Author Archive | Jarrett

Holiday Card, with Controversial Hummingbird

Posted on December 22, 2020 in General

The card was lightly controversial because it has no public transit or urbanism theme, but I’m sorry: Hummingbirds are amazing. If you’ve never watched one in action I suggest that as a New Years Resolution. And when you get a green hummingbird at a red feeder, that basically ticks all the holiday boxes.

We are deeply grateful to all the clients and friends who’ve helped us get through this difficult year. We hope we’ve been helpful to you as well. Happy holidays, with best wishes and all necessary fortitude for 2021.

It’s OK to be Absolutely Furious

Posted on December 10, 2020 in General

Today I took a stab at writing a holiday letter and discovered that, right at this moment, I can’t figure out how to cheer up transit advocates, or people who work in local government, or anyone else who loves cities. Since consultants like me are expected to exude at least some degree of optimism, this is more of a problem for me than it is for the average person.

Why? At the Federal level in the US, powerful forces, especially in the Senate, are happy to watch local governments implode in budgetary crisis, weakening the only level of government that citizens can influence. Particular hostility seems to be directed at transit agencies associated with big cities. In an absurdity that only Federal policy could create, high ridership in the big agencies before the Covid disaster is exactly why they are in such trouble now. New York, Washington, Boston and possibly others are looking at service cuts that will simply devastate those cities, undermining essential workers and destroying the access to opportunity without which an equitable economic recovery is impossible. Smaller agencies are in better shape at the moment, but if there isn’t a new funding package soon we’ll see devastating cuts across the US.

Tomorrow or next week, I will express optimism again and encourage constructive action. But I know that the journey to any authentic optimism goes through the anger rather than around it. So today I feel the need to state, for the record, that I’m absolutely furious: about what’s happening to transit in the US, and about many larger things of which that’s just an example.

Again, working consultants like me aren’t supposed to say this in public, and if I were at an earlier stage of my career I wouldn’t dare.

Please remember that when you deal with public servants or consultants at this time, and they don’t seem to be reacting in the way you think they should, that they are probably furious too, but are in roles where they can’t express that. In addition to being furious about all the things that you’re furious about, they have also been through a period of unprecedented assault on their professions. Because they did the long, hard work of learning about a topic so that they can help people deal with it, most have been slandered and a few have been threatened physically. So when you see these people managing their own emotions to keep working constructively, consider expressing some gratitude and admiration for that.

When I am in a room with some citizens trying to solve a problem together, we can’t get much done if everyone is just expressing anger in every moment. But even if we park it at the door in order to do our work, we shouldn’t deny it. In almost every meeting, I wish I could say: “I know how furious you are about all the injustice and cruelty and oppression and destructive behavior that surrounds us, in addition to your fears for yourself, your family, and your community. I’m angry too.” Maybe it’s my work to figure out how to say that, even to diverse audiences who may be angry about different things.

There will be many places where it’s not safe to talk this way. But I know I speak for many calm-seeming professionals when I say: I’m absolutely furious, and I hope you are too.

A Brief Detour into Comedy

Posted on November 18, 2020 in Interviews

Well, this isn’t your average interview.

“Nobody Listens to Paula Poundstone” is a comedy podcast series spun off by the US National Public Radio game show Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me. A while back they called out of the blue. Apparently they had done an interview with a parking garage designer, and a listener replied by asking them why they don’t interview the Human Transit guy, for balance I guess. I had all the leeriness of comedy that you might expect, but it came off better than I expected, and it was fun.

The podcast is here. After half an hour of comic banter between the hosts, the segment starts at 31:53 to 1:02:00.

Portland: A 30-Year Old Kludge Finally Fixed

Posted on November 5, 2020 in General, Portland

Living in Portland, I still care about the details of transit network planning here, and here’s a thing that Portland folks should comment about, especially those who deal with downtown.

Back in the 1980s, when the current frequent grid network was laid out, there was a controversy about the east-west path that Morrison Bridge buses (now Line 15) should use across downtown. As a result of this, the two directions of service ended up five blocks apart, with westbound buses on Washington St and eastbound buses on Salmon St.

