What Is Good Transit?

Good Transit is Frequent🚉. Good Transit is reliable🕑. Good Transit is (reasonably) fast🏎️. Good Transit feels safe🔒

Recently I was talking with my husband after a bus ride, and he said "that experience was not worth $2.50; I'd rather walk” (not related to the header picture). That obviously made me sad as a transit planner, but after we kept talking (and I got over myself), I realized that he was right. Transit types like me (and probably you if you’re reading this) tend to be more forgiving of bad transit experiences than the general riding public (I ride the bus for the destination and the journey; my friend is just riding for the destination). This forgiving nature is good for staving off the jaded ennui that can afflict our profession. However, we do ourselves a disservice to carry that forgiving nature into the decisions we make when we’re designing and operating our transit systems. I (kinda) like being on a packed train at rush hour because it feels good to see transit doing what it does best; getting a lot of people where they need to be. The lady smashed uncomfortably close to some guy that gives her a weird vibe, or that guy with a cane that’s doing his best to stay upright (and losing the fight) probably disagrees.

Accepting this reality drives home one point that all transit types (myself included) must carry in our work:

The transit we design and operate needs to be useful as hell. It needs to be Good Transit

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Good Transit sits in the background of the lives it facilitates. Because of this, people don't really think too much about it. If you bring up at dinner how smooth the bus ride was, you might get a polite “I guess it was.”

However, if you're cold and winded because you waited 20 min for the bus that never showed up and had to jog four blocks to barely catch the second best transit option, or your $5 round trip is now $40 because you had to take a Lyft, you probably won't have to bring up the transit experience for it to be the center of the conversation.

Bad transit sits stubbornly in the foreground of the lives it disrupts. It’s commonly said that every negative interaction requires five positive interactions to offset it in people’s memories (the 5:1 ratio was initially developed for marriage success by Dr. John Gottman, but I first encountered it in the book The Librarian’s Guide to Homelessness by Ryan Dowd.) If we want transit to last and grow, transit needs to routinely create positive experiences to offset the inevitable bad experience. We need Good Transit.

🚉 Good Transit Is Frequent

Public transit’s usefulness increases EXPONENTIALLY📈 with frequency. Check out my my article on transit frequency if you want to know why.

If you’ve ever been in a transit planning conversation, you’ve probably heard the phrase “a line on a map.” It has several connotations, but generally it refers to how we visualize and communicate the availability of transit service. When trying to assuage concerns about a proposed transit change, the presence of a simple “line on a map” is often enough to calm even the most impassioned. In my experience, this has a lot to do with windshield bias.

Windshield Bias (n) - The inability to see beyond the literal and figurative windshield to envision different ways of doing things.

The unfortunate reality is that, for a lot of transit authorities, the people with the most transit decision making power often don't ride transit much, and it influences the decisions that they make. It’s become a recurring tradition in Chicago for a local journalist to Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) the transit records of Chicago Transit Authority (CTA) leadership and publish the results. The most recent iteration published by Block Club Chicago in 2023 found that “Eight of the CTA’s top leaders…used their unlimited work cards to swipe onto the system on less than 50 days each in all of 2021 and 2022” with one executive never using her pass in two years.

Windshield bias can obscure the reality that there really is a floor for Good Transit. Service every 15 minutes or better is the transit gold standard, but in my experience, service every 30 minutes is the floor for measuring the sincere transit demand in a place. Less frequent than that, and people with other options will employ them, leaving only the people with few other options. I'm not suggesting that these people are any less deserving of Good Transit (quite the opposite actually). Acknowledging this floor means that people with limited transportation options benefit from a transit service that is respectful of their time. I know that a 30 minute floor might seem ambitious in some places, but I sincerely think any transit service striving to provide Good Transit should aim for every 30 minute service as a floor.

🕑 Good Transit is Reliable

Remember the 5:1 ratio? Reliable transit builds that 5. If a transit authority is having reliability issues, there probably needs to be an open conversation between management, the planning department, the scheduling department, and the operations department to figure out what’s going on.

Most bus drivers don't want to be late. It adds chaos and uncertainty to their day (when do I get a break? All of my passengers are irritated now. Am I going to get off on time today? etc). If this becomes the norm, some drivers will give up on maintaining the schedule altogether and just drive. Once, when I was talking to a retired, large transit authority bus driver, he mentioned catching up with the bus in front of him and “riding them like a cheap suit” to get a break (if you’re right behind the bus in front of you, there’s a good chance you’re riding empty). He was, by all accounts, a good, professional bus driver, but when confronted with an impossible schedule and an 8 hour shift, he found a way to pass the time.

Most schedulers don't want to create bad schedules. The job is to optimize, and the satisfaction is seeing a well optimized schedule translated into real life transit service. However, if the route takes 65 minutes, planning wants the route to run every 60 minutes, and management says they can only afford to operate the route with one bus, then you’re probably going to get a bad schedule.

