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Our Fun Interactive Course in Network Design Comes to Chicago, Oct 1-2!

Posted on August 6, 2026 in 2-Keepers, General 0

NOTE: New blog content appears below this post.

We’re delighted to announce a 2026 Chicago session of our “inexcusably fun” two-day intensive course in public transit network design.  This course, which we at Jarrett Walker + Associates have been teaching since 2011, is a chance to work intensively with me and our team to explore the challenges of designing transit networks in various geographies and situations.  It’s not just for budding transit planners, but also for advocates, executives, city planners, developers — anyone who wants to better understand how transit network planning works, and how it can support their own goals for their cities.  Read all about the course here.

Our next offering will be October 1-2 in downtown Chicago, just before the APTA TransForm conference.  $745/student.   The location is near the LaSalle, Monroe, and Jackson Blvd. CTA stations.   Taught by me.    Register here.

AICP Credit is available.

For questions about registration or to request an invoice, please contact Melissa Tverberg of our team, melissa at jarrettwalker dot com.

Please spread the word!

An Instructive Win for Transit in Spokane

Posted on August 12, 2026 in Advocacy, Elections, Funding, Spokane 0

Downtown Spokane is really spectacular, by the way. Photo by William Jacobs vs Pexels.com

In many US cities, voters will soon be asked to invest in public transit, if only to sustain services as operating costs rise.  So it might be useful to look closely at the just-completed battle in a very “purple” place, i.e. a place with plenty of Democrats but also lots of Republicans.  What’s interesting is the specific arguments that the opposition made.  You can expect these arguments when this issue comes up in your community.  This post provides some responses to them.

Spokane, Washington’s transit agency faced the voters on August 4 in a special election in order to renew their 0.2% sales tax.  This renewal does not let them expand the total quantity of service very much, but it does ensure that they can maintain the current level of service well into the future.  The measure looks like it has passed although the State of Washington takes a long time to confirm, but it was a nail-biter — currently 51.5% in favor.  (You can follow the results here.)

Again, the Spokane metro area is not an especially progressive place, although there are concentrations of progressives especially in the City of Spokane and the college town of Cheney.  It is in a safe Republican congressional seat.   Spokane County (85% of whose population is in the transit agency boundary) voted 50.6% for Donald Trump in 2024 and 54.6% for the Republican candidate for governor the same year.

Knowing that, it’s striking that the leading opponents of the measure all emphasized how much they support public transit.  You’ll see that in

The Downtown Spokane Partnership statement gives the essence of these business-based arguments:

After careful consideration about fiscal priorities and timing, the DSP Board voted to oppose Proposition 1 on the August 2026 ballot. Consistent feedback from DSP members and the broader community indicates that the community’s highest priorities remain focused on addressing urgent public needs that affect safety, economic vitality, and quality of life. The DSP believes those priorities should remain the primary focus of new public revenue commitments at this time.

The’s DSP’s opposition to Prop. 1 is not a reflection of the value of public transit, or the quality of the services STA provides. Our position reflects the reality that taxpayers are being asked to fund a growing number of important public needs at a time when available resources are limited. In this environment, difficult choices must be made about which investments should take precedence.

None of the leading business arguments claim that transit is unimportant, or that it’s obsolete because we’ll soon have driverless cars.  Instead, they affirmed how much they support transit, and then gave these arguments, which we should expect in city after city:

  • “There are other more urgent priorities.”  They emphasize other obvious needs — help with public safety, homelessness, etc.  This gives opponents the opportunity to give speeches about those problems as though the transit agency has anything to do with them.  This is going to be a common issue.  In city after city, transit seems to be everyone’s seventh priority.  Business leaders are going to keep saying “this isn’t the right time,” as though they would be more supportive at some other time.  Other urgent priorities are not going away, and at some point it’s going to be necessary to deal with this one even though those others are still urgent too.
  • They think that the agency doesn’t need the money.  In some places you’ll hear opponents imply that transit agencies should just crush their labor unions and pay people less.  Some senior workers are certainly highly paid, but overall the current salaries of bus drivers and mechanics are mostly market-driven and reflect the difficulty of hiring those positions.  In Spokane, thanks to years of responsible management, the agency has a substantial reserve.  Opponents demanded that the agency spend down that reserve, moving the system closer to the real fiscal cliff that many agencies face.

