From xkcd:
Note that the Y-axis is a log-scale, so this is not really a straight line. As longtime readers know, I prefer durable.
Author Archive | Jarrett
more uk frequent network maps: nottingham
Nottingham, UK now highlights frequent services on its network map. More detail at the link.
Often when you first map the frequent network, you notice for the first time how self-disconnected it is. Nottingham's frequent network is entirely radial with just one frequent orbital (crosstown) service spanning about 45 degrees of arc along the west side, easily seen on the full map. The orbital is an extension of a radial, but it's clearly in an orbital role for a while.
One of the great outcomes of frequency is easy connections, so once you map the frequent network you usually start seeing opportunities to build more non-downtown connection opportunities, whether they be full orbital lines or just ways for two radials to connect (or even through-route at the outer ends) so as to create more direct travel opportunities within a subarea of the city. For example, looking at this map, I immediately wonder whether 44 and 45 should be combined into a two-way loop so that you could ride through, say, between Carlton rail station in the far southeast corner of this image and Mapperley in the centre. (You wouldn't present it as a loop in the schedule. You'd still call it 44 and 45 but note on the map and in the timetable that 44 continues as 45 and vice versa. This is how you build more direct travel opportunities in small city while still keeping the network legible.)
quote of the week: the portlandia streetcar
"I think frequency is an overrated thing. Let's say there's a 20-minute [wait]. You can look on your phone, wait inside and have a beer."
— Portland Streetcar Citizens Committee member
Peter Finley Fry, justifying the 18-minute frequency
of the Portland Streetcar's new eastside loop,
quoted last August in Willamette Week.
Note that Mr Fry is referring to a very slow service (the original segment of the Portland Streetcar is now scheduled at around 6 miles/hr) which is useful only for relatively short trips around the greater downtown area.
new york: playing on fears of subway safety
The Atlantic Cities has a must-read about why people still fear being hit by New York subway trains, even though the subway is one of the safest ways to travel. The union representing New York subway workers is proposing a series of steps to reduce the risk of subway-person collisions, assisted by lurid graphics. It just so happens that their main ideas require hiring more unionized staff! This includes the proposal to slow down trains as they enter stations, which will slow down everyone's travel and increase the number of trains, and hence drivers, needed to maintain the current frequencies.
If subway-person collisions were common, these would be valid safety precautions. Transit agencies do take these expensive steps when an objective safety issue arises.
But as the article states, the facts are these:
And yet, subway deaths remain exceedingly rare. The fatality rate has not changed significantly over the last decade. Of the 55 fatalities on the subway tracks in 2012, 19 were suicides. The remaining 36 accidental deaths on the New York City subway in 2012 occurred on 1.66 billion subway rides. That’s one death for every 46 million rides.*
For infrequent riders, death on the rails is less likely than being hit by lightning. If you’re a twice-a-day commuter, you’re likely to be killed once every 100,000 years. …
A significantly more dangerous feature of city life is car traffic. Even the most dedicated mass transit commuters are twice as likely to be hit and killed by a car than a train. One in 50,000 New Yorkers is killed by a car each year, and one in five hundred is injured.
If your desire to continue living is quite clear in your mind, it's very easy not to be hit by a subway train. Stay behind the yellow line. If that doesn't feel safe, stay back still further.
The real question is: Why do we reward the media for giving us lurid details of every subway fatality but not for every road fatality? The Atlantic article has some ideas about that, though I think it dwells too long on the late-20c period when New York was much more objectively dangerous than it is today.
Let's also note that some subway systems are installing platform walls with doors (like these in Singapore) opening only when and where a train door is present. These further reduce risk and are useful in stations with very high crowding, but are very expensive (Over $1m per station) and technically difficult to fit into the already-compact New York platforms. The MTA appears to be considering these, and other technological options. The goal, however, would be to increase the feeling of safety, since actual safety is already extremely high. How infinitesimal does the risk need to be before we focus our investments on other things, like more useful service?
countering the “empty buses” myth — with video!
The Pinellas County, Florida transit agency has done this video to help counter the impressions people get from seeing empty buses around the area. Seeing empty buses often causes people to complain that the buses are too big, are obviously not needed, should be replaced with smaller ones, etc.
