Totally agree with the fallacy of being 'served'. The planners of public transit systems should be forced to dog food it everyday for at least 2 years before they can claim that a neighborhood is (adequately) 'served'.

Make a video about Barcelona Metro system pls

Yep, I'd always assume anything that doesn't exist today never will. It leads to less dissapointment!

That's so true! - and also tragic. Building the Bakerloo extension is not only completely logical (as would be also e.g. extending the Victoria Line from Brixton) but would reduce the use of cars in SE London - with correspondingly better air quality and general urban environment. The whole plan was (maybe still is?) for the B'loo to take over the Beckenham/Hayes rail line which, at present has (typically of S.London) two half-hourly services (alternately to Cannon Street (financial) and Charing Cross (shopping), adding up to a train every 15 minutes from Ladywell southwards; sounds OK-ish, but it means that those stations get only a train every 30 minutes to Lewisham, a major shopping centre, with connections to much of SE London by bus, rail and Dockland Light Railway. Contrast that with an extended Bakerloo - direct services every few minutes to Lewisham, Elephant & Castle (for Thameslink,) central London and even parts of NW London; see why it would reduce car use?

@@ricktownend9144 Reese and RM Transit has fans in "real" London! Great!

@@ricktownend9144 Extending the Victoria line beyond Brixton is not a good idea. That line already operates at full capacity at rush hour - with 8-car trains, a peak frequency of 36 trains per hour, and every train still packed to the brim with commuters. Adding any more stations to that line wouldn’t add any extra commuters into the system, since they literally can’t fit any extra commuters. (This is also why the Northern line was only extended to Battersea instead of Clapham Junction - they knew a station at CJ would cause absolute chaos on the rest of the line.) The Bakerloo line is a different story though; there is a lot of potential extra capacity on that line so an extension to Hayes (and Beckenham Junction?) makes sense.

Another issue, this time from east London is the shortening and loss of high frequency bus routes from inner city neighbourhoods into central London since the commercial redevelopment of London’s dock lands. The introduction of the DLR, jubilee line extension and the London overground improvements are welcome, but as you mentioned in the video, direct bus services are convenient for those people travelling at unsocial hours, giving an almost door to door service; and are cheaper than tube fares to / from central London. Rail improvements are good but tend to benefit new residential and commercial developments at the expense of older communities with long established travel patterns.

Yes all good cases of the exact thing I'm talking about

"you have to walk 500 meters, maybe 2km" And this is bad because…? People gotta to do some exercise and even 2km is walkable under 20 minutes at good peace.

I always beat the bus on my city with the bike, and quite often walking!

But then again thy servant shall not work on the day of the lord , and years ago walking three miles to church was often done - esp when the landowner built the chapel near his house and not in the village he owned.

@@carlosdgutierrez6570 Does it serve an 80 year-old grandma then?

Haha, that's beautiful

You'd have to have a pretty unusual work-pattern to use it for commuting. Wikipedia: On 20 May 2018, Northern replaced the Friday service with one return service on Saturday mornings. The train stops here at 9:00 towards Stockport and 9:50 returning to Stalybridge. ... In January 2020, the station was named as the UK's third quietest with just 60 entries and exits between 1 April 2018 and 31 March 2019.[12]

We have lot of Parliamentary Services in the UK. It's the Train Operating Companies, Network Rail and even the Department of Transport colluding to cover up stations that intentionally get give a useless service. They get a useless service to dissuade folks from using them, so that people can then use the stats to argue that the stations don't need a better service ("because nobody wants to use the stations"). And it's very strange to think that multiple public bodies have spent decades conspiring against local people and that, if you attempt to look at usage statistics, and don't understand the situation, the stats make you wonder why the station has not been closed (instead of making you wonder how awesome that station could be, if it was not being held back).

@@DavidShepheard Damn that's sinister

@@DavidShepheard or because the station itself is practically useless (see Teesside Airport which is located pretty far from said airport and only has one train a week probably because of it)

DC is one of the best examples of transport that looks alright on a map but which doesn't function nearly as well when you're actually using it.

@@RMTransit Absolutely. There are a handful of individual spots & corridors that are really nice & the fact that multiple regional services use the same card & allow free transfer between them is great. But unless you're in the core of the city, very little is connected. And it's still treated as a Mon-Fri, 9-5 system, even though the city hasn't been like that in well over a decade.

@@matthewconstantine5015 DC seems to think its just a service for all those government workers I guess.

@@michaelrmurphy2734 I think that's exactly right. Metro management still acts like it's the 1980s, but D.C. isn't the same metropolitan area. It's a huge tourist spot with tons of non-governmental businesses that run 24/7.

