Why People Don’t Like Public Transport

The question of people wasting time on public transportation was raised quite often recently by my colleagues urbanists. Discussions of how to make public transport more popular attract a lot of public interest. These all inspired me to pay more attention to how public transport is organized, defined, and perceived by people.

Here are some observations I want to share.

First - how to define a goal of public transportation? Evidently, it is to take people from one place and bring them to another place with maximum efficiency. Whether we take an overcrowded metro (underground) train at a rush hour in St. Petersburg, Russia, a crowded and dirty bus in a poor neighborhood, or a comfortable European train, the organization of its inner space shares the same basic features, dictated by this definition of the goal. Lines of seats are organized in parallel rows, between them people can stand also in quite an orderly manner.

This organization of space defines strong rules of behavior: what people are supposed to do and not to do there. Specifically, they are supposed to sit or stand still, waiting patiently while they are delivered to the point of destination. They shouldn’t wonder or move around unless they do it with a purpose - to find a seat or make their way to exit.

People are like industrial goods there, stacked together in a public transportation vehicle to be delivered to the end point. Ideally, they would fall into anabiosis until they reach their destination:)

How people react to it? In my view, there are three different groups in this regard.

First of them I'd call “industrial-minded people”. They exist, at least here in Russia. These people internally agree with a picture of the world as a big machine controlled by “big people” and engineers and with their own place as small screws of this machine. For them, it's normal that their time is not valued when they are not at work. When they step into a public transport, they fall into a semi-unconscious state if not lucky enough to have an acquaintance near them to talk to. These people usually look quite dull and “low-class” and often become one of the mains reasons for “I hate public transportation” declarations of more successful ones.

The second group may be called “postindustrial individualists”. These are people who feel irritated about putting them into a condition of being stacked in a public vehicle like in a railroad container; so they prefer a private car. Despite its cost and all inconveniences of using it in a modern city.

The last group is “postindustrial social-minded people”. They don’t like public transport too much ever but use it because this is what good citizens should do. Some “individualists” also choose public transport as a result of a trade-off between wasting their time in traffic jams and public transport lack of privateness (this is a common way to describe this feeling of inconvenience though a more precise term would probably be “de-individualization”).

These two groups make efforts to try to accommodate the “lesser evil” of public transportation they choose to their needs: they read, use their laptops to do some work; but still are left with general perception that time spent for commuting is “wasted”. Here I oversimplify it a bit to make the model clearer - some people do choose public transport both for individualistic and social good reasons.

Bicycle is a separate story. It may be seen as a way out of this trap. As one of my colleagues put it: “public transportation sucks, car creates congestion and pollutes the air – so bicycle may become a solution for many”. But as everyday means of transportation bicycle is useful only for distances not longer than about 10km (e.g, see our research here). Otherwise it becomes more and more like “falling back” into pre-industruial era when even small distance trips took a lot of time to make.  Moreover, if you use your bike to commute every day by the same route to work and back home, this time starts feeling half-wasted anyway. The same is true for the car: you are still a piece of industrial goods delivered to your destination, but just a more luxury goods delivered in an individual package.

It looks like we’ve got a big discrepancy between mostly post-industrial world of nowadays with people sticking to post-industrial values of individual personality and preciousness of a person’s time – and old industrial understanding of public transportation. This understanding results in industrial-type space layout inside public transport vehicles that severely restricts possible ways of behavior and de-valuate people’s time. What can we do to it?

Let me share some thoughts that can possibly be useful (your comments are appreciated).

First of all, what if we look at it from this point – how people would use this time if they were not in public transport? If this time was not “wasted”, what it could be used for? Probably, different people would do different things; some of them would read (in a more comfortable place) or rest, some would prefer to work, or discuss important matters with their friends and colleagues, spend time with their children, or go out and meet other people.

So, we can question ourselves: why life should stop when people get on a public transportation? Can we possibly accommodate inner space so that different people could use their time doing different things they want to do while on the road? What if a bus or a streetcar had some multi-modal inner layout including semi-private spaces for people who want to read in peace, a space provoking social interaction, space fit for small companies or people with kids to talk and play? And if it was appropriate for people to move from one place to another if they want, during their trip?

It is challenging – and may even look a bit fantastic – taking into consideration the density of population in big cities and how many people need to commute daily inside these buses and streetcars (and density of population itself is a good thing because it provides for lesser usage of energy).

Public transportation time quality is also strongly influenced by external time and place conditions that seem to restrict possible ways of using this time. There is a certain moment of time we need to get off whatever we are busy with at this moment. And not all the people we’d like to communicate with will need to take the same transport at the same time as we do. But don’t we actually have some kind of these restrictions in other situations too? There is time to go to work, scheduled meeting and events, restrictions posed by the location of our work and home and those of our friends.

I myself feel a bit of uneasiness when I start seriously thinking of how to design this kind of public transportation vehicles inner layout. But why don’t we try?