Author Archive | Jarrett

solidarity with frozen transit staffs

Posted on January 6, 2014 in Toronto

A deep cold snap is affecting North America east of the Rockies today and/or tomorrow, with many cities plunging toward near-historic lows. It's been an unusual winter all around, including an epic ice storm in Toronto.

As a gesture of solidarity and appreciation toward all the heroic work that's going into keeping transit running today, I thought I'd pass on this photo taken last week by Twitter user @madhava. It's a view from Toronto's CN Tower out over the harbor to Toronto Island.

The narrow sliver of clear water is where the hard-working Toronto Island Ferry is carefully clearing a channel so that it can resume service. This photo has everything: The molecular stillness that is the definition of cold, the hugeness of the city, and the tiny but heroic the acts of diligence and problem solving by people who's job is to restore your freedom to get around.

Stay warm everyone, and if you see a transit staffer working hard against the elements, thank them.

word wars: urbanism, urban

Posted on January 3, 2014 in Language

The Atlantic Cities staff have done a nice year-end piece on Ten Urbanist Buzzwords to Rethink in 2014. In the next few days I'll do quick posts on them all.

Amusingly, the Atlantic's title for its Ten Urbanist Buzzwords to Rethink in 2014 uses one of the ten words it's questioning, a good sign of how hard buzzwords are to unwind. But they took on that problem as #1:

Urbanism: At first glance, this word might seem utilitarian: urban is a perfectly fine word, and-ism, meaning a "distinctive practice, system, or philosophy, typically a political ideology or an artistic movement," a frequently helpful English language suffix. But this particular combination never fails to makes me cringe when I hear it spoken aloud. Not only does it imply that there exists some universally accepted ideology of the best way to construct, organize, and manage any given urban area, it's frequently misapplied as a term for the study of urban issues (shouldn't that be urbanology?) or the basic interaction of people and things within an urban environment. Deploying this word should be undertaken with extreme caution, and always with the understanding that it almost never carries real meaning. -Sommer Mathis

Like the Atlantic Cities crowd, I use urbanist routinely to mean "people who care about sustainable cities and the livability of dense cities in particular. " I haven't found another good word for this, and on reflection, I think urbanism deserves a vigorous defense.

Here are three questions to ask about a word, if you're suspicious of it:

Is it trying too hard to please me? (Or: Is it trying to sell me something?)
Does it say what it means?
Is it easily misunderstood? (Ask especially, "what opposites does it suggest?")

Sometimes we have no choice but to use a word that fails on some of these points, but if we want to help people think, we should resist those that fail on most or all (see "Smart Growth".)

As Mathis concedes, Urbanism seems to approximate its meaning fairly well, and it seems to be referring more than selling or flattering us. What's more, it's a word worth fighting for because urban is a word with fighting for, and the fight is on between two definitions of that word:

As including the suburbs, i.e. "the opposite of rural." This meaning shows up in the term urban area and in numerous social-science and statistical categories. It's also implied by the term urban sprawl. This meaning, I will suggest, is not helpful and a source of confusion. It could even be called hegemonic or imperialist in a sense I'll outline below.
As distinct from suburban, as well as from rural. This sense of urban refers to the generally pre-war dense and walkable parts of cities. Urbanism, to the extent it's about both promoting those places and fostering similar new places, tracks this meaning, and needs to insist on this meaning.¹The history of the word suburban — whose Latin roots imply separation from the urban — is also on the side of this meaning.

Why be dogmatic on this point? Does a dull bureaucratic term like urban area really constitute threat to the thriving walkable inner cities? Yes, for this reason: It prevents people who care about dense, gridded, walkable, usually pre-war parts of big cities from saying what they mean. It prevents me, in many reports, from saying urban and forces me to find ways to say "dense, gridded, walkable, usually pre-war parts of big cities" over and over.

This is not a two-way street. Insisting on the second meaning does not make it impossible to discuss the first, "urban area" meaning. There is still a perfectly good word for that: metropolitan, metro area, etc.. Talk about metro areas, metro area mobility, and there's no problem.

As anyone who's explored the language dimension of civil rights history can tell you, dominant cultures routinely co-opt and corrupt the words that the minority needs to think about itself and its situation.