What can we learn from this near-disaster? First, the opponents of the measure were smart: they focused their message entirely on the swing voter.  Their political base includes people who think transit is evil because it brings crime or communism or immigrants, but their message ignored those people.  Instead, they spoke to people who think transit is good but are worried about taxes.  Every part of their argument is talking to that person.

If you are an urban progressive socializing mostly with other urban progressives, you must remember that even in your city, your social circle is unlikely to make the difference in a transit election.  The swing voter is someone who supports transit but worries their taxes are too high.  Be ready with responses like the ones I’ve given above.  Above all, don’t talk about transit as though it were a progressive thing.  Don’t talk about free fares or structural racism or overthrowing capitalism when you’re trying to get people to vote for transit, unless you’re 100% sure that everyone who hears you cares about those things.  Emphasize instead the diversity, including political diversity, of the people who find it useful.

In most communities (yours may vary) the swing voter is politically moderate and often respectful of local business leadership.  In Spokane, this swing voter probably voted for Trump but cares about their community and is open to taxes that provide efficient investments that deliver outcomes they value.  In this election, Spokane Transit’s good management and a careful “yes” campaign appears to have won the day over very well-organized, well-funded, and strategically savvy opposition.  It will be a victory worth learning from.

New Interview of Me on “War on Cars” Podcast

Posted on August 5, 2026 in Events 0

“War on Cars” is certainly a provocative name for a group, since it’s something that pro-car advocates often accuse urbanists of waging.  Certainly it’s not how I’d describe what I do, because cars are essential in rural areas, useful in suburbs, and at their most destructive only in cities.

But it was great to do a half hour podcast with Sarah Goodyear on the War on Cars Podcast.  Sarah is coauthor of the book The War on Cars.  We had a great conversation about the new edition of my book and how to be an effective advocate.  Atlanta, Portland, and New York are among the cities discussed.  It’s here!  Hope you enjoy.

Public Transit Is Not “Coming Back” … It’s Doing Something Better

Posted on June 23, 2026 in Language, Meditations 23

The history of transit ridership in the US is what it is:

But it matters enormously how we talk about it.  Many US transit agencies will be facing the voters in the next two years, seeking new funding to plug their structural deficits and forestall destructive service cuts.  Many agencies are already involved in fights for more funding in their state legislatures, sometimes winning, as in Illinois, but often losing, as in Pennsylvania and Oregon.

Most of the voters or legislators in these debates are not well informed, so they can be swayed by the rhetoric used.  So transit agencies need to be carefully choosing their language.  And we should be talking as an industry about what messages are helping and what aren’t.

I found myself provoked this morning by this well-intentioned tweet from the fine folks at the San Francisco Peninsula regional rail agency Caltrain:

It made me ask:  When are we going to stop describing our ridership as a percentage of pre-COVID?  Because as long as that’s below 100%, which I expect it to be for a long time, we are playing into a narrative of relative failure, instead of talking about our real success.

In my experience, most reporters and commentators begin with these false assumptions about transit:

  1. That ridership is the only measure of success.
  2. That ridership is under the agency’s control.
  3. That their goal is to get “back” to where they were in 2019.

When journalists interview me, they usually start with these assumptions and I have to say stop, wait:

  1. Transit has competing definitions of success, so low ridership doesn’t mean failure.  The ridership-coverage trade-off is only one example.  The boards that govern US transit agencies routinely tell staff  to do all kinds of things that are not good for ridership.  This is their right, but it means ridership is not the only indicator of success.  (Our consulting work is all about making these conversations clearer, so Boards understand the consequences of their choices.)
  2. Most ridership factors are outside agency control.  Work from home caused an overall decline in travel demand, and especially in the kind of concentrated peak demand into major centers that transit can serve easily. Nothing a transit agency can do will change that.  It’s clear now that we’re never going back to the office in pre-COVID volumes. The best transit agencies are shifting their service to address other markets where there’s potential to grow ridership, but that means:
  3. We are attracting new riders, not getting riders “back”.  Any new growth in ridership will be in new and different markets.  Smart agencies have already made these adjustments (we‘ve often helped) by shifting service to weekends and to more regular all-day patterns, instead of the old intensive peak.  (Increasing numbers of agencies are above pre-COVID Saturday ridership as a result.)  The great mass of briefcase commuters is gone but there are many others who will use our service if it is useful.  So it makes no sense to talk about getting “back” to 2019 performance.  Even if that were possible, it’s not a fair description of what we are doing now.

