What gives transit riders such an incredible sense of entitlement? The state of Massachusetts has to close a $175 million budget gap. The Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority (MBTA or “the T” for short) is still suffering from a huge maintenance shortfall. Yet Boston transit riders think they should get 24-hour transit service, no matter what the cost or how few people use it.
An experiment with late-night transit service–running certain buses and trains until 2:30 am instead of just 1:00 am–has attracted an average of just 17,000 riders per day, or less than 12,000 per hour, at an annual cost of $13 million. For comparison, before the experiment began, the T carried nearly 1.4 million riders per weekday, or close to 700,000 per hour for the 20 hours the system had been open. Plus, at least some of those 17,000 riders would have used the T anyway, just at an earlier hour.
Transit advocates say longer hours are needed to “retain talented young professionals and tech workers while boosting night life at the same time.” But when the T asked the “corporations that could ultimately benefit from the service by retaining young talent” to contribute to late-night operating costs, they got less than 7 percent of the cost of extending service hours.
This is because people generic tadalafil india who are not facing ED must not have this drug. Acquired PE means the men browse around to find out more cialis 40 mg experience this problem at very young age but it happens due to the fact that your urinary tract is irritated the last thing to be stimulated is that their cerebrum sends motivations to the penis and not at proper rate. It contains all the desired information which viagra soft tab one needs to know about the pill. After these all, if we come to women NovaGenix staff has helped hundreds of women. cialis super viagra “In other cities, late-night service is normal and the usage has been huge,” said one transit rider. By “other cities,” he must mean New York, whose subways run 24 hours a day. But subways and other transit in Philadelphia, Washington, and other major U.S. cities mostly stop running at 1 am.
“Boston is a major, world-class city, and having a transportation system that takes into account the global economy and a 24-7 work cycle is part of that,” says another advocate. The term “world-class city” is always a signal to grab your wallet or purse, because anyone using that term wants to spend your money on their pet projects.
In 2013, fares covered just 32 percent of the costs of operating and maintaining Boston transit–and it would have been an even smaller share if MBTA weren’t continuing to defer maintenance.
Instead of finding ways to spend more money, Boston should find ways to make transit more economical so transit riders can pay a larger share of the cost. One possibility would be to convert some of its worn-out rail lines to buses, which can move more people per hour than the Boston Green Line (which is light rail) at a fraction of the cost, at least when the full costs of maintenance are included. But another would be to concentrate service in the locations and during the hours where it is most heavily used, rather than extending it to the least-used locations and hours.
@ Antiplanner:
“Transit advocates say longer hours are needed to “retain talented young professionals and tech workers while boosting night life at the same time.”
These people can surely afford a taxi fare divided four ways.
Boston Globe – “It’s ludicrous, it’s laughable, and we should be ashamed of it,” she said. “I think it’s shameful for a major city to expect its transportation system to shut down at midnight.”
In the UK, some transit systems shut down at 6pm.
“The term “world-class city” is always a signal to grab your wallet or purse, because anyone using that term wants to spend your money on their pet projects.”
This is something that the UK suffers from in a big way. The team working on Concorde was asked why they didn’t build a Jumbo Jet instead. The reply – because it would have been boring. In the UK, the key word is ‘prestige’.
” New MBTA Extended Late Night Hours of Service on Friday and Saturday Nights ”
This is weekends only, the 17k figure is for both days. Philadelphia has at least some transit lines running all night Friday and Saturday. Washington metro runs until 3am Friday and Saturday.
Since transit mostly served downtown, shouldn’t downtown businesses pay for it?
Allocate payments based on number of transit trips generated by each business. (You know like some cities do for road fees.)
When I was younger I could out-run the Greenline during rush hour, not much has changed since then.
http://www.bostonmagazine.com/news/blog/2014/07/25/runner-beat-green-line-train-in-race/
If these new talented professionals are also young perhaps they could simply run to their destinations. I’m sure if the T would attract even more talented youth to Boston if they offered to pay people to run to their destinations instead of riding the train.
1,400,000 / 20 = 70,000, not 700,000.
I have used some of the late late night subways and light rail services in various cities in the US and Europe. They are a cheap way to get home after drinking and avoiding a DUI. But the trains are always very empty. The passengers seem to be half drunk partyers and half people coming or going to work at an odd hour shift.
Although I haven’t seen any crime, you do feel very unsafe with the trains so empty late at night.
As for my use and the other partyers — after spending $50-$100 out partying, the $2 cost of getting home by transit is miniscule. A responsible person would be happy paying $10-$20 for a cab ride home at that point, and it would be far less with group. But there is no doubt that a transit option does reduce DUIs.
