Human Transit

deadly journalism alert: “planners say” tunnels cost money

Posted on January 6, 2011 in Advocacy, Journalism, San Francisco

James Fallows of the Atlantic has been pushing back on the habit of journalists to resist all statements of objective fact:

In today's political environment, when so many simple facts are disputed, journalists can feel abashed about stating plainly what is true. With an anticipatory cringe about the angry letters they will receive or the hostile blog posts that will appear, they instead cover themselves by writing, "according to most scientists, the sun rises in the east, although critics say…."

How does this play out in transit journalism? Very, very often, journalists present a transit expert stating a fact and someone else expressing a desire, as though this were a "he said, she said" disagreement. For example, here's Mike Rosenberg of Bay Area News Group, about the routing of California High Speed Rail through the suburb of Burlingame just south of San Francisco.

Burlingame officials want their entire stretch of planned high-speed rail track buried underground … State rail planners say it would be several hundred million dollars cheaper to build aboveground tracks, which locals fear would tower 30 feet in the air, produce more noise and create a physical divide.

Note the tension of the two stem verbs. "Burlingame officials want" and "state planners say." It's set up to sound like "he said, she said."

But these two sentences don't describe a disagreement at all. Burlingame city officials are stating a desire, to have the line underground, to which state rail planners are responding with information about consequences, namely that undergrounding would be more expensive. That's not a disagreement; that's staff doing its job.

The disagreement is actually about who should pay for the undergounding that Burlingame wants. The state says that if a city wants high speed rail to go underground, it should pay the difference. The article quotes Burlingame mayor Terry Nagel's response:

Nagel said Burlingame could spend the city's entire $33 million annual budget on funding the tracks and barely make a dent in the price tag.
"It's not even a possibility," Nagel said Wednesday.

Note that mayor understands that building the line underground through his city will cost more than building the line on the surface. In fact, he's clear that it will cost massively more, more than his entire city budget. The cost is not in dispute. So why did we need "state planners say" in this sentence?

State rail planners say it would be several hundred million dollars cheaper to build aboveground tracks …

All other things being equal, underground construction is more expensive than surface. This is a fact about the universe, readily found in any transport engineering textbook, so it's misleading to describe it as a claim or allegation.

Even if the journalist were thinking like a divorce lawyer, for whom there may be no verifiable reality outside of the fevered imaginations of the two parties, he still could have said that "all parties agree that undergrounding costs much, much more than surface." The journalist knows this, because he has quoted the Mayor of Burlingame displaying a complete grasp of that fact, even though the fact is inconvenient for his side.

So let's read that whole passage again:

Burlingame officials want their entire stretch of planned high-speed rail track buried underground … State rail planners say it would be several hundred million dollars cheaper to build aboveground tracks, which locals fear would tower 30 feet in the air, produce more noise and create a physical divide.

Look again the three main verbs: want – say – fear. Emotion – alleged fact – emotion. And both emotions are on the same side! It's as predictable as the structure of a pop song. The people of Burlingame get their emotions recorded twice, while in opposition we hear only a fact about cost, presented as though it were the voice of some oppressor, crushing these honest folks who are trying to defend their homes.

Journalists! If you want to help people form coherent views that bear some relation to realty, ask yourself these questions:

What facts are agreed on by all parties to the dispute, and by experts in the field? State those as facts.
If facts are not agreed to by all parties, are they agreed to by people expert in the subject? If so, say "experts generally agree that …" This can still be wimpy, like "experts agree that the sun rises in the east," but even that is vastly more accurate than "state planners say …"
Are there widely shared values motivating both sides? If so, make them visible. You may or may not agree that High Speed Rail is a good policy, but its motivating purpose is not to torture the people of Burlingame. Drop in a standard sentence about the larger economic and environmental purposes High Speed Rail advocates claim the line will serve. We know what values the burghers of Burlingame are defending — "home" — but what values are those on other side defending, and might these also matter to the reader?
Are there strong emotions on both sides? If so, describe them. In this case, don't just quote "state planners," who are professionally compelled to be balanced and judicious. Quote a committed and informed High Speed Rail advocate making a stronger, more vivid statement about the actions of cities like Burlingame, and the cumulative burden they place on getting a line built. In today's world of expert blogs, you don't even need to pick up the phone; just quote Robert Cruikshank off his California High Speed Rail Blog, for example …

[Burlingame expects] the rest of the state to essentially subsidize their property values. I cannot emphasize enough how absurd and out-of-touch that view is. At a time when property values have crashed hard in other parts of the state, why on earth would anyone in Riverside or Stockton or San Diego or East LA believe that Burlingame property owners deserve state aid to maintain their land values?

