General

Great South Bay Bridge near Babylon, NY,  Photo: Adobe Stock

by Scudder Wagg

Suffolk County is a vast and variegated place covering the eastern two-thirds of Long Island, New York. It includes a range of historic towns like Babylon, Huntington, and Port Jefferson, many of which grew up around the Long Island Rail Road. The western two-thirds of the county is largely developed in an car-oriented suburban pattern.  That area includes about 90% of the county’s 1.5 million people and 520,000 jobs. The eastern third of the county is much more rural and includes the famous Hamptons, summertime retreat for many elite New Yorkers, the well-known Montauk Lighthouse, and protected Pine Barrens Forest.

On Sunday, October 29, Suffolk County Transit will implement a new bus network that we’ve worked with them to design. The redesign process began in mid-2020 with our team working with County staff to analyze the existing system. One key issue that arose in our initial work was the extent of reliability problems across the system due to outdated speed and travel time assumptions. The need to correct for slower speeds, sparked a conversation about investment more in transit to achieve better outcomes in many ways.

In early 2021, we worked with staff, stakeholders and the public in a conversation sparked by our Choices and Concepts Report. This report focused on key trade-offs, like ridership versus coverage, and showed two contrasting concepts for how to redesign the bus network, and assumed 15% more service to account for slower speeds. Based on feedback from the public, stakeholders, and staff, we developed a Draft Plan that prioritized higher ridership, and resulted in some loss of coverage. A key feature of the Draft Plan was much more consistent spans of service, with more evening and weekend service across most key corridors in the county.

While overall response to the Draft Plan was very positive, there were some specific concerns about coverage loss on some roads and the Final Plan was tweaked to add service back to a few areas. To address these coverage needs, and maintain the improved frequency and span , the County has made a commitment to increase overall service levels by nearly 30%, joining agencies like Tri-Met in Portland, Santa Cruz Metro, and Dallas’s DART in expanding service in the post-Covid transit recovery period.

While the increased service is a major boon, it is not enough to create a network of every 15-minute service in the vast areas of moderate density across western Suffolk County. A major focus of the plan, therefore, is to build a series of timed connection points, or pulses, in strategic locations across the county, like Amityville, Central Islip, Patchogue, and Riverhead. You can see those location on the network maps below as they are marked with a clock icon.

You can compare the old and new networks at this cool data viewer that we developed.  Below are static maps of the existing network followed by the new network.  Note the frequencies in the legend, without which these maps make no sense.

Old Network. Line colors indicate frequency. (See legend.)

New network. Line colors indicate frequency (see legend).

With more frequent service on many corridors, and timed connections, the average resident will be able to get to 50% more jobs in 60 minutes and low-income residents see an even bigger gain.

In addition to developing the network plan, we’ve been thrilled to provide continuing support to County staff as they’ve worked to implement this new network. We’ve helped to develop

• New schedules and printed timetables with more reliable travel times and clearer maps and information.
• An updated detailed network map for use at information kiosks across the county.
• A new schematic map (below) showing the overall structure of the network.

We’ve also provided a range of technical support and other materials to help County staff prepare to roll-out the new network and two of our staff will be on-site to help riders learn the new network in the first week.

So, thanks and congratulations to everyone at Suffolk County who worked hard to get this done. We hope that everyone who lives in, works in, or visits Suffolk enjoys the SCT New Network and we encourage locals to stay involved in advocating for more and better transit, as there are plenty of ripe opportunities to increase frequency, span, and coverage with more investment in transit in Suffolk.

Scudder Wagg is a Principal with Jarrett Walker + Associates and the head of our Arlington, Virginia office.

PS by Jarrett:  If you’re wondering why the buses aren’t scheduled to meet the Long Island Rail Road trains, there’s an explainer for that!

Just found this ad through APTA‘s members-only Knowledge Gateway, from Passio Technologies. Ignore the words. Look at the picture.

But that’s not a photo of microtransit.  That is a photo of an elite fixed route commuter bus called Leap that existed in San Francisco for a few months in 2016-17.  I wrote about that project here. You’ll recognize the bus from the video at that link.  I wonder what the folks at Passio were thinking.

