Philosophy

basic questions about “cost/benefit analysis”

Posted on December 5, 2011 in Philosophy

Transit projects, like all government projects, have costs and benefits, so one classic way to evaluate project proposals has been the "Cost/Benefit Analysis" (CBA). Add up all the benefits, add up all the costs, divide benefits by costs and announce the Benefit/Cost Ratio (BCR). If the it's below 1, which means the costs exceed the benefits, you kill the project. The higher the it is, the better the project.

In the Financial Post (part of Canada's National Post), Peter Shawn Taylor argues that the Cost/Benefit Analysis is the best way to evaluate a project, and that bad projects are being advanced by a newfangled thing called Multiple Account Evaluation (MAE). I encourage you to be bored by this dispute, but not before you understand it. Neither of these methods is sufficient to end a passionate argument, and it's important to know why they never will be.

The problem with Cost/Benefit analysis is that it requires you to convert all the costs, and all the benefits, to the same currency. That means you must know, with imperial confidence, the cost in dollars of such things as:

each minute of each customer's time
a particular ecosystem to be destroyed or preserved, which may involve various degrees of endangerment (of species, and of ecosystem types)
historic or cultural resources to be destroyed or relocated, or preserved.
the redevelopment potential of a particular area with or without the project, and the various benefits and costs arising from that potential.
impacts of the project on affordability, and thus on the future shift of disadvantaged persons from one area to another, with a range of social impacts.
benefits of electrification (quiet, no on-site pollution) on a neighborhood's quality of life, which impacts the previous point.
a particular aesthetic impact that makes the city distinctive in a new way, such as a stunning piece of architecture or a new relationship to a unique historic artefact or feature of landscape.

Several of these items require confident prediction of the future, and there is also a vast question of who pays these costs and reaps these benefits. I am not criticizing the vast body of research that has gone into improving the conversion factors that turn all costs and benefits into a dollar value. But unless we really agree on what endangered ecosystems or municipal self-esteem are worth, in dollars, it's reasonable to question whether Cost/Benefit analysis can deliver the last, decisive word on whether a project deserves public investment.

One Canadian solution is the Multiple Account Evaluation (MAE). Different types of benefits and costs are calculated differently and not converted into a common currency. As Taylor describes it:

Developed by the [British Columbia] government in 1993 and now in widespread use, MAE dispenses with a single spreadsheet of advantages and disadvantages and adopts instead numerous separate “accounts:” a financial account, social account, environmental account and so on. In this way, the actual monetary costs and benefits of a project become just one of many issues to be considered.

A similar idea is inherent in the term "triple bottom line," which refers to economic, environmental, and social impacts — positive and negative — of a proposal. In either case, you end up with a series of parallel analyses that give different answers from the point of view of different kinds of cost and benefit.

So then what do you do? Taylor quotes emeritus Professor John Shortreed of the University of Waterloo:

“The problem with MAE is that each account is given equal weight,” he observes. “This suggests the billion-dollar cost of the project is no more or less important than any of the other accounts, however trivial.”

It's easy to weight each account equally, because that sounds fair, but of course equal weighting is just as arbitrary as any other weighting, because we're talking about things that are not directly comparable to each other, such as a social cost vs an environmental one. If you could really compare those things, we'd be able to do cost/benefit analysis.

MAE and the "triple bottom line" are useful concepts because they reveal the arbitrariness of weighting. Weighting implies decisions, for example, about the relative importance of social vs environmental impacts. That means the weighting is a value judgment about what matters to us as humans, as a community, as a civilization. Surely we should argue passionately, maybe even irrationally, about that!

The real problem here is that in the interests of consensus, we tend to allow technical analysis to make important value judgments for us, which is to say, we want technical analysis to tell us who we are.

When you hear the terms social benefit, environmental benefit, and economic benefit, which arouses the strongest positive feelings? The answer is an important signal about your deeply-held values and world-view. If a technical analyis is making that decision for you, are you sure it's the analysis you want to trust?

