California Legalizes Life Near Public Transit

Castro Valley BART station, surrounded by parking and low-rise residential. Zoning such low densities around rapid transit is no longer legal under SB 79.

OK, the headline is a little exaggerated, but California’s Senate Bill 79, authored by Senator Scott Wiener and just signed by Governor Newsom, is a game-changer.  It prohibits most cities from forbidding dense development near rapid transit stations.

All over America, we have built rapid transit systems and then allowed local governments to prohibit dense development around their stations, thus limiting how many people can take advantage of the transit service.  The result is not just a crisis of affordable housing but one of affordable living.  Not owning a car can be liberating, for a lower-income person especially, but only if they are allowed to live in a place where public transit gives them ample access to opportunity.

For much of the late 20th century, the solution to low income housing was dense developments on cul-de-sacs nowhere near anything.  This development pattern assumed that everyone would need a car, thus impoverishing the residents further.  Because not everyone in those developments had cars, transit agencies were then forced to run inefficient services to these places that were designed without transit in mind.  We deal with this problem in almost every US network redesign we work on.

SB 79 overrides local zoning just in the areas around rapid transit stations (rail or high-end Bus Rapid Transit).  This is not nearly enough places, and it’s not all the places where transit can provide for a liberated life without cars.  But it’s a start.  If you want to dig into the details, I’d start with this writeup at M. Nolan Gray’s blog, Arbitrary Lines.

SB 79 passed the Legislature by the narrowest of margins.  The City of Los Angeles formally opposed it.  It cleaved the Democratic Party’s activists from some of its more self-interested donors.  And it has some wild exceptions: cities below 35,000 population (read: Beverly Hills) and counties with fewer than 15 rail stations (read: Contra Costa County).  The legislative process is never neat, and usually has some of these indefensible exceptions.  But that doesn’t change the fact that a real line has been crossed and a new way of thinking about our public transit resources is becoming essential.

Is SB 79 all good news?  No, it’s bad news that it was necessary.  It’s bad news that in the midst of a historic crisis of homelessness and housing affordability, so many California local governments were still happy to wring their hands and demand that the problem be solved somewhere else.  I support the right of local communities to express their own values in their governance.  But when values harden into denial about an urgent crisis of housing and affordable living, the state must step in, and it has.

“Nobody Walks Here. It’s Too Hot or Cold or Wet or Dry.”

Pedestrians in Mexico City

Almost everywhere I travel as a consultant, someone asks me whether it’s realistic to expect people to walk given the extremes of their climate.

They don’t just ask me this in Edmonton and Singapore.  I’ve even been asked this about Los Angeles, where the climate is very mild by global standards.  Well-traveled elites can form wildly nuanced intolerances about weather.  But how much should these opinions matter?

For example, if you’re a popular economics pundit based in the bucolic climate of San Francisco, almost all of the world’s urban climates will seem extreme to you, so it may seem logical to say:

And yet when I travel in the “Global South” I see lots of people walking.  They may not be having an ideal experience.  The infrastructure may uncomfortable or even unsafe.  But they’re walking.  They are probably walking because they can’t drive or can’t afford to buy a car, but then, their cities are already congested, so their cities wouldn’t function if everyone was in cars.

These people’s behavior matters.  Once more with feeling:  The functionality of a city, and of its transport system, arises from the sum of everyone’s choices about how to travel, not just the preferences of elites.  When elites make pronouncements about what “people” will tolerate, while really speaking only of themselves, they mislead us about how cities actually succeed.  They also demean the contributions of the vast majority of people who are in fact tolerating extreme weather to do whatever will give their lives meaning and value.

Most people don’t travel that much.  Most people have therefore adapted, often unconsciously, to the climate where they live.  (As they say in Saskatchewan, “there’s no bad weather, there are only bad clothes.”)  There are ways to adapt to most weather conditions.  There are things you can do as an individual, and then there are also things that great urban design and planning can do.

Are there extreme exceptions?  Dubai comes to mind.  I’ve walked in Dubai, scurrying from one rectangular block of Modernist shade to the next, often needing to cross high-speed streets full of reckless drivers.  But Dubai’s problem is not that it would be impossible to walk there.  It’s that the city was mostly designed by elites who assumed that nobody would walk (because they as elites wouldn’t walk) and they’ve therefore made choices that make walking difficult.  There are pleasant walkable areas in Dubai, notably the historic port that was laid out back when everyone walked.

