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Chile: Planning as Everything Changes

Posted on December 6, 2019 in General

Santiago resembles Los Angeles in geography and climate, but the mountains are much higher, the city is denser, and of course there is much more poverty (not pictured).

My planned week in Santiago, intended to be for the CEDEUS conference, was wildly rearranged by the civic uprising that’s transforming Chile, which until a month ago was famously the most stable country in Latin America.  Bigger events than ours had to be cancelled, since nobody could guarantee security in the center of Santiago while the protests took their uncertain course.

You have probably heard about the appalling vandalism of the Santiago Metro and the destruction of businesses.  You may not have heard that these are massive protests whose underlying grievances have broad public support, even though almost everyone deplores the destruction.  Suddenly, the word on everyone’s lips is desigualdad — inequality.

But of course immobility is part of inequality, so around the edges I thought I might still have something to offer.  Some low income people in Santiago are over 90 minutes travel time from their jobs, giving them no time to either seek a better life or care for their families.  As always, this is both a transport problem and a land use problem, one I did my best to explain in purely geometric terms.

The graffito in yellow reads: “It wasn’t peace, it was silence.”

My host Juan-Carlos Muñoz of the Catholic University of Chile made an extraordinary effort to make good use of my time, even though nothing could be planned for certain.

We had planned an overnight trip to Concepción, for example, to speak at the university there, at the invitation of transport engineering professor Juan Antonio Carrasco. But Juan Carlos had to call me the day before to tell me there would be a general strike the next day, so while we could fly there tonight nobody knew if we would be able to get back tomorrow.  Also, there would be no public transport and students would be in the streets, so nobody knew if anyone would come to my talk.  He invited me to cancel, though he encouraged me to go.

The courageous, dashing consultant that I’d like you to think I am paused for effect and then said, in a gravelly voice: “Let’s do it.”  In fact I leaned hard on Juan Carlos’s optimism, and I’m glad I did.  Our spare time in Concepción was consumed by the work of getting around barricades and fires, so the only sightseeing we could do in that beautiful city was to gaze in shock at the looted and burned big box stores.  In the end, I was delighted to see over 40 people, including journalists, show up for my talk, and asked great questions.  Later I did a similar presentation back in Santiago (summarized in Spanish here) to a similar number. [1][2]

From left, Professor Juan Carlos Muñoz, I, Chile’s Minister of Transport and Telecomminications Gloria Hutt and Vice Minister José Luis Domínguez.

And there were great casual chats, including with activists from the sustainable transport advocacy group Muevete, and with dedicated and energetic staff from the government public transport authority, Transantiago.  Finally, beyond my expectations, I had an hour with Chile’s Ministry of Transport Gloria Hutt to talk about immobility in the context of the dramatic transformations in public transit that they are trying to achieve. [3]

Finally, there was a series of conversations with Lake Sagaris, one of the most fascinating people I know.  She’s now a Canadian-Chilean transport professor, but she was also one of the key journalists and authors who chronicled the Pinochet dictatorship and its aftermath.   Today, she’s a leading expert in the now-urgent task of fostering a constructive and inclusive public conversation.

One of the most remarkable features of the current crisis is the spontaneous generation of many thousands of cabildos, locally generated groups of people, beyond the usual interest groups, who gather to discuss the crisis and paths forward.  These groups, often organized by local government, are widely viewed as credible, and their ideas are strongly influencing the conversation as presented in the media.

Land use planning in Concón, Chile: a little too laissez-faire?

With such fractured but intense impressions, what can I say about Chile in this remarkable time?

The word revolution comes to mind but is too strong, and premature.  The Chilean media tend to call the recent events el estallido (explosion, outbreak, shattering), which conveys the force and disruption without implying a point of view on the grievances or a belief about how things will turn out.  The conservative government is showing openness to dramatic change, including a new Constitution, so perhaps things will evolve in a peaceful way.

