We have ended up with one free seat in the Portland session of my Interactive Course in Transit Network Design, which is tomorrow and friday, 8:30 AM to 5 pm, downtown. The price is $395.
If interested, contact me through email (button at right).
Edmonton: what a great transit debate looks like
The Edmonton Journal's Elise Stolte has been doing an excellent series on the city's debate about the future of transit. Unlike many transit debates, this one is about a real issue that affects the entire city: how to balance the ridership goals of transit with the competing coverage goals, where "coverage" means "respond to every neighborhood's social-service needs and/or sense of entitlement to transit even if the result is predictably low-ridership service." This is the great inner conflict in transit planning: Do we respond to demand (ridership) or to needs and expectations (coverage)?
When I briefed the Edmonton City Council last year, as part of their Transit System Review, I encouraged the council to formulate a policy about how they would divide their transit budget between ridership goals vs. coverage goals. This solves a fundamental problem in transit analysis today: too often, transit services are being criticized based on their failure to achieve a goal that is not the actual goal of the service.
For example, almost all arguments about how unproductive North American bus service is are based on the false assumption that all bus services are trying to be productive. Based on all the agencies I've worked with, only around 60-70% of bus services have ridership as a primary purpose. (My test: "Is this service where it would be if ridership were the only goal of the agency?")
I may have invented this rigorous way of talking about transit's conflicting mandate. I began developing it in a Spokane (Washington) project around 1997 and in projects in Bellingham and Reno a few years later. My peer-reviewed paper on the methodology us here and the case for it is also in Chapter 10 of my book Human Transit. Helping transit agencies think about this question has been a central part of most transit studies I've done since, including major projects in Houston, Columbus, Indianapolis, Salem (OR) etc.
Nothing makes me happier than to hear elected officials debating an actual question whose answer, once they give it, will actually affect reality. This is what's happening in Edmonton now. So far, articles in Elise Stolte's series have included
- A nice backgrounder on the whole issue, in which I was interviewed.
Mayor Don Iveson scribbling a hand-drawn map of his ideal Frequent Network, rich with evocative ball-point ovals and clear hints of grid, and explaining the Frequent Network concept that is the foundation of many high-ridership networks.
- A city councilman from an outer suburban district arguing against too much service to his own low-density constituents: "If you want good transit," he says, "live where it already exists."
Soon, I'm sure, she'll cover some of the passionate arguments in favor of coverage services, which we heard from several City Councilors when I last briefed them on the issue.
Throughout, the Journal's Elise Stolte has taken a tone of genuine curiousity ("So, will you help me think this through?") in an argument where there are no right or wrong positions, only different priorities and visions to be balanced. Is your city having this conversation clearly?
defending new york’s subway from british sneers
Guardian journalist Bim Adewunmi recently traveled from London to New York and slammed the subway as compared to her beloved Underground. The blowback has been delightful. She seemed especially angry about the information system that isn't exactly what Transport for London would do.
The city’s subway map is dense and needlessly complex. Where in London the Central line (red) is distinct from the Piccadilly (dark blue), which is markedly different from the Hammersmith and City line (pink), New York’s map has designated the same forest green to the 4, the 5 and the 6 lines. The B, D, F and M all rejoice in exactly the same shade of violent orange. … Why would you do this? The whole thing resembles a child’s approximation of a city transit system: it makes no sense.
She's talking about branching lines. If she were from Paris, whose elegant Métro is nearly branchless, she'd have a point. But what a comment for someone from London!
In New York's map, the common color helps you navigate the core part of a line while the numbers or letters help you sort out the branches. This is a very common way of making branching lines clear. Meanwhile, in London, where transit is presumably designed by sober adults, we have this:
No 4, 5, and 6 to confuse you! No, just a beast called the Northern Line even though it's both northerly and southerly, consisting of two entirely different lines through the central city. Is there a direct train from Waterloo to Mill Hill East? How would I know? As Clive's Underground Guide helpfully explains: "The pattern of service … tends to change with each new issue of the timetable."
