Author Archive | Jarrett

chicago: a new bus rapid transit plan

Posted on August 24, 2011 in Bus Rapid Transit, Chicago, Connections, Transfers

A Chicago-area planning nonprofit, the Metropolitan Planning Council, has released a plan for 10 Bus Rapid Transit within the City of Chicago. The final report is here: Download BRT TRB Report Final

The work, led by consultant Joshua K. Anderson, is admirably wonky. It analyzes a huge range of arterial segments to identify those that appear best from a standpoint of both constructibility, demand, and nexus with livability values. The report is a "screening" study, which means it seeks to narrow the range of possibility and encourage more detailed study of those that remain.

Bus Rapid Transit is defined quite vigorously:

BRT is 4 defined by four main components: 1) dedicated bus lanes, 2) at-grade boarding, 3) pay-before-you-board stations, and 4) signal-prioritized intersections.

This definition is met by almost none of the things now called BRT in North America, or at least not continuously from one end to the other. But screening is a time to be ambitious about such things.

The 10 corridors that survive the screening are shown on this map. They're a mixed bag: portions of segments, some of them maybe too short to be effective as BRT, but also two very long corridors, Western and Ashland Avenues, one of which is probably the most urgent BRT project in the city.

The study appears to be silent on whether these are envisioned as open BRT or closed BRT. Open BRT means that the infrastructure can be used by bus lines that flow onward beyond it to other destinations. To take an obvious example, an Irving Park BRT that ends at Ashland, short of the Red Line's connection opportunities and the high density of the lakeshore, is unlikely to be satisfying as a complete corridor. But if it's an open BRT, usable by buses that continue east, it could well be useful.

Unfortunately, a presumption of closed BRT, in which buses can't continue beyond the limits of the infrastructure, seems to be implied by the author's decision to discard super-dense Lake Shore Drive from the analysis simply because of the complexity of branching patterns that it requires; this assumption will have to be reconsidered in light of open-BRT best practice.

The study illustrates a common challenge in analyzing large, long transit corridors. Many of the key issues, including available right of way and "livability" impacts, are segment-by-segment affairs; if these dominated the analysis, the result would be a huge pile of largely disconnected short segments, which could not deliver the intended outcomes. So the author streamlined, discarding small segments and emphasizing larger continuous ones, which is quite right.

But issues of network integrity and completeness seem not to be fully considered. The report needed to step much further back and describe the underlying geographic structure of Chicago, which determines the type of services that could be relevant to citywide mobility needs.

Except near the lake, Chicago is an extremely regular grid of arterials spaced 1/2 mile (800m) apart. CTA follows this grid with a grid-pattern of long bus lines that attempt, as much as possible, to cover the entire length of an arterial all the way across the city. This achieves the important goal of grid completion. The purpose of each line is not just travel across that street but to complete a network in which people can travel from literally anywhere to anywhere else through a simple L-shaped movement:

For more on the high-frequency grid principle, see here. Obviously this structure only works, in its purpose to serve any origin-destination pair, if its constituent lines flow all the way across the grid to its natural edge. This is the problem with many of the proposed BRT corridors in the report.

Not everyone sees this grid, because Chicago also has an overlying radial system of rapid transit, which runs along diagonals pointing toward downtown. The two overlaid elements — radial trains and grid buses — work well together, but if you focus too much on the trains, which are mostly about going downtown, you miss the power of the underlying grid to complete trips on any origin-destination pair by a reasonably direct path. (The report discusses "network integration" only in the form of integration with rail. Confusingly, too, it gives heavy emphasis to connections with suburban commuter rail — whose poor frequency makes connection difficult — and little to the bus-bus grid connections that are the essence of the network's anywhere-to-anywhere versatility.)

Given Chicago's grid structure, and how well it already works, BRT needed to be understood as a system of grid accelerators, just like the Metro Rapid and proposed Wilshire subway in the similar grid of Los Angeles. Obviously, if you can concentrate particularly heavy demand on a few elements of the grid, you can justify an overlay of much faster service, stopping only at the grid connection points every half-mile.

