Meditations

can we define “livable and lovable” cities?

Posted on April 23, 2011 in Advocacy, Congestion Pricing, Meditations, Urban Structure

That's the nice slogan from a new Phillips Corporation initiative praised today in the Atlantic by NRDC's Kaid Benfield. The Phillips think tank suggests that we can gather all the qualities of a "livable and lovable" city into three virtues:

Resilience, which replaces the more bureaucratic and depressing word sustainability, but means roughly the same thing. Some great work has already been done on the concept of resilience. There's already a Resilient Cities movement, and an excellent book on Resilience Thinking.
Inclusiveness, which is about "social integration and cohesion," demonstrated for example in the lack of discrimination or social exclusion based on race, religion, age, and all the other usual categories.
Authenticity, which means "the ability to maintain the local character of the city," including "heritage, culture, and environment."

Below is their graphic summary. (The PDF [Download] is much sharper!) Below that is a bit of affectionate heckling from me.

Personally, I have some practical discomfort with the framing of the Inclusiveness category because it is easily exaggerated into visions of a socialist paradise in which we have abolished competition. When Philips says that "inhabitants should have equal opportunities to participate in the activities of the city," does that mean that when our city's team in the playoffs, we'll give out tickets by lottery rather than selling them, in order to avoid discriminating against the poor? If we're talking only about nondiscrimination by extraneous demographic categories, fine. But when you imply that you can neutralize the impact of differences in wealth, you lose so much of the politicial audience — at least in North America, Australia, and the UK — that you've probably lost the game. This issue comes up often in transit, of course, notably whenever anyone suggests that in a capitalist economy, it's foolish not to use pricing to help citizens understand the intrinsic cost of things that they take for granted. It's a tough one.

Note, also, the lingering contradictory message in their framing of resilience. On the one hand, the train station signifies that resilient cities acknowledge their "interdependence" with other cities. On the other hand, the emphasis on local farms and local energy generation suggests the opposite, that resilient cities aspire to greater and greater self-reliance. This is philosophically interesting, especially because high volumes of international trade — including in food, which is the opposite of local self-reliance — are the most reliable mechanism that human society has found to prevent large-scale wars.

I make both of these comments in the spirit of meditation. I am not claiming to know how better to define inclusiveness or resilience. Rather, I'm just marvelling at how difficult it is.

the “cities vs suburbs” trope

Posted on April 22, 2011 in Meditations, Philosophy, Urban Structure, Words, Unhelpful

We all have too much to read, so here's a tip to save time. Whenever any article (such as this one) cites information about incorporated US cities as a basis for any claim about trends in the culture, quit reading. US big-city boundaries are irrelevant to most people's lives, and to anything else that matters about our culture, economy, or destiny.

Christopher Leinberger makes this point in a New Republic article recently, usefully expanded on by Sarah Goodyear at Grist. Leinberger argues that "city" and "suburb" is no longer a useful opposition, and that what really matters are walkable urban places vs drivable suburban ones. True enough, but replacing city with it's near-synonym urban doesn't take us far. "City" and "suburb" are rich, evocative, and succinct words. The word city in particular must be fought for, redefined in ways that defend its profound cultural heritage. The word has an ancient and clear lineage from Latin, one that forms the basis for the word citizen, not to mention civic and civilization.

Greek and Roman political theory was all about the city, in a sense of that word that we can recognize today: groups of people living together in a small space for reasons of security and economy, but also the site of humanity's cultural and intellectual development. City is a word of enormous evocative power to capture a range of ideas that drive urbanism. Leinberger himself can't describe what really matters without using the word urban, which evokes a similar history and resonance.

What Leinberger is really complaining about are discussions of data about incorporated US cities, which are a very narrow and specific problem. A few of the oldest US cities (San Francisco, St. Louis) have coherent boundaries that describe real cultural and demographic units, but many are bizarre shapes of purely historical interest.