Mostly, Chile is just deeply uncertain.  Uncertain in daily life:  Will we be able to travel tomorrow, and if so will we be able to come back?  Can a meeting in inner Santiago be planned for next week?  Will anyone come?  Will a random strike close a national park, stranding all the international visitors staying nearby?  And more deeply:  How much more violence and destruction lies ahead?  How real are the promised transformations?  What will the new constitution say? What kind of country will Chile be five years from now?

Chile presents a rapid alternation of the utterly normal and the utterly disrupted, and nobody knows where the future equilibrium is.  If there’s reason for optimism, it’s that there seems to be widespread consensus to deplore the violence but insist on the urgency of change.  And as always, equality isn’t just about how much money people have.  It’s also about mobility, access to opportunity, so land use and transport are at the center of it all.

 

Notes

[1]

The courageous, dashing consultant that I’d like you to think I am did all these events in fluent Spanish, despite not having studied the language at all until 6 months ago.  In fact, I was at a stage where I could give a prepared speech in Spanish but not really take questions in it. [2]  This is what I look like when I’m doing that.  Walking a tightrope, basically, or trying to invoke any available deity to give me the next word when I need it.  Note the heavenly light of inspiration slightly missing me to my right:

[2]

A further challenge to comprehension is that the Chilean accent tends to omit vowels (which, to be fair, is a common complaint about the American accent in English.)  Thus I had conversations like this:

I:  A qué hora devolverán mi ropa mañana?  [when will they return our laundry tomorrow?]

She:  Awa owo.

I:  Um.  Otra vez?  [again?]

She:  Awa owo!  Eight!

I:  Ah!  “A las ocho?”

She:  Sí!  Awa owo!

This endless humiliation had its uses, of course.  It kept me from feeling that I could figure out the place too easily, and so slowed the inevitable slide from curiosity into judgment.

[3]

Chile is going through the same process that I was part of in Australia, New Zealand, and Ireland: bringing over-privatized bus services together into a single network that government controls and markets, while private companies still compete to operate the services.  It’s the only way to get a coherent and efficient network design that maximizes mobility while also yielding the benefits of competition in operations.

 

I Am Not a Bus Advocate

Posted on December 2, 2019 in General, Mobility, Technophilia

What, you say?  But you wrote an article in the Atlantic called The Bus is Still Best!  You redesign bus networks for a living!  You’ve been a skeptic about all kinds of new alternatives to the bus, from monorails to streetcars-stuck-in-traffic t0 “microtransit.”  Have you changed your mind?  

I am a freedom advocate[1], which means that I like it when people can go places, and therefore do things, and therefore have better lives more rich with choice and opportunity.  And when I analyze how to deliver freedom cost-effectively, the fixed route bus turns out to be the right answer in a huge percentage of cases.  It’s not right in all cases, and where it isn’t I don’t recommend it.  (Where a community has other goals, that too can yield a different answer, which is fine.  It’s their community.)

But it’s increasingly common to read things like this

Entrenched beliefs that the bus or rail is best, period — and that ridership and scalability are all that matter — stop us from seeing all the places where we can leverage technology and new ideas.

[UPDATE:  This article has since been revised in response to my objections.]

The word “bus” was a link to my Atlantic article, whose headline, “The Bus Is Still Best,” I dislike but could not control.[2]  The implication of this link is that I am “entrenched” in an emotional attachment to buses the way that many people can be emotionally attached to trains or airplanes or Porsches or whatever.[3]

Such attachments may also just be financial interests.  For example, huge amounts of venture capital are being spent making it sound like microtransit is a world-changing idea, and to attack those of us who honestly can’t make mathematical sense of that claim as being rigid, stuck in our ways, “entrenched.”[4]

In fact, I feel no emotions about transport technologies.  My shelves are not full of cardboard model buses.[5]  And where the right answer to the problem of efficiently providing freedom isn’t a bus, I don’t recommend a bus.  I have recommended all kinds of technologies in different situations. I want to achieve goals, and I look for tools that do that in each situation.

