Author Archive | Jarrett

shared housing and shared transportation (guest post by alfred twu)

Posted on May 26, 2011 in Density, Transit-Oriented Development (TOD), Urban Structure

Alfred Twu lives in the Bay Area and is a long time transit rider. He has studied architecture and business and is also an active participant of the cooperative movement, having worked in artist, food, and housing co-ops. He is also an illustrator for my forthcoming book Human Transit.

Also known as cooperative living, co-ops, communes, intentional communities, or living with roommates, shared housing creates challenges and opportunities for transit service. It can increase density without zoning changes or construction. However, good transit service needs to already exist for this to happen. As such, shared housing's greatest potential is in increasing utilization of under-zoned but well served neighborhoods.

What is shared housing?

Shared housing denotes a group of unrelated people live in a single dwelling unit. Kitchens, bathrooms, and other living areas are shared, bedrooms may be shared or single occupancy. In the Bay Area, this model is known as a co-op or cooperative. Note that the word co-op has an entirely different meaning on the East Coast.

Shared housing has a long history in the Bay Area, dating back to boarding houses. The modern Bay Area cooperative housing movement began in 1933 with the founding of the Berkeley Student Cooperative.

Although some structures are built with shared housing in mind, usually the building is simply a repurposed large house. For example, Ridge House, a 38 person student co-op, used to be a mansion, while Cooperative Roots, pictured below, houses around 20 people in two adjacent single family houses.

What does this have to do with transit?

Let's look at two neighborhoods: one dense, and one sprawling. The denser neighborhood will usually have better transit service.

Now, if zoning ordinances prevent additional housing from being built in Sprawlville, that does not mean it's the end of the story. While zoning typically concerns itself with units per acre, the density that matters for transit service is population per acre, or more specifically, commuters per acre.

This is where shared housing comes in. When a neighborhood of single family houses goes from having one or two working adults per house, to having 4 to 8 working adults, as far as transit is concerned, it's a high density neighborhood.

The catch to this though, is that this can only happen where there is already good transit service. When a group of people share a house, they'll all want easy access to their jobs, which may be in different directions. Not all of them will take transit either – some of them will need to drive to their jobs, some people prefer to bike. This is why shared housing works so well with college students – everyone is going to the same place for their "job", so only one frequent route is necessary.

Case Study: Ashby BART (San Francisco Bay Area)

A number of my friends who used to live in shared housing as students have formed their own communities after graduation. Most are now in their mid 20s to early 30s. Some work office jobs with traditional 9-5 hours, others work retail jobs with varying hours. Over the last few years, about 30 communities of 4 to 18 people have been formed. Most cluster around the Ashby rail rapid transit station. Let's examine why.

It is about halfway between the two big job centers in the area: UC Berkeley and Downtown Oakland.
It is 20 minutes on rapid transit to the region's largest job center, downtown San Francisco.
It is close to freeway on-ramps.
It is on flat ground and within biking distance of a large number of commercial districts. Bike access is important since transit service in the evenings and on weekends is limited.
It is not in itself a downtown district. This means there are a lot of large houses with lots of bedrooms and yards – the preferred housing type.
There are already other co-ops in the area.

The one co-op not near a BART station — an outlier near the bay — is an artists' warehouse.

Ashby Station: Excellent transit service but low density

The Ashby station neighborhood, which currently consists of mostly single family houses, had long been targeted by planners for transit oriented development. It has an underground rapid transit station with train frequency of every 7 minutes on weekdays and 20 minutes at night and on weekends.

Ashby station neighborhood. Station is blue, parking lot is black.

However, the official plan to build 300 units of housing on the station parking lots met significant neighborhood opposition. Existing residents were concerned about losing the flea market that currently operates on weekends in the parking lot, increased traffic, and future upzoning of the area. The project was put on hold in 2006.

Shared housing, however, has achieved something similar with no official intervention.

Can the Ashby model be replicated elsewhere?

Using shared housing to increase neighborhood density offers a solution for low density areas where economic constraints or zoning limits the ability to build new housing units. The following factors are needed for its success:

Multimodal Job Access

Members of a shared house with long commutes tend to move out. Therefore a location needs good access to members' existing jobs, and potential future ones. Transit is just one part of the equation – those working 9 to 5 hours downtown. For the other members, good car and bike access to nearby commercial areas is needed for those working retail and service jobs on evenings and weekends.