Separating the two directions of service, beyond the minimum required by typical one-way couplets, is a Very Bad Thing, because a service is useful only if you can walk easily to both directions of it.

Blue shows the area with easy access to service. As the directions of service get further apart, the area served gets smaller.

Why was this five-block split ever created? I was hanging around TriMet as a teenager then, so I think I remember. Nobody who designed this liked it. It was a political compromise, partly involving the department store whose large and busy loading dock fronted onto Alder, creating conflicts with buses.

The department store is long gone, but for some reason this was never fixed. I started banging this drum again about a year ago, and the objection I heard was that Alder has too much rush hour traffic, backed up from the bridge. While this is true:

A problem that happens briefly, like rush hour congestion, shouldn’t define the route that buses use all the time.
Congestion always happens where people want to go. Designing bus routes to avoid congestion usually implies avoiding logical paths that would be useful to the most people.
Whatever time may be lost in that backup is far less than the time spent driving ten additional blocks, in the eastbound direction, to go down to Salmon St and back.

Now, TriMet is finally proposing to fix it:

Now, like any existing routing, some people find the Salmon St routing useful, probably including many municipal and county employees whose main offices are near there. But these people are already walking from distant Washington St to travel in the other direction anyway, so they’re proving that they can.

If you live in Portland, please comment on this! Tri-Met is taking feedback here. As always, you must comment if you like an idea, not just if you hate it. Negative comment predominates on almost all service changes, because people who like a change take it for granted that it’s happening anyway. Don’t be part of that problem! Comment here. There’s other cool stuff to comment on there too!

Livability and Protest in Portland: An Interview with Me

Posted on November 3, 2020 in General, Portland

Protest against the Vietnam war in March 1970. Bonus points for knowing not just where this photo was taken, but also what the giant neon sign at the end of this street said.

Oregon Public Broadcasting has posted an interview with me about how Portland’s reputation for livability is related to its reputation for protest. OPB’s Geoff Norcross is a great interviewer, and it was a fun conversation. The audio and transcription are here.

“Through our livability, through the way we’ve built the city, we’ve created the stage on which those protests can express themselves effectively, but also attracted the kinds of people who are inclined to protest, who already see themselves to be as rejected by the system and want to stand up to it.”

How US Public Transit is Like the Postal Service

Posted on August 31, 2020 in General

I’m in Bloomberg CityLab today. Key quote:

Postal and transit services have the same problem. We want them to attract high usage and we want them to go everywhere, but those goals imply opposite kinds of service. Pursuing either goal will cause outcomes that look like failure when judged by the other goal’s measures of success. It’s like we’re telling our taxi driver to turn right and left at the same time. When they can’t do that, we just yell louder and call them incompetent. Is that taking us where we want to go?

Racial Justice and Transport Modeling

Posted on August 25, 2020 in Philosophy

Two important thinkpieces just appeared that seem to be about different topics but should to be read together.

Christof Spieler, the Houston METRO Board member who drove the 2015 network redesign at the political level, has a piece at Kinder Institute called “Racism has shaped public transit, and it’s riddled with inequities.” Meanwhile, in Vice, Aaron Gordon takes on “The Broken Algorithm that Poisoned American Transportation,” by which me means transportation demand models.

Spieler outlines how transportation, like everything else, has been forged through many decisions that reflected the values of the time, and how this history has created structures that still produce racially unjust outcomes today. These structures can be literal infrastructure — like bus lanes designed to be useful for suburban commuters but useless for buses linking inner city residents to opportunity — but they can also be a wide range of bureaucratic and analytic procedures that continue those racially unjust practices in more subtle ways that the people executing those procedures don’t have to notice.

One of those procedures is transportation demand modeling, as Gordon describes it. The best modeling is not nearly as dumb as the examples Gordon highlights. But the problem of all modeling is that to show the effects of a proposed action, you have to assume that everything else in the background will remain constant, or at least will continue changing only along predictable paths.

