The Oil Drum has a discussion about a report on car-use in Manhattan.

The basic conclusions are that low-volume passenger cars are taking up space and causing traffic problems, while having low value to the area. I.e., people aren't providing business or an economic incentive, they could use mass transit, and they are getting in the way of high-value traffic like deliveries and high-capacity passenger vehicles like buses.

The response to things like this is often to punish low-volume passenger vehicles. Some of these options are implemented in a very dumb way. For instance, encouraging medium-volume passenger vehicles with special lanes for vehicles with more than one passenger. Usually the poor delivery trucks get stuck with the rest of the traffic. Or parking is constrained and/or expensive. Or there's a toll for all vehicles entering the central business district, like in London.

Not surprisingly, it doesn't make people happy to be punished. It's also a really lame response. If people are using cars instead of other options, then why?

I think it is because mass transit sucks. It sucks a lot. Horribly. There's sometimes a perception problem, sometimes an intimidation factor, but mostly it's just that mass transit is awful.

I say this as a person who uses public transportation and actively dislikes cars. But that doesn't blind me to the real disadvantages of our current options.

• The incremental cost of a car trip is low compared to mass transit. In Chicago it now costs $4 to make a round trip ($4.50 if you transfer). Per person, regardless of distance. For many people even the total operational cost of a car is likely to be lower. For a family traveling together the price can be rather absurd (even if children get discounted fairs -- discounts which are not well facilitated as systems are automated).

• If transit isn't a complete solution -- i.e., people can't actually get rid of their cars -- then only the incremental cost matters.

• Transit generally fails in several situations. No late night service. Poor service to certain areas, even inside the city. Difficult to use for things like grocery shopping. Not much consideration of the importance of car and trunk rentals as a complimentary service. (Generally, no consideration at all of the changes in and needs of a community.)

• It typically takes 2-4x longer to get somewhere on mass transit. This is door-to-door time; sometimes mass transit can be faster for the portion of the trip where it applies. But usually it is much slower. When you add wait times and time to walk to your actual destination, it's almost always slower. Even commuter rail, which is one of the most effective kinds of mass transit, doesn't do that well here.

• Mass transit seldom goes where you want it to. Chicago buses actually do really well because of the grid system -- it's two bus rides to get just about anywhere, and you can predict exactly what those bus rides are. The El sucks; it is optimized only for people going to and from downtown. In most cities there are large portions of the city that are either not served at all, or only have service going to one location (with transfers for other destinations).

• Service that stops closer to where you want also makes it slower to get there. More stops means nearby service. More stops means stopping for other people's stops, and thus slower service.

• Many forms of mass transit are not energy efficient. Light Rail frequently uses more BTUs than a car ride (depends on ridership). Heavy Rail (conventional subway systems, which is ironically usually lighter than Light Rail) fairs a little better, but not substantially better than cars. Buses do okay, commuter rail is excellent. If you factored in the overhead of electrical distribution (which I understand is substantial) I expect mass transit would do even worse.

  To be fair, this doesn't keep anyone off mass transit. But it is fair to tax the environmentally detrimental aspects of cars. But -- excluding smog and other localized environmental factors -- cars aren't that bad compared to current alternatives.

• Maintenance and capital costs for these systems are insane. Only buses do okay. Trains have staggering capital costs. Significant maintenance on even a small section can require shutting down the entire line. Avoiding shutdowns requires slow and meticulous maintenance processes that are expensive, and discourages upgrades.

• Buses aren't that nice of an experience. Unpredictable schedules. Generally uncomfortable, and they don't really free up time -- you can listen to the radio in your car just as well as in the bus, and you can't do much more than that in a bus. Except when given special lanes buses always travel slower than cars.

