Human Transit

Learning from Portland’s “For Rent” Signs

Posted on November 4, 2017 in General, Philosophy

Photo: City Observatory

Joe Cortright spreads the good news that “For Rent” signs are proliferating across Portland, signaling an easing of the affordable housing crisis. And he points out a critical thing that many activists miss. That luxury housing that affordability advocates decry does improve affordability for everyone.

The … myth is that you can’t make housing affordable by building more of it, particularly if new units are more expensive than existing ones. The surge in vacancies in existing apartments is an indication of the interconnectedness of apartment supply, and an illustration of how construction of new high end, market-rate units lessens the price pressure on the existing housing stock. When you don’t build lots of new apartments, the people who would otherwise rent them bid up the price of existing apartments. The reverse is also true: every household that moves into a new apartment is one fewer household competing for the stock of existing apartments. This is why, as we’ve argued, building more “luxury” apartments helps with affordability. As our colleagues at the Sightline Institute recently observed, you can build your way to affordable housing. In fact, building more supply is the only effective way to reduce the pressure that is driving up rents. (Emphasis added.)

Why mention this on a transit blog? Because the mistake activists make here is the same one that many transit advocates make, which is to think of wealth as a set of boxes, called classes, that never intermix or affect each other. It’s the same mistake that underlies the false dichotomy of “choice” and “dependent” riders in transit planning, the notion that you need separate services for each type of rider because they are absolutely different kinds of people who will never mix.

In fact, wealth is a spectrum. People are everywhere along it. Admittedly, this is less true that it once was, but it’s still true. So although people certainly differ in wealth and thus in the options they have, they are still part of the same diverse market — for housing, as for transit. When advocating for a fairer and more equal economic world, don’t lose track of this. Don’t become so focused on us-them differences that you miss the solution that improves things for everyone, including you.

Anchorage: Alaska’s First Frequent Network

Posted on October 24, 2017 in Anchorage

We’re happy to announce that Anchorage’s new bus network, for which we were the planning consultants, went live yesterday. Without adding much operating cost, it introduces a network of four frequent lines — shown in red — where there were previously none. See these maps in high resolution here.

Again, the colors matter: red means high frequency (every <=15 minutes) while blue means every 30 minutes, green means every 60 minutes, and brown means less frequent than that.

(And if you like trivia, this is the northernmost Frequent Network in its hemisphere!)

This plan was the result of a two-stage public conversation which began by thinking about the trade-off between ridership goals and coverage goals. The first round of that process led to a decision to lean heavily toward ridership — which means focusing resources where demand is highest instead of trying to cover the whole city. So as always, a no-growth plan isn’t good news for everyone. You can see several route segments disappearing.

We worked hard, though, to minimize that impact. In the urban grid in the northern part of the city, lots of little hourly segments winding between the major grid streets have been removed, but there is still some service within walking distance for most of these people. Further south and west, the development pattern is more scattered and less walkable, so focusing on high-demand areas meant complete deletion of service to some low-demand areas.

Remember, we didn’t propose this shift toward ridership. As always, we laid out options and let the community decide. If a community decided it wanted less frequency in order to have more coverage, we’d help them do that, too.

Another moral to this story: Active political leadership matters! These plans usually need at least one political leader to show active interest, not just passive support. Anchorage Mayor Ethan Berkowitz took personal interest in this project, engaging with it far more than any mayor in any city we’ve worked in so far. His leadership was critical to pushing it over the line.

We really enjoyed collaborating with the great staff at Anchorage’s municipal transit department, People Mover. It was a fun project for us from start to finish, because we were dealing with people who were really enthusiastic about making a better system.

Singapore: No More Cars

Posted on October 24, 2017 in General, Singapore

That freeway serves a trivial share of Singapore’s travel demand.

I’ve written about the why cars are a bad fit for cities in the past. While technologies such as automation and electrification may offer improvements in safety and environmental impact, the spatial requirements of automobiles will always be at odds with the spatial limitations of cities.

Cities in the United States have an estimated 8 parking spaces for every car. Automobiles take up a lot of space just to store, and require even more space on streets to move and be useful.

As one of the most densely populated cities in the world, Singapore has already devoted 12% of its land area to roads and there is no room to add more. Their updated policy to cap the total number of privately owned automobiles, including those used for ride-hailing services such as Uber and and its Southeast Asian competitor Grab, isn’t what some commentators may decry as a “war on cars”. It is an acknowledgement of the facts of geometry.

