The Problem With Mass Transit

The problem with mass transit is that it isn't mass enough.

I had to make a run to downtown Portland this afternoon right during rush hour. It was repeat of my experience last week when I had to make the same run early in the morning. It took me an hour to get there and a half hour to get back home. It's times like this that make me consider taking the MAX, but the MAX always takes an hour to get there, and then it would take another hour to get back, not to mention any extra time that it would take to get to my actual destination once I got downtown.

And then I got to wondering if mass transit is really any more efficient at moving people than our system of cars and freeways. How many people are actually getting moved?

I used to see ads on TV that recommended you leave two seconds of space between you and the car ahead of you, and I find that a comfortable distance. You do this by noting when the car ahead of you passes some marker, like a road sign, and then start counting the seconds, one thousand one, one thousand two, until you reach that same point. If you don't get to two seconds, you should slow down until you are farther back.

Most people don't follow this rule, especially during rush hour. You see cars following each other that are one second, a half second, or even a quarter second apart. There are even some people who will follow you with only a tenth of second gap. These are the people who are right on your bumper. A tenth of a second at 60 MPH is only nine feet, which is less than one car length. At 60 MPH that is pretty dang close.

But say we allow 2 seconds per car. That means we can get 1800 cars down one lane of traffic in one hour. Since most cars only carry one person, that means 1800 people per hour.

How many people can a train carry? The MAX only runs every ten minutes, which is six trains an hour. You would have to get 300 people on a MAX train to transport the same number of people. A MAX train only has 4 cars. I think you could probably get 300 people on one, but it would be crowded.

You could up the capacity of the MAX by scheduling more trains. New York City subways run as often as every four minutes during rush hour. And you might be able to increase the number of cars in a train. You could likewise increase the capacity of the highway by closing up the gaps between cars. If we cut the gap in half we could double the number of people. But we are still looking at roughly the same number of people, and we still have the same original problem with the train: it doesn't come to your house and it doesn't take you to work. In a denser urban area like NYC, it may work fine, but out here in the suburbs, it is not a big improvement over the automobile.

How Not To Do Mass Transit

'Don't kill my trams' met NLse ondertitels
I don't particularly care for mass transit, mostly because I am not willing to pay the exorbitant rent that is required to live in a place where it might actually be handy. Or maybe I just don't like being around other people. But I can see that it could be useful, especially in those places where traffic is congested and parking is non-existent.

This video does a good job of laying out the problems with mass transit planning. They are not unique to Amsterdam, they apply to any large city. I'm not quite sure what they mean by 'metropolis'. I thought any big city qualified as a metropolis, but maybe that's not the case. Maybe metropolii are not a good idea. Yes, I know, the idea of a city with a population of a zillion people is impressive, but I wonder if it is really good, useful or beneficial. Maybe we would all be better off if cities weren't any bigger than a million people and were at least 100 miles apart.

This video was made by S. G. Collins. I've been following him for a while now. He has a day job as a cameraman, and he produces his own little videos on the side. Some of them are pretty great.

Police

Portland Transit Cop

Recently I realized there is another reason to avoid mass transit: the police. Driving a car you are unlikely to attract a copper's attention, well, unless you are driving like a maniac, or flagrantly speeding. But riding on the Max you are very likely to encounter a copper checking tickets. Now, it's a not a big deal, but it's not a conductor, it's a cop, and this kind of thing smacks of the 'your-papers-please' kind of thing you run into in totalitarian regimes. I don't like it.
Today I read a story about a man's unpleasant run-in with the police which prompted me to comment that 'First rule of living in the first world is avoid the police.' I don't know where I got that, I mean I didn't grow up in the ghetto, and as far as I know my dad wasn't mobbed up, but that was certainly the impression I managed to collect.

Then there was another story I read about how people behave differently in different social settings, but the author uses a whole different set of words to describe it.

Previous posts about what's wrong with mass transit.

Buses

Proposed Transit System for Detroit

I was just reading about this proposed transit system in Detroit and I suddenly realized why I don't like buses. There are several components to this.

• They are uncomfortable. The seats are narrow and cramped. You have to sit up straight. Half the time your seat is not facing forward so every time the bus speeds up or slows down you are having to work to sit up straight. And not topple into the person next to you.
• You are out in public so you have to behave yourself. No loud conversations, no cursing, no rude noises, no stretching, and definitely no picking your nose.
• You are out in public so you are liable to run into a lunatic. They might be harmless, or they might decide you are the object of their affection, or disdain, or maybe they just want to talk about aliens or their schemes or their in-laws. They might be drunk or sick or filthy and they may be depositing their debris on you. The odds of any of this happening on any one trip are very low, but if it ever happens it can really sour you on the whole going out in public experience.
• They are slow.

