Advocacy

dueling academics on cost-benefit of rail

Posted on August 30, 2011 in Advocacy, Language, Rail Transit

Two new academic abstracts set up a striking debate, on the question of the cost-benefit analysis of rail projects. From Peter Gordon and Paige Elise Kolesar:

Rail transit systems in modern American cities typically underperform. In light of high costs and low ridership, the cost-benefit results have been poor. But advocates often suggest that external (non-rider) benefits could soften these conclusions. In this paper we include recently published estimates of such non-rider benefits in the cost-benefit analysis. Adding these to recently published data for costs and ridership, we examine 34 post-World War II U.S. rail transit systems (8 commuter rail, 6 heavy rail and 20 light rail). The inclusion of the non-rider benefits does not change the negative assessment. In fact, sensitivity analyses that double the estimated non-rider benefits and/or double transit ridership also leave us with poor performance readings. Advocates who suggest that there are still other benefits that we have not included (always a possibility) have a high hurdle to clear.

Meanwhile, from Robert Cervero and Erick Guerra, both of UC Berkeley:

The debate over the costs and benefits of rail passenger transit is lively, deep, and often ideological. As with most polemical debates, the truth probably lies somewhere in the middle of extreme views. Some rail systems have benefits that outweigh their costs, while others do not. Applying a commonly used transit-fare price elasticity to 24 of the largest light and heavy rail systems in the United States and Puerto Rico, assuming a linear demand curve, and accounting for a counterfactual scenario, we find that just over half of the systems have net social benefits. Although Los Angeles’ rail system does not “pass” our back-of-the-envelope cost—benefit analysis, as the network expands, it will begin to mimic the regional spatial coverage and connectivity of its chief competitor—the auto-freeway system—and approach the fare recovery rates of other large, dense American cities.

I don't have time to dig into the papers, but I think the difference in tone of the abstracts is interesting in itself. The issue of network completeness identified by the second abstract is of course critical. Discuss.

(Hat tip: Murray Henman. Post composed via wifi on the Amtrak Cascades, which is excellent!)

How urbanist visionaries can muck up transit

Posted on July 16, 2011 in Advocacy, Architecture, Demand-Response, Frequent Networks, Los Angeles

Architects and urban visionaries play an incredibly important role in a leadership-hungry culture. They have to know a little bit about almost everything, which is hard to do. But for some reason, certain segments of the profession have decided that the basic math and geometry of transit isn't one of those things they need to know, even when they present themselves as transit experts.

To see what I mean, I encourage you to watch this short video from Gensler Architects in Los Angeles. It's a concise summary of all the crucial mistakes that you'll need to confront in much "visionary thinking" about transit. (If Gensler takes down the video, read on. I've inserted enough screenshots from it that you can follow.)

[NETWORK_LA transit from tam thien tran on Vimeo.]

The five most common "visionary" mistakes about transit, all on display in the video, are:

Disinterest in costs and efficiency. Visionaries do need to set aside cost and efficiency for part of their brainstorming phase, because by doing so they might come upon an idea that's efficient and affordable in a completely new way. But they don't have a coherent idea until they've brought those factors back in, at least at the level of order-of-magnitude reasonableness. Sadly, some urbanists scoff when I use the word efficiency, assuming that this means I've lost touch with human needs, aspirations, aesthetics and values. In reality, efficiency means how much of those good things you can have in a world of limited resources. Even in the arts, we speak often of the efficiency or economy with which an artist achieves an aesthetic effect. (The Gensler video, for example, is efficient in displaying all five of these fallacies in only five minutes.)

Fixation on transit technologies as though they were the essential distinction between different mobility outcomes. For more on this, see here.

Confusion about scale. In transit, if it doesn't scale, it doesn't matter. Because visionary thinking often focuses first on a prototype – a tiny example of the hoped-for transformation — it often goes too far without thinking about scalability. Sure, this cool idea works in one suburb or in one cool building, but that says very little about whether it would work in a whole city. Gensler's particular error about scale is …

Confusion about "flexibility," a dangerous slippery word. Gensler imagines that a demand-responsive style of transit, in which you make a request on your phone and the transit system somehow deviates to meet your personal needs, is scalable to a vast, dense city where the transit system is already very crowded much of the time. More on this below.

