Transit isn't just for going to work.
How to reshape your city and transit network and unlock tons of journeys.
On a typical day, where do you travel? For many, the answer will be work; but for many people, work is not the answer.
People make a lot of trips, and while work is obviously a common one, there are a lot of other trips that transit should be aiming to serve. In the 2020s, there has been a lot of talk about “15-minute cities”, or communities where many daily essentials are within a short walk or bicycle ride, so in this article I’m not going to focus on transit to the grocery store, the local park, or the pharmacy (though transit obviously does have a role to play in these trips). Instead, I’m going to focus on how we enable more trips to more specialized places on transit.
The reality is that cities are always going to feature lots of trips that go beyond a local neighbourhood, and this requires options beyond walking and cycling. That's because cities are places where people with diverse interests, talents, and needs congregate, and the specialized facilities from educational institutions, to medical treatment centres, to museums and art galleries are niche enough to generally not exist in every neighbourhood. Cities also often have great restaurants, but it’s very possible that the restaurant you want to go to isn’t in your direct vicinity — a great example of this can be ethnic restaurants that tend to cluster in different parts of a city. People also like to travel outside of their neighbourhoods for the sake of it, to see something different and visit new parts of their city.
The question raised at the beginning of this article is an interesting one, because for the past 10+ years of my life, a very small percentage of trips I have made have been to a place of work. Most of my working life my work has been remote, or YouTube (which suffice to say doesn’t give me slick downtown office space!), and during summers off from school I also did trade work that required a lot of driving around with a crew and equipment that meant that transit wasn’t an option. There is of course also school itself, which was actually a source of tons of transit trips — heading to the university and on little excursions with classmates and friends. A lot of people do not work traditional office jobs, and that’s not a huge issue for transit in my personal view (despite endless proclamations that transit is doomed), but it will be if all of your transit runs to the city centre in the morning and back out after 5PM.
The idea that all that many transit systems only run rush hour peak direction service is obviously incorrect, but it still amazes me how many peak-hour only commuter rail systems existed just prior to the pandemic. It’s also definitely the case that a transit system can be oriented towards office commuting even without only providing peak hour service. And a large number of systems do use the vast majority of their resources on peak-hour service. This can be as simple as missing major suburban hubs in a quest to make direct to downtown trips faster, or it can be a highly radial network design that forces inter-suburban trips to divert through the city centre.
If transit can be a compelling option to get to the local mall, or a cafe to meet with people interested in the same subculture as you (like say… transit planning and advocacy), or to a night class at university — we can reduce car trips, even if an individual uses a car to commute to work!
So how do we fix this and design transit that is useful for more? This may become a recurring series because there are tons of initiatives to discuss, but let’s start with three.
Create Suburban Hubs
It’s well known that public transit tends to work well with density, but what’s less appreciated is how you build that outside of a city centre. If you can do that and create a suburban hub, you can reroute services in the area to that hub, and connect it to other hubs and the city centre with higher order transit, shortening trip times for suburb to suburb trips, increasing trip options, and attracting more riders. This also lets you more efficiently utilize service hours by sending local residents to a suburban hub with more frequent service, and then carrying those desiring to go to the centre onwards on more cost effective rapid transit. Even slightly lengthening routes so they can connect to a hub should be considered because additional passengers allows a hub to meet the critical mass necessary for facilities that significantly improve the transit experience like washrooms and climate controlled waiting areas. All of this can be done without really hurting the quality of the downtown to suburban connections, since some services can always run via the hub!
Now, it’s worth highlighting that transit doesn’t just uniformly benefit from all types of density. Residential density drives less trips than office or institutional space, because homes use up a lot of square footage! It’s also worth appreciating that trip density often isn’t associated with density in built form; tons of people travel to destinations like malls, universities, and even beaches — but you probably don’t imagine any of these places being dense in the traditional sense.
Connecting a suburban hub to rapid transit, or even building a high quality transit station can be a catalyst for development. Malls tend to be fairly good sites to develop suburban hubs, because they tend to feature lots of useful shops and services, already have an established importance as employment centres, have lots of developable land in the form of parking, and increasingly successful malls are being turned into regional destinations with expanded food and leisure options. This means a mall is a great third space where people can go to meet with colleagues over a coffee, meet with family over dinner, or meet with friends to go to the cinema.
If a mall is provided with good transit service, it can be upzoned, allowing high rise office and residential development that is accessible to more of the city. Residents and tenants of this development get the benefit of convenient transport access and shops and services, and the mall operator gets loads of new customers — It’s a win win win, and effectively the seed of a “15-minute city” in its own right. What’s better is that as a suburban hub develops, it can offer more and more of the amenities previously limited to the city centre, meaning local residents often don’t even need to make those longer journeys.
This type of site comes to mind for me because it’s happening all over Canada, rapid transit connected malls like Brentwood Town Centre in Burnaby, to Fairview in Toronto are replacing parking with high-density development, giving people new transit connected start and end points for their journeys. The potential for similar developments in the United States is huge. Chatswood is a great example of just such a centre in Sydney, which has multiple rail and bus transit service connections, tons of amenities and lots of density!