On that score, Western Avenue is clearly a winner. It is the longest arterial in Chicago, running north-south the entire length of the city. Its extreme length creates reliability issues on a local-stop service, which has caused CTA to break it into three lines thus reducing its usefulness for continuous movement. BRT would be an opportunity to recombine these three segments to offer a service that would be understood as an intrinsic feature of Western Avenue over its entire length. Western is also far enough out of downtown that the direct paths it serves are much faster than riding rail into downtown and back. A vast range of trips between many parts of Chicago would find a Western BRT line useful.

None of the other corridors identified in the study can match Western in the utility that arises from extreme length with lots of connection opportunities. Ashland is obviously close. Most of the other proposed segments are simply too short, and would be useful only as open BRT segments used by buses that run further. Effective BRT has to serve long corridors, because the tradeoff that BRT requires of the customer — walk further in return for faster service — makes sense only for a fairly long trip.

To sum up, the report is very useful and highly recommended. But it misses (or at least downplays) two points that are missing in many similar studies, and that really matter:

Open or closed BRT? They're totally different, and if you're not clear which you mean, it's impossible to envision the service patterns, and thus the mobility, that your proposal will offer.
Integration with the total network, not just rail. This requires seeing how the whole mobility flow of the city works, and how each corridor would contribute to that flow. Localized analysis that asks where BRT would be easy to create or locally beneficial can easily lose this "forest" in its obsession with the trees. Understanding this principle would have required a much firmer focus on complete corridors that traverse the grid and make many connections, rather than the small fragments that are frequently proposed.

Still, the report can do a lot of good, and bravo to the Metropolitan Planning Council for sponsoring it. Chicago really needs to start accelerating its bus grid, especially on its busy, high-stakes, versatile corridors like Western. I hope this study helps to move that along.

what makes a good “planning game”?

Posted on August 19, 2011 in 3-newbasic, Public Outreach, Simulation

People learn from doing more than by being told, so public outreach is increasingly turning to various kinds of simulations, which can broadly be called planning games. A planning game is any interactive exercise that allows people to play with the tools of planning, under some kind of budgetary constraint, and thus to experience the hard choices that arise from the material.

You've probably played with online tools, often published by newspapers, that invite you to "balance the government budget yourself." Planning games drill down to a more detailed level than that, but they share the same spirit: They invite the citizen to express her views through grappling with the actual problem that government is facing. When used as outreach tools, the rule of these games is: Listen and educate at the same time.

Planning games can be group exercises in public meetings, but of course they can also happen on the web. Web-based versions are better for allowing an individual to explore at her own pace, but they don't fully expose the user to the diversity of opinions and needs in a community. Public workshops tend to be much better for that.

I'm inspired to return to this topic because of an intriguing style of planning game developed by Community Transit in suburban Snohomish County, Washington (north of Seattle). I'll talk first about the kind of planning game I do — and the one on which my network design course is based. Then I'll talk about the very different approach that Community Transit used.

Geography-Based Planning Games

To build stakeholder consensus around a transit plan in a difficult area, TransLink in Vancouver BC uses a geographical planning game. I helped them hone this tool for their South of Fraser area in 2006 and they have used it successfully in other areas since then. It can be helpful in many other contexts. This planning game technique, applied to a fictional city, is also the core of the interactive course in network design that I teach.

For a long-range infrastructure plan, stakeholders would be gathered in groups of about six around a map of their community, with a layer of clear acetate over it. We'd give them some tools: the red tape is an elevated metro, the blue tape is light rail, the green tape is frequent bus service. Here, fellow citizens: We have 24 kilometers of green tape that we can lay out. You can trade five km of green tape for a km of blue, or ten km of green tape for a km of red. Design your own system, but experience the process of making hard choices as you do.

A similar exercise can be done when doing a short-range bus service redesign. Here, you're just dealing with frequencies of service rather than technologies, so the costs are more obvious. Red tape is a bus every 15 minutes, blue is a bus every 30 minutes, green is a bus every 60 minutes, so a kilometer of red is worth two km of blue or four km of green.

At the end of the work at tables, different groups of citizens would have come up with different networks for the same area. So we'd put the resulting maps on the wall and I'd lead a discussion about how different groups had solved the problem differently, and get citizens talking to each other about why they approached the problem in various ways.

At the end, we understood their views, but more important, they understood each other's views. They also understood the underlying problem facing the transit agency, so they could form more useful and constructive ideas in the future.

