Quote:
Originally Posted by ByeByeBaby
Yes, a trip is defined as the travel between two stops. You are correct. Perhaps I should have been clearer that I was using trips as my metric, not tours, or better yet, PKT. The point stands. Should we not have a transit system that can serve people who stop off at the bank on the way home from work? (Note that if they make both the trip to the bank and the trip home by transit, they would both count as transit trips.) Should we not aspire to have a transit system that can serve people for some of the errands they run, even if it is as multiple chained trips as part of a single tour?
Sure, commuting is more than 20% of my trips. What percentage do you suppose it is of the trips made by a stay-at-home parent, or a retired senior, or a student? Pretty close to 0%. Not all Calgarians are workers; about 61% work, which is staggeringly high for North America. But that still leaves 39% of the population. I think Calgary Transit should try to meet their needs as well.
I just don't see the point in sitting back and saying "we were able to pick 40% of the low hanging fruit; these other guys only picked 30%; we're awesome".
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I agree, we need to work more on transit for non-work trips. But to do this, oddly, we have to focus on work trips. Because many non-work trips are chained with work trips, connecting people to work helps achieve this.
Let me put it this way- we can group most activities into three broad categories based on the characteristics of the activity:
Work (or school) trips: These trips are necessary (you need them to survive), regular (happens at the same time each day), frequent (happens often), time constrained (you usually can't radically change your work hours), location constrained (you can't easily change job locations), duration constrained (you can't change how long you work each day), participant constrained (only one family member can go to work at your job- i.e. your teenage child can't fill in for you at work)
Non-work essential trips- These trips are necessary, but vary in every other aspect. Grocery shopping, going to the bank and doctor's visits would fit into this category. Doctor's visits are regular, but very infrequent for most, but have a set time and location (making transit almost impossible to serve them- Carsharing participants I interviewed in Forest Lawn used carshares a lot for doctor's visits).
Non-work non-essential trips- Essentially "lesiure" trips- going out to eat, going to the mall for non-essential goods, etc. These trips are not necessary, and typically have a lot of irregularity in their locations, times and durations.
So what you have is a single activity that is fairly frequent, fairly regular and fairly constrained in terms of time and duration, which is the commute. So, the household travel pattern is basically then built around this trip. People will adjust their grocery shopping, other errands, leisure trips, etc around this. Many households will chain minor errands with the commute trip and then do major errands on weekends. You will notice those who take transit end up doing more errands on weekends because stopping to pick up something from the grocery store on the train is just that much harder (but not impossible). As well for transit users, will find that for non-essential trips, the activity location, frequency and time are heavily influenced by transit availability.
What you find with households without a dominant trip (i.e. Seniors) is that everything becomes incredibly easy to plan around. You can grocery shop whenever you want, so working around a bus that comes every 45 minutes is no problem. Doing so when you have only a few hours at night after work to do so is an entirely different matter altogether.
My beef with transportation engineers is that they don't talk about any of the things I just mentioned above, which is why I think the whole field is pretty much pseudo-science.
So yeah, I did my Masters Thesis on this, so I get carried away.
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