Human Transit

On Incompleteness (of Networks, of Life …)

Posted on February 1, 2010 in Philosophy, Urban Structure

Reader Russell Bozian thinks he spies a theme coursing through recent posts.

Will partially built houses ever be energy efficient? Ones where the walls are up, but the roof has not been put on yet? If you don’t qualify for a full home loan, will banks even lend you half the money you need to build a house? Will the banks figure that you can at least have half a good life, living in a house with walls but no roof? …
Jarrett, your original post wonders out loud why Portland can spend tens of millions on transit and not, in 2010, see a much higher percentage of people commuting to work on public transport. But at the present build rate, won’t it take at least until 2050 before Portland has a comprehensive and ubiquitous public transport network, such as we see in Manhattan? Why do we starve public transport of the money it needs to finish a decent network of routes, and then pause to criticize its incomplete performance statistics? Would we ponder why the waterworks is not delivering much water to our faucets, if we only gave them enough money and right of way for each water line to stop 100 feet short of our houses?
Continue Reading →

Comment of the Week

Posted on January 31, 2010 in General

On the phenomenology of crowding and reliability, from Alon Levy:

People’s perception of utilization is always going to be skewed upward. There are always more people to witness crowding than emptiness. If half the trains run at 100% capacity, and half run at 20%, then five sixths of passengers will see 100% crowding rather than 20%; therefore, real utilization will be 60%, while perceived utilization will be 87%.
Continue Reading →

If Your Bus is Late, Should the Agency Pay?

Posted on January 28, 2010 in Montréal, On-Time Performance

An engineering professor in Montréal got his transit agency to pay for his taxi fare because his bus didn’t show up. Unfortunately, it took many days of his time in small-claims litigation, so his trophy, a $40 check from the agency, should probably be framed rather than cashed.

Now and then a transit agency tries some kind of “on time or we pay” guarantee. In the Montréal suburb of Laval, for example, the buses are equipped with Global Positioning System (GPS) technology. The deal is that if your bus is more than five minutes late (a fact that the agency can verify via GPS), you can demand a free bus ticket, which is nice but not much of an incentive for the agency. It seems to me the same GPS-driven approach could be used to implement a policy if “when we’re more than x minutes late, we stop collecting fares.” That would actually help a late bus get back on time, because fare transactions are so time consuming. Continue Reading →

Portland: Another Challenging Chart

Posted on January 27, 2010 in Portland

A while back I posted some City of Portland data showing that in the past 12 years, during which four new rail transit segments were opened, the percentage of Portlanders who take transit to work, called the journey-to-work mode share, didn’t improve at all.

Several commenters wondered if data for the whole Portland region, as opposed to just the city, would look different. One also raised questions about the representativeness of the City survey’s sample.

So Portland reader Nathan Banks dug into the Census for similar data. His charts show census data for 1990 and 2000, plus American Community Survey (ACS) data for the years since 2000.

He’s done charts for all three of the Portland area counties. You can see a PDF of his charts here: Continue Reading →

Unemployment and the Transit Imperative

Posted on January 26, 2010 in Cuts

As US leaders suddenly pivot to focus on unemployment, Emily Garr at The Avenue picked up on a line of President Obama’s recent speech in Lorain County, Ohio.

You can’t get to work or go buy groceries like you used to because of cuts in the county transit system.

She goes on to describe cuts in the transit services to this suburban county that are definitely not “trimming the fat” but more like multiple amputations.

Transit advocates need to be picking up this line. Back in the mid-90s, when welfare reform was timely, I routinely ran passenger surveys on various transit systems as part of planning projects. The surveys had many other purposes, but I made a point to ask both “what is your trip purpose?” and “if transit had not been available, how would you have made your trip?” A common answer to the second question was that the person would not have been able to make the trip. Cross-tabulate that with a trip purposes of “work” and you get a count of people who could not hold their jobs without public transit. It’s an easy thing to do in any customer survey, and every transit agency and advocate should know this number.

