Human Transit

pricing and “the poor”

Posted on March 25, 2011 in Congestion Pricing

Is congestion pricing — charging more to use a facility when it's in high demand, in order to decongest that facility — an unacceptable burden on the poor? Joshua Arbury of the Auckland Transport Blog asks this on my recent post on congestion pricing terminology:

Fundamentally though, there's a political question to consider. Is it acceptable to have a road pricing scheme that prices the poor off the roads to create more room for the rich? Because, in a nutshell, that's effectively what road pricing/congestion charging/decongestion charging is.

These discussions will never get anywhere until we can separate two completely different questions:

What is the accurate price for this facility that arises from the relationship of supply and demand?
For whom, and for what social purposes, should we offer discounts from that price?

Australian and British transit agencies offer a nice example of how to keep this clear. As in North America, transit in those countries routinely offers discounts to senior citizens and the disabled, because, well, we as a society want to honor those people. Those discounts don't serve any particular transit agency mission, but the society judges them to be important. Fine. So in both Australia and Britain, the cost of those discounts is added up and a central government reimburses the transit agency for that amount, as a "shadow fare." The transit operator can then count all riders as equal, and compete for all riders as being of equal value to it, because it experiences them as all paying the same fare.

That's very clean, because it separates transit's real purpose from a separate (perfectly valid) social agenda, rather than just expecting transit operators to pay the cost of the social agenda. Seniors and disabled persons get their discounts, but the transit operator continues to value their patronage as much as they would value that of a full-fare customer.

Meanwhile, back on the roads, our current prevailing road pricing policy is that "when demand for road space exceeds supply, government will subsidize everyone's travel so as to elminate any monetary cost." The effect, of course, is that instead of paying in money we pay in time. That's what congestion is. Something of value is being given away for free, so we have a long queue of people waiting for it. If you want to "fix congestion," you have to change the price.

Is that hard on "poor" people? Yes, it is, like many things. The answer may be to subsidize the price as an expression of a social objective, in exactly the way that British and Australian governments subsidize senior/disabled fares as something entirely separate from other transit subsidies, thus enabling them to more cleanly connect each spending to a public purpose.

on “category errors”

Posted on March 23, 2011 in Meditations, Philosophy

From a chapter of my book called "Five Paths to Confusion," which discusses common errors in thinking about transit. I hope that somewhere out there is a logician or linguist or philosopher who can suggest a better term for "category error."

A category error occurs when you think about a spectrum as though it were a series of boxlike categories. If you and a friend disagree about whether something is blue or purple, you’re making this error together. Blue and purple are adjacent zones on a continuous spectrum of colors (technically wavelengths of light) and zones on a spectrum can only have fuzzy or arbitrary edges. So if you disagree about whether something is blue or purple, you can both be right, based on slightly different notions of where you mark the boundary in the fuzzy area where blue shades into purple. If one of you is right and the other wrong, it can only be because of some arbitrary standard about where blue ends and purple begins, a standard you’ve both agreed to respect.

Category errors are built into the very structure of our language. Our category words feel like boxes with hard edges: blue, purple, tall, wealthy. But like colors, most of them really refer to directions or zones on a continuous spectrum. There’s no objective basis for saying “Jim is tall,” unless we just mean “Jim is taller than most people.” “Tall” is not a box; it’s just a range or direction on a spectrum of possible heights. We all know that, and for simple ideas like height or color the category error rarely causes trouble.

But when we talk about emotive categories, such as wealth or success, we can easily lose sight of the spectrum, and as with blue and purple, this can cause pointless arguments. Consider a famous comment widely (if falsely) attributed to British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher: “A man who, beyond the age of 26, finds himself on a bus can count himself as a failure.” Stated that way, “a failure” sounds like a box that you’re either in or out of. Associating buses with failure or poverty is a common attitude in some cities. If you think about failure or poverty as a box, this can be an easy way to decide that buses aren’t worth your attention, and that there’s no point in thinking about how buses and rail transit can work together as one network.

