Remarkably enough, none of my past new years resolutions has transformed human consciousness to the point of making the resolution obsolete. So if you need one at this late date, here are a few of my past resolution pieces:
If you really need a new one, how about: “I resolve to value smart old ideas as much as smart new ones.”
Happy New Year!
This blog is a resource, not just a source of New Exciting or Enraging Stuff. Each year I review the most-read pages from the previous year, and am always relieved to find old posts, which were written to last, still doing well. This year, three of the top ten are from 2010-11, and a 2009 post is #13. (Two of those posts later became parts of my book.) Here’s the list:
And a few important ones that are just outside the top ten:
A very sensible selection, readers, by you and the publications that linked here! Honored to have such a thoughtful audiencc.
Happy New Year.
Below is our firm’s self-consciously cheesy holiday card, and below that my mellow personal one. (If you didn’t get one, it’s probably because I don’t have your email address, which you can rectify by hitting the little envelope symbol on the bar above.)
Plus, on the personal blog, there’s a cool parable about squirrels.
Happy holidays to all. We’ll be quiet here until January.
Elon Musk just gave the media a tour of his 1.5 mile prototype tunnel under Los Angeles, which he spent US$10m to build. Why are Elon Musk’s tunnels so cheap? Because they’re tiny.
As media photos of the event will show you, the tunnel is just slightly wider than a car. That means that if you used it for a train, it might have room for one seat per row. I suppose you could fit two if there was no way to move through the train while it was between stations, but that’s almost unimaginable once you add a required emergency exit plan.
So despite Musk’s occasional noises about using his tunnels for public transit, this thing is for moving cars, which means it is for moving trivially tiny numbers of people.
As we’ve discussed before, a car-based tunnel also requires elevators. You zip your car into a parking space and it descends to the tunnel. Cool, but have they run the numbers on how many of these they would need, assuming it takes, say, a minute to do a full cycle of the elevator? How much real estate would it require to get cars into the subway at a rate that even maximizes the tiny capacity of the subway?
Anyway, those are some questions to ask today.
And yes, it would be great if this dalliance produces genuine improvements in tunnel technologies useful for building actual train-sized tunnels that can move the number of people who need to move. But Musk’s prairie-dog burrows are mostly hype, confusion, and elite projection. While delivering almost nothing useful, they are confusing elite opinion about whether we still need to build mass transit, which we do. Is any marginal benefit worth the resulting delay in getting the infrastructure we really need?
Two lessons to remember:
Does this remind you of other transport fantasies, such as replacing transit with “service to your door”? These rules about scalability are pretty good tests to bring to all the fun new inventions, including whatever’s coming next.
I’m recently returned from almost a month in Australia and New Zealand — mostly doing speaking events in Sydney, Melbourne, and Auckland — and am way behind on blogging. This happens now and then, which is why you should also follow me on Twitter (@humantransit). When there’s no time to write paragraphs, I still write tweets.
Some important things:
It’s fun, and the writer, who goes by Joe Bagel but may have several identities, certainly knows his Shakespeare, and his Plato, and his hip-hop. More impressively, he cast himself as Musk, who is not, in the end, the hero.
To complement my last two serious book reviews (both of which make great gifts) here’s a very lightweight one.
Guy in SUV
throws gum wrapper out window—
I throw it back in.
Aaron Naparstek’s Honku is 106 fun haiku poems about cars and traffic. It’s 15 years old and still in print. It fits in a stocking.
Aaron Naparstek, Honku: The Zen Antidote to Road Rage. Penguin Random House, 2003.
Some people will read a book from beginning to end, but many are browsers, nibbling here and there. Some people want to be told want to do, while fewer want to plumb the depths of why. So it’s not surprising that we’re seeing more list-books, lists of things to do with only brief explanations of each. Most are terrible.
The great list-books are by people who have written the long book first. You can trust Michael Pollan’s fun book Food Rules — a set of memorable rules about how to recognize good food, each explained in a page — because it’s a summary of his longer book on the topic, In Defense of Food. Likewise, you can trust Jeff Speck’s Walkable City Rules because it’s a summary of Walkable City, one of the most important books in modern urbanism.
Speck calls his new book “an effort to weaponize Walkable City for deployment in the field.” War metaphors are appropriate, especially in the US, where so many pedestrians die on the roads, and so many more are forced to drive because it’s too scary to walk.
These rules are practical interventions in the decisions that local governments make every day. As with transit, great walkability is not the result of “pedestrian planning.” It arises mostly from other decisions that seem to be about other things: zoning, development review, street design, housing policy, parking policy, and even law enforcement.