It’s also important to notice that the people who are on the verge of not being able to hold their jobs are mostly in relatively low-wage jobs in the service sector — restaurants, fast food, big box retail, etc. These people are commuting all day and much of the night. Transit that supports high employment is all-day service, not just peak service aimed at the generally better-off 9-to-5 commuter.

Transit’s Zoom-Whoosh Problem

Posted on January 25, 2010 in Bus Rapid Transit, Rail Transit, Technophilia

My friend Dale, a Portland poet and essayist, recently shifted his commute to downtown from car-and-sometimes-bus to usually-bicycle. He’s posted “ten things I’ve learned after six months of riding a bicycle” (here, preceded by three interesting paragraphs on Jefferson and Adams). My favorite of the ten:

9) It’s just as fun as when you were a kid. You go zoom! and whoosh!
You’re a sky creature, not a miserable earth-crawler. And you get to
the end of your commute feeling invigorated and intensely alive.

And I thought: Yes, transit has a zoom-whoosh problem. Nobody today will describe the riders of the 14-Hawthorne bus (Dale’s other option) as “sky creatures.” Indeed the 20th century bus operations model — lots of stops, one-by-one fare transactions, getting stuck in turnouts or behind parallel-parking cars — is the closest thing to “earth-crawling” that modern technology can offer at scale. Continue Reading →

New York: Cutting Service Without Cutting Abundant Access

Posted on January 25, 2010 in Cuts, New York City

The U.S. service cut epidemic — the result of transit agencies relying on recession-sensitive funding sources — is about to touch New York again. But as in the first round of San Francisco cuts, the New York MTA planners are doing their best to reduce service but not the abundant access.

As with everything in New York, the details are complicated, but here’s a simple example. The G subway line is the only line running directly between Queens (the top of this map) and Brooklyn (the bottom). It has long included a segment from Court Square to Forest Hills where G trains run alongside two other subway lines, the E and V which connect Queens directly to Manhattan. (Full subway map here.) Continue Reading →

Unhelpful Word Watch: Captive Rider

Posted on January 24, 2010 in General

Just now, in a LinkedIn Public Transit Professionals thread, someone asked how to describe a “demographic” that has a choice about how to travel, as opposed to “someone whose only mode of transportation other than foot is public transport.” An engineer came back promptly with the common industry terms, choice rider and captive rider. The second of those terms has always sent me through the roof.

Dense cities, as we know, have people who have chosen not to own a car, including me. These people may not have the option of driving for a particular trip, but their mode of travel is nevertheless based on their choice, not their “captivity.” Continue Reading →

Guest Post: U.S. Transit Needs an “Emergency Operations Fund”

Posted on January 24, 2010 in Guest Posts, US Federal Policy

This guest post is by Ron Kilcoyne, General Manager/CEO of Greater Bridgeport Transit in Bridgeport, Connecticut. Ron’s previous posts include CEO of Santa Clarita Transit near Los Angeles and manager of research and planning for AC Transit in Oakland, California. The views expressed are his own and not those of his agency.

What will it take to restore all the transit service cuts over the past two years and prevent additional service reductions? I haven’t found an exact number but 10% of the total cost of providing transit service nationally would be good rough estimate. For example, at least two suburban transit systems – one in Cleveland OH, another in Atlanta — have or will shut down completely this year. The Chicago Transit Authority anticipates eliminating 14% of it service on February 7. Colorado Springs CO reduced service by 53% on January 1. Between late 2008 and this spring Orange County Transit reduced service by 22%. Continue Reading →

Quote of the Week

Posted on January 24, 2010 in US Federal Policy

When everyone was “driving” horses, and nobody had cars, and there were no gas stations, every isolated new stretch of road built in 1902 could not possibly have passed FTA cost benefit analysis criteria. — Russell Bozian, in an email.

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