But even if it’s true that bus riders are poorer than rail riders on average, you can change your perspective by reminding yourself that the boundaries of “poor” and “middle class” and “wealthy” are as fuzzy or arbitrary as the boundary between blue and purple.

Some category errors are built into transportation planning jargon. For example, you may hear certain planners divide transit riders into two boxes. One box, called a discretionary or choice rider, contains people who have the option of driving, and who will use transit only if it out-competes their car. In the other box is the transit dependent or captive rider, who has no viable alternative and therefore has to use transit. Dividing up riders this way leads to the idea that transit must compete for choice riders, while captive riders can largely be taken for granted; they will ride no matter how poor the service gets.

These categories are imposed on reality, not derived from it. Transit dependence, like wealth itself, is a spectrum, with vast numbers of people in the grey areas between “choice” and “captive.” For example, many people with low incomes own a car out of necessity, but experience owning a car as a financial burden. Many low-income families feel they have no alternative but to own a car for every adult in the house. If we give these people credible alternatives to car ownership, they can experience the result as liberating, even though some transportation planners will now call them captives. Often they will find better things to spend that money on, such as education. Many people are in situations like these, and we can achieve both environmental and social goods by helping them choose to own fewer cars. The two-box model of society, where everyone is either choice or captive, prevents us from seeing those possibilities.

Very few of our category words describe things that are really boxlike categories. So whenever you hear someone divide people into two categories, it's worth asking, "are these really boxes, or just zones or directions on a spectrum?"

jetlag links

Posted on March 22, 2011 in General

Brewing a summary piece on the whole connection-activated plaza issue, but I may need to get past the jetlag first. Meanwhile:

I really love the spirit of the Bay Area's new Transit & Trails service. As a transit expert who's also an amateur botanist and fierce lover of wilderness, I've always been frustrated by the gaps between transit stations and major trailheads. This is one of the few aspects of public transit in Sydney that works brilliantly well, even yielding reveries such as this.
Nathan Wessel is fundraising to promote his Cincinnati Frequent Network Map and guide.
From DePaul University's Chaddick Institute for Metropolitan Development comes an interesting study on how portable electronic technology is affecting transportation choices. The institute's Caitlin Allen wrote, in an email to me: "To our knowledge, our data set is the only one of its kind in the country. The data confirms that transportation environments that Baby Boomers avoided have become more attractive to Gen Y or Millennials because they can 'privatize' their space with tech use." PDF: Download Privacy Invades Public Space, The Growing Use of Portable Electronic Technology…2011

next stop san francisco

Posted on March 20, 2011 in General

Thanks to everyone who responded to my search for connection-activated public squares. There's a lot to sort through there, and it may take a few days.

Meanwhile, I'm about to get on a plane from Sydney to San Francisco. I'll be there through the end of March, then on to Vancouver.

information request: connection-activated civic squares

Posted on March 19, 2011 in Downtowns, Information Requests, Urban Structure

Thanks to all the commenters who responded to my too-vague request in the last post. Let me now be clearer and, I hope, more concise.

This image …

… shows an idea for the design of a civic square intended to be the "living room" of a suburban city east of Vancouver. It does not exist on the ground, so I'm looking for examples that do. The core of the idea is that:

The square is successful as a civic heart. It's a place people would naturally go to not just to catch transit but also (a) to eat a lunch that they've brought, (b) to meet friends or people-watch, (c) to rally for a political cause, (d) to watch a local sporting team on an enormous screen (e) to attend any of a range of festival events programmed for the space and (f) to feel, as one feels in great squares, that you're in the very centre of the community, a place that is credible as a symbol of the whole community. I'll settle for most rather than all of those things, but the point is to define a certain kind of civic importance. Note that the flexibility of the space to serve many purposes is part of what makes it effective as a symbolic centre. It is, as they say of Portland's square, the community's "living room." It may have some green landscaping but it is mostly hardscaped in the anticipation of handling large volumes of people.
To me, this means that the place is big, let's say at least 50m in its narrower dimension. (Smaller plaza spaces around rail stations are routine in Europe, but this thing needs to be big enough to do the symbolic and practical work outlined above.)
The square is also an important node in the transit network, where substantial volumes of people make connections, either between mulitple surface transit lines or between those lines and a rapid transit line. (In the last post I artlessly referred to the place as suburban. I now realize that what I really meant was: a place where the high volume connections happen on the surface, not inside subway stations as is the case in most big European examples. Such a place may well exist downtown in a North American city that lacks much of a subway network.)
All, or at least most, of the surface transit stops are directly on the square. That is, when you step off the transit vehicle, you feel that you are in the square, not across the street or down the street from it.
These high-volume connections require walking across the square, not just along one edge of it.
Finally, let me rule out plazas at universities, where the community served is artificial and intentional. I'm after places that serve as the centres of towns or cities.

I'm asking because I want to discuss this possibility in my book, based on my experience in developing the idea sketched above. It has particular relevance as a way to organize local bus connections at a rapid transit station that is also a local CBD. If really successful examples exist, I want to praise them. If they don't, I'm interested in credible theories of why not. Is there something intrinsically wrong or unrealistic about this kind of design?

The closest I've seen so far are as follows. People who are familiar with these spaces are encouraged to chime in with views on whether they work on the above criteria, especially the perception of the space as a centre or "living room." The notation C? means "I'm not sure if this really functions as a civic heart or livingroom. T? means "I'm not sure if the transit connections are major, that is, I'm not sure if lots of people have reason to make connections here.)

Copley Square, Boston. (C? T?)
Mont Royal station, Montréal. (C? T?)
Plaza on the north side of Gare Montparnasse, Paris. (C?)
Pershing Square, Los Angeles (T?)
Picadilly Gardens, Manchester, UK (C?) (not hardscaped)
Place Bellecour, Lyon, France (T?) (very close!)
JFK Plaza, Philadelphia (T?) (not clear where bus stops are)
Alexanderplatz, Berlin, specifically the area southwest of the elevated station, between there and Spandauerstr. (C? T?) (Is this a major bus-rail connection path?)

Thanks for everyone who's commented so far!

information request: suburban transit plazas

Posted on March 18, 2011 in Information Requests

NOTE: This obsolete post is retained to preserve its comments. The updated post is here.

I'm looking for examples of a successful civic plaza space which is also transit connection point, and where people making connections between transit lines need to walk across the plaza to do that. In other words, I'm looking for something like this:

(This illustration is of a an idea that was developed for a town center in the metro Vancouver area. The place as drawn does not exist. I am looking, by contrast, for something already built and working well.)

The rapid transit station doesn't have to be elevated. It could be underground or it could even be on the surface. What I'm after are these key features:

We are in the high-wage "developed" world. North America, Europe, wealthy East Asia, Australia/New Zealand, etc.
Local bus (or streetcar/tram) stops are directly on sides of the square, so that when alighting it feels that you are now "in" or "at" the square. Ideally, terminating buses stop on the correct side of the street to put you right in the square, not across the street from it.
People walk across the square to make connections between local transit and rapid transit, so that they become, at least briefly, part of the life of the square.
A rapid transit stop is probably right at a civic square, though if someone found a square with trams on three sides and lots of people connecting between them, I could work with that.
The connection being made represents a major node in the transit system, so many riders are making the connection there. Typically that means that the lines that cross at the square do not cross anywhere else nearby, and/or this is the most logical place to make a connection between those lines.
The square is also successful as an urban place, a place where people like to go to have lunch, meet friends, watch people, see street entertainments, etc. It probably has lots of retail nearby but it is an open public square, not a shopping mall. It's a place that might be described (to use the well-worn term for Portland's Pioneer Courthouse Square) as the local area's 'living room.'