Ignorance about what's already working, leading to premature demolition fantasies. If you already hate buses, you won't have much interest in understanding why so many people use them. Like many urbanist visionaries, Gensler doesn't appreciate the very high ridership and efficiency of the existing transit system across the core of Los Angeles. This allows them to jump to the conclusion that the system should be replaced instead of incrementally improved. (Tip: Prematurely dismissing the relevance of something that so many people clearly find useful is an excellent way to sound elitist, regardless of the nobility of your intentions.)

So watch the Gensler video if you can, but you can also follow along via my screenshots and comments below. You'll see these mistakes again and again in the urban visioning business.

0:27 Gensler states the question as "Get LA on transit HOW?" No argument with the question.

0:51 Transit is divided into a set of vehicle types, and these types (light rail, metro, bus) are confused with "methods" of transport. For more on the absurdity of treating bus/rail distinctions as primary, see here.

0:53 "We have only these methods. What if we added more?" An interesting question to which transit experts (and economists, and engineers) have a very good answer. The more competing systems you establish in the same market trying to do the same thing, the less well any of them will function, and the less investment any one of them will justify.

0:56 They now begin to analyze vehicles in terms of distance, sustainability, flexibility. What's missing? Cost! Efficiency! Some things are just wildly expensive relative to what they deliver. Darrin Nordahl has already been down this path, evaluating technologies by discussing only their supposed benefits. That's not evaluation, it's either aesthetic rumination or marketing. (Neither of those are bad things, but they have to be identified as what they are.)

1:20. They talk about distances but their graphic is talking about speeds. These are fair for personal modes but absurd generalizations for the transit modes. When your notion of "rail" conflates light rail, heavy metro rail subways, and 70 mile-long infrequent commuter rail, the word "rail" means nothing relevant about speed or travel distance, or any other transit outcome apart from capacity. (Note that the earlier claim "we have only these methods" implies that these three kinds of rail are the same thing in every way that matters.)

Likewise, if you think buses have an ideal distance, you're unclear on the role of local buses vs Bus Rapid Transit vs long-haul expresses, all of which are very successful in Los Angeles. Gensler imposes a "technology first" frame on the data, thereby concealing almost everything that matters about how transit gets people where they're going.

In transit, the real speed distinctions within transit are usually not direct results of technology. Speed is the result of how often you stop and what can get in your way. See here.

2:00. Staggering incoherence in comparing input (bus service) to an unrelated output (total ridership including rail). What's more, the numbers are misleading. Per the 2011 APTA Fact Book, Los Angeles MTA has America's 3rd highest total boardings and 2nd highest total bus boardings. In the context of its starved resources and the vagueness of public support for it, the Los Angeles bus system is working brilliantly.

2:26. Here is Gensler's biggest mistake:

Which of these two networks would you rather travel on?

Gensler has mistaken metaphor for logic. They think that "liberating" bus routes has something to do with liberating or enabling people. The idea is barely explained and totally incoherent.

Today, in our supposedly "inflexible" system, you'll find a bus going down a major boulevard with maybe 60 people on it. Some of them want to go somewhere straight ahead, some want to go to somewhere ahead and to the left, some want to to somewhere ahead and to the right. Fortunately, they are in a high frequency grid system, which will take all of them to their destination, either directly or via a connection to a north-south line, probably by a path similar to what they'd have followed if driving. So this huge number of diverse people making diverse trips are all moving toward their destinations on a reasonably direct path. This is the extraordinary power of the high-frequency grid. So instead, Gensler proposes bus lines should twist and turn just because somebody with an iPhone wants them to?

Personal technology has great opportunity to better inform us about all transit services, and it can transform the convenience of transit at low-demand places and times, by influencing the operations of low-ridership, low-capacity services, such as demand-responsive buses and taxis.

