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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. 

  1. New streetcar lines always, always, get more passengers than the bus routes they replace.  Cultural Feedback Effect.
  2. 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.
  3. Streetcars don’t feel “low status” to transit riders. Buses often do.  Cultural Feedback Effect.
  4. 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.
  5. 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.
  6. There is a compelling “coolness” and “newness” factor attached to streetcars.  Cultural Feedback Effect.
  7. 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.
  8. 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.
  9. Streetcars don’t smell like diesel.  Propulsion is a Misidentified Difference.
  10. 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.
  11. 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.
  12. Streetcars have an air of nostalgia.  Cultural Feedback Effect.
  13. 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.
  14. 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.
  15. 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.
  16. 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.
  17. 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.
  18. 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.
  19. 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.
  20. 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. 
  21. 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.
  22. 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.
  23. 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.
  24. 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.
  25. 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.
  26. 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.
  27. 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. 
  28. 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.
  29. 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. 
  30. 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. 
  31. 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. 
  32. 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.
  33. 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.) 
  34. 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.
  35. 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.  
  36. 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.

    sorting out rail-bus differences

    Posted on February 10, 2011 in Bus Rapid Transit, Commuter Rail, Monorail, Philosophy, Rail Transit, Ride Quality, Streetcars (Trams), Technophilia, Trolleybuses

    Here's a crucial passage from the book I'm working on, though it may will end up in the next book rather than this one [Human Transit].  The topic is emotive, so I'm trying to be very carefully factual here.  I welcome your critiques in comments.  If you disagree on a matter of fact, please provide a reference to a source. 

    In 2009, the then-popular [but now defunct] blog the Infrastructurist asked its readers whether streetcars are better than buses, and why.  Readers came up with 36 responses (listed verbatim here) that formed a good summary of popular perceptions about the rail-bus distinction.

    Of the 36 reasons, only six refer to an intrinsic difference between bus and rail technologies.  All the others fall into two categories, which I’ll call misidentified differences and cultural feedback effects. 

    Misindentified Differences

    In your city, the rail system has lots of differences from the buses, including technological differences. But that doesn’t mean that all these distinctions are true rail-bus distinctions.  For example:

    • Propulsion: electric vs internal combustion.   In most North American cities that have both bus and rail, the rail is electric but the buses use internal combustion (diesel, “clean diesel,” or various forms of natural gas).  Electric motors have obvious advantages – in emissions, noise, acceleration, and comfort – but none of these are true rail vs. bus differences.  Rail can be run by internal combustion, and buses can be electric.  If you want to compare your electric rail option with a bus option, compare it to electric trolleybuses.  If you want to compare your internal-combustion buses with a rail option, compare them to internal-combustion rail options such as the Diesel Multiple Unit (DMU).
    • Mixed-flow vs exclusive-lane operation.  Transit speed and reliability are mostly a result of how much you stop and what can get in the way.  Rail is more often run in exclusive rights of way, but some streetcars run in mixed traffic and some buses run in exclusive lanes.  Monorails never get stuck in traffic, but neither do buses in Brisbane, Australia’s busway system.  Most city buses can get stuck in traffic, but so can any streetcar, tram, or light rail vehicle that runs in a mixed traffic lane.  (A major problem for BRT in North America is that people keep taking junkets to Latin America, where BRT is powerful but the economic context is too different, rather than to Brisbane, where they could see high-end BRT working in a wealthy city.)
    • Off-board “proof of payment” fare collection vs. “pay the driver” fare collection.  Fare-collection style has big psychological effects.  “Pay the driver” slows down boarding and is a greater hassle for all concerned.  Some rapid transit sytstems (rail and bus) provide paid areas with faregates, eliminating this delay.  The other solution is “proof of payment,” which means that you buy a ticket on the platform (or already have a valid ticket) but you only show it if a roving “fare inspector” asks to see it.  If you don’t have one, you pay a fine.  Rail is more likely to use “proof of payment” than buses, but there are exceptions both ways, and there’s no necessary link between the rail-vs-bus choice and the fare collection system.  High-capacity bus systems are beginning to shift to “proof of payment” fare collection to eliminate fare-related boarding delay.  UPDATE: San Francisco now uses proof of payment on its entire bus system.
    • Frequency and Span.  Your whole rail transit system may be frequent, while some your buses aren’t, and in that case, you’ll naturally associate frequency with rail.  As we saw here, a good Frequent Network map, which shows both frequent rail and frequent buses, will clear up that confusion.  Buses can be very frequent, while some rail services can run infrequently or peak-only.  (We usually call those commuter rail.)

