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watching our words: route or line?

Posted on February 1, 2011 in Advocacy, Language, Marketing

(Another short selection from the draft of the book I'm writing.)

The word for the path followed by a transit vehicle is sometimes route, and sometimes line.  Whenever you have two words for the same thing, you should ask why.

Most of the words used in transit discussions also have a more common meaning outside that context.  That common meaning often forms a connotation that hangs around the word, often causing confusion, when we use the word to talk about transit.  In saying the word, we may intend only the transit meaning, but some people may be hearing the more common meaning.  Regardless of our intentions, the commonplace meaning of a word is often still there, as a connotation, when the word’s used in a transit context.  The words route and line are a good example.

A route, in its common meaning, is the path traced by some kind of person or vehicle.  When a package or message is going through a postal system, we say it’s being routed.   The person who delivers newspapers to subscribers in the morning is following a paper route.  School buses typically follow routes.

What these meanings of route have in common is that the route isn’t necessarily followed very often.  A package going through a delivery system may end up following a specific route that no package has followed before.  Paper routes and school bus routes run only once a day, and not at all on some days.  These common uses of route imply a place where some kind of transport event happens, but possibly not very often. 

The word line, on the other hand, has a clear meaning from geometry: a simple, straight, one-dimensional figure.  In common usage we often use line for something curved, like the laugh-lines and worry-lines on a face, and transit lines may be curved as well.  But in any case, the word line doesn’t imply an event, as route does.  A line is a thing that’s just there, no matter what happens along it. 

Lurking inside these two words, in short, is a profound difference in attitude about a transit service.  Do you want to think of transit as something that’s always there, that you can count on?  If so, call it a line.  We never speak of rail routes, always rail lines, and we do that because the rails are always there, suggesting a permanent and reliable thing.

If you’re selling a transportation product, you obviously want people to think they can count on it.  So it’s not surprising that in the private sector, the word is usually line:  Trucking and shipping companies often call themselves lines, as do most private bus companies and of course, the airlines.  This doesn’t mean that all these services are really line-like – some may be quite infrequent – but the company that chose the word wants you to think of it as a thing that’s reliably there, that you can count on.

So in general, when talking about transit, think about the more commonplace meaning of the word you’re choosing.  In this case:

  • Use route to indicate the site of a (possibly very occasional) transportation event.  The word route reminds many of us of school transportation, newspaper deliveries, and delivery systems that may operate only infrequently.
  • Use line when you want to imply something that has a continuous physical presence and availability – for example, a transit line where service is coming so often that you don’t need a schedule.

To put it even more simply, the word route lowers expectations for the frequency and reliability of a service.  The word line raises those expectations.

Often, transit agencies themselves will use these words in a way that’s not quite conscious of these connotations.  In Australia, for example, bus services are usually routes, but rail services are lines.  This usage carries a hint that we should have intrinsically lower expectations of bus service as compared to rail.  In many cases, that’s not true: many bus “routes,” for example, run frequently all day while commuter rail  “lines” may run only a few times at rush hour. 

Of course, these connotations can be a nuisance. Sometimes you don’t want any connotation.   Sometimes you just want the meaning.

Unfortunately, words without connotations tend to sound abstract and dull.  I could insist on saying “fixed vehicle path” instead of route or line, just as I could say “nonmotorized access” when I mean walking or cycling, but you wouldn’t get through this book if I did.  Language that strikes us as evasive or bureaucratic is often the result of word choices that try to avoid all connotation.  Such language is precise but uninspiring, and long passages of it are just plain hard to read.

To keep our speech vivid and engaging, we have to use words with connotations, and do our best to choose those connotations consciously.  I’ll do that throughout this book, and note where there may be a connotation problem.  As for route and line, my broad intention is to raise expectations of transit rather than lower them, so I generally use line.  However, when I speak specifically of a service that doesn’t run very frequently, I use route.

transit’s product: mobility or access?

Posted on January 26, 2011 in Access, Language, Mobility, Philosophy

This post is an important early section in the book I'm working on.  Longtime readers will recognize the primordial muck from which it arose.  I thought I would share it because it's a key conceptual marking-point and I know it will be controversial.  In brief, I argue that while "mobility" is problematic as a goal of a whole transportation system, we can't abandon it as a descriptor of transit's primary purpose and function, because to do so makes it impossible to understand how and why transit does what it does.  If anyone has a better word for what I'm calling mobility, I'd love to hear it. 

 

Because transit debates so often lose track of transit’s defining product – which I’ve called personal mobility – it’s worth pausing to clear some weeds around this concept.