Quite possibly, personal apps will allow demand-responsive service to replace some low-demand fixed-route buses, which is fine with most transit planners. Those low-ridership buses run mostly for social-service or "equity" reasons, and if there's a more efficient way to do that, I expect many transit experts would be all for it. It would let them concentrate on the high-ridership, high-capacity services that can achieve a great deal of personal mobility and sustainability, very efficiently.

Successful high-capacity frequent transit needs to take on more of the rigidity of subways, in order to spread the benefits of subways (which we can't afford everywhere) more widely. That means it needs to be even more frequent, reliable, legible, permanent, and reinforced with infrastructure investment. Fortunately, within limited resources, many transit agencies are now trying to do that.

The video is full of entirely laudable and familiar green ideas, but then we get to this …

3:23 In Gensler's Los Angeles, every transit trip must be reserved. Do you really want to have to make an appointment with a single vehicle and driver, because that's the only way to make any use of all the buses swarming around you on unpredictable paths? Or might you prefer a simple frequent transit corridor where so many buses are coming all the time, in such a predictable pattern, that you can take any of them, and are thus almost guaranteed a vehicle soon even if one breaks down?

4:20 "What if we had PERSONAL service?" they ask? Well, the extreme of personal service would be low-ridership system in a tiny town, where the driver has time to learn everyone's name. Is that what Los Angeles wants to be? Or would you rather live in a city where you can get anywhere you want to go easily, starting right now, without making a reservation, and even with the option of spontaneously changing your path or destination, just like motorists do?

To me as someone who values my personal freedom, flexibility, spontaneity, human dignity, and travel time, Gensler's Los Angeles would be a hell-world worse than Blade Runner. Fortunately, it's also mathematically impossible.

We've blown up transit networks before, of course, and Gensler's vision should remind us of what was thought about cars vs. transit in the 1940s. Like personal technology today, cars were just so wonderful for the individual that we just assumed the world could be made in their image. (The technical term for this idea — that the world will bend to reflect my emotional needs and enthusiasms — is narcissism.) So we made a deep investment in a car-and-highway technology that could not possibly scale to big cities. Gensler proposes the same mistake: Because our iPhones are so cool, they assume that the city, at every scale, can be reinvented around them.

For a more positive vision of the future of Los Angeles, one that begins by noticing the city's strengths and looking at how to build on them, see here and especially toward the end of an interview here.

social media’s influence on public transit (guest post)

Posted on July 9, 2011 in Advocacy, Guest Posts, Public Outreach

Guest Post by Daniela Baker

Daniela Baker is a social media advocate at CreditDonkey where she helps entrepreneurs find small business credit cards. She grew up in Europe where public transportation plays a huge role in everybody's life. Public transit "consumers" like Daniela are finding their voice and publishing it on the web for all to read. With that newfound confidence, they are discussing political issues, gaining support for changes to be made when it comes to public funding and increased public transit choices.

With more and more people on the road and gas prices on the rise, Americans are looking for a better alternative to commuting by car. Unfortunately, many transit systems can be hard for the newbie to decipher, or fall short in offering what citizens are after. Even more unfortunate, many people are unaware of the options their towns offer when it comes to transportation.

When consumers aren’t finding what they’re looking for when it comes to public transportation, they are turning to social media to help garner the influence they need to get the services they’re after. This has left many professionals scratching their heads, uncertain how social media can influence a public service.

Here are some answers as to why consumers are turning to social media when it comes to public transportation, as well as how consumers and cities are driving the social media efforts.

Americans’ sentiments toward public transportation

A poll released in March 2010 by Smart Growth America and Transportation for America found that Americans are craving more transportation options. The poll indicated that Americans would be open to doubling the amount of funding that is currently being funneled toward public transportation.

The poll found that Americans are frustrated with the transportation options that are currently available. In fact, 73 percent of respondents stated they have no options other than driving as much as they currently do. In the study, only 1 in 5 of those polled took public transportation during the previous month (this included walking) but indicated they would like to use it more; about 47 percent indicated public transportation is not an option in their area and 35 percent said the timing of routes did not work with their schedule.

