General

Bus Service in England: The Need for Clearer Maps

Posted on June 11, 2025 in General, Maps, UK 1

Map of Cambridge bus services, showing the extreme complexity.

When different operating companies all plan their own bus service, the combined network is really complicated!

It’s a time of rapid change for urban bus services in England.[1] Since Margaret Thatcher’s privatization reforms of 1985, these services have been subsidized but not really controlled by government. I wrote here about Thatcher’s vision for privatized public transport, including why it has been teetering for some time and is now being swept away.

Now, all over England, governments at the county or shire level have been looking at whether and how to take control of their public transport, so that they can offer coherent networks and fares, integrate public transport planning with town planning, and ensure accountability to the public. Right now, most of these conversations are happening at a procedural level, but now it’s time to look at maps, and try to figure out what an improved and integrated network would actually look like geographically.

Right now, though, maps are a problem. As we have wandered the transport websites of the UK, we’ve found maps by operating companies, showing only their services, but a shortage of good maps done by governments showing how all the services interact. So we drew one, as an example, and a lot can be learned about England’s challenge by staring at it for a bit.

On my tour of the UK last summer, I spent a day in Cambridge, site of one of the UK’s most elite universities. I was fortunate to be hosted by Andrew Highfield, an assistant director at the Cambridgeshire-Peterborough Combined Authority (CPCA), which manages transport for Cambridgeshire and its cities. If he hadn’t been showing me around, the service would have been incomprehensible. Many operating companies, trained to see each other as competitors, intersect here and cover different parts of the shire. They have their own signs and shelters, each advertising their own services, and each draw maps of just their own services, if they draw maps at all.

After my visit, the CPCA commissioned us to draft a map for them. Our mapping style focuses on what matters to the customer and not what matters to anyone else. Instead of highlighting operator brands, we highlight frequency, the single most important variable about a service that is not always shown on maps. We use hot colors for high frequencies so that these jump out visually against the background complexity of lower frequency services.

Here is a PDF of our map. As you can see, it’s very complicated, but the complexity of the service, as it’s evolved through the privatization era, is part of the point.

Since I’m now going to make some observations about the network, I should first announce my ignorance. I can’t claim to know Cambridge that well. I’ve spent a day there, and haven’t explored the shire around it at all, though of course I’ve poked around in aerial maps and Street View. So nothing I say here should be taken as a recommendation. Only at the end of long study of the network, and many conversations with local people, would we be in the position to do that.

However, this map should be useful for people in Cambridgeshire to understand what they have, and to think about how well it fits with the demands of the communities that they know well. So the most important point of this article is: Every local authority should have a map like this!

What can we see? First, let’s zoom into a slice of Cambridge itself.

Overlapping services on Histon Rd. in the NW of Cambridge

One of the first things I look for in a network is heavy overlap of low-frequency services, because this means there’s enough service to deliver a higher frequency if the service were organised differently. So looking at our map of Cambridge, my eye immediately went to Histon Road in the northwest part of the city, served by A, 8, 8A, and T2

There’s enough service here to deliver a frequency of every 10 minutes or better, but instead there are four blue or purple lines, indicating less frequent services overlapping. This means long gaps at some times and a pile of buses running together at other times, even when everything is running on time. These routes look like they were drawn separately, by different people at different times with different goals, which is not what you do when you’re trying to build an integrated and efficient network.

Histon Road, by the way, looks like this, mostly the two-story built form typical of urban fabric in much of the British Isles, more than enough to generate demand for service that’s always coming soon.

What these people have now, in return for low frequency and uneven spacing of buses, is direct buses to lots of places. Is that better or worse? In most cases, higher frequency, even requiring connections, delivers better access to opportunity. But an actual network plan would be the chance for the community to consider these tradeoffs and figure out what they want.

