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Is the NYTimes Worsening Transit Crime?

Posted on April 27, 2022 in Journalism

Whenever you read a news article in an influential publication, ask: “How is this article changing the thing that it claims to be passively describing?”

A recent New York Times story leads with fears of transit crime but waits until paragraph 5 to explain the math that shows that their own article is making things worse.  Here is the headline:

Here is fifth paragraph that most people won’t read:

Low ridership has left many passengers saying they feel more vulnerable than before. In Philadelphia, the number of certain serious crimes reported on public transit is higher than before the pandemic, and in New York about equal to previous levels, even though ridership in both places is significantly lower. In other cities, there are fewer crimes being reported than in 2019, but the crime rate is up because there are so few passengers. [emphasis added]

So in most cities:

  • Crime is down but crime/rider is up simply because ridership is down.
  • We can expect crime/rider to fall as ridership goes up, because, as the NYT itself says, low ridership makes passengers more vulnerable because they are more likely to be alone. A more crowded vehicle is safer (both absolutely and per passenger) because there are more potential witnesses, which tends to deter crime.

In this situation, the NYTimes decision to lead with the fear and bury the math is worsening the problem it claims to describe.  The effect of the article is to scare people away from transit, so that ridership stays low, so that crime/rider stays high, so that they can do more articles about how scary public transit is.

 

 

Wellington: Notes on that Newsroom NZ Piece (updated)

Posted on October 1, 2018 in Journalism, Wellington

According to Newsroom NZ’s Simon Louisson, I am “the US Consultant behind the Wellington bus nightmare.”  Wellington, New Zealand is having some problems with recent bus service changes.  I have had no role in Wellington for the last six years, and did not even know the service changes were happening until I read about them in the media, but I, being a foreigner, must be to blame!

Jarrett Walker, the US consultant that has united Wellingtonians in their loathing for the chaotic new bus network, has also redesigned Dublin’s network and has met an even more rigorous negative response.

The entire article is false and defamatory, so if you read it, please also read this.

Through my employer at the time, the Australian firm MRCagney, I did a project for the Greater Wellington Regional Council on the design of the bus network in Wellington (the city only).  This work was mostly in 2011, ending in early ’12.  My role ended with the completion of the draft network plan.  I had no role in how the plan was presented to the public, and when that didn’t go well in 2012, I assumed it was dead.  That is always a possible and valid outcome of a public consultation process.

This year, a somewhat similar plan was implemented without my knowledge and involvement.  The implementation has not gone well, for a variety of reasons, most of them not related to the network design.  One of the big ones was a decision to switch operating companies at the same time in a way that changed the drivers’ working conditions, something I always advise against.

At it happens, my role in Wellington was exactly the same as my role in the Auckland redesign, which has been rolled out over the last several years to great success.  In Auckland, too, I led the original design process six years ago, then had no further role except to offer encouragement.

But no facts will prevent Newsroom NZ from constructing me as a cartoon villain, through an astonishing series of blatant falsehoods about who I am and what I believe.

Jarrett Walker, head of JWA, is one of America’s foremost advocates of public transport over cars, but he sees the intense reactions of Wellingtonians and Dubliners as a welcome part of the process. His stance opposing ride-sharing has led Tesla manufacturer Elon Musk to call him “a sanctimonious idiot”.

My exchange with Elon Musk had nothing to do with ride-sharing.  It was about Musk’s insulting and ignorant comments about public transport which I identified as an example of elite projection. And while it’s true that I anticipate negative feedback on my plans, that doesn’t mean my goal is to make people upset, as he seems to imply here.  All I have said, in many ways, is what every politician knows: Changing anything will upset some people.

In paragraph after paragraph, Mr Louisson wanders around the internet finding things I wrote that sound vaguely incriminating to him, and uses these to construct false descriptions of my views:

Walker takes a very binary view of change. In his blog he says cities should either totally revamp a network or leave it as it is.

That appears to be a perversion of this post, which points out that network plans have a degree of interdependence that limits how much they can be revised without falling apart.  People who need me to be a villain imagine me saying “my way or the highway,” which is nonsense.  Plans get revised a lot through public consultation, and that’s a good thing.

