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.

This post will be on top of the blog for a while. New material appears beneath it.

I'm told the book is now in warehouses in both the US and Australia, ready to ship!  See the top of the next column for all the links —>

We're now planning some events around the book, including, so far:

— Vancouver, Simon Fraser University downtown, Jan. 17, evening.

— Los Angeles, UCLA Lewis Center, Jan 19, 6-8 pm.

— Washington DC.  National Building Museum, Feb. 9.

We welcome other suggestions for events, ideally fitting my travel schedule (which is evolving in the third column, under my photo).  The email link is there as well!

My friend and former colleague Julie Anne Genter, an expert in sustainable transport policy, won a seat in the New Zealand parliament on Saturday, with the Green Party. 

Raised in Southern California, Julie will be the first US-NZ dual citizen to sit in the New Zealand parliament.  More important, she has done superb work for our firm in sustainable transport policy across Australia and New Zealand, including as a leading exponent of Donald Shoup's work on parking pricing.  (I featured one of her early videos on this topic here.) 

While it appears she will be sitting in opposition, I know she'll be doing great work for New Zealand and beyond.

Here you can download the flyer promoting Human Transit, the book.

North America:  Download Island Press flyer here:   Download Island Flyer Human Transit

Australia/NZ (with discount!): NewSouth flyer can be downloaded here:  Download Human Transit flyer(2)

From Rob, who appears to have long experience in the transit business:

I've often wished for a Steve Jobs of transit. Someone with a vision of how it would work if "it just worked", and the dedication to make it so. Most transit is a huge compromise in service design, operating performance and customer communications, and its biggest challenge often is the willingness of its users and fans to overlook those compromises uncritically. We accept too much that we shouldn't.

I've known people I think are like Steve Jobs; maybe not as confident or charismatic, but systems-oriented with a keen awareness of how customers experience is affected by how transit works – and I find they are rarely in charge. We put people in charge who know about management and organizations, not the ones who have a laser focus on how to produce a product that delights the customer, or at worst works as expected without [the customer] thinking too hard about it.

This is not a critique of the organizational and management expertise that transit also needs.  Steve Jobs had great managers without whom his work would have been impossible.  The real challenge is to form mutually respectful partnerships — and ideally friendships — between great organization managers and creative, strategic thinkers like Jobs.   The key to building these winning partnerships is to accept that almost nobody is a really great manager and a really great creative strategist.  The two skills can fit together like lock and key, but only if they choose not to be intimidated by each other.  You have to have the confidence that your partner, by exercising his skills, isn't diminishing your very different skills.  In fact, he's implicitly praising them.

These partnerships happen now and then in city planning, and often in consulting on the planning side.  But is your transit agency even looking for them?  Some are.

The table of contents is now online here! The complete introduction is here.

The book will be released by Island Press in November or December 2011.  For more or to preorder, see Island Press or Amazon, or my hometown favorite, Powell’s.  (If you use Powell’s, be sure to chide them for filing it in the Automotive section!)

As those pages are closed to comments, feel free to comment below.

The content of this post has been moved to here.

Below is the table of contents of my forthcoming book Human Transit: How clearer thinking about public transit can enrich our communities and our lives.

The book will be released by Island Press in November or December 2011.  For more or to preorder, see Island Press or Amazon, or my hometown favorite, Powell’s.

Human Transit
Jarrett Walker
Island Press, 2011.

Table of Contents

Introduction

The complete introduction is available online here.

1.  What Transit is, and Does

This chapter defines transit and its role in the city compared to other transport modes, and proposes the concept of personal mobility, a measurable freedom, as transit’s most fundamental product.

2.  What Makes Transit Useful?  Seven Demands and How Transit Serves Them

A customer’s expectations of transit can be boiled down to seven demands:

1. It takes me where I want to go.
2. It takes me when I want to go.
3. It’s a good use of my time.
4. It’s a good use of my money.
5. It respects me.
6. I can trust it.
7. It gives me freedom to change my plans.

This chapter defines the main elements of the transit product (speed, frequency, span, reliability, etc.) and explains how each serves those various demands.

3.  Five Paths to Confusion

An introduction to five of the most common conceptual mistakes in transit planning: map-reading errors, motorist’s errors, box errors, polarization errors, and choosing words with unfortunate connotations.

4.  Lines, Loops, and Longing

The most basic geometric concepts in transit.  Should transit lines be I-shaped or U-shaped?  And why do people get so excited about loops?

5.  Touching the City: Stops and Stations

How far apart should transit stops be?   This chapter explores why this technical-sounding question is fundamental to almost everything you care about.

6.  Peak or All Day?

Does your transit agency’s thinking begin with the peak commute, or with an all-day pattern of service?  Why this matters.

7.  Frequency is Freedom

Frequency is oddly invisible to the non-rider, yet it’s sits at the core of almost all transit outcomes.  This chapter explores the urgent challenge of making frequency visible, in marketing, planning, and policy making.

8.  The Obstacle Course: Speed, Delay, and Reliability

Transit speed is mostly the absence of delay.  This chapter surveys the delay types, explains how planners address them, and how we might think more clearly about them in making policy.

9.  Density Distractions

This chapter confonts recent claims that development density is not as important to transit as we thought, and sorts through some of the confusing ways density can be measured.  Transit can do good work at many density levels, but density — properly measured — is still fundamental to transit outcomes.

10.  Ridership or Coverage:  The Challenge of Service Allocation

Every city or region has some areas where transit demand is high and others where it’s lower.  How can transit agencies reach consensus on how to apportion service among these areas?

11.  Can Fares be Fair?

An exploration of the hard choices around fares, and how smartcards are resolving some but heightening others.  Can fares be “fair”?  Are you sure you want them to be?

12.  Connections or Complexity?

Nobody likes to get off one transit vehicle and get on another — an act known as transferring, changing, or connecting.  This chapter explains why connections are inseparable from many other things we value, including frequency and simplicity.

13.  From Connections to Networks, to Places

If we accept the need for connections (also called transfers), what does this mean for design?  This chapter explores the common types of network structure that arise from this problem, and then considers how connection points can galvanize great urban places.

14.  Be on the Way!  Transit Implications of Location Choice

Whenever you choose a location, such as for your home or business, you largely determine what transit can do for you.  When cities and developers decide where to build things, they profoundly impact the potential for transit in the city as a whole.  This chapter explores how to make these decisions more consciously, as individuals, organizations, governments, and developers.  The physical layout of a community or region is an overwhelming factor in determining how relevant transit can be, so in that sense, this is the most important chapter in the book.

15.  On the Boulevard

The car-oriented suburban boulevard has much more transit potential than it seems.  This chapter explores the special role transit can play in healing the most troublesome features of fast boulevards, and re-creating them as humane and functional places.  The chapter ends with a vision of North America’s most boulevard-based city, Los Angeles, in a future when walking, cycling, and transit all have adequate space alongside the private car.  It’s a nice place, and one where you can be sure of getting to a meeting on time.

16.  Take the Long View

Clearly, the total planning problem requires synthesizing land planning and transport planning, including transit.  It’s pointless to try to tear down the walls that separate these professions from each other, because each has unique expertise that must be valued.  Instead, the key is to create clear conversations at the points where the professions intersect, and for each to provide just the right tools to support and inform the other’s work.

Epilogue: Geometry, Choices, Freedom

A summation of the book’s key themes.