Cost/benefit analysis and Multiple Account Evaluation (or "triple bottom line") both conceal value judgments. Cost/benefit analysis hides value judgments in the factors used to convert various costs and benefits into dollars. MAE or "triple bottom line," by contrast, comes up with multiple ratios — social vs environmental, for example — and ends up having to weight them, which is where the judgment appears. I prefer the MAE or "triple bottom line" only becuase it makes the arbitrariness of weighting more visible, and hence pushes the conversation about it closer to the public sphere.

It's understandable that we don't want to compare a billion-dollar pricetag to unquantifiable but powerful benefits that people will weight differently. But the whole idea of the triple bottom line is that (a) we have to make these comparisons and (b) there's no technical basis for an answer. When I'm doing evaluation frameworks of any kind, I look for guidance on the weighting based on locally adopted goals, value statements, or public discussion. If the goals haven't been articulated, I often suggest some public discussion about the weighting itself. (Some evaluation processes do consult the public on weighting, but the question can sound too technical at that point so not enough people pay attention; I think more can be done to make these discussions more vivid and consequential.)

As usual, I don't have the answer, only a refinement of the question. Should communities talk about how to weigh competing values that are in conflict? Or should they let those decisions be made inside a technical process in the guise of analysis? There's a very powerful argument for the latter: decisions get made. It's a lot of work to educate a community enough that it can express its values and desires in a form that a project can implement, even before you impose the other value judgments attached to various funding sources. I don't advocate either position entirely, but have argued the "discuss the values" position because it should be visible as a choice. In many ways, this is the "democracy vs technocracy" debate that we're hearing right now in the context of the European Union. It's a hard question, maybe too hard, but it's one of those great debates worth caring about.

should transit agencies “retrench” to become “profitable”?

Posted on September 19, 2011 in Advocacy, Consulting, Philosophy, US Federal Policy

The University of Minnesota's David Levinson wrote a bracing article last week arguing for a new approach to how we decide what transit lines should exist. In its emphasis on "not losing money," it may remind you of some of the broadsides of the anti-transit right, but Levinson is not one of that crowd, as far as I know.

So I thought I'd quote the juiciest parts here, and provide some counterpoint. Levinson and I use very different frames, but if you look beyond those, there's some agreement here.

Mass transit systems in the United States are collectively losing money hand over fist. Yet many individual routes (including bus routes) earn enough to pay their own operating (and even capital costs). But like bad mortgages contaminating the good, money-losing transit routes are bogging down the system.

This "profitability" or "breaking even" frame may alienate many on the left from the merit of Levinson's idea. Currently, transit agencies are not trying to break even, so they are not failing if they don't. If we propose a free-market view in which transit should be breaking even, well, I'd like to see this as well in a perfect world. But that would be a world in which government isn't heavily subsidizing transit's competitor, the private car — not just through road expenditures but through such interventions as minimum parking requirements and petroleum-based foreign policy. I would further suggest that current environmental crises argue for government to be biased away from the private car and toward modes that do less environmental harm, and that subsidies toward transit (i.e. accepting that transit "loses money") are one valid way of doing that.

We can divide individual systems into three sets of routes:

Always be suspicious when a transit network is analyzed as though it were a pile of routes, because a good network is more than the sum of its parts.

1. Those routes break-even or profit financially (at a given fare). This is the "core".

These tend to be of two types: commuter express routes that run only when they're very busy, and all-day high-frequency lines in dense urban cores with all-day demand. In my work, I describe these services as having a "Ridership Goal" or "Productivity Goal."

2. Those lines which are necessary for the core routes to break-even, and collectively help the set of routes break-even. These are the "feeders".

Levinson is acknowledging here that it's not actually possible to classify all lines cleanly, because in a well-designed transit network designed for anywhere-to-anywhere travel it is the network that yields ridership, not just individual services. It appears Levinson wants to distinguish a set of lines as individually unprofitable but necessary for the overall profitability of a network — as opposed to the third category below. OK, but this is the same as saying that there is no meaningful line-by-line measurement of "profitability" in an interdependent network; only the entire network (except for the weakest services discussed below) can be judged as profitable. That's true in my experience.

3. Those lines which lose money, and whose absence would not eliminate profitability on other routes. These money-losers are a welfare program. We might politely call them "equity" routes.

Many people don't want to talk about this category, but these routes exist in any network. They tend to be circulator services in low-density areas — including rural areas — that provide lifeline access but have little or no potential to compete with the car. You can identify them because they don't contribute substantially to the performance of the main network (though this is of course a matter of degree with no hard edge).