Some viewers may be irritated by the "big number" rhetoric: We hear the systemwide annual ridership over and over without any context for understanding it. It's certainly not true that the system's 14m annual rides mean that buses aren't empty a lot of the time, as the video has already explained and justified.
But it's a very worthwhile effort, and transit agencies need do to these things. APTA or some other pro-transit entity could be commissioning them for all transit agencies to use, but home-grown ones will always have some advantage because so many people respond only to data from their own community.
Thanks to Michael Setty for the tip!
help kill the term “congestion pricing” (and “congestion charge”)
I've argued before that congestion pricing (or charging) is a terrible term for anything that you want someone to support. It literally implies "paying for congestion," so it belongs to that set of terms that suggest we should pay for something we hate, e.g death taxes and traffic fines.
"Congestion pricing" also sounds punitive. When the Sydney Morning Herald asked me to join a discussion of the topic a couple of years ago, they framed the question as: "Should motorists pay for the congestion the cause?" This is a reasonable inference from the term congestion pricing, and yet a totally backward and schoolmarmish description of what congestion pricing buys.
In short, congestion pricing (or charge) sounds like a term coined by its opposition.
I have argued before that the term should be decongestion pricing, because escape from congestion is what the price buys, from the user's point of view. And it's the user who needs to be convinced that this is a purchase, not a tax. Finally, it has to be framed in a way that doesn't imply that it's only for the rich. People who like a class-conflict frame will never let go of the term "Lexus lanes," which is why I'd avoid vaguely upscale terms like "premium."
In any case, over on Twitter, Eric Jaffe of the Atlantic Cities (@e_jaffe) is soliciting your suggestions. (Or your votes for mine!) Another idea that meets my goals — to describe this as a purchase rather than a tax or penalty, and to describe it from the user's point of view — is "road fares," by @larrylarry.
montgomery since rosa parks
Charles Blow in the NYT has a piece today arguing that Rosa Parks was not the meek figure of legend but something of a firebrand, "as much Malcolm X as she is Martin Luther King Jr." Cap'n Transit thought this might be a good time to ask, "What happened to Montgomery's bus system?" He found the answer in a remarkable 13-year old piece in the Nation, by JoAnn Wypijewski:
From 1977 to 1999 a white … Republican named Emory Folmar was mayor, and he made the bus system scream. … Advertising income disappeared after Folmar tried to bar an anti-death penalty ad and then decided that if he couldn't discriminate among advertisers he wouldn't have any at all. By the fortieth anniversary of the bus boycott, service had been cut by 70 percent and fares had doubled, to $1.50. Student and old-age discounts were eliminated. In 1996 midday service stopped. Finally, in 1997, the City Council said there just weren't enough riders or revenue; the traditional system of big buses and fixed routes was finished.
However, things have clearly bounced back this piece was written in 2000. Today Montgomery has a simple, radial fixed route system of 16 routes, running at headways ranging from 30 to 60 minutes with some evidence of a downtown pulse. It's not much service in the context of a metro area of over 350,000 — especially one where a state capitol and university. But you start where you are, or where you retreated to.
a leading bureaucrat on the need to take more risks
Here's a very worthwhile three minutes of Washington DC Planning Director Harriet Tregoning on risk-taking and failure. Her discussion of Capital Bikeshare, which failed in its first incarnation and succeeded in its second, is an incisive challenge to the bureaucratic mind, and it's directly related to transit improvements.
Whenever we try to improve transit systems, we often find — especially in network redesign — that a whole lot of big changes have to be made at once. What's more, they're irreversible. Network redesigns are so big and impactful that you can't just "try" them and undo them if they don't work. By the time you've done them, the previous status quo is irrecoverable.
So they're big risks. And most people — especially most groups of people working together such as Boards and committees — don't like to take risks. The deliberation process in government often seems designed to shrink every initiative, so that all strong transformative moves shrivel into hesitant "demonstration projects," if they survive at all.
Tregoning's story here is basically that the first bikeshare system failed because it was too small, too hesitant, while the second one succeeded because it was far bigger, bolder, riskier. Many of the government cultures I've known would have decided, based on the first round, never to try bikeshare again. It took courage to say that maybe the lesson was that some things just can't be done as tiny demonstration projects. You have to build the courage to actually do them, at the natural scale at which they start to work.
