Author Archive | Jarrett

beyond grey

Posted on April 7, 2011 in Amusing, Architecture, Oakland, Rail Transit, San Francisco

San Francisco's Bay Area Rapid Transit system (BART) is, let's be frank, extremely grey. Most of its above-ground stations feature vast expanses of exposed concrete, true to the prevailing modernism of the age. (Most of the system was designed in the 1960s.)

At stations like MacArthur, where the grey station infrastructure interacts with the surround grey ramps of the freeways, one can wonder if the original BART planners were so obsessed with competing with freeways that they deliberately chose freeway-like lines and colors, especially where real freeways were nearby. This, of course, would be competition by resemblence rather than by differentiation. At one stage, that probably made sense.

And yes, cool grey can be beautiful, but only if there's color to throw it into relief. Modernism sometimes drew encouragement from the coolness of classical Greek and Roman architecture, but of course the ancient world seems colorless to us only because paints, fabrics, and other vehicles of color don't survive the centuries.

So it was fun to open my mail this morning and find this painting by Alfred Twu, reimagining the freeway-dominated landscape of MacArthur BART station with a more tropical sense of color. Why must we go to Germany to see bright colors and strong choices in design?

UPDATE: I can't resist highlighting a comment from jfruh:

I always think that BART is what someone in 1969 thought the future was going to look like.

If you're too young to remember 1969, I strongly recommend reviewing Stanley Kubrick's great film 2001: A Space Odyssey (1970). When I rode BART for the first time in 1976, I felt like I had arrived in the world of that film.

station design and virtuous society

Posted on April 3, 2011 in Architecture

Does the experience of gaining altitude cause people to behave less selfishly? David Schroeder in Scientific American profiles a recent study by Professor Larry Sanna of the University of North Carolina:

Building on research showing the power of metaphors to shape our thinking, Sanna and his colleagues noted that height is often used as a metaphor for virtue: moral high ground, God on high, looking up to good people, etc. If people were primed to think about height, they wondered, might people be more virtuous?
In a series of four different studies, the authors found consistent support for their predictions. In the first study they found that twice as many mall shoppers who had just ridden an up escalator contributed to the Salvation Army than shoppers who had just ridden the down escalator. In a second study, participants who had been taken up a short flight of stairs to an auditorium stage to complete a series of questionnaires volunteered more than 50 percent more of their time than participants who had been led down to the orchestra pit.

The link between elevation and virtue, of course, is an ancient idea. It's why universities are so often on hilltops, despite the problems this presents for cycling and often for transit.

But this specific research reminds me of my old post on the difference between end-stations and through-stations, and my visceral dislike of stations that require arriving passengers to go down into tunnels under the platform. I far prefer those, like Melbourne's Southern Cross or Calatrava's Liège Guillemins, where arrival involves climbing an escalator to a bridge-like concourse. The real virtue of those stations, of course, is that you are continuously in the same space throughout the arrival experience, while a conventional through-station is inevitably two different spaces — the train shed and the arrivals hall — connected by tunnels. End-stations, of course, achieve the same thing by not requiring a change of level at all.

My question of Professor Sanna's work would be whether it matters that you are in a continuous space throughout a change of elevation, as you are in the Melbourne and Liège stations, as opposed to being transported from one space into another, as you are in the typical escalator or stair connecting platforms to an underground passage. I get no sensations of elevation when rising from one room into another, whereas I do from climbing within a single large space.

(via Andrew Sullivan)

in vancouver

Posted on April 2, 2011 in Ferries, Vancouver

I've arrived in Vancouver, and will be starting in my new part-time role with the transit agency, Translink, on Tuesday. At the moment I'm preoccupied with looking for housing for this six-month stay. Home is so important to me that when I don't have one, it's hard to focus on anything else. So between that and the book, my posts may be light for few days.