If this open conversation doesn’t prove fruitful, try talking with the local right of way owner (probably a department of transportation) to investigate roadway treatments that prioritize transit (I know this is much easier said than done, but that doesn't excuse us from trying. Check out NACTO’s Transit Street Design Guide if you’re in need of inspiration). While you work through this process, schedule a few more open conversations between management, planning, scheduling and operations. You may find that the answer is in the room after all.

🏎️ Good Transit is (reasonably) fast

Transit is probably never going to be faster than driving (exceptions apply), but it should never be slower than walking. Transit authorities can make sure transit is fast by ensuring routes are straight and direct, stops are appropriately spaced apart (see “Wow, these bus stops are close together!”), and frequencies are high enough or schedules are coordinated enough that transfers are seamless.

🔒Good Transit Feels Safe

By the numbers, taking transit is very safe. However, if people don’t feel safe on transit, the numbers are next to useless. This issue is acutely felt today. Changing commute patterns have resulted in more empty transit vehicles, and in transit there really is a feeling of safety in numbers. If someone is acting a little sketchy on your train car, the time between now and the next stop can feel like a millennium if you’re the only other person on the train car. More people around means more “Eyes on the Street,” as Jane Jacobs would call it. This Planetizen article sums up the concept of “Eyes on the Street”, but in short, places feel (and often are) safer when there are people around. This works on two levels. First, more eyes just generally discourage mischief. Additionally, in the event of mischief, more eyes mean more of a crowd to blend into to avoid and evade the mischief (we really operate a lot like birds if you think about it).

This presents a pernicious paradox. People will continue to avoid transit if they don’t feel safe on transit vehicles, but transit vehicles feel the most safe when people are on them. Several transit authorities have adopted unique solutions to this problem.

• BART Transit Ambassadors: In 2020, Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) serving the San Francisco Bay area launched its Progressive Policing and Community Engagement Bureau, which introduced unarmed, highly visible transit ambassadors and crisis intervention specialists onto BART trains. These staff members, equipped with radios, Narcan, and de-escalation training, walk trains and stations, providing a uniformed presence onboard transit vehicles.

• SEPTA SCOPE Program: In 2021, the Southeastern Pennsylvania Transit Authority (SEPTA) serving the area in and around Pittsburg, PA launched its Safety, Cleaning, Ownership, Partnership and Engagement (SCOPE) program. This program uses a mix of armed police officers, SEPTA outreach specialists, and community partnerships to create a safe and pleasant experience on transit vehicles in SEPTA’s service area. Uniquely, this program also tripled SEPTA’s annual spending on maintenance custodians, organically providing more eyes for the system.

• Transit Watch Apps: BART, SEPTA, RTD Denver, and LA METRO are just a few of the many transit authorities that have launched a “Transit Watch App.” This application allows passengers to discreetly report unsafe, unruly and unsanitary conditions onboard transit vehicles. Depending on the system, reporting a behavior on-board may even culminate agency staff meeting the transit vehicle at its next stop or station to resolve the issue. SEPTA uses the information from their Transit Watch App to target resources to problem areas on the system. While this app doesn’t provide physical “eyes” on the street, it does help to ensure that passengers never feel truly alone while on the system. Let’s call it virtual eyes on the street.

The Transit Center publication “Safety for All” dives more deeply into the topic of safety on transit if you’re interested.

Good Transit is Equitable by Nature

Equity in transit is something that comes up a lot in this industry. However, I think the conversation can be a bit off base. The discussion tends to center around the equitable distribution of transit service. "Equitably" distributing bad transit service may make decision makers look and feel good, but it does little to encourage those with other options to take transit. Worse, it shackles those with limited other transportation options to bad transit service that is frankly, disrespectful to their time. The most equitable thing a transit service can do is provide Good Transit service, and push for surrounding land use that supports transit and ensures that those that have limited other options (and those that just prefer to not drive) can live their lives near Good Transit. This gets into the relationship between transportation and land use. Essentially, you want higher density, mixed use development around transit so there's a lot of places to live near transit, and a lot of reasons for people to be going to a lot of places at a lot of times.

Let's Recommit Ourselves to Good Transit

This is by no means an exhaustive list of what makes Good Transit, but a transit authority that provides service that is available, reliable, fast, and safe is probably providing what its passengers would consider Good Transit. Honorable mentions for what makes Good Transit are listed briefly below. Feel free to respond with any elements I missed!

• Good Transit isn't necessarily comfortable, but it's not uncomfortable. Hostile architecture is hostile to everyone, not just the people you're trying to discourage. William H Whyte says it better than me

  

• Good Transit is lean. If transit authorities are good stewards of public funds, the public is more likely to support requests for additional funding.

• Good Transit is locally integrated. Transit is just one element of the mobility mix of a region. It should coordinate with the other modes to get people where they need to go.

• Good Transit is flexible. The needs of today aren't necessarily the needs of next year. Microtransit is offering one vision for what that can look like

• Good Transit is fun. The Kansas City Streetcar Authority hosts the KC Streetcar Holiday Jam annually, with live musical performances on select trains.