Human Transit

This blog is a resource, not just a source of New Exciting or Enraging Stuff.  Each year I review the most-read pages from the previous year, and am always relieved to find old posts, which were written to last, still doing well.  This year, three of the top ten are from 2010-11, and a 2009 post is #13.  (Two of those posts later became parts of my book.)  Here’s the list:

1. The Dangers of Elite Projection (July 2017).  This is one of my most useful posts ever, about a basic mistake that’s everywhere in city planning.  It’s an example of my attempt to talk very patiently and inclusively about a difficult topic that makes people very emotional. (Also #1 last year).
2. The Problem of School Transportation (August 2017).  Why don’t transit agencies serve schools in just the way they need?  Here’s the answer.  (Surprisingly viral.  Not on the list last year, but then it was written late in the year.)
3. Basics: Walking Distance to Transit.  (2010)  An explainer.  (#4 last year.)
4. Basics: The Spacing of Stops and Stations.  (2010).  This turned into Chapter 4 of my book.  (#5 last year)
5. That Photo That Explains Almost Everything (2011).  You’ve seen the photo.  I notice a few things in it beyond its first impression.  (#6 last year)
6. Streetcars vs Light Rail … Is there a Difference.  (2010).  Not linking to this one because  it’s dated and I need to rewrite it, which I will do soon.  (Not on the list last year.)
7. Does Elon Musk Understand Urban Geometry? (2016)  My first effort at laying out what’s wrong with Elon Musk’s attempts to make cars go faster through cities, and to provide “service to your door.”  Written several months before I got Musk’s attention.  (Down from #2 last year, which I hope means that my interaction with Musk is receding as a topic.}
8. Microtransit: What I Think We Know.  (February 2018).  The summary of my “microtransit week” series of posts, which lays out my concerns about the over-hyping of this supposedly new idea.
9. Do We Need a New Theory and Name for Bike Lanes?  (August 2018)  A brainstorm that happened on a bus.  (Surprisingly high for a post written so late in the year.)
10. Apps Are Not Transforming the Urban Transport Business.  (February 2018)  The urban passenger transport business is just not very profitable, and never has been.  Apps, both for ride-hailing (Uber etc.) and microtransit, seem to improve customer experience without improving efficiency.

And a few important ones that are just outside the top ten:

• 11.  Dublin: A New Map of Where You Can Go, and How.  (August 2018).  The link is dead, but this is still a good explanation of isochrone mapping, a surprisingly high rank for a piece written in August, in the midst of the Dublin network redesign phase 2 outreach.  Again, surprisingly high for a piece written so late in the year.
• 12.  Is Microtransit a Sensible Transit Investment?  (February 2018). Part of “microtransit week,” see #8 above.
• 13.  Streetcars: An Inconvenient Truth. (2009) My first controversial post, still starting arguments eight years later.  (#9 last year)
• 14.  Explainer: The Transit Ridership Recipe (2015).  Perhaps my single most essential explainer, but it’s now been updated and improved as this page.   (#11 last year)
• 15.  Why Your Bus Network May Never Improve (August 2018).  Understanding the political challenge of bus network redesign.

A very sensible selection, readers, by you and the publications that linked here!  Honored to have such a thoughtful audiencc.

Happy New Year.

Below is our firm’s self-consciously cheesy holiday card, and below that my mellow personal one.  (If you didn’t get one, it’s probably because I don’t have your email address, which you can rectify by hitting the little envelope symbol on the bar above.)

Plus, on the personal blog, there’s a cool parable about squirrels.

Happy holidays to all.  We’ll be quiet here until January.

Elon Musk just gave the media a tour of his 1.5 mile prototype tunnel under Los Angeles, which he spent US$10m to build.  Why are Elon Musk’s tunnels so cheap?  Because they’re tiny.

As media photos of the event will show you, the tunnel is just slightly wider than a car.  That means that if you used it for a train, it might have room for one seat per row. I suppose you could fit two if there was no way to move through the train while it was between stations, but that’s almost unimaginable once you add a required emergency exit plan.

So despite Musk’s occasional noises about using his tunnels for public transit, this thing is for moving cars, which means it is for moving trivially tiny numbers of people.

As we’ve discussed before, a car-based tunnel also requires elevators.  You zip your car into a parking space and it descends to the tunnel.  Cool, but have they run the numbers on how many of these they would need, assuming it takes, say, a minute to do a full cycle of the elevator?  How much real estate would it require to get cars into the subway at a rate that even maximizes the tiny capacity of the subway?

Anyway, those are some questions to ask today.

And yes, it would be great if this dalliance produces genuine improvements in tunnel technologies useful for building actual train-sized tunnels that can move the number of people who need to move.  But Musk’s prairie-dog burrows are mostly hype, confusion, and elite projection.  While delivering almost nothing useful, they are confusing elite opinion about whether we still need to build mass transit, which we do.  Is any marginal benefit worth the resulting delay in getting the infrastructure we really need?