Bottom line: If your story sounds like passionate people are in conflict with soulless bean-counting bureaucrats, you probably don't understand your story yet. You may in fact have a story about venal, conniving bureaucrats, or about frightened or lazy bureaucrats blowing smoke, but the rules above will help you figure out if that's the case. You may also have a story about expert public servants doing their jobs, and if you want any honest and dedicated experts to be willing to work in those jobs, you owe it to them to consider that possibility.

I would welcome some push-back from professional journalists on this. (Email link is under my photo in the next column to the right.) Please forward a link to any journalists in your life! Me, I'm just a consumer of the product, and often not a very happy one.

email of the week: thinking pedestrian thoughts

Posted on January 6, 2011 in Advocacy, Cycling, Minneapolis – St. Paul, Pedestrians, Philosophy

Is it useful to talk about "pedestrians" as a group the way we often talk about cyclists or transit riders? All these category terms are problematic, as I discussed here. Riordan Frost of Minnesota 2020 asks:

A recent article in a local paper and its connection to one of your previous blog posts has inspired me to write to you. The article is “Thinking Pedestrian Thoughts”, and it covers the recent adoption of a ‘pedestrian plan’ by Edina, which is an inner-ring suburb of the Twin Cities [of Minneapolis and St. Paul]. One of the points made in the article is that people don’t really advocate for themselves as pedestrians. This made me think of a post that you wrote back in October, which was entitled “should I call myself a ‘transit-rider’?” and discussed labels given to people using certain modes of transportation. In the post, you quote Michael Druker, who advocates for switching from ‘cyclist’ to ‘people cycling’ and from ‘pedestrian’ to ‘people walking’.
You agreed with him, but pointed out that these new terms were cumbersome, and you would probably still opt for the shorter terms in your writing. I write blogs and articles for MN2020, and I feel the same way. I understand the importance of what language we choose, and I try to be conscious of it in my writing, but I have a need for brevity and I have an editor. There is a more significant question apart from brevity, however: how do we avoid labels (which may carry negative connotations and/or stereotypes) while advocating for improvements of certain modes? …
Is it possible to cut down on lumping people into categories and still have effective advocacy for certain modes, like better crosswalks or more bike lanes? The cycling community is pretty well established in the blogosphere, which sometimes contributes to their ["cyclist"] label and its connotations, but pedestrians have no blogs or personalities specifically tailored to them – mostly because we are … all pedestrians at some point in the day, and there is nothing terribly distinctive about walking. I n a perfect world, we would just design our environments for all modes of transportation that people use, with people (not cyclists vs. motorists vs. pedestrians) in mind. This doesn’t seem terribly viable, however. What are your thoughts on this?

I think that the potential for organized activism and fellow-feeling is easier among a group of people who all wield the same tool, because tools are such powerful symbols. Think about the role of the hammer and sickle — archetypal tools of manufacturing and agriculture, respectively — in the imagery of Soviet communism, for example.

The possession of the tool, and the knowledge of how to use it, becomes a feature by which a group defines itself and sets itself in opposition to other interests.

If you don't think this still happens, look at all the clubs and forums for people who own and cherish a particular tool — a Linux-powered computer, say, or a certain musical instrument. If you read an online forum about such possessions, you'll see the practical work of exchanging troubleshooting tips also builds a community in which people love hearing each other's stories about life with the cherished tool.

So this is another thing that's going on behind the obsessive attachment to transit technologies. People who love aerial gondolas or whatever can now network worldwide with every city that runs one, compare notes about each other's problems and achievements, and thus form a global community based on love of that particular tool. Psychologically, it's just like a club of guys who all own a particular kind of car, or computer, or electric guitar, or whatever.

