Author Archive | Jarrett

email of the month: grids on the brain

Posted on August 6, 2012 in Urban Structure

An intriguing email from Kenny Easwaran:

I was very struck by this post in which you try to generalize the geometric issues to show that some of these features of transit are really universal. [JW: I also wrote this on the underlying power of grids in public transit.]
At the time, I was thinking of the various transportation systems we know of that aren’t designed by humans. The main examples I could think of were things within the human body, and I noticed that things like the circulatory systems of animals and plants, and the digestive system of animals, seem to follow somewhat different trajectories from grids. In particular, they either have a branching tree structure, or something more like an extended linear structure.
Of course, in these cases, it may have more to do with the drive system – the circulatory system is driven by a single central pump, and I don’t know if it has any sort of intelligent routing, which may make a grid system hard to operate. It also seems to primarily ferry resources from two centers (the lungs and digestive tract) to all the rest of the body, so a tree structure may be the most efficient way to do this (like an old hub and spoke rail network centered on downtown).
At any rate, the reason I’m writing this e-mail now is that I just saw an article suggesting that the human body *does* actually use a grid system!

From the article:

It’s rather weird: If you’ve ever seen a computer ribbon cable — a flat, 2D ribbon of wires stuck together, such as an IDE hard drive cable — the brain is basically just a huge collection of these ribbons, traveling parallel or perpendicular to each other. There are almost zero diagonals, nor single neurons that stray from the neuronal highways. The human brain is just one big grid of neurons — a lot like the streets of Manhattan, minus Broadway, and then projected into three dimensions.

Kenny goes on:

It seems plausible that the information transport network of the brain is a better comparison for human transportation needs than the resource transport network of the bloodstream … !
Looking at the diagram in that article a little more closely, it seems that there’s a two dimensional grid structure, even though the brain is three dimensional. There appear to be axes going from front toback, and other axes going radially from the “suburbs” through the central axis through to the “suburbs” on the other side, but no grid elements going around the periphery from left to right. I guess there’s an interesting sense in which a three dimensional transport structure can be gridlike in two dimensions but not the third?
At any rate, I’d be very interested to hear your thoughts on any of these analogies! (It might also be interesting to look at structures in ant colonies and prairie dog towns, to see how they approximate thevarious geometries of transportation that you think might be worth looking at, though they are probably more analogous to purely pedestrian cities, rather than ones with long transport tubes.)

I’d be interested in hearing everyone’s thoughts on this! (Apologies for the new comment monitoring; it’s purely to combat spam!)

Image from the article.

greater seattle: loving the new sub-network maps

Posted on August 2, 2012 in Frequent Networks, Legibility, Los Angeles, Maps, Seattle

Now this is a clear map! It's by the Seattle area agency King County Metro. First the legend:

RapidRIde is King County Metro's new rapid bus product, with widely spaced stops, high frequency, special stations, but usually no exclusive lane. Note how cleanly this legend distinguishes services that are useful for different purposes. Note too that it omits peak-only commuter express services, because if they were present they would be lots of confusing overlapping lines that would make the basic network impossible to see.

So here's a piece the map. Click to enlarge, but more important, go here (that's an order) to see the whole thing.

The distinctions on this map are entirely about what matters to the customer, especially the person who wants to see the all-day transit network that is ready to liberate your life, not just your commute. Red means fast and frequent. Blue means frequent. Green means all day but not frequent. And if you want to see peak commuter express services, which would obliterate the legibility of this map if they were included, see another map or individual timetable.

To be fair, many good maps do show peak only services and visually de-emphasise them as faint dashed lines. That works too, but the key design principle is this: The network of any particular layer in the hierarchy of service should be clear without being obscured by lower levels of service. This map does that perfectly: You can see just the red Rapid Ride line, or you can focus easily on red plus blue to see the frequent network, or you can notice the paler green and see the all-day network. All in one map.

To get to this kind of customer-centered clarity, note what they had to omit: Two transit agencies' services are presented here with no differentiation at all. Bus routes numbered in the 500s belong to Sound Transit while the others belong to King County Metro. Most multi-agency regions would focus on highlighting this distinction first, on the assumption that the customer's loyalty to a transit company is much more important than their desire to get where they're going. The distinction should arguably be at least a footnote if you don't have integrated fares between the companies, as it could imply fare penalties and different fare media.

