Human Transit

Luca Guala: Why “personal rapid transit” evolves into fixed route transit

Posted on November 27, 2014 in Guest Posts

Remember Masdar, the car-free neighbourhood in Abu Dhabi that was going to show the power of "personal rapid transit" (PRT)?

I just received this interesting letter from Luca Guala, a transport engineer in Italy:

Let me introduce myself. I am a transport planner and I am partner of a consultancy Company named MLab (mobilitythinklab.com), based in an obscure corner of Italy. Nothing to brag about except that I have had the chance to participate in two very interesting experiments that concerned automated, driverless vehicles: the Masdar City "Personal Rapid Transit" “automated taxi” transit system and the CityMobil2 experiment with automated minibuses in a mixed setting.
In 2006, I proposed to London’s architects and planners Foster & Partners to choose PRT as a sustainable, non-polluting transport system in their bid for Masdar City’s masterplan (which they won).
To make a long story short (my involvement in Masdar City lasted 3 years) we soon realized that the dream of using “automated taxis” as a mass transport system often resulted in… queues of taxis at pick up points!
Even though the “podcars” are the size of an European or Japanese mini city car (Citroen C1, or Toyota Aygo for example) but seats 4 people in full comfort and up to 6 rather uncomfortably, they still took up so much space, that we found ourselves at a bifurcation: capacity or space? Should we give up some capacity (and find something else to provide the peak) or enlarge the transport infrastructure beyond our desires, and what was healthy for a city? A well known dilemma for any transport planner…
We then tried a “group rapid transit” strategy, as opposed to “personal rapid transit”: timing the podcars to travel at fixed intervals and on fixed routes at peak, so that they could fill up on most requested routes. This strategy did work, although the capacity almost tripled, it was not that of true mass transit (but in densely built Masdar City there was no room for big mass transit) but then the economic crisis arrived, the plan was dramatically downsized etc. etc.

Bottom line: When "personal rapid transit" succeeds, it succeeds by turning into a conventional fixed route transit system. The fantasy of "personal" transit is that a vehicle will be there just for our party and take us directly to our destination, but in constrained infrastructure this only works if demand is low. But PRT was meant to the the primary transport system in a car-free city, so demand would be high. It was never going to work.

Luca takes on driverless taxis in part 2 of his letter, coming in the next post.

perth: a frequent network map

Posted on November 24, 2014 in Frequent Networks, Maps, Perth

For over four years now, this blog has been encouraging transit agencies to map their high-frequency networks, and encouraging citizens to map them themselves if the transit agency doesn't. We've featured many over the years, including a rapidly rising number of maps by actual transit agencies. Just enter "frequent network maps" in our handy new searchbar. —>

Here's a new citizen entry, from Perth, Western Australia, by a Mr. OC Benz on the Bus Australia discussion board.

And zooming in a bit:

Although the definition does not include weekends, when Perth service levels drop sharply, the map is remarkable nonetheless. Greater Perth is a young and mostly car-oriented area with a population of around 2 million, but it has a lot of frequent bus service — more than Brisbane, its closest peer in both geography and economics, and far more than almost any US city of similar size.

The bus service is also intended for more than going downtown, indeed, you can also see disciplined efforts to construct a high-frequency grid against overwhelming geographical obstacles: downtown is at the convergence of two squiggly rivers that make it difficult. (Again, a dramatic contrast to Brisbane, the only big Aussie city with no orbital frequent transit service at all.)

quote of the week, from ursula k. le guin

Posted on November 21, 2014 in General

Not from her extraordinary National Book Award acceptance speech (text, video), in which she challenged both the commodification of literature and the marginalization of science fiction, but for this [item 90]:

We do have our nice Subaru, but we can’t drive it. I never could. I learned to drive in 1947 but didn’t get a license, for which I and all who know me are grateful. I’m one of those pedestrians who start to cross the street, scuttle back to the curb for no reason, then suddenly leap out in front of your car just as you get into the intersection. I am the cause of several near accidents and a great deal of terrible swearing.

Imagine what might happen if everyone assessed their own driving skills so candidly.

beware bus route saviors at election time …

Posted on November 20, 2014 in Advocacy, Journalism, Melbourne

We don't make endorsements, but beware politicians' promises about individual bus routes.

Melbourne transit guru Daniel Bowen confirms that nobody is threatening to cancel the 822. The other team's plan involves removing some twists and turns on neighborhood streets, so that the route runs faster and is useful to more people. As usual, that plan asks some people to walk further to a more useful service, as virtually any access-improving network design will do.

