General

An excellent comment debate has arisen on my recent post "New Urbanists are from Mars, Transit Planners are from Venus," which addresses the mutual incomprehension between many transit agencies and many urban designers who think they're building transit friendly communities.  Read the whole thing and its comments, but I want to highlight three comments from professionals in particular:

From Alex Block:

Jarrett writes: "I think many New Urbanists have no idea how much conflict they have with transit planning, because in many cases transit planners are excluded so completely from the conversation that the New Urbanist never realizes what a mess has been made for transit."

I also think this fits into a broader critique of New Urbanism in general – in that it originally sought to engage with developers where the action was – in the suburbs – and thus often did so on suburban terms. The signature work products of many New Urbanist firms are often just changes on what remains essentially a drive-able suburban model – albeit one that at least provides for walkability, placemaking, and many other important elements.

In short, it's a evolution of suburban development – an incremental change.

I do think the New Urbanists have done some very good work for core cities insofar as the suburban standards developed by engineers have often been grafted onto existing cities after the fact (and in many cases are now being corrected), but that doesn't get around the fact that the movement's most successful elements are essentially still suburban models.

On the one hand, that's great! As many of the American suburbs are the places that need the most fixing. Providing a walkable environment at least helps mitigate some of the problems.

However, since this model is development-based, therefore the client is the developer and the to the extent that the underlying development model hasn't changed, so too the transportation model of the New Urbanists has not.

Perhaps the growing revival of urban places of all stripes (whether urban, suburban, developed or redeveloped, etc) can help shift the balance a bit – instead of New Urbanism we'll just look at urbansim, which I think would open the doors to transit planning and regional planning in a more fruitful way.

Architect Eric Orozco, also an illustrator on my book, hits a key point about the role of some transit agencies in perpetuating the confusion:

If the "cult of New Urbanism" is as hermetic as it is characterized, it has not done such a good job crafting a unified social theory or keeping its members much aligned to any such thing, much less one. …

The predilection to design pod-like development with self-contained "town centers" stems more from a design vision than a social one. What is to blame is simply poor contextual sensitivity in locating the town center. Not knowing enough about the geometry of supportable transit service and mistaken assumptions about its flexibility. That's an innocent lack of cognizance of the necessities of transit routes, not so much Moses-like hubris.

To be fair to urban designers, this mistaken assumption sometimes stems from the collaboration with the transit agency, which is also studying "optional alignments" on maps, not mentioning the "eternal" costs involved. In fact, some problems stem from the fact that some transit agencies – themselves! – seem not to be prioritizing effective transit service in their planning and are repeating the early mistakes of Calthorpe and folks by conceding more optimal alignments to better serve development. Transit planners, maybe your Venusian priorities need to be communicated forcefully. Martians think you are too easy.

Bingo.  A few transit agencies are very sophisticated about interacting with land use planning, but others are entirely passive and accommodating.  The latter, in my experience, are agencies where staff has internalized the message that what they do isn't very important — a message that local politicians may well be reinforcing. In multimodal agencies, politicians may also be signaling that while rail is important, the access and freedom provided by buses is of no interest to them, so a development's geometry problems for bus service can be ignored.

These agency staffs will respond to transit-hostile development proposals in purely detailed terms.  They will focus on minor adjustments needed to accommodate bus geometry, etc., but are silent on the development's effects on the prospects for transit overall.  Once transit agencies have chosen that submissive role, nobody is in the position to identify the development as transit-hostile — certainly not early enough in the process for the critique to be taken on board.

If your transit agency responds to development proposals in this way, make sure that this is really what the political leadership wants them to do.  Often, the political leadership wants more active engagement from its transit agency but the agency hasn't acquired staff or consultants who know enough about development to engage in that conversation.  If the transit agency won't take on this role, city planning departments need to develop their own expertise in this area.

Finally, commenter Marc reminds us that it's all about education:

Maybe I should elaborate on how much a lack of education may be contributing to this problem: as a former architecture student, I had NO classes on transportation, planning, or even urban design. The program had almost completely devolved into insular, solipsistic endeavors, almost to the point where architecture was little more than fine art. Save for a handful of exceptions, most non-engineering design schools are at least partially trapped in this approach (and the more "avant garde" the worse they are).

Lots of the earliest new urbanists describe how they had to laboriously self-educate themselves on matters of urbanism which their schools completely ignored. Even today you probably will find many NU architects, urban designers, and planners who will say that whatever they learned about transit and urbanism they picked up informally or after graduation, because the architecture-as-art schools simply don't teach these things. You design objects in splendid isolation (never mind the rhetoric about "biophilia" and "connectivity"), and I suspect that isolationist approach might still be carrying over when we see "town centers" or TODs that are strangely disconnected from their surroundings, even if their designers mean well. So injecting some transportation courses into the schools, as well as reducing the preoccupation with isolated art objects, might do a lot for molding designers who can keep transit in the back of their minds when they draw up development ideas.

