We’ve been studying the transit system in Anchorage, Alaska for the last few months, and this Thursday May 5 I’ll be in town for an evening event.  I’ll do a keynote providing an overview of the transit planning challenge and exploring what we’ve found out about your transit system.  (Did you know that on average, your buses are more crowded on weekends than on weekdays?).  There will be plenty of opportunities to get involved and express your views.

See here for more information about the event.  Our most recent detailed report on the system and its prospects is called the Choices Report.  <– Download it there!

For the last 10 days, I’ve been in Yekaterinburg, Sverdlovsk Oblast, Russia.

It’s over a million people in a remarkably compact city at a dam on a river, in the midst of taiga forest (spruce, birch, larch, pine).  In fact, it’s by far the most dense and compact Russian city of its size, which means they need to get used to being a national leader in public transit development.

And yes, it already has a lot of transit.  In this first picture, note the trams, full-size motorbuses, and, at the crowded stop in the distance, trolleybuses and tiny van-like buses.  There’s also a metro.

Still, it’s OK if you haven’t heard of Yekaterinburg.  A year ago I’d barely heard of it either.

But last year, an energetic local NGO called Gorod.pro, which is dedicated to improving the city’s transport and urban environment, called me, and I do my best to say yes to these things.

Yekaterinburg presents a series of transit situations common in middle-wealth places, but that I’ve also struggled with in Australia and New Zealand and the UK.  As I outlined in more detail here, the city has evolved several overlapping transit systems that compete as much as they cooperate, and as a result you can’t get to as many places as quickly as you could if they were all working together.  The trams, trolleybuses, and motorbuses overlap each other and also overlap the single metro line.  And there are about 1000 smaller buses, down to the size of vans, that do all kinds of unpredictable things, including driving rather dangerously in order to get ahead of big buses and grab their passengers.

So I was asked to work with local leaders and transit managers to hammer out a vision — including a specific map — of what that would look like.

I’m always happy to slip quietly into a city, but that certainly didn’t happen here.  The client wanted a splash, so all week I was doing public lectures, radio interviews, and high profile meetings with the City Manager, his key deputy for transportation, and even the mayor, Yevgeny Roizman — all with lots of reporters.

Mayor Roizman was especially generous with his time and interest.  In addition to our formal meeting in his office he also gave me a tour of a museum of icon painting that he founded. He also joined us for a few hours of touring the city, often interrupted by eager citizens wanting a photo with him.   He even dropped into our working sessions, with chocolate.

For much of the week, I was sequestered with a group of key staff leaders, including senior managers from the various transit operating companies and city transport and planning staff.  As I insist on doing in most of my planning projects, we locked ourselves away for 8 hours a day to hammer out a shared vision of how the city’s transit might be better if it were planned as a single network.  An excellent set of photos by Gorod.pro gives a sense of the intensity.

(The guy drawing is Vladimir Zlokazov of Gorod.pro.  He was my main contact, advisor, negotiator and translator throughout the project.)

At the end of the week, we had a sketch of how the network could look if everything worked together.  We had tram, trolleybus, and frequent motor bus lines drawn specifically, and a general set of principles for how the enormous fleet of smaller buses would supplement this network.

We also identified some of the biggest challenges for moving forward:

1. Fixing the fare system.  The current fare structure charges people for changing vehicles, which undermines the whole point of a highly efficient network.
2. Reorganizing operating contracts, so that the only revenue total that matters is that from the entire network.  This is essential to eliminate competitive behavior between subsidized services, so that the result is the maximum possible access to the city for everyone.
3. Maintaining separability from other issues.  There are 1000 other things to be done to improve transit, notably in the area of infrastructure.  But almost none of it has to be done to get the new network on the road.  We worked carefully to make sure we had a plan that didn’t require building anything more than bus stops, and that had a first phase that didn’t even require that.  This is the key to ensuring that a network plan doesn’t get stuck waiting for something to be built.

A report on this network, its benefits, and the challenges it will present, will be out soon, and I’ll do a post on it here.

(Workshop photos: Gorod.pro)

Last year, I got an inquiry from Russia’s fourth largest city, Yekaterinburg, about helping them rethink their transit system.  An excellent local NGO called Gorod.pro put the project together, and after the usual struggles over visas and insurance, I’m off to Yekaterinburg next week to work with City and foundation staff on new options for network design.  If you read Russian, you can follow along on the project page.

We’ve laid out an initial analysis of the system in our Choices Report, which is now public.  You can download it here: English.  Russian.

Yekaterinburg has several transit networks, which is not necessarily better than having one.  There’s a metro, a tram network, a trolleybus network, a local bus network, and a range of small-bus products, and they mostly look like they’ve been designed separately, rather than working together.  There’s an emphasis on low-frequency direct services rather than high-frequency connective services, so that’s a trade-off we’ll explore.

