Asnychronous Travel

People often talk about the value of transit in reducing congestion, or in reducing commute times by providing an alternative to congested freeways. This is all fine, but there’s another benefit to efficient regional transit service that I personally find much more valuable.

Transit provides travel redundancy – an additional option for people to get around. Of course this benefits people during Rush Hour, and if the service goes beyond the region it would be beneficial in the event of evacuations as well. But there’s another important everyday benefit to having multiple transit options: it allows asynchronous travel.

What is Asynchronous Travel?

Put simply, asynchronous travel means a group trip where not everyone can start or stop at the exact same place and time. We deal with this kind of trip all the time – the family is going to dinner, but one person needs to make a side trip after dinner, and the rest of the group would like to come straight home.

The solution we inevitably use is to take two cars to dinner – even if there are only two or three people going.

Now, this choice is made because it’s the only practical one available, but that doesn’t mean it’s the only practical choice that should be available. And while it’s a relatively small waste to drive two cars to dinner, the waste becomes much larger when a bigger trip is on the table.

This is what happened to my wife and me yesterday.

Yesterday’s Trip

Yesterday, my Pam and I were going to College Station to see a basketball game. We needed to leave Houston sometime between 5:00 and 5:30. We had a problem, however. Pam teaches music lessons in Katy on Wednesday afternoons. So, we had to figure out a way to both get to College Station, but we were going to be 25 miles apart at 5:00.

Now, we knew that we were going to either be wasting a bunch of time, mileage, or both due to this situation, but we wanted to try and waste as little as possible. There was no realistic way for Pam to get to Katy from our house without driving, so with that in mind we considered these two options.

In the first option, Pam would drive to and from Katy and then we’d drive to College Station together. The problem is, she wouldn’t be back to pick me up until nearly 6:00, and if we tried to leave from our place (and sit in traffic on 290) then we’d never make it to the game on time. So that wouldn’t work.

In the second option, I take extra time off work to drive Pam to and from Katy so that she’ll be there without leaving the car there. This only takes about 14 more miles than Option 1, but takes an extra hour of my time.

Now, Pam and I only own one car, which we share, so we don’t have some of the options that most folks have. However, because these are common enough when we’re dealing with group travel, I thought I’d lay out two more options that we would have considered if we did own separate cars.

In this scenario, Pam drives to Katy but leaves her car there. I would have then picked her up in Katy, and we would have gone to College Station. On the way back we’d need to go through Katy and get her car, then drive separately. This saves us some time, but it results in 14 additional miles of driving. That’s potentially the best mileage / time balance point, and an option we might have chosen if it had been available to us.

The last option would be the most time-efficient. In this scenario, Pam and I would drive to and from College Station in separate cars – she would leave from Katy, and I would leave from home. This scenario causes us to drive more than 100 extra total miles, however. (By total miles I mean miles accumulated among all cars that are part of the trip, in this case basically two car trips to and from College Station.)

For what it’s worth, we chose none of the above. I decided to drive out to Katy with Pam and work from my laptop in a Starbucks while she was teaching. It saved us a fair amount of time and miles, and we made it to the game with enough time for dinner beforehand. Unfortunately, I didn’t get as much work done as I really needed to, so it was kind of a wash. Oh well.

Imagining Alternatives

Now, the kind of decision making I’m talking about should sound familiar to you – most of us end up doing this kind of calculation in our heads fairly frequently, and depending on the circumstances we make some kind of trade between extra miles on our cars and time saved. But there is an alternative.

Let’s skip 6 years into the future and assume that all of Houston’s currently-planned light-rail is open and operating. In this scenario, Pam could have taken the University Line from our home in Montrose, through Uptown, and arrived at the Northwest Transit Center. From there she could have taken a bus to Katy, and would have had about a 20 minute walk to the high school where she teaches. That trip would probably take about an hour (walking time plus transit time), as opposed to the thirty-five minutes it takes to drive. Not ideal, but not the end of the world.

What does our trip to College Station look like then?

This option saves us about fifty miles of driving as compared to our other options (the mileage accrues to the bus and/or train, instead of our car). Pam ends up losing a little bit of time due to the walk on either end, but we waste less time than if she drove back from Katy to pick me up, or if I drove back and forth to Katy to drop her off and pick her up again later. As compared to the two-car scenarios, this would save us 65 miles (and about 30 minutes on the return trip) as compared to Option 3 (leaving a car in Katy), and it would take a little bit more time but save about 200 miles over Option 4 (both driving separately).

Extrapolating the benefits

If we imagine a better overall transit system the benefits become even greater. Let’s think of some other scenarios.

• If we had better local transit service in Katy, or a bus route that could get us to Northwest Transit Center more directly than the planned light rail, Pam might be able to save a lot more time on her initial trip to Katy.
• If we had intercity transit service, I could get downtown pretty easily using a bus (or future light rail) and take the train (or express bus) to College Station, and Pam could take the car and meet me there.
• If we had intercity transit service and better regional service (including suburb-to-suburb connections) Pam and I might have been able to make the entire trip without driving – she could take regional service to Katy, and from Katy up to a hub in the northwest where we could meet and continue on to College Station.

The additional possibilities are virtually endless. The point of this exercise isn’t to say that our planned light-rail system will fix everything, or that once we have transit all of our travel needs will be met. There will still be plenty of good reasons to drive for a large percentage of trips. However, the more options you have available the better choices you can make.

When I lived in Europe, this was one of the things I found the most liberating. Traveling with a group of people was much more fun because of how much more flexible you could be. If one person in the group decided that they wanted to go home via a different route, it wasn’t a deal breaker. We didn’t need to take extra cars in case we wanted to split up during our trip (although, we almost never drove anywhere in the first place). We didn’t have to worry about people wanting to come and go at different times. It was a really liberating experience.

There are myriad benefits to investing in transportation infrastructure, but it’s important to remember that the most important investment we can make is always to create more options. Whether this means having more connectivity in our local streets; building more HOV lanes; creating new highways and freeways; creating new bus routes; or investing in local, regional, and inter-city rail service; our goal should be to provide as many choices as we can. When we look to prioritize our investments the best thing we can do is identify transportation bottlenecks – trips where there’s only one realistic choice available. Providing an alternative – creating redundancy in our total transportation network, is critical for the efficiency of our economy as well as the safety of our cities.

Lastly, it’s important to remember that when new options are proposed, it’s not only the daily-users that will benefit. Pam and I may never again need to make the exact same trip we made yesterday – but other people will. In the same way, just because you don’t think you’d use light-rail very often, or ride an express bus, or carpool, etc. – that doesn’t mean that you won’t someday directly benefit from the option being available, and every day benefit from living in a safer, more efficient, and more productive city.