Continuing from my last post on the overhead wires of Vienna, here are some additional images. (Click to enlarge.) Decide for yourself when and where they’re unacceptable.
Author Archive | Jarrett
Vienna: Do the Wires Ruin It?
Next time someone tells you that a light rail or streetcar or trolleybus would ruin the beautiful streetscape with their overhead wires, show them a picture of Vienna, where I am now.
Environmentalist Critiques of Strategic Transit Planning
How should environmentalists engage with long-range transit planning studies? What should you focus on? What should you object to?
On Monorails
On my apparent disapproval of monorails, J. D. Hammond comments:
Every planner hates monorail by default, but can never articulate what, exactly is wrong with monorails. I imagine my exasperation with this is not unlike your exasperation with BRT opposition.
I wouldn’t make the claims that monorail partisans do that it can somehow be “profitable” in ways other transportation modes cannot. However, it’s demonstrated that it’s at least cost-comparable with LRT and provides higher levels of service. And the public, moreso than the planning community, is predisposed to like monorail. What’s wrong with that?
I think I can answer most of J.D.’s challenge, but first, a caution. This is not an “anti-monorail” post. This is a post by somebody who values abundant access outcomes and who views transit technologies as tools for delivering those outcomes. I have found Bus Rapid Transit useful in a number of situations, so I tend to say good things about it. This doesn’t mean I’m attached to buses as a technology, merely that they do seem to be the best tool for the job in a wide range of cases. I’m still focused on the abundant access outcome, not the technology that delivers it.
Having said that, we’re all shaped by our own experience, so I should confess that my view of the potential usefulness of monorails is probably shaped by my experience around the Seattle Monorail Project (1996-2005), the only voter-approved effort North America has seen to develop monorail as a high-capacity rapid transit mode rather than as a circulator or fun-ride. The project failed after consuming a decade of advocates’ sweat and tears, because (a) its costs kept escalating and (b) its all-elevated profile was unacceptable to many people who care about the urban landscape. Another factor (c) may have been that the monorail’s inability to branch limited ability to branch constrained the range of future extensions that could be contemplated, thus the range of neighborhoods that could believe they’d get monorail service someday.
Cost escalation is a common problem in transit generally, but the other two problems are quite specific to monorails.
The need for completely grade separated and usually elevated guideway is, in my experience, a huge practical and political limit to the use of monorail technology. Light rail can be elevated but doesn’t have to be. Monorails are the lightest form of elevated rail transit in existence, so when you elevate them you get a less looming structure than other modes require. But the need to be elevated everywhere — even at points where light rail would run at ground level — is a limitation affecting both cost and visual impact. If you require a means of emergency evacuation, you need a walkway alongside the beam that makes this impact even greater.
The inability to branch was a small problem in Seattle because one of the desirable “monorail Phase 2” projects (the Delridge corridor) would have been a branch from partway along the planned Phase 1 monorail, rather than an extension off the end of it. Because of the way monorail trains wrap around their single guide-beam, branching is hard to do. On standard rail, it’s no problem.
But the current generation of urban designers is pretty passionate about the supreme importance of the pedestrian experience at the ground plane, and resistant to putting any substantial structure directly over a street. Even networks of overhead pedestrian crossings, such as the Skyway networks of Minneapolis and St. Paul, are rarely if ever proposed today on such a comprehensive scale.
You can credibly argue that we’ll get over any phobia about structure above the street once our need for rapid transit is urgent enough and we don’t have any other options for where to put it. You won’t win many such arguments now in any European, North American, or Australiasian city I can think of, especially in the dense parts of those cities which are (a) precisely where the transit is needed but also (b) where people are the most anxious about loss of sunlight and the effects of looming structure in general.
I should add that I have both ridden and walked under many of the commonly cited examples of cool monorails, including the circulator/funride monorails at Disneyland, Las Vegas (pictured here), and Sydney, as well as the old two-station Alweg Monorail in Seattle. In Sydney, the monorail is fun for tourists but widely despised by the locals because of its impact on the streetscape, and because, as a one-way loop, it doesn’t offer much useful mobility. [Update: the Sydney monorail was torn down in 2013]
Monorails may have more of a future in Asia. For example, a new monorail system proposed for Delhi will snake through a very sensitive and congested area between the Red Fort and Old Delhi — two of the most significant and touristed historic sites in the city. Here, the relative lightness of the monorail structure, compared to other elevated modes, might be a very good fit given that (a) some kind of rapid transit just has to be built, (b) underground construction would raise huge archaeological and practical issues in such a touristed spot, and (c) the aversion to elevated structure is less total in India, right now, than it seems to be in Europe, North America, and Australasia. So the monorail may continue to find some specialized situations where it really is the best solution.