    Cultural Feedback Effects

    A community’s attitudes toward rail and bus technologies can easily affect they way they are operated and presented.  In short, people who believe that rail is better than buses will tend to act in ways that make that belief true.  For example;

    • Differences in investment or care.  A community that believes that buses are only for poor people, or that rail is the mode of the future, will under-invest in buses as opposed to rail, producing a difference in quality that will reinforce that belief.  It may also hold bus operations staff to lower standards than rail staff, and encourage other cultural differences between bus and rail operations that become real for the customer, but are not intrinsic to the bus-rail distinction.
    • Perceptions of permanence.  If you don’t stop to think about it, rails in the street will make a service feel permanent, especially if you’re used to hearing people tell you that rails imply permanence.  History clearly shows that rail systems do stop running if their market disappears.  True permanence lies in the permanence of the market, and that lies in the pattern of development [See Human Transit Chapter 14].
    • Perceptions of legibility.  The notion that a bus might do something unpredictable and a railcar won’t is also a cultural feedback effect, typically the result of insufficiently clear and compelling information about the bus network.  It is quite possible to build bus services with such a high level of investment in infrastructure, such as stops and stations, that the routing is as obvious as a rail line’s would be; the Los Angeles Orange Line bus rapid transit system is a good example. 
    • Regulatory differences.  Government regulation often enforces different rules for road transport as opposed to rail transport.  These regulations are themselves a kind of cultural feedback, differences in habit and history between agencies that regulate roads and those that regulate rail.  By enforcing different standards and safety requirements, these regulations can cause outcomes that amplify the apparent difference between road-based and rail-based transit. 
    • Different potential for mission-creep.  If you build a stretch of road for a busway, there’s always a danger that somebody might try to open it to cars.  If you don’t trust your government to protect the stated purpose of a facility, this can be a major decision factor.  This issue applies, however, to the narrow range of cases in which a road or lane is being built that could be useful to cars but is closed to them.  It is not an issue where the proposal is to reallocate existing roadspace from cars to transit, nor when building a higher-end busway whose design makes it useless to cars even if they were allowed on it.

    Intrinsic Bus-Rail Differences

    When we set aside those two categories and look at the differences that really follow, intrinsically, from the rail-bus distinction, there appear to be seven, and only the first three of them are always to rail’s advantage:

    • Capacity.  Where demand is high, rail can serve that demand at a higher ratio of passengers to on-board staff, which means that once you absorb the (often large) construction cost, you will be able to offer greater capacity for a given operating cost.  A transit vehicle that’s too crowded to board doesn’t meet any of our seven desires for useful service, so this point is often decisive in favor of rail.
    • Ride quality.   Ride quality in buses is improving, and guided busways may give buses an even more rail-like feel, but new rail systems will probably always have an advantage with their smoother running surface.   Is the smooth ride of rail indispensible to a useful network?  This can be a tough question whose answer may vary from one community to another.
    • Limited energy-efficiency and emissions consequences tied to the difference between tires and steel wheels.  Again, the primary factor governing energy-efficiency and emissions is propulsion (electric vs internal combustion), which is not intrinsic to the rail-bus difference.  However, there is a small range of differences that arise from the physics of steel-on-steel vs tire-on-road operation, and that favor the former.
    • Noise from wheel friction.  Most noise impacts are due to internal combustion, which either rail or buses may use, so that’s a misidentified difference.  Rail transit lines that intersect streets may be required to install noisy crossing signals — a valid response to the extreme weight of commuter rail trains but more controversial as applied to light rail.  These regulatory requirements may be cultural feedback effects.  But rail has a further noise disadvantage that really is intrinsic: the tight fit between steel wheel and rail causes noisy friction when going around curves, especially when going fast. 
    • Some variable cost differences.  Broadly speaking, bus-based projects that use portions of existing roadway will be much cheaper than building rail for those same segments would be.  Beyond that, costs for bus vs. rail projects can be hard to compare.  Capital costs for rail include vehicles, while a busway is sometimes run with an existing bus fleet.  Certain bus-rail comparisons in certain corridors may turn up significant differences in operating cost that may be valid in that situation, but need to be checked carefully to ensure that they assume the same factors on both sides.
    • Maneuverability around obstacles is a specific issue for rail in mixed traffic, usually light rail or streetcars.  In mixed traffic, minor obstructions routinely occur in a lane, especially if the lane is adjacent to on-street parking.  People stop in the lane to make deliveries, get into and out of taxis, and parallel-park.  Accidents and breakdowns happen.  If these events block a streetcar, the streetcar is stuck.  A bus, in the same situation, can often go around the obstruction and continue.
    • Ability to extend existing infrastructure.  If you’ve already built rail on a large portion the length of a travel corridor, it may be logical to build rail on the rest, so as not to create a technologically required connection.  On the other hand, busways can often eliminate extra connections because buses can run through the busway but then flow out onto ordinary streets.  In each case, an advantage goes to the technology that makes better use of the infrastructure that already exists, whether road or rail.

