I’ve had and seen lots of conversations recently about the relative importance of walk-up riders and cyclists for transit projects. This often is in the form of questioning the creation of stations or transit projects, where existing land use is seen as “unfavourable” for public transit. A lot of these conversations happened with respect to the first phase of the Montreal REM, which is suburban and does serve a lot of low density areas (although major redevelopment is also ongoing).
Of course, land use is really important for public transit — not only because dense housing and commercial space brings users to a transit system, but also because transit unlocks denser more efficient forms or urban development — It’s very much circular. To be clear, I fully support dense car-free or car-lite developments along transit as well, as I discussed in a previous article:
But, like anything else, people often take land use desires too far — sometimes this is by suggesting that transit stations belong nowhere that isn’t an existing dense community. Sometimes it’s simply by suggesting an amount or scale of development which is not commensurate with the transit provided. You see this a lot in Toronto, where some suburban trams are set to be lined with high-rises, while inner city neighbourhoods with subway service still are mostly filled with houses.
My personal belief is that while development around transit is incredibly important, people in urbanist circles focus on it too much, often to the detriment of greater network effects. A lot of the time, this is interwoven with a status quo bias about service patterns: “People don’t often travel from A to B today (or transfer at C), why would you make it easier?” While neglecting that ease of travel is a major influencer on travel! In the same way, the existence of transport infrastructure (or more likely it’s absence) has a big impact on where dense housing is or isn’t developed.
I think the reason this is so often an issue is that development along a transit line is visible. By comparison, development that never happens because transit isn’t provided — even obvious transit — is often hard to imagine. What’s funny is that you can deliver far more riders by way of transfers and feeder service in so many locations — perhaps not in a dense city centre, but most cities, particularly the ones I talk about, are not mostly dense city centre.
Ultimately though, a station that plays a role, or could play a role, as a transfer or convergence point is not so obvious: you often can’t see it, in person or even on a map — urbanism discussions are usually about density, walking and cycling these days. While this is great, because we desperately need more walkable and cycling friendly cities, the reality of these transport modes is that network thinking is less important for them. There are not generally wildly different speeds or capacities for different sidewalks or bike paths — and thus the sophistication of the analysis you can do for existing and future networks is just lower. What’s interesting is that in some ways automobile networks are more like transit networks than say pedestrian and cycling networks, because capacity and variations in speed are a very big consideration.
How do these patterns of thought manifest?
I think the most obvious ways the rather simplistic thinking about transit in relation to urban development is manifested is people questioning the existence of transit in places which aren’t dense, or even better — in places where density is very unlikely.
One of the most notable examples of this I can think of is Highway 407 station on the York subway extension in Toronto. This station is in the middle of field next to a highway, and yet I think it’s existence probably makes sense (albeit with a more modest design), and that’s because even now there are significant transfers to the subway here from regional buses. It actually doesn’t take that much real transit service to start feeding a transit station as many people as a mid-rise apartment building, and service to this station has the potential to grow massively in the future — providing similar ridership to a decently large housing development.
You also sometimes hear critiques that surround the idea that we should only ever build new transit where there is existing transit and density, but this ignores the idea of a project cost-benefit ratio:" Sometimes you get a lot of benefit for a much lower cost by building projects along less developed corridors and then infilling with high density.
Ultimately, the built form of a city is important to planning transit, but so is existing and potential transit use. However, figuring things out, especially looking forward is hard — it requires a good understanding of existing networks, land use patterns, and perhaps most importantly the potential for change.
I will write a second part to this article in a few weeks diving into more examples, so make sure to stay tuned!