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replace stop signs with signals on major transit lines?

Posted on November 10, 2014 in Pedestrians, San Francisco

From Streetsblog's Aaron Blalick in San Francisco:

The latest of [San Francisco Municipal Transporation Authority]'’s efforts to speed up [major bus] lines to run into some neighborhood opposition involves its proposed replacement of stop signs with transit-priority traffic signals. Some Western Addition neighbors have protested a proposal to signalize five intersections on McAllister Street to speed up the 5-Fulton, one of the designated “Rapid” routes receiving upgrades under the Muni Forward program (also known as the Transit Effectiveness Project).

Initially, the complaints were driven by fears that signals would bring dangerous speeding to McAllister. Muni planners responded by holding more outreach meetings, and presented data showing that pedestrian injuries declined on similar streets after signals were added. They also say speeds won’t go up significantly, since signals will be synchronized for speeds below 20 mph.  [emphasis added]

Aaron emailed to ask my opinion, which is emphatically:  "Who could oppose something that's good for both pedestrian safety and transit speeds?"

Apparently, the remaining opposition is based on "feel":

Sean Kennedy, the SFMTA’s Muni Forward program manager, said the data seems to quelled some neighbors’ fears, but that the complaints have shifted. “What we hear is that there’s a lot of concern over the neighborhood feel,” he said. “And that’s something we can’t really dispute with facts. It’s an individual preference if people do or don’t like signals.”

So how much should we worsen transit, and maintain higher levels of pedestrian injury, for the sake of "feel"?

And how exactly does a signal change feel?  We're talking about small streets here, mostly striped with a single wide travel lane each way.  Will a signal make the street feel wider?  Are people associating signals with more traffic and just assuming signals will have that outcome?  Not if they're timed for transit rather than cars.  Well-timed signalization can be very effective at discouraging car traffic on transit-intensive streets, when that's the objective.

I spent a decade of my life as a San Francisco pedestrian, in dark ages when pedestrian safetly mattered a lot less than it does now.  Sure, it was nice to encounter a 4-way stop where stepping into the intersection was enough to stop traffic.  

But among global pedestrians like me, San Francisco is famous for very fast signal cycles, and it's not a place where you'll be ticketed for crossing on red if there's obviously nothing coming.  As a pedestrian, I find a few seconds of delay a small price to pay for a transit system that's actually respectful of its customers' valuable time, not to mention the high cost to the public of its drivers' time.  

Remember: If you want frequency, you want less delay, because that makes frequency cheaper!

no, autonomous cars will not “abolish transit” in dense cities

Posted on November 4, 2014 in Technophilia

Is transit headed for a collision with self-driving cars?  David Z. Morris in Fortune writes about how anti-transit Republicans are using the prospect of self-driving cars to argue against transit investments.

Alarmingly, he quotes nobody who can actually refute this argument, except in the fuzziest of terms.

Here is the recommended response:

We are currently in that phase of any new techno-thrill where promoters make grandiose claims about the obsolescence of everything that preceded them.  Remember how the internet was going to abolish the workplace?

In any case, technology never changes facts of geometry.  However successful driverless cars become, transit will remain crucial for dense cities because cities are defined by a shortage of space per person.  Mass transit, where densities are high enough to support it, is an immensely efficient use of space.

(Remember, a great deal of bus transit is in places where densites are not high enough to allow it to succeed; this is evidence of anti-ridership “equity” or “coverage” policies, not of transit’s failure.  Driverless taxis could certainly replace transit in those areas, assuming the pricing were gotten right, thus allowing transit agencies to focus on their core business.)

In many cases, people talking about driverless cars replacing transit are talking from an outer-suburban point of view, based on the experience of low-density, car-dependent places that are unsuited to high-ridership transit.  In those settings, if density is not increasing, they are probably right.  Driverless taxis will be more efficient than transit in these areas.

But all over the world, people are moving into dense cities, where even autonomous cars can’t replace a bus full of 60 people or a train full of hundreds.  There simply isn’t enough space to put walls between every pair of travellers, as the car model of transportation requires.  Nor will driverless taxis ever be there whenever you need them as great transit lines will.  Like bikeshare systems, they will experience surges where many of the vehicles are in the wrong place.

A city can of course choose to sprawl and avoid density to the point that driverless cars could dominate.  But in so doing it will fail to create a place that the 21st century economy will reward.  Real estate prices are already telling us that the market has chosen dense cities as the highest value form of development.  There is no dense city in the world that does not rely heavily on transit, for reasons of space-efficiency that none of the new technologies can change.  (Yes, autonomous vehicles will use space more efficiently than private cars do, but this is saying very little compared to what a great rapid transit network is achieving.)

