It turns out there’s a great video of my recent talk at the Congress for the New Urbanism conference in Dallas, including a great discussion with Mariia Zimmerman and Marcy McInelly. Continue Reading →
Author Archive | Jarrett
Raleigh: Four (or 36) alternatives for Wake County’s transit future
Today, Wake County (the Raleigh, North Carolina area) released our report outlining four possible directions that the community could take in defining a future transit network. Download it here. Happily, the local newspaper's coverage is clear and accurate.
This begins a period of public discussion about the report and the choices it outlines. That discussion will give us direction on what form the final recommended plan should take. That plan, in turn, will form the basis for a proposed referendum on a sales tax increment to fund expanded transit.
Actually, there are more than four possible futures, and the final plan won't look quite like any of these. Read on:
The key idea — as in much of our work — is to build an "alternatives space" in which people can figure out where they want to come down on the two most difficult policy tradeoffs:
- Ridership vs coverage? What percentage of resources should to go pursuing a goal of maximum ridership — which will tend to generate frequent service in the densest urban markets — as opposed to the goal of coverage — spreading service out so that as many people as possible have some service nearby?
- Infrastructure vs service? How much to spend on building transit as opposed to operating transit. Obviously infrastructure can make service more attractive and efficient, but too much infrastructure can lead to not enough ordinary bus service covering the whole county.
Both of these tradeoffs are explored in detail in Chapter 5 of our report.
The idea is to use these four mapped alternatives to imply 36 alternatives, as follows:
The four red squares are the four mapped network alternatives, while the white squares are other possible positions that we can tabulate. The idea is to ask people questions roughly of this form:
- "Which alternative is closest to what you want?"
- Would you like that alternative even more if it moved a bit toward coverage or toward ridership? (a step left or right in this table)
- Would you like that alternative even more if there it moved a bit toward infrastructure or toward service? (a step up or down in this table)
Obviously the questions can be phrased in ways that don't require the user to visualize this matrix. This is just a high-level description of what we'll be after.
This approach allows everyone responding to navigate us to one of 36 squares indicating their preference, giving us feedback that is both nuanced and yet quantifiable. Most public feedback is one or the other but not both. And that's good for everyone who's responding, because in my experience, tabulated feedback is more influential feedback. Written feedback is certain still welcome and will be reviewed, but tabulated feedback really tells what lots of people are thinking.
If you live in Wake County or know anyone there, it's now time to get involved. Download the report, read at least the executive summary, form your own view, and express it! The more people respond, the more confident we'll be in defining the final plan based on their guidance.
Podcast: How we did the Houston redesign
While I was at the CNU conference in Dallas, Charles Marohn of Strong Towns did a great podcast interview with me and James Llamas of TEI. We talked about the Houston network redesign, why it was needed, why it was hard, how we got it through to implementation, and what other cities can learn from it.
It's here!
Our fun short course in network design comes to Tampa June 1-2
On June 1 and 2 in Tampa, Florida, I'll be teaching another session of our popular Interactive Course in Transit Network Design. It's part of the Community Transportation Association of America conference, but you can attend the course without attending the conference.
The price is $750 if you or your organization doesn't belong to CTAA, $650 if you do. Yes, this is higher than we charge when we teach it directly, but at this stage we don't have another direct offering until October in Portland.
We designed this course to fill a gap in the training of most planning professionals. Few graduate programs teach public transit "from the inside," building an understanding of its unique opportunities and limitations through the experience of actually working with the tool. Still fewer hire teachers who are both seasoned practitioners and skilled in relating public transit to larger narratives that motivate people. If you care about public transit as part of your future city, invite your favorite land use planner to take this course! They'll come out much savvier about how to recognize development proposals that truly work with public transit, as distinct from those that are just paying lip-service in order to "paint development green."
Register here. Select "2-Day Intensive Training" and "Transit Network Design." You can also use this paper form: Download Expo2015regform-9
My Post About How Everything Fits Together (updated)
… is here. It comes with a nice diagram you can put on your wall!
Local bus systems reduce employee turnover! (quote of the week)
This. Is. So. Important.
