Author Archive | Jarrett

From “Marc“.  Links added by me.

 It seems that Jevons Paradox is always in force: as single-occupancy travel has become cheaper and easier over the centuries (first by foot, then by horse/carriage, then by bike, then by car/taxi, then perhaps by autonomous car), all we’ve done is induce more travel.

This is hardly “bad” – who wants to be stuck in the village they were born in for their whole life like most people were in the 18th century on the eve of the Industrial Revolution? – but I think it merely means we can’t yet argue that autonomous cars will overcome the timeless congestion-caused-by-induced-travel phenomenon, and that if congestion therefore remains in populated areas, so too will remain the pressure to get around it via fixed-route transit, on dedicated lanes, viaducts, and tunnels wherever possible.

Congestion in Philadelphia, c. 1900. From, ironically, Professor Eric Morris’s article “How the Motor Car Saved the City, ” http://evworld.com/urban.cfm

All we’ve been doing in the great project called civilization is swapping out the mode of congestion – the old 1930s Garden City documentary “The City” showed sidewalks oppressively crammed with people, then with horses and carriages and bikes, then finally with cars. Ironically and against what we would ever have expected, the postwar trend towards dispersed settlements has only increased congestion exponentially – why do Atlanta and LA and Houston build 10-lane highways in a desperate effort to outrun congestion, only to find they have to widen them a couple years later?

Amazingly, dilution in living patterns induced by ever-cheaper/easier transportation has not led to congestion relief, but exacerbated it tremendously due to the ever-increasing need to travel for *more and more basic functions that previously required less or no travel.*

Why is there any reason to believe that autonomous cars will overcome this ancient dilemma? I can imagine a world where autonomous cars are eventually organized as efficient rideshares to minimize a lot of initial wasteful, capacity-gobbling deadheading and idle cruising, but I think when the initial wasteful excesses are wrung out, the resulting available capacity will be swallowed by increased travel induced by efficiency. Again, this is hardly “bad,” I think it merely means that we probably won’t escape congestion and therefore there will be perpetual pressure for space-efficient workarounds for congestion (transit).

Finally, while I can imagine eventual vehicular throughput gains on urban/suburban streets induced by cheap mass ridesharing (i.e. fewer single-occupancy vehicles, which will always be inherently space-inefficient regardless of who/what’s piloting them), I’m finding it hard to imagine increased throughput under the “faster and closer bumper-to-bumper travel” assumption. On most urban and suburban surface streets, bumper-to-bumper travel at low to moderate speeds is already the norm, so can we really push the cars closer together? If you’re already two feet behind the guy in front of you, can the autonomous vehicle get any closer? At such close distances, aren’t human reaction times irrelevant because physics are still in force: you’ll still need a minimum distance for a vehicle of a given weight to safely accelerate/decelerate/stop regardless of who/how it’s being piloted.

Moreover, low urban speeds are caused by the *basic structure of the urban fabric itself* – small blocks and frequent conflicts. Autonomous cars can overcome this if we enlarge blocks and limit conflicts (as we already do for limited-access highways) by introducing “smart intersections” and various other traffic control tactics that will attempt to allow strings of autonomous vehicles to speed unimpeded through urban and suburban blocks. But will it be a Pyrrhic victory like the first attempt was?

I love it when someone who can think historically wades into this debate.  Commenter “MaxO” replied:

Here’s a good discussion of the potential for self-driving cars to reduce (or even eliminate) road congestion and increase road capacity: http://www.templetons.com/brad/robocars/congestion.html

I also think you’re misrepresenting Jevon’s Paradox. It doesn’t mean that if supply is increased, demand will always increase to consume all of that additional supply. If it did, all roads would always be at capacity. It just means that an increase in supply is likely to induce some increase in demand.

To which Marc replied:

Max, I like the author’s thorough musings, but I think he still seems to be falling exactly into the trap I described: He described various *efficiencies* that will only increase capacity, thereby inducing more travel to fill the capacity.