Some multi-agency maps do show all operators, but still visually distinguish them, as the Los Angeles Metro map does, for example. But if you want a really simple map, reduce the transit company's identity to a footnote, or something that can be inferred from a route number*, or don't even show it at all. Instead, show the customer what matters to them: frequency, speed, and duration of service.

*Can you spot the one place on the LAMetro map where they do that? The answer is in "Joseph E"'s comment below.

using dynamite for lack of paint: alex broner on “cities in motion”

Posted on July 30, 2012 in Guest Posts, Modeling, Simulation

Ever since I posted on SimCity and SimCity 4 people have been telling me I must try Cities in Motion. But when you have two jobs and you're already devoting hours to a blog and a book and a remodel, there is only so much time for computer games. Fortunately, Alex Broner has boldly gone there in a guest post, so I don't have to!

In Cities in Motion (a game by Colossal Order, published by Paradox Interactive), one assumes the role of a CEO of a transit company tasked with providing transit to a particular city. In the campaign mode the cities are all based on specific cities at specific historical periods, Berlin during the cold war for example. There is also a “sandbox” mode in which you can play additional cities including player created cities and fictional cities.

Your transit company operates without subsidies for the most part, though there are “missions” which often offer monetary rewards for their completion. The most common mission is to connect two or more places together with a transit line.

In the campaign mode there are certain required missions which you must complete in order to “win” the scenario and unlock further scenarios.

Your transit company has a variety of different vehicle types which it can use to meet the needs of the city’s residents: Buses, trams, Metro, waterbuses, and helecopters. There is (premium) downloadable content that adds electric trolleybuses, cable cars, and monorails.

Your success of failure in the game depends on finding ways to efficiently provide service connecting residents with destinations such as workplaces, shopping, leisure, and government. “Leisure” seems to include regional transportation hubs such as inter-city rail stations and airports. Like a real transit company, you must consider expenses for capital improvements such as stations and vehicles and also operational expenses such as labor and fuel/electricity.

This is not a city building game but the connection between density and transit service is made clear by the simple fact that even though you can build a subway to rural or suburban area, very few people will ride it. The connection between service levels, frequency, and customer satisfaction is made clear by the “wait time” indicator. If the wait time on your transit lines is too long then customers will grow dissatisfied and eventually leave the station. Also, since all infrastructure such as stations and rails has maintenance cost, creating under-utilized infrastructure leads to a poor cost-revenue ratio.

To be successful your agency must take into account the layout of the city and where different groups of people want to go: working class people work at working class jobs, students go to the university, professionals to the offices, and so on. Then you must make choices between vehicle types and network arrangements and put it all together into a profitable enterprise.

All of this is pretty realistic but as I played I immediately began noticing some major problems. The most notable problem is that the “walk shed” for each stop or station is different for each type of vehicle. The game will have residents walk much farther for metro service than they will for buses or trams, no matter how poor the metro service is or how good the buses and trams.

An additional problem is that there is nothing like transit lanes or transit signal priority for buses and trams. The streets of Cities in Motion have various amounts of traffic and in heavy traffic your vehicles will bunch up, depriving you of much needed revenue and making your riders unhappy. One's tools for dealing with this are limited: trams can run on unoccupied ground such as across plazas or on grass. Often in the game I find myself building a tram because there’s a long park or other way to bypass congestion. One can demolish buildings that get in the way of your trams but not build roads or even transit lanes, placing one in the bizarre situation of reaching for the dynamite for lack of paint. In combination the limited walk shed and lack of prioritization tools such as transit lanes means that the game very quickly becomes about building Metro systems. Not only is this unrealistic it’s also quite boring.

Additional annoying features:

Cyclical economic changes causes one to have to adjust ticket prices and labor pay rates constantly for each type of vehicle and 5 types of employees. There’s a mod that allows one to do this automatically but it would have been nice if that had been included in the base game.
Residents are drawn to transit in an almost fanatical fashion, they will navigate around any barrier to reach a station that’s close enough by straight line distance. One is not encouraged to situate stations in places realistically accessible. The routing algorithm of residents is poor meaning that they’ll pile up on the platform of one metro station even if there’s an empty platform with comparable services right nearby.
Metro trains try to get 100% full before departing, even if this means holding up the empty train behind them.
Finally, one is unable to combine either metro or tram vehicles to form longer trains (or construct longer platforms).