And anyone who knows me will burst out laughing at this:

His company, Jarrett Walker [and] Associates, is very comfortable with the neo-liberal mantra of user-pays, and a strong commercial imperative underlies much of its design work.

Bonus points if you can figure out what text of mine was misread to fabricate this, because I can’t think of one.  I have always advocated heavy state subsidy of public transport.  As for commercial, that’s a confusing term that I never use myself, because it gives the impression that the only reason to serve lots of people is greed.  (Tip: Sometimes you do it because you want to improve lots of people’s lives.)  And even so, of course, I don’t bring an imperative to carry lots of people, because I encourage each city to think about the ridership-coverage tradeoff.

Mr Louisson formed all these insights without interviewing me, but you won’t find out why unless you get to paragraph 28:

Asked to comment on the implementation of the Wellington redesign, Walker seemed at pains to distance himself, saying in an email, “Unfortunately, I have not had any role in Wellington since 2012, and have not had time to study recent events there closely enough to have an opinion.”

While JWA’s work had involved developing a network redesign proposal, “I had no role in the public consultation at that time or in anything that has occurred since.”

My quoted words are indeed the only words I sent to Mr Louisson.  I was trying to establish that it would not be interesting to interview me, because I could tell him nothing about what had happened to transit in his city in the last six years.

Does this make me “behind” a revised plan, implemented without my involvement or even my knowledge six years later?  And does my unwillingness to comment on something I know nothing about license a reporter to just make up stories about who I am and what I believe?

Remember, if you don’t want your name dragged through the dirt in the media, it’s an easy thing to avoid:  Say nothing.  Do nothing.  Propose nothing.  Change nothing.

That’s why nothing gets done.

Why the Media Fixation on “Transit is Failing” Stories?

Posted on April 18, 2016 in General, Journalism

Recently, I took issue with the Los Angeles Times for telling a  “ridership is falling” story, even as they published a chart that cast doubt on that claim.

Now here comes the same distortion in Silicon Valley’s San Jose Mercury News.  Look at the chart:

20160415_101955_SJM-VTA-0418-90_300

The chart title contradicts the chart.  The transit agency’s ridership has not been in any serious decline since 2005.  The truth is that it fell steeply from 2000 to 2005, and had a small drop in ’09-10 related to the financial crisis and related service cuts.  Otherwise, ridership has been tracking pretty well with population.

Now, here’s how the Mercury News spins it:

Staggering drop in VTA bus ridership may signal dramatic changes

Despite a Santa Clara Valley population and jobs boom, ridership on buses and light-rail trains has dropped a staggering 23 percent since 2001, forcing the Valley Transportation Authority to consider its biggest shake-up ever in transit service.

 The decline comes as new BART service into the South Bay is projected to spill 23,000 more transit riders into the VTA region next year.
As their own chart shows, ridership is down since 2000 but up since 2005.  The Mercury News is just playing the old arbitrary starting year game.  If you want to tell a story about ridership collapse, just pick a high starting year for your comparison.  If you want to tell a story about ridership soaring, pick a low starting year.  Both kinds of stories are bogus.

From this silliness, the article above spins vast webs of misinformation. Notice how you’re supposed to conclude …

  • … that VTA is in a crisis today.  No, VTA was in crisis 10-15 years ago, and had a bad year during the financial crisis, when everyone else did, too.
  • … that VTA is falling behind recent growth in population and jobs.  Again, just look at the chart!
  • … that VTA’s supposed crisis is some kind of failure to meet the opportunity presented  by the BART extension.  No: The BART extension is happening now, the “crisis” happened over a decade ago.
  • … that a ridership “crisis” is forcing VTA’s hand.  Yes, ridership is lower than we want it to be, but that’s not because of a “crisis.”  It’s because ambitions for public transit are rising as it becomes clear to more people that cars are incapable of serving the region’s growth.

