General

We’re currently working with the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency (SFMTA), which manages the city’s transit network called Muni, on options for how to develop their network as the pandemic wanes.  This piece is cross-posted with the SFMTA Blog.

Source: Wikipedia user Pi.1415926535

When a transit agency comes back from the COVID-19 crisis, should it aim to put service back the way it was, or try to put back something better?  That’s the question that the SFMTA will be asking the public later this summer.  

Muni started out as a service that took people downtown, and even today, most of the service is oriented that way. Meanwhile the pandemic accelerated ongoing trends that have shifted travel patterns away from a single focus on downtown and towards many locations across the city.  So are we sure we want the network to be exactly as it was?

Later this summer, the SFMTA will be sharing three alternatives for how service might be restored in winter and inviting the public to provide feedback on those alternatives. The input received from the public will help the SFMTA Board determine the pattern of Muni service to be implemented in early 2022. The three scenarios the SFMTA will be laying out for the public to consider are: 

1. Return the Familiar Network​
2. Build a High-Access Network
3. Develop a Hybrid Network, balancing the best features of the first two.

The Familiar Network alternative would put back the routes people are used to from prior to the pandemic. But the service that people are used to isn’t always the service that helps the most people get where they need to go. 

The High-Access approach would shift some patterns of service to expand people’s ability to get to more destinations sooner. (See here for a full explanation of how access works.)

When we plan for high access, we aren’t just thinking about trips people are making, or the trips they made before the pandemic. We’re also thinking about all the trips they could make. Better access can mean more opportunities in your life. Right now, many people’s lives are changing as they find new jobs, get their kids started at new schools and explore new types of recreation. A high-access network tries to give people as many options as possible. 

What does a high-access alternative mean in practice? Here’s an example from the Richmond District:  Once Line 31 Balboa comes back in August, the Richmond district will have frequent east-west lines spaced every quarter mile. But Muni’s 2 Clement runs just one-eighth mile (a long Richmond block) from the frequent lines on California and Geary.  

Pre-pandemic map of San Francisco’s Richmond district transit services.  Note the consistent spacing of east-west routes every 1/4 mile, but the exception is Line 2-Clement in the upper right.  Source: SFMTA

Closer look at Line 2 Clement, and the more frequent lines 1/8 mile away on either side.

To measure the total access for people in a particular place, we look at all the trips to all the places they might be going, and calculate how long those trips take on the network. This travel time includes walking time, waiting time and riding time. In other words, we measure travel time starting from when you want to go, not when the bus comes.  

When we calculate access from points along Clement, we find that the 2 Clement doesn’t add much, because the nearby service on Geary is so much faster and frequent.  Even if you walk (or roll) slowly at 2 miles per hour, it would take you 8 minutes to get from Clement to Geary.  But your wait would be 5 minutes shorter, on average, because the 38 Geary is so frequent. You may save even more time if you get a 38R Geary Rapid, which is faster. At most, the 2 Clement service only saves riders a minute or two. And if you walk at a more average pace, 3 miles per hour, it’s almost always faster to walk to Geary than wait for the bus on Clement.

Such close spacing of parallel routes is not something the SFMTA provides in most parts of the city, so does it make sense to dedicate Muni’s scarce resources to provide it here? Should those resources go where they can measurably expand access to opportunity, such as by moving toward five-minute frequency on many lines?

I’ve talked at length about this high-access approach because it’s less familiar and therefore requires more explanation, but that doesn’t mean the SFMTA has already decided to do it. The choices between familiar and high-access approaches is a genuine question, and we’ll want to know what you think.

Finally, all of these choices are harder because the SFMTA faces severe resource constraints. It still faces a labor shortage and has lost much of its income from fares and parking revenues, not to mention the structural deficit that existed even before the pandemic.  So the agency can’t afford to restore all of the service it ran before the pandemic.  Even if the labor shortage were resolved (and the SFMTA is working on it), restoring 100% of the previously scheduled service would run the risk that just a year or two later, when one-time federal funding runs out, drastic service cuts would be needed that could leave us with even less service than we have now. 

Instead, it makes sense to offer only a level of Muni service that the SFMTA is sure they can sustain, at least until they find new resources to replace funds that have eroded over the last decade and fallen dramatically during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Next, we and the SFMTA will lay out exact plans for each alternative, showing the exact routes and frequencies that each alternative would provide. We’ll then analyze how each alternative affects access to opportunity.  We’ll look at this for the whole population, but we’ll also calculate the benefits and impacts for specific neighborhoods, for people of color, for low-income people, and for people who walk or roll relatively slowly.  