In my course, I add a number of other features to this tool, including different ways to analyze the resulting networks, and also ways to humanize the issues. I also emphasize how the geography of transit generates choices among competing values, which is why citizens and their elected officials ultimately need to make the decision.

I advocate geographically-based games because the network design problem happens in geographical space, and you can't really see either the obstacles or the opportunities unless you look at a map. But Community Transit did it differently …

The Community Transit "Transit Values Exercise"

Like many US agencies, Community Transit is having to make a steep service cut this year, around 20% of their total service. They wanted a way to engage citizens in thinking about the choices that this implies, so they invented their own "Transit Values Exercise."

Instead of talking about geography at all, they forged a set of 15 fictional people who represent slices of their market. The question for participants was: "Which of these people should we no longer serve?"

Each person is represented by a card:

The narrative on the left is Cathy's story, but we're to understand that there are many people "just" like her. Services that meet the needs of these people have a total cost of 7 points (lower right) out of a total of 125 for all the cards. Icons on the left tell us that Cathy doesn't have a car (or a bike, or a wheelchair) and gives a sense of the diversity of trip purposes that she uses transit for.

On the right, the five bars describe the consequences, for the whole network, of serving Cathy and people like her. Note that she lives in a rural community, so it's not surprising that (compared to a whole network that also serves a larger urban area) she tends to need services that have high cost to operate (first bar) and require high subsidy (second bar.) Like all rural services, the routes Cathy rides cover a large area (high "Coverage") but have very, very low ridership by system standards. The middle bar, "Efficiency," refers very narrowly to schedule efficiency: the amount of dead running required.

(Obviously there's a little redundancy among these five, since subsidy itself is a result of ridership and cost [as well as fare levels, not modelled here]. Logically, subsidy could have been omitted, but it does tend to pique the interest of more conservative participants.)

Here's another card:

You get the idea. At the APTA Multimodal Operations Planning workshop on August 17, a roomful of professionals had a chance to play with this tool, choosing different people to "discard" (harsh, but that really is what we're doing) and then seeing how that choice effects the system's cost, subsidy, efficiency, coverage, and ridership. For example, if you discarded only the patrons associated with low-ridership routes, you can cut almost 50% of the system's total coverage area while cutting only 20% of cost and barely 10% of ridership. Rural coverage is a lot of area, and almost no riders.

It was clear that the Community Transit exercise would teach citizens about basic budgetary tradeoffs, and obviously it gives those tradeoffs a human face — or at least a set of demographics with a name [though not an ethnicity, an annual income, or a political persuasion]. The bracing task of jettisoning human beings, like deciding who gets the lifeboats on a sinking ship, certainly must have impressed participants with the gravity of the problem, and perhaps, in aggregate over time, such tools could motivate more support for funding sources that could change the picture.

But it's still about geography …

In the last stage of the Community Transit exercise, participants are finally given a map of the fictional community where these people live:

Knowing this, we were to make one final assessment about whom to discard.

For me, this part was a problem, because the geography revealed so much more than the game wanted us to think about. Now, for example, it was apparent that Cathy lives on the way to where Pat lives, so if we "discarded" Cathy but kept Pat we knew Cathy would still have some service. Yet there was no way for the game model to capture this obvious fact. I would probably have introduced the map much earlier in the exercise, and thought about how to integrate its geographic information into the "human" discussion about which cards to discard.

Ordinary citizens often assume that a transit agency's service to them reflects an assessment of what they need or deserve. In fact, this is only true if you're at the outermost end of a line, where the line is serving only you. Everywhere else, transit efficiency lies in combining the needs of diverse ranges of people onto a single vehicle, and this relies, above all, on taking advantage of situations where multiple people, often with very different demographics, are travelling along the same reasonably direct path. If you're on such a path you'll get better service than if you're not, even if you are exactly the same person in all other respects.

I wonder if, by steering us away from noticing the way transit combines diverse markets, the Community Transit game may have missed an opportunity to educate about how transit efficiency actually works. By presenting us with people whose needs are cheap or expensive to serve, the exercise may confirm a widespread and false assumption that transit planning really is about assessing the merits of interest groups and communities.