These survey results were not only for metro areas but applied to suburban and rural areas as well, with respondents stating that rural areas would also benefit from increased transportation systems. In fact, 79 percent stated that in rural areas the U.S. would benefit from expansion and improvements made to both bus and rail systems. Eighty-two percent of suburbanites shared the same sentiment.

Why social media

In the past, when a consumer was looking for information, they would go to the local library to research an issue or visit town hall for information on public services. If they were unhappy about the services provided or felt that there was a need that was being missed, they would meet with their elected official.

Nowadays, citizens are going straight to the Internet to get answers and try to make change. With social media like blogs, Twitter and Facebook, and websites created by the common consumer, people are making real connections with people who they have never met in person.

Nielsen Research wanted to see just how large of an influence social media has on today’s consumers. This question was answered with a study they conducted in 2007. When asked what sources they trust, chat/discussion comments and blogs ranked two and three on the list, just behind other consumers. Other choices included brand websites, TV/magazines, radio, sponsorships, search ads and banner ads.

Citizens making public transportation more convenient

Tech savvy individuals have started to take action by creating social media outlets that help fellow commuters find the information they need to make public transportation options work with their commute.

PBS.org has profiled one such effort – IAmCaltrain.com, which is utilizing web technology to make regional commuter train schedules easier to decipher. The site allows commuters to type in their starting and ending destinations and it maps the closest train stations and shows when trains are scheduled to arrive.

As websites like IAmCaltrain.com and commuter-driven blogs continue to be created, they are encouraging others in their area to embrace the transportation systems that are available to them as well as voice their opinions about what could be improved.

Cities increasing awareness of public transportation

Cities across America have started to embrace social media to help encourage their citizens to take advantage of the public transportations that are available to them. June 16 was the 6^th Annual Dump the Pump Day, sponsored by the American Public Transportation Association (APTA). APTA partnered with cities across the U.S. to encourage citizens to park their cars and utilizing public transportation for the day.

As reported by StatePress.com, the City of Tempe was one of the public organizations that participated in APTA’s annual event. City employees turned to a method they knew would be effective to get the words out to Arizonians—they went to Twitter and Facebook to encourage residents to choose public transit, showing the cost savings available through using alternative modes of transportation (gas prices in the Phoenix area have been hovering between $3.50 and $4.00 per gallon since 2008).

Outside of government, citizens and the private sector are asserting greater control over transit information. Google Transit is now the go-to source for routes and schedules over much of the world, and many transit agencies are increasingly deferring to Google rather than maintaining their own expensive systems.

More importantly, Google’s standard public data formats let anyone access route, schedule, and even real-time location data. As a result, entrepreneurs have developed countless web and phone applications to present and customize transit data, so that customers can increasingly choose the style and emphasis that they want in their own information. Down at the grass roots, activists are even drawing new styles of map for their transit systems, promoting these through social media, and getting their transit agency’s attention as a result.

What Comes Next? Innovation

Most leading transit agencies now have Facebook and Twitter accounts, and some put significant effort into both listening and communicating via these tools. The trick, of course, is not just to listen for suggestions and opinions, but also to notice how the whole communication task is evolving as new tools are invented and new ways of using them arise.

The hardest challenge for transit professoinals is simply to be open to innovation arising from the social media sphere. Sometimes, online innovators will do something better, and more cheaply, than a transit agency can do it. As that happens, the transit agency's interest may lie in encouraging public innovation, not trying to control or limit it.

that influential texas “urban mobility report”

Posted on June 12, 2011 in Advocacy, US Federal Policy

You know you're a transport geek when you find yourself at a 9 PM debate about how governments should measure "urban mobility."

The opportunity arose one night at the Congress for the New Urbanism conference in Madison last week. Long after most urbanists had adjourned to the bars and restaurants, a small but sharp audience gathered to hear Tim Lomax of the Texas Transportation Institute (TTI) debate Joe Cortwright of CEOs for Cities. Tim was there to defend TTI's influential Urban Mobility Report (UMR), an annual compendium of statistics that are widely used to define how US cities think about mobility problems and to benchmark these cities against each other. Joe was there to attack TTI's methodology as biased against compact, sustainable cities.