If it’s the right tool for the job, they should use it.
Like a Cheetah
Last night, on the treadmill at the gym, I watched a bit of a National Geographic Special on the maglev train that connects Shanghai’s airport with its city center. Most of it was about the engineering challenges of the project, and the many small dramas of solving them. At the end of the piece, we viewed the train from above as it rushed away on its elevated guideway, while the narrator said something like: “But the future of the maglev train is very much in doubt.”
And I thought: “Like a cheetah.”
Words I Deleted Today
A client has asked me make the following deletions in a report I’d prepared for them on a public transit planning issue:
“… serious issues of bus access …”
” … to flow through these critical points …”
” … without extreme and circuitous deviations …”
The deleted words are all “emphatic adjectives,” words that mean nothing more than “Hey! This bit here is important!” Serious, critical, and extreme are all-purpose emphatic adjectives, while circuitous becomes emphatic if it’s used redundantly as I did here, “circuitous deviations,” because of course all deviations are circuitous.
A Silver Medal for the Silver Line?
Everyone should peruse the comment thread on my last post, “Should we ride mediocre transit?” If the post and its thread helps you clarify and explain your own view on the question, then this blog is doing its job. (Yes, there’s still no tip jar; I still have a salary as a transit planning consultant, but you’ll be the first to know if I don’t!)
Among the comments, Brian suggested that we need a system
… to “certify” transit systems on a Bronze-Silver-Gold scale according to criteria like frequency, operating hours, accessibility, travel time and so forth.” (Emphasis mine.)
Certification schemes such as Brian proposes function just like those notorious “rankings” — whether for cities or universities or transit lines. They sort a bunch of disparate data and somehow reduce it to a single score. To get there, they do two very different things:
Hard Questions: Should We Ride Mediocre Transit?
We are constantly told that if we want to support transit, we need to ride transit. Current ridership figures are routinely cited by both supporters and opponents of transit as evidence justifying a proposed level of transit investment. This implies that by riding transit, or not, we are effectively voting in a consequential poll.
Yet there’s also a lot of mediocre transit out there, especially outside the biggest cities. Sometimes transit really isn’t the cost-effective and time-effective way to get somewhere. Even if you don’t own a car, you may be able to afford a taxi for, say, 30% of your travel in your city and at least 30% of your trips require using transit that doesn’t work very well. Should you use transit anyway, because it needs your vote?
The US$1 Bill Abolition Campaign Begins with You!
I wonder if a concerted high-visibility campaign in one transit-intensive US city might drive the issue to prominence. It wouldn’t even need to come from the government. Suppose, for example, that one prominent locally-based merchant in, say, San Francisco announced that from now on, they’d be giving out only $1 coins as change. This could be one of those good-corporate-citizen moves, designed to support transit patronage by putting dollar coins in people’s pockets. (I suspect they would also find that the change would result in faster service for the merchant’s customers, since coins are faster to grab and count than bills.)
Ride Quality: The Driver’s Role
In my series on streetcars, I’ve been groping toward constructing a coherent view about technology choice, a hugely expensive and political issue in transit development. Since this is a blog rather than a book, I’m thinking out loud, engaging with comments, and revising without erasing. The effect has probably been jerky and lumbering, with lots of small lateral motions that evoke the feel of riding a bus.
Speaking of ride quality, a reader asks:
Do you know if there are any cities that make a point of ensuring their bus drivers provide a smooth ride? In my experience, even with the same model bus on the same route, some bus drivers manage a vastly more pleasant and less jerky ride. So I’m just thinking that this aspect of the bus experience should be technically feasible to improve…
Good training covers this, but my own hunch is that drivers are good at ride quality based not on training but on how sensitive they are as people. A sensitive driver will constantly make unconscious choices that produce a smoother ride for her, regardless of whether she’s just driving her own car or driving a bus. A person who’s just not sensitive to quality of ride is unlikely to be made more sensitive by the kind of training that bus drivers get.
But I’d be interested in other perspectives, especially from bus drivers and people who know them.