This guest post comes to ZD courtesy of Zatch. Zatch is a lapsed physicist living and working in Washington DC with his wife, son, and another kid on the way. Zatch’s Bloggernacle credentials are that one time he was in this Borderlanders article under his alter ego Zeke: https://forthosewhowonder.com/wp-content/uploads/2006/07/Adolscent-Borderlanders1.pdf
In high school, I was voted “most likely to never buy a car,” and in college my wife studied urban planning. Thus it shouldn’t be a surprise that, after recently attending a cousin’s wedding in the Draper Temple, one of the first things we talked about was how inaccessible the Draper Temple is to anyone without a car. For those who don’t know, the Draper Temple is far up on the hillside, 3+ miles (5+ km) from and 500+ feet (155+ meters) of elevation above the freeway. Unless you are into hiking or mountain biking (things we actually saw people doing on the way in), it is not easy to get there without a car.
This is actually a conversation my spouse and I have a lot. Between work, school, missions, etc. the two of us have lived in at least 8 temple districts across the US. Ignoring Utah for a moment (a place where they literally built cities around the temple), nearly every temple near which we’ve lived has been located not in the city it is named for, but rather one of the city’s wealthy suburbs:
- Tucson -> Catalina Foothills
- Indianapolis -> Carmel
- Detroit -> Bloomfield Hills
- Atlanta -> Sandy Springs
- Oakland -> Oakland, but up a steep hill from downtown and still in a wealthy neighborhood
- Washington D.C. -> Kensington, MD
My personal inclination is that the entire temple-going experience favors those with money. If it were up to me, clothing rental would be free, childcare would be provided, and we’d be opening more cafeterias instead of shutting them down (especially since, as I’ve claimed without evidence, many temples are in wealthy residential areas without places to eat). But that is a rant for another post.* Today I want to focus on one specific aspect of temple attendance: getting there.
Assumptions
I started from the most recent list of temples on the church website. From there, I filtered out any that have not yet had a location announced, but I did include several that are currently under construction but where the location has been announced. I cut out any temples that were named for geographic features rather than cities (e.g. Gila Valley, Mount Timpanogos). This left me with a list of 212 temples, which I grouped into regions using the same bins that Ziff used in his most recent temple-related post.
As my measure of “ease-of-access,” I used Google Maps to estimate how long it takes to travel from the city center (as defined by Google) to the temple, traveling by 1) car, 2) public transit, and 3) foot.** I set the departure time to 7am on a Saturday to avoid issues from current local traffic. The choice to use city center as a point of origin is easily the weakest point of my analysis, but I still think it’s a reasonable assumption for a couple of reasons:
- For members who live in the specified city, you could assume (and this is clearly an assumption) that they are randomly scattered throughout the city such that on average they live near the city center. Some will live in the northwest, some in the southeast, but hopefully those differences all cancel each other out when you include enough people.
- For members who do not live in the specified city and who must arrive by bus, train, or other public transit, I think it’s plausible that they would be dropped off at a terminal somewhere near the city center and then continue to the temple from there.
I thought about using the nearest (non-temple adjacent) meetinghouse as a point of origin instead of the Google-appointed city center, but that would have at least doubled the effort so I didn’t do it. This might give us a better indicator of the average member location than what I did, so please let me know if anyone gives it a try.
Results
The first question I decided to answer is “How many temples are accessible by public transit?”
I noticed that some of the Utah temples (e.g. Ogden) were showing no public transit option even though I know for a fact that’s not true. Given that the Ogden temple is two blocks from what I would consider the city center, I’m guessing Google has a hidden “why on earth would you take a bus for this?” feature. To compensate, I added a 15-minute walking distance filter; that is, if you can walk from the Google-declared city center to the temple in 15 minutes or less, it counts as having a public transit option. The following table shows the number of temples in each region, and the percentage of temples inaccessible via public transit.
| Region | # of temples in region | # with no public transit | % with no public transit |
|---|---|---|---|
| Africa | 8 | 6 | 75.00% |
| Asia & Pacific | 32 | 10 | 31.25% |
| Europe | 14 | 1 | 7.14% |
| Latin America & Caribbean | 53 | 25 | 47.17% |
| Eastern North America | 27 | 9 | 33.33% |
| Western North America | 54 | 17 | 31.48% |
| Utah | 24 | 7 | 29.17% |
| Worldwide | 212 | 75 | 35.38% |
I think the results here can be largely explained by regional trends which are far bigger than the Church. On the one hand, wealthy modern Europe and its strong public infrastructure extends to all but one temple. On the other hand, I’ve never been to Africa, Latin America, or the Caribbean, but my uninformed, eurocentric assumption is that these places are lacking the same robust transit infrastructure. The remaining regions (Asia & Pacific and non-Mexico North America) all came in at around 30%. It’s not a coincidence that this number is near the worldwide average of ~35% – there are so many temples in these places that they mostly set the average – but it is interesting to me that the same fraction shows up across such different parts of the world.