If an hourly circulator carrying 5 boardings per hour connects with a major trunkline carrying 100 boardings per hour, and half the circulator's ridership makes a connection with the trunk, then at worst deleting the circulator (and losing all its ridership) would cost the trunk 2.5% of its 100 hourly boardings, which will barely be noticed. If the service spent on the circulator were spent instead on even more frequency on the trunk, you might well make up the difference.

On the other hand, if the trunk weren't there, the circulator would lose 50% of its boardings, probably a fatal blow. So while connecting lines are always interdependent, some are so weak that the relationship might as well be viewed as a one-way dependence.

Levinson's right about all that, but since I don't share his "profitability" frame I can't share his derision about "welfare" or "equity." In working with transit agencies, I try to educate about these "Coverage" routes, the equivalent of Levinson's third group. I define these as "predictably low-ridership services motivated by goals other than ridership — goals generally including social service objectives, expectations of "equity" between different subareas of the region, and a generalized desire to cover the whole service area with some kind of service." In my work, I encourage public transit authorities to make a conscious choice about how much of this service they want to operate, understanding that every dollar they spend on Coverage service is a dollar they can't spend on Ridership goals or related outcomes of mode share and fare revenue.

So given Levinson's "profitability" frame, here's his solution:

Mass (or public) transit agencies are transportation organizations first, not welfare organizations. They should be considered public utilities rather than departments of government, which provide a useful service for a price to their users.

The conflct between Ridership and Coverage goals needs to be resolved by government. This doesn't require removing transit authorities from government, as there are many needs (especially land use integration) that argue the opposite. Even if transit operations were considered a "utility," policy and planning functions of transit very much need to be part of government, in my experience. Many Australian states, for example, gave away too much policy and planning control to operating companies, and are now undergoing reforms to take this authority back.

My thesis is that the local transit systems should identify and propose to retrench to the financially sustainable system, and present local politicians with a choice.
If local politicians want additional "equity" services, they should be presented with a cost of subsidy per line, and then can collectively choose which lines to finance out of general revenue, as this is primarily a welfare rather than an transportation function. In other words, public transit organizations would present the public with a bill for these money-losing services (the subsidy required in order to at least break even on operating them (i.e. the difference between their revenue and their cost), and not be expected to pay for them out of operating revenue.
If the cost of those lines is deemed too expensive (i.e. the politicians are unwilling to pay for them with general revenue tax dollars), they should be canceled. Transit agencies would no longer be losing money, they would now be break-even or slightly profitable. They might even pay a dividend to their owners (the general public).
General revenue (the treasury) would of course now be losing money, we didn't pull money from thin air, but since this is a social welfare/redistribution function, that is perfectly appropriate. This would entirely change public and political perception of transit services. It might also result in fewer bad routes being funded, since it would be crystal clear where the subsidies lay.

Levinson's tone here is needlessly divisive in my view. I prefer to work from a position of respect toward the users and defenders of low-ridership services, understanding that other valid public purposes are being served. I also respect the notion that a community that pays into a transit system should expect some service in return; this "equity" impulse has nothing to do with "welfare."

But Levinson is right that a choice must be made. There really are two competing goals for transit: Ridership (which leads to high mode share, sustainability outcomes, and "profitability") and Coverage (which provides social inclusion and equity benefits in low-density areas that a Ridership-based system wouldn't serve.) These two goals lead network design in opposite directions. So transit agencies should have guidance — from those who fund them — on how much to spend on one goal or the other.

I agree with Levinson, too, that transit policy would be much clearer if we had budgets definitely allocated to the purpose of maximum ridership — with other budgets that funded the Coverage services.

For more, see this paper of mine on the same topic, and Chapter 10 of my forthcoming book.

UPDATE: Professor Levinson responds here.

“soft city of illusion”? “hard city of maps”?

