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Miami: The Better Bus Network Is Here!

Posted on November 9, 2023 in General, Miami, Network Redesign

 

A slice of Miami-Dade’s Better Bus Network. See the link below for the full map.

On November 13, the greater Miami area will see the biggest transformation in where you can go on public transit since Metrorail opened almost 40 years ago.  Not a new rail line, but a huge redesign of the bus network that will make it useful to more people for more trips, all over the County.  A complete map of the new network is here.

Miami-Dade County’s buses run in patterns that have often been the same for decades, even as the county has grown and many new destinations have appeared.  It’s hard to change bus service, because even the most inefficient bus route has people who depend on it and will object to any changes.  So, to redesign a bus network, we have to show big benefits that make the change worth the trouble, and that’s what this redesign does.

The plan is the result of a planning project that begin in 2019.  In an unusual partnership, Transit Alliance Miami funded much of the work and hired us (Jarrett Walker + Associates) to lead the planning process in partnership with the County. We led a public conversation around key trade-offs, by sharing contrasting network design concepts that showed the consequences of different possible goals.  Based on the response to that process, we developed a Draft Plan in early 2020.  We were then rudely interrupted by Covid-19.

Since 2020, the County has worked to finish the plan and as published a revised plan, with 30% more service, in 2021. Unfortunately, the transit industry was hit by the labor shortages of the post-Covid era, and the plan had to be reworked to manage with a smaller workforce than previously imagined. Even with the changes, the final plan now being implemented still delivers great results for huge swaths of the county, its residents, workers, and visitors.

With the new design, a frequent grid will cover large parts of the county with huge benefits. The simplest measure of that improvement is how many people or jobs are near service. The chart below shows the change in residents or jobs near service by the frequency of service at midday on weekdays. The number of residents who live near frequent transit will increase from 380,000 (14 of the County’s residents%) to 814,000 (30%) during weekday service. The new network will bring frequent service near almost 60% of households without cars; that’s 20,000 additional households without cars near more frequent service. And jobs near frequent service will increase from 29% to 43% on weekdays.

 

A key measure of a network’s usefulness is the access it provides, or how much stuff you can reach in a reasonable travel time. The animated map below shows an example of this change from Little Haiti.

In pink is the area you can reach in the Existing Network in 45 minutes. In blue is the area you can reach with the Better Bus Network. The blue area is larger, but more importantly it has a lot more stuff in it: 30% more jobs and 60% more residents. So if you lived near this place, you would effectively be 30% more free. And if you owned a business here, you’d now have access to 60% more customers, or 60% more workers.

We can measure this exact thing over and over again across the whole county and when we summarize the results we find that the average resident will be able to get to 28% more jobs (or other useful destinations) in 45 minutes. The benefit is even greater for lower-income residents and people of color.  That means more people, when they look up a trip they might make, will find that the travel time is reasonable.  For more on why we use this measure, see here.

The other big improvement in this new network is a major increase in frequency of service on weekends. Across the country, we’ve worked on network plans that have increased service on evenings and weekends and they’ve often shown huge ridership gains. People value flexibility and spontaneity. Everyone wants the ability to get home outside of the traditional 8-to-5 workday. Critically, though, people working in retail or restaurant jobs often need to work on weekends. A route that runs infrequently on the weekends is missing the peak time for people in these industries, and there are many, many people in these industries in Miami-Dade.

Implementing Big Change

Our team has been working closely with Miami-Dade staff to assist with a range of implementation needs. How does a huge change like this happen overnight? Months, sometimes years, of planning leads up to a big day like this.  These efforts included:

  • Work by staff across County government to help people find out about the change, and can learn about it easily.
  • Briefings of elected officials including partners in the city governments.
  • An analysis of compliance with Title VI, the US Civil Rights law that ensures racial equity in transit planning.
  •  Siting of new bus stops and removing old stops.
  • Writing new schedules for customers and bus operators.
  • A big effort by operations and safety teams working on testing turns, reviewing stop locations, working with operators to learn new routes, and much more.
  • Finally, an infusion of temporary staff near the change date, to be out on the street helping people find their way.

It takes an enormous team effort and County staff have worked hard for a long-time to make this day happen. Transit Alliance has continued to partner with the county to help with communicating the network changes to the public and we’ve been please to assist in that process. Our team has contributed in a few key ways:

  • A new system map with routes color-coded by frequency. These maps will start showing up in shelters around the county soon.
  • An interactive trip comparison tool to help folks find out how they can make their trips on the new network.
  • Developing bus stop signage to inform riders at each stop about which routes are changing.

We’re excited to see how people respond to this new network and we hope it helps set the stage for many transit improvements to come as the County implements its long-term SMART plan.

Basics: Why Aren’t the Buses Timed to Meet the Trains?