On the whole I give the game a B- for gameplay and a C for simulation value. It obsesses over certain aspects of transit (different types of customers, different types of workers, etc) while failing to address some really important ones. It teaches some important things about transit (frequency, density, operation costs) while furthering our confusion about the relationship between technology and levels of service. I would love for the makers of the game to fix some of these problems either through downloadable content or a new release. We need clearer thinking when it comes to transit and while this game doesn’t quite provide it, it very easily could.

[Alex Broner is a graduate student working on his Masters of Urban and Regional Planning at the University of Hawaii with an expected graduation date of December 2012. He is also an intern writer/researcher for the Sightline Institute. His professional interests are in transportation, landuse, and urban design. Alex is passionate about creating enjoyable urban places where it is easy and safe to walk, bicycle, and take transit. His personal interests include cycling, science fiction novels, computer games, and dodgeball.]

cycling the last mile: an exchange with kyle “one red paper clip” mcdonald

Posted on July 25, 2012 in Cycling

Kyle McDonald, celebrated author of One Red Paper Clip (book, blog), recently had this exchange with me about bicycle access to transit:

Kyle:

Jarrett

I’ve seen some literature around the web that suggests bike sharing networks may reduce transit use somewhat, but I’m curious to your thoughts/insights on how a bike sharing system can be beneficial to extending the local reach of the network, as a transfer.

I’m in Montreal and have been blown away with the spontaneity afforded byspur-of-the-moment Bixi rides in virtually any direction since the system’s implementation in 2009. I see people riding to and fro from busy commerical areas and major transit nodes on Bixi bikes all the time, either returning on foot, taxi or transit, depending on the reason of their journey.

I’m following the launch of Citi Bike in NYC and Vancouver’s potential launch (currently fuddled behind helmet law and other problems) very closely.

Curious to know your thoughts on bike sharing systems and how they interact with transit, and can extend access and local reach of existing services, etc.

In my experience, the 400m walk-to-transit norm is more in the order of 1km or 2km with very dense and well-planned bike share network like Bixi in place.

Surprised you haven’t done a bikesharing post on Human Transit yet, as I think they’re one of the most exciting and emerging transport technologies for dense urban areas.

Multi-point public bicycling (ie one-way-journeys) is effectively a completely different mode of transport than the private bicycle in terms of usability and integration with transit networks. (no need to transport bikes on trains or buses, just grab a new one at destination, etc)

For that matter, the emergence of multi-point car sharing systems like car2go is a fascination phenomenon and brings up some interesting opportunities for transit/walking integration that return-to-the-same-spot services like ZipCar can simply not accomplish.

I’m of the (under-researched) opinion that these emerging technologies are lowering per-capita car ownership and may have interesting macro effects on public urban transportation as they become more popular and widespread.

Anyhow, I guess I’ll repeat myself….curious to know your thoughts on all this stuff!

to which I replied:

Hey Kyle

I completely agree that bikeshare at stations is valuable to both cycling and transit modes! I suppose I haven’t posted on it because it’s so obvious to me that I’m not sure what to say.

The key thing to keep in mind about these bike solutions, from a transit standpoint, is that anything that helps transit concentrate its resources on more rapid forms of service — e.g. by reducing the demand for “last mile” local transit — is great for transit too, because slower kinds of transit are also more expensive to operate. So this ties directly to my [suggestion] (see Chapter 5 of my book) to not just expand rapid transit but also shift many local bus lines over to more rapid forms of stop spacing … so that service runs faster but is worth walking to.

The challenge for using bikeshare in that context, of course, is that the people who feel confident on bikes in the city are also confident as pedestrians. The challenge is the older or less bike-confident person, some of whom resist walking 200+ meters [to more widely spaced transit stops] as well. It is for these people that many high-cost-per-passenger local transit services — in low density areas — are retained.

Keep in mind that where bikeshare and bike-parking styles of access are needed most is in lower-density development. This is where transit agencies that are focused on maximum ridership and sustainability benefits for the dollar would benefit from being able to run less service, because any service they run is low ridership and thus high cost per rider.

