General

The City Builder's Book Club is about to begin reading Jane Jacobs's seminal 1961 book, the Death and Life of Great American Cities.   

This is one of the few books that Absolutely Everyone Who Thinks About Cities Has Read, so if you haven't read it, (a) don't tell anyone, not even your partner or priest or dog, and (b) take this opportunity to read the book as commentary and discussion appears on the Book Club Blog, chapter by chapter. I'll be providing the opening commentary on Chapter 18, the main chapter on transportation.

Yes, I know, you lazy students can also just read the blog and forget reading the book (much as journalists prefer to interview me rather than read my book!) but believe me, you'll be the poorer for it.  Jacobs is one of the most readable writers ever on city planning, and even those who disagree her tend to acknowledge her brilliance as an observer of city life.

Tim Cavanaugh at Reason.com attacks me this morning for this post, in which I argued that redundancy in transit networks (as hailed by the Economist in their discussion of my book) often comes at the expense of overall service quantity and thus your ability to get where you're going:

… Walker speaks up on his blog, to explain that when he talks about reliability, he doesn’t mean you should actually let people provide a variety of approaches for taking customers where they want to go: 

"Massive redundancy" may be fine if you're a megacity, though even there, its effectiveness may be a feature of the peak that doesn't translate to the rest of the day.  Anywhere else, services need to work together as a network.  Even in London, New York, Paris, Hong Kong and Berlin, that's really what's happening. 

This is what happens when your mind is full of smart networks and transit-oriented growth. The proper word here is not “redundancy” but “competition.” To the owner of a taxi medallion or a member of the Transport Workers Union, minibuses, gypsy cabs, rolling chairs and pedicabs are all redundant, because you’re already providing all the service a customer could legitimately need. If some abuelita is stuck in the rain for 45 minutes waiting to make one of your smart connections, well, that just shows you need more money so the system can be more efficiently planned. 

Note the use of "competition" not as an idea but just as a mantra.  This last paragraph is so incoherent that I'm not even sure what I'm being accused of, so let me just clarify the question of competition.

The problem with encouraging multiple transit products to compete for the customer along the same path of travel is that transit's usefulness lies heavily in frequency (thus preventing 45 minute connections, for example), and frequency is an expensive resource that must be concentrated so that it can be made abundant.  To introduce competition among transit services going the same way is to undermine frequency — as in the increasingly discredited British model where people were required to let Joe's Red Bus go by because their ticket was good only on Jim's Blue Bus.   Earth to competition fantasists: Outside of the peak commute, people just want to get where they're going now, but they want this throughout the day, which means they want frequency.  Abundant frequency arises from concentrating and organizing a single pattern of service, not encouraging lots of different services to run on top of each other.

I have never opposed private sector competition.  There's obviously nothing wrong with taxis, pedicabs, etc competing with each other, and even competing with transit.  On the peak commute, transit is usually overcrowded and can benefit from others taking up some of the load (because peak transit service is so expensive).  But outside the peak commute, where frequency matters, nothing can compete with transit at its price point, once it's built up sufficient frequency.  Taxis and pedicabs and autorickshaws can still have a role (a) at other price-points and (b) in places where the geography prevents transit from offering attractive service.

Still, we need to be more critical of cases where we are spending public transit dollars on multiple services that compete with each other instead of adding up to the greatest possible mobility.  Competition fantasists imagine that when Joe's Red Bus and Jim's Blue Bus run on the same route, the customer is being empowered.  Actually, she's just being obstructed, because in most cases, what she wants is any bus, now.

“[Seattle's] snow and ice response plan is built around getting people to use public transportation.  Given our geography here, we would have to have 100 trucks [to cover the whole city], and at $150,000 to $200,000 a truck, that would be a foolish waste of money because they would sit most of the time. And they would sit for five years because it doesn’t snow that often. So we go with what we have.”

 – Seattle Director of Street Maintenance Steve Pratt

That's from a terrific (and funny) Atlantic article on snow removal, by Emily Badger.  (Seattle has only 30 snowplows in a city that passes some winters with no snow at all, and averages only 7 inches of snow per year.  It also has a traumatic memory of serious blizzards in 2008 and 2010, which I believe caused the coinage of the now-banal term snowpocalypse.)

Today at Slate.com, Tom Vanderbilt, author of How We Drive, reviews my book Human Transit.  It's a friendly review and I much appreciate it.  Followup thoughts on the review in a day or two.  Meanwhile, for the record, I do believe in pleasure!  

I doubt Sydney's notorious talk-radio host Alan Jones would have asked me such polite questions, but he was away that day.  Here's the interview of me on Sydney's 2GB drive-time, by Andrew Moore.  Download MP3.

Much of transit's complexity arises from the difficulty of saying and remembering when it runs.  Route maps can be made pretty simple, but most urban North Americans (and Australians) have been taught that schedules are intrinsically complicated.  You either bypass them using trip planners or realtime information, or learn to enjoy wading through vast tables of times glittering with footnotes ("deviates via Hilltop Community Center on Thursdays").

