Technophilia

a technophile wants my brain, and yours

I'm not sure if I should give this oxygen, but for the record: Randal O'Toole, the infamous anti-planning writer known for his blog The Antiplanner, has falsely implied that I agree with his critique of Los Angeles rail plans.  Not so fast.  If he'd read by blog, or my book, he'd know better.

Here's what he wrote today:

Portland transit expert Jarrett Walker argues that “we should stop talking about ‘bus stigma.’” In fact, he says, transit systems are designed by elites who rarely use transit at all, but who might be able to see themselves on a train. So they design expensive rail systems for themselves rather than planning transit systems for their real market, which is mostly people who want to travel as cost-effectively as possible and don’t really care whether they are on a bus or train.

This view is reinforced by the Los Angeles Bus Riders’ Union, and particularly by a report it published written by planner Ryan Snyder. Ryan calls L.A.’s rail system “one of the greatest wastes of taxpayer money in Los Angeles County history,” while he shows that regional transit ridership has grown “only when we have kept fares low and improved bus service,” two things that proved to be incompatible with rail construction.

So because I defended buses from the notion of "bus stigma", O'Toole assumes I'm a bus advocate and therefore a rail opponent.  This is called a "false dichotomy," identical in logic to George W. Bush's claim that "either you're with us or you're with the terrorists." 

(In a related move, he insists that you can't improve rail and buses at the same time, a claim directly disproven by the last decade in which LA Metro developed the Metro Rapid buses [and Orange and Silver Line busways] concurrent with rail extensions.) 

In fact, I maintain and encourage a skeptical stance toward all technophilia — that is, all emotional attachments to transit technologies that are unrelated to their utility as efficient and attractive means of public transport.  To the extent that the Bus Riders Union is founded on the view that rail is some kind of adversary, while the bus is the unifying symbol of their cause, I view them with exactly the same skepticism that I would bring to the elite architect who implied that we don't need buses because she'd never ride one. 

Some technology-fixated minds just can't imagine what it would be like to be agnostic about technology and to care instead about whether a service actually gets people where they're going efficiently.  To put in terms that conservatives should respect — I'm very interested in transit that efficiently expands people's freedom, and whatever technology best delivers that in each situation or corridor.

I'm also interested in how all kinds of transit fit together as networks, because this is essential if we're to offer a diverse range of travel options to each customers.  Everyone who becomes emotionally invested in bus vs rail wars — on either side — closes themselves to the idea that different technologies can work together form a single network. 

Like many pairs of polarized enemies, the Bus Riders Union and certain bus-hating elites both endorse the same fallacy.  In this case, both seem to believe that the most important purpose of a transit technology is to signify class categories, and that the key feature of their favorite technology is that it serves their class and not the other's.  Both experience cognitive dissonance when one suggests that maybe bus and rail are not enemies but complementary tools for different roles in a complete network designed for everyone, or that people of many classes and situations can mix happily on one transit vehicle, as happens in big cities all the time.

The idea that a city as vast and dense as Los Angeles can do everything with buses, no matter how much it grows, is absurd.  Drivers are expensive, so rail is a logical investment where high vehicle capacity (ratio of passengers to drivers) is required.

The only way the conservative dream (shared by Gensler Architects) makes sense is if you smash the unions so that all bus drivers make minimum wage, preferably from low-overhead private operating companies.  This is how transit works in much of the developing world, and the result is chaos, inefficient use of street space, and fairly appalling safety records.  Most experts I know who've immigrated from such places were glad to trade that for the transit they find in North America, whatever its faults.

It is absurd, too, to continue claiming that the Los Angeles rail program is "elite."  Go ride the Red Line to North Hollywood or the Blue Line through Watts and tell me if those services seem packed with "elites" to you.  When I ride them, I see the same wonderful diversity that I see on the more useful bus services, weighted of course by the characteristics of the neighborhoods we're passing through.

There's no question that some LA rail projects can be criticized for having been built where right-of-way was available rather than where they were needed, though the more you understand the political process the more you sympathize with the difficulty of those decisions.  But when self-identified bus-people attack rail, and self-identified rail people attack buses, they both sound like the lungs arguing with the heart.  There's a larger purpose to transit, one that we achieve only by refusing to be drawn into technology wars, and demanding, instead, that everything work together.

book review: grescoe’s straphanger

Taras Grescoe. Straphanger: Saving Our Cities and Ourselves from the Automobile. Macmillan, 2012.

Straphanger cover

When the publisher of Taras Grescoe’s Straphanger asked me to review the book, I felt the usual apprehension.  Shelves are full of books that discuss transit from a journalist’s perspective.  They often get crucial things wrong, as do many journalists’ articles on the topic.  I wondered I was going to endure another four hours of watching readers being innocently misled on issues that matter.

