Transit Scope
Posted by Fred Jandt
Editor, Mass Transit
When you are participating in anything, it’s difficult to take a step back and look at it as a whole in comparison to the world around it. Are you a sports fan? Take a step back and look at sports fandom some time in relation to the rest of the world.
Now, we really need to step back and take a look at transit on a broader scope while tuning out the rhetoric (good or bad) for just a bit.
Every year Mass Transit piles everyone involved in the magazine into a room and we discuss the past year, what we liked, what we didn’t like, and discusses what we want to change in the next year (not without our fair share of arguing). We purposely step back from the daily grind of publishing to look at the magazine as a whole in the perspective of the industry and world around it.
This led me to think whether or not transit needs to do that as an industry. There was a good story posted on the Mass Transit Web site earlier this week. You can read it here. The story discusses whether or not transit is at a tipping point and looks at it from an outside perspective.
One interesting point stuck with me. In the story, transportation consultant Alan Pisarski is quoted as saying that mass transit only accounts for 1 percent of travel in the United States. So with a 20 percent increase in travel, that would jump to 1.2 percent. Transit isn’t at a tipping point when you look at it in that scale. Really, it’s not even close.
Of course public transportation in the United States is on an entirely different slope than the rest of the world. Let’s take a look at Europe, which gets compared to the United States in terms of public transit so often.
The distance between London and Paris is 212 miles. The distance between Paris and Berlin is 545 miles. The distance between London and Moscow is 1,552 miles.
The distance between New York City and Chicago is 711 miles. The distance between Chicago and Los Angeles is 1,740 miles. The distance between New York City and Los Angeles is 2,444 miles.
It’s further to cross half of the United States than most of Europe. That’s a big difference in scale.
While we’re comparing the public transit offering in Madrid to that in Los Angeles, we need to remember that Madrid is the center of an entire country, while Los Angeles isn’t even the capital of the state of California. The public has a way of talking about transit as something for the “big cities,” but we need to remember that on a comparison scale to the rest of the world, the United States (3,794,066 square miles) needs to be compared with continents (Europe – 3,930,000 square miles), not countries.
Thanks for reading the MT Position updated every Friday,
July 11th, 2008 at 6:15 pm
I was encouraged to see T. Boone Pickens (pickensplan.com) come forward, announcing we are in an energy crisis, we can’t drill out way out of it, and he will be announcing his plan in the coming weeks.
He mentioned natural gas, but not noting the fact it has a very unpredictable peak. That worries me.
What worries more, lack of railway rehab & expansion in his discussions so far. Anyone out there that can talk trains to Boone?
July 21st, 2008 at 8:33 am
This bogus idea that “Europe is smaller than the US” and “Our distances are too great” keeps coming up over and over. I’m a bit disappointed to see it here, and not thought through. My reaction is “So what?”
Now, why “so what?” So what because it’s a long ways regardless of what mode you are taking. Yes, it’s 2,444 miles, NYC to LA, but it’s 2,444 miles whether you are on a plane, train, car or walking. The fact that it’s 892 miles farther than London to Moscow is irrelevant. If we could build the vaunted “high speed rail” system that Europe has been smart enough to build, that would take 4.5 to 5 hours longer. NY to Chicago, 771 miles, yeah, so what? That could be 5 to 5.5 hours if we built the system we should have.
This business of “our distances are too great” is nothing more than an excuse to stand pat and do nothing. The US made the biggest mistake first: NOT to do truly high speed rail on it’s own rights of way, come what may, and to settle for what they could do on the existing ROWs. Look at Acela: it can only do it’s maximum speed for about a half hour of it’s Boston-NYC trip, because it’s limited to the existing ROW. Heavily improved, yes, but still curvy, and through areas where it’s hard to fix that. Much too much concession given to the local abuttors. We need to have a rail authority with real teeth, that can condemn, take and use Rights of Way which will allow the system to work at it’s potential.
NO MORE EXCUSES!!