Catbus

I have a confession to make: I think park’n’rides, or incentive parking as we call them in Montreal, are a bad idea.

Everybody seems to be asking for more and more incentive parking these days, and anyone questioning the driving component of our transit cocktail model may incur the anger of drivers and get painted as some sort of tofu-loving anti-car zealot. Well, I don’t like tofu, but I don’t like free park’n’rides either. Besides being bad for the city, they just don’t make economic sense.

Most people assume providing parking basically costs nothing for a transit agency. Plop a parking lot next to a train station, and you never have to think about it again. Just drive to the station and take the train.

Except, it turns out that parking is surprisingly expensive.

First, there is the one-time expense to buy the land and then to build the parking lot. Then, the parking lot requires a variety of operating expenses for things like maintenance (snow clearing, salting, cleaning, raod work…), security (lighting, cameras), and taxes, to name a few.

It’s not so easy to figure out what the exact cost is to provide free parking, broken down per user and per day. One good source is this 2016 study analyzing the total cost of providing parking, that is, land, construction and maintenance costs, in the US. The following graph shows the annualized costs for different types of parking spaces (note: land and construction costs are amortized over 20 years):

According to the study, surface parking lots typically costs around $1000 in the suburbs and $2000 in the city per year to provide. Those numbers were for 2007 and in US Dollars, so after adjusting for inflation (9 years, 15% total) and converting to CAD, that’s about 1500$-3000$ per year. Every year. For one single parking spot.

Another source, Calgary Transit estimated its 2011 parking costs to ~700$-1642$ per year (assuming 20 year amortization for a lot, and 40 year amortization for a parking structure).

Another survey of parking of American Transit agencies found the average operating cost for a total of 288,000 parking spots to be 1,100 USD per year, or about 1,425 CAD (see this spreadsheet). What’s interesting is that even though the transit agencies charge around 4.50$ per day on average for parking, on average they only recover 34% of the parking costs.

Now, consider that every commuter parking spot can pretty much be used by only one car every day. One person, who drives to the train in the morning and picks up the car after work in the evening. If we’re lucky, we may get up to 1.3 people per vehicle, which is the average occupancy rate of a car.

Moreover, in Montreal, the commuter rail parking lots of the AMT have an occupancy rate of 80%, but the unused 20% still has to be paid for.

Overall, your typical free parking costs around $7.20 to $14.40 per weekday to provide, subsidized by the transit agency or the city.

In terms of economic efficiency, this is quite a waste of money. Instead of having drivers go downtown and have them pay for their own parking, everybody has to pay for the drivers who park near a transit station, on top of having to subsidize the transit itself as well. If this is an ‘incentive’ that society provides to encourage transit use, we’re getting a pretty bad return on investment. Because the advantage of a few drivers being able to park near transit does not outweigh the money that we collectively spend to provide that parking.

If we look at cost per user, it is much more efficient to provide bicycle-parking in those same lots. It is possible to fit 15-20 bicycles in the space required for one parking spot in a parking lot. That’s because the lot is actually twice as big as the actual space required by a car: you need one car-area to put the car, and the equivalent of another car-area for the car to drive to the parking spot.

Park’n’Ride at Terminus Chevrier, only about half the space is used by the parking spots

And walking to the station is even more economically efficient – it’s free.

Comparing with Feeder Buses

Of course it’s not realistic for everybody to just cycle to transit stations, and many don’t live within walking distance. So how else can we bring people to the trains?

The most popular alternative is to provide feeder buses, which collect passengers and bring them to the bus station. And despite requiring drivers and equipment, a feeder bus may actually be cheaper than parking!

Unfortunately, transit agencies don’t generally provide enough information that allows estimating how much it costs to provider feeder buses per person, so we can only infer from available numbers.

In 2014, Translink, Vancouver’s Transit Agency, published a report which contains a table of costs for operating transit per passenger-kilometer.

The chart shows blended operating costs, which is the overall operating cost for bus, metro, and rail combined, for several Canadian cities. We see from the graph that operating cost is lower in Calgary and higher in Ottawa and Edmonton. The difference is consistent with the transit model in every city: Calgary has an efficient light rail system, which is cheaper to operate than buses, because the vehicles are much larger, and most of their buses feed into the light rail. On the other hand, Edmonton and Ottawa have much smaller rail systems, and have to rely on the more expensive-to-operate buses.

According to this chart, Montreal’s transit operating cost was a little over $0.30 per passenger kilometre in 2013. Since this number does not take into account capital costs, we can adjust it up by about 20% (capital costs for buses is about 20% of operating costs) and round it up to $0.40 to account for the blending of different modes.

This means that bringing a person to a train station 2km away by bus costs about $1.60 per day (2 trips). Even if the person lives 6km away, this would only cost $4.80, which is still much less than providing parking, which costs $7 or more!