But accessibility is about more than just getting there; it’s about getting there in a timely manner. A car is almost always going to be faster than walking or taking public transit, and nothing the church can do will change that. But if it’s too much longer, then the time becomes its own burden. In this table, I show the average time (in minutes) by car, transit, and foot. I also show the ratio between driving and transit or walking (whichever is faster).
| Region | Time from nominal location by car (minutes) | Time from nominal location by public transit (minutes) | Time from nominal location by foot (minutes) | ratio min(transit,foot)/car |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Africa | 13.6 | 31.5 | 94.1 | 5.3 |
| Asia & Pacific | 14.9 | 38.1 | 96.2 | 3.8 |
| Europe | 25.0 | 37.0 | 195.3 | 2.2 |
| Latin America & Caribbean | 16.6 | 51.2 | 108.0 | 4.1 |
| Eastern North America | 19.6 | 91.6 | 221.6 | 6.3 |
| Western North America | 15.7 | 59.7 | 186.2 | 6.4 |
| Utah | 4.4 | 17.0 | 33.4 | 5.4 |
| Worldwide | 15.8 | 54.7 | 139.0 | 5.0 |
Gosh, where to begin?
Let’s set aside Utah for a moment and then start with column 4, how long it takes to arrive on foot. I think this is the best measure of absolute distance (something I perhaps should have tracked but didn’t) since pedestrians are relatively unaffected by traffic conditions. From this we see that temples in Europe and North America (not counting Utah) are, on average, twice as far from the city center as temples in the rest of the world. Is this because North American and European city centers are too built up [read: expensive] to build a temple, so they are moving to cheaper land away from the city? Or is there a bias toward building in wealthy suburbs like I suggested earlier? Impossible to say from this data, but something that would be interesting to investigate.
Next let’s go to the driving times column, which I suspect represents the “default” assumption. Worldwide the average driving time from city center to temple is around 15 minutes, but this increases to almost 20 or 25 minutes in Eastern North America and Europe, and decreases to less than 5 in Utah (which we’ll get to soon, I promise!). Eastern North America and Europe both have high population densities and were both pretty built up by the time we started building temples, so the longer travel times perhaps aren’t too surprising. However, there is a clear divergence with respect to public transit. In Europe, you can still get to the temple without a car and it only takes you about twice as long as it would with a car. In Eastern North America, however, it takes more than 6 times longer! The only region with a less-favorable ratio was Western North America.
Aside from that, props to Asia, Latin America, and the islands in the Pacific and the Caribbean for keeping their time-by-car/time-without-a-car ratio down to about 4. An interesting fact I’ll slip in here is that Google only gave me public transit directions to the Seoul temple, not driving or walking. I doubt it is true in reality, but I have no trouble believing that it is far more convenient to take public transit in such a megacity.
For stats nerds, I did ANOVA tests for both minimum non-car time to temple and the ratio of car/non-car times, and both test results were significant. The test does not say which comparisons, if any, are driving the claim, and I don’t know enough statistics to push it any farther in a rigorous manner. But I’m comfortable saying that it takes longer to get to the temple in some parts of the world than others in a statistically-meaningful way.
Utah’s Gonna Utah
Finally, Utah. Temples in Utah run the full gamut, from Draper on the one hand and Salt Lake (accessible via bus, Trax, bike, airport shuttle, even horse drawn carriage) on the other. Prior to this analysis, I was expecting more Draper-like temples in terms of proximity to the city center, but it turns out Utah temples tend overall to be more Salt Lake-like. As I said before, I guess that can happen when you [literally and/or metaphorically] build your city around the temple.
To sort of illustrate this further, the average non-car time-to-temple for all Utah temples is 25.7 minutes, but this number jumps up by almost four whole minutes to 29.5 if you remove just the 4 pioneer-era temples (Manti, Logan, St George, Salt Lake). (The car/non-car time ratio does not change much.)