Posted on October 30, 2023 in Basics, Connections and Transfers, Connections, Transfers, Network Redesign, Rail Transit

Short answer:  Because the buses are timed to meet each other, and this is harder than it looks.

Long answer:  If you’ve used public transit in an area that has infrequent trains, including the suburbs of many cities, you’ve probably wondered why the bus and train schedules aren’t coordinated.  Why didn’t they write the bus schedule so that the bus would meet the train?

First of all, let’s gently note the bias in the question.  Why didn’t you ask why the train wasn’t scheduled to meet the bus?  We assume that because trains are bigger, faster, and more rigid, they are superior and buses are subordinate. You’ll even hear some bus routes described as “feeders”, implying that they have no purpose but to bring customers to the dominant mode.

But it’s rare for an efficient bus route to have no other purpose than feeding the train. Public transit thrives on the diversity of purposes that the same vehicle trip can serve.  At a busy rush hour time, you may encounter a true feeder bus that’s timed to the train and will even wait if the train is late.  But most bus services carry many people locally in their area, on trips that don’t involve the train connection.  For these networks to work, they have to connect well with themselves, and this is harder than it looks.

We’re talking here about infrequent bus routes (generally every 30 minutes or worse) and infrequent trains.  When frequency is high, no special effort is needed to make the connection work.

Pulse scheduling. Buses of many lines are coordinated so that buses meet at the same time each hour, allowing fast transfers despite low frequency.

Infrequent transit networks have a huge problem.  There’s not just a long wait for the initial bus or train.  There’s also a long wait for any connection you may need to make to reach your destination.   We often combat this problem with pulse scheduling.  At key hubs, we schedule the buses to all meet at the same time each hour or half hour, so that people can make connections quickly even though frequencies are low.  We design the whole network around those connections, because they are so important to making the network useful.

That means that the whole schedule has to have a regular repeating pattern.  As much as possible we want this pattern to repeat every hour, so that it’s easy to remember.  We even design route lengths to cycle well in this amount of time, or multiples of it.

If the train schedule has a similar pattern, we will certainly look at it and try to match our pattern to it.  But the timing of a pulse determines the schedules of all the routes serving that point.  Sometimes we have lattices of interacting pulses at several points, which can make an entire network interdependent.  You can’t change any of these schedules without changing all of them, or you lose the fast connections between infrequent bus routes that makes suburban networks usable.

Sometimes, an infrequent trunk train service will also present a repeating hourly cycle in its schedule, and if so, we’ll look at that and try to coordinate with it.  But at most this will be possible at a couple of stations where the timing works well, because of the way the local bus schedules are all connected.

More commonly, especially in North America, we face an irregular regional rail or “commuter rail” schedule, where there may be a regular midday pattern but there’s often no pattern at other times.  The pattern may often shift during the day for various reasons that make sense for the train operation.  All this is toxic to timing with the local bus network.  Local bus networks need that repeating hourly pattern to be efficient and legible.  For example, if at 1 PM the train pattern suddenly moves five minutes earlier, the bus network can’t adapt to that without opening up a gap in its schedules that will affect lots of other people.

Usually, the regional rail network and the local bus network are part of different transit authorities, which makes this an even bigger challenge.  A particular problem in multi-authority region is that different authorities may have different schedule change dates, sometimes baked into their labor agreements, and this prevents them from all changing together at the same time.  But the core problem isn’t just institutional.  Merging the authorities won’t solve it. No efficient bus system – working with sparse resources and therefore offering infrequent service – can make timed connections with a train schedule at every station, and especially not if the train schedule is irregular.  It’s just not mathematically possible.

The best possible outcomes happen when the rail and bus authorities have a relationship that recognizes their interdependence rather than one based on a supposed hierarchy.  That means that the rail authority recognizes that the local bus authorities can only connect with a repeating hourly schedule pattern, and tries to provide one.  It also means that rail schedule changes are made with plenty of warning so that there’s time for bus authorities to adapt.

With the decline of rush-hour commuting due to increased working from home, transit demand is even more all-directions and all-the-time.  It no longer makes sense to just assume that one trip – say, the commute to the big city – is superior to another, like the local trip to a grocery store or retail job.  All possible trips matter, and we get the best transit network when authorities coordinate to provide the best possible connections for all of them.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

New York: A New Bus Network for Eastern Long Island

Posted on October 28, 2023 in General

Great South Bay Bridge near Babylon, NY,  Photo: Adobe Stock

by Scudder Wagg

Suffolk County is a vast and variegated place covering the eastern two-thirds of Long Island, New York. It includes a range of historic towns like Babylon, Huntington, and Port Jefferson, many of which grew up around the Long Island Rail Road. The western two-thirds of the county is largely developed in an car-oriented suburban pattern.  That area includes about 90% of the county’s 1.5 million people and 520,000 jobs. The eastern third of the county is much more rural and includes the famous Hamptons, summertime retreat for many elite New Yorkers, the well-known Montauk Lighthouse, and protected Pine Barrens Forest.

