New York City

New York: Mayor Vows to Increase Bus Speeds

Posted on January 10, 2019 in New York City, Reliability

In all my years of working on transit in North America, I’ve heard lots of mayors make announcements about rail projects and various new technologies. I’ve heard many make vague supportive statements about bus service. I’ve even heard them advocate for more bus service. But I’ve never a big city mayor promise to dramatically speed up buses all over a city. (Correct me if you have.)

Vin Barone at AMNY reports that New York Mayor Bill de Blasio will announce a commitment to increasing bus speeds across his city by 25%.

This is a very high number! Admittedly, it’s a low base, with so many New York city bus routes running so slowly that it’s sometimes faster to walk. Most individual interventions I’ve encountered improve speed by much less than 10%. So hitting 25% will require a huge range of actions.

These actions can be sorted into two baskets: Cost and Controversy.

Some problems can be solved with money, without too much controversy. All of the following are planned, either by the City or by the transit agency (MTA).

Improving signal priority systems, which is a matter of signal technology. (City)
Improving enforcement of bus lanes. (City)
Improving active supervision to reduce bunching, via a “Bus Command Center” (MTA)
All-door boarding via fare-card readers at rear doors, and roving fare enforcement (MTA)

All that is mostly money, both capital and operating. Lots of it. And all together, it is unlikely to get you to 25% citywide.

The other big step involves controversy rather than money. More bus lanes need to be created, and the space for them will come from some other street use, usually parking lanes, traffic lanes, and versatile curb space for pickups and deliveries. Bus facilities cost money too, but winning these battles is the bigger struggle, so the cost is really in political capital rather than money. All of these impacts are profoundly controversial in a dense city, which is why cities tend to do them only after they’ve exhausted all the other options, and why so many bus lane plans are watered down, and made less functional, through the public outreach process.

The mayor’s target will work if it becomes a consistent direction to city government, fully explained to the people, so that not achieving it is not an option. When we work on this process, we do a lot of work in explaining why the target is what it is, and building some consensus around it, so that staff will have political support to not compromise as the inevitable objections roll in. The mayoral declaration is a huge step. It remains to be seen if the target holds in the face of the controversy.

Because ultimately, while money is an obstacle, controversy is a much, much bigger one, and is the main reason big-city bus service usually doesn’t improve.

New York: Bus Network Redesign on the Horizon!

Posted on April 24, 2018 in General, New York City

by Christopher Yuen

MTA New York City Transit has just unveiled a plan today to completely revamp its bus network. Some elements of the plan that will be especially impactful (from their press release) include:

A completely redesigned bus route network. NYC Transit is performing a top-to-bottom, holistic review and redesign of the entire city’s bus route network – the first in decades – based on public input, demographic changes and travel demand analysis. Route changes will provide better connectivity and more direct service in every neighborhood, with updated stop spacing and the expansion of off-peak service on strategic routes.
Collaboration with NYCDOT, NYPD, & local communities. NYC Transit will collaborate with NYCDOT [the city’s Department of Transportation] to expand the implementation of bus lanes, exclusive busways, queue jumps, bus stop arrival time displays and bus priority technology on traffic signals and buses known as “traffic signal priority.” Many of these changes will also require robust community outreach. NYC Transit will also advocate for strengthened [police] enforcement of bus lanes, dedicated transit-priority traffic teams, and legislative approval to expand bus-mounted cameras beyond 16 existing routes to help enforce bus lane rules in more locations. (Most of the big wins in urban transit require transit agencies and city governments to work together.)
Speeding up boarding by using all doors. NYC Transit is pursuing new approaches to speed up bus boarding, particularly using upcoming electronic tap-to-pay readers to facilitate all-door boarding. While purchasing fare media with cash will always be an option with the new fare payment system being developed by the MTA, NYC Transit will also explore cashless options to speed up boarding time in select circumstances.