And in every city there will be times when walking is less pleasant.  But people and economies adapt to that.  The Spanish ritual of the siesta is a practical adaptation to the fact that it’s often unpleasantly hot in the mid-afternoon.  So people often rest then, and instead drive their economies late into the evening.  Most cities also tolerate a few days a year when the weather is so bad that the economy isn’t expected to function normally.  In Portland, where I live, winter ice and snow have this effect; these events are so rare that the city can’t expect to handle them the way Chicago does.  We mostly shut down the city for a day or two, and that ends up being the least bad solution.

The human ability to adapt is the key to our spectacular success on this planet.  Our problem is that the people who lead our public conversations, our elites of wealth and opinion, are often some of the least adaptable people on earth.  And when societies assume that we should listen to those people, we all end up internalizing the message that there’s something wrong with us if we even try to walk in Phoenix in July or Chicago in January.

And that’s wrong.  Sometimes walking a few blocks is the key to liberty and prosperity in someone’s life.  Most people do what makes sense in the place where they live.  Only if we recognize that will we make the investments in urban design to make walking more bearable in extreme weather.  And only then will our cities include everyone.

 

“Should We Let Public Transit Die?” My New Piece in Bloomberg

It’s been embarrassing to be traveling in Europe during critical weeks when several states I care about — including Pennsylvania, Oregon, and Illinois — are going through major transit funding crises.  But the same crises are coming for much of the US in the next year.  So I wanted to lay out everything I could offer in the way of arguments for why US transit deserves funding, why it’s going to need more, and what arguments we can make to win this difficult battle.  Bloomberg Citylab published it today.

I’m especially proud of the line, “If you drive to the mall, bus riders subsidize you.”  But there’s a lot there and I hope you find it useful.

Again, it’s here.

Bern: A Frequent Bus to Corn

 

Is there a more confident, polished, completely self-satisfied city than Bern, Switzerland?

It’s not just that it’s the “Federal City” (please don’t say “capital”) of a famously wealthy and orderly country, the meeting point among its French, Italian, and German identities.  It’s not just the long history of sovereignty, not just as a city but over a vast canton reaching to the summits of the “Bernese Alps”. It’s not just the fresh, cold water falling into pools all over the old town.

It’s that nothing about it seems accidental, as some aspect of most cities does.  Everywhere I looked I saw design, intention, control.

So when a frequent trolleybus takes me past cornfields, I know someone intended this.

I noticed this odd shape of Bern first when we climbed its highest hill, the Gurten, and looked down:

Many well-planned European cities have hard edges, with ten-story buildings looking directly out on farms, but it’s not as common to see farmland so completely surrounded by the city, so that urban infrastructure, such as frequent public transport, will waste some of its capacity serving a place with no demand.

But the frequency!  While we were at a cafe in the old city I kept wanting to photograph how incredibly often the trolleybuses were coming by.  One seemed to always be at the stop.  But of course, you can’t photograph frequency, and all I got was photos of a very nice bus.

Switzerland, like much 0f Europe, is very sentimental about agriculture.  Around the Paul Klee Center, a major museum devoted to the early 20th century painter, still more expensive urban land was devoted to corn, with an interpretive sign of course.

But every city sets aside land for some ceremonial purpose, so if agriculture is what people want to see from their frequent buses, it’s what they should have.  Even the old city has steep terraced slopes that have been gardens for centuries:

If you are anywhere near, I do recommend Bern, a walkable historic city on a dramatically fast-moving river.  If you need transport things to do, there are funiculars, sleek modern trams, and abundant trolleybuses.  For true access geeks, there’s also the half-hourly event at the rail station when trains in all directions are there at once and leave within a few minutes of each other, an aspect of the famous “clockwork” nationwide rail schedule.

And don’t miss the opportunity to notice how similar they want the trams and buses to feel, so that you don’t develop attachments to technologies but just use whatever goes where you’re going.

But then, just walk.  Indeed, if you walk far enough, a pleasant city street may turn into a Wanderweg, the network of hiking trails that laces the whole country, which are so popular that you may find a little shop selling coffee or cheese by the path far from any road.  These trails, too, are part of the romance of agriculture.  While I was there, someone on Twitter was going on about how poor Europe is and mentioned that it has nothing like American national parks.  Yes, Europe has long been so thickly settled and cultivated that has few wild areas on the scale of Yosemite or Yellowstone.  What it has instead are hiking trails everywhere, and a population that sees walking through scenic agricultural land as a valid kind of recreation.

These last images are from Mürren, a recreational area with national-park-level scenery high the Bernese Alps, still part of the proud Canton of Bern.  But this kind of infrastructure is everywhere in Switzerland.  And of course there are also trains and buses, even in rural areas.

