General

There’s more data than ever, so there are more ways than ever to draw brightly colored maps of supposed transit facts.  But that means it’s also easier than ever to take common types of confusion about transit and make them look like the outcomes of analysis.  Your results will always reflect your assumptions, and a lot of transit analysis is still built on common mistakes that are completely obvious if you stop to think about them.

Case in point today, US Department of Transportation wants to undertake a National Transit Map project.  This seems to mean drawing all the nation’s transit data feeds into a national database, which is certainly a good thing. But everything depends on the assumptions being made, and the initial video — recommended on Twitter by its narrator, Dan Morgan of USDOT — is not encouraging.  The big mistakes can all be found in a 3-minute stretch starting at 5:00.  Here’s the video.

The three big mistakes are:

1. Implicitly confusing land area with population in visual representations.  Starting at 5:00, the video presents a map of intercity access by car and train.  The “discovery” from this analysis is that Amtrak doesn’t stop for several hundred miles as it crosses West Texas.  It looks like a gap on the map, but it’s not a gap in reality because there are almost no people there.  Of course, people draw maps like this all the time (we’ll see a lot of them during election season) but good analysis provides some visual cue to caution the viewer that land area, which is what jumps out on maps, has nothing to do with people.  For example, this map could have been superimposed on a map of population density.
2. Assuming that having transit nearby is more important than transit being useful or liberating.   At 6:00 we see a map of the part of Salt Lake City in walking distance to transit, showing obvious gaps.This makes the previous mistake (there’s no indication of whether anyone lives or works in those gaps) but more importantly, it gives the impression that the primary problem with transit is that it doesn’t cover more area.   In actual transit systems with fixed budgets, the area you cover will be inversely related to the frequency, speed, and reliability you can offer, which means that a transit agency that spreads itself thin tends to offer services that are useless to almost everyone.  This geometric fact is the basis of the ridership-coverage tradeoff problem.  When we see analyses that imply that transit’s problem is that it doesn’t go enough places, we need to recognize this as implying an advocacy of coverage over ridership, and more generally an advocacy of spreading service so thin that none of it is useful to most people’s lives.
3. Focusing on peak hour service when discussing the access needs of poor people, even though most low-income people need to travel at all times of the day, evening and weekend.   Starting at 6:55, we get an analysis that identifies poor people who do not have good access to rush hour transit.  Poor people are rarely rush-hour commuters and they go many places other than the downtowns on which most peak service focuses.

I’m sure the analysts behind these examples thought that they were simplifying in a useful way.  In my consulting work we simplify all the time.  But we are careful to simplify in the direction of clarity about reality, rather than in the direction of helping people feel good about their often-false assumptions.  The simplifications in this video — and of so much transit analysis still — are of the latter kind.

You may have seen my recent Washington Post piece on why fixed route transit will always be essential.  Here’s my deeper dive for the Southern California Association of Governments Vision 2040 report.  It focuses more specifically on how a focus on geometry can help us be smarter about prediction.  Most important paragraph:

If you can recognize a problem as geometric — such as the need to use space efficiently in cities – you can become a smarter consumer of predictions. Cities will always have relatively little space per person, so no matter what technologies we invent, the amount of space that things take will always matter, and we’ll have to use that space wisely.

On March 24 at 1:30 PM I’ll be doing a presentation to the board of the Palm Beach County transit agency, PalmTran.  Conveniently, it’s in Boca Raton at the south end of the county, so it’s not too far from Fort Lauderdale or, for the truly motivated, from Miami.  

This is part of a new network review initiative from the new Executive Director, Clinton B. Forbes.  Obviously the presentation will touch on Palm Beach County examples, but much of it will be of general interest.

It’s unusual to have a board meeting noticed as a public event, but PalmTran is encouraging one and all to come.  It’s from 1:30 to 3:00 PM at the Boca Raton Municipal Building, 6500 Congress Avenue in Boca Raton.  The contact for further info is Steve Anderson, [email protected].  No RSVP appears to be required.

