A transit planner in a suburban agency asks an eternal question:
Do you have any examples of best practices in transit service in large business parks? I am looking for some creative solution, such as a transit to vanpool connection, or a site redesign for accessibility.
If you have an opportunity, please share some examples, thoughts, etc.…
On the priorities for infrastructure in developing world "slums," the entry-level neighborhoods that tend to welcome new arrivals from the countryside:
Sewage, garbage collection and paved roads are, for obvious reasons, vital, and can be provided only from outside. But even more important, in the well-informed view of slum-dwellers, are buses: affordable and regular bus service into the neighbourhood is often the key difference between a thriving enclave and a destitute ghetto.
Doug Saunders, Arrival City:
How the Largest Migration in History is Reshaping Our World.
p 310.
Read Eric Jaffe’s piece today on the effect of microtransit (UberPool, LyftLine, Bridj, Leap) on our cities.
The question about all these private operators, seeking to create something between large-scale transit and the private car, is this: Are they going to work with high-capacity transit or try to destroy it? There are signs both ways.
If microtransit co-ordinates with conventional big-vehicle transit, we get (a) lower overall Vehicle Miles Traveled, emissions, and congestion, and (b) stronger cases for transit-oriented land use and thus (c) better, more humane and inclusive cities. If they compete with it, drawing away customers from big vehicles into smaller ones, we get the opposite.
If it turns out to be a fight, the playing field would have to be leveled in terms of the overwhelming public sector cost drivers such as workforce compensation and Federal regulatory burden before we have a fair fight. (And I mean leveled upward, toward fair wages and policies that respect the civil rights agenda encoded in Federal transit regulations.)
Consider the latter: Do we need to clarify the Americans with Disabilities Act so that the cost of complementary paratransit (which takes 20-40% of most transit agency budgets) is shared by all private transit companies operating in the space? Will we require private transit to do Title VI equity plans to prove that they do not discriminate against people with a low ability to pay? (That would be interesting, because neglect of low income people is intrinsic to most profitable business models, which is why you’ve never seen an airline magazine ad that appeals to low-income concerns.) The enormous burdens of Federal regulation — most of it designed to implement a civil rights agenda that’s theoretically endorsed by all sides — would have to be shared before we’d know who’s really best for which market.
If it were a fair fight, high-volume urban transit (not just rapid transit but also high-volume frequent local bus lines) would continue to prevail where it’s the best use of both labor and scarce urban space. My fear is that it’s going to be an unfair fight, one that’s only made worse when the media frame it as ‘little enterprising’ upstarts vs ‘big, old’ agencies. In such an unfair fight, the upstarts can too easily win through means that are destructive to justice and the environment (low wage “contractors”, replacing space-efficient big vehicles with smaller ones) rather than through finding the most efficient equilibrium for all the transport needs of a city.
As Jaffe notes, the way forward is a difficult one for upstarts who are used to thinking of transit agencies as enemies. (It can also be difficult for transit agencies and especially their unions, who may have their own defensive and territorial feelings to work through.) The way forward is for less expensive service tools, including the upstarts, to focus on lower-density suburbia where the land use patterns make efficient big-vehicle transit geometrically impossible. The upstarts could even become contractors of the transit agency part of the time — paid to do things that they can do more efficiently than big buses can — as taxis often are today. And they can do this while also operating in the city at much higher price points than conventional transit, so that they aren’t undermining the space-efficiency of those existing systems.
But when I hear the upstarts appealing to elitism, and derogating conventional high-efficiency transit, I wonder where we’ll end up … One thing is for sure: This sector is going to need strong regulation to turn it into a force for good.
There’s room for hope. As I monitor how the upstart microtransit companies talk to their customers and investors, I notice that their early appeals to elitism and generalized transit-hatred seem to be giving way to more practical and inclusive messaging. Let’s hope the markets (and hey, that means you and your purchasing choices!) reward the companies that want to be part of a humane, sustainable, and efficient city.
I'm writing this while our Interactive Course in Transit Network Design in Seattle goes on around me. About 25 people are huddled around maps having intensely animated conversations about what the best possible transit network would look like. Now and then someone comes up and asks a (good) question.