Those changes are fair game for debate, but remember: If you want to "save" every existing bus route exactly as it is, forever, then you're against almost any coherent plan and cost-effective plan to update and improve your transit network. This and this, for example, would have been impossible!

silicon valley: bus rapid transit that’s faster than driving?

Posted on November 14, 2014 in Bus Rapid Transit, San Francisco

El Camino Real BRT Alignment

Silicon Valley is easily viewed as a car-oriented place, where tech giants rule from business parks that are so transit-unfriendly that they have had to run their own bus systems to bring employees from afar. But one interesting transit project is moving forward: the El Camino BRT, a proposed rapid transit line connecting Palo Alto and central San Jose.

El Camino Real ("the Royal Road") is a path defined by Spanish missionaries as they spread north through California. It lies close to the old railroad line now used by Caltrain, and the two facilities combined determined the locations of the pre-war transit-oriented downtowns that still form the most walkable nodes in the area.

Today El Camino is the spinal arterial of the San Francisco peninsula, passing through or near most of the downtowns. This spine continues across Silicon Valley, through Palo Alto, Mountain View, Sunnyvale, Santa Clara and finally downtown San Jose. (The BRT will not extend the full length of the peninsula, because it is a Santa Clara County project and the county ends at Palo Alto. However, successful projects do get extended sometimes.) In Silicon Valley, too, the corridor is far enough from Caltrain that they are not competing. Caltrain will always be faster but probably less frequent than the BRT, optimized as it is for much longer trips including to San Francisco.

In land use terms, the project corridor is ideal territory for transit – lots of employment and commercial destinations, with strong anchoring institutions at each end. But while the path is historic, the modern street was designed with a singular focus on auto travel time, as a six-lane divided boulevard. Auto and transit travel times continue to increase substantially as more people come to live and work in the corridor, and even more population and employment growth is forecast for the coming decades.

Santa Clara VTA and the FTA released the Draft Environmental Impact Report for this project last week, detailing multiple alternatives relating to the extent of dedicated lanes and street configurations. The purpose and need statement tidily summarizes the rationale for this investment:

El Camino Real is an important arterial in Santa Clara County and on the San Francisco Peninsula. However, El Camino Real is predominantly auto-oriented, and streetscape amenities are limited. There are widespread concerns regarding congestion, appearance, and safety, and a general public perception exists that the corridor is not well planned. Exacerbating current conditions, Santa Clara County is expected to experience substantial growth in the next 30 years from 2010 to 2040. If no improvements are implemented, heavy demand will potentially be placed on the existing transportation infrastructure, which is planned to increase by only 5 to 6 percent.

This striking graph (which I couldn't locate in the report itself, but which is reproduced over at the TransForum blog), compares transit travel time among the four alternatives:

In the A4c alternative (the alternative with the greatest extent of exclusive lanes), a trip during the peak through the corridor would actually be faster on transit than driving, and dramatically faster than the same trip today.

The various alternatives' alignments are compared below:

As usual with arterial BRT in the US, there will be some mixed-traffic segments, and the line will only be as realiable as its least reliable point. Note that the alternatives seem to envision different responses to city limits, as though anticipating that as you get further west (which means wealthier, but also closer to big destinations like Palo Alto and Stanford University), support for exclusive lanes will decline. It will be interesting to see if this is true, in a very educated polity, when the benefits are understood.

replace stop signs with signals on major transit lines?

Posted on November 10, 2014 in Pedestrians, San Francisco

From Streetsblog's Aaron Blalick in San Francisco:

The latest of [San Francisco Municipal Transporation Authority]'’s efforts to speed up [major bus] lines to run into some neighborhood opposition involves its proposed replacement of stop signs with transit-priority traffic signals. Some Western Addition neighbors have protested a proposal to signalize five intersections on McAllister Street to speed up the 5-Fulton, one of the designated “Rapid” routes receiving upgrades under the Muni Forward program (also known as the Transit Effectiveness Project).
Initially, the complaints were driven by fears that signals would bring dangerous speeding to McAllister. Muni planners responded by holding more outreach meetings, and presented data showing that pedestrian injuries declined on similar streets after signals were added. They also say speeds won’t go up significantly, since signals will be synchronized for speeds below 20 mph. [emphasis added]

Aaron emailed to ask my opinion, which is emphatically: "Who could oppose something that's good for both pedestrian safety and transit speeds?"