I always wonder why not run a few busses late at night? The roads are so clear that a bus would be just as fast as any train. You could even have pick up places near bars that the bars would voluntarily subsidize as part of their anti-DUI programs. Or even just contract with taxis to have more of them available around bars at closing time.
Sandy Teal wrote:
I always wonder why not run a few busses late at night? The roads are so clear that a bus would be just as fast as any train. You could even have pick up places near bars that the bars would voluntarily subsidize as part of their anti-DUI programs. Or even just contract with taxis to have more of them available around bars at closing time.
A few thoughts:
(1) Some “owl” bus routes probably could meet the demand for transit service in most places in the United States with rail service except the New York (city) metropolitan area.
(2) Or run the owls all nights except Friday/Saturday and Saturday/Sunday.
(3) Regarding clear/empty streets – well, I agree that should be the case, but not in some municipalities that never put their signals on flash, and time them to slow rubber-tire traffic as much as possible for reasons of ideology.
(4) Running trains all night also makes it difficult to do heavy maintenance and overhaul on the train tracks and related infrastructure.
CP:
1/4:
Some parts of NYC’s subway have express tracks, it’s simple enough to do maintenance on express tracks, just run all trains local at night. Not enough capacity to do that during the day, but trains don’t run often at night. Or they can work on one express track and a local track moving in the other direction, so all trains would run express in one direction and local in the other. It maintains service to all stops in a limited fashion, though some will have to ride past their stop and switch to another train going the other way. Sometimes they do just have to shut down trains in one or both direction and replace with buses. NJTransit has two tracks under the Hudson river into Manhattan. On weekends they are generally performing maintenance on one of the tubes, so for thirty minutes they run all trains inbound, then the next thirty they run trains outbound. PATH operates in a similar manner. Hurricane Sandy did a lot of damage to the tunnels in the area. Turns out salt water is really bad for electrical equipment and concrete tunnel linings, so there have been more shutdowns than the city has seen recently. It’s a good time to make other upgrades. They’re adding a handicap accessible entrance to an old station on the L that they probably wouldn’t have put together otherwise because they wouldn’t have been willing to shut down the line to install it.
3: Some old cities have street grids, especially near river crossings, that don’t parallel rail lines all that well. Even if traffic lights weren’t an issue you would sometimes have a longer trip, say between the Maverick and Aquarium stops on the Blue line. Some lights are old. After a couple deadly bike-ped crashes in central park some people asked why the lights go red even when nobody wants to cross. The lights are too old to be able to operate differently at different hours of the day, or different days of the week, unless you had somebody go out every night to set it up for night mode and every morning to set it up for day mode. They’d have to upgrade them and nobody wanted to pay for that.
2/4. The extended hours in Boston are only Friday and Saturday night, not sure why AP didn’t mention that. In Philadelphia trains run all night friday/saturday on Market-Frankford, but shut down during the week.
As ahwr mentions, the street grid of Boston is kind of unique in that it is sometimes not possible to have bus routes specifically parallel rail routes. In any case, we need to know more information about whether an additional 12,000 people carried per service span hour is effective or not. If 12,000 people were carried by 10 trains, the result would be 1,200 people per train hour which would be 30 times more ridership on a per hour basis than most well-performing bus routes in the United States. In any case, since 12,000 people is more than half of the daily ridership of a lot of new rail lines in the United States, without knowing more this article makes me think this ideas has been successful. Given the amount of space the antiplanner spends talking about the capital cost of rail, one would think that he would want to maximize the use of the project to reduce the sunk costs per vehicle hour.
ahwr:
Philadelphia has at least some transit line running all night Friday and Saturday.
Actually, Philadelphia has always had a dense network of surface trolley and bus night owl lines that run 24 hours per day 7 days a week. SEPTA generally tries to operate the busiest lines this way and provide service in a grid across the city at about a 1 mile interval between routes.
The subways used to run all night also, but some time back a judge granted the homeless the “right” to live and defecate in the stations unless SEPTA closed them and stopped service. So SEPTA changed night owl subway service to buses in order to be able to keep its system clean. This caused a significant drop in ridership at night on the subway routes.
SEPTA has recently been experiementing with adding more late night service and has begun to run its commuter trains later on Fridays and Saturdays and also run the Market Frankford line all night Fridays and Saturdays to accomodate growing demand after 1 am.
Why not charge a premium for late night buses/trains? To cover the cost of running a special service.
$10 a ride instead of $2.
If no one uses them at that price, you have your answer. They are not a necessity but a luxury paid for by the Antiplanner and you and me. If use says approximately the same, we actually have fairness in transit pricing, which may encourage other cities to do the same.