Cambridge’s Park-and-Ride structure is also interesting. Because space is limited in the city centre and car parking is expensive there, park-and-rides around the edges are designed to intercept motorists from the surrounding area, giving them a cheap way to get to Cambridge without contributing to its traffic and parking demand. What’s more unusual is that these facilities have their own dedicated direct routes, with numbers starting with “PR” that run frequently all day. Other local routes may duplicate them for a long distance:

Routes 3 and PR2 can easily be described as being different services with different markets, but we usually get the best public transport for everyone by maximizing the diversity of people on any one vehicle. So it’s more common to serve Park-and-Rides with peak-hour services to provide high capacity where demand is high, but to provide a more basic service at other times, one that serves other markets along the way. (For example, should those intercity buses, 12 and T5, stop at the P&R to contribute to a total frequency product with less duplication? Maybe.) Again, I am not making a recommendation here! That would only come after much more study of demand and some public conversations about goals. But this may be an example of over-specialized service, one whose market is too narrowly targeted to justify being served with these nonstop links.

Now let’s zoom out to the whole map.

It’s rare to see 10-minute frequency on a long intercity link, but there’s one here, formed by A and B from St Ives into Cambridge, running in the Cambridgeshire Guided Busway.

But as it approaches Cambridge in the lower right corner of this map, it splits into two purple (every 20 minutes) branches, which later rejoin in the city centre. So there’s frequent service along the rural link, and to central Cambridge, but not to anywhere in northern Cambridge. This makes some sense from a commute perspective, since there are commute destinations on both branches, but when you’re trying to organise service within a city, the key is to build up simple patterns of high frequency rather than piles of different routes. So it’s awkward to have the frequency go down, because of the branching, right as the line from St Ives reaches the area of highest demand. Maybe this is the right pattern, but it deserves a closer look.

Finally, with our map you can marvel at the incredible complexity of rural services in England:

Most of these are one or two trips per day, many scheduled around schools but open to the public. Some are just a few days a week. It is hard to call this a network, because these services are mostly not intended to work together. Instead, each looks micro-designed around a particular constituency. Could this system be much simpler and thus more frequent — running, say, a few times a day instead of just once or twice? Possibly, but again, it would require a full plan engaging the community. My goal here is just to reveal the patterns that suggest possibilities, and to show why our mapping style is key to showing you what you have.

Update: I will be in the UK for most of September 2025, continuing to promote my book! Let me know if you have an event idea or if your organisation would like to sponsor a short training course.

[1] Transport in the UK is a “devolved power,” which means that policy can be different in England, Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland, not to mention the various other semi-autonomous islands. This means that Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland govern transport through their own parliaments, but the UK government plays the same role for England, since there is no separate English government. (About 83% of the UK population is in England.)

My Globe and Mail Piece on Bus Priority

Posted on June 9, 2025 in General 3

I was in Canada’s national newspaper, the Globe and Mail, on Sunday with a piece about the urgency of bus priority. An unpaywalled version is here.

Canada’s major cities and transit authorities will continue to propose street design changes that nudge everyone toward sharing the scarce space of the city street more fairly. These proposals will always be compromises between the needs of different users of the street. The goal is always to make everyone’s lives better, and maximize the access to opportunity that is the whole purpose of cities. But if the result is a bit inconvenient for you, it’s probably also still a little inconvenient for everyone else, and that may mean it’s the right compromise for everyone. Urban life is all about making compromises so that we share limited space fairly, with no user allowed to veto the needs of others. In a city, if everyone is compromising, everyone is winning.

What Was Wrong with the Washington DC Streetcar

Posted on May 28, 2025 in General, Streetcars (Trams), Symbolic Transit, Technophilia, Washington DC 5

Washington DC mayor Muriel Bowser has announced that the DC Streetcar, a single line of mixed-traffic streetcar along a portion of H Street, will be replaced by a “next generation streetcar.” The Washington Post headline cuts through the spin:

If I could have edited that headline, I might just have said “DC Streetcar to be Replaced by Useful Transit”.

