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Speaking at a Research-to-Practice Symposium

Posted on October 20, 2024 in Events

The 2024 Transit Research to Practice Symposium is a two day virtual event (October 22-24) with many interesting panels devoted to the challenge of making academic research more relevant to the daily practice of transit planning and management.  It’s many sponsors include the University of Florida Transportation Institute, the University of California at Davis Institute for Transportation Studies, and the California Department of Transportation.

I’ll be doing a keynote for them at 9:00 AM Pacific on Tuesday October 22.  My understanding is that you can attend just for that.  But you need to register here.

Thanks to Kari Watkins at the University of California at Davis for this invitation.  Kari will also be leading the Q&A after my talk.

A Useful Graphic Made Clearer

Posted on October 16, 2024 in US Federal Policy

Urban planning guru Brent Toderian likes to share this graphic, which has just been redrawn more clearly by Willem Klumpenhouwer and Kathryn Mathias.

I should clarify, though, that this is an image about local urban development policy.   It captures the fact that when talking about local infrastructure and service costs, high density uses public resources more efficiently even though it has requirements, such as public transit, that are also expensive. Its real purpose is to challenge the suburban NIMBY perspective that imagines the central point of the diagram is possible.  Anyone who embraces all three of the outer-circle slogans is contradicting themselves.

A few other cautions:

  • Taxes can be high or low for many other reasons.  Much tax revenue goes into things that aren’t related to urban density.
  • It’s also the case that high density, while more efficient in consuming urban services, can understandably correlate with progressive politics that demand greater public investment in solving social problems, in part because those problems are often more visible and troubling in high density places.  That, in turn, can also be a reason for higher taxes given higher density.
  • Finally, in the US, the structural dominance of suburban and rural voters over voters in walkable urban areas — especially in the Senate and Electoral College — can lead to policies by which urban voters subsidize suburban and rural needs through their taxes more than the reverse.  Similar effects operate in some other countries.

 

San Francisco Bay Area: A Consistent Regional Mapping Standard?

Posted on September 30, 2024 in General, Maps, San Francisco

In the San Francisco Bay Area, the regional transportation planning body, the Metropolitan Transportation Commission (MTC), has launched a major effort to improve the coordination between the region’s 27 transit agencies.  One element of this, just unveiled, is a regional standard for transit network maps.  The goal is to have all of the region’s maps evolve toward the same style, so that it’s easier to explore the entire region’s network.

MTC has now released the first sketches of the design standard, which you can find starting on the 20th slide of this document.  I’m generally delighted.  The recommendations look very much like what I’ve been promoting for years: reds to denote high frequency (15 minutes or better) and less prominent colors for lesser frequencies.  They 0bserve that three major transit agencies in the region already do this.

We’re flattered!  We drew AC Transit’s map, and probably influenced the other two, as we helped San Francisco MTA (SFMTA) with service branding and also led the redesign of the VTA network, both in the mid 2010s.  Our study mapping for our VTA network redesign was all in this style.

Here are the proposed colors of the regional standard:

 

In our maps we use those reds with those meanings, but I’m puzzled by the two blues. To me, that darker blue is more prominent and eye catching than the light blue, so shouldn’t it represent the higher frequency? In all of our firm’s maps, we use pale blue to represent a lower frequency than dark blue, but I’m curious if others disagree.  Here is our public-facing map of San Antonio, for example.

Finally, whenever you use color to show frequency, you have the problem of what happens when the frequency changes along a line, often because of branching.  The draft MTC standard shows this example for where a red line, representing the combined frequency from two overlapping routes, separates into two blue lines:

 

We’ve learned from long experience that most people need more help understanding that the route continues even as the color changes, mostly because people have seen many other maps where colors distinguish the routes from each other.  So we always show a fade from one color to the other, as in this San Antonio example where Route 28 separates and rejoins:

We also make sure there’s a legend item clarifying this:

So anyway, that’s what we know about transit mapping.  We hope MTC thinks further about these details before imposing a regional standard.

So if you’re in the Bay Area, and you want to share your own comments with MTC, this page has an email address to write to.  Click “Public Engagement and Staff Contact” partway down the page.  But this is a great initiative!

Chicago: The Ridership-Equity Tradeoff, a Video

Posted on September 11, 2024 in Chicago

In a recent post I explained some of the findings of our recent Framing Report for Chicago Transit Authority’s Bus Vision Project.   It’s a detailed and image-rich exploration of how Chicago’s bus network functions, or sometimes doesn’t, and what it would take to improve its design.  We focus especially on the problem of racial equity in Chicago, and the way this goal conflicts with the goal of ridership because of Chicago’s racial geography.

Again, read the post, or if you really want to go deep, read the report.  On the other hand, if you’d prefer 14 minutes of video, I did a virtual presentation this morning to the CTA’s governing body, the Chicago Transit Board.  The whole meeting is interesting if you want to understand the larger context of CTA’s Bus Vision Project and hear the questions that were asked, but if you just want my part, it runs from 9:46 to 23:54.