Nobody who understands the lived experience of Los Angeles would claim that the City of Los Angeles is a useful or interesting demographic unit. While the city excludes a great deal of dense inner-city fabric close to downtown, it has long balloonlike tentacles extending north to take in the whole San Fernando Valley and also south to grab the port of San Pedro. It also contains a good deal of near-wilderness in the Santa Monica Mountains.

The tentacular, pockmarked, pulsating blob that we call the City of Los Angeles is the map of a long-ago war over water and power. The only people who care about it today are those who work for city government or serve as its elected officials, plus a few who've considered city taxes and services as a reason to locate in the city or out of it.

Americans should notice, too, that bizarre and misleading city boundaries are largely a US phenomenon. Europe, Australia, and New Zealand generally allow central (state or national) governments to draw the boundaries of their local governments, so these boundaries usually (not always) end up making some kind of sense. (With the exception of Queensland, Australian local government areas are too small to have much influence, but that's a different problem.)

As Leinberger says, we need a distinction between walkable urban communities and drivable suburban ones, and American city limits are useless for understanding that distinction. But the word city — whose Latin ancestor meant "walkable urban" for millennia until about 1950 — is still worth fighting for. Legal US "city limits" are an imperfect and aspirational approximation of what cities really are, and what they really mean for the human project. Despite their pedantic misuse by the likes of Cox and Kotkin, city limits have no authority to tell us what a city is, and why we should want to live in a real city or not. The deep attractions and repulsions that we feel for big cities are the key to a longer and truer cultural understanding of what cities are, and of why the civic is the root of civilization.

futility, geometry, and action

Posted on April 11, 2011 in Meditations, Philosophy, US Federal Policy

To bypass the rage and righteousness around an issue, and move toward solving it, we first have to convince ourselves that solving it is impossible.

That's the thesis of Andrew Sullivan's piece today, "Why the Healthcare Question is Insoluble." He's talking about healthcare in the US context, but few countries have achieved widespread contentment on the issue. I'm not sure you can expect widespread contentment on an issue that requires thinking about sickness and death, at least not at humanity's current level of spiritual development.

My work on transit policy has always come from the same existential position that Andrew lays out. Like every family working out its budget, societies have to make choices between different things that they value. As in healthcare, arguments about these choices often use pre-emptive appeals to compassion or justice to shift our attention away from the the real choice. Government actions that are "compassionate" or that address "civil rights" seem to be responding to an absolute standard of goodness and truth, but often, they still cost money, possibly more money than any government can expect to spend.

I'm very glad to be in transit instead of healthcare, because a few hours debating healthcare makes transit problems look easy. Easy, but still impossible.

By easy that I mean that the questions are relatively easy to frame (Connections or complexity? Ridership or coverage? Wide stop spacing or close?) and it's not too hard to explain (a) the consequence of each choice and (b) why the choice is geometrically unavoidable. Laying out those questions is a key task of my book Human Transit.

But once you lay out those questions, you have to pause and see that by their nature, there's no answer that everyone will like. There may not even be an answer that a majority will like. And in that sense, the task of resolving the issue is impossible.

The geometry of transit tells us that each of these choices gives us a spectrum of possibilities. A transit network can go to the extreme of relying on connections, and thus minimizing complexity, or it can go to the extreme of avoiding connections, which maximizes complexity, but every time you move toward one desired outcome, you move away from another one. That's how a spectrum works. And you can appeal to "civil rights" or "compassion" or "common sense" or "the needs of working families" as much as you want; those appeals may prod policymakers to move one way or the other, but they don't change the geometry. In fact, they're dangerous to the degree that they encourage us not to notice what has to be sacrificed to move in the direction that the speaker advocates.

My experience with many transit agencies is that everyone is a little scared of stating these questions in such a simple way, because it means you really have to answer them. And answering them requires accepting, with some humility, that any possible decision will leave many people outraged. Faced with the courage that this requires, it's tempting to retreat into the confusion. It's tempting to want the issue to be complicated so that you'll never be called to account for making a clear, stark choice of this over that — even though true leadership lies exactly in the willingness to make those choices. So when an issue seems complicated, we always need to ask, "what interests are being served by the sheer complexity of this issue?" "Can the issue actually be made simple?"

