The following question was recently posted on Quora:
“What factors are considered in a city’s decision to develop a train mass transit system?”
Graham Jenkins, Defense Analyst, provided this response:
There are a couple factors at play here that need to be teased out. The first is separating the desire for rail from that for just transit in general. Mode doesn’t matter quite as much as people often think - done right, a bus can in fact bemore useful than a train. But let’s come back to this.
To have an effective transit system, a transit agency needs riders. You need to place both the routes and stations/stops in a place where they will attract people, where they’re easy to walk to and where a decent amount of passengers can be expected most hours of the day. The routes need to connect destinations both at the ends and along the way; you don’t want to design a route with nothing but terminal anchors, because that wastes the potential of any intermediate stops.
Which leads us to the underlying issue here: land use. Getting good transit relies on the land use patterns along the way. And this means all the buzzwords: dense, pedestrian-friendly, walkable, human-scale, etc. This kind of land use is what makes good transit possible, because it concentrates a large number of people into a smaller area, making transit more efficient.
But the flip side comes operationally. Often, it’s more efficient to run a larger number of shorter routes more frequently - and require connections - than it is to run a few long routes. In this case, you actually can take transit from Coventry to Ohio City - but it requires a bus to a train https://www.google.com/maps/dir/... .
This isn’t a huge issue, except for I see how frequently these run. The Red Line runs every 15 minutes, which is higher than most people like, but not totally horrible. What is totally horrible is the 7 bus, which at best runs every 30 minutes, and by 6:45 runs only hourly. That just isn’t useful for anyone. (And as an aside, that difference in frequency - which is all too common for trains versus buses - is a big reason why people have such negative connotations associated with the bus. But it’s not inherent; it’s a choice made by the transit agency.)
The way transit becomes a success is when it allows freedom of mobility. And the best way to do that is to run your transit vehicles, trains or buses, frequently. Abstract thinking about driving versus transit often comes down to “if I drive, I can leave now, but if I want to catch the train/bus/whatever, I have to leave ___ so I can catch it.” But again, it doesn’t have to be that way.
Frequency is freedom, and the best way to replicate the freedom of the car - being able to leave whenever you like - is to run transit frequently enough that you don’t have to consult a timetable or a clock; you just show up and can expect your vehicle to be there within a few minutes. If you knew that were the case, you’d be more likely to give the No. 7 bus a try, right? The same is true for many lines. When the transit is so infrequent that it becomes unreliable and inconvenient, few people will use it, which will lead to further cutbacks, and so on and so forth.
24-hour service is a whole different story, which depends on potential ridership and the cost. Often, there simply aren’t enough riders to justify the cost of running the service. But Cleveland could start with late night service, til 2 or 3 AM.
TL;DR: Read Jarrett Walker’s Human Transit (or just explore his blog). And petition the RTA to improve the frequency and operating hours of the No. 7 bus.