Meanwhile, if your city is on a river or very calm harbour, you should know about the micro-ferries of Vancouver's False Creek. They're the smallest-scale passenger ferries I've seen in the developed world. They carry 12 passengers on a perimeter bench while the single operator sits in the center and handles driving, docking, and fares.

They're ideal for short runs at high frequency over calm water, which is what they do. More on them soon.

transit acceleration campaign goes national

Posted on March 31, 2011 in Los Angeles, Rail Transit, Strategic Transit Planning, US Federal Policy

For over a year now, Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa has been spearheading a "30/10" initiative, designed to accelerate the construction a range of urgently needed transit projects (mostly rail transit lines). The key word is accelerate, not fund. The projects are already funded, but on a 30-year timeline. The 30/10 proposal would deliver the projects in 10 years.

The idea begins with Measure R, a 30-year sales tax increment approved by Los Angeles County voters in 2008 to fund a large package of rail transit improvements, including the Wilshire subway to the westside. Villairagosa wants the Federal government to create a mechanism to bond this revenue so that it can be spent in one decade instead of three.

Well, you can only get Congress interested if the same idea can be applied in many places, so predictably the Mayor and Metro are now presenting America Fast Forward, a national campaign to create a similar mechanism for any urban region that has already put funded projects in place. Los Angeles Metro's blog Source covers it here, the Los Angeles Times's Tim Rutten opines here. Here's a puffy PDF.

Because it relies on Federal financing rather than spending, and because the funding sources are local tax streams that are relatively stable, it's an approach that could potentially succeed even in lean times.

In a tweet, Cap'n Transit asked me: Could it be used to build highways? Yes, it looks like the same mechanism could be used, in theory, to fund any locally supported infrastructure. I hope it will be constrained to transportation, and if it were constrained to voter-approved funding streams like Los Angeles's Measure R it could well usher in a new era of these measures, in which most voters could vote up or down on a set of plans knowing that if passed, all of them would be built and running in just ten years, soon enough to affect most voters' lives.

vancouver: new round of broadway line options

Posted on March 30, 2011 in Light Rail, Rail Transit, Vancouver

The planning for the missing link in Vancouver's transit network has taken the next step. Newly refined options are out for public comment. The corridor corresponds, at least in its endpoints, to the orange line on this map, where the existing Line 99 runs one of the most frequent and crowded bus corridors in the west.

The west end is the University of British Columbia (UBC). The east end is Commercial/Broadway station, the main transit gateway to the entire eastern two thirds of the region. In the middle is Vancouver's second downtown, Central Broadway, which includes City Hall and the main hospital, as well as a station on the Canada Line to the airport and the southern suburbs. (Skytrain and the Canada Line form the region's driverless rapid transit network.) It's hard to overestimate how central this corridor is not just to the city, but to the region. For example, many trips between southern suburbs and northeastern ones (Richmond to northern Burnaby say, or Coquitlam to the airport) will be made much easier, or not, depending on this project's outcome.

The newly refined options include rapid-transit options (widely presumed to be extensions of the Skytrain Millennium Line) either to UBC or possibly just to Arbutus Street, which makes sense to consider because it's the end of the dense or densifiable portion of Broadway, and completes all of the regional-connection needs except for UBC itself. They also look at light rail options and Bus Rapid Transit, both of which would need an exclusive lane. Light rail options are suggested both on Broadway and also veering off onto an alignment closer to False Creek, feeding into Great Northern Way.

It looks like an interesting process, one that will impact the transit mobility options for a vast part of greater Vancouver.

are toll lanes “congestion pricing”?

Posted on March 29, 2011 in Congestion Pricing, Seattle

Congestion pricing should really be called decongestion pricing. Its purpose is to provide an alternative to sitting in congestion for people and businesses willing to pay the fair price for the scarce road space required. The toll isn't a tax, it's a price for driving in an uncongested lane. So if your toll lane is still congested, you're not doing (de)congestion pricing, and your results say nothing about whether it's a good idea.