So I’d like to see bike parking and bikeshare promoted especially in new lower density areas, and with a focus on being attractive to a wide range of users, not just the athletic younger people who’ve traditionally driven US bike advocacy. That means infrastructure that’s more about safety than speed, such as you see in Europe. (As I recall, the “design cyclist” for whom the Dutch design their infrastructure is a 60 year old woman with two bags of groceries.) This is really easy to do in new suburbia with well-designed off-street paths and connective paths via low-traffic streets. Canberra, Australia is one city that’s long done this kind of infrastructure really well for a long time, though they’re only now connecting it to transit.

All the best, Jarrett

Kyle:

I couldn’t agree more with you pretty much on all this stuff.

I’m from Vancouver and find it’s cycle culture especially militant, pushy and spandex clad to the point of turning the average person OFF cycling.

Last-mile infrastructure to harbor more mainstream, even boring, cycling is totally necessary! I’ve never heard the term “design cyclist” but strongly feel this concept needs more traction in the USA/Canada, especially the 60 year old with two bags of groceries……that’s pretty much my mom!

(I should add that I don’t necessarily endorse Kyle’s implied critique of all “militant, pushy, and spandex clad” cyclists. The tension between slow and fast cycling is a fact of the cultural moment, one that calls for some tolerance on all sides … But I appreciate where Kyle’s coming from here.)

a technophile wants my brain, and yours

Posted on July 22, 2012 in Access, Advocacy, Journalism, Los Angeles, Technophilia

I'm not sure if I should give this oxygen, but for the record: Randal O'Toole, the infamous anti-planning writer known for his blog The Antiplanner, has falsely implied that I agree with his critique of Los Angeles rail plans. Not so fast. If he'd read by blog, or my book, he'd know better.

Here's what he wrote today:

Portland transit expert Jarrett Walker argues that “we should stop talking about ‘bus stigma.’” In fact, he says, transit systems are designed by elites who rarely use transit at all, but who might be able to see themselves on a train. So they design expensive rail systems for themselves rather than planning transit systems for their real market, which is mostly people who want to travel as cost-effectively as possible and don’t really care whether they are on a bus or train.

This view is reinforced by the Los Angeles Bus Riders’ Union, and particularly by a report it published written by planner Ryan Snyder. Ryan calls L.A.’s rail system “one of the greatest wastes of taxpayer money in Los Angeles County history,” while he shows that regional transit ridership has grown “only when we have kept fares low and improved bus service,” two things that proved to be incompatible with rail construction.

So because I defended buses from the notion of "bus stigma", O'Toole assumes I'm a bus advocate and therefore a rail opponent. This is called a "false dichotomy," identical in logic to George W. Bush's claim that "either you're with us or you're with the terrorists."

(In a related move, he insists that you can't improve rail and buses at the same time, a claim directly disproven by the last decade in which LA Metro developed the Metro Rapid buses [and Orange and Silver Line busways] concurrent with rail extensions.)

In fact, I maintain and encourage a skeptical stance toward all technophilia — that is, all emotional attachments to transit technologies that are unrelated to their utility as efficient and attractive means of public transport. To the extent that the Bus Riders Union is founded on the view that rail is some kind of adversary, while the bus is the unifying symbol of their cause, I view them with exactly the same skepticism that I would bring to the elite architect who implied that we don't need buses because she'd never ride one.

Some technology-fixated minds just can't imagine what it would be like to be agnostic about technology and to care instead about whether a service actually gets people where they're going efficiently. To put in terms that conservatives should respect — I'm very interested in transit that efficiently expands people's freedom, and whatever technology best delivers that in each situation or corridor.

I'm also interested in how all kinds of transit fit together as networks, because this is essential if we're to offer a diverse range of travel options to each customers. Everyone who becomes emotionally invested in bus vs rail wars — on either side — closes themselves to the idea that different technologies can work together form a single network.

Like many pairs of polarized enemies, the Bus Riders Union and certain bus-hating elites both endorse the same fallacy. In this case, both seem to believe that the most important purpose of a transit technology is to signify class categories, and that the key feature of their favorite technology is that it serves their class and not the other's. Both experience cognitive dissonance when one suggests that maybe bus and rail are not enemies but complementary tools for different roles in a complete network designed for everyone, or that people of many classes and situations can mix happily on one transit vehicle, as happens in big cities all the time.

