| > I’ve been thinking the past couple of years you should be able to vote in local elections in the area you work in, even if you don’t live there. In many areas this would effectively lead to the suburbs being able to dictate urban policy to the inner city, where suburban commuter interests like parking override the interests of the actual residents. The 1998 amalgamation of Toronto is a good example of this happening, and I think a lot of Old Toronto voters are quite unhappy with this, given how it led to mayors like Rob Ford who would never have been elected with the old boundaries. Other areas try to solve this by creating an uber transit authority which theoretically directs and coordinates the smaller agencies for the greater regional good. A good example of this is the Regional Transportation Authority in Chicago. It often doesn't work out the way it's intended (in Chicago, the CTA [city proper transit] and Metra [commuter rail] still have very poor coordination, although Pace [suburban buses] and CTA do have somewhat good coordination). A third approach is to (try to) make the whole region's transit the responsibility of one single agency. Picking Atlanta as an example here (MARTA), it tends to lead to affluent suburbs (Cobb and Gwinnett Counties) trying to stay out of the system because of concerns like "transit brings crime" and "it's too expensive and no one will use it" and other assorted nonsense. So that approach has its problems too. In short, this is a very thorny problem and there honestly aren't a lot of places in North America that do it very well, although some are worse than others (the SF Bay Area may seem like a mess, and it is, but it's inarguably better than the dozens of barely-funded, not-at-all-sufficient systems that exist in most large and medium cities in the U.S.). I think the right solution is probably specific to each region and it still won't solve every problem, at least not without a level of funding that transit simply does not get on this continent. |
From a customer perspective, it seems to work well: one map, one timetable, one fare payment program, one branding, regardless of what city or suburb or wherever you’re in.
It does have the occasional political snag though of suburbs occasionally spreading core service in Dallas proper thinner than they should be (e.g. in order to get DART representatives from the suburbs to sign off on a second subway alignment through downtown, urban Dallas representatives had to agree to fund a suburban-only E-W line that could have been better located also in the city proper). But, each city does contribute an equal proportion of funding (1% of all sales tax revenue) to DART, so it seems fair enough.
The result? From having no rail network in 1996 to having the US’s longest* single light rail network by 2020
*by track mileage; that isn’t to say the breadth of the system doesn’t have its own flaws, mainly that some high density urban areas are woefully underserved in the effort to have a single station in every (very car-oriented) member suburb