Grescoe does a little of that, but he also shows why spectacular writing compensates for many problems of detail.  Straphanger is a tour de force of compelling journalism and “travel writing” – friendly, entertaining, funny, pointed, and (almost always) compelling.  Like any good explainer, he announces his prejudice at once:

I admit it: I ride the bus.  What’s more, I frequently find myself on subways, streetcars, light rail, metros and high-speed trains.  Though I have a driver’s license, I’ve never owned an automobile, and apart from the occasional car rental, I’ve reached my mid forties by relying on bicycles, my feet, and public transportation for my day-to-day travel … I am a straphanger, and I intend to remain one as long as my legs will carry me to the corner bus stop.

Grescoe and I have almost all of this in common, but I felt a pang of regret at this posture.  To the mainstream, car-dependent people who most need this book’s message, Grescoe has just announced that he’s a space alien with three arms and a penchant for eating rocks.  But there’s a positive side: once you decide you’re not in danger, eccentric tourguides can be fun.  Perhaps I have a poor dataset from living in “officially weird” Portland, and before that in San Francisco, but in a culture that seems increasingly welcoming of eccentricity and difference, there may be an audience for Grescoe among the motoring set.

Because this is what Grescoe is at heart:  A great tourguide, in this case a travel writer, showing you around some fascinating cities, exploring intriguing transit systems, and introducing us to vivid and engaging characters, all while having fun and sometimes dangerous adventures.  These last are important; Grescoe has had enough traumatic and confronting experiences that he can describe straphanging as a form of endorphin-rich adventure analogous to mountain climbing or skydiving.  I look forward to the movie.

Statistics are cited lightly but to great (and usually accurate) effect.  Effective and quotable jabs are everywhere: 

“The personal automobile has, dramatically and enduringly, broadened our horizons.  In the process, however, it has completely paved them over.

Grescoe has a great eye for characters, too.  Who can fail to be charmed, for example, by this portrait of a character I hadn’t known:  Bogotà mayor Antanas Mockus, alter-ego of his successor, the aggressive and practical Enrique Peñalosa:

Working with a tiny budget and no support from district councillors, Mockus focused on … undermining cycles of violence through jester-like interventions in daily life.  He dismissed the notoriously corrupt traffic police and hired four hundred mimes to shame drivers into stopping at crosswalks.  …  Taxis drivers were encouraged to become “Gentlemen of the Crosswalks,” and every new traffic fatality was marked with a black star prominently painted on the pavement.  To discourage road rage and honking, he distributed World Cup-style penalty cards to pedestrians and motorists, a red thumb’s down to signify disapproval, a green thumbs up to express thanks for a kind act … Seeing tangible evidence of municipal progress, citizens once again began to pay their property taxes … and the once-bankrupt city’s finances began to recover.

What’s wrong with this book?  Well, if it’s travel writing, nothing; travel writing is about the adventure, and while you learn things from it, you expect to learn subjective, unquantifiable things that may be inseparable from the character of your guide.  Journalism, on the other hand, has to get its facts right, or at least state its biases.  Grescoe gets a pass on his largest biases, mostly because he’s entirely aware of them and happy to point them out.

But there are a few mistakes.  Like many commentators, Grescoe throws around meaningless or misleading data about urban densities.  Here’s a typical slip:

Thanks largely to the RER, the metropolitan area of Paris, with over 10.2 million residents, takes up no more space on the Earth’s surface than Jacksonville, Florida, a freeway-formed city with fewer than 800,000 residents.

This doesn’t seem to check out, unless some subtle and uncited definition of metro area is being used.  (Wikipedia tells me that the City of Jacksonville is 882 sq mi in area while the Paris with 10.3 million residents is 1098 sq mi.)  But even if it did, this is the classic “city limits problem.”  Jacksonville is a consolidated city-county whose “city limits” encompass vast rural area outside the city, whereas “metro Paris” is by definition a contiguous area that is entirely urbanized.  An accurate comparison with metro Paris would look only at the built-up area of Jacksonville, which is tiny compared to Paris.   The point is that any talk about metro areas or cities is prone to so many different definitions, including some really unhelpful ones, that it’s wrong to cite any urban density without footnoting to clarify exactly what you mean, and how it’s measured. Grescoe is far from alone in sliding into these quicksands.

As with many journalists, Grescoe’s sense of what would be a good transit network is strongly governed by his emotional response to transit vehicles and technologies.  Grescoe is very enamored with rapid transit or “metro” service to the point that he sometimes misses how technologies work together for an optimal and liberating network. 

