Erin Chantry, of Tindale Oliver urban designers, wrote a nice little piece about the Congress for the New Urbanism panel where I spoke alongside G.B. Arrington of Parsons Brinckeroff. I promised a little fire and brimstone, but apparently I came off as way too reasonable.
Author Archive | Jarrett
fort lauderdale: yet another triumph for multi-destinational networks
If your city is producing lousy outcomes with its bus services, are you sure it's because of the buses, or the drivers, or the sidewalks, or the degree of "transit oriented development", or that they're not streetcars? Maybe it's because the network structure is obsolete. A study team led by Gregory Thompson of Florida State looked at the success of Broward County Transit, which serves greater Fort Lauderdale. Apart from a few special enclaves, Fort Lauderdale is unlikely to be high on anyone's list of urbanist paradises. It has plenty of gridlock, plenty of pedestrian-hostile environments, and the usual abundance of oversized roads that seem only to generate more congestion.
Yet the hard-working if unappreciated Broward County Transit system is producing excellent outcomes through multidestinational design. Instead of running a radial system into a single downtown, they decentralized to serve many destinations, through a network of routes making easy connections with one another. Eric Jaffe tells the story today in Atlantic Cities.
The whole case for this kind of design is in my book Human Transit, esp Chapter 12 and 13, but Thompson has been making it for years. I'm impressed at how well it's working in not-especially-transit-friendly Florida metros. Tallahassee took the plunge last year.
Obviously this is an issue close to my heart. I came to consciousness as a transit planner during the decentralization of Portland's network in 1979-82, which created local pulse networks in each suburban area and culminated in the high-frequency grid that today covers most of the city. Almost every network design I've ever done has helped to improve the multi-destinational utility of transit networks of all sizes. Huge amounts of resistance have to be overcome. But if they're designed well, they work.
Finally, kudos to the folks at Atlantic Cities for coming back to this issue with one great story after another. I'm not sure I've ever seen a major media outlet build up this degree of internal understanding about the fundamentals of transit network design — a topic that's easily forgotten while obsessing about how cool technologies are. Is any other American media outlet dealing with network planning issues so clearly? Certainly not the New York Times, which publishes one story after another in which well-meaning platitudes about social needs are proposed as ways to change the facts of geometry.
paris: “the bus stop of the future”
Now that Paris has bus lanes on almost every boulevard, we can expect their transit agencies to continue investing and innovating around their frequent and popular bus services. Today we get "the bus stop of the future," where designer Marc Aurel has packed in every convenience that will fit in the space, plus a few more.
Yes, it's still a bus shelter, but the idea is to make it both more useful and more of a social space. People may come here for a range of things other than catching the bus, so that social interaction and the life of the street intermix with waiting to produce a more vibrant, interesting, and safe environment. It's the same principle by which transferring passengers can help activate civic squares. From Bati-journal (my rough translation):
This experimental station at boulevard Diderot is not just a place to wait for a bus. Covering an area of 80 m2, it was designed as a multi-purpose public space … . Here you can buy a bus ticket, get information about the neighborhood, have a coffee, borrow a book, play music, recharge a phone, buy a meal to take away, rent an electric bike, stay warm while eating a sandwich, or set up a bag on a shelf to do your makeup. Variable light adjusts for day and night conditions. This project will also be the first urban test of materials and technological innovations … such as ceramic furniture invented by Marc Aurel, and a sound design integrated into the fabric of furniture …
I'm disappointed they didn't include an art gallery with some durable lendings from the Louvre, on the model of Louvre-Rivoli station.
But seriously: This is what a major bus stop or station might look like if you really, really valued buses, and also value the principle that uses of the street should be intermixed so that they contribute activation, interest, and safety to one another.
vancouver publishes frequent network map
The Wayfinding team at Vancouver's TransLink has finally unveiled their new network map, with Frequent Network designations. In this case … orange:
Download the whole thing here: regional transit map
The term "FTN" (Frequent Transit Network) also appears on the map here and there. This term has already been used for several years in TransLink policymaking. In fact, four years ago in Transport 2040 TransLink committed to this goal:
The majority of jobs and housing in the region are located along the Frequent Transit Network (frequent, reliable services on designated corridors throughout the day, every day).
