Author Archive | Jarrett

california topples a tyrant

Posted on July 8, 2014 in Language, Words, Unhelpful

Is "reduced congestion" a positive environmental impact in cities? Is it good for the environment to have endless lanes of free-flowing traffic everywhere?

It's a bizarre claim when you look at how prosperous, sustainable, and livable high-congestion cities are. (They tend to be places where you don't have to commute so far, by example, and their overall emissions tend to be lower.)

Yet until now, all California transit infrastructure has had to conform to an analysis process that treats traffic congestion as a threat to the environment. A metric called Level of Service — congestion experienced by motorists, basically — could not be made worse by an infrastructure project, even one whose purpose was to reduce the impact of congestion on the economy, by providing alternatives to driving.

Thanks to a state bill nearing approval, this provision of the California Environmental Quality Act — which has caused years of delay and cost-escalation on transit and bicycle projects — will no longer apply to urban transportation projects or to much transit oriented development. Eric Jaffe's long article today from the barricades of this revolution is a great read. Key quote:

Level of service was a child of the Interstate Highway era. The LOS concept was introduced in the 1965 Highway Capacity Manual, at the very moment in American history when concrete ribbons were being tied across the country, and quickly accepted as the standard measure of roadway performance. LOS is expressed as a letter grade, A through F, based on how much delay vehicles experience; a slow intersection scores worse on LOS than one where traffic zips through. Planners and traffic engineers use the metric as a barometer of congestion all over the United States.
In California, LOS has an especially high-profile. As the primary arbiter of traffic impacts under CEQA—adopted in 1970 by Governor Ronald Reagan—the metric not only determines the fate of many transportation and development projects, but has the awkward role of promoting car use within a law designed to protect the environment. "We have one section of CEQA saying we've got to reduce greenhouse gas emissions," says transportation consultant Jeffrey Tumlin of Nelson\Nygaard, "and another section of CEQA saying we need to accommodate unlimited driving."

Level of Service is an example of rhetoric that we all have to learn to challenge: the effort to hide strong value judgments inside language that sounds objective or technical. A key move is to rely on terms that sound vague, neutral, and boring ("Level of Service") to describe something that's actually expressing a strong ideology — in this case, asserting the superiority of some street users over others. If the Level of Service Index had been called, say, the "Free Flow of Cars Index" it would have been much clearer who was being excluded by it, and how blatantly it contradicted many other widely-shared goals for California's cities.

Tip: If a term sounds vague, neutral, and boring, demand a precise definition. Confused words imprison our minds. You'll be called a geek for caring about something as boring as "Level of Service," but in the end, you may help topple a tyrant.

Photo: Children with toppled statue of Stalin. The Times.

seeking: good examples of island bus stops behind sliplanes

Posted on July 8, 2014 in Information Requests

For a client in the Middle East, we are looking for good examples of this situation:

Two high speed streets intersect, and the intersection features sliplanes (shortcuts for right turns) which in turn create islands (in green above). The islands are big enough that bus stops can be placed on the island. Transit lines run east-west and north-south (not turning at this intersection.)

One bus stop on an island like this is common enough, but I'd like to find examples of the situation above, where two intersecting bus lines stop on the same island — one nearside, the other farside — so that the island becomes a very easy transfer point, at least if you're travelling (in this drawing) between points west and points south, or between points east and points north.

If you've seen this arrangement, please leave a comment! Thanks!

brisbane: a city transformed by a bus link

Posted on July 1, 2014 in Access, Brisbane, Bus Rapid Transit, Transit-Oriented Development (TOD), Urban Structure

Next time someone tells you that transit has to be rail in order to affect real estate demand, send them this paper [paywalled] by Elin Charles-Edwards, Martin Bell and Jonathan Corcoran – a dramatic example of bus infrastructure profoundly transforming residential demand.

Our scene is the main campus of University of Queensland, which is located on a peninsula formed by a loop of the Brisbane River. It's in the southwest corner of this image. The area labeled "Brisbane" is the highrise downtown. Most everything in between — which is mostly on the south side of the river — is dense, redevelopable inner city fabric.

If you look closely you can see a single faint bridge connecting the University across the river. This is the Eleanor Schonell Bridge, which opened in 2006, and which is solely for pedestrians, cyclists, and buses. No private cars. It's one of the developed world's most effective of examples of a transit path that is vastly straighter than the motorist's options.

Prior to the opening of the bridge, University of Queensland had a problem much like that of Vancouver's University of British Columbia. Its peninsula setting helped it feel remote and serene (the rarefied air of academe and all that) but it was also brutally hard to get to, especially from places where students and lower-paid staff could afford to live. While there are some affordable areas west of the campus, most of the immediate campus area is far too affluent and low-density to house the university's students or the bulk of its workforce. So commutes to the campus were long and difficult.

