This is just funny. From the Los Angeles Times today, an article by David Zahniser on cuts to Commuter Express services run by the City of Los Angeles:
The agency also would phase out three Commuter Express routes: Line
575, which travels from Simi Valley to Warner Center; Line 413, which
moves from Van Nuys and North Hollywood to downtown; and Line 430, which
runs from Pacific Palisades to downtown Los Angeles.
Seattle’s Orphan Road laments the news that the Seattle Waterfront Streetcar, which from 1982 to 2005 ran historic cars — mostly on single track, mostly right under the Alaskan Way Viaduct — might never be restored to service. I’m apparently part of the problem: Continue Reading →
Is it true that while everyone loves Portland’s regular 200-foot street grid, urbanists are turning away from it as something to emulate?
Daniel Nairn, who just wanted to make a nice nerdy poster about street grids, points me to a fascinating Planetizen article by Fanis Grammenos and Douglas Pollard. It argues that the standard street grid, an easily repeated pattern where most intersections are four-way, is and should be history. The future, they argue, lies in more complex grids where there are a lot of street connections but where 3-way “T” intersections are the rule. It’s an excellent article. Read the whole thing. Continue Reading →
In a post last week I mentioned Abraham Maslow’s famous hierarchy of needs, a simple diagram suggesting that certain needs will only arise if more fundamental needs are met: Continue Reading →
The Sydney Morning Herald’s Indepent Public Inquiry on Transport published its final report yesterday. I had a major role in the preliminary report, which I discussed here, but not in the final.
The Herald’s coverage today focused on the big controversy about what the next rail project should be, and also on the dangers of spread-out job growth. But in my view, the Inquiry’s most important work was the discovery, through public surveying and financial analysis, that a comprehensive network of improvements — extending the old commuter rail network and also upgrading it to offer the frequencies of an urban metro — could be funded with a package of sources that a majority were willing to support. All of these sources are politically radioactive if you just propose them in a vacuum: Congestion charges! Higher fuel taxes! Higher property taxes! Higher fares! But if you package them carefully with the transformative improvements that they buy, you could win a referendum. Continue Reading →
When transit advocates talk past each other, especially about the
glories of their favorite technology, I often feel we need a better way to talk about
what’s really important. Which features of a technology or transit plan
are truly essential in motivating ridership? Which are just really
nice? Continue Reading →
An excellent article by Meena Kadri at the Design Observer Group offers a tour of the new Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) system in Ahmedabad, India. While North Americans argue about whether Bus Rapid Transit can substitute for rail, the developing world is building a lot of both. India, though, made an early commitment to BRT for its second-tier cities and corridors. Continue Reading →
When planners develop proposals for redesigning a bus network, how do they do it? And when is it necessary?
In 20 years of doing bus network planning around the world, I’ve encountered few systems that don’t have some major obsolete features in their design. Most public transit authorities continually fix small problems in the network but have trouble fixing the big ones.
Making superficial changes to a network is like adding little bits to a house. One by one these bits make sense, but over time they can destroy the design of the house,You may also be doing these little remodels because you can’t face the fact that the foundation is rotting.
Cities change, and every 20 years or so, the bus network should be comprehensively reviewed. Such a project should really include an exercise where you study the city’s demand patterns and design a network on a “blank slate” i.e. deliberately not considering what your network does now. Such a thought process will retain the strongest features of your existing network, but will let you discover new patterns of flow that are a better fit for your system as it is today.
Network design is a process of creative thought, not just analysis. When we rethink a network, we’re doing what a scientist does as he tries to form a new theory:
1. Data Presentation. Look at all the data and try to see NEW patterns in it that the current theory/network misses. (Geographical representations of the data are crucial at this stage. The quality of your data presentation will limit the range of ideas you’ll have.)
2. Creative Thought. Form new ideas that work with those patterns. (This step is creative rather than analytic, and proceeds in unpredictable bursts of inspiration.)
