Low volumes creates low frequency. Low frequency creates low volumes. That is why it is called MASS transit. You need the mass for it to function. Low frequency and volume then equals low fare revenues. Low revenue is the end of the mass transportation.

Can you please explain that to Deutsche Bahn?

I have looked at making several trips in the northeast by Amtrak, and while a single leg of the journey being 6hrs vrs 3 in a car is bad, its the 1-2 hr layover that seals the deal for just taking a car on the interstate. Would i rather take a train, yes. Would i like to arrive before sunset, bigger yes. If it was a 15min layover it would be alot more bearable, and probably would have garnered enough investment for a car competitive travel time. (And intercity trips are generally more forgiving about poor frequency, just look at plane schedules, and even planes have multiple trips a day for the major intercity routes)

Come on up to Knoxville. The KAT route planning app actually suggested that I walk four miles down the shoulder of US-129 (widely regarded as one of the most dangerous highways in Tennessee) because the frequency from Neyland to UT Hospital is so bad.

Atlanta is one of those cities that is massive and needs to get it in gear transit wise

I've tried to express the same idea, but never as neatly

@@zacharywhitehead2622 I think you misread OP (or I'm misreading you). His comment was about how much of an upgrade Vancouver's service was over Chicago's.

Sadly that's only true out to maybe Coquitlam to the east and around 100th St. in Surrey to the south, if you're on the main corridors. It is getting better thanks to the Rapidbus lines, but those are pretty new and still getting rolled out. Still, where it is that frequent the SkyTrain really punches above its weight, considering that there are only 3 lines which only service one corridor each, which seems to be about half of what other cities mentioned in the video have to work with.

Uhm... Vancouver WA or Vancouver BC? Because I live in metro Van BC and the transit was so painful I gave up and bought a car. Maybe if you live and work right next to a SkyTrain station...

@@TheoWerewolf I assuming by Metro Vancouver you mean "not the city of Vancouver", in which case, yeah, like I said, Burnaby is the limit of full reliability eastward, Coquitlam is okay along Como Lake or near SkyTrain but otherwise terrible, everything east of that is basically only halfway decent at getting you to a SkyTrain station at rush hour, if you are near a major corridor. South of the Fraser good luck, maybe Richmond is okay but Surrey and Langley are pain if you aren't near King George or Surrey Central station. In the city itself, however, and especially the downtown, I found it great. A little less useful west of Cambie St., but otherwise totally viable to live day to day without using a car

@@TheoWerewolf Same. Translink: it's why I drive. To get to Superstore: 9 minutes by car. 2 hours by Translink. (Edit: the Superstore in question is almost visible at 8:15)

Yes! When I'm going to work and I have to run to get a bus that arrived earlier than the schedule to get to a bus that will (hopefully) arrive on time, otherwise I will miss my bus and be late for 30 minutes - it's not fun :(

With transfer oriented transit systems it’s also important to implement things like hourly tickets/fares (per ride fares are still common in many systems), so that it’s much more convenient for the user

@@riilhiiro Or, you could make the transit free to use. Like, yknow, a public service.

@@nairsheasterling9457 oh how i wish in the current economy atleast, you’d probably still pay it through taxes, just that if we have a progressive tax the rich would cover a lot of it which is good but it probably has a lot of side effects

@@riilhiiro a few cities have experimented with free at point of use funding, with better success than they anticipated :) I have hope it can spread further

I leave without checking the schedule all of the time but that's because the buses in my city are never on time. Heck, even at the start of the route they may be early, late, or not even show up.

Well, to put what you say more brutally, you can start your journey whenever the schedule of work, schools, daycare, &c. ALLOW you to start it. We rarely get to choose any of these timings and we never get to choose them all.

Not just frequency; timing too. It's great that I can get a train into the city! ...except that there's barely any weekend service and if you're not riding during the peak commuting hours of 7-10ish in the morning and 4-6ish in the evening, it may as well not exist. Makes it real hard to, say, enjoy the nightlife if all the public transit closes down at midnight /if you're lucky/.

depends what route, but yea

i remember those days of living in NYC waiting for the 4 train during rush hour. you could literally see one train pulling out and look down the tunnel and see the lights of the next one right behind it.

except when the next express train is suddenly delayed by 20 min and is actually running local right now

NYC gets so much ridership cus everyone is on a tiny island and they all live, work and recreate in a 10 mile radius

@@steezmuffin thats the whole point of a city though

That's actually great news. Hope to hear more.