I'm not sure that can be done for healthcare, but bravo to Andrew Sullivan for trying. I am pretty sure it can be done for many of the main debates in transit policy, and that's the core of my work right now.

comments of the week: ideal stop spacing is 400m?

Posted on April 11, 2011 in Access, Meditations, Stop Spacing

Zoltán:

My experiences in Leeds and Baltimore confirm the validity of a 400m standard for stop spacing. Rarely do you get to experiment with reducing or increasing stop spacing, but we can look at the sum of the experience of the two cities.
In Leeds, there have been a number of routes, normally small single-deck buses running every 30-60 minutes, that have stopped frequently and taken local roads to penetrate various neighbourhoods better than the frequent, relatively fast buses on the main arterials.
These have pretty much all disappeared with time, because people always proved willing to walk about 400m to the main arterials, which is about the furthest you're ever expected to. My experience of occasionally catching one of the slower local routes is that I would be the only passenger.
So, this demonstrates that people really are willing to walk to speed and frequency.
Meanwhile, in Baltimore, buses do stick to the main arterials. But they stop at every corner, just like the streetcars before them, which in Baltimore is about every 120 metres. And hell, are they slow – from Catonsville, MD to downtown Baltimore, I frequently spent 50 minutes to an hour to travel 8 miles that can be driven in about 20 minutes.
What's more, it's an uncomfortable ride, because the bus pulls violently to the corner at every corner, to keep the hell out of the way of traffic. And that's actually the problem with the frequent stops in Baltimore – while boarding time is a bit more complicated (though there's a fixed element to people getting up and making their way out of the bus, and people waiting for the driver's nod to start boarding), you can basically multiply the time spent waiting to pull out back into traffic by the number of stops.
So what you have is a slow service, and by that virtue, a less frequent service, because one bus can make fewer trips. So, if people will walk to speed and frequency where delivered by different routes, then we can assume that people will also walk to speed and frequency on existing routes when that's achieved by means of widely spaced stops.

In thinking about this sexless but profoundly consequential issue, you may want to refer back to this post, which clarifies the concepts of coverage gaps and duplicate coverage areas. (See that post for more explanation of this figure.)

Balancing these two considerations is the essence of the stop spacing task. Closer stop spacing means smaller coverage gaps but more wasteful duplication of coverage area. So a lot depends on the local land use. If there's more stuff along the transit corridor than in the coverage gaps, that argues for pushing stops wider.

The European HiTrans guides suggest 600m for stop spacing in busy areas where demand is high and local access is the intent. In general, Europeans and Australians are willing to go wider than North Americans in a similar setting.

So why on earth does any transit agency that aims to compete with cars put stops as close as 120m?? Well, these things creep up on you. If ridership is so low that you won't be stopping at every stop anyway, close spacing doesn't present much of a problem. But once ridership reaches the level where you're stopping at every stop, close spacing requires you to stop more, and thus run more slowly, to serve the same number of people.

On the tradition of very-close North American spacing, John offered an interesting speculation:

"But right now, a lot of transit (in North America especially) seems designed to compete with walking, rather than with the car. Do we have the balance right?"
I think the balance is off, and I think it's largely a legacy of the streetcar era, when transit only needed to be faster than walking to draw a huge mode share. In that situation, minimizing walking distance made sense. Then the competition changed when cars came along and average trip distances increased. The streetcars were removed, but nobody ever bothered to change the stop spacing. Now transit isn't time-competitive, and in most cities it serves only the transit-dependent and niche markets like express routes to the CBD.

Is very close stop spacing on North American bus systems really so old that it predates the car, and therefore reflects the competitive situation between transit and its alternatives as it was around 1910? That would be some sort of record for failure to adapt: a habit that has survived for an entire century after its obsolescence.

Obviously, too, many North American services aren't trying to compete with the car; they're social services intended only for the transit dependent, and in those cases travel time is presumed to travel less. But be careful about taking that attitude too far.

dissent of the week: stop spacing and transit’s multiple goals

Posted on April 10, 2011 in Access, Dissents, Meditations, Philosophy, Stop Spacing

Ben Smith from Toronto defends closely-spaced stops, on my post on imagining cities without mobility, which suggests the need to focus more on widely-spaced "rapid transit" stops.

