Journalism

the atlantic wonders if transit is failing white people

How do you react when you read the following sentence?

In Los Angeles, 92 percent of bus riders are people of color. 

This supposedly shocking fact is the starting point for Amanda Hess's confused and aggravating piece in the Atlantic today, which argues that somehow transit is failing because it's not attracting enough white people.  "As minority ridership rises, the racial stigma against [buses] compounds," Hess writes.  Sounds alarming!  But who exactly is feeling this "stigma," apart from Ms. Hess, and how many of those people are there? 

Read it again:

In Los Angeles, 92 percent of bus riders are people of color.

Now, how does your reaction change when I point out that in the 2010 census, just under 28% of the population of Los Angeles County is "non-Hispanic white," so over 70% can be called "people of color."  Now what if I tell you that as always, transit is most concentrated in the denser parts of the county, where the demand and ridership are higher, and these areas happen to be even less "non-Hispanic white" than the county at large?  (Exact figures can't be cited as this area corresponds to no government boundary.)  So the bus system, weighted by where the service is concentrated, serves a population of whom much, much more than 70% could be described as "people of color".

Please don't treat these figures as too precise.  The claim that "92% of Los Angeles bus riders are people of color" is impossible to fact-check because two of its key terms are ambiguous. 

  • Does "Los Angeles" mean the City of Los Angeles or Los Angeles County?  They're both big but very different.  Remarkably, though, both are over 70% "people of color."
  • Likewise there are many definitions of "Los Angeles bus rider" depending on which transit agencies you include.  I suspect Hess got her figure by looking just at LA Metro, rather than the many suburban operators who are also part of the total Los Angeles bus network, but it's hard to know. 
  • And by the way, I'm assuming that "people of color" include what the Census calls "Hispanic whites," as it has every time I've heard the term. (To the Census, anyone of European ancestry, including from Spain centuries ago, is "white.")

So to the extent we can track Hess's statistics here's what they say:  Los Angeles bus ridership is mostly people of color because Los Angeles is mostly people of color. 

But Hess wants the nonwhiteness of Los Angeles bus riders to be a problem, evidence that the transit agency — at least on the bus side — is somehow failing to reach out to white people. 

Racism has sometimes had a role in the history of U.S. transit planning, and there's a Federal regulatory system, called Title VI, devoted to ensuring it doesn't happen again.  But racist planning — discriminatory service provision aimed to advantage or disadvantage any ethnic group — is not only immoral but also a stupid business practice.  Diversity is the very essence of successful transit services — not just ethnic diversity but diversity of income, age, and trip purpose.  Great transit lines succeed to the extent that many different kinds of people with different situations and purposes find them useful.  As a planner, I want every line I design to be useful to the greatest possible range of people and purposes, because that ensures a resilient market that will continue even if parts of it drop out for some reason.

So why is it a problem that in massively diverse international cities we don't have "enough" white people on the bus? 

I happen to be in Los Angeles at the moment, on a brief and busy trip.  Tonight, after dark, I took a pleasant walk across downtown — from Union Station to 7th & Flower — pausing to note how safe I felt on streets and squares that were synonymous with crime and violence when I was a child.  Few of the people I saw were white like me, but the folks relaxing and listening to music in Pershing Square seemed like citizens of a decent city capable of joy.  (In a mean moment, I wanted to call my late grandmother and say: "Hi, Gramma! It's 10 PM and I'm in the middle of Pershing Square!"  I wanted to see the look on her face, back in 1980 or so.  She would probably have called the police and demanded they rescue me.)

Then I took the bus back to my Chinatown hotel, Metro Line 78, well after dark, and marveled at all the dimensions of the diversity.  Some people looked poor, others seemed prosperous and confident, but a strong social contract was obvious.  I read clues suggesting a huge range of professions, situations, life choices, and intentions.  And if Amanda Hess hadn't been so insistent about it, the fact that I was the only white person on the bus wouldn't have occurred to me, and certainly not occurred to me as any kind of problem.

Yes, there are plenty of people, still, who feel more comfortable riding with people who look like them, in a vague way that encompasses both race and class signals. But how much does this desire influence service planning?  How long should it?  Questions worth debating, I suppose.

Among young people out in downtown Los Angeles at night I see mostly interracial groups of friends.  I have no illusion that the whole city is like this, but it's striking nonetheless.  About 18 years ago in the New Republic — too old to be linkable — I read a story about how "post-racial" young people in Los Angeles are, how they are used to cultural diversity and uninterested in racial divides.  If any cultural observer could discern that then, how much truer it must be now.