@@matthewconstantine5015 What is the population of the American capitol anyway? Several million?

Exactly . . .

well you can get a frequent Overground service 1 stop to West Brompton for the District (London Underground) line. I'd say London has very good "served" areas with buses being everywhere to help the several rail services

@@zay-ju8fb Yes you can. However when I was there at rush hour on Wednesday there weren't any Overground trains as they had cancelled them, which meant I had to cram into a Southern Train like a sardine. The next train was an hour later!

@@zay-ju8fb There are numerous buses running past Olympia, connecting to High Street Ken in the east and Hammersmith in the west. You're still pretty well served from Olympia.

Pre 2010 life sucked, but now with Uber one can use transit without fear of being stuck downtown. At $10 Uber is good, counting tax subsidy a bus is $6, we literally should just give each person 500 Uber rides a year with bonus for offpeak use to help congestion and fire the union bus drivers and mechanics. Bus on MN is too brutal for women and kids, , , ,

@@mostlyguesses8385 or do what the rest of the world does and give workers decent pay and conditions, and not clog valuable real estate up with incredibly spatially inefficient cars.

@@mostlyguesses8385 So basically, you want to use Uber to help congestion. Really. What a troll.

Yep, that's a great point - the simplistic "coverage only" thinking around public transport would see the Vic line as completely useless!

@@peskypigeonx ... 1. Uber is better than cars, you build from steel and plastic 200 cars to serve 1000 people not the current 1000. Those 200 cars would be booked for rush hour and offer discounts for offpeak times so congestion may go down if only 20% of people (the Uber drivers) have cars.... 2. And for the person needing a ride few times a week they aren't causing congestion, so yeah let the rare travelers Uber.... 3. And if carless are only 10% of workers having them Uber is not a huge increase in congestion, let's just give up on buses and trains in US its too suburban, so give the 10% carless workers 500 uber rides a year cost govt same as a bus fleet.... France has more cars per 100,000 than US, transit isn't the great success in Europe that is claime. You guys are the fake info, no country of people avg person prefers transit to cars, despite higher density like France .. Uber is new tech last 10 years, worth considering not just snarkily dismissing...

Singapore Land Transport Authority (LTA) might be like: _But I want to save money_ (& people will still take public transport anyway as cars have high taxes) Over here there's an uproar as LTA is shortening & removing some bus services that run parallel to the new Thomson-E Coast MRT (subway/metro) line (TEL), & making other bus services detour more to cover parts of the removed services that aren't parallel to TEL (just 3 weeks before the largest fare hike in 25 yrs too). Trains are faster than buses but using them may require more transfers as there're fewer train station then bus stops, so if you use trains you might also need to transfer to/from a connecting bus, while some interchange stations need quite a bit of up & down detours to transfer between lines. Trains also have proportionately less seats - 1 TEL train car has 38-40 seats & a total rated capacity of 320 passengers, while a bus has between 30-82 seats & a total rated capacity of between 88-140 passengers

Yep, service pattern and network design are all critical too

Exo is still waiting for ridership to increase before adding the two trains they removed on the Saint-Jérôme line during COVID 🤷‍♂️

Montreal’s commuter trains are such a great example of places being “served”, but with service being awful. This video also reminded me of one of the arguments people made against the REM de l’Est, which was that it didn’t make sense to build a direct rail connection between Montréal-Nord and downtown because Montréal-Nord would already be served by the BRT on Pie-IX. Never mind that some of the places that would’ve been served by the REM de l’Est are over 2km away from Pie-IX.

They are a common tool, but if you don't create "what ifs" you can't see the benefits!

Caltrain has local and limited stop service.

I wouldn't say so! Express and local buses are a thing!

@@RMTransit Okay, maybe Toronto does those okay, but most other cities sure don't.

Interestingly, this is talked about fairly often in the Cities:Skyline community and Biffa (for example) has a number of videos that mention this (under the name "road hierarchy"; also for example CityPlannerPlays) ... sometimes even the similar concept for transit (Bus -> tram -> metro -> rail).