When a transit agency describes their progress in terms of how far “back” to 2019 they are, they concede several things that they shouldn’t be conceding.  They imply that 2019, rather than the future, is their north star. The imply that history really can be rolled back.  Worst of all, they allow people to fantasize that all this is possible if transit agencies just work harder, from which it’s easy to conclude that if that doesn’t seem to be happening, it means transit agencies are misgoverned and the only way for a voter to object is to vote no on funding them.

Instead, transit agencies need to be much more forthright about explaining:

  • what they do and don’t control
  • what they’re doing with the control they have
  • what is happening in larger travel trends
  • why 2019 expectations for transit no longer make sense.

Then, they should tell a data-driven story starting around 2022, when the new world of urban transport demand began to stabilize.  Managements turn over frequently in US transit agencies, so you probably can’t judge your current management on what happened more than a few years ago.  In any case, the story should be how transit agencies are building for the new world, not how they are bringing back the old one.  The first story is about success.  The second, no matter how you spin it, will always sound like failure.  Nobody can bring back 2019, and nobody who suggests they can is going to look like they’re succeeding.

I just do not see how the “back” narrative leads anywhere good for transit agencies, and would love to hear from those who differ from me.

 

 

 

 

Des Moines: Welcome to Your New Transit Network

Posted on June 15, 2026 in Des Moines, Network Redesign 1

Downtown Des Moines viewed from the Robert D Ray Asian garden, which celebrates the contributions of Asian immigrant groups to the region.

Iowa’s capital and largest city, a place I knew well in my childhood, now has a new bus network, the result of our firm’s network design work with the Des Moines Area Regional Transit authority (DART).  The new network started operating yesterday so today is its first weekday.  You can find our full report explaining the plan here.

The DART network was obsolete because it:

  • Was too focused on suburban Park-and-Ride markets that no longer exist due to working from home.
  • Did not provide adequate frequencies in the densest corridors where there is strong all day demand.
  • Did not make timed connections between routes at the downtown transit center.

Here’s what the old network looked like (click to enlarge and sharpen).  Note the colors in the legend.  Only one segment had service better than every 15 minutes, the point at which transit becomes much more useful and ridership tends to rise more substantially.  The suburbs were mostly served by extremely infrequent services, worse than hourly and often peak-only.

We had a couple of severe constraints:

  • To balance the agency’s budget, we had to cut the overall quantity of service by 10%.  This was painful, because for the last 20 years the agency’s service has not grown with population growth, so the agency has been falling behind the growth in demand.
  • Like many transit agencies in red states, DART is constructed as a voluntary organization of member cities, which gives every city a right to secede.  As usual, the greatest ridership potential is in the historic fabric of Des Moines but the agency relies on tax revenues from the outer suburbs and struggles to serve them well, since their car-oriented development patterns are less supportive of transit ridership.

As usual, our first step was to ask the community whether the primary goal should be ridership or coverage.  To do this, we developed two contrasting concepts.  The first showed what the network would look like if ridership were the only goal.  It has more frequent lines in the densest and most walkable areas, but covers fewer places overall.

This wasn’t a pure 100% ridership concept, because this agency wanted to acknowledge the right of each city to make its own judgment.  So we included the highest-ridership thing was that we could do in each member city.  Putting all the resources where they would attract the most riders overall would have meant moving almost all the resources into the city of Des Moines, and that would not have worked given the governance structure.

We also designed a coverage concept, which maximizes the number of people who have some service, though at the expense of lower frequencies.  This concept makes more use of microtransit as a coverage tool.