Not suprisingly, the Texas Transportation Institute, whose "Urban Mobility Report" is a study of inconvenience to motorists, uses urban in the first, imperialist sense: as referring to an entire metro area and denying us the language to talk about dense and walkable areas as something different from suburbs. But again, if we concede that meaning, what word is left to mean "dense, gridded, walkable, usually pre-war parts of cities"?

City, as you've noticed, experiences similar tension, as any patch of development, at any density, can decide to call itself a city. Ultimately, it's the same battle, because in practical language urban has become the adjectival form of the noun city. So it is the same struggle.

That's why I like urbanist. It's not just saying what it means, it's helping to fight for the word urban, without which people who care about walkable cities simply can't talk about them, and be understood.

¹African-American uses of the word urban, as in "urban music" and "National Urban League," also deserve credit for holding this original sense of urban. There are likely other threads I'm not thinking of.

resolution: find more dimensions

Posted on January 1, 2014 in Meditations

Here's a new year's resolution that would help everyone in transit and sustainable urbanism.

Now and then, I will step outside of the binarisms that energize me.

Or perhaps more simply,

I will find and explore more dimensions.

This is not vague spiritualist babble. Here's what I mean.

A binary conflict (or binarism, or dualism) is simply a pair of opposites that engender strong feels of attraction or repulsion toward one end or the other: Capitalism vs socialism. Competitive vs collaborative. The underclass vs the overlords. Labor vs. management. Car-centered thinking vs. sustainable transport options. Buses vs. trains.

If you have a strong attraction to one of these poles over the other, then whatever the conflict is, it's really "us vs them". And that engenders excitement. If the "us vs them" binarism did not fundamentally animate us to action and joy and devotion, nobody would care about sports.

Here's why I'm thinking about this:

Untitled

This blog normally putters along around 2000 pageviews per day, more when I post more often, lower in the holidays. Now and then, though, I take on some piece of journalism that expresses ignorance about the whole project of creating viable alternatives to the private car. I did that on December 29, making an example of Brian Lee Crowley's anti-transit rant, and of the Globe and Mail for publishing it without fact-checking and without marking it as opinion.

(As I wrote that last sentence, my pulse went up a bit. That's part of my point. Bear with me.)

I didn't promote this post more than any other, but Twitter exploded with retweets and and favoriting, driving traffic to be blog. Troops briefly rallied to my side. Why? I had stepped into a known position in an already-mapped binary conflict between people who believe in sustainable transportation options and people who advocate car-centered thinking.¹ So it was easy. It drove traffic. It was fun watching all that approval pile up.

But remember when George W. Bush said "you're either with us or you're with the terrorists"? If you think of that spatially, he was saying: "the universe consists of only one dimension, and along that dimension there are two poles with nothing in the middle." These are the two foundational assertions of the polarizer who invests in binary conflict as a way of life:

All meaningful points of view are on the line between A and B.

… and then, as it heats up …

There is not even a spectrum of options between A and B. There are only the extremes.

Polarization is both claustrophobic and deafening. If you're stuck in the binarism of "sustainable transport vs car-dependence" to the point that you can't hear someone who's thinking "liberty vs control," you're trapped. It's no better than being stuck in "labor vs management" or "poor vs rich". Critical thinking, the kind that makes us smarter, is multi-dimensional. It may try on a binarism, see how it works, even advocate it as practically useful for certain purposes. But it knows how to consider other binarisms, try them on, and it knows that they're all approximations of what really matters.

The catch, of course, is that action requires some loss of awareness.

Watch a cat. Cats have an awake and scanning state where they are aware of a three dimensional environment. But then they get interested in something: food, prey. As the cat's pulse rises, its focus narrows, and at the end, when it's ready to pounce, its world is virtually one-dimensional and polarized: me and the thing I want.

Briefly losing awareness of multiple dimensions seems almost inseparable from action. (I explored this idea more here, when I argued that considers every possible perspective in detail is never an action plan.)

Binary conflict rallies the troops. Binary conflict raises hell. But it's the opposite of critical thinking; it's one-dimensional, claustrophobic. There's nothing wrong with it, but we have to be able to move back and forth between binary conflict and broader, more open thinking. Ultimately, we have to be able to choose to do it, consciously.

