Navigation

comments of the week: against sustainability

Posted on February 7, 2011 in Language

Really, the comments are the best thing about this blog.  Distracted as I am by the book project, I dash off an idle post in 15 minutes, suggesting we might consider substituting the word durable for sustainable, and I get a rich lode of comments that expands the thought in several directions, argues pro and con, adds Dutch, French and Spanish points of view, and even finds its way back to antiquity, per Mark:

It seems we haven't really improved upon the Romans in this, as I think the three legs of Vitruvius's stool of good architecture and urbanism: commodity (well fitted to human needs); firmness (durability and resilience); and delight (self explanatory) pretty much cover it. In our discussions on sustainability and resilience we hardly say anything about delight/beauty forgetting that we have to love places to want to preserve them.

… and — in the same spirit of nothing having changed — ends (for now) with a fine evocation of apocalypse from frequent commenter Wad. 

The world we live in wasn't designed to be sustainable. Biological cells die and regenerate, soil becomes less fertile, land erodes, water evaporates, metals oxidize and species go extinct.

In the human-built realm, nations break away or are swallowed by conquest, empires fade away, languages appear and disappear and communities are settled and abandoned.

Stasis would be a wonderful alternative to the bleakness of chaos. Yet it has its own perils.

Agricultural societies that produced monocultures of a specialized crop suffered famine when some force disrupted growth cycles.

Supply regions specialize in the extraction of a good, but are blindsided when resources are exhausted. Industrial societies aren't immune, either. Economic policy in the Upper Midwest starts and ends around reactivating factories and producing more stuff again.

Sustainability itself is unsustainable.

But as with any satisfying apocalypse, you've got to care about what came before it.  So browse the whole comment thread!  More book snippets soon.

durable urbanism? durable transport?

Posted on February 4, 2011 in Advocacy, Language

Are you tired of the word "sustainable"?  Does it seem to lecture rather than inspire?  Does it feel defensive, perhaps even conservative in its suggestion that humans should have no higher ambition than to sustain?  Doesn't sustaining sound, at times, like endless, thankless work?

Well, in French the equivalent word is durable.  So in an idle moment I wonder: what if we used "durable" in English?  Durable urbanism.  Durable transportation.  Durable energy.  Durable lifestyles.

"Durable" shares many virtues with that more popular alternative, "resilient."  There's already a Resilient Cities movement, and an excellent book on Resilience Thinking.  

What I like about both words is they imply an intrinsic strength.  Sustainability implies the endless labor of sustainers, while durability and resilience are just features of the thing itself. 

But "durable," in particular, sounds strong, even masculine.  It's a quality sought in boots, storm windows and SUVs.  Guys want to be durable, and to live in a durable world.  They certainly don't want to be sustained.  (And let's face it, a lot of the people resisting sustainability are guys.)

Not sure.  Something to try, maybe.  

the connection-count test

Posted on February 3, 2011 in Connections, Transfers, Rail Transit

As I look at the new metros being built in the developing world, I'm noticing some striking connection-count problems.  Consider Delhi, a city I know a bit:

Delhi metro frag

The full Delhi Metro network map is here, but this slice is the only part of the system where lines connect with one another. 

What's wrong with this picture?  Well, suppose you want to go from Shivaji Park, on the green line in the upper left of the image, to Khan Market, in the lower right.  That's right: three connections.

Developing a new metro in a crowded city is always an exercise in compromise, but I'm struck by how often one of the first compromises is network integrity, easily measured in the reasonableness of the number of connections required. 

In an idealised grid network, the maximum number of connections for almost any trip is one.  Plenty of real-world networks require two connections for a range of trips between secondary stations.  But requiring three is pretty remarkable. 

music video for subway map lovers

Posted on February 2, 2011 in Amusing, Art

I’m advised that I’d like this subway-map-themed R.E.M. video, though R.E.M. is not really my thing.

Actually, it’s a nice test of whether you’re more interested in transit graphics than in transit!

watching our words: route or line?

Posted on February 1, 2011 in Advocacy, Language, Marketing

(Another short selection from the draft of the book I'm writing.)

The word for the path followed by a transit vehicle is sometimes route, and sometimes line.  Whenever you have two words for the same thing, you should ask why.

Most of the words used in transit discussions also have a more common meaning outside that context.  That common meaning often forms a connotation that hangs around the word, often causing confusion, when we use the word to talk about transit.  In saying the word, we may intend only the transit meaning, but some people may be hearing the more common meaning.  Regardless of our intentions, the commonplace meaning of a word is often still there, as a connotation, when the word’s used in a transit context.  The words route and line are a good example.

A route, in its common meaning, is the path traced by some kind of person or vehicle.  When a package or message is going through a postal system, we say it’s being routed.   The person who delivers newspapers to subscribers in the morning is following a paper route.  School buses typically follow routes.