On more thought, I can think of a bunch of other minor mistakes that really reduce the effectiveness of the Denver public transit network and severely impact the Isochrone Map situation. - There are two separate rail systems, light rail and commuter rail. The main transit hub is Union Station, but the light rail and commuter rail stations are a couple blocks from each other, joined by an underground bus terminal that has become a homeless shelter and drug den, or a few blocks of city street walking. At one time, before the more recent commuter rail was built, the light rail station was right next to Union Station proper (which at the time only served Amtrak), but it was moved, I think to make way for high-value real estate development. - To get from my suburb to the neighborhood involves two commuter trains, with a transfer at Union Station. The schedule is designed in such a way that they miss each other - both directions - by about two minutes, requiring a wait of either 13 or 28 minutes for the next one, for no good reason. - This is somewhat hard to explain without a map, but the light rail is set up in sort of a tree-like manner with a central corridor, southeast branch, southwest branch, northwest branch to Union Station, and northeast branch that circulates downtown. A new line - the W line - was added later to serve west-central suburbs (Lakewood, Golden). It connects to the northwest branch towards Union Station literally within sight of, about a block from, the junction that splits off the northeast branch into downtown, but the nearest station on that branch is about a kilometer away. This means no direct connection to the northeast branch if you're going that way, and if you're going south you can't get to at least half the trains going that way that are coming from the northeast branch (I've sometimes walked over to that other station as that was quicker than waiting for one serving the station I was at). Relocating one (or perhaps eliminating two and replacing them with one) station and changing where the W line connected by a few blocks could have allowed easy transfer between all the lines on the system. So yeah, all these places are "served," but with these issues it seems the designers weren't really considering people getting from one place to another that would involve utilizing multiple lines. They consider people going in or out of downtown (which granted is probably the majority) but not those who want to get from one suburb to another by coming in on one line then out on another.

@@KaiHenningsen I could see that - not very familiar with that game. Does the game provide for the player to see the city from the perspective of a given individual trying to do a given task or make a given journey? I get the sense that a lot of designers try to serve the majority as effectively as possible - and not see clogs - but don't have as much awareness of how a given individual is served. Not-jammed roads and fast, not overcrowded public transit are seen as success, but overall journey time for any given user is forgotten. I somehow suspect players - especially hardcore ones - of a game like that would probably do better at city designing than actual city planners. Time to give more credit to gamers and less to those with relevant degrees. In fact, come to think of it, that game might be good for a high school or college civics class (I'm working on becoming a science, mostly physics, teacher, but who knows where my career might take me). The other factor is that a player of Cities: Skylines is one person looking holistically at everything, while real cities are designed by committees and separate entities (private and city) who each have their separate motives and objectives, and in many cases conflicts-of-interests.

part of why there is benefit to express services, people in a rush can transfer to an express train to get those minutes back.

@@Joesolo13 absolutely, but only if they are frequent enough as well. If you have to wait 30' to gain just 10-15' in travel time, unless you can stay busy doing some grocery shopping or something during those 30', you'll just stay on the slow train, because you're still going to be at your destination a bit sooner

It's amazing how rules and regulations can be skirted or fulfilled in unexpected ways. I actually think 800m (a ten minute walk) from frequent service is decent, but if not frequent it's useless!

@@RMTransit except that 800 m straight line distance can easily translate to multiple km with North American style cul-de-sacs, if the requirement doesn't stipulate a fully walkable grid. They could so easily have required an 800 m walkable route!

The suggestion would be take the streetcar to Union!

@@RMTransit it’s faster to walk 😆

"Faster to walk" is so true in so many places and if transit can't even win that race the planners need to be reprimanded.

I did not! But thank you!

My area has the same issue, and it's in new jersey. The train lines run just-shy of 24 hours, the nearest station's first train running at 4:30am and last one leaving at 1am The bus, however, only runs between 6am and 10pm. And on sundays the first bus doesn't come until noon. Added bonus that the bus is only hourly, and doesn't align with the trains most times of the day A few more buses per day could massively improve the situation. Even if it was just enough to get it to 40 minute headways and one early and later bus added to the current schedule.

Rail is critical, UP could run 24 hours even if not super frequently

I've made lots!

In general, the Europeans are much better at this stuff (except maybe British, I hear a lot of complaints about their systems) than North Americans.

​@@quillmaurer6563 It depends very much where you live in the UK. Some of it is genuinely world-beating, whereas in other parts the "service" on offer is just dire. Of course, you also have to realise that complaining is our most popular way of passing the time. (On reflection, the French are pretty good at it too, but they tend to be more physical about it - which may explain why their trains tend to be better than ours!)

@@philroberts7238 Good points - I figured we probably mostly hear about the worst examples Britain has to offer. A lot of things tend to be something that when it's done well nobody really thinks much of, but when done horribly everyone complains.

Indeed, there are a lot of factors that go into providing compelling transit!