In Crosscut, former Washington State Secretary of Transportation Douglas MacDonald lays out the issue today as it applies to Seattle area freeways. There, likely toll lanes are already High Occupancy Vehicle (HOV) lanes permitting cars with two or more people. Everyone knows that if the goal is free flow, this minimum has to go up to three whenever congestion requires it.

When carpool lanes were first established there was a vigorous “now or later” debate about the right limit for the carpool privilege: two-to-a-car, or three-to-a-car? Pragmatism won. Except for three-to-a-car from the start on the Evergreen Point Bridge, carpool lanes were introduced with the two-to-a-car rule.
Everyone involved at the time believed that later the rule would have to be, and could be, changed to three-to-a-car. Everyone was entirely up-front about this expectation. The trigger would be the growth of traffic in the carpool lanes to the point where access would have to be cut back so that they would still work.
Didn't happen. Good luck today with that ticking time bomb for a political revolt. The moment of truth is at hand, at least for some carpool lane segments. But no one today seriously talks about outright banishing the two-to-a-car carpoolers to thin out jammed carpool lanes.

I defer to Doug's knowledge of Washington State politics, but I do resist the apathy-inducing hyperbole of the phrase "no one talks seriously." Is "everyone" sure that changing carpool lanes to 3+ would trigger a political revolt if it also caused people to start getting to work on time? Especially if the state also put some effort into casual carpool facilities at the same time? Especially if transit riders (in buses in the same lanes) began getting to work on time too? I wonder. I can see it would be controversial. I can see it would take some time. But can no one "seriously" discuss it?

connection-activated civic squares

Posted on March 26, 2011 in Architecture, Berlin, Connections, Transfers, Portland, Streetcars (Trams), Urban Structure

A few days back I asked for examples of connection-activated civic squares, public squares that serve as both a symbolic and functional heart of the community, but where people connecting between transit lines form part of the square's activity. I was looking for a real-world example of something like this, which is a design for a (non-existent) square in Surrey, an outer suburb of Vancouver:

The idea arises from the desire to have bus-rail connections happen in an interesting urban setting, rather than a typical suburban bus interchange that features an area where only bus passengers would be.

First, I should answer this comment:

Isn't the idea to reduce transfer penalties, not to deliberately increase them for other ends? Getting off the train on a cold, stormy night, I think I would resent being made to animate an otherwise deserted public square – running 200m for my bus, with my umbrella blown inside out, dodging puddles. Even worse if it was on the way to work in the morning!

Indeed it is. I always want connection walking distances to be as short as possible. The square above is 100m wide, so maximum walks would be no more than that, and that's not out of line compared to what you'll do in tunnels in many of the great subway systems of the world. But I'm not sure that walking across a square is more onerous than walking along corridors or tunnels, so long as there's some reasonable alternative in bad weather. And of course the urban designers are always telling us that visual interest makes walks feel shorter. When walking along a typical subway tunnel lined with shops, I feel reduced to the status of consumer. I would much rather walk across a square on a nice day.

One reason that these arrangements are unusual, and that I should have noted, is that they require buses to be organized in an inverted couplet. In a country that drives on the right, you would expect that a westbound one-way street would be north of its eastbound partner. That's the way two-way streets normally divide. In this Surrey proposal, we set up the car traffic to do that but the buses to do the opposite in contraflow lanes. That's how we got the bus stops to be on the square rather than across the street from it. This is a great trick in situations where you already have one-way couplets of streets. It gets buses out of traffic and puts them with their doors facing each other so that they can stop at opposite sides of a square (or even just at opposite ends of a pedestrian street or lane).

(Portland's transit mall is a famous example of an inverted couplet — the northbound street is west of the southbound street — and if the Pioneer Courthouse Square were one block further east, it would be a spectacular example of a connection-activated square. The mall couplet does help create an effective square at PSU Urban Center Plaza, where the mall and the streetcar intersect.)

