Author Archive | Jarrett

guest post: nate wessel on why google transit will never be enough for small to medium-sized systems

Posted on April 8, 2013 in Guest Posts, Legibility, Maps

Nate Wessel lives in Cincinnati, Ohio where for the last few years he's been working to improve public understanding of the local transit system. In 2011 he designed and published his own map of the system and he now writes the Cincinnati Transit Blog. Nate has a degree in urban planning from the University of Cincinnati from where he graduated this past June.

I've heard quite a few times that Google Transit and similar technologies have made hand-rendered transit maps outdated. Being myself a maker of hand-made, tangible maps and having spent the last couple of years physically working with a lot of maps, I find myself with a bit of a gut reaction to this common claim. It's more than just a reaction to an existential threat though. My reaction is to an idea that would toss the baby out with the bathwater. Not only are lovingly created, tangible transit maps incredibly valuable to our understanding of the cities we live in, they're essential to the widespread use of transit. We'll need to go back to basics.

What do maps do? What are maps? Why are they?

Maps are like Cliffs-Notes for the physical world. We don't have time to read the whole book but we still need to get an idea what it's about before the test. You'll probably never manage to explore the entirety of one mid-size city let alone a country or the whole world. Yet we still want to see what's out there, where we could go if we wanted to and what we'd find when we got there. Understanding the shape and nature of the whole world or even one city through direct physical experience is a practical impossibility.

We all need an understanding of the world beyond our fingertips; that's absolutely essential to modern human existence. It's why we have novels, to pick one example. A story from another life lets us share an experience we haven't yet had and perhaps never will. It lets us plumb the depths (and heights) of our own emotions and thoughts by momentarily opening ourselves up to the author's. We don't necessarily have to go there ourselves to learn something of love or sorrow(or downtown). Our innate curiosity pulls us to see what's possible in the world and within ourselves.

The same goes for everything on TV, in print, and many things on the internet. Most media lets us reach beyond our own personal experience to learn something of the world we can't see directly. We absolutely need these things. They give us an understanding of the broader world and let us contextualize our own existence. They show us what's normal, and more importantly what's possible for ourselves; where we can go and what we can do. Kids can't dream of being astronauts if they've never heard of one. We can't speak seriously of knights in shining armour and chivalry and honor and of other deeply interesting ideas until we've read of their existence and felt something of it ourselves. In exactly the same way maps show us what's possible in the physical world. They tell us that Spain is a place in Europe, that Queens is connected to Manhattan by subways and bridges, and that it's not similarly connected to Britain. We can't think of taking transit until we know what transit does and doesn't.

The other critical thing maps (and some other media)do is provide us with answers to specific questions. These might be:

"Which line can I take to Queens?"
"Are there coffee shops within walking distance of my current location?"
"Exactly how much will the bus cost?"

Filling this need for specific information is in part why the encyclopedia was so revolutionary during the Renaissance and why the internet can be so powerful today. The amount of precise information available to people is just exploding. The age of science and empiricism has given us the idea of bulk 'information' as something that can succinctly and precisely answer an isolated question. "Where is the nearest bike shop?" We now keep stock of them in a Google database that can return the answer in milliseconds. Often you can ask the most esoteric questions of the Internet and find a succinct and satisfying answer in less than a minute. That's stupendously useful for travellers and college students with deadlines.

So maps (and other media generally) have two big functions: First to inform broadly and second to answer specifically. The informative function must necessarily precede the precise answering function. We need to know what's generally possible before we can know what exactly to ask. We need to know that transit is even an option before we can ask how exactly to use it.

Answering specific questions with specific answers is what Google Transit does well. Here's how it works:

You tell Google Transit your location and exactly where you want to go.
You tell it when you want to go there(usually now).
It decides exactly the fastest way to do it, with perhaps a second option if it's a close call.
It puts this exact path on a map and narrates directions like "turn left" or "wait here".

In many circumstances, this is quite useful. Many people, if they're taking a one-time trip to somewhere they don't normally go, will just want a quick answer; if the trip is possible, a computerized map can tell them exactly how to get there and exactly how to get back. That's often a very handy thing.

