Fix Transit 1: 10 Principles for Great Transit

How does your local transit system measure up, particularly on principle 10?

This is the first in a series of common sense solutions for fixing public transit.

What great transit systems have in common

Why do some transit systems work, while other transit systems seem to be barely trying?

Great transit systems recognize the importance of 10 key principles to their success. Get these principles right and you’ve got a great transit service. Get one or more of these wrong, and your transit system will suffer.

1. Reliable

Great transit arrives when expected. Users shouldn’t have to show up for an earlier bus out of fear that their scheduled bus will never materialize.

Reliability also means that transit gets riders to work, school or whatever their destination on time. This means transit that has priority access and dedicated lanes when required, so that transit does not suffer from the unreliability that comes with congestion.

2. Frequent

Transit users should be able to just show up and catch the next bus or train. Users shouldn’t have to wait more than 5 or 10 minutes; nor should they have to time their day around a bus schedule.

3. Competitive with other modes of travel

Transit competes with other modes of transportation, and it needs to be competitive, particularly in terms of the time required to complete a voyage. Transit fares also need to have a significant cost advantage over the costs associated with driving, such as parking, gas and maintenance.

4. Affordable

Affordable fares is critical, to ensure the transit system doesn’t lose riders to other modes of travel.

Affordability measures for low and fixed-income riders is particularly important when considering transit as a public service. A number of jurisdictions around the world are taking the affordability question to its natural conclusion — providing certain groups with entirely free transit.

5. Customer-focused

Transit systems are often government-run monopolies, with management teams that focus on keeping their political masters happy.

Great transit systems focus first on keeping users happy.

Customer-focused transit begins with engaging users on route choices, service levels and budget prioritization — engaging residents in a meaningful way. That should help create a network that includes a mix of coverage within neighbourhoods and express routes to a central business district.

A customer focus also involves keeping users hyper-informed of delays, cancellations and network performance, including through real time location based services.

Customer-focused transit involves treating all riders as people who have other choices in moving around town — even those users who may not have the means, age or ability to use other modes.

6. Accessible

Great transit recognizes that all users, regardless of physical ability, should be able to access transit. This means accessibility measures, such as elevators, accessible washrooms and ramps.

Accessibility also means providing a level of service for those with mobility challenges on par with other users. This might mean same day booking, or trip options that run past midnight, for paratransit users.

7. Equitable

People choose transit for any number of reasons. One reason is the expense of other transportation modes, and the need to keep down household expenses. Public transit systems have a unique responsibility to service underprivileged neighbourhoods where cars are less pervasive.

In fact, neighbourhoods with high transit usage are doing everyone a favour. As car drivers, our use of roads is heavily subsidized by society. Transit users help pay that subsidy but without receiving the full benefits. Transit users also take cars off the road, reducing congestion for everyone else and lowering our emissions.

8. Safe

Great transit provides a system that is safe for all, providing users with well-lit and public areas to wait for transit. Travelling on the system should be a low-stress experience. Different systems have different approaches for ensuing safety, but all solve for end-to-end safety in a manner best suited to local conditions.

9. Stable funding

Great transit systems are able to provide solid and consistent service because they are backed by reliable, predictable and sufficient funding.

Public transit is a public service. It would be a mistake to try to run it on a cost-recovery basis. Transit has important societal benefits that warrant a strong public investment, much as we see the need to provide public funding for education, policing or vaccines.

Determining service levels based on fare revenue is a mistake. Higher fares leads to lower ridership which leads to reduced service levels, which leads to even higher fares which leads to … a transit death spiral.

The basis for public transit funding is the municipal tax base. But increasingly, transit systems need other sources of stable income. In Canada, federal and provincial governments are happy to provide capital budget support, but less so for operational budgets. It’s long overdue for higher levels of government to step in and provide support for both capital and operating budgets.

Transit provides an important contribution to the transportation, equity and environmental objectives of those higher levels of government, who should provide funding accordingly.

Passenger fares is an unreliable source of revenue, as we have seen in the pandemic and its aftermath. Furthermore, the approach of using fare revenues to finance system improvements gets the logic backwards. Service investments should drive increased ridership; not the opposite.

10. Integrated land use

Urban planning commentator, Jason Slaughter of Not Just Bikes, provides the final key principle for great transit. He notes that transit needs to drop people off at the places they want to be. Transit works when people can get off their bus, tram or train and are at their location easily.

Users shouldn’t have to exit transit and then walk for anything more than a few minutes. Also, users should not exit transit and find themselves in pedestrian-unfriendly zones, forced to walk through car-heavy areas to reach their destination. Transit that is isolated from a final destination is just not an attractive product.

But this requires coordination between transit and land use decisions. If the land around transit is not built up for mixed residential, commercial and office use, then transit will probably fail as a convenient way to get people to a destination.

Slaughter says transit should be thought of as a “walkable accelerator”, dropping people off in a neighbourhood where they can easily and quickly reach their destination. This means that “rapid transit needs good land use, but also good land use requires rapid transit.”

Your transit system

How does your local transit system measure up on these 10 principles?

Many transit system will fall short on one or two.

But what happens when a system fails to meet the majority of these principles? Or barely gets any of them right?

Chances are those transit systems are in serious trouble.

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