That's not what it is at all. Your transit service isn't a judgment about who you are, but about where you are! The barriers and opportunities presented by your location (and the location of places you go) are what determine how much service you can expect. We need to put a human face on our work, and help people understand the human consequences of changes, but we also need to help customers focus on the geometric fact of life. More than anything else about you, your location matters.

do line numbers matter at all?

Posted on August 18, 2011 in Branding, Legibility, Navigation

Does anyone care how the lines or routes of a transit system are numbered? Commenters Chris and Paul Jewel, the latter a former colleague of mine, say no. They're responding to this line numbering scheme proposed by LANTA in Allentown-Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, which even makes a line numbering distinction based solely on whether a route runs on Saturday. Chris's example-rich comment boils down to this:

Route design is what makes the transit system easy to understand, not what you number the routes.

Paul Jewel piles on:

I think many transit planners tend to overthink the issue of what passengers want and more importantly, what they have the capacity to understand. After 20 years of planning I have yet to come across more than a handful of transit patrons who really care about the numbering scheme of their bus system or for that matter…the system they are visiting. Visual cues (i.e. good maps) and simple number systems (perhaps variations of the NYMTA's bus lines (M=Manhattan, Q = Queens, etc) are…IMHO…far more effective than complicated numbering systems that try to organize lines into neat and clean systems.

If I may update my earlier post on this topic (which is considerably funnier than this one): Line numbering is really a dialogue between four impulses:

Big-picture Visionaries, who imagine schemes where each number will not just refer to a line, but reveal its position and role in the network. They want the customer to be able to identify her service amid the complexity of the offerings, but also to find it easy to grasp the whole network and how its parts fit together, so that it's less threatening to use transit for something other than a single rigid commute. For example, these people may think up schemes that recall the patterns of numbered streets and avenues in many North American cities, or the similar numbering of the US Interstate system. Visionaries, in their extreme form, can sometimes become …
Perfectionists, who believe that a line number, properly chosen, can encode all the richness and complexity of a service, so that to those in the know, the number 834 will tell you where the bus runs, what node it feeds into, how frequent it is, what color the bus is, whether it runs on Saturday, and whether you can expect the driver to be courteous.
Anarchists, who need a number for a new line, don't care about the vision, and pick whatever number comes to mind.
Conservatives, who believe that once a line number is assigned it should never be changed, no matter how offensive it may be to the Visionaries, let alone the Perfectionists. Conservatives are responsible for the permanence of various reckless numberings made by Anarchists over the years.

Paul and Chris have spoken for the Anarchists, but we've heard from a few Visionaries and Perfectionists on the last post as well. Conservatives on this score don't tend to read transit blogs.

I agree that when perfectionists run wild, you get overly specific line numbering systems. When I hear of a scheme where, say, the first digit of a three-digit number signifies subarea, the second signifies type, and the third signifies the node served, my first thought is :"You're going to run out of numbers. In fact, you already have."

But I do think there are several uses for line numbering systems that are clear and simple, and that help a customer see important information that might otherwise be unclear. For example, in Sydney, an important frequent corridor from downtown to the university is known as the "420-series", denoting a group of routes (421, 422, 423 etc) that all run this common segment but then branch further out. This is a clean way of conveying both the useful frequent inner segment and the individuality of the different lines.

In a huge system, numbering by subarea helps customers just sort through what would otherwise be an enormous complex mass of line numbers. Put it this way: If, to make your trip, you can take any of five routes, which of the following would you rather have to remember?

Route 1, 4, 7, 8, or 9
Any route numbered in the 30s
Route F, 9, J2, 76, or 239K

Few would prefer the third, I think, so I don't think it's true that a totally random or Anarchist pattern of numbers is ideal. It's also clearly true that lower numbers feel simpler. Using lower route numbers in the central city, as many big regional agencies do, helps this core area, where ridership is highest, feel more navigable without reference to the more complex networks that the suburbs require.

I do also think route numbers can help capture some basic distinctions of importance. Using certain route number groups for specialized commuter express lines, for example, helps them not distract from the simpler all-day network. Rapid transit lines can reasonably have simpler numbers, such as the letters used by Seattle's Rapid Ride against the background of 1-3 digit local line numbers. The letters cause the Rapid Ride to "stand out" as a backbone, just as the agency intends, much the way the lettered rail lines do in San Francisco against the background of numbered bus lines.