Above all, I hope I’m known for suggesting that our thinking should start with goals rather than emotional excitement about technologies, and that this requires some serious effort, because every technology salesperson wants us to do the opposite: first, get excited about a technology, then try to come with a goal that could justify it.  As soon as “innovation” becomes a goal in itself rather than a tool, we are headed down that slippery slope.

So I’m not surprised that I get attacked now and then, and now here’s a post as a ready-made response.  Next time you see someone say that I am (or you are) a “bus advocate,” or “entrenched,” just send them a link to this.  Thank you!

 

Notes

[1] Or, if you prefer, an access advocate.

[2] Never, ever link to something based only on the headline!  Headlines express the attitudes of the publication, not the writer.  (I am slapping my own wrist as I write this, because I’ve been guilty too.)

[3] … which is not to criticize emotional attachments.  I have them too about many things. As always, I am describing myself, not judging you!

[4]  This assumption about financial interest also gets projected onto me sometimes, so for the record: I have no financial link with any bus manufacturer, bus operating company, etc.

[5] … though if yours are, that’s wonderful!  As always, I am describing myself, not judging you!

Santiago: I’m Coming Anyway

Posted on November 5, 2019 in General, Santiago

Photo: Carlos Figueroa, Wikimedia Creative Commons.

For months I’ve planned to be in Santiago next week, with a brief side trip to Concepción.  I was to speak at the annual joint conference of the Centre for Sustainable Urban Development and the Centre for the Study of Conflict and Social Cohesion.  I had visited the country in 2004, and looked forward to returning to one of the most stable and peaceful countries in Latin America.

So it goes.  Stability can always mask horrors that eventually have to come to light.  Chile’s extreme inequality had reached a point where a small increase in Santiago Metro fares sparked a broad social revolt. The initial outburst was violent, including looting of stores, burning of buildings, and terrible damage to the magnificent Santiago Metro.   The conservative government briefly tried out a confrontational response (“Chile is at war“) but backtracked the next day, apologizing, sacking much of the cabinet, and promising reforms. Today the protests continue as they should, mostly peaceful but with the inevitable scatterings of violence, and the country is debating profound reforms that Serious People deemed impossible even two weeks ago.

But the conference venue is right in the centre of Santiago, where protests are continuing, and the organizers have decided to cancel the conference, because, they write, “at this moment we do not have the conditions to complete the conference as it was planned.”  Instead, “we believe that the efforts of academics should lie in understanding and engaging in dialogue on the problems that confront our country, as well as cooperating to open paths to a more just country.”

I’m coming anyway. I’ll meet with some transport officials, and speak to a class at the university. In Concepción I’ll face the challenge of giving a talk in Spanish, a language I knew almost nothing of six months ago. I look forward to experiencing something even better than stability: a country transforming itself, as few countries dare imagine.

Dublin: A Revised Network Plan

Posted on October 22, 2019 in Dublin

Map: National Transport Authority of Ireland

After many months of thinking about the feedback we got on our draft, a new version of the bus network plan for Dublin is out today!  At this site you’ll find:

  • Links to our revised report, and to the report on the consultation process, at the bottom of the cover page.
  • A map of the revised network.  (Detail about frequency is no longer on the website’s map but is in the maps and frequency tables in Chapter 7 of the report.)
  • Local area maps with more detail.  We understand that the National Transport Authority will be sending these maps to every household in Dublin.
  • A helpful tool that shows how any trip you select would be completed in the new network.
  • A little video explaining how a spine works.  (Here’s a written explanation.)
  • A way to provide feedback or ask questions.

You may recall that the last draft received a lively and sometimes hostile response.  That’s the whole point of drafts: as a starting point for conversation.  The new network plan won’t resolve every complaint, but it shows NTA’s best effort (with our advice) to reflect what we heard, and to integrate those comments into a functional and efficient network.

The heart of the network design, the frequent grid of spines and orbitals, is unchanged, but many services have been added or revised.

We are at the end of our engagement with NTA, so we won’t be as engaged in Twitter discussions about the details as we were in the last round.  But we will be watching this project closely.

