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Why do so many big cities make it so difficult to use their transit systems?

March 2nd, 2016 · 9 Comments

Alert readers may have clued in to the fact that I was out of the city during February. Among other places visited, I was in Buenos Aires for a week, a city I’ve never been before.

And, once again, I was amazed and frustrated and ticked off at how complicated it was to figure out how to use the transit system, the same feeling I’ve had in Toronto, San Francisco, Rome, and numerous other cities.

It’s beyond me why cities that get large numbers of new arrivals and tourists, not to mention the existing huge populations they service, allow transit messes to develop that turn taking the bus and subway into a maze.

New York and Paris are the best. You go to the subway station. You get a pass for a week or a month or three days or whatever and you can use it on everything. You might even get a map.

In Buenos Aires, a considerable part of my mental bandwidth during the week went into figuring out how to use both. The subway, okay, was easy enough. You get a paper ticket for a certain number of rides or a plastic SUBTE card and you’re off. (And an incredible bargain — about 50 cents Cdn per ride.)

For the buses, which I ended up preferring because a) you’re above-ground and b) they go to more places in the city, a whole ‘nother story. I was told in the guidebooks that buses would take real money, but that wasn’t true for most I was on. Instead, you have to buy a plastic SUBE card from a kiosca (corner-store type operation) for $3 Cdn, then get it loaded with value. We managed to find, after much hunting, a kiosca that would do both and thought we were good.

But, when we went to re-load, it turned out that we couldn’t find a kiosca anywhere that would re-load some value — even the place where we got the original card and extra value claimed they couldn’t provide us with that any more. Not sure whether it was just that hour or just that day or what.

This is not some “developing country” thingie. I’ve had the same experience in San Francisco, where a Clipper card for the BART subway system (which you can only buy at certain drugstores and select metro stops), doesn’t allow you to transfer to the bus system. You pay again (albeit with a small discount). And you have to buy your bus tickets in a different place from BART passes.

In Toronto, I’ve spent more hours hunting for the right place to buy what I needed to take the bus/streetcar, without having to hike a few miles to the nearest Metro stop.

In Rome, we simply gave up and rode the buses and trams for free for several days while we tried to figure out where the heck we should buy transit tickets.

I’m sure some dear readers will respond, saying “Oh, it’s really easy, you should have just done X or Y.” But the point is, it should all be completely obvious and everywhere how to use the transit system in cities that rely on them. (And in Buenos Aires, you really need it. The streets are hopelessly jammed. It took 40 minutes in a taxi to get from the centre to the relatively nearby district of Palermo in non-rush-hour traffic.)

And it should be obvious for people who aren’t fluent Spanish or Italian speakers. There should be some kind of international symbol that indicates “transit tickets that work for the whole system HERE.” (Visualizations gratefully accepted.)

Your stories of transit frustration — or compliments for the best systems ever — welcome here.

 

Categories: Uncategorized

  • boohoo

    Seoul’s system of trains and buses is massive but I got around with relative ease. This is the metro system alone! https://www.smrt.co.kr/program/cyberStation/main2.jsp?lang=e

    You use the same smart card system, you can buy the card at all train stations or at all cornerstore/7-11 type places (there are thousands). Works on all buses & trains. You can use the card not only in Seoul but basically all of S. Korea.

    The buses there are colour coded so you know if one is a long distance commuter, local, etc.

    It’s the best integrated system I’ve used.

  • Than Ko

    “But the point is, it should all be completely obvious and everywhere how to use the transit system in cities that rely on them.”

    Thank you, thank you, thank you.
    Transit systems and their user experience should be designed for 11 year old blind tourists and designed to that standard.
    We have a system where, while standing on the Broadway platform heading to New Westminster or Surrey, a train will come along announcing that it is the “VCC Clark” train, which is A STATION IN THE OPPOSITE DIRECTION TO WHERE YOU WANT TO GO. It’s like being at an airport heading to San Francisco and they anounce your flight as “Calgary” because that’s where the plane is ending up at the end of it’s circuit. Insanely dumb. It’s ruthlessly, needlessly stupid.
    I have repeatedly and often far too urgently argued against the ridiculously bad signage and notice systems we have in place here. Station signange is all over the map design-wise. Try getting to the Granville Skytrain station while in Pacific Centre Mall sometime, but be sure to have 9-1-1 on standby, when you collapse from that fruitless pursuit. Arrows will literally point you in the wrong direction.
    The entire idea of transit systems seems to be built in stupidity as a result of a bureacracy that has no stake in the outcome.

  • Kenji

    I am not much of a world traveler so my perspective is limited. I found London Underground very easy to navigate. Clear signage and easy-to-understand colour coding for various routes (assuming you’re not colour-blind, I guess), simple swipe in/out gate, and plenty of coverage.

    The Paris metro, as a line, is fine. What is not fine is its extreme grossness. It is a nest of scammers in a giant festering urinal.

  • AL

    The buses in Buenos Aires are notorious. They are run by independent companies, so it’s very challenging to coordinate them.

    When I was a kid there you could pay the driver in cash but that was a couple of decades ago so it may have changed. Also, the drivers were all terrible because they were motivated to complete their routes quickly, so they’d run red lights, start driving before passengers were all the way on/off the bus (even old ladies carrying groceries or moms with babies).