Conclusion
I understand there are good reasons for not building temples near city centers. For instance, there may just not be space. But I think it could make a better effort to locate temples in places that are easier to access without a car.
But President Nelson is not Moses, and we can’t just pack up our temples and move them to somewhere better. For temples that are already built, I suggest offering some kind of a shuttle service. The DC temple had one of these, pre-COVID. It wasn’t an official church thing, mind, just some guy that started offering free rides from the Metro station to the temple and back during certain hours. I don’t think he’s still doing it today, but I think the need is there and the idea is solid.
Have you ever tried to get to your temple without a car? What other ideas might make it easier to get to the temple without a car?
Notes
* Okay, here’s the gist of my rant: I hate it when people talk about these things as a test of faithfulness. Like, we already pay tithing and qualify for temple recommends. Isn’t that supposed to be enough?
** Credit to my spouse for pointing out that the real question I wanted to answer isn’t whether you can get there by public transit, but whether you can get there without a car.*** Thus, I also collected times to walk from city center to temple.
*** The REAL real question I want answered is whether you can get there cheaply. Thus rental cars and taxis are out, IMO. Bikes are potentially in, but I didn’t include them in this analysis because bikes don’t work as well for groups, families, or elderly people.
This is a fascinating analysis, Zatch! Thanks so much for sharing it with us here. It does seem likely that the GAs as a whole are pretty immersed in car culture, and for most of them, it’s not likely that it would occur to them that people would be going to the temple using other transportation methods. I do hope that someone in whatever department it is that plans locations for temples at least considers public transit a little.
Also, I love your side ideas of making temples more accessible by offering child care, temple clothing, and food. Especially for child care, I feel like this is just a much more reasonable approach that something that, say, Dallin H. Oaks would come up with, which would boil down to just be more righteous and your lack of child care won’t be an impediment.
The Draper temple annoys me in particular, because it is deliberately not in a central place. Essentially no one lives east or south of it (close by). Moving it just a mile or two toward the center of Draper would make it more convenient for the vast majority of people who will ever attend there.
I’m not sure if this post is an indictment of LDS temple building practices, or just an indictment of US, and particularly Western US, transit investments. I Googled the driving, transit and walking times to the 9 temples within 30 miles of my house. (Yes, I live in Utah.) The closest temple is only 5.1 miles away. I can drive there in 12 minutes, walk there in 98 minutes, or I can get there on transit in only 73 minutes. But that starts with a 27 minute walk (in the wrong direction) to get on a train for 15 minutes, to get on a bus for 9 minutes, to then walk for 10 minutes and arrive at the temple.
Even the most transit friendly temple of them all (SLC, less than 20 miles away) still takes me 86 minutes to get to on transit (vs 36 in a car) because it starts with that same 27 minute walk. 9 temples within 30 miles, and only 3 of them are less than 2 hours away by train/bus. Two are more than 3 hours away and 2 of them are infinitely far away by transit (hello again, Draper). The church has scatter shot 9 temples near my house, in every direction, and still none of them are well placed for mass transit. Blind squirrels may find nuts, but not if there are no nuts to be found. Because the closest transit option for me is a 27 minute walk away, every possible route starts with that walk at a bare minimum. And that just gets me to a train line that only goes toward SLC, so if that isn’t where I’m headed, I have to get off that train at some point and start back tracking.
The only way the church can improve on this is to literally build a temple closer to my house than that train line. Oh wait, it turns out they did this. I lied earlier. There is a 10th temple within 30 miles of my house, and it’s only a 13 minute walk. (Utah is a very silly place sometimes.)
Clearly, this is only a commentary about Utah, and is particular to my house. (I checked for my parents, who live 25 minutes away from me, also in the SLC suburbs, and they’re no better off.) In my lifetime (sample size: 1) the best transit I’ve ever had access to was when I lived in the suburbs of Chicago, and even still, the only way to get to the city started with a 6 mile drive to the nearest train station. Google can’t find a bus that gets from my old home to that terminal.
Nice analysis, which incidentally spotlights the hidden cost [in time expended] of a temple visit. Possibly another reason to consider using your extra time to ‘serve your neighbor’ rather than ‘serving the Lord’ ?
My real reason for posting, however, is to ask the burning question: Lapsed Physicist ??? The Public needs more information . . . perhaps the illustrious poster no longer believes in quarks ?