The public and the Board considered these alternatives and gave us direction about how to balance these two goals, leading to the final plan:

The plan does several things that we’re proud of:

  • It expands the extent of 15 minute frequency in the densest parts of inner Des Moines and Windsor Heights, the highest-demand cities in the region.
  • It increases weekend service substantially.  All 15-minute and 30-minute routes have these same frequencies seven days a week.
  • It creates a continuous two way loop line, Line 4, which is designed to connect many major activity centers on a single service that does not require changing buses.  The route links downtown, three shopping centers, the county government offices, the State Capitol, and the walkable old town of West Des Moines, as well as serving a great deal of relatively dense development.  (Note that part of Line 4 is overlaid on Line 5 to create a combined 15 minute frequency, which is why you see the color of the route change.)
  • It removes all 20 minute frequencies and instead standardizes frequencies at 15, 30, or 60.  This means that …
  • All infrequent services (every 30 or 60 min) are timed to meet at the transit center at the same time, ensuring that connections are fast even if the frequencies are low.
  • Outer cities that wanted coverage service get it, through some mixture of infrequent fixed routes and on-demand transit (a. k. a. microtransit).  For example, in the west, the town of Clive wanted coverage while West Des Moines wanted more focus on ridership, so the network gives each what they preferred.  I would not recommend this in every agency, because the level of investment in ridership services has consequences for the agency as a whole, but it was the right choice given the governance model here.

For one rough measure of the outcomes, we looked at how many jobs each resident of the region could get to in 45 minutes.  Even though the overall network is a 10% cut in service, this access to opportunity score is up for the whole population and for all subgroups we studied:

And although the final network invests more in ridership service and less in coverage service than the old one, we still managed to increase the number of residents covered with some service, by 5%!  Again, all this was done while reducing the total service level by 10%, not because we want to but because of the agency’s budget situation.

If you’re in Des Moines, we hope you’ll check out your new transit network.  Many, many trips are possible that weren’t before, especially to shopping, medical, and educational destinations in the inner parts of the region.  Go somewhere you couldn’t go before!

Atlanta: Welcome to Your New Transit Network

Posted on May 12, 2026 in Atlanta, General, Network Redesign

The Atlanta area transit agency MARTA finally implemented its bus network redesign, called NextGen, on April 18, 2026.  We led the network design and analysis tasks for the consulting team, and although it was a long and difficult journey, we’re proud of the results.  Now that the new service is running, I want to give a quick overview of what the redesign did, and the new opportunities it creates.  If you want to go deep into geographical detail, and understand why we made each routing choice, you can find our Final Report online here.

Here’s the big picture.  Old network on the left, new network on the right.  Note the legend: Colors indicate all-day frequency.  The wide grey lines on the basemap indicate the rail rapid transit network, which is all frequent most of the time.  Our more detailed map of the new network is here.)

The overall quantity of service we had to work with is slightly higher than in 2023 but lower than what existed in 2019.  This reflected the available resources and key policy decisions about priorities.  For example, the City of Atlanta has its own transit funding source, More MARTA Atlanta, but during the study process they chose to devote these funds entirely to future transit projects rather than short-term transit service.  That’s why there isn’t more service within the city.  As network design consultants, we work with the service budget that the agency has.  When I have been asked how much service Atlanta needs, or how much would attract good ridership, I say “much more than this.”  But that is not the question we were asked in this project.

Within those budget limits, we were able to increase by 22% the number of useful destinations the average person can reach in 60 minutes.  (For more about these access measures, and why they matter, see here.  For more on how we measured this in Atlanta, see the Final Report.)  This is the easiest way to describe why the network is better: more people will find it useful for more trips.

The old network had three major problems that we tried to address:

  • Low Frequency.  For a city of Atlanta’s size and density, there was remarkably little high-frequency service, which we define as service coming every 15 minutes or better all day.  The new network has much more frequent service, shown in red on the maps above.  Purple lines in the new network, running every 20 minutes, all deserve to be every 15 but our resources just didn’t go that far.
  • Poor Connectivity.  While the old frequent bus lines all connected to rail, they did not connect much with each other.  Most connections outside the rail system required multiple transfers at low frequency, without any particular timing of connections.  This made for long delays even on fairly short trips.  In addition to increasing frequencies and increasing the number of places where frequent lines meet each other for fast connections, we also introduced new timed connections at several suburban locations, enabling fast connections between routes even when the frequencies are low.
  • Buses Exclusively Feeding Rail.  The bus network had not been substantially rethought since the rail network was created decades ago, and its basic assumption was that buses exist to feed the rail network.  Virtually all routes in the old network ended at a rail station.  This is very unusual, and for good reason.  Many local trips in dense areas are traveling across the rail line, and this approach made the rail line a barrier for all those trips.  We questioned this as much as possible, though in many cases, infrastructure limitations forced us to continue the practice.