We find that the size of the fixed-route bus system (measured as real per capita operating expenditures) is negatively related to employee turnover rates [for local employers]: An increase in bus systems’ per capita operating expenditures is associated with a decrease in employee turnover. Decreases in employee turnover represent cost savings to businesses by reducing the costs associated with training new workers and rebuilding firm-specific knowledge or better employee-employer matches. These results suggest that access to fixed-route bus transit should be a component of the economic development strategy for communities not only for the access to jobs that it provides low-income workers but also for the benefits accruing to businesses that hire these workers.
Dagney Faulk and Michael J. Hicks,
"The Impact of Bus Transit on Employee Turnover:
Evidence from Quasi-experimental Samples"
Urban Studies
This also means that new employers need to read this before they choose their location!
I could wish that they had measured transit quantity using revenue hours rather than expenditures, because revenue hours are a better measure of service to the customer. But still, this is a big deal. Eric Jaffe also has the story at Citylab.
email of the week: transit to business parks
A transit planner in a suburban agency asks an eternal question:
Do you have any examples of best practices in transit service in large business parks? I am looking for some creative solution, such as a transit to vanpool connection, or a site redesign for accessibility.
If you have an opportunity, please share some examples, thoughts, etc.…
quote of the week: priorities for slum dwellers …
On the priorities for infrastructure in developing world "slums," the entry-level neighborhoods that tend to welcome new arrivals from the countryside:
Sewage, garbage collection and paved roads are, for obvious reasons, vital, and can be provided only from outside. But even more important, in the well-informed view of slum-dwellers, are buses: affordable and regular bus service into the neighbourhood is often the key difference between a thriving enclave and a destitute ghetto.
Doug Saunders, Arrival City:
How the Largest Migration in History is Reshaping Our World.
p 310.
Microtransit: good or bad for cities?
Read Eric Jaffe’s piece today on the effect of microtransit (UberPool, LyftLine, Bridj, Leap) on our cities.
The question about all these private operators, seeking to create something between large-scale transit and the private car, is this: Are they going to work with high-capacity transit or try to destroy it? There are signs both ways.
If microtransit co-ordinates with conventional big-vehicle transit, we get (a) lower overall Vehicle Miles Traveled, emissions, and congestion, and (b) stronger cases for transit-oriented land use and thus (c) better, more humane and inclusive cities. If they compete with it, drawing away customers from big vehicles into smaller ones, we get the opposite.
If it turns out to be a fight, the playing field would have to be leveled in terms of the overwhelming public sector cost drivers such as workforce compensation and Federal regulatory burden before we have a fair fight. (And I mean leveled upward, toward fair wages and policies that respect the civil rights agenda encoded in Federal transit regulations.)
Consider the latter: Do we need to clarify the Americans with Disabilities Act so that the cost of complementary paratransit (which takes 20-40% of most transit agency budgets) is shared by all private transit companies operating in the space? Will we require private transit to do Title VI equity plans to prove that they do not discriminate against people with a low ability to pay? (That would be interesting, because neglect of low income people is intrinsic to most profitable business models, which is why you’ve never seen an airline magazine ad that appeals to low-income concerns.) The enormous burdens of Federal regulation — most of it designed to implement a civil rights agenda that’s theoretically endorsed by all sides — would have to be shared before we’d know who’s really best for which market.
If it were a fair fight, high-volume urban transit (not just rapid transit but also high-volume frequent local bus lines) would continue to prevail where it’s the best use of both labor and scarce urban space. My fear is that it’s going to be an unfair fight, one that’s only made worse when the media frame it as ‘little enterprising’ upstarts vs ‘big, old’ agencies. In such an unfair fight, the upstarts can too easily win through means that are destructive to justice and the environment (low wage “contractors”, replacing space-efficient big vehicles with smaller ones) rather than through finding the most efficient equilibrium for all the transport needs of a city.