Anything's better than "just one more lane bro"

That’s good, but it can’t only do capital projects, it’s gotta fund more operations!

@@nlpnt We've seen what happens in Denver when you add one or two lanes to a road... it quickly fills up with more traffic, leaving us right back where we started.

W

There's a reason we still remember the campaign promises of the facists in Italy. "Make the trains run on time" and then they actually fulfilled those promises and people were happy (until the evil stuff started). People NEED to be able to trust their mode of transportation, and unfortunately in America its often that the car is the most reliable choice because even with horrendous traffic you can still plan for the delays and often are still faster than the alternatives. (Also we are 1000x more tollerant of risks when we are under the illusion that we are in control, so the risk the bus is late is 1000x less acceptable than the risk you get yourself stuck in traffic or worse.)

@@jasonreed7522 - It is part of a wider problem in both bureaucracy and the government: they are both less and less concerned with the day-to-day problems that mean most to most people, and more concerned with things that are bigger scale or of more interest to themselves. Where one really notices it is policing, as police forces gradually stop dealing with all of the crimes that people are most likely to suffer and which matter most to them. Transit is another.

@@jasonreed7522 that said, it’s actually a myth that the trains ran on time under Mussolini. But Hitler cared about motorways for the same reason you laid out.

@@stanislavkostarnov2157 Public transport was never for the 'ecology'. It's a way to get the poorest of the proles to and from work, and occasionally shops. That's why so many places only run partially respectable service during commutes, with poor or absent service the rest of the time. Considering the billions of monies wasted on useless and virtue signalling wind and solar, it's obvious noone really cares. Only really big cities get good service because otherwise the city would fail. If politicians really cared, they'd spend those billions on public transport that doesn't suck, which would cut down on car use (and cut down on tax revenue). Does your Government want to cut its tax revenue? No. That's why it will take a long time for progress, until it becomes more profitable to run more public transport, or less profitable to not run more public transport. Well, that's basically when a place becomes a dense enough city.

WAW 15 to 20? The problem there is everything else around the bus, the center if Munich has busses every 20min..... so like uhhh its plenty convenient for me because everything else is also on 20m timer

Our main city bus lines typically come every 20 minutes during the main times, *but* the main routes typically have two city bus lines (in my case, also two regional lines with I believe hourly rhythms, which are usually not relevant to me). So that comes out to effectively 10 minutes (and yes, they're planned to really come with 10 minutes difference). Which seems to be fine in this city with between 310,000 and 320,000 inhabitants - the buses are well-used, and whenever there are traffic problems around the central hubs, buses can line up for some distance, so running them more often does not seem to be an option. We once (before my time) had trams, but there is really not enough room for a modern tram network, so buses are it. These are currently (too slowly for my taste, but these things are expensive) transitioned to battery electric, with loading options (from above) at the route ends. I might also mention that sometime in the evening, the city buses switch to a completely different set of night bus routes and lines, cutely named N80 to N89, that run every 30 minutes at least to around midnight (after which I no longer need them, so I'm unsure how that continues except that it does) and are meant to cover the whole city with their somewhat more circuitous routes. I suspect that's two buses per line (one for each direction). They all meet at the main train station, where they are synchronized - that is, if it doesn't take too much time, they wait until passengers from the slowest bus had a chance to switch. Those are typically older buses, to keep expenses down; also, it seems that for similar reasons (which is, in my view, more objectionable), they created a different corporate entity to hire the night drivers so they could pay them less. Hurrah capitalism.

Same for me. My local bus route had a frequency of 20 minutes per departure, except in rush hour, weekends and public holidays. Which is why most people here preferred minibuses, that have a higher frequency of every 5 to 10 minutes. The competition with minibus routes makes the bus ridership even lower.