I'd like to be the devil's advocate for a minute and defend somewhat tighter stop spacing. Think of transit as an elevator: You're on the 7th floor and decide to walk up to the 8th floor, and feel that having the elevator stop there is a waste. However, someone who is getting on at the ground floor may also want to get off at the 8th floor, so having a stop there isn't a waste.
I'm not trying to say that transit should stop at everyone's doorstop, but there is a case for having a more local oriented transit with SOMEWHAT frequent stops. However, if demand and density is having your transit vehicle stop every 100m with a large number of passengers boarding at each stop, then it makes sense to use a higher-order transit vehicle with wider stops.

The easy answer to this is that if you can walk from the 7th floor to the 8th floor to get from one to the other, you can take the same walk from an express elevator that stops only at the 7th. But that may be too easy.

I personally am willing to walk as far to useful rapid transit (for a long trip across the region) as I will to a final destination. My personal mode choice algorithm (as far as I understand it) is that I want to (a) minimize total travel time and also (b) get exercise and (c) avoid waiting and especially passive uncertainty. So I'm as willing to walk the same distance to a place regardless of whether that place is my destination or I'm planning to catch rapid transit there.

Does my philosphical viewpoint on this depend too much on my own abilities and preferences? In other words, am I assuming that secretly everyone wants to be just like me? And if so, am I doing this more than anyone else does?

Obviously, as always, we need to recognize a portion of the population that can't walk far, but at the same time we have two widely articulated policy goals that push the other way:

health goals that support encouraging people to walk if they can.
sustainability goals that require transit with highways rather than with walking and cycling, which means competing for the trip that is well beyond most people's walking distance

Those considerations lead me to a provisional view that the main prioirty for public transit investment needs to be rapid transit that's worth walking to, not slow transit that stops near everyone's door and that looks intimate and friendly in a New Urbanist mainstreet. That was the core of my argument with Patrick Condon.

Obviously, there need to be mobility options for senior and disabled persons who have greater need for short-distance transit. There are also other logical markets for short-distance trips where very high frequency is possible (recalling that waiting time is often the disincentive for short trips) such as downtown shuttles.

But right now, a lot of transit (in North America especially) seems designed to compete with walking, rather than with the car. Do we have the balance right?

UPDATE! Ben Smith, the author of the dissent, has had an epiphany!

on “category errors”

Posted on March 23, 2011 in Meditations, Philosophy

From a chapter of my book called "Five Paths to Confusion," which discusses common errors in thinking about transit. I hope that somewhere out there is a logician or linguist or philosopher who can suggest a better term for "category error."

A category error occurs when you think about a spectrum as though it were a series of boxlike categories. If you and a friend disagree about whether something is blue or purple, you’re making this error together. Blue and purple are adjacent zones on a continuous spectrum of colors (technically wavelengths of light) and zones on a spectrum can only have fuzzy or arbitrary edges. So if you disagree about whether something is blue or purple, you can both be right, based on slightly different notions of where you mark the boundary in the fuzzy area where blue shades into purple. If one of you is right and the other wrong, it can only be because of some arbitrary standard about where blue ends and purple begins, a standard you’ve both agreed to respect.

Category errors are built into the very structure of our language. Our category words feel like boxes with hard edges: blue, purple, tall, wealthy. But like colors, most of them really refer to directions or zones on a continuous spectrum. There’s no objective basis for saying “Jim is tall,” unless we just mean “Jim is taller than most people.” “Tall” is not a box; it’s just a range or direction on a spectrum of possible heights. We all know that, and for simple ideas like height or color the category error rarely causes trouble.