This is so interesting. I grew up on the outskirts of London, England at a time when most families didn’t own cars and very much relied on public transportation. The ‘London’ temple was built in rural Surrey and I recall traveling there via a rural bus service that involved another bus to get to the 2nd. I think a lot of people would get rides with other members and I also remember an old large passenger van being bought at one time for church purposes and going down for baptisms. Looking back I wonder how people got there for sessions. I remember too that there were some sort of lodgings that people could stay overnight. To build a temple closer to London would have been prohibitively expensive.
I’ve gone to several temples in Asia and they were all easily accessible by public transport. Perhaps because we’re so used to it, the ten minute walk up the hill to the Tokyo temple or the taxi to save time to the Seoul or Fukuoka temples isn’t a big deal. But, as you say, time is a huge factor. Going to the temple for most is an all day affair. Normally in Germany and Korea, I’d go up one day and come back the next, spending the night with a friend or at the temple annex. Hotels near temples are too expensive, due, as you say, to the costly areas in which they’re located—Tokyo is surrounded by embassies, others are in wealthy suburbs. It’s definitely an expensive problem. Thanks for bringing it up.
Having lived in Washington D.C. on the Virginia side for two years (end of the orange line), the temple was subject to variable traffic conditions. It could take up to 3+ hours to drive that way due to traffic and you never knew what it would be, so we never wanted to drive to the DC temple. If there had been a reasonable metro option, because the trains run on standard time intervals you can plan for, we would have eliminated a big hurdle. This is just a bit of lived experience, but I think it demonstrates the dilemma. Even if the temple had been within a mile or two of a metro station, it would have been accessible enough for us.
At least in the U.S., outside of Utah most meetinghouses are built in upscale, white suburbs that are inaccessible by public transit. I’ve lived in /regularly visited two wards (upstate NY and Maine) where a “transportation coordinator” has been called to try to arrange rides for members or investigators who don’t drive, don’t own a car (or a reliable car, or multiple cars and another family member needs it), etc. In the “old” days (1960s), with no seatbelt or car seat regulations, members could throw hordes of kids into their station wagons and drive the 20-25 minutes to the church for Primary (held on a weekday after school back then) or Mutual (YM/YW). Now doing so violates the law. The result is that the faithful Saints who are already nickel-and-dimed to death for tithing, fast offerings, etc. end up driving their own families to church and then making (sometimes multiple) trips elsewhere to pick up everyone in need. This is time-consuming and expensive, and when the “needy” aren’t home or bail out at the last minute with no notice, extremely frustrating. The solution, of course, is for the capital-C Church to purchase buses or vans, hire and pay a competent driver and mechanic, and make the rounds. Other denominations do it. Why won’t ours? (Liability! the GAs will respond, while they hoard billions of dollars.) I’ve heard anecdotally from those in Western Europe that the whole “Centers of Strength” concept and closing outlying areas severely impacted activity, largely due to transportation issues.
I also fully agree that if the Church wants more people to attend temples, they need to hand out transportation and food vouchers and provide trained, background-checked babysitters, either at local meetinghouses (once the Church hires janitors to deep-clean them), at temples (construct annexes!), or at peoples’ homes.
Ziff – Coming from you that’s quite a compliment! And I agree, that whole “just be more righteous and your lack of child care won’t be an impediment” attitude makes my blood boil (though I should admit that I was once one of those people).
DaveW – Re: “I’m not sure if this post is an indictment of LDS temple building practices, or just an indictment of US, and particularly Western US, transit investments.” Por que no los dos? I think it’s two sides of the same coin: those in charge assume the people will use cars, while people use cars because the built environment requires them.
Raymond – I didn’t want to join the academic rat race, so I found myself a nice, stable government job doing data analytics. To put it another way, I’m no longer practicing – I’m physics-spiritual but not physics-religious.
Di – I wondered why they built the London temple so far out, so thanks for explaining. As a YSA I definitely joined a number of temple carpools, and I agree it’s better than nothing.
Janet – My Tokyo temple anecdote is that my dad and I found it on accident by attending Sunday service at the nearby meetinghouse. Then we accidentally found all those embassies you mentioned plus a Lamborghini dealership – all within walking distance of the subway! It was a pleasant surprise to find that all so accessible.
Beelee – Ugh, traffic to/from the DC temple is the worst. I feel like I’d be more willing to deal with it if there was a nice place to get lunch or dinner afterwards, but the DC temple just isn’t close to anything.
NYAnn – Agree with what you say about transportation coordinators/carpools. In my experience it quickly leads to burnout for the drivers, even in the best of circumstances when riders are reliable and on-time.