Pedestrians don't have that. So I doubt we'll ever see a pedestrians-rights movement that has anything like the shape and force of the cycling movement. Nor do we need to, really, because the best urban planning thought today is all about the primacy of the pedestrian.

Ultimately, the strongest case for "pedestrian rights" is that we are all pedestrians. Even the guy who loves his Porsche has to walk across parking lots, and can thus see the value of having protected paths between rows of cars instead of having to walk in the lot's roadways where a car can back into you. Even he has a sense of what makes a shopping center or major downtown pleasant or unpleasant to walk in. Maybe he's even broken down on the freeway and thus experienced what those places are like when you're out of your car. So it's not hard to make anyone understand a pedestrian issue on analogy to the walking that everyone has to do. That's how you win these arguments, I think.

chicago: asking the right question?

Posted on January 5, 2011 in Chicago, Public Outreach

Alex Davies in Treehugger looks at a Chicago campaign seeking public input on what would make people use sustainable modes:

Over the last few weeks, Chicagoans have been asked a simple question: "What would encourage you to walk, bike and take CTA (Chicago Transit Authority) more often?" Ads posing the question in buses, subways and public spaces invite the city's residents to respond with their ideas, via text message. This mass call and response is part of Give a Minute, a campaign created by advocacy group CEOs for Cities and media design firm Local Projects, which looks to take public dialogue out of town meetings and into the streets. The idea is simple: by making participation as simple as sending a text message, Give a Minute will bring more people, and ideas, into the debate.

We've long known that this kind of outreach is needed to have a useful conversation about new transit projects. The old solution — inviting people to attend public meetings — has always produced highly skewed responses, over-weighting the angriest feedback. Anything that can broaden the conversation is useful.

But for reasons explored here, I generally advise against grand hypotheticals: "What would you do if …?" or "What would encourage you…?" Nobody can answer those questions accurately, so the answers are a poor guide to what investments would really pay off.

What's really needed is to engage the public in thinking about real tradeoffs, such as the choices built into budgets. What are your priorities, this or that? Those hard choices are the real work of elective government. If we ask people to think about those questions, we not only get more reliable answers, we also encourage citizens to ask smarter questions themselves.

do roads pay for themselves?

Posted on January 5, 2011 in US Federal Policy

In the US, the answer is no, not even close, according to new work by USPIRG:

Gasoline taxes aren’t “user fees” in any meaningful sense of the term – The amount of money a particular driver pays in gasoline taxes bears little relationship to his or her use of roads funded by gas taxes.
State gas taxes are often not “extra” fees – Most states exempt gasoline from the state sales tax, diverting much of the money that would have gone into a state’s general fund to roads.
Federal gas taxes have typically not been devoted exclusively to highways – Since its 1934 inception, Congress only temporarily dedicated gas tax revenues fully to highways during the brief 17-year period beginning in 1956. This was at the start of construction for the Interstate highway network, a project completed in the 1990s.
Highways don’t pay for themselves — Since 1947, the amount of money spent on highways, roads and streets has exceeded the amount raised through gasoline taxes and other so-called “user fees” by $600 billion (2005 dollars), representing a massive transfer of general government funds to highways.
Highways “pay for themselves” less today than ever. Currently, highway “user fees” pay only about half the cost of building and maintaining the nation’s network of highways, roads and streets.
These figures fail to include the many costs imposed by highway construction on non-users of the system, including damage to the environment and public health and encouragement of sprawling forms of development that impose major costs on the environment and government finances.

quote of the week: elevated rail vs elevated freeway

Posted on January 5, 2011 in General

John A. Miller was one of the few Americans who was puzzled by the construction of elevated highways. “Elevated railways with a capacity of 40,000 persons per hour in one direction are [being] torn down,” he wrote in amazement in 1935, “while elevated highways with a capacity of 6,000 persons per hour are being erected.”
Robert Fogelson, Downtown, via Market Urbanism

For more on how beautiful transit viaducts can be, see here.

help plan next edition of u.s. transit manual

Posted on January 4, 2011 in General

In the 1990s, a bunch of transit planners at Kittelson Associates got the idea of creating "Transit Capacity Manual" that could sit next to the ominous authority of the Highway Capacity Manual, and maybe talk back to it in its own language. The result was the Transit Capacity and Quality of Service Manual. It's quite a technical document, but it does endeavor to explain the main concepts of transit planning and especially its similarities and differences with highway planning. This is useful, because a lot of decisions about transit are made in local and state transportation departments where most people are trained as highway engineers.

