Human Transit

Self-Driving Cars: A Coming Congestion Disaster?

Posted on November 25, 2015 in General

We're starting to see professional reports echoing long-standing concerns about how driverless cars will affect our cities. This new one from KPMG, in particular, is getting a lot of press. It's actually a focus group study about the transport desires of different generations, but it confirms the thought experiments that many of us have already been laying out for a while.

Much depends on whether these cars are owned or spontaneously hired like taxis, Uber, and Lyft. A taxi model is definitely better in its congestion impacts, but that doesn't mean it will happen. The ownership model is closer to the status quo, and the status quo always has enormous power. Driverless taxis will not always be available on demand, especially in suburban and rural areas, so a legitimate fear of being stranded will make people in those areas prefer the security of having a car just for them. And of course, that's just the effect of rational concerns about relying on taxis. Less rational desires for car ownership, as an expression of identity or symbol of liberty, will also not vanish overnight.

This leads to a nightmare scenario that University of Washington's Mark Hollenbeck laid out in our recent Seattle Times panel. Paraphrasing Mark: A suburban father rides his driverless car to work, maybe dropping his daughter off at school. But rather than park the car downtown, he simply tells it to drive back home to his house in the suburbs. During the day, it runs some other errands for his family. At 3 pm, it goes to the school to bring his daughter home or chauffeur her to after-school activities. Then it's time for it to drive back into the city to pick up Dad from work. But then, on a lark, Dad decides to go shopping at a downtown department store after work, so he tells his car to just circle the block for an hour while he shops, before finally hailing it to go home.

This is really easy and obvious behavior for a driverless car owner. It reduces the number of cars someone needs to own, and reduces pressure on inner city parking, but would cause an explosive growth in vehicle trips, and thus in congestion (not to mention emissions and other impacts). Just the commute behavior doubles car volumes, because the car now makes a two-way trip for each direction of the commute, instead of just one. And if everyone shopping downtown has a car circling the block waiting for them, well, that level of congestion will far exceed what's generated by cars circling for parking today. It could pretty well shut down the city.

This is the good old problem of induced demand, which is what happens when you make a resource available at an artificially low price – as we do with most urban roads today. If you don't pay the true cost of something in money, you will pay it in time, and that's what congestion is. (It's also why in the old Soviet Union, people spent hours waiting to buy bread: Soviet price controls made the price too low to compensate the suppliers, so there wasn't enough bread, so everyone waited in line. Congestion — waiting in line to use an underpriced road — works the same way.)

Pricing of some kind will be the solution, but we tend to do this only when things get really bad. Notice how bad congestion has to be today before solutions like toll lanes and transit lanes are finally accepted as necessary.

As always, the very worst scenario won't happen, but some really bad ones still can. If the economic functioning of downtown is too badly impaired by driverless cars circling the block waiting for their owners, the government will intervene to save the economy, as it always does, probably with some kind of downtown street pricing on the London or Singapore model. But this only happens when congestion threatens the economy. That's a very high bar. Long before that point, congestion will be bad enough to be ruining people's lives, wrecking the urban environment, strangling public transit, worsening climate change, and so on.

As always, the scary thing about congestion is how bad people (and therefore governments) allow it to get before they start making different choices to avoid it. The level of congestion we (justifiably) complain about is much lower than the level that we choose to tolerate, and this is the real reason for pessimism about how bad congestion could potentially get, if driverless car ownership — like cars today — are so massively underpriced even in the context of high urban demand.

How Important is “Downtown”?

Posted on November 20, 2015 in Density, Houston, Urban Structure

In North America, the word downtown invites us to imagine the densest and most walkable part of any city, the place where transit and other non-car modes naturally thrive more than anywhere else. And where this is actually true, it's logical for all kinds of intercity and local transit services to focus there.

But when we project this model of downtown onto every city, we encounter fatal confusions. Downtown implies a single place; there's just one per city or metro area. But some cities aren't like that. Los Angeles and Houston, two take two famous examples, have a place called downtown, but it's really just a slightly larger cluster of towers among many clusters of towers dotted across the region. Downtown in this model is not like a center of energy around which the whole city revolves. It's like the brightest of a bunch of stars in a constellation, and not even the brightest by much.

