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Atlanta: A Draft Redesign of the Bus Network

Posted on December 12, 2024 in Atlanta, General, Network Redesign 1

After much hard work, intense discussions, extensive public outreach, and a pandemic, we’re finally ready for public comment on the draft MARTA “NextGen” bus network redesign, whjch covers Atlanta and the neighboring cities in Fulton and DeKalb Counties.  (Clayton County is also part of MARTA but being addressed by a different process.)

The project website has all kinds of maps and useful information.  But if you’re curious, I hope you will delve into our readable full report (download high resolution pdf, or view low resolution pdf).  There you’ll find a complete explanation of the thinking that led to the proposal as it stands.

This is the first complete rethinking of the bus network since the MARTA rail system opened 45 years ago.  Back then, the core idea of the network was that the purposes of buses was to feed the rail system, producing a network overwhelmingly suited to bringing people into downtown Atlanta.  But since then, much has changed about the region and it transit demand:

  • Many suburban employment and activity centers have developed, some of which are well suited to transit service.
  • The rise of working from home after Covid-19 has reduced the downtown rush hour commute market.
  • The need is greater than ever for all-day, all-week, all-direction trips that matter to lower income people.  Many of these trips are not going downtown, but to activity and job destinations all over the region.

We have done our best to redesign the network reflecting these changes.   Big ideas include:

  • More lines that run frequently (every 15 minutes or better) all day and on weekends.  These are in red on our maps below.
  • More lines that continue past rail stations instead of ending at them, to connect more destinations with fewer transfers.

Is this all of the service that the service area needs?  No, it is what MARTA can afford, given its other commitments and the decisions that have been made about priorities.   MARTA directed us to plan for a total service budget that is slightly lower than 2019 though higher than 2023.  I wish we could have proposed far more service than this.

Still, within these constraints, the plan achieves some dramatic improvements.  Here is the Fall 2023 network on the left, which we used as a baseline, and the proposed “NextGen” network on the right. (These are just diagrams.  Much more detailed maps are on the project website and in our report.)

 

Some key facts:

  • The average number of jobs reachable in an hour goes up by 21% for all residents, 23% for racial minority residents, and 23% for low income residents.  (Why does this matter?)
  • The number of residents within 1/4 mile of service goes up by 2%.
  • The number of residents within 1/4 mile of frequent service (every 15 minutes or better all day, shown in red above) goes up by 245%.

I hope you’ll take the time to peruse our friendly report, which talks through the whole thought process and explains how we got to this recommendation.  Then, if you live or travel in the MARTA service area, please comment!  MARTA is taking comments through February.

 

 

 

Chicagoland: Pace Needs Your Input on Priorities!

Posted on December 4, 2024 in General 2

One of our firm’s biggest-ever transit planning projects, certainly in terms of land area, is unfolding at Pace, the agency that provides bus service for almost all of the suburbs of Chicago and a few corners of the city itself.  Pace is wrapped around all sides of the Chicago Transit Authority network, extending across an area roughly the size of Connecticut.   Here’s the current system map for a sense of scale:

The Pace network, with red denoting high frequency. (See legend.) Service is concentrated on the edges of Chicago and in the older satellite cities, leaving large developed areas, including much of DuPage County, unserved.

Right now, network alternatives are out for public review, so we need the input of people who live or work in the Pace service area.  If you know such a person, please share this with them, and point them to the project website here.

The Pace ReVision plan is happening in the context of a larger conversation about transit in the greater Chicago region, which I reviewed here.  All three of the region’s transit agencies are underfunded, especially as operating costs have risen post-Covid.  Pace, in particular, has never been funded to the degree needed to keep up with the vast growth of the Chicago suburbs over the last 70 years.  Even now, it’s service is heavily concentrated in the older areas that were built out over 70 years ago, both on the edges of Chicago and in the older satellite cities such as Elgin, Waukegan, Joliet and Aurora.  So any meaningful improvement in service needs to presume new resources, and make the case for them.

