What is a transit center?

If you're travelling anywhere on public transport and you see on a map that there is a "transit center", what does it mean?

This may seem like a simple and uninteresting question (simple to most, yes; uninteresting to all but transit geeks, probably). While no particular definition exists, I could easily make some assumptions if you were to state you were at one. First, I'd immediately assume you were in the US or Canada. This is because I have never heard of a transit center anywhere outside of North America outside from a different name for "central station" here or there. And just exactly how would you describe a transit center to someone else?

Is it a point where one line meets another? Two? Where's the line to draw between a simple transfer point and this mythical place called a "transit center"?

Tokyo would have more transit centers than anyone else. Image source: Tokyo Metro

Perhaps it comes down to amenities: toilets, shops, shelter, etc. Maybe it comes down to frequency: at any point, you're going to see a transit vehicle (or two, three, or ten). One thing that all transit systems seem to have in common who use this terminology is that they all seem to be low-frequency, slow, and inconvenient systems. In other words, they're in places with poor transit. They're used to make a system sound more friendly and important than it really is.

This is a "transit center" in Portland, Oregon. More info here.

What is a transit center? Whatever you want it to be.

Train/Passenger barriers are part of the total transit experience

We go to great lengths to create an environment in our private automobiles that is entertaining and comfortable. Modern vehicles are equipped with heated seats, air conditioning, sound systems, video screens, and much more. More often than not, although depending largely on where you are, vehicles are stored in sheltered areas where we don't even have to go out in the rain. The entire system benefits from point-to-point class and comfort. What about public transport?

Not so much, although it depends again largely on where you are. Trains are loud just like cars, so it becomes even more important to rival the experience of private transportation.

Consider an environment for rapid transit where your station was not just covered from the rain (now a pretty universal amenity around the world, save for maybe a select few at-grade tram systems), but also sheltered from the noise of traffic - both from trains and autos. Aside from the occasional noise of an express train going by, your station is clean and quiet. It is a peaceful experience where you can relax briefly before your train arrives or carry out a conversation comfortable with your neighbor.

Hong Kong's Mass Transit Railway (MTR) at Sunny Bay. Some areas in the MTR system also have passenger-train barriers

Some of the newest and most alluring systems are even equipped with station barriers that prevent any train noise from being heard at all, although this also has the added benefits of preventing suicides, accidents, and safely allowing fully driver-less automation among other things.

Seoul, South Korea's metro and its passenger-train barrier

Dubai, United Arab Emirates' metro and its passenger-train barrier

It should be noted, however, that full train automation with no operator does not require total separation between passengers. Paris Metro line 14, for example, is driverless and has barriers between passengers and trains. Translink's Skytrain in Vancouver, British Columbia is driverless and has no barriers.

On the flip side, The MTR system (pictured above) has train operators and some train barriers while obviously the majority of systems have an operator with no barriers.

In the United States, there exists only one form of public transport that has barriers separating passengers and trains to create a safe, peaceful, seamless experience. All of these examples are found at airports: Detroit, Seattle, Denver, Houston, San Francisco, Newark, Atlanta, Dallas, Phoenix, and many more.

If only we treated public transportation the same way that we treat our airport concourse connectors. Only then could we have a better ride.

A common sight in the Untied States: a rail station with a loud, bustling motorway nearby and very little shelter from the environment.

Airplanes: Public Transport?

There was a time when public transport was relevant to travel for ordinary citizens. Between then and now, a lot has come to pass. Or has it? Perhaps the meaning of what public transport is simply should to be tweaked for the 21st century.

I travel a lot throughout the world, having been to every habitable continent on Earth. While at these places, I strive to utilize nothing but the public transport systems in the respective cities. Most of the time, this is not only possible, but also very easy. In English and Spanish speaking countries, I also expand my options out beyond trains and BRT to ordinary buses as well. Rarely do I resort to taking a taxi (or most likely, Uber). But I digress... how do I get to all of these places?

Over the last year, I have flown to many places

What about airplanes? Public transportation or not? As previously discussed, "public transport" can have a lot of meanings for different people, but here are some general things to take in to account.

Air travel relies heavily on public infrastructure and subsidies. Like all modes of transportation, air travel is not immune to tax subsidies. Airports are public places, runways are public 'roads' (albeit specialty ones), airport security and border control officers are public employees, and aircraft controllers are also public. Certain routes are even subsidized in the United States by the federal government under the Essential Air Service program. The system is largely organized in blocks of airspace with rules, certifications, airworthiness directives, and more. European manufacturer "Airbus" doesn't even hide its similarity with public transport. However, while the direct costs of running an airplane from point A to point B are mostly hidden from the consumer, they are widely regarded as completely privatized and for-profit. Despite this, subsidies are rampant in all forms of public transport (and air). Two graphs sum this up pretty well, although it is a bit dated now:

Source: US Department of Transportation

Plainly, air travel received the second largest subsidies, after transit. Things have changed a bit since fluctuations in fuel prices, the declining fuel tax for the highway fund (due to more efficient vehicles and inflation, among other things), as well as the 9/11 terrorist attacks and subsequent recession. Unfortunately, more recent data is not available from the DOT.