He claims, for example, that there should be circular metro lines around Los Angeles, Chicago, and Toronto.  In fact, circular or “orbital” services (regardless of technology) rely not just on network effects but also on being radial services into major secondary centers.  This is why the Chicago Circle Line made no sense: Chicago is so massively single-centered that there are few major secondary centres sufficient to anchor a metro line until you get way out into the suburbs, at which point concentrations of jobs are laid out in such transit-unfriendly ways that no one line could serve them anyway. Chicago is going the right direction by improving the speed and usefulness of its urban grid pattern of service – a mathematically ideal network form that fits well with the shape of the city.  Toronto has similar geography and issues.  As for Los Angeles, this is a place with so many “centers” that the concepts of radial vs orbital service are meaningless.  Especially here, where travel is going so many directions and downtown’s role is so small, the strong grid, not the circle, is the key to great transit. 

Grescoe is clear enough about his strongest bias:

“I don’t like buses. … Actually, I hate them.”

Despite his opening statement that “I ride the bus,” Grescoe repeatedly associates buses with losers, and with unpleasant experiences.  In correspondence with me, he wrote:  “The anti-bus bias you perceive was a concession to North American readers whose experience of buses tends to be negative.”  Again, this is understandable as travel writing, but it’s tricky as journalism and very tricky if the purpose is advocacy.  When you presume a bias on the part of your reader, with the intent of later countering it, you can’t really control whether you’ve dislodged the bias or reinforced it.  I felt the bias being reinforced; other readers may have different responses.

Again, the problem with anti-bus bias is not that I don’t share it.  The problem is that if you set transit technologies in competition with one another, the effect is to undermine the notion that technologies should work together as part of a complete network.  If you want a network that will give you access to all the riches of your city, buses are almost certain to be part of it – even if, as in inner Paris, you have the densest subway system in the world.  Hating buses – if that becomes your primary focus — means hating complete networks. 

When it comes to Bus Rapid Transit, Grescoe accepts the common North American assumption that the place to see BRT is Bogotà or Curitíba.  So he comes back from Bogotà with the near-universal reaction of North American junketers there:  The massive structuring BRT is really impressive in the numbers it carries, but hey, this is the developing world. Not only is car ownership low but it’s more authoritarian in its politics, giving mayors the power to effect massive transformation fast without much consultation.  What’s more, these massive busways are effective but really unpleasant as urban design – not something I’d want in my city.  Respecting the effectiveness and utility of the Bogotà busways, Grescoe does endorse Bus Rapid Transit in secondary corridors, but he has not seen busways done completely for a developed-world audience.

North Americans who want to experience successful Bus Rapid Transit in a developed-world context should skip South America and visit Brisbane, Australia, where a wealthy modern city moves, in part, on a complete network of beautifully designed, landscaped, and highly functional busways that flow into an underground segment right through the heart of downtown, and that are designed to provide an extremely frequent rapid-transit experience.  There are some European pieces of good busway, such as Amsterdam’s Zuidtangent.  But you have to go to Brisbane to see an uncompromised developed-world busway network, one that provides reliable operations end to end.

While Straphanger’s flirtation with anti-bus stereotypes was troubling to me, there’s a limit to how much Grescoe can be criticized for this.  This is journalism of its time, and the bus=loser stereotype is still of our time in some cities.  It’s up to each of us to decide whether to seek experiences that confirm our stereotypes or those that might contradict them, but nobody can challenge all of their stereotypes at once.   Grescoe does eagerly challenge many other destructive attitudes throughout the book, and the brilliance of a book lies in the way it brings delight and confidence to the experience of both using and advocating transit and great urbanism. I heartily recommend this fun, enlightening, and inspiring read.

a great new resource on european buses and bus rapid transit

In case you've missed the headlines, Europe's economy is even more shaky than that of the US, with the consequences of the global crisis overlaid with the crisis of the Euro.  So as in the US, it's time to do more with less. But they're doing a lot more with less, as you can see by browsing this great online resource, www.bhls.eu.

  Bus_at_stop_N_Riverside_Gothenburg-2

26_-_Nantes_-_bus_way_vue_aerienne_BDefBHLS stands for "Bus at a High Level of Service" and it refers not just to Bus Rapid Transit but to a range of other high-frequency, branded bus products.  The site features case studies from all over Europe, and provides numerous PDF downloads where you can read about individual cases in more detail — not just sexy photos but (Gotheburg above, Nantes at right) but also an explanation of the decision process that led to choosing a bus project over rail.

I'm trying to buy a house and pack up my office today, and will be at the Canadian Urban Transit Association conference in Victoria the next few days, so posting may be slow.  Fortunately, there's enough at www.bhls.eu to entertain anyone who cares about urban transit for days.