Posted on May 31, 2011 in Meditations, Philosophy

You can always construct a wise one-liner by dividing the richness of urbanism into two opposing boxes. This move is most interesting to me when done by someone I admire, for purposes that I largely share. The great Cascadian writer Jonathan Raban, for example:

"The … soft city of illusion, myth, aspiration, and nightmare, is as real, maybe more real, than the hard city one can locate on maps [and] in statistics …”

This came to me via Bruce Katz on Twitter, and it's so affecting that I retweeted it before I had time to think: "Hey, wait, this is BS."

Yes, the importance of illusion, myth, aspiration, and nightmare always needs to be stressed if you feel that your city is being run by statisticians. But it's still a false and misleading dichotomy, as almost all dichotomies are. We often need dichotomies as crutches, but when they get too easy, it's time to let them go.

Maps are full of illusion, myth, aspiration and nightmare. We may think of them as technical, and we can argue for the value of replacing illusion with information. But as Mark Monmonier devotes a famous book to explaining, maps always distort for some purpose. The aspirations that drove the settlements and conquests that created today's "New World" were unimaginable without maps — maps designed to inform the conquerer but also to encourage his illustions and aspirations.

Anxiety about statistics, on the other hand, is a masking of the real problem, which is a confusion about the location of goals and ideas of the good. Statistics and maps tell us about facts of life, and you can't go anywhere with your aspirations if you can't deal with the present reality. We all have to start where we are.

Statistics, math, and maps also tell us something about the limits of aspiration. You may aspire to a city where the circumference of a circle is only twice its diameter, because this may open up wonderful possibilities for the ideal city. When the mathematicians respond that the circumference of a circle will always be 3.14 times the diameter, it's easy to dismiss them as "statisticians," or to use a common urbanist stereotype, "engineers" who can't engage with vision.

Inside Raban's epigram, and also inside the quotation from the last post, is the confusion of why and how. "Why" we do things and want things must ultimately lie in the space of "illustion, myth, aspiration, and nightmare." (Even the balance-sheets of developers express such motives.) To get what we want, however, we have to interact with reality, and statistics and math do contain some important information about reality, as does our lived experience.

If we could ever separate why from how, we'd save a lot of time, a lot of rage, and move forward much more quickly in thinking and acting about cities. We might suppress some great literature, but a writer as great as Jonathan Raban would turn his mind to the subtler issues that remain.

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.

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?"

imagining cities without mobility

Posted on March 13, 2011 in Access, Mobility, Philosophy, Urban Structure

Philips Corporation, like everyone, is running a livable cities program, in this case a set of awards for individual projects rather than big-picture rankings of cities. I just stumbled on it, and got a rude shock.

There are eight categories: Neighborhood, Mobility, Care, Education, Water, Shade, Sport, and Regeneration — all excellent things. Obviously, I'm professionally interested in mobility, so I looked to see who was winning there.

The leading candidate for the Mobility award is Plaza Movil Street Park, a proposal (for Buenos Aires, Argentina) for temporary street closures to create community park space. Its benefits are described like this:

Creating recreational spaces for local communities to relax, play, meet, and chat.

That's wonderful. It's glorious. I'm all for it. To use Philips's terms, it's great for Neighborhood, and probably also for Shade. But it's not mobility!

The only relationship that this plan has to mobility is that it takes space normally used for mobility and uses it for something else.

St. Augustine observed that we are always either being or becoming. In urbanism, "being" corresponds to placehood, and "becoming" corresponds to movement or mobility. The late 20th Century car-centered model led to the massive conversion of land area from placehood functions to mobility functions. Transit's great virtue is that it provides a lot of mobility using relatively little space, so that more area can be devoted to places, both public and private.

And yes, a great street provides an experience that integrates placehood and mobility to a degree. And yes, good urban redevelopment also reduces our need for mobility up to a point.

Bravo for well-designed street closures. But to give a street closure a mobility award seems to imply that mobility — our ability to get to places we want to go to — just no longer matters.

There is a strong current in New Urbanism, not without detractors, that does seem interested in abolishing mobility. Patrick Condon's idea for Vancouver, for example, would cancel a single proposed subway line and instead replace all of the city's electric trolleybuses with streetcars that go the same speed as the buses do. He would cancel a mobility-improving project and instead spend money in way that that may do great urban things but doesn't increase mobility at all. Once his network was complete, nobody could get anywhere any faster than they can now.