As Jaffe notes, the way forward is a difficult one for upstarts who are used to thinking of transit agencies as enemies. (It can also be difficult for transit agencies and especially their unions, who may have their own defensive and territorial feelings to work through.) The way forward is for less expensive service tools, including the upstarts, to focus on lower-density suburbia where the land use patterns make efficient big-vehicle transit geometrically impossible. The upstarts could even become contractors of the transit agency part of the time — paid to do things that they can do more efficiently than big buses can — as taxis often are today. And they can do this while also operating in the city at much higher price points than conventional transit, so that they aren’t undermining the space-efficiency of those existing systems.
But when I hear the upstarts appealing to elitism, and derogating conventional high-efficiency transit, I wonder where we’ll end up … One thing is for sure: This sector is going to need strong regulation to turn it into a force for good.
There’s room for hope. As I monitor how the upstart microtransit companies talk to their customers and investors, I notice that their early appeals to elitism and generalized transit-hatred seem to be giving way to more practical and inclusive messaging. Let’s hope the markets (and hey, that means you and your purchasing choices!) reward the companies that want to be part of a humane, sustainable, and efficient city.
Knowing it in your hands
I'm writing this while our Interactive Course in Transit Network Design in Seattle goes on around me. About 25 people are huddled around maps having intensely animated conversations about what the best possible transit network would look like. Now and then someone comes up and asks a (good) question.
This kind of workshop is not just "inexcusably fun," as one student called it, but it's also the best way to get a practical grasp of the transit tool. If you've actually tried designing a transit network, you have some knowledge of the material in your hands, not just in your head, and hand-knowledge is easier for the mind to trust and integrate. Hand-knowledge (also called body knowledge) is knowledge you trust without even having to think about it. It's the very essence of what we perceive as obvious.
The biggest problem facing urban transportation in North America is that most influential people have hand-knowledge of driving cars but only brain knowledge of other transportation options, if that. Hand-knowledge is so powerful in us that it governs the metaphors and assumptions we bring to other topics. When people ask me why transit isn't serving their labyrinthine business park, or ask why it can't run smaller buses that fit better into their neighborhood, or why it can't run sexier vehicles with nicer seating, they're assuming that transit is just like cars, only bigger. And until you've taken some time to play with what transit really is, that's a compelling delusion and therefore a consequential one for policymaking.
Transit is not just like cars. It's also not just like bikes or any other private vehicle. It's not just like taxis or Uber either. It's a completely different thing, and to know it you have to touch it.
A lot of experienced transit riders do have this kind of knowledge, though you also have to be able to separate what's convenient for you from what makes a good network for the city. (The public outreach for the Houston System Reimagining asked people both "Is this better for you?" and "Is this better for Houston?" to try to prompt both kinds of thinking.). Many existing transit riders aren't able to make that distinction, but those who can become powerful advocates and leaders.
Hands-on workshops are also the essence of my firm's approach to all forms of outreach, not just formally educational activities like this course. A key part of all of our planning projects is the stakeholder workshop, where key leaders from a city sit down and do network planning exercises together. At first it seems amazing that such busy people are willing to take the time to do this, but on reflection it's less so. Great leaders know they don't know everything, and are eager for fun ways to expand their hand-knowledge.
The other great frontier, of course, lies in web-based tools that let people have some of this experience at home. Explicit games that involve designing transit networks are either wildly simplifed (Mini Metro) or arcane (Cities in Motion) or massively misleading (Sim City). (I've heard good things about Cities:Skylines but don't have the supercomputer needed to run it smoothly.) What's needed is something less graphically complex that still helps people explore the essences.
But of course games don't have to call themselves games. Transitmix is an excellent and fast-developing tool for sketching and costing transit networks. As it adds features that measure outcomes, it takes on the features of a game: It's a space where you can try out different transit plans, see the results, and gradually figure out what kinds of network work best. This is one of the most effective kinds of learning, because the result is hand-knowledge.
Hand-knowledge doesn't always make you an explainer, of course. I've met many transit planning professionals who have great instincts but can't describe their thought process. So we work back and forth between hand-knowledge and brain-knowledge. Feel how this substance works in your hands, but then spend a little time thinking more about what you've learned from that. Get your brain and your hand on the same page. Then you're ready to change the world, or at least figure out the real transit issues in your community.