General

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."

As a freelance consultant in North America, or as a Principal Consultant with MRCagney in Australia/New Zealand, I provide a range of advice and assistance to anyone who needs to think clearly about transit. 

With the flexibility and low rates of a small firm, it’s very easy to engage me for even very small pieces of work, such as to be on call to advise on projects or provide expert review of a piece of work being done by your staff or another firm.  I can also play an expert role in larger consulting teams.

My areas of greatest expertise include:

• Network design, including not just the inductive geographical problem-solving required but also the process of explaining the work and building understanding of it.  I have been designing transit networks for 20 years.  Basic elements of my network designs still operate successfully in many cities, including Minneapolis/St. Paul, San Antonio, Spokane, large parts of suburban southern California, and Australia’s national capital, Canberra.  
• Transit goals clarification and policy development.  For over a decade I’ve been innovating around the specific question of how to help elected officials, stakeholders, and interested citizens think more clearly about their goals for transit, and especially with how to handle predictable conflicts between different goals.  I believe that clear thought about these inevitable tradeoffs is the basis of sound and resilient policy.  Some of this work is summarized and explained in my 2008 Journal of Transport Geography paper “Purpose-driven public transport: creating a clear conversation about service goals,” which is here:    Download Purpose-driven public transport creating a clear conversation about public transport goals-8 

• Land use planning with attention to transit opportunities and impacts.  Land use planning, even for projects that claim to be transit-friendly, often contains mistakes that undermine transit.  Sadly, an easy “rule-book” for how to avoid these mistakes is missing, though it’s something I’m working on.  Considering transit’s geometry early and fully in a project can also form the basis for new design insights that produces a better outcome.  My track record of such work includes new suburban areas as well as dense rapid-transit station areas, in both North America and Australia.  An introduction to my approach to the subject is here, and you can find discussions of a range of cases in the category Be on the Way.

• Strategic long-term planning for transit.  Great long-term plans aren’t just a list of capital projects to build.  They establish an inspiring vision and offer tools that help people act now in ways that will serve the long term goal.  Because transit is so integrated with other aspects of urban life and infrastructure, strategic plans don’t have to be done by transit agencies; in fact, I’ve worked on several for city governments, including those of Minneapolis and Seattle, as well as the first comprehensive strategic transit plan for the Australian capital, Canberra.  I discussed some of the big issues in strategic planning here.
  

• Speaking and writing in ways that inspire and inform.  A video that shows my speaking style is here.  Browsing the blog will reveal a range of writing styles for different purposes.  Note in particular the Basics category, which is devoted to explanations of the fundamental geometry of transit and the choices that it requires us to confront.  I am currently working on a book expanding on these issues, for Island Press, due out in late 2011.
• Fun, interactive short courses in transit network design.  I teach a one- or two-day intensive workshop that gives participants the opportunity to wrestle with network design challenges in an interactive setting.  It’s ideal for professionals and activists who are interested in transit but suspect they don’t know enough about how and why transit networks are designed the way they are, and how their own decisions may be affecting transit outcomes. It can also be great for young people interested in exploring the profession.

My complete CV is here:   Download JW CV 2012-1

Please contact me if you’d like to inquire about how I might assist your work.  I’ll be happy to provide additional references and suggestions specific to your needs.  Just use the contact button up on menu bar, or click the link to my firm’s website.

John A. Miller was one of the few Americans who was puzzled by the construction of elevated highways. “Elevated railways with a capacity of 40,000 persons per hour in one direction are [being] torn down,” he wrote in amazement in 1935, “while elevated highways with a capacity of 6,000 persons per hour are being erected.”

Robert Fogelson, Downtown, via Market Urbanism

For more on how beautiful transit viaducts can be, see here.

In the 1990s, a bunch of transit planners at Kittelson Associates got the idea of creating "Transit Capacity Manual" that could sit next to the ominous authority of the Highway Capacity Manual, and maybe talk back to it in its own language.  The result was the Transit Capacity and Quality of Service Manual.  It's quite a technical document, but it does endeavor to explain the main concepts of transit planning and especially its similarities and differences with highway planning.  This is useful, because a lot of decisions about transit are made in local and state transportation departments where most people are trained as highway engineers.

The manual is now in its 2nd Edition, and the whole thing is online, here.  Kittelson is now starting work on the 3rd Edition, and has set up a web survey asking for input from the profession about how the next version could be improved.  If you've used the previous editions at all, or even if you just have strong feelings about what manual should do, you're encouraged to fill out the survey here.  I just finished it.  It mostly invites you to submit text comment, not just tick boxes, so it's obviously going to be read with some attention.

Greetings from what Australians call "Silly Season," made sillier by the need to roll out all the winter-based imagery of European Christmas at the height of summer. 

Over the holiday I will be beavering (as they say in this beaverless country) on the book project, with the help of a great illustration staff. 

Expect new content here on January 2.  Meanwhile, if you've only recently started reading Human Transit, there's plenty of older but timely stuff to enjoy.  Browse for your favorite catgory in the column at right.

And no, this is not my house.  Happy holidays.

David Marlor writes:

Thought you’d like to see this.

http://www.edmonton.ca/transportation/ets/transit_news/ets-december-24-and-27-service.aspx

Every year, Edmonton Transit reduces costs by reducing service during the Christmas holiday season. I’ve no problem with that, but the way it is done is totally user-unfriendly. When you look through that list of changes you quickly realize you have no easy way of knowing when buses are running and if the connections work. Yes, you can use the trip planner, but this kind of thing just defeats the idea of an easy to use network. My eyes glaze over and I think I’d just say “forget it, I’ll drive”.

Personally, I think Edmonton is too surgical with the reductions at the expense of losing the ease of understanding the network. I’m not sure it’s even worth it.

Edmonton Transit certainly has made it complicated, but I respect the imperative behind it.  Transit operators are under such constant cost-cutting pressure that they often can't justify running regular schedules on unusual holidays where when demand is higher than a typical weekend day but lower than a full weekday.

Most of the approaches to network planning that I recommend are based on the notion that we need to make networks simpler.  Part of that is grouping services into brands of similar usefulness (based on distinctions such as rapid vs. local, peak-only vs all-day, frequent vs not).  Doing this, however, requires that a transit agency give up some of its ability to micro-adjust service to its perception of demand.  For example, if we specify that the Frequent Network as a whole must be frequent until 9 PM, a few lines that we've included in that category may have to have their evening frequency expanded evne though their ridership then doesn't seem to justify it.  That's right: we spend a little and in return we get a network and schedule that we can describe succinctly, and that our customers can remember.

The same principle should ideally apply to these unusual days, though I respect that it's hard to get there.  But this kind of standardization, and the clarity that results, are an important frontier for transit if we're going to substantially increase its usefulness, and make people who value freedom choose to rely on it.