The book is due out from Island Press in about two months.
The complete introduction is now online here.
The Island Press listing is here, and you can also preorder through Amazon. You can also order it from my hometown favorite, Powell’s, but be sure to chide them for filing it in the “Automotive” section.
TransLink in Vancouver has a great opportunity for a manager of service planning (10+ years planning experience, including some in management). They do more junior hiring as well, so keep an eye on their careers site. This one, though, is especially critical for the agency, so I wanted to feature it.
I'm under a long-term contract with TransLink doing work on their Regional Transit Strategy and similar planning tasks, so I hope to be working a bit with this person.
To apply see the "Manager of Transit Planning" item here. Full job description is attached. Move fast; it closes on Oct 14.
TransLink, and Vancouver in general, is a great place to work on transit and sustainable urbanism. Even more remarkable, their colleagues in city governments mostly share that vision, though the usual tensions arise as you'd expect anywhere. The agency's position as a single regionwide authority makes it relatively easy to think across boundaries. Few metro areas in North America have such a strong pro-transit consensus as metro Vancouver.
Their regional long-term plan, Transport 2040, is also the only one I've seen whose fundamental goals refer to the extent of a Frequent Transit Network. It's Goal #3. To me this is especially strong evidence that despite all the thrills of their extensive driverless rapid transit, the agency's thinking is focused on mobility outcomes, and their urban livability consequences, but not on technology for its own sake.
If you'd like to work in a region where suburban cities compete over who can build the most vibrant high-density centers around transit stations, but where you can still, as they say, ski in the morning and sail in the afternoon, Vancouver's the spot.
Fine print: If my experience in 05-06 is any indication, the days when you can ski in the morning and sail in the afternoon will be heavily overcast and drizzling, but you will still be enjoying the warmest winter weather in all of Canada. Think of it as the Canadian Riviera!
Deep inside the Atlantic magazine's Cities section, an article on restructuring a bus network! The city is Tallahassee, and the redesign team included Samuel Scheib of StarMetro, who comments here now and then. The redesign took an all-radial system, reduced the number of lines but increased their length, and introduced some new non-downtown connection points and even some lines that don't go downtown at all.
Few journalists would consider the topic interesting, but the article by Emily Badger takes the lay reader through the issues, highlights the relationship to city-building concerns, and generally helps it make sense. I wish every journalist — or even every New York Times reporter — took this kind of care to understand a planning issue. Given how well Badger explains the issue, I wouldn't have minded if she'd also interviewed some riders who are personally inconvenienced by the change. But most journalists cover only the latter, as though their goal is to maximize rage rather than understanding.
This quote from Scheib was interesting:
“If you talk to a land-use planner, typically they would want you to keep … service focused more on the downtown because they want more people to live downtown, in that dense environment. I’m all for that, I’m all for urbanization, I’m all for denser places,” Scheib said. “But the reality is that people need to get to work. And you’ve got to go where the jobs are."
I can assure you that this change won't damage downtown. I was hanging around Portland's TriMet in 1982 (in the indispensible role of teenage transit geek) when they totally restructured the inner city bus system, creating a grid pattern with many crosstowns that don't go downtown at all. Several of those crosstowns are now among Portland's most productive lines. But downtown Portland survived, to say the least.
The University of Minnesota's David Levinson wrote a bracing article last week arguing for a new approach to how we decide what transit lines should exist. In its emphasis on "not losing money," it may remind you of some of the broadsides of the anti-transit right, but Levinson is not one of that crowd, as far as I know.
So I thought I'd quote the juiciest parts here, and provide some counterpoint. Levinson and I use very different frames, but if you look beyond those, there's some agreement here.
Mass transit systems in the United States are collectively losing money hand over fist. Yet many individual routes (including bus routes) earn enough to pay their own operating (and even capital costs). But like bad mortgages contaminating the good, money-losing transit routes are bogging down the system.
