Did you hear that background noise in Daniel's prompt, Herman? The honking, the hiss of the bus brakes, the general chaos of a Jerusalem street corner? It really set the scene. I think he was literally standing at a bus stop on Jaffa Street while recording that. You can almost feel the heat radiating off the stone and the impatience of the crowd waiting for the seventy-four bus.
It certainly sounded like it. Herman Poppleberry here, and I have to say, Daniel's frustration with the ticket inspectors—those guys in the fluorescent vests who seem to appear out of thin air—is something I think every resident of this city feels in their bones. But he's touched on something much deeper than just the annoyance of being asked for your ticket for the third time in ten minutes. He's asking a fundamental question of urban science: how do we actually know if a system is good? Is it just a "vibe"? Is it just because the trains look shiny and have that new-plastic smell? Or are there hard, objective numbers we can look at to compare, say, the Jerusalem Light Rail to the London Underground or the Tokyo Metro?
Right, and it's a great question because public transport is one of those things where everyone has an opinion based on their last commute. If the bus was late today, the whole system is "garbage." If you got a seat and the air conditioning was blasting, it's "world-class." But the reality is often much more complex. Daniel mentioned that while people criticize the Israeli system, he finds the trains between Jerusalem and Tel Aviv—the high-speed line—quite pleasant and the costs relatively low. So, where is the disconnect? Why do some systems rank at the top of global lists while others, which might feel okay to a casual user, are considered failures by urban planners?
Well, to answer Daniel's question, we have to look at the professional yardsticks. When transport planners and researchers sit down to evaluate a system, they aren't just looking at whether the seats are comfortable, though that is a factor. They use a set of core metrics that fall into a few different buckets: operational efficiency, accessibility, and what we call the passenger experience. And since it is February thirteenth, twenty-twenty-six, we have more data than ever to actually rank these things.
Let's start with the big one that everyone thinks they understand: reliability. We always hear about on-time performance. But how is that actually measured? Because if a bus is supposed to come at ten o'clock and it comes at ten-oh-five, is that on time?
That is actually a huge point of contention in the industry. Most systems use a metric called On-Time Performance, or O-T-P. In many European systems, a bus or train is considered on time if it arrives within five minutes of the scheduled time. In Japan, specifically with the Shinkansen, they measure it in seconds. If a train is sixty seconds late, it is considered late. But here is the catch, Corn. O-T-P can be gamed.
Gamed? How so?
It is called padding. If a transit agency knows that a particular route always hits traffic at four in the afternoon, they just add ten minutes to the scheduled travel time in the official timetable. So the bus arrives when it was always going to arrive—slowly—but on paper, it is "on time." This is why many planners are moving toward a different metric called Headway Regularity. Instead of asking if the bus arrived at ten o'clock, they ask if the gap between buses is consistent. If a bus is supposed to come every ten minutes, and they consistently come every ten minutes, the system is reliable even if they aren't hitting a specific clock time. For a high-frequency system like a metro, passengers don't look at a timetable anyway. They just show up and expect a train within a certain window.
That makes sense. If I'm standing at a station in Paris or New York, I'm not checking my watch against a schedule; I'm looking at the countdown clock saying the next train is in three minutes. But that brings up the second big metric: frequency. Daniel mentioned that the buses in Jerusalem come fairly regularly, but is there an objective standard for what constitutes "good" frequency?
There is. We often talk about the twelve-minute rule. If a service runs every twelve minutes or better, it is considered a "turn-up-and-go" service. This is a massive psychological threshold for commuters. Once frequency drops below fifteen minutes, people start feeling the need to check a schedule. They start worrying about missing the bus because the penalty—waiting another twenty or thirty minutes—is too high. High-quality systems aim for what they call a high-frequency network where you never wait more than ten minutes during peak hours. In twenty-twenty-six, the gold standard is moving toward five-minute headways for all major urban trunk lines.
I want to push back on the idea of frequency for a second. You can have a bus every five minutes, but if that bus doesn't go where you need it to go, or if it takes a winding, circuitous route through every side street, it is still a bad system. How do we measure the actual utility of the network?