This kind of workshop is not just "inexcusably fun," as one student called it, but it's also the best way to get a practical grasp of the transit tool. If you've actually tried designing a transit network, you have some knowledge of the material in your hands, not just in your head, and hand-knowledge is easier for the mind to trust and integrate. Hand-knowledge (also called body knowledge) is knowledge you trust without even having to think about it. It's the very essence of what we perceive as obvious.
The biggest problem facing urban transportation in North America is that most influential people have hand-knowledge of driving cars but only brain knowledge of other transportation options, if that. Hand-knowledge is so powerful in us that it governs the metaphors and assumptions we bring to other topics. When people ask me why transit isn't serving their labyrinthine business park, or ask why it can't run smaller buses that fit better into their neighborhood, or why it can't run sexier vehicles with nicer seating, they're assuming that transit is just like cars, only bigger. And until you've taken some time to play with what transit really is, that's a compelling delusion and therefore a consequential one for policymaking.
Transit is not just like cars. It's also not just like bikes or any other private vehicle. It's not just like taxis or Uber either. It's a completely different thing, and to know it you have to touch it.
A lot of experienced transit riders do have this kind of knowledge, though you also have to be able to separate what's convenient for you from what makes a good network for the city. (The public outreach for the Houston System Reimagining asked people both "Is this better for you?" and "Is this better for Houston?" to try to prompt both kinds of thinking.). Many existing transit riders aren't able to make that distinction, but those who can become powerful advocates and leaders.
Hands-on workshops are also the essence of my firm's approach to all forms of outreach, not just formally educational activities like this course. A key part of all of our planning projects is the stakeholder workshop, where key leaders from a city sit down and do network planning exercises together. At first it seems amazing that such busy people are willing to take the time to do this, but on reflection it's less so. Great leaders know they don't know everything, and are eager for fun ways to expand their hand-knowledge.
The other great frontier, of course, lies in web-based tools that let people have some of this experience at home. Explicit games that involve designing transit networks are either wildly simplifed (Mini Metro) or arcane (Cities in Motion) or massively misleading (Sim City). (I've heard good things about Cities:Skylines but don't have the supercomputer needed to run it smoothly.) What's needed is something less graphically complex that still helps people explore the essences.
But of course games don't have to call themselves games. Transitmix is an excellent and fast-developing tool for sketching and costing transit networks. As it adds features that measure outcomes, it takes on the features of a game: It's a space where you can try out different transit plans, see the results, and gradually figure out what kinds of network work best. This is one of the most effective kinds of learning, because the result is hand-knowledge.
Hand-knowledge doesn't always make you an explainer, of course. I've met many transit planning professionals who have great instincts but can't describe their thought process. So we work back and forth between hand-knowledge and brain-knowledge. Feel how this substance works in your hands, but then spend a little time thinking more about what you've learned from that. Get your brain and your hand on the same page. Then you're ready to change the world, or at least figure out the real transit issues in your community.
A few years ago we assisted San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency in rethinking how they talk about the various services they operate. Our key idea was to classify services by tiers of frequency, while also distinguishing, at the highest frequency only, between faster and slower services. In extensive workshops with staff, we helped the agency think through these categories and the names to be used for them.
It's great to see the result coming out on the street. The old-fashioned term "limited," for example, been replaced by "Rapid," a new brand that emphasizes speed and reliability improvements as well as frequency and widely spaced stops.
But the biggest news is that a new network map, by Jay Primus and David Wiggins, is about to debut. Don't open it yet!! Before you do, look at it in a fuzzy small image:
Notice how much information you can get just from this fuzzy picture. Most transit maps are total nonsense at this resolution, but in this one, even though you can't even see the legend, you can see the structure. All you need to know is that bigger, brigher lines are more useful lines, because they tend to be faster or more frequent. In other words, this works just like any coherent street or map (paper or online) in which the faster roads are more visually prominent. Any good map is legible at multiple levels of attention, including very zoomed out like this, and in loving detail of every right and left, which you'll also admire if you zoom into the massive PDF.
Why has it taken so long for transit maps to get this clear? Well, first of all, you have to figure out that frequency, not speed, is the primary equivalent of speed in a highway map. Highways and streets can all be ranked by their design speed, but in transit, frequency trumps speed in determining most kinds of utility, and speed distinctions matter most where frequency is already high.
