That was the slogan of this 1912 advertisement for the first segment of subway rapid transit to open in the Boston area, the Cambridge segment of the Red Line. Thanks to the TRB History Committee.
Yes, I know that slow, fun transit is supposed to make us enjoy the ride more, and the ride is part of life. But if you're not riding for fun, wouldn't you rather get where you're going?
The City Builder's Book Club is about to begin reading Jane Jacobs's seminal 1961 book, the Death and Life of Great American Cities.
This is one of the few books that Absolutely Everyone Who Thinks About Cities Has Read, so if you haven't read it, (a) don't tell anyone, not even your partner or priest or dog, and (b) take this opportunity to read the book as commentary and discussion appears on the Book Club Blog, chapter by chapter. I'll be providing the opening commentary on Chapter 18, the main chapter on transportation.
Yes, I know, you lazy students can also just read the blog and forget reading the book (much as journalists prefer to interview me rather than read my book!) but believe me, you'll be the poorer for it. Jacobs is one of the most readable writers ever on city planning, and even those who disagree her tend to acknowledge her brilliance as an observer of city life.
When people think of a new transit need, they often jump prematurely to the idea that they need a new route. This article of mine — linked to in Chapter 7 of my book — explains why this can be a bad idea.
Tim Cavanaugh at Reason.com attacks me this morning for this post, in which I argued that redundancy in transit networks (as hailed by the Economist in their discussion of my book) often comes at the expense of overall service quantity and thus your ability to get where you're going:
… Walker speaks up on his blog, to explain that when he talks about reliability, he doesn’t mean you should actually let people provide a variety of approaches for taking customers where they want to go:
"Massive redundancy" may be fine if you're a megacity, though even there, its effectiveness may be a feature of the peak that doesn't translate to the rest of the day. Anywhere else, services need to work together as a network. Even in London, New York, Paris, Hong Kong and Berlin, that's really what's happening.
This is what happens when your mind is full of smart networks and transit-oriented growth. The proper word here is not “redundancy” but “competition.” To the owner of a taxi medallion or a member of the Transport Workers Union, minibuses, gypsy cabs, rolling chairs and pedicabs are all redundant, because you’re already providing all the service a customer could legitimately need. If some abuelita is stuck in the rain for 45 minutes waiting to make one of your smart connections, well, that just shows you need more money so the system can be more efficiently planned.
Note the use of "competition" not as an idea but just as a mantra. This last paragraph is so incoherent that I'm not even sure what I'm being accused of, so let me just clarify the question of competition.
The problem with encouraging multiple transit products to compete for the customer along the same path of travel is that transit's usefulness lies heavily in frequency (thus preventing 45 minute connections, for example), and frequency is an expensive resource that must be concentrated so that it can be made abundant. To introduce competition among transit services going the same way is to undermine frequency — as in the increasingly discredited British model where people were required to let Joe's Red Bus go by because their ticket was good only on Jim's Blue Bus. Earth to competition fantasists: Outside of the peak commute, people just want to get where they're going now, but they want this throughout the day, which means they want frequency. Abundant frequency arises from concentrating and organizing a single pattern of service, not encouraging lots of different services to run on top of each other.
I have never opposed private sector competition. There's obviously nothing wrong with taxis, pedicabs, etc competing with each other, and even competing with transit. On the peak commute, transit is usually overcrowded and can benefit from others taking up some of the load (because peak transit service is so expensive). But outside the peak commute, where frequency matters, nothing can compete with transit at its price point, once it's built up sufficient frequency. Taxis and pedicabs and autorickshaws can still have a role (a) at other price-points and (b) in places where the geography prevents transit from offering attractive service.
Still, we need to be more critical of cases where we are spending public transit dollars on multiple services that compete with each other instead of adding up to the greatest possible mobility. Competition fantasists imagine that when Joe's Red Bus and Jim's Blue Bus run on the same route, the customer is being empowered. Actually, she's just being obstructed, because in most cases, what she wants is any bus, now.
