How is the mass transit system inadequate?

Question

why do you think people feel this way ?

does it work around your schedule?

does low income familes benifit from it?

Answer 1

Depends where you live.  In many places, especially outside major cities, service is infrequent and requires changing multiple buses or trains, making it take longer to get someplace by mass transit than it would by driving.

Answer 2

Or you could be in Calgary, where the system is ridiculously crowded despite massive service increases every year.

For us, it's the cost of parking ($21/day) + the cost of gas (1.39/L or 6.40/gall) + traffic that drives everyone to transit (no pun intended). I believe the system carried over 42% of the downtown working population to work every day in 2006. I'm the proportion has gone up now since traffic downtown is improving despite increasing population.

Last week, I had to ride a train to make a meeting at school. I was on the train platform with a thousand other people, with another 500 or so waiting on the sidewalk to get on the platform. Trains we're packed and could maybe pickup about 10 people at the platform... That;s how it's inadaquate up here. It's just pure crowding in Calgary.

The bus I usually take, the #3, now comes every in doubles every 5 minutes during the rush hour. Plus, there are 5 express routes every 10 minutes during rush hour and special BRT (sort of like route 3 express) that runs all day at 10 minutes or better. So scheduling for me isn't an issue at all. Mind you the sprawling parts of the city get very rummy service, I'm right on the Norht Central corridor, one of the busiest transit areas in the city.

Low income families definatley benefit from good transit. Those who qualify for AISH (low income assistance) can apply for half price transit passes, so the whole family can travel for the cost of just insurance on a car.

Although there is a lot of mentality in other cities that transit is for the poor people. Well really I gues that depends on what people like to do in your city. Those who are persay less equal than the rest likely are forced to choose transit. But most riders are actually choice riders. They ride because they don't want to pay for gas, not that they can't afford it.

Not only is there sort of "bad press" thats hung over transit for years, 1950s urban planning didn't help either. Particularily, the US Federal Highway initiative is coming abck to haunt us.  I'll slim it down a lot, but its more complex than what Ill say here. Ask me later if you want a little story. But the highways and automakers made it so easy to live in the suburbs, cities began to sprawl. This meant that we became dependant on the automobile. Transit doesn't work well in sprawl, just not enough people.

For decades, we've built cities like that. Transit has takes the biggest hit. It not only has trouble providing service to these places, but a lot of transit funding ended up being diverted to building roads and highways instead. If you look at some statistics, countries that didn't have a massive highway funding program show much better transit service, ridership an usage. Canada and the US are the easist to compare. The easiest to compare is in cities of 500,000 to 1.5 million. Most of these cities were developed in the post-WWII era where the effect of highway construction is the most prevalent.