So if you cling to the notion that downtown means "focal point of travel demand and especially transit", then you have to embrace the concept that an urban area may be a constellation of many downtowns. This is not just an American sunbelt idea. Most of the population of the Netherlands is in a single metro area called the Randstad; it's made of many small cities each with its own downtown, with a shared airport near its centroid. Many Asian cities are so uniformly and extremely dense that almost any point in the city could be called downtown, so long as there is some mixture of uses. All of Paris is about equally dense, with government, business, and retail districts all over the city and the tallest towers around the edge of it, so good luck finding "downtown" there.

In Citylab, Eric Jaffe gives us the supposedly bad news that the proposed Dallas-Houston High Speed Rail (HSR) line won't go to "downtown" Houston. Instead it will end at Northwest Mall, just outside the I-610 loop in the northwest of the city.

But most of the Houston transit-advocates I've talked with aren't sounding nearly as upset. That's because:

the proposed terminal is close to the centroid of Houston as a whole. It's also very close to Uptown-Galleria, the region's second downtown, and to Northwest Transit Center, the busiest transit hub in the western 2/3 of the city.
the terminal station area is massively redevelopable. You could easily build yet another downtown there, and if HSR is built, they probably will.
the project will provide great impetus for light rail or Bus Rapid Transit linking the station to the original downtown. These projects have been sketched many times and could include either I-10 nonstop links or a refurbishment of Washington Street, a promising old streetcar street linking the two nodes.
in high speed rail, the cost of the last miles into an historic downtown can be a huge part of the cost and grief of the whole project. So if you want high-speed rail to happen at all, provoking this battle is not always a sensible part of Phase 1.

The bigger challenge, for folks from strongly single-centered cities, is to notice the limits of the term downtown. As cities grow, there is no correlation between the sustainability of a city and its single-centeredness. On the contrary, single-centered cities present huge problems for transportation, because they use capacity so inefficiently. New York, for example, is spending over $10 billion on a project to fit more Long Island commuter trains into Manhattan, and to put them closer to jobs there. The demand is mostly one-way, so this requires either storing trains all day on expensive Manhattan real estate, or running them all empty in the reverse-peak direction. It's very inefficient compared to the transit problem in a multi-centered place like Paris or Los Angeles, where demand is flowing two-way most of the time.

So growing a single downtown isn't the key to becoming a great transit city. Quite the opposite, it's best to have a pattern of many centers, all generating high demand, and supporting balanced two-way flows between them that let us move more people on less infrastructure. This is the great advantage of Paris or Los Angeles or the Dutch Randstad over Chicago or Manhattan.

So remember: when it comes to the efficiency and abundance of transit — or roads for that matter — "downtown" isn't all it's cracked up to be. For transit, big clumps of density and walkability are great, but several are better than one.

Can Taxis and Uber/Lyft replace Paratransit Vans? There’s Money in it …

Posted on November 16, 2015 in General

The Boston Globe has a story about the region's transit agency, the MBTA, launching a pilot program with local taxis to provide paratransit service. This is worth watching because of the potential to unlock resources for fixed route transit services.

Paratransit, in the strictest sense, is door-to-door service for people with disabilities who cannot use fixed route transit. In the United States, the Americans with Disabilities mandates that transit agencies provide paratransit wherever and whenever they run fixed route service, and charge no more than double the fixed route fare.

In the agency budget, this mandated service competes with the services that everyone else uses. It's common for over 30% of a transit agency's operating budget to be paratransit.

Subsidizing taxis has always been an option to meet the paratransit requirement, but in big cities the routine solution has been paratransit van services. These vans can theoretically serve multiple people at once, but the sparseness of paratransit demand means they often carry just one person, or zero between runs. So paratransit operating cost is often over $30/passenger trip, as compared to more like $5 for an effective fixed route service.

MBTA is now testing using taxis — or in the future, taxi competitors like Uber and Lyft — in the same way that small towns often do. It will encourage some customers to use taxis instead of paratransit vans — which is not hard to do, since taxi service is much more flexible. (Paratransit vans must be booked 24 hours in advance, but these taxis can be called spontaneously.) The customer will pay a reasonable transit fare, $2, and MBTA will add an average of $13/trip to round out a typical average taxi fare of $15.