You see, Bim, Americans like maps and nomenclature systems that actually indicate where their train will go! In London I'm sure you just somehow just know what the next Northern Line train might be up to. But all that aristocratic just knowing that you Brits do is exactly why you lost your Empire!
😉
reflections on world commuting times
Here's an interesting chart! It's from a study of commute times in Brazil, but there are enough world cities to make it interesting.
Takeaways?
1. Viva Marchetti's constant! There are interesting academic debates around the edges, but the persistence of the 30-minute one-way commute, and especially the few cities with averages much less than that, echoes the observation of Marchetti and others that this seems to have been a tolerable daily travel time across both many centuries and many cultures. Average commute times in cities don't seem to get much below 30 minutes because most people don't seem to value such short commutes. But in highly dysfunctional cities they can get much longer.
2. The organic "planning" of many Brazilian cities is producing better outcomes than the alleged orderliness of Chinese planning.
3. Despite the common whining about traffic in both places, the California metros are in good shape. Los Angeles in particular sings the advantages of a decentralized urban structure that gives many people opportunities to live near their jobs, one that can be easily adapted to successful transit-walk-bike mobility.
4. Conversely, dominant and fantastically wealthy central cities (London, New York) are bad for commute times because so few workers can afford to live close to them.
5. Aestheticist master planning in the car era was really bad for commute times, because it tended to create building-in-park arragements that are just toxic to both transit and pedestrians. Like many capital cities that were planned to symbolize rather than function, Brasilia excludes too many pieces of a necessary economy, spawning a vast and disorganized fringe where commute times are even longer than in more organically grown Brazilian cities.
(Don't get me started about Australia's master-planned capital Canberra,where I've done a great deal of work over the years. While I love Canberra for a lot of reasons, it took a lot of planning effort to get less than 400,000 people spread out over an area that's 37 km (23 miles) long, insuring long commute times for most of the population.)
Oh, and this chart demonstrates one other takeway: If you write studies or consulting reports for a living, make sure that everything someone needs to know to understand a graphic is in the graphic, not in adjacent text. As here, graphics quickly throw off the shackles of context to make their own journeys across the web, confusing or enlightening people depending on the wisdom of the designer.
a dream job in Australia for the right transit planner
Are you an experienced public transit planner/engineer with 5+ years experience and a commitment to breaking through old paradigms and raising the standards of the profession? If so, my colleagues at MRCagney in Sydney may be looking for you. They are open to hiring from worldwide, so if you've ever dreamed of living in Australia, this may be your chance. Here's the listing.
MRCagney is small and focused sustainable transport firm with offices in Brisbane, Sydney, Melbourne, Auckland, and Singapore. Built around a group of former transit agency executives, it now does a range of work but is closely associated with BRT, bus network design, and public transit management, with many projects across Australia, New Zealand, Southeast Asia, and the Middle East.
I worked for them fulltime for five years when I was based in Sydney (2006-2011), and I'm still on their payroll part time, helping out with the occasional network design study. In 2012, for example, I worked with them on a redesign of Auckland's bus network, which is being rolled out over the next few years, and we did a similar project in Darwin earlier this year. MRCagney is really the Australia-NZ firm for cutting-edge transit planning, which is why I stay involved with their work as much as I can. I like to think I've had some influence on MRCagney's transit planning values, so if you like what I've written on public transit, and have your own ideas about how to put these ideas into practice, that's probably an advantage!
Please pass this on to other professionals who might be ready for an adventure Down Under. It's an exciting time to be a transit planner in that part of the world.
indianapolis: upcoming meetings on your transit system!
Last spring, Jarrett Walker + Associates was contracted by IndyGo, the transit agency serving Indianapolis and Marion County, to lead an update of their last Comprehensive Operation Assessment. This project involves consideration of the design, performance and mobility outcomes of IndyGo's existing network, followed by an extensive public engagement and redesign process. Next week, we will be on the ground in Indianapolis for a series of meetings, asking stakeholders and members of the public to share their views on the future of the network, including one very fundamental question: to what degree should IndyGo pursue each of the competing goals of high ridership and high coverage?
