Human Transit

The Chinese Straddle Bus Exists! What Now?

Posted on August 3, 2016 in Technophilia

13909015_1342015949159179_6822123175964675488_o

The Chinese straddle bus has now been built, and run on a test track! Whee! Here’s the gee-whiz video.

As I said before, I think that especially in wealthy countries, this thing is mostly useful as a parable, whose message is: Look how much money people will spend on infrastructure whose sole purpose is to avoid taking any space from motorists.

If the thing has any application, it’s probably not in Europe or North America, because:

It’s massively capital intensive. The little rail-like running-ways in the street are the least of it, and the fleet is the second-least. The stations must be massive elevated structures, with a mezzanine above the top of the bus. Existing bridges would almost all need to be raised. Countries with high construction costs will find this a barrier.
It will serve stations located on expressways, which tend to be bad places for the pedestrians that the bus will attract and disgorge. The only solution to this is massive grade separation, leading to a continuous pedestrian plane at the station level, well above the street. This leads to urban design that essentially abandons the ground plane to cars and rebuilds an entire pedestrian city above it.
The vast raised pedestrian plane was a hot idea for about 15 minutes in the 1970s, giving us London’s Barbican, Paris’s La Défense, Los Angeles’s Bunker Hill, etc etc. Today, most European and North American urbanists hate these places and insist on solving problems on the ground plane, though of course the pendulum could swing again. But it’s much more common and accepted in East Asia, and to some extent in former Soviet countries.
There’s also the problem that if you build this thing in an existing dense city, you are building it right outside of someone’s window. So you probably need a political structure that can make and enforce highly controversial decisions, as opposed to the kind of deference to public protest that prevails in most Western democracies.
You really have to redesign big districts around this thing, which is another big barrier unless we are talking about entirely new areas. A high pedestrian plane only works if the idea is shared by many surrounding buildings.
Where this thing connects with underground subway lines, your mezzanine for this elevated thing is at least four stories away from the subway’s mezzanine. This requires high-volume vertical circulation, which no inventor has ever really cracked. Elevators are really inefficient at high volume, and escalators are really slow at it.
The nature of this technology makes it hard to demonstrate at the right scale. There is a basic conflict between “huge capital expenditure” and “demonstration of new technology.” It’s the same problem that monorails and maglevs and “Personal Rapid Transit” and many other cool ideas have had. Inventors need places to do demo projects. But it’s not smart for a city to agree to be Version 1.0 of something, while also spending billions on the assumption of its permanent success. This is how cities end up with stranded transit assets that can become net barriers to good transit (see Scarborough RT, Toronto, or the airport maglev in Shanghai, etc etc.)

(Update: In the third top-level comment below, Brian Smith points out that the surface space this thing takes is still wider than a bus lane, so why not just do aa busway? He also points out that the vehicle is rigid and the test track was straight. What happens when it goes around curves? It takes more horizontal space of course. And it seems to rely on a ground-level third-rail, which is considered wildly unsafe in the business.)

Having said that, if anyone can pull this off at scale, it’s probably China, which seems to tick all the boxes I’ve identified. They have the sufficiently centralized decision making, low enough construction costs, ability to do things at scale, and relative indifference to Western aesthetics that this thing requires. They are also building entirely new districts, which offer the best possibility for actually organizing a place around the correct elevated ground plane. So yes, it may happen, and it may do some good. Which doesn’t mean it’s not, deep down, ridiculous.

Anton Dubrau’s Automated Transit Maps

Posted on July 27, 2016 in General

Back in 2010, cartographer Anton Dubrau got my attention with his beautiful hand-drawn map of the Montréal transit system. In my post on his work, I wrote:

There’s no question that the most beautiful network maps will continue to be those made by hand, with great care and thought, by people who know the city. I’d like to say “most useful” as well, but that will be true only as long as they can be kept up to date.

Anton agreed, but now he’s not so sure. He emailed me today:

It feels like a long time ago that Google Maps started publishing their transit maps generated by algorithms. You wrote about it, and I actually made a map by hand of Montreal’s frequent transit that you used in this discussion of algorithms vs humans for maps, on your blog: Montréal: The Pleasure of Maps Made by Hand, or by Eye.
Even though I advocated for maps made by hand at the time, the question of algorithmically generated but nevertheless pretty and functional transit maps has occupied me since then, for years. Well, working for Transit App, I had the chance to spend a significant amount of time trying to make the best algorithmically generated maps possible. We spent a significant amount of effort on this. Although not perfect, I feel we’ve gotten pretty far.
We published the maps last week, they’re shown inside Transit App. We wrote about our mapping story, telling it as wanting to achieve the prettiness of Apple’s more manual solution, but the scalability of Google’s automatic process. In short, we wanted algorithms to draw beautiful transit maps. Check out Chicago’s Loop as an example.