That's $13 per ride for the transit agency instead of (usually) over $30. For service that is more useful to the paratransit customer.

Remember, paratransit expenditures by US transit agencies often exceed 30% of the operating budget. Cut that in half, and you can expand fixed route service dramatically.

Guest Post: Autonomous Vehicles and the VMT Problem

Posted on November 13, 2015 in Guest Posts

This guest post is by Ron Kilcoyne, general manager of Lane Transit District in Eugene, Oregon and formerly the head of transit in Bridgeport, Connecticut and Santa Clarita, California.

The flurry of speculation about the future of autonomous vehicles is mostly ignoring a signficant downside: the impact on vehicle miles travelled (VMT). Safety and congestion resonate with people while VMT doesn’t. Yet reducing per capita VMT is also essential for combating climate change. The potential increase in VMT when self-driving cars become prevalent could negate any congestion reduction benefit. Indeed it could be far worse than today.

Reducing VMT or per capita VMT is usually viewed as restricting individual freedom. But is it? If high quality pedestrian and bicycle infrastructure and high quality transit service is provided, individuals have attractive choices to driving and many use them. Add to this mix car sharing, bike sharing and transportation network companies (TNC) like Uber and Lyft and many households are choosing to go car free or reduce the numbers autos owned without sacrificing mobility and accessibility.

Much has been written about autonomous cars in this blog and elsewhere. Countless predictions on the impact autonomous vehicles have been voiced – and they are probably all wrong. One good analysis on the introduction of autonomous vehicles is here, Zipcar founder Robin Chase has a heaven or hell scenario here.

Autonomous vehicles will not eliminate the need for high capacity transit (and Jarrett makes this case here) and we should be concerned that opponents of transit investment will use the prospect of autonomous vehicles as a reason not to invest in transit.

But the real concern is on the impact on society and the communities in which we live. Will the trend toward walkable communities and more active transportation be thwarted? Will we become a more isolated society moving about in our autonomous pods? Will sprawl spread? And to the main point, how much will VMT growth inhibit efforts to combat climate change. Even electric vehicles contribute to climate change if the electricity comes from fossil fuels, and fast growing VMT implies accelerated road construction, with its own environmental impacts.

No one knows how fast autonomous vehicle availability and use will occur. But let's focus on two of the most discussed impacts of the growth in autonomous vehicle penetration in urban areas:

reducing the amount of land devoted exclusively to the movement and storage of automobiles (a benefit) and
the increase of Vehicle Miles Travelled (VMT), causing inevitable pressure to pave more of the earth (a negative);

The former will only occur, and the latter will only be tamed, if we price the movement and storage of vehicles correctly.

Improper pricing of automobile use and storage has put public transportation at a disadvantage since the end of WWII and maybe even longer than that. There is plenty of literature that makes the case for proper pricing of road space, but as impressive as these arguments are there is little public support to increase the cost of driving or storing a car. Without public support there will not be political support.

Car sharing and bike sharing have been growing over the past few years. The prevalence of these options result in some households shedding an car and using alternatives, including using transit more frequently. Indeed the two are mutually supportive. It is likely that households will reduce the number of cars they own (some may become car free while others will reduce the number of vehicles owned) if they have choices including a good car share program and good transit service.

If car ownership declines, and trips using shared cars are accurately priced, then individuals are more inclined to walk, bike or use transit when those modes are attractive alternatives. High-ridership transit, in particular will still be cheaper than shared cars. Therefore it is in the transit industry interest to partner, promote and facilitate growth of the sharing economy, but also to ensure that these services are priced fairly. If so, the sharing economy and high-ridership transit should be the best of friends, offering complementary services at different price points and often connecting with one another.

Shared autos, whether in the Zipcar or Uber model are still not paying anywhere near the cost of using road space. Once autonomous vehicles enter the picture, ZipCar and Uber will become indistinguishable. Articles such as the one referenced at the beginning of this blog make an appealing prognosis about the potential to repurpose significant chunks of urban land but fail to acknowledge the impact of increased VMT.

