General

Test page for Chapter 8 detail.

This isn't about transit, but it's about loving the city.  For the holiday weekend, some selections from the plywood that still covers storefronts broken in Vancouver's 2011 Stanley Cup Riot. These are from the Chapters bookstore at Robson & Howe.

"Previous generations found freedom and flexibility through the car.  But Generation Ys find their freedom and flexibility by staying connected to their friends, family and workplaces through the various information devices – like their laptops, or iphones.

"They can stay connected on a bus or a train. They can bring the office with them. They can bring their study with them. They can bring their friends with them. They can't if they're driving."

— Peter Newman, Curtin University, Perth, Australia, quoted in the West Australian

Joshua Arbury of Auckland Transport Blog ruminates further.

“Awesome!  Clear and challenging!”

“Well done!  Would like to see this course offering annually, widely advertised to municipal staffs.”

“Excellent instructor.  A lot of information with a high degree of clarity.”

On the East Coast? Come to our two-day course in NYC February 6&7, 2014!

 “Transit Network Design: an Interactive Course” is designed to give anyone a grasp of how network design works, so that they can form more confident and resilient opinions about transit proposals.  Any institution or organisation can sponsor the course.  So far, it has been offered through universities, professional organisations, and transit authorities. 

Much professional training in transit will teach you about quantifying demand, understanding statistics about what transit achieves, studying the features of the various transit technologies, and seeing how transit relates to other goals for governments, individuals, and businesses.  All that is valuable, but there’s a piece missing: Few people get hands-on experience working with transit as a tool, understanding how to use this tool to build a transit network. Learning to think creatively with these tools is the essence of transit planning.

I believe in teaching transit planning the way you’d teach carpentry.  A carpentry class might involve a lecture about the physical structure of wood and how to not kill yourself with a saw, but after that, you’ll only learn carpentry by doing it. 

The course is a built around a series of exercises where students work together to design transit networks for a fictional city, based on its geography and a set of cost limitations.  The exercises let students learn the basic tools and materials by actually working with them to develop creative solutions to a series of planning problems. 

Issues covered include network design, frequency, right-of-way, basic operations costing, and interactions with urban form.   This course is well suited for professionals, students, community leaders and local government staff. 

The course is done in intensive format covering one or two days. Longer versions can be developed on request. About 60% of class time is in interactive exercises, while most of the rest consists of group discussion based on the results of the interactive work. 

 What Students Have Said

“Jarrett Walker’s two day transit network design class explores the intricacy of designing transit networks, touching on elements ranging from maximizing the utility of a strained, underfunded bus system to planning high capacity bus and rail lines.  This is the kind of modern design that transit agencies should be using to attract new ridership.”  — Mike Cechvala

 “The actual design of the games was fascinating and would be a very useful exercise for any transit system to employ in a variety of situations. — Christopher MacKechnie, publictransport.about.com

“The game format … was great, and it really spurred us to focus on the planning process and understanding the tradeoffs that we were making, and not “force” specific outcomes.”

Recent Sessions

• Simon Fraser University.  Surrey, British Columbia.  Two-day session marketed to the public as part of City Program (continuing education).  June 2011.

• Licensed Professional Planners Association of Nova Scotia, in association with Halifax Regional Municipality and Dalhousie University.  Halifax, Nova Scotia.  One-day session marketed to mainly to municipal planning staffs.  June 2011.
• TransLink (public transit agency).  Vancouver, British Columbia.  Two-day session for internal staff, mostly not transit planners but in adjacent fields including operations and marketing.  June 2011.

• BC Transit (public transit agency).  Victoria, British Columbia.  Two-day session for internal staff, mostly not transit planners but in adjacent fields including operations and marketing.  September 2011.
• Sound Transit (public transit agency).  Seattle, Washington.  One-day session for internal staff, mostly not transit planners but in adjacent fields including operations and marketing.  December 2011. 

• University of Technology, Sydney.  Sydney, Australia.  Two-day version for a mix of graduate students and professionals in land use planning and local government.  March 2012 and again in October 2012.

• MAPA COG (regional planning agency).  Omaha, Nebraska.  One-day session of leading stakeholders of all kinds, in the context of the beginning of a regional transit planning effort.   September 2012.