Anyone who can identify a place that matches these criteria, and point me to some good pictures of it including a picture or diagram that shows the transit circulation clearly, will get, at least:

a mention in the book (at least in the small print.)
a shout-out here on the blog
lunch or dinner on me whenever we're next in the same city

Please forward a link to friends who might also enjoy the challenge.

(Speaking of shout-outs, the above sketch is by Eric Orozco, based on a plan by Hotson Bakker Boniface Haden architects, in which I played a small role.)

UPDATE: Clarifications in response to the first round of suggestions is here.

watching our words: congestion charge or price or (shudder) tax

Posted on March 17, 2011 in Auckland, Congestion Pricing, Journalism, Language, Words, Unhelpful

There seems to be a flurry of new interest in congestion pricing, partly under the pressure of tight budgets almost everywhere. But journalists can muddy the waters by describing congestion pricing as either exploitative or punitive.

Last month, I was invited to contribute to a Sydney Morning Herald thinkpiece on the subject. My contribution, the second of four pieces here, emphasises that congestion pricing is not about paying for congestion, it's about paying to avoid congestion. The core point:

Suppose you announce that you'll give away free concert tickets to the first 500 people in a queue. You'll get a queue of 500 people. These people are paying time to save money.
Other people will just buy a ticket and avoid the queue. They're choosing to pay money to save time.
Today, we require all motorists to wait in the queue. When stuck in congestion, we are paying for the road space in time rather than in money.
Shouldn't we have a choice about this? Why are we required to save money, a renewable resource, by spending time, the least renewable resource of all?

Unfortunately, the Sydney Morning Herald framed the whole piece with the question, "Should motorists pay for the congestion they cause?" The implication is that congestion pricing is punitive, that some citizens believe that other citizens should be punished for their behavior. The question seems designed to sow misunderstanding and inflame rage. To their credit, none of the four expert responses — even the one from the auto club opposing the congestion charge — really took this bait.

So there's a problem with the terms congestion charge and congestion price. The terms sound like "paying for congestion," when the truth is the opposite, we're being invited to choose whether to spend money to avoid congestion. A more accurate term would be congestion avoidance price or even better, congestion avoidance option. But those are too many words.

Should we call it a decongestion price?

Real congestion pricing is about giving free and responsible adults a set of options that reflect the real-world geometry of cities. The core geometry problem is this:

Cities are, by definition, places where lots of people are close together.
Cities are therefore, by defintion, places with relatively little space per person.
Your car takes 50-100 times as much space as your body does.
Therefore, people in cars consume vastly more of the scarce resource, urban space, than the same people without their cars — for example, as pedestrians or public transit riders.
When people choose whether to drive, they're choosing how much scarce urban space to consume.
If urban space is to be used like any other scarce resource, its price needs to be deregulated so that it is used efficiently.

Congestion pricing is a form of deregulation. It is the most libertarian concept imaginable.

There's another way to mess this up, and that's the term "congestion tax." Here's the New Zealand Herald:

Aucklanders may be levied to drive through increasingly congested streets in the absence of Government funding of the region's "strategic aspirations".
A paper released by Local Government Minister Rodney Hide before Auckland's first spatial plan due out in 11 days suggests raising revenue by charging motorists to drive around the Super City at peak times.

Hide makes clear that this isn't a congestion price intended to reduce congestion. It's just another tax, intended to raise revenue. So just to be clear: If it's congestion pricing, there are public transit (and bike-ped, and casual carpool) alternatives that enable people to get where they're going. The congestion price cordons on the CBDs of London and Singapore work because there's abundant public transit to those places, so relatively few people absolutely have to drive into them. The San Francisco Bay Bridge tolls have a congestion-pricing value because there's both abundant transit and casual carpool options for avoiding them.