The technical core of the argument is simple. TTI's Travel Time Index, one of their more quoted products, is a ratio of peak congested travel times by car against uncongested travel times by car. In other words, travel times are said to be "worse" only if they get much longer in peak commute hours than they are midday.

This ratio inevitably gives "better" scores to cities where normal uncongested travel times are pretty long — in other words, spread-out cities. Here's the CEOs' critique of how the TTI compares Charlotte and Chicago:

This index certainly looks hard to defend as any useful measure of travel time, even by car. Two cities that expose the average motorist to near-identical amounts of congestion delay are being scored entirely based on how far people have to drive there, where "further" means "better" on the travel time index score.

In his rebuttal, Lomax emphasized that Institute doesn't stress its Travel Time Index as much as it used to. He even offered a table showing the number of times his report mentioned the index in each successive year (plenty in the 90s, but way down in the late 00s.) We were to conclude that critiquing the Travel Time Index is a 20th century battle.

The real problem, of course, is TTI's title, "Urban Mobility Report," for a document that's really mostly about congestion. Only if you live in a very car-dependent city, or care only about car-dependent citizens, can you reduce mobility to congestion in that way. A more truthfully titled "Urban Congestion Report" would raise no objection.

Lomax argued that his insititute is interested in the other modes and wants to be able to talk about them more effectively, and I'm sure that's true. It's also true that nobody can be responsible for what journalists and editors choose to emphasize in reporting about their work. It may well be that journalists continue to fixate on the Travel Time Index more than the Institute itself wants them to.

But look at how the TTI's own website introduces its most recent study:

The 2010 Urban Mobility Report builds on previous Urban Mobility Reports with an improved methodology and expanded coverage of the nation's urban congestion problem and solutions. The links below provide information on long-term congestion trends, the most recent congestion comparisons and a description of many congestion improvement strategies. All of the statistics have been recalculated with the new method to provide a consistent picture of the congestion challenge. As with previous methodology improvements, readers, writers and analysts are cautioned against using congestion data from the 2009 Report. All of the measures, plus a few more, have been updated and included in this report.

Mobility is in the report title, but this entire leading paragraph is about congestion. If you dig into TTI's full press release about its 2010 report, you also find that it's all about congestion except for this curious paragraph:

The congestion reduction benefits of two significant solutions are discussed—public transportation and roadway operations. Without public transportation services, travelers would have suffered an additional 785 million hours of delay and consumed 640 million more gallons of fuel—a savings of $19 billion in congestion costs. Roadway operational treatments save travelers 320 million hours of delay and 265 million gallons of fuel for a congestion cost savings of $8 billion.

The journalistic spin that TTI itself recommends is that non-car modes matter only if they reduce congestion, and that congestion remains the primary measure of urban mobility.

What's more, TTI's suggestion that public transit directly reduces congestion is actually quite fraught, and many transit experts, including myself, steer away from it. Transit certainly creates alternatives to congestion for individuals, and the resulting benefit to individuals can be aggregated to describe society-wide improvements in both productive time and personal/family time. But those calculations are much more clear and direct than any "transit benefit to congestion" overall. That's because newly freed, high demand road space tends to induce new car trips.

Most transit projects are not trying to reduce congestion, or not all by themselves. If congestion reduction is your goal, you need a combination of transit and market-rate "decongestion" pricing for motorists. For most advocates of transit in the context of compact sustainable cities, the goal is not to reduce congestion but to give citizens options to liberate themselves from it.

Could a real "Urban Mobility Report" have value? Yes, but it would look totally different from TTI's, and it wouldn't be easy. Creating mobility measures that work across all the modes — cars, walking, cycling, transit etc — is fiendlishly difficult. I have some notions about how it might be done, but it would have to start with the right question. If you're going to talk about true urban mobility, then surely you have to ask questions like:

How much of people's lives is lost to travel, where that travel has no positive value to them as personal time or recreation?

Or perhaps even more powerfully:

What degree of freedom do people have to move about their city at will?

Any methodology that focuses on the performance of a single mode — whether congestion on freeways, continuity of cycle networks, or reliability of transit — is not going to lead us that way.