I’m a little reluctant to praise Switzerland for such abundant rural service, fashionable as that is, because it’s something you can do only if you have enough money.  Most countries have to economise more, and so they face the fact that however much they would like to provide access to rural areas, the demand there is usually so sparse that it is not something you do if you want to attract many riders.

But Switzerland does have the money to spend on this.  They can even afford to run frequent urban trolleybuses to cornfields.  And who am I to judge?

 

The Fall of Philadelphia

The Pennsylvania State Senate has decided that the transit system of America’s fifth largest city should be substantially destroyed.  Similar dramas are playing out in Illinois, Oregon, and Rhode Island.  Each crisis has arisen from the state legislature’s refusal to find new funding to save public transit, but Pennsylvania is the first state to actually push its biggest transit agency over the cliff.

(Oregon will be next to decide, at a special legislative session in late August.  Look for action in Illinois later this fall.)

In the Philadelphia area, SEPTA is making a 20% service cut but will eventually have to cut service 45%.  Cutting almost half of a transit system is not a way to make it more efficient.  It more like asking whether you’d like to keep your heart or your lungs.  Back in 2018 our firm did a detailed study of the Philadelphia network, and while we found many things to improve, none of those things would save even 10%, even if there weren’t unmet needs on which any savings should be spent.

So this will be a disaster with far reaching consequences.  A city whose high density makes transit essential for the city’s functioning will soon not function very well.  Service cuts will push transit riders back into cars (either as drivers or as people being given rides) triggering increased congestion.  It will also cause people to lose jobs and opportunities due to lack of transportation.

From what I can tell, the Republican-controlled Pennsylvania State Senate seems to be motivated by pure cultural animus toward urban life.  One state representative has already replied with a proposal to return tax revenues to the county from which they came, to make the point that the rural counties are actually net recipients of government spending that is funded by urban -generated prosperity.

This raises one of the most insidious aspects of how many US states have constructed the powers of local governments.  Conservative state leaders appear to be nearly unanimous in their view that big cities should be prevented from governing themselves.  In particular, they are committed to denying local governments the freedom to ask their own voters to raise their own taxes to pay for things that they value.  The idea is to make city governments helpless while continuing to blame them for everything that goes wrong in cities.  It plays well in conservative media, but it’s not fair and it’s certainly not democracy.  When dense cities are not allowed to fund their services in a way that reflects their needs and values, it guarantees that the city will be a site of failure — failure that will be especially visible to the media because in dense cities everything is more visible.

A good backgrounder on this, which I’m reading now, is historian Steven Cohn’s book Americans against the City.  It’s a history of anti-urbanism the explains how foundational hating cities has been to America’s sense of itself.  None of which changes the fact that cities are engines of prosperity, and that to hate the city is to hate your own prosperity.

Cities need more transit.  Rural areas need more roads.  Let’s let everyone pay for what they value.

A Compliment

A US transit agency client just gave me a really interesting bit of feedback on our work as transit network planning consultants at Jarrett Walker + Associates.

They said (paraphrasing): ‘We really appreciate your willingness to challenge us. Most consultants tell us what they think we want to hear. When we went into our last project with you, we expected you to validate that our network was good, but you asked lots of questions we didn’t think to ask, and we ended up making some change to 80% of our service. The results are so much better.’

The fundamental gamble of my career, and our firm, has always been that some clients do want to be challenged.   Not everyone government authority wants to be told that everything is fine and they should go on as they are, although many of them do. Some authorities really do see the need to question what they’re doing, and even to back up and question the assumptions that they’re not even aware they’re making.

I say this not to brag, but to encourage. There are spaces in the market for consultants who don’t give clients just what they think they want. There’s even space to express an opinion now and then.

Of course, I don’t recommend everyone taking the risks I’ve taken.  Obviously, the book and 15 years of professional blogging have given me some credibility that not everyone has.  You may be in a job that truly rewards cowering, as I sometimes was in Australia 18 years ago when a professional friend told me:  “The key to success in this business is to write reports that say as little as possible.”[1]

With the world as it is, there’s no time for that.

Feel a bit more courage!  Find people who can handle that, and move toward them.  You’ll be happier, and the world will be better too.

 

 

[1]  This was someone working professionally in Sydney, but not associated with my employer at the time, MRCagney.

Two of Our Bus Network Redesigns Help Lead to Awards

Akron Metro’s New Award. Monterey-Salinas Transit received a similar one.