Imagine Speck striding through your City Hall. (He is tall, but with a disarmingly soft voice.) He leans into each meeting, listens for a minute, and then inserts the one idea that those people, working on that exact issue, need to hear. That’s what the book feels like.
Of course, you want me to comment on his treatment of transit, but full disclosure: I had a small role in this part of the book, including commenting on a draft. Two sections are based partly on my work and we exchanged ideas about some of the rest. So while this is definitely his book, written from the standpoint of an urban designer, it might seem self-promoting to single this part out for praise. Having said that, it says important things and it says them well, in a language that policymakers will understand.
Speck and I disagree on a tiny number of points [1], but overall, this book brilliantly describes not just the challenge of being a pedestrian and how to make it better, but also exactly how to shift each decision to achieve that, in every room of City Hall, and beyond.
Jeff Speck. Walkable City Rules Island Press, 2018.
[1] I defend countdown clocks at signals, while Speck wants to remove them. And while he and I will never perfectly agree on how to talk about streetcars, his streetcar chapter is the most candid I’ve ever seen from someone in the urban design profession.
The massive redesign of Houston’s bus system, which has helped grow ridership as many US transit agencies are losing riders, would not have happened without Christof Spieler. Within the Houston METRO Board, he was the one member who rode transit, thought constantly about transit, brought professional credentials as an urban planner, knew what needed to be done, and knew how to argue for it to people of many different ideologies and cultural backgrounds. The Board, which was itself ideologically and culturally diverse, was inevitably guided in part by his expertise, passion, and patient persistence.
Since then, Christof has been traveling the US, studying and thinking about transit. Every week, it has seemed, he tweets from some new city. Finally, all that thinking has come together as Trains, Buses, People: An Opinionated Atlas of US Transit.
The first two parts of the book are a sensible explanation of what good transit planning is: Think about people rather than technologies. Think about networks rather than lines or corridor projects. Think about frequency rather than just speed. These are arranged in simple one-topic pages, with a summary paragraph and bullet points — ideal for skimming.
Christof’s map of Los Angeles. Note what a small area has frequent service both north-south and east-west. (Orange lines are frequent buses, and all rail is frequent except the purple commuter rail lines.) (Island Press, 2018)
But it’s the third part, the atlas, that will really suck you in. For the 50 largest metro areas in the US that have rail or Bus Rapid Transit (that’s everything bigger than Fort Collins, Colorado or Eugene, Oregon) he provides a loving description of the city’s network, its demand pattern, its recent history, and its issues. Denizens of each city may disagree with what Spieler chooses to emphasize, but he certainly will start a lively conversation, not just within cities but about the comparisons between them.
What’s new about this atlas? Spieler shows you the frequent bus network for every city, thus helping you see not just where trains go, but where people can go easily.
Christof’s map of Chicago at the same scale. Note the substantially larger area with both north-south and east-west frequent lines. (Island Press, 2018.)
For example, his Los Angeles map reveals that despite the vast area of moderate density in that city, a complete frequent grid (with both north-south and east-west lines near most people) exists only in a tiny area of about 7 x 7 miles (the size of San Francisco), extending roughly from downtown to the edge of Beverly Hills and from the Hollywood Hills to just south of I-10. Everything else, including highrise centers like Century City, Burbank, Glendale, and Pasadena as well as vast areas of mostly 2-3 story housing, has frequent service in only one direction, if at all. Another map of Los Angeles includes densities, and shows how much high-density area lies outside the frequent network entirely.
Spieler’s map of Chicago, by contrast, shows a remarkably complete grid over very similar densities in a city with even fewer major destinations outside of downtown.
Spieler’s book is perfectly designed to be both readable and browsable — a great gift for an urbanist or transport geek and a great book for the coffee table. You can read around in for a long time, exploring different cities, their strengths and their missed opportunities. Let’s hope it produces a smarter conversation about urban transit.
Christof Spieler: Trains, Buses, People: An Opinionated Atlas of US Transit: Island Press, 2018
While I was in Sydney last week I didn’t have a public event, but I did do this podcast, interviewed by Committee for Sydney’s Eamon Waterford. Not the best sound quality, but it might be interesting. It’s here.
If you’ve just landed from my piece on “microtransit” at the Atlantic, welcome! Here are a few key things that will help you understand where that piece was coming from:
And for the big picture of what I’m about, try the introduction to my book!