Really good article on why people take transit

The fundamental attribution error in transportation choice

Original link: http://psystenance.com/2010/03/15/the-fundamental-attribution-error-in-transportation-choice/

Posted by Michael D on March 15, 2010

In social psychology, the fundamental attribution error refers to the tendency for people to over-attribute the behaviour of others to personality or disposition and to neglect substantial contributions of environmental or situational factors. (Actually it isn’t quite fundamental, as collectivist cultures exhibit less of this bias.) People are generally more aware of the situational influence on their own behaviour.

Thus, the fundamental attribution error in transportation choice: You choose driving over transit because transit serves your needs poorly, but Joe Straphanger takes transit because he’s the kind of person who takes transit. This is the sort of trap we find ourselves in when considering how to fund transportation, be it transit, cycling, walking, or driving.

Let’s say you live in a suburban subdivision. You can afford to drive, and it’s the only way you can quickly and easily get to your suburban office and to the store, and pick up your child from daycare. How do you interpret the decision of other people to take transit? Is it something about the quality of transit where they are? More likely you are going to attribute it to something about those people themselves — they’re poor, or they’re students, or they’re some kind of environmentalists. It’s difficult for people to realize the effect of the situation, e.g. one with frequent transit service to many destinations along a straight street that is easy to walk to. (I’d also point out that students, the poor, and even environmentalists do drive as well.)

Why do Europeans walk more, cycle more, and take transit more? Surely it is something about their culture? But this is an excessively dispositional attribution. I won’t deny that culture plays some role in transit use, especially in the decisions that lead to the creation of transportation infrastructure. But that infrastructure itself and the services provided on it are a strong influence on the transportation choices people make. The European infrastructure situation facilitates those other modes of travel much more so than does typical North American transportation infrastructure.

Where our infrastructure gets closer to the European model, so does the transportation mode choice, and conversely, where Europe is more like the North American model, Europeans turn out to drive more. If culture were really the driving force, you wouldn’t expect to see much fluctuation in transportation choice. But just as North America suburbanized and fell in love with the private automobile, so did Europe, albeit to a lesser extent. Only recently has Europe started again building new tram lines and clawing back space from the car. Copenhagen, now viewed as an urban cycling mecca, wasn’t always one. The rise of the car drastically lowered cycling there in the 1960s. Copenhagen owes its recent fame to restrictions on parking and to its dedicated cycling infrastructure, which have led to a cycling renaissance.

Consider how North American visitors travel in Europe. How do they get around London? The Underground. How do they get between London and Paris? The train. How do they get around Amsterdam or Copenhagen? Quite possibly they rent a bike. When in Rome, they do as the Romans do: they walk, take the subway or tram, or maybe ride a Vespa. What do European tourists do in North America? Generally they rent a car, because that’s the only realistic way to travel in most places. There are exceptions, of course: tourists to New York City or Washington, D.C. take the subway because that’s the most convenient way to travel in those cities.

We’re not so different from tourists in how we choose to get around. We may have our own preferences, but the biggest influence on our choice of transportation mode is what modes are available to us and how useful they are. Above all this is determined not by culture and personality but by the kind of infrastructure and transportation service provided.

Addendum: Jarrett Walker has some great commentary on this post at Human Transit. More context was given in the Streetsblog write-up.

National Post transit discussion

This article ran in the National Post on 7 December:

When the Toronto Transit Commission announced in November it would hike fares a 25¢ in the new year -- a roughly 10% increase -- it blamed the usual suspects: rising costs of fuel and wages.

The system, said TTC chairman Adam Giambrone, faced a $100-million shortfall in next year's operating budget.

When the bad news broke, the Torontoist.com, compared the inflation of the TTC's 21 fare hikes in the past 30 years against the price of gasoline and against the inflation rate.

Consistently, the analysis found, TTC fares had risen faster than inflation, and far faster than the price of gas. Between 1980 and 2010, the cash fare, adjusted for inflation, soared more than 80% and token prices are up 50%. The price of a litre of unleaded gas? Up about 30%, without inflation. As for wage increases, Statistics Canada reported last year that the median full-time, full-year salary of average Canadians has hardly increased at all since 1980.