This "profitability" or "breaking even" frame may alienate many on the left from the merit of Levinson's idea. Currently, transit agencies are not trying to break even, so they are not failing if they don't. If we propose a free-market view in which transit should be breaking even, well, I'd like to see this as well in a perfect world. But that would be a world in which government isn't heavily subsidizing transit's competitor, the private car — not just through road expenditures but through such interventions as minimum parking requirements and petroleum-based foreign policy. I would further suggest that current environmental crises argue for government to be biased away from the private car and toward modes that do less environmental harm, and that subsidies toward transit (i.e. accepting that transit "loses money") are one valid way of doing that.
We can divide individual systems into three sets of routes:
Always be suspicious when a transit network is analyzed as though it were a pile of routes, because a good network is more than the sum of its parts.
1. Those routes break-even or profit financially (at a given fare). This is the "core".
These tend to be of two types: commuter express routes that run only when they're very busy, and all-day high-frequency lines in dense urban cores with all-day demand. In my work, I describe these services as having a "Ridership Goal" or "Productivity Goal."
2. Those lines which are necessary for the core routes to break-even, and collectively help the set of routes break-even. These are the "feeders".
Levinson is acknowledging here that it's not actually possible to classify all lines cleanly, because in a well-designed transit network designed for anywhere-to-anywhere travel it is the network that yields ridership, not just individual services. It appears Levinson wants to distinguish a set of lines as individually unprofitable but necessary for the overall profitability of a network — as opposed to the third category below. OK, but this is the same as saying that there is no meaningful line-by-line measurement of "profitability" in an interdependent network; only the entire network (except for the weakest services discussed below) can be judged as profitable. That's true in my experience.
3. Those lines which lose money, and whose absence would not eliminate profitability on other routes. These money-losers are a welfare program. We might politely call them "equity" routes.
Many people don't want to talk about this category, but these routes exist in any network. They tend to be circulator services in low-density areas — including rural areas — that provide lifeline access but have little or no potential to compete with the car. You can identify them because they don't contribute substantially to the performance of the main network (though this is of course a matter of degree with no hard edge).
If an hourly circulator carrying 5 boardings per hour connects with a major trunkline carrying 100 boardings per hour, and half the circulator's ridership makes a connection with the trunk, then at worst deleting the circulator (and losing all its ridership) would cost the trunk 2.5% of its 100 hourly boardings, which will barely be noticed. If the service spent on the circulator were spent instead on even more frequency on the trunk, you might well make up the difference.
On the other hand, if the trunk weren't there, the circulator would lose 50% of its boardings, probably a fatal blow. So while connecting lines are always interdependent, some are so weak that the relationship might as well be viewed as a one-way dependence.
Levinson's right about all that, but since I don't share his "profitability" frame I can't share his derision about "welfare" or "equity." In working with transit agencies, I try to educate about these "Coverage" routes, the equivalent of Levinson's third group. I define these as "predictably low-ridership services motivated by goals other than ridership — goals generally including social service objectives, expectations of "equity" between different subareas of the region, and a generalized desire to cover the whole service area with some kind of service." In my work, I encourage public transit authorities to make a conscious choice about how much of this service they want to operate, understanding that every dollar they spend on Coverage service is a dollar they can't spend on Ridership goals or related outcomes of mode share and fare revenue.
So given Levinson's "profitability" frame, here's his solution:
Mass (or public) transit agencies are transportation organizations first, not welfare organizations. They should be considered public utilities rather than departments of government, which provide a useful service for a price to their users.
The conflct between Ridership and Coverage goals needs to be resolved by government. This doesn't require removing transit authorities from government, as there are many needs (especially land use integration) that argue the opposite. Even if transit operations were considered a "utility," policy and planning functions of transit very much need to be part of government, in my experience. Many Australian states, for example, gave away too much policy and planning control to operating companies, and are now undergoing reforms to take this authority back.
My thesis is that the local transit systems should identify and propose to retrench to the financially sustainable system, and present local politicians with a choice.
If local politicians want additional "equity" services, they should be presented with a cost of subsidy per line, and then can collectively choose which lines to finance out of general revenue, as this is primarily a welfare rather than an transportation function. In other words, public transit organizations would present the public with a bill for these money-losing services (the subsidy required in order to at least break even on operating them (i.e. the difference between their revenue and their cost), and not be expected to pay for them out of operating revenue.
