Chicago

Chicago: The Ridership-Equity Tradeoff, a Video

Posted on September 11, 2024 in Chicago 2

In a recent post I explained some of the findings of our recent Framing Report for Chicago Transit Authority’s Bus Vision Project. It’s a detailed and image-rich exploration of how Chicago’s bus network functions, or sometimes doesn’t, and what it would take to improve its design. We focus especially on the problem of racial equity in Chicago, and the way this goal conflicts with the goal of ridership because of Chicago’s racial geography.

Again, read the post, or if you really want to go deep, read the report. On the other hand, if you’d prefer 14 minutes of video, I did a virtual presentation this morning to the CTA’s governing body, the Chicago Transit Board. The whole meeting is interesting if you want to understand the larger context of CTA’s Bus Vision Project and hear the questions that were asked, but if you just want my part, it runs from 9:46 to 23:54.

It’s here, and here:

Chicago Area: Rethinking Both Pace and CTA

Posted on July 15, 2024 in Chicago, General

As the State of Illinois launches a complex conversation about how to fund public transit into the future, our firm has been doing planning work with two of the three big agencies in the Chicagoland region: Chicago Transit Authority (CTA), which mainly covers Chicago, and Pace, which covers almost all Chicago suburbs. I thought it would be a good time to share thoughts from both of those projects.

Recently, I listened to a big State Senate Transportation Committee hearing in which all of the agency heads in the region spoke. The key issues facing the region are:

a “fiscal cliff” which threatens all the agencies in 2026, as Covid relief funds run out, operating costs go up due to the difficulty of hiring workers, and yet pre-pandemic fare revenue can’t be expected to return.
a proposal to consolidate the three agencies (Pace, CTA, and the regional rail agency Metra) into one giant agency, supposedly to save money or achieve efficiencies.

To help with these debates, I want to lay out my view here why the agencies need more funding, and why I think consolidation would be a bad idea.

Why the CTA Needs More Money

We just completed a Framing Report for Chicago Transit Authority’s Bus Vision Project. We put a big effort into this report because we wanted to create a sample of all the things we could do, especially in access analysis, to illustrate exactly how a transit system functions and how it addresses various goals.

The report took a long time to write and was somewhat overtaken by events: You’ll notice that it mostly describes the 2019 network, and then more briefly describes what’s happened since then. As CTA recovers from the pandemic-related hiring crisis, the 2019 network is not exactly what it should go back to, but it still represents the most recent “non-crisis” state of the network, so it’s a good point of reference.

The report’s most important point is that Chicago’s geography creates a tradeoff between the goal of ridership and the goal of equity, because Chicago has a large low-income and racial minority population living in especially remote parts of the city, often at low densities or in areas with other physical barriers to service, where service to them is expensive per person to provide. This geography has a history of course, often tied to racist policies and practices that were common in the past.

The racial geography of Chicago and its inner suburbs, from our report. White people (blue) live mostly around downtown or in the northern third of the city, where density is high and travel distances are short. The rest of the city features “pie slices” of mostly Hispanic/Latino (orange) or mostly Black (green) areas. Black people (green) dominate the remote South Side, where they tend to be furthest from jobs and opportunities.

The ridership-equity tradeoff is a consequence of the mathematically inevitable ridership-coverage tradeoff. A ridership-equity tradeoff arises wherever a ridership-maximizing network design would inadvertently disfavor disadvantaged groups, because those groups tend to live and travel in places where their needs are more expensive per person to serve. Chicago has this problem in a big way.

We have two key findings about this problem:

Transit is doing a lot to help, and it can do more, but only by running some services that won’t be justifiable on purely ridership grounds.
Transit by itself cannot be expected to heal the legacy of decades of racist land use and real estate policies. Only redevelopment that reduces the isolation of low-income and minority areas, and adds more jobs and educational opportunities near them, can do that.

This conflict between ridership and equity goals is important because CTA has long labored under an unrealistic requirement to pay 50% of its operating costs from the farebox. In 2010, funding shortfalls related to the recession led to service cuts that made it difficult to maintain equity.

A new vision of CTA will need to create a set of standards that will accurately reflect the real goals that motivate support for public transit. These will surely include an equity goal that will be a counterweight to a ridership goal, because it will justify service expansions in disadvantaged areas despite their lower ridership potential. The balance between those competing goals will need to be chosen, as a political decision. But as always when there are tradeoffs, expanded funding makes it easier to do both.

