In solidarity with the people of Christchurch, New Zealand, I offer these memories of their beautiful city and its people, over on the personal blog. If you've never been there, it may help you visualize.
Archive | 2011
basics: expertise vs. activism
The planning professions work in a grey zone between expertise and activism, and managing these competing impulses is one of our hardest tasks.
As a transit planning consultant, I don’t worry much about being perceived as an advocate of transit in general. Experts in any field are expected to believe in its importance. But I do try to keep a little distance between my knowledge about transit and the impulse to say “You should do this.” A good consultant must know how to marry his own knowledge to his client’s values, which may lead him to make different recommendations than he would do as a citizen, expressing his own values. Continue Reading →
tadpoles of new zealand: an auckland transit animation
There's a lot of potential for animation of Google Transit data, and we're just starting to see it explored. Some results will be rich with information, differentiating various kinds of service so that you can see how they dance together. Chris McDowall's animation of a day's transit in Auckland is less informative but correspondingly more meditative. Buses, trains and ferries are all rendered as earnest little tadpoles (or comets, or sperm, or viruses, depending on your sense of scale).
(An animated map of Auckland's public transport network from Chris McDowall on Vimeo.)
It nicely illustrates the point that frequency is what makes a route into a line. The line that goes really solid during the peak is the Northern Busway, which is far more frequent than any of Auckland's rail lines.
UPDATE: Commenter "numbat" points out that on the island at the east edge of the image (Waiheke Island) you can see local island buses pulsing with ferries that link the island to Auckland's CBD.
sydney morning herald on congestion pricing
(If you've found your way here from my article inside the Sydney Morning Herald's "debate" on congestion pricing, welcome! There's a category of articles on Sydney here, but I hope you'll poke around more widely. The "about the blog" and "about the author" are the place to start.)
In the Herald's congestion pricing debate today, I tried to make the general case, but Professor David Henscher seemed to nail the policy angle that's needed, one that would respond even to the car advocate's complaints.
Congestion pricing, if and when it happens in Sydney, needs to start by replacing other fees associated with driving, especially those that affect rural areas where there's no alternative to driving and never will be. This won't be enough to build all the public transport that Sydney needs; we ran the numbers on that last year for the Herald inquiry. But it makes both political and practical sense as a way to start.
The NRMA [Auto Club]'s line about needing better public transport before you charge for roads is one I agree with, but of course NRMA has no idea how to pay for that, nor is it really their priority. Realistically, any congestion charging scheme would need to start with the places where public transport is already abundant, which means for travel into and out of the City of Sydney. That's the one thing that seemed missing from the four articles.
I certainly objected to the punitive tone of the framing question: "Should motorists pay for the congestion they cause?" No, motorists should have the option to pay to get out of congestion.
UPDATE: By the way, One reason that the Sydney car vs transit debate is so polarized is that both have major projects in mind that require expensive tunnels. NRMA (the auto club) recently proposed that they would support turning a surface street into a "transit boulevard" if transit advocates would just support a multi-billion dollar road tunnel underneath it. I doubt there's a deal there.
london’s northern headache
Commenter David M on what rivers teach about transit:
It's interesting to note that in London the newest Underground lines have no branches (Victoria, Jubilee). In fact, when Jubilee was originally opened it took over one of the Bakerloo Lines branches, reducing the Bakerloo to a branchless line also.
For real complications, look at Camden Town [top center] on the Northern Line [black on this classic map] in London, England. Just south of this station is a complex deep underground junction that lets trains from any two of the branches south of Camden to simultaneously run on any two of the branches to the north. It is a marvel of engineering, but it is also an operational nightmare with trains run from any branch to any branch – one train runs late and it can cause problems on all of the branches.
London has wanted to simplify the operations by spliting the line into two and requiring an interchange at Camden Town. There are four platforms at Camden Town but the interchange passages are insufficient to handle the expected interchange traffic – so for now, it is cheaper to suck it up and deal with the operational issues.
There is an interesting effect of this interchange. Going south, both branches serve Euston Station before heading off to cross London on two different lines serving different areas of the core. You can get on one train at Camden, stop at Mornington Crescent and at Euston. You could get on the following train at Camden and arrive at Euston without passing through Mornington Crescent. The reason is that Mornington Crescent is on only one of the two branches, the other just bypasses the station. It makes for fun time when trying to get to Mornington Crescent.
The other night a Sydney rail expert was telling me that when the North West line is built, creating a four-way junction at Epping similar to the one at Camden Town, they will spend a number extra millions on the tunnelling to create the ability to route trains from any segment to any other. A similar decision has already been made about a similar junction at Glenfield in Sydney's southwest. I wonder how much could be saved if we let lines cross without connecting track, and required connections, where that pattern makes sense as part of a larger grid. It's not the right answer everywhere, certainly, but it sounds like London transit experts aren't very appreciative of all the flexibility that their great-grandparents gave them with the design of the Northern Line.
what rivers teach about transit
Cartographer (and artist) Daniel Huffman is drawing river systems as subway maps. He insists it’s just for fun, but these maps push an important button for me. Continue Reading →
has anyone ridden a yike-bike?
