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.