I hope this doesn’t sound like fishing for praise, but a client has asked me to provide some pithy quotations from my book for use in advertising an event. Rather than trying to remember or find them myself, it would be great if people who’ve read the book could share pithy quotations that they remember. That way I don’t have to decide what was pithy, or for that matter memorable.
Leave them in the comments if you think of any! Thanks!
It may seem an obvious point, but transit is a remarkably safe form of travel, especially compared to the private car. A new report from the American Public Transportation Association (APTA) authored by Todd Litman puts some numbers to how higher transit dependence yields a transportation system that kills fewer people.
Public transportation is one of the safest ways to travel. It is ten times safer per mile than traveling by car because it has less than a tenth the per-mile traffic casualty (injury or death) rate as automobile travel. Public transit-oriented communities are five times safer because they have about a fifth the per capita traffic casualty rate as automobile-oriented communities. In addition, crash rates tend to decline as public transit travel increases in a community. Contrary to popular perceptions, public transit travel is significantly safer than automobile travel.
Credible research indicates that many planning practices that improve public transportation and encourage its use also tend to increase traffic safety. However, these benefits are often overlooked: individuals tend to exaggerate public transit risks; planners tend to overlook safety benefits when evaluating public transit improvements; and traffic experts seldom consider pro-transit policies as safety strategies.
It’s worth a peruse. The press release is here, and the full report is here.
One of our longtime favorite transportation bloggers, Yonah Freemark over at the Transport Politic, has added an excellent new feature to his site: a set of interactive charts detailing key US transportation indicators called the Transport Databook. This does a great job of taking measures that are readily available in public data, though not always easily accessible, and compiling them into simple one stop shop for this kind of information. And the source data is also available in a condensed form that is likely to be easier to use for anyone unfamiliar with the original sources. These charts cover a wide array of transit and transportation trends beyond the familiar ridership, service hours, or VMT stats. For instance:
We’ve already noticed parts of this work fueling a number of Twitter conversations, and hopefully, this site continues as a good resource for people interested in informing themselves about long-term trends in transportation data.
For just two days, over a weekend, I’ve visited Barcelona for the first time.
It has the sort of public transit system that will impress a North American at first: a large metro, pleasant buses with numerous stretches of exclusive lane, two practical funiculars, commuter trains, and two tram networks …
That’s the usual way most people summarize a transit system, isn’t it? A list of technologies in use, which says nothing about how easy it is to get around the city. Did you notice how, when I said “two tram networks,” it sounded at first like that’s better than one tram network? The opposite is true, of course, and indeed they’re working on making it just one.
In the end, what matters is not the diversity of technologies, but how easy it is to get places, and this requires a different kind of transit tourism. Instead of going to a city to marvel at the technologies – picking trams over buses regardless of where they go, and riding every funicular, gondola, and odd little ferry – I prefer access tourism: I try to actually go places, and experience how easy or hard that is. (I still experience serendipity of course, but it’s in sharper relief when seen against the bright background of intention.)
Only traveling with intention made me notice the oddness of the Barcelona metro. The transit agency’s full map is here, and a slice is coming up below. You may also enjoy Jug Cerovic‘s more austere version here. The network is complicated partly because it shows metro lines (L), tram lines (T) and regional commuter rail lines (R) but for this purpose I’ll focus on the Metro lines (L).
Some simple math: In an optimal grid network, lines keep going more or less straight, and intersect each other more or less perpendicularly. You change direction in this network by making a connection. The perpendicularity maximizes the area of the city that each connection could take you to.
Transit grids can be standard or polar, but are almost always some subtle fusion of the two. The polar grid arises when there’s a huge center on which the network logically converges, because desirable destinations are packed most tightly there.
Once you recognize these patterns, you notice how coherent most metro networks are. Even those that are kludges to a degree have usually been patched as much as possible to create some appropriate fusion of radial and standard grid effects.
But among the metros I’ve encountered Barcelona’s metro network seems unusually chaotic in its network structure, often seeming to meander without intention.
On the map above, for example, look at the medium blue line that enters the map area on the left at Pubilla Cases station. This is Line 5. It heads resolutely across the map from left to right, but two-thirds of the way across the city, at La Segrera, it seems to get distracted, suddenly turning 120 degrees and heading for the hills at the top of the map.
The network is also full of lines meeting tangentially instead of crossing. For example, here’s a diagram of just Lines 5 and 2 (dark blue and purple, respectively) touching tangentially at (unmarked) Sagrada Família station:
There are numerous cases like this. In each case, you would have a more coherent network — more likely to connect more people to more destinations with fewer transfers — if the lines traded paths at this point, crossing over each other rather than touching tangentially.
