Human Transit

Photo: Universidad Católica de Chile

My friend Professor Juan Carlos Muñoz Abogabir is Chile’s new Minister of Transport.  He is a Bus Rapid Transit expert and an eloquent advocate for sustainable and just transport planning, and is also one of the nicest people I know.

Juan Carlos has already been a leader through turbulent times.  In the 2000s was a key advisor to the project that created Transantiago, a government agency managing all public transport in the capital region.  The reform introduced integrated bus service planning and also changed the motivations of bus drivers. I remember riding a Santiago bus with Juan Carlos in the bad old days of 2004:  Bus drivers raced down the street, cutting each other off in hopes of grabbing the passengers at each stop.  And since they made money from taking passengers on but not for letting them off, people sometimes had to jump from the bus as it slowed but didn’t quite stop.

The implementation of Transantiago, however, was a disaster.  When the system was turned on in January 2007, some parts of it hadn’t come together.  Not enough new buses had arrived. Not all the necessary technology was ready. The incentives weren’t quite right.  The result was a couple of months of chaos.  Everyone who touched it, including Juan Carlos, was blamed.  It even affected the President’s approval rating.

Large-scale transformations like Transantiago are to some extent always like this. They were changing an entire sector of the economy over to a new model, in a way that required many people to see their jobs differently. You can flip the switch on a designated date, but people take longer to adapt and there’s always some conflict in the meantime.  In any case, the messy implementation doesn’t mean the reform wasn’t worth doing.  Over time, the biggest problems were fixed, the network began functioning and the anger quieted down.

A few years later, I saw Juan Carlos give a presentation on the Transantiago implementation, and was struck by the tone: He was not defensive at all.  He explained that this was a necessary reform but that Chile’s transport leaders, not excluding himself, had screwed it up.  He knew that failure is a better teacher than success, and he wanted everyone in the world to benefit from their meltdown.

During my 2019 trip Juan Carlos set up a meeting with then-Minister of Transport & Telecommunications Gloria Hutt to talk about my work on access analysis. From left to right: Juan Carlos, yours truly, Minister Gloria Hutt and Vice Minister José Luis Domínguez.

Fast forward to 2019.  The institute that Juan Carlos leads, CEDEUS, was planning a major global conference in Santiago when the country erupted in violent protests. All conferences were canceled, including his, because nobody could guarantee the security of visitors.  I had been booked as a speaker at the conference, but Juan Carlos asked if I would come anyway, and do some events around the edges of the crisis.  So I went, and lacking translation services I did a few presentations in my then-terrible Spanish. I described the experience here.

Obviously Juan Carlos grieved at the way that the social unrest began: a massive act of vandalism against the Santiago Metro.  But he shared the protesters’ demand for change, and he worked to channel the energy toward revealing the injustice of the built environment and transport systems.

So I’m just delighted at this announcement.  Chile is wealthy enough to do things, but its car ownership is low enough that it can still choose to avoid many of the worst mistakes of North America.  And it has the perfect transport leader for the moment.

Here in Oregon a new law mandates that all public meetings must have a virtual component. It is no longer acceptable to do only an in-person meeting.

This is great news, especially for people who want to have diverse and inclusive conversations about public transit.

In the old world, pre-2020, the default public meeting was in person.  If you wanted to express your view, you had to clear your schedule at the appointed time and travel to a meeting site — which was especially onerous for people who don’t drive. The result was a process that is biased against people who are busy. Most people don’t have the time that in-person meetings require.

When it comes to public transit, there is a direct tension between the interests of busy people — who tend to care about getting places quickly — and those of many people who have spare time.  To take one example, retired people often tell me that they need a bus right at their door, but that it’s fine if it comes once an hour, because they can plan around that.  That’s great for them, but that kind of service is useless to anyone whose day is full of deadlines they don’t control: punching a time clock, getting to class, picking up the kid at daycare.

The only way we get functional, just, and inclusive transit is for people with different needs to listen to each other.  That only happens if everyone has the opportunity to contribute, as they do in virtual events.

The other issue, of course, is that virtual meetings can be civil, because the moderator has tools to cut people off if they are rude, profane, or off-topic[1] or speaking too long. All forms of physical intimidation, however subtle, are also off the table [2]. Those behaviors have become another good reason to avoid public meetings.

The in-person event shouldn’t disappear until we’ve fully replaced it for everyone who really needs it, but the exigences of the pandemic have made far more people comfortable with virtual meetings, and there are a range of ways to reach those who still aren’t.  Oregon’s law doesn’t ban in-person meetings, of course. It just says that a process that’s only in-person is no longer acceptable, because it just excludes too many people. I hope we’ll see this spread far and wide.

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NOTES

[1] At a Cleveland meeting a few years ago, where I was presenting about our bus network design project, one lady devoted her three minutes to probing whether I was married, and if not, what I was doing about that.

[2] Then there was the meeting in a Western US city, years ago, where one belligerent gentleman testified while keeping one hand in his pocket, holding a clearly gun-shaped object.