The one-day shutdown of the Washington DC Metro is a useful call to arms about the dreadful state of maintenance in some of the US’s major rapid transit systems — a subset of a larger issue about deferred maintenance in all kinds of infrastructure.  If it seems like this makes the US like the developing world, NPR reminds us that most developing world metro systems are in much better shape.  (My Moscow correspondent Ilya Petoushkoff was also quick with an email reminding me that when even one Moscow subway lines go down, emergency bus lanes are created with Jersey barriers.)

The Washington Post’s Philip Kennicott is also fine on how the subway’s failure ties to great themes of US urban decay.

I have no opinion about the wisdom of DC Metro CEO Paul Wiedefeld’s decision to shut down the subway for a day to inspect faulty wires, except that it seemed sudden and left little time for preparation.  Its attention-grabbing effect was unmistakable, and perhaps that was necessary to shock everyone into understanding the urgency of the problems. But it doesn’t appear to have been a PR stunt: the system’s faulty wiring had already caused a fatality, and sure enough, the one-day shutdown to inspect these wires turned up even more dangerous ones.

But do read this Vox piece by Libby Nelson on how transit agencies can be more honest with their customers, including on Twitter.  Bravo to the Bay Area Rapid Transit for telling customers the truth about the problems facing the agency — which is to say, facing the region.

One of our big projects this year is a Transit Ridership Improvement Program for the Santa Clara Valley Transportation Authority, which serves San Jose and Silicon Valley in California.  A key piece of that will be the “Next Network,” to be implemented in 2017 with the opening of the BART extension into San Jose.  The Next Network is about more than accommodating BART.  It’s also a chance for citizens to help the agency think about its network design priorities.

I’m happy to announce that the project website is now live, and that our first report, called a Choices Report, can be downloaded here.

A Choices Report is our preferred term for what is often called, tediously, an “existing conditions” report.  (Has anyone ever looked forward to reading about “existing conditions”?)  The report does cover existing conditions — the performance of the transit service in relation to the markets it serves — but with an eye toward revealing insights that lead to a better understanding of the real choices an agency faces.

The Choices Report will form the background for a series of three network alternatives that will be shared with the public over the summer.  The whole point of those alternatives is to encourage you to think about different paths VTA could take.  A final network plan is expected near the end of this year, to be implemented when BART opens in July 2017.

The public conversation in this project is not a thing we do on the side.  It’s the whole point of the study.  We need robust public participation in this project to help sift the alternatives and make sure we’re heading in a direction that the community can support.  So please, if you live in the region, bookmark the project page, and watch for updates there and here.

It’s here.  Twitter’s favorite quote from it is:

Cities have relatively little space per person. Cars are big. Big things don’t fit in little spaces.

In short, it’s all, always about geometry, which technology will never change…

To predict the future, we need to think carefully about what’s permanent and what may be fleeting. Fashions and tastes are fleeting, but geometric facts are permanent. Fifty years from now, our sense of what’s sexy or hip or green will be very different, but big things still won’t fit in small spaces.

How specific or vague should a transit plan be, before it’s announced?  And what kinds of specificity matter?

It’s easy for a journalist to say that a plan is short on specifics, but all plans are short on specifics.  If included every detail, you’d have construction drawings, escrow arrangements, employee work shifts, and so on. But that’s a lot of work, so you don’t do it until you’re sure you want to proceed.

Good planning starts at high altitude and proceeds downward through levels of detail until it’s ready to happen “on the street.”  In transit, for example, it’s best if you first do big-picture city or regional plans, then implement these through local area or corridor plans, then implement these with more detailed design, then implement those with construction drawings or timetables.  Finally you implement those by actually building or operating the proposed thing.

As you descend in altitude, you may hit a fatal flaw. You may have to back up to a higher altitude to see a way forward.  But without altitude at first, you can’t see the big picture, and if you go into detail too soon, there’s a risk that the whole point of the plan gets lost as you quibble over a parking space.

So when a plan is announced, don’t jump to quickly to saying it lacks enough detail.  We planners spend a lot of time trying to figure out exactly what to be specific about, and what can be left vague for now.  Not out of any desire to mislead, but because it’s impossible to talk about all the details at once, and too expensive to study them all at an early stage.  We rely on well-honed instincts:  Which details are most likely to erupt into a problem — technical or political — down the line?  Which other details can be noted and honored but left to a later phase to refine?  These are some of the hardest calls that planners make.

