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Author Archive | Jarrett

What Was Wrong with the Washington DC Streetcar

Posted on May 28, 2025 in General, Streetcars (Trams), Symbolic Transit, Technophilia, Washington DC 0

Washington DC mayor Muriel Bowser has announced that the DC Streetcar, a single line of mixed-traffic streetcar along a portion of H Street, will be replaced by a “next generation streetcar.”  The Washington Post headline cuts through the spin:

If I could have edited that headline, I might just have said “DC Streetcar to be Replaced by Useful Transit”.

What was wrong with the DC Streetcar?  Apart from all the problems of putting transit in mixed traffic while denying it the ability to move around obstacles, the problem was this:

That orange line in the middle of the image, extending from (near) Union Station along H Street to just short of the Anacostia River, is the DC Streetcar.  Note that a frequent bus line X2 runs right on top of it but extends further east and west.  That’s because the X2, as a bus, is able to operate a complete corridor linking to logical endpoints, and functioning as part of a high-frequency grid.  High-frequency grids, which maximize access to opportunity in a dense city, are made of lines that keep going all the way across the grid, so that they intersect as many other lines as possible.  One thing an effective grid bus line would never do is end just short of a major connection point, as the streetcar does by not crossing the Anacostia River to at least reach Minnesota Avenue station.

This is one of the key things wrong with most of the mixed-traffic streetcars developed in the US in the 2000-2015 period, and especially those heavily promoted by the Obama Administration.  The excitement generated by the development industry, combined with the eagerness to get something started at low cost, led to starter lines that were very short, so they were unable to function well inside of larger grids.  The duplication of the X2 and the streetcar is just wasted precious driver time, but the X2 can’t get out of the way of the streetcar because it’s doing important work in a longer corridor, while the streetcar just duplicates part of it.  Because the resulting streetcar service was so useless, it never saw the surge of ridership that would form the basis for political support to expand the network.

Across the country now, we’re going to see a divergence in the fates of these little modern streetcars.  At this stage, I’m aware of two modern streetcars that I’m really confident will endure: the westside line in Portland and the line in Kansas City, both of which are being extended.  Portland’s is, and Kansas City’s will be, long enough to usefully serve a complete corridor rather than just a fragment of it.  There are a few other niche streetcars that have strong enough markets.  Tucson’s, for example, doesn’t extend across the city’s vast grid but it does link downtown and the University through several walkable neighborhoods, so it makes some sense.

Over time, too, the streetcars that endure are going to be those that gradually transform themselves into something more like light rail, by reducing car traffic’s ability to disrupt the service and widening the spacing of stops.  Portland, where the modern streetcar movement was hatched, spent years sending urbanists out across the country saying that “rail is special because it’s permanent.”  But fortunately the Portland Streetcar stations weren’t permanent!  They were way too close together, and wisely, some have now been removed in the campaign to get the service a bit above its original average speed of 6 miles per hour.

I must admit that when I saw this story, my first reaction on social media was less than magnanimous:

If you weren’t there, trust me.  At the major urbanist conferences between 2000 and 2010, few people were saying the obvious things I was saying, namely:

  • The permanence of a service lies not in rails in the street, but in the permanent justification of the operating subsidy.  That depends (in part) on ridership, which depends on the land use that actually develops around the line, not just what the boosters fantasize.  Many US cities facing budget crises now have streetcar operations on their books that compete directly with other city priorities, and if the streetcar wasn’t designed to succeed, they may not win those battles every year.
  • Streetcar lines that are too short, and serve only parts of corridors that really need to be served continuously, are net barriers to transit access, reducing access to opportunity. They either require us to take apart corridors that serve more people if they’re continuous, or they require a bus and streetcar to duplicate each other, wasting the precious staff time that is the primary limit on the total quantity of transit service.