What these meanings of route have in common is that the route isn’t necessarily followed very often.  A package going through a delivery system may end up following a specific route that no package has followed before.  Paper routes and school bus routes run only once a day, and not at all on some days.  These common uses of route imply a place where some kind of transport event happens, but possibly not very often. 

The word line, on the other hand, has a clear meaning from geometry: a simple, straight, one-dimensional figure.  In common usage we often use line for something curved, like the laugh-lines and worry-lines on a face, and transit lines may be curved as well.  But in any case, the word line doesn’t imply an event, as route does.  A line is a thing that’s just there, no matter what happens along it. 

Lurking inside these two words, in short, is a profound difference in attitude about a transit service.  Do you want to think of transit as something that’s always there, that you can count on?  If so, call it a line.  We never speak of rail routes, always rail lines, and we do that because the rails are always there, suggesting a permanent and reliable thing.

If you’re selling a transportation product, you obviously want people to think they can count on it.  So it’s not surprising that in the private sector, the word is usually line:  Trucking and shipping companies often call themselves lines, as do most private bus companies and of course, the airlines.  This doesn’t mean that all these services are really line-like – some may be quite infrequent – but the company that chose the word wants you to think of it as a thing that’s reliably there, that you can count on.

So in general, when talking about transit, think about the more commonplace meaning of the word you’re choosing.  In this case:

  • Use route to indicate the site of a (possibly very occasional) transportation event.  The word route reminds many of us of school transportation, newspaper deliveries, and delivery systems that may operate only infrequently.
  • Use line when you want to imply something that has a continuous physical presence and availability – for example, a transit line where service is coming so often that you don’t need a schedule.

To put it even more simply, the word route lowers expectations for the frequency and reliability of a service.  The word line raises those expectations.

Often, transit agencies themselves will use these words in a way that’s not quite conscious of these connotations.  In Australia, for example, bus services are usually routes, but rail services are lines.  This usage carries a hint that we should have intrinsically lower expectations of bus service as compared to rail.  In many cases, that’s not true: many bus “routes,” for example, run frequently all day while commuter rail  “lines” may run only a few times at rush hour. 

Of course, these connotations can be a nuisance. Sometimes you don’t want any connotation.   Sometimes you just want the meaning.

Unfortunately, words without connotations tend to sound abstract and dull.  I could insist on saying “fixed vehicle path” instead of route or line, just as I could say “nonmotorized access” when I mean walking or cycling, but you wouldn’t get through this book if I did.  Language that strikes us as evasive or bureaucratic is often the result of word choices that try to avoid all connotation.  Such language is precise but uninspiring, and long passages of it are just plain hard to read.

To keep our speech vivid and engaging, we have to use words with connotations, and do our best to choose those connotations consciously.  I’ll do that throughout this book, and note where there may be a connotation problem.  As for route and line, my broad intention is to raise expectations of transit rather than lower them, so I generally use line.  However, when I speak specifically of a service that doesn’t run very frequently, I use route.

san francisco: transit and endangered species

Posted on January 31, 2011 in Art, Events, San Francisco

San Francisco artist Todd Gilens has four major works now on display in that city.  To find them, though, you'll need a special bus tracker:

Endangered-bus-tracker

From the Muni Diaries:

Instead of thinking about buses an advertising space, Gilens wondered if buses can be a vehicle for visual impact. “We use buses without thinking, like using a paper towel, but what if we used images to transform the bus, to give an emotive quality to buses?”

Gilens raised money to wrap four buses in photographs of the Brown Pelicans, Coho Salmon, Salt Marsh Harvest Mouse and Mission Blue Butterfly.

They're quite beautiful:

Gilens bus

Images of all four buses are here.  Just click the little forward and back buttons.

Todd lays out the background for his work in a short statement here, and in a longer article in Antennae (PDF here).  Here's his conceptual bridge from transit to endangered species, by way of urban form:

A way to think of settlement patterns would be: how can mutual needs or living space be courteously accommodated?  Just as we do when crowded around other humans (as on a bus for example) being close enough to all fit while everyone gets at least somewhat of the space they need.  In the framework of regional settlement, this means checking to see if the streams, the coyotes, the polliwogs or ferns are not getting trampled, and if they are, maybe shifting over a bit to give them some room.

It was courageous of Todd to even tell me about this project, given what I've written elsewhere about advertising wraps.  I also long to see bus exteriors used for the primary mission of helping people figure out the bus system.  I especially like simple color-coding schemes that distinguish fundamentally different kinds of service, such as the simple Los Angeles paint scheme where red means Rapid and orange means Local.

