Navigation

Technophilia

What Was Wrong with the Washington DC Streetcar

Posted on May 28, 2025 in General, Streetcars (Trams), Symbolic Transit, Technophilia, Washington DC 3

Washington DC mayor Muriel Bowser has announced that the DC Streetcar, a single line of mixed-traffic streetcar along a portion of H Street, will be replaced by a “next generation streetcar.”  The Washington Post headline cuts through the spin:

If I could have edited that headline, I might just have said “DC Streetcar to be Replaced by Useful Transit”.

What was wrong with the DC Streetcar?  Apart from all the problems of putting transit in mixed traffic while denying it the ability to move around obstacles, the problem was this:

That orange line in the middle of the image, extending from (near) Union Station along H Street to just short of the Anacostia River, is the DC Streetcar.  Note that a frequent bus line X2 runs right on top of it but extends further east and west.  That’s because the X2, as a bus, is able to operate a complete corridor linking to logical endpoints, and functioning as part of a high-frequency grid.  High-frequency grids, which maximize access to opportunity in a dense city, are made of lines that keep going all the way across the grid, so that they intersect as many other lines as possible.  One thing an effective grid bus line would never do is end just short of a major connection point, as the streetcar does by not crossing the Anacostia River to at least reach Minnesota Avenue station.

This is one of the key things wrong with most of the mixed-traffic streetcars developed in the US in the 2000-2015 period, and especially those heavily promoted by the Obama Administration.  The excitement generated by the development industry, combined with the eagerness to get something started at low cost, led to starter lines that were very short, so they were unable to function well inside of larger grids.  The duplication of the X2 and the streetcar is just wasted precious driver time, but the X2 can’t get out of the way of the streetcar because it’s doing important work in a longer corridor, while the streetcar just duplicates part of it.  Because the resulting streetcar service was so useless, it never saw the surge of ridership that would form the basis for political support to expand the network.

Across the country now, we’re going to see a divergence in the fates of these little modern streetcars.  At this stage, I’m aware of two modern streetcars that I’m really confident will endure: the westside line in Portland and the line in Kansas City, both of which are being extended.  Portland’s is, and Kansas City’s will be, long enough to usefully serve a complete corridor rather than just a fragment of it.  There are a few other niche streetcars that have strong enough markets.  Tucson’s, for example, doesn’t extend across the city’s vast grid but it does link downtown and the University through several walkable neighborhoods, so it makes some sense.

Over time, too, the streetcars that endure are going to be those that gradually transform themselves into something more like light rail, by reducing car traffic’s ability to disrupt the service and widening the spacing of stops.  Portland, where the modern streetcar movement was hatched, spent years sending urbanists out across the country saying that “rail is special because it’s permanent.”  But fortunately the Portland Streetcar stations weren’t permanent!  They were way too close together, and wisely, some have now been removed in the campaign to get the service a bit above its original average speed of 6 miles per hour.

I must admit that when I saw this story, my first reaction on social media was less than magnanimous:

If you weren’t there, trust me.  At the major urbanist conferences between 2000 and 2010, few people were saying the obvious things I was saying, namely:

  • The permanence of a service lies not in rails in the street, but in the permanent justification of the operating subsidy.  That depends (in part) on ridership, which depends on the land use that actually develops around the line, not just what the boosters fantasize.  Many US cities facing budget crises now have streetcar operations on their books that compete directly with other city priorities, and if the streetcar wasn’t designed to succeed, they may not win those battles every year.
  • Streetcar lines that are too short, and serve only parts of corridors that really need to be served continuously, are net barriers to transit access, reducing access to opportunity. They either require us to take apart corridors that serve more people if they’re continuous, or they require a bus and streetcar to duplicate each other, wasting the precious staff time that is the primary limit on the total quantity of transit service.

This, one of my first really viral pieces from 2009, captures how I was talking back then.  I also got into a notorious 2010 fight with Vancouver urbanist Patrick Condon about his vision of covering Vancouver with slow streetcars instead of fast, driverless, high frequency rapid transit.  But as always, having been right in the end is never much consolation.  Mostly I’m sad that so much well-intentioned energy went into so many projects that weren’t scaled to succeed, and that weren’t sufficiently focused on being useful.