In contemporary urbanist thinking, the world mobility is profoundly out of fashion. Todd Litman of the Victoria Transport Policy Institute defines mobility this way:

Mobility refers to the movement of people or goods. It assumes that “travel” means person- or ton-miles, “trip” means person- or freight-vehicle trip.   It assumes that any increase in travel mileage or speed benefits society. (Litman, 2008)

By this definition the output of transit that matters is passenger-miles or passenger-km.  A passenger-mile is one passenger carried for one mile.  (Ten passenger miles, for example, could mean one passenger carried for ten miles or ten passengers each carried for one mile.)

Defined this way, the concept of mobility can be misleading because it doesn’t measure how readily people got to where they were going; it just measures how far they were moved.  Most of the time, though, our travel isn’t motivated by a sheer desire for movement; it’s motivated by the need to do something – make some kind of economic or personal contact – that is too far away to walk to.

Suppose that your favorite grocery store is reachable from your house only via a circuitous bus route.  When you ride this bus to the store, you only want to go about 3 miles, but the bus takes you 5 miles in the course of getting there, and the bus company will claim to have delivered 5 passenger-miles of mobility as a result of your trip.  Obviously, that’s unfair, because you only wanted to go 3 miles. 

But really, you didn’t even want that.  What you wanted was your favorite grocery store.  You wanted access to your grocery store, not 3 miles worth of mobility.

So there are two problems with mobility, defined and measured this way.  First, it measures how far you were moved, even if some of that movement wasn’t necessary.  Second, more fundamentally, it implies that a greater good was delivered by taking you to shops three miles away than would have been delivered if the same shops were close enough to walk to. 

Transit that participates in reshaping the city, by encouraging greater density and walkability so that the basic needs of life are available with less travel, has the effect of increasing access even as it reduces our need for mobility.   From the perspective of almost all of transit’s goals, replacing long trips with short trips that achieve the same outcome is a good thing.  If shops identical to the ones you have three miles away were to open next to your house, you wouldn’t travel as far. In fact, you wouldn’t make a transit trip at all.  The bus company would lose a customer and its ridership would fall as a result.  Yet clearly, the ability to do something via a short trip rather than a long trip is better for you, better for the energy-efficiency in your city, and better for the environment. 

That’s why Litman suggests we should care more about what he calls access:

Accessibility (or just access) refers to the ability to reach desired goods, services, activities and destinations …   Access is the ultimate goal of most transportation, except a small portion of travel in which movement is an end in itself (jogging, horseback riding, pleasure drives), with no destination. This perspective assumes that there may be many ways of improving transportation, including improved mobility, improved land use accessibility (which reduce the distance between destinations), or improved mobility substitutes such as telecommunications or delivery services.  (Litman, 2008)

Mobility is how far you can go in a given time.  Access is how many useful or valuable things you can do.  If a new grocery store opens near your house, that doesn't improve your mobility but it does improve your access.  You can now get your groceries closer to home, so you don't need as much mobility as you did before.  You can also improve your access by working at home instead of commuting, downloading music instead of going to a CD store, and moving in with your romantic partner.  In other words, a lot of the work of access is simply about eliminating the need to move your body around the city in order to complete the economic and personal transactions that make up a happy life.

But before we dismiss mobility as a distraction, let’s look again at the three ways of improving access, as Litman lists them:

  • “Improved mobility”
  • “Improved land use accessibility (which reduces the distance between destinations)”
  • “improved mobility substitutes such as telecommunications or delivery services”

When I say that transit’s product is personal mobility, I’m emphasizing the first of these three ways of improving access.  I’m not implying that the others are unimportant, only that the first of these – improving access by improving mobility – is transit’s primary job, just as firefighting is the fire company’s primary job.

Transit does have side effects, though, that affect the second kind of access, and we’ll return to these in Part II.  If an especially popular or exciting form of transit, such a streetcar or monorail, is built in an area, this may raise the land value of the area in a way that encourages denser development, and denser development often improves access by putting shops and other destinations that you value closer to your house. 

Designing transit to trigger desirable development is one of the core ideas of the New Urbanism, but like many new ideas it’s really an old one.  In 1900, when public transit was the primary form of urban transport for distances too far to walk, the public transit infrastructure determined the shape of the city’s growth.  In fact, many transit lines were created and owned by developers whose real goal was to build and sell houses along the line.

So transit can improve access two ways: (a) by providing personal mobility and (b) by influencing development to create denser communities where less mobility is required to do the same things. 

