Urban Transportation Systems

Efficient and attractive mass transit systems can greatly help in breaking the car habit. Some cities struggle with transportation systems that have noisy, polluting equipment that runs behind schedule and requires passengers to change vehicles to continue their routes. Clearly, commuters will not be eager to leave their cars for this experience. Other cities have built transit systems consisting of new vehicles that burn fossil fuel alternatives

Curitiba, Brazil, has built an admirable advanced transit system. The system designates separate roads for buses and long nonstop car commutes, point-to-point public transit routes, and local routes that speed the travel of people who do not need to enter the city center. The city now has what many consider the world’s best bus system supported by well-planned highways and bus stations. Curitiba has also built extensive routes for bicycle commuting.

and that run on well-planned routes. Curitiba, Brazil, for example, emphasized transportation in 1969 when it embarked on a project to become an ecological city. Curitiba planned walkways, bicycle paths, bus routes, and car thoroughfares that complemented each other and took large numbers of commuters quickly into and out of the city center. The detail-oriented system in Curitiba even included extra-wide rail doors and platforms to
allow more people to board and disembark at the same time.

Mass transit’s main advantage over other modes of transportation resides in its ability to carry many passengers in a single vehicle. Despite this obvious benefit to the environment, mass transit must overcome many problems that hamper it in the United States and other countries, as summarized in the following table.

Future mass transit systems will need to fix the problems of noise, pollution, inconvenient routes, and poor performance, but new systems must also improve in other ways. People value certain intangible qualities such as convenience, safety, and cleanliness. Many individuals simply do not like mass transit’s strict schedules, predetermined stops, and the feeling of riding in close quarters with hundreds of strangers. U.S. lifestyles also do not mesh well with mass transit schedules for the following reasons: (1) many people work long overtime hours and do not feel comfortable taking mass transit during nonpeak hours after dark; (2) mass transit does not lend itself to drop-offs and pickups at daycare facilities;
and (3) mass transit is difficult to coordinate with extra trips linked with work commutes, such as shopping, medical appointments, and school schedules. Some rural areas have no access at all to mass transit even if riders would be willing to use buses and trains.

Perhaps the biggest hurdle to mass transit in the United States relates to habit. Some Americans see their cars as extensions of their identity. Developing countries, by contrast, have depended on mass transit as their main means of travel to work and recreation. The Institute for Transportation and Development Policy (ITDP) based in New York City and
Wohltorf, Germany, has developed the following primary focus areas for breaking the car habit:

1. developing high-quality, low-cost mass transit infrastructure
2. planning for and advocating cycling and walking
3. strengthening bicycle and other nonmechanized vehicle industries

Of the three ITDP goals listed here, high-quality and low-cost mass transit will be key to ushering people from their cars and onto buses and rails. Mass transit must outcompete cars by offering outstanding service.

This means improvements in comfort and safety, frequency of service, speed, and ease of transfer from one line or mode to another. Australia has focused on these things to make recent enhancements to its mass transit, and, as a result, transit systems have become profitable for large cities such as Sydney, Melbourne, and Brisbane. Mass transit improvements that have worked for Australia and that are now being adopted by other countries are the following:

• walk or cycle routes leading to park and ride transit stops
• mass transit vehicles that accommodate bicycles
• single ticketing system for an entire metropolitan area
• extensive suburban routes
• dedicated bus-only roads with overpasses at intersections
• buses with driver-activated priority at intersections
• feeder buses that link neighborhoods to express routes

Sydney, Australia’s “T-way” transit system has used several of the improvements listed above to reduce some travel times by up to an hour. Yet even with these advantages, large countries like Australia and the United States do not maintain the mass transit ridership seen in densely populated European countries. In Brisbane, Australia, citizens take an
average of 20 rail trips each year, while in Switzerland citizens take about 530 rail trips per year. Zurich, Switzerland, has developed a bus and tram system that is one of the best in the world, based mainly on the provision of separate roads for mass transit. In the early 1990s Zurich converted some of its streets to pedestrian and public cars only, removed some curbside parking to help traffic flow, raised tram tracks to avoid congested areas,
and reduced the number of legal left turns—Swiss drivers drive on the right side of the road as in the United States. In addition, public transport vehicles control 90 percent of the traffic lights, which helps transit drivers make the route more efficient with less slowdowns.

No place on Earth is a mass transit utopia. Australian mass transit runs well, but still has its pitfalls; Zurich’s system did not arise overnight and would likely be prohibitively expensive in the United States, with its much larger area. (The size of the New York metropolitan area alone is one-fourth the area of Switzerland.) American Public Transportation Association spokesperson William Millar told the USA Today reporter

European cities have developed the most efficient train stations in the world. Europeans travel by train more
frequently than travelers in the United States. This station is Gare du Nord in Paris, France, which is the busiest rail station in Europe and one of the busiest in the world. (iStockPhoto.com)

Marisol Bello in 2008 that “only 5 percent of [U.S.] workers commute by public transit . . . and no more than 20 percent of households has easy access to buses or trains.” If countries like the United States are to achieve sustainability in natural resource use, it will take a new commitment by people to mass transit, but also at a cheaper price tag. Joe Giuletti of the South Florida Regional Transportation Authority said in the same news article, “At a time that ridership is at an all-time high and people are desperate to use mass transit we are in a terrible spot.” Mass transit remains a very tough test for the next generation of environmental engineers.