Author Archive | Jarrett

Is Covid-19 a Threat to Public Transit? Only in the US

Posted on January 22, 2021 in Covid-19, General

Jake Blumgart has a must-read in CityMonitor pointing out that in most wealthy countries, Covid-19 has raised few doubts about the future of public transit, nor have there been significant threats to funding.

City Monitor spoke with experts in Canada, East Asia, western Europe and Australia about the impacts of the pandemic on public transportation. None feared that systems in their nations would be deprived of the funds needed to continue providing decent service – and most even believed they would keep expanding. … In the US, by contrast, systems have been preparing doomsday scenarios, and advocates fear for the future.

We are seeing this with our own clients outside North America: Even with demand cratering, authorities continue to fund good service.

There’s one technical reason for this in some cases. In most wealthy countries outside North America, transit agencies are not free-standing local governments dependent on their own funding streams. Instead, any needed subsidy flows to public transit directly from the central government budget.[1] This means that public transit funding is debated alongside other expenses in a central budget, so the service level depends on what the nation or state/province values as a society, rather than what a transit agency can afford.

But there’s no question that apathy about public transit, and in some cases hostility, is higher in the US. In my work I hear three kinds of negativity:

Cultural hostility to cities, which implies indifference to meeting their needs.
Disinterest in funding things that are useful to lower-income or disadvantaged groups, or groups that are culturally “other” in some way.
Especially aggressive marketing of new technologies as replacements of most public transit. (Many new technologies are compatible with high-ridership public transit, but some are not, and many are overpromoted in ways that encourage opposition to transit funding.)

All three of these are understandably worse in the United States than in most other wealthy countries.

In any case, if you’re in the US, remember: there is no objective reality behind the idea that Covid-19 is a reason to care less about transit. It’s just a US thing, and we could choose to make it different.

[1] By central government I mean whichever level of government is sovereign: In most countries this is the national government, but in loose confederations like Canada and Australia, it’s the state or province.

Why Are US Rail Projects So Expensive?

Posted on December 28, 2020 in Rail Transit

We’ve known for a long time that the US pays more than most other wealthy countries to build rapid transit lines, and especially for tunneling. If the incoming Biden administration wants to invest more in transit construction, then it’s time to get a handle on this.

The transit researcher Alon Levy has been working on this issue for many years, has generated a helpful trove of articles is here. Alon’s work triggered a New York Times exposé in 2017, focus on the extreme costs (over $1 billion/mile) of recent subway construction there.

But while the New York situation is the most extreme, rapid transit construction costs are persistently higher than in comparable countries in Europe, where they are tunneling through equally complex urban environments.

Now, Eno Foundation has dug into this, building a database of case studies to help define the problem. Their top level findings:

Yes, US appears to spend more to build rail transit lines than comparable overseas peers.
This difference is mostly about the cost of tunneling, not surface lines. The US pays far more to tunnel 1 km than Europeans do, even in cities like Rome where archaeology is a major issue.
Needless to say, the type of rail doesn’t matter much. Once you leave the surface, either onto viaducts or into tunnels, any cost difference between light rail and heavy rail is swamped by the cost of those structures. (This is true of bus viaducts and tunnels too, of course)
Remarkably, stations don’t seem to explain the difference in rail construction costs. European subways with stations closer together still come out cheaper than US subways with fewer stations.

Most of us have known this for a long time — though I admit to being surprised by the last point. But it’s good to see a respected institute like Eno building out a database to make the facts unavoidable. If you want more rail transit in the US, it simply has to be cheaper.

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.

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