For that reason, the Pace ReVision project has put three alternatives before the public:

  • Plus 10 – Limited Investment.  This shows what we could achieve with a return to 2019 service levels, which may be possible within existing funding.
  • Plus 50 – Ridership Focus.  This shows what the network would look like if we could expand service 50%, to roughly per-capita service level of Connecticut Transit, and if the overriding goal were ridership.
  • Plus 50 – Coverage Focus.  This shows the same 50% growth but with emphasis on the goal of coverage.

All this is explained in this graphically rich Executive Summary, which I hope you’ll peruse.  If you want to go into even more detail, there’s a full report explaining even more of the thinking.

Above all, we need people to engage!  This is the moment for people in the Chicago suburbs to think about what they want transit to be.  Tell us now for maximum impact!

Nashville: Presenting a Transit Plan in a Car-Dominated City

Posted on November 4, 2024 in General 3

Tomorrow’s US general election is a massive turning point in history, but on the same day, many cities are also making big decisions around transit and urbanism.  Here’s a rundown of all the main measures on the ballot across the country.  Meanwhile, I’d like to highlight one that I find especially interesting: the “Choose How You Move” proposal in Nashville.  It’s a smart combination of measures, including bus infrastructure, bus service, pedestrian infrastructure, and traffic signals, while the key word “choose” emphasizes that the point is to expand the freedom of people in the Nashville region.

In September I had the chance to spend a few days in Nashville, at the invitation of a group of civic leaders called Cumberland Region Tomorrow.  I did a keynote at their event and also had a chance to meet with staff at the transit agency, WeGo.

Like many sunbelt cities, Nashville has been growing in a car-dependent way for decades, but meanwhile, it has evolved a dense core that is just too dense for everyone to drive.  The city has three main functions concentrated downtown: State government, the usual mix of business office towers, and the country music industry’s main tourist attractions.

Just outside of downtown is Music Row, where the country music record labels have their offices, and Vanderbilt University with its large medical center.  This density is typical:

This is enough dense development to generate a lot of need for alternatives to private car travel, but the street network lags behind that demand.  Many main streets are state highways, managed for vehicle flow at the expense of nonmotorized human flourishing.  Many lower-income people live on or near these highways, which are often unsafe for pedestrians, lacking both adequate sidewalks and a reasonable spacing of safe places to cross.  Prevailing driving styles are aggressive even by US standards.

The transit network is far better than I’d been led to expect.  The buses are modern, and there is a downtown transit center that should be the envy of many nearby cities.

But its main issue is quantity — there just isn’t much service — and the tendency of buses to get stuck in traffic.

Nashville’s last transit adventure at the ballot box was in 2018, where a proposed ballot measure failed with 64% voting no.  TransitCenter reviewed the advocacy lessons here, but fundamentally, this was a plan for major light rail investment, including a tunnel under downtown, as well as a few Bus Rapid Transit lines.  That made it very expensive and at the same time very specialized.  The concentrated investment in a few corridors would leave much of the city feeling left out — a routine problem with infrastructure-heavy transit plans.  The plan was also all about transit, and didn’t connect the dots to how many Nashvilleans experienced their transportation problems, for example as traffic congestion or the danger to pedestrians.

The new measure is much more balanced.  It includes operating funds for expanded transit, infrastructure for bus priority, but it also includes sidewalks and traffic signals.  That means more money will go to making high-speed streets safer.  That’s all good for transit — in fact, it’s essential for a great transit experience — but it also has a large constituency of people who don’t necessarily care about transit all that much.  While I wish the website provided more technical detail to those who are interested, it does a good job of connecting the plan to issues that matter to people, including housing and even loneliness.

I’ll be rooting for transit measures all over the US tomorrow, but this one will be especially instructive, because if it succeeds, it could be a good model for the next generation of measures in car-oriented cities.

Update: It passed by a big margin!