But as a temporary exhibit, which is what this is, I'm all for it.  These buses operate through surprise. (True beauty is always surprising, which is why it can be hard to appreciate in a museum.)   So even if the bus wraps were permanent, their beauty would diminish as people got used to them.

The four buses will be wrapped through the end of March and a bit into April.

edmonton: strasbourg of the prairie?

Posted on January 29, 2011 in Downtowns, Edmonton, Guest Posts, Light Rail, Strasbourg, Streetcars (Trams)

A Guest Post by David Marlor

David Marlor was raised in the UK and is currently a regional planning manager working on the coast of British Columbia, Canada in a coastal rural setting.  He holds a planning degree from the School of Community and Regional Planning at UBC, where his thesis was on an integrated approach to transportation planning in the lower mainland.

Chinese_Arch_1
In the past couple of years, led by Bob Boutilier (general manager of transportation) the City has been planning the expansion of the LRT using low-floor technology.  Edmonton is credited with leading in transit innovation twice in the past. In the mid-1960s, transit superintendent Don MacDonald introduced an early version of a hub and spoke [or pulse] transit system. This is still widely used in Edmonton and in many other North American cities. The second was the introduction of the modern LRT to North America in 1978.

What’s different about the current LRT plans in Edmonton is that instead of fast LRT trains moving commuters from suburbs to the city, the LRT will be a European style system, still in its own right of way, but with stops closer together, smaller and more intimate with the community, low floor vehicles and replacing car lanes with LRT lanes. That last is a paradigm shift for Edmonton.  LRT up until now has been about building it without removing road capacity for private automobiles. The new LRT lines, the cost of which is currently pegged at about Cdn$3.4 billion, will see extension of the existing high-floor system to the north-west north-east and south as demand warrants, but the lines will fit the community better than before.

The approved plans includes a completely new low-floor network running on the street, even in the city centre. It is a system designed to support future TOD at the stations, to encourage higher densities. Unlike the existing system, only five stations on the proposed 29 station low floor line have bus stations attached to them and only two have park and ride facilities, both adjacent to freeways. This is about shaping the city, not moving commuters from the suburbs to the city (although that is part of it, it is not the focus).  The plan includes future low-floor line linking the downtown with the Old Strathcona business district on the Southside of the river and a line out to the eastern suburbs.

In fact, the proposed the proposed Edmonton system may remind some readers of Strasbourg. Like Strasbourg, Edmonton is envisioning completely remodeling the streets the trams run on – in many cases removing lanes of traffic, restricting turn movements, closing or redesigning intersections, and where possible, widening and improving the pedestrian infrastructure. Like Strasbourg, the stations (stops) will be located every 3-4 blocks (300-400 metres) in the city centre and further apart outside the core. The aim is around every 800 m, but in reality the stops will be placed at convenient nodes or logical locations that best fit the fabric of the city.

The City of Edmonton website has extensive information, including design details, routing, and illustrations. Unfortunately, the project is not funded yet, but City Council and the Mayor are keen to see it happen and want to get it built in the next 6-8 years. The plans are ambitious, and it's exciting to see a car-oriented oil producing city like Edmonton be thinking and supportive of this direction.

Illustration: Simulated image by City of Edmonton

 

transit’s product: mobility or access?

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 GoogEarth walkscore

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

disasters can raise your taxes

Posted on January 25, 2011 in Advocacy, US Federal Policy

Australians will be paying higher taxes to pay for the recovery from this disastrous flood season.  When you're the relatively small central government of a small country that's prone to big disasters, there are only so many ways you can self-insure against these things. 

I think about how this would play out in the US.  People would scream about the hardship from the disaster. The governor and president would promise relief, and by and large all those unexpected expenses would simply be piled into the deficit.

That happens, in part, because the US Federal government is so huge and opaque. It deals with such colossal numbers that even its deficits convey a liminal suggestion of boundless capacity.  The mysteries of managing the world's reserve currency, for example, just can't be explained by analogy to your family's budget.

Aussies just don't see their government that way.  They know how small it is, and they can see that its budgetary choices are like of a household at a larger scale.   

This is part of why I'm so obsessed with tools that make big public choices comprehensible, like the Los Angeles Times "balance the California budget yourself" tool, or, in my business, network planning games.  It's a reason why I don't mind if the California budget crisis leads to functions being pushed down to the local government level, as long as these functions scale to the local government boundaries and as long those governments can go to their voters for the funding they need.  One thing we've seen clearly in Calfornia is that people will vote for taxes for things that are important to them, and that they're more likely to support taxes that are kept close to home and devoted to a specific purpose.

People have got to see the choices.  They've got to understand government budgets on analogy to their family's budgets.  I don't see another way.

 

You are here: Home
Older posts Newer posts