It was quickly clear from the reader suggestions that really large connection-activated squares have to be in pretty big cities. Even there, size can be a problem. Note how Lyon's Place Bellecour, below, is reduced in width by a bit of landscaping. The whole block is 250m x 170m, but the trees reduce the purely open space to about 100m wide. At that, it's still the largest clear square in Europe, says Wikipedia. There's room for two soccer fields in the remaining open space, three if that guy on the horse would get out of the way.

Place Bellecour does have a bus stop facing onto the square on the east side, but the main east-west bus movement is east on the south side, west on the north side, which in France puts the stops across the street from the square.

Many readers pointed to Berlin's Alexanderplatz, a vast and intense area that includes Berlin's iconic tower, the Fernsehturm. Alexanderplatz is technically the northeast part of this image, but it's all intimately connected.

The interaction here is between rapid transit ("U") at the center of the image and tram and bus lines. One of the tram lines extends northeast and northwest from just south of the rapid transit station. As I recall some of these trams turn to stop alongside the station (so are not activating the plaza) but others do not, so some people do walk across parts of the plaza. Also relevant are buses on both the far northeast corner of the image and on Spandauerstrasse, which is the street cutting across the southwest corner. Greater Alexanderplatz is a series of spaces where the interaction of transit and urban life is quite intricate.

A clearer big-city example is Syntagma Square, Athens. It's about 110m on a side, and seems to work well, though Google is a little fuzzy there:

Syntagma has an underground metro station on the east side of the image, including entrances right into the square. Buses are organized as a couplet, and in this case, it appears to be an inverted couplet so that the buses open into the square, but I can't quite be sure. The Athens Tram also terminates there. The position next to the Greek parliament building ensures that the square is a symbolic center of the city and nation.

Several readers suggested Piccadilly Gardens, Manchester, UK. I had in mind hardscaped plazas, but this one is interesting as an example of how much transit work a grassy park with a fountain can do. It's about 120m x 90m at its widest points.

This is clearly a major tram+bus terminal, with lots of space taken up by end-of-line storage as opposed to just stops. That's part of why the transit operations seem to dominate the space to a degree that urbanists are likely to find objectionable. Note that the main pedestrian links between connecting services are paved paths across the gardens. The landscaping is a nice way of saying "this is a park, not just a transit interchange," even as the paths serve the interchange volume.

Last among big-city examples, I'm intrigued by Insurgentes station plaza in Mexico City, which is in a roundabout roughly 120m in diameter.

Note that the red buses appear to cycle the circle in a contraflow lane, i.e. clockwise where all other traffic is counter-clockwise, so that they open onto the central plaza. (UPDATE: I am now advised that they are operating with-flow, counter-clockwise, but in their own lanes, and have doors on the left that enable them to open onto the plaza. The two silver-roofed structures are their main stops). Obviously, this is a massive bus-rail connection point. The red buses are from the city's Bus Rapid Transit system. This is certainly enough pedestrian volume to activate a space, and indeed it looks as though some kind of merchant activity is going on. But of course a roundabout is inevitably more of an island than a heart, as you'll need to go underground, through the subway station, to cross safely to any part of the surrounding district.

But when we step down to smaller cities, or to outer locations that aren't major transit hubs, the successful squares are quite a bit smaller. Several readers praised Mont Royal station plaza in Montréal. The subway station is on the west side, with bus stops on the east and north sides. This looks like a case where terminating buses are actually looping around the square.

But it's only about 50m wide. Many readers suggested connection-activated squares on this scale, often in secondary nodes of big cities or in suburban areas, especially in Europe. Many such squares were mentioned, but Stockholm's Odenplen is typical. And even in North America, small open spaces, usually less than 50m on a side, are common at some subway stations; Vermont/Santa Monica station in Los Angeles and the two Mission BART stations in San Francisco come to mind. Another example, at a simiar edge-of-downtown scale, is the PSU Urban Center plaza in Portland, which handles interactions between an inverted couplet of north-south buses and an east-west streetcar. The open space there, too, is less than 50m on a side.

