Technophilia

welcome, readers from portland’s willamette week

Posted on December 7, 2011 in Portland, Streetcars (Trams), Technophilia

If you've come from today's interview of me in Portland's free weekly Willamette Week, please note that while I certainly stand by my own words, my work on "rail vs bus" questions is easily misunderstood. In fact, my work is all about giving you better ways to frame the question, ones that focus on the outcomes that we want.

For a quick intro to my work on the issue, see especially these articles:

"Rail-Bus Differences: Premise or Conclusion?" (2011)
"Sorting out Rail-Bus Differences" (2011)
"Streetcars: an Inconvenient Truth" (2009)

And there's a lot more in the "Streetcars (Trams)" category. A full list of categories is in the next column –>

… but above all, buy the book, after first reading the introduction!

lamentation: bicycles vs transit?

Posted on October 3, 2011 in Advocacy, Cycling, Portland, Technophilia

From a correspondent in Portland:

Among my peer group [educated people in their 20s-30s] I see a "mono-modal" fixation on cycling, very similar to the attitude many drivers have that their primary mode should be everyone's primary mode. It really is remarkable how many young, affluent, educated folks living in inner Portland see cycling as the only legitimate travel mode for all people everywhere. My [peers] basically scoff at the idea that I might prefer to take the bus to and from school when it is rainy or dark out. I see walking, biking, and transit as three completely complementary modes that support a car-free or car-light lifestyle, but I'm realizing that in Portland at least there is a large group of people in the cycling community who see both cars and buses as the enemy, or at least not an option worth considering or supporting. This might help explain TriMet's underinvestment in the bus network, since politically active young people do not support transit.

I've been away from Portland too long to have my own impression, but if this is true it's certainly unfortunate. While there are some conflicts between bicycles and transit in road design, I have always tried to accommodate both. I don't necessarily believe bike lanes can be accommodated on every street, any more than transit is, but I do think both cycling and transit deserve and can have complete and functional networks.

How common is a monomodal fixation on bicycles? If so, why does it occur?

There's nothing wrong with cycling advocacy, or advocacy of any mode, until it becomes hostile toward other aspects of the full sustainable transport package. Wouldn't advocacy for the suite of sustainable transport options (walking, cycling and transit, supplemented by carsharing etc.) be more effective than endless conflicts among these modes?

wellington: a sensible tourist on the cable car

Posted on October 1, 2011 in Architecture, Technophilia, Wellington

This blog rarely goes on about interesting transit vehicles, since my main interest is in getting people where they're going in whatever vehicle makes sense for the purpose. But while working in Wellington last month, I made early morning ritual of climbing to the Botanic Gardens summit just west of downtown, and on one such walk I took some time to admire the cable car.

"Cable car" generally means any vehicle attached to a cable that provides the locomotion. The car has no engine, but an engine of some kind is moving the cable. The cable can be aerial (gondolas, aerial trams) or underground (San Francisco cable cars) or it can just lie on the surface in a special guideway, as in most funiculars. Wellington's is essentially a funicular: it runs in a dead-straight track up the side of a steep hill. The two cars are fixed to the ends of a single cable, connected at the top, so that they move in counterweight fashion, one car rising as the other descends.

Unlike most funiculars, though, it has more than two stations — five in fact. At Talavera station in the exact middle, tracks widen out so that the cars can pass. Everywhere else the cars share one track, but with two separate rollers for the two cables:

(In this case, the presence of just one cable means that one car is below us, the other above.)

The spacing of the other stations is limited by the design or the system, because when a car is at the station one up from the bottom, the other is stuck the same distance below the top. In Wellington, even spacing of stations — not always ideal for local geography — ensures that both cars are at stations whenever they stop.

But enough with technology fetishes. Why is this thing useful?

Easy: it's a straight line, running at high frequency, through high density, where competitors are at a disadvantage.

Cable cars (aerial or surface) can make sense in settings where you want a straight line up the side of a steep hill — especially if there's no straight road that a bus could follow. That's exactly what the Wellington line (marked by the five yellow pins) is:

The terminal stations are Lambton Quay in the heart of downtown and the Botanic Gardens summit. There's demand everywhere on this dense hillside. Botanic Gardens station offers a level walk into the fairly dense Kelburn district to the southwest, while Lambton Quay is right on the Golden Mile, where buses come every minute or less to take you north or south through downtown, and beyond.