What was wrong with the DC Streetcar? Apart from all the problems of putting transit in mixed traffic while denying it the ability to move around obstacles, the problem was this:

That orange line in the middle of the image, extending from (near) Union Station along H Street to just short of the Anacostia River, is the DC Streetcar. Note that a frequent bus line X2 runs right on top of it but extends further east and west. That’s because the X2, as a bus, is able to operate a complete corridor linking to logical endpoints, and functioning as part of a high-frequency grid. High-frequency grids, which maximize access to opportunity in a dense city, are made of lines that keep going all the way across the grid, so that they intersect as many other lines as possible. One thing an effective grid bus line would never do is end just short of a major connection point, as the streetcar does by not crossing the Anacostia River to at least reach Minnesota Avenue station.

This is one of the key things wrong with most of the mixed-traffic streetcars developed in the US in the 2000-2015 period, and especially those heavily promoted by the Obama Administration. The excitement generated by the development industry, combined with the eagerness to get something started at low cost, led to starter lines that were very short, so they were unable to function well inside of larger grids. The duplication of the X2 and the streetcar is just wasted precious driver time, but the X2 can’t get out of the way of the streetcar because it’s doing important work in a longer corridor, while the streetcar just duplicates part of it. Because the resulting streetcar service was so useless, it never saw the surge of ridership that would form the basis for political support to expand the network.

Across the country now, we’re going to see a divergence in the fates of these little modern streetcars. At this stage, I’m aware of two modern streetcars that I’m really confident will endure: the westside line in Portland and the line in Kansas City, both of which are being extended. Portland’s is, and Kansas City’s will be, long enough to usefully serve a complete corridor rather than just a fragment of it. There are a few other niche streetcars that have strong enough markets. Tucson’s, for example, doesn’t extend across the city’s vast grid but it does link downtown and the University through several walkable neighborhoods, so it makes some sense.

Over time, too, the streetcars that endure are going to be those that gradually transform themselves into something more like light rail, by reducing car traffic’s ability to disrupt the service and widening the spacing of stops. Portland, where the modern streetcar movement was hatched, spent years sending urbanists out across the country saying that “rail is special because it’s permanent.” But fortunately the Portland Streetcar stations weren’t permanent! They were way too close together, and wisely, some have now been removed in the campaign to get the service a bit above its original average speed of 6 miles per hour.

I must admit that when I saw this story, my first reaction on social media was less than magnanimous:

If you weren’t there, trust me. At the major urbanist conferences between 2000 and 2010, few people were saying the obvious things I was saying, namely:

The permanence of a service lies not in rails in the street, but in the permanent justification of the operating subsidy. That depends (in part) on ridership, which depends on the land use that actually develops around the line, not just what the boosters fantasize. Many US cities facing budget crises now have streetcar operations on their books that compete directly with other city priorities, and if the streetcar wasn’t designed to succeed, they may not win those battles every year.
Streetcar lines that are too short, and serve only parts of corridors that really need to be served continuously, are net barriers to transit access, reducing access to opportunity. They either require us to take apart corridors that serve more people if they’re continuous, or they require a bus and streetcar to duplicate each other, wasting the precious staff time that is the primary limit on the total quantity of transit service.

This, one of my first really viral pieces from 2009, captures how I was talking back then. I also got into a notorious 2010 fight with Vancouver urbanist Patrick Condon about his vision of covering Vancouver with slow streetcars instead of fast, driverless, high frequency rapid transit. But as always, having been right in the end is never much consolation. Mostly I’m sad that so much well-intentioned energy went into so many projects that weren’t scaled to succeed, and that weren’t sufficiently focused on being useful.

Let’s plan public transit with the goal of being maximally useful to human beings, expanding their access to opportunity. That means designing the right lines first and then picking the technology, not falling in love with a technology and then designing a line around its limitations.

Do US Conservatives Support Public Transit? A Clue

Posted on May 26, 2025 in Advocacy, General 4

If you live in an urban progressive bubble in the US, it may seem absurd to speculate about whether US conservatives could support public transit. The Trump administration’s Secretary of Transportation is openly attacking the funding plan for the nation’s most transit-dependent big city, while amplifying exaggerated narratives about crime. It’s rare to see national Republican politicians speaking up strongly for public transit as a worthy public investment, particularly where this would compete with road funding or with other Republican priorities such as tax cuts.