In the moments between the bouts of us vs. them conflict, step into another dimension. It's still hard for me too, so it's my resolution for 2014. Feel free to join me.

¹although the absence of widely accepted terms for either of these positions suggests a certain space inside the binarism, perhaps other dimensions waiting to be released. You could also argue that my specific suggestions in that post were in the spirit of this one, though I'm not sure that's why it was so popular.

my letter to the globe and mail (update 1)

Posted on December 30, 2013 in Advocacy, Congestion Pricing, Journalism

Sent just now to the Globe and Mail Public Editor, Sylvia Stead. Beneath this I will post any reply I receive.

Ms Stead

Thank you so much for your followup re the Crowley article [see yesterday's post, and Ms Stead's comment at the end]. As a professional consultant and author on public transit, I have one more thought.

The interesting journalistic question is "What degree of rhetorical exaggeration crosses a line into explicit falsehood, and requires a correction even for an opinion piece?" I assume you'd agree that opinion pieces must still state accurate facts. The New York Times runs corrections to its opinion pieces and columnists all the time, at least in its online version.

The issue is clearest in this paragraph of Crowley, which I believe warrants a correction:

Portland, Ore., has pursued road-skeptical policies similar to many major Canadian cities. The result is markedly worsened commuting times. According to the TTI, over the past 30 years Portland has gone from having the 47th worst congestion in the U.S. to the sixth worst.

The second sentence not only untrue but the opposite of the truth. Portland has among the best commuting times in the US. As the third sentence reveals, when Crowley talks about "commuting times" he means "motorists' commuting times". Portland's commuting times are relatively fast not just because lots of people walk, cycle, or take transit. They're faster because people here tend to live closer to their jobs, the result of decades of careful land use planning that began with Oregon's 1972 laws limiting horizontal sprawl.

Crowley's omission of that crucial word "motorists'" not only makes the sentence false, it reveals that a large part of the population simply does not exist to him. People who do not commute by car do not count as commuters at all in this calculation.

Does denying the existence of a large group of readers constitute a reasonable distortion for an opinion column? Or is it just a falsehood?

(You can find my rebuttal of Crowley here.)

Regards, Jarrett Walker

UPDATE 1: Globe and Mail's Sylvia Stead replies:

Yes thank you Mr. Walker. An opinion piece must be based on the facts so that a reader can come up with his/her own opinion. I will look into the points below and get back to you later this week.

More when I have it.

a glimpse into the road lobby’s echo chamber, and how to respond

Posted on December 29, 2013 in Advocacy, Congestion Pricing, Journalism, Portland, Vancouver

Canada's leading newspaper has published an anti-transit rant, by Brian Lee Crowley of the "non-partisan" MacDonald-Laurier Institute. It's based on the work of the Texas Transportation Institute, a leading source of studies that view cities from behind the wheel of a single-occupant car. It's filtered via Wendell Cox, who's made a career of car-centered advocacy.

I analyzed TTI's work more patiently here, so I'll cut to the chase now. TTI believes that traffic congestion is a valid measure of people's ability to access the resources of their city. They do not measure actual travel times for all people, or the liberty and economic opportunity that a good urban transporation system offers. They apply these things as factors to a degree, but their bottom line is road congestion.

Specifically, their metric is the difference in travel times, by car, between travel time on congested roads and the same roads in a free-flow condition. In other words, their baseline utopian condition is abundant free-flowing roads at all times of day. (That condition is actually an economic impossibility in a city above a certain size with a healthy economy and no road pricing.)

Once you insist on measuring congestion, and against that fantasy baseline, you can get absolutely everything backwards.

Portland, Ore., has pursued road-skeptical policies similar to many major Canadian cities. The result is markedly worsened commuting times. According to the TTI, over the past 30 years Portland has gone from having the 47th worst congestion in the U.S. to the sixth worst.

"Markedly worse commuting times" is false. If you count everybody's commuting time, Portland is ahead of most US metros. As the next sentence reveals, it is only congestion that is worse. Yes, like all dense cities, Portland has exactly as much congestion as it makes room for, but it has low overall commute times, mostly because its carefully mixed density allows many people to commute very short distances. Remember, if you are measuring car congestion, Portland's transit riders and cyclists and the many people who can walk to work simply do not exist. Crowley disses "congested" Vancouver for the same reason, even though Vancouver is the only Canadian metro where the long-term trend is toward shorter commute times, due to continued consolidation of housing and business around transit.

