Author Archive | Jarrett

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.

portland: “opt-in” to comment on the future, despite biased questions!

Posted on February 21, 2013 in Advocacy, Portland, Public Outreach

If you live in the Portland metro region (Oregon side only), the regional government Metro wants you to be part of an online panel that comments on key issues facing the region. It's called Opt-in, and you can read about it, and join it, here.

When I tweeted about this yesterday, several people I respect commented that Opt-In sometimes asks wildly distorted and leading questions. I can now verify that this is the case, based on a survey it asked me to take this morning which includes this appalling question (click to sharpen):

Two choices about transit and they're both about expanding rail. Bus infrastructure and fleet are not mentioned even though buses are still the dominant mode in Portland and Bus Rapid Transit is a serious option in two rapid transit corridors now under study. The designer of this question appears to be unfamiliar with Metro's own transit planning process, and is imposing their own biases on the survey. That may be understandable in the early stages of a tool's develoment, when Metro's leadership may not be paying attention yet, but it should be unacceptable and if the tool thrives, it soon will be.

But is this a reason not to join? No, it's the opposite. Biased questions are a reason to use the little text feedback boxes to complain about biased questions, and to contact your Metro councilor if you feel strongly about them. When Metro councilors will start getting letters about biased questions being asked in Metro's name, the problem will be righted quickly. Just as boycotting elections is a bad way to get your views represented in government, boycotting survey tools is a bad way to get them to ask better questions!

Like all self-appointed panels, OptIn reaches a distorted sample of the population, but so does the massively inefficient and exhausting ritual that it could someday replace: the public meeting. (The FAQs gently suggest this long-term prospect, though I'm sure we won't see the end of the public meeting soon.) Public meetings still have value when they are organized as genuine conversations, such as interactive workshops that I'm often hired to run. But if the purpose of a public meeting is for you to go and give a speech about why you're right and everyone else is wrong, well, we can all save carbon emissions and time out of our busy lives by doing that at home in our pyjamas.

Need to smash the patriarchy or abolish the government? I admit online surveys aren't very satisfying if you're massively angry and need something destroyed, and for that your options are still voting, peaceful demonstrations, and if necessary civil disobedience. But online surveys are a great way to hear from a vast array of voters who are willing to communicate more thoughtfully and with less effort, and who tend to be shouted down or intimidated in public events. Yes, there are issues about exclusion of low-resource groups and those with language and educational barriers, but Metro's surveys look pretty accessible to anyone with high-school literacy in English and they'd be easy enough to translate and supplement with spoken text.

Metro's currently asking its panel about its priorities for the future of transit in the region, and unlike the survey I mention above, it's a good and worthwhile survey that everyone should complete.

Again, I wish the transit survey had the courage to ask about new funding sources. The region's transit agency has cut over 15% of its service in the last decade, and is in ongong budget difficulty due to unfunded health and pension commitments made in wealthier times. While it may gradually restore a basic functional network, it is nowhere close to offering the pace of service growth that would support the region's land use vision or its justify its green reputation. But the questions the survey does ask, about your priorites for deploying what resources can be found, are mostly clear and reflect the realities of transit's geometry and costs.

If you don't enjoy public meetings, or have better things to do with your time, join Opt In, and if you're not in the Portland region, encourage your regional government to emulate it. And if you find a biased question, comment about it!

the mobile battery problem solved, in 1908! (quote of the week)

Posted on February 20, 2013 in Congestion Pricing, Journalism, Technophilia

[Thomas Edison] has so far perfected his storage battery that it will live long enough to stand charges to carry a truck over fifty thousand miles. The perfected battery will pull twice the load of an ordinary truck, will have double the speed and only take up half the space. It will modify, to an extent hardly appreciated, the congestion of the down-town streets, for an electric truck equipped with the batteries will be half as long as today's unwieldy wagons. Being twice as fast, there will be only one eighth of the present congestion in the streets under the new system of speedy motor trucks.
From a fascinating article about Thomas Edison
in Success magazine, 1908, by Robert D. Heil.
The whole article is a delightful read!

