Philosophy

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

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 →

sorting out rail-bus differences: endnotes

Posted on February 12, 2011 in Bus Rapid Transit, Philosophy, Rail Transit, Streetcars (Trams)

This post is an endnote to my post "sorting out rail-bus differences." Read that first.

I took as a starting point the results of an Infrastructurist survey, which gathered and published "36 reasons that streetcars are better than buses." I used these to sort perceived rail-bus differences into three categories:

Misidentified Differences. Issues such as propulsion and exclusive right of way that may differentiate a particular rail line from a particular bus line, but are not intrinsic to rail or buses.

Cultural Feedback Effects. Differences that result from how people think about or perceive the difference. These are profound influences on existing ridership, investment outcomes, etc. but come with the caution that culture changes but geometry doesn't.

Intrinsic Differences. These few items, only 6 of the 36, really are rail-bus differences.

Several items on the Infrastructurist list are either duplicative or are combinations of several issues, so I streamlined them, and added others of my own, in producing the main post. Several readers wondered why there wasn't a one-to-one correspondence between the items in my post and the original Infrastructurist items, so I've added these notes to show how my post derives from the original. Bold is the original Infrastructurist text, followed in each case by my response in plain text.

New streetcar lines always, always, get more passengers than the bus routes they replace. Cultural Feedback Effect.
Buses, are susceptible to every pothole and height irregularity in the pavement (and in Chicago we have plenty). Streetcars ride on smooth, jointless steel rails that rarely develop bumps. Intrinsic difference in "ride quality," though pavement can obviously be maintained to higher standards. Score 25% Cultural Feedback Effect, 75% intrinsic.
Streetcars don’t feel “low status” to transit riders. Buses often do. Cultural Feedback Effect.
Mapmakers almost always include streetcar lines on their city maps, and almost never put any bus route in ink. New investment follows the lines on the map. Cultural Feedback Effect.
The upfront costs are higher for streetcars than buses–but that is more than made up over time in lower operating and maintenance costs. In transit you get what you pay for. Intrinsic difference, though with a lot of caveats, and certainly not universally true of rail-bus tradeoffs. Score 50% intrinsic.
There is a compelling “coolness” and “newness” factor attached to streetcars. Cultural Feedback Effect.
Streetcars feel safer from a crime point of view. Cultural Feedback Effect. If this difference in "feeling" results from differences in design unrelated to the rail-bus difference, such as better lighting at streetcar stops as opposed to bus stops, then this is also a Misidentified Difference.
Steel wheel on steel rail is inherently more efficient than rubber tire on pavement. Electric streetcars can accelerate more quickly than buses. First item is intrinsic, though the difference is not large. Second item is mostly about propulsion, which is a Misidentifed Difference. Score 50% intrinsic.
Streetcars don’t smell like diesel. Propulsion is a Misidentified Difference.
Streetcars accelerate and decelerate smoothly because they’re electrically propelled. Internal-combustion engines acting through a transmission simply cannot surge with the same smoothness. Propulsion is a Misidentified Difference.
The current length limit for a bus is 60 feet, but streetcars can go longer, since they are locked into the rails and won’t be swinging all around the streets, smashing into cars. Intrinsic difference, and the one most likely to be decisive.
Streetcars have an air of nostalgia. Cultural Feedback Effect.
New streetcar and light rail lines usually come with an upgraded street experience from better stops, landscaping, new roadbeds, and better sidewalks, to name a few. Of course, your federal transit dollar is paying for these modernizations, so why wouldn’t cities try to get them! Cultural Feedback Effect.
Perhaps the most over looked and significant difference between street cars and buses is permanence. You’ll notice that development will follow a train station, but rarely a bus stop. Rails don’t pick up and move any time soon. Once a trolley system is in place, business and investors can count on them for decades. Buses come and go. Cultural Feedback Effect.
Streetcars are light and potentially 100% green. Potentially they could be powered by 100% solar and/or wind power. Even powered with regular power plant-derived electricity, they are still 95% cleaner than diesel buses. [Source? -Ed.] Propulsion is a Misidentified Difference.