Of course, a mall is just one potential site — universities, health campuses, and large exhibition or sporting grounds can also be turned into strong suburban hubs, each with their own initial assets that need to be augmented by different types of development. For example, universities often do not have large amounts of shops and services needed for the broader non-university community.
You might have noticed that each of these hub concepts put a major non-work trip generator at its centre. Of course, few destinations are strictly employment, residential, or leisure, and a mix of uses is always good, but most people going to malls and universities are not going for work. By strengthening these centres, you can not only divert trips from the centre, but also shorten journeys, unlock the ridership needed for higher order transit, and open up a new anchor for numerous non-work trips and some work ones as well!
Plan Better Infrequent Service
The first thing you’re probably thinking when reading that heading is “what the hell is Reece thinking? Infrequent service is bad!”. You’re not wrong, but we’re also trying to provide service to more places, and sometimes trade offs need to be made! Of course, as always, what makes service better at 30-minute headways will also make it better at 15!
The reality is that a lot of trips to the dispersed destinations people make non-work trips to, as well as even to suburban hubs, will not justify the same frequency as a peak-hour shuttle to the city centre. But, a lower headway need not be a far worse transit experience! One key solution to making low frequency routes work better is minimizing the pain of transfers, which riders often have to make to reach non-work destinations.
One technique for doing this is timed transfers and clock face schedules. Counterintuitively, beyond a certain headway (probably about every 20 minutes), lower frequency routes that are coordinated are often better than slightly higher frequency routes that are not. This is because coordination maximizes the amount of time passengers can be sitting in a climate controlled vehicle. Multiple non-timed transfers also become completely impractical at higher headways, leaving a passenger waiting for longer than they are moving.
You can also try to provide more one seat rides. If you can’t justify running higher frequencies, then making natural extensions of your routes to prevent the need to transfer in the first place is good practice. For example, instead of having the Toronto east-west subway replacement night bus terminate at the last subway station, it continues on to the airport, another major non-work and work trip generator by the way! This approach can be extended to daytime routes, by having them consistently run through major terminals rather than terminate at them (something which Toronto is much less good at, with many buses needlessly ending at Yonge Street).
Provide Transit at Non Work Times
One of the things that never fails to astonish me is the extent to which some transit systems cut back service in the evening. And when I say evening, I mean it — many transit systems around the world substantially cut back service every night after 7 or maybe 10 PM, and now are ironically frantically trying to understand where their ridership has gone. Of course, night service (which usually refers to service from about 11 PM to 5 AM) is often even worse, with even highly respected systems in places like Asia not providing a lot of it.
One of the recurring things I want to impart on readers is that the ridership a transit system develops will always be reflective of the service. Frequent service is better service and will attract more riders, and peak-hour service will attract the type of people travelling at rush hour, but it’s important to remember that the service you don’t provide will also influence the riders you don’t get! If you don’t provide good service past 7PM, good luck getting shift workers or university students with late lectures! This was actually the topic of one of my first Substack articles where I suggested it was quite possible that regular non-night service would likely also benefit from riders using night service, since many night outings start or end during the day.
These impacts aren’t even all that obvious. Toronto looks to have an impressive express bus network when you look at a map, but many express routes only run during rush hour. Meaning that trips during the midday, or at night are needlessly slower. The approach taken in cities like Seattle of providing a distinct all-day (and sometimes all-night) express route is a much better one.
In this article, I’ve highlighted some key ways to promote non-work trips, including by encouraging polycentrism, improving the quality of the type of infrequent coverage routes that are often important for non-work trips, and running more service at times when people make non-work trips. But, as mentioned earlier it will probably only be the first of many! Thanks for reading.
We need to think in terms of total transit trips per capita instead of transit commute mode share. Work trips comprise only 20-25% of all trips and exclude even students traveling to school.
San Diego's University City is precisely the kind of suburban hub you mentioned, containing a university, hospitals, and a large mall, linked together by LRT and the city's busiest bus line.
Interestingly, institutional land use is spearheading San Diego's TOD boom. The biggest under-construction TOD in the city is SDSU's $4B satellite campus. The Navy will redevelop its cybersecurity facility into another TOD with several million sq ft of offices and up to 10,000 units.
I’ve learned much about my city by taking almost every bus route in the city for different reasons. (School, work, sports game, meet friends, exploration, etc). That when I started driving I practically memorized the the whole city, due to knowing where each bus goes on their route and where it would go when any detours were present.
Made me realize as well which corridors are great for any higher order of transit like BRT, LRT, Light Metro. Picked up where good hubs are in commercial zones, stadium district, neighborhood strip malls, and even our downtown transfer hub that was right in front of the mall got moved a block south to the park replacing the parking with bus made a better looking and inviting transfer point with nice large green space downtown.