But locally, the picture is quite different. And like all local pictures, it’s different in each locality.

This is about to become very important, because we are headed into a period of epic state and local battles about public transit across the country. Many agencies are facing financial crises that will require either new funding or service cuts. That new funding will need to be approved either by voters, or by state and local politicians who will need the support of voters. All this needs to happen by November 2026 at the latest.

And in a lot of places, that will mean winning the votes of some people who see themselves as conservatives. These are not people who will vote for Democratic candidates nationally, but who are still open to local efforts to solve problems that they see in their own communities.

So I want to flag a remarkable detail from a survey just completed by Spokane Transit Authority in Spokane, Washington. 85% of self-described conservatives believe that it’s at least “somewhat important” for “the region to support and fund public transportation”!

(Note for math geeks: Yes, I know that with 447 total replies a single cell of a crosstab may not be statistically meaningful, but look at the larger pattern: Over 90% saying at least “somewhat important” in a region that’s not especially leftist. Again, this is a statistically valid survey, not a self-selected one.)

Spokane area can fairly be described as a purple region in a blue state. It has some universities but is not culturally dominated by them. The City of Spokane itself is moderately progressive and much of the suburbs are quite conservative. The congressional district is safely Republican. So while the transit system benefits from state funds that it wouldn’t have if it were a few miles further east in Idaho, it still must build local support in a bipartisan way. The agency’s communications and management have been aware of that for some time, and have grown adept at engaging with conservatives to build left-right consensus.

I don’t believe for a moment that the Spokane area’s conservative voters, when presented with a specific tax measure and a specific “no” campaign, would vote 85% yes. But this does speak to the importance of not presuming they will vote no, and talking about transit in ways that will appeal to them. Transit agency comms and campaigns must avoid signaling that transit is an exclusively progressive cause, even if some on the urban left will find the results a little irritating. There’s just no other way to build a large enough consensus. In California, for example, the political leadership is overwhelmingly progressive and will tend to speak in progressively-coded ways, but many sales tax measures require 2/3, which means the deciding voter is far to the right of the median voter

As Strong Towns founder Charles Marohn likes to say, “When bottom-up conservatives work with bottom-up progressives, they find that they need each other.”

Meanwhile, have other transit agencies asked this question and run this crosstab? If not, it’s something I’d recommend.

Your Neighbors Support Car Dependence Less Than You Think

Posted on March 28, 2025 in General 1

A new paper by Ian Walker and Marco te Brömmelstroet, which you can read for free here, digs into why so many people accept the assumption that driving a car an essential activity that cannot be judged the way other activities are. For example, the authors wonder why more Americans agree with the statement:

People operating dangerous machinery should be responsible for any harm they cause.

than with the statement

People operating motor vehicles should be responsible for any harm they cause.

This bias, called motonormativity, is easy to see when following, for example, the debate over (de)congestion pricing in New York City. Opponents repeatedly claimed that a vaguely defined “working class” would be devastated by the proposed charge of $9 to drive into Lower Manhattan, even though the people actually driving into Lower Manhattan are wealthier than average and abundant public transit options are available. A notion that getting to work is impossible without driving, which is broadly true in exurban and rural areas, was projected into the densest place in the United States, a place that only functions because so many people already don’t drive. This motonormative notion was enforced throughout media coverage of the issue, not just in the predictably rabid New York Post and in much of the radio and television media, but even in the New York Times, where subheads like “See what it will cost you” reminded us that even in the densest and most transit-rich of US cities, all readers are assumed to be motorists, or to care about them.

In the new paper, the authors go beyond whether motonormativity exists — which many previous studies that they cite have established — and dig into what causes it. Using a broad survey of over 650 people each in the United States, United Kingdom, and the Netherlands, the study finds correlations between motonormative attitudes and:

the social norms of close personal contacts
the social norms of other people
the infrastructure and physical environment, and
the perceived attitude of the government.