So to sum up:

An obvious larger design point is that civic squares have to be scaled to their catchment area. The bigger the city and the more central their role in it, the bigger they can be. For squares that aim to serve a smaller suburban or neighborhood node, the squares are smaller, usually less than 50m on a side. The plaza we sketched for Surrey (at the beginning of this entry) was probably too big. Place Bellecour in Lyon a totally open space of 200x100m with only a statue as furniture, probably is too big.
At all scales, these squares can work as multiple-purpose plazas while also serving transit connections, and there seem to be many examples of these two functions supporting each other.
Inverted couplets are rare but work well with public squares. The inverted couplet is a key unappreciated feature of the Portland transit mall.

Thanks to everyone for contributing to this adventure! I'm sure there are many other great examples I haven't mentioned.

This work is important to me because many designs for great highrise urban nodes at rail stations collide with the needs of connecting and terminating buses, and it's often tempting to push the buses away. These examples, at a range of scales, capture how transit connections and urban life can happen in the same place, and indeed support each other. Links to other great examples are welcome!

pricing and “the poor”

Posted on March 25, 2011 in Congestion Pricing

Is congestion pricing — charging more to use a facility when it's in high demand, in order to decongest that facility — an unacceptable burden on the poor? Joshua Arbury of the Auckland Transport Blog asks this on my recent post on congestion pricing terminology:

Fundamentally though, there's a political question to consider. Is it acceptable to have a road pricing scheme that prices the poor off the roads to create more room for the rich? Because, in a nutshell, that's effectively what road pricing/congestion charging/decongestion charging is.

These discussions will never get anywhere until we can separate two completely different questions:

What is the accurate price for this facility that arises from the relationship of supply and demand?
For whom, and for what social purposes, should we offer discounts from that price?

Australian and British transit agencies offer a nice example of how to keep this clear. As in North America, transit in those countries routinely offers discounts to senior citizens and the disabled, because, well, we as a society want to honor those people. Those discounts don't serve any particular transit agency mission, but the society judges them to be important. Fine. So in both Australia and Britain, the cost of those discounts is added up and a central government reimburses the transit agency for that amount, as a "shadow fare." The transit operator can then count all riders as equal, and compete for all riders as being of equal value to it, because it experiences them as all paying the same fare.

That's very clean, because it separates transit's real purpose from a separate (perfectly valid) social agenda, rather than just expecting transit operators to pay the cost of the social agenda. Seniors and disabled persons get their discounts, but the transit operator continues to value their patronage as much as they would value that of a full-fare customer.

Meanwhile, back on the roads, our current prevailing road pricing policy is that "when demand for road space exceeds supply, government will subsidize everyone's travel so as to elminate any monetary cost." The effect, of course, is that instead of paying in money we pay in time. That's what congestion is. Something of value is being given away for free, so we have a long queue of people waiting for it. If you want to "fix congestion," you have to change the price.

Is that hard on "poor" people? Yes, it is, like many things. The answer may be to subsidize the price as an expression of a social objective, in exactly the way that British and Australian governments subsidize senior/disabled fares as something entirely separate from other transit subsidies, thus enabling them to more cleanly connect each spending to a public purpose.

on “category errors”

Posted on March 23, 2011 in Meditations, Philosophy

From a chapter of my book called "Five Paths to Confusion," which discusses common errors in thinking about transit. I hope that somewhere out there is a logician or linguist or philosopher who can suggest a better term for "category error."

