Human Transit

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.

holiday hairsplitting: the challenge of one-day schedules

Posted on December 23, 2010 in General

David Marlor writes:

Thought you’d like to see this.
http://www.edmonton.ca/transportation/ets/transit_news/ets-december-24-and-27-service.aspx
Every year, Edmonton Transit reduces costs by reducing service during the Christmas holiday season. I’ve no problem with that, but the way it is done is totally user-unfriendly. When you look through that list of changes you quickly realize you have no easy way of knowing when buses are running and if the connections work. Yes, you can use the trip planner, but this kind of thing just defeats the idea of an easy to use network. My eyes glaze over and I think I’d just say “forget it, I’ll drive”.
Personally, I think Edmonton is too surgical with the reductions at the expense of losing the ease of understanding the network. I’m not sure it’s even worth it.

Edmonton Transit certainly has made it complicated, but I respect the imperative behind it. Transit operators are under such constant cost-cutting pressure that they often can't justify running regular schedules on unusual holidays where when demand is higher than a typical weekend day but lower than a full weekday.

Most of the approaches to network planning that I recommend are based on the notion that we need to make networks simpler. Part of that is grouping services into brands of similar usefulness (based on distinctions such as rapid vs. local, peak-only vs all-day, frequent vs not). Doing this, however, requires that a transit agency give up some of its ability to micro-adjust service to its perception of demand. For example, if we specify that the Frequent Network as a whole must be frequent until 9 PM, a few lines that we've included in that category may have to have their evening frequency expanded evne though their ridership then doesn't seem to justify it. That's right: we spend a little and in return we get a network and schedule that we can describe succinctly, and that our customers can remember.

The same principle should ideally apply to these unusual days, though I respect that it's hard to get there. But this kind of standardization, and the clarity that results, are an important frontier for transit if we're going to substantially increase its usefulness, and make people who value freedom choose to rely on it.

email of the week: marketing a “bowl of tangled noodles”

Posted on December 20, 2010 in Branding, Frequent Networks, Marketing, Portland

Why do so many transit agencies not provide clear maps highlighting basic user-critical features such as frequency? From a major transit authority located between the Arctic and Antarctic Circles, a planner proposes this explanation (links mine):

The current method [of designing marketing and information materials] is based on showing things to focus groups, and whatever wins the opinion poll seems to [get done]. Focus groups can kill good ideas. [For example] if you show the Los Angeles 12-minute map [now a 15-minute map], it will probably be considered way too complicated. However since the public’s image of buses [in my city] varies between zero and a bowl of tangled noodles, surely an effort like the 12 min map would be an improvement, despite the criticism re complexity.

Our marketing people are marketing people who work in transport, not transport people who work in marketing. So their knowledge of customers is probably better than mine, but their knowledge of the network (including its frequent service strength areas) would be inferior.

In contrast I take the view (influenced by the familiar themes on HT) that passengers worldwide pretty much have the same wants and needs. So you can look at what works elsewhere, and apply it to relevant parts of the network here – no need to reinvent the wheel. You’d still have focus groups, but they would help with refining rather than saying yes or no. I may grit my teeth at their lack of network knowledge; they’d probably think the same if I talk about marketing.

By “bowl of tangled noodles,” I’m guessing he means something like this (although this is not his city):

My experience is that good marketers and good transit planners have the same reaction to a bowl of tangled noodles — confusing piles of overlapping routes. They hate them. Both professions strive to reduce complexity, but often they don’t have the same notion of which fundamentals are most important.

For example, as a planner I’d rather see a map that uses a strong color like red to highlight frequency, whereas many published maps use red to highlight speed — even fast services that run for only a few hours and are thus useful only to a narrow market. San Jose’s VTA map, for example, uses red to mean “express, but maybe not all day, and maybe not in both directions.” To me as a planner, this gives a misleading impression that the red lines are the underlying structure on which the network is built. In fact, that structure lies more in the green and blue lines.

Others, as in this 2009 Portland map, prefer to use colors to differentiate the lines from each other, leaving little information bandwidth to convey other distinctions. Portland’s 2009 map “highlights” Frequent Network lines by making the number bullet background yellow rather than white. See? Me neither.

Also, on this Portland map, if you look at 39th Avenue (north-south a bit to the left of the center of the image) you’ll see a route 66 running for a little distance, clearly an exception to the overall all-day grid pattern. This route is one-way and peak-only, just a few trips designed to handle commutes to the medical center. To me, drawing it as such a solid line gives a misleading impression that it’s more important than it is, and partly obscures the grid structure of frequent all-day lines that’s most people are likely to find useful. So my instinct is usually to render peak-only services as dotted lines, showing them but not letting them distract from the big picture.

UPDATE: Fortunately, Portland’s map has been revised, effective September 2010, exactly along the lines that I’d have suggested! (Thanks to Nathan Banks for the update.)

The near-invisible yellow dots are still there, but Frequent Network lines are now drawn slightly wider. See the difference?

Thanks to years of diligent planning, and a high tolerance for connections, Portland’s network is not a bowl of tangled noodles, though the 66 is a step down that slippery slope. Still, even in Portland, these differences arise between the planning perspective and a marketing perspective on what’s important to show on a map.

I would especially love to get comments from transit marketing professionals on this. Confidentiality policy is here. Feel free to use email, via the link under my photo –>

two offers still open

Posted on December 18, 2010 in General

Two housekeeping items:

My request for illustrators and mapmakers for my current book project got a good response, but I suspect there's room for one or two more. See the original post for terms and conditions.
I recently sent a brief survey to North American professionals in transit planning/marketing and urbanism who read Human Transit regularly. If you are in that category but didn't receive the survey and would like to respond, please email me and I'll send you one. Use the email button under my photo. —>

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