 

 

 

fort lauderdale: yet another triumph for multi-destinational networks

If your city is producing lousy outcomes with its bus services, are you sure it's because of the buses, or the drivers, or the sidewalks, or the degree of "transit oriented development", or that they're not streetcars?  Maybe it's because the network structure is obsolete.  A study team led by Gregory Thompson of Florida State looked at the success of Broward County Transit, which serves greater Fort Lauderdale.  Apart from a few special enclaves, Fort Lauderdale is unlikely to be high on anyone's list of urbanist paradises.  It has plenty of gridlock, plenty of pedestrian-hostile environments, and the usual abundance of oversized roads that seem only to generate more congestion.

Broward sidewalk campaignYet the hard-working if unappreciated Broward County Transit system is producing excellent outcomes through multidestinational design.  Instead of running a radial system into a single downtown, they decentralized to serve many destinations, through a network of routes making easy connections with one another. Eric Jaffe tells the story today in Atlantic Cities.

The whole case for this kind of design is in my book Human Transit, esp Chapter 12 and 13, but Thompson has been making it for years.  I'm impressed at how well it's working in not-especially-transit-friendly Florida metros.  Tallahassee took the plunge last year.

Obviously this is an issue close to my heart.  I came to consciousness as a transit planner during the decentralization of Portland's network in 1979-82, which created local pulse networks in each suburban area and culminated in the high-frequency grid that today covers most of the city.  Almost every network design I've ever done has helped to improve the multi-destinational utility of transit networks of all sizes.  Huge amounts of resistance have to be overcome.  But if they're designed well, they work. 

Finally, kudos to the folks at Atlantic Cities for coming back to this issue with one great story after another.  I'm not sure I've ever seen a major media outlet build up this degree of internal understanding about the fundamentals of transit network design — a topic that's easily forgotten while obsessing about how cool technologies are.   Is any other American media outlet dealing with network planning issues so clearly?  Certainly not the New York Times, which publishes one story after another in which well-meaning platitudes about social needs are proposed as ways to change the facts of geometry.

toronto and sydney: triumphs for network planning, not just light rail

Breakthrough news on rail battles in both Toronto and Sydney, both of which I posted on recently (Toronto, Sydney).  

  • Sydney's state government has made it official.  The one-way loop of the Sydney Monorail, designed to decorate the tourism-convention playground of Darling Harbour without being very useful to anyone, is to be torn down.  While the decision is being described as a move toward light rail — plans for which are definitely moving forward — it's really just a decision to invest in transit lines that do useful things — such as running in both directions, running efficiently enough to justify reasonable fares, and connecting with many other services so that people can go where they want to go, not just where you want to take them. 
  • Toronto City Council has definitely scrapped Mayor Rob Ford's plans to spend all of the city's transit resources on a few expensive outer-suburban subway segments designed to serve small parts of the region.  The move opens the way to move forward on more cost-effective light rail projects that will enrich mobility across the entire city.

Toronto transit commentator Steve Munro makes an important point, which could also be said of Sydney:

This is an important day for Toronto.  We are on track for a [light rail]-based plan and for a more detailed evaluation of our transit future than we have seen for decades.  Talking about one line at once, about fundraising for one project at once, is no longer an accepted way of building the city.  

That's the key.  The Sydney Monorail failed because it was "one line at once" — a project conceived in isolation with no interest in being part of a complete network.  And in Toronto, a city with numerous desperate rapid-transit needs, planning will no longer pit neighborhoods against each other to the degree that Mayor Ford wanted to do.  Instead, Toronto can move forward on projects that fit together into a more complete rapid-transit grid — serving "anywhere to anywhere" trips.

Finally, a warning to technophiles!!  Technophile commenters will doubtless chalk this up the Sydney decision as a defeat for monorails in general.  I disagree.  It's a defeat for one-way loops, poor connectivity, and symbolic as opposed to actual mobility.  The monorail didn't fail just because it was a monorail, but because it was a poorly designed line.  Likewise, the Toronto outcome isn't a victory for light rail or a defeat for subways, but merely a commitment to better network design.

a great summary of my talk at apta, washington dc

6850202555_e278ff2178_oIn Greater Greater Washington (GGW), Jenifer Joy Madden and Malcolm Kenton have written an excellent summary of my talk at APTA in Washington DC last week, which GGW also partly sponsored. It also includes this photo, which makes me look a bit like a preacher.   (Click to enlarge, if you must.)

If you missed my talk(s), please read the article but also the comment thread, in which some people accuse me of "anti-rail bias" and others say everything I would say in response to that.  This is gratifying to say the least.  It's fun to be applauded, but it's far more fun to be understood.

sydney: monorail soon to be scrap metal?