The idea that a city as vast and dense as Los Angeles can do everything with buses, no matter how much it grows, is absurd. Drivers are expensive, so rail is a logical investment where high vehicle capacity (ratio of passengers to drivers) is required.

The only way the conservative dream (shared by Gensler Architects) makes sense is if you smash the unions so that all bus drivers make minimum wage, preferably from low-overhead private operating companies. This is how transit works in much of the developing world, and the result is chaos, inefficient use of street space, and fairly appalling safety records. Most experts I know who've immigrated from such places were glad to trade that for the transit they find in North America, whatever its faults.

It is absurd, too, to continue claiming that the Los Angeles rail program is "elite." Go ride the Red Line to North Hollywood or the Blue Line through Watts and tell me if those services seem packed with "elites" to you. When I ride them, I see the same wonderful diversity that I see on the more useful bus services, weighted of course by the characteristics of the neighborhoods we're passing through.

There's no question that some LA rail projects can be criticized for having been built where right-of-way was available rather than where they were needed, though the more you understand the political process the more you sympathize with the difficulty of those decisions. But when self-identified bus-people attack rail, and self-identified rail people attack buses, they both sound like the lungs arguing with the heart. There's a larger purpose to transit, one that we achieve only by refusing to be drawn into technology wars, and demanding, instead, that everything work together.

my new piece at the atlantic, on “bus stigma”

Posted on July 17, 2012 in Journalism

The Atlantic's Atlantic Cities project asked me to do an article expanding on my recent blog post challenging the supposed "stigma" attached to buses. My piece is here.

guest post: a reader’s struggle to map tel aviv’s transit network

Posted on July 17, 2012 in Frequent Networks, Maps, Tel Aviv

Alan Tanaman is a transit planning enthusiast who is working to help redefine the perception of public transport in Israel as a service to be used by everyone. Alan was an advisor on transport policy for the Israeli Labour Party during their 1998 election campaign, and more recently has been assisting the Israeli Public Transport Passengers Organisation (an NGO). He is also one of the moderators on the Tapuz Public Transport forum, but his primary interest is in trying to make transit more simple to understand and use.

This blog was the prime motivator for my attempt to produce a frequent-network map for the Tel Aviv Metropolitan region. The area lacks a rapid transit system, but the slack is generally taken up by a fairly frequent bus system, albeit lacking in priority measures. Although frequent, the network has grown sporadically and without method, and it was decided in 2004 that a complete overhaul of the network was needed, one that would be based on free transfers.

Only in July 2011 did the first major reorganisation phase take place, but it was shrouded in secrecy until about 10 days before the change. Once the change did take place, there was mass confusion. Suffice to say that the information was insufficient and the implementation was poor.

People resented having to make changes, but in this case the change was poorly explained; the benefits of the new system with high-frequency core sections were unclear. It is incredible that one of the missing pieces was a complete network map. The government website www.busline.co.il included only individual line maps along with maps of individual areas. But if you wanted to get from one end of the city to the other, it was pretty difficult to work out the best way to do so.

I wondered if some of Jarrett Walker’s principles would work – was there a clear network of high-frequency lines running all day? During that month, curiosity got the better of me, and I put together a map of the highest frequency routes. These were to be called ‘fork routes’: Routes with a high-frequency trunk, forking out into two or three branches at each end. I also added a few of the other high-frequency routes and published the map on a public transport forum. The reaction was very positive, but the network coverage was sparse, so I was urged to add lower frequency routes.

At this point I decided that the map was going to become a mission to produce a complete network map, excluding only the very lowest frequency routes. This seemed impossible – the network is so complex and there are far too many line numbers to fit. Worse still, the agency was now backtracking on some of the changes that had simplified the network, and had announced that it would bring back some cancelled routes, and revert some to their old meandering ways.

But by combining two bus mapping systems, often known as French and Classic, it could be done. The French system uses coloured lines for each route, whereas the Classic (or British) system marks route numbers along the streets. By using coloured lines for groups of high-frequency routes and marking the rest of the numbers along the streets in black, everything fitted in, and the high-frequency routes were still clear enough to follow.