Catalyst community and clustering effect

The Ashby area community began with just a couple of houses. However, the community grew rapidly as the original residents' friends also wanted to live nearby. UC Berkeley provided a feeder system with many members having already familiarized themselves with shared housing through living in the Berkeley student co-ops. In places far from colleges, immigrant neighborhoods can also benefit from the feeder effect.

One of the side benefits of shared housing is a group of residents will have a lot of purchasing power with their combined incomes, and will seek out the area that meets their needs best. Until most people live in shared housing, this means that a region will likely have only a small number of preferred neighborhoods.

Why not MacArthur? Station placement matters.

The next station down the line, MacArthur, is even better positioned in terms of access to transit and jobs. However, this station is located in a freeway median. As a result, a lot of the land walkable to the station is either paved over, or so close to a freeway that it is an unpleasant place to live. As a result, even though this area has been zoned for multistory apartments, few have been built.

Creating community: the station as social hub

Shared housing in the Ashby area occurred without any official planning – an existing community (recent UC Berkeley graduates) simply moved in. Where no existing community exists, social hubs such as coffee shops or community centers, located inside or directly next to the station, can aid the formation of the close relationships that shared housing requires.

post removed

Posted on May 26, 2011 in General

This post has been removed, as it had served its purpose.

seeking information: performance-based investment policies

Posted on May 26, 2011 in Information Requests

That headline may sound like a perfect storm of vague and bloodless words, but its meaning is actually pretty forceful.

I'm looking for examples of policies, often at the level of planning authorities spanning an urban region, that state expected performance outcomes for major investments. These policies frame the big infrastructure decisions as investments, which implies some risk but also some sense of expected level of return. The return doesn't have to be to the transit agency's budget, though it certainly can be. It could also be a return to the tax base or development goals of the city served.

The purpose of such policies is to push back against purely political impulses in prioritization, including all the many aspects of parochialism that are inseparable from representative democracy. The policy is polite, but behind the politeness it basically says: We can't focus on how worthy or victimized or generous your suburb or community or electoral district is, nor do we care what our grandparents promised to your grandparents. We as a regional infrastructure agency care about outcomes for our region, and we will not make investments that look unlikely to deliver those outcomes.

In my case, I'm interested in major transport infrastructure investments, both highway and transit.

These policies are in early stages of being invented in most of the agencies I'm familiar with, but I want to make sure I'm not missing any inspirational leadership in this area. Anyone with knowledge of such policies in any urban area, please inform me of them, either in comments or with the email button under my photo. —>

make your own transit maps! a success story

Posted on May 25, 2011 in Cincinnati, Frequent Networks, Maps

Frequent Network maps, which show you the transit network that's useful if you're not willing to wait long, have been a good idea for a long time, but it takes a while for ideas to move through bureaucracies in even the most competent and well-intentioned transit agency. So bravo to the agencies that now produce these maps in some form, including those in Los Angeles, Minneapolis, Adelaide, and Montréal.¹

Fortunately, you don't have to wait for the transit agency to do it. Today anyone can create, promote, and perhaps even sell their own maps, and now people are doing it. A few had already gone down this path, like Brent Palmer in Brisbane and Steve Boland in San Francisco. But my post on this topic seems to have started (or at least encouraged) a barrage of local innovation in cities all over North America and Australia. Within weeks I had a feast of map samples and ideas from Seattle, Vancouver, Melbourne, Columbus, and many others. The most beautiful of them was certainly Anton Dubreau's map for Montréal, but all showed interesting ideas on how you could attack the problem. They ranged, for example, from artistic hand-drawings to automated outputs (Los Angeles by Routefriend, Chicago by Jeff Wegerson) that could update automatically.

Back in January, Nathan Wessel of Cincinnati contact me to share an early draft of his proposed Frequent Network Map for that city. He had done this on his own, initially for fun. But since then, floodgates of opportunity have opened. Here's his story from an email to me.

