The other day, when I took my painfully slow ride home from LaGuardia Airport, I clearly chose the worst route possible. As many commenters here pointed out, taking the Q33 to the Queens Boulevard line or hopping on the Q train in Astoria would have sped up my trip by a few minutes, but the fact remains that the trip was sluggish and slow from the US Airways terminal to the exit from the airport. No amount of better planning would have improved that trip, and a taxi will always be faster, if significantly more expensive.
An article I came across yesterday had me revisiting that commute. It’s a piece from The Globe and Mail in Canada about some transit reluctance. Despite traffic in two big Canadian cities, commuters aren’t embracing transit alternatives because they’re just too slow.
According to a recent Canadian study, a whopping 82 percent commuted by car while just 12 percent rode public transit. The Canadian Press explained the why of it:
“Commuters who used public transit took considerably longer to get to work than those who lived an equivalent distance from their place of work and went by car,” says the study. Nationally, users of public transit spent 44 minutes travelling to work, compared with 24 minutes for those who went by car.
Commuting times are door-to-door, StatsCan notes. Times for public transit are generally longer because its use can involve walking to a transit stop and waiting for a bus, it says. In the six largest cities, the average commuting time was 44 minutes for public transit users and 27 minutes by car. The gap in average commuting time was slightly larger in mid-sized metropolitan areas — 46 minutes on public transit and 23 minutes by car.
“The gap was not a result of distance travelled,” the agency says. “Among workers in (cities) with at least 250,000 residents who travelled less than 5 kilometres to work, car users had an average commute of 10 minutes, compared with 26 minutes for public transit users. The same held true for longer commutes.”
Now, on the one hand, this isn’t a surprising result. By and large, public transit is going to be slower than personal automobiles. They stop more frequently than cars do; they don’t deliver commuters directly from point A to point B; and despite pre-board payment technologies, bus in particular aren’t adept at picking up passengers in a speedy fashion.
These factors clearly matter to many. People in New York dislike the bus system because for many routes, it’s faster to walk. Once you calculate waiting time and travel speeds, buses aren’t great time-savers. Even the subways over great distances at off-peak hours provide little to no time savings. It’s only during congested rush hour commutes that public transit can save significant time.
While I’m not as familiar with the ins and outs of Canadian transportation policies and politics, in New York, cost as well as speed plays another factor. I was willing to take the bus to the subway on Monday because I had all the time in the world and didn’t feel like dropping $35-$40 on a cab. For Manhattan-bound commuters, the costs of daily parking often outweigh any time benefits that may accrue from driving, and those costs help push commuters toward environmentally and socially friendly transportation options.
Yet, it’s important to note the results of studies such as these. Speed and the perception of speed matters. New York City buses — and buses in various locations through the world — are artificially slowed because transit agencies haven’t yet embraced pre-board fare payment systems. They don’t have enjoy dedicated lanes or signal prioritization. Some subways — such as those old IRT routes that run through Downtown Brooklyn and Lower Manhattan — simply stop too frequently. These factors create inefficient and slow systems.
As the MTA looks to encourage more transit ridership, it would do well to assess travel speeds. It shouldn’t take me 20 minutes to leave LaGuardia because everyone waiting to board the bus has to dip their MetroCard as lines form. Buses, especially during peak hours, shouldn’t be at the whims of surface traffic. If you make the rides faster, they will come.
9 comments
I don’t know how this breaks down within Canada, but for Manhattan-bound commuters, the difference between transit and auto commute time is small – 53 vs. 50 minutes one-way (link). The key here is that commuting to a large CBD just takes a very long time, and this is precisely the market in which transit’s high capacity gives it the biggest advantage over cars. Cars dominate in low-volume markets, which are also those with the shortest commute times. This makes what’s really a feature of employment and commuting patterns look like a feature of the mode of transportation.
“No amount of better planning” on your part would have improved the trip, but a dedicated busway out of the airport would certainly have. You could call that better planning in the design of the airport.