The first network map was released on 23rd August. You can see this archive map in Hebrew at http://telaviv.busmappa.com/p/blog-page_22.html. Here is a slice:

Only a week later a bunch of (bad!) route changes took place, which led me to release a second map as soon as I could. This map included routes every 20 minutes or better (in black) and 15 minutes or better (in colour). Routes running every 10 minutes or better got thicker lines and solid coloured number discs.

For the final map, in English map see here: Here is a slice of it.

In the final English version, I also decided to incorporate some high-frequency commuter lines, but only when they were similar to the coloured lines that were already on the map. For example, route 166, which branches off route 66 at its eastern end, and also runs slightly differently for a short portion within Tel Aviv. Unfortunately, this does have the effect of making the all-day frequent network rather less clear.

email of the week: more bike racks on buses?

Posted on July 16, 2012 in Cycling

A reader asks:

Do you have any examples of buses that can take several bikes rather than just two on the front? I suggested at the Velovillage conference that transit companies run a competition for designs to put more bikes on buses. Where i live, many people are left by the side of our roads or at the main bus stop unable to board or have to leave their bike behind.

There are ways to fit another bike or two in. Seattle's King County Metro, pictured, is up to three.

But when you consider the real problem, on-board bus racks cannot possibly be the long-term answer. Obviously, bus drivers hate anything that reduces their visibility, including downward at something or someone that they're about to run over. The broader issue is simply that bikes take space, even when they're outside the bus frame, and taking that space has consequences.

For example, exterior bike racks increase the length of the bus. That means the bus needs a longer bus stop zone, needs more room to turn, etc., and this can easily make the difference in whether a bus line can get through a tight spot where its service is needed, or has to make a detour around it. Small racks are widely accepted in North America now, but in the long run it should be obvious that bike racks on buses only work if they're not very popular. The long term solution has to be a range of bike parking and bike rental stations at stations. This is what you'll see in bicycle-dominated countries in Europe.

“shockingly neutral”: my first sort-of negative review!

Posted on July 14, 2012 in Dissents, Philosophy

An intriguing take on Human Transit from Josh Stephens at the California Planning and Development Report concludes with this striking thought:

Much of Walker's technical discussions aren't any more riveting than they sound. And yet, it is, on the whole, … a surprisingly un-tedious exercise in armchair planning. Walker loves and believes in public transit, but his awareness of the costs and tradeoffs render him a shockingly neutral advocate (if such a thing is possible). On the one hand, Walker is trying to encourage stakeholders to advocate for better transit systems. But if you read him closely, you might end up with mental gridlock (while actual gridlock grows all the worse).

I can accept being nonriveting — this isn't Stephen King — and am happy to settle for "un-tedious." Otherwise, I treat this critique as a badge of honor. To me as a consultant, few epithets are finer than 'shockingly neutral.' Yes, my book is about helping you and your community think about the real choices that you face. And yes, to make those choices, you in your armchair (and your community in the real transit planning process) must think about what you want, and sometimes about which of two things you want is more important.

I'm sorry if that gives some people "mental gridlock", but functional human beings and communities do this all the time. Everyone understands the process of budgeting when money is at stake. Transit simply requires the similar kind of hard-tradeoff thinking in some other dimensions, including street-space, service priorities, etc. My book also makes budgeting decisions around transit much easier, because it helps everyone understand exactly what they are buying or sacrificing.

Once, years ago, I was working with a community's elected officials to help them reach a consensus on how they want to balance the competing goals of lifeline coverage vs higher ridership. (The former goal produces a little bit of service everywhere and the latter produces a high-intensity network only when demand is high. See Chapter 10.) We were having a contentious public meeting on exactly this subject, with the electeds debating each other and the public inserting a range of useful testimony. The electeds were going to have to vote.

We took a break, I went to the men's room, and suddenly one of the electeds was at the adjacent urinal. He whispered: "Hey Jarrett, I know you don't want to say anything out there, but really, what do you think we should do?"

As a citizen I'd have an answer based on my values, but I wasn't a citizen here. I was here to help a community make its own decision. So my private answer was the same as a public one. "No! This is not a technical question. You have to balance your priorities between two things that you value, just like you do when you're budgeting. This is a chance to express your values, so asking me to tell you what to do is like asking me to tell you who you are."