Again, most metros are kludges to some degree. It’s unlikely that anybody alive in Barcelona today deserves blame for the odd patterns of the metro’s flow. There are always historical reasons for why things have ended up as they are. If you want to follow that history, here’s a fun video.
But meanwhile: Does your head contain some received wisdom along the lines of: “European metros are so fantastic that why would anyone take buses?” I can remember when many Europeans used to believe this, but today, bus network improvement is one of the most important of European trends. The need for a rational bus network may be even more urgent if your metro is staggering around drunkenly, unable to follow a straight line.
What’s great about the new Barcelona’s bus network then, is not just that it’s a grid, but that it really wants you to know that it’s a grid, and how straight its constituent lines are:
The new lines have numbers preceded by “H” or “V” for “horizontal” or “vertical”. (Vertical is quite literal: not just up-down on standard maps like this one, but also up to the hills or down to the sea.) These frequent lines are also numbered in logical sequence across the city, so that as you get to know the network, a number reminds you of roughly where in the grid each line sits, and thus what it’s likely to be useful for.
The idea is that people should be able to keep a sense of the whole grid network in their heads. If you just remember what H and V mean, and the sequence in which they’re numbered, you have an enormous amount of information the whole system. When you see any bus numbered this way, you have a general sense of which way it’s going, or at least along which axis. And when you hear a bus route number, you can easily form a general sense of where it is.
There’s liberty in this kind of legibility. You could measure it in terms of the number of useful places you can get to divided by the bytes of information you need to remember to have a workable map of how to get there. Anyone who’s navigated Manhattan knows the difference between the regular grid across most of the island (high usefulness/byte) vs the patternless warren of streets at the south end (low usefulness/byte). European cities tend to be especially challenged in this regard.
I talk about Barcelona’s bus network a lot because it’s one of the best examples of the marketing of network-scale legibility, an idea that’s almost unheard of in other parts of the world. (Perhaps related, it also has a Wikipedia article that describes it with the same respect you’d expect in discussing a metro network. Someone should translate it into English.)
Barcelona may have come upon its grid bus network, in part, because proudly legible grids were already its most celebrated urban planning idea. Most European street patterns are largely gridless and irregular. But in a sytematizing vision rivaling that of Haussmann in Paris, 19th century Barcelona embraced a single grid pattern for its fast expansion around the medieval core.
Photo by Alhzeiia via Wikipedia
This plan is usually described as the Eixample district, but it’s really a principle rather than a place. (The Catalan word eixample means “extension” or wider area”.) The new grid flows across the city over a distance of about 7km (4.5mi). It therefore covers many neighborhoods, uniting them not just with a perfectly regular street pattern but also with the grid’s most distnctive detail: the “cut off” corners that create little square spaces at each major intersection.
Now that Barcelona is beginning to close many of these streets to fast car traffic, these little diamonds will be the next great public spaces in a city already rich with them. And a great bus network, whose citywide grid pattern you can remember, and that stops just down the street, will take you there.
Thanks to my Barcelona friend Andreu Orte for background, including the Line 5/2 diagram.
On the whole question of whether ridesourcing (Uber/Lyft/etc) can replace fixed route buses, my fullest explanation is here, in both text and video form. Since then, there’s been some interesting news:
I will be in Dublin all this week (Aug 29-Sep 3), then in Barcelona over the weekend, then in Paris next week. Keen to meet public transport professionals!
For the past few years, planners at the transit agency TriMet and MPO Metro in Portland have been carefully shepherding the development of a new sort of transit project for the city. It’s turning into a new sort of transit project, period — one that doesn’t fit in the usual categories and that we will need a new word for.
The Powell-Division Transit and Development Project extends from downtown across Portland’s dense inner east side and then onward into “inner ring suburb” fabric of East Portland — now generally the lowest-income part of the region– ending at the edge city of Gresham. It was initially conceived as a Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) line, though one without much exclusive lane. It would be a new east-west rapid element in Portland’s high-frequency grid, and also serves a community college and several commercial districts.
(Full disclosure: JWA assisted with a single workshop on this project back in 2015, but we haven’t been involved in over a year.).
Below is a map of how the project had evolved by 2015, with several routing choices still undetermined. From downtown it was to cross the new Tilikum bridge and follow Powell Blvd. for a while Ironically, as inner eastside Portland began to be rethought for pedestrians and bicycles, decades ago, Powell was always the street that would “still be for cars.” To find most of the area’s gas stations and drive-through fast food, head for Powell. As a result, it’s the fastest and widest of the streets remaining, but correspondingly the least pleasant for pedestrians.
