Author Archive | Jarrett

light rail “for dummies?”

Posted on June 7, 2011 in Advocacy, Bus Rapid Transit, Journalism

A polarizing summary of "facts" about a light rail debate in Waterloo, Ontario has popped up in an Atlantic item by Nicholas Jackson. After an introduction in which Jackson seems to confuse intercity high-speed rail and intra-city light rail, he invites us to admire a graphically rich presentation Waterloo light rail advocates. It's at the bottom of this post.

I cite this not to take a position on light rail transit (LRT) in Waterloo. (I'm certainly open to it, and am following with interest a similar project in similar-sized Victoria, BC.) I mean only to offer a useful illustration of the dangers of almost all "pro vs con" or "this vs that" or "with us or against us" framings of a question, in which all distinctions are reduced or distorted to fit the quarrel at hand.

Commenters are encouraged to nominate their favourite absurdities out of this piece, or to defend them. Mine are mostly (but not all) in the table partway down. Did you know light rail lines seem to cause high-tech companies to sprout decades before the line opens? Did you know that regionwide populations of Ottawa and Waterloo can be compared to city limits populations of other cities, as convenient? And what exactly can we learn from knowing the population of San Francisco in 1904, when they opened their first light rail line? Might the absence of cars in that year make the cases hard to compare?

Snapsort's LRT for Dummies Infographic

This is well-intentioned, and perhaps in late stages of debate it's unavoidable. Again, my response to it is not a view about light rail but rather about the style of argument, which assumes (contrary to this) that rail-bus distinctions overwhelm all others, and explain so much of the arc of history.

UPDATE: This post isn't about the Waterloo light rail debate itself, but here are some sources on the subject:

BACKGROUND

Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rapid_transit_in_Waterloo_Region

The Region's Plan:

http://rapidtransit.region.waterloo.on.ca/

Opponents:

http://www.t4st.com/index.php?title=Main_Page

mapnificent breaking through?

Posted on June 4, 2011 in Education, Maps, Public Outreach, Simulation

As WalkScore's fine transit travel time tool languishes in extended beta, the alternative, Mapnificent, is getting some mainstream blog attention.

I may still be alone in this, but I as I explored with WalkScore's Matt Lerner here, I believe this tool, whoever finally perfects it, has revolutionary potential. It can easily be converted into a two-digit transit score which, unlike the WalkScore Transit Score, actually describes people's ability to get places. But it's bigger potential is as an alternatives analysis tool. When you city is facing a series of possible alternative transit projects, what if every citizen could use a tool like Mapnificent to see the exactly impact of each alternative on their mobility, and that of people and destinations they care about.

A major problem in transit politics today is that negative impacts of a project are obvious but benefits are often described in terms of ridership and development outcomes — things that don't matter to the selfish present-minded citizen. We will always have selfish present-minded citizens, and I'd rather work with them than complain about them. Until we help people see the way a proposed project will change their lives for the better, sensible transit projects will continue losing these debates.

value capture as a tool for tying land use to transit

Posted on June 3, 2011 in Rail Transit, Urban Structure

Yonah Freemark of the Transport Politic has an interesting post today on Toronto Mayor Rob Ford’s effort to build a subway line entirely through value capture – a process that captures, as revenue for the project, some of the profits that will arise from dense development around stations. Mayor Ford's initiative is not going well, partly because neighbors are objecting to the level of density that would be needed to support the subway.

Value capture has several connections to urbanist outcomes. A rail expansion program driven by value capture would:

Tie completion of the line to zoning and development choices that allow major density around stations. For anyone who values compact and sustainable development, this is a feature, not a bug. It means a line cannot proceed unless communities on the line have agreed to significant density increases. Many urban regions are trying to make this linkage through policy, but tying it to the project's funding is obviously a far more effective way to keep land use planning tied firmly to the transit.
Fail to serve existing high-density areas, such as SF’s Chinatown or Van Broadway. If you believe that existing density deserves as much service as new density, value capture won’t get you there.
Fail to serve “social justice” outcomes, such as far SE Chicago Red Line extension to the extent that value capture requires displacement of populations.

I don't endorse or opposite value capture in the abstract, and I'm suspicious of public-private partnership in general, but there's no denying that first point, that when you want to ensure that the land use will be there to support your rail line, value capture keeps everyone much more focused on that outcome.

quotes of the week: ed glaeser

Posted on June 3, 2011 in US Federal Policy

"Conservative" economist Ed Glaeser, author of The Triumph of the City, at today's Congress for the New Urbanism plenary:

De-federalizing [US] transportation policy would help transit compete more effectively with the automobile.

He's talking about the funding methodologies imposed by the US Federal Transit and Highway Administrations, which effectively (a) federalize the transit/highway tradeoff and (b) put possibly excessive weight on near-term ridership outcomes as opposed to personal mobility outcomes, not to mention impacts on urban form.