I’m not arguing that induced travel will cause us to hit capacity *everywhere*, but in any economically dynamic region any transportation efficiencies always seem to be gradually eaten away by induced travel. Autonomous vehicles might not overwhelm Boise or Cleveland – unless they become economic dynamos (again) – but they could Houston or LA.

None of the efficiencies the author described are novel – in fact, we’ve been undertaking most of the improvements he cited for centuries already – lighter and smaller cars, better traffic control devices with optimized timing, better parking management, and so on – and we’ll continue to do so. But again, in regions with dynamic economies, these efficiencies will free up capacity that will be eaten up by induced travel.

It *would* be possible to overcome the historical noose of congestion if the spatial efficiencies autonomous cars introduced unfolded extremely rapidly – in less than a decade. That is, the road space they’d free up would increase so quickly that it’d take us years to dilute ourselves further enough to fill up that road space.

However, as I’m sure the author would concede, these tremendous spatial efficiences – the “1000%” increase in road capacity he pondered or even something more modest like 100% – wouldn’t occur overnight, but over a period of decades. It takes a considerable amount of time for enough of the improvements he described to happen at large enough scales for us to see the capacity increases. It takes time to replace traffic lights on a large enough scale to see large-scale improvements, for enough people to progressively purchase lighter and lighter autonomous cars, for new maintenance and operational practices (“convoys” etc.) to replicate themselves at scales large enough to reap the purported capacity increases.

That is, I think that because these improvements and their resulting capacity increases will occur *gradually,* precisely because they’ll occur gradually any modest, gradual, incremental increases in capacity will be eaten away in tandem by modest, gradual, incremental increases in induced travel. Isn’t this already the history of road transportation: from, say, 1880 to 1980 didn’t we increase roadway capacity by many thousands of percent through incremental roadway construction/enlargement and gradual improvement in vehicular and traffic management technologies? Yet in regions with dynamic economies, incremental induced travel kept pace with incremental increases in capacity. Had that increased capacity caused by efficiency flooded those regions in, say, 5 or 10 years, then maybe we would have thought we “out-teched” congestion. But it always catches up with us – at least in any area where even modestly large groups of people congregate!

(Marc and MaxO, if you want to be linked to here, please contact me.)

When you talk about autonomous cars (or automated, or self-driving, or driverless cars), do you really mean vehicles? If so, say vehicles.  The word cars (or taxis) explicitly excludes transit (as well as trucks and many other vehicles).

As a transit planner, I’m routinely told that we should neglect our transit systems, and certainly not improve them, because transit will soon be made obsolete by “autonomous cars.”  There are very low density places where this is true, but it is geometrically impossible for dense cities, because there is simply not room to move everyone out of big transit vehicles into the tiny ones that the word “cars” implies.

However, the fantasy of cars replacing big transit vehicles can lead to serious dystopian outcomes, including higher Vehicle Miles Traveled, higher emissions, and higher exclusion of disadvantaged groups from opportunity.  The fantasy is already encouraging neglect of transit systems and opposition to efforts to improve them, which is having all the negative impacts listed above,  today.

None of these problems arise if the tech proponents would consistently speak of “autonomous vehicles.”  In that case, the notion of autonomous vehicles replacing transit wouldn’t even arise, because it’s obvious that transit is made of vehicles too, and that the automation of transit vehicles would be part of any long-term automation project.

When I press an autonomous-car advocate on this point, they almost always say that of course autonomous vehicles will come in all sizes, including transit vehicle, etc.  But they keep saying autonomous cars, which implies the opposite.

Remember, many people hate transit, love cars, and are generally OK with all the outcomes of mandatory car dependence, especially sprawl.  These people love to hear that autonomous cars will destroy transit.

But if you talk about autonomous vehicles, you can promote autonomous technology without sounding like you’re advocating cars over transit, with all the problems for big cities that this implies.  Why not do that?  You’ll provoke less blowback from urbanists, and have more friends.

If you want to know why your bus system isn’t better, the answer is almost always that not enough people care, and that in particular, not enough influential people care.  Sure, there are other kinds of resistance, but those can all be overcome when civic leaders decide that better bus service is important.