Let’s plan public transit with the goal of being maximally useful to human beings, expanding their access to opportunity.  That means designing the right lines first and then picking the technology, not falling in love with a technology and then designing a line around its limitations.

 

 

 

 

 

Las Vegas: A Ride on Elon’s “Vegas Loop” Did Not Change My Mind

Posted on January 25, 2025 in General, Las Vegas, Technophilia

Eight years ago, I experienced 10 seconds of Elon Musk’s attention.  The occasion was my criticism of his idea, now being implemented by his Boring Company, that the future of urban transportation was cars running in tunnels — tunnels that he claimed to be able to build so cheaply that there would just no longer be any barrier to building as many as we might need.  It was clear to me at once that this was a very low-capacity solution to a problem that required much higher capacity — the kind of capacity only provided by real public transit.

I have written several other articles on these themes over the years, many mentioning Musk as a technicolor example of common fallacies in tech industry thinking about urban transportation.  In the new edition of my book Human Transit, I laid out a more thorough critique of the most developed example of the Boring Company vision, the “Vegas Loop” that serves the Las Vegas Convention Center and nearby hotels.  It had just been approved for a large citywide expansion featuring over 60 stations.  I had studied whatever I could find explaining the concept — which wasn’t much — and explained why I felt that a system that sort-of worked with four stations would be a fiasco with more than 60.

But I must admit that until last week, I hadn’t actually ridden it.  Now I have.

Last weekend I found myself in Las Vegas for my nephew’s wedding, and had a few hours to spare.  So I did some walking, rode the monorail, and tried the Loop.  Until recently, the service had been confined to stations within the Las Vegas Convention Center complex, and thus not always open to the public.  But now there are two stations outside that complex, Westgate and Resorts World, so I rode from one to the other.

The monorail delivered me to Westgate station, where a short walk took me to the Westgate Loop station.

An attendant was there to help me pay my fare with a QR code, and pointed me to a car.  It was about 9:30 on a Sunday morning, so I knew I wouldn’t be seeing the Loop’s alleged ability to handle big crowds.  Instead, there was Tesla parked at the station, with a friendly driver. One odd detail is that he was parked on his left, so that I had to go into the roadway to board on the right.  Other than that, it was exactly like boarding an Uber or Lyft Tesla, including the perennial difficulty of hooking up the seatbelt.

Once I was secured, we took off, driving slowly through the narrow tunnels.  Two screens provided ample distraction, about half of it advertising.

Famously, the colors of the lights in the tunnels change — as lights do all over Las Vegas.  This was supposed to make it feel modern or fun.  What I saw instead was the narrowness of the tunnel, barely wider than the car.  I wondered about emergency exits.

Finally, we arrived, queued behind one other car, at an underground intersection, with a standard red-and-white-striped barrier blocking our path.  A man was standing around in a bright yellow jacket, much like the people you’ll see standing around in many kinds of transport infrastructure, not doing much but presumably ready to jump into action as needed.

Looking to my right, the view partly obstructed by the screen’s reflection in the window, I saw we’d arrived at a complex underground intersection.  There was a little booth for the man, as though he might be going to collect tolls. Except for the reflected screen, it all looked like infrastructure from 1970 or so.

We waited here for over a minute, which happens sometimes in public transit but is very much not the Boring Company pitch.  It appeared that the next bit of tunnel we needed to use was “single-track,” used by cars in both directions, so we had to wait for an oncoming car to come out of it.  Then, our barrier lifted and we went on our way.

We arrived at our destination, a trip of about 4 minutes of which one was spent waiting at that intersection.  This station, deep under Resorts World, had the same features:  A QR code to pay the fare, an agent in a yellow jacket, and some people standing around.

Walking out, I gazed back at the station.  It looks exactly like three Uber Teslas lined up at a curb in a parking structure, a space dominated by roadways that scream “keep out” to the pedestrian.