Streetcars stop less. Because of the increased infrastructure for stops, transit planners don’t place stops at EVERY BLOCK, like they do with buses (SEPTA in Philly is terrible for this). Instead, blocks are a quarter to a half mile apart, so any point is no more than an eigth to a quarter mile from a stop. Misidentified Difference. To the extent that bus stops are too close together becuase planners think that buses are or should be intrinisically slow, this is also a Cultural Feedback Effect.
People will travel longer distances on streetcars. At one point, in the 1930s, a person could travel to Boston from Washington solely on trolleys, with only two short gaps in the routes. Cultural Feedback Effect.
Buses are noisy. I ride them every day in Chicago, and I am constantly amazed at how loud a diesel bus engine is–even on our latest-model buses [and] the valve chatter is an irritant to the nervous system. By comparison, streetcars are virtually silent. Propulsion is a Misidentified Difference.
Technological advances already make the current generation definitely NOT your grandfather’s streetcar. Low floors are standard, for easy-on easy-off curbside boarding. Wide doors allow passengers to enter or exit quickly. So streetcar stops take less time than buses. Misidentified Difference. Good Bus Rapid Transit vehicles have all of these features; some even have doors on both sides. The only difference that's intrinsic here is some limits on internal configuration required by wheelwells, but in a well-designed vehicle this doesn't affect boarding time.
Passengers can take comfort from seeing the rails stretching out far ahead of them, while ever fearing that the bus could take a wrong turn at the next corner and divert them off course. Cultural Feedback Effect. Good Frequent Network mapping and BRT-level infrastructure for stops can equalize this for buses. Note also that this supposed assurance provided by rails really works only in cities that have just one or two streetcar lines. Streetcar-rich Toronto and Melbourne have tracks in so many of the streets that there are plenty of opportunities for a wayward streetcar to go off course, if you really want to be paranoid about that.
Once purchased (albeit at high cost) streetcars are cheaper to maintain and last way the hell longer (case in point, streetcars discarded in the US in the 40’s, snapped up by the Yugoslavs, which are still running). Intrinsic difference.
Streetcar tracks are cheaper to maintain than the roadways they displace. Not if the streetcar tracks are in the roadway, where they are additional to the roadway rather than a "displacement" of it. Score 50% of an intrinsic difference.
People get notably more excited about the proposed extension of the streetcar system and expect revitalization of the neighborhoods around the planned stops. This is practically the definition of a Cultural Feedback Effect.
Streetcars create more walkable streets. This is because streetcars, as mentioned above, are more attractive to riders than buses, which in turns prompt to more mass transit usage in general, which in turns prompts to more walking–a virtuous cycle that creates more attractive city streets. Cultural Feedback Effect.
Most European cities and countries kept investing in public transit during the decades when America was DISinvesting. Now I look across the pond and see dozens of European cities extending or building new rail transit systems, including many streetcar lines, and conclude: ‘They probably know what they are doing; we should do some of that too.’ Cultural Feedback Effect.
You know exactly where a streetcar is going – but have you ever tried looking at a bus route map? Misidentified Difference. To the extent that bus maps are incomprehensible because the transit agency mapmaker accepts the notion that buses are intrinsically confusing, this is also a Cultural Feedback Effect.
Streetcars are faster than buses or trackless trolleys (aside from 2 lines in Philly, do any other cities run trackless trolleys, or trolley buses anymore?) because trams tend to have dedicated lanes. Even if they don’t, if they operate on streets with multiple lanes, people stay out of the tram lane, because it’s harder to drive a car along tram tracks (the wheels pull to one side or the other as they fall into the groove). Right-of-Way is a Misidentifed Difference. Driver behavior is a Cultural Feedback Effect.
In buses you’re still jostled by every pothole and sway at every bus stop. I thought bus rapid transit would be a significant improvement – there’s still a bit of sway and they concrete was not installed as smoothly as line of steel rail. This is a duplicate of Item 2, which I scored 25% Misidentified Difference and 75% intrinsic.