Zatch: My point, which I probably used far too many words to make, is that it’s not clear that there is anywhere the church could build a temple in Utah that would work well for those without cars, and short of the LDS church buying out UTA and/or starting their own rival transit system, I don’t know what I can expect them to do about it.
Another way to think about it is this: in many American cities people don’t take transit to ANY location, or if they do, it is massively inconvenient. This implies that every destination is in a poor location for using transit, and that even if the church had their choice of every possible location they would still be unable to find a good spot. Thus, this is much more of a transit problem than a temple problem. In SLC, I’d argue that this is exactly one spot that is convenient(ish) to reach using transit, and they’ve already got a temple there. 😉
They could probably do a better job of locating temples closer to transit options, and prioritize ease of access over the photo appeal of the location, but in much of the US, until transit is improved, there’s no good location for the temple at all.
DaveW – Ah, I see your point, and you’re right – the US is pretty bad at public transit. But I don’t want to let the Church off the hook completely.
I served my mission in Indiana while the Indianpolis temple was being built, so I’ll use that as an example. Indianapolis has a public transit system – I wouldn’t say it has a great one, but it exists. And Indianapolis is a Rust Belt town, with all that entails: large swaths of abandoned factories and burnt-out apartment buildings that could be bought and torn down for relatively cheap. I bet they could have bought a brownfield near a bus line and a freeway exit for a good price (see my comparison below), but instead they built on former farmland 30 blocks north of the closest bus line.
$48k for 0.75 acres near bus and freeway: https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/4006-E-21st-St-Indianapolis-IN-46218/2058095281_zpid/
$530k for 0.89 acres just a couple miles down the road from where they built the temple:
https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/11683-Cold-Creek-Ct-Zionsville-IN-46077/138982608_zpid/
TBH I kinda get why – Carmel is safe, clean, and comfortable compared to a lot of Indy – but still, it was a conscious choice that somebody made. I guess what I should do is count not just the number of temples accessible via public transit, but the number of cities that have public transit at all. I’ll add that to my to-do list.
Continuing from Di’s point, I am quite surprised only one in Europe has no public transit. I am in the London temple district.. it’s quite a way south of London in the countryside… DH and I attempted the train journey only once.. to a small station, and then had to try and find a taxi to complete the journey.. and that was when we lived closer in Kent.. we’re now quite a way north of London, and believe me, I would not choose public transit to get there.. it just takes so long. Even as a car passenger the journey is onerous due to heavy traffic on motorways around London. I find the older I get the less I want to travel. I simply hate traffic.
For ease of access I love the Tokyo temple (I’ve only been once however), just a short walk from the subway station. I was in Tokyo at the time. I see it’s been mentioned in a couple of other comments.
And yes to temples are just not child or family friendly. At all. Families picnicking on the grass beside the temple have been reprimanded for.. not sure really… looking untidy maybe.. choosing a spot under trees too close to the temple perhaps.. it was something we did when the children were younger and DH and I had to take turns going in, whilst the other was left to keep the kids entertained in the grounds..
And don’t get me started on Bishops who want primary outings to the temple and have not a clue how hard that is, and how unwelcome children actually are… grrr..
Since Draper received repeated mention as an inaccessible temple, it seems worth pointing out theTaylorsville temple currently under construction 13 miles away. Taylosrville has been sited adjacent to a freeway on-ramp and a six-lane artery perpendicular to the freeway. A bus route runs down the artery. The bus only stops twice an hour, but I doubt this site is any less accessible than any other location within three miles.
A thoroughly urban temple of recent vintage I have enjoyed is Philadelphia’s.
This brings back the question of what a temple is supposed to be. In my mind a temple does not belong in any city center unless that city is Zion. It used to be that a visit to the temple was an expeience that stayed with you and was not generally repeated weekly, but maybe that is the past. Maybe the endowment will be our Mormon equivalent of the Catholics’ mass, and worship and activity as wards will recede.
Zatch – Thanks for this analysis. In the spirit of peer review (from a random person on the internet, in a non-scholarly outlet!), I’d like to point out a flaw or two.
It seems intuitively obvious to select the center of the city as the departure point for the temple, assuming that the different travel times of people who live close to the city center and far from the city center will average out. But that assumption really only applies to cities that are much longer than they are wide and can be idealized as a line. Most(?) big cities are built on plains with room to spread out, and can be idealized as circles. In that case there’s a strong directional component to travel times due to the difference between radial and tangential routes. Public transit systems in circular cities often use a hub and spoke model, with many bus routes and train lines that go from downtown to the outskirts of the city but few that go between different sectors on the outskirts, except for service on a traffic-choked ring road.