We’ve had two or three decades of architects and developers and other elite voices telling us that rail “matters” and buses don’t.  Now we have Uber, Lyft, and all their peers.  Their role is partly helpful — when they help transit agencies withdraw services that are wildly unproductive for them — but also partly harmful — as their PR can help urban elites feel good about not caring about bus service, or even about transit in general, regardless if that’s the intent.

But most people can’t afford to use Uber/Lyft/taxi all day.  What’s more, not everybody lives on a rail line, and not everybody should.  Some places are just not suited to rail transit.  So if you want to serve your entire city, buses just have to work.  (Buses, remember, are also the ideal tool for building a market to the point where rail transit starts to make sense.)

I’ve been working on this issue — against the enormous forces of apathy — for most of my career in North America and Australia.  Lately, we’re starting to see progress, not just in the newly spectacular bus networks of Europe but also in North America’s denser cities.  (Australia, sad to say, still lags a bit.)

In these places, it’s becoming obvious to everyone, not just to transit geeks, that

• … car-based travel (including Uber/Lyft/taxi) is hitting a wall of limited street space
• … rail transit systems, if any, aren’t adequate for everyone’s needs.  (And remember, even cities with very extensive subways — like Paris and Barcelona — end up needing extensive, efficient and attractive bus systems too.)

So bus network redesign and reform is taking off in North America.   I’ve been doing these designs for over 20 years, but only recently has it been politically possible to do really transformative redesigns in big cities, like our recent one in Houston.  Up to now, the political direction has often been: “Don’t make any existing rider unhappy.”  This, of course, is a flat prohibition on transformative design, and it ignores the fact that a lot of existing riders, not to mention potential riders, are unhappy already.

That’s why everyone in North America should be following, and replicating, successful campaigns for better bus service.  For example, TransitCenter in New York is helping spearhead a “Turnaround” campaign to get leaders to pay attention to the city’s bus system.

Their excellent report, which I first wrote about here, is impressive because it talks about what really matters to every transit customer: logical network design and improvements to speed and reliability.  They’re getting traction at City Council, which is impacting local media editorials.

The New York transit agency, MTA, is sounding defensive at first, which is understandable and can be overcome  I try to encourage transit agencies to avoid talking this way, because I think it’s bad for their long term public support, but you should understand why they do. Every senior transit agency staffer in North America has been though endless hearings where people angrily demand things from them but refuse to do anything to help.  (For example, in cases where transit service consistently inadequate everywhere, people spend too much time yelling about how they are being poorly service but everything would be fine if the agency just cut service to those other people.)

These days, most great transit improvements arise from partnerships, where transit agencies, city governments, unions, and key constituent groups, and voters at the ballot box are cooperating to put all the pieces in place.   (There are places where transit agencies must lead, most obviously in network design and service quality, but when I lead service designs I do my best to involve cities and key stakeholders in that too.)   There’s always tension in these relationships, but they get a lot more done that yelling at transit agencies does.

So takeaways:

• Your city would probably be better off with better bus service.
• Better bus service for your city is not the same as service micro-designed around your personal needs.
• If you want better bus service, be confident that there are people inside your transit agency who want the same thing.
• Still, some transit agencies can sometimes sound resistant and defensive.  This reflects their decades of experience of being bombarded with unrealistic demands, often belligerently expressed.  Yelling at them louder does not make this better.  You have to work with them, take the time to understand their situation, and offer to help.

My little stoush with Uber over the last few days — observing that its advertising seems to be presenting itself as a threat to all public transit, including rail — went modestly viral, coming close to a pageview record for this seven year old blog.  Uber quickly pulled the offending ad.

Again, as I laid out here, if Uber and its ilk — collectively and misleadingly called Transportation Network Companies (TNCs) — successfully draw customers away from high-ridership transit services, rail or bus, the result would be several overlapping disasters for our cities, including massive increases in congestion, emissions, road space demanded by vehicles, and inequality of opportunity.