There are interesting differences among the three countries. The Dutch, for example, are the only ones who perceive thee infrastructure surrounding them to be less supportive of cars than of other modes of travel — and they’re right.

The most interesting finding to me, though, was that people tend to assume that people around them are more supportive of cars than they are, an example of the phenomenon of pluralistic ignorance. Our everyday life is full of reinforcements of motonormativity — my doctor’s office in inner-city Portland provides car directions but not transit directions — so it’s not surprising that people wrongly assume that their support for alternatives to driving in a minority view. Very car dependent places like Los Angeles routinely vote big taxes for public transit. A crucial share of people appear to be resentfully car-dependent — forced into car-dependence by their circumstances and thus behaving in a way that may superficially appear “car loving” — but actually longing for alternatives, if not for themselves than for their community at large. We must never presume that people in cars are car advocates.

I strongly recommend this paper. Even if you don’t have the statistics knowledge to follow the technical part, parts 1, 4, and 5 are an easy read and full of useful insights.

New Interview of Me from Active Towns

Posted on March 11, 2025 in General, Video

Active Towns has just posted an hour-long conversation with me, one that takes me a little deeper than usual into my professional work as a transit planning consultant. My video was a little fuzzy at times, but it’s all clear enough. This is a good deep dive into what I’m about, especially for those with a professional or geeky interest in transit network design.

It’s also listenable as a podcast. You don’t have to have the visuals to make sense of it. It’s here.

What’s Next for Rural Intertown Bus Service in the US?

Posted on March 4, 2025 in General, Rural

My friend David Bragdon (the former head of TransitCenter and former elected head of the Portland area’s regional government) has a good, through article at Eno on the problem facing rural bus service, generally defined as services more than 50 miles long not primarily intended for commuting. He’s not focused on links between big cities, which have air and (sometimes) rail options, and where bus services are often still profitable. The concern is all the smaller towns that had commercial bus service 50 years ago, but generally no longer do. These towns have lots of people who need to get to nearby bigger towns for medical services, errands, shopping, and other needs that they can’t get locally. I call these services “rural intertown” but note that the difficulty of describing this category is probably part of why it’s so neglected.

This should be not be a left-right issue, and mostly isn’t. Congress, with ample support from rural Republican lawmakers, has long supported a Federal funding program called 5311(f) which provides funding for needed bus links that no longer exist commercially. But this funding is basically a grant to the state Departments of Transportation, which can spend it on whatever bus service they like. Bragdon observes that some states are doing great things with this money, creating statewide lifeline networks focused on towns that would otherwise be abandoned, but that other states often just give the money to private carriers like Greyhound, without even checking their claims that the subsidy is needed to keep some service running. “In short,” Bragdon writes, “many state DOTs spend a lot of money, particularly on highways but to some extent on buses, without explaining what they’re trying to achieve.”

Bragdon is arguing, in short, that like urban transit, intercity lifeline service should be planned. At its root, planning is the process of identifying goals and making sure that a plan of action actually meets them cost-effectively. I agree, and anyone interested in this challenge should read his article.

There’s an overlapping problem, though, when we’re talking about shorter corridors (under 80 miles or so) and there are enough towns along the way to justify service every day and several times a day. Here, the obstacle may be the county-level organization of transit, which gives no agency the job of serving the entire corridor. I addressed that in the next post.

US Rural Intercity Transit: The County Line Problem

Posted on March 4, 2025 in General, Rural

In the US, public transit is often organized at the county level, so the service ends where the county does. There are countless situations like this, where two significant cities are 20-80 miles apart with a county line separating them:

If transit is provided by county-level agencies, the service in this situation looks like this:

The two transit agencies probably have the best of intentions. They’ve probably worked together to find a common stop in Town 2 where they meet. They may or may not have planned the schedules so that the buses meet and people can connect between them to travel to the big cities. But even if they’ve done that, the end-to-end connection is a gratuitous hassle. You have to get off one bus and onto another, and worse, there’s a well-above-zero risk that you’ll be stranded if an arriving bus is late.