If, on the other hand, you're in a place where there's no reasonable alternative to driving — such as large parts of Auckland — then anything that suppresses driving will suppress travel, and that means it will suppress economic activity. And if you're just taxing economic activity, then this is really no different from sales taxes, Goods and Services Taxes (GST), or income taxes. By taxing economic activity, you're suppressing something that government and society should be encouraging. That's not a libertarian idea; quite the opposite.

imagining cities without mobility

Posted on March 13, 2011 in Access, Mobility, Philosophy, Urban Structure

Philips Corporation, like everyone, is running a livable cities program, in this case a set of awards for individual projects rather than big-picture rankings of cities. I just stumbled on it, and got a rude shock.

There are eight categories: Neighborhood, Mobility, Care, Education, Water, Shade, Sport, and Regeneration — all excellent things. Obviously, I'm professionally interested in mobility, so I looked to see who was winning there.

The leading candidate for the Mobility award is Plaza Movil Street Park, a proposal (for Buenos Aires, Argentina) for temporary street closures to create community park space. Its benefits are described like this:

Creating recreational spaces for local communities to relax, play, meet, and chat.

That's wonderful. It's glorious. I'm all for it. To use Philips's terms, it's great for Neighborhood, and probably also for Shade. But it's not mobility!

The only relationship that this plan has to mobility is that it takes space normally used for mobility and uses it for something else.

St. Augustine observed that we are always either being or becoming. In urbanism, "being" corresponds to placehood, and "becoming" corresponds to movement or mobility. The late 20th Century car-centered model led to the massive conversion of land area from placehood functions to mobility functions. Transit's great virtue is that it provides a lot of mobility using relatively little space, so that more area can be devoted to places, both public and private.

And yes, a great street provides an experience that integrates placehood and mobility to a degree. And yes, good urban redevelopment also reduces our need for mobility up to a point.

Bravo for well-designed street closures. But to give a street closure a mobility award seems to imply that mobility — our ability to get to places we want to go to — just no longer matters.

There is a strong current in New Urbanism, not without detractors, that does seem interested in abolishing mobility. Patrick Condon's idea for Vancouver, for example, would cancel a single proposed subway line and instead replace all of the city's electric trolleybuses with streetcars that go the same speed as the buses do. He would cancel a mobility-improving project and instead spend money in way that that may do great urban things but doesn't increase mobility at all. Once his network was complete, nobody could get anywhere any faster than they can now.

This makes sense only in a context where going places (even under renewable elecric power) is an objective evil. Streetcars, in this vision, supposedly cause greater urban density to be built at livable neighborhood scales, so that people meet more of their needs close to home. People spend most of their time in their own "villages" and others nearby. They simply do not travel far across the city, and had better not be in a hurry when they do.

It's understandable that "urban village" is a winning concept right now. We do need to increase the self-reliance of each part of a city, so that travel demand for many of life's needs can met closer to home. The pendulum swung far the other way in the late 20th century, toward surrendering placehood to movement. I support and eagerly participate in efforts to help it swing back.

But I think we can see what it might look like to swing too far in the new direction. We stay close to home, and thus evolve transport systems that are useful for going short distances and useless for going long ones. And the obvious retort to this is: In that case, why live in a city? Why not just live in a country village, or in a small city?

The whole point of living in a city is to have access to unusual things that are only possible at a large scale. If you want major league sports or a good symphony orchestra or a world-class major university, you need to be in some kind of urban area. If you have a very unusual interest, only a place with lots of people will have a few people who share that interest. If you want choices, you need redundancy, also known as competition. You need there to be two or more sources for whatever service or product or experience you're looking for, readily available from where you live. For those things, you need a certain amount of urban mass, and some options for moving around within it.

The great irony of anti-mobility village-first thinking is that it inevitably leads to monotony — less choice and therefore less opportunity for people to form specalized communities where unusual thought and creativity can flourish. More disturbingly, it leads to a world where only the internet offers those things, which leads in turn to nightmare images of a world of plugged-in couch potatoes, people who never go outside anymore because their social and intellectual needs simply aren't met by the 500 people who happen to be within walking distance.