This, one of my first really viral pieces from 2009, captures how I was talking back then.  I also got into a notorious 2010 fight with Vancouver urbanist Patrick Condon about his vision of covering Vancouver with slow streetcars instead of fast, driverless, high frequency rapid transit.  But as always, having been right in the end is never much consolation.  Mostly I’m sad that so much well-intentioned energy went into so many projects that weren’t scaled to succeed, and that weren’t sufficiently focused on being useful.

Let’s plan public transit with the goal of being maximally useful to human beings, expanding their access to opportunity.  That means designing the right lines first and then picking the technology, not falling in love with a technology and then designing a line around its limitations.

 

 

 

 

 

Do US Conservatives Support Public Transit? A Clue

Posted on May 26, 2025 in Advocacy, General 2

If you live in an urban progressive bubble in the US, it may seem absurd to speculate about whether US conservatives could support public transit.  The Trump administration’s Secretary of Transportation is openly attacking the funding plan for the nation’s most transit-dependent big city, while amplifying exaggerated narratives about crime.  It’s rare to see national Republican politicians speaking up strongly for public transit as a worthy public investment, particularly where this would compete with road funding or with other Republican priorities such as tax cuts.

But locally, the picture is quite different.  And like all local pictures, it’s different in each locality.

This is about to become very important, because we are headed into a period of epic state and local battles about public transit across the country.  Many agencies are facing financial crises that will require either new funding or service cuts.  That new funding will need to be approved either by voters, or by state and local politicians who will need the support of voters.  All this needs to happen by November 2026 at the latest.

And in a lot of places, that will mean winning the votes of some people who see themselves as conservatives.  These are not people who will vote for Democratic candidates nationally, but who are still open to local efforts to solve problems that they see in their own communities.

So I want to flag a remarkable detail from a survey just completed by Spokane Transit Authority in Spokane, Washington.  85% of self-described conservatives believe that it’s at least “somewhat important” for “the region to support and fund public transportation”!

 

 

(Note for math geeks:  Yes, I know that with 447 total replies a single cell of a crosstab may not be statistically meaningful, but look at the larger pattern: Over 90% saying at least “somewhat important” in a region that’s not especially leftist.  Again, this is a statistically valid survey, not a self-selected one.)

Spokane area can fairly be described as a purple region in a blue state.  It has some universities but is not culturally dominated by them.   The City of Spokane itself is moderately progressive and much of the suburbs are quite conservative.  The congressional district is safely Republican.  So while the transit system benefits from state funds that it wouldn’t have if it were a few miles further east in Idaho, it still must build local support in a bipartisan way.  The agency’s communications and management have been aware of that for some time, and have grown adept at engaging with conservatives to build left-right consensus.

I don’t believe for a moment that the Spokane area’s conservative voters, when presented with a specific tax measure and a specific “no” campaign, would vote 85% yes.  But this does speak to the importance of not presuming they will vote no, and talking about transit in ways that will appeal to them.  Transit agency comms and campaigns must avoid signaling that transit is an exclusively progressive cause, even if some on the urban left will find the results a little irritating.  There’s just no other way to build a large enough consensus.  In California, for example, the political leadership is overwhelmingly progressive and will tend to speak in progressively-coded ways, but many sales tax measures require 2/3, which means the deciding voter is far to the right of the median voter

As Strong Towns founder Charles Marohn likes to say, “When bottom-up conservatives work with bottom-up progressives, they find that they need each other.”

Meanwhile, have other transit agencies asked this question and run this crosstab?  If not, it’s something I’d recommend.

Great new David Roberts Interview of Me

Posted on May 16, 2025 in Podcasts 0

David Roberts, an energy policy expert known as “Dr. Volts”, did a great podcast interview of me a few weeks back.  His frame was “what’s the state of play in transit in the US?”  It was great fun, and I hope you enjoy it. It’s here.

