Technophilia

outtake: on endearing-but-useless transit

Posted on December 13, 2011 in Streetcars (Trams), Technophilia, Tourism

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 useful. useful 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.

(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 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

Posted on December 10, 2011 in Technophilia

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.

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 their own knowledge to their client’s values, which may lead them to make different recommendations than they would do as a citizen, expressing their own values.

Often, I use this blog and its comments to refine my own thinking about transit in the abstract. This is part of how I cultivate my own expertise, but it is easy to mistake what I say for activism. When I say, for example, that some of the widespread claims about the superiority of rail over buses are cultural feedback effects, I’m not thinking like an activist or advocate; I’m thinking theoretically, like a philosopher. To me, this is a crucial skill for a consultant who’s going to have to marry his client’s values with his own expertise.

Philosophical or scientific training attunes you to the difference between prescription (telling people what they should do) and description (describing reality as it appears to be). In their purest form, prescription is the job of ethics, while description the job of science and metaphysics. A great deal of human speech, especially political speech, is a mixture of description and prescription, often one pretending to be the other.

In the planning world, prescription is the job of citizens, leaders, and advocates, while description is the work of professional experts like me. Obviously, this has to be a conversation. The expert has to ask the community to clarify its values based on the actual tradeoffs presented by reality, and the community has to respond. And as that goes on, both sides need to be clear about their roles, and respect the role of the other.

Partly because of my science and philosophy training, I tend to police the prescription-description boundary in my own thinking, and dwell in the space of pure description more than many people do — certainly more than most activists do. A lot of regular readers of HT share that training and that inclination, and some don’t.

For a critique of the futility of living your whole life in this descriptive mode, watching and describing the world but never doing anything, see Shakespeare’s Hamlet. But the opposite is also futile. An ethical system devoid of curiosity about objective reality devolves into pure egotism. Tyrants — whether they lead a nation or an office clique — are people who sift reality and see only what suits their ethical narrative (which, at that point, is really an egotistical narrative) and who forge echo chambers of people who help each other do that. At the core of the tyrant’s stance is a childlike egotistical wail: “Why doesn’t everyone do as I say? I see so clearly what needs to be done!”

And yes, everyone has an inner tyrant, including me. I try to describe that tendency in myself, so that while it will always be in the room of my mind it’s not usually able to set the room on fire. In fact, that’s exactly why I’m so careful about not letting my descriptive thinking turn too quickly into prescriptions.

Streetcars, for example. Nowhere in this blog have I said that cities shouldn’t build streetcars if they are sure that they want streetcars. Some streetcar advocates hear me saying that because they are dividing the world into pro-streetcar and anti-streetcar camps, and I’ve said things about streetcars that don’t sound like enthusiastic advocacy. I’ve made some descriptive observations about problems raised by the American streetcar revival movement, and I’ve also noticed situations in which streetcars are inferior to buses in their ability to actually get you where you’re going, like this one:

Car blocking streetcars

I would like people to know about these issues so that they make better decisions about what to advocate and why. That doesn’t mean I want them to decide not to build streetcars, but it may mean, for example, that in deciding whether to support a streetcar, you might need to care about whether it will be in mixed traffic. It may also mean being very clear, when you’re advocating a streetcar, that you’re not getting anything faster or more reliable than a bus can be. Again, I say this not because I think cities should or shouldn’t be building streetcars, but because you shouldn’t be deluded about what you’re buying, and what purposes it will really serve.

I have vivid memories of San Francisco Transportation Authority meetings in the early 1990s when the Third Street light rail was under debate. Activists from the neighborhood had turned out in droves to support the line, but when you actually listened to their testimony, some were talking about “we need rapid transit,” while others were saying “we need rail to stop in every block where it will strengthen our businesses.” I knew, as an expert, that while this whole crowd appeared to be on the same side of the issue at hand, half of them were not going to get what they thought they were advocating. They were not going to get a project that served their values.

I may also point out that if you think purely about “extending your rail network” as though your bus network is irrelevant, you can do serious damage to your existing transit system. For example, in a high-frequency grid, if you break one line of the grid into three consecutive pieces because you want rail in the middle but buses on the extremeties, you may suddenly force many new connections to a degree that could quite possibly will reduce the overall level of mobility in the city. That thought is relevant, for example, to several cities’ streetcar plans, and to the Crenshaw light rail line in Los Angeles, and to the Gold Coast light rail line (at least its first phase) in Australia.

And yet, sometimes I do sound like an advocate — about transit in general, about protecting transit from traffic, and about congestion pricing. Am I just falling off the wagon when I say those things?

Well, all scientists (by which I mean broadly “people who try to describe without prescribing”) have this problem. Sometimes the scientific work of description discovers that something needs to be done if we want to survive and prosper: Banning DDT, addressing carbon emissions, correcting perverse pricing signals, even building a transit line. If you’ve followed any of the conversation around climate change, you know how uncomfortable trained scientists can be when they’re required to speak prescriptively. Their credibility (not just to their profession but also to themselves) has depended precisely on not doing that. It’s like telling a recovering alcoholic that after all the disciplined work of recovery he’s done, the future of humanity now requires that they start drinking again, just a little.

All I can say is that I feel that discomfort and try to manage it, by marking, as clearly as I can, when I’m prescribing and when I’m describing. And there are also issues (like climate change) where, quite frankly, practically all experts seem to know what needs to be done to achieve the outcomes that everyone seems to want. I feel that way about congestion pricing. It’s just not that hard to explain, to a reasonable person who’s familiar with the idea of supply and demand, that as a motorist you are going to pay for scarce road space in either time or money, and that it’s not unreasonable for some people to choose to spend money to save time.

I do what I can to distinguish between description and prescription when I’m writing. But frankly, we all need to do the same work when listening. If your first contact with transit politics is in the context of a fight about whether or not to build a particular rail line, you’re going to hear prescriptive voices on both sides, citing data that’s been selected to match their point of view. You’re also going to hear descriptive voices treated as prescriptive — which is how some streetcar advocates perceive my comments about streetcars. One of the most basic disciplines that you can cultivate, as an advocate or leader, is to try to hear descriptive information as descriptive. This may require you to consciously suppress or bracket the emotional reaction you have, as an advocate, when you first hear it.

Really, none of what I’ve written about streetcars is about streetcars, except insofar as the American streetcar revival movement is a excellent example of a descriptive point that seems important to me. The point is that “it’s possible to spend a lot of money on transit lines that don’t improve anyone’s mobility.” I’m not saying you shouldn’t do that. I am saying that before you that, you should understand this point, so that you’re sure that the line you support does what you want it to do.

That’s what responsible experts do: they help you implement your values.

Basics: Sorting Out Rail-Bus Differences

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

Do you like trains more than buses, or vice versa? If so, are you clear on why? Debates about whether to build rail lines instead of bus lines are heated and often confused. This post is designed to help you think through what exactly the rail-bus distinctions are, so that you can decide which ones are important to you. Remember, if you love rail, and win a battle for rail, you may get rail, but you may not get the outcomes you associate with rail. That’s because most features of transit that matter to how soon you get where you’re going — such as speed, frequency, and walking distance — have nothing to do with the rail-bus distinction. They are the result of other aspects of how any service, rail or bus, is implemented.

Back 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 and misconceptions about the rail-bus distinction.

Of the 36 reasons to prefer trains over buses, 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.

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