Let’s compare the city sectors to a clock, and say the temple is at the 12:00 position on the outskirts of the city. Someone who lives at the 2:00 position or the 10:00 position may be able to take a bus along the rim, but someone at 3:00 or at 9:00 will have to take a bus all the way to center of town and take another bus all the way back out to the rim to get to 12:00. That means the appropriate departure point for the average travel time to the temple by bus isn’t the center of town, but any point at the radial distance from the center with the highest population density. If the areal population density is modeled as an isotropic Gaussian distribution centered on downtown, then the mean distance from downtown that people actually live is modeled as a Rayleigh distribution. (I’m probably getting a lot of this wrong, probability density functions and density kernels and such always confuse me – but I spent the last three years working on a couple of papers about Gaussian and Rayleigh distributions as applied to all the planetesimals out past Pluto, so I’m not totally making this up.) That will add about 50% to your travel times, to wildly guesstimate a number.
The other thing you neglect in your analysis that I’d like to point out (understanding that many things are neglected for a bloggernacle post, and that’s totally ok – this is not a scholarly paper) is that many places with well-developed public transit systems also have lots of privately-run transit options, and those mostly don’t show up when you’re searching for a transit route on Google Maps. For instance, in Cordoba, Argentina (where I served my mission while the temple was being built), the temple is at about the 10:00 position on the clock (where due north is 12:00). The big bus station downtown is not only the hub for all the city-run buses, but also dozens of private bus companies that form a pretty competitive marketplace. The Sarmiento company runs an extensive bus network that is not only nearly co-extensive with the city-run buses in the big city, but also provides bus services in smaller outlying towns that are too small to run effective bus networks themselves. For instance, almost all of the bus routes in Cosquin and the chain of towns along the Sierras Chicas are run by Sarmiento. Some of the private bus companies have better routes between sectors on the rim than the city buses, but mostly they use the hub-and-spoke model too.
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Recently there have been complaints on the bloggernacle about temple announcements that look like they’re too close to the Washington DC temple to make much sense, but if heavy traffic can make the drive to the temple take 3+ hours and be unpredictable in total time, then those near-DC locations start to make more sense.
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Zatch – In the summer after I graduated high school I thought it would be fun to ride my bike from home to the Salt Lake temple, and also to the Draper temple. They’re about the same distance from my childhood house. The ride to the Salt Lake temple was long but mostly flat and very doable. The ride to the Draper temple was the longest, hardest bike ride I’ve ever done, and I’ve never tried to repeat it. I think someone outside the temple was nice enough to give me a water bottle, but I don’t remember anything about them except that they weren’t a temple worker or a temple goer. (It wasn’t a busy day at the temple, I actually don’t remember if anyone was even there.) Maybe someone on the grounds crew?
If you want walking and driving data for the Seoul temple, you should use NavarMap, which is one of two primary map apps used in Korea (the other is Kakao Map). We just went to this temple when visiting some family, and it was quite an uphill hike from the public transit stop (especially when you’re running late)! It’s also in a part of town where there are some expat communities and overall feels less built up.
The Oakland Temple does have bike racks, next to the multi stake center, thanks to my push. We biked up there with electric cargo bikes for a long time. When it was Fast Sunday, we took the bus and it does bring you right up the hill, but it’s only every half hour and if you have 9am Church, you’ll show up 10-15 minutes late due to how the bus schedules work.
One tricky thing is that the ward that covers downtown Oakland goes to church at the multi stake center by the temple and is like 70% people who don’t have cars. There’s a lot of depending on others to carpool, or the bus.
Once, we were giving our kids snacks while waiting for the bus and a ward member waiting at the bus stop made a comment about it being Fast Sunday. yes, I know. That’s why we took the bus instead of biking, but they were little kids!