The SFMTA will bring this information to the community, so that everyone can think about the choices and express their view.  This will help the SFMTA Board reach a decision that reflects the values of San Francisco.  

As a transport planner with a strong interest in science fiction, I am obviously provoked by this tweet:

I’m going to keep saying this: a sizeable share of contemporary science fiction is really just bad faith rationales for not building bus lanes. https://t.co/oq9aeHtTMq

— Scott Edgar (@scottedgar) March 17, 2019

Scott is talking about flying cars, a staple of science fiction at least since The Jetsons.  And as it happens, one of the most fascinating science fiction series of recent years — at least for anyone interested in politics, history, philosophy, or public policy — is about a 25th Century world where automated flying Uber has crushed all other modes of transport, creating a dreaded concentration of monopoly power from which flow the crises that drive the plot.

Historian Ada Palmer’s four “Terra Ignota” books, which begin with Too Like the Lightning and will end later this summer with the Perhaps the Stars, tell of a world where globe-spanning flying cars have done away with geographic nations, where “it does not take a firebrand leader to make someone who lives in Maui, works in Myanmar, and lunches in Syracuse to realize the absurdity of owing allegiance to the patch of dirt where babe first parted from placenta.” [p43]  Indeed, at 9,640 km/h, you’ll only need an hour to get from your job in the Myanmar to lunch in Syracuse, Italy — and a half-hour longer to get to Syracuse, New York.  (The people of this world seem to have no concept of sonic booms, presumably for the same reason that fish don’t have a concept of water.)

In place of nations 25th Century earth has organized itself into Hives, non-geographic entities that do much of what nations do.  They have governments, laws, shared values, capitals, and cultures, but they don’t control patches of land.  You can choose which one to belong to, and still live anywhere.

For my readers who work in city planning or transport, many skeptical questions now jump to mind, so first let me say this:  These books are superb. They are funny.  They’re erudite but not intimidating, cheerfully explaining the key points of philosophical history when you need to know them.  They are driven by brightly sketched and often endearing characters.  They bristle with sharp ideas about everything from the enduring appeal of monarchy to the minefield of gendered pronouns.  They are especially interested in how societies use and distort the past; this, for example, is a world run by leaders who love an idealized memory of the European 18th Century — the philosophy, the politics, the hoopskirts and wigs — much as the Renaissance (Palmer’s expertise) was built on an idealized memory of ancient Greece and Rome.

This, in short, is what happens when historians write science fiction.  We have lots of science fiction where the science is meticulous but the history and culture are thin.  These books are the opposite.  Here, the technology is lightly and questionably sketched, but the cultural, political, and social consequences of that technology are worked out with stunning detail and plausibility.  Even if I doubt its technological premise, this alternative world — one that hasn’t had a war for centuries — was one that I could believe in while I was inside of it.

Still, all of it is built on universal, cheap, and frictionless flying cars.  There seems to be no reason not to go anywhere in the world, at any time.

After wondering how anything this energy-intensive could be provided in such abundance that people never discuss its cost, the economist asks: Why would there still be cities?  They do exist, and some of them seem to have streets that people walk along, so perhaps people still like being around other people.  Progressive urbanists will breathe a sigh of relief when they encounter these scenes.

But most of the cities we visit are capitals of Hives or of other Hive-like communities, and if we’re not there to see powerful people in secret chambers, then we are often there almost as tourists, seeing the sights and savoring the uniqueness and symbolism of the city.  Maybe the few pedestrian-filled streets that we see are like those of Colonial Williamsburg or Disneyland. We don’t delve into how the cities function beyond their role as stage sets for the drama.  It’s not clear that they function as cities at all.

The city we meet first, Cielo de Pájaros in Chile, is designed to attract vast clouds of birds but lacks commercial districts. It’s a “city designed for for those who don’t like city centers, whose perfect evening is spent by a window, watching gulls and black waves crashing down.” [p31]  Clearly if there’s universal Uber there must also be universal Amazon, delivering fish fresh off the dock from your choice of Portugal or Maine, so maybe nobody needs shops anymore.   But again, if you don’t like the bustle of human activity, why live in a city?  Why not scatter in cabins all along Chile’s coast?

If members of different Hives live side by side while obeying different sets of laws, what law is in force when they interact?  For Palmer this is a simple problem of inter-Hive crime, so she images a system of “polylaw” that brings a neutral justice to bear.  But a city that functions (rather than just symbolizes) needs a much finer shared web of legal and cultural systems.  There must still be rules about where you can land a flying car, or what you can throw in a sewer drain that goes to the local river, or whether you can build a factory next to people’s homes.