Chicago is a city with vast unrealized transit potential. Its grid geography allows for especially efficient network structure. It has many areas that could be redeveloped in more transit-oriented ways, especially to improve the balance between housing and activities on the South Side. But it is held back by two things: inadequate protection from traffic, which CTA and the City of Chicago are also working on, and inadequate frequency, which is purely a matter of operating funds.

I will be presenting to the Chicago Transit Board (which governs CTA) on this report later this year, and that will be the end of our contract. I don’t know if we’ll have any future role in CTA’s Bus Vision Project. Meanwhile, if you want to understand the CTA’s situation in more detail, please look at our report.

Why Pace Needs More Money

In the hearing, one Senator emphasized that he wanted to talk first about a vision of service, then about governance, and finally about funding. That suggests that rather than just talking about how to address the “fiscal cliff”, so as to keep things as they are, this would be a good time to present a positive vision of the level of service that could transform the relevance of public transit across the region.

That’s what we’re doing for Pace, the agency that provides bus services to almost all of the Chicago suburbs. Later this year we expect to release a report that will show both what Pace could do if its funding returns to 2019 levels, which is not much, but also what it could do with an expansion of funding. The public outreach process on those alternatives will happen toward the end of 2024.

There’s one finding I can share now, which won’t be a surprise to anyone who knows the network. Pace has never been resourced to keep up with development and population growth of the last 70 years.

If you look at the Pace network, you’ll see intensive local services focused on places that were already built out by the mid-20th century, mostly around the edges of Chicago and in the large, old satellite cities of Waukegan, Elgin, Joliet, and Aurora. An enormous area of newer suburban development has very little service, just a thin scattering of hourly bus routes and a few rush-hour express services.

The Pace network, with red denoting high frequency. (See legend.) Service is concentrated on the edges of Chicago and in the older satellite cities, leaving large developed areas, including much of DuPage County, unserved.

So when regional leaders think about how Pace should be resourced, they have to keep in mind that for decades Pace has been unable to grow as the region has grown.

That’s why the Pace project will show two alternatives for a substantial expansion of service, which is currently unfunded. We need to show people what it would mean to plan based on needs rather than just on constraints, and how that network could transform the possibilities of life in all of the suburban cities. These scenarios would bring service up to a level that comparable suburbs in many other states already have.

Will Consolidating the Agencies Help?

As I am a consultant who sees both CTA and Pace as clients, you should not expect me to disagree with their managements in public. So of course you should expect me to share their opposition to consolidating CTA, Pace and Metra into a giant agency.

But I really do think it would be a bad idea, for the same reasons that I’d oppose similar moves to create a single giant agency for the San Francisco Bay Area, which has also been proposed.

First, there aren’t that many economies of scale that arise from consolidating agencies as large as CTA and Pace. The resulting agency would be huge, and you should expect bureaucratic inertia to increase with hugeness. Two 50-bus agencies probably have a lot of duplicated administrative functions that you could consolidate in one 100-bus agency, but at the already-huge scale of CTA and Pace, further consolidation probably won’t eliminate much administration, because the job the new agency would have to do is so vast and diverse.

More importantly, dense core cities like Chicago and San Francisco have profoundly different transit needs and transit politics than their suburbs. Many US cities that are served by regionwide transit agencies have constant conflicts with their suburbs over how to get their needs met. Transit needs per capita are higher in dense cities, yet it is often difficult to get a regional transit authority, especially one dominated by suburban cities, to apportion to the core city more than its per capita share of service.

Dense cities are also where the most can be achieved through intimate coordination of transit planning, land use planning, and street planning. Since the latter two are controlled by city government, a lot can be achieved by urban transit agencies that are close to city government, if not part of it. San Francisco already has the model of an integrated transportation agency that handles both transit and street planning, allowing those functions to be harmonized. If you were going to merge CTA with something, it might make sense to merge it with Chicago Department of Transportation. Even now, CTA is ultimately answerable to the Mayor of Chicago, just as the SFMTA ultimately answers to the Mayor of San Francisco, so the Mayor is in the position to make transit, street planning, and land use planning work together.