Cities, by definition, have relatively little space per person. Cars take up a lot of space per person. For cities undergoing population and economic growth, the only long-term solution to this geometric problem is to enable people to get around using less space than cars require — through walking, cycling and mass transit.

Canberra: Good Planning Can Lead to More Service

Posted on October 22, 2017 in Canberra, General, Strategic Transit Planning

A decade ago, I was part of a team developing a Strategic Public Transport[1] Network Plan for Australia’s national capital, Canberra. It gave rise to this thinkpiece about long term public transport planning in general.

A key idea was to have a citywide network of Rapid buses, with widely spaced stops. Our most ambitious map (below, click to enlarge) imagined four of them, shown in red, though only the two longest ones were to be implemented anytime in the near future. We also proposed a local frequent network (orange) covering most of the city.

We stopped there because we wanted the plan to seem financially reasonable. Still, we were clear at the time that we were creating a structure for growth. We were not predicting what would happen in what year, but rather defining a network of services that would phase in as development and political support warranted.

So it’s in the nature of such a plan that you’re creating a guide without knowing exactly how it will come out. As it turns out, the plan has moved faster than I expected. One Rapid line is now becoming light rail, but just as important, the government has announced a far larger Rapid network than we ever imagined, nine lines in total:

When a transit idea catches on locally, everyone wants it, so the next stage is often to deploy it beyond the range of where it can really succeed.[2] So I wouldn’t be surprised to see this network pruned as ridership numbers come in, especially if times get leaner. But meanwhile, the lesson is that great planning can lead to more money, if it starts to build a vision that people care about. I don’t regret the fact that our plan’s vision, prepared 10 years ago, was more limited. At that time, a more abundant plan would have seemed delusional. You walk before you run, as they say. We were walking 10 years ago. Now Canberra is running.

[1] Public transport is the global term for what North Americans call transit. I tend to use the word appropriate to the place I’m talking about, but I hope everyone understands it on both sides of North America’s moat.

[2] One of my concerns in strategic planning is to propose only a few corridors of high-level transit in the early years, so that there’s a motive for development to concentrate on them. This effect is lost if that network goes too many places, relative to the demand for development. The result is likely to be a more sprawling city.

On Being Among the “100 Most Influential Urbanists”

Posted on October 17, 2017 in General

Planetizen did an online survey on the most influential urbanists, and a first round, with a list of over 200, has now been narrowed to 100. For some reason, I am #57. It means a lot to me that there’s this much interest in transit networks. For most of my career, this has felt like lonely work, swimming upstream against a torrent of apathy.

But my gratitude wouldn’t be credible if I didn’t have a few questions.

The only person whose presence is really objectionable is surely Thomas Jefferson (#51). He is on the list mainly for his contributions to rural architecture, notably his estate at Monticello, as though all architecture is automatically urbanism. Meanwhile, he is famous for writing things like this:

I think our governments will remain virtuous for many centuries as long as they are chiefly agricultural; and this will be as long as there shall be vacant lands in any part of America. When they get plied upon one another in large cities, as in Europe, they will become corrupt as in Europe.

Jefferson was a good guy in many ways, but if you want to understand why the US constitutional structure is so biased against urban interests — most obviously in the construction of the Senate — you must consider Jefferson’s role in fostering this attitude.

Jefferson is the only person on this list that I’d question — and fortunately, I’m not too worried about offending him. Which raises a more amusing point.

Though I’m ranked as more influential than Hippodamus of Miletus (498-408 BCE), I’m obviously infinitely less influential than he was, if only because he got a 25-century head start. When I did this survey myself, I voted mainly for dead people, with a preference for long-dead people, because we have some perspective on how influential they actually were. Separate polls for different historical eras, and one for living people only, would have been a little more credible maybe. (And of course, the list makes it sound like urbanist history happened only in Europe and its colonies.)

Enough nitpicking. I’m not the 57th most influential urbanist in human history — maybe not even the 5700th — but it’s still a huge honor to be the 57th most popular among the readers of Planetizen. I’ve done what I could to change a conversation about transit that is very set in its ways, and I’m grateful to everyone who thought my work was worthwhile.

As for whether I was really influential, check back in the 47th century.

Not the Suburb of the Future

Posted on September 25, 2017 in General

Several people have asked me to respond to landscape architect Alan Berger’s NYTimes piece on “The Suburb of the Future.” The piece invites us to imagine a series of technologies that will allow all of us to live on large plots of land spreading out across the landscape. It’s worth reading, because it captures a lot of what goes wrong when architects posit a purely aesthetic notion of urbanism without running the numbers or discussing the full impacts.