    Of course, in a particular transit debate, you may not have all of the choices that I’ve articulated here.   Still, it’s important to remember that most of the things you hear about why rail is better than buses are not true in the abstract, as facts of geometry or physics that follow from intrinsic differences between roads and rails. 

    It may very well be that rail is culturally better than buses in your city, in which case all you’re really saying is that people in your city think rail is better than buses and will therefore tend to act in ways that make that true.  If you’re interested in appealing to your current population, and motivating them to make investment decisions based on their current perceptions about the benefits of rail, that may even be a good reason to build rail even if you don’t need its intrinsic benefits. 

    But if you’re thinking in longer-range terms, don’t forget:  Attitudes, assumptions and perceptions will change over time.  Physics and geometry won’t.

    UPDATE!  See endnotes for this post here!

    transit’s product: mobility or access?

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

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

     

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

     GoogEarth walkscore

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    redundancy in transit networks: a good thing?

    Posted on January 14, 2011 in Brisbane, Mobility, New York City, Philosophy, Urban Structure

    Transit planning consultant Bob Bourne is thinking about the Brisbane flood's impact, and wondering whether building more redundancy into transit networks is a good idea:

    My heart goes out to everyone affected by the floods.  It can be devastating on so many levels, individual lives lost; extensive property damage to individual residences, and infrastructure damage.  I managed the system in Ames, IA during our floods in 1990, 1993, 1998, and 2005 and I have been assisting the Cedar Rapids, IA transit system in recovering from their 2008 floods.  I worked in Chicago during the blizzard winters of 1977-78 and 1978-79 where the city and suburbs experienced several weeks of paralysis due to the continuous heavy snows as well as way too many blizzards in Iowa over the years.
     
    In the U.S. buses typically operate without a lot of redunancy in the route network.  Your commentary on numbering overlapping bus routes and make them understandable to the riding public is interesting and implies that there are lots of routes serving several corridors.  In the U.S. that may be true, but usually the headways are pretty well trimmed to provide the absolute minimal level of service.  When you add demand due to adjacent services becoming inoperative, the existing routes are overwhelmed.  Overloading causes extended travel times and buses cannot make their normal cycle times which exacerbates the problem.  Throw in a street network in chaos and the bus system will be criticized as not meeting the needs of the citizens in the time of crisis.  No easy way to explain the problem.
     
    The other problem that we had in Ames, Chicago, and Cedar Rapids was that some of the drivers lived in areas that were flooded or had immediate family in those areas.  They needed to tend to their family/housing priorities and this decreased the number of people available when the workload  of more passengers and longer travel times increases.
     
    At some time in the future, after everything settles, perhaps you could solicit comments on building redundancy into your transit system.  Sometimes, it is good to have lightly used routes that can be cancelled in a crisis allowing redeployment of drivers and vehicles.  Sometimes it is good to have headways with a loading standard of less than 125% of seats at the peak point on the route instead of cramming buses with 150% or 175% of seated load.   Your 10 or 12 minute frequent headway concept can provide additional resources if you need to cut it back to 15 to 20 minutes during a crisis.
     