Greensboro, North Carolina is a pleasant city of 300,000 with two big universities, located in the Piedmont Triad northeast of Charlotte.  The city has  already adopted a goal to be “car-optional” by 2045.  What kind of public transit would that goal require?  Working for the City (who runs the local transit service through the Greensboro Transit Agency), we at Jarrett Walker and Associates are seeking public input on two alternative conceptual transit networks.  Both conceptual networks have than twice as much service as today.

How would this giant increase in service be funded? In North Carolina, larger counties are allowed to ask the voters for a half-cent sales tax to fund the expansion of transit. Voters in Mecklenburg (Charlotte), Orange (Chapel Hill), Durham, and Wake (Raleigh) have endorsed transit sales taxes in the last 25 years. Our firm was part of the planning process that helped lead to the successful 2016 referendum in Wake County. Here in Guilford County, the potential funding would be split between Greensboro Transit Agency (GTA), High Point, Guilford County, and the regional agency: Piedmont Authority for Regional Transit (PART). The GoBORO Concepts show what could be done with the slices of funding for Greensboro and PART.

The Greensboro News & Record has an article summarizing these Concepts, and it particularly highlights the low level of transit service in Greensboro today.

We often frame transit conversations around a ridership-coverage trade-off, instead of starting with recommendations. That framework can be as relevant in this visionary plan with more resources, as it is in a budget-neutral redesign. We are asking what it means for transit to be an option to cars. Does it mean that:

• Most people have a transit option that is very useful for reaching many places in a reasonable time? Or
• Everyone has a transit option, but it may not be very useful for many people for reaching many places in a reasonable time?

Here’s the existing network.  Remember, the colors indicate frequency, as shown in the legend.  It’s all half-hourly and hourly routes, converging on a downtown transit center.

(Line 73 is a shuttle funded by the University of North Carolina. Route numbers starting with P are the regional transit agency, PART.)

Here’s the Ridership Concept. It has a lot of service focused on frequent corridors in the densest, busiest parts of Greensboro, though it also covers a slightly larger area.

The Coverage Concept focuses instead getting service close to more places, including industrial destinations in the far northeast of the city.   At this service level, we can still afford some very useful frequent service on a few corridors.

As always, these are two ends of a spectrum, and not an either-or choice.

If you’re used to seeing this tradeoff mapped using the low existing service budgets of agencies, as we did in Miami, Atlanta, Cleveland, and many other cities, you are used to seeing painful choices, where the Ridership concept removes low-ridership services that a few people depend on.  This is a different exercise.  We are trying to create a vision of a future network that the people of Greensboro can get behind, so we are asking the community to help us define the balance of ridership and coverage goals that should drive that vision.The large service increases such a tax can fund would have dramatic effects on the usefulness of transit. The Ridership Concept increases median access to jobs within 45 minutes by 140%, and the Coverage Concept increases job access by 86%. Both Concepts also invest in vastly better evening and weekend service. Today, all GTA routes run hourly service on weeknights and weekends. By using these outcomes to demonstrate the effects of investing more in transit, we want to ask the public: “Do you want to invest more in transit?”

If you know anyone in Greensboro, send them to the project website so that they can explore further and provide their input on the Concepts. We also encourage people to read the Choices & Concepts Report that details existing conditions, these Concepts, and the outcomes of service increase and the choices that shape transit networks.

Last week I wrote about the tension that the US national rail carrier Amtrak faces between ridership goals — which require focusing on its best markets — and coverage goals — which require covering the entire country.  I was applying a framework that I developed for urban public transit, but that seemed relevant enough to be useful in discussing Amtrak.  The post attracted a great comment thread with lots of lively disagreement.  So let me briefly respond to the commenters’ main objections.  To be clear, though, I am not an intercity rail expert, so I am intentionally keeping a high altitude on an issue with lots of rich detail.  I may be wrong, and if so I’m sure commenters will say so, with receipts.

