World: Frequent All-Day Service Serves Commuters Better.

The North American Commuter Ideology is Nonsensical.

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Over the last fifty years in North America, a “commuter rail” operating paradigm (perhaps more accurately described as an ideology) has been popular, where the goal was to provide a commuter shuttle, but with minimized operating footprint and infrastructure, instead of actually maximizing convenience for commuters.

This manifested as diesel trains with big passenger cars shuttling from a yard in the suburbs to a yard in or near the city centre, probably literally just heading from the suburbs to the city centre in the morning and doing the reverse in the evening — likely with five trips or fewer in total. Sometimes you might see a single midday trip, or some limited weekend trips for special events, but generally that is the exception and not the norm.

Fortunately, the COVID-induced commuting collapse seems to have shaken this model to the core, likely because it was always marginal. It sort of worked to skim some commuters off the highways in a situation where congestion was bad and there were a lot of downtown commuters, but with downtown commute trips down, both because of shaky economics and downtowns struggling a bit, and some work-from-home still happening, the model needs to change.

In many ways, this model for commuter rail was perfectly epitomized by GO in the Greater Toronto region, which operated this model in a more intense way than almost any other operator in any other region. GO was the original and remains the primary operator of the Bombardier Bilevel coach, as well as variants of it and several locomotives. The system is large, with 7 lines and over 60 stations, with hundreds of thousands using the trains (which are some of the largest in terms of seated capacity in the world) every day. GO also was more explicit in its “highway-skimming” than most other operations, with GO coaches (at least historically) featuring the same shade of green used on highway signs, tons of signs on highways directing drivers to stations, and enormous volumes of parking at stations.

Now, obviously the model has grown far beyond Toronto, with numerous other cities setting up similar services, albeit usually with just a fraction of the fleet and mileage seen in Toronto. However, I think there's a real issue with this models applicability outside of the GTHA, and even more so outside of Canada. Toronto is almost unique within North America in having a ton of distant suburban sprawl, but also a very strong (and growing stronger) core, limited radial road capacity into the city centre, and also solid downtown walking and transit connections. Basically, there are cities with some of these qualities, but few with all of them that don't already have some form of even better “commuter” service.

You see, this type of commuter service is sort of unique because it not only sort of requires these conditions (all the other “similar” commuter rail operations combined probably have less ridership than GO alone), but it's what I would call “fiscally unstable”. Let me explain.

The North American commuter rail ideology is low-cost, but not cost-effective. That is, creating a service like GO doesn't need to cost a lot starting out: just some curbs at already existing freight tracks in suburban locations with parking lots, a few new yard tracks, and some trains which can be purchased used. However, this is not a cost-effective operation. You’re buying trains and taking up space to run just a few trips a day, each of which is probably used by only a few hundred people. Since operations are split between the morning and night and each train probably only makes one round-trip per day, you also actually using your labour super inefficiently because you’re having to pay folks for a lot of hours of work (and potentially split shifts) to run single trips.

This left “commuter (I use this term in quotes because I really think it’s a misnomer — lots of people want to go into cities, even in an in in the morning out in the evening pattern) systems” (also weird to call something so completely basic a system) in North America in a generally tough place post-Covid. Ridership was broadly down, but the systems are still expensive to run. In most cities, congestion isn’t so bad that the commuter services are that compelling, and the service is generally stagnant at best, and often degrading due to a lack of reinvestment (which is hard to get when ridership is low and costs are high); because of this, some systems (such as in the Minneapolis area) are shutting down, and I would expect something similar from others.

There is the other case, which is the sort of rare one Toronto is in where you clearly need to have the rail service, but it’s really expensive to operate for what you’re getting, and especially with a large volume of passengers, so the goal is to try to invest to both bring down operating costs (through reducing labour requirements, which tend to be very high, as well as electrification).

Of course, another response to an expensive-to-operate mass market government service might be to cut it, but fortunately it doesn’t seem we see much of that with railways (emphasis on mass market).

The issue is few cities have the capital needed to “step up” and make these investments. What’s worse is that there is actual institutional resistance in places like Toronto that have built up a railway which is good at operating this inconvenient and expensive service pattern to change from this model.

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Despite this, change is happening, and while I could cite for you the many suburban railways around the world that do not operate this archaic “commuter” service pattern, or New Yorks railways, I think GO already shows why more service is dramatically better … even for the commuter market, and operators.

Right now, the GO line I live closest to has regular all-day service, if not trains every 15 minutes. And while obviously we would all love 15-minute and better service as soon as possible, regular trains in both directions all day long feels like just as big of a departure from the traditional commuter model as 15-minute service will be from what we have today.

With a traditional in-in-the-morning, out-in-the-evening service pattern, you really are living by the train. You've got a handful of options in the morning, and you're going to have to pair that with a handful of options in the evening to get home. To be sure, this works for a lot of people, but it creates anxiety — “what if I miss the last train” and it's inconvenient. Something I've talked at length about in videos and posts in the past is that providing extra service does not only enable more riders on those new services, but it also allows for a higher intensity of riders because those riders can have the confidence that a return journey will be easily and conveniently available.