Apart from the geography of income, the issue here was classic chokepoint geography, and that was the key to the transit opportunity. Brisbane's looping river, and its extreme shortage of bridges outside of downtown, slices the city into a series of hard-to-access peninsulas. Motorists are used to driving way out of direction to reach their destinations, and until recently, buses had to do the same thing. The only transit that could do what cars couldn't was the river ferry system, CityCat, and while this system is immensely successful, it is still a small share of the travel market because (a) so much of the population is not on the river and (b) the river is a circuitous travel path as well.

Charles-Edwards et al show how the bridge created an explosive expansion of access (where can I get to, soon?) for the campus by walking, cycling, and bus service. Walking:

And by bus (focus on the triangle in the centre of the image, which is the campus):

It's worth noticing why this bus bridge is so effective: It plugs right into the Brisbane Busway network, which looks like this. ("UQ Lakes" is the campus stop.)

Direct buses from campus run along most of these paths, and connect to many other frequent services covering the area south of the river, including a couple of useful frequent rail lines extending southeast from downtown. This is the biggest and highest-quality busway system in the developed world, in terms of the degree of protection from private car traffic along complete travel paths, including a tunnel under downtown. So the access opened up by this bridge was extraordinary. The busway is so fast and reliable that even commutes from northern Brisbane — on the same side of the river as the campus — were speeded up by the new bridge because they could remain in busway for the entire journey.

The effect on the location of students and staff, from 2003 until 2012 (six years after the bridge opened) looks like this.

The colour choices are unfortunate, so pay attention to the legend and focus on "St Lucia" (the campus) and the inner city areas just across the river from it. Remember, too, that this is a map of percentage change, so don't be distracted by big colors far away from the action, which represent noise (percentage changes on a tiny base). You can see that students and staff have shifted in big numbers to the inner city across the river from the campus, but also to southern and eastern suburbs each of the river, which are more affordable and still easily reached by buses from the campus. In the author's careful words, the bridge caused "a significant redistribution of staff and students across the metropolitan area." It also had the likely effect of reducing overall commute times by enabling people to live much closer to the campus, though the authors don't mention that.

Because the project gave buses so much of an advantage in accessing the campus, the mode share shifted dramatically, enabling the campus itself to grow without choking on cars:

Between 2002 and 2011, the population accessing the campus increased by 23 per cent, … all of which were absorbed by [non-car modes on] the bridge. There was an accompanying shift in the modal mix of trips away from cars to public transport. This was most marked among students, for whom less than one-quarter of trips were by car in 2011, down from two-fifths in 2002. Bus patronage increased among students from around a quarter of trips to more than half. Staff car usage declined from 70 per cent in 2002 to just over half in 2011, with buses, cycling and walking all increasing in popularity.

Eleanor Schonell Bridge is a powerful example of infrastructure that transforms a city's living patterns by transforming the isochrones of access. We can all think of trains and ferries that do this, but it's rare that buses are allowed to succeed in the same way. Once again, Brisbane has shown that it's not the transit technology that matters to people's location choices. It's where you can get to easily.

the dangers of travel time comparisons

Posted on June 30, 2014 in Access, Boston, Journalism, Language

Revised in response to early comments.

Are you sure you know which of your transportation options is fastest? It depends on how you think about travel time.

A recent Boston Magazine article about the private bus service Bridj featured typical "race" between two transit modes: the MBTA subway and Bridj, which provices luxury buses on fixed routes and schedules running only at times of peak commute demand. The newspaper sent someone by each path at the same time. The outcome of the race is supposed to be decisive:

Why is this not a fair race? Well, it depends on when you start. From the article:

The MBTA passenger arrived last, [sic] even though she had a head start and boarded the train six minutes prior to Bridj’s departure.

Why a six minute headstart? Why not 10 or 20? What headstart would be appropriate? The headstart is your cue that there's something wrong with this methodology.

What's really happening here is that a service that is available all the time — the subway — is being compared to one that's only available at a few special times — Bridj's specialized commuter buses. Any "travel time race," with any headstart, is going to miss the real point of this comparison.

The notion of travel time seems so self-explanatory that most people miss how deeply misleading it is in discussing transit. The imagined user is someone who happens to be going at the ideal moment for the preferred mode to succeed. We talk about travel time this way because it's how motorists, cyclists, and pedestrians experience it: as something that begins at the moment you want to go.

But that's not how transit travel time works, so the comparision implied by the term "transit travel time" is often a false one.

When I teach transit planning and rhetoric, I encourage people to think of a weighted sense of travel time that includes average wait time, or more generally the difference between when you wanted to go and when you went. A bus that's 10 minutes faster is of no use if gets you somewhere 30 minutes before you needed to be there [an 8:00 AM class or meeting, for example] because that's the only time it ran.

