Public Outreach and Consultation

Portland: Turning the Dial Toward Equity (How Far?)

What does it mean to make a bus network design more equitable or “just”?  These terms mean different things to many people, but in this case the core idea is a redistribution of bus service resources, particularly toward people with lower incomes also toward historically excluded racial groups.

In Portland, where I live, we’ve been working with the local transit agency TriMet on a bus network design effort that has two overriding motives: ridership and equity.  And as we look at how much to invest in equity, we have a big question for the community to think about:  How much redistribution of service toward lower-income areas should we do?

TriMet’s project will eventually develop a near-term plan for expanded bus service.  Thanks to a new Oregon state funding source and some other revenues, the agency has the financial capability to run about 10% more bus service than it ran in 2019, and more than 30% more than TriMet runs right now.  The constraint at the moment is the dire shortage of bus operators, but once that’s resolved this level of service will be possible.

These goals, ridership and equity, overlap more than they differ.  If we were planning only for ridership we’d still offer good service where there are lots of people with low incomes even if equity weren’t a separate goal.

However, there are cases where people with low incomes need services that wouldn’t have especially high ridership.  With the suburbanization of poverty, more and more of these people live in areas with low density and/or street networks that present obstacles to efficient bus service.  Another example is service to industrial areas: These tend to have poor ridership because of the low density and terrible pedestrian environment, but they are much valued by the people who rely on them to get to lower-wage jobs.  So in these cases, the equity goal is the only reason we suggest more service there.

Note the word suggest.  The Service Concept we’ve released is just that, a concept.  It is not even a proposal, and it’s certainly not a recommendation.  We are not saying that we have it right.  We are putting it out there to start a conversation.

We drew the Service Concept map around a conference table with TriMet planning staff, and in an earlier phase we also had staffs of most of the cities and counties in TriMet’s service district as well.  In our professional judgment, it’s a good illustration of what you might do if you were trying to expand both ridership and equity.  We’re sure the public feedback will give us lots of great ideas for how to refine it.

But we are also asking the public a specific question:  How far should we shift the priorities toward equity?

One approach you could take is to spend the new resources on the needs of people with lower incomes, while retaining all the services that are there now.  This would get you some improvement in equity, but we wondered if that would be enough to match the public’s priorities.

So we (staff and we the consultants) decided to put out an illustration of what it might look like to turn the dial even further toward equity.

The concept map cuts some existing services to make an even larger investment in equity-improving services. The service cuts happen in places where the service has neither a ridership justification nor an equity justification.  These areas are low ridership because of physical features like low density, poor walkability, or disconnected streets.  They’re also low equity priorities because they have relatively few people with lower incomes.

In shifting service in this way, from higher-income areas to lower-income areas, did we go too far or not far enough?  That question is purely about values.  It has no technical answer.  That means that my opinion doesn’t matter and I won’t express one.  We are asking the community this question, as part of TriMet’s survey about the concept, and that will lead to a decision by the Board on how far we will turn the dial in creating the final plan.

 

 

 

 

“Give Mrs. McG Her Bus Stop”? Reasons to Pause

Here’s some refreshing candor from a local politician, in the context of an effort to speed up express bus services on New York’s Staten Island by removing excessive bus stops and deviations:

Borough President James Oddo added that “people like me” were part of the problem: Requesting new bus stops to help vocal constituents.

“Who doesn’t want to give Mrs. McGillicuddy a bus stop?” Oddo asked.

When bus routes meander, do little squiggles, or make too many stops, the cause is almost always local elected officials who insisted that transit agencies say yes to whatever a noisy constituent demands.  Such officials are always calling the transit managers and saying: “Get Mrs McGillucuddy off my back!”

Of course, Mrs. McGillicuddy rarely calls to advocate the kinds of efficiency that makes transit more attractive and useful for the whole community.  She’s calling to demand something that’s good for her or her friends.

Here, as often, we’re in the presence of the paradox of public outreach.  We want transit to be useful to busy people, but busy people don’t engage much with public outreach processes.  They’re too busy.

So we disproportionately hear from the not-busy people, who have priorities other than speed.  So we hear demands like:  “All those busy people should have 3 minutes added to their trip so that I don’t have to walk three blocks.”

I don’t want to dismiss the concerns of senior and disabled riders, but if a person physically can’t walk three blocks, then the answer may be some kind of paratransit.  Paratransit is expensive, but not as expensive as doing something every hour all day to meet just one person’s needs.  There are some genuinely difficult choices here, but they should be addressed by a policy, rather than a process of just rewarding whoever makes the most noise.

Because if a transit agency establishes a pattern of saying yes to every demand for things that slow down the service, that precedent will only trigger more demands, accelerating a downward spiral in which a resource designed to be used by many becomes micro-designed around the demands of one or two, to everyone else’s detriment.

Arguing against these demands with data is tricky.  The differential impact of adding one bus stop or squiggle may not be much. It’s the cumulative effect of 100 such decisions is devastating, gradually transforming relatively fast and efficient services into slow, meandering scenic tours that only people with lots of spare time to use.

So you really need policy, not just data, to hold the line.  Service design standards about stop spacing and linearity can give staff the backup they need.  These standards should be periodically re-adopted, so that current elected officials feel ownership of them, or at least understand the dangers of not observing them.  And the adoption is the time to have the debate about how to balance some people’s difficulty walking with the need for transit to be fast, direct, and reliable.  Again, the point is not to leave seniors behind but to ensure we’re addressing their needs in a fair and consistent way.