Human Transit

Toronto’s King and Queen Streets — where packed streetcars stop and wait behind one left-turning driver or someone taking forever to parallel-park — is one of North America’s greatest monuments to the natural superiority of motorists over everyone else.

100+ people’s lives inadvertently held hostage by the lady in the grey car at far left. Photo: GTD Aquitaine at Wikimedia Commons

These streetcars are all Toronto has in the way of east-west transit through the very core of downtown, yet their operations are routinely strangled by quite small numbers of cars, running as slow as 6 km/hr (4 mi/hr) (!) during the peak in the most critical section. This for a service that carries the overwhelming majority of the people moving down the street.

We’re talking about the middle of downtown Toronto, the city’s densest and fastest densifying area.  For such a place to function, transit just as to succeed.

We’re clear on how dense downtown Toronto is, right?  The King streetcar connects this area to very dense residential areas to the east and west.

Since this is Canada, you can be sure these are legacy streetcar lines.  Almost nobody outside the US intentionally builds streetcars in mixed traffic, but many cities have inherited them.  Long ago, they were reliable because there wasn’t much traffic.  But things got worse in the usual boiling-frog manner, and now here we are.

Now, the city is attempting the first step to improve things, by banning through traffic on King Street, one of the two key arteries.  Oliver Moore has the story, which sounds like almost every story about a city trying to pry a little space away from the motorist so that anyone else can move.  In few places, though, are the motorist’s claims to dominion so indefensible.

The key change will be that cars will be forced right at every intersection, and left turns will be banned.  There are still compromises: traffic is still in the streetcar’s lane, and refuges for passengers to board and alight will be marked only with paint.

Yet the plan will still be controversial at Council, with some Councilors arguing that they have a geometrically incoherent “right” or “need” to drive cars anywhere in the city.  This plan is a critical step, and deserves enthusiastic support.

By Scudder Wagg.  (Scudder is our firm’s new East Coast lead, based in Richmond, Virginia.)

One of the more exciting developments in the Greater Toronto Area is the conversion of historically infrequent commuter rail lines into all-day frequent services, so that you can travel, and make connections, at all times of day. This is creating new rewards for suburban cities who develop more frequent local bus networks. When local bus trips connect to a regional train with minimal waiting, they become useful for vastly more destinations and therefore will attract more riders.

Burlington Waterfront. Photo: László Varga

We are now getting started working with the City of Burlington, in the western suburbs of Toronto, to help them rethink their transit system. The city has been shifting its focus in recent years from a suburban growth pattern to a city that wants to grow up instead of out. Combined with the region’s plans to improve the commuter rail line serving the city to 15-minute service all day, there is a fertile opportunity to rethink the role transit can play in Burlington.

As part of the Greater Toronto-Hamilton Area, Burlington is growing fast but the style of that growth is shifting. For many years, the city sprawled northward from Lake Ontario in a typical suburban pattern. But in 2005, the provincial government instituted a greenbelt, putting a limit on the sprawl. Having hit the greenbelt limit, Burlington has responded by intentionally deciding to grow more intensely.

With so much sprawling growth over the last twenty years, the transit system has been stretched to try to cover as much of the newly developed area as possible. This has shifted the transit system toward a higher coverage focus. The city’s transit system has only a few routes with anything approaching high frequency.

But the city has a strong two-kilometer grid built around the old concession roads that could form the backbone of a grid transit network, although the spacing of parallel grid streets is too far for this to be the only service.

The City adopted a new strategic plan in April 2016 that calls for shifting more trips to walking, biking and transit. They are following this up with a new Official Plan, currently in the draft form, that calls for higher density development in key areas. The draft Official Plan also promotes expanded and improved transit system with a frequent transit network to connect key areas.

We are helping to translate these visions and goals into a concrete network that can be implemented by 2019. That network can then be expanded and improved over time as the city adds more hubs of density and more walkable areas. We look forward to lots of great conversations about transit in this fast-changing and growing city over the next nine months.

Jane McGonigal — the noted game designer and futurist — has a TEDx video about imagining the future.  I’ll be speaking at this topic at CNU on May 4, so having loved her book on gaming, Reality is Broken, I was curious about her take.

You can watch it here, or below, but I also summarize it below.