Schedules are intrinsically complicated if running times change throughout the day, as is the case in many transit services that are stuck in mixed traffic.  But when you have an exclusive right of way, like a busway or separated train track, and you want the network to be simple, you can achieve beautiful repeating patterns like, well, this … (click to sharpen)

It's a slice of this new diagram of the entire Swiss railway network, showing the repeating hourly patterns on which the entire network runs.   [Download PDF]    The notation takes a while to figure out, but there's a legend in English, French, and German that will talk you through it with typical Swiss clarity.  But for example, suppose you're at Grenchen Süd on the left side of the image, and you take an eastbound local train (the black line that runs across the middle of the image).  It arrives Grenchen Sud at :30 after every hour departs a minute later.  You'll then stop at Solothurn West at :42 after the hour and arrive Solothurn at :44.  Stay on the train and you'll get to Niederbipp, but if you want to go to Wiedlisbach, on the local line north out of Solothurn, you'll have a nice connection.  That train leaves at :48, only four minutes after you arrive.

This regular pattern happens every hour, all day, every day, and similar patterns cover the entire country.  The whole rail network is an interconnected structure of times, not just lines, with schedules built around each other to optimize connections as much as possible.  The core enabling idea is the regular hourly pattern of almost everything. That's what assures that (a) you can remember the schedule and use it regardless of when you decide to travel and (b) the connection timing is the same regardless of which trip you're on.

Download the full map if you dare.  The legend itself is a work of art.  I stared at it happily for half an hour, but I'm a fallen geek.  A true geek could kill an afternoon.  

And of course, the Swiss do the same thing at the urban transit scale.   Here you can download a similar map for the Zurich S-Bahn. (Legend only in German, but it's similar to the main map, which has English.)

No, I'm not saying that all public information should look like this, only that regular patterns in a timetable are a radical act of simplification, one that suddenly makes the whole day's service graspable in a couple of numbers.  Where these regular patterns are possible, they're worth fighting for.

It will be quiet here over the holidays, as I get (semi-)(re-)settled in Portland.  Back just after New Years, if not sooner.  

Michael Pal has launched a new blog about his experiences as a transit manager.  In a recent post, he talks about the process of dealing with complaints about bus driver behavior, especially things that can be perceived as courtesy or the lack of it.

Here's Pal's list of "clearly unacceptable behaviors"

1. Cursing and/or using profane vulgar language/gestures at customers, even if provoked.
2. Raising voice / screaming at customer
3. Ignoring reasonable requests from customers for directions/information
4. Failure to provide explanations for delays/disruptions if known
5. Failure to assist when required
6. Speaking to the customer in a dismissive fashion
7. Prejudging a customer based on past experiences
8. Treating customers differently based on sex/race/physical disabilities
9. Putting schedule before service

While I would agree that there's no excuse for items 1, 2, 7 or 8, a great deal of professional driver behavior can be interpreted by someone as including one of these faults.  If you are used to an intimate bus service where the driver knows your name and leaves the seat to help you carry your groceries, then you're used to a low-ridership, low-speed, low-efficiency service.  If you then get on a Bus Rapid Transit vehicle with 100 passengers on board an expect the same service from the driver, you're going to be disappointed.  You might even accuse her of "failing to assist" or "putting schedule before service."  And if you lean over her shoulder and harague her when she's trying to get 100 people to their destinations, she might eventually do something that you perceive as "speaking to you in a dismissive fashion."

What's more, the world is full of people who are angry at their parents, their employer, their landlord, their cellphone, the prospect of death, Microsoft, their government, their partner, their aching back, Wall Street, God, or the weather.  In all these cases, the anger can't be fully expressed at its true object, so people displace, becoming irritable with others who somehow remind them (and the resemblence can be vanishingly faint) of the true object of their anger.  If you're angry at "authority," for example, well, you're going to beat up on a lot of decent people who happen to be in charge of something — including a bus driver.

The driver of busy, crowded bus services needs an extraordinary personality — able to be calm and focused even as they deal with danger and aggression all around them.   They need to be totally attentive to their driving even as all kinds of needy egos surge and roil in a small space behind their backs.  Drivers who are dealing with their own rage really just can't do this and shouldn't be driving — either a bus or a private car.  I've seen bus drivers snap — suddenly begin screaming obscenities until passengers either flee or cower in silence.  Plenty of people don't have the right personality for the job, and should be doing something else.  Many, too, have the right personality for driving but not for customer service; they should be driving services that require less customer contact, like rail or Bus Rapid Transit. 

If your bus driver starts screaming obscenities, or driving aggressively, report him.  But forgive your bus driver for the fact that his job is to do something efficiently, as part of a larger network, especially if he's driving a big bus serving lots of passengers.  If you fixate on the fact that he didn't smile as you expected, or that he couldn't answer you question while he was focused on everyone's safety, you'll beat up on a lot of bus drivers, and their managers, unfairly.  And when you make a job more unpleasant, you make it harder to get good people to do it.

Need a handy cartoon to remind people that correlation is not causation?  Here you go, from Bloomberg's Vali Chandrisakran via Andrew Sullivan.

Whenever I point out that low density areas tend to have low ridership potential regardless of the service offered — as I do at length in Chapter 10 of Human Transit — someone always asks: "But what if we used flex routes or 'demand-reponsive transport''?'

I've added a page — referenced in the book — that tries to answer that question.  It's here.