Given the resources and credibility that TTI has, I really hope they move in this direction. But it won't be easy. If the TTI report continues to be about congestion, that's another choice, but in that case their "Urban Mobility Report" will be a report of declining relevance (and increasingly offensive title) as this urban century unrolls.

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

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.

“ten best” rankings: the #1 way to confuse and disempower

Posted on May 2, 2011 in Advocacy, Journalism

When an article promises to reveal the "ten best" transit systems or colleges or corporations, why do we care? Why do we even think such a list could be meaningful?

Well, how would you react if a major news magazine published definitive research on the "ten best fruits"?

Imagine it. The timeless standards (apple, orange, grape) are in the #3-5 positions. This confirms just enough of our long-standing assumptions to give the ranking system credibility. But the fast-surging pomegranate is now #1, the bratty little blueberry is #2, and more scandalous, some long-trusted fruits have crashed out of the top 10. Where did the banana (#21) go wrong?

The list would also contain some entries meant to surprise you. You're supposed to think: "Wow, the mushy little kiwifruit is now one of the ten best fruits? When did that happen? I'd better buy this magazine and get the details! Maybe the kiwifruit deserves another look!"

No, that would be silly, because almost anyone can see that "best fruit" is a meaningless term. You could do a list of the most popular fruits, the sweetest fruits, the most sustainably cultivated fruits, the best fruits for various kinds of nutrition, or the most important fruits for the Solomon Islands economy. But a list of the "ten best fruits" would be nonsense. We each have many different demands of a fruit, but those demands aren't all important in the same way at the same time. Most of us couldn't even form our own absolute definition of "best fruit," let alone try to get anyone to agree with it. In fact, we woudn't even try. The whole idea is obviously silly.

So why do we look twice at a list of top ten US transit systems? Why would a major magazine think we would care?

Well, the fruit analogy suggests that when it come to transit systems (or colleges) people either (a) assume that everyone's idea of a "good" transit system is the same or (b) just don't want to think about what they want from their transit system.

As in any business, journalists may think they're responding to their readers' desires, but they're also helping to forge those desires.

If ten-best lists are about something that's reasonably factual ("ten most reliable transit systems," "ten safest transit systems", "top ten in ridership per capita") then they can be useful. They can encourage excellence and help people reward that excellence with ridership and investment.

But when you tell your readers that certain transit systems are the "best," and don't explain your criteria very well, you signal that everyone must have the same sense of what's good. That encourages people to go into transit debates as bullies, assuming that if a transit agency doesn't deliver on their notion of the good, the agency must be incompetent or failing, so the only valid response is abuse. It encourages people not to notice that "failing to do what I want" is often a result of "doing what someone else wants."

In short, it encourages people to think like three-year-old children, for whom "my needs" are rich and glorious and self-evident to any reasonable person while "other people's needs" are vague and tedious abstractions. That, in turn, forces officials to act like parents managing their childrens' tantrums. And then we're offended when those officials can seem paternalistic?

Photo: Luc Viator, from Wikipedia

comment of the week: “expertise as a human being”

Posted on April 26, 2011 in Advocacy

Danny sees the deeper theme in my post on the difficulty of figuring out how far people are willing to walk to transit.

I have run into analysis situations like this before. After factoring in psychological bias, demographic trends, purchasing behavior, opportunity costs, and incentives, you end up with an answer that is so complex that it isn't even worth mentioning to anybody. And then everything changes the next month and your analysis is worthless again.
And of course, everybody out there has a theory backed by their own expertise as a human being. And everybody is qualified to say what makes them choose one or another usage pattern. Unfortunately, we tend to extrapolate our own preferences onto others, even though we rarely actually have the same preferences as others.
Randomized controlled trials will work wonders, but for that to happen, people have to be open to the possibility that their favorite theory is wrong. Unfortunately people rarely do things like that…and when they do accept that their theory is wrong, they only do it implicitly after being forced into accepting some other theory by competitive pressure. Its a sad state of affairs.