Apparently, the remaining opposition is based on "feel":

Sean Kennedy, the SFMTA’s Muni Forward program manager, said the data seems to quelled some neighbors’ fears, but that the complaints have shifted. “What we hear is that there’s a lot of concern over the neighborhood feel,” he said. “And that’s something we can’t really dispute with facts. It’s an individual preference if people do or don’t like signals.”

So how much should we worsen transit, and maintain higher levels of pedestrian injury, for the sake of "feel"?

And how exactly does a signal change feel? We're talking about small streets here, mostly striped with a single wide travel lane each way. Will a signal make the street feel wider? Are people associating signals with more traffic and just assuming signals will have that outcome? Not if they're timed for transit rather than cars. Well-timed signalization can be very effective at discouraging car traffic on transit-intensive streets, when that's the objective.

I spent a decade of my life as a San Francisco pedestrian, in dark ages when pedestrian safetly mattered a lot less than it does now. Sure, it was nice to encounter a 4-way stop where stepping into the intersection was enough to stop traffic.

But among global pedestrians like me, San Francisco is famous for very fast signal cycles, and it's not a place where you'll be ticketed for crossing on red if there's obviously nothing coming. As a pedestrian, I find a few seconds of delay a small price to pay for a transit system that's actually respectful of its customers' valuable time, not to mention the high cost to the public of its drivers' time.

Remember: If you want frequency, you want less delay, because that makes frequency cheaper!

no, autonomous cars will not “abolish transit” in dense cities

Posted on November 4, 2014 in Technophilia

Is transit headed for a collision with self-driving cars? David Z. Morris in Fortune writes about how anti-transit Republicans are using the prospect of self-driving cars to argue against transit investments.

Alarmingly, he quotes nobody who can actually refute this argument, except in the fuzziest of terms.

Here is the recommended response:

We are currently in that phase of any new techno-thrill where promoters make grandiose claims about the obsolescence of everything that preceded them. Remember how the internet was going to abolish the workplace?

In any case, technology never changes facts of geometry. However successful driverless cars become, transit will remain crucial for dense cities because cities are defined by a shortage of space per person. Mass transit, where densities are high enough to support it, is an immensely efficient use of space.

(Remember, a great deal of bus transit is in places where densites are not high enough to allow it to succeed; this is evidence of anti-ridership “equity” or “coverage” policies, not of transit’s failure. Driverless taxis could certainly replace transit in those areas, assuming the pricing were gotten right, thus allowing transit agencies to focus on their core business.)

In many cases, people talking about driverless cars replacing transit are talking from an outer-suburban point of view, based on the experience of low-density, car-dependent places that are unsuited to high-ridership transit. In those settings, if density is not increasing, they are probably right. Driverless taxis will be more efficient than transit in these areas.

But all over the world, people are moving into dense cities, where even autonomous cars can’t replace a bus full of 60 people or a train full of hundreds. There simply isn’t enough space to put walls between every pair of travellers, as the car model of transportation requires. Nor will driverless taxis ever be there whenever you need them as great transit lines will. Like bikeshare systems, they will experience surges where many of the vehicles are in the wrong place.

A city can of course choose to sprawl and avoid density to the point that driverless cars could dominate. But in so doing it will fail to create a place that the 21st century economy will reward. Real estate prices are already telling us that the market has chosen dense cities as the highest value form of development. There is no dense city in the world that does not rely heavily on transit, for reasons of space-efficiency that none of the new technologies can change. (Yes, autonomous vehicles will use space more efficiently than private cars do, but this is saying very little compared to what a great rapid transit network is achieving.)

Again, technology never changes geometric facts. And the problem of cars in dense cities, and transit’s superiority there, is a geometric fact, a fact about space and its scarcity.

email of the week: a new map for the moscow metro

Posted on November 3, 2014 in Maps, Moscow

(Updated with final version of map.)

From Ilya Petoushkoff in Moscow, explaining this remarkably beautiful map (download this draft version here, or the final version here):

Here I'd like you to see a beta-version of a result of a zillion-year struggle. Moscow finally is going to have a transit map with not only metro, but also regional rail and bus/trolleybus/tram connections between adjacent metro lines.

From the beginning of 20th century and till nowadays there hasn't been any kind of common map. Presently we still have a metro-only map inside the whole metro system, and regional-rail-only map inside some 30-50 percent of all regional trains …. Even the transfers between metro and rail are not announced on the trains! Until 2010s, city politicians simply didn't understand that it is a significant problem, many of them believed in 'who the hell will have a ride on a regional train when we have our metro'.

