty percent difference in costs between the public and private sector. In the decade following Britain’s market reforms, operating costs per bus kilometre fell forty-four percent. Cervero (Transit Metropolis, chapter 2, footnote 47) cites American studies showing that urban transit funding is largely absorbed by higher labour costs and lower productivity. Less relevant to passenger transport but generally indicative of savings possible from privatization of public-sector rail operations is L. Thompson and K.J. Button, “Railway Concessions: Progress to Date,” Rail International (January/February 1998): n.p. 85 Financial success is usually measured as the ratio of farebox revenue to operating costs (excluding capital spending). Typical ratios run between 0.3 (thirty percent of costs paid by passengers) and 0.6. Anything over 0.7 (seventy percent cost recovery) is considered stellar: among these are operators who benefit from public policies favouring compact land use and discouraging cars, and those who genuinely earn their stars by good operating management. 86 Much of the following text is based on my research on market reforms in Britain. See P.M. Bunting, Deregulation and Privatization of Coach and Bus Services in Britain, background report for the Ontario Ministry of Transportation, 1995 and “Competition in Surface Passenger Transport: Interpreting the British Case,” Canadian Transportation Research Forum, Annual Conference, Montreal, May 1999. 87 McGuinness et al., “Organizational Responses to the Deregulation of the Bus Industry in Britain,” Transport Reviews, 14, no. 4 (1994).

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Notes to pages 133–42

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88 If California had specified acceptable fleet emissions, leaving it to auto makers to meet this limit, it might be faster and more reliably met with low-emission vehicles, such as hybrid gasoline-electric cars. 89 See a similar argument in D.B. Klein, A. Moore, and B. Reja, Curb Rights. 90 This requires attention not only to the technical feasibility and economic value of road pricing but also to moral issues. See P.M. Bunting, “Moral Aspects of Road Pricing,” Canadian Transportation Research Forum, 32d Annual Conference, May 1997.

chapter eleven 91 With container dimensions and lifting points standardized, carriers could acquire vehicles and handling equipment designed to move containers on and between various transport forms. Otherwise, cargo had to be removed (unstuffed) at each transfer and reloaded (stuffed) on the next vehicle for onward transport. 92 As John Ralston Saul has argued, moreover, one cannot expect reform advocates to succeed unless they are directly involved in the processes they want reformed. Saul says of non-governmental organizations (ngos): “So long as an ngo ... remains outside the democratic system, it has no real political levers. Its activists are not there, in the people’s chamber, to clarify the cause. And there is no practical link between the problem they are devoted to ... and the real action required to deal with it.” Quoted from Saul’s Lafontaine-Baldwin lecture, Toronto, March, 2000 reported in the Toronto Globe & Mail, “How We Will Make Canada Ours Again,” A16 and 17, 24 March, 2000.

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Further Readings

Apart from citing sources in the notes I have not attempted to provide a public transport bibliography, since it would inevitably underrepresent a huge literature. The reader wishing to explore issues further, however, might consult the following items, some of which contain bibliographies. Bunting, P.M. Deregulation and Privatization of Coach and Bus Services in Britain. Toronto: Ontario Ministry of Transportation, 1995. A bibliography of uk bus market reforms. Center for Urban Transportation Research (cutr). Lessons Learned in Transit Efficiencies, Revenue Generation, and Cost Reduction. Tampa: University of South Florida, 1997. A catalogue of ways to improve urban transit markets and financial performance. The value of this document, and others like it, lies in communicating “best practices.” This is most productive where the market and operating challenge is well understood: then, individual operators have a basis for deciding when to “follow the leader” and when to try an entirely new approach. Center for Urban Transportation Research (cutr). Public Transit in America: Findings from the 1995 Nationwide Personal Transportation Survey. Tampa: University. of South Florida, 1998. A reasonably current presentation of American public transport markets, traveler characteristics, and public attitudes. Cervero, Robert. The Transit Metropolis: A Global Inquiry. Washington, d.c.: Island Press, 1998. A valuable survey of better urban transit systems, most of which rely on active public sector involvement in transport and land-use development. Cervero, Robert. Paratransit in America: Redefining Mass Transportation. Westport, ct.: Praeger, 1997. Includes a short bibliography. A recent survey of paratransit, related policy issues, and prospects for “smart” paratransit. Cervero sees potential for wider applications but also feels that paratransit should play a secondary role in relation to conventional transit.

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Further Readings

Crowley, D. and B. Watson. The Implications of Demographic and Socioeconomic Trends for Urban Transit in Canada, Phase 1 – Trends and Implications. Toronto: Canadian Urban Transit Association, 1991. If dated, this report is a thoughtful treatment of factors underlying present and future urban transit markets. Mumford, L. The Urban Prospect. New York: Harcourt, Brace and World Inc.,1968. A dated, but fascinating collection of essays that reminds us that contemporary problems of city and transport planning are not new. Newman, P. and J. Kenworthy. Cities and Automobile Dependence: An International Sourcebook. Aldershot, uk: Gower, 1989. Again, somewhat dated, but an often-cited comparative study of international urban transit performance. Pucher, John and Christian Lefevre. The Urban Transport Crisis in Europe and North America. Basingstoke, uk: Macmillan. With a bibliography. A survey of challenges facing public transport in diverse geopolitical environments. The authors’ solutions rely on active public intervention to reduce car use and boost public transport. Safdie, Moshe and Wendy Kohn. The City after the Automobile: An Architect’s Vision. Toronto: Stoddart, Toronto, 1998. If this book’s transport proposals are sketchy (and likely unworkable), its coverage of urban planning issues and the prospects of human-oriented urban design, is eminently readable. White, P. Public Transport: Its Planning, Management and Operation. 3d ed., London: ucl Press, 1995. Overview of public transport practice in Britain. Wright, C., Fast Wheels Slow Transit: Urban Transport Choices. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1992. A proponent of the “characteristics method” of analyzing transport issues from the perspective of both the user and the community, Wright represents a planner’s view of urban transport issues and prospects. United Kingdom. Department of Environment, Transport and the Regions. A New Deal for Transport: Better for Everyone. White paper on transport policy, Cm.. 3950, Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, London: 1998. An example of an “integrated” transport policy, prepared following extensive consultation and research. If comprehensive in scope, it does not break new ground but instead offers a catalogue of conventional transport policies.

