Greetings from New Zealand’s largest city, the focal point of an agrarian nation’s ambivalence about urban life. If you’re a young North American who wonders what Seattle was like 40 years ago when I was a tyke — before Microsoft, Amazon, and Starbucks — Auckland’s your answer. To a visitor accustomed to North American or European levels of civic vanity, it often seems that Auckland still doesn’t know how beautiful it is. That’s always an attractive feature, in cities as in people, even though (or perhaps because) it can’t possibly last. Continue Reading →
Is Speed Obsolete? Professor Condon Responds
The following is Professor Patrick Condon’s response to my post “is speed obsolete?” including many ideas raised in the comments. His reply will make sense only if you have read the original post, and it focuses specifically on the current Broadway transit debate in Vancouver. For a more general presentation of the same views, applicable to any city, see Chapter 2 of his new book Seven Rules for Sustainable Communities (Island Press, 2010). I will do my own post responding to Condon’s views in the next few days, tying the issues back to larger themes that readers in any city will care about. Meanwhile, I’m sure HT readers will join me in expressing appreciation to Prof. Condon for his constructive engagement with the critiques raised by me and by many commenters.
Q, Why bother with trams when buses are just as good?
A.
Well, why not bother with trams, if you can have one for the
same money? On heavily traveled streets in Vancouver, with buses already
at 3 minute headways, we are getting constant pass bys at rush hour.
Ridership on these routes is sufficient to merit switching to tram as
over time they are cheaper. They are certainly easier to ride for the
infirm. And a key motivator is GHG reduction, at least for our design
center. Diesel buses produce a lot of GHG, and the particulates they
spew are very bad for air quality on our crowded arterials. Yes trolley
buses do that too, and ok, lets save the planet with trolley buses.
Fine. Sign me up. But for the same money you can have tram. I will take
tram.
Q. But fast transit competes with cars and freeways!
Trams compete with walking and bikes. I would rather compete with freeways!
A. Good point. As i say in our “learning from
Portland publication”, IF we are building a region where we expect the
average trip to continue to get longer and longer then go with skytrain,
by all means. But if, on the other hand, you can put policies in place
that will, over the decades, produce shorter and shorter trips, then
start investing in tram. I am explicit in tying our promotion of trams
to the necessity for more equal distribution of affordable housing and
jobs in the region. But without those shifts in both land use and
transit i fear that our sustainability targets are beyond reach. Most
importantly, reaching our Provincially mandated 80% reduction in GHG
target seems very much out of reach . Again, our centre approaches all
of this not from a “transit” perspective. Rather its from a
“sustainable communities” perspective. This perspective provides a very
different “frame” and a much longer time horizon for our work. But
believe me, working in Vancouver makes a difference. If i was in Houston
i would have a different point of view. Or at least it would be
mitigated to account for the reality of the crushing amount of freeways
characteristic of such places.
Q. Isn’t it “classist” for you to promote slow
transit ? Its easy for you to say, living close to UBC. What about those folks who live 40 KM away in Maple Ridge?
Yes it would be classist if we were saying that the poor should live in
Maple Ridge and the rich close to UBC, but we are not. We are saying
that there can and should be a paired initiative for affordable housing
close to where you want to be, and a reasonably priced transit system
suitable to the needs of the 22nd century. This is not naive. Most UBC
students already live close to the school. This is largely because they
can live in secondary suites scattered throughout the city of Vancouver
at a price of about 500 dollars per bedroom. Not cheap but not out of
reach.
Q. Streetcars dont really produce the kind of
investment along corridors that Condon suggests.
A. Trams bythemselves are no silver bullet, agreed. But as part of a vision for a sustainable future they start to make sense. Imagining corridors revitalized that are currently in tough shape, not so much in Vancouver but in other cities in our region and in other parts of North America, makes sense. I explicate this point at sufficient length in chapter two of my new book: Seven Rules for Sustainable Communities.
Q. There is tons of land around the University. Why
not put housing there?
A. Well, they are. The university is
building a ton of new housing in its “University Town” initiative. In
time there will be enough beds to accommodate the majority of students
and staff. Its mostly market housing though so its an admittedly open
question as to whether it will actually be occupied by students and
staff. But the attempt to balance housing with job and student slots is
well underway.