Transit routes are often tweaked in response to infrastructure changes, local desires, and complaints. Some of these changes serve specialized markets and may work well for some people’s specific trips, but over time, they erode the ability for a system to work well for the everyone else. It takes a clean-slate redesign approach to create a network of simple, frequent and reliable lines. The result, as has been the case in Houston, Coloubus, and Anchorage, is usually less routes in total, but more routes at higher frequencies all day, 7 days a week.

It’s also promising to see the New York MTA include measures to improve the speed and reliability of buses. Since the speed of urban transit is not determined by how fast vehicles go, but by how often they have to stop, increased stop spacing, all-door boarding and properly enforced bus-only lanes will help keep people moving, especially during rush hour when traffic congestion and crowding has its worst impacts. It’s also important to note that for transit, time is money, so faster service means more service for the same operating budget.

New York’s plan is ambitious, and potentially very impactful, so this will be an interesting story to follow over the coming years.

The Pleasure of Track Maps

Posted on May 14, 2017 in Maps, New York City, Rail Transit

If you’ve never seen a subway track map, I suggest you look at this one, for New York, by “radical cartographer” Andrew Lynch. Most track diagrams are not to scale, and look like they’re meant to make to make sense only to insiders. But this one is beautiful.

What’s more, it’s accurate in geographic scale, though of course the separation of tracks can’t be on the same scale as the network. Still, New York’s subway is both huge and full of details, so this is no mean feat. Only 22 insets were required, to zoom in on tricky segments.

Gazing at a good track map can give you an appreciation for the heroics involved in moving trains around in this limited infrastructure. Switches and extra tracks are very expensive underground, which is why they are never where you need them to handle a particular incident. This, for example, is why a track closure at one station may continue through several stations nearby.

Gaze at this piece of the Bronx, and marvel at what a train would have to do to get from Jerome Yard to a station on the Orange (B+D) line. I presume they don’t have to do this very often, but in a pinch, they can.

I spent a delighted hour with it.

Basics: Where Can Ferries Succeed?

Posted on December 27, 2016 in 3-newbasic, Basics, Ferries, New York City

Brisbane’s cross-river ferry

(Updated 2 May 2019)

Ferries are always an appealing transit idea. A serene way to travel when the weather is nice. Great views! And they must be reliable, because they never get stuck in congestion!

As always, there’s more to it. Ferries are sometimes the right answer, but the barriers they present often outweigh their benefits. Where should they seriously be considered?

Think of a ferry as a rapid transit line, minus the huge cost of land and rails and power supply, but unable to continue across a land-water boundary.

Like rail, ferries carry the limitation that everyone has to get off at the end of the line. Obviously you need transit connections there for onward journeys onto land, but the resulting passenger trips often require several changes of vehicle to continue in one direction, which is always less effective than services that can flow continuously across the city like a well-designed bus or rail line. So if the same market is already served by land transit using bridges or tunnels, ferries often struggle to compete, because bus and rail services can penetrate deeper into the city on both sides to complete logical networks.

Another constraint of ferries is that waterfront land is expensive, so it’s hard to find space at a ferry terminal for everything you’d want at a transit node, including terminals for connecting transit, transit-oriented development, and (if you must) commuter parking.

To overcome these limitations, a successful ferry line must have most or all the following necessary conditions.