I'm always struck by how often even highly educated people explain their view of a transit issue by reference to their own experience, as though everyone experiences things the way they do. Just the other night, for example, an accomplished architecture professor told me that she would ride trains but would never ride a bus. She preceded this by emphasizing that she knew nothing about transit except what she experiences as a customer, which I later realized was maybe a subconscious way of claiming to speak for all people at that level of expertise — clearly the majority in most cities.

Although she would never claim to speak for anyone's experience but her own, she presumed she was part of some larger consensus on this question, which made her experience possibly relevant as a basis for public policy. Watching the larger mass of transit debates, it's always striking how quickly "I would never ride a bus" turns into an unverified claim that "most people would never ride buses." Most of us want to feel that we're part of the majority, however invisible or repressed. At another point on the spectrum, you'll hear the same pattern, "I feel x, therefore most people feel x," in claims that transit is an effete distraction from real people's needs because real people (like the speaker) want to drive their cars.

So I can share all of Danny's reasons for declaring it a "sad state of affairs." Still, we all get out of bed in the morning, despite it all …

can we define “livable and lovable” cities?

Posted on April 23, 2011 in Advocacy, Congestion Pricing, Meditations, Urban Structure

That's the nice slogan from a new Phillips Corporation initiative praised today in the Atlantic by NRDC's Kaid Benfield. The Phillips think tank suggests that we can gather all the qualities of a "livable and lovable" city into three virtues:

Resilience, which replaces the more bureaucratic and depressing word sustainability, but means roughly the same thing. Some great work has already been done on the concept of resilience. There's already a Resilient Cities movement, and an excellent book on Resilience Thinking.
Inclusiveness, which is about "social integration and cohesion," demonstrated for example in the lack of discrimination or social exclusion based on race, religion, age, and all the other usual categories.
Authenticity, which means "the ability to maintain the local character of the city," including "heritage, culture, and environment."

Below is their graphic summary. (The PDF [Download] is much sharper!) Below that is a bit of affectionate heckling from me.

Personally, I have some practical discomfort with the framing of the Inclusiveness category because it is easily exaggerated into visions of a socialist paradise in which we have abolished competition. When Philips says that "inhabitants should have equal opportunities to participate in the activities of the city," does that mean that when our city's team in the playoffs, we'll give out tickets by lottery rather than selling them, in order to avoid discriminating against the poor? If we're talking only about nondiscrimination by extraneous demographic categories, fine. But when you imply that you can neutralize the impact of differences in wealth, you lose so much of the politicial audience — at least in North America, Australia, and the UK — that you've probably lost the game. This issue comes up often in transit, of course, notably whenever anyone suggests that in a capitalist economy, it's foolish not to use pricing to help citizens understand the intrinsic cost of things that they take for granted. It's a tough one.

Note, also, the lingering contradictory message in their framing of resilience. On the one hand, the train station signifies that resilient cities acknowledge their "interdependence" with other cities. On the other hand, the emphasis on local farms and local energy generation suggests the opposite, that resilient cities aspire to greater and greater self-reliance. This is philosophically interesting, especially because high volumes of international trade — including in food, which is the opposite of local self-reliance — are the most reliable mechanism that human society has found to prevent large-scale wars.

I make both of these comments in the spirit of meditation. I am not claiming to know how better to define inclusiveness or resilience. Rather, I'm just marvelling at how difficult it is.

u.s. “transit lovers unite”

Posted on April 19, 2011 in Advocacy, US Federal Policy

A new campaign by the American Public Transporation Association:

Washington, DC –The American Public Transportation Association (APTA) and its more than 1,500 members are launching “I <3 Transit”(I heart transit), a mobile text campaign, to engage riders across the country and demonstrate the importance of public transportation to individuals, communities and the nation. The campaign, which starts this week, allows participants to show their support for increased public transit funding by simply texting “transit” to 86677.
Each year 10.2 billion trips are taken on the nation’s public transportation systems. Riders depend on their local transit provider for freedom, mobility and access. By texting “transit” to 86677 public transit riders and enthusiasts alike can stand together in support of public transportation. This simple action helps spread the message that Americans want public transportation as a travel option in their daily lives.
Supporters can also follow the campaign on twitter at @ihearttransit.

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