Q. It makes no sense to have a region of just trams.
People have to make long trips, at least some of the time.
A.
Agreed. I never said, nor do i advocate, regions of just tram transit.
But here in Vancouver, the existing skytrain already provides this
region wide transit function to a large degree, and will do a better job
if and when the Evergreen line connection to Coquitlam town Centre is
built. Also there is commuter rail between downtown Vancouver and
Mission. The question is, when do you acknowledge that a “transit
backbone” system cant serve a very large portion of the population
within walking distance of their homes. At what point do you stop
extending the backbone and do something different. I would argue that
2.8 billion to go to the very tip of a peninsula with no demand beyond
that point other than the fishes is most certainly that point.
Q. Speaking of 2.8 billion. You pulled that number
out of the air to make skytrain look bad, didnt you?
A. I wish i had. That figure is still on the Province of BC.s web site. Go
there and find “transportation plan” for confirmation. At that figure
they can only be imagining deep bore tunnels very far below grade. Its
about 240 million per km.
Q. How can you
believe a guy that misquotes the auditor general’s report?
A. Argghh…… In my haste on ONE post to our local
LRC list i put a number out that was wrong. I corrected that on that
list serve as soon as i was convinced of my mistake and with my regrets.
The information on trip costs per mile and per trip for skytrain found
at http://www.sxd.sala.ubc.ca/
what should be looked at. I regret the error. You have no idea how much.
I trust that my honest and timely correction is evidence of this good
faith, but am no longer surprised that, after watching US presidential
politics for a lifetime, a gaff is never behind you. How do you spell
potatoe Vice President Quayle?
LRC list i put a number out that was wrong. I corrected that on that
list serve as soon as i was convinced of my mistake and with my regrets.
The information on trip costs per mile and per trip for skytrain found
at http://www.sxd.sala.ubc.ca/
what should be looked at. I regret the error. You have no idea how much.
I trust that my honest and timely correction is evidence of this good
faith, but am no longer surprised that, after watching US presidential
politics for a lifetime, a gaff is never behind you. How do you spell
potatoe Vice President Quayle?
Q. A hierarchy of service types
that provide a robust network with the base mode of walking (and cycling
too!) should be the framework design, rather than proliferating routes
that want to restore a blip in history when streetcars was the best mode
(1889 to 1919)?”
A. That short time in North America is showing itself
to be a longer time in France, Germany, and the North American
exception Toronto. And I too think the challenge is to find the mode
that can extend the walk trip. I believe it to be tram because you can
afford to get the tram close to almost everyones front door (if regional
densities are over 8 upa double gross density). You cant possibly
capture and extend the walk trip with skytrain. You can only capture the
three part trip: the walk, the bus, and THEN the skytrain.
Q. To do what
Condon suggests would require the deforestation of Pacific Spirit Park.
Where would all those Condos go?
A. In a separate analysis on demographics that can be
found on our Sustainability by Design research page we find that the
city of Vancouver has enough unused capacity on its existing bus route
arterials to add an additional 250,000 units or another half million
people, all without exceeding 4 stories in height. No forests required. http://www.sxd.sala.
Q. Why would
you want people to go slower than they want to? People hate to waste
time.
A. I DONT want that! I want them to go as fast as is
practical, compatible with a host of other balanced objectives. But the
reality of the Broadway line is this. At the most a Skytrain line would
shave 20 minutes off the speed of a tram (assuming more frequent stops,
more mixed traffic, and limited signal priority). At the least it would
shave 10 minutes (assuming widely spaced stops, dedicated lanes and
complete signal priority). The reason for the modest gain is the large
number of stops anticipated for the Skytrain, roughly one per mile on
average. I am all for speed, but not at a rate of 200 million per
minute saved, and not when this expenditure empties the transit coffers
for decades to come.
I appreciate all of
the thoughtful comments and hope that this adds depth to the impression
your readers have of this work.
Respectfully submitted,
Patrick M. Condon.
New book: The Seven Rules for Sustainable Communities: http://islandpress.org/
Line Numbering: Geek Fetish or Crucial Messaging?