So, I tweeted:

My most loyal reply-guy was right there in an instant.

And this was the perfect reply to make my point!  To a certain kind of tech fantasist, their vision is so self-justifying that the only people who would question it must be those who haven’t experienced it yet.  This guy really thought that somehow, riding a Tesla through a tunnel (as opposed to reading and watching videos about it, which I’d done at length) would be a revelation that would overcome all my professional doubts about how such a low-capacity system could possibly scale.  At the same time, he was sharing images of the much better Vegas Loop of the future, with an extended network and sexier driverless vehicles.  This amounted to admitting that experience of the current demonstration project is not adequate to convey how cool this is, and how that coolness will supposedly someday get me to stop thinking about math.

Fortunately, there are a few journalists who share my skepticism about this project.  ProPublica did a recent piece focused more on the project’s failure to keep up its agreements with local governments that allowed it to be built.  They note that the big news event in May 2023, the Clark County Commission’s approval of the expansion plan, featured an opaque agenda item that didn’t even mention the Vegas Loop explicitly.  More importantly, they note that the kind of justification document that would exist for any publicly funded project just doesn’t seem to exist.  The Boring Company does not seem to want to show their math, either on their own website (where they should expect curious transport geeks to be looking) or in a submission to local government.

It’s remarkable to me that the Clark County Commission approved this, with the head of the convention bureau calling it “the only viable way” to manage traffic on the Las Vegas Strip.  Obviously, if there are no other options, there’s no need for analysis, but every transport planner knows how absurd that is.  Other options include:

  1. extending the monorail north to downtown and south to the airport, or
  2. building a proper rail subway (the most expensive option) or
  3. developing light rail or BRT on the surface of Las Vegas Blvd, taking 1/3 of the traffic capacity but carrying far more than 1/3 of the corridor’s person trips, so that traffic won’t get worse as a result.  (San Francisco’s Van Ness Avenue, where this was done in 2022, is now a great proof-of-concept.)

Was it easy to say yes because the Boring Company wasn’t asking for public money?  Certainly, but they are still taking something valuable: an enormous amount of underground real estate in public streets.  This will have the effect of preventing a properly scaled subway from ever being built because its path will be blocked by this warren of too-small tunnels.

I don’t expect to influence the debate in Las Vegas from afar.  The region has its own distinctive politics, and a particular notion about how to serve and entertain people that is unrelated to the principles of liberating urban transport.  But like many, I do find it fascinating as a case study, one that other cities should think about.

If this technology escapes from Las Vegas and threatens a bigger, denser city, that will be a more critical battle.  In 2022, Vox’s Avishay Artsy and Alissa Walker did a roundup of the state of action at the time, noting all the elected officials around the US who were expressing vague support for Boring Company projects.  But they also noted that the company tends not to follow through when they encounter the typical legal and infrastructural complexities of almost any large city.  Is some of this excessive regulation?  Maybe, but some of it is just people demanding that before you build something this impactful, you should lay out the math, and answer questions, to prove it’s the best alternative.  That’s all I’d be asking too.

A Next Step for Autonomous Buses?

Posted on September 11, 2023 in Automation, General, Technophilia

Photo: David Wheatley

A fully autonomous bus is now in regular service in Scotland.  It still has employees, two in fact.  But if this technology works out, the ultimate goal is probably to run buses with no employees on board. In wealthy countries, the cost of running a bus is mostly the cost of the driver, so in theory, if and when all the bugs are worked out, a driverless bus could be far more abundant, for a given operating budget, than buses with human drivers can be.

That will be wildly controversial. I have mixed feelings about it. But driverless rail transit has existed for decades, starting in Vancouver in 1985. The lack of a driver is why trains in Vancouver come every few minutes even late at night. In emergencies people like for there to be someone in charge, but the voices coming over the intercom from headquarters often have a better picture of the situation than an on-board employee does. Driverless buses would definitely be part of a world where security is based more on electronic surveillance, and like many people I have mixed feelings about that.