But when we talk about emotive categories, such as wealth or success, we can easily lose sight of the spectrum, and as with blue and purple, this can cause pointless arguments. Consider a famous comment widely (if falsely) attributed to British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher: “A man who, beyond the age of 26, finds himself on a bus can count himself as a failure.” Stated that way, “a failure” sounds like a box that you’re either in or out of. Associating buses with failure or poverty is a common attitude in some cities. If you think about failure or poverty as a box, this can be an easy way to decide that buses aren’t worth your attention, and that there’s no point in thinking about how buses and rail transit can work together as one network.

But even if it’s true that bus riders are poorer than rail riders on average, you can change your perspective by reminding yourself that the boundaries of “poor” and “middle class” and “wealthy” are as fuzzy or arbitrary as the boundary between blue and purple.

Some category errors are built into transportation planning jargon. For example, you may hear certain planners divide transit riders into two boxes. One box, called a discretionary or choice rider, contains people who have the option of driving, and who will use transit only if it out-competes their car. In the other box is the transit dependent or captive rider, who has no viable alternative and therefore has to use transit. Dividing up riders this way leads to the idea that transit must compete for choice riders, while captive riders can largely be taken for granted; they will ride no matter how poor the service gets.

These categories are imposed on reality, not derived from it. Transit dependence, like wealth itself, is a spectrum, with vast numbers of people in the grey areas between “choice” and “captive.” For example, many people with low incomes own a car out of necessity, but experience owning a car as a financial burden. Many low-income families feel they have no alternative but to own a car for every adult in the house. If we give these people credible alternatives to car ownership, they can experience the result as liberating, even though some transportation planners will now call them captives. Often they will find better things to spend that money on, such as education. Many people are in situations like these, and we can achieve both environmental and social goods by helping them choose to own fewer cars. The two-box model of society, where everyone is either choice or captive, prevents us from seeing those possibilities.

Very few of our category words describe things that are really boxlike categories. So whenever you hear someone divide people into two categories, it's worth asking, "are these really boxes, or just zones or directions on a spectrum?"

rail-bus differences: premise or conclusion?

Posted on March 3, 2011 in Bus Rapid Transit, Meditations, Rail Transit, Streetcars (Trams), Technophilia

When you think about transit technologies, how do you categorize them? And why?

Have a look at this first table, which sorts services according to the exclusivity of their right of way. The terms Class A, B, and C are from Vukan Vuchic, describing the basic categories of "what can get in the way" of a transit service.

Is this table two rows, each divided into three columns? Or three columns, each with two rows? Which distinction is more fundamental, and which is secondary?

Right-of-Way Class vs Rail-Bus Distinction

Class A

Exclusive right-of-way and separated from cross traffic

Class B

Exclusive right-of-way, NOT separated from cross traffic.

Class C

Mixed with traffic, including mixed with pedestrians.

Rail

Most rail rapid transit, using “third rail” power sources. Most classic “subway” and “metro” systems.

Most “light rail” in surface operations. Parts of some European and Australian tram networks.

Most North American streetcars. Many European and Australian trams.

Bus

Separated busways: (Brisbane, Ottawa, Bogotá, and segments in Los Angeles, Pittsburgh) Freeway bus/HOT lanes.

At-grade busways: Los Angeles Orange Line, Western Sydney busways, etc.

Buses in mixed traffic.

Well, if your objective is to get where you're going fast and reliably, the Right-of-Way Class tells you a lot about a services's potential to do that, while the rail-bus distinction, in isolation, tells you nothing. The fact is, both rail and bus technologies are capable of the complete spectrum of possibilities. Both can average 6 mph (10 km/h) in Class C situations, and both can run Class A at 60 mph (100 km/h) or more.

RIght-of-way isn't the only thing that matters for getting you where you're going. There's also stop spacing, with its inevitable tradeoff between speed and local access.

Stop Spacing vs Rail-Bus Distinction

Rapid, Limited

(faster = fewer stops)

Local-stop

(slower = more stops)

Express

(one long nonstop segment)

Rail

“Subway”, “Metro”, some commuter rail.

Tram / Streetcar

Some commuter rail.

Bus

Bus Rapid Transit,
“Rapid Bus”, “limited-stop” bus

Local bus

Commuter express bus (often on freeway)

… and of course there are other essential distinctions like frequency, which are also entirely separable from rail and bus technologies.

