Bridge the Gap: Transit — What's the point?

It’s no secret — I am definitely of the opinion that we should expand transit networks in the Boston area and in the United States.  

The reasons for this are plentiful. Transit helps us reduce our carbon footprint. It helps make transportation within and between cities more affordable. It reduces the number of vehicles on the road, reducing the demand for roads and allowing cityscape improvements such as wider sidewalks and more green space. When properly planned and designed, transit can offer a way to get around a city that is faster than driving a car. The list goes on.

But consider this simple thought experiment. According to the American Community Survey, in Boston, only 33 percent of workers commute to work using transit, and 45 percent commute by car or other private vehicle. How much transit would we need if everyone commuted by transit? These numbers suggest that we would need to grow our transit network by about two and a half times to accommodate the added demand. For the area around Tufts, a 150 percent increase in transit service could be achieved by simply building the Green Line extension and having the bus routes around campus run on ten minute headways. That’s hardly sufficient to really replace the timing flexibility that cars and other forms of transportation provide.

The practical meaning of this is that it would be simply unfeasible to turn Boston into a car-free utopia. Bummer. More to the point though, this also means that there is no obvious answer to the question of how much transit is enough transit. Are people like me going to always want more transit, regardless of how much there actually is? At what point should we be satisfied?

There is no single answer to that question. However, it seems to me that the closest approximation to an answer might be that we should be satisfied when we have achieved substantial progress toward realizing the benefits that transit provides to a city. In my view, we have not yet made such substantial progress — or at the very least, there are still lots of low hanging fruit that will allow us to improve the utility of our transit system at a minimal cost.

Take, for example, expanding rush hour capacity on the MBTA’s Red and Orange Lines. As any peak-direction daily commuter could attest to, these lines are over capacity. An increase in capacity will require additional trains — these have been ordered and will begin arriving in 2018 — and will also require a new signal system on these lines, but the existing system is antiquated and in need of replacement already. Moreover, the subway system actually covers its costs and more during rush hour, so this would not be an investment into a money-sucking abyss.

There is more to be done, but I am nearing my maximum word count. The point is: reforms such as adding rush hour subway capacity should take little more than common sense to implement. By ignoring them, we weaken the purpose of having a transit system in the first place.