Author Archive | Jarrett

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.

Dave Hitchborne http://www.geograph.org.uk/

Nottingham is the first city in the UK to introduce a levy (i.e. tax) on all workplace parking to finance public transit.  Stephen Joseph at the UK’s Campaign for Better Transport thinks it’s a better strategy than congestion pricing (or as I have always advocated calling it, decongestion pricing):

Although every city is different, there might be some wider lessons here. One, for the transport economist geeks, might be to stop obsessing with congestion charging. Efficient in economic theory though this might be, Nottingham looked at it and decided that it would be very costly – all those cameras and enforcement – and would not target peak hour traffic jams and single-occupancy car commuting as effectively as the levy would.

The wider lesson from this is that the politics of a levy are different, too. With congestion charging you have to get support from the whole city and potentially its hinterland; and referenda in Manchester and Edinburgh show how difficult that is. With a workplace parking levy, there is a narrower and potentially more politically winnable discussion with businesses and commuters about what a levy could pay for – things that might make journeys to work easier and cut peak hour jams and pollution.

This may indeed be a good strategy at least for smaller cities.

This is not the first parking levy in the world: Sydney, Melbourne, and Perth in Australia all have them in their inner cities, as does Montreal in Canada.    Toronto is debating the issue now, while in the UK, Cambridge is considering following Nottingham’s lead.

I hope this doesn’t sound like fishing for praise, but a client has asked me to provide some pithy quotations from my book for use in advertising an event.  Rather than trying to remember or find them myself, it would be great if people who’ve read the book could share pithy quotations that they remember.  That way I don’t have to decide what was pithy, or for that matter memorable.

Leave them in the comments if you think of any!  Thanks!

It may seem an obvious point, but transit is a remarkably safe form of travel, especially compared to the private car.  A new report from the American Public Transportation Association (APTA) authored by Todd Litman puts some numbers to how higher transit dependence yields a transportation system that kills fewer people.

For just two days, over a weekend, I’ve visited Barcelona for the first time.

It has the sort of public transit system that will impress a North American at first: a large metro, pleasant buses with numerous stretches of exclusive lane, two practical funiculars, commuter trains, and two tram networks …

That’s the usual way most people summarize a transit system, isn’t it?  A list of technologies in use, which says nothing about how easy it is to get around the city. Did you notice how, when I said “two tram networks,” it sounded at first like that’s better than one tram network? The opposite is true, of course, and indeed they’re working on making it just one.

In the end, what matters is not the diversity of technologies, but how easy it is to get places, and this requires a different kind of transit tourism. Instead of going to a city to marvel at the technologies – picking trams over buses regardless of where they go, and riding every funicular, gondola, and odd little ferry – I prefer access tourism: I try to actually go places, and experience how easy or hard that is.  (I still experience serendipity of course, but it’s in sharper relief when seen against the bright background of intention.)

Only traveling with intention made me notice the oddness of the Barcelona metro. The transit agency’s full map is here, and a slice is coming up below.  You may also enjoy Jug Cerovic‘s more austere version here.  The network is complicated partly because it shows metro lines (L), tram lines (T) and regional commuter rail lines (R) but for this purpose I’ll focus on the Metro lines (L).

Some simple math: In an optimal grid network, lines keep going more or less straight, and intersect each other more or less perpendicularly.  You change direction in this network by making a connection.  The perpendicularity maximizes the area of the city that each connection could take you to.

Transit grids can be standard or polar, but are almost always some subtle fusion of the two. The polar grid arises when there’s a huge center on which the network logically converges, because desirable destinations are packed most tightly there.

Once you recognize these patterns, you notice how coherent most metro networks are. Even those that are kludges to a degree have usually been patched as much as possible to create some appropriate fusion of radial and standard grid effects.

But among the metros I’ve encountered Barcelona’s metro network seems unusually chaotic in its network structure, often seeming to meander without intention.

On the map above, for example, look at the medium blue line that enters the map area on the left at Pubilla Cases station.  This is Line 5.  It heads resolutely across the map from left to right, but two-thirds of the way across the city, at La Segrera, it seems to get distracted, suddenly turning 120 degrees and heading for the hills at the top of the map.

The network is also full of lines meeting tangentially instead of crossing.  For example, here’s a diagram of just Lines 5 and 2 (dark blue and purple, respectively) touching tangentially at (unmarked) Sagrada Família station:

There are numerous cases like this.  In each case, you would have a more coherent network — more likely to connect more people to more destinations with fewer transfers — if the lines traded paths at this point, crossing over each other rather than touching tangentially.

Again, most metros are kludges to some degree.  It’s unlikely that anybody alive in Barcelona today deserves blame for the odd patterns of the metro’s flow.  There are always historical reasons for why things have ended up as they are.  If you want to follow that history, here’s a fun video.

But meanwhile:  Does your head contain some received wisdom along the lines of: “European metros are so fantastic that why would anyone take buses?” I can remember when many Europeans used to believe this, but today, bus network improvement is one of the most important of European trends. The need for a rational bus network may be even more urgent if your metro is staggering around drunkenly, unable to follow a straight line.

What’s great about the new Barcelona’s bus network then, is not just that it’s a grid, but that it really wants you to know that it’s a grid, and how straight its constituent lines are:

The new lines have numbers preceded by “H” or “V” for “horizontal” or “vertical”.  (Vertical is quite literal: not just up-down on standard maps like this one, but also up to the hills or down to the sea.)  These frequent lines are also numbered in logical sequence across the city, so that as you get to know the network, a number reminds you of roughly where in the grid each line sits, and thus what it’s likely to be useful for.