On Sunday, October 29, Suffolk County Transit will implement a new bus network that we’ve worked with them to design. The redesign process began in mid-2020 with our team working with County staff to analyze the existing system. One key issue that arose in our initial work was the extent of reliability problems across the system due to outdated speed and travel time assumptions. The need to correct for slower speeds, sparked a conversation about investment more in transit to achieve better outcomes in many ways.

In early 2021, we worked with staff, stakeholders and the public in a conversation sparked by our Choices and Concepts Report. This report focused on key trade-offs, like ridership versus coverage, and showed two contrasting concepts for how to redesign the bus network, and assumed 15% more service to account for slower speeds. Based on feedback from the public, stakeholders, and staff, we developed a Draft Plan that prioritized higher ridership, and resulted in some loss of coverage. A key feature of the Draft Plan was much more consistent spans of service, with more evening and weekend service across most key corridors in the county.

While overall response to the Draft Plan was very positive, there were some specific concerns about coverage loss on some roads and the Final Plan was tweaked to add service back to a few areas. To address these coverage needs, and maintain the improved frequency and span , the County has made a commitment to increase overall service levels by nearly 30%, joining agencies like Tri-Met in Portland, Santa Cruz Metro, and Dallas’s DART in expanding service in the post-Covid transit recovery period.

While the increased service is a major boon, it is not enough to create a network of every 15-minute service in the vast areas of moderate density across western Suffolk County. A major focus of the plan, therefore, is to build a series of timed connection points, or pulses, in strategic locations across the county, like Amityville, Central Islip, Patchogue, and Riverhead. You can see those location on the network maps below as they are marked with a clock icon.

You can compare the old and new networks at this cool data viewer that we developed.  Below are static maps of the existing network followed by the new network.  Note the frequencies in the legend, without which these maps make no sense.

Old Network. Line colors indicate frequency. (See legend.)

New network. Line colors indicate frequency (see legend).

 

 

With more frequent service on many corridors, and timed connections, the average resident will be able to get to 50% more jobs in 60 minutes and low-income residents see an even bigger gain.

In addition to developing the network plan, we’ve been thrilled to provide continuing support to County staff as they’ve worked to implement this new network. We’ve helped to develop

  • New schedules and printed timetables with more reliable travel times and clearer maps and information.
  • An updated detailed network map for use at information kiosks across the county.
  • A new schematic map (below) showing the overall structure of the network.

We’ve also provided a range of technical support and other materials to help County staff prepare to roll-out the new network and two of our staff will be on-site to help riders learn the new network in the first week.

So, thanks and congratulations to everyone at Suffolk County who worked hard to get this done. We hope that everyone who lives in, works in, or visits Suffolk enjoys the SCT New Network and we encourage locals to stay involved in advocating for more and better transit, as there are plenty of ripe opportunities to increase frequency, span, and coverage with more investment in transit in Suffolk.

Scudder Wagg is a Principal with Jarrett Walker + Associates and the head of our Arlington, Virginia office.

PS by Jarrett:  If you’re wondering why the buses aren’t scheduled to meet the Long Island Rail Road trains, there’s an explainer for that!

Portland: Good Outcomes from “BRT-Lite”

Posted on October 26, 2023 in Bus Rapid Transit, Frequent Networks, Portland

Photo: TriMet

Portland’s transit agency TriMet has some good news to report from its “light Bus Rapid Transit” project on Division St.  It’s especially good news because lots of North American cities have streets that look like Division, namely:

  • A segment of a few miles through the inner part of the city where the street is too narrow for bus lanes, but where redevelopment is driving up densities and thus travel demand.  This part of Division is increasingly lined with four story buildings — residential over retail — with historic small-lot single family homes behind them.
  • An outer segment in “inner ring suburbia” where the street is wide enough for bus lanes, and where the critical issue is the unsafe environment for pedestrians.

The Division FX project consisted of the following changes, probably in roughly declining order of importance.

  • Wider spacing of stops (up to 1/2 mile in some places) with no underlying local-stop service alongside it.
  • A 12-minute frequency, instead of the usual 15 for Frequent Service Network lines.
  • Signal priority at signals along the line.
  • Improvements to sidewalks and pedestrian crossings in the outer segment.
  • A short stretch of bus lane in the area that had room for one.
  • Articulated buses (60 feet long, with a hinge).
  • Nicer shelters with signage identifying the location and a realtime information display.
  • A special green paint scheme.

But it’s still in mixed traffic on the narrow and congested inner segment.  There was a lot of reason to doubt how much improvement could be achieved in that situation.

So I’m pretty impressed with the results:  Overall travel times are up to 20% shorter.  That’s 20% more access to opportunity for people traveling along the line.  And of course, this line is part of a frequent grid, which spreads these benefits over this whole side of the city.