I want to shout this post from the rooftops. The car-centric culture of the Church is so discouraging sometimes. I live in West Valley City, Utah, where my husband and I choose to be a one-car family by biking a lot and taking TRAX. We knew a temple would be coming to our area soon because Salt Lake and Jordan River were always full to capacity. There were several large attractive pieces of vacant land right by the Decker Lake Station of the Green Line TRAX; since that area is scenic, walkable, and also right off I215 we thought/hoped a temple might go there. When Taylorsville Temple was announced we were pretty disappointed that they missed the opportunity to build a temple where it would be easily accessible by train; we were even more disappointed when our stake president confided in my husband that the city of West Valley had offered those pieces of land *for free* to the Church to build a temple on but the church chose the Taylorsville location instead. Adding insult to injury is that the temple is on 4700 South, which is the border between West Valley City and Taylorsville. In other words, it’s a temple to serve West Valley City (the second biggest city on Utah, where missionary work is booming) but the Church didn’t want the stigma of having a temple in the often reviled and maligned West Valley City, so it’s just over the border into Taylorsville. I’m still so sad that walkability and accessibility by transit wasn’t a higher priority, and that West Valley was deemed unworthy of a temple even though we have dozens of vibrant stakes here.
Pontius Python, I also served my mission in Córdoba while the temple was being built. Did you serve under Pte Salas?
Qué pequeño el mundo, hermana, o por lo menos qué pequeño el mundo del bloggernáculo! Sí, hice toda la misión menos las últimas seis semanas bajo el Pte Salas. Para decir quién soy en otra manera que publicar mi apellido por internet – fui financiero entre mayo y noviembre de 2012, papel que me dió mucho respeto para las personas que estudian las finanzas y todo, pues yo no sabía nada de nada de nada. Te pido perdón por cualquier enojo te dí como financiero, me imagino que habrán sido muchos. Pero tú, quién eres tú?
” I’m no longer practicing – I’m physics-spiritual but not physics-religious. ”
Best line of the month – thx.
Hedgehog – Your comment made me curious, so I went back and looked more closely at the Europe temples. Google claims the London temple is 75 minutes by car from the city center (by far the longest drive on my list; the next closest was Mexico City at 50 minutes). Interestingly, Google claims it only takes 73 minutes by public transit (more of course if you live away from the center). FWIW, the sole European temple with no apparent public transit option is Kyiv, Ukraine. Not sure if that’s true all the time or just during Russia’s invasion.
John Mansfield – Agree, I was pleasantly surprised by the Philadelphia temple (and not just for its location, but also its tasteful design). And you bring up a good point in your last paragraph. I suppose having the temple near the city center is not the end goal, and in the good ol’ days where people just went once or twice in their lifetimes it probably doesn’t much matter where they are. But given the recent-ish push to increase temple attendance by making temples accessible to the members, I wish they would prioritize making them accessible to all members.
Pontius Python – I think my analysis is sound for grid-like cities and a normally distributed population – let me know if you disagree. But your note about spoke-and-hub cities is a good one: the layout forces both cars and buses to divert from the “ideal” bird’s-eye route, but bus riders will be particularly impacted since their diversion may take them all the way to the city center. So the true car/bus travel time ratio is probably even worse than what I reported since, as you say, many (most?) cities are more wheel-like than grid-like. Second, thanks for your note about private transit companies. Such things are mostly outside my lived experience and therefore not something I had even considered, but it makes sense that private options could be viable in some parts of the world.
Audrey – That’s a good tip. And, together with Pontius Python’s private transit tip above, it is a good reminder that Google doesn’t know everything. I wonder whether my results would change if I used more localized map services.
TopHat – Thanks for fighting the good fight with those bike racks. I don’t know what the bike rack situation is at most temples, but I suspect it is not great.
Gail – A part of me wondered whether maybe the Church built temples in wealthy areas in part because it received land donated from wealthy members, but you’ve just shown that it’s not all about cost savings for the Church. I think your comment makes the point I was trying to make about the Church’s temple-siting priorities much more clearly and concisely than my post does.
Raymond – 🙂
Pontius Python, terminé la misión en junio de 2012 así que seguro que te conozco…estoy tratando de recordar quien era el financiero en aquel tiempo. Yo serví en las Zona Norte (en Córdoba capital en General Paz), en Zona Villa María (en Bell Ville), en Catamarca, y en Río Tercero. Fui media famosa en la misión por un tiempito por abrir la primera área de hermanas en Catamarca después en 30 años y entrenar una nueva hijita a la vez. Mi apellido en ese tiempo era el equivalente de marrón. 🙂 Y el tuyo, alguna pista para ayudarme a recordar si quieres compartir?
Gracias, hermana, sí te recuerdo. Para mí, no me llamaron el matecito, sino el matesón!
Ahora sí, me acuerdo de tí—el financiero pelirrojo! Un gusto conocerte de nuevo aquí. ?