More under-the-radar cleverness from the country that commercialised the bungee-jump:
YikeBike is a statement about using smart technology to solve the problems of our increasingly congested, polluted, stressful cities. It is the first commercial expression of the mini-farthing concept, created up by a bunch of successful entrepreneurs, engineers and dreamers. We sat down to try and answer:
- What is the simplest way to get from A to B with the aid of a machine?
- What is the smallest wheel you can have to get a stable, safe, comfortable ride?
- Can you make something small enough to be able to go with you anywhere in a city?
- Wonder if we could make a unicycle dramatically easier to ride and fold?
We were intrigued by creating something that could dramatically change urban transport, enabling city dwellers a fast, safe and easy way to navigate their environment.
The result was the mini-farthing concept and its first expression, the YikeBike. It employs state-of-the-art technology, engineering and industrial design to create a new class of personal transport.
I continue to wonder whether we might see a technology so lightweight and reliable that it would become universal for short-distance travel to the point of eliminating the need for local bus services — at least in low-density markets. I'm not sure this is it. Recycling a 19th century idea, though, is certain appealing.
Downside: It starts at US $3595, so we're a bit away from mass production.
guest post policy
I'm a big believer in clear policies, so now, in addition to the comment policy, there's a new guest post policy. I could use some good guest posts in the next few weeks, because the book is taking some time!
that second on-board employee
A reader asks:
My question relates to the relationship between frequency and capacity. In Boston on the MBTA … for many of the trains, there are 2 employees running the train. On the Green line, trains are 2 cars long, with a driver in the first, and in the second an operator responsible for opening and closing doors and making sure no one gets on without paying. For the other lines, the 2nd operator only has to open and close doors because you need to pay to get into the stations.To me, it seems like a waste to have to pay a second individual to open and close the doors. Outside of the highest frequency travel times, and even possibly during those, wouldn't it be better for travelers to have service twice as often even at half the capacity? Outside of the truly busy travel times, trains rarely run anywhere near capacity. Especially on weekends and in the evening, trains are never full but the less frequent service does not encourage those spontaneous transit trips that are so vital to urban life.
This is not my core expertise, but my understanding is that generally this is right: the second employee is usually a holdover from days when fare collection and monitoring of doors had to be done manually. The job often survives because it's coded into labor contracts and sometimes also into regulations.
I am unaware of anything that non-driving on-board employees do that would be utterly impractical to automate today, the best evidence for which is that trams, streetcars, light rail, and heavy rail can be found operating with a single employee all over the world. (Fully grade separated heavy rail, of course, can also be run with zero on-board employees, liberating the agency to operate intense frequency even late in the evening.) Fare collection is increasingly handled by Proof of Payment systems which feature roving fare inspectors. While these fare inspectors have a cost, their number is not directly related to the number of vehicles in service, so they are not such a direct barrier to increases in service.
Frequency is driven by staffing requirements rather than vehicles, so the number of employees on board is the dominant variable determining how frequently any line can be run. Only during the peak commute period is the availability of vehicles a significant element of the frequency decision.
As you would expect, however, any local debate about turning second employees into drivers of additional service will be fraught. It is very easy for opponents (usually including the unions) to make generalized allegations about safety and security because most people feel safer and more secure if there's an employee nearby. So it's politically hard to do.
This is one of those issues that is intensely local, and where examples of experience from other cities just have trouble penetrating a local debate. It happens even in Europe. See for example the peculiar fare-collector job that exists on Amsterdam trams. A little cubicle placed at the middle of each tram contains an employee who serves as a cashier, selling tickets. Boarding and circulation on Amsterdam trams is awkward, and effective capacity much reduced, because you're required to board only at certain doors and exit at certain others.
This second employee on Amsterdam trams is, as near as I can tell, unique in Europe; everywhere else trams run with one employee (the driver) and roving fare inspection. Get a European transit professional going on how bizarre this Amsterdam practice is. It's great fun over a beer. But they can also explain, politically, why it will probably never change.
If readers know of recent stories where second employees have been successfully removed and retrained as drivers, thus allowing more service, please post a link in the comments.
quote of the week: beyond “david vs. goliath”
Cap'n Transit on the journalist's temptation to write "David vs Goliath" stories:
Behind an apparent David and Goliath story of Outraged Residents confronting the Heartless Bureaucrats may be a much uglier story. The Outraged Residents may actually be a few wealthy or upper-middle-class people protecting their privilege and convenience at the expense of the convenience – or often the safety and well-being – of much larger numbers of less fortunate people, and the Heartless Bureaucrats may actually be engaged in an emotionally draining struggle to protect these less fortunate people.
I expanded on this difficult issue here. Cap'n Transit frames this specifically as a class issue, but it doesn't have to be. In many cases the Heartless Bureaucrats are just balancing the needs of a number of conflicting parties, who would all rather yell about "the government" than do the hard work of talking and listening to each other.