2010-12-16 » Once again on the train

Skytrain

It’s already been more than a week since my last post! That’s almost impossible to believe. “Time flies when you’re having fun” though, is something to which I can attest. I’ve been really enjoying the opportunity to dig into a pretty ambitious project at work for the past while, and that’s been taking up most of my time. Eventually I hope to be able to talk about the details of the project that I’m working on but since I’m going to be working on it again when I get home, for now I’ll just write another random post of thoughts that come to me on the train. So this post will be limited to what I can write up while on the train and then will get minimal editing after that. This way I can still post this week, but leave the time after I get home for getting back to work. Sorry in advance for mistakes.

One thing that obviously comes to mind while on the train is my commute on the train itself. I’ve written before about my dislike for cars in the past, but public transit also has its pros and cons. When taking transit my commute takes approximately an hour and a half each way. That’s only approximate because:

  • sometimes I just miss getting on the bus
  • sometimes the bus doesn’t show up
  • sometimes the bus gets stuck in traffic and takes a long time to get to the train
  • sometimes I miss the last bus home and have to walk 6 miles (3 miles if one other bus still comes that will take me half way) or take a cab
  • sometimes I just miss the connection getting off the train to the bus
  • sometimes the train breaks

When everything works perfectly it actually can be closer to about an hour and 20 minutes… But when multiple things fail it can take well over 2 hours.

This commute is pretty long but overall the portion spent on the train is the most comfortable (assuming I’m lucky enough to get a seat). I’d be ok with it if it were just the train I had to deal with. What I spend more time complaining about is the bus. Most of the issues listed above with the bus are a result of a few properties that are unique to the bus and aren’t an issue for the train:

  • the bus needs to deal with traffic and construction
  • the bus only comes every 15 minutes at peak times and goes down to hourly at non-peak times
  • the last bus on weekdays is ~21:20 and ~22:15 on weekends
  • there is only one bus that will drop me off within 3 miles of my house

Unfortunately I’m not really sure how reasonable it would be to change these. It seems like they could probably run buses later even if it was on an hourly frequency. That seems like a good idea anyway because it encourages people to take transit if they go out and may be returning impaired. If you ask me, having the last bus to an area be so early is just encouraging impaired driving. I don’t think running a few more buses a day on an hourly frequency would really cost the bus company that much and if they did so they may find that more people ride the bus during the day since they can actually rely on being able to get home. I don’t think however that they could probably justify running the bus more frequently until there are more riders. So that one’s kind of a catch-22.

So it seems like for now, I’ll probably just be stuck with crappy bus service.

It would, I think, be in translink’s interest to make the train a little more efficient though. One optimization that I think would make a lot of people’s commute shorter would be to apply different types of train like they do in Japan. In Japan many lines have local, semi-express, express, super-express and even more classes of train. They all run the same route it’s just that some have fewer stops. The idea here would be to have local trains that stop at each station and other trains that each stop only at main stations. That way you could get on the nearest local station and take it to the main station and switch there for an express or super-express train which wouldn’t stop much before getting you where you’re going. I’m guessing that the reason they don’t do that here has something to do with the fact that people here seem more easily confused. It probably also requires more switch points which I don’t think they have.

Anyway, at this point I’m just about at my train stop! So I better get off and see how close I make it to when my bus leaves. Wish me luck!