To recap:  Amtrak sees its biggest growth opportunities as corridors linking major cities under 500 miles.  (This is also the ideal distance for high-speed rail, but Amtrak’s plan is about providing medium-speed service even as high-speed rail is developed in parallel.)  The company’s new vision document, Amtrak Connects US, is almost entirely about investing in such corridors, serving trips lasting a few hours at most.  But the US also has huge states with small populations, and there, Amtrak runs its multi-day long-haul trains.  Worldwide, only Russia, China, and Canada have longer passenger train lines than the US.  The Chicago-Los Angeles train formed by the Texas Eagle and Sunset Limited, is almost three times longer (in both time and distance) than the longest line in Europe.

Amtrak’s long-haul trains have two roles: they are marketed as a scenic and relaxing way to travel between cities if you’re not in a hurry, but people also use them for access to towns along the way.  (I was thinking of the first market when I carelessly called them “land cruises, and the objections of many rural readers is understandable.)  These services do as well as they do only because they combine both markets , so each kind of user depends on the other for the total package to make sense. You can see the “land cruise” role competing with the local access role in the service design. For example, these trains sometimes follow routings selected for scenery but not population, most obviously in Montana where the Empire Builder‘s far-northerly routing goes through spectacular Glacier National Park but misses all of the state’s largest population centers.

Amtrak’s Empire Builder. Map: Jkan997 at Wikipedia.

Many commenters objected that these can’t be coverage service because their ridership is actually pretty high, so I should be clear that by ridership I always ultimately mean ridership divided by operating cost.  These trains are expensive to run.  I will not delve into the arguments over Amtrak’s accounting for these trains, but it’s easy to see that they can’t be using labor very efficiently.  The many rural stations need staff, all of them serving just one train at a time.  The long runs require crew to rotate in and out of duty on board, so those people need places to sleep.  The frequent delays mean that employees (both on the train and at the stations) often work longer than their scheduled shifts, incurring overtime.  It’s all very labor intensive, compared to short train lines where you turn over passengers quickly and most your staff can go home every night.

Meanwhile, the fares, if you don’t get a private room, are almost zero.  Portland, Oregon to Wisconsin Dells in central Wisconsin, coach, nonrefundable, a month out, is currently showing a fare of only $128, which is about 6.5 cents per mile.  A similar coach seat on the Northeast Regional train from Washington DC to New York with the same features is $31 or 13 cents per mile, twice the cost for a service that almost certainly costs Amtrak less to provide on a per passenger basis.  So the cost of these services lies not just in their inefficiency but in their low per-mile fare, which of course is what keeps them affordable enough to have a lot of use.

So can these services be justified by their ridership?  It depends entirely on whether you count ridership in passengers or passenger-miles.  If you want long-distance services to look good, you count passenger-miles, which values one person going ten miles as much as ten people going one mile.   In the urban transit context, there is a similar suburb-vs city debate.  If you want to make long-haul suburb-to-city service look better than shorter runs within the dense city, you cite passenger-miles, but some inner city folks will object that those long distances are a side effect of poor land use planning and location choices, not an actual benefit.  The benefit lies in how many actual human beings have gotten to where they’re going.  There’s no objective way to decide the question between measuring passengers and measuring passenger-miles.  It comes down to what kinds of trips you value.  A rural-urban divide is unavoidable on that point, because long distances are the defining fact of rural life.

My other question about the “rural lifeline” case for the long-distance trains is: Do these services really match the pattern of rural demand?  Probably not.  If you were optimizing a network for access to rural communities, it wouldn’t look much like these long-haul lines. Instead, it would look like a robust set of links between smaller centers and nearby larger ones.  Most rural intercity travel demand isn’t for the thousand-mile trips that Amtrak makes.  It’s more local, under 200 miles, with smaller centers usually needing access to larger ones that have more jobs, essential services, and onward transportation options.