So how should an activist respond to this kind of talk from the asphalt-and-petroleum echo chamber?

Everyone should know how to respond to articles like this, because we'll keep seeing them. The comments on the article ("Wendell Cox is an idiot") are not encouraging. Wendell Cox is not an idiot. He is part of a reactionary process that accompanies every revolution, one that we'll hear more from. He's a smart man who knows exactly what he's doing.

Take time to understand the point of view. Many people's brains are so fused with their cars that to them, congestion really is the same thing as urban mobility or urban liberty. To them, the TTI is right.

So first you have to object by shining light on that premise. TTI, and by extension Canada's leading newspaper, believes that certain people do not exist or do not matter — namely everyone who already travels by transit, bike, or foot, and everyone who can imagine choosing not to drive in the face of real and attractive choices.

But then, avoid the trap of casting these excluded people as an underclass. Too many activists fall into that Marxist reading, and issue a call to arms on behalf of "ordinary people." They get through to people who already agree with them, but to the dominant business culture they look like an easily-dismissed-or-manipulated rabble. Instead, read Edward Glaeser or Bruce Katz and understand that people who are investing in low-car "congested" cities are the leaders of the new information economy.

A good retort to road-lobby claims that life is really better in Houston than in Vancouver is to check the cost of comparable housing. If it were has hard to get around in Vancouver as TTI suggests, people wouldn't pay a fortune to live there. Transit-rich cities are expensive, in part, because many people there can get around without being stuck in congestion. High costs of living, in turn, are the market telling us to create more places just like that. This is the free-market argument. It is the only one that will break through to the business mind and start conveying that maybe there's something to all this transit-oriented investment.

The TTI will last at least as long as the Tobacco Institute, and it will sound just as scientific in praise of its product-centered world view — in this case, a world in which only motorists count. So you have to question the world view. If an argument is based on a false remise, don't engage the argument, because in doing so you're accepting the premise. Attack the premise.

vancouver: interactive public outreach on network design

Posted on December 27, 2013 in Public Outreach, Vancouver

Here's another example of a transit agency trying to interact with the public in a way that presents people with real choices. It's from TransLink (greater Vancouver) and it deals with the northeastern suburbs of greater Coquitlam. They invite you first to state your priorities about matters of prinicple ("fewer transfers", "service to more places" etc) and then look at some network scenarios that might illustrate those principles. You then get to rank the scenarios, which invites you to notice whether your principles have shifted once you see their consequences. Check it out. And on an ethical note: Play with it, but don't actually submit your views if you don't live or work or travel there!

holiday map immersion

Posted on December 24, 2013 in Chicago, Houston, Maps, Portland

If you're hiding with your laptop in the laundry closet because an ancient family argument has broken out over holiday dinner, it's a great time to geek out on how fast mapping is changing. Go over to Atlantic Cities and explore Emily Badger's great overview of 10 ways that mapping has evolved over the past year.

My favorite: I usually try to be race-blind in my thinking about transit and cities, but I have to admit I was absorbed by Duncan Cable's Dot Map of Everyone in the US, which is color coded by ethnicity. Not really everyone: You can't zoom in to find your personal dot, but it's still a magnificent rendering of how dot-crowding conveys density on a map more naturally than shaded zones. Chicago, for example, displays pie-slices of single-ethnicity neighborhoods (blue is white, red is Asian, green is African-American, orange is Latino/Hispanic), but you can also see where the borders are soft, where they're hard, and where highly mixed areas exist or are emerging:

Houston, where I'm working now, is also made of pie slices, but the colors are more muted, indicating more mixture almost everywhere. Near the center of this image, the greater Montrose and Heights districts are rainbow pointillism. The Asian node in the south is student areas near Texas Medical Center.