One key thing we did was to draw what may be the first map that shows all the transit services.  You can find it in the report, but here’s a slice.  The colors here mean frequency (red is 15 or better, green is 30 or better, green is 60 or better).  The number symbols distinguish the technologies.

We think maybe this could be simpler.

And of course, when you have a lot of infrequent lines piled up on the same long segments, it means you could afford more frequent lines if you combined them.

But it’s all about trade-offs.  I ask the questions but the locals answer them.  We’re happy to see people downloading and reading our Choices Report, and I’m looking forward to great conversations (in simultaneous translation) over the next two weeks.

… or as the City of Edmonton calls it, the frequency-coverage tradeoff, which is fair too.  We’re proud of our role in getting this conversation started, with City Council workshops a couple of years ago …

It’s here.  Background here.

Self Driving Cars Likely to Restore 70% of Lost Faith in Humanity.  (Planetizen)

Google Netherlands (who else?) Invents the Driverless Bicycle  (Excellent YouTube Video of Dutch people being adorable as usual.)

With typical tech-bro grandiosity, inventors promise that Duck Rapid transit will abolish that old fashioned subway system in Washington DC.  (Greater Greater Washington).

Community Transit (Everett, WA) will celebrate 40th Annversary by running its 1976 network on October 4.  Helpful diagram:

I’ll add more as the day progresses.  Send links to your favorites.

There’s more data than ever, so there are more ways than ever to draw brightly colored maps of supposed transit facts.  But that means it’s also easier than ever to take common types of confusion about transit and make them look like the outcomes of analysis.  Your results will always reflect your assumptions, and a lot of transit analysis is still built on common mistakes that are completely obvious if you stop to think about them.

Case in point today, US Department of Transportation wants to undertake a National Transit Map project.  This seems to mean drawing all the nation’s transit data feeds into a national database, which is certainly a good thing. But everything depends on the assumptions being made, and the initial video — recommended on Twitter by its narrator, Dan Morgan of USDOT — is not encouraging.  The big mistakes can all be found in a 3-minute stretch starting at 5:00.  Here’s the video.

The three big mistakes are:

1. Implicitly confusing land area with population in visual representations.  Starting at 5:00, the video presents a map of intercity access by car and train.  The “discovery” from this analysis is that Amtrak doesn’t stop for several hundred miles as it crosses West Texas.  It looks like a gap on the map, but it’s not a gap in reality because there are almost no people there.  Of course, people draw maps like this all the time (we’ll see a lot of them during election season) but good analysis provides some visual cue to caution the viewer that land area, which is what jumps out on maps, has nothing to do with people.  For example, this map could have been superimposed on a map of population density.
2. Assuming that having transit nearby is more important than transit being useful or liberating.   At 6:00 we see a map of the part of Salt Lake City in walking distance to transit, showing obvious gaps.This makes the previous mistake (there’s no indication of whether anyone lives or works in those gaps) but more importantly, it gives the impression that the primary problem with transit is that it doesn’t cover more area.   In actual transit systems with fixed budgets, the area you cover will be inversely related to the frequency, speed, and reliability you can offer, which means that a transit agency that spreads itself thin tends to offer services that are useless to almost everyone.  This geometric fact is the basis of the ridership-coverage tradeoff problem.  When we see analyses that imply that transit’s problem is that it doesn’t go enough places, we need to recognize this as implying an advocacy of coverage over ridership, and more generally an advocacy of spreading service so thin that none of it is useful to most people’s lives.
3. Focusing on peak hour service when discussing the access needs of poor people, even though most low-income people need to travel at all times of the day, evening and weekend.   Starting at 6:55, we get an analysis that identifies poor people who do not have good access to rush hour transit.  Poor people are rarely rush-hour commuters and they go many places other than the downtowns on which most peak service focuses.

I’m sure the analysts behind these examples thought that they were simplifying in a useful way.  In my consulting work we simplify all the time.  But we are careful to simplify in the direction of clarity about reality, rather than in the direction of helping people feel good about their often-false assumptions.  The simplifications in this video — and of so much transit analysis still — are of the latter kind.

You may have seen my recent Washington Post piece on why fixed route transit will always be essential.  Here’s my deeper dive for the Southern California Association of Governments Vision 2040 report.  It focuses more specifically on how a focus on geometry can help us be smarter about prediction.  Most important paragraph:

If you can recognize a problem as geometric — such as the need to use space efficiently in cities – you can become a smarter consumer of predictions. Cities will always have relatively little space per person, so no matter what technologies we invent, the amount of space that things take will always matter, and we’ll have to use that space wisely.