One pet peeve that gets to me is something that’s done on a lot of commuter railways and S-Bahns, the 10/20 minute schedule. The schedule looks like:
2:10
2:20
2:40
2:50
3:10
etc, when it should be like this:
2:10
2:25
2:40
2:55
3:10
This minimizes waiting and allows for frequent service every 15 minutes.
What are your pet peeves?
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Love having headways that are 30 minutes and the stops for two lines at a key transfer point are perfectly timed so that you’ll just miss it as you get off and be forced to wait for half an hour.
stay low because it’s easier to drive.
This is my hometown. Bus is supposed to come every 10, then 20, then 10 minutes. Really, they come once every 45 minutes to an hour due to traffic congestion and not enough busses. They operate from 7:00 AM to 8 PM, no service on Sundays.
Because of all this, you can’t rely on the bus for transportation, lest you want to show up to every stop an hour early so you don’t miss work. The only people who ride the bus are kids, people with suspended licenses, or people too elderly/disabled to drive. They only use the bus because they legally cannot drive. So now everyone says "Well I don’t use the bus, so why would I pay more taxes to support the bus? and funding gets cut, causing a negative feedback loop.
It was incredibly frustrating before getting my license to get around anywhere. And that was like 20 years ago or some shit, so bus prices are higher now than the $0.50 ~ $0.75 when I was in middle school/high school. I think it’s closer to $3 now to go one-way.
Minor nitpick: this is a positive feedback loop, as the response to the input produces conditions that lead to more of the same input
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Transit stops that are actively hostile to people wanting to use them. Removing shade/shelter/benches and generally making them unpleasant as possible. They always says it’s to “save money” or “improve safety” but it’s always clear it’s to prevent people who are homeless from using them for the smallest bit of comfort.
Recently they started renovating transit stops near me to remove any enclosed warm places (important when it regularly reaches 0°F or colder) where someone could wait, and it’s not unusual to have 15 minute+ waits.
Two hour beaks in schedules. It sucks if your teacher out of nowhwhere decides to run class for an extra 15 minutes.
Frequent lack of TOD in America. Building new transit should be an opportunity to build whole new dense neighborhoods, and instead we make park and rides.
Yeah where I live every train station is a huddle of towers. I don’t necessarily love towers but I think this is a good way to build them if we’re going to have them.
It’s supposed to be some kind of olive branch to suburbanites but they largely fucking hate transit anyway. What gets me is building rail parallel to an interstate so a huge amount of possible TOD space is taken up by the worst civil infrastructure ever built.
In USA, there isnt consistent funding to build new lines. This leads to great inneficiency and more cost overruns when a new workforce needs to be built from the bottom up and properly trained to complete one project, and is then disbanded.
In SD, we recently (well, its been like 2 years now) finished a long awaited extension of one of our 3 light rail lines. But once it was complete, the contractors involved disbanded because we can only build one line every 30 years i guess. There is talk of the next line, but it probably wont break ground until 2040 or later. Land wont get cheaper, wages wont get lower, and now the entire apparatus of contractors to build it will have to be built back up.
If we could preemptively fund and plan multiple extensions and new lines to be built consecutively, according to a comprehensive plan, things would be done much faster and cheaper. The way it typically is in the USA though is just comrpomosed piecemeal additions every decade or two, that will never add up to a comprehensive transit system
This is part of the reason why China is able to keep costs so low, they keep the construction workers they have and send them to work on another subway line.
This is why China has or will very soon have next gen HSR across their whole country, and CA, the 6th biggest economy in the world, will finish a single HSR line by 2040 at best, on older technology then what China will have widespread.
Neoliberalism is incompatible with public transit
Shutting down every night for maintenance.
Like I’m not saying it shouldn’t be done, I’m sure it’s important to regularly maintain tracks and cars but dang couldn’t it be open a little later to allow people to take the train home from the club
If your transit system shuts down before the bars close you have a city that loves drunk driving
The two payment options being either cash (with some absurd non-whole dollar amount fare and no change given) or having to download a specific app for the specific transit agency and having to make an account etc. to buy a ticket.
Just support tap-to-pay.
I also dislike schedules that don’t indicate or include timed transfers. If I wanted to travel car-free to my local ski mountain, it’s possible, but it includes two transfers to buses that are scheduled within minutes of each other, but they’re not timed transfers. One will not wait for the other if it’s late. And the frequency on those buses is hourly at best.
I know a few places that have tap-to-pay and automatically give you the 1 day all you can ride pass once you’ve spent that much. There’s not really a better system unless the transit is totally free. No need to fuck around with apps or even transit cards.
It is the ideal (excluding free). Pay-as-you-go capping with tap-to-pay.