The second of these, however, is obviously an indirect impact.  Transit may lead to access-improving development, but only via several intermediate and unreliable steps.  You can build a rapid transit line and still not get more density if several other things don’t fall into place – including zoning, economic growth, cooperative neighbors, and bankers willing to lend to developers.  In that case, the new transit project doesn’t improve access at all, unless it has improved the first kind of access: mobility.

What is more, the ability of transit to stimulate development is clearly related to how well that transit seems to promise good mobility to the people who will live, work, or play there.  We don’t pay more for an apartment over a transit station because the station is a nice community amenity, like brick paving and planter boxes.  A transit station adds value to development precisely because buyers think it will make it easier for them, or their tenants, to get around.  So if transit isn’t credible in offering mobility, or at least appearing to do so, it’s unlikely to stimulate development.

In 2009, we began to see web-based tools that allow you to enter an address and see where you can go, in a fixed amount of time, from that address.  Here, for example, is the output from WalkScore.com's travel time tool, when queried by someone near the San Francisco Civic Center at 9:00 AM:

 GoogEarth walkscore

These tools aren’t for planning a trip, they’re for visualizing your freedom.  Not your freedom in some improved city of the future, but your freedom now.  That’s what mobility is: your freedom to move right now.

But the genius of these tools is that they let us see how choices we might make would affect that freedom.  Imagine that you’re deciding where in a city to live.  For each house or apartment you’re considering, you can check one of these sites and see quickly where you’ll be able to get to easily on transit.  And you won't get just an abstract "transit score."  You can look at this map and see how easy it will be to get to the places that matter to you.

The tool might save you a fortune.  If you’ve decided that you can only afford a house in a distant suburb, enter that address and you’ll get a clear map of just how far away things that you care about will be.  You might run the numbers on the cost of commuting and decide you’ll save money by spending more to live in a better location, closer to rapid transit and/or closer to the city, where you’ll spend less on transportation. 

In other words, you might make a decision that requires less mobility, because it has better access.  That access will consist not just in being closer to things you value, but also in having better transit options for the trips that are still too far to walk or cycle.

Mobility and access aren’t opposites, and mobility isn’t some tired doctrine worshipped only by blinkered traffic engineers.  If we want cities to be built in ways that require less travel, cities with better access, we will do that by ensuring that those cities still have generous transit mobility.  We need to show that if you locate in a transit-intensive place, you will be able to get to lots of places that matter to you, on transit; indeed, that you’ll have full access to all the riches of your city, or at least those that you care about. 

So in a book on transit, I’m going to insist, unfashionably, that in the transit business mobility is still our primary product.  Mobility is only one dimension of access.  The other two, as Litman defines them, are urban redevelopment and telecommunications, both of which can reduce the need for travel.  But mobility is the kind of access that most people expect transit, in particular, to deliver.

One of the major hazards of urban planning is that planners and theorists can get so excited by their visions of the future that they lose track of the present.  We can imagine futures in which transit systems help us to build denser cities, where we can have more access because things are closer.  But if we want today’s voters to support our vision, we have to care equally about what their needs are right now. 

In the short term, most of us are stuck with the current geography of our lives.  Our homes, jobs, relatives, friends, and favorite shops are wherever they are, and we’ve accepted, consciously or not, the need to travel the distances between these important things.  We can try to relocate some of these things in the months or years ahead, but we can’t relocate any of them today. 

This book will look more at urban form and all the ways we can change it, but we can’t use transit to create better cities unless we first understand how transit does its primary task of providing mobility.  Meanwhile, though, transit needs to focus on the shorter-term perspective: the perspective of someone who needs to go somewhere, and get there soon, to address a need that they have right now.  This person isn’t thinking about how better transit might help transform her city.  She’s thinking: “I just need to be there!”  We need to figure out whether transit can help her, and if so, how.

weekend distraction ii: google’s word history tool

Posted on December 18, 2010 in Language

This weekend everyone's playing with Google's new Books Ngram tool, which shows you how often any word you can think of showed up in books in each year of modern history, using Google's vast archive of digitized books.  The tool can be set to look back to before 1600, but before 1800 or so the dataset is too small to mean much.

"Tram" vs "streetcar" is interesting.  It seems that in the golden age of streetcars nobody was saying "streetcar" yet:

Ngram tram streetcar

Then there's "bus" vs. "coach."

Ngram bus coach

Personally I love the word "coach," and want it back, but I'm sure that the word's 20th century run refers mostly to athletic coaches.  

You can sometimes see a change in the prevailing meaning of a word marked by a low-point in its frequency, and that may be happening to "coach" around 1920.  (For an obvious recent example of the same phenomenon, see "gay.")  Words go quiet for a while as nobody's sure what they mean anymore.  Then people get sure, and they take off. 