Air travel has a competitive energy consumption. This comes as a surprise to many people. Energy use for an airplane isn't radically skewed:

Source: US Department of Energy

a Includes passenger cars, vans, and small buses operating in response to calls from passengers to the transit operator who dispatches the vehicles.
b Data are not available.
c Energy use is estimated.
d Only domestic service and domestic energy use are shown on this table.  (Previous editions included half of international energy.)  These energy intensities may be inflated because all energy use is attributed to passengers–cargo energy use is not taken into account.

These are kJ per passenger-kilometer. It is probably safe to say that your Toyota Prius has better energy efficiency than a Boeing 747, but that may be comparing two radically different things used for different purposes - like goods trucks, which of course would look terrible if they were in this chart due to the fact that they aren't designed to carry passengers (they would over 20,000 kJ per "passenger"-kilometer, according to the US Department of Transportation). There are about 4 kJ per Calorie if you wanted to turn that ice cream you had last night in to an indicator for flying around the world. The verdict? Data seems to suggest it is one of the most efficient ways to transport passengers, at least domestically (which is all that is considered in this chart).

Paths and hubs are strikingly similar. Most transit agencies rely on a "hub and spoke" system, and the vast majority of air carriers do exactly the same thing. Here is a map of Houston, Texas' downtown area, "the Metro":

This is a terrible way to show routes, but there will be a post on that some other time

It's plain to see that many routes converge in one place (and for many agencies, particularly larger systems, there are also smaller satellite nodes in the outskirts).

Here is Fort Worth, Texas' hub-and-spoke system:

Fort Worth's system, "The T", has got hub-and-spoke syndrome bad!

Minneapolis-St. Paul's METRO system is a great example of a multi-hub-and-spoke system, with Minneapolis and St.Paul both acting as massive feeders of routes for one another. Unfortunately, their system lacks user friendliness, and they do not have a complete system map at all. More on system maps another time, as well as why everyone likes to call their systems the bland name of "Metro."

Airlines, by comparison are no different, although they are a bit larger in scale both geographically and monetarily:

Delta's route map as of February 2016. Atlanta's Hartsfield-Jackson airport is the world's busiest

Spirit's route map, as of February 2016

Airlines, whether large or small, low cost or mainline, domestic or intercontinental, all use a hub-and-spoke system. The only exception seems to be Southwest Airlines, although they do operate point-to-point with focus cities. This exception is about as rare in airlines as it is in transit. Is a hub and spoke system a good thing? It depends - more on that some other time.

Corridors and frequencies are also similar, and what we would expect from transit as well. Between city pairs such as Los Angeles and San Francisco (one of the most frequent and heavily used air corridors in the United States and the world), Seattle and Portland, Houston and Dallas, and all along the Northeast Corridor of the United States, frequencies are what we would expect from typical transit services. Some of these flights operate hourly, half-hourly, or even more frequently during certain parts of the day and days of the week.

I would be pretty happy if my transit ran as often as my flights between Los Angeles and San Francisco/Oakland. That's right, Google Flights is showing 80 departures on a weekday between LAX and SFO/OAK.

There are many other things one could analyze in regards the similarities (and differences) between airlines and public transport - so the final question is the one in the title. Are airplanes public transport?

I think yes.

What is the meaning of transit?

What is transit? Certainly it is mass transit, public transit, public transport... but what does it stand for and what do you think of when you hear the term? What sort of feelings do you find yourself having?

Here is a tag cloud of the "Public Transport" page on Wikipedia:

(Made using Tag Crowd with the following words omitted: archived, edit, http, org)

While there are some great words (like "access"), there are certainly some that we don't associate with public transport ("car" or "private"). There is no real answer to what transit stands for in your mind, but arguably we can all agree of what we want it to stand for and what it should strive to be.

It should be fast, efficient, easy, convenient, safe, and reliable. I refrain from using the word "cheap" because it can have a negative connotation; instead, I also think it should be "not costly."

This is a tall order, especially because of our hefty amounts of infrastructure in the private automobile. However, it's what is necessary for public transport to succeed and thrive. If we want it to be a part of our lives, it must be at least most of these things. Almost always, it seems as though transit gives up on being fast - but how many more of these qualities would we give up before we no longer consider riding it at all?

My local transit agency, TriMet, is building a new bus rapid transit (BRT) system. Like most government, they are soliciting input from the public in terms of what is expected of them. The following is a real question asked in the survey:

If a transit agency is giving up on creating a service that is both faster or more reliable than regular buses before the project is even started, how much hope do we have that it will be easy to use? That it will be safe? Can we honestly assume it will be efficient? I immediately asked these questions and the following ones to myself:

Will service be efficient if it is faster, but not on schedule?

Will service be efficient if it is on schedule, but not faster?

I stopped taking the survey at this point because I assumed they weren't serious about delivering quality service. Unfortunately, this is nearly always what BRT in the United States is: lanes where you don't need them, and mixed traffic where you do (more on the topic of watered-down BRT, or "BRT Lite", in a later post). The end product is a BRT system that does little in the way of providing multiple well-developed options for transportation.

That's really what I want: multiple well-developed options. That's what freedom of choice is. A fancy bus sitting in traffic is the same as a regular bus sitting in traffic.