Go ahead.  Try riding one of the well-lit, air-conditioned buses of inner Los Angeles.  It's not full of people just like you.  But neither is the city, and that's the glory of it.

fort lauderdale: yet another triumph for multi-destinational networks

If your city is producing lousy outcomes with its bus services, are you sure it's because of the buses, or the drivers, or the sidewalks, or the degree of "transit oriented development", or that they're not streetcars?  Maybe it's because the network structure is obsolete.  A study team led by Gregory Thompson of Florida State looked at the success of Broward County Transit, which serves greater Fort Lauderdale.  Apart from a few special enclaves, Fort Lauderdale is unlikely to be high on anyone's list of urbanist paradises.  It has plenty of gridlock, plenty of pedestrian-hostile environments, and the usual abundance of oversized roads that seem only to generate more congestion.

Broward sidewalk campaignYet the hard-working if unappreciated Broward County Transit system is producing excellent outcomes through multidestinational design.  Instead of running a radial system into a single downtown, they decentralized to serve many destinations, through a network of routes making easy connections with one another. Eric Jaffe tells the story today in Atlantic Cities.

The whole case for this kind of design is in my book Human Transit, esp Chapter 12 and 13, but Thompson has been making it for years.  I'm impressed at how well it's working in not-especially-transit-friendly Florida metros.  Tallahassee took the plunge last year.

Obviously this is an issue close to my heart.  I came to consciousness as a transit planner during the decentralization of Portland's network in 1979-82, which created local pulse networks in each suburban area and culminated in the high-frequency grid that today covers most of the city.  Almost every network design I've ever done has helped to improve the multi-destinational utility of transit networks of all sizes.  Huge amounts of resistance have to be overcome.  But if they're designed well, they work. 

Finally, kudos to the folks at Atlantic Cities for coming back to this issue with one great story after another.  I'm not sure I've ever seen a major media outlet build up this degree of internal understanding about the fundamentals of transit network design — a topic that's easily forgotten while obsessing about how cool technologies are.   Is any other American media outlet dealing with network planning issues so clearly?  Certainly not the New York Times, which publishes one story after another in which well-meaning platitudes about social needs are proposed as ways to change the facts of geometry.

seattle media cover last night’s event

My fun faux-debate with Darrin Nordahl last night, sponsored by Town Hall and Transportation Choices, has been covered by both the Seattle Times and the online journal Publicola.  Both summarize the question as something like:  "Should transit be useful or fun?"  Put that way, it's easy to say yes to both, but there really are some choices to be made, because often we're asked to sacrifice the useful for the fun.  As I said in the debate, I support all of Darrin's recommendations for a more joyous transit experience, except where the abundance and usefulness of service must be sacrificed to achieve them. 

a great summary of my talk at apta, washington dc

6850202555_e278ff2178_oIn Greater Greater Washington (GGW), Jenifer Joy Madden and Malcolm Kenton have written an excellent summary of my talk at APTA in Washington DC last week, which GGW also partly sponsored. It also includes this photo, which makes me look a bit like a preacher.   (Click to enlarge, if you must.)

If you missed my talk(s), please read the article but also the comment thread, in which some people accuse me of "anti-rail bias" and others say everything I would say in response to that.  This is gratifying to say the least.  It's fun to be applauded, but it's far more fun to be understood.

the economist and the “redundancy” fallacy

Today's unsigned piece in the Economist "Democracy in America" blog picks up on Tom Vanderbilt's Slate item reviewing my book.  I'm certainly grateful for the publicity, though for the record, I do believe in pleasure!

But the Economist's writer ends his piece with a commonplace of old-inner-city thinking that can do real harm when taken outside those bounds:

Ultimately, what makes public transit work is massive redundancy: lots of different systems layered on top of each other, all running at high frequencies, providing you clear information on when the next one arrives. The world's best cities, New York, Paris, London, Hong Kong, Berlin, all do this pretty well. For cities that aspire to greatness, the road map doesn't seem so hard to follow.

"Lots of different systems layered on top of each other" begs the question of whether these systems are working together — for example by encouraging connections from one to the other — or simply duplicating each other.  That is the distinction that matters.  