Transit network redesign is exactly like that. It's hard to do in hesitant, reversible phases, because it's all so interconnected, and because a network doesn't start to work until it's all there.
Thanks to Melanie Starkey of the esteemed Urban Land Institute for pointing me to this!
a transit manager on driverless cars (guest post by ron kilcoyne)
A recent post of mine on the potential of driverless cars elicited an excellent comment thread. My own response is in the works, but meanwhile, here is one of my longtime mentors, Ron Kilcoyne, on the topic. Ron is the General Manager of Lane Transit District, the transit system covering the Eugene-Springfield area in Oregon.
About three months ago I read one of Jarrett's posts that provided a good explanation as to why self-driving cars will not become the transportation utopia that its promoters envision. I had just returned from the American Public Transportation Association (APTA) Annual meeting and this post provided a needed antidote to sense of depression I was feeling.
During the Conference I heard speaker after speaker wax poetic about the trends that favored significant transit growth. And every time I heard wonderful visions of this transit (and pedestrian and bicycle) nirvana, I kept thinking to myself: but what about self-driving cars? Will they undo the positive trends towards less sprawl, revitalized cities and walkable suburbs? Will we once again become isolated in our pods even at levels unheard of at the height of our past car culture?
The focus of this earlier post (as opposed to the recent one which generated lots of chatter that focused on how we get from today to the self-driving autopia) was the physical limitations that will impede the vision that self-driving cars will replace transit as we know it today. Now being a transit geek all my life (my parents did not drive so I was dependent on transit growing up) and a transit professional for almost 33 years (early in his career Jarrett worked for me) you may think I am not willing to accept change out of fear the buses and trains that I am passionate about will disappear. Maybe a little but my real concerns are far much broader and relate to the social, health and environmental implications of self-driving cars becoming the sole motorized mode.
Evidence keeps piling up that the keys to longevity, good health and happiness lie in social interaction, physical activity and diet. I might add that beauty is also important; both from easy access to nature and in our built environment. Whereas a car centric society has encouraged isolation, less physical activity and ugly sprawl that has also diminished healthy local food production; there are a number of positive trends moving in the opposite direction. The tea party and its paranoia notwithstanding, more and more people value a physical environment that supports sociability, active and public transportation. Will these trends grow or wither? Factors other than self-driving cars may play a role in answering that question but at some point self-driving cars could play a major role in determining how society evolves.
Mark Frohnmayer, who is a member of the Oregon Transportation Commission and owner of a company developing an electric car, presents a PowerPoint to groups interested in his vision of the future of urban transportation. The three components of his vision are electric cars, car sharing and self-driving cars. What I found most memorable from his presentation was his illustration of how a part of Eugene transforms into a green urban utopia as acres of land currently devoted to parking are put to other uses. Peter Calthorpe makes a compelling case as to why electric cars are not the answer to our energy or climate issues and that we will still need urbanism that supports the pedestrian/bicycle/transit modes. Jarrett Walker has likewise presented good evidence as to the physical limitations of self-driving cars in an urban environment. This leaves car sharing as the one component of Mr. Frohnmayer’ s vision that could reduce the amount of land devoted to parking.
I am a big fan of car sharing and believe that its growth can be an essential component of improving the sustainability of our cities and towns. Indeed car sharing is an important cog toward achieving the types of communities that rank high is positive economic, environmental and social metrics along with an attractive and safe pedestrian and bicycle environments and robust transit systems. Indeed transit needs highly walkable and bicycable communities to thrive and car sharing further enhances that by providing individuals with the mobility and accessibility of an auto when the other three modes are insufficient without being encumbered with the high cost of owning a vehicle. The evidence so far is that car sharing reduces the need for vehicles and increases walking, bicycling and transit use.
Reducing the percentage of land devoted exclusively to the auto should be a major priority. This is true in communities of all sizes. The combination of highly walkable and bicycable communities with robust transit systems and car sharing can move us in this direction. It appears that this is what more and more people want and with less pavement for autos we can have more local food production, access to more parks and open space, broader housing choices close to jobs and other amenities and support healthier life styles with more physical activity and social interaction.