Sounds like the conversation Paris had a decade or so ago. Many US cities are just starting to think about how regional commuter rail can be repurposed to form useful links within the core city.

Most of the city inhabitants … are not aware … that many destinations in the city are covered with regional rail services. Now it's to be that everyone finally becomes much more familiar with what our transit is capable of.

The regional rail trains are quite frequent, running from 4 a.m. till midnight with a frequency of 6…10 [trains per hour] (sometimes more) and a strange 'technical daylight break' between 11 a.m. and 1 or 2 p.m. (except Sat.& Sun.), when there is no service at all.

Sounds like one of those clauses that make labor contracts such a dramatic read.

This very map is extremely important, finally bringing citizens and authorities to the fact that city has much more lines of rapid rail than those 12 of the metro system, and the regional rail should be developed as soon as possible, while certain areas of the city do not need new metro lines at all, they already do have rails and trains to use. …

Also the interesting fact is that connecting services between metro lines have been put onto this map. Many people are just unaware … that they don't have to stuff themselves into metro and have a ride to the center and backwards to get to adjacent lines, stations and city areas. Now it's a first significant attempt to make it clearer.

The color codes on those links are about technology, rail/bus/tram, but of course those don't tell you which is fastest. Frequency, I'm assured, is not an issue, as all of these services are frequent.

Still, I perused this map with great pleasure, and respect it not just as a clear diagram but a work of art.

quote of the week: “rail is only part of the equation”

Posted on October 31, 2014 in Bus Rapid Transit, Los Angeles, Rail Transit, Technophilia

Trains would be just one layer of a comprehensive, multi-modal network that greatly enhances both neighborhood and regional accessibility for people all across the [Los Angeles] region. …
A singular focus on rail would divide the region into two: neighborhoods with rail and neighborhoods without. Such a future would perpetuate income inequality as housing costs rise near stations and station areas would be choked with traffic congestion. …
Getting our existing buses out of traffic is the quickest, most cost-effective means to bring high-quality transit to the greatest number of Angelenos.
Juan Matute, UCLA Institute of Transportation Studies
from a discussion called "Trains are Not the Silver Bullet"
at ZocaloPublicSquare

This is from a collection of commentary about the the role of rail in the larger context of transit investment strategies. Read the whole thing!

when transit agencies say “we don’t control that!” (email of the week)

Posted on October 28, 2014 in Public Outreach

Ask: Who does?

From Mark Szarkowski:

A common transit agency response to these pleas for improved service … is that the problem is out of their control. And in some cases, such as "bunching" due to traffic, they're right. So do you think irate passengers would get more mileage by directing their pleas to the third parties that actually are in a position to fix issues that are truly outside the transit agency's control – say local {transportation and public works departments] that could improve signal timing or implement [transit signal priority], bus lanes, bus bulbs, and so on?
Do we mistakenly assume transit agencies are more powerful than they really are? If so, should they be more aggressive in lobbying third parties for the improvements they know are needed to make bus service more reliable? And how can bus riders – a usually-invisible, but potentially powerful constituency – be tapped to do the lobbying? Would folding a metro's transit, traffic, road maintenance, and planning agencies into a single organization help, such that "complete streets" would actually be designed by "complete" agencies with a "complete" spectrum of users in mind?

When it comes to surface transit that interacts with traffic or other obvious causes of delay, vast parts of the customer experience are outside its control. The same is true, more obviously, about the experience of walking to or from transit, or waiting at a surface transit stop. These are important parts of the transit experience, but the transit agency usually has zero control over what happens in those places.

I encourage transit agencies never to say "we don't control that!" Instead, say "____ controls that." Name the agency that has jurisdiction over the issue.

This doesn't necessarily mean that it's ___'s fault, exactly. Sometimes the problem lies in inter-agency communication and planning.

Sometimes, transit staffs feel so unsupported that they fear they would get reprisals if they forward a complaint to the responsible agency. But refusing to say who's responsible makes the transit agency sound like it's obfuscating, and that affects the transit agency's image.

For example, if transit riders blame all service problems on the transit agency, while the road authority hears only from motorists, the road authority won't get much evidence that they should care about transit riders, will it?

And if the responsible government agency doesn't get the calls about the things they do control, it's unlikely anything will change. …

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