If the cost of those lines is deemed too expensive (i.e. the politicians are unwilling to pay for them with general revenue tax dollars), they should be canceled. Transit agencies would no longer be losing money, they would now be break-even or slightly profitable. They might even pay a dividend to their owners (the general public).
General revenue (the treasury) would of course now be losing money, we didn't pull money from thin air, but since this is a social welfare/redistribution function, that is perfectly appropriate. This would entirely change public and political perception of transit services. It might also result in fewer bad routes being funded, since it would be crystal clear where the subsidies lay.
Levinson's tone here is needlessly divisive in my view. I prefer to work from a position of respect toward the users and defenders of low-ridership services, understanding that other valid public purposes are being served. I also respect the notion that a community that pays into a transit system should expect some service in return; this "equity" impulse has nothing to do with "welfare."
But Levinson is right that a choice must be made. There really are two competing goals for transit: Ridership (which leads to high mode share, sustainability outcomes, and "profitability") and Coverage (which provides social inclusion and equity benefits in low-density areas that a Ridership-based system wouldn't serve.) These two goals lead network design in opposite directions. So transit agencies should have guidance — from those who fund them — on how much to spend on one goal or the other.
I agree with Levinson, too, that transit policy would be much clearer if we had budgets definitely allocated to the purpose of maximum ridership — with other budgets that funded the Coverage services.
For more, see this paper of mine on the same topic, and Chapter 10 of my forthcoming book.
UPDATE: Professor Levinson responds here.
Now and then, advertising seizes on the image of a classic subway map, using it to organise some other set of ideas. From the Metro Wine Map of France:
The Metro station stands for some distinct thing that we should learn to distinguish from other things nearby — fine-grained appellations in this case. The brightly colored subway lines are categories that we should also understand — in this case, the wine regions of France. Somehow this metaphor seems to satisfy, over and over, as a way to bring a certain je ne sais quoi to a topic.
(Absentmindedly, I begin to sketch a radial metro network converging on a central station complex called "Plants in my garden." A bright blue line called "Heather Family" departs from the Cassiope platform and heads outward via stations called Vaccinium (blueberries/cranberries) and Gaultheria before swerving toward a terminal loop of scenic Rhododendron stations. A bright red line called "Rose Family" departs from a platform called "Rosa" and heads outward via stations called Rubus (alight here for blackberries and raspberries), Fragaria (strawberries), Pyrus (pear) and Malus (apple) [those last two stations too closely spaced, really] before reaching its terminus: Prunus, the cherries, plums, apricots and peaches.)
Why does the metro line serve as such an excellent selling or organizing metaphor? Conjecture: it suggests speed, order, power, reliability, a larger design that gives meaning to experience, and an urban(e) sense of excitement (as opposed to the rural excitement of the "open road").
Of course, a true transit network functions only through the interdependence of its lines, like the lines of Daniel Huffman's transit-map of the Mississippi River system.
But the metro-as-metaphor doesn't seem to need that. The "wine-metro" map at the top of this post is all disconnected but still seems to sing, at least to its intended crowd.
What is it about the rail transit as a metaphor? How could we corral this metaphorical power to get some of the real thing built?
Most cities that I know have one or more major downtown streets where parades and other major civic celebrations tend to occur. San Francisco's Market Street, Chicago's State Street (pictured), and New York's Fifth Avenue are obvious examples.
These same cities, if they value transit, often want this same street to be the core of their transit system, because they want transit to deliver customers to the "front door" of the city.
So it's normal to see huge, complex reroutings of transit service when one of the civic events is happening. The legibility problems of this shift are accepted because they happen only a few times a year.
Vancouver, however, does something different, and I want to verify how unusual it is. Vancouver's core downtown transit street, Granville Mall, is closed to buses (and all vehicles) every weekend evening. Specifically:
On Fridays, Saturdays, Sundays, Holidays and the day before a Holiday, buses will run along Granville each day until 9pm, then switch to the re-route, travelling northbound on Seymour and southbound on Howe. The re-routes will stay in place until the close of service.