The manual is now in its 2nd Edition, and the whole thing is online, here. Kittelson is now starting work on the 3rd Edition, and has set up a web survey asking for input from the profession about how the next version could be improved. If you've used the previous editions at all, or even if you just have strong feelings about what manual should do, you're encouraged to fill out the survey here. I just finished it. It mostly invites you to submit text comment, not just tick boxes, so it's obviously going to be read with some attention.

the beginning of the end of car travel growth?

Posted on January 4, 2011 in Developing World

Melinda Burns in Miller-McCune profiles a new study with some surprising news:

A study of eight industrialized countries, including the United States, shows that seemingly inexorable trends — ever more people, more cars and more driving — came to a halt in the early years of the 21st century, well before the recent escalation in fuel prices. It could be a sign, researchers said, that the demand for travel and the demand for car ownership in those countries has reached a saturation point.

The study is by Lee Schipper and my former colleague Adam Millard-Ball, both now at Stanford. Car ownership is slowing down too:

There are signs of saturation in vehicle ownership, too, at about 700 cars per 1,000 people in the U.S. — more cars than licensed drivers — and about 500 cars per 1,000 people in Japan and most of the European countries. Car ownership has declined in the U.S. since 2007 because of the recession.

It will be interesting to see how much car ownership rebounds as the US emerges from recession, which of course depends on when and how quickly that emergence occurs. There are certainly some signals that the sustainable-urbanist alternative to car ownership — urban life dependent on a suite of options including transit, cycling, walking, and car-sharing — is holding its value through the recession better than car-dependent life is doing. If so, we might never see car ownership rebound to the 2007 rate.

Car ownership is still rising in the developing world, of course, but Schipper doubts that can continue.

“My basic thesis is, ‘There ain’t room on the road,’” he said. “You can’t move in Jakarta or Bangkok or any large city in Latin America or in any city in the wealthy part of China. I think Manila takes the prize. Yes, fuel economy is really important, and yes, hybrid cars will help. But even a car that generates no CO2 still generates a traffic problem.
“Sadly, what is going to restrain car use the most is that you can’t move.”

Well, if developing-world cities weren't growing horizontally, creating new space for gridlock, I'd be more confident in that call. But it's definitely encouraging.

new year’s resolution: no more coercion

Posted on December 31, 2010 in Advocacy, Mobility, Philosophy, Words, Unhelpful

If you want to find vigorous attacks on urbanism and sustainable transport by car-and-highway advocates, just Google for forms of the verb to coerce. The most recent one you'll find is from the reliable Fred Barnes of the Weekly Standard. Called "Coercing people out of their cars," it exploits an unfortunate comment by Secretary of Transportation Ray LaHood. As Barnes puts it:

Last year, George Will zinged LaHood as the “Secretary of Behavior Modification” for his fervent opposition to cars. LaHood all but pleaded guilty. Steering funds from highways to bike and walking paths and streetcars, he said, “is a way to coerce people out of their cars.” His word, coerce.

Here's the source, reported on conservative blogs but not much elsewhere. CNS News:

On May 21, [2009?] LaHood told reporters at the National Press Club that the “Partnership for Sustainable Communities’ his department had formed with the Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of Housing—sometimes known as the “livability initiative”–was designed to “coerce” people out of their cars.

If LaHood did describe the sustainable transportation project as coercion, even in jest, he should be more careful. Just as one doesn't joke about terrorism at airport security checkpoints, we shouldn't even joke about coercion in urban and transportation policy. The word is a primitive grenade that can blow up any and all parties present.

The idea that urbanists and transit advocates are trying to coerce people to give up cars is one of the most treasured bits of pro-car rhetoric, because it feeds the association of cars with liberty. Because so much urbanist work necessarily happens through government, the image of coercion also helps people think of government as intrinsically an oppressor, always a convenient refuge for the lazier kind of libertarian.