    After the September 11, 2001 disaster in New York, the subway system was able to recover quickly because the lower end of Manhattan was one of the few places in the subway system where there was some redundancy.   Multiple routes close to each other and at the end of some routes made it easy for commuters to resume their normal lives long before the reconstruction of the subway damage.
     
    Redundancy is not favored by policy makers and can add to costs.  However, a system with excess capacity will perform well in times of crisis and will provide addtional service during normal times.
     
    Our prayers are with everyone who is suffering through this disaster and we hope that good luck will shine on Australia again.

    The kind of redundancy that Bob praises is something transit planners spend much of their time trying to get rid of, because on typical days when we don't need it as redundancy, we call it duplication and waste.

    Transit agencies work on such tight budgets that it doesn't make sense to run, say, a bus line next to a rail line, doing the same thing, just for the redundancy.  If the rail line is serving the market, the bus should be off somewhere else, providing unique mobility rather than duplicating the rail.

    This is especially true in small cities like Bob's hometown of Ames, Iowa, or Great Falls, Montana.  These networks' resources are stretched tightly to create the maximum amount of mobility for the budget.

    Having said that, there are a few situations where an efficient network is also a redundant one.

    Classic high-frequency grids provide redundancy for transit in the same way they do for cars.  If one segment in a grid goes down, there's a parallel line 800m away that you can walk to in a pinch.  It will probably allow you to complete the same L-shaped trip that you intended to make on the disabled line.  

    Grid with trip

    Ferries are more complicated.  The long cross-city run of the CityCats mostly connects stations that are also connected by bus.  The bus trip generally runs a shorter distance at a higher frequency, though it may require a connection.  So there's no question that the intrinisic attraction of the ferry is part of what keeps it busy.  There may also be secondary issues, like the legibility problems of much of the bus system in downtown Brisbane, where most connections occur.  But there are also situations where CityCat and the smaller CityFerry does a link that's simply impossible by road, or much, much longer, and in these cases the ferry wins on pure mobility grounds. 

    Of course, bus operators generally have backup fleets in case they need to suddenly replace a non-redundant train or ferry line that goes down.  In Australia, there are often standing agreements between government and private operators to shift buses into this role, and given a day's warning — which Brisbane had — it's not hard to replace a failed network segment with buses even while running the rest of the bus network.

    So is redundacy a good thing in disasters?  Of course it is.  Is it a reason to design networks that are redundant all the time, at the expense of more mobility that could be provided at the same cost?  No, probably not, because you're weighing a rare disaster against daily inefficiency.  Are there styles of network design that are both efficient and redundant?  Yes, the high-frequency grid comes to mind. 

    In really big and dense cities, you can also get both redundancy and efficiency, because there will tend to be overlaps of service just to provide capacity into dense centers like Lower Manhattan, and in these cases, as Bob notes, redundancy is often possible.  The key there, however, is that the duplication of services isn't justified by the need for redundancy, but rather for the sheer capacity need, and providing necessary capacity, of course, is part of efficiency.

     

    email of the week: thinking pedestrian thoughts

    Posted on January 6, 2011 in Advocacy, Cycling, Minneapolis – St. Paul, Pedestrians, Philosophy

    DSCF5316 Is it useful to talk about "pedestrians" as a group the way we often talk about cyclists or transit riders?  All these category terms are problematic, as I discussed here.  Riordan Frost of Minnesota 2020 asks:

    A recent article in a local paper and its connection to one of your previous blog posts has inspired me to write to you. The article is “Thinking Pedestrian Thoughts”, and it covers the recent adoption of a ‘pedestrian plan’ by Edina, which is an inner-ring suburb of the Twin Cities [of Minneapolis and St. Paul]. One of the points made in the article is that people don’t really advocate for themselves as pedestrians. This made me think of a post that you wrote back in October, which was entitled “should I call myself a ‘transit-rider’?” and discussed labels given to people using certain modes of transportation. In the post, you quote Michael Druker, who advocates for switching from ‘cyclist’ to ‘people cycling’ and from ‘pedestrian’ to ‘people walking’.