DSCF4148

The state government that rules Sydney is giving signs that it's ready to tear down the city's monorail, ostensibly for a rebuild of the convention centre but also to remove some obstacles to surface light rail, including game-changing new line down the middle of Sydney's CBD spine, George Street.  Jake Saulwick has the story in today's Sydney Morning Herald.

A source from one consortium [bidding to build a new convention centre] said no decision had been made ''but the word from the government is 'don't let the monorail constrain your thinking' ''.

''Conversely they say the light rail is quite important.''

This could be read as a story about big bad developers destroying a crucial transit resource, but it's not. The Sydney Monorail, opened in 1988, is the red line in the map below: a one way loop connecting the CBD to the nearby tourism-entertainment-convention district of Darling Harbour:

Sydney_metro_map
Map by discoversydney.com.au

Like many transit toys, it was built cheaply on the assumption that the joy of the technology itself would transcend its lack of usefulness.  Its most obvious use is for travel between the convention/exhibition area on the west side of the loop to the city centre in the east, but the key stations on the west side of the loop, serving the convention/exhibition area and Paddy's Markets, are attached to parking structures, offering an unattractive walk to the destination itself.   The fare is $5.00.  Meanwhile, it's less than 1.5 km (1 mile) walk from one side of the loop to the other, mostly along reasonably pleasant paths that lead to the front door of your destination, though to be fair there is one elevated waterfront freeway in the way.

I lived and worked in inner city for five years, crossing the monorail's service area on foot several times a week.  Twice in that time, in very bad weather, using the monorail made sense to me.

The monorail is a barrier to light rail, indirectly, because its pillars form a bottleneck in a potential north-south traffic lane on Pitt Street, and this lane could be useful in rearranging street uses to create room for a light rail line the whole length of George Street, the largest continuous north-south street in the city's core.  Light rail is being designed to be useful.  It will be in an exclusive lane (which is why it's not being called a "tram") and it will form the common CBD segment for several lines branching out in several directions, serving high-demand corridors in the inner city.  Its high capacity (in the sense of passengers per driver) and its two-way service in high-demand places will make it a real transit service, unlike the tiny one-way loop of the monorail.

Next time someone wants to introduce a fun new technology into your city using a one-way loop, remember: 

  1. Very few people really want to travel in circles.
  2. Except for tourists and others travelling for pleasure, most people need direct service in both directions, which loops don't do well, and …
  3. Loops are intrinsically closed, turned inward on themselves, impossible to extend without disrupting existing travel patterns.  That's why one-way loops are never a good starter project for a technology that's expected to expand its relevance in the future.

For more on those principles, see Chapter 4 of Human Transit.

Finally, monorails are fun to ride, but most people experienced this one from being underneath it.  This was just a single beam for one-way loop service, causing all the problems above, but it was still much-disliked, especially in the narrow streets of the highrise core where it added to the sense of overhead weight above the pedestrian.

DSCF4171

DSCF4174

To be fair, it's less oppressive than, say, the Chicago "L" or many other downtown viaducts.  A transit advocate might fight hard for exactly this kind of visual impact if it was the only way to get useful two-way service through a high-demand area.  In fact, one of the best uses of monorail is in historic and very crowded areas where the combination of archeological and ground-plane impacts of any transit service simply mandates elevated as the least bad solution — parts of New Delhi, for example.  But the Sydney monorail had few of these benefits.  Perhaps it was just a toy, and Sydney has outgrown it.

outtake: on endearing-but-useless transit

Here is an outtake from an early draft of my book, written at a time when I intended to confront technology choice issue more directly than I ended up doing.  (There turned out to be a book's worth of stuff to explain that was even more important than that, so the next book will likely be about technology choice.) 

Darrin Nordahl's My Kind of Transit argues the opposite of my view here.  Since I am debating Darrin tomorrow in a webinar (for US Green Building Council members only, alas) I thought I'd post this in the spirit of cheerful provocation.

In Chapter 2 of Human Transit, I argue that useful transit can be understood as involving seven dimensions or elements.

1.    “It takes me where I want to go.”

2.    “It takes me when I want to go.”

3.    “It’s a good use of my time.”

4.    “It’s a good use of my money.”

5.    “It respects me.”

6.    “I can trust it.”

7.    “It gives me freedom to change my plans.”

The dominant mode in a community is the one that best addresses the seven demands, compared to the available alternatives, in the perception of the majority of people.  In a rural area, or a low density suburban one, the automobile meets all seven demands handsomely.  You can drive to just about anywhere (demand 1).  The car is in your garage when you need it (demand 2).  It is the fastest way to get to most places (demand 3) and thanks to many government subsidies it is relatively cost-effective to own (demand 4).  It is comparatively comfortable (demand 5).  You maintain the car, so you have some control over its reliability (demand 6).   Finally, it’s easy to change your travel plans mid-trip (demand 7).