This makes so many important points!

The technology that Edison "perfected" is something that we're still trying to invent over a century later. Richard Gilbert and Anthony Perl argue that much humbler batteries are close to physically impossible.
A century ago, like today, everyone assumed that problems of geometry and economics could be solved by some sort of technology. Nobody wanted to think about induced demand, the obvious idea that demand for a valuable commodity is affected by its avaialbility. In a growing city especially, technologies that open up new space for traffic (via either road expansion or vehicle shrinkage) inevitably create more demand for that space, causing congestion to return to an unpleasantly high state sufficient to deter further travel by private vehicle. This is why all forms of modelling that imply a fixed demand for car travel in some future year (the "traffic is like water" idea) are preposterous.
If you wonder why I rarely hyperventilate about game-changing technologies on this blog, and tend to be skeptical about technological solutions, one reason is that technology doesn't change the laws of geometry and physics, nor does it transform the mathematical concept of scarcity that underlies the law of supply and demand — perhaps the only idea in economics that deserves to be called a "law". No invention has ever changed these facts, and doing so is the closest thing to an impossibility that we can imagine.
If you wonder why I am skeptical about transformative claims made for driverless taxis, well, one reason is that Edison is making the same claims about congestion reduction benefits, based on the same limited assessment of impact.
More generally, if you've been fortunate to have some training in literature or history, you have read a lot of stuff that sounds like this. If you study the history of "this-technology-will-change-everything" rhetoric, all the way back to the Industrial Revolution, much of what we hear today from technology promoters sounds thoroughly familiar, just as Edison's claims here should sound familiar to those following the driverless car debate (on which I have an article in the works). You learn that most great ideas come to nothing, or have quite different impacts from those promised, often because of problems of physics, math, or basic economics that any rational, non-hyperventilating person could have thought about at the time.

Obviously, stuff gets invented that changes things, but when technology claims to fix a physics problem, such as seems to underlie the challenge of mobile batteries, or a problem of supply and demand, like the role of induced demand in congestion, be skeptical.

Hat tip: @enf, (Eric Fischer)

fare-free transit spreading in europe? can cities do this on their own?

Posted on February 19, 2013 in Fares, Funding

It's too soon to say, but Tallinn, Estonia (pop. 425,000) is now by far the largest city to offer fare-freefree public transit — not just in Europe but anywhere in the world as near as I can tell. Most other free-transit communities are either university-dominated small cities (like Chapel Hill, North Carolina and Hasselt, Belgium) or rural networks where ridership is so low that fares don't pay for the costs of fare collection technology, let alone contribute toward operating cost.

Tallinn — along with Hasselt and the small city of Aubagne, France — are also forming the Free Public Transport European Network, to spread the idea and disseminate experience about it.

As the city's webpage explains, Tallinn citizens must still buy a farecard, which will allow them to ride free. This allows the transit network to continue to collect fares from tourists and people living in other cities.

This raises the interesting possibility that any city, inside a bigger metro area with a regional transit system, could elect to subsidize transit fares for its own residents, by simply buying fares in bulk and giving them away to its own residents — just as some universities and employers already do for their own students or staff. Indeed, smart farecards make it possible for anyone to subsidize fares without much complexity, opening up a huge range of subsidy possibilities for any entity that sees an advantage in doing so. Yet another reason that city governments are not as helpless about transit as they often think, even if they don't control their transit system.

the unsustainability of “sustainability”

Posted on February 17, 2013 in Amusing, Words, Unhelpful

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.

more uk frequent network maps: nottingham

Posted on February 15, 2013 in Connections, Transfers, Frequent Networks, Legibility, Maps, UK

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

Posted on February 14, 2013 in Frequent Networks, Portland, Streetcars (Trams)

"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

Posted on February 12, 2013 in New York City, Rail Transit

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!

Posted on February 7, 2013 in Advocacy, Public Outreach

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!

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