And my home town, Portland, with downtown on the far left (as it is), showing the new concentric-circle pattern, as lower income minorities (because of income, rather than race) are forced to settle on the fringes of the old city (top edge and far right) or what we'd now call "inner ring suburbs." The bike-and-transit-friendly city you've seen pictures of is mostly white with small dashes of color. The exception is downtown, which still has a mix of housing types tending to both income extremes, and the continuing black presence in the neighborhoods straight north of downtown even as these gentrify. (As a small child in 1970 I remember seeing a cover of the local free weekly that showed a hand drawn line around this district with the title "Red-lining the Ghetto," about the impossibility of getting loans to buy or improve homes in that area. Now, it's on fire with higher-end redevelopment.)

Of course these are also fascinating simply as density maps. Did you know that Oregon cities have had Urban Growth Boundaries since 1972? The hard edges show around many Oregon cities … Here's the north edge of Portland's western suburbs (the "Silicon Forest"):

For contrast, here's a same-scale image of the north edge of Clark County suburbs, just over the river in Washington:

Washington loses farmland to development much more rapidly than Oregon does. It makes a difference.

In the end, what I love most about these maps is that they're beautiful. As in art, patches of a bright color are beautiful, but so are intense mixtures of color. So I look at these maps and feel good about both single-ethnic communities and mixed-ethnic communities, and my eye enjoys the patterns of density, hard edges here, soft there, even more. These maps take an emotive kind of diversity and render it as serene. The perfect geek-out for serene holidays.

santiago: a low-tech approach to fast exits from a subway station

Posted on December 21, 2013 in Rail Transit

So you're on a crowded subway train on Santiago's Line 4, the dark blue line on this map. You're northbound, approaching the end of the line at Tobalaba station.

Everyone on the crowded train will get off at once. Most customers are changing to an intersecting line 1, which has side platforms on the level above. That, means you can't exit the platform at just any stairwell; each of the two stairwells goes to just one direction of the connecting line.

So customers tend to collide as they exit the train trying to get to the correct stairwell for their preferred direction, creating massive platform congestion that slows people's exit from the train. this increases the dwell times of the train and thus reduces the possible frequency, which in turn only makes the trains even more crowded.

Massive infrastructure solutions were proposed. My friend Juan Carlos Muñoz, a professor of engineering at the Catholic University of Chile, came up with a simpler solution (Spanish with English subtitles):

A gate blocking the platform halfway along it forces people to exit at the door nearest to them, which in turn teaches people to be in the correct part of the train for their preferred connection. People who try to exit the wrong exit are stopped at the staffed gate, and let through last only after the crowd has cleared. These people are irritated, and a few write to their elected officials, but most people just learn how it works, and work with it.

UPDATED: Shouldn't people have figured out anyway what part of the train to be in to be close to their exit? No, becuase in this case, there's an exit at the front end of the platform and another in the middle. Juan-Carlos explains:

There is one set of stairs coinciding with the middle of the train. Let´s call them A.
Only 40% of the passengers in this train wants to take these stairs.
Thus if we were to assign every passenger a position inside the train we would put all these passengers at the back half of the train. Then the front half of the train would be full of passengers taking the stairs at the front end of the station (stairs B).
However, a great place inside the train to take stairs A is in the back of the front half of the train. Indeed every train used to have around 120 (out of a total of around 1500) such passengers taking such a strategic position. You can see them in the video! These are the passengers causing the problem, not only because they cause the counterflow but because they force some passengers wanting to take the B stairs to enter the back half of the train. The gate forces to act otherwise leaving some room for more B passengers into the front half. They can now exit the station much faster.

So this was a "tragedy of the commons" problem. People optimizing for their own outcomes were in conflict with the most efficient way to get everyone out of the station before the next train arrived.

Note how Juan-Carlos refers to the "greatest good." The implication is that we can't let a few people's anger get in the way of solving the problem in a cost-effective way.

should we cut fares or increase service? an advocacy parable

Posted on December 6, 2013 in Advocacy, Portland

A dispute in Portland is bringing to light the age old question of whether fare cuts or service increases are the best way to "improve" transit. Both options improve ridership.

The high-level answer is pretty simple.

If you want transit to be mainly for low-income people who have a low value of time, cut fares, as this is an improvement targeted to benefit only the cost-sensitive. By not improving service, this choice may also lead to an increased "stigma" around transit as it is perceived, with increasing accuracy, as a low-quality experience that is of no relevance to people who have choices.
If you want transit to be useful to a broad spectrum of the population, increase service.