Two lessons to remember: 

• If it doesn’t scale, it doesn’t matter.  The media are easily excited by demonstration projects, but this idea doesn’t scale.  You could build lots of tunnels, and they would each move so few people that they wouldn’t make a dent in a city’s transport needs.
• If it doesn’t scale, it’s for the rich.  Or to put it another way:  Inefficiency is inequality.  Anything that spends a lot of money to serve small numbers of people raises the question “why are those people so important, and what about everyone else?”

Does this remind you of other transport fantasies, such as replacing transit with “service to your door”?  These rules about scalability are pretty good tests to bring to all the fun new inventions, including whatever’s coming next.

I’m recently returned from almost a month in Australia and New Zealand — mostly doing speaking events in Sydney, Melbourne, and Auckland — and am way behind on blogging.  This happens now and then, which is why you should also follow me on Twitter (@humantransit).  When there’s no time to write paragraphs, I still write tweets.

Some important things:

• Holiday gift guide!  I’ve reviewed the great new books by Jeff Speck and Christof Spieler, and also suggest, as a stocking stuffer, an Aaron Naparstek collection of traffic haiku.
• San Francisco and Minneapolis have eliminated parking minimums for new development.  This is a colossal step that no other big US (or Australia/NZ) city has taken.
• Our firm is starting into bus network studies (not necessarily redesigns) in Salt Lake City (UTA) and Cleveland (GCRTA).
• Auckland New Network ridership is up massively gaining 7% year over year and much more than that on the North Shore where routes were restructured to connect with a rail-like frequent busway service.
• I am now a character in a play, written in Shakespearean iambic pentameter, which deals with what I hope is not the only thing I will be remembered for.  It received a staged reading in Montreal last week.  A sample:

It’s fun, and the writer, who goes by Joe Bagel but may have several identities, certainly knows his Shakespeare, and his Plato, and his hip-hop.  More impressively, he cast himself as Musk, who is not, in the end, the hero.

To complement my last two serious book reviews (both of which make great gifts) here’s a very lightweight one.

Guy in SUV
throws gum wrapper out window—
I throw it back in.

Aaron Naparstek’s Honku is 106 fun haiku poems about cars and traffic.  It’s 15 years old and still in print.   It fits in a stocking.

Aaron Naparstek, Honku: The Zen Antidote to Road Rage.  Penguin Random House, 2003.  

Some people will read a book from beginning to end, but many are browsers, nibbling here and there.  Some people want to be told want to do, while fewer want to plumb the depths of why.  So it’s not surprising that we’re seeing more list-books, lists of things to do with only brief explanations of each.  Most are terrible.

The great list-books are by people who have written the long book first.  You can trust Michael Pollan’s fun book Food Rules — a set of memorable rules about how to recognize good food, each explained in a page — because it’s a summary of his longer book on the topic, In Defense of Food.  Likewise, you can trust Jeff Speck’s Walkable City Rules because it’s a summary of Walkable City, one of the most important books in modern urbanism.

Speck calls his new book “an effort to weaponize Walkable City for deployment in the field.”  War metaphors are appropriate, especially in the US, where so many pedestrians die on the roads, and so many more are forced to drive because it’s too scary to walk.

These rules are practical interventions in the decisions that local governments make every day.  As with transit, great walkability is not the result of “pedestrian planning.”  It arises mostly from other decisions that seem to be about other things: zoning, development review, street design, housing policy, parking policy, and even law enforcement.

Imagine Speck striding through your City Hall.  (He is tall, but with a disarmingly soft voice.)  He leans into each meeting, listens for a minute, and then inserts the one idea that those people, working on that exact issue, need to hear.  That’s what the book feels like.

Of course, you want me to comment on his treatment of transit, but full disclosure: I had a small role in this part of the book, including commenting on a draft.  Two sections are based partly on my work and we exchanged ideas about some of the rest.  So while this is definitely his book, written from the standpoint of an urban designer, it might seem self-promoting to single this part out for praise.  Having said that, it says important things and it says them well, in a language that policymakers will understand.

Speck and I disagree on a tiny number of points [1], but overall, this book brilliantly describes not just the challenge of being a pedestrian and how to make it better, but also exactly how to shift each decision to achieve that, in every room of City Hall, and beyond.

Jeff Speck. Walkable City Rules  Island Press, 2018.

[1] I defend countdown clocks at signals, while Speck wants to remove them.  And while he and I will never perfectly agree on how to talk about streetcars, his streetcar chapter is the most candid I’ve ever seen from someone in the urban design profession.

While I was in Sydney last week I didn’t have a public event, but I did do this podcast, interviewed by Committee for Sydney’s Eamon Waterford.  Not the best sound quality, but it might be interesting.  It’s here.

If you’ve just landed from my piece on “microtransit” at the Atlantic, welcome!  Here are a few key things that will help you understand where that piece was coming from:

• Microtransit week.  I spent a week thinking out loud about this issue, to arrive at my current position.  Here’s the wrap-up article.
• What’s the single biggest conceptual mistake in urban transportation?  I call it elite projection.
• What does high ridership transit look like?

And for the big picture of what I’m about, try the introduction to my book!