When we look at this piece together with Laura Nelson’s recent Los Angeles Times piece, then, the only interesting question is this: Why are newspapers so desperate to tell “transit in crisis” stories?

Why is this story what everyone supposedly wants to hear? Why do we see this hysterical spin over and over, even when the very same article contains a chart telling a different story?

There’s no doubt that the San Jose / Silicon Valley transit system isn’t what citizens want it to be.  That’s why we’re working with the agency.  But the issue is not that these agencies are in crisis; it’s that citizens’ expectations of them are higher than they have been in the past.  Most transit staffers I know, including those at VTA, spend all their time looking for ways to meet those higher expectations.

But if you wonder why transit agencies can sometimes seem defensive, imagine how you would feel if everything you did was slammed in the media using simple distortions like the arbitrary starting year.  Would you remain cheerful, open-minded, and ready to take risks for a better world?

 

Chart: San Jose Mercury News, from a chart in our own Choices Report, which is downloadable at the bottom of this page.

For Reporters Disparaging Transit Projects, “Far” Isn’t Far

Posted on February 18, 2016 in Amusing, Journalism, Language

If you’ve ever wondered what well above and well below mean, as opposed to far above and far below, Dan Weikel and Ralph Vartebedian at the Los Angeles Times have quantified it for us, in an article about the California High Speed Rail project.

Rail officials also say the latest cost estimate for the entire 500-mile project has been reduced from $68 billion to $64 billion, well below the $98 billion projection from several years ago, but still far above initial estimates of less than $40 billion.

I’d always assumed that  far was further than well.  But no, by their math, well is $34 billion but far is as little as $24 billion.   Well is further than far.

So now, anytime someone uses far or its relatives to imply extremes — “the furthest corners of the earth” etc,, you can ask:  Sure, they may be the furthest, but are they the wellest?

Does the Ridership-Coverage Question Apply to Bikes?

Posted on August 21, 2015 in Cycling, Journalism

For over a decade, I've been encouraging transit agencies to be clear about how they balance the contradictory goals of ridership (as many customers as possible for the fixed operating budget) or coverage (some transit service everywhere, responding to needs rather than to demand).  I lay out the tradeoff in the opening part of this explainer.  

Michael Anderson, the editor of the excellent blog Bike Portland, has a very thoughtful article exploring how, and whether, this paradigm applies to cycling infrastructure.  Disclosure: It would be fascinating even if they hadn't interviewed Michelle Poyourow, a bike-and-transit planner who's also a Senior Associate at our firm.  (Did you know, btw, that we're hiring?)

Really, if you care about cycling, read Michael's piece.  It's a great piece of writing, one that I'm still thinking about.

My interview on National Public Radio

Posted on February 23, 2015 in Houston, Journalism, Press

Last week I was a guest on Here & Now, a nationally syndicated radio program produced by WBUR in Boston, talking with the show's Jeremy Hobson about the recently approved Houston METRO Transit System Reimagining, and how its lessons apply to other American cities.  The segment aired today, and is a nice summary of the project, quickly covering much of the material discussed here, here and here. Take a listen via the embed above, or head over to the Here & Now site to check it out.

beware bus route saviors at election time …

Posted on November 20, 2014 in Advocacy, Journalism, Melbourne

We don't make endorsements, but beware politicians' promises about individual bus routes.  

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Melbourne transit guru Daniel Bowen confirms that nobody is threatening  to cancel the 822.  The other team's plan involves removing some twists and turns on neighborhood streets, so that the route runs faster and is useful to more people.  As usual, that plan asks some people to walk further to a more useful service, as virtually any access-improving network design will do.    

Those changes are fair game for debate, but remember:  If you want to "save" every existing bus route exactly as it is, forever, then you're against almost any coherent plan and cost-effective plan to update and improve your transit network.  This and this, for example, would have been impossible!