Two of our recent successful bus network redesigns have helped lead to APTA Outstanding Public Transportation Agency awards! Congratulations to Akron METRO in Ohio and Monterey-Salinas Transit in California, both of which implemented our redesign plans in the last couple of years.  (We also made MST’s public network map!)

We certainly don’t take credit for everything that those great agencies did to win those awards, but we did contribute something important: Network redesigns that increase ridership and align the service with current goals help to put transit agencies on a sound footing where they’re ready to make the case for the funding they need.

But please don’t think of us just for redesign. We also do visionary expansion plans that many agencies need now to create the excitement for new funding. Those plans aren’t just lines on the map; they’re stories about how the city will function better and its people will have better lives. We also do evaluations and workshops that help educate local elected officials and the public about the consequences of various transit improvement ideas.  And we teach a very fun intensive course in network design (see here).

For more on us, contact me or see jarrettwalker.com. Meanwhile, congratulations to our friends at Monterey-Salinas Transit and Akron METRO, APTA Outstanding Transit Agencies of 2025 and two of our many satisfied clients!

Coming to the UK in September!

My travel plans will have me in the UK for much of the month of September this year. This is a great opportunity for British friends to think about events they might want me to do.

First, I can do speaking events related to my book, for free as long as there’s a reasonable marketing value.  These events can focus on any mixture of.

  • The guide we wrote on considering bus service in town planning, for the National Transport Authority of Ireland.  (The town planning habits of the UK, and the resulting public transport issues, are similar.)
  • Our Irish network redesigns, and lessons for the many redesigns that will be forthcoming in the UK.

Second, I can also offer sessions of our fun two-day intensive course in public transport network design, for any sponsoring organisation.   You can read more about that here.  These take some planning so please contact me right away if your organisation is interested.  (Our fee to run the two day course is £12,000 plus a suitable venue.)

My larger objective for the trip, apart from some time off in beautiful landscapes and cities, is to see if we can be helpful in the reform of bus services across England, which will give shire and urban area governments the power to define their own bus services for the first time in decades.  We have already provided some planning advice in both Cambridge and Birmingham, as well as in Wales.  We’re also keen to do more comprehensive network maps to help British communities assess their current services, like the one we did for for the Cambridgeshire-Peterborough Combined Authority.

So please share your ideas for what I should do!

UPDATE:  A few events are now in place:

  • Leeds, Sept. 9, Transport Planning Society event, evening, details TBD.
  • Sheffield, Sept 10, date and time TBD.
  • Portsmouth, Sept 22-24 for Quality Bus Conference

… but there is still time to schedule other things.

 

Bus Service in England: The Need for Clearer Maps

Map of Cambridge bus services, showing the extreme complexity.

When different operating companies all plan their own bus service, the combined network is really complicated!

It’s a time of rapid change for urban bus services in England.[1]  Since Margaret Thatcher’s privatization reforms of 1985, these services have been subsidized but not really controlled by government.  I wrote here about Thatcher’s vision for privatized public transport, including why it has been teetering for some time and is now being swept away.

Now, all over England, governments at the county or shire level have been looking at whether and how to take control of their public transport, so that they can offer coherent networks and fares, integrate public transport planning with town planning, and ensure accountability to the public.  Right now, most of these conversations are happening at a procedural level, but now it’s time to look at maps, and try to figure out what an improved and integrated network would actually look like geographically.

Right now, though, maps are a problem.  As we have wandered the transport websites of the UK, we’ve found maps by operating companies, showing only their services, but a shortage of good maps done by governments showing how all the services interact.  So we drew one, as an example, and a lot can be learned about England’s challenge by staring at it for a bit.

On my tour of the UK last summer, I spent a day in Cambridge, site of one of the UK’s most elite universities.  I was fortunate to be hosted by Andrew Highfield, an assistant director at the Cambridgeshire-Peterborough Combined Authority (CPCA), which manages transport for Cambridgeshire and its cities.  If he hadn’t been showing me around, the service would have been incomprehensible.  Many operating companies, trained to see each other as competitors, intersect here and cover different parts of the shire.  They have their own signs and shelters, each advertising their own services, and each draw maps of just their own services, if they draw maps at all.

After my visit, the CPCA commissioned us to draft a map for them.  Our mapping style focuses on what matters to the customer and not what matters to anyone else.  Instead of highlighting operator brands, we highlight frequency, the single most important variable about a service that is not always shown on maps. We use hot colors for high frequencies so that these jump out visually against the background complexity of lower frequency services.

Here is a PDF of our map.  As you can see, it’s very complicated, but the complexity of the service, as it’s evolved through the privatization era, is part of the point.