Half a mile north is Division Street. For the first few miles out of downtown, Division is a two lane mainstreet, and it’s exploded with development. It’s on the way to being built almost continuously at three stories. Further out, Division is one of the busier commercial streets of disadvantaged East Portland, though still very suburban in style as everything out there is. (For an amusing mayoral comment on that segment, see here.)
Because dense, road-dieted Division is very slow close to the city but wide and busy further out, the project began out with the idea of using Powell close-in and then transitioning to Division further out, as Division got wider, though of course this missed the densest part of Division, which is closest-in.
However, very little of the corridor would be separated from traffic. While this project was never conceived as rail-replicating, it was based on the premise that a limited-stop service using higher-capacity vehicles, aided by careful signal and queue jump interventions, could effect a meaningful travel time savings along the corridor, compared to trips made today on TriMet’s frequent 4-Division. That line runs the entire length of Division and is one of the agency’s most productive lines, but it struggles with speed and reliability.
As it turned out, though, the travel time analyses showed that from outer Division to downtown, the circuitous routing via Powell cancelled out any travel time savings from faster operations or more widely spaced stops.
As a result, planners looked at a new approach, one that would seek to improve travel times by using inner Division, which had previously been ruled out. Inner Division is a tightly constrained, 2-lane roadway through one of the most spectacularly densifying corridors in Portland, and one that is rapidly becoming a prime regional dining and entertainment destination. This development has led to predictable local handwringing about parking and travel options. Here’s what that alternative looks like:
Proposed Division station locations
Current 4-Division eastbound stops
The new plan is basically just stop consolidation with some aesthetic and fare collection/boarding improvements. But the stop consolidation would be dramatic. Note that one numbered avenue in Portland represents about 300 feet of distance, so the new spacing opens up gaps of up to 2400 feet. If you’re at 30th, for example, you’d be almost 1/4 mile from the nearest stop.
Such a plan would be controversial but quite also historic. It’s a very wide spacing for the sole service on a street. On the other hand, the wide spacing occurs on a street that is very, very walkable — one of the city’s most successful “mainstreets” in fact. And it’s basically the only way to optimize both speed and frequency on a two-lane mainstreet like inner Division.
At this point, it would be strange to call this project “BRT” (Bus Rapid Transit); even the project webpage refers to this alternative as “Division rapid bus”.
Disappointing as this will be to those who think BRT should emulate rail, it has one huge advantage over light rail. In Portland, surface light rail tends to get built where there’s room instead of where existing neighborhoods are, so it routinely ends up in ravines next to freeways, a long walk from anything. This Division project now looks like the answer to a more interesting question: What is the fastest, most reliable, most attractive service that can penetrate our densest neighborhoods, bringing great transit to the heart of where it’s most needed?
This is such a good question that we shouldn’t let arguments about the definition of “BRT” distract from it. Because it’s not a question about technology. It’s a question about people.
Line 72 stopping pattern (Powell to Division, approx. 0.5 mi)
Upgrading the 4-Division to a rapid bus line (without underlying local service, which is impossible due to the constrained roadway) should present a real improvement in quality of service (in terms of capacity using the larger vehicles, and in a 20-25% travel time savings), while at the same time being easier to implement and less disruptive to existing travel patterns.
It also provides a template for TriMet to consider stop consolidation and frequent rapid service on other corridors like the aforementioned Line 72. Rather than seeing this as a failure to design a rapid transit project, perhaps we can celebrate a process that has steered away from a path that would have resulted in a disappointing outcome, towards a more limited, more economical, but still meaningful improvement for riders.
Last week’s trip to Barrow, Alaska — with a stop at Deadhorse — was not a business trip. We weren’t looking for transit, or even really for a town. We were looking for landscapes, plants, birds, indigenous art, an unfamiliar sea, and of course latitude.
Still, on news that I was going, a prominent figure in the microtransit world tweeted me this:
@humantransit Jarret [sic] – can I request a blog post on Barrow transit options? rural … transit doesn’t get enough press.
— Matthew George (@NotMattGeorge) August 14, 2016
So with him in mind, I snapped this pic at the Iñupiat Cultural Centre. A small bus with several riders arrived and dropped off a man, who went into the adjacent library.
Barrow’s a small town (<5000) and this is a typical small-town transit bus — except for the lack of markings, which doesn’t surprise me. Barrow is a largely indigenous community with locally-oriented problem-solving networks that aren’t going to be visible to an outsider, and there’s no reason they should be.
It was my only sighting of that bus all day, not that I was looking for it. Mostly, people get around Barrow in pickup trucks, SUVs, and deafening little ATVs. Not much on two wheels. And people walk.