In the hearing, Pace Executive Director Melinda Metzger argued that a combined Chicagoland public transit agency would also be bad for the outer suburbs, because Chicago’s interests would dominate. On balance, I think both Chicago and its suburbs should fear the creation of an agency so huge that it will be hard to bring its resources to bear on the actual problems of each community.

An “Opinionated Atlas” of US Transit by a Great Transit Traveler

Posted on December 14, 2018 in Books, Chicago, General, Los Angeles

The massive redesign of Houston’s bus system, which has helped grow ridership as many US transit agencies are losing riders, would not have happened without Christof Spieler. Within the Houston METRO Board, he was the one member who rode transit, thought constantly about transit, brought professional credentials as an urban planner, knew what needed to be done, and knew how to argue for it to people of many different ideologies and cultural backgrounds. The Board, which was itself ideologically and culturally diverse, was inevitably guided in part by his expertise, passion, and patient persistence.

Since then, Christof has been traveling the US, studying and thinking about transit. Every week, it has seemed, he tweets from some new city. Finally, all that thinking has come together as Trains, Buses, People: An Opinionated Atlas of US Transit.

The first two parts of the book are a sensible explanation of what good transit planning is: Think about people rather than technologies. Think about networks rather than lines or corridor projects. Think about frequency rather than just speed. These are arranged in simple one-topic pages, with a summary paragraph and bullet points — ideal for skimming.

Christof’s map of Los Angeles. Note what a small area has frequent service both north-south and east-west. (Orange lines are frequent buses, and all rail is frequent except the purple commuter rail lines.) (Island Press, 2018)

But it’s the third part, the atlas, that will really suck you in. For the 50 largest metro areas in the US that have rail or Bus Rapid Transit (that’s everything bigger than Fort Collins, Colorado or Eugene, Oregon) he provides a loving description of the city’s network, its demand pattern, its recent history, and its issues. Denizens of each city may disagree with what Spieler chooses to emphasize, but he certainly will start a lively conversation, not just within cities but about the comparisons between them.

What’s new about this atlas? Spieler shows you the frequent bus network for every city, thus helping you see not just where trains go, but where people can go easily.

Christof’s map of Chicago at the same scale. Note the substantially larger area with both north-south and east-west frequent lines. (Island Press, 2018.)

For example, his Los Angeles map reveals that despite the vast area of moderate density in that city, a complete frequent grid (with both north-south and east-west lines near most people) exists only in a tiny area of about 7 x 7 miles (the size of San Francisco), extending roughly from downtown to the edge of Beverly Hills and from the Hollywood Hills to just south of I-10. Everything else, including highrise centers like Century City, Burbank, Glendale, and Pasadena as well as vast areas of mostly 2-3 story housing, has frequent service in only one direction, if at all. Another map of Los Angeles includes densities, and shows how much high-density area lies outside the frequent network entirely.

Spieler’s map of Chicago, by contrast, shows a remarkably complete grid over very similar densities in a city with even fewer major destinations outside of downtown.

Spieler’s book is perfectly designed to be both readable and browsable — a great gift for an urbanist or transport geek and a great book for the coffee table. You can read around in for a long time, exploring different cities, their strengths and their missed opportunities. Let’s hope it produces a smarter conversation about urban transit.

Christof Spieler: Trains, Buses, People: An Opinionated Atlas of US Transit: Island Press, 2018

quote of the week: the neglected american bus

Posted on October 7, 2014 in Access, Boston, Bus Rapid Transit, Chicago, Houston, Minneapolis – St. Paul, Oakland, San Francisco

In the six cases examined, we conducted off the record interviews with public officials, general managers, and thought leaders in each region. One of the consistent themes that emerged was that the bus systems and bus passengers were an afterthought. In every region – Chicago, New York, Boston, Minneapolis/St. Paul, Dallas/Ft. Worth, and the Bay Area – rail was the primary focus of virtually everyone we interviewed. We also found that maps of the regional transit networks tellingly either included a jumbled mess of bus routes behind a clean rail network, or ignored bus altogether.
It is likely this bias toward rail has very little to do with governance. But it does have a negative impact on transit delivery, particularly from a customer point of view. The vast majority of transit riders in the United States are on buses, so it would make sense to devote more resources and attention to them compared to rail riders, rather than less. Also, improvements to the bus network are likely to be less expensive than new rail expansions, and would be likely to yield substantially more net benefit per dollar. Yet while every region we visited had a new rail expansion either in planning or under construction, outside of New York none of the regions had any plans for regional bus networks, reorganization of existing bus systems, or major expansions of bus rapid transit (BRT).
Joshua Schank, President CEO,
Eno Center for Transportation
"The Case of the Neglected Bus"