(It also contains that self-ridiculing term “what Millennials want,” which in the absence of data means “what I want Millennials to want.” Most people can’t predict what they’ll want later in life, and their parents and grandparents can only do this by assuming, perilously, that their children are copies of themselves who will follow the same life trajectory that they did.)

There are basic geometry problems with uncontrolled sprawl that Alan Berger is not discussing, and that his vision does nothing to address. These include the long travel distances which consume more transport capacity and cause more emissions, as well as the removal of so much land from agriculture, flood protection, and the environment generally. There is also the severe problem of induced travel demand from driverless vehicles, which will expand the demand for road space.

My own city, Portland, has achieved its desirability largely through it’s urban growth boundary constraining sprawl. If Alan had had his way 40 years ago, the magnificent and relatively new vineyard region just outside of our city, and Oregon’s best agricultural land, would all be covered with houses by now.

Oregon’s wine country just outside of Portland. It exists only because our 1972 limits on sprawl kept us from paving it.

In short, sprawl still has all of the usual negative impacts, and because these problems are not aesthetic, making sprawl more beautiful is not really the point.

Personally, I live in a detached house because am into gardening, so I would never argue that everyone should live in apartments. In our existing suburbia there can still be plenty of places for people who genuinely want low-density living to have it. But there is not enough room for it to continue to be promoted as the only way to have a normal life.

Helsinki: A Transit Map by Jug Cerovic

Posted on September 22, 2017 in Maps

A while back I did a post on the subway maps of the Paris-based Serbian designer Jug Cerovic. His style is to look for distinguishing features in the geometry of the network structure, and highlight these to give a sense of order.

He has a new one of Helsinki …

… but the cool thing is not just the map but his explanation of his design process, which I highly recommend.

Bus Network Design is a “Hot Trend”!

Posted on September 13, 2017 in Press

Longtime readers know I’m suspicious of “hot trends,” but it’s great to see that bus network design is finally having its moment in the limelight. The respected public policy magazine Governing has a nice feature by Daniel Vock on bus network redesign. It happens to feature two projects that we worked on, Columbus and Houston, and it has some quotes from me, but it would be a good article even without those things.

There’s one mistake in the piece. Vock writes, “Plus, a well-designed bus network can lead to fewer trips because riders have to transfer less to get to their destinations.” I think he means boardings rather than completed trips, but in any case, our network designs sometimes increase transferring, even as they reduce travel time.

But it’s a good read.

Fare Policy vs Ticketing Technology: San Francisco Edition

Posted on September 6, 2017 in Fares, San Francisco

Many, many times, I’ve asked a transit agency’s leaders about their fare policy, and been told instead about their ticketing technology. “Are you thinking about fare structure?” I ask. “Yes, we’re on it!” they say. “We’re working on this fabulous smartcard!” Don’t trust a fare expert who can’t distinguish the policy decisions that set fares and the technologies that implement them.

Arielle Fleisher of SPUR has a good piece on fare policy in the Bay Area, which will be useful to anyone in multi-agency regions in North America.[1] Describing Clipper, the smartcard shared by almost all of the region’s 27 transit agencies, Fleisher writes:

There is no denying that the Clipper card is a magical piece of plastic. Since its debut in 2010, Clipper has made it much easier for people to switch between different transit systems and travel throughout the region. But if you look under Clipper’s hood, it quickly becomes apparent that the card’s magic masks a complex web of transit fares, passes and policies that ultimately limit its effectiveness. Put simply, a close look reveals that the Bay Area has a fare policy problem.

Back in the 80s and 90s, when I worked in the Bay Area, there was no “hood” to look under or “mask” to hide behind. The mess was in everyone’s faces. The many transit agencies required their own paper tickets or passes, and your only hope of moving freely across agency boundaries was to carry numerous rolls of quarters.

As the Bay Area considers the next generation of Clipper, Fleisher rightly warns of the risk that the region’s leaders will focus on making the technology cool rather than making the fares logical. She enumerates five problems a multi-agency fare policy should solve:

Disparate fares make using transit confusing.
Separate fares for different agencies are a problem when one agency substitutes its service for another’s, as happens during disruptions.
There isn’t a single pass that employers can purchase for their staffs.
The system penalizes trips that happen to require multiple operating agencies. (And note that some agencies still charge for connecting between services of the same agency!)
The system makes it hard to do coherent discounting for low-income persons.