 

Pope Francis on the Problem of Cars in Cities

Posted on April 28, 2025 in Meditations 4

In the wake of his death, many have shared this observation from his 2015 environmental encyclical Laudato Si’

The quality of life in cities has much to do with systems of transport, which are often a source of much suffering for those who use them. Many cars, used by one or more people, circulate in cities, causing traffic congestion, raising the level of pollution, and consuming enormous quantities of non-renewable energy. This makes it necessary to build more roads and parking areas which spoil the urban landscape. Many specialists agree on the need to give priority to public transportation. Yet some measures needed will not prove easily acceptable to society unless substantial improvements are made in the systems themselves, which in many cities force people to put up with undignified conditions due to crowding, inconvenience, infrequent service and lack of safety. (153)

But I was especially struck by this, a statement likely to be confronting to many architects:

 It is not enough to seek the beauty of design. More precious still is the service we offer to another kind of beauty: people’s quality of life, their adaptation to the environment, encounter and mutual assistance. (150)

That’s it.  The beauty is not in the thing humans have built, however much we may be dazzled by photos and renderings.  The beauty is in the transformation of people’s lives.

That’s why I’m an advocate of public transit service, and an advocate of infrastructure only if it makes the service better.

Your Neighbors Support Car Dependence Less Than You Think

Posted on March 28, 2025 in General 1

A new paper by Ian Walker and Marco te Brömmelstroet, which you can read for free here, digs into why so many people accept the assumption that driving a car an essential activity that cannot be judged the way other activities are. For example, the authors wonder why more Americans agree with the statement:

People operating dangerous machinery should be responsible for any harm they cause.

than with the statement

People operating motor vehicles should be responsible for any harm they cause.

This bias, called motonormativity, is easy to see when following, for example, the debate over (de)congestion pricing in New York City.  Opponents repeatedly claimed that a vaguely defined “working class” would be devastated by the proposed charge of $9 to drive into Lower Manhattan, even though the people actually driving into Lower Manhattan are wealthier than average and abundant public transit options are available.  A notion that getting to work is impossible without driving, which is broadly true in exurban and rural areas, was projected into the densest place in the United States, a place that only functions because so many people already don’t drive. This motonormative notion was enforced throughout media coverage of the issue, not just in the predictably rabid New York Post and in much of the radio and television media, but even in the New York Times, where subheads like “See what it will cost you” reminded us that even in the densest and most transit-rich of US cities, all readers are assumed to be motorists, or to care about them.  

In the new paper, the authors go beyond whether motonormativity exists — which many previous studies that they cite have established — and dig into what causes it.  Using a broad survey of over 650 people each in the United States, United Kingdom, and the Netherlands, the study finds correlations between motonormative attitudes and:

  • the social norms of close personal contacts
  • the social norms of other people
  • the infrastructure and physical environment, and
  • the perceived attitude of the government.

There are interesting differences among the three countries.  The Dutch, for example, are the only ones who perceive thee infrastructure surrounding them to be less supportive of cars than of other modes of travel — and they’re right.

The most interesting finding to me, though, was that people tend to assume that people around them are more supportive of cars than they are, an example of the phenomenon of pluralistic ignorance.  Our everyday life is full of reinforcements of motonormativity — my doctor’s office in inner-city Portland provides car directions but not transit directions — so it’s not surprising that people wrongly assume that their support for alternatives to driving in a minority view.  Very car dependent places like Los Angeles routinely vote big taxes for public transit.  A crucial share of people appear to be resentfully car-dependent — forced into car-dependence by their circumstances and thus behaving in a way that may superficially appear “car loving” — but actually longing for alternatives, if not for themselves than for their community at large.  We must never presume that people in cars are car advocates.

I strongly recommend this paper.  Even if you don’t have the statistics knowledge to follow the technical part, parts 1, 4, and 5 are an easy read and full of useful insights.

New Interview of Me from Active Towns

Posted on March 11, 2025 in General, Video 0

Active Towns has just posted an hour-long conversation with me, one that takes me a little deeper than usual into my professional work as a transit planning consultant.  My video was a little fuzzy at times, but it’s all clear enough.  This is a good deep dive into what I’m about, especially for those with a professional or geeky interest in transit network design.

It’s also listenable as a podcast.  You don’t have to have the visuals to make sense of it.  It’s here.