Jarrett here. In the images above, Google is on the right, Apple in the center, and Anton’s new Transit Maps product on the left. I recommend their entire post, which is a fun and well-illustrated read, if a bit brash. Anton:

It’s a bit brash, in true startup fashion, but the response has been pretty positive overall so far. The story is getting shared by tech celebrities like Benedict Evans, NYT data journalists, and quite a number of transit thought leaders (Yonah Freemark, Second Avenue Sagas, Taras Grescoe).
So far we’re only including rail lines, and the odd BRT here and there. That’s a more technical limitation, bus networks are still a bit too complex – we plan to add them later.
Maybe this is interesting for you as well. I’d be interested in your thoughts.

I like it! I wonder how much information density it can handle. A simple frequent bus network? A complicated mass of overlapping lines with numbers like 674Q, as in a typical peak commute network? I’d encourage them to aim for the former and not bother with the latter, which are impossible to map clearly and are better found with trip planners anyway.

I don’t run many private sector press releases here, but I’ve liked Anton’s work for a long time, and as someone who routinely needs realtime info in lots of different cities, I admit I’ve become fond of Transit App.

Good Article on My Talk on Microtransit …

Posted on July 26, 2016 in General, Microtransit

Caleb Pritchard at the Austin Monitor did a very clear writeup on my new talk on the impacts of microtransit (Bridj etc.) and ridesourcing (Lyft, Uber etc.) on public transit. In it, I push back hard on the notion that these services have any potential to “disrupt” public transit in any meaningful way, though there are potential synergies around the edges of transit’s mission.

Here’s the most important paragraph:

“There’s an enormous amount of public relations noise coming out of the tech industry, and most of it is directed towards people who don’t understand transit very well,” Walker said. “And transit leaders like yourselves really have to be able to confront that and say, ‘No. The fixed-route service, especially frequent fixed-route service, is doing something incredible that no tech innovators are doing or show any signs of doing.’”

Read the whole thing.

Guest Post: David Moss on Driverless Buses

Posted on July 25, 2016 in General

David Moss is a Detroit-based freelance transportation writer. When he is not writing about vehicle technology, he spends his time hiking. You can reach him at @davidcmoss

Buses driving autonomously might seem like something from science fiction but the technology is developing fast, and is actually in practice, or at least in a trial phase, in a number of cities all across Asia, Europe and North America.

The most important finding is that while European and American driverless trials are for very small buses – too small to be transformative to the larger public bus market – larger buses are now also under development, in China and also in a recent announcement by Mercedes. If perfected, these large buses would have the potential to dramatically increase the quantity of transit service that agencies could afford to offer.

China

While there has been a heated debate in the United States over driverless vehicles, China took the initiative by developing a self-driving bus that completed a 20 mile trip through the city of Zhengzhou in August of 2015. Using a variety of sensors, cameras and an integrated navigation system, this bus was able to roll through the streets of Zhengzhou at a top speed of about 42 miles per hour.

This remarkable achievement was the end product of a three-year trial conducted in the city by Yutong—a Chinese bus company and the creator of the bus. This company, along with the Chinese Academy of Engineering, has shown that it is possible to put a driverless bus on the road and do it safely. However, while this test was impressive, it’s still going to take additional testing before a full-scale rollout can begin nationwide. Fortunately, that is currently in the works as the Chinese tech firm Baidu has recently unveiled a five-year plan to introduce a variety of autonomous vehicles at the streets of Wuhu.

While Google believes that the first truly autonomous vehicles to be used full time on the road will be taxi cabs, Baidu believes that the future of this technology is in driverless buses and/or shuttles. Although it should be said that their five year plan not only focuses on autonomous buses and vans, but on cars as well.

Singapore

A few years ago, Singapore launched the Singapore Autonomous Vehicle Initiative (SAVI)—a joint partnership with the Land Transit Authority and A*STAR – whose primary goal is to research and develop autonomous vehicle technology.

SAVI has currently partnered with MIT on improving public transportation systems in urban areas by using autonomous vehicle technology. Several trials will take place this year, and the test route has already been planned to test the efficacy of driverless technology solutions. This study, which is expected to take about two years to complete, will end in 2018—at which time the public is expected to have full use of driverless transportation technology.

