The gifted and talented CBC videographer Uytae Lee has produced a compelling short video about the crisis facing public transit after the Covid-19 pandemic. With an urban design background and a degree from Dalhousie University’s Community Design program, Uytae Lee has the “About Here” YouTube channel that has a plethora of videos about urban issues and planning in Vancouver.
In his latest video that already has over 3,000 views, Lee looks at the issues around transit in the post-covid world, where those private vehicles will look like viable options for safe travel and less chance of virus contagion. He compares this next phase of the pandemic to that experienced in China after the 2003 SARS pandemic, where public transit usage plummeted from 40 percent of the population to 24 percent, while private automobile use skyrocketed.
Lee gets full points for referencing the region’s 1991 Transport 2021 Long Term Transportation Plan which laid out the framework for regional transit. At that time only 9 percent of people took transit and 83 percent drove. Current figure show that 20 percent now use transit and vehicular use is down to 65 percent.
If the transit system is not well used in the post pandemic years it will not be able to sustain the level of service for those that rely on it. More private vehicles on the road create more congestion, pollution and is less equitable for society.
Jeffrey Tumlin, head of the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency is looking to Taiwan and Seoul for best practices in managing public transit in the post Covid period. Tumlin is referencing this article by Eric Jaffe that sees the health of public transit being as important as the reboot of the economy.
As Tumlin states:” If San Francisco retreats in a fear-based way to private cars, the city dies with that, including the economy. Why? Because we can’t move more cars. That’s a fundamental geometrical limit. We can’t move more cars in the space we have.… For San Francisco to come back as San Francisco we have to find ways to feel safe and comfortable in shared spaces or the city doesn’t work.”
The approach being taken in San Francisco includes the following:
- Protect Essential Transit workers with personal protective gear;
- Provide public displays of disinfection
- Reduce contact points that people need to touch
- Spread the customer peak with fare incentives so there is not overcrowding
- Stagger work place business hours to reduce capacity and crowding concerns
- Integrate fares across services to include bike shares and e scooters
- Display real-time occupancy levels
- Fund these programs as essential public health.
You can read the full detail of the San Francisco strategy in Jaffe’s Sidewalk Talk on Medium.com here.
You can take a look at Uytae Lee’s excellent video below, and check out his YouTube channel “About Here” for other well researched videos by clicking on this link.
That was an excellent video op ed by uytai lee.
A couple of comments. Not all the growth in transit mode share can be placed on iproved transit service. A lot of it is due to demographic shifts. We are an older society now than we were in 1991, and also more immigrant-based than we were.
Also, costs to drive have gone way up — gas, parking, inurance, maintenance, and of course, the cost of cars.
But the biggest factor is the way that transit counts ridership. They count boardigs. This made sense in 1991, before the compass card. Now, with the compass card, they should be counting individual riders.
Every ten years or so for the past four decades, translink has added a new skytrain line. Expo line, surrey extension, millenium line, canada line, evergreen extension.
Each time, they eliminated bus lines and directed riders to the new skytrain line. This makes sense interms of efficienct. A skytrin can caffy a lot more riders than a buss, so translink would have to operate lots more buses to carry those same riders than trains.
But, be aware that almost every skytrain rider arrives at the train bt bus. Many also take buses at the end of their train ride to reach thei final destination.
This means that each trip is two boardings, maybe even three or four.
This makes translink lookgreat compared to other cities where they count riders in trms of trips instead of boardigs.
Every ten years, translink ridership takes a huge leap up in,riders, whwn it opens a new skytrain line.
But are those new riders, or just an increase in boarding numbers?
I wonder whether this trend leads translink to be complacent when it comes to quality of service.
It’s pretty easy to look at the Census data to see whether mode share data for the journey to work supports the idea of a big increase in ridership. It counts people, not journeys.
In the 10 years from 2006 to 2016 the number of people using transit for travel to work in Greater Vancouver increased, from 165,000 to 236,000. That’s a 43% increase.
Translink’s ridership numbers show 283 million boardings in 2006 and 385 million in 2016. That’s a 36% increase in ridership, and it suggests that the number of people using transit in Greater Vancouver is going up at a slightly higher rate than the increase in the total number of journeys recorded by Translink.