Rather than provide only my own recap of the highly insightful sessions at last week’s Smarter Transportation event in Washington, let me simply point you to the recap from Sean Barry, from Transportation For America, and give you direct access to all the videos of the sessions.
Barry points out two session highlights in particular on the T4America blog, the first from Dr. Leo Kroon of the Netherlands Railway and second from Gunnar Soderholm, of the Stockholm. We’ve talked about Stockholm quite a lot here on the blog, so I’ll focus Dr. Kroon’s comments:
Kroon described the importance of rail in his “tiny country,” whose 60 million people make it extremely dense. According to Kroon, rail market share between some Dutch cities reaches 50 percent, an amount that would be unheard of in the United States. And rather than force anyone onto the train, Kroon says the Netherlands Railways “seduces” them instead, through continued technological improvement that makes travel convenient and a commitment to reliability and affordability.
The concept of “seducing” travelers into transit is one we could do well to emulate elsewhere. Even here in New York City, where transit is quite effective and ridership is relatively high, I would hardly consider the riding the subway a seductive experience (though, it does have its own charm.
Cost and efficiency are critical pieces of creating a public transportation system that seduces ridership. But it’s beyond simple utility.
Think of premium brands: Apple, BMW, etc. They seduce you on a level above pure functionality. You pay more for the experience. I could find mp3 players far cheaper than the iPod with similar (sometimes better) functionality, yet I willingly pay more so I can have an iPod in my pocket.
What if we applied a similar approach to transit? I’m not naive about the realities we face, nor the challenges of this kind of approach. But surely there’s more we can do to entice transit ridership.
It is interesting to consider how this concept could be applied to the public transportation system in New York. I think the chief selling point of the subway is simply its affordability. There are times when mass transit is recommended even for people who normally drive to work, but that is because the roads would likely be far more unpleasant and inefficient on a gridlock alert or snowy day. Otherwise, New Yorkers generally find the subway to be far from tempting. I know people who would only consider taking a regular train and a taxi to get around the city; of course, they do not have very tight budget constraints.
Generally, New York subway stations are not very welcoming places. In contrast, the subway stations I've seen in Washington DC are far more user-friendly. As I recall, they had easy-to-find elevators and were comfortably air-conditioned. Of course, the system there works very differently; the riders have to check in and out because the fare depends on the distance travelled.
I do remember an advertising campaign for other trains, though, that did seem to attempt to seduce riders with the tag line that was sung during the commercials, "There's something about a train that's magic."
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Earlier today at the Intelligent Transportation Society of America's annual meeting in Houston, IBM CEO Sam Palmisano shared the stage with the US Secretary of Transportation, Ray LaHood, and delivered the day's keynote speech. We'll have more insights and feedback from the speech in the coming days, but I want to call out a few of the key points as they underscore some of the thinking here around a path forward for transportation in America by applying a level of systems thinking.
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