If your organisation or institution is interested in offering the course, contact me using the email button under my photo! –>

[Photos: Heather Ternoway, Dalhousie University, Halifax]

This post has been removed, as it had served its purpose.

Brewing a summary piece on the whole connection-activated plaza issue, but I may need to get past the jetlag first.  Meanwhile:

• I really love the spirit of the Bay Area's new Transit & Trails service.  As a transit expert who's also an amateur botanist and fierce lover of wilderness, I've always been frustrated by the gaps between transit stations and major trailheads.  This is one of the few aspects of public transit in Sydney that works brilliantly well, even yielding reveries such as this. 
• Nathan Wessel is fundraising to promote his Cincinnati Frequent Network Map and guide.
• From DePaul University's Chaddick Institute for Metropolitan Development comes an interesting study on how portable electronic technology is affecting transportation choices.  The institute's Caitlin Allen wrote, in an email to me: "To our knowledge, our data set is the only one of its kind in the country.  The data confirms that transportation environments that Baby Boomers avoided have become more attractive to Gen Y or Millennials because they can 'privatize' their space with tech use."  PDF:  Download Privacy Invades Public Space, The Growing Use of Portable Electronic Technology…2011

Thanks to everyone who responded to my search for connection-activated public squares.  There's a lot to sort through there, and it may take a few days.

Meanwhile, I'm about to get on a plane from Sydney to San Francisco.  I'll be there through the end of March, then on to Vancouver. 

In solidarity with the people of Christchurch, New Zealand, I offer these memories of their beautiful city and its people, over on the personal blog.  If you've never been there, it may help you visualize.

Michael Todd has a disappointing article in Miller McCune arguing that High Speed Rail projects are likely to go over budget.  His justification is, well, that they're large capital projects, and large capital projects often go over budget.  Yes, they do.  But this isn't an argument against high speed rail or any other major capital project.  It's an argument for better approaches to cost estimation and control. 

Nowhere does Todd justify the implication that high speed rail projects are at greater risk of cost overrun than, say, huge urban freeway tunnels such as Boston's Big Dig, Sydney's Cross-City Tunnel, or the likely tunnel in downtown Seattle's future.

But I'm grateful to Todd for linking to a very useful 2008 article by Ryan Blitstein on the work of Danish economist Bent Flyvbjerg.  Read it.  It's a good overview of Flyvbjerg's important work on cost overruns and strategies for predicting them.  For more, see Flyvbjerg's book Megaprojects and Risk.   

Note, by the way, that the problem of cost overruns is conceptually separate from questions about why capital costs, predicted or not, are so high. 

Aaron Renn at the Urbanophile has an especially fine piece on innovation, and the reasons it's hard to cultivate. 

If we consider the parable of the sower, we tend to think that the problem of innovation is not enough seeds. But the true big problem is not enough good ground. Every city and organization I know has tons of seeds raining down on them every day. I’m constantly amazed at the incredible innovative thinking and ideas that I come across in practically every city I visit. The problem is that most of those seeds are landing on the rocks or in the weeds.

But as a consultant, I was a little surprised by this:

Consultants … exist outside the org chart. To steal a phrase, they stand behind a “veil of ignorance” about their status in the hierarchy. Consultants take great pains to maintain this, which is one reason why consultants have such nebulous, generic titles. …

In fact, I hate to say this, but a lot of times all consultants do is talk to middle managers at the client and document up what they’re told for higher level consumption. That’s one reason middle management particularly despises consultants.

True, but this can also be why middle management sometimes loves consultants.  When I start exploring a client agency's issues, I sometimes find that some mid-ranking planners have already figured out what needs to be done, but aren't able to get their insight up through the layers to the executives.  My role is sometimes to be that conduit.  Obviously, I don't pass on ideas that I don't think make sense.  I'm expected to reach my own professional judgment about the best way to reach the agency's goals, and I do.  But if that judgment happens to match what certain mid-level staff already know, and sometimes it does, then yes, in presenting my recommendations to the executive I'm also presenting theirs. 

Obviously, the people above them who were blocking those ideas may not appreciate it, but this is why "middle management" is a relative and nebulous term, not unlike "middle class."