High frequency. Unless you have a huge rush-hour commute market, low frequency makes a service t0o narrowly specialized. Frequency requires minimizing on-board labor, as labor drives operating cost and thus constrains frequency. (Marine regulations in many countries are an obstacle to this.) Ferries with only one employee on board achieve frequency through low labor costs. See, for example, the privately owned micro-ferries on Vancouver’s False Creek (really a small, sheltered harbor) or the small cross-river ferries in Brisbane. These can do well with only moderate demand because they are so cheap to operate, and can build up useful frequency for the same reason.
Very high density right in walking distance of the ferry terminal, preferably without major grades to climb. This is a challenge because if you draw a walk-access circle around a ferry terminal, most of it is usually water. Cities that slope upward steeply from the water, like Seattle, present further barriers. Using Park-and-Ride as the main method of ferry access almost never works, because waterfront land is too expensive for such an inefficient land use.
Quality landside access by frequent connecting transit modes, sufficient to draw adequate all-day demand. This and the previous one can substitute for each other to a degree, but the most successful services have both. In Hong Kong, for example, there are large bus terminals at the major ferry terminals, despite astronomical land value and the many competing demands, because they really understand the importance of total networks, which in turn are built on easy connections.
No competition from bridges or tunnels, especially those carrying frequent transit lines (rail or bus). Ferries just can’t compete, for high volume, with bridge-and-tunnel services. Sometimes ferries are run to densely populated coves where the competing bridge or tunnel lands too far back from the water to serve the area, as on New York’s East River, but in this case you have to fill the ferry solely with waterfront demand, because people inland will take the bridge or tunnel service.
A Direct Path. Ferries along twisting rivers are often disappointing, unless the available land-based paths are equally indirect.
Few Major Terminals, Not Many Little Ones. A common mistake in ferry planning is to build too many little terminals, each with too small a market, so that they don’t support enough frequency to be useful. Auckland and Sydney, for example, have lots of ferry terminals in bucolic suburban coves, down a steep hill from most nearby residents, where there are just not enough people. These tend to become elite services and often not very productive ones. Fewer stops with larger demand is the key, just in the most productive land-based networks.
Favorable Pricing. If there is any possible competition with bridge/tunnel service, the ferry needs to be cheaper to use, counting the total trip including any connections. It’s often hard to justify that if there is more than one employee per vehicle.

The immensely successful Staten Island Ferry has all the necessary features, including huge transit networks converging on both ends.

Really successful ferries, like New York’s Staten Island Ferry or Hong Kong’s Star Ferry, have all of these features. At a smaller scale, Brisbane’s cross river ferries and Vancouver’s False Creek ferries, both with just one employee per vehicle, scale well for short trips across a water barrier.

The romantic and scenic qualities of ferries always generate support, just as happens with rail services, but service must be useful, compared to your alternatives, if it is to succeed long-term. Tourism and recreation are often cited as markets, but unless you have a supercharged tourism sector, and the right kind of service and connections, this market is easily overstated due to inevitable private sector boosterism.

As always, if the ridership prospects are low and the benefits are mostly private, the funding should be private as well. Encourage the tourist sector to fund tourist ferries directly, just as you would for any service precision-designed around a single interest. The same could be said for small, low-demand ferries that mostly benefit a single development or specialized community.

So yes, ferries are good at certain things, but destinations along the water, and some local enthusiasm, isn’t enough to ensure a successful ferry project.

New York: “Subway Deserts” and the Bus “Turnaround” Campaign

Posted on July 20, 2016 in New York City

It’s fun to draw maps of “deserts,” places where some cool thing is absent and where you can therefore imply that people are being abandoned or ignored. This Chris Whong map of New York “Subway deserts” for example, just showed up in Citylab:

Source: Chris Whong

Sure enough, most of the land area of New York city is not near a subway station.

But how many people is that? It’s a lot of people, but fewer than you’d guess from looking at the map, because so much of the subwayless area is low-density or even open space. Geographically accurate maps always invite you to misread area as population.

And in any case, should everyone in New York be close to a subway stop? The subway is not the whole transit system; it’s just the high-capacity backbone of it. You build subways only where you expect to fill long trains at high frequency for much of the day.

There may be places in New York that would profit from, and reward, the investment in a subway, but a map of everywhere that subways don’t go doesn’t even start that conversation.

The deserts that really matter are deserts of access, places where people are truly without options. And to assess that for New York, even just for transit, you’d have to care about the massive bus network. It’s the bus network job to cover the whole city, getting close to everyone. Much of the bus system is also very frequent.

That’s why the smart folks at TransitCenter — a New York – based transit advocacy foundation — have launched a Turnaround campaign, meant to call attention to all the things that can be done to make New York bus service more useful, so that almost everyone can get to useful transit. I deal with the barriers to good bus service all over the developed world, and the problem is always the same. It’s not the technical limitations to what buses can do. It’s the official apathy about them.