The main thing is that whenever I have to go someplace public, like a bus or the library or the courthouse, I feel like I have to put on my armor, not just to protect myself, but to project my proper self and conceal the real me. Part of it may be that I have little patience with stupidity, and bureaucracies are full of it. Telling the clerks or the guards what you really think of the crap you are having to deal with is not going to help your case and could very well land you in the clink.
     Mass transit comes from committees, and committees are not known for being the brightest organisms on the planet, so I guess that's why we have such stupid transportation systems.

Via Indiana Thomas 

The Commuting Life

California Bob reports:

I am now using mass transit to get to work.  Using transit kind of imposes a whole framework on your day, because it greatly reduces your flexibility, and puts you into a helpless hurry-up-and-wait mode.  But I've used transit heavily in the past so the adjustment hasn't been too shocking.

It's one of those liberating things, in the way that jail can be liberating, because once you accept the constraints, it allows (forces) you to abandon all sorts of other options and activities.

One neat advantage to my commute is that my office is right on the F streetcar line.  The F line runs up and down the Embarcadero, an historic and touristy strip, and they run all these old-timey, vintage, antique and exotic streetcars (not to be confused with the famous cable cars).  Today I rode a 1928 Peter Witt, designed/built in Cleveland, though this one came from Italy.  It still has the Italian signs inside -- "no fumare," "uscito..."  Note the functioning windows, wooden doors, glass globes on the interior lights, etc.

The most bizarre car I've seen is the Blackpool, an open-top boat shaped thing -- I hope to ride it.

Here's a roster of what runs on the F line.

Conspiracies Я Us

I think there is a conspiracy operating in downtown Portland that is trying to destroy real estate values. Walking around a small area near Nordstrom I noticed numerous storefronts that are either empty or for lease. The city government seems bent on destroying the automobile. Mass transit and conversion of parking spaces to anything but parking seems to be the order of the day. The result of this, along with their increasing taxes, is that running a small business in Portland is becoming a losing proposition, hence the numerous empty storefronts. They are empty because nobody’s renting them because they don’t believe they could operate their business successfully in such a hostile atmosphere. Businesses operating on the upper floors are kind of immune to all this. Virtually none of them depend on walk-in traffic. But office space is a commodity. The only time you can charge a premium is if there is a view or office space market is tight.


Meanwhile rent for ground floor places is plummeting, which has to be driving the value of the property down. Eventually some real estate investors are going to get tired of the bullshit and sell off their holdings. At that point the conspirators will swoop in and snatch it all up at bargain prices.

Once they have consolidated their hold on downtown they will replace the City Council with one that has the proper attitude and all these bullshit regulations and restrictions will be blown away, people will start driving cars again, storefront businesses boom and the conspirators will reap their criminal rewards.


I’m pretty sure this theory is nonsensical and could easily be destroyed by any kind of elementary analysis but the fact remains that I am troubled by the numerous empty storefronts. Maybe we don’t need so many retail establishments anymore. So what do you do with them? What could these places be used for that would generate kind of rent that a retail store would? Maybe it doesn’t make any difference since nobody seems to be opening any new retail stores.
You might be able convert them to parking, but many buildings are not going to be suitable for that. Or maybe they will become squats for the homeless. There are certainly enough of them. I saw maybe a dozen while I was out walking, so I'm estimating that somewhere between one out of a thousand and one out of a hundred people are homeless.

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I originally wrote this using pen and paper while I was waiting for my wife. She got herself a new iPhone 8+ today because her old iPhone 6 was getting flakey, so I thought I would try using the 'talk-to-text' feature instead of typing it in by hand. She set up her phone to compose an email, pressed the go button and I read what I had written. It took three emails to get it all, but I don't know whether that was due to the operator or the phone. That got the bulk of it entered, but then I had to go through and replace the incorrect words and insert the necessary punctuation. It was kind of a fun experiment, but not very efficient.

The actual conversion of voice to text is done on a server somewhere in the cloud, so theoretically you should be able to do this from any computer with a microphone and an Internet connection.

No Left Turn

Then I took them to see the storied “NO LEFT TURN 7 AM - 9 AM  4PM - 7 PM” sign at Beverly and Normandie. That’s a classic I never get tired of seeing and love to take out-of-towners to gaze at it.  It’s such a sweet thought back to memory lane. Those wonderous days when the morning rush ended at 9 a.m. and the afternoon rush didn’t start until 4 p.m..  Imagine that. Back then, from 9 am to 4 pm - seven hours! – drivers hummed along in Los Angeles streets like they were Formula One champion Lewis Hamilton zooming around the Nürburgring racetrack in Germany. 

