Calgary’s transit use suggests high ridership is possible even in sprawling cities

[Pavlov]

Originally Posted by Crawford

Which North American city has higher downtown employment share? Can you name one?

Certainly no U.S. metro has higher downtown employment share.

Certainly no major Canadian metro (Toronto, Montreal, Vancouver, Edmonton, Ottawa) either.

[hipster duck]

We can dissect policies, employment share, parking costs, gas prices and other socioeconomic characteristics until the cows come home, but, at the end of the day, Canada just has more of a public transit "culture". It's not something you can replicate in the US very easily.

There are Canadian cities that are just as dispersed and easy to get around in by car as their American neighbors, and with bus service just as infrequent and poorly conceived, and Canadians will still dutifully wait in the freezing cold for their bus to come. I mean, why would a city like Brantford, ON - with the saddest-looking downtown, free unlimited parking, and only 9 bus lines that run every 30 minutes - have somewhere in the neighborhood of 140,000 riders a month, while equivalently-sized (or larger) Saginaw, MI - with almost exactly the same bus service, employment characteristics, weather, and a decidedly more vibrant downtown - only have 80,000?

[Qubert]

/\ sure, there's some of that. However, this article underscores what I was trying to get at in the Job Sprawl thread. Having the majority of professional jobs be located downtown boost transit usage, even if residential areas remain suburban in nature.

[Policy Wonk]

Calgary's "transit culture" (and I'm sure my buddy will be along shortly to assail me for this with either a comparison to London or a random city in Eastern Europe.) is that when someone in Calgary sees a middle aged white guy in a suit sitting at a bus stop their first thought isn't "DUI", there is no first thought at all.

Particularly where the C-Train is concerned it had a nice incubation period in the 1980's where it wasn't too packed, the trains were clean, there was still zero-tolerance for vagrants and parking at an outlying station wasn't usually too difficult. It took it's place comfortably in corporate Calgary's identity. There was nothing really negative to say about it or for a lot of people a good reason not to use it.

The problem going forward where downtown and centralization is concerned is one of looming gridlock and spiraling rents. The SELRT is a minimum of twenty years away. Downtown LRT tunnels to fix the at-grade bottlenecks even probably even further out and don't presently even register as a priority.

The current boom has in addition to spiraling rents has also seen older B and C buildings felled to make way for new AAA development. Until fairly recently there was always good, not great but affordable office space to be had in downtown Calgary, this is changing and it isn't difficult to imagine a lot of back-office type functions being forced from the core.

[memph]

Originally Posted by Crawford

Which North American city has higher downtown employment share? Can you name one?

Certainly no U.S. metro has higher downtown employment share.

Yeah I suspect that's higher than any American city. What are the numbers like for some of the bigger American cities?

I think for Toronto it's about 15-20%, Ottawa is also similar.

Montreal is around 15%.

Vancouver is around 10-15%.

But yeah, it makes a huge difference. If you have 20% of people working downtown (almost never requires transfers between trains in most NA transit systems), as opposed to 4%, that means the likelihood of someone living near the train line taking the train to work is basically 5x higher since most NA cities have relatively little employment (compared to downtown) near other parts of their rail networks.

Combine this with relatively dense suburban development and you get some pretty frequent service too, further boosting ridership. Plus the C-train is pretty fast, although it's light rail, the stops aren't too close and it mostly runs on a grade separated ROW (or at least has priority at intersections).

[DarthMalgus]

Originally Posted by electricron

Calgary economic activity C$116 billion (2014)
Dallas-Ft.Worth metro economic activity $440 billion (2014)

Population (metro)
Calgary(1950) 132,000
Dallas(1950) 855,000

Calgary(1980) 568,000 (+430% from '50)
Dallas(1980) 2,713,000 (+317% from '50)

Calgary(2010) 1,004,000 (+176% from '80)
Dallas(2010) 5,685,000 (+209% from '80)

Looks like sprawl has major economic advantages. Whenever government gets in the way of growth, less economic growth happens.

I would guess that some of Dallas' population "increase" from 1980-2010 consisted of adding counties to its metro area, as opposed to actual population growth. Also, Calgary's metro population is more like 1.4 million, not 1.0 million (and even back in 2010 would have been at least 1.2). Regardless, I hope we can agree that both cities are growing very quickly, and it's splitting hairs to suggest that one of these cities is very successful and the other is not.

But if we use your population numbers and break them down to GDP per capita, we get Calgary at $115,000 per capita; Dallas at $77,396. So while my political leanings swing conservative/libertarian (at least by Canadian standards), I would respectfully suggest that Calgary's numbers show that minimal, targeted government intervention that still allows people to prosper, does not restrict economic growth.

[GreaterMontréal]

There are more than 300k jobs in downtown Montréal, + more than 200k additional people who attend the downtown core each day : residents, students or tourists.

More than 500 000 people pass through downtown Montréal every day. that's about 25% of the island's population.