But if we end up in a world with abundant and affordable autonomous taxis — still a big if — it will be very hard for cities to function without autonomous buses. When we remove the hassle of traveling by private vehicle, and reduce the cost, everyone will want to do it, and a city simply doesn’t have room for that.  The only other solution will be heavy decongestion pricing to make the affordable autonomous taxis less affordable, and/or bus lanes on every street so that buses effectively bypass autonomous-taxi congestion.  That may be the answer, but in the long run I’d rather see public transit be abundant, so that everyone can go places quickly in a space-efficient way.

I Am Not a Bus Advocate

Posted on December 2, 2019 in General, Mobility, Technophilia

What, you say?  But you wrote an article in the Atlantic called The Bus is Still Best!  You redesign bus networks for a living!  You’ve been a skeptic about all kinds of new alternatives to the bus, from monorails to streetcars-stuck-in-traffic t0 “microtransit.”  Have you changed your mind?  

I am a freedom advocate[1], which means that I like it when people can go places, and therefore do things, and therefore have better lives more rich with choice and opportunity.  And when I analyze how to deliver freedom cost-effectively, the fixed route bus turns out to be the right answer in a huge percentage of cases.  It’s not right in all cases, and where it isn’t I don’t recommend it.  (Where a community has other goals, that too can yield a different answer, which is fine.  It’s their community.)

But it’s increasingly common to read things like this

Entrenched beliefs that the bus or rail is best, period — and that ridership and scalability are all that matter — stop us from seeing all the places where we can leverage technology and new ideas.

[UPDATE:  This article has since been revised in response to my objections.]

The word “bus” was a link to my Atlantic article, whose headline, “The Bus Is Still Best,” I dislike but could not control.[2]  The implication of this link is that I am “entrenched” in an emotional attachment to buses the way that many people can be emotionally attached to trains or airplanes or Porsches or whatever.[3]

Such attachments may also just be financial interests.  For example, huge amounts of venture capital are being spent making it sound like microtransit is a world-changing idea, and to attack those of us who honestly can’t make mathematical sense of that claim as being rigid, stuck in our ways, “entrenched.”[4]

In fact, I feel no emotions about transport technologies.  My shelves are not full of cardboard model buses.[5]  And where the right answer to the problem of efficiently providing freedom isn’t a bus, I don’t recommend a bus.  I have recommended all kinds of technologies in different situations. I want to achieve goals, and I look for tools that do that in each situation.

Above all, I hope I’m known for suggesting that our thinking should start with goals rather than emotional excitement about technologies, and that this requires some serious effort, because every technology salesperson wants us to do the opposite: first, get excited about a technology, then try to come with a goal that could justify it.  As soon as “innovation” becomes a goal in itself rather than a tool, we are headed down that slippery slope.

So I’m not surprised that I get attacked now and then, and now here’s a post as a ready-made response.  Next time you see someone say that I am (or you are) a “bus advocate,” or “entrenched,” just send them a link to this.  Thank you!

 

Notes

[1] Or, if you prefer, an access advocate.

[2] Never, ever link to something based only on the headline!  Headlines express the attitudes of the publication, not the writer.  (I am slapping my own wrist as I write this, because I’ve been guilty too.)

[3] … which is not to criticize emotional attachments.  I have them too about many things. As always, I am describing myself, not judging you!

[4]  This assumption about financial interest also gets projected onto me sometimes, so for the record: I have no financial link with any bus manufacturer, bus operating company, etc.

[5] … though if yours are, that’s wonderful!  As always, I am describing myself, not judging you!

The Chinese Straddle Bus Exists! What Now?

Posted on August 3, 2016 in Technophilia

13909015_1342015949159179_6822123175964675488_o

The Chinese straddle bus has now been built, and run on a test track!  Whee! Here’s the gee-whiz video.

As I said before, I think that especially in wealthy countries, this thing is mostly useful as a parable, whose message is:  Look how much money people will spend on infrastructure whose sole purpose is to avoid taking any space from motorists.