McGonigal’s project here is to undermine that pervasive feeling that we are unable to shape the future.  “The future is dark,” she says, not in the sense of bad but in the sense of hard to see into.  It is precisely our ignorance of the future that gives us the space to imagine it, and thus to change it.

She tells the story of a futurism class she teaches at Stanford, where she asks students to name things that they are absolutely sure will be true in ten years.  Then, she takes this list to researchers and asks how sure they are of those things.  Sure enough, there are cases where something that people thought was permanent is in fact changing.

I am totally with McGonigal on the urgency of helping people imagine a more diverse range of futures, but we must also notice how easily this message gets out of control, and how much of the craziness — and destructiveness — of the tech industry arises from this belief in the radically open future.

If I were in her futurism class I could easily name things that will absolutely be true 10 years from now.

• The circumference of a circle divided by the diameter of the circle will still be a little over three.
• Adult elephants still will not fit into wine-glasses.
• There will still be a mathematical limit to how many vehicles — each filling the width of a traffic lane — can fit down a single lane in a state of free flow.
• In the absence of barriers to walking, the density of population will still determine the number of people within a fixed, short walking distance of any point.  That in turn determine the potential market size for fixed transit, which will govern the level of transit intensity and infrastructure that will pencil out in ridership terms.
• Carrying fewer people in more vehicles will consume more urban space, compared to carrying more people in fewer vehicles.  This mismatch between demand for road space and its supply will manifest as either traffic congestion or a need to widen roads, removing scarce urban land from other uses.

Those are geometric facts.  Within the scale of space and time in which humans live, no invention can change these things.

McGonigal’s rhetoric echoes that of the corporate motivation industry, with its endless implication that nothing is impossible.  But as with heated political rhetoric, the danger is always that some people take this stuff literally, and literally, it’s nonsense.  The facts about the future I listed above are extremely useful, despite not being ridiculous.  They are useful because they keep us from imagining, and spending billions on, truly impossible things.

If we know one thing from watching the tech industry, it’s that the wide-open “anything can happen” futurism that McGonigal praises can be its own bubble, with its own blinders.  Much good has happened from Silicon Valley’s willingness to throw venture capital at the occasional wild idea — “moonshots,” they’re called in the biz — but a lot of VC also goes to investing in mathematically impossible things — like moving people from big transit vehicles into small ones without taking up more space — and into attacking folks like me who try to point that out.

In this new era of “disruption,’ urban transportation suffers as much from delusional imagination as from lack of imagination.  Only when we allow boring math to constrain our imaginings — and when venture capital gets smarter at recognizing those constraints — can we start to have reality-based conversations about how to liberate people to move in our cities.

Not everything is possible, and it’s a good thing, too.

We’re now at the end of a 1.5-year study to help Silicon Valley’s local transit agency, VTA, rethink its bus network.   I explained the thinking, and public conversation, that led to the draft final plan in this comprehensive post, and also showed how it compares to the existing one.  The final plan looks pretty much like the draft one with a few additions and adjustments.

Here’s the new network.  Download a sharper copy here.

The plan is expected to be implemented when the BART extension into the area opens next year.

You can explore the plan in more detail here, including maps, route-level info, and the background documents in the Board report.

We’re very proud of this work, and of all the people — in the transit agency, other local governments, and the broader community — who worked with us design and refine it.  With this plan, 150,000 more people will have access to all-day high-frequency service, as will 160,000 more jobs.  A huge expansion in weekend service is planned.  A new rapid bus line is added.  (Again, more on the details here.)

Most importantly, more people can get to more places sooner, so that they can do more things and have better lives.  And that’s what we’re all about.

Houston’s West Loop Freeway. How many of these lanes were in the national interest?

We all need to practice reading and refuting arguments of the form: “Central government should focus on big national issues, like highways, instead of local needs, like transit.”  It’s become one of the most common ways for people to dress up their preference for roads over transit as an expression of a consistent policy.

Here’s how it sounds:

For the most part, transit systems are local matters. Using federal taxes to collect money from the whole country and then send it back to each local transit system is a terribly inefficient way to raise money for transit and is also inherently unfair as different locales receive back either more or less than they paid in. The only reason to rely on federal funding for part of the cost of local transit systems is that it helps local politicians by keeping their local taxes and transit fares lower.