For example, I sympathize with the proponents of the recently announced Brooklyn-Queens Streetcar in New York, including the estimable Sam Schwartz, (“Gridlock Sam” at the New York Daily News) who advised the Mayor on the project and is also a leading advocate.  Since it was announced a couple of weeks ago, civic leaders have lined up to support it but many leading transit advocates and urbanists have challenged the project, or at least raised hard questions about it.

I have been on both sides of these issues.  But while every plan is going to be vague, it’s important to notice which parts are specific and which parts are vague, because this can signal something important about how the plan is likely to change as it goes through later stages of refinement.

The mayor’s press release, including the map shown here, spends most of its length talking about why a certain area needs transit, and asserts that a streetcar is the answer.  It assumes that “streetcar” will make us like the project before we know much about what it does.  The release does include a set of travel time claims, but it doesn’t say much about:

• Frequency, which governs how long you’ll wait before you can even begin.  (An ideal travel time estimate would always include half of that wait.)
• Connections, notably which subway lines the service would connect to.  The curves on the map suggest but don’t imply any particular path, which would run on particular streets and connect with particular subway stations.  I’m sure I’m not the only person who spent a while on Google Earth trying to figure out what these sensuous curves might mean in reality.
• Reliability, which generally requires exclusive right of way.  The mayor’s press release says “majority of the line” is protected from car traffic.  Other sources have told me anything from 70% or 100%.   If it’s not 100%, it matters which 50-99% we’re talking about.  Transit advocates have good reasons to be concerned about this.  There are cases where transit can mix briefly with traffic and not be much affected – typically when the traffic is very low because the street is just for local access.  But what tends to emerge out of the political process is exactly the opposite: Where traffic is bad, it’s politically hard to take a lane for transit, so transit ends up with exclusive lanes that disappear precisely where they are needed most.  This is a very important part of the history of both streetcars and Bus Rapid Transit in the US.
• Fares. What will they be, and will it be free to transfer to the rest of the transit system, so that people can get to the 95+% of the city that’s not on this line?

If you just love streetcars, and want a streetcar, then these sound like the petty concerns of people who can’t see or trust your grand vision.  But if you want an efficient transit network that liberates people to access opportunity, these things are paramount.

If the main goal of a project is to build a piece of technology, this sets up a risk that when hard choices have to be made down the line, the speed, frequency, and reliability will be sacrificed later in the project, as the “details” are being worked out.    Suspicion about this is understandable, when you consider how slow and unreliable many US streetcars have turned out to be.

So how vague should a plan be?  It’s a tough call.  You have to be vague about something, but from that, people may reach judgments, fair or not, about what your priorities are.

The Richmond (Virginia) city council has approved plans for a Bus Rapid transit line running east-west through the core of the city — the starting point for a more robust transit network for the whole city and potentially the region:

Like all starter lines, it focuses on a small part of the city, and these projects always raise questions about the city-wide benefits. What’s in it for you if you don’t live or work near the line?

One answer to that concern is that a good core transit line produces all kinds of benefits across the city. By running a busy corridor more quickly and reliably, resources are freed up to run more effective local services.  Like all rapid transit lines, this one will depend heavily on improved local bus service, and improved local bus service will mean better mobility for people not on the rapid line.

That’s all very nice in the abstract, but what’s the specific plan? Fortunately, the people of Richmond will have the chance to help forge that plan in the coming year. We are now working with City of Richmond, GRTC and the local office of planning firm Michael Baker International on the Richmond City Transit Network Plan.  This effort, to develop specific ideas for a better local bus network, will include many opportunities for citizens to consider the choices themselves and share their ideas and priorities.

So if you’re worried about whether your neighborhood will be well served by the future transit system, get ready to join a conversation about exactly that.  Plans for major transit infrastructure are never total transit plans, any more than a main street is a total street network.   The real network planning starts now.