On Flying Cars

Posted on October 16, 2019 in General

A journalist asked my opinion about flying cars. I wrote this.  Please tell me where I’m wrong.

For every technology pitch, you must ask not just “what is this like from the inside?” but also “what is it like from the outside?”  All vehicle technologies are sold based on how cool or useful it will be to ride them.  And most of these pitches do not want you think about what it will be like to be outside of them, or to share a city with them.

The issues with air taxis are obvious.  Even if they are much quieter than helicopters, they will introduce a new type level of noise to the city, anywhere near where they takeoff and land.  Their presence overhead in any numbers will have physical and emotional effects on the population.  They will introduce entirely new kinds of accidents that make everyone fearful of the space above them.  And in the end, by allowing elites to opt out of the transportation problems that everybody else in the city is having, they will encourage elite disinterest in solving those problems.

They will be cool to ride, though.

 

A Fine New Guide for Transit Activists

Posted on October 13, 2019 in Books, General

Steven Higashide, Better Buses, Better Cities: How to Plan, Run, and Win the Fight for Effective Transit. Island Press, 2019.

Why are American cities finally taking buses seriously?  Because, as Churchill famously said, “Americans will do the right thing, after they’ve exhausted all the alternatives.”

I’ve been following transit in America for 35 years, and working in the field for 25. During that time, cities have growh frustrating to get around in, with dire consequences for people’s access to opportunity. But throughout that time powerful people have always been telling me that buses just don’t matter. Development interests cared only about rail or ferries. Technology marketers have always shiften the conversation to new patented things, of which some are useful but many are tragic distractions.  To the extent that buses have mattered to the powerful, it’s often been as a social service — a charity that they give pennies to out of pity but whose functionality they barely care about.

And that’s not even to mention the active hostility to bus service that transit planners encounter daily: the shopping mall or hospital that refuses to let a bus get anywhere near the building, the communities that want buses out, the urban businesses who think that motorists are the only customers who matter.

But having exhausted all the alternatives, American cities are finally rediscovering this essential tool. No remotely functional city in the world lacks a transit system, and the bus is always a critical layer – the thing that goes to all the high-demand places that rail can’t go.  As we enter the inevitable hangover from the mid-2010s sugar-rush of tech boosterism, people are finally doing the math to see why, for a city to function for everyone, buses simply must be allowed to succeed.

Steven Higashide has written a great little book charting the current and incipient bus revolution.  In a skillful balance of facts and stories, Higashide explores what successful bus services look like, and how to overcome the barriers to bus service reform. He interviews the architects of some of the most impressive achievements, and also delves well into the deep challenge of equity and public engagement.

Do I have quibbles?  My only serious one is that I wish the book were clearer about where activists should direct their constructive rage.  US transit agencies are less powerful than they appear and are often not the source of the biggest problems. Much of what they do is defined by their poverty and by the great mass of regulations and labor contracts that form the boundaries of their world.

At times Higashide understates the danger of telling transit agencies to do so many things that everything they do suffers from lack of focus.  Transit agencies desperately need to focus on designing and running good transit systems.  Demanding they take on other battles often comes at a cost to that core business, by dividing staff and elected attention.

For example, Higashide suggests that transit agencies lead on pedestrian infrastructure around stops, a massive task that falls in the city (and sometimes state) role in managing streets. Cities must be pressured to adopt their own transit goals that lead to those kinds of investments, as leading ones like Seattle have done for years.  Just because transit is connected to everything doesn’t mean transit agencies should have to solve every related problem with their own meager budget, as they are often told to do. That just leads to ever-lousier bus service.

But this book is so good in so many ways that I don’t mind disagreeing with it here and there. The messages are critically important. The writing is lively and fun.  You can read the whole thing in a couple of hours, and it’s short and logical chapters support easy snacking.  It’s a great tool for giving you hope, and focus. Buy it, read it, give it to people who need it. It will make a difference.