Again, technology never changes geometric facts.  And the problem of cars in dense cities, and transit’s superiority there, is a geometric fact, a fact about space and its scarcity.

 

email of the week: a new map for the moscow metro

Posted on November 3, 2014 in Maps, Moscow

 

(Updated with final version of map.)

From Ilya Petoushkoff in Moscow, explaining this remarkably beautiful map (download this draft version here, or the final version here):

Moscow 2014 draft

Here I'd like you to see a beta-version of a result of a zillion-year struggle.  Moscow finally is going to have a transit map with not only metro, but also regional rail and bus/trolleybus/tram connections between adjacent metro lines.
 
From the beginning of 20th century and till nowadays there hasn't been any kind of common map. Presently we still have a metro-only map inside the whole metro system, and regional-rail-only map inside some 30-50 percent of all regional trains …. Even the transfers between metro and rail are not announced on the trains! Until 2010s, city politicians simply didn't understand that it is a significant problem, many of them believed in 'who the hell will have a ride on a regional train when we have our metro'.
Sounds like the conversation Paris had a decade or so ago.  Many US cities are just starting to think about how regional commuter rail can be repurposed to form useful links within the core city.
Most of the city inhabitants … are not aware … that many destinations in the city are covered with regional rail services.  Now it's to be that everyone finally becomes much more familiar with what our transit is capable of.
 
The regional rail trains are quite frequent, running from 4 a.m. till midnight with a frequency of 6…10 [trains per hour] (sometimes more) and a strange 'technical daylight break' between 11 a.m. and 1 or 2 p.m. (except Sat.& Sun.), when there is no service at all.
Sounds like one of those clauses that make labor contracts such a dramatic read.
This very map is extremely important, finally bringing citizens and authorities to the fact that city has much more lines of rapid rail than those 12 of the metro system, and the regional rail should be developed as soon as possible, while certain areas of the city do not need new metro lines at all, they already do have rails and trains to use. …
 
Also the interesting fact is that connecting services between metro lines have been put onto this map. Many people are just unaware … that they don't have to stuff themselves into metro and have a ride to the center and backwards to get to adjacent lines, stations and city areas. Now it's a first significant attempt to make it clearer.
The color codes on those links are about technology, rail/bus/tram, but of course those don't tell you which is fastest.  Frequency, I'm assured, is not an issue, as all of these services are frequent.  
 
Still, I perused this map with great pleasure, and respect it not just as a clear diagram but a work of art.  

quote of the week: “rail is only part of the equation”

Posted on October 31, 2014 in Bus Rapid Transit, Los Angeles, Rail Transit, Technophilia

 

Trains would be just one layer of a comprehensive, multi-modal network that greatly enhances both neighborhood and regional accessibility for people all across the [Los Angeles] region. …

A singular focus on rail would divide the region into two: neighborhoods with rail and neighborhoods without. Such a future would perpetuate income inequality as housing costs rise near stations and station areas would be choked with traffic congestion. …

Getting our existing buses out of traffic is the quickest, most cost-effective means to bring high-quality transit to the greatest number of Angelenos.

Juan Matute, UCLA Institute of Transportation Studies
from a discussion called "Trains are Not the Silver Bullet"
 at ZocaloPublicSquare

This is from a collection of commentary about the the role of rail in the larger context of transit investment strategies.  Read the whole thing!

 

 

 

 

 

when transit agencies say “we don’t control that!” (email of the week)

Posted on October 28, 2014 in Public Outreach

Ask: Who does?

From Mark Szarkowski:

A common transit agency response to these pleas for improved service … is that the problem is out of their control. And in some cases, such as "bunching" due to traffic, they're right. So do you think irate passengers would get more mileage by directing their pleas to the third parties that actually are in a position to fix issues that are truly outside the transit agency's control – say local {transportation and public works departments] that could improve signal timing or implement [transit signal priority], bus lanes, bus bulbs, and so on?

Do we mistakenly assume transit agencies are more powerful than they really are? If so, should they be more aggressive in lobbying third parties for the improvements they know are needed to make bus service more reliable? And how can bus riders – a usually-invisible, but potentially powerful constituency – be tapped to do the lobbying? Would folding a metro's transit, traffic, road maintenance, and planning agencies into a single organization help, such that "complete streets" would actually be designed by "complete" agencies with a "complete" spectrum of users in mind?