In core areas of Paris, London, or New York, these same demands explain why the rapid transit system, not the automobile, is dominant.  Rapid transit goes to every part of the city that many people want to go to (demand 1).  It runs every 5-10 minutes for 18 hours a day or more, so there is always a train coming in a few minutes (demand 2).  It can easily be faster than driving (demand 3), and is certainly cheaper given the high cost of big-city parking (demand 4).  It is probably weakest in demand 5 — the comfort and sense of respect — but some systems do a good job at this, especially away from the crowded rush hour, and in any case the high speed means a fast trip where a period of discomfort is more tolerable.  It’s reliable (demand 6) -– or at least, it’s big news when it fails, so you’re likely to be forgiven for being late.  Finally, the rapid transit systems of these major cities offer a level of freedom (demand 7) that is hard to achieve in a car, which faces the constant problems of parking and congestion.  You can spontaneously get off at any station, for example, knowing that when you’re ready, another train will be along soon to complete your journey.

The seven demands collectively define the dimensions of a transit service that most people in a society would rationally decide to use.  If transit satisfies these seven demands, to the standards of the people that it is trying to serve, and compared to their alternatives, then the transit service is usefuluseful service to denote service that is good enough in its seven dimensions that given the alternatives, many people would rationally choose to use it.

(Note that by useful (and later useless) I mean useful or useless as transportation, because that is transit's primary task, just as firefighting is the fire department's primary task.)

Now here’s a key point:  “many people” may not mean “people like me.”  An effective strategy for maximizing the use of transit can't serve everyone, because some people are just not cost-effective to serve, so success as a strategy may be different from usefulness to you or the people you know.  If your friends will only ride streetcars rather than buses, but your town is too small to fill streetcars to the point that their capacity is needed, then your friends may just be too expensive, and too few, to be a good service investment for a transit agency focused on citywide demand.  Likewise, if you live in a low-density area, and you wonder why transit isn’t useful to you, the answer may be that you form too sparse a market for transit to efficiently focus on.  Chapter 10 is all about the challenge of hard-to-serve markets and how, or even whether, subsidized public transit should be trying to serve them.

Still, most public transit services aspire to attract a wide range of people, and breadth in the market is important for political support.  Of course, most transit agencies cannot hope to capture a majority of the travel demand in their communities, or even to their downtowns, but they can provide services that many people will find useful — enough to get many cars off the road and dramatically improve mobility for everyone.  A great deal of research has been done, and much remains to be done, about the seven dimensions of the useful and how good transit really needs to be at each of them to achieve a city’s goals.

The key idea, though, is that useful transit will appeal to a diverse range people with different origins, destinations, and purposes.  The more diverse the market that can be rationally attracted onto one transit vehicle, the greater the potential for the service to grow and prosper, and to help the city achieve higher levels of economic activity with lower numbers of cars.  Again, though, some people will be too expensive to serve, and if you’re one of them, you’ll need to distinguish between your private interest and the public good.

Endearing Transit

A vast range of public comments fall into the seven values that form useful transit.  Did we leave anything out?  Well, what about comments such as:

            “I like the logo.”

            “I like what it says about my community.”

            “It’s on rails, and I just like rail.”

            “Streetcars make the community more attractive.”

            “They gave me this really cool coffee mug.”

            “It’s lots of fun to ride.”

These comments may seem to overlap some of the vaguer demands that fall under the fifth element of useful transit (“It respects me.”) but there is a crucial difference.  The concept of “respect” in the definition of useful transit includes demands that are subjective and perhaps unmeasurable, but there is wide agreement about these demands in a given culture. 

In most societies, at least in the developed world, most people will not choose to sit in a seat next to a pool of urine.  Pools of urine in a seat indicate the failure of the service to respect the passenger, and thus a failure to be useful, because the revulsion that a pool of urine causes is nearly universal in the society.

Some cultures may react differently to a pool of urine, so clearly, the boundary of the useful is culturally relative, but it can still be defined for a given society.  Useful service, in its subjective fifth dimension of “respect,” is determined by what the vast majority of people in the society, or at least the target market, consider acceptable.

But many subjective comments are not universal, such as the ones listed above.  A beautiful free coffee mug may motivate some people to feel good about transit, or even to try riding it once, but most people do not make their routine mode choices based on such gifts.  Even if a coffee mug lures you onto the bus or train, it is unlikely to make you more comfortable sitting next to a pool of urine.  Clearly, the absence of a pool of urine is a fundamental requirement in a way that commemorative coffee mugs are not.  The absence of urine, then, is part of the definition of service that “respects me,” and therefore part of the definition of useful service.  The commemorative coffee mug is … something else. 