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Index

accidents. See safety. Amtrak, 13 architecture of public transport, 88-9, 103-4, 107-9 automobile: love affair with, 14, 33, 40-2, 80-2, 147n26, 152n66 automobile advertising, 150n56 automobile rentals, 152n68 Ballard Power Systems, 147n23 best practice reports, 30 British Rail, 13 bus stops: location of, 151n59 California, 155n88 Canada: greenhouse gas emissions, 149n39; intercity ridership, 13; jurisdictional divisions, 145n4, 136; rail pas-

senger revenues, 145n2; ridership loss, 13, 146n7; safety standards, 135; urban passenger revenues/ ridership, 13, 145n1 Canadian Urban Transit Association, 148n31, 150n50 Cervero, Robert, 147n22 climate change, 38-9 comfort, 82 computers and communications, 103-4 container transport, 138, 155n91 Copenhagen, 147n22 costing, 109-11 Curitiba, 147n22, 152n72 customers: attitude of, 149n46, 150nn47, 48, 51; attitude towards, 59-61, 113; definition of, 9; relationship with, 47-8, 57-9, 62-4, 69-71, 114-18, 139-40

cycling, 135-6 demand-responsive transport, 91-5, 98101, 102, 132 demographics: impact of, 16, 146n21 deregulation, 126-7, 145n4 developed world: attitude towards public transport, 18 economic implications, 41-4 education of transport professionals, 141 environmental concerns, 6, 37-9, 132-3 equipment: replacement of, 131 ethics of transport professionals, 142-3 fares: comparison of, 153n79; impact of, 23-4, 80-1, 108-9, 130-1

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160 flexible transport operators, 91 franchises, 117 free market, 125, 127, 140 frequency: increase of, 20-1 fuel cell (hydrogen), 22 fuel efficiency, 151n60 go Transit, 14, 15, 16, 146nn19, 20 governments, role of, 141-2, 153n76 Great Britain: deregulation, 5, 126, 127-8, 129, 154n84; environmental legislation, 38; equipment aging, 131; fatality rates (1996), 152n64; operating costs, 154n84; ridership loss, 13, 27, 146n9, taxes, 147n24; Victoria Station, 132 Greater Toronto Area (gta), 14, 16, 145n5; greenhouse gas emissions, 148n39, 155n88 Greyhound, 126 high-speed trains, 22 history, 3-5, 119 individualism, 43 infrastructure costs, 149n42 integrated transport, 75-7, 111-12, 138-9 Japan, 14

Index Kingston, Ontario, 91-5 Kyoto Protocol, 149n39, 150n40 land use: controls, 2830; impacts on, 36-7 Los Angeles, 148n33 market position, 12-14, 22, 46, 145n5 market research, 62, 86, 149n46 market share, 13, 147n22 Melbourne, 28-9, 147n22 moral attributes, 65-6 multimodal operators, 115 Munich, 147n22 National Express, 126, 128, 132 non-governmental organizations, 155n92 oil prices: impact of, 5 Ontario: environmental concerns, 38 operating costs, 153n80, 154nn84, 85 Oxford, 152n67 paratransit, 152n69 patterning, 55-6 pedestrians, 135-6 Pinto case, 150n56 planning studies, 74 private transport: benefits of, 45; definition of, 10; potential increase of, 34

public involvement in policy, 8, 113, 143-4 public ownership, 120-5, 133-4; successful systems, 147n22 public transport: definition of, 10, 119 quality standards, 104-7 rights of the individual, 150n53 Rio Convention, 149n40 road pricing, 134-5 road wear, 147n24 rural transport, 98-100 safety, 39-40, 84-5, 132-3, 135, 150n56 Saul, John Ralston, 155n92 service gaps, 88 smartcards, 153n81 subsidies, 4, 15, 24-6, 107-8, 130; hidden, 42, 43, 147n24, 149n41, 153n77 taxes, 24, 26-7, 147n24 taxis, 152n68 technological change, 21-3, 148nn35, 36; advanced systems, 152n73 tolls, 26-7 Toronto, 14, 15, 145n5, 147n22, 154n83 Toronto Transit Commission, 15, 16, 25-6, 146n17

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Index traffic calming, 27-8 Trailways, 126 training staff, 150n50 transfers, 151n63; transfer points, 95-7 transport usage: measurement of, 13 tourists, 150n49

union work rules, 150n54 United States: market share, 13; operating costs, 154n84; subsidies, 4; taxes 147n24

161 urban planning, 17, 28-30 urban transport, 97-8 via Rail Canada, 145n2 Vienna, 147n22 working hours, 154n82

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