Now you are getting into the meat of it. This is where we look at Accessibility and Connectivity. One of the best objective tools we have is something called P-T-A-L, which stands for Public Transport Accessibility Level. It was developed in London and is now used globally. It maps out how many different transport options are within walking distance of any given point and how frequent those services are. But even more sophisticated than that is the concept of Reach.
Reach? As in, how far I can get?
Exactly. Planners look at how many jobs, schools, or hospitals an average resident can reach within forty-five minutes using public transport. This is a much more honest metric than just looking at a map of bus lines. If I live in a suburb and there is a bus stop near my house, but it takes me ninety minutes and three transfers to get to the city center where the jobs are, my accessibility is low. In cities like Vienna or Singapore, the percentage of the population that can reach the city center within thirty minutes is incredibly high. That is a hallmark of a top-tier system. We use "isochrone maps" to visualize this—blobs of color that show how far you can travel in fifteen, thirty, or forty-five minutes. If your "forty-five-minute blob" is tiny, your city's transport is failing you, no matter how clean the trains are.
And that connects to what Daniel said about the hub-and-spoke approach versus secondary connections. He mentioned that getting between major hubs like Jerusalem and Tel Aviv is great—the high-speed train is fast, it is comfortable, it is affordable. But once you get off that main spoke and try to make a secondary connection, things fall apart. In Israel, we have a very strong radial system—everything flows to the center—but the lateral connections—getting from one suburb to another without going through a major hub—are often quite poor.
That is a classic problem in rapidly growing regions. It is much easier to build a high-speed rail line between two big cities than it is to coordinate a web of local buses that talk to each other. This is measured through something called Transfer Penalty. Every time a passenger has to switch from a bus to a train or from one bus to another, there is a psychological and time cost. Planners usually calculate this as being equivalent to adding fifteen to twenty minutes of "perceived" travel time. A high-quality system minimizes this by having integrated ticketing—which we actually have here with the Rav-Kav and the mobile apps—and synchronized schedules. In Switzerland, they use a system called Taktfahrplan, or integrated timed transfer. All the trains and buses are timed to arrive at a hub at the same time, allow five minutes for people to swap platforms, and then all depart. It is like a heartbeat for the whole country.
I love that analogy. It makes the whole country feel like one giant, synchronized machine. But let's talk about the money. Daniel mentioned affordability. Public transport in Israel is heavily subsidized. I think a ride on the light rail is about six shekels, which is roughly one dollar and sixty cents in today's exchange rate. Compared to London or New York, that feels like a bargain. How do we measure affordability objectively?
We look at "transport poverty." This is usually defined as a household spending more than ten percent of its income on transportation. In some cities, even if the system is reliable, it is so expensive that lower-income residents are effectively barred from using it to its full potential. However, there is a flip side to affordability that planners look at, which is the Farebox Recovery Ratio.
That sounds like a very Herman Poppleberry term. Break it down for us.
It is actually pretty simple. It is the percentage of the operating costs that are covered by passenger fares. In most American cities, this ratio is very low, often below twenty percent, meaning the government is paying for eighty percent of every ride. In Hong Kong, the ratio is often over one hundred percent—they actually make a profit on the transport itself.
Wait, how does Hong Kong make a profit? Are the tickets just incredibly expensive?
No, the tickets are actually quite reasonable. They use a "Rail plus Property" model. The M-T-C—the transport agency—owns the land around and above the stations. They develop massive shopping malls and apartment complexes there. The rent from those buildings funds the trains. It is a brilliant feedback loop: better trains make the land more valuable, and more valuable land pays for better trains. A very low farebox recovery ratio isn't necessarily a bad thing—it means the government is prioritizing social equity—but it can make the system vulnerable to budget cuts. The goal for a healthy system is usually to find a balance where fares are low enough to be inclusive but high enough to help fund expansion and maintenance.
So we've talked about reliability, frequency, accessibility, and affordability. But Daniel brought up something that isn't usually in the spreadsheets: the "vibe." The inspectors, the noise, the behavior of other passengers. How do you measure the quality of experience?
