Author Archive | Jarrett

singapore: bbc profiles new frontiers in transit denial

Posted on April 1, 2013 in Demand-Response, Singapore, Technophilia

This just in from the BBC: Technology giant Philips corporation sent some people to the extremely busy Singapore bus system to imagine an alternative to typical fixed-route bus service. The researchers' definition of the problem:

We discussed the benefits and limitations of the fixed-route system – it's clear such a system provided consistency in time and place (to get on and off), and to a certain extent convenience, but not completely. Flexibility is not what a fixed-route and fixed-time bus service system can offer. We have all experienced times when the bus is very empty or extremely packed, which means efficiency is best optimised at the bus-route level, but not individual bus level, since that bus is unable to respond to dynamic demand and traffic situations immediately. We all have all been in situations when there are only a few passengers in the bus and yet, the bus still has to plough through the entire fixed route, picking up no passengers along the way. The motivation was how to optimise the bus service by allowing the passengers and bus drivers to respond immediately to dynamic demand and traffic situations, not unlike a taxi that you can flag anywhere, anytime, and it will take you directly to your destination.

Needless to say, they came up with a massively all-demand-reponsive system identical to the one promoted last year by Gensler Associates, to which I responded (perhaps too colorfully) here. The idea is that now that you have a smartphone, the transit line should twist and turn to meet chase everyone's speciic need and that somehow this will be more efficient. As I said in response to Gensler, there's little to fear from this dystopian vision beause it's mathematically impossible.

In a place as crowded as Singapore, well-designed scheduled fixed routes are not just efficient but liberating. They're efficient on a large scale despite routine under- and overcrowding because they follow straight paths that thousands of people find useful at the same time. They're efficient because people gather at major stops where they board and alight in large numbers that are impossible in any demand-responsive form. Frequent fixed routes are liberating because they're there for you when you need them, just as subways are, so that you don't have to wonder whether some automated system will approve your request for transport.

The all-demand-responsive vision can mean one of two things: (1) large buses that carry large numbers of people on complex variable routes, changing its route in response to every beep of desire from each of 5 million phones, or (2) fleets of very small vehicles each serving a few people on a more direct path. Vision (1) is a hellishly circuitous system to ride any distance on, while (2) is a vision of vastly more wasteful use of urban space, as people who are now carried in a space-efficient way are converted to a space-wasteful one. Vision (2) also requires either driverless technology or extremely cheap labor, which is why it only happens at scale in low-wage developing countries.

No, Singapore has built its success on subways, and is developing fixed, infrastructural bus lines that work more like subways.

Please don't call yourself a transit visionary until you've grappled with the facts and possibilities of transit network design, by reading a book, say, or taking a course!

branding individual routes: too many colors, or the gold standard of legibility?

Posted on March 28, 2013 in Auckland, Branding, Legibility

What might we learn from this bus? (click to enlarge)

Inner Link is one of four Auckland bus lines — all very frequent and designed to be useful for a wide range of trips — that have buses painted specifically for the purpose. The other three are Outer Link (orange), City Link (red), and Northern Express (black). In each case, the paint job is all about making it look easy to hop on. Note that the bus assures you of the maximum fare you'll pay, and that the list of destinations along the top of the bus gives confidence about exactly where this bus will take you. (For an Aucklander, these names are all familiar landmarks, so anyone can mentally string them together into a general sense of route.)

It's important, too, that this is one of Auckland's newer buses. The big, clear windows are important. In fact, if it weren't for the maddening bus wrap, this bus would be entirely transparent, so that you could see the people on board and even make out the city beyond it. This bus arises from European designs that are intentionally gentle on the eye, and whose transparency starts to undermine complaints about a "wall of buses."

When I first saw the branding of these buses in Auckland, I found them irritating. These buses were announcing simple, legible, frequent routes in a way that marketed them effectively enough, but did nothing to convey that they are part of a larger network of services designed to work together. Of course, the reality of today's network in Auckland (unlike the one Auckland Transport has in the works) is that it is a confusing tangle of infrequent and overlapping services that is almost impossible to make clear. [PDF]

In the context of all that chaos, you needed these strong route-level brands like Inner Link to stand out as something useful. And now that we plan to create over 20 bus routes that are as clear and legible as this one, the question arises, should we continue to brand them this way, each one separately, perhaps in a lively diversity of colors from goldenrod to teal?