I've certainly noticed, in my own work, that the aggressive, agency-wide commitment to building a complete access-maximizing transit system is stronger in cities that don't have much rail, or where rail is in early stages of development, as in Houston. Key tools for total network legibility, such as Frequent Network branding, also seem to be spreading much more effectively in the midsized transit authorities than in the gigantic ones.

A while back I had a brief chat with a major airline CEO at an event. He asked me: "So what's the future of transit. It's rail, isn't it?" I wanted to say: "So what's the future of aviation? It's all intercontinental jumbo jets, isn't it?

Or is it about people feeling free to go places? In that case, the future of aviation is a network, where many types of vehicle have an essential role.

holiday map immersion

Posted on December 24, 2013 in Chicago, Houston, Maps, Portland

If you're hiding with your laptop in the laundry closet because an ancient family argument has broken out over holiday dinner, it's a great time to geek out on how fast mapping is changing. Go over to Atlantic Cities and explore Emily Badger's great overview of 10 ways that mapping has evolved over the past year.

My favorite: I usually try to be race-blind in my thinking about transit and cities, but I have to admit I was absorbed by Duncan Cable's Dot Map of Everyone in the US, which is color coded by ethnicity. Not really everyone: You can't zoom in to find your personal dot, but it's still a magnificent rendering of how dot-crowding conveys density on a map more naturally than shaded zones. Chicago, for example, displays pie-slices of single-ethnicity neighborhoods (blue is white, red is Asian, green is African-American, orange is Latino/Hispanic), but you can also see where the borders are soft, where they're hard, and where highly mixed areas exist or are emerging:

Houston, where I'm working now, is also made of pie slices, but the colors are more muted, indicating more mixture almost everywhere. Near the center of this image, the greater Montrose and Heights districts are rainbow pointillism. The Asian node in the south is student areas near Texas Medical Center.

And my home town, Portland, with downtown on the far left (as it is), showing the new concentric-circle pattern, as lower income minorities (because of income, rather than race) are forced to settle on the fringes of the old city (top edge and far right) or what we'd now call "inner ring suburbs." The bike-and-transit-friendly city you've seen pictures of is mostly white with small dashes of color. The exception is downtown, which still has a mix of housing types tending to both income extremes, and the continuing black presence in the neighborhoods straight north of downtown even as these gentrify. (As a small child in 1970 I remember seeing a cover of the local free weekly that showed a hand drawn line around this district with the title "Red-lining the Ghetto," about the impossibility of getting loans to buy or improve homes in that area. Now, it's on fire with higher-end redevelopment.)

Of course these are also fascinating simply as density maps. Did you know that Oregon cities have had Urban Growth Boundaries since 1972? The hard edges show around many Oregon cities … Here's the north edge of Portland's western suburbs (the "Silicon Forest"):

For contrast, here's a same-scale image of the north edge of Clark County suburbs, just over the river in Washington:

Washington loses farmland to development much more rapidly than Oregon does. It makes a difference.

In the end, what I love most about these maps is that they're beautiful. As in art, patches of a bright color are beautiful, but so are intense mixtures of color. So I look at these maps and feel good about both single-ethnic communities and mixed-ethnic communities, and my eye enjoys the patterns of density, hard edges here, soft there, even more. These maps take an emotive kind of diversity and render it as serene. The perfect geek-out for serene holidays.

chicago: bus rapid transit moves forward

Posted on April 25, 2013 in Bus Rapid Transit, Chicago

Chicago is moving forward with an ambitious and large-scale Bus Rapid Transit project on Ashland Avenue, a north-south corridor running from Cortland to 31st parallel to the Red Line L to the east. Back in 2011, I did a post on a report from a Chicago nonprofit called the Metropolitan Planning Council on a plan for a network of BRT lines in the city. At the time, it looked like Western was the natural choice for rapid transit as the longest arterial in Chicago; following a study and outreach process on both streets last year, Ashland was chosen instead. Here is the proposed alignment, with the BRT corridor in yellow and potential future extension in black. (It's a beautifully straight line, designed to function not just with Chicago's radial rail network but also with its grid-shaped network of frequent bus lines.)