(The exception, high speed but low frequency service, tends to be commuter rail and commuter express bus service. That service is so intrinsically specialized and complex that it makes a complete mess if you put it on the map with the all-day frequent routes. These ephemeral routes must be faded out; on this new map they are the weakest lines of all. The previous map was chaotic precisely because it used the strongest color — red — for these most specialized and ephemeral services, concealing the structure of interdependent service that is running all the time and that vastly more people will use.)
What are the other barriers to maps of this clarity? Well, you have to decide whether your goal is information (helping people understand their options) or marketing (which at its worst means deliberately confusing people so that they do you want them to do). I have always argued that in transit, clear and beautiful information is the best marketing, but many professional marketers disagree.
This map is glorious because it's 100% information. Services aren't highlighted because someone thinks that they serve "target markets" or "more important demographics", for example. Everything is mapped, and named, according to its potential usefulness to anyone. The more diverse the range of people who'll find a service useful, the brighter the line is.
Of course, it doesn't show everything, but that's also why it's clear. I'm sure I will be bombarded with comments pointing out that they don't show how San Francisco's network connects to the wider region's, and that they don't show how transit integrates with cycling, walking, private transit, Segways, and whatever else. Including too much non-transit information is also a great way to make transit maps confusing. This map is just what it is, a map of San Francisco's fixed route transit network. It's also, in my experience, one of the best in the world, something even the world's best transit systems could learn from.
When the physicist Richard Feynman found himself listening to a scientific talk in a field he didn't know well, he had a favorite question to ask the speaker: Can you give me a really simple example of what you're talking about? If the speaker couldn't oblige, Feynman got suspicious, and rightly so. Did this person really have something to say, or was this just fancy technical talk parading as scientific wisdom? … Simplification is not just for beginners."
Daniel C . Dennett
Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking
Intuition Pumps is best book on philosophy that I've read in decades, and also an fun and engaging read. Engineering makes no sense without science, and science makes no sense without a philosophy of science. Dennett's great contribution is what I'd call a practical skepticism. When I was in college, philosophy was receding into arid debates about pure logic. (One of my advisors wrote papers with titles like "Is 'Not' Logical?") I'd call that absolute skepticism, and while it's abstractly interesting in the way that chess is, it never emerges from its logical culdesacs to address any of the practical questions about how human beings, given what we are, should go about deciding what to believe.
Dennett's work starts with a different standard embodied in his trademark adverb sorta. Ideas don't have to be absolutely or abstractly or logically true in all frames of reference; they can be sorta true, which means valid enough to be reliable and useful, because what humans most urgently need are reliable and useful ideas. Newton's physics is sorta true, and it's sorta correct to talk about trees solving problems through natural selection even though we know they don't have brains. Free will is a philosophical problem in the world of abstract ideas, but Dennett argues it's not a real problem, because it doesn't matter to the actual decisions that we make in the context of what we sorta know.
Sorta turns out to be a surprisingly rigorous term for getting us out of logical holes and out into the space where actual problems need solving. This, and the practical skepticism it underpins, is worth the price and pleasure of this excellent book.
From John DeFazio. He's responding to this post, or maybe to this one. I have not edited for grammar or clarity.
Jarrett,you write like a scholar, using you master's degrees to cleverly make readers feel sorry for Translink and vote yes, even if they are confused… you know the adage, "bullshit baffle brains", thats what you and your kind are doing… and how much are they paying you Jarrett?
there are many other ways that Translink can raise funding for transit and you bloody well know it… alternatively Translink should go public, make it competitive for private companies to run transit for the masses… look at BC Ferries, they run low on cheddar and they raise their rates, simple, you wanna ride, you pay…
like [Vancouver] Mayor Robinson who makes stupid promises he cant even come close to keeping, and big ones too, you know, the "end homeless" bullshit he's peddling… Robinson wants a freebie from all lowermainlanders in the form of 0.5% tax hike to pay for his Broadway subway that he's been promising for years! Hey, what about if Vancouver raises their own money to do the subway? or lobby the provincial govt for cheddar or lobby the Federal govt for cheddar!!
Im so glad i don't live in Vancouver where Robertson pretends he's the Mayor in…
and who's paying for the yes advertising eh? taxpayers? who else… that's so shameful and in the end will see what a waste of resources this has been… pissing away good money when there is no chance of winning this plebiscite!Why didn't you talk about Mayor Corrigen eh? remember him? he's opposed to the tax hike with validity…
Ive voted NO, every one i know has done the same… the yes campaign hasn't a hope in hell to even come close and you know it Jarrett…
We frequently fail to recognise that our own personal preferences are in most cases just that. And too often in urbanist discussions, that means white hipster preferences.