The better service, and the greater access to opportunity, arises from doing this:

If this corridor is important enough, the county level agencies may have merged to resolve this problem, but usually they haven’t. Mostly I’m talking about cases where City A and City B are the centers of counties that have numerous internal travel demands, including to other towns in other directions, so that this particular corridor isn’t the most important thing they do. In fact, it may seem rather peripheral to them. What’s more, if they are just running to a small town near the county line, the ridership probably isn’t that great, which means that there’s not much impetus to improve things.

So if the county-level agencies aren’t able to combine their services, the state Department of Transportation should look at this situation and see if they can use their leverage to create a solution. This could mean leaning on the county-level agencies to solve the problem, or it could mean creating (or enhancing) a state intercity bus product to handle these situations.

None of this is easy. Like all organizations, county level transit operations may feel threatened by the loss of role, importance, or access to funding. They may be bound up with different labor contracts, which can be especially hard to reform. A state bus route taking over some local services in the county will need fare integration with the rest of the local system. But states that want great statewide transit networks need to care about this issue. A lot of service is already tied up in these county-level rural links, and they won’t always run the most efficient patterns if they are trapped by county lines.

Should Service Cuts be Random or Planned?

Posted on February 6, 2025 in Basics, Cuts, General

Like most people who plan public transit, I hate cutting service. Most cities that I work in have obvious markets where more transit would attract more ridership and expand the possibilities of people’s lives. So of course I hate taking service away.

But sometimes we have to. Ever since the Covid-19 pandemic, there have been two large reasons that transit service can’t be sustained:

Lack of funding. Large agencies that relied on fare revenue, especially those that moved large volumes of people into city centers before Covid-19, are having trouble balancing their budgets. Some face “fiscal cliffs” that will require new funding to stave off service cuts.
Lack of staff. Across the world, authorities and operating companies are struggling to hire and retain bus drivers. The problem has stabilized in many places but doesn’t seem to be going away.

There are two kinds of service cuts, random and planned. When you hear discussion of service cuts, it’s usually about planned cuts. But the alternative to planned cuts is random cuts, so it’s important to know what those are.

Random cuts happen in the course of operations, when not enough drivers show up for work. There are always a certain number of drivers calling in sick, and agencies manage this by paying some spare drivers to be on hand at the operating base, to fill in whatever runs would otherwise be missed. But during the Covid-19 pandemic, these processes were overwhelmed by the number of employees not coming to work. Even today, many US agencies are failing to deliver some of their scheduled service due to lack of staff.

These cuts are random and unpredictable. In many cases, a particular bus never pulls out of the operating base in the morning because the driver of that bus didn’t show up, and there weren’t enough spare drivers on hand. So every trip that bus was going to do will just not be served. In other cases, operations managers are more proactive at reassigning drivers so that the most urgently needed service is saved. In either case, the customer experience is that sometimes their bus doesn’t show up, and there is no way to plan ahead for that because it might happen today but not tomorrow. It all depends on who showed up for work that morning and what decisions were made on the fly at the operating base.

This is a very bad situation, and it’s sadly routine. Why is it still happening at some agencies so long after the pandemic? Because many decision-makers are deciding that random cuts are better than planned cuts. Let’s look at why this happens, and why it’s almost always the wrong choice.

During the pandemic, I happened to be working closely with San Francisco Muni, and one thing that really impressed me is that all through the crisis, they made every effort to plan their scheduled service to match their shrunken workforce. It was chaos in the first months of the pandemic, as it was everywhere, but as soon as they could, they intentionally designed a stripped down network that they could operate reliably with the reduced workforce they still had. Ever since then, as the workforce as grown, they have been gradually and strategically bringing service back. They currently report that over 99% of their scheduled service is operating, far above what many agencies are achieving. Why? Because they designed the scheduled service to be operable in their actual situation.