This common practice of using federal funds for local projects in order to hide the true cost should be stopped. The federal government should pay for the things that are truly national in scope (like the interstate highway system). This type of federal spending for local needs encourages too much government spending by making higher costs easier to sell to voters. The federal government should stop being used as an enabler to higher local government spending.

That’s University of Georgia economics professor Jeffrey Dorfman, in Forbes yesterday.

Dorfman seems to invoke the principle of devolution — the idea that government actions should be planned and funded at the lowest level of government that can deal with the issue within its boundaries.  It’s often stereotyped as a conservative idea in the US, but it shouldn’t be. In the UK, for example, it’s mostly the leftist cities who are rebelling against over-centralization of planning power in Westminster.    The same idea is gaining force in US urban policy, as cities chafe under rule by central governments that care only about suburbs and rural areas.  Everyone prefers to deal with more local governments that are easier for a voter to influence, so this is a space of potential left-right agreement that deserves more discussion.

But the notion that highways are national while transit is local? This makes sense if you’re a motorist, but here’s what happens when you press on it:

Motorist tribalism dressed up as economics. Why are urban freeways more “national” than transit? @DorfmanJeffrey https://t.co/f2PvtXAKTH

— Jarrett Walker (@humantransit) April 3, 2017

@humantransit Because it is possible to drive on the interstate from state to state (as truckers and some drivers do), while subways are local. Period.

— Jeffrey Dorfman (@DorfmanJeffrey) April 3, 2017

If the test for Federal funding is that a facility is used for interstate travel, fine, but this suggests a coherent interstate network of roads and rails scaled for the interstate demand only.  Then, all additional capacity and upgrades needed for travel within a state would be state and local costs.  What would this mean?

• The Federal government would invest to create a robust interstate road network sized to interstate needs only.  In urban areas, the Federal government would fund only as many lanes as are justified by cars and trucks originating outside the state.  That means two lanes at most, and it means that many Federally funded highways would have no Federal role at all.
• The Federal role in airports and maritime transportation would be viewed the same way.
• The Federal government would also fund interstate rail (passenger and freight) to the degree that this is a better investment than roads for serving interstate needs.  Interstate high speed rail improvements would be squarely Federal.
• Finally, many US metro areas span state lines, so a large part of the costs of urban transit in those cities would be Federal, as it would count as interstate transportation.

Nobody would propose this policy, but only for the boring reason that it’s biased toward multi-state metro areas: The Northeast wins big while California and Texas lose.  But if you could control for that, this would be a coherent principle of devolution such as Dorfman seems to be advocating.

But our car-first friends never make that argument.  Instead, they just handwave about how of course highways are naturally national while those other things are local.  In fact, the distinction between interstate and intrastate doesn’t line up at all with distinctions among road, rail, maritime and aviation modes — either passenger or freight.

This is why you should see through these familiar arguments, and recognize them instead as sheer claims to hegemony: “We road people are superior, so of course money should be spent on us — including giving road-based services a leg up in competition with other modes.”

The former Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott liked to make the same argument:

“We have no history of funding urban rail and I think it’s important that we stick to our knitting,” the Federal Opposition Leader declared. “And the Commonwealth’s knitting when it comes to funding infrastructure is roads.”

In his autobiography, Abbott wrote about how driving a car is a quintessential Australian experience, a key to the national character.  He is also known for an extreme social and cultural conservatism that is toxic in inner cities.  So even among those who agreed with him, Abbott’s comments were widely recognized as an expression of a cultural agenda, not an economic one. While nodding at devolution, he was really saying that road people like him are superior to those urban transit people, none of whom will ever vote for him anyway.(1)

When you see arguments like Dorfman’s, that, I’d suggest, is what you should hear.  Devolution itself is a powerful idea, but we’ll never have a clear conversation about it if it’s only used to make claims of superiority.

(1) Abbott was deposed in 2015 by Malcolm Turnbull, an urban conservative from a wealthy part of Sydney.  Turnbull dumped Abbott’s roads-first view, stressing instead that Federal transport investments would be multimodal.  Despite its powerful rural interests and cultural identity, Australia has a strong bipartisan consensus that its national economy depends on the functioning of its cities.