I'll also concede that sometimes there seems to be a callous disregard for transit modes that are beneath a certain ideal – "streetcars or nothing." But I'm not sure if this is concentrated among new urbanists or even among architects and other designers in general, or whether it's just a widespread upper-class attitude. (Like the situation with buses that Jarrett noted: "I don't take buses and don't see them as all that important, so I don't really care about how well they function.")

Whenever I've lectured in graduate programs — including the one time I taught an entire graduate transit planning course (Berkeley, 2002) — it's been clear that the practical, geometry-based approach to transit that I present in my book is completely unlike what urban planning students are used to getting in school.  They seem to get empirical material about what transit achieves and how it relates to society, but nothing of the geometry of how transit works.  I know people who completed Masters of Urban and Regional Planning degrees with a transportation emphasis and never learned the essentials of transit.  Architecture students, as Marc indicates, are likely to be even more remote from these realities.  So urban designers and planners who want to understand transit have to notice the problem and choose to teach themselves (tip: that's what my book is for!), just as the early New Urbanist architects had to learn urbanism on their own.

What will it take to build respect for transit into our curricula?

I'll leave comments unpublished on this one, but will definitely read them … Remember, consulting logos are about seeming cool, rational, reliable …

… in Portland, which, as you might expect, is a little all-consuming.  Back in a few days. 

It's in southeast Portland.  The "Street Smart Walkscore" is 66, though the "street-dumb" Walkscore is only 58.  Bravo for street-smarts!

Tomorrow's my 50th birthday, and today I just made an accepted offer on a house in Portland.  A bit to digest, so we'll be dark here for a couple of days!  Coming soon: posts on Tel Aviv and on British de-regulation …

I'm at the Arizona Transit Association conference, which is also the annual conference of the Arizona DOT. Interesting factoid from an excellent presentation by CTAA's Scott Bogren:  In the US, when a local initiative or referendum to raise some tax to fund transit is put to the voters, they pass 75% of the time.

Scott is on Twitter as @CTMag1 … Follow for more of the same!

The City Builder's Book Club is in the process of reading Jane Jacobs's seminal 1961 book, the Death and Life of Great American Cities.   For Chapter 18, which deals with transportation, I did a guest post for them designed to kick off their discussion.  It's there, but also here:

Chapter 18: "Erosion of cities or attrition of automobiles?"

The frame of the question is striking: “Erosion of cities or attrition of automobiles?” Both key terms, erosion and attrition, warn us of a gradual process, a process we might not notice as we focus on the shiny revolution of the moment.

They warn us too, that the causes will be multiple and probably untraceable. Jacobs is adamant that the automobile itself didn’t cause sprawl, just as it didn’t cause traffic congestion; the horse-and-buggy era already offered the possibility of both. So, the attrition of automobiles, as it’s achieved, will have many causes and effects. Each needed but compromised revolution – market-based parking, congestion pricing, major transit, complete streets, road diets – will take due credit for this attrition, but it will really happen through individual choices, and of course the liberation from habit that comes only from the turning of generations.

Early on Jacobs attacks Corbusier for failing to run the numbers on the freeways that were supposed to serve the massed apartment towers of his Radiant City (left). The free flowing traffic in his drawings would have been gridlock, and “his vision of skyscrapers in the park degenerates … into skyscrapers in parking lots.” Corbusier’s freeways are “embroidery,” – surely an insult to that delicate craft – adding a mood or symbol of transportation rather than providing actual mobility. Many urban “visionaries” still do that, of course, implying that a new transportation tool will be so cool to ride or drive that nobody will care if it provides the volume and efficiency required, or fits into a network that will get everyone where they need to go.

Like many urbanists, Jacobs is not very interested in how public transit works, even though it is clearly the mode that must grow as the role of cars gradually shrinks. To anyone who values pedestrians, the mode that delivers as pedestrians beyond their walking range surely deserves more thought. But what she does observe is astute.

For example, she notes that forcing surface transit to use one-way couplets is a way of sacrificing transit’s needs to those of cars, and causes a gradual loss in transit’s effectiveness. (You need transit in both directions for it to be useful in either, and moving the two directions of service apart reduces the area that can walk easily to both of them.) One way couplets aren’t universally evil. They are an essential feature of downtown Portland, for example, and work well with its 200 ft blocks. But one-way couplets that are further apart are another story, sometimes serving completely different neighborhoods with their two directions.

Still, Jacobs knew, from watching New York streets, something that transportation planners needed several more decades to establish: in a dense and active city that is rich with mobility options, there will be as much car traffic as the city chooses to make room for. Her story about the closure of the roadway through Washington Square Park – which resulted in traffic simply disappearing – is the story of San Francisco’s Embarcadero Freeway 30 years later, and of other road capacity removals from the expressways of Seoul to the boulevards of Paris. The traffic that used the formerly busy road disappears, through countless private readjustments, so long as there is an abundant grid of alternate paths into which traffic can disperse, and other modes, such as public transit, to which it can convert, and other times of day to which it can shift its travel. (Anthony Downs later coined the term “triple divergence” to describe these three universally available paths of dissipation.)