Edmonton: what a great transit debate looks like

Posted on September 26, 2014 in Edmonton, Frequent Networks, Journalism

The Edmonton Journal's Elise Stolte has been doing an excellent series on the city's debate about the future of transit.  Unlike many transit debates, this one is about a real issue that affects the entire city: how to balance the ridership goals of transit with the competing coverage goals, where "coverage" means "respond to every neighborhood's social-service needs and/or sense of entitlement to transit even if the result is predictably low-ridership service."   This is the great inner conflict in transit planning: Do we respond to demand (ridership) or to needs and expectations (coverage)?

When I briefed the Edmonton City Council last year, as part of their Transit System Review, I encouraged the council to formulate a policy about how they would divide their transit budget between ridership goals vs. coverage goals.  This solves a fundamental problem in transit analysis today: too often, transit services are being criticized based on their failure to achieve a goal that is not the actual goal of the service.  

For example, almost all arguments about how unproductive North American bus service is are based on the false assumption that all bus services are trying to be productive.  Based on all the agencies I've worked with, only around 60-70% of bus services have ridership as a primary purpose.  (My test: "Is this service where it would be if ridership were the only goal of the agency?")

I may have invented this rigorous way of talking about transit's conflicting mandate.   I began developing it in a Spokane (Washington) project around 1997 and in projects in Bellingham and Reno a few years later.  My peer-reviewed paper on the methodology us here and the case for it is also in Chapter 10 of my book Human Transit.  Helping transit agencies think about this question has been a central part of most transit studies I've done since, including major projects in Houston, Columbus, Indianapolis, Salem (OR) etc. 

Nothing makes me happier than to hear elected officials debating an actual question whose answer, once they give it, will actually affect reality.  This is what's happening in Edmonton now.  So far,  articles in Elise Stolte's series have included

Soon, I'm sure, she'll cover some of the passionate arguments in favor of coverage services, which we heard from several City Councilors when I last briefed them on the issue.  

Throughout, the Journal's Elise Stolte has taken a tone of genuine curiousity ("So, will you help me think this through?") in an argument where there are no right or wrong positions, only different priorities and visions to be balanced.  Is your city having this conversation clearly?

 

If a carpenter can’t be a hammer opponent, then I can’t be a streetcar opponent

Posted on August 1, 2014 in Journalism, Language, Philosophy, Streetcars (Trams), Toronto

I’ll be leery of Toronto Star interviews in the future, because I explained my view carefully and that’s not how it came out:

Jarrett Walker and Rob Ford (see Rob Ford’s policard) don’t have much in common. One is an Oregon-based transit consultant, the other Toronto’s chief magistrate. One blogs avidly, the other disdains the media. Whereas Ford rails against the “war on the car,” Walker touts the virtues of buses.

But on one issue, at least, the policy wonk and the conservative politician agree: streetcars are overrated. Walker is decisively on one side of a new debate in the U.S., over whether the trendy form of rail transport springing up in American cities makes practical sense.

My actual view is too long for a soundbite but should not have been too long for an article.  My view is that streetcars mixed with private car traffic are overrated. I was very clear with the reporter that all of my critiques of the US streetcar revival movement are about streetcars in mixed traffic.  In the Toronto context, I specifically distinguished between the old downtown Toronto mixed traffic streetcars, which are nearly inoperable due to traffic impacts, and Toronto’s exclusive-lane light rail segments such as Spadina and St. Clair.  None of my concerns about streetcars apply to the latter.

Here’s the bottom line.  Streetcars are just a tool.  They can be used in smart ways and in stupid ways.  Asking a transit planner for an opinion about a transit technology is like asking a carpenter what his favorite tool is.  A good carpenter sees his tools as tools and chooses the right one for the task at hand.  He doesn’t use his screwdriver to pound nails just because he is a “screwdriver advocate” or “hammer opponent”.  Yet the Toronto Star  assumes that nobody involved in transit debates is as smart as your average competent carpenter.

To call me a streetcar advocate or opponent, you are imposing on me your own assumption that the bus-rail debate is the most important conversation about transit.  This is the Toronto Star’s assumption, but it’s not mine.  In fact, my work is about blowing up that assumption, and suggesting that instead of falling in love with vehicles, wires, and propulsion systems, we might consider falling in love with the freedom to get where you’re going.

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