Obviously, once you've chosen what you want, your consultant will start telling you what's required to deliver that outcome, and in that mode the consultant may sound like an advocate. But that only happens once the client — you, your community, your electeds — have stated their desires clearly in an understanding of the tradeoffs they imply.

Sorry. Life's full of hard choices, for people and for their communities. If it gives you mental gridlock, put down the book or step out of the meeting. Breathe fresh air, study a flower, or look at the stars. But sooner or later, you'll decide, or others will do it for you.

san franciso: all-door boarding on buses!

Posted on July 13, 2012 in San Francisco

In San Francisco passengers will be able to board through any door of any city bus, as they have long been able to do on light rail and streetcars. Nate Berg has a nice piece on this at Atlantic Cities.

This could be a very big deal.

No more of the silliness pictured at right, where passengers who could all board the bus in 10 seconds instead spend a minute or two outside in the rain. No more tired exhortations to "move to the back of the bus!" because people will naturally distribute themselves evenly throughout. No more delays due to fare payment problems and disputes. Fewer angry and threatening signs, like the "stop" sign on the back door in this image.

Obviously this change requires Proof of Payment (POP) fare collection, which has been routine on most North American light rail and commuter rail for a generation (though it arrived in San Francisco relatively recently.) POP means that you're responsible for having a ticket, pass, transfer slip, etc., called a "proof of payment", and a roving fare inspector can ask you to show it at any time and nail you with a big fine if you don't have it.

If you want to dig down into why so some people hate the bus-riding experience, well, the congestion and delay of front-door fare payment has to be a big factor. It is a major reason why buses are so slow and unreliable. It also produces inefficiency, hassle, and discomfort that everyone can see: the huge lines to board at the front, the crowding in the front of the bus while there is space of the back. The whole experience is both unpleasant and an objective cause of delay.

There's also a subtle emotional thing here: We're required to have a brief interaction with a (quite properly) impatient driver, which can give a subconscious feeling that we're being judged or dismissed. With all-door boarding, we feel free to move through the system by paths that feel direct to us, and we're much less likely to be waiting in line. If an observer chose to interpret my dislike of this experience as a stigma, front-door boarding might turn out to be part of why some people think there's a cultural stigma about riding the bus.

Front-door boarding is one of those indignities that people associate with buses but that is not an intrinsic feature of them. The idea that POP could be done on rail but not buses is just a North American (and Australasian) industry habit. It makes sense where loads are low, because front-door boarding doesn't involve much delay in that case, but it's never made sense at higher levels of crowding that are now routine in our transit-starved cities. Sure you need to have an expensive fare collection crew, but you are also saving so much running time, getting people where they're going faster, and so dramatically improving the sensation of civility and freedom in bus riding, that it's definitely worth it.

You do have to get over a hump. Many people are very upset about fare evasion, and the public usually thinks that it's a bigger problem than it is. With all-door boarding, you as a passenger can't tell whether others have paid their fares, and when you see a guy who looks shady to you (whatever that means to you in terms of race, class, dress or behavior cues) jumping on the back, you'll now have to assume that he's paid his fare. It's up to a fare inspector, not you, to verify that. The reality is that the cost of bringing fare evasion down from, say, 5% to 1% costs vastly more than the fares you'd collect, because you have to hire vast hordes of inspectors to catch those last few hardest-core offenders. We're better of tolerating a somewhat higher fare evasion so we can spend our money on service.

So all-door boarding on buses is hard to get to, and you tend to do it when, as in San Francisco, the overcrowding and slowness of buses is perceived as real crisis. (That means two things: overcrowding and slowness are severe and lots of citizens and elected leaders are demanding a solution.)

Don't expect every transit agency to follow San Francisco's lead at once, because there's a startup cost and risk that's hard to face in the middle of a recession, not to mention the whole public education struggle about tolerable levels of fare evasion. But I expect this to spread rapidly in the major metros if San Francisco MTA has the fortitude to keep it going. (I suspect all-door boarding is actually irreversable in San Francisco, because all-door boarding will create more capacity that will be instantly used, to the point that going back would require adding more service that MTA can't afford.)

And once it does, the experience of riding buses will a bit more like riding rail, in a way that matters to almost everyone. Greater speed and reliability. Less waiting in line. Less crush-loading The freedom to board where you want. Who doesn't value those things?

Photo: Tom Prete.

Older posts Newer posts