If VMT grows dramatically we may find that the promises of freeing our cities of parking craters an illusion. And for the same reason widening roads doesn’t end congestion – induced demand — the promises that autonomous vehicles will end congestion could be just as fleeting. Therefore the need to properly price road usage and parking spaces; and to include externalities such as greenhouse gas emissions (tailpipe for liquid fuels or at the source for electricity) becomes more imperative.

Any combination of greenhouse gas tax, vehicle mile traveled tax, weight –distance tax, congestion pricing, or variable tolls can accomplished this if priced properly. However getting any of these fees enacted is daunting. Opponents of ending auto subsidies are much more effective in framing the issue in ways that appeal to the average citizen. The human inclination to resist change and oppose paying are also on their side. Yet we have seen sea changes in societal attitudes happen in our life time – some take decades (smoking); others less than a decade (gay marriage). In this case we don’t have the luxury of waiting decades.

Individuals and organizations that care about climate change, the quality of our urban spaces, and protecting open space need to brainstorm on how to frame this issue to build the needed political support to accurately price road and parking space usage. We can start by using the comment section by focusing on how we can accomplish this rather than giving reasons why we can’t.

To keep our cities moving and not overrun with vehicles, we need high quality transit in an autonomous vehicle world. Most modeling relating to the impact of autonomous vehicles indicates an increase in VMT even in scenarios that assume the availability of high quality high capacity transit. Unless the number of people arriving at a destination equals the number of people leaving at the same time there will be a lot empty autonomous vehicles moving about going to their next trip. If we can call up a vehicle wherever we are and, and if use of street space is heavily subsidized enabling these services to be inexpensive, induced demand will overwhelm our road network even with these vehicles travelling closer together.

With parking taking up to 25% of the space in our communities large and small and road space another 25% or more, the prospect of reducing this is very appealing. One futurist claims we can reduce the need for parking by 80%. That may seem fantastical but even a 10% reduction in land devoted to parking can result in more green space, housing and employment opportunities in our cities without destroying the character of existing neighborhoods and allowing cities and small communities to grow preventing sprawl.

This can only happen if road space is properly priced, and if we invest in high quality pedestrian and bicycle infrastructure and high quality transit service. The question we need to think about and answer is how do we succeed in getting pricing and investment decisions right.

Reykjavík: The National Broadcasting Interview of Me

Posted on November 3, 2015 in Reykjavík, Video

While I was in Reykjavík in March, I was interviewed on Iceland's national public broadcaster RUV, on a show called Kastljós ('Spotlight'). Host Thora Arnorsdóttir asked excellent questions, but with typical Nordic modesty she has edited herself out, leaving just 6 minutes of me talking with Icelandic subtitles. If you don't speak Icelandic, you'll want to start at 1:17. It's here.

Weekend Ramble: Empathizing with the Fear of Urbanism

Posted on October 31, 2015 in Meditations, Seattle

Last Thursday, I joined a panel discussion put on by the Seattle Times about "gridlock". Mike Lindblom of the times summed it up here, and I previewed it here, but I'm thinking about the guy who came up to me afterward.

At great length, he told me that Seattle's streets had been planned and designed for cars. He began listing specific streets, why they were built as they were, with the number of car lanes that their designers had intended.

He objected to what was happening to his city's streets: replacing 4 tight lanes with 2-3 lanes to add room for bikes, pedestrians, and transit stops. Not because he hates those things, but because we were betraying the original intent of the design. These were meant to be car streets, so they should always be car streets.

The conversation sticks with me because he wasn't angry. (Angry people are boring and unmemorable.) Instead, he seemed more offended and hurt. The urbanists remodeling Seattle's streets were betraying a promise that someone had made to him.

I don't agree, but I can feel his feeling. This kind of empathy, I contend, is a stance worth practicing.

Here's an example, or maybe a confession. I'm one of those tech users who've been trained by experience to fear so-called upgrades. Just now, Apple told me to upgrade to "El Capitan," and all about how it would be better. None of the featured improvements are things I want, so my first reaction is that they're just adding complexity and thus increasing the risk of malfunction and confusion. Based on my experience, I'm entitled to suspect that (a) they've probably introduced new bugs and (b) they've probably wrecked something that I do value about the current version.