 

What’s Next for Rural Intertown Bus Service in the US?

Posted on March 4, 2025 in General, Rural 4

My friend David Bragdon (the former head of TransitCenter and former elected head of the Portland area’s regional government) has a good, through article at Eno on the problem facing rural bus service, generally defined as services more than 50 miles long not primarily intended for commuting.  He’s not focused on links between big cities, which have air and (sometimes) rail options, and where bus services are often still profitable.  The concern is all the smaller towns that had commercial bus service 50 years ago, but generally no longer do.  These towns have lots of people who need to get to nearby bigger towns for medical services, errands, shopping, and other needs that they can’t get locally.  I call these services “rural intertown” but note that the difficulty of describing this category is probably part of why it’s so neglected.

This should be not be a left-right issue, and mostly isn’t.  Congress, with ample support from rural Republican lawmakers, has long supported a Federal funding program called 5311(f) which provides funding for needed bus links that no longer exist commercially.  But this funding is basically a grant to the state Departments of Transportation, which can spend it on whatever bus service they like.  Bragdon observes that some states are doing great things with this money, creating statewide lifeline networks focused on towns that would otherwise be abandoned, but that other states often just give the money to private carriers like Greyhound, without even checking their claims that the subsidy is needed to keep some service running.  “In short,” Bragdon writes, “many state DOTs spend a lot of money, particularly on highways but to some extent on buses, without explaining what they’re trying to achieve.”

Bragdon is arguing, in short, that like urban transit, intercity lifeline service should be planned.  At its root, planning is the process of identifying goals and making sure that a plan of action actually meets them cost-effectively.  I agree, and anyone interested in this challenge should read his article.

There’s an overlapping problem, though, when we’re talking about shorter corridors (under 80 miles or so) and there are enough towns along the way to justify service every day and several times a day.  Here, the obstacle may be the county-level organization of transit, which gives no agency the job of serving the entire corridor.  I addressed that in the next post.

 

 

US Rural Intercity Transit: The County Line Problem

Posted on March 4, 2025 in General, Rural 17

In the US, public transit is often organized at the county level, so the service ends where the county does. There are countless situations like this, where two significant cities are 20-80 miles apart with a county line separating them:

 

 

 

If transit is provided by county-level agencies, the service in this situation looks like this:

The two transit agencies probably have the best of intentions.  They’ve probably worked together to find a common stop in Town 2 where they meet.  They may or may not have planned the schedules so that the buses meet and people can connect between them to travel to the big cities.  But even if they’ve done that, the end-to-end connection is a gratuitous hassle.   You have to get off one bus and onto another, and worse, there’s a well-above-zero risk that you’ll be stranded if an arriving bus is late.

The better service, and the greater access to opportunity, arises from doing this:


If this corridor is important enough, the county level agencies may have merged to resolve this problem, but usually they haven’t.  Mostly I’m talking about cases where City A and City B are the centers of counties that have numerous internal travel demands, including to other towns in other directions, so that this particular corridor isn’t the most important thing they do.   In fact, it may seem rather peripheral to them.  What’s more, if they are just running to a small town near the county line, the ridership probably isn’t that great, which means that there’s not much impetus to improve things.

So if the county-level agencies aren’t able to combine their services, the state Department of Transportation should look at this situation and see if they can use their leverage to create a solution.  This could mean leaning on the county-level agencies to solve the problem, or it could mean creating (or enhancing) a state intercity bus product to handle these situations.

None of this is easy.  Like all organizations, county level transit operations may feel threatened by the loss of role, importance, or access to funding.  They may be bound up with different labor contracts, which can be especially hard to reform.  A state bus route taking over some local services in the county will need fare integration with the rest of the local system.  But states that want great statewide transit networks need to care about this issue.  A lot of service is already tied up in these county-level rural links, and they won’t always run the most efficient patterns if they are trapped by county lines.

 

Should Service Cuts be Random or Planned?