This makes sense only in a context where going places (even under renewable elecric power) is an objective evil. Streetcars, in this vision, supposedly cause greater urban density to be built at livable neighborhood scales, so that people meet more of their needs close to home. People spend most of their time in their own "villages" and others nearby. They simply do not travel far across the city, and had better not be in a hurry when they do.

It's understandable that "urban village" is a winning concept right now. We do need to increase the self-reliance of each part of a city, so that travel demand for many of life's needs can met closer to home. The pendulum swung far the other way in the late 20th century, toward surrendering placehood to movement. I support and eagerly participate in efforts to help it swing back.

But I think we can see what it might look like to swing too far in the new direction. We stay close to home, and thus evolve transport systems that are useful for going short distances and useless for going long ones. And the obvious retort to this is: In that case, why live in a city? Why not just live in a country village, or in a small city?

The whole point of living in a city is to have access to unusual things that are only possible at a large scale. If you want major league sports or a good symphony orchestra or a world-class major university, you need to be in some kind of urban area. If you have a very unusual interest, only a place with lots of people will have a few people who share that interest. If you want choices, you need redundancy, also known as competition. You need there to be two or more sources for whatever service or product or experience you're looking for, readily available from where you live. For those things, you need a certain amount of urban mass, and some options for moving around within it.

The great irony of anti-mobility village-first thinking is that it inevitably leads to monotony — less choice and therefore less opportunity for people to form specalized communities where unusual thought and creativity can flourish. More disturbingly, it leads to a world where only the internet offers those things, which leads in turn to nightmare images of a world of plugged-in couch potatoes, people who never go outside anymore because their social and intellectual needs simply aren't met by the 500 people who happen to be within walking distance.

The antidote to conformity and monotony is the city. For a city to function as a city, you need mobility. Streetcars are fun to ride, but not if you're in a hurry. Closing a street on Sundays so people can dance is a great thing. But you can't run an economy that way, nor can your citizens feel free.

how universal is transit’s geometry?

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

Uranus 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 their own knowledge to their client’s values, which may lead them to make different recommendations than they would do as a citizen, expressing their own values.

Often, I use this blog and its comments to refine my own thinking about transit in the abstract. This is part of how I cultivate my own expertise, but it is easy to mistake what I say for activism. When I say, for example, that some of the widespread claims about the superiority of rail over buses are cultural feedback effects, I’m not thinking like an activist or advocate; I’m thinking theoretically, like a philosopher. To me, this is a crucial skill for a consultant who’s going to have to marry his client’s values with his own expertise.

Philosophical or scientific training attunes you to the difference between prescription (telling people what they should do) and description (describing reality as it appears to be). In their purest form, prescription is the job of ethics, while description the job of science and metaphysics. A great deal of human speech, especially political speech, is a mixture of description and prescription, often one pretending to be the other.

In the planning world, prescription is the job of citizens, leaders, and advocates, while description is the work of professional experts like me. Obviously, this has to be a conversation. The expert has to ask the community to clarify its values based on the actual tradeoffs presented by reality, and the community has to respond. And as that goes on, both sides need to be clear about their roles, and respect the role of the other.

Partly because of my science and philosophy training, I tend to police the prescription-description boundary in my own thinking, and dwell in the space of pure description more than many people do — certainly more than most activists do. A lot of regular readers of HT share that training and that inclination, and some don’t.

For a critique of the futility of living your whole life in this descriptive mode, watching and describing the world but never doing anything, see Shakespeare’s Hamlet. But the opposite is also futile. An ethical system devoid of curiosity about objective reality devolves into pure egotism. Tyrants — whether they lead a nation or an office clique — are people who sift reality and see only what suits their ethical narrative (which, at that point, is really an egotistical narrative) and who forge echo chambers of people who help each other do that. At the core of the tyrant’s stance is a childlike egotistical wail: “Why doesn’t everyone do as I say? I see so clearly what needs to be done!”

And yes, everyone has an inner tyrant, including me. I try to describe that tendency in myself, so that while it will always be in the room of my mind it’s not usually able to set the room on fire. In fact, that’s exactly why I’m so careful about not letting my descriptive thinking turn too quickly into prescriptions.

