The Commuter Train: Coming Up to the Twenty-First Century
The Challenge of Commuter Train Design
The efficient transportation of large numbers of people has become a focal point of urban engineering. In the last few decades, as cities have swelled and infrastructure stretched to its limits, how we move has taken on heightened visibility. At the same time, designers of public vehicles have faced the challenge of accommodating diverse rider experiences. Using insights from human behavior, they have sought to create a balance among three Cs: comfort, capacity, and cost.
Train operators everywhere are trying to find ways to boost comfort and maintain or enhance capacity. They must do so within certain budgetary constraints. Rigorous public funding audits require that train service be as inexpensive as possible while still achieving a level of efficiency acceptable to riders, who may then report their impressions to family and friends.
Maximizing Passenger Flow and Capacity
Commuter trains are an important element for the future because they can clean up the streets. In August 2023, according to the UN, the median projected global population living in urban areas by 2050 has grown to 68.4%, affirmed by a powerful recent growth spurt in a handful of megacities (with populations above 10 million) mostly around the Global South. These numbers mean that, in U.S. dollar equivalents, urban residents here and abroad have poured and will continue to pour vast resources into the coffers of public transit systems. Efficient moving systems benefit society by clearing the roads, lowering emissions, and providing reliable, efficient access to basic services. And as global wealth flows into urban areas, it will continue to pay for expensive improvements. One of those improvements can involve the design of the commuter train.
Innovative Solutions for Efficient Boarding
As Stanford professor and public transportation designer Julie C. Powelson has noted, the human sense of smell is the biopreferred pathway to the judgment center of a person’s being. The design of anything that humans must experience over long periods is fundamentally about using all five human senses to make the experience enjoyable and satisfying. That is how public appearance works.
From a societal perspective, adding in the value of each person perceiving his or her public space as a better space, the calculations begin achieving a kind of social equity from the affordable and accessible public vehicle experience. Drawing on this basic principle, public transport systems can start to afford the benefits of up to five E’s: efficiency, effectiveness, economy, equity, and enjoyment.
Balancing Comfort and Cost in Train Design
Train operators face revenue challenges that push in the direction of tougher trade-offs between operational and passenger comfort. Challenges in the coming decades of urban sprawl demand that we think about life inside the vehicle from every possible angle. Despite these challenges, train operators should be moving to a new paradigm, one that thinks inside the vehicle and invests in achieving social and economic benefits for future urbanization. Ultimately, this series of trade-offs concerns the design practices that influence half a billion passengers now and in the near future.