Yes, if you're in "New York, Paris, London, Hong Kong and Berlin" you may perceive a layering of "redundant" services, but one of two very different things is happening:

  1. The services are truly redundant in the sense of duplicating (or even competing) but the demand is so intense that they're all full, so the duplication isn't much of a waste.  This is the case with many big-city commute markets, but often not with all-day patterns.
  2. The services are actually fitting together into an integrated network, through some mix of planned connectivity and complementarity.  An example of complementarity is the simultaneous presence of services in one corridor that differ in the speed/access tradeoff.  A major Manhattan avenue, for example, may have an "express" train stopping only every mile or less, a "local" train stopping less than every half-mile, and a bus on the surface stopping even more frequently.  That isn't redundancy unless the market isn't strong enough to support all three.

Praising these super-dense cities for "massive redundancy" sends exactly the wrong message to less-dense and smaller cities.  Tell them to plan for redundancy, when their markets are insufficiently developed, and they'll spread their resources out in tangles of overlapping services none of which are frequent or attractive enough to be worth waiting for.  This is the lesson of inner Sydney, discussed in Chapter 12 of my book.

You need massive agglomeration for true redundancy to work.  Without that, you dissipate service quality too much.  This was a key failing of the privatization of the British bus industry, which gave private companies control over transit planning and prohibited them from working together to create rational connective networks, by declaring that to be collusion.  The result was a generation of frustrated riders who had to let Jim's bus go by because they had a ticket for Joe's bus, even though the two bus lines together might add up to enough frequency to actually be useful.  The last Labour government finally removed this prohibition on "collusion," allowing simple, obvious, and mutually beneficial plans to go forward, like this one in Oxford.

"Massive redundancy" may be fine if you're a megacity, though even there, its effectiveness may be a feature of the peak that doesn't translate to the rest of the day.  Anywhere else, services need to work together as a network.  Even in London, New York, Paris, Hong Kong and Berlin, that's really what's happening. 

calgary: good local journalism on transit!

This Calgary Herald article by Tony Seskus deserves some kudos for taking the time to understand the transit planning problem, and educating readers about it.  This, for example, is strikingly clear and accurate:

Peering at his map, [transit planning manager Neil] McKendrick finds transit routes that don't look like looped shoelaces. They look more like wobbly cursives penned with the wrong hand.

They are the result of circuitous streets and discontinuous roads in communities that often have limited or no connections to other communities. Some are the product of old neighbourhood planning where transit wasn't a focus. Others result from the city's topography.

The routes aren't just awkward. They often don't perform well on a costperpassenger basis because they don't serve enough people or aren't direct enough to attract riders. On that basis, it means the difference between the best-and worst-performing routes might be more than $6 per passenger in some cases.

My only critique: reliance on Transit Score, a metric that contains a heavy bias toward rail even when the mobility and access outcomes are identical.  For example, when Seskus writes:
            Generally, results show better scores … along C-Train lines …
… some of this is tautology, because the presence of rail — regardless of whether it's more useful than a bus — is part of the Transit Score formula.
By the way, I look forward to visiting Calgary in April for a public lecture, which we're in the process of scheduling now.

should we criticise false claims of “innovation”?

Yesterday, twice in one day, I encountered major news articles in media I generally trust (the New York Times and the Atlantic) which described very old ideas as though they were innovations.

In the NYT (opinion section) Lisa Margonelli described basic small city bus network planning as though it were an innovative critique of big-city planning.  (It's not, it's just different tools for a different problem.)  She also seemed dazzled by the private minivans proliferating in New York — a public transit model that's almost universal in the developing world.   (Her piece was ignorant of several other important things too, and I hope I wasn't too harsh.)

Then, on the same day, a respected (by me) columnist at Atlantic Cities proclaimed the work of an academic who claimed to have just invented flexible-route or demand-responsive transit.  This is an old idea, widely used in lower-ridership places around the developed world.  Considerable academic work has been done on it for years, and I personally was desgining these services, and often ripping them out, almost 20 years ago.

(I'm not very sympathetic to Margonelli, because her rhetoric toward my profession is so hostile.  When someone writes an article that displays ignorance of the field while hurling invective at everyone who works in it, they deserve some pushback.  I feel guilty about calling out the Atlantic writer, though, because I'd probably have made the same mistake in his place, writing in an unfamiliar field and urged on by the claims of a published academic.)

So my question for discussion is:  Should we care?  Should it matter if someone claims to have invented an idea, if that helps a good idea spread?  Am I just being a curmudgeon or killjoy to point these things out?  Is there anything wrong with letting people have the idea that the great ideas were theirs?