Streetcars, for example. Nowhere in this blog have I said that cities shouldn’t build streetcars if they are sure that they want streetcars. Some streetcar advocates hear me saying that because they are dividing the world into pro-streetcar and anti-streetcar camps, and I’ve said things about streetcars that don’t sound like enthusiastic advocacy. I’ve made some descriptive observations about problems raised by the American streetcar revival movement, and I’ve also noticed situations in which streetcars are inferior to buses in their ability to actually get you where you’re going, like this one:

Car blocking streetcars

I would like people to know about these issues so that they make better decisions about what to advocate and why. That doesn’t mean I want them to decide not to build streetcars, but it may mean, for example, that in deciding whether to support a streetcar, you might need to care about whether it will be in mixed traffic. It may also mean being very clear, when you’re advocating a streetcar, that you’re not getting anything faster or more reliable than a bus can be. Again, I say this not because I think cities should or shouldn’t be building streetcars, but because you shouldn’t be deluded about what you’re buying, and what purposes it will really serve.

I have vivid memories of San Francisco Transportation Authority meetings in the early 1990s when the Third Street light rail was under debate. Activists from the neighborhood had turned out in droves to support the line, but when you actually listened to their testimony, some were talking about “we need rapid transit,” while others were saying “we need rail to stop in every block where it will strengthen our businesses.” I knew, as an expert, that while this whole crowd appeared to be on the same side of the issue at hand, half of them were not going to get what they thought they were advocating. They were not going to get a project that served their values.

I may also point out that if you think purely about “extending your rail network” as though your bus network is irrelevant, you can do serious damage to your existing transit system. For example, in a high-frequency grid, if you break one line of the grid into three consecutive pieces because you want rail in the middle but buses on the extremeties, you may suddenly force many new connections to a degree that could quite possibly will reduce the overall level of mobility in the city. That thought is relevant, for example, to several cities’ streetcar plans, and to the Crenshaw light rail line in Los Angeles, and to the Gold Coast light rail line (at least its first phase) in Australia.

And yet, sometimes I do sound like an advocate — about transit in general, about protecting transit from traffic, and about congestion pricing. Am I just falling off the wagon when I say those things?

Well, all scientists (by which I mean broadly “people who try to describe without prescribing”) have this problem. Sometimes the scientific work of description discovers that something needs to be done if we want to survive and prosper: Banning DDT, addressing carbon emissions, correcting perverse pricing signals, even building a transit line. If you’ve followed any of the conversation around climate change, you know how uncomfortable trained scientists can be when they’re required to speak prescriptively. Their credibility (not just to their profession but also to themselves) has depended precisely on not doing that. It’s like telling a recovering alcoholic that after all the disciplined work of recovery he’s done, the future of humanity now requires that they start drinking again, just a little.

All I can say is that I feel that discomfort and try to manage it, by marking, as clearly as I can, when I’m prescribing and when I’m describing. And there are also issues (like climate change) where, quite frankly, practically all experts seem to know what needs to be done to achieve the outcomes that everyone seems to want. I feel that way about congestion pricing. It’s just not that hard to explain, to a reasonable person who’s familiar with the idea of supply and demand, that as a motorist you are going to pay for scarce road space in either time or money, and that it’s not unreasonable for some people to choose to spend money to save time.

I do what I can to distinguish between description and prescription when I’m writing. But frankly, we all need to do the same work when listening. If your first contact with transit politics is in the context of a fight about whether or not to build a particular rail line, you’re going to hear prescriptive voices on both sides, citing data that’s been selected to match their point of view. You’re also going to hear descriptive voices treated as prescriptive — which is how some streetcar advocates perceive my comments about streetcars. One of the most basic disciplines that you can cultivate, as an advocate or leader, is to try to hear descriptive information as descriptive. This may require you to consciously suppress or bracket the emotional reaction you have, as an advocate, when you first hear it.

Really, none of what I’ve written about streetcars is about streetcars, except insofar as the American streetcar revival movement is a excellent example of a descriptive point that seems important to me. The point is that “it’s possible to spend a lot of money on transit lines that don’t improve anyone’s mobility.” I’m not saying you shouldn’t do that. I am saying that before you that, you should understand this point, so that you’re sure that the line you support does what you want it to do.

That’s what responsible experts do: they help you implement your values.

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