Greece and Switzerland

Greece also tested a small driverless bus in the town of Trikala—a rural community nestled in Northern Greece. Their trial lasted from October 2015 until February 2016, and featured a ten-passenger bus that could navigate the streets at a speed of about 12.4 miles per hour. In Switzerland, two driverless “SmartShuttles” are currently being tested in the Old Town of Scion. They are currently carrying passengers for free. The trials will continue over the next two years.

The United Kingdom

London unveiled plans to introduce autonomous bus-like vehicles this year. This plan—part of the Greenwich Automated Transport Environment Project (GATEway)—will utilize driverless shuttles that will be first tested on the streets of Greenwich—around the O2 Arena, several residential areas and the North Greenwich tube station. Currently, the Heathrow Airport shuttle operates between the business car park and terminal five. Seven of these shuttles will be modified for use in these trials, which are slated to begin later this year. If the trials prove to be successful, then people can expect to see completely autonomous shuttles used for everything from transportation to automated deliveries.

Belgium and Sweden

Belgium is also working on its own autonomous transit system that is due to be launched in 2018. This project—which is a joint partnership between the Belgium public transport operator De Lijn and the Brussels Airport Company—will feature driverless buses that are expected to transport passengers and airport staff around the airport.

In April of 2016, Sweden also conducted a trial on driverless bus technology, completed by Ericsson, a Swedish IT company that operated minibuses using 5G technology. However, their plan is not only to have autonomous electric vehicles transporting passengers, but also to develop a whole system of vehicles working together in a highly efficient transportation hub.

United States

The Bay Area is ground zero for autonomous buses in the United States. San Francisco has developed a detailed plan for driverless vehicles on its roads, a system that will use both buses and shuttles. And a Bishop Ranch business park in San Ramon, California is initiating a pilot program in the summer of 2016 that will use two EZ10 pods to relieve traffic congestion in the area.

The Future of Driverless Bus Technology: Benefits and Concerns

Driverless technology may well be the wave of the future. And there are several reasons why that is the case. The vehicles in question are good for the environment because they are all electric and in full use they will dramatically reduce a city’s oil consumption. They are also safer than human driven vehicles. Some studies have also shown that driverless vehicles are more efficient and will increase the flow of traffic—particularly in congested areas. But most importantly, they would allow transit agencies to make bus service dramatically more abundant, by severing the link between operating costs and labor costs that constrains all bus operations today.

It is also clear that many people have concerns about driverless technology. There are still many that believe that driverless buses are unsafe.

Certainly, there will be labor resisitance to automation, though history shows that automation usually prevails in the end. While the jobs of some drivers will indeed be lost due to the adoption of this technology, that will be offset by an increased need for other specialized workers. More mechanics, programmers and technicians will be needed to maintain driverless buses and keep them operating correctly.

However, so far, autonomous vehicles have proven to be safer than manned vehicles. That’s because they eliminate the “human error” factor common in many accidents. And while some people are still concerned about these vehicles’ reaction time, sensor arrays and vehicle safety technologies are improving continuously.

There are still, among other things, liability issues to be ironed out and there are too many public fears to be pacified. However, we can expect that eventually, driverless buses—like driverless cars—will be a common sight on our highways and roads.

Hello, Austin!

Posted on July 22, 2016 in General

I’m heading for Austin Sunday for two days of meetings about the relationship between transit, microtransit, and ridesourcing (Bridj, Split, Uber, Lyft, etc etc). (Yesterday’s post may be a preview of my angle on this topic.)

The event open to the public is a Capital Metro Board Workshop Monday. July 25, Noon-2 pm, at the Cap Metro headquarters 2910 E 5th. Note that this is a Board meeting and there may be some other business.

Look forward to meeting lots of cool people in Austin!

Basics: Technology Never Changes Geometry

Posted on July 21, 2016 in General

Like many fashionable tech folks, Elon Musk wants to replace city buses with little vehicles that protect you from having to share space with strangers.

With the advent of autonomy, it will probably make sense to shrink the size of buses and transition the role of bus driver to that of fleet manager. … [This technology] would also take people all the way to their destination. … (Emphasis added)

Musk assumes that transit is an engineering problem, about vehicle design and technology. In fact, providing cost-effective and liberating transportation in cities requires solving a geometry problem. This confusion is very common in transport technology circles.

In dense cities, where big transit vehicles (including buses) are carrying significant ridership, any “small vehicles replacing big vehicles” solution increases the total number of vehicles on the road at any time. The technical measure of this is Vehicle Miles (or Km) Travelled (VMT).

Today, increasing VMT would mean increased emissions and increased road carnage, but let’s say technology has solved those problems, with electric vehicles and automation. Those are engineering problems. Inventors can work on those.

