General

Congratulations to everyone in the United Kingdom on a decisive election result, one that will unleash big changes in the public transport sector.  The Labour party, which is on track for a large majority, promises to restore government’s right to manage public transport in the public interest, sweeping away Margaret Thatcher’s vision of public transport as a purely private and competitive business. Even before the election, the dam had already started to break, as the previous Conservative government had allowed Manchester and other big cities to reform Thatcher’s system.

Since 1985 the sort of public transport planning that governments normally do in wealthy countries has been illegal in the United Kingdom outside London and Northern Ireland.  Privatization meant that private companies were free to run services whenever they liked, changing them on just a couple of months notice, and could also set their own fares.  They kept the profits from high-ridership services but demanded government subsidies for low-ridership but critically needed coverage services.  These companies were also too essential to fail:  When Covid-19 gutted their fare revenue, government had to bail them out to keep essential services running.

A report by the Center for Human Rights and Global Justice describes the results of Thatcher’s grand experiment:

Privatization has not delivered a service that provides good value for money.  Private operators’ primary goal is to earn a profit for shareholders, rather than provide the best possible service. Companies extract profits in the form of dividends, which otherwise could be reinvested in the system.  They largely choose to run only profitable routes, resulting in cuts or forcing local transport authorities to step in at additional public cost. And far from taking buses off the government books, privatization has left the public on the hook for billions of pounds a year in subsidies.

Thatcher never imposed her experiment on London, because you simply can’t run a big city this way.  At high densities, public transport service is intensely interdependent with other civic functions, especially land use planning and traffic management.  Government needs confidence about what the buses and trains are going to do, so that it can provide certainty to developers, planners, and everyone else making decisions about the life and structure of the city.  Voters also deserve to know that the service funded by their taxes is designed, operated, and priced in a way that reflects their goals and values.

In the new model, which the British call franchising, there will still be a role for the private operating companies.  They’ll be able to compete for contracts to run portions of public transport networks, but those networks will be designed, managed, and marketed by governments.  Fares will no longer be the basis of their profit.  Instead, they’ll be paid a fair price to drive and maintain the services, enough to give them a small profit margin, and with various incentives and penalties for good and bad performance.  Their success will depend on providing good service.

I’ve worked extensively in three countries that have made a similar transition fairly recently: Australia, New Zealand, and Ireland.  In all three, I have led the planning of bus network designs for governments that were just starting to take firm control of public transport planning, usually while maintaining a role for the private sector.   These transitions have been difficult, especially for the operating companies who must make cultural changes to match their new incentives, but they have made dramatic improvements in service possible.  With this background, our firm hopes to find a role in the forthcoming tsunami of bus planning in the UK.  In fact, we’d love to have a little office there.  For now, I hope UK public transport advocates are enjoying their election night.  Soon, the buses may even run late enough for you to get home from the party.

On May 27 I’ll be doing a webinar focused on the greater Toronto area, sponsored by Transport Futures.  I’ll talk about the new edition of my book and then take questions.

Details and registration here.

Look forward to seeing you there!

On March 21 is my next webinar about the new book, sponsored by the Smart Growth Network and the Maryland Dept of Planning.  This one is a little longer than some recent ones: 90 minutes, of which about half is me speaking and half is Q&A.  Hope to see you there!  Register here!

The next webinar on the Revised Edition of my book Human Transit is coming up next Thursday, March 21 at 1 PM US Eastern (UTC-5), sponsored by the Maryland Department of Planning.  Learn more and register here!

We used to give a two-day course in public transit planning, designed for professionals in both transit and adjacent fields, and we’re trying to get back into the practice.  This April 10-11 in Los Angeles, Access LA will sponsor one of these course, taught by me.  You can also get AICP credit (details here).  This one is free, for professionals in all of the city building professions, including transportation or land use. That’s a bargain, because usually the course costs about $500/person.  The course location is a short walk from El Monte busway station.

Registration is now open at this page.  Note that they have this set up with separate registrations for the two days, but day 1 is a prerequisite for day 2.

And if you’d like sponsor a similar course in your city, get in touch.  Click the envelope on the black bar at the top of this page to email me.

If you are looking for a gift for a transit-lover or urbanist, here’s something even better than an ugly sweater.  I can heartily recommend Jake Berman’s beautiful and engaging book The Lost Subways of North America.

Berman has constructed beautiful period maps of North America’s many “lost” rail systems, including the original streetcar networks of many cities and the numerous rapid transit maps that were sold to voters, often unsuccessfully, over the years.  But this is also a fine introduction to the history of rail transit in 23 North American cities.  The chapter on each city tells some aspect of the story of how the rail transit, or lack of it, came to be.

The book has a blurb from credentialed transit historian Nicholas Dagen Bloom (The Great American Transit Disaster), so you can feel confident in Berman’s work as history.  The tale of each city’s transit wars is both truer and more interesting than the old conspiracy theory about General Motors.  Throughout the middle and late 20th century, countless leaders worked hard to create the transit renaissance that they knew had to happen sooner or later, and that in many cities is finally happening now.  The failure of some of these schemes, and the success of others, makes for a lively read.

Berman is fully aware of the dangers of his title, and his section on terms suggests that he’s done time in the trenches of grim arguments over what subway, streetcar, and light rail really mean. The title Lost Subways suggests an ideal world of fast underground transit that’s routine in Europe and East Asia but that was abandoned or stillborn in most of North America.  But much of North America’s rail transit is on the surface or elevated, and it moves at a variety of speeds, from giant BART trains rushing under San Francisco bay to cable cars and streetcars in traffic that are sometimes not much faster than walking.  Rail, in short, is a poor shorthand for speed or even usefulness, and in a few cases, as in Los Angeles and Pittsburgh, Berman acknowledges where busways have become a critical part of the rapid transit network, as they are across much of the developing world.  But Berman gracefully deploys the hook of his title without being hung up on it himself.  At the end, you’ll come away with an appreciation for the diversity of North American transit problems, and it will be clear why “subways everywhere” has never been the right answer to every city’s needs.

Ultimately, all transportation problems are land use problems, and these problems were created by zoning and other development policies.  Berman takes every opportunity to point out where these policies have shaped cities to be better or worse transit markets.  The point is most dramatically made in comparing Dallas and Houston.  The Dallas area built the nation’s largest light rail network but maintained a culture of strict zoning controls that prevented much development from happening around the suburban stations.  The result is an overstretched low-ridership network that currently runs only every 20 minutes, and a huge need for a robust bus network to go where the development actually is.  Houston has much less light rail but more permissive zoning laws, which has allowed development to respond to transit more rapidly and at scale.  So while Houston’s network goes fewer miles, the stations it serves are more likely to be your destination.  Berman weaves the zoning story into the transit story in a way that must be done to explain why North America’s transit situation is what it is.

While it tells many frustrating stories, this is not a sad or angry book, as many books on this topic justifiably are.  The short chapters and beautiful maps make it a pleasant browse, arousing curiosity and encouraging the reader to want to know more.  It’s a beautiful addition to a library, or a coffee table, in any home where people care about cities.