Compare this to what Los Angeles Metro did, dividing its fleet of 1000+ buses mostly into just two colors, red for Rapid and orange for Local. This has helped everyone see the faster Metro Rapid buses, but how much more might be achieved if you could paint a bus with both icons and information that would celebrate its role as, say, the Venice Blvd. Rapid?

The marketing and legibility question, of course is: Would the diversity of looks (perhaps in the context of shared design elements that mean "Rapid") make the system look simpler or more complicated? In Los Angeles I'm not sure. In Auckland, where the system as a whole could hardly look more complicated than it does today, the call seems easier.

The issue for operations is the risk of fleet diversity. In almost any transit agency, the operations folks will tell you they need maximum flexibility to deploy any bus on any route. In some big-city agencies I've worked with, operating bases ("depots" in British) store buses in long stacks, where buses can be sent out only in the sequence that they came in the previous night. Every new factor of fleet specialization becomes a new threat to getting the right bus on the right route every morning — an admittedly heroic effort if you've toured some of the grimmer, overcrowded facilities involved.

So a separate color for every route would be a non-starter in most of North America. Yet if we designed operating bases so that you could access any bus, or even could just have much shorter stacks, it's not obviously outrageous. For each route, you'd paint enough buses to run just 80-100% of the midday fleet requirement. You'd never have more painted buses than you could use. You'd also have a supply of generic buses that could be added to any route, either as replacements for buses in the shop or as supplemental peak service. And you'd only do this for routes with high all-day frequency seven days a week and relatively little additional service added at peaks.

In certain contexts — especially in a case like Auckland where the whole city must learn a new story about the usefulness of buses — it might make sense. Even if we end up with goldenrod and teal.

should u.s. federal transit spending aim to redistribute wealth? (guest post by alexis grant)

Posted on March 26, 2013 in US Federal Policy

Alexis Grant holds an M. Sc in Speech and Language Processing from the University of Edinburgh and is an active transportation advocate in Portland, Oregon. She enjoys shaping and interpreting complex systems for the benefit of their users and riding her bike around Portland. You can find her on Twitter @lyspeth.

Should the goal of US Federal transit spending be
the redistribution of wealth?

The Transport Politic’s Yonah Freemark recently examined data from the 65 largest American metropolitan areas to
provide a deeper look at his assertion that local funding for transit
operations tends to depend on local income rather than on ‘need’, magnifying
“seriously inequitable outcomes”:

The
data demonstrate that increasing local and state transit operations spending is
closely correlated with metro area median household income.
This is not the case for federal aid, as minimal as it is. In addition, though
cities and states with more progressive electoral tendencies appear to be able
to increase local funding for transit operations, that contribution may be
significantly limited by the incomes of local inhabitants.

Freemark
argues that this is problematic: “Since public transportation is a vital social
service, this has the perverse impact of providing the least support to the
regions that likely need it most."

When I
first read this line, I paused over “vital social service”, wondering whether
he meant “vital public service”, but the article as well as his prior coverage of
the topic makes
clear that he meant just what he said: here, transit is being depicted as a
social service provided to people who can’t afford other ways of getting
mobility:

If
public transportation is an essential social service — almost as important to
our society as Medicare or Medicaid or Social Security (that is what we think,
right?) — then how is it fair for the people who live in the poorest
metropolitan areas to suffer from inadequate transportation services?

Freemark
seems to be advocating here for addressing a perceived inequity that relates to
only one of the two common goals of transit: what Jarrett Walker calls the
Coverage Goal (Human Transit, Chapter 10).

The
Coverage Goal reflects the “social service objective” that Freemark is
appealing to, “meeting the needs of people who are especially reliant on
transit”, in this case primarily due to lack of wealth, or poverty. When aiming
for high coverage, agencies provide service broadly, including to those who may
be difficult to serve because of poor connectivity or low density but also need the service more.

The other
major goal, the Ridership Goal, reflects the desire to provide efficient and
effective service by serving the most people at the least cost. Services
oriented to the Ridership Goal focus on important
destinations and corridors and may separate services or stops by larger distances to speed travel
and avoid overspending on overlapping service.

While
Walker discusses the Ridership-Coverage tradeoff mostly in the context of local
decision-making, the same idea can be applied to state or federal funding. Federal funding can pursue an ideal of maximum
ridership; that would mean lots of money for big cities, where ridership
potential is high, and none for Wyoming.
Or, it can focus on spreading out the resource, pursuing a Coverage
goal, based either on a political ideal of equity or, as Freemark proposes, an
explicitly redistributive view that spends more in poorer communities.

