Human Transit

Bogotá’s Carrera Séptima on the day without cars. It was hard to get a bus in the photo because they went by so fast.

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Yesterday I got to witness the world’s largest “day without cars and motorcycles”.  On that day, only taxis, public transit, and emergency vehicles are allowed to circulate, at least in theory.

It is the one day a year when the buses flow freely, not just in the TransMilenio busways but all over the city.  On other days, I’ve sometimes found buses so hopelessly stuck in traffic that it’s faster to get out and walk.

In an elevator the day before, a man dressed for business overheard us planning the day and grumbled that it’s “a day for working from home.”  It probably is for many who can do that.  But the crowding on the public transport was as intense as ever, and since the buses were moving so much faster, they must have been taking more people than usual to their destinations.

This policy of allowing a day without cars is meant, as I understand, mostly to expand awareness.  The city wants people to see that a city without cars is possible.  But of course, since it’s just one day a year, confirmed motorists can choose to perceive it as the opposite: an obstruction to be planned around.  What’s more, the things that are possible on one day without cars are not the same as what could be done if cars were managed in a more rigorous way all the time.

My photo above is on one of the most critical arteries, Carrera Séptima, which links dense activity centers, including the city centre and multiple universities, all along its length.  It is far from the nearest parallel busway.  It moves fine on the one day without cars, but the rest of the time it’s often strangled, and an endless debate about whether to develop bus lanes or trams (light rail) leads, as it often does, to doing nothing.

Is it good to see the Septima so empty one day a year?  Or is it mostly just irritating, both for the motorists who work from home that day and for everyone else who wonders whether one day a year really makes a difference?  Does this day make it easier or harder to envision permanent changes to create a more just and liberated city?  I don’t know the answer, but that’s the question.

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Ayer presencié el “día sin coches ni motos” más grande del mundo. Ese día, solo se permite la circulación de taxis, transporte público y vehículos de emergencia, al menos en teoría.

Es el único día del año en que los autobuses circulan libremente, no solo en las vías de TransMilenio, sino en toda la ciudad. Otros días, a veces me he encontrado con autobuses tan atascados que es más rápido bajarse y caminar.

El día anterior, en un ascensor, un hombre vestido de negocios nos escuchó planear el día y se quejó de que era “un día para teletrabajar”. Probablemente lo sea para muchos que pueden hacerlo. Pero el hacinamiento en el transporte público era tan intenso como siempre, y como los autobuses iban mucho más rápido, debían de llevar a más gente de lo habitual a sus destinos.

Esta política de permitir un día sin coches tiene como objetivo, según tengo entendido, principalmente crear conciencia. La ciudad quiere que la gente vea que una ciudad sin coches es posible. Pero claro, como solo es un día al año, los conductores empedernidos pueden optar por percibirlo como lo contrario: un obstáculo que hay que planificar. Es más, lo que se puede hacer un día sin coches no es lo mismo que se podría hacer si se gestionaran los coches de forma más rigurosa todo el tiempo.

Mi foto de arriba es de una de las arterias más importantes, la Carrera Séptima, que conecta centros de alta actividad, como el centro de la ciudad y varias universidades, a lo largo de toda su longitud. Está lejos de la vía de autobuses paralela más cercana. Se mueve bien el Día sin Carros, pero el resto del año suele estar congestionada, y un debate interminable sobre si desarrollar carriles bus o tranvías (tren ligero) lleva, como suele ocurrir, a no hacer nada.

¿Es bueno ver la Séptima tan vacía un día al año? ¿O es simplemente irritante, tanto para los automovilistas que trabajan desde casa ese día como para todos los demás que se preguntan si un día al año realmente hace una diferencia? ¿Este día hace más o menos fácil imaginar cambios permanentes para crear una ciudad más justa y liberada? No sé la respuesta, pero esa es la pregunta.

Are Americans a “car culture” or are they “car dependent”?  Do they drive because they love driving, or are they in an unhealthy relationship with a substance they would be happy to do without?  Obviously there are plenty of Americans who do love their cars, but here’s more evidence that there are fewer of them than you might think, and that the common “car culture” frame is misleading us.

A new study by Nicole Corcoran and others did a nationwide survey with a striking finding:

We find that nearly one fifth of urban and suburban US car owners express a definite interest in living car-free (18 %), and an additional 40 % are open to the idea. This is in addition to the small share (10 %) of urban and suburban US residents currently living without a car.

Five key factors are associated with interest in car-free living: having prior experience living without a car, using alternative modes of transportation for at least five percent of trips, lower car dependence, riding transit regularly, and having less enjoyment of travel by private car. Further, we find that car owners interested in car-free living are a diverse group, with few significant associations between interest in car-free living and key socioeconomic or demographic variables.

Given the sizable unmet demand for car-free living, we conclude that planners should allow and facilitate car-free and car-lite developments. In practice, this can be done by embracing zoning reform, investing in alternative transportation infrastructure, lowering parking requirements for development, and encouraging mixed land uses, including in residential neighborhoods.

I wish they had dropped the word “infrastructure,” because the fastest things we can do to make car-free live possible for more people is to expand the provision of public transit service.  That means actually running more buses and trains, not just building facilities for them.