Google assembles a convenient list of definitions of to coerce. Wikipedia's is typical of the range:

Coercion (pronounced /koʊˈɜrʃən/) is the practice of forcing another party to behave in an involuntary manner (whether through action or inaction) by use of threats, intimidation or some other form of pressure or force.

Almost all of the definitions refer to actual or threatened force.

By those definitions, I can't think of anything that I have done, in 20 years in this business, that would qualify as coercion. Certainly, I've never threatened any motorist with force, or advised anyone else to do so. No, Barnes would respond, but I have advised governments to adopt policies that are coercive toward motorists. For example, I advised the City of Minneapolis to restrict traffic on certain streets to create a functional transit mall, which they did in 2009. They even changed the direction of certain lanes. Something that used to be legal is now prohibited. If someone drives his private car through the bus lanes (especially in their pre-2009 direction!) police might show up and, if all else fails, might even shoot at him. Force! Coercion! Rhetorically, the coercion-victim wins. Of course, the vehicle he was driving was also a deadly weapon, so he too was threatening force, but he's already declared victory, paid his citation with an air of martyrdom, written his angry article, and gone home.

In the new year, let us all resolve not to be coerced by the rhetoric of coercion, and never to use the term, even in jest, to describe our own project.

In its impact on motorists, sustainable urbanism is all about accurate pricing. We care about pricing in two separate and non-convertible currencies: money, and the limited road space of our cities.

We experience urban congestion, and parking shortages, when road-space is inaccurately priced. As I explored here, it's as though we were giving out free tickets to a concert; when you do that, you get lots of people waiting in line, spending time to save money. Today's approach to pricing forces everyone to act like those frugal concertgoers, when in fact many could easily afford to spend some money to save time, and would prefer to do so if asked. High Occupancy Toll (HOT) lanes are one experiment in that direction, while the downtown congestion charges of London, Stockholm, and Singapore are another. On the pricing front, San Francisco's free-market approach, which may finally liberate motorists from endlessly circling the block seeking a space, is another breakthrough.

The absurdity of underpricing scarce urban road space, and thus causing congestion and parking shortages, is simply this: It forces us all to save money, a renewable resource, by wasting time, the least renewable resource of all.

Of course, when a price goes up, some who could afford it now can't, and may blame the government. This happens when the price of anything goes up; it will always happen as long as people hold exaggerated notions about the power of government over the economy. To meet the needs of people who are dissuaded from driving by price, and ensure that they continue participating in the economy, road-pricing and parking-pricing strategies work only in the context of abundant and attractive travel alternatives, including transit. This is part of the free-market justification for transit subsidies, in a big-city context, so long as there continue to be equal or greater subsidies for the motorist.

Reduction of government subsidies is not coercion. Fred Barnes is the socialist in this debate, demanding government subsidy for his own chosen lifestyle but not for that of others. As for those of us who support more accurate pricing — of road space, parking, and all the other incremental costs of transport, including transit fares — we are the libertarians!

request for information: detailed studies of operations delay

Posted on December 30, 2010 in Information Requests

Long ago, when all transit data was collected manually by students with clipboards, I did a few studies that watched what happened on a bus or streetcar/tram in normal operation and counted the seconds of delay associated with each of the following factors:

Being stopped at signals.
Being stopped or slowed by traffic.
Being stopped or slowed by accidents.
Normal-pace boarding and alighting.
Wheelchair boarding and alighting.
Conversations with the driver that interrupt boarding/alighting.

These studies are usually done deep inside of transit agencies and often not published (not out of secrecy or shame, but just because they're very technical.) Have any readers seen or done any studies like this? I'd like to pull some typical data for a couple of them.

happy holidays: see you january 2

Posted on December 23, 2010 in General

Greetings from what Australians call "Silly Season," made sillier by the need to roll out all the winter-based imagery of European Christmas at the height of summer.

Over the holiday I will be beavering (as they say in this beaverless country) on the book project, with the help of a great illustration staff.

Expect new content here on January 2. Meanwhile, if you've only recently started reading Human Transit, there's plenty of older but timely stuff to enjoy. Browse for your favorite catgory in the column at right.

And no, this is not my house. Happy holidays.

Older posts Newer posts