When the modeling process considers many possible futures, the one that is most like the past is called the conservative assumption, as if that means “this is the safest thing to assume.” This assumption seems calm and rational, attracting many people who would never call themselves conservative politically. But fact, assuming that the future will be like the past can be crazy if the trajectory defined by the past is unsustainable — environmentally, financially, or morally. “Unsustainable” means that it is going to change, and in that case, the “conservative” assumption is really the “self-delusion” assumption.

Transport modeling can’t be thrown out, but it never tells us what to do. It is a basic logical fallacy to say that “the modeling shows we must do x.” All modeling insights are if-then statements. A full version of this statement, which I would like to see at the beginning of every modeling-drive transportation study, is: “This report shows that if the future matches our assumptions, then you can expect this outcome. But the future may not be like that. In fact, maybe it shouldn’t be like that. So what really happens is up to you.”

Adelaide: A Network Design Proposal Fails

Posted on July 15, 2020 in Adelaide, General

In my long experience redesigning bus networks, it’s been rare to see a team spend years talking with people, studying reams of data, and developing a design through many iterations, only to have the result be nothing. Most designs I’ve worked on have either been implemented or at least been the basis of some improvements.

Adelaide, Australia, however, has just abandoned a thorough redesign of its network. It was a political decision, in which the Premier of South Australia overruled his own Minister of Transport, who had proposed the changes. (I was not involved in this project.)

The basic idea of the plan was to reorganize services into a simpler pattern with far less complexity and far more frequency — which is what high-ridership redesigns (like the projects I worked on in Auckland, Houston, and Silicon Valley) do. Such a revision will typically delete stops that are too close to other stops, and may ask people to walk to frequent service on a nearby main street rather than having infrequent service closer to their door. It may require some people to change buses who don’t have to do so now.

The result of the proposed simplification is typically a dramatic expansion of the high frequency network, which in turn means a network that provides faster door-to-door travel times and is easier to learn, remember, and explain.

Here’s a slice of the existing Adelaide network. Lots of infrequent routes, but none of them are likely to be coming when you need them.

Here’s what it would have looked like under the new network. Here, red lines are likely to be coming whenever you need them — they run every 15 minutes all day — while blue lines come every 30 minutes. (Oddly enough, this is the same color scheme that we use in all of our maps!)

If your goal were higher ridership, or maximizing where people can get to in a fixed amount of time, this kind of network design would do that. (Again, I was not involved in this design, and am not endorsing the specific design choices.)

But even if you do everything right — even if you do the right engagement, analyze the data well, and come up with the best possible design, people will scream. That’s because many riders are used to the system as it is, and have no interest in how the network improves access to opportunity for anyone but themselves. It doesn’t matter how useless the existing network is. Some people use it, and they will defend it, and the negative feedback is always louder than the support.

Almost all journalists will tell the negative side (Rage! Recriminations! A chance to paint leaders as incompetent!) because it just gets more clicks than the positive side (More people can get to more places, especially disadvantaged people! More people will ride! Less car traffic and pollution!) So of course, if a plan eliminates some bus stops that are too close to other stops, the headline will be:

It’s possible to make this reaction worse by doing a poor job at engaging decision makers and the public at every step, but it’s not possible to make it go away. Thus, I always have to remind elected officials at the beginning of the process: “All network designs that don’t add new operating cost are controversial. The more they try to achieve, the more controversial they are. Some people will scream at you. It may divide your own coalition. If you’re not up for that, let’s not even begin.” This, quite simply, is why some really incoherent and wasteful ones are never fixed.

So what went wrong here?