    I hope you had a good time there anyway. Buenos Aires is a great place for a vacation!

    The Shanghai metro was fantastic, even as someone who doesn’t speak a word of Mandarin.

  • TKO

    In Bangkok, the BTS is a dream… if you have a Rabbit card! It’s a stored-value system that can used to buy trips (tap-in-tap-out) and works in many low-cost restaurants (food courts, McDonalds) which sometimes even offer discounts to pay by Rabbit card. They are all tap-based, and you can load money into Rabbit at transit stations and in the food courts too!
    But if you chose to pay as you go, you enter a world of pain: stand in line to buy a ticket from a machine, discover that machines do not take bills, go over to person in booth to change bills to coins, go back to machine line, figure out your fare based on distance and buy a paper ticket.

  • Tiktaalik

    I had the chance recently to try out public transit in Melbourne and Auckland. It couldn’t have been more different.

    Melbourne, unlike most cities in the world, never got rid of its streetcar system, and I believe it has one of the largest in the world. People seem to have mixed feelings about streetcars (they’re criticized frequently in Toronto) but from my experience in Melbourne I felt they worked very well.

    They have a large network with high frequency, great signage, and nice, modern Bombardier streetcars. The streetcars did a very good job of announcing every stop. It was very easy for me as a tourist to know when I should be getting off.

    The system used the same sort of tap on/off top up card that every city seems to be implementing. Theirs seemed about as flakey as Vancouver’s is. I have to admit I had a hard time keeping track of how much I was using. They have a multiple zone system and I think a few times I may have crossed over a zone without realizing it so I ended up paying more than I should have. I had the same problem as Frances had of having trouble finding places to top up the card. Interestingly they had a few kiosks at major streetcar platforms in the Central Business District (CBD). Vancouver may have to implement something similar. I was able to load up the card with an exact amount at a random convenience store at one point during my trip when I was way outside the CBD. This would have been pretty hard I wasn’t fluent in English!

    Another neat thing is that in the entire CBD the streetcars are free. Very nice. Essentially the CBD is treated as a zone and tapping on and off in that zone doesn’t cost anything.

    Many of the negatives of street cars come from poor signaling systems and interactions with vehicle traffic. Melbourne’s system seems to avoid this by having a great deal of dedicated street car paths and by using “Hook Turns” so that turning cars can free up room for cars moving forward without also blocking streetcars. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hook_turn

    It’s worth noting that Melbourne also has several train stations that I assume take you to much further out suburbs and cities. I didn’t need to make use of this.

    Summary: Melbourne does streetcars right. Cities with streetcars such as Toronto (or Surrey…) should be copying Melbourne closely.

    Auckland is not as good as Melbourne, or Vancouver or any major city I’ve been to really. From my understanding Auckland only invested in automobile infrastructure for a very long time and is very, very far behind everyone else. They’re only really getting serious about public transit now that they’re at a breaking point. Congestion in Auckland is absolutely terrible but according to my friends the transit is so weak you basically need a car to get anywhere.

    Auckland only has a bus system (and some commuter rail which I didn’t use) and it was very hard to figure out. It does seem that they’re completely overhauling everything at the moment but that’s not much of an excuse. I had some really odd experiences in Auckland where I asked bus drivers to help me figure out which bus I should be on to get somewhere, and they didn’t seem to know their own system.

    The one positive of Auckland’s system is that they’ll give you change back when you pay cash.

    An additional interesting thing about Auckland is that there’s basically no bike infrastructure at all. Even lines painted at the side of the road were incredibly rare. It would be an awful city to bike in. This seemed pretty common throughout NZ, as the country is super car oriented.

    The lack of good transit and cycling infrastructure is surprising because in so many other ways New Zealand is better at city building than Canada is. Their towns are compact, well designed and very walkable. There were great shared street areas in downtown Auckland.

  • maya

    I was similarly confused by transit in Sweden this past summer. Buying a ticket from the agent in the booth was more expensive than the machine but we couldn’t understand what we were buying at the machine. Also, the base rate was about $6 Can. We chose to walk most of the time. We also used uber, which was great. The speed train from the airport to central Stockholm was $42 per person for a 40 minute journey, although there was a slower, cheaper option. I think we should be charging more for the Canadaline from the airport. Visitors will pay!

  • brianeleryphillips

    Ah yes, the cash-grab airport link. Having been in London for 6 months, I’ve flown out of the city using the ‘Gatwick Express’ a few times. Until some of the locals I know pointed out that you can take an ordinary train for half the price, with only one stop along the way, for an extra 5 minutes of travel time.

  • Lysenko’s Nemesis

    I recently took a bus into town and informed the driver of my destination. He charged me the fare and gave me a transfer ticket. I connected on to the Canada Line. On exiting at Marine Drive Station there was no way to exit through the barrier gates. I and others were waving our tickets over the electronic sensors but the gates stayed closed. There were no transit employees visible anywhere. Eventually we walked out through a wide opening, that must be for people in wheelchairs, because this wasn’t closed.

    Is it possible that the bus tickets do not have electronic sensors that activate the rail line exit gates?

    If the wide exit gate had been closed then how would passengers transferring from buses get out?