Ashland BRT Route Map, http://www.transitchicago.com/assets/1/brt/map_routemap_ashlandbrt.png

Today, the street is composed of four travel lanes, parking lanes, and a median alternating with a turn lane. It's interesting to read the press materials for this project, because they heavily emphasize the importance of the repurposed right-of-way and related improvements, rather than focusing on the character the vehicles. They also frequently highlight the suitability of the "70' curb-to-curb right-of-way". From the Ashland BRT Project Factsheet:

Dedicated center bus lane in each direction to keep buses out of general traffic during boardings
Limited stops: every 1/2 mile and at CTA 'L' stations
Transit Signal Priority intersections and longer green lights to keep traffic moving

The redesigned street will sport a dedicated busway with median stations, one travel lane in each direction. As the urbanists will like, it removes a general purpose travel lane but retails the majority of on-street parking spaces. The initial Western-Ashland study considered alternatives that places the BRT right-of-way against the curb, as well as removing travel lanes or parking lanes. Ashland Avenue will also continue to be served by local bus service.

This is clearly open BRT, meaning the buses could enter and exit the busway at many points. Ashland Avenue BRT buses, for example, are likely to want to run further along Ashland than the facility currently goes, reducing the need for multiple transfers. An open design allows for other bus lines whose routes take them onto the busway to realize the benefits of the reserved right-of-way where it exists. In this case, open BRT means that buses will need doors on both sides, so that they can open on the left at busway stations and on the right at ordinary curb stops beyond the busway's end.

Ashland Ave BRT Project Rendering, http://www.transitchicago.com/assets/1/page_header_images/680header_centerbrtrender.jpg

This looks like a great project. It's position in a high-frequency grid means that it will be useful for trips extending far beyond the busway itself. It makes the street itself a nicer place. And it seems precision engineered to improve travel time, and thus access, for a wide swath of Chicago, making transit an even more logical choice for an even larger spectrum of riders.

You can also view an interview with the project's lead planners, here.

1930s chicago: when transit meant freedom, and power

Posted on December 15, 2012 in Chicago

The magazine Imprint has posted a beautiful collection of early 20th century graphics from the Chicago Transit Authority, emphasizing how transit can liberate you to access the riches of your city (and even a bit of countryside).

I like this one, because the "above the congestion" meme is still a powerful one, part of the advocacy for monorails, gondolas, and so on …

guest post: the transport challenger (by adham fisher)

Posted on March 17, 2012 in Chicago, London, Marketing, Moscow, Paris, Rail Transit

Here's a fun weekend read, by British transit-marathon champion Adham Fisher, shown at right in the process of conquering Madrid. You know you love your transit system when your community can honor exploits such as his.

I admire rail fans. Though I am sure that other nations have people who yearn after trains, I almost consider it a typically British pastime. Individuals take a day out to descend on a station where they know lots of weird and wonderful trains will pass. Notebooks in hand, they write down the numbers; cameras on tripods, they take photographs of the carriages, and a different train in an unusual location is always a bonus. At these platform picnics can be a good social atmosphere. And the amount of knowledge rail fans have is astonishing. But I don’t like public transport to that extent. I wouldn’t want to stay in one place all day documenting things. I like to move.

Rail magazines here might deal a lot with main line intercity and heritage trains. But I like city trains, specifically urban rapid transit. I try to go around underground rail networks as quickly as possible in one day, visiting every station. There is actually an official Guinness World Record for doing so on the London Underground – currently 16 hours, 29 minutes, 13 seconds – which I have attempted 11 times, often completing the system but not touching the record. I have also undertaken similar challenges on buses and trams.