We’re especially proud of what we achieved in Downtown and Midtown, the densest place in the region.  Three lines now run continuously east-west across the city center — including the very frequent route 2 as well as the 11 and 51.  (Old network above, new one below).  (All these detailed maps can be fiound in the final report.)

Old network (above) and new network (below) in midtown Atlanta. Colors represent frequencies, using the same legend as in the first image above.

Of course downtown Atlanta would support a full grid of frequent lines, as comparable downtowns such as Denver and Los Angeles have, but with so few resources devoted to bus service, that wasn’t possible here.   Still, the new continuous routes across downtown will vastly improve access into and across the city.

One route with great potential was actually removed: the old north-south route 40 along Peachtree Street, the highest-density spine of downtown Atlanta.  This route ran right alongside the rail line but made more stops between the stations.  We observed that this route, if running frequently, would have very high ridership.  Comparable streets in similar cities certainly do, even with rail running beneath them, because the demand for local trips is so high and the time to access the station often isn’t worthwhile for short trips within downtown.

But with the budget we had to work with, and the need to divide service among the various parts of the region, we couldn’t afford the level of service that Peachtree Street would need, which would be every 10 minutes or better.  So we decided not to serve it at all.  The 45 minute frequency being offered was simply not relevant to the kind of market that Peachtree Street is.  Plenty of people are moving up and down the street and would benefit from the service, but most are doing so spontaneously, not on predictable schedules, so they will only use the service if it’s coming when they need it.  Without extremely high frequency, there wasn’t much point.

Thinking about the needs of disadvantaged communities was hard in this project.  In the Atlanta area, the greatest concentrations of low-income and minority populations are in the south and southwest, but southside Atlanta in particular has a very difficult street network.  There are north-south streets, but none of the east-west streets is entirely continuous across the area.  Freight rail lines, which made some crossings inoperable due to the disruptions long trains would cause, further complicate the picture.  That’s why we weren’t able to create as much of a frequent grid pattern on the south side as we would have liked.

The Atlanta area is also a world leader at building low-income apartment developments in places where efficient transit can’t get to them, often because they are on long cul-de-sacs or in locations that would require an awkward deviation.  This is where you’ll find many of the new on-demand or “microtransit” zones, which are the only way to get any service to some of these locations.   We also used one of these zones in the far west to cover part of the unwalkable Fulton Industrial Area, bringing people to a central point where they could connect to several fixed routes.  As always, these zones were designed to maximize coverage, not ridership.  Their purpose is to provide lifeline access to as many people as possible in the places where the geography is especially difficult.  They are not meant to be superior to fixed routes.  They are just a way of arranging service to get some coverage to areas where the design has made efficient fixed routes impossible.

If you live in the MARTA service area, I hope you’ll explore how the network has changed, and how it might be useful to you now.

 

 

 

Our Intensive Transit Network Design Course Comes to Chicago!

Posted on May 7, 2026 in Events

We’re delighted to announce a 2026 Chicago session of our “inexcusably fun” two-day intensive course in public transit network design.  This course, which we at Jarrett Walker + Associates have been teaching since 2011, is a chance to work intensively with me and our team to explore the challenges of designing transit networks in various geographies and situations.  It’s not just for budding transit planners, but also for advocates, executives, city planners, developers — anyone who wants to better understand how transit network planning works, and how it can support their own goals for their cities.  Read all about the course here.

Our next offering will be October 1-2 in downtown Chicago, just before the APTA TransForm conference.  $745/student.   The location is near the LaSalle, Monroe, and Jackson Blvd. CTA stations.   Taught by me.    Register here.

AICP Credit is available.

For questions about registration or to request an invoice, please contact Melissa Tverberg of our team, melissa at jarrettwalker dot com.

Please spread the word!


My Book Human Transit On Sale until 6/6!

Posted on May 6, 2026 in Events

My book Human Transit, revised in 2024, is your friendly, readable guide to how public transit planning works, and the choices that communities have to think about.  Whether you’re an advocate, a transit professional, or someone working in an adjacent field like urban development, this book will make you confident in your decisions and conversations about public transit in your community.

If you’ve been meaning to look at my book Human Transit, or know somebody who would benefit from it, now’s your chance.  It’s half price at Princeton University Press website until June 6.

You can read the preface and Table of Contents here.  You can also read the introduction from the first edition here.  Buy it here at half price until June 6!  Please spread the word!

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