    You agreed with him, but pointed out that these new terms were cumbersome, and you would probably still opt for the shorter terms in your writing. I write blogs and articles for MN2020, and I feel the same way. I understand the importance of what language we choose, and I try to be conscious of it in my writing, but I have a need for brevity and I have an editor. There is a more significant question apart from brevity, however: how do we avoid labels (which may carry negative connotations and/or stereotypes) while advocating for improvements of certain modes? …

    Is it possible to cut down on lumping people into categories and still have effective advocacy for certain modes, like better crosswalks or more bike lanes? The cycling community is pretty well established in the blogosphere, which sometimes contributes to their ["cyclist"] label and its connotations, but pedestrians have no blogs or personalities specifically tailored to them – mostly because we are … all pedestrians at some point in the day, and there is nothing terribly distinctive about walking. I n a perfect world, we would just design our environments for all modes of transportation that people use, with people (not cyclists vs. motorists vs. pedestrians) in mind.   This doesn’t seem terribly viable, however.  What are your thoughts on this?

    I think that the potential for organized activism and fellow-feeling is easier among a group of people who all wield the same tool, because tools are such powerful symbols.  Think about the role of the hammer and sickle — archetypal tools of manufacturing and agriculture, respectively — in the imagery of Soviet communism, for example.

    The possession of the tool, and the knowledge of how to use it, becomes a feature by which a group defines itself and sets itself in opposition to other interests.

    If you don't think this still happens, look at all the clubs and forums for people who own and cherish a particular tool — a Linux-powered computer, say, or a certain musical instrument.  If you read an online forum about such possessions, you'll see the practical work of exchanging troubleshooting tips also builds a community in which people love hearing each other's stories about life with the cherished tool.

    So this is another thing that's going on behind the obsessive attachment to transit technologies.  People who love aerial gondolas or whatever can now network worldwide with every city that runs one, compare notes about each other's problems and achievements, and thus form a global community based on love of that particular tool.  Psychologically, it's just like a club of guys who all own a particular kind of car, or computer, or electric guitar, or whatever.

    Pedestrians don't have that.  So I doubt we'll ever see a pedestrians-rights movement that has anything like the shape and force of the cycling movement.  Nor do we need to, really, because the best urban planning thought today is all about the primacy of the pedestrian. 

    Ultimately, the strongest case for "pedestrian rights" is that we are all pedestrians.  Even the guy who loves his Porsche has to walk across parking lots, and can thus see the value of having protected paths between rows of cars instead of having to walk in the lot's roadways where a car can back into you.  Even he has a sense of what makes a shopping center or major downtown pleasant or unpleasant to walk in.  Maybe he's even broken down on the freeway and thus experienced what those places are like when you're out of your car.  So it's not hard to make anyone understand a pedestrian issue on analogy to the walking that everyone has to do.  That's how you win these arguments, I think.

    new year’s resolution: no more coercion

    Posted on December 31, 2010 in Advocacy, Mobility, Philosophy, Words, Unhelpful

    PC310069 If you want to find vigorous attacks on urbanism and sustainable transport by car-and-highway advocates, just Google for forms of the verb to coerce.  The most recent one you'll find is from the reliable Fred Barnes of the Weekly Standard.  Called "Coercing people out of their cars," it exploits an unfortunate comment by Secretary of Transportation Ray LaHood.  As Barnes puts it:

    Last year, George Will zinged LaHood as the “Secretary of Behavior Modification” for his fervent opposition to cars. LaHood all but pleaded guilty. Steering funds from highways to bike and walking paths and streetcars, he said, “is a way to coerce people out of their cars.” His word, coerce.

    Here's the source, reported on conservative blogs but not much elsewhere.  CNS News:

    On May 21, [2009?] LaHood told reporters at the National Press Club that the “Partnership for Sustainable Communities’ his department had formed with the Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of Housing—sometimes known as the “livability initiative”–was designed to “coerce” people out of their cars.

    If LaHood did describe the sustainable transportation project as coercion, even in jest, he should be more careful. Just as one doesn't joke about terrorism at airport security checkpoints, we shouldn't even joke about coercion in urban and transportation policy.  The word is a primitive grenade that can blow up any and all parties present.