So many of Vancouver's most important street-running transit lines (mostly trolley buses in this case) shift from one downtown street to another at 9pm on almost half of all days. So the process of explaining and remembering where to find the bus is complicated all the time, which is quite different from finding the street closed for a very rare parade.
What North American cities do this routinely with their main transit street? Nicollet Mall in Minneapolis is the only example that comes to my mind, but its role in the transit network is much less important than Granville's.
To be clear, I'm not interested in reopening the Granville Mall debate, where many advocated closing the street to buses entirely. I am interested in the precedent as it might apply to other important transit streets, in Vancouver or elsewhere.
Matt Conway writes:
AC Transit (Oakland, CA and surroundings) recently came to an agreement with schools to adjust the start times at those schools to reduce the cost of providing bus service. I've never heard of schools adjusting [start times] to save agencies money!
http://www.actransit.org/2011/08/26/end-of-summer-adjustments-in-bus-service/
Start and end times of schools can have a huge impact on transit agencies that are expected to serve them. If three large schools choose to start at the same time, rather than at staggered times, they can dramatically increase both the fleet needs and the operating cost of the transit system. To serve such a short, sharp peak of school demand, the transit agency needs more drivers to work very short shifts, and must own more buses for them to drive. Staggered school times can replace four buses with one, and replace two 1-2 hour driver shifts with one 3-hour shift. Note that drivers must often be paid more to work a short shift; often the rule is that they must be paid for four hours even if they work one. That's understandable; would you be willing to commute to work for just one or two hours' pay?
When I worked as a network design consultant for small agencies across California and the American West, I encountered this problem constantly. Schools were under intense budget pressure and were cutting their own school bus service, shifting their transportation needs on the transit agency. Schools would change start and end times for their own reasons, and falsely assume that the transit agency could deliver a fleet of buses at whatever time they choose. It's an example of a common problem wherever many government agencies overlap; your agency can appear to "solve" a problem by shifting it to some other agency.
Has this situation improved? Are many public transit authorities now co-operating with school districts to ensure that expensive transit resources are used efficiently?
As I mentioned two days back, the new Spokane, Washington network map [Full PDF], designed by CHK America, is exceptionally clear in presenting the layers of the network so that you can see all of the following at a glance;
The key point is that each layer is never allowed to distract from the ones above it.
But it has one other important feature that I should mention: If you look closely, you'll see that its content is still there if you copy it to black-and white. Line widths and styles distinguish all the service categories from each other. The only exception is the distinction between "Shuttles" and "Frequent Routes", both wide lines, and this matters less than it seems because the shuttles are frequent too.
All this is relevant not just because the world is still full of black-and-white photocopiers, but also because of color-blindness. Matt comments:
In a recent post on stop spacing, I quoted an eloquent defense of very closely-spaced stops based on the needs of mobility-limited persons. This view is unfortunately in tension with the need to move stops as far apart as possible to increase the speed and reliability of operations, and thus attract more passengers.
I was surprised at how many comments suggested that the answer is to provide a mixture of local-stop and limited-stop or "Rapid" services. This is absolutely the right thing to do on the extremely major streets where you can afford very high frequency (say, every 10 minutes or better) on both patterns. Most New World cities have just a handful of these streets. Examples include Mission and Geary in San Francisco, Broadway and 41st Avenue in Vancouver, Western Avenue in Chicago and Wilshire in Los Angeles. Key features of these streets are (a) very high demand supporting two frequent services and (b) relatively long trips, so that speed advantage of a rapid stopping pattern outweighs the longer walking time it may require.
But if you can't afford high frequencies, overlaying local-stop (every 200m or less) with Rapid or limited-stop service (every 800m or more) can be really unsatisfying. Should you wait 11 minutes for a local at your stop, or walk to a Rapid stop 400m away where the next bus comes in 14 minutes but might be faster? Those are the uninspiring choices presented to a customer when the frequencies are only, say, every 15 minutes but two patterns are being offered.