I recently moved upstate temporarily (orange county) and have been taking the metronorth into Hoboken, then the path to WTC. I now live at the end of the Port Jervis line and this commute is door to door 3hrs (one way). I tried driving from there and saved about 35 minutes in time, but gained a monster headache in aggravation. I don’t know about the other lines, but this one in particular despeartely needs an express service and/or a skip stop service for the New York part of the line. Its all single track upstate so there isnt even trackage they could resurrect to make this happen.
I’ve spoken with many people who ride the line who hate it simply because it takes too long. Others choose to drive for this reason as well. If the MTA and the state government want to encourage mass transit use (esp. outside of the city) the infrastructure needs to be overhauled to make this option more palatable (this aside from the fact that the local gov’ts in these counties don’t want to support the MTA).
I wonder if high-speed WiFi on-board public transportation would change this perspective. If people (in certain types of jobs) were able to consider time on the train as “office time” rather than “travel time”, the longer trip might be more attractive.
I’m not sure exactly how they work here, but a service like this splits the difference between the pricey and speedy cab and the slow and clunky bus:
http://www.supershuttle.com/en.....wYork.html
or this 1 in NJ:
http://www.airbrook.com/Shared.....uttle.aspx
And particularly if you are a luggage toter. This service serves only Manhattan as you can see, but I wonder if a competing service serves other parts of NYC.
I found this type of service to be the best balance going to and from the airports in a couple of European cities that had no direct train service to/from the city and airport.
“Benjamin Kabak says:
August 22, 2011 at 5:57 pm
Mostly it’s because I wasn’t really thinking. I woke up at 4:30 this morning and had the M60 stuck in my head. The Q33 showed up first, and I could have taken that. I’m not sure how much faster it would be. My route was the worst.”
And you said you waited 15 mins for the M60 to show up, which itself was painfully slow as you stated. I don’t count 15 mins as a “few mins” You could have shaved at least 25 off your trip. Well, now you know.
Public transit to Pearson is 55-60 mins at the least to downtown Toronto but only $3.00 cash.
With regard to what you posted, Alon already made the right point.
Toronto’s TTC is constructing rail service to Pearson airport. The airport is in the city of Mississauga wich is about 20-minutes to the west. Transit service is offered by the regional Go Transit bus network. The distance is roughly equal to Summit/ Woodbridge New Jersey or White plains New York.
The city of Mississauga is the 6th largest in Canada with a population of nearly 700,000 residents with a retail, corporate & housing base that rivals Stamford or White Plains making transit access to the airport esential.
It would been faster in NIMBYs hadn’t cancelled the N to LGA.
As it is, NYCT should consider an Airlink bus direct from LGA to the N at Astoria Blvd, with BRT aspects such as pre-paid fares. It wouldn’t be so hard to cordon off an area of the curb as a “station.”
You can ride the M60, but traffic on 125th Street and the Triboro lead to extensive delays. The Q33 is hurt by the lack of north-south arterials in western Queens, and must cross several major avenues with signal priority.
The M60, for its part, is a good candidate for BRT. Perhaps the bus to Astoria Blvd. could be a “put in” to keep a schedule when the M60 is delayed.
Pre-boarding in NYC is a mostly POS. The main reason these bussses can ‘fly’ up the avenue are they SKIP so many stops and you seem favorable inclined to cut out stops to all those places you have no use for. We have this on BX 12 Select Bus and Manhattan M15 Select Bus Service. I see there are times when pre-boarding can help and But there are still waits to load wheelchairs and such and if there was an unbiased survey, let’s see it there are at least as many people who are inconvenienced as have faster service.
Mainly I am quite angry at the tens of millions it took to set this up incuding what I estimate as 132 fare collector machines and a team or two of inspectors as they cut service. The old system with regular and “Limted” busses was fine, perhaps only calling for a try at bus lanes!