In the absence of such rules, we must imagine the libertarian urban world that the unrestrained flying car would make.  In the first chapter, even before you meet a child who performs decidedly religious miracles, you will encounter Palmer’s most unbelievable sentence:

Carlyle bade the car touch down, not on the high drawbridgelike walkaway which led to the main door of the shimmering [house], but by the narrow maintenance stairs beside it. [p14]

You can fly across the world on a car that will land on your preferred side of a house, so that you don’t have to walk even a few steps. Later, we even see this done in Paris.  Even today you shouldn’t expect Uber to come to your exact address in a dense city, and there will be lots of honking if it does. Bus lanes, bike lanes, pedestrians, deliveries — all these things need space in the street.   If a flying car can land in Paris exactly where the customer wants, what does the narrow Parisian street look like? Is there room to walk? What’s left for anything but landing space?

But while city planners may puzzle over these things, Palmer’s books still ask great questions that are at the heart of the question of cities:  Are you sure we should want to “abolish geography”, as so many transport gadget inventors have promised over the years? Would you really want to “live in Maui, work in Myanmar, and lunch in Syracuse,” or would you feel that in a world of such universal travel, all these places have become so identical that you might as well work from home?  If you did that, would you even go for a walk in your neighborhood, meeting familiar people in the flesh, when you could just as easily walk in a city that’s having better weather at the moment?  Will you like a placeless society where you and your neighbor listen to different news sources to the point that you have incompatible views about reality?  If so, would you still be able to cooperate about fixing the fence or agreeing on quiet hours?  And if that incomprehension got out of hand, then whoa, what would a war between Hives be like?

Whatever your first reaction to those questions, Palmer’s books will add nuance to it.  If you enjoy thinking about politics, philosophy, history or public policy (and if you are willing to live without the presumptive atheism of most science fiction) I think you’ll enjoy these books. And I promise: Your skepticism about flying cars will survive the journey.

When you call it that, it’s not very popular.

Looking at this Pew survey, Matt Yglesias points out that Democrats and Republicans seem to agree on the unimportance of improving transportation.

Alas, faced with that, our politicians talk about jobs and infrastructure rather than transportation.  This in turn creates the suspicion that we’re employing people to do nothing or building things we may not need.

But of course, many of the things people seem to care most about (and the two parties agree most about) depend on transportation, notably: “Improving job situation.” “strengthening economy.”  (It’s also important to several things that are sadly more polarizing, such as “dealing with global climate change,” dealing with the problems of poor people,” and “addressing issues around race.”)

I wish we were in the habit of asking people if they care about “access to opportunities“, which captures why we care about jobs but also resonates with other important goals, like economic growth and access to opportunity.

But in any case, transportation  doesn’t poll well.  Maybe that’s fine.  Even I am not that interested in transportation. I’m interested in people being able to do things, as a result fo being able to go places.  Let’s talk about that.

Jake Blumgart has a superb piece in Governing (free but click “Continue to site.”) about the distinctly North American artifact called commuter rail, and why it’s so different from the way heavy rail infrastructure is used for transit in most other developed countries.

The key difference is that most other countries want their heavy rail services to be useful all day, while the default in most of the US has been to run only at rush hour with at best minimal service the rest of the time, as though the briefcase commuter is the only conceivable customer.

There are not such sharp contrasts between regional rail and the rest of transit systems in most wealthy European or East Asian nations. But in North America, the divide was sacrosanct. As recently as 2016, then-MBTA General Manager Frank DePaola drew a bright line between this service and the rest of the agency’s subway, bus, and light rail services: “Commuter rail is commuter rail. It’s not transit. It’s designed to bring people into the city in the morning and take them home at night.”

The COVID-19 pandemic, however, calls that whole concept into doubt.

“It’s not transit.” “The divide was sacrosanct.” Of course this division of the market by trip purpose also implied a distinction of social class, manifested especially in very high fares.  But high ridership is diverse ridership.  If the goal is to help everyone go places, it’s always best to design services that are useful to everyone and make those services connect, rather than run two systems side by side (commuter rail and slow buses, for example).

Commuter rail services also tend to run long distances across core cities without providing much relevant service to them.  They either run nonstop or offer a frequency that’s too low to be relevant for the shorter in-city trips happening along the line.

I have my own trauma about this, because I spent too many years in the 1980s trying to advocate for an all-day frequent service on Caltrain, the commuter rail line between San Francisco and San Jose in California.  Caltrain has the geography of a frequent all-day rapid transit service: it runs through the historic downtown of almost every city it serves, because the downtowns grew around the rail line.  In terms of the useful transit provided, it could have functioned as another BART line.