The excellent blog Melbourne on Transit blog has a long post-mortem. I agree with most of it, and would add:

If you are using the redesign to cut service, there should be a clearly understood reason, like the pandemic and related budget crises. Service cuts due to crisis can be a good time to do redesign — if that helps reduce the overall damage of the cuts — but it means that you have to deal with anger about the cuts at the same time that you deal with anger about the redesign.
Minimize the number of controversies you are having at once. Network redesign is controversial enough when the public is allowed to focus on it; it gets much harder when the public confuses it with other issues happening at the same time. Don’t try to reform contracts with operating companies, or introduce new companies, at the same time. Don’t raise fares at the same time.
Don’t propose magical outcomes. The government used the language of trying to “reduce subsidies” while improving service, due to some alchemy that was supposed to happen inside the operating companies. This is not how it works. Setting impossible expectations is a guarantee of failure.
Provide very clear information in lots of formats, with good before-and-after analysis tools. We provide before-and-after trip planners, maps of how access (where you can get to in a reasonable time) changes, and lots of other ways for people to engage with how the plan affects their lives as well as how it affects the city.
Go to the public with options, or at least a draft, with a clear message that the plan will be revised in response to comment.

Still, it’s a struggle. This may not have been the right design for Adelaide, but it’s unfortunate that after all that effort, they’ll get nothing. An obsolete and inefficient network will always be popular among people who are used to it, but if that’s always a reason not to improve it, the whole city loses.

San Francisco: A Forbidden Fantasy Comes True

Posted on June 21, 2020 in Rail Transit, San Francisco

Around 1989, when I lived in San Francisco, I spent too much time in little rooms with transit advocates (and some transit professionals who could not be named) complaining about Muni Metro, the combined surface-subway light rail system. It looked like this and still does, except that the T line was added more recently. Note the r0ute letter names in the lower left.

The segment with 3-5 lines on it, from Embarcadero to West Portal, is the underground segment, which carries the heaviest loads through the densest part of the city.

It had always been wildly unreliable. The five lines that ran through it (J, K, L, M, and N) always came in sequences of pure arithmetic randomness: N, J, M, K, J, N, N, K, K, M, N, J, L. (Finally, my “L”! But of course, after such a long gap, it’s crush-loaded and I can’t get on.)

Four decades after the subway opened, lots of things have been fixed: longer and better trains, better signaling, an extension downtown that helped trains turn back more efficiently. But none of this touched the true problem: The core Metro subway carries five lines, all of which deserve to be very frequent. But they can’t all be frequent enough because they all have to squeeze into one two-track subway. The other part of the problem is that they all have surface segments at the outer end, where they encounter more sources of delay, causing them to enter the subway at unpredictable times, and in an unpredictable order.

In those small rooms in the 1980s, we all knew that there was only one mathematically coherent solution. Some us drew the map of this solution on napkins, but we really didn’t need to. The map was burned into our minds from our relentless, powerless mental fondling of it. Of course it was politically impossible, so impossible that if you valued your career you would wad up that napkin at once, burn it probably, and certainly not mention it outside your most trusted circle.

At most you might let out the pressure as a joke: “You know, we *could* turn the J, K, and L into feeders, and just run the M and N downtown. And then we’d have room for a line that just stayed in the subway, so it was never affected by surface delays.” Everyone would titter at hearing this actually said, as though in some alternate universe such a change could be possible.

Now, the impossible is happening. Without fear or shame, I can finally share the content of that forbidden napkin, because it looks like San Francisco is actually going to do it.

The two busiest western lines (M, N) will still go downtown, the others (J, K, L) will terminate when they reach a station but you have to transfer to continue downtown. M trains will flow through as T. Finally, a shuttle (S) will provide additional frequency in the subway, immune to surface delays. As always, asking people to transfer makes possible a simpler, more frequent, and more reliable system.

You may detect, at San Francisco’s tiny scale, a case of the universal “edge vs core” problem. Like many, many US rail transit systems, Muni Metro had been designed to take care of the edge, people who lived on one of the branch lines, rather than the core, people traveling along the subway in the dense inner city. The new system finally fixes the core. But the edge folks benefit from a reliable subway too. What’s more, in the future it may be possible to run the surface segments of J, K, and L more frequently, because their capacity will no longer be capped by the need to fit down the subway with four other lines.

All that in return for having to transfer to go downtown if you’re on the J, K, or L.

