After reading “Autos, Transit, and the Sprawl of Los Angeles” by Martin Wachs, I keep thinking about the vicious circle faced by the city’s transit service in its early stage. In the vicious circle, the problem of congestion happened first on LA streets, as the rapid growth in automobile ownership is much faster than the rate of street widening and opening. The congestion “slowed transit service, increased operating costs, and caused even larger numbers of commuters to abandon the trolleys in favor of auto commuting” (Wach, 1984). This effect made the problem of congestion even worse and finally formed a vicious cycle. On the modern stage of transit development in LA, improvements have been made. However, whether it is Railroads and trams, cars and highways, it is aimed at improving mobility while ignoring accessibility and proximity, that led to the rapid suburbanization and multi-centralization of the city, which made it harder for LA transit to attract passengers and provide efficient services like New York, Chicago, cities dominated by single centers.
In my opinion, improving the accessibility and proximity of transit stations is the key to reviving the city’s transit service. The introduction of bike availability at transit stations will promote people’s willingness to use transit services more and serve as a last-mile solution for passengers. Robert Cervero, a researcher from UC Berkeley, once did a study in 2013, researching how bike facilities at public transit hubs affect ridership. In his article, “Bike-and-Ride: Build It and They Will Come”, Cervero concluded that bicycle infrastructure improvements at BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit) rail stations could increase the use of both bicycles and rail ridership. Cervero’s study was conducted in San Francisco Bay Area transit service, but I think LA could take a similar approach to improve the city’s transit ridership.
In fact, there has been an existing bike-and-ride program in LA called “Metro Bike Share” since 2016. Metro Bike Share is a partnership between Metro and the City of Los Angeles. The program aims to provide convenient bike access to the public at transit stations including rail, bus, and BRT stops. It only costs $1.75 for a 30 minutes ride and the monthly pass costs $17/month. Annual passes are also available at $150 per year. As of October 2021, the program has sold 211,808 passes and more than 1.3 million trips were made. Here is a map of Metro Bike’s service area and bike path. (https://media.metro.net/dcr/bikemap/metro_bikemap.html)
1. Wachs, M. “Autos, Transit, and the Sprawl of Los Angeles: The 1920s.” Journal of the American Planning Association 50, no. 3 (1984): 297-310.
2. Cervero, Robert, et al. 2013. Bike-and-Ride: Build It and They Will Come. Journal of Public Transportation, 16 (4): 83-105.
3. Los Angeles Metro Bike Share. Web. October 2021. https://bikeshare.metro.net/
Hi, Yingjia, thank you for your interesting blog post! I agree with your opinion that the key to reviving a city's transit service is improving the accessibility and proximity of transit stations. I am also a big fan of Robert Cervero's research, as he has been a frontrunner for decades in the research field of transportation planning. From reading the literature, in my opinion I find it inefficient, in terms of time and financial costs, to have transit stops less than a quarter-mile of each other. I understand that this is an equity concern, but I think at a distance less than a quarter-mile of each other, transit stops induce slower travel times, due to more stops and boardings and alightings, and therefore transit loses some of its advantage in competing with single-occupancy vehicles for ridership and right-of-way priority. Plus, transit stops spaced out between a quarter-mile to a third of a mile from each other could induce personal and bikeshare cycling to and from transit stops. And, I think this could induce more bikeshare cycling than personal cycling, because there would not be a need to board a bikeshare bicycle, and bikeshare could be more appealing the more adjacent it is to transit stops.
ReplyDeleteThanks for the post, I like your suggestion of introducing bike share as a first- or last-mile addition to transit trips. I wish there were more concrete findings than "bicycle infrastructure improvements at BART rail stations could increase the use of both bicycles and rail." While I am hopeful, it is difficult to imagine bike sharing attracting new riders to rail. I feel confident that it would get existing rail users to bike more, though. To better incentivize this, Metro Bike Share should include a 30-minute bike trip in the cost of a metro ticket instead of requiring additional payment.
ReplyDeleteI'm a big fan of bike-and-ride! I end up bringing my bike on the MAX pretty often though I make plenty of trips where I'd be just as happy storing my bike at the station or using bike share if those were secure and reliable options. I feel like BART and biking go hand-in-hand in a lot of ways. The newer BART trains ("Fleet of the Future" they're calling them) have pretty good bike accommodations. Also the lack of a bike lane on the San Francisco side of the Bay Bridge makes BART one of the easiest ways to bring a bike across the Bay if you're coming from Oakland or Berkeley.
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