Purveyors of low-frequency transit services, such as classical North American commuter rail, do this as well, bragging about how fast you can get from A to B without mentioning that this travel time is available only once a day.

Unless you are sure that you will absolutely always travel at the same time each day, transit travel time figures have to be viewed with skepticism. Whenever you hear about travel time, ask about frequency!

race, racism, and transit planning

Posted on June 25, 2014 in Journalism, Los Angeles, Philosophy

I should not have taken the phone call from LA Weekly. As soon as the reporter said that he wanted to probe "why so few white people ride transit in LA", I should have said no, I will not give any more oxygen to the divisive and pointless conversation that the question is trying to encourage. I had already given the factual answer to that question in my article on "bus stigma" in the Atlantic Citylab, and I should have simply referred the reporter, Chris Walker, there.

Still, there's nothing wrong with the LA Weekly article:

[Jarrett] Walker tells L.A. Weekly:
"There is no reason to believe that Angelenos are irrational about their transportation choices. … I believe a transportation system is reflective of its usefulness. The focus should be on making a more useful system. Do that, and [increased] diversity will be a side effect."
Walker argues that the way to get bigger ridership more reflective of Los Angeles is to increase density along L.A.'s transit lines: add special transit lanes for buses (as the city is currently creating on Wilshire Boulevard) and push for transit-oriented developments (TODs) that feature high-density buildings filled with offices and housing near the major transit routes.

But of course, this was too much for Breitbart News:

According to Jarrett Walker, a designer of transportation systems for a number of big cities, the Los Angeles bus system is designed in a way that offers better service to non-white Angelenos. No one uses the word racism, but the dog whistles in this clinical explanation will chill your spine:
But Jarrett Walker, who has designed transportation systems in multiple cities, says stigma and social standing are not what's keeping L.A.'s white folks in their cars.
In a blog post, he points out that white residents are more likely to live in low-density areas where bus service is not common or practical. Meanwhile, the population of the area served by Metro is well over 70 percent people of color, "which means that the number of white bus riders is not far off what we should expect."
What say we just stop with the word games, Los Angeles.
" And fancy language like "the number of white bus riders is not far off what we should expect" is just another way of screaming "honky."

What can one say? Well, this:

This is transit planning consultant Jarrett Walker, author of the book Human Transit and the blog humantransit.org. The author of this post clearly knows nothing about my work, though he could have looked me up easily enough, and like many race-obsessed folks he seems to know nothing about the law of supply and demand, or the nature of how organizations succeed.
If anyone wants to understand my actual views on this matter, see the original article of mine: http://www.citylab.com/commute…
Like any organization that seeks any kind of success, including every private business, transit in LA tries to respond to the demand for its product. It does this by focusing on areas where the nature of development makes it easy for transit to succeed. It's a mathematical fact that transit is more useful in places where density is high, the local street network is well-connected, and where walking is easy. If white people in LA are more likely to live in areas that are not like this, transit is not being racist in not serving them.
You know what I love about LA? It's way less obsessed with race than its media is. I suspect most Angelenos would never have asked how many white people ride the bus, because it's not an interesting question. As a white person I couldn't care less, and most of the white people I know couldn't care less. LA's prosperity arises from people working together, and getting where they're going together. Racial resentments get in the way of that.
Conservatives need to chose between their commitment to ethnic resentments and their commitment to prosperity. In an age of global collaboration, you can't have both.

I can now imagine a horde of commenters saying: "You're giving the merchants of hatred too much attention, Jarrett. Breitbart News deserves to be ignored." Yes, they do, but when ethnic hatemongering gets as much attention as Breitbart News does, there has to be a response on the record, and now there is.

Transitmix: a new tool for armchair transit planners (and pros too?)

Posted on June 19, 2014 in Maps, Technophilia

Another interesting web transit app, this time from a group of Code for America developers:

Transitmix is a sketching tool for transit planners (both professional and armchair) to quickly design routes and share with the public.

Transitmix is simple way to think about transit in terms of bus requirements and real costs. Basically, the user draws a route on a map and plugs in span and frequency. The app then calculates a vehicle requirement and cost in both hours and dollars, factoring in an adjustable layover ratio, average speed and dollar cost per service hour.

Transitmix is very similar to (though much simpler and prettier) the sort of cost estimation methods used in transit design processes , and as it stands is a fun sandbox to think about transit in your city. It's still very much a beta, but the prospects are intriguing.

Its clear that the developers of Transitmix see it as much more than a curiosity. They've actively sought feedback from people in the industry, and are working hard to build an app that could one day replace some of the tedious documentation work of network design with an interactive, visually attractive interface. Apparently functions like summary tables, GIS file exports, and the ability to save multiple iterations of one design are all in the works.