And of course, there will always be people saying that as long as customers want something they should have it, and the consequences don’t matter.  This is how we got all of the environmental problems we deal with today, and many of our problems of inequality.

Meanwhile, the resistance is getting traction.  A Boston Consulting Group report, flagged in Citylab, argues that autonomous taxis will destroy the passenger rail industry, including urban subways.  Anyone with the slightest sense of geometry can see immediately what a disastrous increase in vehicle trips that would be.

Then, Greg Lindsay, a leading observer and commenter on urban tech, noted this:

When @FTAlphaville is quoting @humantransit approvingly, you know the tide is turning, and turning fast. https://t.co/IetlNGUCtv

— Greg Lindsay (@Greg_Lindsay) October 6, 2016

Alphaville is a blog at the Financial Times, usually a pro-business outfit.  But they’re not just quoting me; they’re sounding a serious alarm:

At FT Alphaville we’ve questioned the rationality of glorifying a business model (Transportation Network Companies, ‘TNCs’ like Uber) that undermines decades worth of urban planning work focused on encouraging mass transit options like buses and trains, whilst marginalising petrol-guzzling space-consuming single-occupant cars. It seems backward, to say the least.

But the tech world seems oblivious to the limitations posed by urban geometry, seemingly convinced that app-controlled taxis can overcome the space constraints of London Bridge at 5pm more effectively than non-app controlled taxis. Why this should be the case, however, is never clearly explained.

They also cite this paper by Matthew Daus, outlining the numerous dangers of the current prevailing TNC business model, including environmental dangers as well as issues of equality of opportunity.  (See his page 20 of his report for the formal litany.)  Here’s the critical bit:

TNCs have grown at a near exponential rate, adding a significant amount of automobiles on the streets of already congested cities. For example, Uber grew from zero (0) drivers in 2012 to 160,000 actively partnered drivers (defined as drivers that have completed more than four trips per month) by the end of 2014 in the United States alone.

As demonstrated in the graph below, the rate of growth has risen rapidly since July 2012:

Uber and its fellow travellers can “grow” like this by continuing to flood dense inner cities with cars, but of course we will run out of space, so that’s not going to continue.  The danger is that the attempt to do this will strangle all of our other options, notably public transit, so that once Uber has taken over our streets we’ll have no alternatives, even though they are all sitting in self-made gridlock, shoving cyclists and pedestrians out of the way.  This is exactly how cars took over the world, 60-100 years ago.

In other words, this seems to be an issue where only strong government intervention, over the noisy objections of the techno-libertarians, is going to save us.

Of course, there is a free-market solution to this problem, which is to charge for the actual market value of limited urban road space.  Once most cars on the road are run by some corporation instead of by individuals, it may be easier to impose the necessary free market forces so that traffic is limited to match the space available.  That, in turn, would drive massive demand back to space-efficient modes such as public transit, but only if techno-libertarian public relations campaigns haven’t destroyed those options first, by encouraging apathy about them.

So it’s an interesting time.  Maybe the tide really is turning.

Early yesterday, I saw an Uber ad which expressed the company’s intent to attract passengers from high-capacity public transit.  The ad is below, and my post in response is here.

In my response I reminded readers of what it would mean to shift large numbers of people from big transit vehicles, like the subway pictured here, to individual Uber cars — in terms of outcomes for cities, society, and the environment.

Within hours I got a Twitter message from a senior person at Uber, asking where I’d seen the ad and then assuring me the ad had been removed.  All good.

But readers wondered if I was over-reacting to a mere ad, or if I regretted my post now that the ad had been taken down.  No, and here’s why.

Advertising, like political speech, has a long history that we can study and learn from.  Precisely because it seems so fleeting and insubstantial, it disarms our skepticism, exploits our desire to be “in” or “cool,” and thus shapes attitudes that will define the world of the future.

This ad also had a context, as part of a torrent of messages — from many parts of the culture including the tech industry — that encourage contempt for public transit, or at least apathy about it, among the relatively fortunate.  And when our transit systems are not what our cities need or deserve, that apathy is the main reason why.  With that ad, Uber had identified itself as an advocate of that apathy.