So I'm kind of person who upgrades at the last possible moment, only when the oldest version is collapsing into engineered rubble.

Computers are one of many spheres where I'm happy with what I have and would prefer it quit changing. What's more, what I have and like is what I feel the tech companies promised me, in other marketing messages long ago, a promise that I can now see them as betraying.

Maybe you don't have this feeling about computers, but I bet you have it about something.

Another word for this feeling of betrayal might be invasion. Because really, we're talking about home, and the fear of the invasion of home.

In my early fifties, I'm at home with with my hard disk and thumb drives, just as my mother, in her seventies, is at home with notebooks and manila file folders. When Millennials tell me my stuff should be in the Cloud, it doesn't matter what the argument is. The feeling is that Stalin plans to knock down my sturdy and ancient hovel, move me to a shoebox in a concrete modernist tower, and put all my stuff in some mysterious storage promising me that the System will take care of it.

So yes, I'm conservative in this most primal sense of the word: I get defensive about various kinds of home: physical and intellectual. And at this primal level, I bet you are too. You may be sold on the Cloud — and maybe you're right — but I bet you have a ferociously defended sense of home about something. If you feel aversion about something changing, or anger about something having changed, that's it.

And this kind of conservatism could be more compatible with advocating necessary change, but only if we who advocate change could hear it, and convey that we hear it.

Now and then I'm reminded that for a lot of people, "home" includes their car. If that's the case, then of course "traffic" is as offensive as Stalin threatening to knock down your hovel. And then I see this on a street in Portland today:

This is the universal fear-image of other people's cars: not your friends and family, and therefore something invading your neighborhood, your home. (It's a night image because in the day you might recognize the driver, and be less fearful.) And so the battle between homes, yours and that evil motorist's, is joined.

I think about these things on a rainy weekend to remind myself that conflict about changing the built environment is inevitable, because we are so deeply wired to fear for our homes. What's more, our sense of home can be so extended into the world (as our cars, neighborhoods, or for environmentalists, our planet) that it will inevitably conflict with the "home" of others..

But even if we can't agree with someone about an issue, we should practice empathizing with the feeling that something we rely on is under threat. Because on some issue, I bet you have that feeling too.

Houston: Great Ridership News on the New Network

Posted on October 28, 2015 in Houston

It's now been about two months since Houston METRO implemented their New Network, developed through a process called the System Reimagining. The first ridership numbers are in, and some could be misread as cause for panic. In fact, they're exactly what we'd expect. So let's take a deep breath and have a look:

First, let's remember what thew New Network did. The changes did three major things, without increasing the operating budget by much:

They shifted the percentage of the network devoted to ridership goals from 55% to around 75%.
They vastly expanded the reach of frequent service so that it connected 1 million people with 1 million jobs.
They expanded weekend service, especially Sunday service, so that the daytime and evening service levels on those days are almost identical to service on weekdays.

We now have the first ridership data, in the form of a report comparing ridership each month to the same month a year before. Since the New Network was implemented in August, the first data showing the impact is the comparison of September 2015 to September 2014. Here it is, from METRO's monthly report. Note that the "METROBus – Local" is the category of service dramatically changed by the redesign.

Rail is soaring, but look at the buses! Red ink! What's wrong? Were the consultants fools?

Not at all. This is exactly what we'd expect. In fact, it's consistent with the New Network having a positive impact on bus ridership. Here's why.

The Big Good News: The Weekend Explosion

First of all, ridership is surging on weekends, especially Sundays. That's because we grew weekend service dramatically and made it simpler. Local service levels are now essentially the same seven days a week. (The only exceptions are the weekday rush hour period, when they're higher, and that weekend service starts a bit later.) We knew that weekends were a huge area of suppressed demand that could be tapped at low cost, and we were right. The weekend ridership growth in the first month is especially gratifying, because ….

