alt Hacker NewsTransit always seems to be kind of a chicken and egg problem. You can’t have good transit unless you have good ridership, and you can’t have good ridership if you don’t have good transit.
Everywhere I know of in the US with decent transit already had it before the culture of car dominance really took hold, so it was already good enough to maintain sufficient ridership to stay good. Does anyone know of anywhere that managed to bootstrap good public transit after the fact?
Anyway I wonder if congestion pricing could potentially be such a bootstrapping force, pushing enough people to use transit to start the virtuous cycle of increasing ridership and increasing quality.
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The other good reason to choose congestion pricing as the start to breaking the chicken/egg problem is that, outside of NYC and maybe Chicago, public transit in the US is primarily buses on streets shared with car traffic. It's hard to attract ridership and improve buses when they're always stuck in car traffic, so starting by reducing traffic via congestion pricing is particularly pragmatic.
> Does anyone know of anywhere that managed to bootstrap good public transit after the fact?
Shanghai. Amsterdam up to a point - they never completely lost their transit, but it was in pretty bad shape.
> Anyway I wonder if congestion pricing could potentially be such a bootstrapping force, pushing enough people to use transit to start the virtuous cycle of increasing ridership and increasing quality.
It can help. You need improving transit and densification to happen together so they can reinforce each other, so you need coordination between transport policy and housing policy, I think that's the key.
> Does anyone know of anywhere that managed to bootstrap good public transit after the fact?
That's not true. You just have to have competent leadership. You can build the infrastructure first knowing people will use it when it's done.
Vancouver. The first section of SkyTrain was built in 1985 (40 years ago) well after cars had dominated the city. I couldn't find historical figures for transit mode share, but today more than 50% of all trips are made by public or active transportation, and 90% of residents live within 10 minutes of a frequent transit line.
For context, in most US cities that figure is 2-3%.