Jarrett,
I thought you'd be interested to see how this all turned out.
The final version of the map is here: http://cincimap.org/CincinnatiTransitMap.pdf
A blog post on the launch event for the map at the Contemporary Arts Center:
http://5chw4r7z.blogspot.com/2011/05/cincinnati-transit-map-launch.html
I spoke to about 100 people came out for the event, including a board member from the transit agency and two city council candidates. Lots of designers, young folk, and activists.
I managed to print 30,000 maps with the money I raised and will add about 500 posters!:
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1057319855/a-frequent-transit-guide-for-cincinnati/posts
About 5,000 have been distributed so far-to the library system, a transit agency and the people at the event and who donated.
The main transit agency has acknowledged on their website that their map is inaccurate (they hadn't before!): http://www.go-metro.com/maps.html And they are looking into paying me to make a map that includes all of their routes with park and ride locations.
And Cincinnati's largest university, the University of Cincinnati is printing 6,000 of their own maps for next year's freshmen class. Right now I am distributing maps to orgs and businesses with customers who ought to be riding the bus and being clear that if they want more, they'll have to(and can) print their own.
I even inspired someone in Dallas to do a similar project with their downtown pedestrian tunnels:
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/dfwcre8tive/designing-a-map-for-the-dallas-pedestrian-network
Anyway, I wanted to share all this with you because your blog gave me the idea to start this project, and I want you to know you're helping to start good things 🙂
Moral: Don't wait for your transit agency to take the initiative! In our distributed and wired world, initiative can come from anyone, and that means you!

¹ Portland's TriMet was an early leader in this trend, but budget cuts have forced them to undermine the meaning of "frequent" to the point that Portland would be misleading as an example.

planning games: “in praise of the urban sandbox”

Posted on May 23, 2011 in Education, Simulation

Games may soon be the best way to build understanding of city planning and transport. So argues an excellent article in Planning magazine by Jeff Ferzoco of New York's Regional Plan Association (my links):

At a recent talk at the American Museum of Natural History, Jane McGonigal, the Institute for the Future's director of Game Research and Design, noted that research from universities and the U.S. Army Mental Health Assessment Team show that the benefits of gaming lessen at about 21 hours in a week. … Her point is that gaming has major benefits — stress relief, strategic thinking, goal attainment — if kept within the 21-hour limit.
She isn't the only one to see the implications. The Serious Games Initiative, founded in 2002 at the Woodrow Wilson Center for International Scholars in Washington, D.C., aims to "help usher in a new series of policy education, exploration, and management tools utilizing state of the artcomputer game designs, technologies, and development skills." One of its initiatives, Games for Change, runs an annual festival highlighting games — both electronic and physical — that encourage social change. Throughout the year, the initiative provides support for and development of new titles and helps potential developers navigate game making from concept to distribution.
There is already a lot of interest in how we can use games for teaching. Those who design virtualworlds put a lot of emphasis on crafting the experience — and allowing others to change it…
In my work as a graphic designer for Regional Plan Association in New York City, I constantly think through concepts, illustrations, and designs. Ideas don't just come from thin air, and everything I experience influences what I make. Looking back, I can clearly identify instances when city-building games influenced my design work. For instance, axonometric views: giant human hands placing houses on a row. These can be directly traced to a weekend I spent redesigning the suburbs of one of my virtual towns. And I'm not alone. Many of the people around me have taken their design problems to these samearenas and come out with a slightly wider and more empathetic perspective.
Playing a simulation game is a bit like gardening. Just as air, soil, and water interact with seeds to bring a plant to life, simulated … cities can blossom and wilt, depending on your actions. You have to tend to the needs of the citizens, joining job centers and adding transit and roads to bring circulation to a dying center. It's instant, satisfying, and educational. In fact, it's why I work where I do in planning. I could say that my career began the moment I opened up SimCity for the first time.

Or if that's too many words, see Jane McGonigal's enjoyable video. Her basic thesis: "If we want to save the world, we need to spend more time playing computer games."

fictional city seeks reality check

Posted on May 21, 2011 in Education, Maps, Simulation, Urban Structure

Did you draw maps of fictional cities when you were 8 years old? If so, you and I are part of a near-invisible, uncounted minority.

If that's you, I dare you not to be interested in this! Even if you just enjoy maps of other cities, here's a chance to study a city you've never seen before.