This is not easy. Notebooks are required for this exercise to write the route down station by station, the arrival and departure times at/from each and the operating numbers of the trains. Cameras are required to take photographs of every station. Every so often, a challenger must ask a generous member of the public to sign a witness statement, saying they were where they say they were. Basic fitness is useful; if one wants to travel as quickly as possible, they must run when they transfer. Just one train missed could mess up the schedule entirely. Running is not restricted to stations, and neither are the participants. Guinness rules allow running or the use of other scheduled public transport to travel out of the system between adjacent stations, which can save time; the train need only arrive at or depart from the station for it to count. It is physically and mentally demanding, being up extremely early, probably not going to bed until very late, with no guarantee of success due to service delays, line suspensions and signal failures which can occur any time of any day, as regular commuters know. One of these can mean the end of an attempt if it slows you down enough and prevents you going further. And the average commuter who hates the Tube and tries to spend not one single second longer on it than absolutely necessary, will surely ask: why? Why would you want to waste a whole day underground doing something that pointless?

Admittedly, I’m not quite sure. After all, public transport is merely a mundane and functional thing, no? Designed to ferry people from home to work, A to B, and nothing else. But the beauty of something like this is that I can make the ordinary extraordinary. I can buy a travelcard and the amount of single journeys I make per attempt add up to many times that cost. An unorthodox exploitation of the system. I have been greeted with incredulity and called eccentric by some for doing what I do. Of course, it is not a normal activity; I admit that straight away. But neither is climbing a mountain. Mountains are in far away places with treacherous terrain and tangible danger. People climb mountains because they are there, and the same reasoning applies to those who choose to make much more out of something ordinary on their doorstep. Mountain climbs are many times more demanding, and I don’t think I could do one; I would rather spend several hours underground on trains than eight miles up Everest in temperatures well below freezing and extremely thin air.

No other official world record is considered for traversing a transit system apart from in New York, so the fact I have performed the feat in other cities will no doubt seem even more pointless. Having attempted the London record several times without success, I began to look at other maps, realising it could be even better to plan a route around a system where perhaps few people might have done the same. With a wealth of European metros just across the Channel, I have visited every station in cities including Paris, Madrid, Brussels, Amsterdam, Rotterdam and Lille. The challenges are worthwhile when completed, but being recognised for it is also a major bonus. I have been interviewed on radio, been the subject of a museum story, but the best reaction was to my first attempt out of Europe, on the Chicago L. I told one or two people I was doing it and was asked to contribute to the main CTA blog. It became perhaps the most debated story of 2011 in the comments section. A while later, three students read about what I had done and tried to do the same thing, but were slightly slower. Articles were written about them and my name started to be dropped as the “record holder”.

Next thing I know, I am contacted by the CTA to be informed its President, Forrest Claypool, wants to write to me personally. Which he does, also sending me a special Chicago-styled station sign with my name on. Such recognition is, in many ways, better than a world record. Has any other transport authority honoured an individual for riding its system to extremes? No Guinness certificate but I can joke about having a station named after me.

Paris yielded another special run, and led to my other public transport project. At the same time as planning the excursion, I happened to be writing a song with my friend Annanem called Métro, which listed every station in alphabetical order. I was being discussed and thought that if we finished the song in time, it could be another promotional tool. So we put it on YouTube the week before I went out. A short clip was played on French radio to accompany an interview I gave them.

Afterwards, I thought of returning to Paris to play the song live, having been told it was very off the wall. Only having the one tune and hoping to secure a gig, I asked several people if they would like to write songs, poetry, anything, about a rapid transit system of their choice. Enough material was submitted for an album, which I compiled and called the Metro EP (cover at left). All artists were given the collective name 1000 Stations.

I and two other contributors launched the album in Paris, playing it in an arts venue and also giving out CDs to a few people on the Metro, explaining what it was about. We have just played the first UK gig with the project and hope to release it very soon.

That is an example of public transport creativity. An album was born out of my tendency to use public transport in an unorthodox fashion, which I think itself is a bit creative – devising the potentially quickest way to go around a rail network, poring over maps, plans and timetables, making transfers that would seem silly to a local. And it’s incredibly exciting to do, especially when you don’t even know the city. I had never been to Madrid before, and with the route drawn up at home, had just one or two days to research properly and become accustomed to the Metro before I attempted to visit all 235 stations.