I think their is a fair argument to opening a rail line where a bus service can provide the same frequency and speed, that is comfort of the trains, reduce operating costs if it is able to get high enough ridership, and that you can then get direct service on to mainline rail that can quickly connect onto stations in the center of the city. Still I don't know the details and could end up being close to your average over-confident reditor, probably could do with some travel time maps.

@@MaebhsUrbanity but in such cases the rail might be better for the operator, but I wouldn't call it better

Perhaps the bus network can be redesigned as feeders into the newly reopened railway stations? I know that in the Netherlands, they experimented with a 'fishbone model', in stead of keeping the parallel bus lines running along a regional railway line threatened by closure, they let the buses run into the stations, increased frequency and integration fares (both train and bus were run by Syntus at that time). The results were an increase in overall ridership, especially in the train. Of course, I don't know exactly which line you're talking about, so distance may be too big still. I agree, it's not always the best investment to reopen an abandoned old railway line, running where it was needed then, not now, sometimes deliberately far from the settlements it was meant to serve, so a local transport company could benefit ferrying people and goods to the station when most people still walked as their main way of transportation... It's why I agree with a British railway advocate who prefers the term 'opening' of railway lines in stead of 'reopening', even if part of an old alignment is used.

Euston is on two tube lines right now, and will have a direct connection to Euston Square to connect 3 more when it is done. Curzon Street is already well served by buses and the Tram extension which will serve it is well into construction. Curzon Street should have included platforms for local trains on the line to New Street right next to it though.

frustrating when the solution is clearly more bus lanes and signal priority first and foremost. If end-to-end speed was an issue, you could offer express buses, but hurting local buses makes little sense.

Fare systems and their impacts on the issue could really be its own video, that being said I don't love London's model of different prices for different modes!

The local MVRTA buses covering Massachusetts' Merrimack Valley have all gone fare-free, which is fantastic except that they're so infrequent (usually hourly, every half-hour for some major routes, particularly painful if you have to make a transfer) that they're still hard to use.

That's a really good example of just the thing Im talking about, "served" means different things to those who want the minimum possible expense and those who actually want usable transit.

On one hand, i agree as Barking Riverside really should have had a link to the centre of london (heck, make it a Hammersmith and City extension) but then you can always change at Barking for a C2C/Tube train into the centre of london (im sure these are bad arguments though)

I must disagree with that, it's a very short and direct connection to the District/H&C that does go into Central London.

That's because no one (or very few people) currently live in Barking Riverside. Once those apartment blocks are finished and more people move in, they'll naturally ramp up the frequency. As for "doesn't go directly into central London", it's not such a big deal when the next stop from Riverside is Barking itself, which is a major interchange with the Underground as well as c2c services. The Overground itself continues on to North London, the Underground takes you into central London or to Hornchurch/Upminster, and c2c takes you either to central London or way out towards Southend. All of these are very useful connections. A barrister friend of mine typically works at his chambers in central London, but his work takes him out into Essex or Hertfordshire for court appearances. Having all these rail connections that don't necessarily go into central London are very useful and means he doesn't need to have a car.

Say that to Thamesmead who are often promised a DLR station but never get it

@@ricequackers don't forget thames clipper services in the Peak and all day weekend service straight into central london

I realized I made a bit of an error on my isochrone, iirc this is only two vehicles

I will add the words "When I want to go" to the above.

In general, the bus network in Montreal leaves a lot to be desired. Some routes are pretty frequent on weekdays during the day, but then have 30-minute frequency after 8 or 9pm and on weekends. Other routes have 20 or 30-minute frequencies all day. Compared to Toronto and Vancouver, the bus network in Montreal is kind of embarrassing. So many places are “served” by the buses, but that service isn’t always good.

@@ethandanielburg6356 yep 30 minute frequency on saint denis is pathetic

It's not always the case that rail on the same corridor as buses provides a better service though, it really depends on the context!

I have gone from the west coast of Mid Wales to Cologne by rail to visit my grandson. When there with almost all places we went to, we used the tram.

@@wta1518 for a young, healthy person in somewhat of a shape. As a completely out of shape thirty year old I dread what will happen in twenty, thirty years time, especially as my home is right at the 800m mark and 40m uphill. Now, consider people who are not able bodied, or simply elderly. What about them? Especially in a country where buying a new car is considered a luxury.

@@wta1518 nothing like that here, but then we have pretty dense bus stops. Those 800 meters is *walking*, changing modes of transport is pretty common, and for some neighborhoods even expected. This in fact ties into what was said in the video - mix modes of transport. Have train stations more rarely but have buses people can take to reach the train.