Commenter Mike recently laid out a nice explanation of the line numbering system in Aachen, Germany, and then asked, fatefully:
How do professionals assign line numbers?
The answer is: Much as geeky amateurs do, when drawing imaginary networks. It’s a process of (1) imagining beautiful systems of order, and (2) willing them in to being. Unfortunately, real-world professionals have to proceed through the additional steps of (3) clashing with proponents of competing systems, (4) enduring the derision and sabotage of anarchists, and finally (5) resigning to a messy outcome where only traces of beauty remain, visible “between the lines” so to speak, for those still capable of enchantment. Continue Reading →
Streetcars and Spontaneity
The comments on Is Speed Obsolete? — my post on Professor Patrick Condon’s thesis that slow streetcars are better than rapid transit — are a gold mine of perspectives and insights. I could spin a month of posts out of them.
Let’s start with this one, from Adrian, in response to my claim that slow transit competes more with walking and cycling, while fast
transit competes more with cars. Continue Reading →
San Diego: The Rail-Bus Balance
The Transport Politic has a good overview of the recently announced rapid transit plans for San Diego. The plan, in short, is to add only one more line to the region’s light rail system, a long northward extension to the huge University of California San Diego (UCSD) campus. For other corridors in the region, the focus is Bus Rapid Transit. Continue Reading →
Do-It-Yourself Maps of Real-Time Information
Eric Fischer wondered how fast San Francisco’s transit system really was, so he asked the transit agency’s realtime data feed, and drew a picture of the answer:
Guest Post: Samuel Scheib on Parking, the Field of Nightmares
Samuel Scheib is the senior planner at StarMetro (Tallahassee, Florida) and the editor of Trip Planner Magazine: the art and science
of transit. He holds a master’s degree in planning from Florida State University, as a Transit Fellow.
Parking was one of the earliest problems associated with the widespread automobile ownership that began in the 1910s and 1920s; having a place to leave cars—the terminal capacity—is as important to the transportation system as the carriageway that moves them. By the 1930s, urban streets were filled with cars that were driving in circles searching for curb parking. The accepted solution to this congestion problem was off-street parking.
Soon, cities around the United States had enshrined off-street parking requirements in their zoning laws. According to Donald Shoup (The High
Cost of Free Parking) a 1946 survey found that only 17% of the cities in the study had zoned parking requirements; just five years later that percentage was 76. Today free, unlimited parking is the expectation for most drivers: parking is free for 99% of all automobile trips in the U.S. Continue Reading →
Is Speed Obsolete?
For a while now, a strain of urbanist thought has been asking: Should we want transit to be slower?
That, broadly speaking, is the question raised by Professor Patrick M. Condon at the University of British Columbia (UBC). Condon heads the Design Centre for Sustainability inside UBC’s Department of Architecture and Landscape Architecture, and is the author of the very useful book Design Charrettes for Sustainable Communities. In his 2008 paper “The Case for the Tram: Learning from Portland,” he explicitly states a radical idea that many urban planners are thinking about, but that not many of them say in public. He suggests that the whole idea of moving large volumes of people relatively quickly across an urban region, as “rapid transit” systems do, is problematic or obsolete: Continue Reading →
Should We Plan Transit for “Bikeability”?
As cycling becomes more and more popular, how should transit planning respond? I’ve suggested before that better integration of cycling can be crucial to expanding the reach of rapid transit, and possibly eliminating some of the need for less efficient local-stop transit. That post also attracted great comments from experienced bike+transit riders hammering out the details.
But the details of whether and how much this can work vary a lot from one city to another. Continue Reading →
Applying Highway Concepts to Transit
One of this blog’s recurrent themes is that we need to notice when people are thinking about transit as though it worked just like roads and cars. Our transportation bureaucracies are full of people who’ve been trained to understand traffic, and who sometimes struggle to extend that mental framework to transit. One of the most important American “bibles” on public transit, the Transit Capacity and Quality of Service Manual, was explicitly designed to imitate the structure and style of the AASHTO Highway Capacity Manual, because it saw traffic experts as one of its key audiences. Continue Reading →