For the transit planning course that I'm developing, I've created a fictional city that's designed to present a range of major transit issues, while also being an interesting place. I considered using a real city, but in my experience, planning for a real city slides too quickly to details that obscure the big picture of how a good network works.

My introduction to the fictional city is here: Download Game Newport intro (.doc)

A rich set of map layers, created in Excel, is here: Download Game data backsave (.xls)

Both documents are covered by the assertion of copyright that covers all of this blog's material.

I'd love feedback, especially about these questions:

Is the city realistic? Does it contravene what you perceive to be "facts" of geology, hydrology, urban economics, bird psychology, or post-1800 urban history?
Have I omitted information that seems relevant to the basic task of designing a transit network? Note that I'm not asking "have I omitted anything that might be interesting?" The austere novelist and dominatrix who sells rare Asian herbs out of her Craftsman basement at 3315 W 43rd St while also being the invisible brains behind a top eco-fashion label is extremely interesting, but I only had a day to put this together.

Have fun! The premiere of the transit planning course is in Surrey, British Columbia near Vancouver on June 9-10. Last I checked there were a few places left. Details here.

UPDATES:

Please do not try to comment based only on the illustration above. I'm getting many comments that indicate you've only looked at that image. You would need to download the files and look at the whole thing.
Apologies to those who had trouble with the .docx and .xlsx versions; these old formats should be more widely compatible and convertible.
The newest version now has layers for income and existing rail infrastructure.

Finally, I'm surprised at early comments that I don't have enough freeways! It's not a freeway dependent city, by choice. (See the .doc file above for more on the freeway wars.) But freeways that run only on the periphery and don't connect into the core are common enough in cities of this size class. See:

Victoria, British Columbia, metro pop 330k. Two small shreds of freeway, created only as traffic required.
Halifax, Nova Scotia, metro pop 372k. Fragments of an outer ring freeway, nothing into the city.
Christchurch, New Zealand, metro pop 390k at least before February's earthquake. One 5-km shred of freeway approaching from the north (Kaiapoi to Belfast), but it's really just an extended bridge.
Palm Springs-Indio, California, metro pop 365k. The area is bypassed on the north by Interstate 10, far from most of the urban cores.
Gold Coast, Queensland, metro pop 591k. A massive highrise hotel/retail core (30-60 storeys) at Surfers Paradise, a highrise business core in adjacent Southport, but the only freeway bypasses 7 km to the west.

The last two of these are not, by any stretch, leftist car-hating enclaves. In fact, they're exceptionally car-dependent. Still, no freeways near the core. It's possible!

great american “metro areas”

Posted on May 20, 2011 in Fresno, Journalism, Las Vegas, Maps, Seattle

When any US study or journalist refers to “metro areas,” they probably mean this:

These are all photos of US Metropolitan Statistical Areas (MSAs). Many, many national studies — most recently the Brookings study on “transit and jobs in metropolitan America” — mean “MSA” when they say “metro area.”

MSAs, however, are aggregations of counties. They’re the red patches on this map:

Counties come in all kinds of weird sizes, and are usually irrelevant to anyone’s lived experience of a metro area. Eastern US counties are mostly small, so MSAs there are often credible. But western counties are often huge, so MSAs have to be huge too. Almost two-thirds of California’s land area is a metro area by this defintion, including the “Riverside-San Bernardino-Ontario MSA,” which contains most of the Mojave Desert. Metro areas in America include the Grand Canyon, a big chunk of the Everglades, and the vast Voyageurs wilderness of northern Minnesota, accessible only by canoe or snowmobile.

So when the Brookings Institution, for example, declares that Riverside-San Bernardino is doing poorly on transit travel times to work, they’re referring partly to travel times from Needles to Riverside, a distance of about 230 miles (370 km) over open desert. They’re also implying that there ought to be intense transit service between the Riverside area and the Palm Springs area, even though locals largely experience these as two different metro areas. (Their centroids are 50 miles apart, the towns between are mostly semi-rural in nature, and if those facts don’t convince you, there’s also a 10,000-foot mountain in the way.) What matters to the MSA is that the two metro areas are in the same counties as Riverside-San Bernardino, so nothing else about their lived geography can possibly matter.

