Speaking of Redundancies
- Posted by ryan on March 30th, 2009 filed in Transit
Andrew Smith at the Seattle Transit Blog has an interesting post that compares BART and Metro — the two largest postwar heavy rail transit systems. He first quotes one Christof Spieler, who writes:
San Francisco is in the 5th largest metropolitan area in the country. Washington DC is in the 4th largest. Both cities have old, urban cores with major employment centers surrounded by extensive post-war suburban development. In the 1960s, both decided to build a heavy rail system. And not only do those two systems use very similar technology, they are nearly the same length (104 miles vs. 106 miles).
There is one significant difference between San Francisco’s BART and Washington’s Metrorail, though: Washington has 2 1/2 times the ridership (902,100 average weekday boardings compared to 338,100.)
And then adds:
Mr Spieler sees three main reasons for the massive difference in ridership:
- BART serves the suburbs. Metrorail serves the suburbs and the urban core.
- BART saves money by using existing rights of way; Metrorail maximizes ridership by puting lines where the transit demand is.
- BART stations are where the cars are; Metrorail stations are where the people are.
The big result is that BART has ended up being a big commuter rail system, and DC Metro is both a commuter rail system and an urban Metro.
Spieler’s reasoning isn’t entirely correct. In fact, there are parts of the Metro system that are structured exactly like BART — serving the suburbs, along existing right of way, where the cars are. Where Arlington and Montgomery counties (and the District) have done a pretty good job putting transit where the people are and shaping land-use accordingly, Fairfax County ran the Orange Line along a freeway and surrounded stations by massive parking lots. The difference in the return to Metro construction has been clear (and Fairfax is now reversing field on its strategy, both on existing Orange Line stations and in planning for new Silver Line stations). The lesson that appropriate land-use planning is critical in maximizing the return to transit is one that every local government everywhere should internalize.
But there’s a downside to Metro’s one size fits all approach to system design — there are few redundancies. And this is state of affairs is actually made more problematic by the success Metro has had in altering land-use patterns. BART and Metro in Fairfax are essentially close substitutes for driving — rather than driving to the freeway, driving downtown, and then parking, the system allows you to drive to the freeway, park at the station, and ride downtown. This substitutability means that small shifts in the cost of one mode versus another have big effects on ridership — if Metro gets just a little inconvenient, lots of folks will just drive downtown. It also means that if something knocks out Metro for a day or two, it’s not that costly a problem for residents.
But where Metro is an urban system, things are different. Land use has changed considerably to allow residents to limit or eliminate car use. The tight linkage between transit and planning makes residents dependent on transit. This is what we want, of course. That dependency fuels private investment in communities near transit, and it makes for a very green and sustainable way of life. But it means that when transit systems experience problems (or suffer funding cuts in recession) it’s very painful for residents.
This is the big weakness with an everything to everyone system like Metro — when it breaks, there’s not much to fall back on. Metro planners knew this was a risk, but went ahead with it anyway, in part because they liked the all-in-one solution, and in part because they couldn’t afford to build in redundancies (like a third track). This problem can be fixed, of course. More Metro lines can be built, and other transit modes — like streetcars, local bus circulators, and commuter rail — can be developed to allow Metro to do more specializing. The returns to such upgrades are high. Each new transit node improves the connectivity of the system and creates new opportunities for transit-oriented development. Redundancy means that riders will have more confidence in the system and private developers will feel better about investing near transit. And redundancy allows the system to manage demand more effectively, reducing crush loads and making time for maintenance, and thereby reducing costs.
The problem is that these are major investments that require a lot of capital up front, but which pay off incrementally over time. Governments struggle to make those kinds of investments. This is another area where the federal government should work to adjust the incentives of local officials — to make them care about the long term — by changing funding formulas so that the immediate return isn’t the preeminent concern.
March 30th, 2009 at 12:45 pm
The Purple Line will add a lot of redundancy to the system.
March 30th, 2009 at 12:48 pm
Redundancy again?
As a visitor, I enjoy both BART and Metro, but I’ve noticed that friends who live in or near DC are much prouder of Metro than those in the Bay area are of BART. I wonder how much of that is aesthetic, and how much aesthetics might affect ridership. The D.C. Metro you could hold up against Paris’ while the Bay Area’s subways look more like Budapest’s.