Now, finally, the public can see it too! Disclosure: I had a review-and-comment role in a few stages of this process, but it's definitely TransLink's work, led by their excellent Wayfinding team.
shock-shifting to transit, but not back
When some disruption or unusual event causes people to shift from driving to transit, many never shift back. Ezra Klein Brad Plumer reviews the evidence in the Washington Post.
He's talking mostly about shifts caused by gas price shocks, but something similar happens in response to major disruptive events. For example, the 2010 Olympic Winter Games in Vancouver caused a major burst in ridership — obviously a mix of Olympic visitors and residents who were trying to avoid Olympic traffic. But ridership never dropped to pre-games levels, and in fact, 2011 ridership was higher than 2010, despite the huge influx of Olympic visitors in 2010.
Klein goes on to lament that the very fuel price volatility that affects transit ridership also affects transit's funding, since federal funding is based on fuel taxes so they drop when fuel use drops. Unfortunately, US local operating funding (which is the real crux of the matter) is even more volatile, depending typically on payroll or sales taxes. Loss of a job equals a drop in payroll taxes, and causes drops in spending shortly afterward.
I wonder if we'll eventually create something like a property tax surcharge that captures some of the benefits of transit to a location — possibly based on some future, vastly more objective Transit Score or index of transit access. Road funding could work the same way, but tending to fall more on the properties that benefit least from transit, since higher road use correlates to lower transit use. Property taxes (inevitably passed through to renters) are the least volatile funding source around, and if you want your transit agency to work on real service improvement, instead of endless cycles of cuts, adds, and cuts, we'll have to find our way to a more stable funding solution.
one of my favorite book reviews so far …
Here's a very thoughtful review of my book, from Colin Marshall of Los Angeles — admittedly a city I've flattered a fair bit!
ever wanted to be that sexy voice on the train?
I certainly did, maybe still do. Last week, the Washington Post's "Dr Gridlock" asked readers to call in to record their rendering of the following sentence:
“Next station L’Enfant Plaza. Transfer to the Orange and Blue lines. Doors open on the right.”
An odd choice for an audition text, since it raises all these American anxieties about Frenchness, manifested in the endless question of how frenchly to pronounce French names …
dissent of the week: uk bus policy and “profitability”
In a recent guest post, Peter Brown praised the Tyne and Wear (greater Newcastle) region in the UK for seeking to regain government powers of integrated planning. The new paradigm is what the Brits call a "contract scheme" in which the government controls planning and operators provide service under contract with government. This is pretty much how privatized operations work in North America. The rider's is a customer of the government agency, the government agency is the customer of the bus operating company. Each link has accountability; operating companies are accountable to their government purchasers, while government is democratically accountable to voters.
UK reader John Smith responds:
Bus operators in North East England have formed the North East Bus Operators' Association to vigorously oppose the imposition of a contract scheme in Tyne and Wear. They are working together with Nexus on a Voluntary Partnership Agreement (VPA), which will provide much of the benefits of a contract scheme without the 'unintended consequence' of transferring the financial responsibility to the public sector, particularly at a time when local authority finances are under increasing pressure. You can read about it here.
Commeter Peter Laws also responded enthusiastically to the fact that 90% of bus miles outside of London run without subsidy.
Not so fast. While it's obviously desirable to reduce subsidy/bus, is the purpose of this savings to be able to afford more buses? Or is it just to avoid spending money on bus service?
The problem with aiming zero-subsidy service is it usually implies zero public control. Government is shrivelled to the role of a "regulator," with the implication that, as in safety regulation, government can enforce laws but not direct the provision of service to serve larger public ends.