 

10 Years of Human Transit

Posted on September 29, 2019 in Meta

This blog is 10 years old!  Please help celebrate by perusing the new Basics page!  There, you’ll find links to all the articles I’ve done that are likely to be most useful to people thinking about transit all over the world.  (If you think I’ve missed one, let me know!)

The blog was started by a frustrated American transit planner living in Australia.  Its first two years gestated the book Human Transit (introduction here) which in turn helped create our firm, Jarrett Walker & Associates, which provides transit planning and policy advice.

We’re 13 people now, with offices on both coasts of the US.  We’re proud of our recent track record of network redesigns.  Ridership is up as a result of plans we (or I) worked on in Houston, Auckland (NZ), Columbus and Richmond.  Our redesign for San Jose and Silicon Valley (VTA) goes live soon.  We’re currently doing similar work in Dublin (Ireland), Kansas City, Miami, Cleveland, and (just starting!) Dallas.  We’re also proud of our record in many smaller cities, from Anchorage to West Palm Beach.  And we’ve had some more distant adventures, including advising on the massive Magistral redesign of buses in central Moscow and a sojourn analyzing the network in chilly but friendly Reykjavik.

Some data for fun:  This is the 1225th post and the blog has gathered about 20,000 non-spam comments, many of which have started great conversations and generally made me smarter.  The top countries by readership over the last 3 years are, not surprisingly:

  1. USA
  2. Canada
  3. Australia
  4. UK
  5. India
  6. Ireland

But the top countries by readership per capita (readership divided by population) are

  1. Ireland
  2. New Zealand
  3. Canada
  4. Australia
  5. Iceland
  6. USA

… all places I’ve worked! Not all of this is honest curiosity, of course.  A few people have been looking for things to attack me for. But that’s fine.  No such thing as bad publicity.

You may have noticed the rate of new articles slowing down, and especially this year.   I will certainly never return to the rate of posting of the early days, when all of my surplus energy went into the blog, but I’ll keep writing useful things as long as enough people keep reading them.

How to keep up?

  • You can subscribe using FeedBurner.  (In the bar under the banner above, it’s the symbol to the left of the “search” (magnifying glass) symbol.)  If you’ll click that you’ll see an option to get every post emailed to you.
  • Follow me on Twitter, @humantransit!  There you’ll find every post announced there, and you’ll also get a lot of other commentary.

I can’t say how grateful I am for all of the feedback over the last 10 years.  I look forward to continuing the conversation.

 

 

What is “Microtransit” For?

Posted on August 28, 2019 in Microtransit

In last year’s “microtransit week” series, I challenged the widely promoted notion that “new” flexible transit models, where the route of a vehicle varies according to who requests it, are transforming the nature of transit, and that transit agencies should be focusing a lot of energy on figuring out how to use these exciting tools. In this piece, I address a more practical question:  In what cases, and for what purposes, should flexible transit be considered as part of a transit network?

For clickbait purposes I used “microtransit” in the headline, but now that I have your attention I’ll use flexible transit, since it seems to be the most descriptive and least misleading term.  Flexible transit means any transit service where the route varies according to who requests it.  As such it’s the opposite of fixed transit or fixed routes.  But the common terms demand responsive transit, on-demand transit and “microtransit” mean the same thing.

This article is specifically about flexible transit offered as part of a publicly-funded transit network.  There may be all kinds of private-sector markets — paid for by institutions or by riders at market-rate fares — which are not my subject here.  The question here is what kind of service taxpayers should pay for.

As I reviewed in the series, the mathematical and historical facts are that:

  • Flexible transit is an old idea, and has long been in use throughout the world.  No living person should be claiming to have invented it.  The only new innovation is the software and communications tools for summoning and dispatching service. You can now summon service on relatively short notice, compared to old phone-based and manually dispatched systems that only guaranteed you service if you called the day before.
  • Flexible transit is extremely inefficient compared to fixed route transit, for reasons that no communications technology will change. Flexible services meander in order to stop at each person’s destination. Meandering consumes more time than running straight, and it’s less likely to be useful to people riding through.  Fixed routes are more efficient because customers walk to the route and gather at a few stops, so that the transit vehicle can go in a relatively straight line that more people are likely to find useful.
  • How inefficient are flexible services? While there are some rare exceptions in rare situations, few carry more than 4 customers per driver hour.  In suburban settings, fixed route buses rarely get less than 10, and frequent fixed route services usually do better than 20.
  • There is no particular efficiency in the fact that flexible transit vehicles are smaller than most fixed route buses, because operating cost is mostly labor. You can of course create savings by paying drivers less than transit agencies do, but if a particular flexible service achieves a low cost per rider, that’s not because it’s flexible. It’s because you’re paying the driver less.
  • The only places where flexible service is the most efficient way to achieve ridership are places with very, very low transit demand, like small towns, rural areas, and the lowest-density suburbs.  If there is no demand for fixed routes that could carry more than 4 boardings per driver hour, you might as well run flexible.
  • Therefore, except in very low demand places, flexible transit makes sense only if ridership is not the primary goal of a service.  If your goal is coverage, however, they may still have a role.

All transit agencies must balance the competing goals of ridership and coverage.  Coverage means “providing access to transit regardless of whether many people use it.” A typical measurement of coverage is “___% of population is within ___ distance of transit service.”  Coverage goals arise from popular principles such as “leave nobody behind,” “be there for people who need us,” and “provide a ‘fair share’ of service in every city or electoral district.”  They are important goals to many people, but they tend to conflict with ridership goals, because they require running lots of service that has no hope of every being highly productive in ridership terms.  (For a fuller explanation of this critical concept, see here.)

To provide clear direction to planning, we always encourage transit agencies to form a clear policy on how much of their resources should be set aside for service whose goal is a high coverage, not high ridership.

Once you have decided to invest some of your resources in coverage service, and know that ridership is not the point, flexible service may have a role.  That’s because if your goal is take credit for bringing transit close to many homes, it’s sometimes more efficient to do that without actually near every home every hour.

In a great deal of American suburban development, you’ll find things like this:

This series of peninsulas and islands on the south edge of Savannah, Georgia is covered with very low-density residential development, in which entire neighborhoods are effectively cul-de-sacs.  A fixed route that tried to cover this area would have to go out each peninsula, turn around, and come back. In fact, there’s a bus route that tries to do that.

Savannah’s Route 20. Source: Chatham Area Transit.

It’s a rare example of a route who’s ridership is so low that flexible service might do better, and it’s not hard to see why.  Few people would be willing to ride through all these loops.

A flexible service could service this area with fewer driver hours.  To do this, it would allow enough time to go to perhaps half of the peninsulas in each hour, but would take credit for covering all of them.  That way, it would provide the lifeline transit access that is coverage service’s goal.  If enough people lived in landscapes like this, then this tool could help an agency satisfy a target like “90% of residents are within 1/2 mile of service.”

Flexible service isn’t always the right coverage tool.  There are many areas where density is too low to attract ridership, but where the street network puts most homes and destinations within a reasonable walk of through-streets.  Fixed routes can cover those areas quite efficiently, even when meeting a coverage goal.  But flexible services do have a place in the coverage toolbox.

However, contrary to almost all “microtransit” marketing, ridership is the death of flexible service.  Suppose that a flexible service on these peninsulas was so attractive that many people began calling it.  Then the flexible route van would be expected to go to every peninsula every hour, which is impossible. So more vans would have to be added, still at a very high cost/rider.  This process would devour the limited coverage budgets of most agencies, and if those agencies haven’t established a clear limit on what they’ll spend on coverage service, this process can start threatening high-ridership service.  At that point, someone should ask: If you end up deleting a bus carrying 30 people/hour so that you can run a van for 3 people/hour, aren’t you basically telling 27 people/hour to buy cars?