Since I’m now going to make some observations about the network, I should first announce my ignorance.  I can’t claim to know Cambridge that well.  I’ve spent a day there, and haven’t explored the shire around it at all, though of course I’ve poked around in aerial maps and Street View.  So nothing I say here should be taken as a recommendation.  Only at the end of long study of the network, and many conversations with local people, would we be in the position to do that.

However, this map should be useful for people in Cambridgeshire to understand what they have, and to think about how well it fits with the demands of the communities that they know well.  So the most important point of this article is: Every local authority should have a map like this!

What can we see?  First, let’s zoom into a slice of Cambridge itself.

Overlapping services on Histon Rd. in the NW of Cambridge

One of the first things I look for in a network is heavy overlap of low-frequency services, because this means there’s enough service to deliver a higher frequency if the service were organised differently.   So looking at our map of Cambridge, my eye immediately went to Histon Road in the northwest part of the city, served by A, 8, 8A, and T2

There’s enough service here to deliver a frequency of every 10 minutes or better, but instead there are four blue or purple lines, indicating less frequent services overlapping.  This means long gaps at some times and a pile of buses running together at other times, even when everything is running on time.  These routes look like they were drawn separately, by different people at different times with different goals, which is not what you do when you’re trying to build an integrated and efficient network.

Histon Road, by the way, looks like this, mostly the two-story built form typical of urban fabric in much of the British Isles, more than enough to generate demand for service that’s always coming soon.

What these people have now, in return for low frequency and uneven spacing of buses, is direct buses to lots of places.  Is that better or worse?  In most cases, higher frequency, even requiring connections, delivers better access to opportunity.  But an actual network plan would be the chance for the community to consider these tradeoffs and figure out what they want.

Cambridge’s Park-and-Ride structure is also interesting.  Because space is limited in the city centre and car parking is expensive there, park-and-rides around the edges are designed to intercept motorists from the surrounding area, giving them a cheap way to get to Cambridge without contributing to its traffic and parking demand.  What’s more unusual is that these facilities have their own dedicated direct routes, with numbers starting with “PR” that run frequently all day.  Other local routes may duplicate them for a long distance:

Routes 3 and PR2 can easily be described as being different services with different markets, but we usually get the best public transport for everyone by maximizing the diversity of people on any one vehicle.  So it’s more common to serve Park-and-Rides with peak-hour services to provide high capacity where demand is high, but to provide a more basic service at other times, one that serves other markets along the way.  (For example, should those intercity buses, 12 and T5, stop at the P&R to contribute to a total frequency product with less duplication?  Maybe.)  Again, I am not making a recommendation here!  That would only come after much more study of demand and some public conversations about goals.  But this may be an example of over-specialized service, one whose market is too narrowly targeted to justify being served with these nonstop links.

Now let’s zoom out to the whole map.

It’s rare to see 10-minute frequency on a long intercity link, but there’s one here, formed by A and B from St Ives into Cambridge, running in the Cambridgeshire Guided Busway.

But as it approaches Cambridge in the lower right corner of this map, it splits into two purple (every 20 minutes) branches, which later rejoin in the city centre.  So there’s frequent service along the rural link, and to central Cambridge, but not to anywhere in northern Cambridge.  This makes some sense from a commute perspective, since there are commute destinations on both branches, but when you’re trying to organise service within a city, the key is to build up simple patterns of high frequency rather than piles of different routes.  So it’s awkward to have the frequency go down, because of the branching, right as the line from St Ives reaches the area of highest demand.  Maybe this is the right pattern, but it deserves a closer look.

Finally, with our map you can marvel at the incredible complexity of rural services in England:

Most of these are one or two trips per day, many scheduled around schools but open to the public.  Some are just a few days a week.  It is hard to call this a network, because these services are mostly not intended to work together.  Instead, each looks micro-designed around a particular constituency.  Could this system be much simpler and thus more frequent — running, say, a few times a day instead of just once or twice?  Possibly, but again, it would require a full plan engaging the community.  My goal here is just to reveal the patterns that suggest possibilities, and to show why our mapping style is key to showing you what you have.

Update:  I will be in the UK for most of September 2025, continuing to promote my book!  Let me know if you have an event idea or if your organisation would like to sponsor a short training course.

 

 

[1]  Transport in the UK is a “devolved power,” which means that policy can be different in England, Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland, not to mention the various other semi-autonomous islands.  This means that Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland govern transport through their own parliaments, but the UK government plays the same role for England, since there is no separate English government.   (About 83% of the UK population is in England.)