FUCKING LOL sweet, sweet summer child Airports have their own mass transit because of jurisdictional pissing matches. - Airports are the responsibility of the Port Authority. Yes, even if they're nowhere near water. The Port has its own cops, its own taxes and its own budget. - Airports are hosted by the Port Authority but they must also host Customs & Border Protection and the Transportation Security Agency. I don't know how it works elsewhere but Seattle Port Authority cops threaten to kick TSA cops out of the airport about every eighteen months or so because the TSA is an organization of dire overreach at its very core. - Local trains are the responsibility of some sort of municipal transit authority, which does not touch the port authority, CBP or TSA. - inter-county trains are either the responsibility of a multi-county transit authority or Amtrak, one of the worst federal bureaucracies in America - Then of course there's the taxi association, which may be practically dead but still very much bureaucratically in play. Here's two ways this pissing match has played out in cities I've lived in: SEATTLE. inner-city congestion was first recognized as a problem in 1911, when a cut-and-cover subway tunnel was first proposed. Nobody could agree on anything though so shit just got worse despite the tunnel being brought up again in 1926, 1928, 1958 and 1968. Things had gotten so ridiculously stupid that by 1984 the plan became "fuck you we'll build a tunnel for buses and convert it to trains someday." This required completely repurchasing the Seattle bus fleet to use the tunnel (which didn't exist yet) because switching the buses to dual-mode electric (to deal with smog in the tunnel) put them overweight for Seattle city streets. With state, federal and city funding the tunnel started construction in 1986, finished in 1990 and began being studied for conversion to light rail to the airport in 1996. I personally worked on this tunnel conversion project in 2001, 2003 and 2005. The project went over budget in 2006 and the "bus tunnel" was not included in light rail, then re-added three years later, with full bus exclusion in 2019. So while it was possible for about eight shining years to catch a city bus and take it to the airport without herfing your shit a block or more, it is no longer. This, of course, kicks the ever-loving shit out of Los Angeles, which has a fully-functional light rail system that white people don't know about but is packed elbow-to-elbow everywhere brown people live. However, it does not get within a mile and a half of LAX because in the '80s the taxi union held their breath until they turned blue to let LAX know that if any buses or trains were allowed to serve LAX they would boycott it. This led to three awesome compromises: (1) it costs $34 to take a taxi to downtown because that's the law (2) any taxi ride from LAX to anywhere within 3 miles of LAX costs $20 because that's the law (3) if you want to get from Union Station, where all the trains go, to LAX, where all the planes go, you will get a ticket on a fucking airport shuttle operated by Metro because fuck you, that's why. I hear the K-line will make it to LAX in 2024. I also hear that the Uber wait is no longer 2 1/2 hours. The trick used to be (1) get off your plane (2) hop a free shuttle to a nearby airport hotel (3) hail an Uber from the hotel, rather than the airport because otherwise yeah you're absolutely positively not leaving. The ruling linked in the Vice article 404s, by the way, which is about as perfect an encapsulation of the situation as I can come up with. Either way, the impact of a frickin' $4.50 "passenger facility fee" has exactly fuckall to do with why US airport trains suck bawlz.
Good ol' trifecta of incompetency, power grabs and grift. That makes...more sense. Fuckn' stellar journalism, Vice. Over time I've come to appreciate slash realize that on a fundamental level, the general public simply does not care for public transportation. It's why the US gets so many trams that should have been metros. Even here - the railways cut service in half to a rural-ish city, and people grumbled and some politicians sputtered, but transit is only 13% of all trips so they'll grumble and sputter and the train just won't come more than once an hour and the people will adapt and the people will forget it wasn't always that way and they will wonder why the roads are so busy these days and they will never link the bad choices in the past to the bad outcomes in the present.
Americans hate transit because of the last mile problem. You know exactly how close my house is to light rail. I can walk there, take a bus to the train station and be downtown in about 45 minutes for around $4 round trip. I did exactly that to see lil down in the International district. But if I needed to get further than that? It starts sucking. There's a parts house downtown that I could stand to visit more often. In order to find parking my best bet is to wander into Target three blocks away, buy $15 worth of shit I don't need, then walk to the parts house, get what I came for, go back to Target and head home. OR I could walk down to the bus terminal, ride into the international district and walk another mile and a half. Or? I could spend an hour and a half on a bus each way, also an option. Because the bus from the International District to the Pike Place Market does not exist. So instead I pay $7 shipping from a place I can hit by car in 20 minutes. When I was in North Hollywood? I was a 10-minute walk to the Red Line, a 10-minute ride to Hollywood & Vine and a 10-minute walk to the Arclight. That made the Arclight pretty approachable. But public transit to LAX? three and a half hours. It was much better from Cypress Park - I was a 20 minute walk, a 20 minute ride and then hurry and catch that shuttle I have tickets for for a total of around 75,80 minutes. But the Arclight? two and a half hours.
Americans hate transit because it’s usually not a viable alternative to driving. Not always though - 65% is no joke. The first law of transit is that people will always drive unless transit / cycling is fast enough. If the travel time of transit is below 144% of that of driving, more than half of people will choose transit. Your 45 minute bus trip is a 26 minute drive (Maps tells me) so it’s just on that threshold. You’re totally right in assessing that for a lot of people and a lot of trips it’s garbage, because it just takes too fucking long and the bus doesn’t even go where you need it to go. The second law is that transit needs to do everything right to succeed, whereas cars need to suck real bad for people not to use them. That 144% assumes the transit system is working, people know how to use it, and it’s not just perceived as a plebeian can of sardines. I don’t buy that the geography of US cities prevents good transit, I just believe it’s transit on hard mode. Canada’s superb suburban bus networks prove that you can make a successful transit network even in car-dependent suburban hellscapes. That does require buses to be fast, to get priority and to have an agency and city that really get that. A friend and transit professional of mine objected to a pedestrian crossing that the city wanted to place, because that street saw 26 buses an hour each way and if you calculated the extra cost just in terms of paying bus drivers that €2000 of paint would cost the transit agency over €120K a year, let alone the time it asked for everyone riding it. So they didn’t.