When it comes to surface transit that interacts with traffic or other obvious causes of delay, vast parts of the customer experience are outside its control.  The same is true, more obviously, about the experience of walking to or from transit, or waiting at a surface transit stop.  These are important parts of the transit experience, but the transit agency usually has zero control over what happens in those places.  

I encourage transit agencies never to say "we don't control that!"   Instead, say "____ controls that."   Name the agency that has jurisdiction over the issue.

This doesn't necessarily mean that it's ___'s fault, exactly.  Sometimes the problem lies in inter-agency communication and planning.  

Sometimes, transit staffs feel so unsupported that they fear they would get reprisals if they forward a complaint to the responsible agency.  But refusing to say who's responsible makes the transit agency sound like it's obfuscating, and that affects the transit agency's image.  

For example, if transit riders blame all service problems on the transit agency, while the road authority hears only from motorists, the road authority won't get much evidence that they should care about transit riders, will it?

And if the responsible government agency doesn't get the calls about the things they do control, it's unlikely anything will change.  …  

 

Access across America!

Posted on October 7, 2014 in Access, Advocacy, Education, Strategic Transit Planning, Urban Structure, US Federal Policy

  Levinson cover

There should be nothing amazing about a new report on how easy it is for Americans to get to work on transit, but there is.   Think about all the arguments we have about transit …

… and ask: Why do we try to discuss these things in the absence of good analysis of the most basic question of all:  Is transit useful?  Does it help people get places in at a time and cost that's a logical choice for them?  Such information is often hiding inside ridership models, but it's rarely revealed in a way that lets people see and discuss it.  Without that, it's hardly surprising that the American transit debate is so confused.   

Access across America: Transit 2014, from the University of Minnesota’s Accessibility Observatory, describes how easy it is to get to jobs in America’s major metro areas by way of transit plus walking.  (For very short trips, it shows what can be reached by walking alone.)   The authors are Andrew Owen and Professor David Levinson.  The report is meant to sit alongside similar studies for the other transportation modes.

So here’s Portland, say, shaded by the number of jobs that can be reached within 30 minutes from each point in the city:

Levinson pdx
The report also offers a ranking of how easy it is to get to jobs for the average residential location in all the major metros.  The ranking looks at where you can get to in a range of travel time budgets, from 10 minutes – basically a measure of walk access – to as much as 60 minutes.  Here's are the top 17:

Levinson

As the travel time budget rises, the relevance of transit to economic opportunity becomes visible.   Los Angeles, with long access distances but extensive frequent transit, does poorly on 10-minute walkability but climbs in the rankings as you consider longer travel time budgets, thanks to its effective frequent transit grid.  Miami drifts in the other direction, signaling that compared to Los Angeles, transit there is adding relatively little to access to jobs beyond what’s achieved by walking alone.

Now here's what's amazing for a study pubished in 2014:  Owen and Levinson claim (p 6) that this study is unusual in properly accounting for frequency.  Many analysts approach transit from the point of view of the nine-to-five commuter, who was presumed to be largely insensitive to frequency because they have made an appointment with a particular scheduled trip that they take every day.   This sometimes feels right to bureaucrats and civic leaders, many of whom have such commutes themselves, but out there in the larger economy, more and more people work part time, or at irregular hours, or at times outside the standard commute peak.  Increasing numbers of people also value flexibility and spontaneity even in work trips — things that only a robust all-day frequency can provide.

Perusing these maps and rankings, my overwhelming reaction was “what if they’d analyzed it like this, or graphed it like that?”  A huge amount of insight is readily available out of this database if we query it differently.  For example:

  • Instead of ranking cities by the number of jobs reachable on transit in a given time, what if we ranked them by the percentage of jobs accessible?  The current rankings are still, predominantly, just a ranking by total volume of jobs.  Doing it in percentage terms will really pop out the winners in their size class, like Portland.
  • For the same reason, I really want to see Canadian cities ranked in this way.  They tend to have far more transit service per capita than comparable US ones, and higher ridership per capita as a result.  If this shows up in dramatically better economic opportunity and personal liberty, it could create a powerful contrast when cities compare themselves with similar ones across the border.
  • Why confine our attention to 7-9 AM, the classic morning commute peak?  There’s a good argument for starting there: it’s when the maximum number of people are trying to travel.  But the time-of-day dimension is essential to understanding the real lives of the majority of workers who are not peak commuters: those who work part time and in non-standard shifts, like almost everyone in retail, entertainment and manufacturing.
  • Let’s look at access to other things besides jobs.  All transportation studies overemphasize the journey to work because we have better data on it than on anything else.  But with the appropriate layer about locations, we can explore access to retail, access to food, access to education, even access to nightlife.   Regions may not have this data, but many cities do, and much of the interest in this tool will be at the municipal level.