We are stuck in a narrative of a city being great and fabulous and walkable because it appears so (i.e. those sidewalks look pretty and nice, and I would walk down them if I felt like it and wasn’t driving to the store right now), not because it actually is.
The city of reference in the post is Minneapolis, but the point is a much broader and more nuanced one.
Pic: PRAIRIEFORM
Just noticed this on my Amazon listing:
Just published, and already over $50 of clean profit on resale! You should really buy boxes of them, shouldn't you? ;-)
“[Seattle's] snow and ice response plan is built around getting people to use public transportation. Given our geography here, we would have to have 100 trucks [to cover the whole city], and at $150,000 to $200,000 a truck, that would be a foolish waste of money because they would sit most of the time. And they would sit for five years because it doesn’t snow that often. So we go with what we have.”
– Seattle Director of Street Maintenance Steve Pratt
That's from a terrific (and funny) Atlantic article on snow removal, by Emily Badger. (Seattle has only 30 snowplows in a city that passes some winters with no snow at all, and averages only 7 inches of snow per year. It also has a traumatic memory of serious blizzards in 2008 and 2010, which I believe caused the coinage of the now-banal term snowpocalypse.)
Today's unsigned piece in the Economist "Democracy in America" blog picks up on Tom Vanderbilt's Slate item reviewing my book. I'm certainly grateful for the publicity, though for the record, I do believe in pleasure!
But the Economist's writer ends his piece with a commonplace of old-inner-city thinking that can do real harm when taken outside those bounds:
Ultimately, what makes public transit work is massive redundancy: lots of different systems layered on top of each other, all running at high frequencies, providing you clear information on when the next one arrives. The world's best cities, New York, Paris, London, Hong Kong, Berlin, all do this pretty well. For cities that aspire to greatness, the road map doesn't seem so hard to follow.
"Lots of different systems layered on top of each other" begs the question of whether these systems are working together — for example by encouraging connections from one to the other — or simply duplicating each other. That is the distinction that matters.
Yes, if you're in "New York, Paris, London, Hong Kong and Berlin" you may perceive a layering of "redundant" services, but one of two very different things is happening:
Praising these super-dense cities for "massive redundancy" sends exactly the wrong message to less-dense and smaller cities. Tell them to plan for redundancy, when their markets are insufficiently developed, and they'll spread their resources out in tangles of overlapping services none of which are frequent or attractive enough to be worth waiting for. This is the lesson of inner Sydney, discussed in Chapter 12 of my book.
You need massive agglomeration for true redundancy to work. Without that, you dissipate service quality too much. This was a key failing of the privatization of the British bus industry, which gave private companies control over transit planning and prohibited them from working together to create rational connective networks, by declaring that to be collusion. The result was a generation of frustrated riders who had to let Jim's bus go by because they had a ticket for Joe's bus, even though the two bus lines together might add up to enough frequency to actually be useful. The last Labour government finally removed this prohibition on "collusion," allowing simple, obvious, and mutually beneficial plans to go forward, like this one in Oxford.
"Massive redundancy" may be fine if you're a megacity, though even there, its effectiveness may be a feature of the peak that doesn't translate to the rest of the day. Anywhere else, services need to work together as a network. Even in London, New York, Paris, Hong Kong and Berlin, that's really what's happening.
Toronto readers, today's Globe & Mail everything you need to know about Mayor Rob Ford's dream of building expensive subways under low-density suburbia, thereby spending billions that could be spent expanding actual mobility (and access) where it's most needed and demand is highest. The article is about the crucial Eglinton corridor, an obvious grid-element that could help thousands of travellers get where they're going without having to go through downtown, thus adding to capacity problems there. But the same logic applies to an underground extension of the Sheppard East line toward Scarborough, which the mayor has also mooted. Reporter Adrian Morrow has done his homework (not just by talking to me) and he carefully sets aside all the main talking points of the suburban-subway advocates.
Bottom line: Going underground is expensive, so we do it only when we really need to! Responsible planning fights hard for space on the surface — especially in space-rich low-density suburbs — before sacrificing millions just to get transit "out of the way" of cars.
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