The other stations are Victoria University, one down from the top, Talavera in the middle, and Clifton, one up from the bottom. Victoria University's campus is visible on the south side of the above image. It has its own bus services, but it's a short level walk along a terrace to its station.

And while climbing this hill is something I might do as early morning exercise, it's understandable that you might want an alternative to that. The climb is 120m of elevation gain in only 612m of horizontal length, a grade of nearly 20%.

But the real reason I thought to write about it is the interesting feature observable at the top.

The vehicles themselves are designed for their constant slope. The floor is always parallel to sea level while the car's structure is tilted 20% from the floor, to match the grade.

As a result, it's possible to open the car on both sides and produce a level boarding from the surrounding ground. Where the car dwells at the top, as in this image, you can even walk right through the car as though it were part of the sidewalk.

I'm always interested in ways to make transit feel more continuous with the pedestrian realm. I long for buses with precise docking for absolute level boarding — not just to eliminate the delay of wheelchair ramps but also to create a feeling that the bus is a moving piece of sidewalk, that you are not leaving the street to crawl into an oppressive enclosure. Local transit won't really feel effortless to use until we have this effect.

So that's why this image appealed to me, so much that I even indulged some uncharacteristic technology-fetishism. Because the effect in this picture in important, and if I need a cable car to get it, I'll take a cable car.

best u.s. cities for transit?

Posted on April 30, 2011 in Journalism, Portland, Technophilia

US News and World Report claims to have identified the 10 best US cities for public transit:

1. Portland, OR

2. Salt Lake City

3. New York

4. Boston

5. Minneapolis-St. Paul, MN

6. San Francisco

7. Los Angeles

8. Honolulu

9 (tie). Denver

9 (tie). Austin

All fine cities. The methodology:

The rankings take into account per capita spending on public transportation, number of safety incidents per million trips, and the number of trips taken per capita.

But then there was this:

Analysis of data from the Federal Transit Administration and APTA shows which cities are among the best in the country for public transportation. All of these cities' systems have unique features that set them apart. Portland's public transit provides riders with a variety of travel options, including buses, light rail, commuter rail, streetcars, and an aerial tram.

Aargh! Diversity of technologies says nothing whatever about travel options! And if Portlanders really did have the options of a bus, a light rail train, a commuter rail train, a streetcar, and an aerial tram all competing for the same trip, that would be a pretty silly network, wouldn't it?

UPDATE: Followup post is here!

rail-bus differences: premise or conclusion?

Posted on March 3, 2011 in Bus Rapid Transit, Meditations, Rail Transit, Streetcars (Trams), Technophilia

When you think about transit technologies, how do you categorize them? And why?

Have a look at this first table, which sorts services according to the exclusivity of their right of way. The terms Class A, B, and C are from Vukan Vuchic, describing the basic categories of "what can get in the way" of a transit service.

Is this table two rows, each divided into three columns? Or three columns, each with two rows? Which distinction is more fundamental, and which is secondary?

Right-of-Way Class vs Rail-Bus Distinction

Class A

Exclusive right-of-way and separated from cross traffic

Class B

Exclusive right-of-way, NOT separated from cross traffic.

Class C

Mixed with traffic, including mixed with pedestrians.

Rail

Most rail rapid transit, using “third rail” power sources. Most classic “subway” and “metro” systems.

Most “light rail” in surface operations. Parts of some European and Australian tram networks.

Most North American streetcars. Many European and Australian trams.

Bus

Separated busways: (Brisbane, Ottawa, Bogotá, and segments in Los Angeles, Pittsburgh) Freeway bus/HOT lanes.

At-grade busways: Los Angeles Orange Line, Western Sydney busways, etc.

Buses in mixed traffic.

Well, if your objective is to get where you're going fast and reliably, the Right-of-Way Class tells you a lot about a services's potential to do that, while the rail-bus distinction, in isolation, tells you nothing. The fact is, both rail and bus technologies are capable of the complete spectrum of possibilities. Both can average 6 mph (10 km/h) in Class C situations, and both can run Class A at 60 mph (100 km/h) or more.