Ridership is up dramatically as a result, almost 40% for the first year of operation (September 2022 – August 2023) compared to the year before.  Total transit system ridership grew about 8% over that time, so some of this is background growth due to ongoing pandemic recovery.  But still, even if the effect of these changes were only a 30% increase, that would be spectacular.

There are many, many streets like Division where this quality of service is needed and possible.  I hope we can aspire to a time when all frequent bus lines have at least this level of quality.

 

 

More Microtransit Marketing Confusion

Posted on October 21, 2023 in General

Just found this ad through APTA‘s members-only Knowledge Gateway, from Passio Technologies. Ignore the words. Look at the picture.

But that’s not a photo of microtransit.  That is a photo of an elite fixed route commuter bus called Leap that existed in San Francisco for a few months in 2016-17.  I wrote about that project here. You’ll recognize the bus from the video at that link.  I wonder what the folks at Passio were thinking.

Greensboro: A North Carolina City Imagines a “Car-Optional” Future

Posted on October 10, 2023 in General

Greensboro, North Carolina is a pleasant city of 300,000 with two big universities, located in the Piedmont Triad northeast of Charlotte.  The city has  already adopted a goal to be “car-optional” by 2045.  What kind of public transit would that goal require?  Working for the City (who runs the local transit service through the Greensboro Transit Agency), we at Jarrett Walker and Associates are seeking public input on two alternative conceptual transit networks.  Both conceptual networks have than twice as much service as today.

How would this giant increase in service be funded? In North Carolina, larger counties are allowed to ask the voters for a half-cent sales tax to fund the expansion of transit. Voters in Mecklenburg (Charlotte), Orange (Chapel Hill), Durham, and Wake (Raleigh) have endorsed transit sales taxes in the last 25 years. Our firm was part of the planning process that helped lead to the successful 2016 referendum in Wake County. Here in Guilford County, the potential funding would be split between Greensboro Transit Agency (GTA), High Point, Guilford County, and the regional agency: Piedmont Authority for Regional Transit (PART). The GoBORO Concepts show what could be done with the slices of funding for Greensboro and PART.

The Greensboro News & Record has an article summarizing these Concepts, and it particularly highlights the low level of transit service in Greensboro today.

We often frame transit conversations around a ridership-coverage trade-off, instead of starting with recommendations. That framework can be as relevant in this visionary plan with more resources, as it is in a budget-neutral redesign. We are asking what it means for transit to be an option to cars. Does it mean that:

  • Most people have a transit option that is very useful for reaching many places in a reasonable time? Or
  • Everyone has a transit option, but it may not be very useful for many people for reaching many places in a reasonable time?

Here’s the existing network.  Remember, the colors indicate frequency, as shown in the legend.  It’s all half-hourly and hourly routes, converging on a downtown transit center.

(Line 73 is a shuttle funded by the University of North Carolina. Route numbers starting with P are the regional transit agency, PART.)

 

Here’s the Ridership Concept. It has a lot of service focused on frequent corridors in the densest, busiest parts of Greensboro, though it also covers a slightly larger area.

The Coverage Concept focuses instead getting service close to more places, including industrial destinations in the far northeast of the city.   At this service level, we can still afford some very useful frequent service on a few corridors.

As always, these are two ends of a spectrum, and not an either-or choice.

If you’re used to seeing this tradeoff mapped using the low existing service budgets of agencies, as we did in Miami, Atlanta, Cleveland, and many other cities, you are used to seeing painful choices, where the Ridership concept removes low-ridership services that a few people depend on.  This is a different exercise.  We are trying to create a vision of a future network that the people of Greensboro can get behind, so we are asking the community to help us define the balance of ridership and coverage goals that should drive that vision.The large service increases such a tax can fund would have dramatic effects on the usefulness of transit. The Ridership Concept increases median access to jobs within 45 minutes by 140%, and the Coverage Concept increases job access by 86%. Both Concepts also invest in vastly better evening and weekend service. Today, all GTA routes run hourly service on weeknights and weekends. By using these outcomes to demonstrate the effects of investing more in transit, we want to ask the public: “Do you want to invest more in transit?”

If you know anyone in Greensboro, send them to the project website so that they can explore further and provide their input on the Concepts. We also encourage people to read the Choices & Concepts Report that details existing conditions, these Concepts, and the outcomes of service increase and the choices that shape transit networks.

Santa Cruz County: A Growing Transit Agency in a Beautiful Place

Posted on September 28, 2023 in San Francisco, Silicon Valley

While you’ve heard plenty about big US agencies facing a “fiscal cliff,” some agencies are doing well and expanding their offerings as their staffing permits.  That includes Portland and Dallas, where we’ve been working, but here’s a similar story from a smaller agency in an outrageously beautiful place.