Doing this is an interesting way to see a city. I talk to people who wonder why I have just jumped onto a train at full speed, taking photographs and writing furiously. I do make time to experience some culture and sights, but that has never particularly bothered me. Landmarks may be seen from metros as several run above ground. And just as interesting to me are the local areas; from the built up blocks of inner Chicago …

to the vast plains beyond Madrid’s city boundary …

The Tube Challenge has gained popularity in recent years; there are a few websites dedicated to it and an entire online forum bustles with record holders and hopefuls. The New York Subway’s Ultimate Ride has had followers for decades; the Amateur New York Subway Riding Committee was founded in 1966. Moscow has had English teams flying out to tackle its architecturally magnificent Metro. Others have tried Paris, and I am sure several people have been all the way round on small networks like that of Glasgow.

You might consider having a go at this. Not necessarily at a fast pace, but how you like. I know of someone who visited every Paris Metro station in six months. Break out of the box, make as many journeys as you can, ride on every single piece of track, tell the system what you want to do. You will have a different perspective of a city. Regarding my Chicago journey, a spokesman for the CTA said “We have a lot of people in Chicago who ride the L every day and would never even think of doing anything like this.” So you’ll be one up on the locals and join an elite club. And even if you are thought of as eccentric, someone might say to you “I couldn’t do that”. Like me with mountaineers. And rail fans.

request for information: routine closures of transit streets

Posted on September 16, 2011 in Chicago, Downtowns, Information Requests, Minneapolis – St. Paul, Vancouver

Most cities that I know have one or more major downtown streets where parades and other major civic celebrations tend to occur. San Francisco's Market Street, Chicago's State Street (pictured), and New York's Fifth Avenue are obvious examples.

These same cities, if they value transit, often want this same street to be the core of their transit system, because they want transit to deliver customers to the "front door" of the city.

So it's normal to see huge, complex reroutings of transit service when one of the civic events is happening. The legibility problems of this shift are accepted because they happen only a few times a year.

Vancouver, however, does something different, and I want to verify how unusual it is. Vancouver's core downtown transit street, Granville Mall, is closed to buses (and all vehicles) every weekend evening. Specifically:

On Fridays, Saturdays, Sundays, Holidays and the day before a Holiday, buses will run along Granville each day until 9pm, then switch to the re-route, travelling northbound on Seymour and southbound on Howe. The re-routes will stay in place until the close of service.

So many of Vancouver's most important street-running transit lines (mostly trolley buses in this case) shift from one downtown street to another at 9pm on almost half of all days. So the process of explaining and remembering where to find the bus is complicated all the time, which is quite different from finding the street closed for a very rare parade.

What North American cities do this routinely with their main transit street? Nicollet Mall in Minneapolis is the only example that comes to my mind, but its role in the transit network is much less important than Granville's.

To be clear, I'm not interested in reopening the Granville Mall debate, where many advocated closing the street to buses entirely. I am interested in the precedent as it might apply to other important transit streets, in Vancouver or elsewhere.

chicago: a new bus rapid transit plan

Posted on August 24, 2011 in Bus Rapid Transit, Chicago, Connections, Transfers

A Chicago-area planning nonprofit, the Metropolitan Planning Council, has released a plan for 10 Bus Rapid Transit within the City of Chicago. The final report is here: Download BRT TRB Report Final

The work, led by consultant Joshua K. Anderson, is admirably wonky. It analyzes a huge range of arterial segments to identify those that appear best from a standpoint of both constructibility, demand, and nexus with livability values. The report is a "screening" study, which means it seeks to narrow the range of possibility and encourage more detailed study of those that remain.

Bus Rapid Transit is defined quite vigorously:

BRT is 4 defined by four main components: 1) dedicated bus lanes, 2) at-grade boarding, 3) pay-before-you-board stations, and 4) signal-prioritized intersections.

This definition is met by almost none of the things now called BRT in North America, or at least not continuously from one end to the other. But screening is a time to be ambitious about such things.

The 10 corridors that survive the screening are shown on this map. They're a mixed bag: portions of segments, some of them maybe too short to be effective as BRT, but also two very long corridors, Western and Ashland Avenues, one of which is probably the most urgent BRT project in the city.

The study appears to be silent on whether these are envisioned as open BRT or closed BRT. Open BRT means that the infrastructure can be used by bus lines that flow onward beyond it to other destinations. To take an obvious example, an Irving Park BRT that ends at Ashland, short of the Red Line's connection opportunities and the high density of the lakeshore, is unlikely to be satisfying as a complete corridor. But if it's an open BRT, usable by buses that continue east, it could well be useful.

