Today, I want to talk about transit in outlying regions of large cities. That isn't too applicable to the Quad Cities, of course, since for all that we're sometimes interested in feeling like Chicagoland is coming to swallow us all whole, that's not really the case. But I think it's worth starting with perhaps the easiest case in which transit can serve places without huge density: the suburbs and exurbs of cities, where density falls off but they are still connected to the center.
1. Good transit can make places accessible
As a US American, when I think of suburbs, I think of cars. And to be fair, that's often true globally, thanks to the historic trends of 20th century car ownership and development. But it's particularly true here.
And when I think of that, I usually think of living in Rochester, New York and then moving to its suburbs (Brighton, then Greece)--and how in all three, but especially the suburbs, I simply could not operate without a car. And trust me, I tried. My friends and family can tell you stories of me trekking across the snowy front yards of suburban businesses to try to get from a bus stop to a board game store because "it's only about a mile."
I did make it, but let's just say the urban design was not accessible for anyone who wasn't not only willing but able to dodge through accumulated snow without sidewalks from the only, once-hourly bus to the next major road that didn't even have a bus line.
We could contrast that with my visit to the French town of Noisy-le-Sec earlier this year.
Noisy-le-Sec has trains. Now, trains are not inherently better than buses, but they often are, and they represent a serious promise of service that a bus stop sign doesn't (or at least, a promise that there was service at some point--thanks, crumbling US infrastructure). And I went to Noisy-le-Sec before their even-more-recent expansion of service, so things are even better than they are now.
Noisy-le-Sec is half the population of Greece, NY, and approximately the same distance from the city center. But it was much easier to get to because of, well, these guys:
Thanks, RER!
But also, the station, even though not actually in the town center, is conveniently located. There were sidewalks, but also just things you could access right there: the businesses I was walking by in Rochester weren't oriented towards walk-ins, but Noisy-le-Sec is much more so. Having transit made this a place I could access, but it also made it the kind of place that wants to be accessed; there is a virtuous circle there.
2. Good transit makes places discoverable
This is closely related to my second point: not only could I get to Noisy-le-Sec, I was infinitely more likely to go there because of the transit. Even more, I was infinitely more likely to know it was a place I could want to go, because it's on the train map.
Yes, Rochester had and has a bus map. I even was the kind of person (and still am) who read it! But the more integrated the transit, the more likely someone will become aware of places on the transit--and the better the transit, the more likely someone will both know to come and be willing to make the effort. I could and did explore Rochester through its buses (and the same with the Quad Cities) but literally only because I wanted to say I had. Nothing about either bus system actually encouraged me to use it to go places; it's more about making it minimally possible to go there if I had to (coverage) than actually making it easy or natural to do (real service).
My best example of this isn't from Rochester, but here in the QC. I wanted to go to the end of the furthest bus line, way out in Silvis, IL. And I did.
But I didn't get off the bus.
Why not? Wasn't that the whole point of going somewhere, to actually go?
Well...yes. But also, no. Because the bus runs once an hour, and the bus I'd connect to on the other end runs once an hour, and the bus I'd connect to after THAT runs once an hour. And none of those times linked up. So I would not have gotten home in three hours if I had gotten off the bus, and quite possibly longer, as I would have had to wait for the next one.
And as it was, I ended up walking all the way from downtown Moline home, over 5 miles, because one of those buses didn't come when I expected.
On the one hand this shows the potential of transit: I did make it to and back from Silvis only because the bus ran there. On the other it shows the need for actually decent service: I didn't contribute to the Silvis economy at all, because that was all I could do.
3. Good transit can make small cities part of big ones
The classic example of this is the Randstad: the megacity that is the main urbanized areas of the Netherlands. I took the train from Amsterdam to Haarlem, which is a separate city with a population of a bit over 150,000. It took less time than the bus takes me to get to work here (well, let's not overstate: it took the same amount of time) and it dropped me off here:
OK, that one is just pretty. Let's look more closely at Haarlem as a city:
Not super dense; just a little city street.
It's definitely a city. It's just not Amsterdam. But because of good, reliable (don't listen to the Dutch, they're spoiled so they complain about NS, Nederlandse Spoorwegen, their rail operator), fast transit, they're intimately tied together
That's the true power of transit: not just regular suburbs or exurbs but even adjacent cities with their own traditions and histories can become fundamentally linked if you have good transit. And you don't need huge cities for this. Haarlem is a little smaller than the Iowa side of the Quad Cities. Yes, Amsterdam metro is big (2.5 million); but it's not just the big part of the metro that benefits. The little guys do too.
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