Adding to this, I hate transit stations that don’t have ticket machines. The BRT station near me has an indoor waiting area, wifi, an arrivals board, but no ticket machines. Gotta go to some random convenience store almost a kilometre away to reload your card instead. Why do they do this.
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Buses can be great. My guess is that you are dealing with buses that are either horrendously underfunded (low frequency, poor quality seats, stuck in traffic constantly), or are running transit services that should have been a subway many years ago. Buses can play a great role (especially trolleybuses) in cities that can’t build or shouldn’t build metro everywhere. High quality buses running every 5-10 minutes to every station can turn a single metro line into a comprehensive transit network.
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No regional trains for most of the night. I should be able to get home from the big city between the hours of 22 and 6
Specific pet peeve of mine for the transit in my city is building a Bus Rapid Transit line right along the path of an already existing network of rail lines which are under-utilized by the rail company, at a cost comparable to building a whole new LRT line, through an area of the city which used to be empty marshland that was conveniently purchased and started development by a friend of the mayor when the BRT line did rather than along one of the actual main corridors of the city, to a part of a the city that was already the best serviced by existing transit rather than one of the parts that are impossible to navigate without a car, in a city where we get a huge amount of annual snowfall and have a ridiculous deficit of road maintenance already (BRT route being another road that has to be plowed and maintained vs trains where u kinda can just put a plow on the front), while you are constantly litigating with the transit driver union and refuse to pay even close to an acceptable wage while simultaneously complaining that pre-covid service cannot be restored due to lack of drivers, and then proceeding to mostly abandon or stall any of the other proposed transit expansion in the city for almost a decade.
Outside of that specific example it really bothers me when people stand directly in front of the doors of a subway or tram car waiting to get on. Not only is it stupid and illogical if you want to actually get on the train but everywhere has ample arrows and signs indicating where you should stand to wait to get on so as to allow other people off.
Oh my god, there are far too many to name and I’m always looking for someone to listen to my ranting about terrible transit. Sorry, but for asking this question you’re now going to get a very large wall of text.
1: A lack of signal priority. Countless hours of collective human time have been wasted in transit vehicles waiting at completely empty intersections for a red light to change because the traffic signal uses the state of the art technology called a timer.
2: Terrible right of way. Way too many transit agencies place their transit lines not based on where demand is highest or where transit will be most effective, but just where land is cheapest or where the transit agency already owns. The principal rapid transit line in my city runs along a river because the city already owned the land, but it means that literally half of the area surrounding the transit line is just completely useless because it’s water. Highway median transit is another example of this, which can often lead to…
3: Terrible land use surrounding stations. Almost without fail transit stations in North American cities are surrounded by parking lots, highway interchanges, or just straight up undeveloped land.
4: The North American light rail obsession. Nearly every single new or recently built rapid transit line in the US or Canada is done using trams, often running partially on the street, with absolutely no consideration for if this is the right transit solution for a given city. Link in Seattle is a good example. It’s absolutely absurd for a city the size of Seattle to have light rail. A city of 4 million people in any other developed nation would have a proper metro, but because Seattle is in America it gets a shitty light rail.
I may return to update this later but this was all I could write for now
Terrible right of way. Way too many transit agencies place their transit lines not based on where demand is highest or where transit will be most effective, but just where land is cheapest or where the transit agency already owns.
Looking at you Denver
Frequency and on time performance are the two biggest problems with Denver’s RTD, right of way is a distant third.
The unending ambiguity of how to pay at an unfamiliar transit system.
You don’t all have to use the same system but it’d be nice if your websites all actually said it somewhere easy to find. And said it at all.
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Massive train/metro station platforms with just a couple of benches and a small fraction of it covered. Most people have to wait in the rain / baking sun.
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Buses / trains not running at night.
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On-level pedestrian crossings of railroads with ridiculously loud “incoming train” bells
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A ton where I live but it’s all because of lack of funding and car centric infrastructure. My top would be how unsanitary it is when you’re forced to pile up with others in a really small space that shouldn’t have so many people inside.
In my area it’s that we only have buses and the maximum frequency is 30 minutes, which the system only achieves on a few lines M-F from 6-18:00. Otherwise it’s like a 1-2 hour frequency.
Oh, and we have a train station but there’s only 2 trains in the morning and 2 in the evening and they’re so slow and cost so much fucking money that there’s no point in ever taking them into the city. There’s legitimately no use case for them as a commuter train because they wouldn’t get you downtown early enough and leave too early to catch after work and a round trip is like $34. The only use is if you’re taking a long distance trip and even then it costs so much more than any other option while being 2x slower than driving and 6-7x slower than flying. Why, yes, it is Amtrak. How did you know?