So attracting many riders to flexible services is the last thing a transit agency should want to do.  In fact, when flexible services become too popular, they have to be turned back into fixed routes.  Imagine that a flexible service covering the area above got so popular that you needed three vans to run it.  At that point you might as well just run a separate fixed route for each peninsula, at which point each one could be reasonably straight.  Still, though, three buses may be more than this particular area deserves, when you look at the total budget for coverage services and spread it over the whole region.  So if you really want to claim that you’ve covered all of these peninsulas, you want flexible service, but you also want to take every possible step to keep ridership down.

For this reason, too, flexible transit must avoid being more convenient than fixed routes.  It may need to have a higher fare, and it certainly shouldn’t offer service “to your door.” If the goal is coverage to areas where fixed routes don’t work, like these Savannah peninsulas, then you should provide the same quality of service that fixed routes do, which is to say, service to a point within a short walk of your house. This keeps the van out of cul-de-sacs and gravel roads, allows it to follow a somewhat straighter path, and thus allows it cover more area in an hour, which is the whole point.

So most discussion of flexible services or “microtransit” is missing the point.  The Eno Foundation report, for example, went to great length to sound optimistic about pilots that were achieving three passengers per service hour – a worse-than-dismal performance by fixed route standards.  Flexible service will never be justifiable if the goal is ridership, because if ridership were the goal you wouldn’t serve places like these low-density peninsulas at all. Only if the goal is coverage do these services ever make sense, so only in that context does flexible service appear as a possible solution.

Unfortunately, plenty of “microtransit” marketing is still sowing confusion about this.  Transloc promises to “solve the frequency-coverage dilemma,”[1] which is dangerous nonsense.  “Microtransit” is a kind of coverage service, not a way to avoid having to think about how much service to devote to coverage goals.

Flexible service will never compete with fixed route on ridership grounds, so it should stop pretending that it can.  Market the service as what it is.  It’s one tool for providing lifeline access to hard-to-serve areas, where availability, not ridership, is the point.

 

 

[1] Transloc page https://transloc.com/microtransit-ondemand-software/ as of August 28, 2019.

Linking US Small Cities and Towns: Time for State Leadership

Posted on August 7, 2019 in General

When I was a boy, the US had a robust network of intercity commercial transit services, run by Greyhound and Trailways.  These services didn’t just link the biggest cities.  They also linked smaller towns and cities, too small or too close for airlines to serve.

In my home state of Oregon, for example,  the network looked like this.

Oregon private sector intercity bus services in 1976. Source: Bill Vandervoort chicagorailfan.com.

 

We often rode Greyhound (blue) or Trailways (red) from Portland to the then-small towns of Central Oregon (150 miles) or on one one of four routes out to towns on the coast, 60-100 miles away.

Almost all of those services are gone.  Private intercity bus companies, including new players like Megabus, stick to linking big cities.  All that remains is a minimal state-funded service called Point, one or two trips a day, mostly to feed Amtrak.

Transit agencies have done their best, but the US habit of organizing transit in county-level agencies means that many obvious services don’t exist.  Consider Eugene, Oregon (metro population about 250,000 with a big university).  It has a city bus line (4 trips/day) to the small mountain town of McKenzie Bridge, 53 miles away, but there’s no line to go the 41 miles to Corvallis (population 58,000 with the state’s other major university).  Why? McKenzie Bridge happens to be in the same county, and Corvallis in a different one.

Australia has similar geography to many US states but features state control of all public transit.  Local governments, including the rural ones that are comparable to US counties, have little role.  This arrangement has big downsides, but it does mean that state government actively organizes the long transit lines linking small cities, often with rail but extended as needed with buses.  As a result, there’s a viable public transit option for intertown travel in many parts of Austraila.

We have worked for several county and municipal transit agencies on addressing this problem. All are doing their best. Some have formed interesting partnerships, such Oregon’s NW Connector, to extend service a ways into adjacent counties and present multi-county networks in an integrated way.  But the mission of a county or municipal agency just does not let them run the long, continuous routes that make sense for these markets.

So bravo to the State of Colorado for a new initiative to expand state-funded service for obviously intercity links across their state.  Oregon is in the early stages of developing more such services, thanks to a new statewide funding source.  What is your state doing in this regard?

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