My uncle and aunt stared at the sign it wistfully. “Wow, what a, well, I guess, in a way, a melancholy sign,” said aunt Sheila, who was born in Manchester, England and grew up fairytales about Los Angeles allowing left turns from non-“left turn only” designated lanes. “So back in the day, the evening rush hour didn’t start until four? And only lasted three hours? That’s crazy. What a delight that must have been to drive in those days.” - Krikorian Writes

Driving into downtown Portland these days I often get stuck in creepy-crawly traffic for several minutes while we descend from the top of Sylvan to the Vista Ridge tunnel. Once through the tunnel, things open up, but of course, now I am downtown where parking lot driving rules apply (10 MPH max, watch out for homeless people in the middle of the road, hipster pedestrians crossing against the light, bicycles, electric scooters, people opening car doors into travel lanes, etc.). But it usually only takes another five minutes to get where I am going. Not like those poor bastards who are taking I-5 North to Washington. They are going to be stuck in that crap for another week or two.

I am pretty sure neither more freeways or mass transit are going to help. More cities might help. That way cities wouldn't need to be so big. But we used to have more towns, but small towns are shriveling up and dying. Everyone moved to the big city. Maybe we need more tariffs on stuff coming from China, and maybe a tax on automation, and maybe some public works projects. I really don't know, but I expect things are going to just continue to get worse. On the other hand, maybe most people don't mind putting up with traffic congestion.

Lost In Space

While waiting for I Work On A Starship to arrive, I started rereading Stephen Baxter's Manifold Space, which starts off by asking where is everybody? Meaning, the universe is a big place, there ought to be life out there somewhere, so why haven't we seen any evidence of an advanced civilization from another star?

Space Battleship Yamato

Then Roberta's book arrived, and I started reading it, and it, and several other ideas gelled* in my head, and it suddenly came to me. We haven't seen anybody, because anybody who has escaped the gravity well of their sun isn't going to want to get trapped in one again.

Interplanetary Transport Network

There is something called the Interplanetary Transport Network which is a really just a way of navigating the solar system using little or no power. It doesn't get talked about much because these pathways are really slow. Suitable for unmanned probes, but not really suitable for humans with their gnat like attention spans.

However, barring the development of a warp drive it is our best bet for actually going someplace. A vessel carrying people and using these paths would need be able to sustain it's population indefinitely. The best way to do that would be to make it big enough to contain a complete ecology. We could build such a vessel if we wanted to. It would no doubt need to be assembled in orbit. Parts could be launched from Earth, or possibly fabricated on and launched from the Moon. Getting the biology of the ecosystem would be the bigger challenge. We have had only limited experience with biological systems that have been completely cut off from the Earth. But suppose we got one built and got the ecology running.

Once such a vessel is launched, it would really have no reason to visit the surface of a planet, or even remain in the neighborhood of the sun. Asteroids could provide all the raw materials needed, and would not require descent into a gravity well from which there may well be no escape.

So starships may cruise by a star just to see if there is anything interesting in the neighborhood, but it would be foolish to stay.

* Contributing ideas:

• The Madness Season by C.S. Friedman. She posits the existence of longships: large spaceships made of rock, or perhaps hollowed out asteroids, that do not slow down when they approach a star and planets. Their velocity is not that high. Skimships (small ships capable of large changes in velocity) act as shuttles, decelerating when they depart the long ship to land on a planet, and then accelerating after leaving the planet to meet up with the longship again. This limits the time you can transit between the longship and the planets. It makes a sort of sense, changing the velocity of a three mile long asteroid would take a great deal of energy. Let the little ships do the hard work. They would be much more fuel efficient for these kind of maneuvers.
• Rendezvous With Rama by Arthur C. Clarke gives us the idea of a starship simply using our Sun as an accelerator, much like we use the planet Jupiter to slingshot our probes that are on their way farther out. Also, no stopping to chat or even slowing down for a look-see.
• Space Battleship Yamato (pictured above) and The Matrix give us the idea of using old war surplus miltary hulls as space ships. Never mind the problem of getting all that mass into orbit, and never mind that The Matrix wasn't set in outer space, they are water tight (especially submarines) and so are also air tight. And all that steel would make good radiation shielding, important if you are going anywhere outside of Earth orbit. If you are following Roberta's story, you already know that Lupine means wolf. The British had a destroyer named Seawolf, and both the British and the US had submarines with that name.

Update: June 2015. Replace pictures that Blogger lost.