I can imagine all sorts of possibilities for a tool like this, particularly if secondary data sources were incorporated. How about a public or stakeholder involvement process that would actually give people a way to view demographic and ridership data and make real, financially constrained transit choices with a familiar, modern toolset? Or an update to our transit network design courses, where participants are given the same information for a fictional city and asked to design a transit network from the ground up? It's great to see transit concepts picked up by a talented group from an organization as reputable as Code for America. A project worth keeping an eye on!

for the right transit planner, a dream job in new zealand!

Posted on June 16, 2014 in Auckland, Jobs

Are you a professional transit planner with 3+ years experience and a commitment to breaking through old paradigms and raising the standards of the profession? If so, my New Zealand colleagues at MRCagney may be looking for you. They are open to hiring from worldwide, so if you've ever dreamed of living in New Zealand, this may be your chance. Here's the listing.

I have a keen interest in this hire, because I'll probably be working with this person!

MRCagney is small and focused sustainable transport firm with offices in Brisbane, Sydney, Melbourne, Auckland, and Singapore. Built around a group of former transit agency executives, it now does a range of work but is closely associated with BRT, bus network design, and public transit management, with many projects across Australia, New Zealand, Southeast Asia, and the Middle East.

I worked for them fulltime for five years when I was based in Sydney (2006-2011), and I'm still on their payroll part time, helping out with the occasional network design study. In 2012, for example, I worked with them on a redesign of Auckland's bus network, which is being rolled out over the next few years, and we did a similar project in Darwin earlier this year. MRCagney is really the Australia-NZ firm for cutting-edge transit planning, which is why I stay involved with their work as much as I can. I like to think I've had some influence on MRCagney's transit planning values, so if you like what I've written on public transit, and have your own ideas about how to put these ideas into practice, that's probably an advantage!

Please pass this on to other professionals who might be ready for an adventure Down Under. It's an exciting time to be a transit planner in that part of the world.

climate change made simple, by xkcd

Posted on June 14, 2014 in Amusing

If all infographics were as wise as xkcd's, I'd be a fan of the genre.

So why are so many infographics uninspiring? Xkcd has answered that question too!

visualizing transit: subway operations made beautiful

Posted on June 12, 2014 in Boston, Maps, Simulation

Grad students Mike Barry and Brian Card have produced an impressive new set of interactive visualizations of Boston's subway system. It's worth having a look for yourself here; much is lost when these are reduced to a screenshot. They've looked at key transit metrics like travel time, passenger volume, vehicle delay, and station congestion among other topics, all drawn from MBTA's open realtime data, in a style inspired by the content-first approach of design guru Edward Tufte.

The image below is an example, showing the time of point-to-point trips of individual trains through the day. In this chart, the steeper the slope of the line, the longer the trip took. Scrolling through the day, the effect of the peak periods becomes apparent as the quantity and steepness of lines increases.

Another example of the type of work skilled information designers can produce when public agencies make their data available.

indianapolis: a comprehensive transit plan

Posted on June 11, 2014 in Indianapolis, Strategic Transit Planning

I'm just home from Indianapolis, where our firm is beginning work on something called a Comprehensive Operational Analysis (COA) update. The project is shaping up to be an important step in the transit vision for the city.

Many parts of Indianapolis are seeing a remarkable revitalization. Dense housing is growing fast in and around the walkable downtown core, galvanized by public works like the Cultural Trail and a strong base of downtown parks, monuments, state government, universities, and cultural institutions. There are even canals lined with housing, much like the Dutch might build.

Many neighborhoods are also vibrant and growing. The northern suburbs include Carmel, famous not just as the "Roundabout Capital of the US" but also for a very strong walkable downtown. Carmel is the sort of massive suburban transformation that is common in the west coast and northeast but still unusual — in its sheer scale — in midwest metros of Indy's size. The critical mass around walkable urban development is clearly developing fast in and around Indy, making it an important city to watch especially for its midwestern peers.

Sometime in the next couple of years, voters will be asked whether they want to make a commitment to improved transit service. That vision, called IndyConnect, includes a series of Bus Rapid Transit corridors but not much detail on how the total network would work. Our study (for the regional planning agency, Indianapolis MPO, as well as the transit agency IndyGo) will help build a clear and costed set of scenarios for how the total transit network could improve, extending the benefits of the rapid transit element well beyond the specific corridors it serves and telling a story about benefits to the entire metro area. (We also have a practical short term task, which is to figure out how to rearrange bus routes downtown to work with a new transit center opening next year.)

There will be plenty of opportunities for public comment over the next six months as the planning process proceeds. We look forward to lots of great conversations about this exciting and fast-changing city.

Photo: Chris Hamby

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