March 30th, 2009 at 1:03 pm
Ryan - Given this post and assuming we have to do them one at a time, which do you think is a higher priority (and thus should be built first): The network of streetcars or the new Blue line subway? We do them both, sure, but assuming we only have the money to do one in the next 10 years and have to wait a decade for the other, which comes first?
Doug - I don’t know. Aesthetically speaking Metro is great for visitors, but less great for every day users. Too many of the stations look too alike to be differentiated from one another at a glance. A lot of the stations are also poorly lit. I think that the more regular a user of Metro one is, the less the aesthetics seem impressive.
Also, this was sort of covered in the “Metro is more an urban system than BART” point of the OP, but it’s worth noting that Metro has three trunk subway lines while BART has only one. The systems have the same mileage, but in the center city Metro is really three times the size of BART.
March 30th, 2009 at 1:10 pm
If BART didn’t have the advantage of the Transbay Tube, I think it would be considered a huge failure. The Transbay crossing is what makes BART good, despite the other shortcomings.
March 30th, 2009 at 1:26 pm
This is implicit in both Christof’s list and Dan’s comment, but it’s a point that’s worth making directly: There are 43 BART stations. WMATA has how many? On a “per-station” basis (not that this really means anything, but …), they’re not that far off.
Furthermore, there are a grand total of eight BART stations in the city of San Francisco, another seven in Oakland, and three in Berkeley. That’s the extent of what you might generously call the “urban core” of the Bay Area — with a combined population of 1.3 million, and it’s served by a total of 18 stations.
Which is all just another way of saying that yeah, Metro serves urban neighborhoods, and BART basically doesn’t. Even where it passes through urban neighborhoods on its way from the ‘burbs to the Financial District, BART makes a bare minimum of stops (see no stations at 30th Street in S.F., at San Antonio in Oakland, etc.). In BART’s defense, though, the agency increasingly gets it. Folks around here have long been well aware of the comparisons and contrasts between BART and WMATA.
March 30th, 2009 at 9:48 pm
“Spieler’s reasoning isn’t entirely correct. In fact, there are parts of the Metro system that are structured exactly like BART — serving the suburbs, along existing right of way, where the cars are.”
I think I’m agreeing with you here. DC did run some lines down freeways and those stations how lower ridership than the stations that are embedded in walkable urban fabric. Overall DC put fewer lines in freeways than SF did (and didn’t extend them as are out) so overall DC got better ridership. And where BART did put stations in the urban fabric — Downtown Berkeley, the Mission District — they got higher ridership. The point isn’t that Metro is perfect, but it did some important things right.
And yes, DC has more stations — 86 vs. 43. That’s related to the choice of where the tracks are — BART runs through some areas that have zero population. It’s also a planning decision — BART runs right through some fairly dense places without stopping.
March 31st, 2009 at 12:10 pm
As for the Metro serving the urban core, in this case we’re lucky that our height limit makes our job center really spread out for a city of our size. The Metro planners put lots of stations in the L’Enfant City because there are offices all over. We don’t really know why they included nice stops in the inner suburbs and outer DC. That’s is a really nice feature that really increases ridership. I can’t imagine what ridership would be like if the Red Line didn’t stop at Silver Spring or Takoma.
The compact nature of WMATA is a big reason why there are so many stations in residential DC and the inner suburbs. Since WMATA was and is funded by DC, the two Maryland counties, the Virginia counties, and the Virginia independent cities, the system had to provide service to every contributor jurisdiction. Due to political reasons, there also had to be a balance in stations and track miles between the three states/districts. Outside the downtown commercial core in DC, the Metro has almost as many stations as both Maryland and Virginia. Maryland and Virginia have simililar amounts of track miles. The thing was designed to be in harmony politically as much as operationally. That has turned out to be a blessing as everyone in WMATA feels they have their fair share and everyone in WMATA has some depenence on it and a common interest in maintaining it.
On the other hand, BART was designed in one state during a time that was obsessed with suburbs. Hence why it serves suburbs and has low ridership.
I sort of see BART as an example of how not to build a subway. The Metro planners got a lot more right than they did wrong.
March 31st, 2009 at 6:29 pm
That Metro got as much right as it did given the times in which it was built is nothing short of a miracle.