We Always Expect an Near-Term Drop

When the Houston METRO Board asked me for an educated guess of ridership impact, I said +20% after two years of well-marketed operation, and net of the impact of other events. This was simply a very educated guess based on my experience. However, if you prefer modeling, I can offer that a run of the regional model later came up with the same answer.

It's commonly observed, in our business, than when you make any big change, you may get a downtick in ridership in early months, even if the longer term path will be positive. Humans are incredibly habit-driven beasts, and it takes time for them to see new opportunities. Also, the most profound and transformative impacts of a frequent network happen as people start to make location choices in response to it, so that frequent lines come to be populated by people and businesses that value transit. None of that happens in the first month, but a fair bit is starting to happen in two years; the bigger payoffs, of course, are even longer term.

Other Things Happened to Cause a Drop

So a first month downtick is exactly what we'd have expected. Am I surprised that the local bus ridership is down 3.9% overall.?

No, because of three other things that happened during the same year, from Sep '14 to Sep '15:

Contextual changes — events unrelated to the New Network — also occurred. The biggest was the dramatic drop in oil and gas prices. Low gas prices tend to depress ridership, but in Houston they also meant severe layoffs in an economy dominated by those industries, which also reduced demand.
Two major light rail lines opened, intentionally shifting ridership from heavy bus lines to rail.
The New Network removed services running parallel to light rail lines, further encouraging people in those corridors to use rail instead of bus services.

Let's look at those in detail.

Contextual Changes

Weekday local bus ridership is down 8.4% but Park-and-Ride express ridership is down 3.8%. That's interesting because the New Network made almost no changes to the Park-and-Ride express system, which is mostly oriented toward outer suburbs that are unserved by the local system.

That's our cue to look for other things changed during the year from September 2014 to September 2015 that would affect ridership. The obvious culprit? A spectacular fall in oil and gas prices. This probably had two effects:

Ridership always shows some sensitivity to retail gas prices, going up when driving gets more expensive and down when it gets cheaper.
Layoffs in the oil and gas industries — a major part of Houston's economy — meant fewer people commuting.

So we should have expected a ridership drop regardless of the New Network. Again, it would be great to correlate the P&R ridership losses with downtown job losses.

Impacts of Light Rail I: Direct Replacement of Crowded Buses

When rail is introduced to replace a very busy bus line, of course the high bus ridership becomes rail ridership, and you should expect total bus ridership to go down. That doesn't mean buses are failing; it means they succeeded so well that a higher-capacity transit technology was needed, and they handed off their role to that new technology.

Two new light rail segments opened in the year under study. The Green and Purple Lines, both oriented toward the southeast of the city, opened in May 2015. These obviously caused a shift of bus ridership from buses to light rail, as they were expected to.

One of these, the Purple Line, replaced a very high-ridership bus corridor, the link between downtown and the giant University of Houston. (The smaller Texas Southern University is also tangentially served.) Universities are ferocious engines of all-day, all-week ridership. This alone would have caused thousands of riders to shift from bus to rail, causing a bus ridership drop and rail increase.*

Impacts of Light Rail II: Deletion of Competing Bus Services

Another reason to expect bus ridership to drop and rail to grow is that the New Network deleted bus services that compete with light rail. Some of these right alongside the Red Line through the densest parts of inner Houston, inevitably drawing some passengers from rail for various reasons. The New Network also introduced bus-rail connections for what had previously been bus-bus connections. Every time you do this, bus boardings turn into rail boardings. That's probably a big part of the ridership growth on the Red Line, since this line did not change during the 2014-15 year.

Did we Increase Transfers?

An internal frustration of American transit statistics is that rely so heavily on counting boardings, when what everyone cares about is completed journeys. When you transfer, you are two of the former but only one of the latter. If we increased transfers, that would suggest that the drop is even worse that the numbers make it appear.

My sources tell me that a preliminary look at this suggests it's a non-issue; the amount of transferring looks about the same as before.

We made a big deal about how the New Network would require and encourage more transferring for some existing trips. That statement was to manage the expectations of existing riders, but it doesn't mean we expected transferring to rise, and it's great to hear that the rate is about the same. After all, the New Network also eliminates many potential transfers for trips to non-downtown destinations, and the grid replaces many two-transfer trips with one-transfer trips.