It is harder to quantify, but we do use something called the Passenger Environment Survey. This looks at things like cleanliness, lighting, the quality of real-time information, and perceived safety. And Daniel's point about the inspectors is a fascinating one from a design perspective. It is about the "friction" of the journey. In some cities, like Berlin, they have an honor system with occasional undercover inspectors. In other cities, you have to pass through a physical barrier like a turnstile. Jerusalem's light rail uses a proof-of-payment system with very visible, very frequent inspections. While this might be effective for revenue protection, it increases the psychological friction of the trip. It makes the passenger feel like a suspect rather than a customer.
Exactly. It's that feeling of being watched. And when you combine that with the overcrowding we often see on the Red Line here, the quality of experience drops even if the train is technically on time. I've been on trains in Tokyo where you are packed in like sardines, but the silence and the orderliness make it feel different than being packed into a bus where people are shouting on their phones and the driver is slamming on the brakes.
And that brings us to another metric: Load Factor. This is the ratio of passengers to seats. Anything over one point zero means people are standing. Most systems aim for a load factor of around zero point seven during off-peak hours to ensure comfort, but during rush hour, it can go up to four or five in places like Mumbai or Tokyo. But you're right, the culture of the commute matters. There is a reason why Singapore invests so much in those bright, cheerful signs and clean stations. They are trying to reduce the "cognitive load" of using public transport. If the system is easy to navigate, clean, and feels safe, people will use it even if it is slightly slower than driving.
I want to go back to Daniel's point about the cars. He mentioned that even when the system is decent, people are entrenched in their cars. This is a huge issue in Israel. We have massive car ownership growth every year, and the traffic on Highway One is legendary. How do we measure the success of a system in actually getting people out of their cars?
We look at Modal Share. This is the percentage of total trips in a city made by different modes of transport—car, bus, train, bike, walking. In a city like Copenhagen, the modal share for bikes is incredibly high. In Jerusalem, the car still dominates. One of the best ways to measure if a system is working is to look at the Cross-Elasticity of Demand. This is a fancy way of asking: if we make the bus five minutes faster, how many people stop driving? Or if we make parking twice as expensive, how many people switch to the train? The problem in many places is that we only look at the transit side of the equation. We don't look at the incentives for driving. If you have a great train but also have free parking at the office and cheap gas, people will still drive.
That is a great point. It is a two-sided coin. You have the carrot—the good public transport—and the stick—the costs of driving. In Jerusalem, we have a lot of carrots being built right now, with the new Green and Blue light rail lines in various stages of completion, but the sticks aren't really there yet. The city is still very car-friendly in many ways, despite the traffic.
And that leads to a metric that is becoming very popular in urban planning circles: Total Cost of Mobility. This doesn't just look at the price of a bus ticket. It looks at the cost of owning a car, the cost of insurance, the value of the time lost in traffic, and even the health costs of air pollution and noise. When you add all that up, public transport almost always wins objectively, but humans aren't always objective. We value the autonomy of the car—the "private bubble" it provides.
So, if we were to give Daniel a checklist for his next trip or his next time waiting for a bus, what should he be looking for to judge if the system is truly world-class?
I would say look for three things. First, the Forty-Five Minute Test. How much of the city can you actually reach in forty-five minutes from your front door? If it is just the city center, the system is mediocre. If it is most of the metropolitan area, it is world-class. Second, the Frequency of the Secondary Network. Don't just look at the shiny trains. Look at the bus that goes through the neighborhood. If it doesn't come every ten to twelve minutes, the system isn't truly reliable. And third, the Integration. Can you pay for everything with one app? Are the transfers seamless? Does the bus wait if the train is two minutes late? That level of coordination is what separates the good from the great.
It is interesting that you mention the secondary network. I think that is where the criticism of the Israeli system really comes from. The big projects—the high-speed rail, the Jerusalem light rail—are actually quite good. They are modern, they are fast, they are relatively clean. But the moment you try to get from, say, a residential neighborhood in the south of Jerusalem to a high-tech park in the north without a car, you are looking at two buses and maybe an hour of travel time for a distance that is only a few kilometers. That is where the system fails the objective accessibility test.
Exactly. It is a coverage versus quality trade-off. Some cities try to cover every single street with a bus that comes once an hour. Other cities, like Barcelona with their "superblocks" or Bogota with their TransMilenio, focus on high-frequency corridors. The modern thinking is that it is better to have a slightly longer walk to a very frequent, very fast line than to have a bus stop at your door that only serves you once an hour. It is about creating a network that people can trust without looking at a watch.
