Like a Cheetah
Last night, on the treadmill at the gym, I watched a bit of a National Geographic Special on the maglev train that connects Shanghai’s airport with its city center. Most of it was about the engineering challenges of the project, and the many small dramas of solving them. At the end of the piece, we viewed the train from above as it rushed away on its elevated guideway, while the narrator said something like: “But the future of the maglev train is very much in doubt.”
And I thought: “Like a cheetah.”
Words I Deleted Today
A client has asked me make the following deletions in a report I’d prepared for them on a public transit planning issue:
“… serious issues of bus access …”
” … to flow through these critical points …”
” … without extreme and circuitous deviations …”
The deleted words are all “emphatic adjectives,” words that mean nothing more than “Hey! This bit here is important!” Serious, critical, and extreme are all-purpose emphatic adjectives, while circuitous becomes emphatic if it’s used redundantly as I did here, “circuitous deviations,” because of course all deviations are circuitous.
A Silver Medal for the Silver Line?
Everyone should peruse the comment thread on my last post, “Should we ride mediocre transit?” If the post and its thread helps you clarify and explain your own view on the question, then this blog is doing its job. (Yes, there’s still no tip jar; I still have a salary as a transit planning consultant, but you’ll be the first to know if I don’t!)
Among the comments, Brian suggested that we need a system
… to “certify” transit systems on a Bronze-Silver-Gold scale according to criteria like frequency, operating hours, accessibility, travel time and so forth.” (Emphasis mine.)
Certification schemes such as Brian proposes function just like those notorious “rankings” — whether for cities or universities or transit lines. They sort a bunch of disparate data and somehow reduce it to a single score. To get there, they do two very different things:
Hard Questions: Should We Ride Mediocre Transit?
We are constantly told that if we want to support transit, we need to ride transit. Current ridership figures are routinely cited by both supporters and opponents of transit as evidence justifying a proposed level of transit investment. This implies that by riding transit, or not, we are effectively voting in a consequential poll.
Yet there’s also a lot of mediocre transit out there, especially outside the biggest cities. Sometimes transit really isn’t the cost-effective and time-effective way to get somewhere. Even if you don’t own a car, you may be able to afford a taxi for, say, 30% of your travel in your city and at least 30% of your trips require using transit that doesn’t work very well. Should you use transit anyway, because it needs your vote?
The US$1 Bill Abolition Campaign Begins with You!
I wonder if a concerted high-visibility campaign in one transit-intensive US city might drive the issue to prominence. It wouldn’t even need to come from the government. Suppose, for example, that one prominent locally-based merchant in, say, San Francisco announced that from now on, they’d be giving out only $1 coins as change. This could be one of those good-corporate-citizen moves, designed to support transit patronage by putting dollar coins in people’s pockets. (I suspect they would also find that the change would result in faster service for the merchant’s customers, since coins are faster to grab and count than bills.)
Ride Quality: The Driver’s Role
In my series on streetcars, I’ve been groping toward constructing a coherent view about technology choice, a hugely expensive and political issue in transit development. Since this is a blog rather than a book, I’m thinking out loud, engaging with comments, and revising without erasing. The effect has probably been jerky and lumbering, with lots of small lateral motions that evoke the feel of riding a bus.
Speaking of ride quality, a reader asks:
Do you know if there are any cities that make a point of ensuring their bus drivers provide a smooth ride? In my experience, even with the same model bus on the same route, some bus drivers manage a vastly more pleasant and less jerky ride. So I’m just thinking that this aspect of the bus experience should be technically feasible to improve…
Good training covers this, but my own hunch is that drivers are good at ride quality based not on training but on how sensitive they are as people. A sensitive driver will constantly make unconscious choices that produce a smoother ride for her, regardless of whether she’s just driving her own car or driving a bus. A person who’s just not sensitive to quality of ride is unlikely to be made more sensitive by the kind of training that bus drivers get.
But I’d be interested in other perspectives, especially from bus drivers and people who know them.
Mundane Things That Matter: Abolish US$1 Bills!
If the Obama administration wanted to strike a dramatic blow for public transit, one that would immediate speed up transit journeys all across America, they would abolish the $1 bill, and get everyone used to the $1 coin.
Travelling in the US last month, I had several opportunities to feed dollar bills into fareboxes. Even if you have perfectly flattened your dollar bill, and folded out all its corners, the process takes at least three seconds per bill, and often closer to five, during which a bus or streetcar with a 100+ passengers goes nowhere.
Why Isn’t Through-Routing More Common?
A reader asks:
[Alon Levy’s] post on The Transport Politic about through-routing commuter rail in New York brought up a question I’ve had for several years regarding transit systems. Why isn’t through-routing more common? This applies to rail, BRT, regular bus, etc. It seems that through-routing all or most of a city’s lines via a central transit center provides all the benefits of the “hub-and-spoke” model but also eliminates the need for transfers for a significant minority of people. Is there a downside or cost that isn’t apparent at first?
Legibility as Marketing: The “To-Via” Question
From Portland’s newly rebuilt transit mall, here’s a great example of the idea that clear information is the best marketing.
Every transit line goes TO some endpoint VIA some street or intermediate destination. But which matters more, the TO or the VIA? Which should be emphasized in the naming of a route and the signage on buses and stops? Both, if you can do it succinctly. But if you have to choose, think about where on the route you are and what information is most likely to be useful there. Continue Reading →