Cutting fares is good for lower-income people, while increasing service is good for almost everyone, including many low-income people.

But it's not as good for some low-income people, and that's the interesting nuance in this particular story.

OPAL, an environmental justice organization that claims to focus on the needs of low-income people, is demanding that Portland's transit agency, Tri-Met, institute a fare cut. The cut is specifically in the form of extending the period for which a cash fare is valid from two to three hours, an interesting issue that the Oregonian's Joseph Rose explores in a good article today. (The headline is offensive, but reporters don't write headlines.)

At the same time, Portland has a throughly inadequate level of midday service, by almost any standard. In the context of cities of Portland's size and age, Tri-Met practically invented the high-frequency grid that enables easy anywhere to anywhere travel in the city, but in 2009 it destroyed that convenience by cutting service to 17-20 minute frequencies. At those frequencies, the connections on which the grid relies are simply too time-wasting. Those cuts correlated with substantial ridership losses at the time.

OPAL's demand for a fare cut costing $2.6 million (about 2% of the agency's revenue) is, mathematically, also a demand that Tri-Met should not restore frequent service. This money (about 80 vehicle-hours of service per day) is more than enough to restore frequent all-day service on several major lines.

The rich irony of this proposal is that OPAL uses those service cuts to justify its proposed fare reduction. In Portland, the basic cash fare purchases a two-hour pass that enables the passenger to transfer one or two times. Because of the frequency cuts, transfers are now taking longer, and a few are taking too long for the two-hour pass. OPAL therefore wants the pass to be good for longer.

So OPAL's position is that because service has been cut, Tri-Met must mitigate the impact on low-income people instead of just fixing the problem.

In particular, OPAL wants a solution that benefits only people who are money-poor but time-rich, a category that tends to include the low-income retired, disabled, and underemployed. You must be both money-poor and time-rich to benefit from a system that reduces fares but wastes more and more of your time due to low frequencies and bad connections.

If, on the other hand, you are money-poor and time-poor — working two jobs and taking a class and rushing to daycare — you will benefit from a good network that saves you time as much as from one that saves you money. But that means you don't have time to go to meetings or be heard. We transit professionals see these busy low-income people on our systems and care about their needs, but we also know that we're not going to hear their voice as much from advocacy organizations, because they just don't have time to get involved.

The same is true, by the way, of the vast working middle class. In the transit business, we get lots of comments the money-poor-but-time-rich, who have time to get involved, and from the wealthy, who can hire others to represent them. We don't hear as much from the middle class or from the money-poor-and-time-poor, even though those groups dominate ridership. But hey, we understand! They're just too busy.

yet more evidence for the decline of driving in the US

Posted on December 4, 2013 in Mobility

Another report from USPIRG on the decline of driving in US cities is out today. Transportation in Transition: A Look at Changing Travel Patterns in America's Biggest Cities combs through secondary data to assess changing mobility patterns. The big picture is clear: in nearly all of America's major cities, less driving is happening, as measured by miles traveled, journey-to-work mode, or share of work done from home.

Some key statistics from the report:

The average American drives 7.6 percent fewer miles today than when per-capita driving
peaked in 2004.
From 2006 to 2011, the average number of miles driven per resident fell in almost three-quarters of America’s largest urbanized areas
The proportion of workers commuting by private vehicle – either alone or in a carpool – declined in 99 out of 100 cities studied
The proportion of residents working from home has increased in 100 out of the 100 largest urbanized areas since 2000.
The proportion of households without cars increased in 84 out of the 100 largest urbanized areas from 2006 to 2011.

A few illlustrative maps:

Of course, the canned response to data of this sort is to attribute it entirely to the 2008 recession and its knock-on effects on personal income and unemployment. USPIRG's analysis seems to refute this idea, finding that unemployment in the 15 areas with the greatest declines in VMT actually increased less from 2006-2011 than in all other cities. The same holds true for declining income and increasing poverty. The bottom line is that in the cities where mobility patterns are changing most intensely, this shift cannot be handwaved away by pointing to the recession.

Previously noted: USPIRG's report on the correlation of the market penetration of mobile communications technology and decline of driving.

by Evan Landman

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