I also think we should touch on the data aspect. We live in twenty-twenty-six, and the amount of real-time data available now is incredible. Does the availability of data count as a metric for a good system?
Absolutely. We call it Information Symmetry. In the old days, the transit agency had the schedule and the passenger had a paper map and a lot of hope. Now, a high-quality system provides open data A-P-Is so that apps like Google Maps or Citymapper can tell you exactly where your bus is. But more than that, the best systems are now using that data for Dynamic Transit Management. If they see a huge crowd forming at a station because of a concert or a protest, they can automatically dispatch extra vehicles. The responsiveness of the system to real-time demand is a huge objective yardstick.
It's like the system has a nervous system. It can feel where the pressure is and react. I've noticed that even in Jerusalem, the accuracy of the bus arrival times on the apps has improved significantly over the last few years. It used to be a suggestion; now it is usually pretty accurate.
It is, but we still have the issue of the physical environment. Daniel mentioned the noise pollution from the trucks and the honking. This is a second-order effect of transport policy. A city with a truly world-class public transport system is a quieter city. In places like Zurich or even parts of Paris now, they have restricted car access so much that the ambient noise level has dropped significantly. That is an objective metric too—decibel levels on residential streets. If your transport system is good enough that people don't feel the need to honk their way through traffic, your quality of life goes up.
That's a powerful thought. The quality of a transport system isn't just measured by what's happening inside the bus, but by what's happening on the street because the bus exists. It's about the space we reclaim from cars. Every parking lot that becomes a park because people are taking the train is a win for the system.
Precisely. And this is why it is so important to look at the second-order effects. When we talk about transit-oriented development, we are looking at whether the transport system is actually shaping the city. Are people building apartments near the stations? Is the economy growing because people can get to work more easily? In the long run, the best metric for a public transport system might just be the economic and social vitality of the city it serves.
I think this gives a lot of perspective on why Daniel feels the way he does. He's seeing the high-quality parts—the shiny trains, the low fares—and he's comparing that to the lived experience of the noise and the inspectors. It's a system in transition. It has the "hardware" of a world-class system in some areas, but the "software"—the integration, the secondary network, the passenger culture—is still catching up.
That is a perfect way to put it. Hardware versus software. Israel is very good at building big, impressive hardware. The tunnels for the high-speed rail were a massive engineering feat. The software—the coordination between different bus companies, the way inspectors interact with the public, the timing of the transfers—that is the harder, more subtle work that takes decades to perfect.
Well, I think we've given Daniel plenty to think about next time he's standing at that bus stop. Maybe he can start timing the headways or checking his forty-five-minute reach instead of just fuming at the inspectors.
Or he can just keep recording those great ambient sounds for us. It really does help bring the topic to life. Hearing the city is part of understanding the city.
It really does. Before we wrap up, I want to pivot to our listeners for a second. We've been doing this for over six hundred episodes now, and the reason we keep going is the engagement from this community. If you're finding these deep dives into the mechanics of our world useful, we'd really appreciate it if you could take a moment to leave us a review on your podcast app or on Spotify. It genuinely helps the show reach new people who are as nerdy about these things as we are.
It really does make a difference. And if you have your own weird prompts or questions about how the world works, head over to my-weird-prompts-dot-com. There is a contact form there, and you can also find our full archive and R-S-S feed. We love hearing from you, whether it is a technical question or just a rant about your local bus system.
Absolutely. We've covered everything from emergent behaviors in machine learning to the history of urban planning, and it's all there on the website. This has been a fascinating look at the yardsticks of public transport. It's made me look at my own commute a little differently. I might actually start counting the seconds next time I'm on a train.
Me too. I'll be thinking about on-time performance versus headway regularity next time I'm waiting for the light rail. And I'll definitely be looking at those isochrone maps.
Thanks for diving deep with me, Herman. And thanks to Daniel for sending in such a thought-provoking prompt. This has been My Weird Prompts. We'll be back soon with another exploration of the strange and interesting ideas our housemate throws our way.
Until next time, keep asking the weird questions.
Goodbye, everyone.
Goodbye.
