Human Transit

Source: Greater City Providence, www.gcpvd.org

In the US, streetcars mixed with traffic are popular with developers and some urbanists. But when it comes to actually getting you where you’re going, a bus can do anything a streetcar can do, and it can go around many obstacles (accidents, poorly parked cars, etc.) that shut down a streetcar line.  US streetcar starter lines also tend to be very short, forcing people to make connections to reach most destinations.

Last year, Rhode Island leaders decided that the streetcar wasn’t the right answer for downtown Providence.  Instead, they redirected their federal funding for a streetcar into a bus-based project in the same place.  The Downtown Transit Connector will run through the center of the city, from the medical center in the south to the train station (also a major development node) in the north.   Its buses will come every 4-5 minutes, more frequently than any modern US streetcar. Frequency is critical in downtown circulation; we experience waiting time as a percentage of travel time, so we need extremely high frequency if we’re going only a mile or so.

This is not just a streetcar run with buses.  It’s more powerful, because the buses running along this path, forming the high frequency, will continue onto other routes across the city.  The genius of the project, then, is that it solves two urgent downtown problems at once.  It provides the attractive and legible very-frequent spine that makes so many American urbanists want streetcars, but it also solves the problem of getting major bus line through downtown, so that the whole city benefits.

It’s an excellent project with relevance to many US downtowns. I encourage you to follow its progress.

Today, the National Transport Authority of Ireland launched the planning process that will lead to a redesign of the bus network in Dublin. We are incredibly honored and excited to be their lead consultant on this effort.  I explain the planning issues (for a Dublin audience) here.

Our project is part of BusConnects, which is a three-pronged effort to improve Dublin’s buses:

• Network redesign (our project)
• Fare and ticketing improvements, for faster boarding/alighting and to ensure that the fare system does not discourage changing buses.
• Projects to improve bus speed and reliability throughout the city.

Dublin has less rail transit than most European cities of its size. There is no subway, two surface light rail lines, and one corridor along the coast where commuter rail runs every 15 minutes. So most of the city is on buses, and the buses must succeed for the city to succeed.

The bus service is abundant; almost 1000 buses are on the streets during the peak period, in an urban area of 1.2 million. But as is the case in almost all growing cities, the service may need revision to reflect some emerging needs. These include:

First, all frequent lines run into the City Centre, so trips between suburbs out can be difficult.  Orbital routes exist but they are not frequent enough for the connections on which most orbital travel relies. This becomes a bigger issue as suburban employment centers – some of them well suited to public transport – emerge.

Second, the system is very complex. We drew what may be the first really clear map (link coming soon) of the entire network, but we put a grey box over the City Centre, where a clear map may be literally impossible. Here is the best version available.  You see the problem.

As a result, we think Dublin may be missing opportunities to encourage patronage within the greater City Centre – especially for spontaneous trips and tourism — because while buses are everywhere, it is simply too hard to figure out how to use them. As consultants we can attest to this, because our work requires learning bus systems very quickly.

Finally, the City Centre has so many buses running through it that buses are frequently obstructing each other.

This problem has many solutions, including bus priority and ticketing improvements that parallel tracks are addressing. But we might be able to reduce these numbers a bit, especially with better orbital service that reduces the need to go through the city if you are not going there.

But as it turns out, the key to all of these problems is one question: Can we ask people to change buses if this means they can reach their destinations sooner, and reach other destinations citywide more quickly?  (I explained that math here.)  This is a hard question, because whatever we do to make it easier, changing buses is still an inconvenience.

So we’re asking the public what they think.  For the next month, we’ll be accepting input through a web survey, which you can find here, along with our Choices Report that you can download.  There, we share some specific possibilities, and ask the people of Dublin about their priorities.  As usual we ask:  Given how the math works, and the choices it presents, what should we do?

Uber’s UberPool service, which attempts to gather multiple people on a single vehicle going the same way, is undergoing some tinkering that will make it even more like fixed route transit.  Andrew J. Hawkins at Verge has the story:

[UberPool riders] are being prompted to walk to the closest corner or intersection for more convenient pickups, rather than have drivers deviate from their north-south route.

The same goes for drop-offs, where riders are being let out at a proximate corner rather than the exact address of their destination. Uber calls it “dynamic drop-offs,” but the result is pretty plain. If you want those cheaper fares, you’re going to have to be cool with a lot more walking. Uber began testing this feature last year, and has since rolled it out in wider use.

Does the difference between these images remind you of anything?

Walking further for more direct, useful, and affordable service is the basic deal that fixed route transit has offered for more than a century.

What’s more, if you walk to the bus instead of to UberPool, you can get on any bus instead of waiting for your specific UberPool to arrive.

Yet this is exactly what Uber must do to make their UberPool less unprofitable.   As we’ve explored many times here, demand-responsive service is wildly inefficient.

UberPool would be less absurd if we were talking about somewhere other than Manhattan, or any other big city that’s rich in frequent transit.  In places with less transit, this concept could have some use.  But in big cities it’s clearly converging on something for which fixed route transit is already the ideal tool.

Now, New York City bus service has some problems, especially in the delay-ridden way that they handle fares.  I am not defending specific practices of any agency.  But the geometry remains what it is.  If you want affordable transit service, you’re going to have to walk to it.  That’s the math that makes fixed route service inevitable.

Transit people all over the world have understood this since long before Uber’s CEO was born.  They’ve also known about the concept of demand responsive transit, which means “transit that is extremely inefficient because of the degree to which it deviates or circulates based on the needs of a single person.”  Demand responsive service is so inefficient that it arises only in these contexts:

• extremely low-wage environments, as in parts of the developing world, or:
• focused on elites who can pay high fares, as in typical Uber or Taxi operations, or
• for special-needs groups, such as the disabled and seniors, or for other groups that have the power to demand it, always at astronomical subsidies per rider.   (Costs per rider for this kind of service, called paratransit in North America, typically run about 10 times the rate for well-designed fixed route service.)

All the new apps have helped smooth out inefficiencies of communication, but they will never change the math.  Technology never changes geometry.

As UberPool gradually discovers this, the question becomes: Did Uber, and similar companies, really invent anything at all?  They invented apps, and algorithms, but do they have any new answers for the geometry problem that is urban transportation?

(Yes, I said almost exactly this in a post two years ago!  But one needs repetition to break through all the noise)  

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.