Freemark
positions his work in contrast to academics and commentators profiled by Eric Jaffe
at The Atlantic,
who argue “too many projects…are poorly designed or executed, in part because
of federal sway”. He pictures the redistributive power of the federal
government as a positive force necessary to overcome the inability of some
local governments to raise the amount of funds their areas ‘need’ to meet their
presumed Coverage goals. Yet his vision of how this would make for “better
projects” only asserts that it would be more fair.

Cities,
left to their own devices, will restrict funding on transit operations based on
the income of their inhabitants, not based on need. It is not rational that the
state and local funding for transit in San Jose is more than six times higher
than that in Fresno, just 150 miles apart, much because of the latter’s
significantly lower household incomes and more Republican voting tendencies.
Fresno, after all, has more than double the poverty rate of San Jose and thus
has a significant transit-dependent population that is not being appropriately
served….
To
dismiss the federal government’s role is to ignore its important redistributive
powers — its ability to transfer tax revenues from wealthier regions to poorer
ones to help contribute to a more just society.

Coverage
and equity goals tend to be in tension
with ridership and mode-share goals, and by focusing solely on the coverage side of the
equation, Freemark provides an incomplete picture of what the role of federal
funding could or should be. Do all communities have the same goals for their
transit systems, and do they want to serve the same populations? Should they?
An equally good argument can be made that limited federal dollars should be
spent on providing service that reaches the most people for the least amount of
money. That, too, could be called fair.

In his
transit planning outreach, Walker “emphasize[s] how the geography of transit
generates choices among competing values, which is why citizens and their
elected officials ultimately need to make the decision.” What kind of transit
to fund, and how much money to devote to it, is not merely a question of the
availability of money, but also a value judgment, one that the local area has
to make for itself. A more conservative community’s funding choices may be in
part a reflection of their values, just as their voting behavior is.

Federal
funding for transit operations could provide a valuable resource for local
governments that would like to do more, but can’t afford to. But Federal funding also relies on evidence
of local financial support or “match.” Local
government must decide whether it would like to fund additional transit, and if
so, what the goal of that transit should be. In discussing the role of federal
funding, no one is well served by assuming all cities would make that decision
with the same goals in mind.

sim city will continue to mislead on transit

Posted on March 22, 2013 in Simulation

Ian Miles Cheong updates us on the struggles of Electronic Arts to get the new SimCity right. But it sounds like EA is committed to the original SimCity idea that the user can place stations and pieces of track, but the program will decide the paths that the buses and trains follow. And it doesn't decide very well. Key quote from EA's designer Guillaume Pierre:

1. If there are 300 Sims waiting for the streetcar on the other side of the loop for example, they may have to wait a long time for the vehicles to make their way. To remedy this problem, we’re looking into make crowded stops “high priority pick-up” destinations that transit vehicles will go to first.
2. Another problem is that, well, all the vehicles that are in the same area and want to go to the same destination type will all follow the same path, resulting in clumping and general traffic problems. We’re looking into various ways to improve the situation so traffic will spread out better.

If this all sounds oddly like demand-responsive service, well, that's more or less the model of fixed route service — even subways — that EA is using.

I criticized Sim City (original and version 4) long ago, but my understanding that EA's priority continues to be "immersiveness" for the gamer, not any relationship to reality. (Yes, I'm aware this argument is like the argument about whether movies about science and history should be accurate or at least flag their biases — and given their influence I personally wish they did.) I look forward to what the new Cities in Motion 2, expected soon, comes up with.

welcome, new zealand herald readers

Posted on March 21, 2013 in General

If you've arrived from the link in today's article in the New Zealand Herald, welcome! The best introduction to my own thinking on the Auckland network redesign, with remarkable maps, is here. Meanwhile, the post below is a big-picture argument about the set of choices that the redesign proposes, and the relationships among them …

“Abundant Access”: a map of a community’s transit choices, and a possible goal of transit

Posted on March 10, 2013 in Access, Basics, Modeling

In my book Human Transit, I argued that the underlying geometry of transit requires communities to make a series of choices, each of which is a tradeoff between two things that are popular. I argued that these hard choices are appropriate assignments for elected boards, because there is no technical ground for making one choice or the other. What you choose should depend on what your community wants transit to do. Examples of these choices include the following: Continue Reading →

are free fares realistic? it depends on the alternatives

Posted on February 28, 2013 in Fares, Funding

In response to my post on Tallinn, Estonia's experiment in free transit for all city residents, a freelance reporter asked me:

The idea I'm most interested in exploring from your post is your proposal that smart farecard systems can be used to easily subsidize fares and "opening up a huge range of subsidy possibilities for any entity that sees an advantage in doing so." I'd like to get more of a sense of what you mean by that and whether this is possible even in today's austerity-obsessed environment.