Unfortunately, a presumption of closed BRT, in which buses can't continue beyond the limits of the infrastructure, seems to be implied by the author's decision to discard super-dense Lake Shore Drive from the analysis simply because of the complexity of branching patterns that it requires; this assumption will have to be reconsidered in light of open-BRT best practice.

The study illustrates a common challenge in analyzing large, long transit corridors. Many of the key issues, including available right of way and "livability" impacts, are segment-by-segment affairs; if these dominated the analysis, the result would be a huge pile of largely disconnected short segments, which could not deliver the intended outcomes. So the author streamlined, discarding small segments and emphasizing larger continuous ones, which is quite right.

But issues of network integrity and completeness seem not to be fully considered. The report needed to step much further back and describe the underlying geographic structure of Chicago, which determines the type of services that could be relevant to citywide mobility needs.

Except near the lake, Chicago is an extremely regular grid of arterials spaced 1/2 mile (800m) apart. CTA follows this grid with a grid-pattern of long bus lines that attempt, as much as possible, to cover the entire length of an arterial all the way across the city. This achieves the important goal of grid completion. The purpose of each line is not just travel across that street but to complete a network in which people can travel from literally anywhere to anywhere else through a simple L-shaped movement:

For more on the high-frequency grid principle, see here. Obviously this structure only works, in its purpose to serve any origin-destination pair, if its constituent lines flow all the way across the grid to its natural edge. This is the problem with many of the proposed BRT corridors in the report.

Not everyone sees this grid, because Chicago also has an overlying radial system of rapid transit, which runs along diagonals pointing toward downtown. The two overlaid elements — radial trains and grid buses — work well together, but if you focus too much on the trains, which are mostly about going downtown, you miss the power of the underlying grid to complete trips on any origin-destination pair by a reasonably direct path. (The report discusses "network integration" only in the form of integration with rail. Confusingly, too, it gives heavy emphasis to connections with suburban commuter rail — whose poor frequency makes connection difficult — and little to the bus-bus grid connections that are the essence of the network's anywhere-to-anywhere versatility.)

Given Chicago's grid structure, and how well it already works, BRT needed to be understood as a system of grid accelerators, just like the Metro Rapid and proposed Wilshire subway in the similar grid of Los Angeles. Obviously, if you can concentrate particularly heavy demand on a few elements of the grid, you can justify an overlay of much faster service, stopping only at the grid connection points every half-mile.

On that score, Western Avenue is clearly a winner. It is the longest arterial in Chicago, running north-south the entire length of the city. Its extreme length creates reliability issues on a local-stop service, which has caused CTA to break it into three lines thus reducing its usefulness for continuous movement. BRT would be an opportunity to recombine these three segments to offer a service that would be understood as an intrinsic feature of Western Avenue over its entire length. Western is also far enough out of downtown that the direct paths it serves are much faster than riding rail into downtown and back. A vast range of trips between many parts of Chicago would find a Western BRT line useful.

None of the other corridors identified in the study can match Western in the utility that arises from extreme length with lots of connection opportunities. Ashland is obviously close. Most of the other proposed segments are simply too short, and would be useful only as open BRT segments used by buses that run further. Effective BRT has to serve long corridors, because the tradeoff that BRT requires of the customer — walk further in return for faster service — makes sense only for a fairly long trip.

To sum up, the report is very useful and highly recommended. But it misses (or at least downplays) two points that are missing in many similar studies, and that really matter:

Open or closed BRT? They're totally different, and if you're not clear which you mean, it's impossible to envision the service patterns, and thus the mobility, that your proposal will offer.
Integration with the total network, not just rail. This requires seeing how the whole mobility flow of the city works, and how each corridor would contribute to that flow. Localized analysis that asks where BRT would be easy to create or locally beneficial can easily lose this "forest" in its obsession with the trees. Understanding this principle would have required a much firmer focus on complete corridors that traverse the grid and make many connections, rather than the small fragments that are frequently proposed.

Still, the report can do a lot of good, and bravo to the Metropolitan Planning Council for sponsoring it. Chicago really needs to start accelerating its bus grid, especially on its busy, high-stakes, versatile corridors like Western. I hope this study helps to move that along.

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