[Calgarian]

Originally Posted by GreaterMontréal

There are more than 300k jobs in downtown Montréal, + more than 200k additional people who attend the downtown core each day : residents, students or tourists.

More than 500 000 people pass through downtown Montréal every day. that's about 25% of the island's population.

The same thing happens here, so lets keep it apples to apples.

[Surrealplaces]

I think he meant in terms of 'per capita' Here's what I could find from Statscan from 2007, so it's out of date and it's only for labor force usage, but both cities look pretty close. Both cities have opened up new rail lines since then also so the numbers could be a fair bit different.

Originally Posted by logan5

Not sure where you got your numbers from, but the figures I have put Metro Vancouver transit ridership 55% higher than Calgary. Vancouverites don't look down on Calgary.



http://www.calgary.ca/Transportation/TP/Documents/forecasting/Changing%20Travel%20Behaviour%20in%20the%20Calgary%20Region_v1_forWeb_2013-06-04.pdf


http://buzzer.translink.ca/2012/10/more-trips-in-metro-vancouver-and-more-bike-and-take-transit-initial-findings-from-our-2011-trip-diary-survey/

[1overcosc]

The original article didn't mention at all the national cultural differences between Canada and the USA which are a huge part of the reason why Canadian cities have higher transit ridership than American ones.

The suburban car-centric mindset of 'everybody should drive, those who take the bus are those who are forced to', while it exists in both countries, is way more common in the States. The racial issues in the US that deter the white majority from using transit are not a thing in Canada, really. Buses don't have a stigma in Canada the way they do in America. You see many middle-class middle-aged white people taking buses in Canada, and nobody judges them for it or thinks its weird.

Canada's relative lack of urban freeway infrastructure compared to the US, which was mentioned in the article, is also rooted to an extent in national culture differences. In the US, many freeways into downtowns were built by bulldozing black neighbourhoods, because of this mindset of "ah well, they're just inner city blacks, who gives a s**t about them, we can tear down their houses to build a freeway". In Canada, the fierce racial and class divisions that seperate urban and suburban areas are much less intense and in some ways not really existent at all. The urban freeways Canada does have were built on old railroads and stuff, because it just wasn't possible in Canada to tear down inner city areas for freeways the way it was in the US.

[nname]

Originally Posted by Surrealplaces

I think he meant in terms of 'per capita' Here's what I could find from Statscan from 2007, so it's out of date and it's only for labor force usage, but both cities look pretty close. Both cities have opened up new rail lines since then also so the numbers could be a fair bit different.

And here is the 2011 version of the same stat:



Source: StatsCan

[lrt's friend]

Originally Posted by 1overcosc

The original article didn't mention at all the national cultural differences between Canada and the USA which are a huge part of the reason why Canadian cities have higher transit ridership than American ones.

The suburban car-centric mindset of 'everybody should drive, those who take the bus are those who are forced to', while it exists in both countries, is way more common in the States. The racial issues in the US that deter the white majority from using transit are not a thing in Canada, really. Buses don't have a stigma in Canada the way they do in America. You see many middle-class middle-aged white people taking buses in Canada, and nobody judges them for it or thinks its weird.

Canada's relative lack of urban freeway infrastructure compared to the US, which was mentioned in the article, is also rooted to an extent in national culture differences. In the US, many freeways into downtowns were built by bulldozing black neighbourhoods, because of this mindset of "ah well, they're just inner city blacks, who gives a s**t about them, we can tear down their houses to build a freeway". In Canada, the fierce racial and class divisions that seperate urban and suburban areas are much less intense and in some ways not really existent at all. The urban freeways Canada does have were built on old railroads and stuff, because it just wasn't possible in Canada to tear down inner city areas for freeways the way it was in the US.

I think these points are very valid.

The white flight of the 60s and 70s also helped decimate transit usage in the US. Basically, the way central cities got depopulated as a result. If you look back, until around 1950, Canada and the US were likely very similar in transit ridership. But then the racial issues caused a migration and the US federal government funded urban freeways that didn't happen in Canada to the same degree. The US did a lot more urban experimentation including building urban renewal projects that ended up causing urban rot. Canada, with a little less wealth, to entertain these massive urban projects, watched them turn out not so well and decided to be more moderate in building roads and doing urban renewal. The end result was that Canadian cities didn't get hollowed out to the degree that American cities did and this prevented Canadian transit systems from being decimated during those critical years between the 60s to the 80s.

[Doady]

The article mentions that Calgary's ridership is not much different compared to other suburban cities in Canada. Here some examples:

Scarborough 33.1%
Longueuil 22.8%
Calgary 17.2%
Laval 16.1%
Mississauga 15.9%

These are for transit commute to work for 2011.

I think this is not very applicable to US. It is just a different culture.

Did fast-growing Canadian cities really "prioritize transit use"? No quite the opposite. But transit use happened anyway.

I think if anything the US has tried harder to increase transit use than Canada. Look at all the smart growth in Portland. US transit system get a lot more funding than Canadian systems too.