To Sum Up: The Network's Impact is Probably Already Positive

A downtick in ridership right after a major service redesign is routine. Because humans are so habit-driven, people who find the new network less convenient disappear as riders while the vastly more who will find it more convenient take some time to figure that out.

I would not have been surprised at a drop of a few percent. Indeed the total drop in local bus ridership, counting the weekday drop and the weekend surge, is under 4%.

But when we remember the other things that happened:

Major bus markets shifted to light rail, both through new rail lines and deletion of bus lines competing with existing rail lines.
Suggestions of a contextual bus ridership drop unrelated to the New Network, tied to falling gas prices and how that affects the Houston economy.

… I don't think we know that any of an 8% drop in weekday bus ridership can be attributed to the New Network. And compared to what we expect one month after implementation, that's a rousing success.

* Sadly, we can't separate these two effects because light rail opened just as the university year was ending, so September is both the first full month of the New Network and the first full month of light rail running with the universities in session..

Seattle: Before the Live Debate, the Written One (and an Imptertinent Question)

Posted on October 26, 2015 in Philosophy, Seattle

Setting up for our panel discussion this Thursday night, the Seattle Times asked each of their panelists to answer some canned questions about the future of transportation. The result is here. I hope the contrasts will motivate you to come!

Bravo to Bryan Mistele of INRIX (the traffic consultants to the notorious TTI Urban Mobility Report) for being willing to come into the densest part of Seattle and announce that (a) cars are our future and (b) light rail is a bad investment because of its ridership in the early years. (Both claims presume the linearity of past trends and the irrelevance of land use changes in response to transit.) But the courage is admirable: To say these things in the middle of Seattle would be like me pitching high-intensity transit networks at the Elks Hall of a small town in Nebraska.

Which raises a key point:

Notice, as you read this, how all high-level discussions, at regional levels or above, tend to presume that there is some answer to the "transit vs cars" question that is the same everywhere.

In fact, the answer is radically different in different places, based on known built-environment factors and local politics that tend to track closely with those factors. Some places are suited to cars and therefore defensive about cars. Some places function only with transit, so they view transit as an existential issue. All urban regions — and most states, provinces or countries — are going to have both kinds of places and everything in between.

So my question going in is this: Why can't we let Seattle have the kind of transportation system it needs, and let low density and rural areas have the kind that they need? Why do the differing needs of different communities require that we have a war between those communities, at all levels of government?

Reykjavík: Adventures in Sub-arctic Urbanism (Part 2: The Words)

Posted on October 13, 2015 in Postcards, Reykjavík

Part 1 of this post gave an urbanist tour of Reykjavík, with photos.

Iceland has no rail infrastructure. Public transit is buses, but they’re nice buses, as is usual in Europe. They blanket most of the city at a 30-minute frequency (blue below) but only two lines – linking the historic town centers, rise to 15-minute all-day frequency (red). These are the only places where the next bus is “always coming soon.” Here’s the frequency map we drew for them (full PDF here: Download Frequency Map):

Given the density, that’s not much frequency. There are probably more opportunities to build high-frequency corridors that dramatically expand transit’s usefulness.

My main tasks were to run a two-day transit planning workshop for municipal and national planning staff, to give a public lecture, and also to do a briefing for elected officials. In all, I said some of the things I say anywhere: Don’t get distracted by the merchants of any transit technology, or their appeals to your supposed envy of other cities and countries. Instead, think about human beings, their liberty and opportunity, and build a transportation system that fosters that.

Iceland’s most interesting challenge is that it’s a small country at a time when we’re all supposed to worship bigness, so it probably takes some effort for Icelanders to stay focused on solutions that suit their scale. Iceland’s population is only about 330,000, of which 2/3 are in greater Reykjavik. If it were in the EU, Iceland would be the smallest member by population, smaller than Malta and certainly smaller than giant Luxembourg.