For aspects of a service that do not fall within the culture’s requirements for useful transit, but are nevertheless perceived as fun, nice, good to have, attractive to tourists, etc., let me propose the term endearing transit.  By this term, I mean any aspect of a service that engenders good feeling, but that do not seem to be essential for achieving ridership.  The boundary between demand #5 of useful transit (“It respects me.”) and demands for endearing features such as a cute paint scheme is simply the boundary between values that are nearly universal in the culture and values that are not so universally shared, or that seem to be a lower priority in people’s actual decisions about how to travel.

Another way to think about the useful/endearing distinction is that useful features of transit encourage regular use, but endearing features encourage occasional use motivated by curiosity or pleasure, which is why endearing services are often justified by the economic rewards of tourism and recreation.  Endearing transit is often about fun, or about the way that the service contributes to the community’s general “look and feel,” but it also includes obsessions with any transit technology that go beyond that technology’s usefulness. 

“Endearing” may seem like a loaded word, but the other words commonly used for these values are simply too vague.  We constantly hear about service needing to be more “convenient” or “attractive,” but if you press on these terms they usually come apart into some measurable element of usefulness, such as speed or frequency, plus some strong but obscure sentiment that isn’t really about the service at all.  The endearing, then, includes all of the values people bring to transit that are not related to whether transit is useful, where useful is defined by the seven demands that we’ve summarized. 

Endearing-but-Useless Transit

Endearing aspects of transit are important, because subjective perceptions unrelated to service do influence whether people choose to use transit. However, there remains a vast difference in importance between the endearing and the useful.  The difference is this: Many people will use service that is useful, even if it is not especially endearing.  Relatively few people will use service that is endearing but useless, with the major exception of tourists and others who are travelling for pleasure.  Endearing transit may attract tourists and others for whom the ride itself is the purpose of traveling, but if the service is useless, it will not attract anyone who needs to get somewhere at a particular time, and it is these people – people who just need to get somewhere – who make up the vast majority of travel demand in all but the most tourist-centered communities.

Effective transit planning, then, must start with a diligent focus on the useful.  It will make the service as endearing as possible, but it never sacrifices the useful for the sake of the endearing, unless a tourist or recreational market is its primary aim. 

If tourism and recreation are the aim, the success of the service is not measured by whether it gets you where you’re going within acceptable bounds of time and cost, because there are enough people who will use the purpose solely for the purposes of fun.  Endearing-but-useless services succeed or fail not on their value as transportation, but on their value as entertainment.  If our goal is to add a new kind of attraction to our community, then they may meet that goal, but we must not mistake these services – essentially amusement-park rides with multiple access points — for a useful service that many people will logically choose to ride day after day.  We may all enjoy riding a Ferris wheel, but that doesn’t mean we’d enjoy commuting on one. 

800px-London_Eye_Twilight_April_2006

(Many endearing-but-useless services can be understood as amusement rides with multiple points of access.)

Perhaps the world’s most famous endearing-but-relatively-useless transit services are the cable cars of San Francisco, particularly the lines running to Fisherman’s Wharf and particularly during the daytime.  Developed in the late 19th century as a strategy for serving hills that were too steep for horses, these charming vehicles have been preserved on three lines as part of the city’s identity and tourist appeal.  Until recently they were presented as essential parts of the city’s transit network, but their contribution to actual transportation within the city is minuscule. [1]  Now, because they are so specialized around tourism, recent budget cuts have raised their fares dramatically to capture their high operating cost, further separating them from the vast and integrated transit network that most riders use.

Cable car sfCable cars run on tracks, but unlike other rail services they have no means of propulsion within themselves.  Instead, they have handles that reach through a slot in the middle of the trackway and grab onto a cable that slides continuously underneath the street at a speed of nine miles per hour.  Cable car “gripmen” learn the delicate art of grabbing this cable in a gradual way that provides some sense of acceleration, while a second crewman, the “conductor”, operates brakes located at the opposite end of the vehicle.  When no braking seems to be needed, conductors also collect fares.  Because the grip apparatus and the brakes are at opposite ends of the car, cable cars require two transit employees, so they cost much more to run than typical buses or rail vehicles, even before we take into account the expense of maintaining a technology that is now unique in the world.

In high season, tourists may stand in line for half an hour or more to board these cars at the foot of Powell Street.  Once they reach the front of the line, they scramble to fill a car to bursting.  A cable car has a small enclosed cabin, but most of its riders sit on side-facing seats that face directly onto the street without any protective railing.  Around the edges of the car is a narrow platform with vertical bars.  The last or most adventurous passengers stand on this platform and cling to these supports.  On a fully loaded cable car, about 30% of the exterior surface consists of customers’ bodies.