Although it is charging more than ever, getting heftier federal, provincial and municipal subsidies than at any time in its history, although fuelling a car is pricier; and though its customer base has never been larger or keener to reduce its carbon footprint, the TTC, the largest system in the country, is struggling as much as ever to stem its losses. If this is the future of public transit, it does not look bright.

As other major systems across the continent strain in similar circumstances, the strategy of public transit system boosters has been to promote the service as an environmental necessity. In the name of Mother Nature, North American transit systems have received billions in subsidies in recent years - even though they were never developed for environmental purposes in the first place.

If the goal is to reduce carbon dioxide emissions, air pollution and gas consumption, and maximize the environmental impact of sustainability spending, we may be better off without publicly funding transit at all.

"Subsidized transit is not sustainable by definition," says Wendell Cox, a transport policy consultant in St. Louis, and former L.A. County Transportation commissioner. "The potential of public transit has been so overblown it's almost scandalous."

It's not that environmentally minded transit promoters are being dishonest when they argue that city buses are more efficient than private cars: It's that they're talking about a fictional world where far more people ride buses. Mass transit vehicles use up roughly the same energy whether they are full or empty, and for much of the time, they're more empty than full.

For the bulk of the day, and on quieter routes, the average city bus usually undoes whatever efficiencies are gained during the few hours a day, on the few routes, where transit is at its peak.

Last year, policy analyst Randal O'Toole ran the numbers for the CATO Institute, where he is a senior fellow, comparing mass transit vehicles to private vehicles, ranking each based on how much energy they consume and how much CO2 they emit. The average motorized city bus, he reports, burns 27% more energy per mile than a private car and emits 31% more pounds of CO2. The U.S. Bureau of Transportation Statistics confirms that the average city bus requires 20% more energy per passenger than the average car.

"Unfortunately, right now the state of the art is that you're generally better off with private automobiles when you're talking about energy utilization. About the only way that transit can be competitive for energy or for environmental quality is if the transit lines gets an incredible amount of use, far higher than is now normally the case," says Tom Rubin, a transit policy consultant in California, and former chief financial officer of the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority. But crowded systems are a turn-off for riders, he says, so more passengers means even more buses and rail cars. "It's almost impossible to make transit more attractive without spending a huge amount of money."

The bus may be the most inefficient part of any major city's transit network, but they're the most vital part. Wider use of subways and light rail relies utterly on a feeder system of buses, says Michael Roschlau, president of the Canadian Urban Transit Association. "You can't just run [Calgary's] C-Train by itself and expect everyone to drive to the stations," he says. "Same thing for the subway in Toronto or Skytrain in Vancouver."

Without buses to carry them from their neighbourhood to the train stations, even fewer citizens would ride the trains, making trains, in turn, less efficient per passenger. Already, when trains, subways and streetcars are combined, the average public transit system is still no more efficient that private cars, according to the CATO study. All transit together does emit less CO2 than passenger cars carrying the same number of people the same distance (about 13% less) but even that gap is disappearing -- fast.

The U.S. Department of Energy's Data Book shows that while transit's energy efficiency has worsened in recent decades -- transit buses today consume 4,315 BTUs per passenger mile, or about 50% more energy than in 1980 -- the trend in cars has been the opposite direction: Today's cars are already nearly 20% more efficient than they were 25 years ago, down from 4,348 BTUs per passenger mile in 1980 to 3,514 in 2007.

The environmental case for public transit is falling just as fast, now that hybrid cars are achieving mass market status, with 65 models set to hit North American roads next year, Chevrolet planning to launch its electric Volt by 2011 and manufacturers rolling out super-high efficiency vehicles. In the next few years especially, the average energy consumption of passenger vehicles, and their emission levels, will only improve, with projections by the International Council on Clean Transportation showing the average auto could beat all public transit modes for efficiency and CO2 within the next five years.

"At this point, a Toyota Prius is less greenhouse-intensive than New York City Transit," Mr. Cox says. "Whatever advantage that transit has at the moment is going away very quickly."