Yet decades later, Caltrain service levels are still terrible in the context of the corridor it serves.  It was big event when the midday frequency was improved from two hours, as it was in my day, to one hour, but that still makes it irrelevant to most trips along the corridor, especially those of less than 10 miles or so where waiting time becomes more onerous.  So a bus system has to run alongside it, inefficiently serving some of the same trips that rail could be serving, and unable to efficiently feed the rail line very well because of the rail’s low frequency and erratic schedule.

Since then, as a bus network planner, I’ve encountered the same problem in many other cities.  There’s just no way to integrate commuter rail with a local bus network, because good bus networks involve regular patterns of frequency that are not what US commuter rail does.  At best you have to provide dedicated shuttles that meet the trains, and that’s a form of duplication that leads to worse access for everyone.

Blumgart’s piece touches on the effort that’s now being made to rethink commuter rail to make it more like what it’s always been in Europe, East Asia, and even low-density Australia and New Zealand.  In all these countries, rail is how you travel longer distances across the region all the time, not just at rush hour.

That difference arises in part from a different geography of social class.  When I lived in Sydney, I wasn’t happy with midday frequencies on the all-day rail network — mostly every 30 minutes then, mostly 15 now — but that was far superior to what most big US cities are used to.  The difference is the suburbanization of poverty, which has been happening for decades in Europe and Australia but is only now accelerating in the US.  The most remote parts of Sydney are some of the poorest.  In this urban structure, lower income people have to travel longer distances, but mostly to non-peak jobs.  Making heavy rail services part of the total transit system isn’t just a better use of infrastructure, it’s increasingly going to be an equity issue.

If Covid-19 causes a permanent drop in rush-hour commuting, we could see a golden opportunity to make better use of all the existing infrastructure of commuter rail.  There are plenty of obstacles, but they aren’t physical. They’re mostly cultural issues embedded in regulation and labor practices.  When it becomes important enough, those can be solved.

If you are involved in debates about Bus Rapid Transit, you need to stop and think about whether the project will be closed or open, because this will have a big effect on how useful the service is.  I’m always surprised at how few BRT projects clearly debate this issue.

A BRT system is open if the buses can continue off the end of the infrastructure and operate as conventional buses on local streets.  In situations where multiple bus operating companies run along the same path, open can also mean that the infrastructure can be available to multiple operators, although that almost always implies the first meaning as well.

A BRT system is closed if the buses must remain with the infrastructure, so that service must end at the end of the infrastructure, just as all rail services do.

In a given situation, a closed BRT option will require more transferring than open BRT for people to reach actual destinations that lie beyond the infrastructure.  As a result, it will tend to lead to longer overall travel times unless the speed advantages of the BRT compensate for that transfer delay.

There are two reasons this is a problem for your actual ability to go places:

• A very single-centered urban form may logically need services to branch as they head out of the city, because as demand gets lower, you need less frequency but needed to cover more area.  Branching divides frequency, and in that case this can be OK.
• But the bigger problem is that for non-transit reasons, the infrastructure may end where the demand doesn’t end, and closed BRT in this situation forces a lot of people to transfer just to keep going in the same direction.  In a high-frequency grid, for example, it’s important that service operate continuously all the way across the grid, so that while some people will have to transfer once few have to transfer twice.  Closed BRT can be an obstacle to this.

Despite this disadvantage, BRT systems are often closed for two major reasons:

• In extremely crowded systems, closed BRT allows for tighter control of operations, for maximum capacity and minimum waiting time.  Capacity considerations may also dictate that all buses using the infrastructure be as large as possible.
• In wealthy countries closed BRT more likely to be about trying to mimic the experience of rail transit, so as to be more attractive to a supposed discretionary or “choice” rider. If the goal is to make BRT appear special and different from regular buses, this goal is muddied if BRT buses run outside the infrastructure, or regular buses run inside of it.

The first of these reasons translates into measurable benefits in travel time, and thus access to opportunity, while the second does not.

Closed BRT is the more common kind of BRT in the United States, mostly for the second reason.  Where it appears in developing countries with very high public transit demand, it is mostly for the first reason.