A deeper problem arises when all the demographic statistics of an MSA are declared to be features of a “metro area.” Consider the Visalia-Porterville MSA, site of the top photo above. The MSA, identical to Tulare County, has a 2000 population of 368,000. All of these people are counted in MSA-based statistics about “metropolitan America,” but only about half of them live in a city over 50,000. The other half live in much smaller towns and in rural areas. (The rural areas also have high labor needs, so they support semi-mobile populations, validly picked up by the census, that have no relationship to any city.) A fundamentally rural and small-town culture, indistinguishable from many other entirely rural counties, is being described as metropolitan whenever the Visalia-Porterville MSA is referenced as part of generalizations about “metropolitan America.” This culture is not just small and easily dismissed statistical “noise.” It’s half of the population of the MSA.

This is one of those absurdities that we’re trained to think of as eternal. Many weird and misleading boundaries (e.g. some counties, city limits etc) are going to persist even if they have no emotional or cultural meaning, simply because influential people are attached to them as a matter of self-interest. But how many people are really attached in this way to MSAs? And is it really impossible, with all the increasingly detailed information in the census, to describe metro areas in a more subtle and accurate way?

Even if we’re stuck with them, is it really appropriate to keep saying “metro area” when you mean MSA? It’s statistically convenient given how much data is organized by these crazy units. But are you really misleading people about what a metro area is?

In the sense that usually matters for urban policy, “metro area” means “the contiguous patch of lights that you can see at night from an airplane or satellite.” You can approximate this with census blocks. Their technical definition is something like “any agglomeration of contiguous census blocks that all have a non-rural population or employment density.” Census blocks are small enough that they can aggregate in a way that follows the geography, connecting what’s really connected and separating what’s really separate. Defining “metro area” in that way would finally mean what ordinary people mean by “metro area.”

What’s more, it would really cut down on bear attacks in “metropolitan America.”

Photos:

Kaweah Gap, Sequoia National Park, Visalia-Porterville MSA, California. Credit: Davigoli, Wikipedia.
Lake Mead National Recreation Area, Las Vegas-Paradise MSA, Nevada. (my photo)
Duck Lake and High Sierra, John Muir Wilderness, Fresno MSA, California. (my photo)
Matanuska Glacier, Anchorage MSA, Alaska. Credit: Elaina G, via Google Earth.
Melakwa Lake, Alpine Lakes Wilderness, Seattle-Tacoma-Bellevue MSA, Washington. Credit: Wikipedia.
Joshua trees in open desert southwest of Las Vegas, Las Vegas-Paradise MSA, Nevada. (my photo)

updated: another weird way to measure “best cities for transit”

Posted on May 18, 2011 in Advocacy, Honolulu

UPDATE: This post in its original form happened when I had the Atlantic article article on the new Brookings report, but couldn't find the report itself. As it turned out, the Brookings report is much smarter than the Atlantic article made it sound. In particular, it appears to have been the Atlantic, not Brookings, who decided that this is a "10 best" story. I've made minor corrections to revise the attribution, but watch soon for a series of posts responding to the Brookings report more fairly. I'll have several things to say about it, some of them critical, over the next few days.

The esteemed Brookings Institution US magazine The Atlantic says that America's best city for transit is … <drumroll> … Honolulu!

Sooner or later, everyone ends up on a "10 best" list. This time around (apart from Honolulu) Brookings seems to be reaching out to southwestern cities that feature vast grids of fast car-centered arterials spreading out across any available flat land. Are those the best cities for transit? Well, maybe it's just their turn.

The Brookings top 10:

Honolulu, HI
San Jose – Silicon Valley, CA
Salt Lake City, UT
Tucson, AZ
Fresno, CA
Denver, CO
Albuquerque, NM
Las Vegas, NV
Provo-Orem, UT
Modesto, CA

As regular readers of this blog understand, "best city for transit" is a meaningless term. There are many ways to define "best," and we don't always agree with ourselves on which one matters, let alone agree with anyone else.

But the Brookings definition, as described in the Atlantic article, is especially perverse, even by "10 best" standards:

Brookings graded each city according to two criteria — coverage (the share of Americans within 3/4 miles from a transit stop) and job access (the share of city jobs accessible within 90 minutes of transit) — to determine the ten best performing cities for public transportation.