If the thing has any application, it’s probably not in Europe or North America, because:

  • It’s massively capital intensive.  The little rail-like running-ways in the street are the least of it, and the fleet is the second-least.   The stations must be massive elevated structures, with a mezzanine above the top of the bus.  Existing bridges would almost all need to be raised.   Countries with high construction costs will find this a barrier.
  • It will serve stations located on expressways, which tend to be bad places for the pedestrians that the bus will attract and disgorge.  The only solution to this is massive grade separation, leading to a continuous pedestrian plane at the station level, well above the street.  This leads to urban design that essentially abandons the ground plane to cars and rebuilds an entire pedestrian city above it.
  • The vast raised pedestrian plane was a hot idea for about 15 minutes in the 1970s, giving us London’s Barbican, Paris’s La Défense, Los Angeles’s Bunker Hill, etc etc.  Today, most European and North American urbanists hate these places and insist on solving problems on the ground plane, though of course the pendulum could swing again.  But it’s much more common and accepted in East Asia, and to some extent in former Soviet countries.
  • There’s also the problem that if you build this thing in an existing dense city, you are building it right outside of someone’s window.  So you probably need a political structure that can make and enforce highly controversial decisions, as opposed to the kind of deference to public protest that prevails in most Western democracies.
  • You really have to redesign big districts around this thing, which is another big barrier unless we are talking about entirely new areas.  A high pedestrian plane only works if the idea is shared by many surrounding buildings.
  • Where this thing connects with underground subway lines, your mezzanine for this elevated thing is at least four stories away from the subway’s mezzanine.   This requires high-volume vertical circulation, which no inventor has ever really cracked.  Elevators are really inefficient at high volume, and escalators are really slow at it.
  • The nature of this technology makes it hard to demonstrate at the right scale.  There is a basic conflict between “huge capital expenditure” and “demonstration of new technology.”  It’s the same problem that monorails and maglevs and “Personal Rapid Transit” and many other cool ideas have had.  Inventors need places to do demo projects.  But it’s not smart for a city to agree to be Version 1.0 of something, while also spending billions on the assumption of its permanent success.  This is how cities end up with stranded transit assets that can become net barriers to good transit (see Scarborough RT, Toronto, or the airport maglev in Shanghai, etc etc.)

(Update: In the third top-level comment below, Brian Smith points out that the surface space this thing takes is still wider than a bus lane, so why not just do aa busway?  He also points out that the vehicle is rigid and the test track was straight.  What happens when it goes around curves?   It takes more horizontal space of course.  And it seems to rely on a ground-level third-rail, which is considered wildly unsafe in the business.)

Having said that, if anyone can pull this off at scale, it’s probably China, which seems to tick all the boxes I’ve identified.  They have the sufficiently centralized decision making, low enough construction costs, ability to do things at scale, and relative indifference to Western aesthetics that this thing requires.  They are also building entirely new districts, which offer the best possibility for actually organizing a place around the correct elevated ground plane. So yes, it may happen, and it may do some good.  Which doesn’t mean it’s not, deep down, ridiculous.

Does the History of a Technology Matter?

Posted on July 4, 2016 in Brisbane, Bus Rapid Transit, Light Rail, Technophilia
6a00d83454714d69e2012875c1a395970c-320wi

Mater Hill busway station, Brisbane

Ben Ross has a nice long read in Dissent about the history of Bus Rapid Transit, noting all the ways it’s succeeded, failed, and been co-opted by various non-transit agendas.  He’s especially interested in the way various petroleum-and-asphalt interest groups have supported BRT as an alternative to rail for reasons that probably don’t have much to do with their love of great public transit.  All this is worth reading and knowing about.

But what, exactly, should we do with this history?  Practically everything that breaks through into the public discourse has private public relations money behind it, and that money always has different goals than you and your city do.  That’s why you should always lean into the wind when reading tech media.  But just as it’s wrong to fall for everything you read in corporate press releases, it’s also wrong to reflexively fall against them.  (Cynicism, remember, is consent.)