But there is still, and aways, the problem of space. Increasing VMT means that you are taking more space to move the same number of people. This may be fine in low-density and rural areas, where there’s lots of space per person. But a city, by definition, has little space per person, so the efficient use of space is the core problem of urban transportation.

When we are talking about space, we are talking about geometry, not engineering, and technology never changes geometry. You must solve a problem spatially before you have really solved it.

—

The reigning fantasy of Musk’s argument is that we must always “take people all the way to their destination.” To do this we must abolish the need to ever change vehicles — from a train to a bus, from a car to a train, from a bus to a bike — and of course we also abolish walking. This implies a vision in which buses are shrunk into something like taxis, because a vehicle going directly from your exact origin to your exact destination at your chosen time won’t be useful to many people other than you.

So a bus with 4o people on it today is blown apart into, what, little driverless vans with an average of two each, a 20-fold increase in the number of vehicles? It doesn’t matter if they’re electric or driverless. Where will they all fit in the urban street? And when they take over, what room will be left for wider sidewalks, bike lanes, pocket parks, or indeed anything but a vast river of vehicles?

—

There are audiences for which Musk’s vision makes perfect sense, people for whom useful high-ridership transit isn’t an option anyway. There are two big categories of these people:

People who live in outer-suburban and rural areas, where space is abundant and high-ridership transit isn’t viable.
The wealthiest 20% or so of urban residents, who can afford to use relatively expensive services that would never scale to the entire population of the city.

If you are in one of these categories, your most urgent task is to remember that most people aren’t like you, and that cities are impossible if everyone lives according to your personal tastes. As Edward Glaser said, “one’s own tastes are rarely a sound basis for public policy.”

That issue, right there, is the great disconnect between tech marketing and genuine urban problem-solving.

Tech marketing is all about appealing to elite personal tastes. It runs on the assumption that whatever we sell to the wealthy today we can sell to the masses tomorrow. But some things stop working when everybody buys them. Cars in dense cities, for example, are not a problem when only the top 20% are using them; it’s mass adoption of cars that makes them ruinous to a dense city and to the liberty of its citizens. Ask anyone in a fast-growing developing world city about that.

—

Here is the harm that this all this elite chatter about abolishing the bus is doing: It’s introducing fatal confusion into the discussion of urban development.

Dense cities that want to live in the real world of space and time, and that do not want to become dystopias that are functional only for the rich, need to use urban space efficiently. There is some simple and well-proven math about how to do this, which is also the math of how transit systems achieve high ridership.

These cities need to organize themselves around frequent transit corridors, where big-vehicle frequent transit, bus or rail, can prosper, allowing the city to grow dense without growing vehicle trips.

Someday some of these corridors will be rail or Bus Rapid Transit. But the only way to grow enough corridors quickly, so that you cover much of the city with frequent service that can succeed in ridership terms, is to take frequent fixed-route bus service seriously. If you don’t do that in your land use planning, you’re going to end up building a city where fixed transit is geometrically impossible, and then you’ll have no alternatives when congestion begins to strangle growth.

Smart cities aren’t just the ones that chase the latest technology fads. They’re the ones that think carefully about the spatial, geometric problem that a dense city is. Because if it doesn’t work geometrically, it doesn’t work.

New York: “Subway Deserts” and the Bus “Turnaround” Campaign

Posted on July 20, 2016 in New York City

It’s fun to draw maps of “deserts,” places where some cool thing is absent and where you can therefore imply that people are being abandoned or ignored. This Chris Whong map of New York “Subway deserts” for example, just showed up in Citylab:

Source: Chris Whong

Sure enough, most of the land area of New York city is not near a subway station.

But how many people is that? It’s a lot of people, but fewer than you’d guess from looking at the map, because so much of the subwayless area is low-density or even open space. Geographically accurate maps always invite you to misread area as population.

And in any case, should everyone in New York be close to a subway stop? The subway is not the whole transit system; it’s just the high-capacity backbone of it. You build subways only where you expect to fill long trains at high frequency for much of the day.

There may be places in New York that would profit from, and reward, the investment in a subway, but a map of everywhere that subways don’t go doesn’t even start that conversation.

The deserts that really matter are deserts of access, places where people are truly without options. And to assess that for New York, even just for transit, you’d have to care about the massive bus network. It’s the bus network job to cover the whole city, getting close to everyone. Much of the bus system is also very frequent.

That’s why the smart folks at TransitCenter — a New York – based transit advocacy foundation — have launched a Turnaround campaign, meant to call attention to all the things that can be done to make New York bus service more useful, so that almost everyone can get to useful transit. I deal with the barriers to good bus service all over the developed world, and the problem is always the same. It’s not the technical limitations to what buses can do. It’s the official apathy about them.