For example, many elected officials still believe that because buses are supposedly “flexible” they should just be changed so that they go by the house of anyone who requests them, as though fixed route bus lines were taxis or UberPools. If they get enough phone calls, these elected officials will tell staff to transform the route on the right into the one on the left, with no comprehension of what they’re destroying.

Obviously, bus lines designed for high ridership run straight, so that they are as useful to many many people as possible, and so that they can run as frequently as possible. Obvious stuff, but you have to fight this battle over and over, and that’s a lot of what I do.

So bravo to TransitCenter for its review of the New York buses. It’s something that people in any developed-world city would be smart to review, and contemplate.

defending new york’s subway from british sneers

Posted on September 25, 2014 in Amusing, Legibility, London, Maps, New York City, Rail Transit

Guardian journalist Bim Adewunmi recently traveled from London to New York and slammed the subway as compared to her beloved Underground. The blowback has been delightful. She seemed especially angry about the information system that isn't exactly what Transport for London would do.

The city’s subway map is dense and needlessly complex. Where in London the Central line (red) is distinct from the Piccadilly (dark blue), which is markedly different from the Hammersmith and City line (pink), New York’s map has designated the same forest green to the 4, the 5 and the 6 lines. The B, D, F and M all rejoice in exactly the same shade of violent orange. … Why would you do this? The whole thing resembles a child’s approximation of a city transit system: it makes no sense.

She's talking about branching lines. If she were from Paris, whose elegant Métro is nearly branchless, she'd have a point. But what a comment for someone from London!

In New York's map, the common color helps you navigate the core part of a line while the numbers or letters help you sort out the branches. This is a very common way of making branching lines clear. Meanwhile, in London, where transit is presumably designed by sober adults, we have this:

No 4, 5, and 6 to confuse you! No, just a beast called the Northern Line even though it's both northerly and southerly, consisting of two entirely different lines through the central city. Is there a direct train from Waterloo to Mill Hill East? How would I know? As Clive's Underground Guide helpfully explains: "The pattern of service … tends to change with each new issue of the timetable."

You see, Bim, Americans like maps and nomenclature systems that actually indicate where their train will go! In London I'm sure you just somehow just know what the next Northern Line train might be up to. But all that aristocratic just knowing that you Brits do is exactly why you lost your Empire!

😉

more maps of your freedom: job access and transit

Posted on April 24, 2014 in Access, Maps, Mobility, New York City

The Regional Plan Association, the New York-region planning think tank, has produced a great new map as part of their Fragile Success report:

http://fragile-success.rpa.org/maps/jobs.html

This map takes the travel time methodology regular readers of this blog know well, but then within that area of access shows all of the jobs, categorized by sector, as a dot density map. The effect is to visualize the quantity and number of jobs that can be reached from a give point in a given time, by walking, transit, cycling, or driving. The map is also able to quickly calculate the number of jobs inside the AM peak travelshed on the fly, and even allows the user to toggle on and off different job classifications. If you want to see all of the education jobs within a 30 minute walk of a given location, now you can.

To revisit a 2012 post, this sort of map of personal mobility is useful for two reasons:

Helping people and organizations understand the transit consequences of where they choose to locate, and thus to take more responsbility for those consequences. This, over time, can help people who value good transit to locate where transit access is good — something that's very hard to discern from a typical bus map but that becomes very obvious here. You can even assess access to specific things that you value, based on exactly where the blobs are.
Helping people visualise the benefit of transit — access to your city — as a freedom, and thus to understand more clearly what transit does for them. It broadens the narrow notion of travel time – which is often understood for only one typical trip — into a picture of your options for accessing all the things you value. The percentage of a city's resources (jobs, housing, retail etc) that is in the blobs for a particular location could also form the basis for a meaningful Transit Score that could replace the technologically biased scores now used by WalkScore.com.

new york:a frequent network map

Posted on February 10, 2014 in Frequent Networks, New York City

Just found this map of all 10-minute frequency or better services in New York City, by this not readily identifiable character on Tumblr. This looks like quite a struggle to make clear given the complex nomenclature that NYCTA uses.