    The idea that urbanists and transit advocates are trying to coerce people to give up cars is one of the most treasured bits of pro-car rhetoric, because it feeds the association of cars with liberty.  Because so much urbanist work necessarily happens through government, the image of coercion also helps people think of government as intrinsically an oppressor, always a convenient refuge for the lazier kind of libertarian.

    Google assembles a convenient list of definitions of to coerce.  Wikipedia's is typical of the range:

    Coercion (pronounced /koʊˈɜrʃən/) is the practice of forcing another party to behave in an involuntary manner (whether through action or inaction) by use of threats, intimidation or some other form of pressure or force.

    Almost all of the definitions refer to actual or threatened force.  

    By those definitions, I can't think of anything that I have done, in 20 years in this business, that would qualify as coercion.  Certainly, I've never threatened any motorist with force, or advised anyone else to do so.  No, Barnes would respond, but I have advised governments to adopt policies that are coercive toward motorists.  For example, I advised the City of Minneapolis to restrict traffic on certain streets to create a functional transit mall, which they did in 2009.  They even changed the direction of certain lanes.  Something that used to be legal is now prohibited.  If someone drives his private car through the bus lanes (especially in their pre-2009 direction!) police might show up and, if all else fails, might even shoot at him.  Force!  Coercion!  Rhetorically, the coercion-victim wins.  Of course, the vehicle he was driving was also a deadly weapon, so he too was threatening force, but he's already declared victory, paid his citation with an air of martyrdom, written his angry article, and gone home.

    In the new year, let us all resolve not to be coerced by the rhetoric of coercion, and never to use the term, even in jest, to describe our own project. 

    In its impact on motorists, sustainable urbanism is all about accurate pricing.  We care about pricing in two separate and non-convertible currencies: money, and the limited road space of our cities. 

    We experience urban congestion, and parking shortages, when road-space is inaccurately priced.  As I explored here, it's as though we were giving out free tickets to a concert; when you do that, you get lots of people waiting in line, spending time to save money.  Today's approach to pricing forces everyone to act like those frugal concertgoers, when in fact many could easily afford to spend some money to save time, and would prefer to do so if asked.  High Occupancy Toll (HOT) lanes are one experiment in that direction, while the downtown congestion charges of London, Stockholm, and Singapore are another.  On the pricing front, San Francisco's free-market approach, which may finally liberate motorists from endlessly circling the block seeking a space, is another breakthrough. 

    The absurdity of underpricing scarce urban road space, and thus causing congestion and parking shortages, is simply this: It forces us all to save money, a renewable resource, by wasting time, the least renewable resource of all.

    Of course, when a price goes up, some who could afford it now can't, and may blame the government.  This happens when the price of anything goes up; it will always happen as long as people hold exaggerated notions about the power of government over the economy.  To meet the needs of people who are dissuaded from driving by price, and ensure that they continue participating in the economy, road-pricing and parking-pricing strategies work only in the context of abundant and attractive travel alternatives, including transit.  This is part of the free-market justification for transit subsidies, in a big-city context, so long as there continue to be equal or greater subsidies for the motorist.

    Reduction of government subsidies is not coercion.  Fred Barnes is the socialist in this debate, demanding government subsidy for his own chosen lifestyle but not for that of others.  As for those of us who support more accurate pricing — of road space, parking, and all the other incremental costs of transport, including transit fares — we are the libertarians!

    Quote of the Week: Manhattan as “Stockyard”

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

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

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

    The Perils of Average Density

    Posted on September 26, 2010 in Books, Density, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, Melbourne, New York City, Philosophy, Toronto, Transit-Oriented Development (TOD)

    In his 2010 book Transport for Suburbia, Paul Mees notices a fallacy that seems to be shared by sustainable transport advocates and car advocates.  Both sides of this great debate agree that effective transit requires high density.

    Sustainability advocates want higher urban densities for a range of reasons, but viability of public transit is certainly one of them.  Meanwhile, advocates of car-dominance want to argue that existing low densities are a fact of life; since transit needs high density, they say, there’s just no point in investing in transit for those areas, so it’s best to go on planning for the dominance of cars.  Continue Reading →

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