Finally, off we go.  In the first three blocks of Powell Street, the cable car mixes with traffic, often in severe congestion.  Through this segment, the car is rarely faster than the pedestrians walking alongside it.  Finally, we begin the steep climb on Nob Hill.  On the ascent, the cable car has its own reserved lane, which finally allows it to reach its maximum cable-driven speed of nine miles per hour.  Passengers on the side platforms lean inward as cars and trucks fly past at three or four times that speed.

When we reach the top of the hill, we go back to sharing a lane with cars, and from there to Fisherman’s Wharf we stop constantly – not just for passengers, but for the obstructions of left-turning or double-parked automobiles, delivery trucks, and so on.  Perhaps we even stop for 15 minutes while a tow-truck is called to remove a poorly-parked car that is blocking the rails.  In theory, the cable cars run every few minutes.  In fact, they encounter so many obstacles[2] that it would be unwise to count on them to be on time. 

I lived for seven years just a few blocks from the Powell-Hyde and California cable car lines, but I used them only late at night, when traffic was low and the crowds were gone, and even then, the parallel buses were usually more useful.  Most of the time, the cable cars were useless to me.   Many people who live in the neighborhoods served by the cable cars reach the same conclusion, so the riders packing the cable cars tend to be mainly tourists, who are riding for recreation rather than to reach a destination quickly.  After a 1993 cable car accident, the San Francisco Examiner listed all of the occupants of the car.  Only two lived in San Francisco: the conductor and the gripman.

Describing the cable cars as endearing-but-mostly-useless doesn’t mean that there’s anything wrong with them.  They are a crucial piece of recreational infrastructure in a very scenic and tourist-oriented part of San Francisco.  Their very high operating cost per passenger is borne by the city as an investment that pays off in attracting tourism – fundamentally the same kind of investment decision that causes cities to buy distinctive streetlight fixtures or encourage horse-drawn buggies for hire.  It’s an amenity, one that makes San Francisco obviously special in ways that tourists in particular will value.  Those may be good investments, but they’re quite separate from the core purpose of transit, which is to help people get where they’re going.

Making Transit Useful

Again, by useful service I mean service that addresses all of the six basic demands of transit.  Useful service takes you where you want to go, and when, in a way that is a good use of your time and money; it offers a decent level of comfort and courtesy, and gives you the freedom to change your plans.  Nevertheless, the logo may not be to your liking, and the type of vehicle may not be what you prefer.  The agency may even lack a commemorative coffee mug.

In many transit agencies, well-intentioned people are pouring their time into making useless services more endearing.  Often, marketing specialists are charged with simply improving the “image” of the agency, regardless of whether the agency offers useful service.   The effort isn’t totally futile, but it is often close.  Although it’s harder to measure than the useful, the endearing is easier for many people to talk about.  Endearment is about feelings after all, so on the surface, it’s a domain where any opinion is as valid as any other.   In conversations about transit, many people focus on the endearing not because they accept transit’s uselessness, but because they aren’t sure how to talk about what makes transit useful. 

To compound this problem, the features that constitute useful transit – features such as frequency, speed, and so on — are often described as “technical.”  This term misleads us in two critical ways.  First, it wrongly suggests that only experts can understand these features.  Second, it suggests that these features can’t possibly be as important as things we all know how to talk about, like logos, slogans, color schemes, or the indisputable “romance of the rails.”

In fact, the seven values that comprise useful transit are easy to understand if we stop to think about them.  By contrast, if we ignore them in our passion for the endearing, we risk creating services that are endearing-but-useless.  If this book focuses heavily on the useful, it’s not because the endearing is unimportant, but because the idea of useful transit is so taken for granted that it’s actually quite poorly understood.  Explaining useful transit is the core challenge of this book.

 

 


[1]         In a city where total daily transit ridership is around 700,000, the three cable car lines combined carried about 24,000 daily trips, as measured by the SFMTA Transit Effectiveness Project in the summers of 2007 and 2008.   http://www.sfmta.com/cms/rtep/tepdataindx.htm

[2]   This unreliability is shared by all transit vehicles that must run in mixed traffic, but especially rail vehicles, as they cannot maneuver around a small disruption – such as a poorly parked car intruding slightly into its lane – as buses routinely do.

more of a debate than i expected

If you missed my live debate with Darrin Nordahl on Treehugger on Wednesday, you can watch it anytime here.  (NOTE:  The debate starts around 4:08).

Darrin's thesis: Transit should be more fun. 

Mine: Transit should be more useful. 

But we also agree on many things.  He's a great guy, and moderator Lloyd Alter is worth watching, too.  Here.