There are incremental ways to improve things, without using a stick approach:

• Longer lights and other traffic designs for buses
• I think bus drivers should get a little more aggressive too; though when riding a bike buses doubly scare me
• Faster systems -- the El is old and slow; other systems are faster (still seldom as fast as cars, even in traffic)
• Decrease headways (why Chicago is putting huge amounts of money into extending the length of all the train stations instead of just running trains more often I cannot fathom)
• Lower fares dramatically -- they don't even cover operational costs anyway
• Free for children -- in addition to being family friendly (current transit systems are actively unfriendly to families) this will get people comfortable with the transit system at a young age
• Systems like I-GO provide an interesting complimentary car service; I'm sure it's heavily subsidized, but the result seems surprisingly affordable

Still, I'm not optimistic. The basic structure of mass transit is ineffective. It feels like the mainframe of transportation systems. Toss a bunch of people together and into a batched process, ignoring latency while optimizing for bandwidth and forcing people to adapt to the system instead of adapting the system to the people. The result is slow and uncomfortable. It also scales in only one way: it handles large number of people coming and going from the same location at the same time of day. So long as the number of people remains within capacity. Once you go over capacity the system starts to collapse. If people have a wider variety of start and end points, if they are traveling different distances, if they are traveling in different densities at a variety of times it doesn't work. As mass transit it never will work.

Cars scale pretty well. A highway lane of car traffic transports far more people than a single rail line. The door-to-door experience is well thought out. The result is an extremely ugly community (parking lots and traffic lights everywhere), but the transportation portion works. Though there are scaling problems as you move from free-flowing highway traffic to regulated local traffic, the service provided is complete. Traffic and parking is a problem these days, but car-based transit has improved continuously and dramatically in the last 100 years, in response to demand. We're seeing diminished returns and reaching the scaling limits, but we shouldn't discount what's been accomplished so far. Mass transit has only improved in very small ways. Cars-based transit is like packet-based networking; we know how superior that model is for internet traffic, and the benefits of that model are just as relevant for transit as for internet traffic.

All this is my long-winded way of getting to my real point, the thing I actually feel optimistic about: we need dramatically different public transit that is not mass transit. We need to revolutionize public transit. We can't put up with these horrible systems we have today. It isn't honest to push these systems as though they are something they are not. It isn't honest to encourage communities to invest many billions of dollars in systems that we know don't work.

People often say "we need a good transit system like in New York or Chicago". I don't know the NYC transit system well, but I can say without a doubt that Chicago mass transit sucks. The traffic sucks too, as does parking, so the mass transit is relatively less sucky than elsewhere. But it still sucks. Please don't use us as a model.

I've already gone on for too long, but I will say that I am thoroughly convinced that what we need is Personal Rapid Transit (PRT). PRT is an automated rail-based system with small cars (typically 1-3 passengers). Service is direct, and stops are made offline -- when one car stops it doesn't hold anyone else up. The systems are as small and light as possible. No 20-ton vehicles to carry around at most one ton of passengers. The systems won't be built in spoke-like systems with hubs as transfer points; instead they use a series of intersecting loops that provide coverage without centralization. Redundancy is built in. New systems can come online incrementally, and every addition expands the overall capacity. It looks a lot like the internet.

The result has the potential to provide better service than cars for most cases (you still can't go camping via PRT). The capital costs are lower than any other rail-based transit, and compare well against roads. Service is provided faster and more comfortably than a bus. Because the system is made as light as possible it is feasible to have lots of stations, giving good coverage. Because of the ease of expansion and adding connections, it can work well with other kinds of transit, and adapt to the community.

The technology is not mature, but this is a benefit. Traditional mass transit is mature, and thus we can't expect them to get substantially better anytime soon (automobiles are also a very mature technology, and we're seeing only very modest advances.)

We know how traditional transit works, and we know it works poorly. With PRT we have a system with future potential. Despite the fact that PRT is an idea that has languished for years, it is an idea that is so cool I can't help but feel excited just thinking about the positive effects it could have on a community. And the crazy thing is that it is not even very high tech, and even the most conservative claims of its potential are revolutionary.

If you are interested, a good place to start reading about PRT is the Innovative Transportation Technologies quick links page, which has links to studies, advocacy, and criticism of PRT.