A Fine Week in Montreal

Posted on October 28, 2024 in General, Montréal 1

I’m just home from a week in Montreal, one of Canada’s most complex and intriguing cities for urbanism and transit, thanks to the Quebec public transit association ATUQ.  In addition to speaking at the ATUQ conference, I had breakfast with the nonfiction writer Taras Grescoe (author of Straphanger and the matching blog), gave a lecture at McGill for the access scholar Professor Ahmed El-Geneidy, did happy hour with the team at TransitApp, and had an interesting two hour meeting with executives of the Longueuil transit agency RTL, which serves the southern suburban area.  The weather (everyone made sure to remind me) was unusually nice for late October, perfect for very long walks, and the trees of this tree-rich city were screaming for my attention.

Montreal is mostly a large expanse of more or less European density, almost all very walkable and with an extensive system of separated two-way bike lanes.  Architecturally, it’s an engaging jumble, with some buildings seemingly imported intact from Haussmann’s Paris while many others are of elegant industrial brick.

Over it all looms the spectre of Brutalism, about which most locals have strong feelings.  A major building spree in the 1960s left a vast legacy of this polarizing style.  It’s often prominent on the skyline, as though installed by colonists to surveil the quaint old city.

About half of my time was spent in the newer suburbs of the south shore.  I had a chance to experience two very dense recent developments, one around the Longueuil metro station which includes the University of Sherbrooke’s local campus …

… the other in Brossard, on the new REM driverless train line, an impressive Vancouver-scale knot of density, still partly under construction, that all dates from the last few years.

It is great to see such density around rapid transit but I noticed some odd things about the network.  The famous metro, which dates from the 1960s, is not kind to Longueuil, serving it with a stubby three-station Yellow Line that requires one transfer to go almost anywhere, with quite a long walk at the key hub of Berri-UQAM.

Apart from this, the structure of the metro is good for Montreal, a city of continuous high density in a mostly grid pattern, interrupted only by the royal mountain just north of downtown.  This slice of the STM network map shows how frequent buses (purple) and one BRT line (the north-south dark green line) fill in gaps in the metro grid across some of the densest parts of the city.  Unfortunately the city’s transit agency, STM, recently retreated from their “10 minute network” under budget pressure, but the purple lines are still, I assume, no worse than 15 minutes at most hours.

Many people bent my ear about the new driverless REM, which is currently just a short line from downtown Montreal south to Brossard but will soon expand into a large system with three lines reaching into northern and western suburbs, including one to the airport.  (Click to enlarge and sharpen)

Planned REM network, with the existing Metro in wide grey lines and the infrequent commuter rail in narrow gray lines. The segment open now is from Bonaventure/Gare Centrale south to Brossard (marked “Rive Sud”). The segment between McGill and Édouard Monpetit is the existing tunnel under the mountain. McGill is downtown and Édouard Monpetit serves the University of Montreal. Source: REM https://rem.info/fr/actualites/la-vraie-facture-du-rem

And yes, I know some of you need pictures of trains, so here is REM sliding into the station behind the platform doors:

Here it is in the median of the freeway at Du Quartier station.  Interesting that it’s overhead pantograph technology, not third rail.

Like the Canada Line in Vancouver, it was a project of a pension fund, which will make good money off of the resulting densification.  But as such, it bypassed many of the usual planning processes in ways that I heard some grumbling about.  It is also taking over the historic rail tunnel under the mountain between McGill and Édouard Monpetit stations, which is currently used by much less frequent commuter rail.  That’s good news for getting more access benefit out of the old tunnel, though I heard some displeasure from people who had wanted to route a future Toronto-Montreal high speed rail link that way.  The tunnel deserves frequent transit not just because it’s a link between downtown and the large University of Montreal, located just west of Édouard Monpetit station, but also because the result is a new north-south element all the way across the grid and extending into the suburbs north and south.  The ultimate planned frequency is 10 minutes on each branch (including one to the airport) so about 3 minutes on the common segment.