The whole thing is here. An NYCTA contact tells me it’s still current except for a change around LaGuardia airport.

When I’m learning a new city — as I do 10 or 20 times a year as a consultant — this is what I need!

time for an urbanist “tea party”? the citylab conversations

Posted on October 14, 2013 in Advocacy, Funding, New York City, Philosophy

The "tea party" US House members who currently dominate the news are unlikely allies of urbanists. But on one core idea, a band of urbanist thinkers are starting to echo a key idea of the radical right: Big and active national government may not be the answer.

Last week, I was honored to be invited to Citylab, a two-day gathering in New York City sponsored by the Aspen Institute, the Atlantic magazine, and Bloomberg Philanthropies. The event featured mayors and civic policy leaders from both North America and overseas as well as leading academics, journalists, and consultants.

I expected the thrilling mix of new ideas, compelling stories, and quirky characters, but I got one thing I didn't expect: A full-throated demand, from several surprising voices, for an urbanist revolt against the power of national governments.

Al Gore said it with his trademark fusion of bluntness and erudition: "The nation-state," he said, "is becoming disintermediated." If you're not an academic at heart, that means: "National governments are becoming irrelevant to urban policy, and hence to the economy of an urban century."

On cue, the New York Times published an op-ed on "The End of the Nation-State," about how cities are leaving nations behind. Citylab also featured a terrific interview with political scientist Benjamin Barber, whose new book If Mayors Ruled the World argues for the irrelevance of nation-states in a world where cities are the real levers of economic power. (According to Barber, the full title of his book should have been: If Mayors Ruled the World: Why They Should and How They Already Do.) When I spoke with Barber later, looking for nuance, he was full-throated in ridiculing the US Federal role in urbanism. On this view, all the well-intentioned money that the Federal government doles out for urban goodies should be spent by cities as they see fit, or perhaps (gasp) never sent to Washington at all.

Follow this logic and you might arrive at a radical urban Federalism, perhaps even one that could meet tea-party demands to "Abolish the IRS!" Pay taxes to your city or state, and let them send a bit of it on to central government to do the few things that only a central government can do. Push power downward to the scale where problems can be solved.

You might even separate urban from rural governance in a way that enables both to thrive, each at its proper scale, replacing the eternal struggle between these necessary opposites that makes today's political discourse so inane. The "size of government" debate is just a pointless and eternal struggle between urban and rural experience, both of which are right. Living in cities means relying on government for many things that the rural resident provides for herself, so of course the attitude toward government is different. But what's really logically different is the role of local government. Both urban and rural experience provide good reason to be suspicious of big-yet-distant national government, which can be as unresponsive to big-city mayors as it is to a Wyoming county official who just needs to get a bridge fixed.

At most of the urbanist and transportation conferences that I attend, though, any shrinking the national government role is met with horror. And that's understandable.

In the US, the prevailing local response to declining federal spending is outrage and redoubled advocacy. In Australia or Canada, two countries I work in extensively, working urbanists and infrastructure advocates seem to agree that of course there must be a bigger central government role in everything, with the US often cited as the model. In the US itself, it's easy to see the current cuts in Federal spending as a disaster for urbanism and infrastructure. It is, but it could also be something else: an invitation to governments that are closer to the people to have their own conversations that lead to local consensus about funding and solutions.

If mayors do end up ruling the world, it will be because the city, unlike the state or nation, is where citizenship is mostly deeply felt. A nation's problems are abstract; if they show up in your life you're more likely to think of them as your community's or city's problems. And that, in short, is why the city may be best positioned to actually build consensus around solving problems, including consensus about raising and spending money.

And yet …

Before urbanists join the tea partiers in trying to shrink the national government, they have to grapple with the problem of inequality. As sites of concentrated opportunity, cities are attracting the poor as well as the rich, and are thus becoming the place where inequality is most painfully evident. But no mayor can be expected to solve a problem that exists on such a scale.