Here's the bottom line: Numbers, like words, never just refer. They also connote. You can refer to a particular bus route as F, 9, J2, 76, or 239K, but those numberings will inevitably convey subliminal messages about those services, especially in relation to the other numbers around them. "239K" for example, connotes that "this is a really complicated network, where you deal with details even to remember a line number, let alone figure out the service." Likewise, if you see a long segment served by lines 121, 123, 124, and 127, the connotation is that the 120s represent some kind of pattern that might be useful in understanding the service. It's almost impossible not to refer to this segment as "the 120s".

So do line numbers matter? What do you think?

what if route numbers signified service level?

Posted on August 15, 2011 in Frequent Networks, Legibility

From the new line numbering scheme (and service plan) in Allentown-Bethlehem, Pennsylvania:

All routes will be designated with a three-digit number which will provide an indication of the level of service
100’s routes act as the core routes – they will provide service Monday through Saturday throughout the day and into the evening. These routes will also operate on Sunday;
200’s routes provide service along key urban corridors Monday through Saturday during day hours;
300’s routes provide service on the more suburban corridors in the region and operate Monday through Friday during day hours;
400’s routes continue to act as special routes to provide added capacity to meet demand from Allentown School District students;
500’s routes are LANta Flex routes – new flexible, reservation based feeder services designed for more suburban areas; and
600’s routes are circulator and crosstown routes designed to address specific markets.

So the whole numbering system is about service quantity. Clearly, too, the higher numbers mean "don't less this distract you from the more versatile lower-numbered routes," which is exactly the principle of good frequency branding or a good network map such as Portland's (which distinguishes four tiers: light rail, frequent bus, infrequent bus, and peak-only).

Obviously, most agencies would resist the Allentown-style numbering because it means that if you change a service level you need to renumber the route. But if followed through, it would be a step toward branding a core network (presumably also the most frequent) with route numbers, yet another way for that most versatile network to be most visible to customers.

Personally I wouldn't recommend this if it were exclusively about service duration, as the summary states. I'd do it only if it were also about a frequency distinction, or at least an intended one. But it's interesting that while Frequent Networks are intended to be lasting top priorities of an agency, and usually represent permanent strong markets, no agency (in either North America or Australasia) has "locked in" the commitment to a Frequent Network by numbering the frequent lines differently.

in seattle next 3 days …

Posted on August 13, 2011 in Meta, Seattle

… but probably not with much spare time for non-work, non-marketing items. I'm the lunchtime speaker on Monday at the APTA Multimodal Operations Planning Workshop, and will be at the conference through Wednesday. It's always a good source of planning stories so I expect to emerge with some material, though maybe not time to write about it.

This is a very busy time for me between the 1.5 jobs and the book, so remember, we welcome quality guest posts — or even just stories from a thoughtful "correspondent," like this guy, that I can publish with just a little commentary.

if you’re not tired of the sound of my voice …

Posted on August 10, 2011 in Journalism

An audio interview of me by the User Experience Podcast is now online. Audio here, transcript here. Longtime readers will probably find it familiar. Because the interviewer is in Melbourne I used mostly Australian examples, but I hope it will be provocative and useful anywhere.

cambridge, uk: world’s longest guided busway opens

Posted on August 7, 2011 in Bus Rapid Transit, UK

From our UK correspondent Peter Brown:

The Cambridgeshire Guided Busway finally opens [today], Sunday 7th August, and at 25km will overtake Adelaide's O-Bahn (on which it was partly based) as the world's longest guided busway. It will be an 'open' BRT as services will not be restricted solely to the Busway. The guideway consists of two sections. The longest runs from the northern edge of Cambridge to St Ives, while the shorter southern section runs from Cambridge rail station to Trumpington. There are three Park and Ride sites on the route.

The buses are standard UK designs (single and double deckers) fitted with guide wheels. Guideway stops will feature off-bus ticketing. Guideway stop (prior to opening):
Two bus companies (Stagecoach and local independant Whippet Coaches) have signed a partnership agreement with Cambridgeshire County Council for exclusive use of the Busway for 5 years. Services will operate under a single brand – "the busway".

