Suppose that somewhere else in our universe, there’s another planet with intelligent life. We don’t know what they look like, or what gases they breathe, or what they eat, or whether they’re inches or miles tall. We don’t know whether they move by hopping, drifting, or slithering. We don’t even know if their lived environment is largely two-dimensional, like the surface of the earth, or freely three dimensional, perhaps a cloud-city full of cloud-beings who drift up and down as easily as they drift left or right. We don’t know what they call themselves, so let’s call them borts. Continue Reading →
Author Archive | Jarrett
sydney, call los angeles
In the Sydney Morning Herald today, I wonder out loud if Australian cities can move forward on public transport given the lack of a mechanism for local initiatives or referenda. Based on our work last year on Sydney's Independent Public Inquiry, I compare Sydney's stasis with the aggressive building program in Los Angeles, and note that for better or worse, California's tradition of direct popular votes on spending plans makes it possible to lock those plans in for decades, providing the security that the private sector needs to do its part. In Australia, where spending on big infrastructure happens through regular state budgets, nobody can make a commitment beyond the next election cycle, and nobody dares ask the public for a major new funding source. So the Australian debate always seems to be about which one or two projects will be built in the current generation, and which will be left for our grandchildren to build. My article is here.
political motivations, and the consultant’s task
We were having a nice conversation about expertise vs. activism in a beautiful, abstract space, and then Engineer Scotty brought us back to earth:
Unfortunately, in many cases the constraints [on the options being considered in a study] … are not imposed by the decision-maker (especially in political systems where much of the authority is distributed), but imposed by outside actors, who may be engaging in self-aggrandizement or rent-seeking at the expense of transit outcomes, but whose participation is needed for the project to get done.
And in many cases, such folks don't want their fingerprints on the planning documents–you won't ever see an Environmental Impact Statement [EIS] explicitly stating that [bus options weren't] considered for project X because developer Y would withdraw his support for the project causing his ally councilman Z to vote no; or conversely that governor W is a teabagger who considers rail transit to be a Soviet plot and thus BRT [Bus Rapid Transit] was the only rapid transit option to advance out of the [Draft EIS] phase in order to avoid a veto. These sorts of political decisions are made in the backroom, off the record, and then often justified on an ex post facto basis when the stench gets too bad. …
Reputable consultants ought not take work that involves declaring that night is day, in an attempt to paper over a blatantly bad political decision. However, in situations like just described, there is plenty of work for reputable consultants to help transit agencies to make the best of a bad situation–if the political realities of a situation require that agency A implement a transit network using only mixed-traffic streetcar, and that other modes are off the table, a good consultant will help them design the best streetcar system that lies within their budget.
At the risk of misquoting Jarrett …, sometimes this is what "help[ing] you implement your values" really means. Often times the "values" in question aren't the values of the riders, the community, or the sponsoring agency, but those of the powerbrokers who ultimately control the fate of the project in question, and who may have little actual interest in improving mobility.
As a consultant, I really like working in situations where the key players really do want to explore the options and reflect the community's values. Having said that, I don't think there's a experienced transit planning consultant on the planet who hasn't been in situations like the one Scotty describes.
Especially in big, complex urban areas, you work for your client agency, and your client agency answers, sooner or later, to elected officials, and if those elected officials aren't happy, the consultant is likely to be blamed. So yes, in an ideal world, the elected officials are conduits for the aspirations and values of the people. But if the elected officials decide to reflect somebody else's values, well, they still get to decide, so yes, it's about their values.
Some purists decide that whenever someone talks about high ideals such as reflecting the values of the community, but then works in real situations where other objectives are taking precedence, that person's being hypocritical. There's some validity to that. At the same time, we all have to move between idealistic and practical modes of thought. You may feel that what company X is doing is ethically wrong, but while you fight that you still have to live in a world where company X is doing that. It's one of the harder things that humans are asked to do, actually, because we do want, in varying degrees, to feel pure and consistent, so we feel awkward about working inside a situation that we know, in larger terms, is somehow wrong.