Santa Cruz County, just south of the San Francisco Bay Area, is known for its beautiful beaches, towering redwoods, college-town ambience, and expensive housing, but the county also contains Watsonville, on the edge of the agricultural Salinas Valley, which has cheaper housing and is over 80% Hispanic or Latino/a.  The University of California at Santa Cruz (UCSC) generates huge demand to its hilltop campus at the west end of the region, but Watsonville generates strong demand for travel both locally and to jobs in Santa Cruz.  Meanwhile, the City of Santa Cruz is trying to encourage denser housing along frequent transit corridors in order to address their problems of housing affordability.

Like many US agencies, Santa Cruz Metro had to make cuts during the pandemic to match the service to their shortage of bus drivers.  In the last year, though, the pace of hiring has picked up, and the agency can do its first substantial expansion.  They asked us to analyze the network and develop some concepts for improvement.  We drafted a couple of alternatives, and had a public conversation about them.  Finally, last Friday, the agency’s Board adopted a Phase 1 restructuring plan. By then, it turned out, hiring had gone even better than expected and some hard choices that we had feared would have to be made turned out not to be necessary.

Phase 1, now scheduled for implementation this December, will change the network completely.  It currently looks like this.  (As always, click maps to enlarge and sharpen.)

Starting in December it will look like this.

Look at the legend! As always, colors on these maps represent frequency, and that’s fundamental to understanding how this network is better than the old one.

The existing system has no service running better than every 30 minutes, but it also has no timed connections, so waits are long, not just for your initial bus but also for the bus you may be connecting to.  The redesign increases frequencies, improves the timing of connections, and streamlines and simplifies the network.

It’s an especially big change in Watsonville, whose confusing tangle of overlapping hourly routes was especially useless for most trips.  There, service is restructured to put a majority of the population and jobs near half-hourly service, mostly on lines that run through to the other cities to the west.

In Santa Cruz, the big change is the restoration of 15-minute frequency on the main lines that connect the University of California (“UC Santa Cruz” on the map) with the westside and downtown.  This is important not just for the university, but also to support the City’s goals for denser residential developments in the existing neighborhoods south of the campus.

The spine of the network linking Watsonville and Santa Cruz is a braid of four hourly routes currently called 69A, 69W, and 71.  In the new network the same resources go into simpler routes 1 and 2, and they’re more precisely scheduled to provide a 15-minute frequency on their westernmost segment where they run together.  Halfway between Santa Cruz and Watsonville, these two routes combine again to serve Cabrillo College, the only community college in the county.  We have shown the frequency there as every 20 rather than every 15 because if Routes 1 and 2 leave downtown Santa Cruz spaced evening every 15 minutes, they won’t be as evenly spaced at Cabrillo College, since Route 2 will have taken a longer path.  Still, this is a significant frequency improvement for the county’s biggest transit destination outside the University.

Santa Cruz Metro is rolling out this change very fast, aiming to have the new service on the street in December.  Meanwhile, this is just the first phase of a more ambitious expansion that will be discussed with the public soon in hopes of further frequency expansions in 2024.  That next phase would extend high-frequency local-stop service to Watsonville, while also adding an all-day Santa Cruz-Watsonville Express.  It will also look at new continuous service from the University to the east side of Santa Cruz.  We look forward to a robust public discussion of that next phase.

At our firm, we are ready to help any transit agency work with its financial situation, whatever it is.  But it’s especially exciting to see a transit agency that’s able to grow its services to match the values and ambitions of the communities it serves.

A Next Step for Autonomous Buses?

Posted on September 11, 2023 in Automation, General, Technophilia

Photo: David Wheatley

A fully autonomous bus is now in regular service in Scotland.  It still has employees, two in fact.  But if this technology works out, the ultimate goal is probably to run buses with no employees on board. In wealthy countries, the cost of running a bus is mostly the cost of the driver, so in theory, if and when all the bugs are worked out, a driverless bus could be far more abundant, for a given operating budget, than buses with human drivers can be.

That will be wildly controversial. I have mixed feelings about it. But driverless rail transit has existed for decades, starting in Vancouver in 1985. The lack of a driver is why trains in Vancouver come every few minutes even late at night. In emergencies people like for there to be someone in charge, but the voices coming over the intercom from headquarters often have a better picture of the situation than an on-board employee does. Driverless buses would definitely be part of a world where security is based more on electronic surveillance, and like many people I have mixed feelings about that.

But if we end up in a world with abundant and affordable autonomous taxis — still a big if — it will be very hard for cities to function without autonomous buses. When we remove the hassle of traveling by private vehicle, and reduce the cost, everyone will want to do it, and a city simply doesn’t have room for that.  The only other solution will be heavy decongestion pricing to make the affordable autonomous taxis less affordable, and/or bus lanes on every street so that buses effectively bypass autonomous-taxi congestion.  That may be the answer, but in the long run I’d rather see public transit be abundant, so that everyone can go places quickly in a space-efficient way.