What’s more, Iceland’s population is small for good reasons, mostly limitations of land, sunlight, and climate. For most of Icelandic history, fish has been the only abundant food resource, but today even that is in need of management. Agriculture so close to the Arctic Circle will always face limits even if much of the soil hadn’t washed away — the result of medieval Norse colonists cutting the ancient birch forests faster than they could regenerate. Today, Iceland is a world leader in the sustainable management and restoration of natural resources, but in such a remote and challenging location there’s not much point in growing beyond what the bare land and low-angle sunlight can support.

So one basic challenge for Icelanders is how to listen to all the roving “experts” whose message is just an appeal to presumed feelings of international envy. “You’re a European capital!,” they say. “How can you not have streetcars and subways and a ‘high-speed train’ to the airport?” This peer-pressure is supposed to overrule all the facts of Iceland’s own geography and situation. You might as well tell Reykjavík that “real European capitals” need medieval and Renaissance buildings, even though there wasn’t a town here until the 1700s.

One expert was quoted to me as saying: “You won’t get business if your downtown isn’t 20 minutes from the airport by rail.” This rule is apparently indifferent to how far away the airport is (50 km!), or how small the metro area is (220,000). The rule’s reference to in-train travel time but not frequency also reveals that it’s addressed to people who don’t understand public transit very well yet. Those who do need to know the frequency, not just the in-train travel time, before they know how useful a service will be.

These abstract, envy-based rules are always the death of public transit. They also imply that no other feature of a place could possibly compensate for the failure to satisfy – that nobody would come to Iceland because they want what only Iceland has to offer.

The Icelanders I met, for the most part, seem wise to this, perhaps partly because Iceland is doing well. By most standards the country is wealthy, stable, educated, safe, and (apart from some former bankers) well-liked on the global stage. So I expect Icelanders are capable of looking overseas with curiosity but not with envy or fear, and of making their own decisions about what kind of major city they want, and what they want to offer the world.

Reykjavík: Adventures in Subarctic Urbanism (Part 1: the Photos)

Posted on October 13, 2015 in Architecture, Postcards, Reykjavík, Urban Structure

I recently returned from a week in Reykjavík, Iceland, working with staff of the regional association of municipalities on the frame of a future public transport plan. It was an opportunity to meet with key elected leaders – including Reykjavík Mayor Dagur Eggertsson and public transit authority chair Bryndís Haraldsdóttir – for a conversation about what they want public transit to be, and what choices might follow from those goals. I also ran a two-day workshop for municipal and national transport staffs, to help them explore their options for their transit future. (There was also some time off to ruminate on the landscape; those musings are on the personal blog, here.)

Part 1 of this post is a photo-rich tour. Part 2 talks through some interesting transport issues.

Greater Reykjavík is dramatic urban landscape, all perched on ridges or gathered around fjords. As in any European city, there’s a walkable historic core, attractive to tourists but still intensively lived-in by the locals, and with plenty of cranes on the edges signaling even greater density in the future.

But despite the European forms, urban history is on a more North American scale. Although the very first Norse settlement was on this spot, in 870, it was another 900 years before anything urban began to emerge. So the inner city urban structure is mostly 18th-19th century, and the buildings are mostly from a range of 20th century styles. (The hilltop church, too, is 20th century.)

It can seem a little austere sometimes, partly because so much of the greenspace is hidden behind buildings, along laneways.

And here are some classic waterfront photos reminiscent of Vancouver.

Note the cyclist’s shadow; at 64 degrees latitude, the beautiful qualities of evening side-light last for much of the day.

That giant tennis ball floating in the harbor seemed a perfect bit of whimsy. It’s a park, with a military history.

Further out, much of the city is high-density but car-oriented: Residential towers grouped at some distance shops and services, so that even though you live on in a tall building, you need to get in your car to buy a liter of milk. This is the view from the 20th story conference room where we held our staff workshops. This particular office tower has a freeway offramp directly into its parking lot, but the area is so riven with high-speed roads that it’s difficult for transit to navigate without lots of awkward backtracking – the “be on the way” problem.

The white tower in the distance in the upper right of that photo is that modern hilltop church in the old city. You’re looking across most of the urban area in this image, so you can sense its compactness, its topographical complexity, its extensive greenspace, but above all, its density.

In Part 2 (the Words) I’ll talk more about the transport issues.

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