When you consider the major streets that support frequent locals plus frequent rapid services, Seattle's long and busy Aurora Avenue might come to mind, but in fact, King County Metro abolished that pattern a few years ago, creating instead a single stopping pattern so that they could run the highest possible frequency. That's the key. Especially for trips of under 10 km or so, waiting time easily overwhelms in-vehicle time in determining door-to-door travel time. So in those cases a reasonable "compromise" stop spacing — not as close as senior/disabled advocates want, nor as far apart as speed advocates want — is actually the fastest at getting everyone where they're going.
Another approach, which I advocate looking at, is to accept that the constituency for very closely-spaced stops may also accept poorer frequency. If you look at the part of a route that is halfway between two Rapid stops, and thus most dependent on the local stops, and you then subtract all the people there who are willing to walk 400m to the rapid stop, you end up with a fairly small number of people. So perhaps locals should be less frequent than rapids. Transit agencies sometimes try to be neutral about this, carefully calibrating local vs rapid service based solely on current ridership. But in fact, transit agencies have a strong reason to prefer rapids: faster service is cheaper service to operate, because transit vehicles complete their cycles is less time, and we pay drivers by time, not distance.
But it's definitely not adequate to say that we can resolve the conflict between close and wide stop spacing simply by running two separate lines on the same street. We can in a few places, and if public transit had a lot more money we'd do it in a few more. But transit agencies need a stop spacing policy that works for the more ordinary street, where you can afford maybe 10-15 minute frequency on just one line. That means just one stopping pattern, so we have to pick one.
Spokane Transit (Washington USA) has a new network map out that is one of the clearest I've ever seen. It carefully delineates not just frequent services from infrequent ones, but also presents cases where basic infrequent lines combine to form frequent segments, and ensures that peak commuter express services are visible but can't distract from the clear all-day pattern. The whole thing in its full glory is here: Download Spokane 2011 map. The legend, too, is both clear and wonkish at the same time.
Congrats to Spokane Transit for designing this map for the public.
Full disclosure: I was the lead planner on a restructuring study for Spokane Transit back around the turn of the century, and if I remember right, our project invented the continuous two-way frequent loop of Lines 33 and 44. (The loop is closed on the west side as Line 20, as shown on the full PDF.) Despite many excellent improvements (and some sad service cuts) since then, it's great to see it still operating.
This kind of two-way loop is often useful as a way to combine radial lines and grid elements into a single service. Line 33, for example, intersects Line s 24, 25, and 90 in a grid manner, one line north-south and the other east-west, allowing for a range of L-shaped trips via a connection at this point. However, Line 33 also flow through so that the same segments can also be experienced as radial; if you stay on the bus, you'll get downtown eventually, and to a lot of other useful destinations.
I sometimes caution against excessive attachment to loops. In some contexts, with far more financial resources, I might applaud the breaking up of this loop, as I did of London's Circle Line. Given the extreme financial pressure on US transit agencies, though, I would contend that Spokane's frequent loop was an efficient solution, maybe even an elegant one.
UPDATE: The next post on the Spokane map, looking at colorblindness issues and comparing the map to Portland's, is here.
All good, but the simplest solution for color-blindless issues is to design maps so well that the information is all there in line weights and styles, so that the color is supplementary — very, very helpful for those who can see it but not essential. The Spokane map does this.
The current Portland map also tries to do this,
with a different line-weight for each of its four layers. The four layers are:
Portland's TriMet uses different colors for different lines, but if you copy it to black-and-white you should still be able to make out these four line weights (though not, of course, the feeble yellow shading of frequent line numbers).
I agree with many observers that the distinction between frequent bus and basic bus is insufficiently strong on the Portland map, whereas the Spokane map shows this distinction dramatically. In the past, when I've tried to use the Portland map as an example of clear delineation of network layers, I've been told that the distinction just isn't clear enough, so now I'll use the Spokane map instead. Still, Portland's intention is clear enough.