It's much cheaper to use a bigger bus instead a smaller one more frequently. In Germany we have some buslines, where the transportation company ordered a cab, so you can use it with your ticket or pay a little bit, some of them are by request, you have to call 1 hour before. When I lived in the Hannover region, there was a night line, operating 2 times the night from Friday to Saturday and Saturday to Sunday. This replaces 6 different lines, the driver asks you, where you want to leave the bus, plans the route individually and the goal isn't to be at a specific place in time, but to get home.

As someone who lives in York Region, I still foam at how much more frequent MiWay is...

UTM students waiting 40min for their bus home because their class ended a minute later than normal

@@TheHothead101 The 6E rolling dice to decide whether or not to keep running or to wait one hour and bunch up

I have seen a transit planner pointing out that agencies focus far too much on "on time" and not nearly enough on "interval". If the bus is supposed to run every 15 minutes and every single bus on that line is 15 minutes late, no one will care. But if one is 12 minutes early and the one behind it is 12 minutes late, someone could stand on that stop for 38 minutes and not see a bus. THAT is unacceptable, even if it is only two buses out of 24 in 8 hours that weren't on time. I know all too well the heartbreak of being a hundred yards down a side street and seeing the bus go by, early, knowing that the next one will be in 30 minutes or an hour.

And MiWay is middle of the pack in the Toronto region!

Yamanote on morning rush? Imagine the line waiting the train. Now I hear in peak it is 90 seconds?

The Yamanote Lines trains are so huge that they can actually impede ultra high frequencies!

Yamanote line train in the morning rush in 2022 may better than 1990's, coz you have more choice and better capacity train than that time, but still as sardines. XD

Brt should be 10 minutes MAX because it has all the expensive infrastructure built for speedy rides and minimal congestion

To ameliorate the empty bus problem, they could use smaller buses to make up the extra frequency. Would probably be faster to train drive the smaller vehicles too.

"Every now and then we'll have a bus that just straight up doesn't arrive" CTA, I'm looking at you. Last couple times I've been in Chicago, this has happened quite a few times. Ghost Buses, we call them. The trains are having this issue too. Then again, CTA consistently says that this issue is due to them being understaffed, which is understandable seeing as literally every business is understaffed nowadays.

It is a chicken and egg issue, if the bus run very frequently and reliable, make it much easier it to travel by transit, then more of ridership, which make higher frequency more efficient. The other hand , less frequent service make riding bus a hassel, hence fewer or even no ridership, and it can just be worse and worse.

This feels like a video in an of itself lol

Metro Vancouver is pretty hit-and-miss for buses. Frequency is pretty good within Vancouver proper but it drops off the further out you go. The TTC is a solid model for bus frequency - you can still get 10 min frequency late at night.

That really depends. If your driver spend all day sitting in taffic (and I'm sure they do), you can increase frequency at no cost by giving RoW or passing lanes.

@@neolithictransitrevolution427, I live in major US city which has a light rail line that runs almost entirely on separate right of way. Traffic congestion isn’t a major factor in its service pattern. Yet, on the mainline spine through downtown, which interlines two routes, the peak single direction frequency is six trains per hour and off peak it may be four per hour. This is embarrassingly poor service frequency for a city of this size. Increasing service frequency would necessarily mean doubling the number of drivers they have to pay to drive the trains.

@@ScottAtwood Fair enough, sometimes its just really stupid people in charge. But often, at least with buses, I do believe frequency can be increased without a large increase in drives simply by using them better.

@@ScottAtwood Well the trams and buses have 10-15 services per hour during peak per line. in the center, you roughly have 6 directions. 11 lines (*2 since running trough). And about 4-8 (up to the point, where the rail lines fan out) trains (3 directions). (not counting the rapid trains, going to other cities). in some directions, this adds up to over 30 connections per hour. City: 138k, agglomeration (city with 70 political independent parts, suburbs...) 419k. To think, that salaries in Switzerland are sky high compared to the US, this is insane. But our highways only have two-three lanes... Public Transport only works, if it's equal good mode of transportation for a lot of people. for that you need both, a comprehensive network and good enough frequencies. And yes, you don't pay full price: city defines the routes and frequencies, opens it for public bidding. transport companies bid. city, consumer protection, and companies negotiate prices and subsidies. rough passenger numbers per day: Rail (covering area with about 1 mio people): 100'000/day, Mainlines of Tram, Bus: 200'000/day Other: 20'000/day? (To many companies involved.)