Once eco-conscious urbanites realize the bus is worse for the planet than cars, they'll have little reason to keep riding, making transit's comparative per-passenger environmental footprint look even worse. And while transit system operators talk of "greening" their fleet, the fact is they face substantial limits. Whatever green gains transit can make, automobiles can probably do better, Mr. Rubin says.

When the federal government, the B.C. government and BC Transit revealed plans to run 20 hydrogen-powered buses in Whistler, B.C., in February for the Olympics, even the hard-green David Suzuki Foundation balked at the preposterous $2-million-per-bus price tag -- four times the price of a standard diesel -- arguing that the money would have been better spent on traditional transit initiatives, which "are on life support as far as the financial needs go," Ian Bruce, the group's climate-change campaigner, said.

He's surely right about the pointlessness of what will amount to a four-year, $90-million showpiece of technology not even remotely realistic for actual, financially strapped public transit systems.

And more money for diesel-powered buses may be hardly more worthwhile: The fact is that despite best efforts of transit planners and funding governments, and surveys showing a public keen on environmentalism, most commuters simply will not, or cannot, ride.

Last year's census data confirmed that the vast majority of Canadians have little use for transit. Just 216,000 more people rode at least once than did in 2001, a half-a-percentage increase, but that's actually a decrease relative to the 5.4% population growth over the same period. At the same time, Statistics Canada shows that operating costs for Canadian transit system has ballooned, up 30% from $3.7-billion in 2003 to $4.8-billion in 2007. In the United States, public transit's market share for travel has fallen by a third since 1980, from 1.5% to 1% in 2005. If anything were to get people out of their cars to stand at a bus stop, it would be the severe pain of soaring gas prices. But even as fuel in the United States. approached the unseen price of $4 a gallon in 2008, public transit ridership rose a mere 3.3%.

Transit boosters insist that we must go further, and redesign our cities to support transit systems. "Our cities continue to approve the suburban sorts of development that are very difficult to serve using public transit," Stephen Hazell, executive director of the Sierra Club of Canada, told reporters upon release of last year's disappointing ridership data. But the thousands of delivery trucks, taxi drivers, emergency vehicles, service trucks, car-bound workers and buses mean even high-density cities will keep needing highways, ring roads, bridges and flyovers. Meanwhile the massive cost of overhauling cities is just more billions to address an automobile environmental problem that is already on the way to resolving itself -- money that might be better, and more effectively deployed toward other earth-friendly measures, such as reducing traffic congestion.

A congestion charge toll implemented in Stockholm in 2007, for instance, reduced CO2 emissions in that city by roughly 16% last year, cut traffic by 18%, and, because it exempts low-emissions vehicles, led to a tripling of purchases of so-called green cars. Best of all, it sustains itself.

More roads, and more efficient roads, still won't address public transit's original, non-environmental purpose: providing mobility for citizens who lack their own. But where public transit is absent, or impractical, solutions for the small minority totally lacking other means have readily sprung up. Ridesharing applications for smart phones -- users enter their location and desired destination and a cost-conscious carpooler responds -- are already in wide use, Mr. Rubin says. Self-sustaining, small-scale private jitney systems have successfully operated for years in Atlantic City and Puerto Rico (all North America's early public transit systems were privately operated until they were nationalized). And with billions freed up from public transit funds, it appears entirely feasible to simply offer subsidized Prius taxis, or even car subsidies, to the small portion of the public entirely reliant on public mobility. A study last year by HDR Decision Economics, commissioned by the Canadian Urban Transit Association, found that Canada's public systems will need $78-billion more in infrastructure spending and $3.6-billion in annual subsidies to reach optimum capacity. For that kind of money, Canadian governments could, if they wanted, hand out $16,000 car or taxi allowances to every single Canadian who rides transit even casually, and still have $50-billion left over at the end of the decade. That plan wouldn't please the public unions and other transit-reliant lobbies pressing for more green-related transit funding. But it would relieve Canadians from having to perpetually prop up a system that's increasingly unsustainable -- financially and environmentally.

National Post

klibin@nationalpost.