Overall, I think the REM is a great contribution.  The pension fund has learned from the notorious mistake on Vancouver’s Canada Line, which was to undersize the platforms to the point that that line is already out of capacity.  REM is clearly built with room for growth.

I expect the REM’s Brossard segment to remain a tourist attraction, at least as far as Ile de Soeurs.  As the train leaves the underground station at Bonaventure / Gare Centrale, it immediately makes a languorous S-curve over an industrial area, as though intentionally offering every passenger a photogenic view in all directions.  (Train geeks will also enjoy looking down at the various passenger trains stored in the rail yards below.)  It reminded me a bit of the gratuitous circuitousness of the Disneyland monorail.  This long curve, sure to be costly in terms of travel time, is doubtless a concession to available right of way.  But it certainly produced a great view of downtown — dramatically backlit in October by the bright red forested hills — and I hope many future generations will delight in the same vista.

The Montreal region certainly has its transit challenges.  They have a Provincial funding source for transit operations (unusual in Canada) but the Province is trying to reduce it, demanding “optimizations” from the transit agencies.  This term, of course, only makes sense if there is a shared notion of the goal of public transit, which in North America there usually isn’t. In my remarks at the ATUQ conference I focused on the tradeoff between ridership goals and coverage goals, because until you think about that, you won’t know what you should be “optimizing.”

The tangle of agencies raises all the usual challenges, and I heard some people express envy for Vancouver’s single-agency structure.  There are three large local-serving transit agencies (one each for Montreal, Laval, and greater Longueuil) plus several smaller ones.  There’s also a regional commuter rail service (Exo).  Now REM is yet another organization in the mix.

The fare structure is challenging.  There is a fare card, but it works in the Parisian manner, storing various tickets but not allowing a pure stored value, which is a hassle for visitors and occasional riders.  No machine would put a one way ticket from Montreal to Longeuil on my smartcard, so I had to deal with a human ticket agent selling me pieces of paper.  (I hadn’t dealt with a human ticket agent in French since my 1980s sojourn in Paris as a young man, so there was a slight frisson of nostalgia to this experience, but only slight.)

Over it all is the recently created ARTM, a new regionwide agency that is supposed to take over all the long-range planning, and through which Provincial funding for each agency will flow.  I asked several informed people to describe ARTM’s role and its division of labor with the local agencies, and got several different answers.  Obviously, such an interconnected region needs some kind of regional authority, but for now, some anxiety among the transit agencies is understandable as they figure out their roles.  As I’ve argued before, there are many strengths to having multiple local-serving transit agencies in a big urban region as long as they are well integrated and coordinated.  It will be interesting to see this new agency step into this role.  We can expect Montreal to continue to be one of North America’s most interesting transit cities.

Speaking at a Research-to-Practice Symposium

Posted on October 20, 2024 in Events 0

The 2024 Transit Research to Practice Symposium is a two day virtual event (October 22-24) with many interesting panels devoted to the challenge of making academic research more relevant to the daily practice of transit planning and management.  It’s many sponsors include the University of Florida Transportation Institute, the University of California at Davis Institute for Transportation Studies, and the California Department of Transportation.

I’ll be doing a keynote for them at 9:00 AM Pacific on Tuesday October 22.  My understanding is that you can attend just for that.  But you need to register here.

Thanks to Kari Watkins at the University of California at Davis for this invitation.  Kari will also be leading the Q&A after my talk.

A Useful Graphic Made Clearer

Posted on October 16, 2024 in US Federal Policy 2

Urban planning guru Brent Toderian likes to share this graphic, which has just been redrawn more clearly by Willem Klumpenhouwer and Kathryn Mathias.

I should clarify, though, that this is an image about local urban development policy.   It captures the fact that when talking about local infrastructure and service costs, high density uses public resources more efficiently even though it has requirements, such as public transit, that are also expensive. Its real purpose is to challenge the suburban NIMBY perspective that imagines the central point of the diagram is possible.  Anyone who embraces all three of the outer-circle slogans is contradicting themselves.