A category error occurs when you think about a spectrum as though it were a series of boxlike categories. If you and a friend disagree about whether something is blue or purple, you’re making this error together. Blue and purple are adjacent zones on a continuous spectrum of colors (technically wavelengths of light) and zones on a spectrum can only have fuzzy or arbitrary edges. So if you disagree about whether something is blue or purple, you can both be right, based on slightly different notions of where you mark the boundary in the fuzzy area where blue shades into purple. If one of you is right and the other wrong, it can only be because of some arbitrary standard about where blue ends and purple begins, a standard you’ve both agreed to respect.

Category errors are built into the very structure of our language. Our category words feel like boxes with hard edges: blue, purple, tall, wealthy. But like colors, most of them really refer to directions or zones on a continuous spectrum. There’s no objective basis for saying “Jim is tall,” unless we just mean “Jim is taller than most people.” “Tall” is not a box; it’s just a range or direction on a spectrum of possible heights. We all know that, and for simple ideas like height or color the category error rarely causes trouble.

But when we talk about emotive categories, such as wealth or success, we can easily lose sight of the spectrum, and as with blue and purple, this can cause pointless arguments. Consider a famous comment widely (if falsely) attributed to British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher: “A man who, beyond the age of 26, finds himself on a bus can count himself as a failure.” Stated that way, “a failure” sounds like a box that you’re either in or out of. Associating buses with failure or poverty is a common attitude in some cities. If you think about failure or poverty as a box, this can be an easy way to decide that buses aren’t worth your attention, and that there’s no point in thinking about how buses and rail transit can work together as one network.

But even if it’s true that bus riders are poorer than rail riders on average, you can change your perspective by reminding yourself that the boundaries of “poor” and “middle class” and “wealthy” are as fuzzy or arbitrary as the boundary between blue and purple.

Some category errors are built into transportation planning jargon. For example, you may hear certain planners divide transit riders into two boxes. One box, called a discretionary or choice rider, contains people who have the option of driving, and who will use transit only if it out-competes their car. In the other box is the transit dependent or captive rider, who has no viable alternative and therefore has to use transit. Dividing up riders this way leads to the idea that transit must compete for choice riders, while captive riders can largely be taken for granted; they will ride no matter how poor the service gets.

These categories are imposed on reality, not derived from it. Transit dependence, like wealth itself, is a spectrum, with vast numbers of people in the grey areas between “choice” and “captive.” For example, many people with low incomes own a car out of necessity, but experience owning a car as a financial burden. Many low-income families feel they have no alternative but to own a car for every adult in the house. If we give these people credible alternatives to car ownership, they can experience the result as liberating, even though some transportation planners will now call them captives. Often they will find better things to spend that money on, such as education. Many people are in situations like these, and we can achieve both environmental and social goods by helping them choose to own fewer cars. The two-box model of society, where everyone is either choice or captive, prevents us from seeing those possibilities.

Very few of our category words describe things that are really boxlike categories. So whenever you hear someone divide people into two categories, it's worth asking, "are these really boxes, or just zones or directions on a spectrum?"

jetlag links

Posted on March 22, 2011 in General

Brewing a summary piece on the whole connection-activated plaza issue, but I may need to get past the jetlag first. Meanwhile:

I really love the spirit of the Bay Area's new Transit & Trails service. As a transit expert who's also an amateur botanist and fierce lover of wilderness, I've always been frustrated by the gaps between transit stations and major trailheads. This is one of the few aspects of public transit in Sydney that works brilliantly well, even yielding reveries such as this.
Nathan Wessel is fundraising to promote his Cincinnati Frequent Network Map and guide.
From DePaul University's Chaddick Institute for Metropolitan Development comes an interesting study on how portable electronic technology is affecting transportation choices. The institute's Caitlin Allen wrote, in an email to me: "To our knowledge, our data set is the only one of its kind in the country. The data confirms that transportation environments that Baby Boomers avoided have become more attractive to Gen Y or Millennials because they can 'privatize' their space with tech use." PDF: Download Privacy Invades Public Space, The Growing Use of Portable Electronic Technology…2011

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