The only way to disarm that ad was to take it seriously.  Advertising always wants to engage us with a wink and a nod, so that we’ll forgive it for implying things that the company wouldn’t want to defend having said directly.  So to confront it, you have to strip off that mask and make clear that you hear what the ad is saying, and what that implies.

It’s like what you have to do to stop any ongoing pattern of abuse.  Sooner or later, you have to speak up about something that seems minor in isolation.  You have to say: “I know you think this is isn’t a big deal, but in the context of 100 similar things that are being said, it’s doing harm.”  You’ll sound like a killjoy, but you’ll sleep better knowing you did what you could.

It worked.  Somebody at Uber read my post, saw the problem and fixed it as a matter of urgency.  Clearly there are people inside of Uber who want the company to be a more responsible player in urban issues.  I look forward to meeting more of these people, and I hope they prevail in defining Uber’s future.

This is the stance that I encourage transit agencies to take toward Uber, Lyft, and similar companies.  Negotiate from a position of confidence that demands respect for the things that only high-ridership transit can do.  The companies worth working with are those that will be happy to meet you in that space, ready to collaborate to build better, more liberated cities.

The rapid growth of private ridesourcing (Lyft, Uber) and microtransit (Bridj, Split) has been a challenge for local governments, including transit agencies. The tech media like to talk about private sector innovation as naturally superior to government, as though government’s sole role is to react.  Local governments are harangued to “get ready” or “get out of the way,” as though they are about to be swept by some tsunami of transformation.  Yet local government — cities and transit agencies — urgently need to lead in forging a mutually beneficial outcome, drawing out the benefits of the new tools while preventing their potential for harm.  I explored these issues, in text and video, here.

A century ago our city leaders were told to get ready for an onslaught of cars.  The onslaught overwhelmed them only because they didn’t have the courage and clarity to demand clear thinking about how to manage the new thing’s impact.

In my own transit planning work I’m already hearing people say that now that we have “door to door” service, we no longer need those big-bus transit lines.   If you take that step, there’s no longer any reason to plan density around logical corridors, so we might as well sprawl into patterns that will guarantee long-term car dependence.  As we gut our transit systems through apathy, what’s left are miserable remnants for the poor who can’t afford an Uber ride, and who are further ghettoized by their exclusion from the new mobilty paradise.  And we also increase Vehicle Miles Travelled, which means more congestion and less space in the public realm for other things we value.  That, admittedly, is the worst case scenario, but it would be foolish not to think about how to prevent it.  And that’s even before we start talking about driverless technology, whose potential benefits and downsides are both even more extreme.

So it was a relief to pick up TransitCenter’s new report, “Private Mobility, Public Interest,”(by Shin-pei Tsay, Zak Accuardi, and Bruce Schaller) and read:

Emerging mobility services … will not replace high-quality, fixed-route transit as the most efficient means of moving people along dense urban corridors, and focusing on emerging mobility services is not a substitute for designing walkable, mixed-use neighborhoods or engaging in pedestrian- and transit-oriented planning.

With that clearly established, the report lays out the many opportunities for collaboration or partnership in providing the best possible mobility for an entire city.  The private players can be very helpful on the peak of the rush hour, when the incremental cost of bus service is very high, and also in providing the low-density services that are not cost-effective for full-wage city buses.  But that’s why the public sector must recognize its own leverage, and make the most of it

The public sector controls valuable assets, like parking spaces and street right-of-way, that can be used to negotiate for contracted services, access to data, or equitable geographic coverage, for example.

Common weaknesses of the public sector side are also explored:

Agencies need to proactively start to break down barriers to collaboration with emerging mobility providers––barriers like restrictive procurement processes, work rules, or agency traditions––by creating clear pathways to working together.

I recommend the whole report to any local leaders, or advocates, who need help describing what needs to be done to ensure that the new technologies help foster a better city for everyone.