Whenever you hear someone cite the travel time of a proposed transit line, your first reaction should always be: “Yes, but at what frequency?” Often, that fact is missing from these soundbites.
There’s a nice example in today’s Transport Politic. Speaking of the proposed Gold Line Foothills extension, which if built will someday extend from Los Angeles to Montclair: Continue Reading →
Whenever I talk about the value of grid networks, as I did here, someone always says: But my city isn’t a grid. For example, Sydney, where I live now, is about as ungridlike a city as you’ll encounter. In fact, there’s no large system of order in Sydney’s road network at all. Some roads follow what were once Aboriginal tracks, but mostly it just grew, one bit at a time, an accretion of millions of short-term decisions.
Why do transit planners love grids? Now and then you’ll even hear one muttering about “grid integrity” or “completing the grid.” What are they talking about?
Suppose you’re designing an ideal transit system for a fairly dense city where there are many activity centers, not just one big downtown. In fact, you don’t want to give preferential treatment to any point in the city. Instead, you want people to be able to travel from literally anywhere to anywhere else by a reasonably direct path, at a high frequency. Everybody would really like a frequent service from their home to everywhere they ever go, which is pretty much what a private car is. But money isn’t infinite, so the system has to deliver its outcome efficiently, with the minimum possible cost per rider. What would such a system look like? Continue Reading →
Updated Jan 16
The next round of San Francisco service cuts have been announced, or as commenter Ted King puts it, “the fuse has been lit.” For local coverage see the SF Chronicle and Streetsblog SF.
Here are some of the most interesting points from the budget summary (via Streetsblog, not the Chronicle):
Although the budget hole to be closed is $16.9m, the service cuts are only $4.8m. That’s impressive. They achieve so much non-service savings by a whole pile of cuts to other things, designed to have wide but manageable impacts. Labor takes a ping: not just 0.7m in “concessions,” but also charges for parking at the workplace. (Since a huge share of the drivers report to work around 4:30 in the morning, many don’t have good transit options.) Continue Reading →
Most North American transit agencies are cutting service this year, but there’s a huge difference in how they’re doing it. My last post discussed the painful cuts happening at Tri-Met in Portland. Here’s better news out of San Francisco, where service is being trimmed and shaped not just to save money, but to create a simpler, more frequent, and arguably fairer network. The changes are informed by a long study and outreach effort called the Transit Effectiveness Project, which is finally bearing some fruit in this year’s harsh desert of funding. Continue Reading →
As hard budget shortfalls sweep across North America, transit agencies are making all kinds of changes to balance the budget. Portland’s Tri-Met tried at first to cut low-ridership services, but as the red ink keeps flowing they’ve finally had to cut something every urbanist should care about. They’re cutting the core Frequent Network, the service that’s designed to meet the needs of people who want to get around the city easily all day, with spontaneity and a sense of personal freedom. Continue Reading →
Can science explain why some transit system maps are so much better than others? Alex Hutchinson has an excellent article in the Canadian newsmagazine The Walrus on how increased reliance on Global Positioning Systems (GPS) for navigation may be reshaping our brains. Might this be related to the difficulty of getting good maps of a transit system?
Humans have two methods of navigation. Spatial navigators can construct maps in their heads as they experience a place, and also tend to be good at using maps as navigational aids. Narrative navigators navigate by creating or following verbal directions. For spatial navigators, the answer to the question where? is a position in mapped space. For narrative navigators, the answer to where? is a story about how to get there. Obviously, this is a spectrum; many of us are in the middle with partial capabilities in both directions. (I think we probably all know this from our own experience, but according to Hutchinson, the definitive academic study showing this difference has the amazingly recent date of 2003.)
Taxi drivers, obviously, have to be spatial navigators, because they must constantly plot courses for trips they’ve never made before. Before the advent of GPS, this requirement actually shaped their brains. Hutchinson writes:
Given the passions that surround the streetcar in North America, it’s interesting to travel in Germany, where there are lots of streetcars, and lots of buses, and not as much focus on the difference between them.
How should environmentalists engage with long-range transit planning studies? What should you focus on? What should you object to?
A common misconception about downtown areas is that great things can be achieved by “shuttles” or “circulators,” short routes that just run around in downtown. The problem with these lines is that they save time for the customer only if they are very, very frequent. This is an issue that separates people who need only a symbolic service (such as a line on the map or a photo of the transit vehicle in front of the development they’re trying to sell) from people who want actual mobility. [2015 update: I’d no longer use the term “mobility” here. I’d use “abundant access.”]
Frequency is really important, but it’s also really expensive. Doubling the frequency of a service (i.e. halving the “headway” or elapsed time between consecutive trips on the line) comes very close to doubling its operating cost. If you double your peak frequency (i.e. the highest frequency you run) it also doubles your fleet, which doubles your fleet capital cost, your ongoing mainteance cost, and the size that your storage and maintenance facility needs to be. So it’s not surprising that we see a lot of downtown shuttle services that offer a line on a map, a photographable vehicle, and even some mobility for people who aren’t in a hurry, but that don’t really compete with walking. Continue Reading →