Thread by @garius

Not surprised by this.

TfL did a whoooooooole bunch of research on this a while back.

Short version: people have a hierarchy of transport needs.

The curve of price as an incentive drops off MASSIVELY once you hit "affordable". Then the big wins are frequency/cleanliness/safety

https://twitter.com/DavidZipper/status/1374700762731794434

The sweet-spot is thus as cheap as you can make it to keep frequency, cleanliness and investments in stations high.

Not that they can do any of that of course, because COVID and government grandstanding.

The whole:

"Make it free. They will come" has always been just a different flavour of wishful thinking as "privatisation will make transport more efficient."

Both have never reflected actual reality. Just someone's vision of how they THINK reality should behave.

The real answer is that what works will vary by city and culture.

Frequency really is king though. It's the old Howard Smith, London Overground plan: If you make it "turn up and go" people stop seeing trains as offering less freedom as cars for near-equivalent journeys.

As long as they have to think about a timetable (or think they do) then a train journey is something you plan, while the car is just something you get into and drive.

Get under 13min gaps was his baseline. Ideally less. You want single figures on the platform countdown clock.

And you damn well need countdown clocks. If people have to look at a big board with actual train times on it, you're fucked.

Again, it's then a planned journey. A list of times they think they have to remember. Not a spur of the moment decision.

Basically, if you read between the lines on ALL the research for this, then it ALWAYS boils back to people being:

1) utterly fucking awful at correctly calculating resource/time cost
2) sunk cost investment in cars
3) perception of luxury/making it = car

You essentially have to accept that you just CAN'T engineer significant modal shift among 'bedded in' transport users. They've invested in their status quo and (mostly) like it. You might as well try and get them to switch banks. Ain't gonna happen.

What you CAN do though is lock in:

1) New groups arriving in a local area (which includes those incentivised by the transport access it now offers)
2) Lock in the KIDS of the people who are happy with their cars.

Generational/immigrational shift, basically.

So what you have to do is optimise the attractiveness of your public transport offering around THAT, and then watch for 'act of god' moments that force the previously locked in car users to have to temporarily shift to public transport instead.

Then you encourage them to stay.

This is also why COVID fallout will hit passenger growth numbers in the short term (I suspect) but not the long term in London.

It's going to push a few existing users into drifting into the 'sunk cost' car group now, combined with more long term home working.

The counters from this, from TfL will need to be:

1) Making absolutely fucking SURE kids still get free travel. You can't lose the teens.
2) Part-time travelcards. Not just PAYG. You need a specific perceived-value offering for those still trekking to Canary Wharf thrice a week.

Yeah. It's best to think of the ZIP 16+ as the equivalent of banks offering students an account with a free overdraft that scales each academic year.

Both are about customer lock in, during the age when humans are most amenable to being locked in.

https://twitter.com/robertwoolley/status/1374769015986479106

Exactly! Both know modal transport shift is about social engineering, as much as physical engineering.

Buses have a weird inverse problem: People see buses as impermanent. Even if they're more frequent than rail. Tracks flip a permanence switch in brains.

https://twitter.com/cmajrail/status/1374766751884398597

As I've mentioned before, this is why Uber's FIRST big fuck up was exploding road usage in London.

In doing so they decreased reliability on the bus network (through lower road speeds) at the EXACT time TfL were trying to persuade people to shift ONTO buses.

It's also why, weirdly, if you're trying to build a transport network in a city or town FROM SCRATCH (hello America) you're weirdly better off trying for light rail at lower frequency and coverage than buses FIRST.

That triggers the brain switch on public transport. Buses don't.

Because you have to remember that for your first line, your goal is to get people to THINK about things as 'lines'. As permanent things they can rely on for 40 years.

Not a vehicle. They own vehicles. They trade them in every 5 years. They think your bus will disappear then too.

Now that feels counter-intuitive and it also then feels like you're not maximising your investment or ability to benefit every resident or socio-economic group.

But you have to find the balance between that, and in beginning a cultural shift that makes public transport permanent

Christ. This is what happens after a year of lockdown with no @lonrec monthly drinks. Suddenly I start explaining this stuff to American transport campaigners for free, rather than them having to visit London and bribe me with beer.

Bloody pandemic. 😆