The idea is that people should be able to keep a sense of the whole grid network in their heads.  If you just remember what H and V mean, and the sequence in which they’re numbered, you have an enormous amount of information the whole system. When you see any bus numbered this way, you have a general sense of which way it’s going, or at least along which axis.  And when you hear a bus route number, you can easily form a general sense of where it is.

There’s liberty in this kind of legibility.  You could measure it in terms of the number of useful places you can get to divided by the bytes of information you need to remember to have a workable map of how to get there.  Anyone who’s navigated Manhattan knows the difference between the regular grid across most of the island (high usefulness/byte) vs the patternless warren of streets at the south end (low usefulness/byte).  European cities tend to be especially challenged in this regard.

I talk about Barcelona’s bus network a lot because it’s one of the best examples of the marketing of network-scale legibility, an idea that’s almost unheard of in other parts of the world.  (Perhaps related, it also has a Wikipedia article that describes it with the same respect you’d expect in discussing a metro network.  Someone should translate it into English.)

Barcelona may have come upon its grid bus network, in part, because proudly legible grids were already its most celebrated urban planning idea. Most European street patterns are largely gridless and irregular. But in a sytematizing vision rivaling that of Haussmann in Paris, 19th century Barcelona embraced a single grid pattern for its fast expansion around the medieval core.

Photo by Alhzeiia via Wikipedia

This plan is usually described as the Eixample district, but it’s really a principle rather than a place.  (The Catalan word eixample means “extension” or wider area”.)  The new grid flows across the city over a distance of about 7km (4.5mi). It therefore covers many neighborhoods, uniting them not just with a perfectly regular street pattern but also with the grid’s most distnctive detail: the “cut off” corners that create little square spaces at each major intersection.

Now that Barcelona is beginning to close many of these streets to fast car traffic, these little diamonds will be the next great public spaces in a city already rich with them. And a great bus network, whose citywide grid pattern you can remember, and that stops just down the street, will take you there.

Thanks to my Barcelona friend Andreu Orte for background, including the Line 5/2 diagram.

On the whole question of whether ridesourcing (Uber/Lyft/etc) can replace fixed route buses, my fullest explanation is here, in both text and video form.  Since then, there’s been some interesting news:

• Uber lost over $1.2 billon in 6 months.  Yes, with a “b.”   Cite this next time someone goes on about “money-losing” public transit systems.
• Uber is starting to do absurdly deep discounts that look a lot like predatory pricing.  20 rides for $20????.  Such a price would undercut transit, thereby causing massively increased traffic with all the resulting ills.  It’s obviously unsustainable for Uber, but if it goes on long enough to damage transit systems, that will be a huge negative impact on our cities.  I hope someone is looking at whether this is legal.
• In happier news, California has its first example of Uber/Lyft/etc. replacing a fixed bus route, and it’s a very sensible one.  It’s at the Livermore / Amador Valley Transit Authority on the eastern edge of the Bay Area.   The key is that the bus route being replaced has predictably dreadful ridership: only five people get on for every hour that the bus operates.  (Usually, a poor suburban fixed route performance is at least 10 boardings/service hour.)  This is almost as bad as a short-trip taxi, which means that Uber/Lyft, with the ability to pick up multiple riders on the same trip, might do just as well.  It’s still not a clean replacement.  The fare is higher than the transit agency’s, as it must be to compensate for ridesharing’s inefficiency, and transfers to the buses don’t appear to be free.  This is a reasonable deal, but there are  not many fixed bus lines that perform this poorly!

Last week’s trip to Barrow, Alaska — with a stop at Deadhorse — was not a business trip.  We weren’t looking for transit, or even really for a town.  We were looking for landscapes, plants, birds, indigenous art, an unfamiliar sea, and of course latitude.

Still, on news that I was going, a prominent figure in the microtransit world tweeted me this:

@humantransit Jarret [sic] – can I request a blog post on Barrow transit options? rural … transit doesn’t get enough press.

— Matthew George (@NotMattGeorge) August 14, 2016

So with him in mind, I snapped this pic at the Iñupiat Cultural Centre.  A small bus with several riders arrived and dropped off a man, who went into the adjacent library.

Barrow’s a small town (<5000) and this is a typical small-town transit bus — except for the lack of markings, which doesn’t surprise me.  Barrow is a largely indigenous community with locally-oriented problem-solving networks that aren’t going to be visible to an outsider, and there’s no reason they should be.

It was my only sighting of that bus all day, not that I was looking for it.  Mostly, people get around Barrow in pickup trucks, SUVs, and deafening little ATVs.   Not much on two wheels.  And people walk.

Like many Alaskan towns, including the capital, Barrow has no connections to the larger road network.  It might as well be an island.  Owning a car, then, lacks one of its main attractions — you can’t “hit the open road.”.  Here, the roads don’t go out of town.  In a car, you’re as trapped in town as you’d be as a pedestrian.

Well, one road ended at a lake, but it had a surprising amount of traffic, as though everyone who wanted to get out of town had only that one place to go.  And you can drive to Point Barrow, but only if that track to the left, in very deep wet sand, looks safe to you.  We were wimps.

To be fair, being trapped in town is a summer problem, because what surrounds the town then is either open ocean or bog-like tundra, the latter hard to walk across.  The winter freeze expands Barrow’s horizons, as both ocean and tundra become hard surfaces, easier to explore.

It is an interesting town, especially when you consider that absolutely everything you see got here on a boat or an airplane.  It’s on stilts, as it’s built on permafrost that turns into bogs in the summer.  Mostly wood, although the nearest tree is several hundred miles away.  And mostly not trying to impress us, which is fine.