RIght-of-way isn't the only thing that matters for getting you where you're going. There's also stop spacing, with its inevitable tradeoff between speed and local access.

Stop Spacing vs Rail-Bus Distinction

Rapid, Limited

(faster = fewer stops)

Local-stop

(slower = more stops)

Express

(one long nonstop segment)

Rail

“Subway”, “Metro”, some commuter rail.

Tram / Streetcar

Some commuter rail.

Bus

Bus Rapid Transit,
“Rapid Bus”, “limited-stop” bus

Local bus

Commuter express bus (often on freeway)

… and of course there are other essential distinctions like frequency, which are also entirely separable from rail and bus technologies.

UPDATE: Please note, yet again, that contrary to early comments I am NOT claiming that these are the only distinctions that matter. As I laid out in some detail here, there are several distinctions that matter. In fact, one of the reasons that people cling so hard to the rail-bus distinction is that the other crucial distinctions are a little more complicated and require some thought, and it's hard to think about this stuff in the political space where decisions get made.

Rail services do tend to be presented in ways that "package" the various crucial dimensions of usefulness. Typical metro systems, for example, are guaranteed to be frequent, with rapid stop spacing, and Class A right of way, because all three are intrinsic to the metro technology, so there's a psychological "packaging" effect when you see a metro map; you can be confident that this means a certain level of service.

I think these tables are interesting because now and then I meet someone who divides the world rigidly into rail and bus, often aligning these categories with a rigid class distinction (William Lind, say) or simply claiming that rail does beautiful things and buses don't. In that view, the different columns of these tables are secondary and interchangeable, while the rows express something absolute.

Patrick Condon, for example, proposes that instead of building one rapid transit line (Class A, rapid stops) we could just build lots of streetcars (mostly Class C, local stops). That can make sense if you judge technologies entirely on their influence on urban form, and prefer the kind of form that seems to arise from streetcars. But it will be just incoherent to a transit planner who's been trained to help people get places, and wonders if he's being told that nobody cares about that anymore. Because if you do care about personal mobility — people getting where they're going, now, today — you have to care about the columns.

I hope to leave this topic for a while, but I do think it's worth coming back to tables like this to ask yourself: Do I tend to divide the world according to the rows first, or the columns? If so, why? Is my way of slicing this table something I've discovered about the world, or something my mind is imposing on it?

basics: expertise vs. activism

Posted on February 21, 2011 in Advocacy, Basics, Light Rail, Los Angeles, Meditations, Mobility, Philosophy, Rail Transit, San Francisco, Seattle, Streetcars (Trams), Technophilia, Toronto

The planning professions work in a grey zone between expertise and activism, and managing these competing impulses is one of our hardest tasks.

As a transit planning consultant, I don’t worry much about being perceived as an advocate of transit in general. Experts in any field are expected to believe in its importance. But I do try to keep a little distance between my knowledge about transit and the impulse to say “You should do this.” A good consultant must know how to marry his own knowledge to his client’s values, which may lead him to make different recommendations than he would do as a citizen, expressing his own values. Continue Reading →

sorting out rail-bus differences

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!

Beyond “Transit Scores”: an Exchange with Matt Lerner

Posted on January 24, 2011 in Maps, Mobility, Public Outreach, Technophilia

Matt Lerner of WalkScore.com and I recently exchanged emails about WalkScore’s “Transit Score” product, which provides a two-digit score supposedly capturing the usefulness of transit at any address in the USA. It’s designed on analogy to the successful (if still controversial) Walk Score, a similar tool for summarizing how friendly a place is to walking. For example, 300 Turk Street, San Francisco is scored 100 (perfect) on both Walk Score and Transit Score.

Toward another extreme, here’s 7000 Lake Mead Blvd in the far east of Las Vegas. Walkscore is 52, Transit Score is 33.

Tools like these have huge potential relevance to the real estate industry, and more broadly to anyone who makes locational decisions about anything. To the extent that we encourage people who value transit to locate where good transit is viable, everyone wins.

Earlier, Matt’s team had created a “transit travel time tool” which can be used to show you the actual area you can get to in a specified amount of time. I used this tool as the core of my definition of mobility, in one of this blog’s earliest posts.