More info:

http://www.busandcoach.com/featurepage.aspx?id=2088&categoryid=5

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambridgeshire_Guided_Busway

If this busway doesn't turn up significant benefits in customer experience, it will probably be the last, or at least the last to be done with guide-wheels. Adelaide's pioneering O-Bahn is now 25 years old, so one hopes the state of the art has moved on. (There's also a guided busway in Nagoya, Japan, dating from 2001, where the government classifies it as a railway.) All of these, including Cambridge, are open busways, i.e. designed so that buses can run off the ends of the facility onto various street-running lines.

So I'll be curious to see how this goes.

bus rapid transit: two kinds of flexibility

Posted on August 5, 2011 in Brisbane, Bus Rapid Transit

On yesterday's post on the watering-down of Bus Rapid Transit proposals in Bristol, UK, a number of comments seem a little vague about how buses are more "flexible" than rail. For example, Carl writes:

The two primary justifications for BRT [are]:
1. Like rail but cheaper. …
2. More flexible. More flexible means it doesn't need exclusive right of way everywhere (usually the chokepoints), that other traffic can use the lanes, etc.

This a very common way of framing the question, and a very misleading one.

First of all, the notion of "flexibility" used in #2 has nothing to do with the bus/rail distinction, at least if we're talking about surface light rail or streetcars. You can put streetcars or light rail in mixed traffic and get all the same speed and reliability problems that a bus would deliver in the same situation. So again, in urban transit: Speed and reliability are not about vehicle technology; they are about what can get in your way.

But Bus Rapid Transit offers a very different flexibility that in certain situations out-competes rail. A busway can be designed so that buses from many surface lines can flow into it. This potentially spreads the usefulness of the busway over a large area without requiring an additional trunk-to-feeder connection. Connections are unavoidable in good networks, but if there are easy opportunities to eliminate one, it's still worth going for.

This ability to flow through to local lines yields what we call an open busway. North American open busways include the Ottawa busway network, the Pittsburgh busway, and the Los Angeles El Monte Transitway, but they are much more common overseas, including the developed world's most extensive example in Brisbane, Australia. This kind of flexibility is impossible to do with rail.

Closed busways, which has none of these benefits but can have more "specailized" vehicles, include the Los Angeles Orange Line.

The flexibility of open busways makes sense only where it matches the pattern of the market. Brisbane is a highly radial city, with a single downtown and densities dropping away as you move away from it. Outlying nodes of high activity, which could be a strong endpoint for a closed busway or rail line, are scarce. So the open busway makes perfect sense. It allows busway service to spread out over a larger area, yielding high frequencies on the inner busway where the demand is higher, and correspondingly lower frequency further out. It's the kind of flexibility that fits the city.

watered-down bus rapid transit: the u.k. edition

Posted on August 3, 2011 in Bus Rapid Transit, UK

We often hear that proper Bus Rapid Transit [BRT] is impossible in the US because any such proposal gets watered down by the defenders of traffic lanes until it's nothing but a fancy bus stuck in traffic. I don't believe in surrendering to the inevitability of that, but there's no question that it's a political challenge in many cities. Meanwhile, US readers should be assured that this isn't a particularly US problem. Our reliable UK correspondent Peter Brown reports:

It would seem that [Bristol's Bus Rapid Transit] scheme has gone from medium to low end BRT due to central government latching on to the ease in which economies can be made by deleting the features that make it rapid – i.e. dedicated busways, and continuous bus lanes. We are now reduced to short stretches of kerbside bus lanes approaching junctions, but no traffic signal pre-emption. Where there were going to be median bus lanes, they are now going to be kerb running.

This will make the BRT little different in the eyes of the (already sceptical) public to the separate package of conventional bus corridor improvements branded 'Showcase Bus Routes', several of which have been rolled out over the last few years. In order to distinguish BRT in the eyes of the public I think the BRT stops are going to have to look much different from standard bus shelters, and the vehicles are going to have to have some eye catching branding, and have hi spec interiors.