BRT can be closed by any of several mechanisms:

• Full separation. It can be made physically impossible for buses to enter or leave the infrastructure.    This is unusual, since buses may need to enter or leave in emergencies or to travel to and from the operating base.
• Station and fleet incompatibility. Stations and buses may be designed so that they can only be used together.  For example, Eugene, Oregon’s BRT can run in regular lanes and even in mixed traffic, but its stations have high platforms that only match the floor height of the designated BRT buses, effectively requiring a closed system.  Fleet incompatibility can also be created through electrification, especially if end-of-line charging stations are required.  These stations become barriers to continuing service beyond the end of the line at that station, because the charging requires an amount of time that is practical only at the end of the line when no passengers are on board.
• Operating plan. Service can be operated as closed even though the infrastructure doesn’t physically prevent open operations.

So should a new BRT system be open or closed?  In most cases, the advantages of open BRT are about people being able to go places so they can do things.  The advantages of closed BRT are mostly about branding and some limited kinds of amenity.

Brisbane, Australia’s BRT system uses ordinary buses that continue onto local streets, but it’s still really, really nice.

The concept of amenity is worth unpacking.  Many great amenities are possible on open BRT – see the beautiful busway stations of Brisbane, for example – but these generally do not include special buses with special features, unless you buy enough of these that they can continue to wherever those buses logically need to go to create the most liberating possible network.  There’s another reason to be cautious about special buses: Really, all buses should be nice, so creating a distinct brand of buses amounts to disparaging the rest of the bus system as much as it’s promoting the BRT.   We may be spending a lot of capital money to promote the idea that most buses are inferior.

But a few things, such as absolutely level boarding, benefit from buses that stop exactly at the platform level, and these buses tend not to be able to stop an ordinary bus stop.  Absolutely level boarding is great, and especially important to people using mobility devices.   But well-designed open BRT, with good operations and training, can still do reasonably level boarding where it’s easy to cross with a wheelchair or stroller.

I said “in most cases,” open BRT offers the best travel times and thus the most access to opportunity.  So what are the exceptions?  Closed BRT can be more efficient at very, very high levels of ridership – such as we see in big cities in less wealthy countries.  Here, an entire corridor may be continuously very busy, and in this case, the most efficient operations, and hence highest capacity, arise from being able to use every bit of the infrastructure and keep buses evenly spaced.  This is harder to do with open BRT, because buses may be entering or leaving the infrastructure part way, thus leaving a part of the infrastructure with fewer buses.  Buses may also be entering unpredictably, because they are coming from route segments where they are running in mixed traffic and thus subject to delay.  Where such huge volumes of people are traveling, these problems can cause pass-ups that do measurably reduce travel.

But this important exception arises only where massive capacity is critical, and this case rarely arises in the moderate-density wealthy countries of North America, Australia/New Zealand, or even most of Europe.  So in those countries tends not to offer any advantage to people’s ability to go places so they can do things.  In these contexts, closed BRT can deliver a better “brand” or “look and feel”, but open BRT is more likely to get you to our destination as soon as possible.  You decide which matters more.

Yes, the ebook of my book Human Transit is only US$4.99 until Friday April 23.  Grab yours here!

Our collaboration with the amazing folks at Transit Alliance Miami has reached its conclusion: A new bus network coming for all of Miami-Dade county.  Here you’ll find maps and info about the new network, and at the bottom of that page you’ll find all of the reports we produced along the way, scheduled to be implemented later this year.

For the central area, here’s the existing system:

Colors mean all-day frequency!  Purple = 12 minutes or better.  Red = 15. Orange = 20, Blue = 30. Green = 60.

And here’s the new network.  Fewer routes, less duplication, more frequency.

(This is not our mapping style, by the way.  It’s from a tool developed by Kittelson Associates that lets you move a slider back and forth between the two maps, so that you can see how different they are in the same place.  It can be a little clunky.  Look close for a vertical grey bar and you’ll find you can slide it left and right.  If it isn’t working, reload.)

The plan lays out meager resources for bus service in a more equitable way, focusing on frequent service on a one-mile grid across the denser inner parts of the county.  It will dramatically expand where people can get to quickly across the county, although often people will have to walk further to better frequency.

My biggest regret about the project?  Most of the bigger cities in the region have their own municipal transit systems, and we had wanted to get better integration between them, which would have created even more improvement in access.  We had good staff engagement with three of the four biggest municipal operators: Miami, Miami Beach, and Doral.  In the end, though, the Miami City Council didn’t support redesigning their shuttle system to work with the revised bus network.

I hope that in the future the cities will look closer at how to build better local networks that work with Miami-Dade transit instead of duplicating it.   Los Angeles County is a good model:  There’s a regional agency and lots of municipal ones, but region and cities have worked together to decide who’ll run which segment, and how to make it all work as a single network that helps everyone get where they want to go.