Kudos to letter writer Patrick Condon for writing this response:

Re: Save The Environment: Don't Take Transit, Kevin Libin, Dec. 7.

Kevin Libin gets it all wrong. He uses average transit ridership figures from cities in the United States that are falling from a market share of 1.5% of all trips to 1% of all trips. If you have ever been to Atlanta or Phoenix you can see why. In the Vancouver area, however, transit trips to work increased from 16%t oover 17% during the same period, seventeen times more trips per capita than in sprawling U.S. cities.

More misleading still is the claim from the Cato Institute that a Toyota Prius produces less greenhouse gas per passenger mile than a diesel bus. But for this to happen (according to analysis by the University of British Columbia Design Centre), the Prius would have to have five people in it and the diesel bus no more than 10. I don't remember ever seeing a bus with less than ten people in it, or a Prius with more than two, do you?

Professor Patrick M. Condon, University of British Columbia, James Taylor Chair in Landscape and Liveable Environments, Vancouver.

This letter went unpublished:

While Kevin Libin is entirely correct to challenge the generally uncontested conclusion that public transit is necessarily clean and efficient, he draws some unjustified conclusions based on some statistical sleight of hand. First, his comparisons present a distorted picture: on the one hand, he compares the per kilometre transportation cost between cars and public transit while on the other hand, he compares the energy consumption per passenger between cars and city buses. Far more costly light rail, included in the cost comparison, is excluded from the energy comparison, where the higher cost pays dividends, using less energy than the buses he identifies. Furthermore, the per kilometre cost referenced in the first figure is based on amortising all kilometres driven by the total cost incurred. This does not accurately represent the cost associated with driving in a grid-locked metropolis. In this regard, I commend Libin for his praise for Stockholm's congestion charge toll, though it is worth noting that Stockholm's official report indicates that the majority of diverted car occupants opted for public transit over the purchase of a low-emission vehicle.

Second, the graph that compares CO2 emissions per passenger mile is similarly misleading. On consulting the CATO policy analysis referenced, it is evident that the vehicle fuel efficiencies used are the ideal values from the American Environmental Protection Agency which represent driving new cars (this study used the 2008 model years) under ideal city conditions which do not represent typical, rush-hour city driving. However, the transit values used are the actual energy consumption values from the Federal Transit Administration. Furthermore, as rail runs on electricity, it is only as clean as its source. The translation of energy consumption to CO2 emissions for this study is based on the 2006 U.S. State energy profiles though CATO did not elaborate on how it selected a value of CO2 emissions per unit energy produced. While we are certainly stuck with decades old electricity plants, sources including nuclear, hydro, solar, and wind offer the potential to reduce these emissions numbers to zero. The vehicles in question may have been built in 2008, but the power plants certainly were not.

It is important that the viability of public transit options be examined, but, as a starting point, I believe that better-researched studies should be employed.

Yours sincerely,
N Ellens

Stockholm's congestion tax

http://www.stockholm.se/PageFiles/70349/Sammanfattning%20eng%20090918_.pdf

This report details the findings of Stockholm's decision to implement a congestion tax on vehicles entering the city from
beyond a cordon during certain hours, similar to that in London, England.

C02 emissions fell, transit ridership increased, and low-emission vehicle purchases increased
(as they are exempt from the tax).

transit expansion report

CATCH Articles:

Study says HSR should be expanded

Nov 09, 2009

A comprehensive operational review says the HSR needs to add ten to fifteen buses a year to achieve the city’s transit goals. It also suggests ways to improve Hamilton’s transit system and offers ideas on modifying existing bus routes and service frequencies.

The year long study by IBI Group was commissioned by the city and tracked ridership at all 2264 stops on the HSR’s 32 routes and compared the results to other communities. A summary was given verbally to councillors in a slide presentation on October 29, but the full document has not yet been made public.

The slides say that the HSR is “performing well … given financial and other constraints” but warn councillors that “there are no magic bullets to grow transit ridership without incurring increased costs”. The consultants argue strongly that more spending is what is required.

