Happy City: Transforming Our Lives Through Urban Design by Montgomery Charles

Author:Montgomery, Charles [Montgomery, Charles]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3, mobi
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Published: 2013-11-11T16:00:00+00:00

Feeling Free in Transit

A small club of economists and psychologists devote themselves entirely to the study of how transit makes us feel and behave. They have found that the difficulty we associate with commuting on public transit can have as much to do with mental effort as physical effort. The less you have to think about your trip and the more in control you feel, the easier the journey. This explains part of the magic of the Paris Navigo card, but also its limitations. Although the smart card helps erase mental effort when jumping between modes of travel, it can only go so far in improving the experience of moving by transit, which depends on a matrix of predictability, comfort, and the perception of passing time.

In central Paris, riders need not worry about traffic delays. The Métro and commuter rail systems are woven tightly under the surface of the city, while shared transit has been gradually recolonizing road space. New trams run along grass medians planted down the middle of arterial roads, and a network of road lanes have been handed over to beautiful city buses, which they share with taxis and bicycles.

But speed alone cannot ease all of transit’s psychological burden. When you ride a bus or train, your travel time includes the minutes you spend doing nothing but waiting for your ride. Planners spend a lot of time debating the question of “headway elasticity”—or how frequently buses and trains need to come in order to draw the most passengers. The behavioral economics of headway elasticity are impossibly arcane, but the first principle to remember is that if you show up at a stop without checking transit schedules, you will have to wait, on average, half the interval time between buses before stepping on board. So if your bus comes only every twenty minutes, your half-hour journey to work will probably become a forty-minute journey.

But it will feel much longer than that.

Inaction has a warping effect on time: a minute spent waiting seems to pass much more slowly than a minute spent moving. So most transportation planners agree that a bus needs to show up at least every fifteen minutes on any route for people nearby to use it effortlessly—i.e., without feeling as though they need to plan ahead. Cities such as Paris solve the headway problem partly by virtue of density: on most routes, there are enough riders to support bus and train arrivals every few minutes. (This also helps explain the vicious cycle of crummy transit service out in suburbia. Dispersal makes frequent service just too costly to provide, but infrequent service sends potential riders back to their cars.)

Frequent service alone doesn’t erase the anxiety of waiting. Just as time decelerates while we are forced to wait, it slows to a crawl when we don’t know exactly how long we have to wait. Anyone who has ever stood at a bus stop in the rain or on a train platform, peering into the distance for headlights that refuse to appear, knows that the anxiety produced by delayed service has a very long tail.

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