I expect to refer to this study frequently, because it pierces the illusion that public transit faces a “cultural” challenge in the US.  Public transit’s problem in the US is that it isn’t very useful.  That’s something we can measure, and change.

Don’t worry about trying to change a culture.  Change the facts and the culture will follow.

(This series of posts on ridership-increasing bus network redesigns starts here, and its wrap-up is here.)

We’re proud of the ridership growth from all of the network redesigns we do, but our recent project in Monterey County, California had results that were off the charts: 45% ridership growth in two years, for a growth in productivity (ridership / quantity of service) of 25%, far above the 15% growth that occurred nationwide in similar systems.  The enormous improvements in ridership and productivity contributed to MST winning the 2025 APTA Outstanding Public Transportation System award for systems in its category.

Why?  There was one other factor: a simplified fare system that made transfers free.  But the much-improved travel times from our redesign, especially in lower-income areas, definitely mattered too.

Located just south of the Bay Area, Monterey County resembles all of California in miniature.  There are scenic and touristed wealthy communities along the coast (Monterey, Carmel-by-the-Sea, Pacific Grove), and a huge interior valley with an agricultural economy and a large city of its own (Salinas).  There’s also a vast rural area, half mountainous (including Big Sur) and half agricultural.  And if you think of Monterey as a little San Francisco, then the adjacent town of Seaside would be its Oakland: more affordable, less touristed, more diverse, with lots of people commuting to jobs in Monterey and Carmel.

Urbanized areas of Monterey County. Big Sur is in the county, much further south along the coast. Along Highway 101, the county also extends further south in a long agricultural valley.  Google Maps.

In 2021, Daniel Costantino led our work to complete a Comprehensive Operations Analysis for MST, which led to a redesigned bus network that the agency implemented in November 2022. A major finding in our early analysis of the MST network was the mismatch between service and activity and need. In the old network

• The greater Monterey-Seaside-Marina-Carmel area had just over 40% of the urban population but had nearly 60% of MST urban service.
• The Salinas area had nearly 60% of the urban population, but only 40% of MST’s urban service.

So a major element of the redesigned network was reapportioning service and bringing more service to Salinas. This required interesting discussions with the Board, which is constructed on a one-city one-vote basis and therefore underrepresents the residents of the county’s largest cities.

In the Monterey area, we encountered many other interesting design challenges.  Here is this part of the network as it was before the redesign.  See the caption for the meanings of the colors.

Old Monterey Peninsula network. Colors mean all-day frequency. Purple means every 20 min, blue means every 30 min, pale green means every 60 min, and pale beige means worse than every 60 min.

Note the complex tangle of very infrequent routes (worse than hourly) on the south side of Monterey.  These had arisen from years of trying to respond to demands for service to some important destinations that had been built in very transit-hostile ways and therefore couldn’t be served efficiently, including, unfortunately, the courthouse.  Meanwhile, the network’s busiest route, the combined A/B service between Monterey and Seaside, was only every 20 minutes, just below the 15 minute threshold where ridership tends to take off.

We were able to increase frequencies on the most important links, bring the A/B spine up to every 15 minutes and the Monterey-Carmel link to every 30 minutes.  To do the latter, though, we had to give up stopping at the  Community Hospital of the Monterey Peninsula, a hilltop fortress whose slow and complicated access path consumes too much running time.   We served that with an hourly frequent route instead.  Obviously, a major hospital should have a more frequency, but it also needs to take responsibility for the high costs imposed by its location and layout.

The new design looks like this (from the new MST map that we designed):

Redesigned Monterey Peninsula network. Map by Jarrett Walker + Associates.  See legend below.

The new design also improved timed connections between routes at the two densest hubs in the county: downtown Monterrey and downtown Salinas. This is an important part of how we achieved faster travel times.  The line linking these two biggest hubs, Line 20, is obviously especially important to keep on time, because timed connections at both ends rely on it.  While this line is exposed to some traffic congestion, a new Bus Rapid Transit project, called Surf, will create a five mile bus-only roadway to help protect this line’s running time.  In fact, the case for the busway is stronger now, because the new network design is helping more passengers along that path.

For this project, we did not conduct the same kind of job access analysis that we did in Akron, but the travel time matrix clearly showed how much better this new network would be for most people in most of the county. This helped sell the value of the redesign to the agency board and the community overall:

Carmel Valley, the only area with travel time losses, is a rural and mostly affluent area.  The vast majority of the region saw huge travel time savings, especially in the lower-income valley communities of Salinas, Soledad, and King City.

I’ve focused on just one part of the network, but we made many other changes.  South of Salinas, we were able to increase the frequency of the route that connects a long series of towns extending south through the agricultural valley; this is one of the higher-ridership rural corridors we’ve encountered.  Salinas saw an expansion in simpler and more frequent service.  Perhaps the hardest place to serve was the California State University Monterey Bay.  Scattered across an abandoned military base, it’s remote from other major destinations and not on the way between them, so we were only able to get two hourly routes to it.  We hope that MST will be able to support better service as the empty spaces fill in.

We really enjoyed working in this complex and very scenic county.  Congratulations to everyone at Monterey-Salinas Transit for their award, and for all the great work that led to it.