But Google Transit totally misses the first function of maps: informing us about the world, sating our curiosity, and showing us the possible. Google transit doesn't tell us anything about where transit goes generally. It makes us ask questions like "how do I get from exactly here to exactly there right now?"

Without a basic understanding of what's possible it's left to hope that "here" is a decent place to start and that "there" is even a realistic possibility. Downtown Cincinnati for example has transit operating on just about every street, but you can't even spot it in the Google Transit interface before inquiring about a specific trip.

When we ask questions without knowing that a reasonable answer even exists, we're sometimes confronted with answers like "no results" or "there's one trip three days from now at 3:29am". Without a broader understanding of how the whole thing works, we don't know what to ask or if the answer we got doesn't sound right. Worse, when we get these disappointing answers to the wrong questions, we get confused and frustrated. Transit users need more guidance than "not possible" or "how about Tuesday?"give us. Also, some specific answers that serve us well for the moment will be misleading in the future. Here for example…

…Google Transit suggests we take the #19 northward, but says nothing of the invisible #17 that runs parallel to it at more than twice the frequency. You can easily imagine someone who's once looked up their route on Google Transit regularly letting a #17 pass by while they wait for a #19 and complain about headways. Similar situations must happen a thousand times a day.

Exploring a transit system with Google Transit is like blind men trying to understand an elephant by touch. This part is thick, this part is bumpy, we don't know how any of the parts attach to each other, and the whole thing is constantly, inexplicably moving. A thoughtfully hand-rendered transit map tells us what the elephant really is. It doesn't go into detail about the dimensions of it's toenails, but tells us of it's overall size, shape and temperament. It tells us that you might be able to ride the thing and that you probably don't want to try poking it with a sharp stick. Once we know these basics we can begin to ask exactly what the trunk is for.

That's why hand-rendered system maps continue to be completely relevant in the heyday of the computer. A map like that of DC's Metro tells us more about the city and how to use the transit system than any GTFS feed ever could on it's own.

A hand-rendered map must necessarily simplify a system, showing only some lines and only some landmarks. To do so it makes value judgements, something a computer has never yet been capable of. It does most of the hard work of understanding for us because a map-maker must understand the transit system before he can make a map of it; it's not just a matter of dumping all the routes into a GIS program. That deeper understanding of the transit system is an experience most people don't yet have and it's exactly what they're looking for when they explore a system map. Similarly, when they explore a novel they may be looking for a deeper understanding of the human condition, history, or their own lives. In either case, they're most essentially looking for their possibilities. "What is there?" "What is within my reach?" What is possible for me?

It seems like most big American cities put these questions, at least so far as transit is concerned, largely to rest decades ago with their famous metro maps but that many small and mid-sized cities, particularly those that primarily use buses, provide little if any coherent, holistic map of how their system operates. They often seem content with either no system maps at all or only topographically accurate maps that de-emphasise and confuse the areas that can benefit from transit the most: those that are dense and well served by multiple lines.

Dense areas by definition get less space than their human value warrants on a topographically accurate map. Every famous transit map, whether it's DC's or New York's or London's does just the opposite; exploding dense, important areas like Downtown Manhattan and condensing suburban service. They do this not only because that makes them easier to draw, but because that emphasis on the dense is typically the actual emphasis of the transit system itself. A map that embodies the logic of a transit system is one that tells us most truly how the system works and most basically what we can do with it. We need something of that understanding before Google Transit can work well. We need to know what the elephant is.

But that deep understanding of a transit system and of a city is so different for each system that no computer program could ever yet describe every system well. Google maps can't yet do it. It's something that just can't be automated.

Google Transit can give us the answers but it can't give us the questions. And that's why it will never be enough for a transit agency to publish schedules to Google Transit without also publishing a substantial and thoughtfully developed system map made by people who are more than passingly familiar with the transit system and with the city.

232-3 ODOT Invoice

Posted on April 2, 2013 in General

Rhonda — Click here to pay by credit card — 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!

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