I once walked to the DC Temple from the Metro and found myself walking on winding, narrow residential streets without sidewalks or a shoulder.
Entirely inaccessible by transit without danger!
Something to keep in mind, Google Maps doesn’t have data on informal public transit routes in many countries in Latin America and Africa. So, many temples may be accessible by affordable public transportation, but Google can’t verify those routes.
I share your frustration about Draper! In 2019, I visited all of the temples within the UTA service area by using public transportation with origin from Provo. Here are my rankings of each temple by ease of access:
Salt Lake – Excellent – so many bus and train lines within a few minutes walking to the temple
Provo City Center – Excellent – Frequent UVX buses right next to the temple
Ogden – Excellent – short distance from Frontrunner and many bus lines, future OGX line nearby
Provo – Good – The UVX drops you off at the MTC, but you have to walk uphill to the temple
Jordan River – Good – Semi-frequent bus route with frontrunner connection nearby
Brigham City – Okay – Semi-frequent bus from Ogden that serves the town center
Payson – Okay – Semi-frequent bus route within a 15-minute walk
Oquirrh Mountain – Poor – accessible from the Daybreak Trax line, but requires a 30-minute walk
Mount Timpanogos – Poor – commuter bus to the temple, 40-minute walk to a return bus
Bountiful – Poor – commuter bus to a 15-minute walk of the temple, but an hour walk to the train station on return
Draper – Poor – Flex bus half way up the hill, an 1 hour+ walk down the hill to the Trax station
It should be noted that since Covid, many of the commuter and flex buses have been cut. However, UTA has started an on-demand service. It’s basically a cheap uber alternative within a confined area. It serves the areas around the Bountiful, Oquirrh Mountain, and Draper Temples. But I’ve heard from others that it can be very slow to get a ride.
As for the temples coming on-line in the Wasatch front, here are my rankings:
Taylorsville – Good – Near a semi-frequent bus and a planned future BRT route
Orem – Okay – 20 Minute walk from Frontrunner and UVX
Layton – Okay – 10-minute walk from a semifrequent bus
Lindon – Okay – 25 minute walk from a frequent bus
Syracuse – Poor – 15 minute walk from a semi-frequent bus
Deseret Peak – Poor – 20 minute walk from a flex bus
Saratoga Springs – Very Poor – No options, not even UTA on-demand services
Your very last comment that “Bikes are potentially in, but I didn’t include them in this analysis because bikes don’t work as well for groups, families, or elderly people” has one shining contrary example, and that’s the temple in The Hague, Netherlands. There the underground parking has space for some cars, but for a lot more bikes, as Holland has a very successful bike-centric transportation culture. And yes, in Holland, bikes are perfectly workable for groups, families, and elderly people, all of which regularly ride everywhere, including to church, summer and winter. I was in The Hague ward for a couple of years, and most people arrived to church by bike, including grannies and families with children. We had three little kids, and three little bike seats, two on my bike for the baby and the 5 year old, and one on my wife’s for the 3 year old. With dedicated bike lanes and an assumption that biking is the normal way to get anywhere in town, biking to the temple is not only theoretical, but practical and normalized. Granted, Holland is pretty unique in this, but as long as we’re making a wish list of what a more perfect world would look like….
(Of course, as is often the case, The Hague temple is not actually in The Hague, but in the town of Zoetermeer, which is kind of between The Hague and Rotterdam. It would probably take 45 minutes to bike there from The Hague, and an hour or so from Rotterdam, so probably as a practical matter only people living in the Zoetermeer Ward would regularly bike to the temple if they had a car available. Public transit is also good in Holland, so that is no doubt also a reasonable option, as in most of Europe, as your survey showed.)
MH – You’re very brave.
Cory Ward – That’s a good real-world assessment. That Provo to Brigham City train/bus trip must have been a long day!
Mark D – Thank you for calling out my error in the very best way!
I am sharing my experience from living and serving in the Democatic Republic of the Congo, Kinshasa. The Temple is located close to a meeting house/stake center. People walk great distances and think nothing of it. I well remember a Stake Conference wherein the Chapel was full, parents and children quietly sitting, waiting 60-30 minutes for the meeting to start. No cars in the parking lot, these people had walked. We left before the Temple was dedicated but I knew the locals very well and am certain they have no problem taking a small local bus, riding their motor scooter (with 4-5 on it), or walking. But they are faithful and will get there!