This is how attrition of automobiles works. And apart from grand gestures like a freeway removal, it is mostly the work of small, steady work: little increases in friction to cars that subtly shift a balance. Jacobs coins the beautiful term attrition tactician – which conjures balding men in dark rooms under bright lamps, engineering the moving of curbs by a few inches each year. Only today are we seeing the emergence of the attrition strategist or even attrition visionary – charismatic figures like New York’s Jeanette Sadik-Khan or Sydney’s Mayor Clover Moore who wage the battle on some scale and do not apologize for their feared traffic impacts, nor the imagined devastation to businesses that will result if some people shift to public transit or bicycles.

An amazing story from Norfolk, Virginia:

NORFOLK, Va. — Hampton Roads Transit is dropping a trial bus service to the Norfolk International Airport due to low ridership.

The agency said Thursday that the pilot program will make its last runs on April 14. The last bus will leave the airport at 11 p.m.

The hourly service began Feb. 5 and originally was to run for a month. The agency says it extended the service a month but ridership remained weak.

Hampton Roads Transit president and CEO William Harrell says the airport service was a good idea but it needs some work.

I have no basis for an informed opinion about the Norfolk airport service, but I would never recommend trying any transit service for a month, or even two.  Any transit service needs time to find its market.   My usual advice is that you shouldn't try an experimental service unless you're prepared to run it for a year, not only so that it can build ridership but also so that you can see how its performance varies with the seasons.  

When it comes to larger network redesigns, in which many route changes occur at once, the message for elected officials is even more challenging.  Redesigns are simply not reversible.  They have to run a full year before you can really assess them fairly, and by then, so many people are used to the new patterns of service that reverting to the old ones would be as disruptive as the intial restructuring was.  If an elected official needs to believe that a restructuring can be done "experimentally," I advise them to vote against it.  Obviously, a year after a restructuring, you'll tinker with things based on the ridership, and even sooner you may have to do small adjustments to handle running time or overloading problems. You'll make larger improvements after you've run the redesign for a year.  But there's no going back to where you were, and in a good redesign, after a year, few people want to.

If you're new to this blog, may I suggest

• the welcome and manifesto
• the friendly introduction to my book
• or browse "Stuff You Need to Know" in column 3.

What's shocking about this idea?

Nothing.  We've had a decade of people proposing to garden every sun-facing surface in the city, ideas I often support.  So it would be astonishing if doing it to bus roofs had not been proposed.  

What's astonishing is that when Marco Castro Cosio proposed it, calling it Bus Roots”, the result was this:

[Marco Castro] Cosio's “Bus Roots” idea has garnered loads of praise, earning the runner-up spot in Designwala's 2010 urban-design competition and landing in 2011's Festival of Ideas for the New City, an event in NYC meant to “harness the power of the creative community to imagine the future city and explore the ideas destined to shape it.”

Publications and websites from France, Japan, Canada, Germany and elsewhere have similarly swallowed Bus Roots uncritically, publishing Photoshopped images from Cosio's thesis that suggest these buses could be out there right now, carrying passengers. The most recent offender is Wake Up World, which ran with this Feb. 27 headline: “Gardens Flourish on Top of City Busses.” Three problems: “Gardens” should be singular, because there's only one garden, a small prototype atop the BioBus that's growing sedum. “Flourish” is much too enthusiastic a verb for what the sedum is doing; the ornamental stonecrop basically sits there at ankle height doing nothing. …"

You can find other misleading stories here, here and here.

That's from today's Atlantic story by John Metalfe.  And "misleading" is right, becuase this idea has serious problems of physics, which Metcalfe patiently explains.  How much more fossil fuel do you want to burn (and greenhouse gases do you want to emit) to haul hundreds of water-heavy gardens around your city, all located so that most people will never see them?

It would be nice to imagine a day when you can't win urban design prizes for things that are physically or geometrically impossible.  Violations of the laws of physics often look inspiring.  That's why we have the image of heaven as built on clouds, an idea that continues through many imagined cloud cities and shows up as Avatar's airborne land formations.  Those formations may deserve a film design prize, but if you called them landscape or urban design, some check against the facts of physics would be in order. 

But there's a also a humanistic problem issue with gardening the bus roof.  Like bus wraps, it implies that public transit design shouldn't be about public transit customers.  Riders, like most of the public, would never enjoy Cosio's roof, but they would certain experience the sensation of heaviness that comes from being under all that weight. 

As Metcalfe points out, there's actually a lot of important stuff on a bus roof, but there's also a question of who the design should be serving.  I would like to see much more transparency in vehicles, extending to the roof as you see on tourbuses, so that we can break down this sense that the bus is box in which you must be stored for transportation.  My goal is that you should be able to be on a bus while also still being on the street, engaged with the whole urban environment.  For more on that, see Chapter 15 of Human Transit. 

Hat Tip: Michael Setty 

Just a few paragraphs at the end of an excellent article by Brian Wheeler.