I've thought about this a lot, because one common critique of me as a consultant, at least in my errant youth, was that I often talked about ideals at moments when everyone in the room needed a practical focus on the current political situation. In middle age, I'm better at working in whatever situation I'm in, but I still feel the awkwardness, and in fact I value it. So long as I feel uncomfortable about the real-world situation, I know that my adaptation to the situation isn't undermining my ability to hold, and act on, clear ideals. Only if it felt easy would I start worrying.
basics: branching (or how transit is like a river)
A short draft chapter from the book, overlapping the content of this recent post but with an extended BART example that I hope readers will enjoy and have comments on.
In 2011, cartographer Daniel Huffman thought it would be interesting to draw river systems as though they were subways. Figure 1 shows part of his sketch of the Lower Mississippi.[i] Continue Reading →
minneapolis-st. paul: let’s name our network!
The Metropolitan Council in the Twin Cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul is taking customer suggestions on how to name their rapid transit network, which until now has consisted only of a single rail line, the Hiawatha between Minneapolis and Bloomington via MSP airport. They are now adding Bus Rapid Transit and, in 2014, the Central light rail line. So they're starting to think about the whole system, and what to call it.
This is one of those moments when two competing impulses tend to diverge.
- The longing for something that says "new and exciting and transformative!"
- The desire to convey exactly the opposite, that although it's new, this thing is a permanent, reliable, and an intrinsic part of the city. This message actually benefits from a branding that's a bit, well, boring.
I lean toward the latter message. I've seen plenty of systems with sexy marketing but incoherent information, so I tend to say that clear information is the best marketing.
If you want "new and exciting and transformative," check out Boulder, Colorado, which has excellent transit, and where most of the bus lines have names like Hop, Jump, and Bound. They seem to be happy with it, and that's great. But I'm relieved to see that this impulse isn't becoming the norm. To me, things that like to hop, jump, and bound don't seem especially reliable; these names are asking me to entrust my commute to a bunch of hyperactive rabbits. They're trying to get my attention, which basic infrastructure doesn't do. And transit's role is really established only when people think of it as basic infrastructure.
Obviously, there are early stages in transit development where you do need to get people's attention. So cute names can have a place — on new shuttle buses, for example, that are trying to get a foothold in car-dependent suburbs. But in the Twin Cities we're talking about naming the basic rapid transit infrastructure that will be the backbone of the entire system. By the time such expensive projects get built, you usually already have people's attention.
So I hope that after an excellent outreach process, with lots of great suggestions, they pick a name like "Twin Cities Rapid" or "the Metro." Even Los Angeles — a city built on industries that sell excitement, enchantment, and novelty — calls its transit system Metro, and its elements Metro Rail, Metro Rapid etc. Boring. But you can count on it.
christchurch: what i remember
In solidarity with the people of Christchurch, New Zealand, I offer these memories of their beautiful city and its people, over on the personal blog. If you've never been there, it may help you visualize.
basics: expertise vs. activism
The planning professions work in a grey zone between expertise and activism, and managing these competing impulses is one of our hardest tasks.
As a transit planning consultant, I don’t worry much about being perceived as an advocate of transit in general. Experts in any field are expected to believe in its importance. But I do try to keep a little distance between my knowledge about transit and the impulse to say “You should do this.” A good consultant must know how to marry his own knowledge to his client’s values, which may lead him to make different recommendations than he would do as a citizen, expressing his own values. Continue Reading →
tadpoles of new zealand: an auckland transit animation
There's a lot of potential for animation of Google Transit data, and we're just starting to see it explored. Some results will be rich with information, differentiating various kinds of service so that you can see how they dance together. Chris McDowall's animation of a day's transit in Auckland is less informative but correspondingly more meditative. Buses, trains and ferries are all rendered as earnest little tadpoles (or comets, or sperm, or viruses, depending on your sense of scale).