Portland: Big Transit Service Changes in SW Hills

Posted on August 27, 2023 in General, Network Redesign, Portland

Here is a little deep dive into how bus network designers think, with an example from very close to (my) home.

Over the past year, our firm has been working with the Portland area transit agency, TriMet, on the “Forward Together” project, which developed a plan for the next several years of bus service improvements.  (The plan will eventually represent about 10% more service than the agency ran in 2019, but TriMet is still recovering from post-Covid workforce shortages, so it can’t do everything at once.)  The plan went through major public outreach and was adopted earlier this year, and a few items have already been implemented.  Now, (August 27, 2023) they are rolling out what will probably be the most controversial part of the package, a series of big changes in Portland’s southwest hills.

The Forward Together plan was motivated by twin goals of ridership and equity.  In general, the plan retains and expands services that either:

The plan includes a major expansion of the Frequent Network in high demand areas, and new local routes in underserved suburban areas with large low-income populations.  Where TriMet was running services that are justified neither by ridership nor by equity, the plan reduces or even eliminates those services.  That’s because even though the total service budget is growing, TriMet is also trying to align its services with current goals, rather than just continuing to run services designed around the goals of the past. I wouldn’t recommend this in every city, but this is the answer to the specific problem posed by TriMet’s limited resources and the goals they have adopted.  

Let me give you a quick tour of SW Portland, using TriMet’s map of the old (2022) network.

TriMet network in 2022, before the changes. Green number shields and wider lines denote high frequency. Dashed lines run only briefly (mostly rush hour only). Map by TriMet.

 

Downtown Portland is in the NE corner of the map, where all of the colorful light rail lines converge.  Immediately west of downtown is a bank of steep hills, running north-south.  Just southwest of downtown, where you see Line 8 ending in a loop, is a huge hilltop complex of medical destinations, including the Veterans Hospital and the old part of the Oregon Health and Science University campus.  This area, called Marquam Hill, is one of Portland’s biggest transit destinations outside of downtown.

Along the west and south edges of the map are the inner-ring suburban cities of Beaverton, Tigard, and Lake Oswego along with the Washington Square Mall.  That ring, linked by orbital lines 76 and 78, is typical older suburban fabric with some dense centers but heavy car orientation.

TriMet’s mapping style makes all the bus routes blue but distinguishes the Frequent Service Network (every 15 minutes all day) with a slightly wider line and a green number sheld.  You can see that there are two big frequent corridors in SW Portland: 54 along Beaverton-Hillsdale Hwy and, further south, the 12 along Barbur Blvd.  Except for those two corridors, inner SW Portland (excluding the inner-ring suburbs) is mostly  low-density and relatively affluent.

With a focus on ridership and equity, and the drop in downtown commuting due to ongoing work-from-home, this area just had to be rethought. Here is the new network as of August 27, 2023:

New TriMet network, same color scheme as the map above. Map by TriMet.

 

 

 

 

As I mentioned, the plan does delete some services that meet neither ridership nor equity goals, mostly all-day local routes in affluent low-density areas that had little ridership except at school times.  Some of these are reduced to school-hour trips only, and a few, such as the 50 in the NW corner of the map, are dropped entirely.

In addition, this redesign seeks ridership and equity with two other big moves:

  • Shift in focus from peak to all day.
  • Shift in focus from office commute destinations to destinations of diverse workers and visitors.

The old network also had a number of services geared to bringing office workers downtown.  As in most US cities, there are fewer of these commuters than there were, and like many agencies, TriMet has heard that it needed to provide better service to a more diverse audience, not just office workers but also everyone else traveling all the time for all kinds of purposes.  So some specialized downtown-oriented services were removed.  In the old network, for example, Line 94 in the southwest corner of the map approached from suburbs beyond Tigard and went all the way into downtown duplicating Line 12.  That was no longer justifiable, so in the new network those riders will need to use Line 12 to complete their trips.

But the biggest and most complicated reworking, encompassing all of these issues, happened at Marquam Hill.  At Portland’s largest medical destination, the network had become too focused on rush hour, even though medical workers and patients come and go all day.

The hill has long had Line 8, a Frequent Service bus to downtown, and it also has a cute aerial tram to another medical campus nearby.  It also had a big network of rush hour express routes from all directions, numbered in the 60s.  These routes duplicated all-day services and mostly helped people avoid transferring.  That can be justified only if the buses were full, and they no longer were.  They ran only at rush hour, which meant they were not useful to many of the lower-income people working shifts all around the clock at the hospitals.

We needed to rework this to remove some of the duplicative rush hour service, and to provide a more useful all-day pattern of service from the south.  In the old network, you could get to Marquam Hill from the south only at rush hour.  To do this, we revised two of the lower-ridership southwest lines (43 and 56) so that instead of going downtown, they’ll go to Marquam Hill.  Where they cross Line 54 in the Hillsdale district, just south of Marquam Hill, people coming off of outer part of these lines will need to transfer if they are going downtown, but people from all over the southwest will be able to use these lines to get to Marquam Hill much more directly.