Still, this is a great piece of work.  And Americans should pause over the core of this announcement:  Only now, in 2014, are we starting to study people’s ability to get where they’re going, and their opportunity to access all the opportunity that makes a great city.

quote of the week: the neglected american bus

Posted on October 7, 2014 in Access, Boston, Bus Rapid Transit, Chicago, Houston, Minneapolis – St. Paul, Oakland, San Francisco

In the six cases examined, we conducted off the record interviews with public officials, general managers, and thought leaders in each region. One of the consistent themes that emerged was that the bus systems and bus passengers were an afterthought. In every region – Chicago, New York, Boston, Minneapolis/St. Paul, Dallas/Ft. Worth, and the Bay Area – rail was the primary focus of virtually everyone we interviewed. We also found that maps of the regional transit networks tellingly either included a jumbled mess of bus routes behind a clean rail network, or ignored bus altogether.

It is likely this bias toward rail has very little to do with governance. But it does have a negative impact on transit delivery, particularly from a customer point of view. The vast majority of transit riders in the United States are on buses, so it would make sense to devote more resources and attention to them compared to rail riders, rather than less. Also, improvements to the bus network are likely to be less expensive than new rail expansions, and would be likely to yield substantially more net benefit per dollar. Yet while every region we visited had a new rail expansion either in planning or under construction, outside of New York none of the regions had any plans for regional bus networks, reorganization of existing bus systems, or major expansions of bus rapid transit (BRT).

Joshua Schank, President CEO,
Eno Center for Transportation
"The Case of the Neglected Bus"

I've certainly noticed, in my own work, that the aggressive, agency-wide commitment to building a complete access-maximizing transit system is stronger in cities that don't have much rail, or where rail is in early stages of development, as in Houston.  Key tools for total network legibility, such as Frequent Network branding, also seem to be spreading much more effectively in the midsized transit authorities than in the gigantic ones.

A while back I had a brief chat with a major airline CEO at an event.  He asked me: "So what's the future of transit.  It's rail, isn't it?"  I wanted to say: "So what's the future of aviation?  It's all intercontinental jumbo jets, isn't it?  

Or is it about people feeling free to go places?  In that case, the future of aviation is a network, where many types of vehicle have an essential role.  

What’s wrong if transit support exceeds transit ridership?

Posted on October 3, 2014 in Advocacy

Nothing.

In today's CityLab, Eric Jaffe expresses concern about the fact that support for public transit in many American cities is far exceeding its ridership.  

Every transit advocate knows this timeless Onion headline: "98 Percent Of U.S. Commuters Favor Public Transportation For Others." But the underlying truth that makes this line so funny also makes it a little concerning: enthusiasm for public transportation far, far outweighs the actual use of it. Last week, for instance, the American Public Transportation Association reported that 74 percent of people support more mass transit spending. But only 5 percent of commuters travel by mass transit. This support, in other words, is largely for others.

This is entirely a good thing, given the state of transit in America today.  If transit were only supported by its existing riders it would be in a death spiral, because most American transit isn't currently useful enough to penetrate a large part of the travel market.

The "support-usage gap," as Jaffe calls it, does not mean that Americans support transit just in hopes that others will use it.  We don't need that psychological speculation because the real explanation is factual:  For most Americans, in the context of their lives and locations and situations and priorities, the transit that exists today is not a rational choice.  Many Americans who support transit but don't use it may be saying that they want transit to be an option, but that it currently isn't.

This is exactly what we should expect in a country with such low quantitites of transit per capita, and where the public consciousness about the need for transit is way ahead of the political process of funding and designing it.  Canada, for example, has more than twice the transit service per capita, therefore more than twice the ridership per capita, therefore more of the population on transit.  But the support for transit in urban populations is high in both countries.  Support and usage are, and should be, unrelated.  That's because people are thinking about what they want, not what they have.

In my experience as a consultant, the real problem with the support-usage gap is one of education.  Working in Canada, I always notice that the public and stakeholder conversation about transit  is just a little more informed than it is in the US.  The common confusions (see Chapter 3 of my book) don't have as much impact on the discussion.  That difference arises from the fact that a bigger share of the Canadian population has personal experience with transit.  If you use transit regularly, there are some things about it that you'll just naturally understand better.  If nothing else you won't fall into common motorists' errors like overvaluing speed and undervaluing frequency, or assuming that technology choice is more important than where a service goes, and how soon you'll get there.

But do you support transit but don't find it useful?  That's great!  Help us make it better!  Welcome aboard!

 

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