I’m in NZ Hamilton where buses every 10 mins actually sounds pretty good, but here, the wage issue is 100% the problem. Bus drivers have got so unhappy with their job that the bus network had to trim down the schedule to match the weekend times (less frequent)

lol.

China's public transportation should be noted as a global example, it's fantastic and IMO as top tier as urban Japan

@@racecardriverrr4201 i disagree. If you look at Chinese highways they're still getting clogged up all the time. Iirc they have had jams lasting hours during the rush hour. Chinese public transport might be good, but if situations like these are happening then it kind of shows how it's not good enough

@@_CaptainCookie The motorways are only clogged because A. They exist, causing induced demand B. China simply has an insanly high population. Even if millions use public transport, a couple hundred thousand using cars will clog up a road network pretty fast. If the rest of the world (except for a couple dense cities) had the same public transportation as China, they would see a lot less less car usage. The issue is, public transportation is most effective in places of high density

@@_CaptainCookie not to burst your bubble but you can have a good transit system and still have traffic jams. Prague has an incredibly developed transit system, and it's also clogged up all the time. The advantage is a metro commuter doesn't have to deal with the traffic jam whatsoever.

Wow!

I had the same impression when I used the metro in Sao Paulo. In peak time you would literally be on your way every 1 minute 15 seconds (like a train left, then there would be a timer for 1:15, the train would arrive 15 seconds before the time was out, and by the time the whole 1:15 had passed you were already moving). It was so frequent that even though it is much bigger than the city where I currently live, the metro there felt emptier* because train were coming so often. *Edit: And not because not many people use it. The daily ridership is bigger than the total population of where I live now.

The "transit is for commute only" mentality exists in Europe as well, I live in countryside and we only two buses in the morning and two more in the afternoon. This is not even in the closest village-with-a-shop, but you have to go to the village-on-state-road. You used to be able to live without a car here as late as the 80's, but after communism got removed everything associated with it became disliked, including a few good things including the bus transit that ran through basically all villages.

The cities need to provide more homeless shelters and it needs to be made harder to even become homeless by the government.

To be fair Toronto compared to some other parts of the country is actually pretty good for bus shelters I find

You might want to try tweeting or writing to YRT about this. I tweeted to them about a lack of bus shelter and how I had to wait for the infrequent bus in the cold, and YRT built a bus shelter at my stop just 3 months later. I was shocked that that's all it took.

Couldn’t have said it better myself. YRT should be renamed and spelled backward. - “TRY”

The Expo Line in LA should’ve had grade separated express tracks to make the trip between DTLA and Santa Monica more competitive to the freeway, especially when the 10 is jammed and having an express train wiz by traffic would convert some drivers to take mass transit.

It doesn't help that one of the branches is a massive stub at the moment, though work is being done to change that.

@@97nelsn Also, the L line needs higher walls between the ROW and the 210 freeway. Too many times has a semi ended up on the tracks...

it's back to 15 min frequencies now isn't it?

192 loyalists unite (now 900)

@@stefslon I took it 2 weeks ago and can confirm it was only every 30 mins. Terrible.

@@stefslon nope! They tried, but then ran out of underpaid staff.

I don’t necessarily think I would say it’s unusable, but it certainly is more annoying than it should be! Ultimately though it’s still faster than driving a lot of the time

Ya there will be a pinch point at Brock and Dundas in Whitby with the new Durham BRT. It was going to be a widened sidewalk and two bus lanes as a transit park, but then there was push back so now its 2 car lanes and a single bus lane. Not giving signal priority is so stupid. Particularly when frequency is so low it would handpy effect cars.

​@@neolithictransitrevolution427 I use to live in Durham Region. My idea to get around the pinch point at Dundas and Brock would be tunnel under from Garden St. to Cochrane, or elevate the road along Colborne St. I know some may balk at the idea of an elevated road along Colborne, but it can be made relatively obscure if the guideway is thin and much of Colborne is parking lots and little residential. Ultimately a sky train style rail line would be best for HWY 2 in Durham and HWY 7 in York Region IMO.