This is an inconvenience to some existing downtown riders, so we selected routes where that would affect as few people as possible.  We chose Line 56 for this role because much of this line duplicates the Frequent Line 54, which is being upgraded to be Frequent all the way to Beaverton.  The segment along Beaverton Hillsdale Highway served by both 54 and 56 is where most of Line 56’s ridership is.  Only riders from the Scholls Ferry Road segment of 56 will need to transfer to reach downtown, and this is not a high-demand area.  Meanwhile, the segment of Beavertion-Hillsdale Highway where 54 and 56 run together has many low-income apartment areas where people depend on transit.  Instead of giving them duplicative routes to downtown, the new arrangement gives them direct Frequent service to downtown (54) and a direct bus to Marquam Hill.   There’s no avoiding some duplication here, but this change makes it less wasteful and more useful.

As for Line 43, this issue is rich with memories, as I lived near the intersection of Terwilliger & Taylor’s Ferry as a teenager.  I was at TriMet as a teenage intern when the current shape of the line was designed, and while I used it I knew it would always be a poor performer.  Much of the line is close to the more frequent Line 12 on Barbur, and if you are west of where the two lines cross, the 43 is so slow to downtown that it makes sense to transfer to the 12 for a faster trip.  That’s one reason why we felt that only a small area (between Barbur Blvd. Transit Center and Macadam Ave) would be affected if we reoriented this route to Marquam Hill, an area that had neither high ridership nor a high priority on equity grounds.  (It does have one business district, which we served another way; read on.)

Just south of there, the plan removes Line 39 from Lewis & Clark College, prompting the biggest outcry in the public outreach.  Lewis & Clark is a liberal arts college located on what is effectively a cul-de-sac for transit.[1]  It’s not on the way to any other destinations, so it has to justify its service all by itself.  Ridership was poor, and the campus was running its own shuttles to downtown.  The final design here divides Line 35, which runs along Macadam Avenue just west of the river, and sends half the service via Terwilliger & Taylor’s Ferry — not directly to Lewis & Clark’s front door anymore, but within a short walk. This change restored direct all-day downtown service from the business district at Terwilliger & Taylor’s Ferry, which was losing it with the removal of Line 43.  I’m normally very resistant to this kind of splitting of service because it reduces frequency.  Here, however, it was the right solution because the segment of Riverside Drive that loses half of its Line 35 service is very low-density, very affluent, and has almost no ridership.

There’s a nice side effect of this change: new all-day service to the main gate of Tryon Creek State Natural Area, one of Portland’s most spectacular wilderness parks. A great new opportunity for people to get out into nature on transit.

You can explore the whole plan, and the justification for each part of it, in our Forward Together final report, which is online.  There you’ll find both an explanation of each change, and also a description of the how the plan was revised in response to public outreach.  Not everyone will like these changes, but they will help TriMet create a more efficient network that’s useful to more people, and more people who really need it.

 

 

[1] The neighborhood beyond Lewis & Clark, called Dunthorpe, is very, very low-density and affluent. Before the big redesigns of 1979-82 it had its own bus route from downtown, evidence of how completely oriented toward coverage (rather than ridership) the system was in those days.  Today, nobody would think of running buses into Dunthorpe, probably least of all the fortunate folks who live there.

Amtrak’s Long Distance Trains: Not Just “Land Cruises”

Posted on August 11, 2023 in General

Last week I wrote about the tension that the US national rail carrier Amtrak faces between ridership goals — which require focusing on its best markets — and coverage goals — which require covering the entire country.  I was applying a framework that I developed for urban public transit, but that seemed relevant enough to be useful in discussing Amtrak.  The post attracted a great comment thread with lots of lively disagreement.  So let me briefly respond to the commenters’ main objections.  To be clear, though, I am not an intercity rail expert, so I am intentionally keeping a high altitude on an issue with lots of rich detail.  I may be wrong, and if so I’m sure commenters will say so, with receipts.

To recap:  Amtrak sees its biggest growth opportunities as corridors linking major cities under 500 miles.  (This is also the ideal distance for high-speed rail, but Amtrak’s plan is about providing medium-speed service even as high-speed rail is developed in parallel.)  The company’s new vision document, Amtrak Connects US, is almost entirely about investing in such corridors, serving trips lasting a few hours at most.  But the US also has huge states with small populations, and there, Amtrak runs its multi-day long-haul trains.  Worldwide, only Russia, China, and Canada have longer passenger train lines than the US.  The Chicago-Los Angeles train formed by the Texas Eagle and Sunset Limited, is almost three times longer (in both time and distance) than the longest line in Europe.