Government, especially local government, has entirely valid interests that are served by operating public transit services. These include not just social service needs, but also a desire to support its urban development intent, or, as in Oxford, a need to organize service so that it uses scarce street space more effectively. The old privatization paradigm made it almost impossible to address these needs. For example, Oxford's effort to get the two bus operators to co-operate on using street space more efficiently would have been impossible, because any such co-operation was considered collusion. (Legislation under the last Labour government finally made it possible.)
Co-ordination of land use and transit, too, was impossible under the old regime, except insofar as an operating company considered it to be in their financial interest. There was no way for government to mandate such co-operation.
Or consider the great problem of frequency. One way you minimize subsidy or maximize profit is to run as little service as possible to serve as many riders as possible, just as the US airlines are doing, for example. Thus, a private operator tends to be happy with a much lower level of service than a public transport authority or local government or local population want, and would pay for.
This is especially important when a Frequent Network is at stake. There may be large network effects, with long term importance to city form and sustainability outcomes, that arise from running a service more frequently than its break-even point, but it is fiendishly hard to do this even by subsidizing the operator to do it, because you are then declaring certain trips of a line to be "profitable" and others "subsidized." In fact, because people respond so much to frequency and span, ridership among trips on a route is thoroughly interdependent, so you cannot declare ridership on a trip to be solely the result of that trip's existence. As a result, any separation between "profitable" vs "subsidized" trips on a route becomes an unmeasurable fiction.
So it's hard. I think the American privatization model (transit agency controls planning, hires operators just for operations and maintenance) enables much clearer democratic conversations about the nexus between public transport and public goods. But I understand why bus operating companies in the UK-influenced world often don't like that outcome, and why people whose main goal is to not spend money on transit don't like it either.
tweet-analysis for transit agencies, and more on positive feedback
A group of researchers studied tweets emerging from Chicago rail transit passengers, plotting them by time of day and correlating them with disruption events on the network. Emily Badger at The Atlantic has the story. A key insight:
Bus and train agencies generally gauge how riders feel about them the old-fashioned way, with surveys and focus groups. What if, instead of politely asking people if they find their morning commutes safe, sanitary and efficient, agencies tapped into the raw and unscripted assessments we all love to broadcast from our smart phones? (Case in point: I may have tweet-whined this morning from inside the Washington Metro system: "Why will it take 8 1/2 months to replace the escalators at the Dupont Metro?")
A group of researchers at Purdue suspected agencies could learn a lot about rider satisfaction by doing this (oh yeah, and all this data is free!).
Unfortunately, the results also picked up on my theme from last week:
[Samuil] Hasan, a Ph.D. candidate at Purdue, presented these findings Tuesday to a riveted room at the annual Transportation Research Board conference in Washington. Noticeably absent from his charts were the moments when everyone seemed to be tweeting wild praise for the Chicago Transit Authority.
"The most interesting thing we found is that transit riders do not give any positive sentiment at a particular time. They only give negative sentiment," he said. Now, this may seem depressing if you work for one of these agencies. "But that’s not very disappointing," Hasan said, "because we found that the lack of negative sentiment is basically what transit authorities should look for. If there’s no negative sentiment at any given time, that means that things are running smoothly."
That may be partly true of operational disruptions, but Hasan seems unaware of the role of positive feedback in encouraging good work by operations employees.
In many other areas of transit agency activity, the absence of positive feedback is unequivocally a problem. In operations, "smooth running" is the goal, which menas that change is usually the enemy. But network planning, for example, is about creative change that solves problems and improves the relevance of the service. Almost everybody, deep down, feels some entitlement to the status quo, so negative feedback on a change proposal is inevitable no matter how good the plan is.
When a transit agency is trying to do something new, and good — whether in network planning, infrastructure, wayfinding, marketing, communications, or whatever — you should assume they're getting lots of negative feedback from people who just want nothing to change. That means your positive feedback really matters.
portland: summer intern job at transit agency
Portland's transit agency TriMet is hiring a planning intern for this summer. I held this exalted position in the summers of 1983-85. And they've raised the pay just a little since then! Details here: Download TriMet Service Planning and Scheduling Student Internship Posting- 2012