@@carlinthomas9482 Ultimate a sky train would be best, but I don't think thats reasonable (or needed) for decades. I do think tunneling/raised roadway would be an unnecessarily expensive solution. Just ban cars going through Dundas and make it a Bus only route (with some commercial exceptions and emergency etc). Anyone trying to go to Toronto can Garden to the 401, Dunlop and Mary can carry local traffic, and Burns can be used as well. Like I personally drive through that intersection daily, and it would be no inconvenience to change this. It would be a huge improvement in tranist and create a much more walkable area. I would also cut up Colborne to cut out through traffic to expand that walkable area.

@@neolithictransitrevolution427 Yes, that would also work. They had to cancel that plan as a bus only thoroughfare due to NIMBYISM, I recall seeing people with signs on their front lawns that were against that idea. Whitby is one of the most NIMBY municipalities in the GTA.

The single lane isn’t a huge issue imo, the poor frequency is!

And part of it is that its easy to reduce the number of vehicles by 1, its a lot harder to reduce the price of your fixed cathedral for transit. And i definitely agree, make the transit buildings scaled for desired capacity and then actually run the vehicles at a viable frequency. (2 vehicles per day is not viable transit for anyone)

I would love to see it! I was glad to see that the lightrail frequencies have improved since last year (when they were still in pandemic mode).

Londoners in the north and west very much dislike anything associated with the poors. The joke's on them, east London finally gets some much-needed investment.

I don't know what city you could be referring to, but one big issue I had in Sydney and Brisbane (the latter in particular) was buses showing up late or never showing up at all. I think the issue here is not about individual users adapting their habits, but reversing that instead so that frequency and scheduling are adapted to people's needs (reliable, on time transport).

I live and NI and using our bus system is like playing roulette. Sometimes the bus is early, sometime it's late and sometimes it doesn't even arrive

Well yeah obviously because its Toronto, financial capital and largest city in the country. Having better transit than a suburb like Mississauga or Markham isn't exactly a high standard.

I would not say the Montreal buses are reliably frequent. Some routes are, and Montréal does a good job of advertising it's 10 min max network on stops and maps, but the vast majority of bus routes in Montréal are of the every ~30 minutes variety non-clockface. There's a long delayed redesign of the bus system that may tackle this, eliminating some routes to make the others higher frequency.

Thanks so much! The weird off peak service on local transit in Aus is problematic! Rail is great though!

Agreed, especially with the caveat that, when frequency is lower, punctuality needs to be excellent. I can live with having to look at a clock to know when to get to the bus stop, I do not like when said bus is not on time, or worse, cancelled. Even worse, when scheduled connections are lost because of lateness of my first ride, and you're halfway and can't even opt to go back home and take a car or bike in stead.

I don’t know! Metra doesn’t really provide all day service on most lines so if you wanna come home in the middle of the day or late at night, you don’t always have that option

@@RMTransit Metra isn't too bad, though Covid did throw a wrench in the schedule. Most lines run a train once an hour with decent predictability, and last trains out of Chicago can be 11 pm - 12 am, which isn't entirely unreasonable. I pretty comfortably (reverse) commuted on Metra for years, and the bigger issue for me was always friends living in the suburbs, not train frequencies.

Ottawa is known for having a pretty bad transit system. It usually Toronto, Montreal, Vancouver and to a lesser extent Calgary and Edmonton that have actual transit systems. Because it's the Capital of Canada, there are a lot of rich, car-owning politicians in Ottawa who feel like investing in a good transit system is bad because "they have a car so everyone else can just get one instead", not realizing that there are many benefits to good transit.

Not on weekends I'm afraid. If you're doing a short journey like North Sydney-Central that's probably true. Any longer trip and you're looking at 15-20 minutes' wait, sometimes even 30.

Lucky you mate😂. I'm jealous

We don't use the stick in North America because (especially in the US) it would literally lead to civil unrest. Cheap gas and free parking is in the Constitution, don'cha know?

wait it's not every 30 minutes anymore?

Now! And five minutes from now! And another five minutes from then!

And in the US, the only response you are most likely to get will be from the big automakers saying "Just shut up and drive".