Each year I’m interested to see which posts have gotten the most attention. Note: This list shows the most popular post in 2021, not the most popular posts written then. As you can see, many of my older posts remain useful and popular for years.  And if you are just starting to explore this blog, the place to start is the Basics posts!)

1. That Photo That Explains Almost Everything (2011).  You’ve seen the photo.  I notice a few things in it beyond its first impression.
2. The Dangers of Elite Projection (2017).  This is one of my most useful posts ever, about a basic mistake that’s everywhere in city planning.  It’s an example of my attempt to talk very patiently and inclusively about a difficult topic that makes people very emotional.
3. The Power and Pleasure of Grids (2010). An explanation of why grid transit networks are so effective.  This showed up in Chapter 13 of my book.
4. Basics: The Spacing of Stops and Stations.  (2010).  This turned into Chapter 4 of my book.
5. Basics: Walking Distance to Transit.  (2010).
6. Access, or the Wall Around Your Life (2021).  My most important 2021 piece by far, in which I talk about a new way to measure public transit’s success  Glad to see it on top of the 2021 stack. Keep promoting it!
7. US Commuter Rail: What It Is and What It Could Be.  (2021)
8. Fixing US Transit Requires Service, not just Infrastructure (2021).  The usual warning about US Federal public transit spending.
9. San Francisco: A Forbidden Fantasy Comes True (2020).  A minor post about a transformation of San Francisco’s rail network.
10. The Problem of School Transportation (2017).  Why don’t transit agencies serve schools in just the way they need?  Here’s the answer.

And a few important ones that are just outside the top ten:

• The Bus Driver Shortage is an Emergency (2021). Speaks for itself.
• Should Bus Rapid Transit be Open or Closed?  (2021)  The biggest question about BRT that most people aren’t thinking about.

A very sensible selection, readers, by you and the publications that linked here!  Honored to have such a thoughtful audience.

Happy New Year.

The architect Jug Cerovic is one of Europe’s most prolific and distinctive transit map designers. Anyone who loves transit maps will love his book One Metro World, which contains 40 of his most gorgeous maps for cities all over the world, and also presents a clear explanation of his design process.  (Unfortunately it doesn’t ship until January.)  You can look at the whole thing on his site, but the physical book is much more satisfying.

Cerovic’s style is to recognize geometric forms in the geography, and to highlight these to create not just a clear diagram of network structure, but one with a certain minimalist beauty:

Cerovic’s new book, Middle Constellation, is about just one map, an infrastructure map of China.  Here, the whole book is about the process.  Page by page, he steps through the design choices, showing how he builds up the final map.  This one is available as an ebook, which gives you an animated effect for some of the process.  You can get a sense here.

If you like beautiful books, both are highly recommended.
 

I know we’re having a lot of emergencies and it’s hard to keep track, but many US transit agencies are looking at devastating service cuts due to a shortage of bus drivers.  Drivers are quitting or retiring early much faster than agencies can replace them.  One friend told me their agency is losing 10 drivers for every one they hire.

Here in Portland, TriMet is cutting 9% of its service, bigger even than the cuts in the Great Recession.  I’m seeing similar cuts all over the US.

Can you blame the bus drivers?  The job was always hard, and now it’s more dangerous in two ways: People breathe on drivers a lot, not always masked, and the mental health epidemic is showing up in more rudeness and bad behavior.  Worst of all, some US cities are seeing a rise in assaults on drivers.

Meanwhile, there’s been huge growth in delivery jobs, some of which pay decently and don’t involve dealing with people.

Transit agencies are doing what they can, offering one-time bonuses for signing up.  But the real problem is retention, and it’s hard to imagine how that will be solved without some increase in compensation, also known as operating cost.  It means less service for the same operating dollar.  And of course when compensation goes up it doesn’t come back down.

Before you jump on me:  I believe that drivers should be paid well and held to high standards. I believe that a bus driver, with an employed partner, should be able to own a home and raise children.  Most US bus drivers are unionized and tend to have relatively good pay and benefits, certainly compared to non-union driving jobs.  (One friend of mine is a freelance software consultant but still drives a bus part-time just for the health insurance.)  I wish all transportation jobs paid as well.

But in any case, these service cuts are an emergency.  They are not minor.  They are not necessarily temporary, because right now it’s not clear how the problem will get better.  We could be looking at a lasting shrinkage in our transit services, right when people are crying out for expanded service and many agencies had been on track to deliver it.

What can you do?  Advocate for funding, but also:

• Be kind to your bus driver. If you have a moment, watch them in action.  Notice how hard their job is, and how much they have to deal with.  Thank them.
• Be kind to your transit agency management.  It’s a terrible moment for them.  They’re as horrified as you are by having to cut service.  (You can be kind to them and still be mad at them for some things. But be sure that what you’re mad about is really their fault.  The driver shortage isn’t.)

This advice may sound simplistic, but it’s actually practical.  Kindness is a powerful form of activism.  A lot of it can add up to big change.