Few transit terms are easy to search, because the profession's vocabulary is constructed metaphorically, so almost every word we use has a more common meaning outside the transit context.  But "city" and "town" are fascinating:

Ngram city town

"City" has lost about half of its frequency in the last century.  In the 19th Century, novels that took place in cities made sure you notice the fact, often dwelling on the confronting textures of city life.  Cities and country are in clear opposition, and as the Industrial Revolution rages everyone's worrying over the contrast between them.  The city is emerging as one of the main problems of civilization. 

Then in the 20th century we get the rise of subjectivity — the idea that stories don't really need settings if the personalities are vivid enough — and also the rise of specialization, which means that stuff that happens in cities is less likely to credit the city as a necessary frame.  And that, of course, sets the stage for the flight to suburbia and the possibility of no longer caring what a city is.  But starting around 1960 there's the beginning of something new.

Of course, some of the decline in "city" matches the rise of "urban," which dances closely with "rural."

Ngram urban rural

"Urban" rises as "city" declines.  Before the "urban" was invented (followed not long after by "urbanism") everyone just talked about the city. 

Have fun!  Did you know that the word "interchange" has been in decline since 1963?  Me neither!

Quote of the Week: Manhattan as “Stockyard”

Posted on October 8, 2010 in Language, New York City, Pedestrians, Philosophy

[T]he comforts of the [Manhattan’s] rich still depend on the abundance of its poor, the municipal wealth and well-being as unevenly distributed as in the good old days of the Gilded Age. When seen at a height or a distance, from across the Hudson River or from the roof of Rockefeller Center, Manhattan meets the definitions of the sublime. At ground level Manhattan is a stockyard, the narrow streets littered with debris and laid out in the manner of cattle chutes, the tenements and storefronts uniformly fitted to fit the framework of a factory or a warehouse.

— Lewis Lapham, “City Light”, Lapham’s Quarterly, 7 October 2010 Continue Reading →

Avoiding Car-Centered Language: A Directive

Posted on September 29, 2010 in Journalism, Language, Words, Unhelpful

In 1996, the City Administrator of West Palm Beach, Florida, Michael J. Wright, issued a directive to his staff on how to avoid biased language in the descriptions of transportation investments and policies.  It’s four pages, sharply written, and may well be the smartest bureaucratic directive you’ll ever read.  (Thanks to Peter Bilton at the Vorhees Transportation Center at Rutgers for pointing it out.) Continue Reading →

The Chinese Tunnel-Bus, or Train, or Whatever

Posted on September 10, 2010 in Bus Rapid Transit, Language, Rail Transit, Technophilia

Old news, I know.

Chinese tunnel train image007 Chinese designers have come up with an innovative cost-effective public transport system: the tunnel bus.

The remarkable bus straddles two lanes of traffic, allowing cars to drive underneath while it carries up to 1,200 passengers.

It’s environmentally sound too because it runs on electricity, using a state-of-the-art charging system. Called relay charging, the roof of the bus conducts electricity and contacts special charging posts as it moves along.

Engadget links to a video in Chinese explaining the concept, which is pretty clear even if you don’t know Chinese.  A trial line is planned in Beijing, so we won’t have to debate it in theory for much longer.

But this is interesting:

It’s cost-effective because there are two ways it could operate: first off, special tracks could be laid into each side of
the road, like a tram.

Or secondly, simple coloured lines could be painted onto the road for it to follow automatically on conventional tyres. There’ll be a driver on the bus at all times, though.

I’m not sure how that makes it cost-effective, but it does have the effect of reducing the bus-rail distinction an almost academic quibble.

Either way, this is going to be a large structure resting on narrow wheels.  It could be on rubber tires but linked to an optical-guidance system (sensors on the vehicle responding to a painted line on the pavement) and the effect would be the same as if it were on rails:  a controlled path with little or no lateral motion.

So is it a train or a bus?  Who cares?

 

Dissent of the Week

Posted on August 17, 2010 in Dissents, Language, Philosophy

This one is really for everyone who saw my presentation “A Field Guide to Transit Quarrels,” rather than just looking at the slides here.  Frequent commenter Alon Levy accuses me of “devious” rhetoric.

Reading the notes, I think you’re using a devious rhetorical technique. You say you’re not going to prejudice in favor of any view, but then you associate your own views on transit with reason, and views that emphasize technology or direct service with emotion. The reality is much more complicated …

There’s some interesting back and forth between Alon, myself, and some others below Alon’ comment in the thread.

I’d like to hear in comments below if anyone got the same impression from my live presentation.  If you were there, please comment or email, and don’t forget to mention which city you saw me speak in.

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