To which I can only say, yes! And yes, we were yelling about all this 30 years ago. The smartcard “solved” this problem only for relatively fortunate people. If you don’t have to think about what you’re spending, you can just buy a Clipper card and wave it everywhere. So there’s a risk of elite projection, in that many decision makers, who tend to have above average incomes, no longer experience the problem in their daily lives, the way everyone did back in the pre-Clipper days.

Still, the fare problem in a multi-agency region is genuinely hard. If it weren’t, we’d have solved it long ago, because technology was never the real barrier. Consolidating all the agencies into one isn’t the answer. The point is to have clear boundaries and clear relationships across those boundaries. But as long as there are multiple agencies, each agency has its own budget to balance. Introducing new inter-agency fares costs money for each agency, as more fares have to be shared with other agencies that were part of each person’s trip. Unless there is some new funding, the money has to come from raising the base fare, which is one of the most unpopular things a transit agency can do. Integrated fares, when they happen, will be a cost item. They always are.

And as I can’t emphasize too strongly, every time you tell a transit agency to use its limited funds to do something other than run service, you’re telling them to cut service.

Even if you don’t live in the Bay Area, Fleisher’s article is a good read. Chapter 11 of my book Human Transit also explores fare issues. And if you’re interested in the dynamics of how a big North American metro deals with having 27 transit agencies, and why that might not be a bad thing, there’s my article on seamlessness, itself a response to an excellent SPUR paper on the subject. (And again: if you want to see how influential, respected, and popular a local policy institute can be, you should learn about SPUR!)

[1] The transit agency structure that I describe here is mostly a North American concept. Elsewhere, the problems described here arise between operating companies (publicly or privately owned) that have the right to set fares and keep fare revenue while also getting subsidy from a government transport authority — a so-called “net cost” contract.” The new best practice is “gross cost” contracts, where the government keeps the fare revenue. This lets the government authority control the fare policy decision, because only its own revenue is at stake. (It also lets the government design a coherent network.)

The Problem of School Transportation

Posted on August 31, 2017 in General

“Why Isn’t the Transportation Sector More Engaged in Student Transportation?” asks Jennifer Schiess of Bellwether Education Partners in the Eno Transportation Weekly. Schless provides a good overview of why school buses — “the largest mass transit system in the [US]” — are so frustrating, for both students and providers.

Yet the real problem is much simpler than her article suggests. The problem is bell times. Really, this is all you need to know.

Many, many US transit agencies are pressured to run service to schools where yellow bus service isn’t provided. In the early 1990s, for example, when I was working in California, funding cuts wiped out almost all school-funded yellow bus service. Suddenly one day, a regular bus passed near a high school and found 200 kids waiting, for more than a bus could handle. The problem was dumped onto the transit agencies without any funding to address it.

What’s more, when school districts run school buses, they think about how to run them more efficiently. This often means setting bell times — the time school begins and ends — differently at different schools so that a single bus and driver can do multiple pieces of work.

But as soon as the schools didn’t have to think about transportation, they stopped setting their bell times with any concern for the efficient use of transit resources. Suddenly, we transit planners were told, bell times were locked down by other priorities. The result was a mess for both transit agencies and students.

For transit agencies, pulling out a bus to work just a brief shift is very, very expensive. The cost lies in the short driver shift, the one-direcitonal demand, and the cost of owning a vehicle that is used only briefly. You can pay the driver less, but expect to get what you pay for in terms of the skills required (supervising kids, intervening in conflicts, and, in your spare moments, driving.)

Deviations to get close to schools disrupt the all-day pattern for other riders, and usually can’t provide the capacity the school needs anyway if the all-day demand is low, as in most low-density suburbs. NCTD Route 332 in Vista, California. Source: 511sd.com

In dense cities, there is often enough all-day transit near a school, and enough walkable streets, that students can disperse at bell times using services that are running all-day anyway, though the sudden big loads are still a challenge for these services. In network designs, I often try to keep routes a few blocks away from major schools, so that kids will tend to walk to stops on different routes instead of all ending up at one.

But in a low density suburban area, there may be almost no demand until 3:00 PM, when suddenly there are 500 kids expecting us to take them home. Buy big buses that hold 100? Sure, but that’s still five driver shifts that are 1-2 hours long. And if three schools set identical bell times, we need 15 shifts, when if they staggered bell times we might still get away with five.

This is a nice example of a problem that no technology will solve, at least until we have such cheap driverless buses that it’s no problem for them to sit around until once, twice a day, we need five of them. Like all users of transportation services, schools need to be motivated to think about the demands they place on public services. Because without staggered bell times, these demands can eat transit agency budgets, disrupt other customers, and produce worse mobility for everyone.

Older posts Newer posts