(An animated map of Auckland's public transport network from Chris McDowall on Vimeo.)
It nicely illustrates the point that frequency is what makes a route into a line. The line that goes really solid during the peak is the Northern Busway, which is far more frequent than any of Auckland's rail lines.
UPDATE: Commenter "numbat" points out that on the island at the east edge of the image (Waiheke Island) you can see local island buses pulsing with ferries that link the island to Auckland's CBD.
sydney morning herald on congestion pricing
(If you've found your way here from my article inside the Sydney Morning Herald's "debate" on congestion pricing, welcome! There's a category of articles on Sydney here, but I hope you'll poke around more widely. The "about the blog" and "about the author" are the place to start.)
In the Herald's congestion pricing debate today, I tried to make the general case, but Professor David Henscher seemed to nail the policy angle that's needed, one that would respond even to the car advocate's complaints.
Congestion pricing, if and when it happens in Sydney, needs to start by replacing other fees associated with driving, especially those that affect rural areas where there's no alternative to driving and never will be. This won't be enough to build all the public transport that Sydney needs; we ran the numbers on that last year for the Herald inquiry. But it makes both political and practical sense as a way to start.
The NRMA [Auto Club]'s line about needing better public transport before you charge for roads is one I agree with, but of course NRMA has no idea how to pay for that, nor is it really their priority. Realistically, any congestion charging scheme would need to start with the places where public transport is already abundant, which means for travel into and out of the City of Sydney. That's the one thing that seemed missing from the four articles.
I certainly objected to the punitive tone of the framing question: "Should motorists pay for the congestion they cause?" No, motorists should have the option to pay to get out of congestion.
UPDATE: By the way, One reason that the Sydney car vs transit debate is so polarized is that both have major projects in mind that require expensive tunnels. NRMA (the auto club) recently proposed that they would support turning a surface street into a "transit boulevard" if transit advocates would just support a multi-billion dollar road tunnel underneath it. I doubt there's a deal there.
london’s northern headache
Commenter David M on what rivers teach about transit:
It's interesting to note that in London the newest Underground lines have no branches (Victoria, Jubilee). In fact, when Jubilee was originally opened it took over one of the Bakerloo Lines branches, reducing the Bakerloo to a branchless line also.
For real complications, look at Camden Town [top center] on the Northern Line [black on this classic map] in London, England. Just south of this station is a complex deep underground junction that lets trains from any two of the branches south of Camden to simultaneously run on any two of the branches to the north. It is a marvel of engineering, but it is also an operational nightmare with trains run from any branch to any branch – one train runs late and it can cause problems on all of the branches.
London has wanted to simplify the operations by spliting the line into two and requiring an interchange at Camden Town. There are four platforms at Camden Town but the interchange passages are insufficient to handle the expected interchange traffic – so for now, it is cheaper to suck it up and deal with the operational issues.
There is an interesting effect of this interchange. Going south, both branches serve Euston Station before heading off to cross London on two different lines serving different areas of the core. You can get on one train at Camden, stop at Mornington Crescent and at Euston. You could get on the following train at Camden and arrive at Euston without passing through Mornington Crescent. The reason is that Mornington Crescent is on only one of the two branches, the other just bypasses the station. It makes for fun time when trying to get to Mornington Crescent.
The other night a Sydney rail expert was telling me that when the North West line is built, creating a four-way junction at Epping similar to the one at Camden Town, they will spend a number extra millions on the tunnelling to create the ability to route trains from any segment to any other. A similar decision has already been made about a similar junction at Glenfield in Sydney's southwest. I wonder how much could be saved if we let lines cross without connecting track, and required connections, where that pattern makes sense as part of a larger grid. It's not the right answer everywhere, certainly, but it sounds like London transit experts aren't very appreciative of all the flexibility that their great-grandparents gave them with the design of the Northern Line.