So which is more useful, the simple two-digit Transit Score, or an actual map of where you can get to in a given time?

Here’s what I wrote to Matt:

Dear Matt,
About a year ago I mentioned your transit [travel time] tool as a useful way to visualize mobility …
The first draft of the book I’m writing … praises this WalkScore tool in some detail, as a way for people to understand the degree of freedom that transit will offer them. I think it may be a crucial tool for helping people see beyond modal fetishes to understand how transit actually works and how to determine if transit can actually get you where you’re going.
… Transit Score is useless to me because it encodes an intrinsic bias toward rail modes, as though rail is intrinsically faster, which is utterly misleading in a world of 6.5 mph streetcars and 60 mph busways. [I’m referring to the Transit Score methodology’s use of a “mode weight” defined as “(heavy/light rail is weighted 2X, ferry/cable car/other are 1.5X, and bus is 1X)”. Note that unlike the travel time tool, Transit Score lacks a way to capture how far you can get how fast, so it uses mode as a proxy for speed, fatally in my view.]
In short, whereas the earlier tool presented raw information in a compelling way that the user could use for her own purposes, Transit Score contains value judgments (“we know you’d rather ride a slow streetcar than an express bus”) which the user may not share, and thus may be an obstacle to her ability to make transit meet her needs.
So I guess I will praise mapnificent.net instead.
This issue sits at the very foundation of my current book, so as an admirer of your work, I’d like a better understanding of why you abandoned the original accessbility tool. Was it a matter of the processing required to do what’s basically a massive search of trip planners? I can see that Transit Score is a much faster calculation, but wonder if that was the key issue.
All the best for ’11,

Jarrett Walker

Matt replied:

HI Jarrett,
Good to hear from you.
You’re right that we are promoting Transit Score over Transit Time Maps — but we haven’t abandoned the transit time maps. We are working on new ways to use them and they are still available here: http://www.walkscore.com/transit-map.php).
Here’s why we’ve been promoting Transit Score more heavily. Our mission is to promote walkable/transit friendly neighborhoods and we think the best way to do this is to have Walk Score / Transit Score on real estate listings.
As we developed Transit Score we looked at a few methods of calculating a Transit Score. The two finalists were our current method (detailed here) and a method where we summed the Walk Score under the area of the transit shed in our Transit Time Maps. In practice, the scores were very similar between the two methods so we chose the current method which is much easier to scale (we show millions of scores per day).
We want to boil down transit access into a score so that it can appear on real estate listings and people can compare locations. ZipRealty.com has added our Transit Score to millions of listings and we have some more partners on the way.
We did not see a lot of consumer/partner interest in the transit time maps — which is unfortunate because of course I love them. One scenario I’m hoping to promote with our Transit Time Maps (we just need a partner) is to allow people on real estate sites to search by transit time. E.G. find me an apartment within 30 minutes of work on transit. I’d also like to integrate the transit sheds into the standard Walk Score experience.
I like the simplification Mapnificent made which was to not include walking time in their transit sheds — this makes it much easier to compute.
So to sum up, I like your suggestion of avoiding any mode weight value judgments — it just turns out that in practice our current method was very similar and easier to scale. Anyway, would love to hear your thoughts on this.
Also, we’re launching a beta of “Street Smart” Walk Score later this month and we’d love your feedback on that too.
Happy New Year!
Matt

To which I replied:

Matt
Thanks! … Suppose, hypothetically, that you had the processing power and datasets to run a purely mobility-based Transit Score. Let’s call it a Transit Mobility Score. The algorithm would be something like: Identify the area reachable in 30 minutes on transit from the selected point (I choose this because it seems to have a long history as an acceptable commute time). Then, grab the MPO’s database of population and jobs by small zone and calculate the percentage of the region’s jobs and population that are in that 30 minute band.
That also gives you a 2-digit number, but now it’s a fact rather than a score. You’re saying: “If you locate here, you’ll have convenient transit access to __% of the region’s activity.” And that strikes me as something that a realtor could value, understand and explain. How far are you (or someone) from being able to do that kind of algorithm? Obviously you’d need to have the MPO on your side, so start with somewhere like Portland where they generally are.
Frankly, you’d probably want to do two such scores, one based on your mobility at 8:00 AM and another for your all-day mobility — say, at 1:00 PM. But I think a realtor could make sense of those too. Everyone understands that transit in the peak is different from midday, and that both matter. Suburban areas, especially those under the influence of commuter rail and commuter express buses would show quite a difference between the two.
I think this could be huge. Because the output is a fact, not a judgment. …
All the best, Jarrett

Matt replies that this “sounds like an awesome planning tool and one we could potentially pursue if we had a grant or something to fund it.”