Galileo paid the bills, in part, by helping the military aim cannonballs correctly.  Does that mean pacifists should resist his insight that Jupiter has moons?

So while I loved Ross’s tour of the history, I reject his dismissive conclusion:

Buses will always be an essential part of public transit. Upgrading them serves urbanism, the environment, and social equity. But a better bus is not a train, and bus rapid transit promoters lead astray when they pretend otherwise. At its worst, BRT can be a Trojan horse for highway building. Even at its best, it is a technocratic solution to a fundamentally political problem.

The term technocratic is really loaded here.  Given the new “revolt against experts” trend in our politics, we urgently need to recognize  hard-earned expertise and to distinguish it from elite selfishness, but technocrat is a slur designed to confuse the two.

6a00d83454714d69e2012875c19fc4970c-500pi

RBWH busway station, Brisbane

There are some great bus rapid transit systems out there, and not just in the developing world.  The mixed motives that underlie BRT advocacy don’t tell us anything about where BRT makes sense, any more than the mixed motives behind rail advocacy do.

A light reading of history can help you recognize the prejudices that may lay behind advocacy on all sides.  But then you have to set that aside, and think for yourself.

 

Portland: Frequent Bus Performance Approaching Light Rail’s

Posted on June 8, 2015 in Light Rail, Portland, Rail Transit, Technophilia

Here's an interesting chart:

Tri Met Ops Cost per Ride

This is a year's trend comparing bus and light rail (MAX) service in Portland's transit agency, TriMet, from the performance dashboard at the TriMet Transparency and Accountability Center webpage.  

The metric here is operating cost per boarding ride.  This is a good overall measure of how effectively a transit agency is liberating and moving people, where down means good.  (I prefer this ratio upside down: ridership per unit cost or "bang for buck," so that up means good. but this is obviously a chart by finance people who always want cost on top.)  This is a "macro" metric.  Practically everything a transit agency does affects it, so it's lousy diagnosis but not bad if you only have bandwidth to convey one measure.

Most American transit data just compares bus and rail, and inevitably shows bus performing worse.  You'll see that here too if you just look at the wide solid lines.  From this we get endless ignorant journalism lamenting the poor performance of the city bus, as though all city buses are basically alike.

What if we separated out highly useful and liberating bus service as a separate category?  That isn't exactly the distinction made here but it's close.  TriMet's Frequent Service network (still being restored, but mostly now back in existence) is the network of all services that are almost always coming soon.  

This chart says two remarkable things:

  • Frequent bus performance is now very close to light rail performance.   
  • The spread between Frequent Bus and infrequent bus is usually bigger than the spread between all buses and light rail.

The lesson is pretty clear:  The "city bus" is a misleading category, and the much-fetishized difference between bus and rail may matter less than whether the services are designed to be useful.  And when it comes to usefulness, no one variable capture that more than frequency.  

Transitmix continues its development

Posted on January 13, 2015 in Maps, Technophilia

By Evan Landman. 

Last summer, we covered an exciting new transit planning tool called Transitmix. Transitmix grew out of a Code for America project that sought to create a web-based tool to automate much of the complex yet mundane work that goes on in the background during transit planning. Cost estimation, line measurement, population and employment coverage analysis, are all examples of tasks that require time and effort such that they cannot all be carried out in real time during a planning meeting or workshop.

The team at Transitmix reached out to transit planners all over the county (including our firm), learning what did and didn't work about current practices and workflows. They created a beta version of a simple online tool that hinted at what might be possible. Finally, last week, Transitmix released a new video announcing the impending release of the professional version of the application, with critical features that offer the promise of a dramatically simpler, more open, and more easily understood transit planning tool.

Dynamic demographic and employment mapping and analysis, and side-by-side network and route comparisons are the main new features implemented here, to go along with the live updated costing, and deeply configurable frequency, span, and cost parameters the older version already includes. Transitmix continues to impress, creating a tool that simplifies and demystifies procedures that are too often known only to practitioners. We look forward to getting our hands on the full-featured product.

You are here: Home › Technophilia
Older posts