3. Analysis. Test those ideas against the data. Revise or discard those that don’t fit the data well. This is the analytic step, and must not be confused or conflated with the creative step that precedes it.
4. Go to step 2 until you have something you like.
This process is important because great network design ideas solve many problems at once, just as a good scientific theory explains lots of data at once. The single most common mistake in network planning is to think about only one problem at a time, and look only for solutions to that problem. That kind of narrow thinking may be necessary to get from one day to the next, but every 20 years or so (or more often if your city is changing fast) you need to do the larger process I’ve described.
You must also control altitude. The first stage of the work must look at the entire city or service area, to be sure that you solve problems that can be solved only at that scale. Only then can you look at details. More on this here.
My preference is to do this process in an intensive professional workshop setting, similar to the design charrette process in urban design. Typically, about 15 professionals set aside 2-5 days of their time. The people need to be a mix of roving consultants like me and staff of the agency being studied, but they all commit to be open-minded, and are encouraged to think about opportunities and not just constraints.
Sometimes, when running these processes, I’ll ask everyone to name one network design idea that they’d really like to do but that they assume is politically impossible.
The point is to break out of the constraint-dominated thought process that often prevails in the daily life of transit agencies. This isn’t a comment on anyone’s creativity, but rather an observation about the daily experience of bus network planners. Bus agency staffs get very little appreciation, and lots of criticism, no matter what they do, so they tend to become risk-averse cultures. When I run a network planning workshop, my first job is to break through that, and encourage the client’s staff to welcome their own insights even if they may seem politically impossible at first glance.
Core Design Workshop in Yekaterinburg, Russia, 2015.
The workshop room has a large table where we can sit around a drawing in progress. On the table is a base map of our study area, covered with either tracing paper or clear acetate, so that we can draw and revise over and over. The walls are covered with maps of relevant data about our project. There’s also a whiteboard where anyone can sketch out ideas that aren’t ready to go on the map.
(In 2020, of course, we figured out how to do all of this online! It works much better than you’d expect.)
The workshop proceeds through the iterative steps that listed above. We start with a half day or day of just reviewing the data. Then we start brainstorming possible “big moves,” large structural ideas which, if pursued, would lead the rest of the network to take a new form. If we’re planning around a new rapid transit project, then that’s already the “big move.” If we’re just redesigning a bus network, we may think of big moves of our own, such as installing a grid system if that’s appropriate.
Once we have an agreement about big moves, we proceed top-down to address the more local design issues that follow from them. This sequence is important, because the big moves will have the biggest impact. The design of the Frequent Network, for example, is always a big move, and I insist that we hammer out this design before we turn to the less frequent local routes that connect to it.
As we develop ideas, we may do some quick analysis to help us verify them. We also sometimes break for field exploration, as different members of our group go out in cars to check various routings that we’re thinking of.
By the end of the workshop, we may not have total consensus, but we always have a lot more consensus than the client expected going in; we’ve always come up with ideas that were new to everyone in the room. The core workshop isn’t the end of the process, but after this point we usually have a map that bears at least a 70% resemblance to what we’ll finally recommend. More importantly, everyone in the workshop will have ownership of that process, and will see their own influence on it. This, finally, is crucial. One of the hardest jobs of a consultant is to transfer the results of his work to the client agency, so that they see the ideas as theirs rather than as “what that consultant recommended.” Ultimately, the interactive design process is the best way I’ve found of doing that.
David Lazarus’s Los Angeles Times column today lays out what everyone who’s studied the problem knows needs to be done.
As usual, the Transport Politic has a good survey of the confronting speech by US Federal Transit Administrator Peter Rogoff. People who are in this business because they love trains will find it especially disturbing. Read the whole thing.
Rogoff’s gist is: We need to slow down on constructing new rail transit, so that we can focus more on our massive deficits in operations and maintenance.
As someone who values abundant access, and who views technologies as tools rather than goals, I obviously have some sympathy with this view, though I prefer to be a little more nuanced than Rogoff is: Continue Reading →