As a result, we can end up doing a poor job of developing and selling pro-urban policies, even within the city.
Aaron Renn, "In Praise of Boring Cities," Guardian Cities, 1 October 2014.
Yes, Yes! Read the whole thing.
A transit referendum underway in Metro Vancouver is asking voters to raise sales taxes to fund a huge range of transit improvements that are inevitably needed in such a dense and densifying region. Polls are suggesting that one of the most transit-dependent regions in North America is going to vote no.
There is plenty of room for argument about whether sales taxes are too regressive, or whether transit measures should go to the voters while highway measures are considered essential Provincial spending. All those debates are happening. I also suggested, here, some principles for deciding how to vote on transit funding measures in general.
But I want to intervene on one point. The no campaign has managed to spin a lot of anecdotes to suggest that TransLink is a wildly inefficient or incompetent agency.
TransLink is a major agency that does many things at once, answers to many masters with conflicting agendas, and certainly makes mistakes. But the core of any transit agency budget is its operating budget — what it spends to run service and what it achieves in return. That's the only budget that goes on and on forever, so it dominates the total budget picture. The numbers confirm that Metro Vancouver is getting excellent value for its transit dollar. Todd Litman of Victoria Transport Policy Institute recently put these numbers together.
First, subsidy per passenger-kilometre (one passenger moving one km on transit). What do regional taxpayers pay to move the massive numbers of people they move every day? Less than 20 cents per passenger-km, which is right on the Canadian average and far better than what's achieved in the US, Australia, or New Zealand.
And what do Metro Vancouver taxpayers get for these 20 cents per ride? Quite simply, a network that makes the regional economy possible, by allowing economic activity to grow despite the limits of the road network.
One measure of this is passenger-kilometers per capita. How much personal transit does Vancouver provide? How many people can travel, and how far, to access jobs and opportunities without contributing to traffic congestion?
Metro Vancouver's TransLink is a leader among similar sized regions, matched only by the older metro area of Montreal. (Toronto does better than TransLink if you look only at the city [TTC in this chart], but the fairer comparison is with the whole metro area [GTHA in this chart], as TransLink covers all of Metro Vancouver.)
Metro Vancouver has reached a level of transit reliance that is unprecedented for a young North American city. Only centuries-old northeastern cities come close. That reliance means that the region can add jobs and housing without adding traffic congestion. Todd's paper provides some other excellent analysis to put these benefits in perspective, and explains why the sales tax is vastly cheaper than not having a good transit system.
There are lots of reasons for Canadians to be unhappy about the Transit Referendum, including why it is happening at all. And there will always be plenty of anecdotes about any agency that does so many different things at once.
But if you're voting no because you think your transit agency is fundamentally wasteful, that's just not true.
My recent visit to London, the first in 19 years, gave me a new appreciation for the dangers of creating express trains to the airport that are useful only to high-paying travelers.
We stayed at Paddington, on the north-west edge of the inner city, because I presumed that the Heathrow Express — nonstop trains between Paddington and Heathrow Airport every 15-30 minutes — would help us handle the awkward moves with luggage. It worked fine for that, but the fare was obscene (well over GBP 20 each way) and the trains were therefore nearly empty. I should have suspected this from the logo's resemblance to a luxury car hood ornament.
This appears to be a classic example of an overspecialized transit service — designed to separate people by fare even though they are all going in the same direction at the same time. Its based on the assumption that people with money would like to wait longer for a more comfortable service that skips a few stations, rather than use the ordinary Underground line from Heathrow that is far more frequent and runs directly to many more parts of London. I have similar concerns about overspecialized airport train projects in Toronto, and others proposed elsewhere in the world.
Quite simply, I'd have been happy to pay half the fare for a train that made a couple of stops, so that a lot more people could get on. Heathrow Express has achieved a nice sensation of luxury; near-empty trains are always a pleasure, but they also suggest a poor business model. Heathrow Express will eventually have competition from Crossrail, which will run deeper into London with a few more stops, but which will still be much faster than the old Piccadilly Line from Heathrow.
After all, if people with money refuse to ride the Underground, then why does the Underground contain advertising for first class seats on Emirates?