I have no idea what "within 90 minutes of transit" means, and the original report doesn't appear to be on the Brookings website. [UPDATE: Now I do. Look for a post on this soon.]

But residential coverage, as a primary indicator of transit quality, is a very loaded way of thinking about "best," especially if you care about transit sustainability outcomes that depend on ridership. Many people are within walking distance of a bus stop but not within walking distance of service that's remotely attractive in terms of frequency, speed and reliability. (Even more are within "air distance," which is what Brookings seems to refer to.)

Due to this definition, the Brookings Atlantic list comes to focus on rather low-density, car-dependent cities that happen to have good transit coverage. The cities listed have transit systems that are complete in terms of getting close to almost every home, but in low-density cities this is usually achieved by sacrificing frequency, speed, and even directness. For example, if you really want to maximise your residential coverage without spending money, and thus satisfy the Brookings criterion, just design routes like this:

This is what "residential coverage" standards encourage transit planners to do! So Brookings needs to explain how an abundance of transit routes that look like this could indicate a "best city for transit."

Then there's a pedestrian environment. Many of these cities are hard to walk in, and transit especially often delivers you to a busy arterial where you'll have difficulty walking to nearby destinations.

Finally, of course, "residential coverage" is about how many people have access to the system, which has nothing to do with who finds it useful. In fact, a transit system that's trying to maximize its relevance is always trying to push residential coverage standards down so that they can focus more service on dense areas where residents are more likely to want to build their lives around transit and other sustainable modes.

UPDATE: Having now perused the Brookings report, I stand by these last three paragraphs, but will expand on them soon. I'm relieved to know that Brookings's framing of the issue is smarter than the Atlantic made it sound.

Still, a report like this from a distinguished institution raises great opportunities to question some of the more common assumptions about how transit should be compared across cities. So I take issue with their reliance on city limits and Metropolitan Statistical Areas, among other things, not to criticize Brookings but simply to encourage more nuanced and coherent explanations of this kind of statistical work. More posts on these critiques in the future, starting here.

washington: what makes a great subway map?

Posted on May 16, 2011 in Maps, Marketing, Navigation, Washington DC

What should Washington Metro's next subway map look like? Greater Greater Washington is running a map contest where you can compare a number of designs, and choose your favorite. Can you improve on the existing one, pictured here?

Even if you're nowhere near Washington, perusing these maps will help you articulate your own views. For example:

Should a subway map be largely to scale, so that you can see the distances invovled, or distorted so that complex areas are easy to see?
How much detail about the surrounding geography should be shown?
Should it show non-subway services that also provide important links between stations? In Washington, for example, all the subway lines go downtown, so many other services (bus, future light rail) are useful for connecting between outer parts of different lines. Should the whole web of those possibilities be shown?

Go vote! GGW has done a great job cultivating public interest in transit details, and steering the public debate toward clearer thought about these practicalities. Help them out!

livability vs dynamism (quote of the week)

Posted on May 15, 2011 in Meditations, Vancouver

On livable cities lists (like this one):

Ricky Burdett, who founded the London School of Economics’ Cities Programme, says: “These surveys always come up with a list where no one would want to live. One wants to live in places which are large and complex, where you don’t know everyone and you don’t always know what’s going to happen next. Cities are places of opportunity but also of conflict, but where you can find safety in a crowd. “We also have to acknowledge that these cities that come top of the polls also don’t have any poor people,” he adds.
And that, it seems to me, touches on the big issue. Richard G Wilkinson and Kate Pickett’s hugely influential book The Spirit Level: Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better (2009) seems to present an obvious truth – that places where the differential in income between the wealthiest and the poorest is smallest tend to engender a sense of satisfaction and well-being. But while it may be socially desirable, that kind of comfort doesn’t necessarily make for vibrancy or dynamism. If everybody is where they want to be, no one is going anywhere.
Edwin Heathcote, Financial Times

Heathcote’s whole article is superb. (Small caution: anyone who loves Vancouver will need to stifle some outrage at the sweeping and sometimes false generalities about the city. But the larger point is worth taking in.)

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