Why are they better served by the minibuses? They cost the same amount for the driver, what is the advantage to buying an "non-peak" fleet instead of using the same large buses, and then having extra capacity. Community collection routes are great, much better if they proceed to run as BRT. But maybe a viable use of mini-buses during peak hours is shuttling people. As a councilor, i don't think there is a real question of economic as you overview the actual infrastructure cost of cars. Remove minimum parking, upzone along arterials, and boost ridership. You'll see returns in both higher tax revenue and lower infrastructure cost. Have you considered trying to eliminate the building portion of property tax and making it a land value tax?

It's great to see a council candidate coming to videos like this to get informed.

How is transporting people by transit more questionable in terms of fuel consumption than making those people drive individually? A single bus consumes way less fuel than 20 cars do, and in terms of economics: Transit shouldn't be measured by its profitability, because it rarely is profitable. It's a basic public service and should be treated with little difference to water, electricity and sewage disposal services.

@@bahnspotterEU While all that is true, she needs to actually make this work in a budget.

@@neolithictransitrevolution427 only thing i can think of is that minibuses are physically smaller and may better fit on some roads/streets. (Ever meet a school bus on a back road) And possibly the cost per vehicle may be better than the same number of full sized buses but I'm not informed enough on that aspect of the difference. (Although i would assume fuel efficiency is better when moveing less steel per person of capacity provided)

I'll be honest what throws me off UK public transport isn't just the frequency. It's the fact that my car is so much more reliable, I can guarantee I'll be on time and if there's a jam I can avoid it so long I use Google maps or Waze. Not only that but generally it's cheaper (Exponentially so if I have a passenger. Or 5) and has a boot to carry my shopping. For anything that isnt going to the pub (Where it'd be illegal to drive home) or going into a city where cars are demonized, my car is just leaps and bounds better in every way.

I don’t know I hate to always bring it back here but Toronto operates plenty of slow services frequently so I don’t really think it’s an either or

Inneresting ...

I like "safari"! Tasty word choice.

New York does operate at lower frequencies than it often should

That’s an interesting idea for sure!

I think you mean "here in Berlin or here in Munich" not Germany as a whole.

I don't know what part of Germany you are talking about. Here in cologne the Stadtbahn operates T10/T5 depending on the demand in the line during normal and peak operation, and drops to T15 and T30 the later it gets during the night... Most buses here are T10 as well however, so generally frequency is good, especially when paired with the fact that you can reach nearly everywhere in the city with only 1 transfer

@@MTobias I've been to places like Hamburg, Bremen, Hannover, Würzburg, Berlin and Frankfurt etc and it was always the same.

Yes I think zoning is a bigger issue than frequency, but TOD is a little outside what North American consider a transit responsibility

The frequency of regular regional trains (not counting express trains) in Germany is typically two, one or half a train every hour (though the latter is something I have yet to exerience). High service (headway of four and six trains per hour on a single line) is S-Bahn frequency and thus only true for big cities. 10 minute frequency of buses is more realistic but only within cities of a reasonable size or lack of trams. In fact, the next city to where I live doesn't run buses even bundled at this frequency outside of hubs so at most, there is a headway of 15 minutes with them, never lower (granted, it has trams which justifies the lack of 6 buses per hour frequency).

Yeah, he always hates on viva. Meanwhile Viva blue runs every 7-15 min during peak times.

Viva blue does alright, VIVA purple has horrendous waiting times. It needs to run more than just 22 and 40 minutes in some cases. Frequency should be doubled, at a minimum, on that line.

problem with YRT/Viva is the the double fare you have to pay when connecting to the TTC. That makes it the same cost as GO transit, so people just drive to the GO/TTC station. With GO's 15 minute trains, I can see more people at least trying public transport as catching the train won't be a worry. What will help YRT/Viva is a Co- Fare or a free transfer with the TTC (fare integration).

@@MatthewHoHiWorld but it doesn’t run 24 hours! And 7-15 is worse than the Steeles or Finch buses which have no massive BRT infra!

@@RMTransit The 99/98 runs throughout most of the night (even though the headways like like, every 75m...)

Toronto manages!