Would block-grants to states that allow each state to determine its own highway vs transit balance be a better structure?

deep-geeking a fictional city

Posted on June 1, 2011 in Education, Simulation

In this post I invited readers to poke around in a fictional city that I'm developing for use in a transit planning course. The city is laid out in Excel to make its features easy to analyze. Students will work with a slightly more naturalistic map under a layer of acetate, and will draw lines on the map to attempt various types of transit networks that might address the city's needs. More on the project and its purpose here.

I received many excellent comments, which I've used to expand and enrich the city. The city now has more layers of detail that you might find it fun to explore and comment on.

You're welcome to poke around in the updated version and share your views on its realism. Download here:

Download Game Newport intro (.doc file)

Download Game data (.xls file)

Your comments are welcome, but before you comment, have a look at the previous post and its comments first, just to see what's been said! Also, the little illustration at left is just one of many layers; to see the whole thing, open the files above.

This course is going to be fun! I hope to be able to repeat it many times in many cities.

“soft city of illusion”? “hard city of maps”?

Posted on May 31, 2011 in Meditations, Philosophy

You can always construct a wise one-liner by dividing the richness of urbanism into two opposing boxes. This move is most interesting to me when done by someone I admire, for purposes that I largely share. The great Cascadian writer Jonathan Raban, for example:

"The … soft city of illusion, myth, aspiration, and nightmare, is as real, maybe more real, than the hard city one can locate on maps [and] in statistics …”

This came to me via Bruce Katz on Twitter, and it's so affecting that I retweeted it before I had time to think: "Hey, wait, this is BS."

Yes, the importance of illusion, myth, aspiration, and nightmare always needs to be stressed if you feel that your city is being run by statisticians. But it's still a false and misleading dichotomy, as almost all dichotomies are. We often need dichotomies as crutches, but when they get too easy, it's time to let them go.

Maps are full of illusion, myth, aspiration and nightmare. We may think of them as technical, and we can argue for the value of replacing illusion with information. But as Mark Monmonier devotes a famous book to explaining, maps always distort for some purpose. The aspirations that drove the settlements and conquests that created today's "New World" were unimaginable without maps — maps designed to inform the conquerer but also to encourage his illustions and aspirations.

Anxiety about statistics, on the other hand, is a masking of the real problem, which is a confusion about the location of goals and ideas of the good. Statistics and maps tell us about facts of life, and you can't go anywhere with your aspirations if you can't deal with the present reality. We all have to start where we are.

Statistics, math, and maps also tell us something about the limits of aspiration. You may aspire to a city where the circumference of a circle is only twice its diameter, because this may open up wonderful possibilities for the ideal city. When the mathematicians respond that the circumference of a circle will always be 3.14 times the diameter, it's easy to dismiss them as "statisticians," or to use a common urbanist stereotype, "engineers" who can't engage with vision.

Inside Raban's epigram, and also inside the quotation from the last post, is the confusion of why and how. "Why" we do things and want things must ultimately lie in the space of "illustion, myth, aspiration, and nightmare." (Even the balance-sheets of developers express such motives.) To get what we want, however, we have to interact with reality, and statistics and math do contain some important information about reality, as does our lived experience.

If we could ever separate why from how, we'd save a lot of time, a lot of rage, and move forward much more quickly in thinking and acting about cities. We might suppress some great literature, but a writer as great as Jonathan Raban would turn his mind to the subtler issues that remain.

the death of the expert?

Posted on May 27, 2011 in Consulting, Meditations

People often call me an "expert," and sometimes I have to welcome that. But Maria Bustillos's Daily Beast article, "Wikipedia and the Death of the Expert," captures my uneasiness with the word.

So long as we believe that there is such a thing as an expert rather than a fellow-investigator, then that person's views just by magic will be worth more than our own, no matter how much or how often actual events have shown this not to be the case. For us to have this magic thinking about "individualism" then is pernicious politically, intellectually, in every way. That is not to say that we don't value those who can lead the conversation. We'll need them more and more, those "who are able to marshal the wisdom of the network," to use Bob Stein's words. But they might be more like DJs, assembling new ways of looking at things from a huge variety of elements, than like than judges whose processes are secret, and whose opinions are sacred.

I would love to live in a world of fellow-investigators rather than experts.

To put it another way, I would love to live in a world where experts are responsible for how, but not for why. There's nothing wrong with expertise that devotes itself to the question: "What are the best ways to deliver the outcomes that you (your country, your city, your neighborhood) want?" Expertise becomes scary only when it starts telling people what they should want. I try, not always successfully, to police that boundary in my own work.

Experts do have a role in telling people what things cost, including costs that are now invisible to the individual such as the environmental and foreign policy costs of oil dependence. That can sound like telling people what they should want, but it's not. It's helping adults accept the consequences of their choices — which is pretty much what adulthood means.

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. —>

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