Amtrak’s long-haul trains have two roles: they are marketed as a scenic and relaxing way to travel between cities if you’re not in a hurry, but people also use them for access to towns along the way.  (I was thinking of the first market when I carelessly called them “land cruises, and the objections of many rural readers is understandable.)  These services do as well as they do only because they combine both markets , so each kind of user depends on the other for the total package to make sense. You can see the “land cruise” role competing with the local access role in the service design. For example, these trains sometimes follow routings selected for scenery but not population, most obviously in Montana where the Empire Builder‘s far-northerly routing goes through spectacular Glacier National Park but misses all of the state’s largest population centers.

Amtrak’s Empire Builder. Map: Jkan997 at Wikipedia.

Many commenters objected that these can’t be coverage service because their ridership is actually pretty high, so I should be clear that by ridership I always ultimately mean ridership divided by operating cost.  These trains are expensive to run.  I will not delve into the arguments over Amtrak’s accounting for these trains, but it’s easy to see that they can’t be using labor very efficiently.  The many rural stations need staff, all of them serving just one train at a time.  The long runs require crew to rotate in and out of duty on board, so those people need places to sleep.  The frequent delays mean that employees (both on the train and at the stations) often work longer than their scheduled shifts, incurring overtime.  It’s all very labor intensive, compared to short train lines where you turn over passengers quickly and most your staff can go home every night.

Meanwhile, the fares, if you don’t get a private room, are almost zero.  Portland, Oregon to Wisconsin Dells in central Wisconsin, coach, nonrefundable, a month out, is currently showing a fare of only $128, which is about 6.5 cents per mile.  A similar coach seat on the Northeast Regional train from Washington DC to New York with the same features is $31 or 13 cents per mile, twice the cost for a service that almost certainly costs Amtrak less to provide on a per passenger basis.  So the cost of these services lies not just in their inefficiency but in their low per-mile fare, which of course is what keeps them affordable enough to have a lot of use.

So can these services be justified by their ridership?  It depends entirely on whether you count ridership in passengers or passenger-miles.  If you want long-distance services to look good, you count passenger-miles, which values one person going ten miles as much as ten people going one mile.   In the urban transit context, there is a similar suburb-vs city debate.  If you want to make long-haul suburb-to-city service look better than shorter runs within the dense city, you cite passenger-miles, but some inner city folks will object that those long distances are a side effect of poor land use planning and location choices, not an actual benefit.  The benefit lies in how many actual human beings have gotten to where they’re going.  There’s no objective way to decide the question between measuring passengers and measuring passenger-miles.  It comes down to what kinds of trips you value.  A rural-urban divide is unavoidable on that point, because long distances are the defining fact of rural life.

My other question about the “rural lifeline” case for the long-distance trains is: Do these services really match the pattern of rural demand?  Probably not.  If you were optimizing a network for access to rural communities, it wouldn’t look much like these long-haul lines. Instead, it would look like a robust set of links between smaller centers and nearby larger ones.  Most rural intercity travel demand isn’t for the thousand-mile trips that Amtrak makes.  It’s more local, under 200 miles, with smaller centers usually needing access to larger ones that have more jobs, essential services, and onward transportation options.

This, of course, is the role of a robust bus system, working with trains as appropriate.  The major Australian states, for example, have publicly funded intercity bus+rail systems that connect most rural towns into their nearest larger center, with onward connections, bus or rail, to the big city.  This pattern is most likely to connect small towns to the destinations most useful to them.  As commercial intercity bus services wither in the US, there will be an increasing role for state funding and management of similar services.  I’ve beaten this drum before, but right now, in the US, rural transit between towns is mostly provided by county-level agencies with minimal state coordination.  Every county line is a potential barrier for travelers on those services.  At best adjacent counties have to make deals to allow service to flow over county lines to serve the trips people need.  What’s missing is often a network managed and funded by the state, running many of the lines that commercial carriers once ran.  Pieces of that might be rail, but a lot of it is probably logical bus networks that may cross the state but don’t cross half the country.

Does that mean the long-haul trains shouldn’t exist?  Not necessarily.  Personally, I’d love to see more of them.  Overnight trains are having a renaissance in Europe, and this suggests new markets where some useful rural service could be combined with overnights between bigger cities.

But still, Amtrak is right not to focus on these trains as part of a ridership-maximizing strategy.  Right now they are part of how Amtrak meets its competing goal of covering the whole country.  But because this has become an exercise in counting states, and thus Senate votes, the result is such thin coverage that most rural communities don’t have access to it. Even towns with stations may not have service in the right direction, or at a useful time of day, or with the decent on-time performance that comes only from shorter lines.  Most of the lifeline access that the rural US needs is logically provided by robust bus networks, managed by states if they can’t make a profit. By all means let’s keep and celebrate the long-haul trains, and expand them as appropriate.  But let’s not let them distract us from what it would really take to provide liberating transportation to rural America.

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