What I mean is that as long as the transit agency sets a price for an unlimited ride pass — with appropriate discounts for bulk purchasers — anyone can buy those passes for anyone. Universities can buy them for their students, companies for their employees, and as in Tallinn, cities can even buy them for their citizens. Any other entity can also buy them for any group of people it cares about, yielding possibilities that we can barely envision now.

Is this realistic in an age of austerity? It depends on what the alternatives are. The alternatives may include building wildly expensive parking, or losing out in a competition for the best people.

Urban universities with constrained sites often subsidize transit because without it they would need unmanageable amounts of parking. One common reason that universities get into transit subsidies is that they want to build on their surface parking lots, and the cost of structured parking (and its impacts) turns out to be higher than the cost of buying transit passes for many years. So it can be a logical business decision.

We're used to the idea that companies leave the cost of commuting to their employees, but companies that are competing for the best talent don't have that luxury. Witness the huge fleets of shuttles that ferry employees to Silicon Valley giants like Google and Apple from as far away as San Francisco. Companies that compete for talent can find transit subsidies to be a reasonable part of a total compensation package. And of course, corporate campuses can have expansion crises much like those of universities, where they'd like to build on their parking lots and look for alternatives to expensive structured parking.

City governments are the hardest to imagine financing free fares in the US, if only because of how broke most of them are. But if it goes well in Tallinn the idea will spread. One problem in much of America, and notably in California, is that residents are net consumers of government services while employers are net subsidizers of them; this motivates cities to minimize their populations and maximize their employment. (This explains many odd shapes of city boundaries that seek to include jobs but exclude residents.). In those distorted tax environments, cities don't want people to live there so much as to work there, so subsidies to residents don't make much sense. But of course residents are the voters, and wealthy cities that value green credentials may sometimes see merit. And of course cities aldo benefit if it can reduce their parking requirements, which may increasingly be the nexus that makes fare subsidies make sense.

Remember, though, that massive fare subsidies don't just require the replacement revenue for the fares but also the revenue needed to add service to handle the crowding that the free fares will generate. I will be interested to see how this plays out in Tallinn. This has been the barrier to free transit in big cities that have studied it, and the main reason that only small towns — especially university towns — have made large scale fare subsidies work.

oklahoma city: 450+ turn out to talk about transit

Posted on February 27, 2013 in Oklahoma City

In the two years that I've been on the public lecture circuit, I've talked with audiences in major cities all over North America. Usually, these have been public events, well-promoted through both social and conventional media. I've done such events in big transit-friendly cities like Washington DC, San Francisco, Seattle, and Vancouver, places where you'd expect transit to be a popular topic.

But the biggest crowd I've ever seen was yesterday, in Oklahoma City. At least 450 people (based on sign in sheets) turned out to hear both my keynote speech and some constructive fire and brimstone from City Councilor (Dr.) Ed Shadid.

Oklahoma City has some of the worst figures in America for public health outcomes such as obesity. Possibly related, it also appears to have the lowest level of transit service. Here's how it stacks up with its nearby neighbors:

These are among the lowest levels of service I've found in the US, and far lower than what you'd expect in other countries. Oklahoma in general is way behind its equally conservative neighbors Kansas, Arkansas and Texas. In Oklahoma City, these numbers translate into a small collection of routes mostly running every 60-90 minutes, all running to a single hub downtown, and designed primarily for coverage rather than ridership. Given such minimal service, it's not surprising that the city also ranks dead last in transit ridership among US metro areas.

The city is currently in the midst of trying to develop a downtown streetcar, but there's definitely some tension between how much should be invested in that when investment in the bus system is so low.

I was invited to Oklahoma City by City Councillor (Dr.) Ed Shadid, who is taking a high profile on transit issues. During my visit I ran a workshop for some key stakeholders — similar in format to my interactive Network Design course but using the city's geography — where we explored the streetcar alignment but where most interest was in how the bus system might evolve. I also had a chance to have great 1-1 conversations with a number of civic leaders on the issue.