“A paradigm shift is needed in city thinking and decision making to make transit a priority,” said IBI presenter Brian Hollingsworth. “The HSR is at a crossroads. All policies and plans call for continued growth, but continued financial constraints are a barrier.”

Hollingsworth pointed to the Vision 2020 goal of 100 rides per person per annum by 2020, and the target of the city transportation master plan to reduce vehicle use by 20 percent by 2030. The provincial and federal governments are also supporting transit improvements with gas tax monies.

He noted that HSR ridership is currently at 45 rides per capita per year, down from 47 in 2008. To achieve the 100 target “would require a doubling of service hours and associated funding increases”.

“HSR should be adding 10-15 buses per year to meet this target by 2021,” says the summary, but notes that “concentrating future population and employment in existing transit corridors and other transit supportive policies can reduce the need for service expansion” in meeting city targets. These policies include promoting infill and higher density, reducing parking requirements, and “controlling sprawl of commercial (i.e. big-box) development”.

The study also contends there are good reasons to improve transit services including the “high cost of owning and operating private automobiles” and the fact that gas tax funding for the city “is tied to demonstrated progress on ridership growth.” It also notes that transit promotes economic development because “increasingly companies are seeking to locate in cities that have high levels of transit accessibility.”

While praising the overall efficiency of the HSR, IBI notes that average fares are low because of the large number of riders getting discounted or free trips. They calculate that “44 percent of all passengers have a discounted fare other than an adult monthly pass” and note that “free boardings for persons with personal mobility devices are potentially subject to abuse.”

Reducing this fare “leakage,” IBI suggests, could be an alternative to fare increases. And they urge “discounts for social programs should be treated as such and not funded entirely from the HSR budget.”

Other ideas for savings include “implementing transit priority in the King-Main corridor” which IBI calculates could significantly reduce the number of required buses – each of which costs the HSR $300,000 a year to operate.
Maps in the presentation show possible changes to bus routes and service frequencies as “for discussion”. At the request of city staff the IBI findings have been referred to the transit department for review and a future report to committee of the whole.

Gridlock costs GTA billions a year: OECD

Gridlock costs GTA billions a year: OECD TheSpec.com - CanadaWorld - Gridlock costs GTA billions a year: OECD

Lost productivity putting brakes on growth

TORONTO — Traffic congestion in the Toronto region costs Canada $3.3 billion in lost productivity a year, the result of urban sprawl, decades of underinvestment in public transit by Ottawa and a disjointed system, the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development says.

In a first-of-its-kind review of the region’s economy, the OECD said transit service in the Toronto Census Metropolitan Area has not kept pace with population growth, with 71 per cent of commuters still dependent on the automobile — one of the highest rates of car use among cities in the organization’s 30 member countries.

The result is air pollution, some of the longest commutes among OECD countries, and “a direct hit on productivity,” especially in economic sectors that depend on rapid delivery such as retail, logistics and food.

A pair of minor accidents on Hwy 403 east in Hamilton brought the morning commute to a near standstill for more than an hour today. A fender-bender near the Hwy 6 exit and a rollover between King Street and York Boulevard backed up eastbound traffic as far as Fiddler's Green. It was a perfect example of how even minor problems have major effects.

To curb traffic jams, the Toronto region should consider measures such as toll lanes, local fuel and parking taxes, and a Singapore-style congestion charge in which roads in the city centre and major routes such as the 400-series highways would be subject to fees that vary according to peak hours, the OECD says.

Although the Toronto region is one of Canada’s “chief economic powerhouses,” the report says the area’s gross domestic product per capita is middling compared to other OECD countries, while its rate of labour productivity is lower than most U.S. and European cities with comparable income levels, the report says.

That’s due in part to the decline in manufacturing jobs, weak investment in innovation, a failure to capitalize on the skills of its immigrant population and a lagging regional transport network, the 200-page report notes.

Toronto Mayor David Miller said the OECD identified several concerns long expressed by Canada’s mayors, including the need for a national transit strategy and revenues that grow with the economy.

“The OECD report makes it clear that if Ontario and Canada are to thrive, its largest urban centre a must not be taken for granted,” he said.

http://thespec.com/News/CanadaWorld/article/669904