A few other cautions:

  • Taxes can be high or low for many other reasons.  Much tax revenue goes into things that aren’t related to urban density.
  • It’s also the case that high density, while more efficient in consuming urban services, can understandably correlate with progressive politics that demand greater public investment in solving social problems, in part because those problems are often more visible and troubling in high density places.  That, in turn, can also be a reason for higher taxes given higher density.
  • Finally, in the US, the structural dominance of suburban and rural voters over voters in walkable urban areas — especially in the Senate and Electoral College — can lead to policies by which urban voters subsidize suburban and rural needs through their taxes more than the reverse.  Similar effects operate in some other countries.

 

San Francisco Bay Area: A Consistent Regional Mapping Standard?

Posted on September 30, 2024 in General, Maps, San Francisco 12

In the San Francisco Bay Area, the regional transportation planning body, the Metropolitan Transportation Commission (MTC), has launched a major effort to improve the coordination between the region’s 27 transit agencies.  One element of this, just unveiled, is a regional standard for transit network maps.  The goal is to have all of the region’s maps evolve toward the same style, so that it’s easier to explore the entire region’s network.

MTC has now released the first sketches of the design standard, which you can find starting on the 20th slide of this document.  I’m generally delighted.  The recommendations look very much like what I’ve been promoting for years: reds to denote high frequency (15 minutes or better) and less prominent colors for lesser frequencies.  They 0bserve that three major transit agencies in the region already do this.

We’re flattered!  We drew AC Transit’s map, and probably influenced the other two, as we helped San Francisco MTA (SFMTA) with service branding and also led the redesign of the VTA network, both in the mid 2010s.  Our study mapping for our VTA network redesign was all in this style.

Here are the proposed colors of the regional standard:

 

In our maps we use those reds with those meanings, but I’m puzzled by the two blues. To me, that darker blue is more prominent and eye catching than the light blue, so shouldn’t it represent the higher frequency? In all of our firm’s maps, we use pale blue to represent a lower frequency than dark blue, but I’m curious if others disagree.  Here is our public-facing map of San Antonio, for example.

Finally, whenever you use color to show frequency, you have the problem of what happens when the frequency changes along a line, often because of branching.  The draft MTC standard shows this example for where a red line, representing the combined frequency from two overlapping routes, separates into two blue lines:

 

We’ve learned from long experience that most people need more help understanding that the route continues even as the color changes, mostly because people have seen many other maps where colors distinguish the routes from each other.  So we always show a fade from one color to the other, as in this San Antonio example where Route 28 separates and rejoins:

We also make sure there’s a legend item clarifying this:

So anyway, that’s what we know about transit mapping.  We hope MTC thinks further about these details before imposing a regional standard.

So if you’re in the Bay Area, and you want to share your own comments with MTC, this page has an email address to write to.  Click “Public Engagement and Staff Contact” partway down the page.  But this is a great initiative!

Chicago: The Ridership-Equity Tradeoff, a Video

Posted on September 11, 2024 in Chicago

In a recent post I explained some of the findings of our recent Framing Report for Chicago Transit Authority’s Bus Vision Project.   It’s a detailed and image-rich exploration of how Chicago’s bus network functions, or sometimes doesn’t, and what it would take to improve its design.  We focus especially on the problem of racial equity in Chicago, and the way this goal conflicts with the goal of ridership because of Chicago’s racial geography.

Again, read the post, or if you really want to go deep, read the report.  On the other hand, if you’d prefer 14 minutes of video, I did a virtual presentation this morning to the CTA’s governing body, the Chicago Transit Board.  The whole meeting is interesting if you want to understand the larger context of CTA’s Bus Vision Project and hear the questions that were asked, but if you just want my part, it runs from 9:46 to 23:54.

It’s here, and here:

 

 

 

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