Let me not make this sound easy. These transfer points, West Portal and Duboce Portal, are a little awkward, because they were never designed for this purpose. You have to walk from one platform to another, crossing at least one street. There are valid concerns from people with mobility limitations, which will have to be addressed with better street and intersection design. Plenty of people won’t like it.

But the transit backbone of a major city will finally function. And for those of us who’ve known San Francisco for decades, that’s a forbidden fantasy come true.

Should Public Transit Shut Down for Civil Disturbances?

Posted on June 1, 2020 in General

What should public transit agencies do when a city is convulsed by massive demonstrations carrying a high risk of violence? Over the weekend, many transit agencies shut down rather than risk possible harm to their staff, passengers, and equipment. This left many good people stranded as they tried to leave the demonstrations.

Christof Spieler, a Board member at Houston Metro, has some ideas in a Twitter thread. He starts with:

Two lessons for transit agencies in the past several days:
(1) Make a plan to never strand riders
(2) Think about an agency’s relationship with the police
— Christof Spieler (@christofspieler) May 31, 2020

As someone who shares the goals of these protests, let me gently lay out why this is so difficult for transit managers. This is not to defend or uphold any particular choices any agency has made. The debate about this is urgent and important. My only point is that it isn’t easy or obvious what transit agencies should have done. It was absolutely not OK that people were stranded, and there needed to be a solution for that, but the actual solution isn’t so obvious.

Before you say that transit should have run as normally as possible during the crisis, ask yourself:

If you were a bus driver, would you be comfortable being told to drive into an area where civil unrest is likely and there is some risk of violence?
If you were a transit manager, who has seen plenty of pictures of burned and vandalized buses, what should be your tolerance of the risk of destroying or damaging the fleet, thus making normal service impossible?
But, you might say, buses could run normally to near the edge of the affected area. OK, but how is the transit manager supposed to know the boundaries of that area in advance? These are not obedient events. They can rove fast and unpredictably. They can even erupt from nothing where they weren’t planned at all.
But surely they could have kept most of the system running, far from the events? I think there are cases where I’d have recommended that, but again, transit managers can’t predict where events will erupt. What’s more, good transit networks are all interconnected and interdependent. You can’t just turn off a piece without it having a huge effect on the rest. This is especially true when that piece is downtown, where lots of lines meet or flow through.
If you say, yes, but they need realtime monitoring and guidance about how to detour in response to what’s happening: Buses have limited option to maneuver as conditions change. They don’t fit down every street. They may need several blocks to turn around. The dispatcher/driver ratio is far too low for dispatchers to give each bus driver the best advice for their situation when everything is changing so fast.

All this has to be figured out in realtime by staff who probably support the demonstrators’ goals, in a situation where they will be attacked for whatever they do. They’re being criticized for holding back, but they’d also be criticized if the evening news were full of burning buses and injured drivers and passengers.

Of course, as with the sudden service changes required by Covid-19, these decisions were made fast by people who might have made better decisions on reflection, and will learn from this experience. But these decisions are hard.

Finally, regarding the use of transit vehicles for police purposes: Most cities put a lot of effort into interagency emergency planning, where the various functions of government decide how they’d work together in various crises. In most situations, that’s exactly what we’d want them to do. Clearly, those plans around civil disturbances are going to be reviewed now, and deserve some public discussion. Obviously, the crisis of trust around policing in the US needs to be considered when transit agencies decide how to work with them in these emergencies.

Those plans also need to address transit system shutdowns, because in a big city these are emergencies all by themselves. They need to honor the limitations of each agency’s product and not expect the impossible from them, while also creatively addressing the challenges. The Los Angeles transit agency reimbursed people’s Uber, Lyft, and taxi rides out of the demonstrations after they shut down service. Was that the right thing to do? Right now, give them credit for doing something.

Finally, if you care about these decisions, you might want to direct some of your activism toward influencing your city’s emergency planning. Many people who do that work are exasperated by public apathy and may welcome your respectful interest.

But please, don’t make these emergency decisions sound easy and obvious, because they aren’t.

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