But to do this, they’ve had to endure a lot of outrage. Riders unite against planned service cuts, because they’re visible and intentional. There’s a staff person putting them forward who makes an easy villain. Sometimes that staff person will even be framed as advocating the cuts, which is ridiculous. Professional transit planners are almost all transit advocates. They want to expand service. If they’re proposing to cut it, it’s because the alternative is worse.

If an agency lacks the staff to run its schedule reliably, then a refusal to cut service in a planned way will just cause more service to be cut randomly. Planned cuts mean that you know that the bus you use will know longer be there, but you can be confident that that one two blocks away, or the one five minutes later, will be there. You will grumble, but it’s likely you can adapt to that. Random cuts, on the other hand, undermine the transit experience for everyone, and do so in a way that nobody can plan for. Sharing the pain among everyone may seem fair, but it’s also a good way to drive away a much larger share of the ridership.

So every time you hear a transit authority debating service cuts, ask what the alternative to the planned cuts is. Is there really a pot of money that can keep the service running? Or is there a workforce limitation, as there is in many cities, that will make an uncut service inoperable? If it’s the latter, then you can make a big show of opposing the scheduled service cuts. But all you’ll have done is condemn riders to random cuts, day after day, which will do far more to undermine confidence in the service.

Las Vegas: A Ride on Elon’s “Vegas Loop” Did Not Change My Mind

Posted on January 25, 2025 in General, Las Vegas, Technophilia

Eight years ago, I experienced 10 seconds of Elon Musk’s attention. The occasion was my criticism of his idea, now being implemented by his Boring Company, that the future of urban transportation was cars running in tunnels — tunnels that he claimed to be able to build so cheaply that there would just no longer be any barrier to building as many as we might need. It was clear to me at once that this was a very low-capacity solution to a problem that required much higher capacity — the kind of capacity only provided by real public transit.

I have written several other articles on these themes over the years, many mentioning Musk as a technicolor example of common fallacies in tech industry thinking about urban transportation. In the new edition of my book Human Transit, I laid out a more thorough critique of the most developed example of the Boring Company vision, the “Vegas Loop” that serves the Las Vegas Convention Center and nearby hotels. It had just been approved for a large citywide expansion featuring over 60 stations. I had studied whatever I could find explaining the concept — which wasn’t much — and explained why I felt that a system that sort-of worked with four stations would be a fiasco with more than 60.

But I must admit that until last week, I hadn’t actually ridden it. Now I have.

Last weekend I found myself in Las Vegas for my nephew’s wedding, and had a few hours to spare. So I did some walking, rode the monorail, and tried the Loop. Until recently, the service had been confined to stations within the Las Vegas Convention Center complex, and thus not always open to the public. But now there are two stations outside that complex, Westgate and Resorts World, so I rode from one to the other.

The monorail delivered me to Westgate station, where a short walk took me to the Westgate Loop station.

An attendant was there to help me pay my fare with a QR code, and pointed me to a car. It was about 9:30 on a Sunday morning, so I knew I wouldn’t be seeing the Loop’s alleged ability to handle big crowds. Instead, there was Tesla parked at the station, with a friendly driver. One odd detail is that he was parked on his left, so that I had to go into the roadway to board on the right. Other than that, it was exactly like boarding an Uber or Lyft Tesla, including the perennial difficulty of hooking up the seatbelt.

Once I was secured, we took off, driving slowly through the narrow tunnels. Two screens provided ample distraction, about half of it advertising.

Famously, the colors of the lights in the tunnels change — as lights do all over Las Vegas. This was supposed to make it feel modern or fun. What I saw instead was the narrowness of the tunnel, barely wider than the car. I wondered about emergency exits.

Finally, we arrived, queued behind one other car, at an underground intersection, with a standard red-and-white-striped barrier blocking our path. A man was standing around in a bright yellow jacket, much like the people you’ll see standing around in many kinds of transport infrastructure, not doing much but presumably ready to jump into action as needed.