The antidote to conformity and monotony is the city. For a city to function as a city, you need mobility. Streetcars are fun to ride, but not if you're in a hurry. Closing a street on Sundays so people can dance is a great thing. But you can't run an economy that way, nor can your citizens feel free.

next move

Posted on March 11, 2011 in Meta, Vancouver

I've just accepted a six-month part-time assignment at Vancouver's transit agency TransLink, to help them with a range of policy and planning issues. So I'm getting ready to relocate from Sydney to Vancouver. (As always, you can track my movements under the photo in the next column.)

My assignment at TransLink will be only 60% of fulltime, so I will continue to work part-time through MRCagney, including several projects for clients in Australia/New Zealand.

As always I'm available to provide services on any of the range of issues that this blog covers, including both consulting services and speaking engagements (such as this one). If I can be useful to your transit agency or consultancy, let's talk. From April to at least October 2011, travel costs can be figured from a Vancouver base, so North American clients will no longer need to bear costs of bringing me from Australia.

Australia is very hard to leave, but I look forward to being back in Vancouver, working on one of North America's most livable urban areas.

At this stage, I have no clear plan beyond October 2011. I might return to Australia, or I might settle back in the Northwest or California. It depends on where it seems I can be most useful. One clear possibility is to establish a small west coast consulting firm (or join an existing one while it's still small). But for now, I'm open, and enjoying that.

on casual carpools, or “slugging”

Posted on March 9, 2011 in Oakland, San Francisco, Washington DC

Emily Badger has a useful article on casual carpools, though it would be a little more useful if she — or her editors at Miller McCune — didn't keep implying that public transit is somehow the enemy.

Casual carpooling — or "slugging" as some of its partisans like to call it — is a perfectly rational response to very congested freeways with High Occupancy Vehicle (HOV) lanes. At informal queues, usually located near an onramp, motorists who want to use the HOV lanes meet up with other commuters who want to ride the lanes as passengers. These passengers fill the empty seats in the motorist's car so that they can all travel in the HOV lane. The phenomenon appears to happen where and when an HOV lane offers quite dramatic travel time savings, as it does on certain Washington DC freeways and on the San Francisco Bay Bridge. It happens only in intensive commute periods, because that's when the HOV lane's advantage is substantial.

For many, it's fun to think of casual carpooling as some sort of revolt against conventional transit. The term slugging, Badger explains, arose as an insult uttered by "bitter bus drivers" who saw their waiting passengers disappearing into private cars. Miller McCune's headline describes slugging as "the people's transit," as though conventional transit is something else.

In fact, casual carpooling or "slugging" is largely compatible with conventional transit. Really, the two are mutually beneficial. The casual carpool markets in San Francisco and Washington are both parallel to rapid transit lines, but the trains are still full. As for competition with peak bus services, the long one-way commuter bus run is one of the most expensive services a transit agency can operate. Often, each bus can be used for only one run during each peak, so all the costs of owning and maintaining the bus must be justified by a single trip. Drivers for these peak buses are also expensive, because there are costs associated with the short shifts that peak-only service requires, and because drivers must usually be paid to get back to where the shift began before clocking out.

Long commuter bus runs can still make sense, but they are very expensive compared to conventional two-way, all-day transit. If casual carpooling reduces the demand for them, the effect on transit is to flatten the overall peak that transit has to serve, increasing its potential cost-effectiveness and improving the utilization of fleet. It's especially helpful on the AM peak, which is usually the sharper of the two.

So slug away, if you need to feel that you're attacking something. I prefer to call it a casual carpool, because that term describes what it really is. And I see no reason not to welcome them. In fact, when new HOV lanes are developed, the casual carpool phenomenon should be planned for, both by ensuring that there are safe and logical pickup points and also by counting casual carpool trips in the mobility benefits of the lane.

Of course, such planning would contradict the libertarian fantasy — heavily stressed in the Miller McCune piece — that casual carpooling is a "government-free" form of spontaneous social organization, a kind of Tahrir Square for the cul-de-sac set. In fact, "slugging" is a freely chosen response to the design of the government-funded transport infrastructure — just like everybody else's commute.

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