At the public event last night, Shadid surprised many (including me) by openly challenging the streetcar as a near-term priority and emphasizing the need to improve the bus system. My own presentation (video soon I hope) steered away from the technology wars by focusing, as I usually do, on the underlying choices that the community will need to think about regardless of the technology used.

Oklahoma City faces some tough choices about transit. Even as the streetcar appears inevitable to many, a bus network study is underway to show the benefits of investing in the basic bus system. I hope my workshops helped stakeholders and activists think about the problem from several points of view, so that they feel more confident in expressing their own values.

Thanks to everyone I met in OKC! It was a great trip! And thanks especially for cancelling the blizzard!

what if a city wants more transit than its neighbors, but they’re all in one transit agency?

Posted on February 25, 2013 in Funding

Large North American transit agencies generally have some revenue raising authority over an enormous and diverse urban area, and feel obliged to serve the same enormous area with something that can be justified as an "equitable" distribution of service. (As I explain in detail in Chapter 10 of my book Human Transit, there's no objective definition of "equitable," but that's another story.)

Most agencies rely on their voters to approve their basic revenue raising authority. So what happens if the voters over the whole agency area give transit a resounding "no," but parts of the area — a core city for example — does value transit and is willing to pay for it? And what should happen in the many urban regions where the whole region will pay for a low level of service but certain communities within it — usually including the core city — want to pay for a higher level of service?

In many areas, it's legally impossible for a transit agency to impose a higher rate of taxation of part of its service area and deliver a higher level of service in response. But why not? The ability to respond to local needs and desires is the core of what we usually think of as successful local government.

This, for example, is the current situation of Pierce Transit in the Tacoma, Washington area, which covers an urban county south of Seattle. Voters over the whole service area have refused to support new sales tax revenues that would present a truly devastating service cut. The agency has already shrunk its boundaries to remove some communities who did not value transit service and that were especially expensive to serve. Now, conversation is turning to an "Enhanced Transit Zone," which would allow parts of the region that value transit more to tax themselves more at higher rates for better transit service.

But this story is not about one agency, because it goes to why core cities whose people would value more transit are often prevented from getting it. The default approach of regional transit agencies has been for the agency to impose one level of taxation everywhere, and then to have endless arguments about how to distribute that resource over vastly dissimilar communities where some think of transit as critical and others don't. The result is almost always a special problem for older core cities, because as I argue in Chapter 10, core cities need more service per capita than newer suburbs. Because regional transit boards are often dominated by suburban interests that have trouble voting for what they see as disproportionate investment in the core city, it's mathematically inevitable that under big regional agencies, core cities will be underserved relative to their values and demand. The result is typically lots of empty buses running in outer suburbs while core city buses are overcrowded and turning people away.

The only solution I see to this problem is for core cities to be ready to start subsidizing transit service directly, over and above the level that their regional government can fund, to ensure that they get their fair share. (In theory they could also rebel and secede from the regional agency, but good networks are so fused across multiple cities that it's very hard to take them apart at city limits without massive losses in efficiency and usefulness.)

Funding of enhanced transit by core city governments is starting to happen, if in some half-concealed ways. The City of Portland, for example, directly subsidizes half of the operations of the Portland Streetcar, effectively creating an overlay of additional transit with its own operating funds. The next step will be for core cities to find ways to fund growth in the overall level of service in their networks beyond what the regional transit agency can afford.

Sure, most transit agencies and city goverments face budget crises right now, but budget crises are as good a time as any to make hard choices about what a fare distribution of service will ultimately be. One key idea is that state governments should quit prohibiting people from raising their taxes to pay for better transit service, if that is what they want to vote for.

in the pacific northwest, the romantic drama is on the bus …

Posted on February 21, 2013 in Access, Amusing, Portland, Seattle

This really is too much fun. From a scholarly study of the Craiglist "Missed Connections" section, where people express a romantic interest in someone that they saw out in the world. You know, ads like this:

We were both on the max [light rail]–me heading to the Blazer's game and you on your bike. You overheard part of my conversation with my friend and were quite amused. I wanted to talk to you but then got pushed back by other riders. Email me if you remember that conversation and would like to grab a drink sometime.

So here, by state, is the location most often cited in "Missed Connections" ads (click to sharpen):

In rail-rich older urban areas, it's rail transit, of course, the subway or train or metro. But in relatively rail-poor parts of the country, only Oregon and Washington find so much wistful romantic drama on public transit! This is one of those slightly twisted points of "Portlandia"-style pride that makes me proud to be an Oregonian transit planner.

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