I still think this could be huge. What if everyone making a locational decision could go to something like the WalkScore travel time tool or Mapnificent and see a map of where they’ll be able to get to in 30 mintues on transit? It would finally make our mobility visible.

And if we could measure our mobility so accurately, for so many hypothetical cases, we just might value actual mobility more, and be less distracted by unreliable symbols of mobility — like, say, whether there are rails in the street. Technophiles shouldn’t be too alarmed; many people will still have modal preferences. But meanwhile, those of us who just want mobility would be able to measure it, fast, for anywhere that we might be locating something, including our homes.

Canberra: “They Only Refer to Buses”

Posted on September 28, 2010 in Advocacy, Bus Rapid Transit, Canberra, Light Rail, Technophilia

Transit debates often get stuck because the word we need doesn’t exist. As longtime readers of this blog will know, I’d really like there to be a word that means “transit vehicle, maybe on rails and maybe on tires” or “clearly a bus right now, but with the possibility of growing rails in the future.”

But there isn’t such a word. So when I’m working in a city where the short-term reality is an all-bus system, and I talk about that system and our short-term plans for it, well, it’s really hard not to use the word bus. When I want to help people visualize it, it’s hard not to draw a picture of a bus.

When I do, rail advocates assume that means I’m expressing an opposition to rail, or perhaps just pandering to such feelings in my clients. Here, for example, the latest blast from the head of the main light rail lobby group in Australia’s capital city, Canberra, in a comment on the Canberra news blog RiotACT:

Although Mr Walker proclaims transport mode agnosticism, he is being paid by a pro-bus department … . What do you think would happen to future work for his firm if he came out and said, replace buses with light rail on the rapid route where the demand warrants this modal change.
I have heard the [local government] policy people report on their long term plans based on the ‘Canberra Transport Plan’. They only refer to buses.

Actually, I’m being paid (and modestly) by a department that’s trying to plot a rational course into a sustainable transport future, for a city of 345,000 people who live mostly at low densities with an abundant road network. The transit system is not yet at a scale or intensity where it needs the capacity that light rail would offer, nor is there much near-term prospect of funding for it. Light rail could happen, and I certainly don’t oppose it, but as I said over and over in Canberra’s Strategic Plan process, if you wait for light rail, you will miss a lot of other opportunities to improve transit mobility, and to encourage more transit-friendly urban form.

So to improve public transit in Canberra, the government is moving forward with a plan to improve the buses. Not because they love buses, but because (a) they have buses and (b) they need to move forward.

And so, to talk about that, they need to say the word “bus” a lot, and even draw pictures of buses. Yes, if your conception of transit begins with an absolute division between a bus world and a rail world, then officials who do that are going to sound to you like bus advocates.

But if you call them that, you’re projecting your scheme onto them. Not everyone lives in a bus-vs-rail world. The experts and officials who say bus a lot may well be true bus enthusiasts, but they may also be people like me who just want to get on with the work of developing good transit, and who therefore reach for whatever tool will best do the job at hand.

The Next Transport Revolution: Trolley Wire on Every Street?

Posted on September 19, 2010 in Books, Technophilia

Richard Gilbert and Anthony Perl. Transport Revolutions: Moving People and Freight without Oil [2nd edition]. Earthscan and New Society Publishers, 2010.

As you’ve probably heard by now, the world is starting to run out of readily-accessible oil, and most rational predictions are that oil prices will continue to rise to reflect the increasing difficulty and risk involved in pursuing new supplies. How will that change our transport system? What kinds of change are needed? What technologies most urgently need research? And who will lead these changes? Continue Reading →

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