With buses transit planners are pushed by funding formulas to capture every pocket of riders thus you can get a very wiggly route – something that’s less practical on a fixed rail system. Misidentifed Difference, arising from a Cultural Feedback Effect. Tell your planners you don't want wiggly routes, and they'll be happy not to draw them.
Buses lurch unpredictably from side to side as they weave in and out of traffic and as they move from the traffic lane to the curb lane to pick up passengers. In streetcars turns occur at the same location on every trip, so that even standees can more or less relax knowing the car is not going to perform any unpredictable lateral maneuvers. Score this 50% a Misidentified Difference, because much can be done to reduce lateral motion in buses (bus bulbs rather than indented stops for example.) Guided busways are also out there as an option, one that's only now really developing. Score 50% an Intrinsic Difference.
Most streetcar riders don’t consciously think about the differences between a bus ride and a streetcar ride. But their unconscious minds–the spinal cord, the solar plexus, the inner ear and the seat of the pants–quickly tally the differences and deliver an impressionistic conclusion: The streetcar ride is physiologically less stressful. This is a complex mixture of propulsion issues — which are Misidentified Differences — and the Intrinsic Difference of ride quality. Score 50% intrinsic.
An internal-combustion engine is constantly engaged in hammering itself to death and buses tend to vibrate themselves into a sort of metallurgical dishevelment. Interior fittings–window frames, handrails, floor coverings, seats–tend to work loose and make the interior look frowzy and uncared-for. By age 12 the bus is a piece of junk and has to be retired. A streetcar the same age is barely into its adolescence. Propulsion is a Misidentified Difference.
Streetcar stops are typically given more attention than most bus routes and the information system is more advanced. In Portland, the shelters even have VMS diplays that tell you the times of the next two streetcar arrivals. This valuable information gives people the option to wait, do something else to pass the time, or walk to their destination. Customer information is a Misidentified Difference. (Some major Portland bus stops also have real-time arrival displays.)
One great advantage of streetcars is that the infrastructure serves as an orienting and wayfinding device. The track alerts folks to the route and leads them to stops. Because they are a permanent feature of the streetscape, the routing is predictable and stable (unlike bus routes). So unlike a bus, a streetcar informs and helps citizens to formulate an image of their city, even if folks don’t ride it. It is a feature of their public realm. Because of this, these streets get greater public attention. Cultural Feedback Effect.
When you ride one of the remaining historic cars in Toronto or San Francisco you can tell they’re “old” in the sense of “out of style,” but when you look around the interior everything still seems shipshape, nothing rattles, the windows open and close without binding. The rider experiences a sense of solid quality associated with Grandma’s solid-oak dining table and 1847 Rodgers Brothers silver. And that makes everybody feel good. Unlike, say, an aging bus. "Historic" is a Misindentifed Difference. Maintenance effort is a Cultural Feedback Effect.
For those of you who cannot see the difference between a bus and a streetcar, I suggest riding a streetcar when you get the chance. Then, if you can locate a bus that more or less follows the same route, give that a try. Compare the two experiences. This, indeed, is the starting point for this entire exercise. Your bus and rail system have lots of differences, but most are not intrinsic differences between bus and rail.

That's how I got to the statement that six of the 36 are intrinsic. There are many duplicates, which I counted, and many items that are mixtures. There's nothing scientific about this analysis, just as there was nothing scientific about the process of developing the list of 36. But I think the overall conclusion, that about a sixth of our impression of bus-rail differences is based on real and intrinsic bus-rail differences, is about right in my professional experience.

I feel the need to say, one last time, that to call something a Cultural Feedback Effect is not to imply that it's unimportant today. These emotional factors may be supremely important, and if you weigh them consciously and decide that they should prevail, I have no reason to argue with you. But when you decide to weigh a Cultural Feedback benefit above a geometric disbenefit (such as maneuverability in traffic), you're gambling that culture will be as constant as geometry and physics are. And I wonder if that's true.

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