For example, many elected officials still believe that because buses are supposedly “flexible” they should just be changed so that they go by the house of anyone who requests them, as though fixed route bus lines were taxis or UberPools. If they get enough phone calls, these elected officials will tell staff to transform the route on the right into the one on the left, with no comprehension of what they’re destroying.

Obviously, bus lines designed for high ridership run straight, so that they are as useful to many many people as possible, and so that they can run as frequently as possible. Obvious stuff, but you have to fight this battle over and over, and that’s a lot of what I do.

So bravo to TransitCenter for its review of the New York buses. It’s something that people in any developed-world city would be smart to review, and contemplate.

Job! Manager of Access Planning in Vancouver

Posted on July 13, 2016 in General

It closes July 20, so act fast. Greater Vancouver (Canada)’s transit agency TransLink seeks a Manager of Access Planning, where “access” refers to people with disabilities. The listing is here.

Does the History of a Technology Matter?

Posted on July 4, 2016 in Brisbane, Bus Rapid Transit, Light Rail, Technophilia

6a00d83454714d69e2012875c1a395970c-320wi

Mater Hill busway station, Brisbane

Ben Ross has a nice long read in Dissent about the history of Bus Rapid Transit, noting all the ways it’s succeeded, failed, and been co-opted by various non-transit agendas. He’s especially interested in the way various petroleum-and-asphalt interest groups have supported BRT as an alternative to rail for reasons that probably don’t have much to do with their love of great public transit. All this is worth reading and knowing about.

But what, exactly, should we do with this history? Practically everything that breaks through into the public discourse has private public relations money behind it, and that money always has different goals than you and your city do. That’s why you should always lean into the wind when reading tech media. But just as it’s wrong to fall for everything you read in corporate press releases, it’s also wrong to reflexively fall against them. (Cynicism, remember, is consent.)

Galileo paid the bills, in part, by helping the military aim cannonballs correctly. Does that mean pacifists should resist his insight that Jupiter has moons?

So while I loved Ross’s tour of the history, I reject his dismissive conclusion:

Buses will always be an essential part of public transit. Upgrading them serves urbanism, the environment, and social equity. But a better bus is not a train, and bus rapid transit promoters lead astray when they pretend otherwise. At its worst, BRT can be a Trojan horse for highway building. Even at its best, it is a technocratic solution to a fundamentally political problem.

The term technocratic is really loaded here. Given the new “revolt against experts” trend in our politics, we urgently need to recognize hard-earned expertise and to distinguish it from elite selfishness, but technocrat is a slur designed to confuse the two.

6a00d83454714d69e2012875c19fc4970c-500pi

RBWH busway station, Brisbane

There are some great bus rapid transit systems out there, and not just in the developing world. The mixed motives that underlie BRT advocacy don’t tell us anything about where BRT makes sense, any more than the mixed motives behind rail advocacy do.

A light reading of history can help you recognize the prejudices that may lay behind advocacy on all sides. But then you have to set that aside, and think for yourself.

Riding Against the Grain: A Photographer on Portland’s Line 75

Posted on June 20, 2016 in General, Portland

Portland-based photographer Geoffrey Hiller is best known for a marvelous book Daybreak in Myanmar, which interleaves pre- and post-revolution images of that country. Now he’s turned his attention to one of Portland’s most interesting bus lines — at least in terms of the diversity of unsung corners of the city that it serves, and the beautiful and often eccentric people who live and do business there. His blog lays out the work in little photo vignettes with commentary. It’s wonderful.

I did an essay for his blog and any future book, in which I say things like …

As it makes its long orbit around Portland, then, the 75 tours the shifting front lines of many epic struggles. Gentrification loves the bohemian but chases it away. Defenders of history scream “stop demolishing Portland!” even as a desperate need for housing calls for bigger buildings. And in parallel, everywhere on the 75, you can watch the parallel dramas of power and weakness: power struggling to protect itself, while others struggle for survival and dignity.
To this shifting landscape, Geoffrey Hiller is the perfect guide. He knows you’ve seen the real estate photos, the chamber of commerce photos, the tourist photos, and the photos of cashed-up millennials in designer grunge luxuriating in sculpted authenticity. He wants you to see something else. Here is the Portland in between things, the struggling and hopeful Portland, the Portland that’s happening anyway despite everyone’s grandest plans.

You might find it a useful accompaniment to Geoff’s photos. It’s all about a Portland you may have missed in your perusing of real estate magazines, or for that matter your urbanist-guided tour.

All photos: Geoffrey Hiller

Older posts Newer posts