So, I live in Vancouver, Canada, we have a pretty famous automated metro system called the Skytrain. I don’t drive and do not own a car, so I use public transit for absolutely everything. And after the automated train I’m on unexpectedly stopped at a station for an extra five minutes longer, causing me to miss my connecting bus by two minutes, and in turn missing my second connection, I’m standing in a deserted transit exchange in the dead of night while needing to pee really bad (there are no public bathrooms anywhere in the Vancouver transit network) as I type this for all of you, expecting to be home by at the earliest 1:30 AM instead of right now, at 12:30 AM. Because of a five minute delay. Yeah.

Ignoring the question of how the hell does a completely automated train system get delayed at night, when every train is less than a quarter full and barely anyone gets on or off, I’m left pondering what makes a good public transit system that is capable of supporting the daily schedules of everyone in the city, and actually stands to entice people to forgo cars for transit. And in my opinion, contrary to popular belief and transit company marketing, the most important part is punctuality, not raw speed, or even service frequency.

The thing about public transit is that only a minority of trips require no transfers. For all the other times, you’ll need to make at least one connection, with the average being potentially two or three depending on the exact system. And this is when the lack of punctuality can really screw you over, with severity increasing exponentially the more connections you have. If your transit system is a little slow, that’s okay because people can easily plan for it. If your transit system isn’t as frequent as you’d like, you can plan for that too, and an expected wait is always better than an unexpected wait. The key is planning. Planning is easy nowadays, with tons of apps that do an excellent job of laying out the best route for you, complete with telling you the expected time you should leave, when you’ll arrive, and how long a wait at each connection. Even with a not so fast and not so frequent transit syatem, just tell the app when you need to be at your destination, and it will still be serviceable. There are even excellent open source apps for this if you hate Google and co, like I do.

But, if there’s a delay, even by a few minutes on an hour long trip, it can and will throw a monkey wrench into this whole thing. If you miss one connection, you will miss every other one afteraward, and could end up very late even in a fast and frequent transit system. That’s when you potentially start losing opportunities, like missing a big job interview, date, etc, and you can bet that the one time you’re catastrophically late is the one time you absolutely can’t be, and the one time everything runs smoothly is the time you don’t give a crap when you arrive. This is far more harmful to the passengers, and the reputation of public transit as a viable means of getting around the city, than if the system is a little slow or not that frequent, because, again, the difference is whether you can easily plan ahead to compenaate for it.

Take Japan for example, where even though both their intra- and intercity transit are both crazy fast and crazy frequent, the thing that locals there are by far the most proud of in their transit network is its punctuality, and in the rare cases where there is a delay, people have been documented getting extremely angry with the transit staff as if they personally injured them.

Anyway, these are just my pissed off, sleep deprived, full bladder thoughts while waiting to go home. What do you think? Do you agree or disagree, and why or why not?