It’s here, and here:

 

 

 

We’re Hiring!

Posted on September 6, 2024 in Jobs

We have openings at or near entry-level in our Portland, OR and Arlington, VA offices!  Applications close Sept. 27.  See here.

Northern Ireland: A Vision for Better Buses

Posted on August 30, 2024 in UK

We really enjoyed our work, in collaboration with Aecom, on the new bus planning document for Northern Ireland public transport operator Translink.*  It aims to inform future policies, strategies and plans with respect to land use and transport planning.  It’s called Bus Better Connected.  The short and graphically rich report can be downloaded here.

Our role was mostly in Chapter 3, which lays out some of the choices that leaders will have to face in taking the next steps on public transport.  For years, Translink has been pushed in opposite directions.  They have been expected to attract patronage (which is tied to both financial and climate/sustainability goals) but they are also expected to serve  everyone’s needs, including in rural areas where demand will always be low and service will be most expensive to provide.  This is the patronage-coverage tradeoff, and much of our work in the report goes into explaining it and its consequences. (I did the first academic paper on this topic back in 2008; it’s here.)

There are some unusual twists in Northern Ireland’s case.  For example, parents are entitled to send their children to distant schools, and Translink is expected to get them there no matter how expensive the resulting services are.  Sooner or later, Northern Ireland’s government will have to think about their priorities for public transport, and give Translink a more realistic definition of success.

Of course, one way out of this problem is to fund more service, as the rest of the island is doing.  In the course of the network designs we’ve done across the Republic of Ireland for its National Transport Authority, we’ve been instructed to increase the total quantity of service dramatically, ranging from over 30% growth in Dublin to over 70% in Waterford.  Our conversations in Northern Ireland suggest that nobody there knows where the money would come from to do this.  But if climate and sustainability goals truly have the force of law, as they do — and if nobody wants to reduce rural services — then the current level of public transport will have to increase.  There’s no other way the math works.

What’s next?  Our contracted work in Northern Ireland is complete, but we hope to be involved in helping frame future conversations that can lead to a public transport network that meets Northern Ireland’s goals.

 

*I have now done work for three agencies called Translink, in Vancouver, Belfast, and Brisbane!

 

San Antonio Welcomes New Map with a Splash

Posted on August 25, 2024 in Maps, San Antonio

 

Source: Landing page for new system map at website of Via in San Antonio, at https://www.viainfo.net/newmaps/

For a couple of years now, our firm, which is mostly known for transit planning consulting, has also been making network maps for transit agencies.  Not “interactive maps,” which invite you to chase flickering, vanishing content around a little screen, but good old physical maps — the kind you can post in a bus shelter, or on your wall.  Like most of what we do, there’s an advocacy angle: Even in the age of trip planners, we really believe in static maps.  They help people see the structure of the network and how it works with the structure of the city. They invite exploration.  And they are especially useful for educating all the decision-makers in the community who do things that affect public transit, like deciding where important destinations will be located.

So we’re really excited that our map for San Antonio’s transit agency Via is not just published, but published with a splash, welcoming everyone to “the new colors of the city.” Those colors, of course, are our firm’s usual way of showing frequency clearly. Hot colors for high frequency, because those catch the eye, and cooler colors for lower frequency.  A slightly darker red signals the Bus Rapid Transit service, locally called Prímo.

Finally, here’s a bit of the map, but you can download the whole thing here.

Those dark red lines are the frequent network, where service is always coming soon.  Want to build something that will need transit?  Build it on those red lines!  Thinking of relocating and want transit to be good?  Locate there!  Sending that signal is one of many reasons that transit agencies should still have beautiful static maps, and spread them far and wide.

 

 

 

Ricky Angueira: A “Top 40 Under 40”

Posted on August 22, 2024 in General

I have mixed feelings about the whole system of awards that runs through the public transit industry in the US, but it’s still nice to see real excellence rewarded.  My colleague Ricky Angueira showed up on Mass Transit Magazine’s list of leading young professionals, their “Top 40 Under 40.”  This award begins with a nomination from one of our clients, not from us.

Since joining our Arlington, Virginia office in 2019, Ricky has become a valued project manager and service planner.  He managed our recent network plans in Williamsburg, Virginia and Knoxville, Tennessee, and also led the analysis team for our complex work on service restoration priorities for San Francisco MTA in 2021.  He’s become adept at all the aspects of a network plan, including navigating the local politics of each community.

Ricky also leads public-facing network maps for our clients.  He managed the design and creation of maps in Miami, Boise, San Juan (Puerto Rico) and now San Antonio, and is now starting a similar project in Cambridge, UK.

Finally, as Scudder Wagg takes over as President of our firm, Ricky will be the new manager of our Arlington office.  It’s great to see this recognition of one of our leading talents.

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