Good words for Walker – and SkyTrain
Reviews and comments continue to come in for Jarrett Walker’s new book, Human Transit - for example, from the Washington Post’s transit columnist:
It’s simply not possible to create routes that will take all of us exactly where we want to go and when we want to go. Much more doable is establishing a grid of reliable transit that requires a transfer if you decide to deviate from a straight path.
If you don’t like transfers, Walker says, that’s just because the ones you’ve experienced have been bad. The way he sees it, all connections should be short, pleasant and — attention, WMATA! — free. “The connection is a necessary inconvenience. It isn’t an added feature,” he says.
For transit systems separated from street traffic, such as our Metro, the future of frequency is particularly bright, Walker predicts. A huge hurdle to increasing service is staffing costs. But if we follow in the footsteps of Vancouver, B.C.’s SkyTrain, a fully automated system, we won’t need drivers any more.
What we’ll always need, however, is clearer thinking about transit — so I don’t have to wait an hour for the next train to work.
Frequency is key. That is why the SFU Gondola would be a great addition. When people look at the time it saves compared to the bus there isn’t much discussion on how little one would wait with a gondola potentially.
The gondola might only take 5 minutes compared to a 10 minute bus ride but on off peak hours the time spent would still be be 5 minutes compared to 25 minutes if one has to wait 15 minutes for the next bus.
For years I’ve heard people criticize Skytrain because of its high pricetag. I guess it’s time to ask what is Skytrain’s average capital cost per kilometre or subway or elevated, and the operating cost per kilometre for, say, a 25 year period, and to compare that to the capital and operating costs of a bus or streetcar system covering the same route.
I accept that the comparison won’t be apples to apples, because it’s very unlikely that a surface system will be operated with the frequency and hours of service (span, in Jarrett Walker’s book), that a driverless system like Skytrain can provide. There are urban design tradeoffs as well, particularly with elevated trains. But I hope such a comparison will shed some light on comparative costs over the long haul.
Every segment in a system is somewhat unique so the Expo line is not the same as the Millenium line is not the same as the C train etc. but there are comparisons out there. Without linking to the sources and going from memory the Translink Broadway corridor assessment does a comparison of Skytrain to LRT and BRT and regular bus. Voony (on his blog) also does a very interesting analysis of translink numbers in relation to skytrain costs…..and the operating costs are very informative, skytrain operating costs per trip are actually less now than in 1987 even without adjusting for inflation (he compares it to average LRT operating costs per trip from APT data…..in 1987 they were not too different, but the most recent data shows Skytrain operating costs per trip as way less). I would guess the key is ridership, with enough ridership skytrain (driverless) is clearly worth it, but if you build a stand alone system without the ridership……..For the record I would assume the Evergreen line will lower total skytrain operating costs as it is part of the same system and would use the same maintainance and control center facilities while adding more riders to the system.
My experience with removing Vancouverites and exposing them to transit systems outside their native habitat has always been illuminating. All of them have been blown away by what are normal operations in a lot of transit systems elsewhere,
Taking a friend on Calgary’s C-Train at one of the terminus stations in the evening was particularly illustrative: he was wondering why the train was sitting for so long and couldn’t just get going. I had to explain that the evening frequency was once every 15 minutes, a staggering amount of time to someone accustomed to Skytrain. It really sucked a lot of the convenience out of the trip.
I definitely think this is one of the reasons that Vancouver’s transit system is a lot more successful then Seattle’s or Portland’s.
It is great to have the high frequencies even late in evening when a lot other systems don’t run the frequently. It is rather like a horizontal elevator
I haven’t been impressed by the few LRT systems I have tried. The Portland one seems over rated. It is so slow through downtown and the frequency is not great off-peak. It does move along nicely on the freeway and old train right-of-ways. Only problem is that placing it there often makes the stations rather out of the way.
The one on Porto Portugal is nice looking. It runs underground in the old core but surface everywhere else. One of the tunnels carries four lines that branch out on surface which means not that great frequencies. It crawls across level crossings even with gates. On Sundays, to one of the burbs, it only runs once every 60 minutes.
The post Rico is referring too is http://voony.wordpress.com/2011/11/28/some-translink-statistic/
I had the same question as Michael Alexander, so I have compiled the number (in the post linked above): skytrain cost ~$4/trip (all included, amortization period of 30 years).
When comparing with other system, it is also worth to consider that the average trip length on the skytrain is 11km (vs probably ~5km on bus…).
I am also a bit puzzled by certain activists on one hand complaining about the “poor frequency” in their area (“poor frequency” referring more often than note to a bus every 30mn or so), and on the other hand promoting model like seen in Portland…