Like many Alaskan towns, including the capital, Barrow has no connections to the larger road network. It might as well be an island. Owning a car, then, lacks one of its main attractions — you can’t “hit the open road.”. Here, the roads don’t go out of town. In a car, you’re as trapped in town as you’d be as a pedestrian.
Well, one road ended at a lake, but it had a surprising amount of traffic, as though everyone who wanted to get out of town had only that one place to go. And you can drive to Point Barrow, but only if that track to the left, in very deep wet sand, looks safe to you. We were wimps.
To be fair, being trapped in town is a summer problem, because what surrounds the town then is either open ocean or bog-like tundra, the latter hard to walk across. The winter freeze expands Barrow’s horizons, as both ocean and tundra become hard surfaces, easier to explore.
It is an interesting town, especially when you consider that absolutely everything you see got here on a boat or an airplane. It’s on stilts, as it’s built on permafrost that turns into bogs in the summer. Mostly wood, although the nearest tree is several hundred miles away. And mostly not trying to impress us, which is fine.
The “end of fixed transit” narratives coming out of the tech industry (and sometimes also from architects and visionaries) are an increasing problem for dense cities, where, as I argued here, the primary need is to provide movement and liberty for vast numbers of people in very little space. Even where ridership is moderate, replacing big vehicles with little ones can only mean more vehicle trips, with all of their congestion and environmental impacts, and if little vehicles are made more cost-effective in labor terms (prior to automation) then this can only be because of a race to the bottom on driver compensation.
The key fact to remember: even that low-ridership suburban bus line that looks empty all the time is probably doing at least 10 riders / service hour (that is, per hour that one transit vehicle is running). No ‘door to door’ service can possibly match this; you are not going to take 10 people to their individual doors in an hour, especially if they live as far apart as they usually do in the suburbs. Ten boardings per hour is a dreadful performance for a fixed route and almost unimaginably high for anything demand-responsive to achieve.
So the only way for a low-productivity service (riders/service hour) to outcompete big buses is through a race to the bottom on wages and compensation, which has consequences for both service quality and for the larger society.
The most urgent thing transit agencies need to do, right now, is start talking more confidently about what their fixed-route, high-ridership transit service is achieving, so that they negotiate with the new players from a position of strength and confidence.
More on this soon, but meanwhile there’s a video. It’s from a presentation I did to the Board of Capital Metro, the Austin area transit agency, last month. It’s here, but you need to select “VIII, 1” on the fifth row on the right, to get to the right spot. The presentation is about 40 minutes, and it ranges across many themes, but always comes back to the spatial geometry issue.
by Evan Landman, the lead data analyst at Jarrett Walker & Associates
For years, we’ve talked about the utility of isochrone maps as a method of visualizing the mobility impacts of different transit choices. The idea is to communicate in a simple, direct way, all of the places a person can get to from a point under different transit network scenarios. Much of our firm’s work involves leading cities and transit agencies through public processes where the outcomes produces by transit networks based on different choices are explicitly compared. We’ve come to rely on isochrone maps more and more as the technology to generate them has become more widespread and accessible. This has led to a proliferation of images like these:
Of course, no set of possible isochrone locations will accurately represent the places of interest of all people who would be impacted by a plan. Better still would be to offer a tool that would allow people to create their own isochrones from any location, and compare the direct impact of a proposed change on the places most important to their own lives and travel behavior.
With that background in mind, we’re excited to share a new tool designed by Michael Baker International, our partners working on a transit network redesign project in Richmond, Virginia. Using GTFS files generated for three conceptual network options, this web map generates travel time isochrones for three different network scenarios. You can check out the live version here. The point is to let people explore, for themselves, how the different options would affect where they could go, and hence the opportunities in their lives.
As more and more of the work of outreach and documentation of transit planning projects moves online, new opportunities have emerged to communicate the true impacts of these plans. Techniques first deployed by open-source software developers, stimulated by the ever-growing capability and adaptability of web mapping software and abundance of GTFS data, are now well-documented, established practices. We are constantly adapting these tools as part of our efforts to clearly explain the outcomes of such projects to the people who will be directly impacted by them.
As Scudder Wagg of Michael Baker International, who directed the tool’s development, put it:
We’re always excited to work on innovative tools and new ways of visualizing the value of transit. We enjoy taking on new challenges and finding ways to help residents understand and explore how different transit concepts can change their lives. The technical hurdles to implementing this tool were not all that great. The biggest challenge was getting the right people talking to each other in a way they could understand so that our transit planners, GIS professionals and web developers could all understand the desired outcome and figure out how to get there.