Note on distance: on the island of Montreal, only few people are farther than 6km away from a rail station, Commuter rail included (which is where most of the parking is). Even in the South Shore (Brossard and Longueuil), most are within 4km of the major transit terminals (Terminus Longueuil, Terminus Panama, Terminus Chevrier) and the commuter rail stations.

Overall we get the following cost estimates:

Alternative Use of the Space used for Parking

If you get more people to take buses from their homes, walk, or maybe even take a bicycle, you free up the land right next to the station. So instead of wasting valuable transit-adjacent land on parking the land can now be developed, to build apartment, commercial or office buildings and generate property taxes for the city, which in turn can be used to improve feeder buses. (The cities already pay most of the subsidies to operate transit).

People will want to live there, because they can quickly get downtown and businesses would want to locate there, because many people pass through the area. Transit stations would become the centers of little transit towns.

But also, you suddenly have people who don’t need to rely on either parking or feeder buses to get to the transit station – because they’re already right next to the station. Anybody who doesn’t need a bus or a parking spot to get to transit will be less expensive for the transit system as a whole.

Transit systems are based on cross-subsidies: some people pay more, so that others pay less. Short trip commuters subsidize those who go from one end of the line to the other. Metro users subsidize bus-&-metro users. The person who takes one ride pays the same as the person who uses a transfer.

And free incentive parking users should realize that they are benefitting from a premium service provided below cost – and provided to those who are more likely to be better off. In effect, those walking, cycling and even those taking buses are subsidizing the car owners who receive free parking.

When people complain about the lack incentive parking, remember that free parking is uneconomical. Money was invested in parking, when it could have been invested in service.

Space was allocated to parking, when it could have been developed to bring in tax revenue.

And maybe we should realize that parking at rail stations should not be free.

The above image that I came across on this tumblr, got me intruiged. The image comes with this short text:

Intermodal transportation involves using two or more forms of transportation in a journey. Bicycles can often increase ridership of public transit. However, limited storage space onboard hinders the promotion of intermodal commutes. This innovative solution from Stuttgart, Germany adds desperately needed bicycle accommodation on this light rail line.

Sure this is looks like an interesting solution, a bike rack on the move. Bicycles can help bridge the last mile (or two), between the transit stop and the home, and make commutes much more pleasant that way. But it immediately raises some questions. If people can get on and off with their bicycles, doesn’t that increase the dwell time and slow down the train a lot? If the vehicle operators observes the bike rack in front of them, what happens when the train goes the other way? This appears to be a terminus, and there’s no loop in sight. Also, doesn’t the rack appear a bit small, how useful could it be?

To answer these questions, one has to look at the actual transit line in question. The line in the picture is actually the “Zahnradbahn Stuttgart” (Stuttgart Rack Railway, the German Wikipedia article is much more informative). A rack railway, or cog railway, is a railway that uses a toothed rail, which can be seen in the picture running between the rails, to be able to climb steep grades. Normal rails can only be operated at grades up to 7~10% for trams, and up to around 4% for electrified main lines. This line has a maximum grade of 17.8%.

The Stuttgart Rack Railway is one of only four cog railways still operating in Germany, and the only one that is integrated into a transit system (i.e. not a tourist line). It started operating in 1884, and it’s really short. Along its 2.2km length there are 9 stations, it’s single track except for a passing station in the center, service is provided every 15 minutes. In its operation it is remarkably similar to the Ottawa O-train, a short single track line with a passing station in the center, and two trains shuttling back and forth every 15 minutes – except it has about the quarter of the length.

Given the short length of the line, it would seem like a line with not a lot of utility. Why wait fifteen minutes, if you can just walk the whole length of the line in that time? And it could be biked even faster! But the key to its utility is that it is a cog railway — along its short length, it climbs 200m in altitude. That’s quite a schlepp, and if you add a bicycle to the mix, the utility of the bike rack reveals itself – the bike rack is only used in the uphill direction, and only from terminus to terminus. This way there are no delays due to bikes when the train is running, and the driver can always observe all the bikes, and make sure none are falling off etc.

The Stuttgart Cog Railway is thus not a system that solve the last mile problem – it’s barely more than a mile long. Instead, it is more like an urban elevator and solves the problem that walking and riding in hilly areas can be a pain.

Contrails is a project to turn bicycles into a paint brush. The goal is to create a device that attaches to a bike and leaves a washable chalk like trail – a bike contrail.

The Brooklyn, New York based organization behind the idea recently completed a successful kickstarter, raising ten thousand dollars. This will allow them to mass produce 2000 devices for relatively cheap, giving half of them away to non-profits.

You may call it public collective art, or just a nuisance. I think it’s a pretty neat idea. Like ants marking their paths with pheromones, it will show where bicyclists go. I am not sure whether it can help increase safety per se, as the group claims, but it will surely increase the visibility of bicycling. Which could help to make people more aware of this mode of transportation and encourage more cycling.
Plus, it looks like a fun toy to use.

images and video via bike contrail