Looking to my right, the view partly obstructed by the screen’s reflection in the window, I saw we’d arrived at a complex underground intersection. There was a little booth for the man, as though he might be going to collect tolls. Except for the reflected screen, it all looked like infrastructure from 1970 or so.

We waited here for over a minute, which happens sometimes in public transit but is very much not the Boring Company pitch. It appeared that the next bit of tunnel we needed to use was “single-track,” used by cars in both directions, so we had to wait for an oncoming car to come out of it. Then, our barrier lifted and we went on our way.

We arrived at our destination, a trip of about 4 minutes of which one was spent waiting at that intersection. This station, deep under Resorts World, had the same features: A QR code to pay the fare, an agent in a yellow jacket, and some people standing around.

Walking out, I gazed back at the station. It looks exactly like three Uber Teslas lined up at a curb in a parking structure, a space dominated by roadways that scream “keep out” to the pedestrian.

So, I tweeted:

My most loyal reply-guy was right there in an instant.

And this was the perfect reply to make my point! To a certain kind of tech fantasist, their vision is so self-justifying that the only people who would question it must be those who haven’t experienced it yet. This guy really thought that somehow, riding a Tesla through a tunnel (as opposed to reading and watching videos about it, which I’d done at length) would be a revelation that would overcome all my professional doubts about how such a low-capacity system could possibly scale. At the same time, he was sharing images of the much better Vegas Loop of the future, with an extended network and sexier driverless vehicles. This amounted to admitting that experience of the current demonstration project is not adequate to convey how cool this is, and how that coolness will supposedly someday get me to stop thinking about math.

Fortunately, there are a few journalists who share my skepticism about this project. ProPublica did a recent piece focused more on the project’s failure to keep up its agreements with local governments that allowed it to be built. They note that the big news event in May 2023, the Clark County Commission’s approval of the expansion plan, featured an opaque agenda item that didn’t even mention the Vegas Loop explicitly. More importantly, they note that the kind of justification document that would exist for any publicly funded project just doesn’t seem to exist. The Boring Company does not seem to want to show their math, either on their own website (where they should expect curious transport geeks to be looking) or in a submission to local government.

It’s remarkable to me that the Clark County Commission approved this, with the head of the convention bureau calling it “the only viable way” to manage traffic on the Las Vegas Strip. Obviously, if there are no other options, there’s no need for analysis, but every transport planner knows how absurd that is. Other options include:

extending the monorail north to downtown and south to the airport, or
building a proper rail subway (the most expensive option) or
developing light rail or BRT on the surface of Las Vegas Blvd, taking 1/3 of the traffic capacity but carrying far more than 1/3 of the corridor’s person trips, so that traffic won’t get worse as a result. (San Francisco’s Van Ness Avenue, where this was done in 2022, is now a great proof-of-concept.)

Was it easy to say yes because the Boring Company wasn’t asking for public money? Certainly, but they are still taking something valuable: an enormous amount of underground real estate in public streets. This will have the effect of preventing a properly scaled subway from ever being built because its path will be blocked by this warren of too-small tunnels.

I don’t expect to influence the debate in Las Vegas from afar. The region has its own distinctive politics, and a particular notion about how to serve and entertain people that is unrelated to the principles of liberating urban transport. But like many, I do find it fascinating as a case study, one that other cities should think about.

If this technology escapes from Las Vegas and threatens a bigger, denser city, that will be a more critical battle. In 2022, Vox’s Avishay Artsy and Alissa Walker did a roundup of the state of action at the time, noting all the elected officials around the US who were expressing vague support for Boring Company projects. But they also noted that the company tends not to follow through when they encounter the typical legal and infrastructural complexities of almost any large city. Is some of this excessive regulation? Maybe, but some of it is just people demanding that before you build something this impactful, you should lay out the math, and answer questions, to prove it’s the best alternative. That’s all I’d be asking too.

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