In small-c conservative terms, of course, the problem is not income inequality but rather the declining credibility of a "ladder of opportunity" that convinces everyone that reasonable effort will improve their circumstances. One reason to care about transit, walking, and cycling — for many points on the income spectrum — is that transportation can form such a formidable barrier to opportunity.

All through Citylab, hands were wrung about inequality and the need to Do Something about it, against the backdrop of a New York City mayoral election that is mostly about this issue. A rent control debate, featuring New York City Planning Director Amanda Burden and economist Paul Romer, found no middle ground on the question of whether city policy can usefully intervene to help low income people. Income inequality appeared to be one issue where cities can do little by themselves.

When I asked sociologist Richard Florida about this in the North American context, he pointed me to an article proposing that the US create a Department of Cities. He has good ideas about how to keep this from being just another bureaucracy, but if income inequality is the big issue that only national policy can address, it's not clear that it should be tagged as an urban issue at all. Cities are not where the problems are. Cities are just where people see their society's problems most intensely in daily life, because they get out of their cars.

The great city in the wealthy parts of the world cannot just be an enclave of success. It will deserve the self-government that the mayors seek only if it relentlessly inspires, supports, and gives back to its suburban and rural hinterland, creating its own "ladder of opportunity" for access to the riches of urban life. Only a few people can afford Manhattan or San Francsico, so those cities' money and expertise must focus not just on themselves but on making life in more affordable places incrementally more humane. Turning Newark into Manhattan would just make it unaffordable, so some of the urgency must lie in less photogenic intervention that works for each place's price-point. It lies in providing safe places to walk and cycle, and a safe way to cross the street at every bus stop, even in landscapes of drive-through everything that will be what many people can afford, and what some prefer.

That's why I'm happy to be working not just in San Francisco but also in Houston, where affordability is a leading selling point. It's why I'm suspicious of transit planning that defines an elite "choice rider" as the only important customer, including much of the transit-aestheticism that comes out of urbanist academia. Where are the prestigious awards for the best affordable, scalable, but nonsexy intervention that made low-income inner-ring suburbia more safe and functional? How do we build not just the shining city behind a moat (San Francisco, Manhattan, Singapore) but a chain of humane and functional places, at every price-point, that combine safety, civility and opportunity?

Where is the money in that? If mayors ruled the world, I hope that would be obvious. So let's hope they already do.

shutting down new york? think of the kittens

Posted on August 31, 2013 in Amusing, New York City

Readers know I often find it necessary to wade into "efficiency vs emotion" debates, usually to point out that there are emotions at stake in efficiency too. Yes, there were kitten lovers everywhere, including me, alarmed by the thought of two lost kittens on the tracks of the New York subway. There were also tens of thousands of stranded people missing their appointments and families and last-chance-to-see-dying-parents as two major subway lines were shut down to avoid hitting them.

But you don't actually say that.

And of course some obsessive philosopher-geek will want to probe each cat-lover's definition of cute-enough-to-shut-down-a-city. "What if they had been squirrels?" he'll ask. "Squirrels are adorable too, but they're rodents, so if squirrels are to be saved, why aren't we braking for all the rats that are down there anyway — mmph!" No, you gag the philosopher-geek for his own safety.

Unless you are a certain Republican candidate for mayor, you don't actually say that you'd have kept the trains running even if it brought two lost kittens to an untimely end. If tempted, you see the angry mobs holding photos of kittens. You see radicals among them hurling dead kittens at you, each bearing a little certificate that it died of natural causes. You imagine that every internet cat pic, for the rest of your life, will be like an ad for your opponents.

Social media have elevated the cat, and especially the cat picture, to a symbolic power not seen since Ancient Egypt. You don't mess with that.

Which reminds me, here's the complete collection of cat posts from my personal blog. Here's an old pic of me holding Cody (1996-2009), whose safety I'd have personally shut down New York for:

So yes, you efficiency-loving, reliability-loving urban technocrats! There are purring, furry, carnivorous limits, and I'm there with the cat-lovers, astride the deserted subway tracks, yelling stop! Isn't this a cute kitten?

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