UPDATE: Please note, yet again, that contrary to early comments I am NOT claiming that these are the only distinctions that matter. As I laid out in some detail here, there are several distinctions that matter. In fact, one of the reasons that people cling so hard to the rail-bus distinction is that the other crucial distinctions are a little more complicated and require some thought, and it's hard to think about this stuff in the political space where decisions get made.

Rail services do tend to be presented in ways that "package" the various crucial dimensions of usefulness. Typical metro systems, for example, are guaranteed to be frequent, with rapid stop spacing, and Class A right of way, because all three are intrinsic to the metro technology, so there's a psychological "packaging" effect when you see a metro map; you can be confident that this means a certain level of service.

I think these tables are interesting because now and then I meet someone who divides the world rigidly into rail and bus, often aligning these categories with a rigid class distinction (William Lind, say) or simply claiming that rail does beautiful things and buses don't. In that view, the different columns of these tables are secondary and interchangeable, while the rows express something absolute.

Patrick Condon, for example, proposes that instead of building one rapid transit line (Class A, rapid stops) we could just build lots of streetcars (mostly Class C, local stops). That can make sense if you judge technologies entirely on their influence on urban form, and prefer the kind of form that seems to arise from streetcars. But it will be just incoherent to a transit planner who's been trained to help people get places, and wonders if he's being told that nobody cares about that anymore. Because if you do care about personal mobility — people getting where they're going, now, today — you have to care about the columns.

I hope to leave this topic for a while, but I do think it's worth coming back to tables like this to ask yourself: Do I tend to divide the world according to the rows first, or the columns? If so, why? Is my way of slicing this table something I've discovered about the world, or something my mind is imposing on it?

how universal is transit’s geometry?

Posted on March 1, 2011 in Amusing, Basics, Be on the Way, Meditations, Philosophy

Suppose that somewhere else in our universe, there’s another planet with intelligent life. We don’t know what they look like, or what gases they breathe, or what they eat, or whether they’re inches or miles tall. We don’t know whether they move by hopping, drifting, or slithering. We don’t even know if their lived environment is largely two-dimensional, like the surface of the earth, or freely three dimensional, perhaps a cloud-city full of cloud-beings who drift up and down as easily as they drift left or right. We don’t know what they call themselves, so let’s call them borts. Continue Reading →

basics: expertise vs. activism

Posted on February 21, 2011 in Advocacy, Basics, Light Rail, Los Angeles, Meditations, Mobility, Philosophy, Rail Transit, San Francisco, Seattle, Streetcars (Trams), Technophilia, Toronto

The planning professions work in a grey zone between expertise and activism, and managing these competing impulses is one of our hardest tasks.

As a transit planning consultant, I don’t worry much about being perceived as an advocate of transit in general. Experts in any field are expected to believe in its importance. But I do try to keep a little distance between my knowledge about transit and the impulse to say “You should do this.” A good consultant must know how to marry his own knowledge to his client’s values, which may lead him to make different recommendations than he would do as a citizen, expressing his own values. Continue Reading →

tadpoles of new zealand: an auckland transit animation

Posted on February 19, 2011 in Amusing, Auckland, Maps, Meditations

There's a lot of potential for animation of Google Transit data, and we're just starting to see it explored. Some results will be rich with information, differentiating various kinds of service so that you can see how they dance together. Chris McDowall's animation of a day's transit in Auckland is less informative but correspondingly more meditative. Buses, trains and ferries are all rendered as earnest little tadpoles (or comets, or sperm, or viruses, depending on your sense of scale).

(An animated map of Auckland's public transport network from Chris McDowall on Vimeo.)

It nicely illustrates the point that frequency is what makes a route into a line. The line that goes really solid during the peak is the Northern Busway, which is far more frequent than any of Auckland's rail lines.

UPDATE: Commenter "numbat" points out that on the island at the east edge of the image (Waiheke Island) you can see local island buses pulsing with ferries that link the island to Auckland's CBD.

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