This, of course, is the role of a robust bus system, working with trains as appropriate.  The major Australian states, for example, have publicly funded intercity bus+rail systems that connect most rural towns into their nearest larger center, with onward connections, bus or rail, to the big city.  This pattern is most likely to connect small towns to the destinations most useful to them.  As commercial intercity bus services wither in the US, there will be an increasing role for state funding and management of similar services.  I’ve beaten this drum before, but right now, in the US, rural transit between towns is mostly provided by county-level agencies with minimal state coordination.  Every county line is a potential barrier for travelers on those services.  At best adjacent counties have to make deals to allow service to flow over county lines to serve the trips people need.  What’s missing is often a network managed and funded by the state, running many of the lines that commercial carriers once ran.  Pieces of that might be rail, but a lot of it is probably logical bus networks that may cross the state but don’t cross half the country.

Does that mean the long-haul trains shouldn’t exist?  Not necessarily.  Personally, I’d love to see more of them.  Overnight trains are having a renaissance in Europe, and this suggests new markets where some useful rural service could be combined with overnights between bigger cities.

But still, Amtrak is right not to focus on these trains as part of a ridership-maximizing strategy.  Right now they are part of how Amtrak meets its competing goal of covering the whole country.  But because this has become an exercise in counting states, and thus Senate votes, the result is such thin coverage that most rural communities don’t have access to it. Even towns with stations may not have service in the right direction, or at a useful time of day, or with the decent on-time performance that comes only from shorter lines.  Most of the lifeline access that the rural US needs is logically provided by robust bus networks, managed by states if they can’t make a profit. By all means let’s keep and celebrate the long-haul trains, and expand them as appropriate.  But let’s not let them distract us from what it would really take to provide liberating transportation to rural America.

Planetizen has done its “100 Most Influential Urbanists” list again.  The voters were readers of Planetizen, who tend to be US urban professionals and advocates.  I’m honored to be there, at #42, along with many, many people that I admire.

You can ask all kinds of questions about this list.  It’s admittedly US-centric, citing folks from other countries based mostly on their influence on the US discourse.   I also wish it didn’t try to compare living people with figures from the past, which is impossible.  Living people are almost all biased in favor of the living.  So I wouldn’t make much of the fact that I’m #42 while Hippodamus of Miletus (498-408 BCE), came in only at #85.  Hippodamus has certainly been more influential, and not just because he had more time.

You can also use the list to start fun arguments about what urbanism is.  Is it a field of study and action, or does it imply an ideology? If the latter, should some of these people — like Thomas Jefferson and Frank Lloyd Wright — be considered anti-urbanists, since their vision of the ideal human settlement was really more rural than urban?  Does anyone whose work affects cities count, and if so, who doesn’t count?

For better or worse, though, people love lists.  If you’re a list-lover, I hope you enjoy this one. Don’t take it as any authority about who’s more important than whom. But if browsing it leads you to discover the work of someone who inspires or intrigues you, it will have done its work.

Planetizen is running a poll to create a list of 100 Most Influential Urbanists.  They last did this in 2017, when I was honored to be #57. They now have a new list of 200 nominees, partly based on public nominations, and want the public to rank them. I’m honored to be shortlisted again.

Personally, I’m not sure don’t how to vote in a survey that mixes figures from throughout (Western) history with people living today.  That mixing feels unfair both ways. People who lived longer ago have had more time for their influence to be felt. On the other hand, the living tend to be strongly biased toward other living people. Do those two unfairnesses cancel each other out? Probably not, except maybe among historians.  The bias toward the living is overwhelming. I’m not really the 57th most influential urbanist ever, because there have been countless influential people, in cultures all around the world, in all the millennia that there have been cities.  So I’d have had an easier time figuring out my vote if I hadn’t had to choose between people I know well and people who lived 2500 years ago. It’s like being asked if I prefer apples or Shakespeare.

Note, too, that the survey is asking how influential people were, not whether that influence was good or bad. The list contains several people whose net impact on urbanism has been negative in my view, including Robert Moses, Le Corbusier, and Elon Musk.  Will they be assessed purely on the magnitude of their influence and not its direction?  Perhaps historians can be called upon for such godlike moral neutrality, but I find myself struggling to give such figures fairly high marks for “influence,” since I would be contributing to their influence by ranking them.

But methodologically questionable as they always are, people love lists.  So whatever method you use to make these mysterious choices, I hope you have fun with it.  Vote here.