Posted on February 6, 2025 in Basics, Cuts, General

Like most people who plan public transit, I hate cutting service.  Most cities that I work in have obvious markets where more transit would attract more ridership and expand the possibilities of people’s lives.  So of course I hate taking service away.

But sometimes we have to.  Ever since the Covid-19 pandemic, there have been two large reasons that transit service can’t be sustained:

  • Lack of funding.  Large agencies that relied on fare revenue, especially those that moved large volumes of people into city centers before Covid-19, are having trouble balancing their budgets.  Some face “fiscal cliffs” that will require new funding to stave off service cuts.
  • Lack of staff.  Across the world, authorities and operating companies are struggling to hire and retain bus drivers.  The problem has stabilized in many places but doesn’t seem to be going away.

There are two kinds of service cuts, random and planned.  When you hear discussion of service cuts, it’s usually about planned cuts.  But the alternative to planned cuts is random cuts, so it’s important to know what those are.

Random cuts happen in the course of operations, when not enough drivers show up for work.  There are always a certain number of drivers calling in sick, and agencies manage this by paying some spare drivers to be on hand at the operating base, to fill in whatever runs would otherwise be missed.  But during the Covid-19 pandemic, these processes were overwhelmed by the number of employees not coming to work.  Even today, many US agencies are failing to deliver some of their scheduled service due to lack of staff.

These cuts are random and unpredictable.  In many cases, a particular bus never pulls out of the operating base in the morning because the driver of that bus didn’t show up, and there weren’t enough spare drivers on hand.  So every trip that bus was going to do will just not be served.  In other cases, operations managers are more proactive at reassigning drivers so that the most urgently needed service is saved.  In either case, the customer experience is that sometimes their bus doesn’t show up, and there is no way to plan ahead for that because it might happen today but not tomorrow.  It all depends on who showed up for work that morning and what decisions were made on the fly at the operating base.

This is a very bad situation, and it’s sadly routine.  Why is it still happening at some agencies so long after the pandemic?  Because many decision-makers are deciding that random cuts are better than planned cuts.  Let’s look at why this happens, and why it’s almost always the wrong choice.

During the pandemic, I happened to be working closely with San Francisco Muni, and one thing that really impressed me is that all through the crisis, they made every effort to plan their scheduled service to match their shrunken workforce.  It was chaos in the first months of the pandemic, as it was everywhere, but as soon as they could, they intentionally designed a stripped down network that they could operate reliably with the reduced workforce they still had.  Ever since then, as the workforce as grown, they have been gradually and strategically bringing service back.  They currently report that over 99% of their scheduled service is operating, far above what many agencies are achieving.  Why?  Because they designed the scheduled service to be operable in their actual situation.

But to do this, they’ve had to endure a lot of outrage.  Riders unite against planned service cuts, because they’re visible and intentional.  There’s a staff person putting them forward who makes an easy villain.  Sometimes that staff person will even be framed as advocating the cuts, which is ridiculous.  Professional transit planners are almost all transit advocates.  They want to expand service.  If they’re proposing to cut it, it’s because the alternative is worse.

If an agency lacks the staff to run its schedule reliably, then a refusal to cut service in a planned way will just cause more service to be cut randomly.  Planned cuts mean that you know that the bus you use will know longer be there, but you can be confident that that one two blocks away, or the one five minutes later, will be there.  You will grumble, but it’s likely you can adapt to that.  Random cuts, on the other hand, undermine the transit experience for everyone, and do so in a way that nobody can plan for.  Sharing the pain among everyone may seem fair, but it’s also a good way to drive away a much larger share of the ridership.

So every time you hear a transit authority debating service cuts, ask what the alternative to the planned cuts is.  Is there really a pot of money that can keep the service running?  Or is there a workforce limitation, as there is in many cities, that will make an uncut service inoperable?  If it’s the latter, then you can make a big show of opposing the scheduled service cuts.  But all you’ll have done is  condemn riders to random cuts, day after day, which will do far more to undermine confidence in the service.

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