It troubles me that much of the BRT busways were to be located in the North Bristol fringe, an area of low density cul-de-sac esatates, out-of-town business and retail parks, all connected by dual carriageway roads and multi-lane roundabouts which cannot handle existing peak hour traffic, and would have made a real statement about better public transport. There are also plans for further massive housing development, and new roads that will add to the traffic load and threaten BRT reliability. This is the latest newsletter that has got me so worried:

http://travelplus.org.uk/media/218106/rt%20travelplus%20newsletter%20final.pdf

Meanwhile I continue to defend the principles of BRT in the local press web comments!

http://www.thisisbristol.co.uk/discussions/Does-think-bendy-bus-plan-abandoned-tram-pursued/discussion-12818823-detail/discussion.html#comment-2459045

Is this problem less likely in continental Europe? I haven't toured the great BRTs of France, but the Amsterdam Zuidtangent certainly has gaps where, even in the judgment of the transit-loving Dutch, keeping an exclusive lane for the BRT was Just Too Hard. (I'm not talking just about the narrow streets of Renaissance Haarlem, where the limitations are understandable, but also the quite modern southern suburbia where the line runs.)

It would be great to hear stories about how BRT has fared in other developed countries, against inevitable demands to compromise reliability because it might get in the way of cars.

transit and a shrinking u.s. government

Posted on August 2, 2011 in US Federal Policy

The recent "deal" intended to cut the US Federal deficit looks like it can only lead to further cuts in Federal spending on almost everything.

Cities, in general, require higher levels of infrastructure, and a range of other spending, than the country as a whole. So the further Federal budget cutting to come is likely to mean further damage to essential services in cities, including public transit. While a powerful cadre of urban economists and thinkers are ready to make the case that the city is essential to the economy of the nation, and the battle for continued Federal funding may well be won, cities and local governments, including transit agencies, should clearly be strategizing for the possibility of permanent decline in Federal investment.

It's important to separate, in all of our minds, two questions about urban services such as transit that often get confused:

Should urban services be subsidized by taxpayers to purchase their benefits to the whole community and economy?
At what level of government should this be done?

I have strong feelings about the first question but am quite agnostic about the second. It's unavoidable, though, that if the Federal level of government decides to care less about cities, other levels of government will have to care more, and spend more.

The prospect of shifting responsibility from one level of government to another is understandably horrifying to anyone close to the task. Voters must be convinced of the need to adapt to new realities with new funding. Processes that have been working have to be changed. Long-settled debates must be unsettled. Most challenging is that the prospect casts doubt on the job security of the very people who have to make it work, though in general the job-security impact would be that Federal jobs would disappear and state-region-city jobs would have to grow.

But you always have to separate thinking about the transition from thinking about the end state.

Would it be a bad thing for each state, each city, and each urban region, to have its own debate about its own funding sources for transit, as it would for similar urban services that may see federal cuts? The outcomes would vary from city to city and state to state. Would that be bad?

Even within urban regions, is it a bad thing for different cities to want different levels of service, and to come forward with their own funding sources if they want more than higher levels of government, including their own regional transit agency, can offer?

What would a US be like in which each city's transit network reflected its own resources and intentions, based on its own hard-won local consensus, in the face of declining Federal funding and therefore declining Federal influence?

California and Texas would become even more different than they are now, as they charted this landscape guided by their very different values. Urban outcomes in general would grow more diverse, as the choice became more stark between low-tax, low-infrastructure, low-service cities and others with higher taxes but a stronger foundation of infrastructure and essential services. So we'd see, even more clearly, the result of that competition.

In other words, US urban policy would become more like that of Canada, a country where the Federal role in most urban matters is much smaller than in the US, but where cities, regional governments, and provinces are correspondingly freer to chart their own way, and pay for it.

It's easy to imagine that more conservative states would just let their cities die through underfunding, but that's certainly not happening in Alberta. Canada's most conservative province, a natural resource powerhouse that draws comparison to Texas in its boom times, has remarkably good inner-city transit policy and a continuous stream of provincial investment. Calgary's downtown commuter parking cost is about the same as San Francisco's and the result is extremely strong ridership on its bus and light rail system, at least for commutes, and support for a dense core.

The transition to a more Canada-like Federal role would be hell. Everyone involved is understandably horrified by the prospect, including me much of the time. But if the Federal budget-slashers win, US cities and states will be on that course whether they like it or not. Are we sure the eventual outcome would be a disaster?

Just thinking out loud here. Discuss.

Older posts Newer posts