General

Rhonda — Click here to pay by credit card — Jarrett

If you've arrived from the link in today's article in the New Zealand Herald, welcome!  The best introduction to my own thinking on the Auckland network redesign, with remarkable maps, is here.  Meanwhile, the post below is a big-picture argument about the set of choices that the redesign proposes, and the relationships among them …

Charles Blow in the NYT has a piece today arguing that Rosa Parks was not the meek figure of legend but something of a firebrand, "as much Malcolm X as she is Martin Luther King Jr."  Cap'n Transit thought this might be a good time to ask, "What happened to Montgomery's bus system?"  He found the answer in a remarkable 13-year old piece in the Nation, by JoAnn Wypijewski:

From 1977 to 1999 a white … Republican named Emory Folmar was mayor, and he made the bus system scream. … Advertising income disappeared after Folmar tried to bar an anti-death penalty ad and then decided that if he couldn't discriminate among advertisers he wouldn't have any at all. By the fortieth anniversary of the bus boycott, service had been cut by 70 percent and fares had doubled, to $1.50. Student and old-age discounts were eliminated. In 1996 midday service stopped. Finally, in 1997, the City Council said there just weren't enough riders or revenue; the traditional system of big buses and fixed routes was finished. 

However, things have clearly bounced back this piece was written in 2000.  Today Montgomery has a simple, radial fixed route system of 16 routes, running at headways ranging from 30 to 60 minutes with some evidence of a downtown pulse.  It's not much service in the context of a metro area of over 350,000 — especially one where a state capitol and university.  But you start where you are, or where you retreated to.  

The Newport Game Board is slightly large for some email accounts, so it can be downloaded here:

Download GAME BOARD

What advice would you give to this emailer? I'm not especially up to date on development approval processes, and have seen none that really capture the crucial Be on the Way issue:

I was wondering whether you were aware of any municipalities who require a 'transit impact study' or something like it on new residential construction?

Here in Halifax (and I'm sure this is very common), an applicant must do a traffic impact study for any new development to demonstrate that the existing road network won't be wrecked by their plans. However, it seems to me that identifying and labelling transit-unserviceable projects during their approvals process would be a good thing. As you say, choices can be made, and they can still be built, but the fact that they can never reasonably be serviced by public transit should be labelled during the decision-making process.

Are you aware of any examples of this being required during rezoning/development approvals processes? 

Register and pay here using PayPal for the New York session of the Interactive Course in Network Design, on Feb 6-7, 2014.  Just click the drop-down menu to select any applicable discount.  (If you select “5 or more” you must select a quantity of 5 or more for this transaction; this is the group discount.

One more thing:  Make sure we have the registrant’s name, affiliation, and email, especially if this is different from the purchaser’s.  On the page where you submit your credit card, there’s a place to give us this info, if you haven’t already emailed it to us.  

Register and pay here using PayPal for the Washington DC session of the Interactive Course in Network Design. Just click the drop-down menu to select your discount (discounts are explained here). Then, click Buy Now.

This morning, Andrew Sullivan, whom I usually find intellectually engaging, featured a confused article about transit productivity from Eric Morris on the Freakonomics blog.  It's the old line about how because buses are often empty, they're not a very efficient transit mode.  I first rebutted it three years ago and the rebuttal hasn't changed at all.

I quickly wrote the letter below. But the big announcement is after the letter!

Eric Morris on the Freakonomics blog has fallen into the familiar trap …

To put my remarks in context: I’ve been a transit network design consultant for 20 years, and am also the author of the blog HumanTransit.org and the book Human Transit (Island Press, 2011) which rebuts many of the false assumptions in this article.

Morris's argument rests on the false assumption is that transit agencies are all trying to maximize ridership as their overriding objective.

In 20 years as a transit network design consultant working across North America, Australia, and New Zealand, I’ve never encountered a transit agency that pursues a ridership goal as its overriding purpose. Transit agencies are always required to provide large amounts of service despite predictably low ridership, for reasons including basic access for seniors and the disabled and the perception that service should be delivered “equitably.” While equitable is a slippery word that means different things to different people, its effect is to justify service spread all over an urban region, even into areas where ridership is inevitably low (usually due to a combination of low density and street networks that discourage walking).

In my own work, I refer to these predictably low-ridership servics as coverage services because they are tied to a coverage goal that conflicts with a goal of maximum ridership. Typically the coverage goal is stated in the form “__% of residents and jobs shall be within ___ feet (or meters) of transit.” This goal requires service to be spread out over areas where prospects for ridership are poor. I then encourage transit agency boards (or Ministers) to think consciously about what how their service resources should be divided between ridership goals and coverage goals.

If this method ever becomes common, it will be possible assess bus services that are trying to achieve high ridership. Only that universe of services is relevant to discussions about whether bus services provide ridership effectively.

A more extensive geometry-based discussion of exactly this issue, and how it needs to be managed in policy thinking is in Chapter 10 of my book Human Transit.

Regards …

The big announcement: I'm not going to do this much anymore.  Here is my response, but hey, regular readers, any of you could have written this, right?   After all, the rebuttal has been on this site for three years!  Could everyone please bookmark that, or bookmark this, and just send a link whenever you see this same argument?  Would save us all much time.  Thanks!

Still jetlagged from four absurdly busy weeks working in Australia and New Zealand, getting back just in time to vote in Oregon today.  

As I've said on Twitter several times, eligible US voters who do not vote today have no right to complain about anything on my blog in the future.  Declining to vote is a rejection of your democratic rights and an expression of consent toward those who would prefer a more oppressive state.  It is also an expression of contempt toward those who have made sacrifices to protect democratic rights.

In short, I agree with Andrew Sullivan that this is a "secular sacred day."

I'm not telling you who or what to vote for, of course, nor telling you how I voted.  

For a helpful rundown of US state and local ballot measures that will affect public transit mobility, see here, a the Overhead Wire.  The Transport Politic looks like it's also setting up to cover transportation issues being voted on nationwide.

More soon.