Self driving cars don’t have to lead to isolation, sprawl and the demise of transit. They don’t have to be a threat to walking or bicycling. Although these were the thoughts that kept going through my mind at the APTA Conference until I read Jarrett’s post. If we can accommodate twice as many cars on a freeway with self driving cars lets shrink the freeway in half. If the cost of using a self driving car – whether in a car share arrangement or through new pricing mechanisms for all drivers – whether the person pays by the mile or hour then self-driving cars are not likely to be sprawl inducing and walking, bicycling and transit would still be attractive alternatives. However to go back into pessimistic mode while the mix a car sharing and self-driving cars could theoretically significantly shrink roadways and reduce the need for parking, it is hard to envision the politics needed to achieve this end.
Here’s what I think will really happen. Technology rarely has the exact impact that its boosters envision. Edison thought his light bulb would eliminate the need for sleep and I am still waiting for all that extra leisure time that computers were supposed to provide me. I can picture in my head an old Popular Science cover from the 40’s that envisioned a world where we would have personal helicopters. Actually this cover is very relevant to this discussion- there were only a few helicopters in the sky. Can you imagine what our skies would be like if we all had personal helicopters?
The self-driving car boosters envision a world that mixes car sharing with vehicles that can navigate streets without a driver. Up to now automated transportation systems operate on a fixed guideway monitored from a central control point. At what point will self-driving cars be allowed to operate without a licensed driver in position to manually operate the vehicle? I have no idea but anticipate that it will be much longer than self-driving car supporters envision. We are not capable of designing 100% foolproof systems.
Self-driving cars will take away one competitive advantage of transit. Even if a licensed driver must sit behind the wheel he or she can read, text and do the other things possible while riding a bus or train not currently possible while driving. On the other hand, if the cost of using a private vehicle reflects the actual cost of the urban space that it consumes (via a charge by the mile or hour) then walking, bicycling and transit will still be attractive alternatives. Regardless of who is driving, transit vehicles will still use urban space more efficiently than cars do, except in the lowest-demand areas.
I don’t foresee an end to peaking in travel, either by time of day or in busy corridors. This means the idea of constantly circulating vehicles will either increase vehicle miles travelled, as they circulate around empty, or create the need for added parking capacity in areas that have high transit market share. For example, here in Eugene there is virtually no parking at the University of Oregon, while Lane Community College has 4,000 parking spaces to serve a student enrolment of 15,000 plus staff and faculty. Right now there are waves of students going to the colleges for a few hours in the morning (the robo cars would have to circulate empty between the waves), then a few hours when demand drops (need to find parking facilities that do not now exist), and then a few hours of waves away from campus (a reverse of the morning).
My biggest fear is that self-driving cars and robo cars such as driverless taxis will become an excuse for not investing in transit. There is precedent for this. Both in Marin County and in Honolulu plans for rail projects were stopped about 20 years ago when a key policy board was convinced that it would have been more cost effective to purchase every household a person computer that could be used for dynamic ridesharing. Both rail lines are finally under construction 20 years later at much higher costs; the computers were never purchased and although there are now apps that enable dynamic ridesharing, it is clear to all that they are not substitutes for transit.
The busy corridors that can support some form of fixed guideway transport – be it BRT, streetcar, LRT, HRT or commuter or regional rail — will still need these modes regardless how self-driving cars and robo cars develop. I will not be surprised if it is decades before self-driving cars are allowed to operate in mixed traffic without a licensed driver – so the day when transit systems can deploy robo vehicles for first and last mile travel and reduce low producing bus routes will be after few cycles of bus purchases (heavy duty buses have a 12 year life, lighter duty buses 5 to 7 years.)
Self-driving cars will happen but how they shape society is unclear. We need to be vigilant and do what we can to shape this development towards positive ends and away from negative ones. Even with self-driving cars, the limitations of urban space will require us to sustain robust transit systems.
bus maps for developing-world cities
Need to get around Dhaka, Bangladesh by transit? It's possible, but you have to know what the buses do. As in many developing-world cities, transit information is almost nonexistent — to the point that when a startup decided to draw a transit map of Dhaka, the only way to figure out what each bus route did was to ride or follow it!
More on their project here. Making developing-world transit more legible is a really obvious category of "low hanging fruit".