Human Transit

Words I Deleted Today

Posted on August 13, 2009 in Language

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.

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A Silver Medal for the Silver Line?

Posted on August 11, 2009 in General

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:

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Hard Questions: Should We Ride Mediocre Transit?

Posted on August 9, 2009 in Philosophy

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?

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The US$1 Bill Abolition Campaign Begins with You!

Posted on August 6, 2009 in General

On my post about the transit speed benefits of abolishing the US$1 bill, many commenters re-emphasised that $1 coins do exist. The US Mint wants to promote them, but that they are failing to catch on with the public. Cashiers encounter resistance when they give them out in change. The resulting back and forth with the customer takes far more time than it’s worth, so even a cashier with revolutionary impulses learns it’s just easier to give out dollar bills.

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.)

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Ride Quality: The Driver’s Role

Posted on August 4, 2009 in Philosophy, Ride Quality, Technophilia

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!

Posted on August 1, 2009 in General

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.

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Why Isn’t Through-Routing More Common?

Posted on July 31, 2009 in Basics, Connections, Transfers, New York City, San Francisco, Urban Structure

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?

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Legibility as Marketing: The “To-Via” Question

Posted on July 30, 2009 in Legibility, Portland, San Francisco

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 →

Symbolic Logic for Transit Advocates: A Short but Essential Course

Posted on July 29, 2009 in Basics, Language, Monorail, Philosophy, Portland, Seattle, Streetcars (Trams)

Part of our job as informed citizens and voters is to sift through the political claims that we hear and arrive at our own sense of what’s true. I’ve been listening to such claims in the transit business, and sometimes making them, for almost 30 years now. It occurs to me that one of the most important tools for evaluating these claims is something you probably learned in high school math and forgot. (Yes, some of you remembered, but I’m really talking to the ones who forgot. To those of you who just don’t like math, don’t worry if you don’t follow this next bit; just skim ahead to the example. This IS really important.)

Here it is.

Consider a statement of the form “If A is true, then B is true,” [A –> B]

IF that statement is true, then:

The Converse, [B –> A] is not necessarily true.
The Inverse [NOT A –> NOT B] is not necessarily true.
The Contrapositive [NOT B –> NOT A] IS true.

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Long-term Transit Plans: Asking the Real Questions

Posted on July 27, 2009 in Canberra, Public Outreach, Strategic Transit Planning

For several years I worked on a Strategic Public Transport Network Plan for Australia’s national capital, Canberra, so I’m happy to report that the plan has now been released for public comment.
The concise Executive Summary pulls together a number of key ideas about long-term transit planning that I’ve found useful in many cities, so even if you don’t know or care about Canberra you might find it interesting.

The most important single idea in the plan (as in much of my long-term planning work) is the Frequent Network, which consists of services that will run every 15 minutes or better all day, every day of the week. This is the level of service that can motivate people to choose a transit-dependent lifestyle, because it assures you of the ability to get around without building your life around schedules. The proposed Frequent Network includes Rapid service (red lines in this image, stopping at “stations” every 1 km or so, averaging 40 km/hour) and Local service (orange, stopping every 200-400m, averaging 20 km/hour). (As always, click image to enlarge.)

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