As always, one of our first steps was to draw a map showing IndyGo's midday route frequencies. To the agency's credit, it already incorporates frequency into its general purpose map (along with a lot of other useful information).
Next week, IndyGo and JWA will be hosting three meetings to discuss the future of the network at The Hall, 202 N. Alabama Street:
- Thursday, Sept. 18: 11:30 a.m. – 1:30 p.m.
- Friday, Sept. 19: 9 – 11 a.m.
- Friday, Sept. 19: 4-6 p.m.
We'll be discussing immediate changes to the network responding to the 2015 opening of the new Downtown Transit Center, as well as long term priorities and plans for future rapid transit lines. For more information, and to take a survey on these questions, head on over to IndyGo's site for the events: http://www.indygo.net/news-initiatives/indygoforward.
ioby invites you to “trick out your trip” via crowd-funding
Our friends at the Transit Center are supporting a new ioby project to crowd-source ideas about how to improve the experience of commuting. If you aren't familiar with ioby, they are basically a crowd-funding platform focused on small-scale neighborhood improvement projects. Have a look at the promo video for the project:
Similar to better-known sites like Kickstarter and Indiegogo, ioby users are able to upload a project and create a funding goal which people who visit the page can contribute to. Examples of projects funded in this manner include community gardens, playgrounds, and environmental education programs, but now, ioby is offering a funding match up to $4000 for ideas related to transit. Have a look at the page for yourself here.
The guidelines for a project seem pretty open-ended:
1. Your project must do one of the following:
a. Be a non-digital tool that improves the public transportation experience, orb. Focus on a single node within a transit system, but can be of any mode, i.e., a train station, a bus station, a bus shelter, subway or metro stop, bike share docking station, or parking lot, orc. Encourage the use of clean transportation, in other words, have less environmental and social negative impacts than a single occupancy private car. Some examples include transit, bicycling, bike share, rideshare, carpool, car share, or vanpool. We will consider modes and shared systems that aren’t identified here as long as they are less environmentally and socially harmful than a single-occupancy vehicle, ord. Be something else in this spirit of the shared public transportation experiences! Talk to us! We don’t know all the great ideas out there! ([email protected])
On this blog, we focus to a great degree on what transit agencies can do to improve transportation outcomes in terms of network design and other aspects of the planning and operations of transit systems. But ioby's new project asks an interesting question: what small-scale, locally sourced ideas can people put into practice to make the transit experience more useful?
Share your thoughts in the comments below, or better yet, head over to ioby and get your idea funded!
“We can’t have density there because there’s not enough transit.”
Ever heard this line? A debate in Google's home town, Mountain View south of San Francisco, has turned up this response to an obvious idea of building more housing close to the city's business-park district, so that fewer people have to drive long distances to get there. No, some council candidates say, because there's not enough transit there.
Well, there's not enough transit there because there aren't enough people there, yet. Transit is easy to add in response to seriously transit-oriented development, but as long as you have a development pattern that is too low-density or single-use for transit, you've locked in lousy transit service as an outcome.
So whenever someone gives you this line as a reason to oppose a transit-friendly development, ask: "Well, what would it cost to provide good transit, and who should pay for that?"
Often, as in Mountain View, extremely frequent transit into the nearby transit hub can achieve plenty, and is not that expensive, because of the very short distances involved.
There are other situations where there's not enough transit because transit just isn't viable at any reasonable price, for an obvious geographic reason like remoteness from transit hubs or destinations.
But it's worth asking.
Does transit infrastructure cause ridership?
Does building a new transit line trigger ridership? Does it even make sense to talk about the ridership of a piece of transit infrastructure?
If you say yes, you're expressing an infrastructurist world-view that is common in transit investment discussions. The right answer to the above questions, of course, is "No, but:
- Infrastructure permits the operation of some kind of useful transit service, which consists of vehicles running with a certain speed, frequency, reliabilty, civility and a few other variables.
- That service triggers ridership."
To the infrastructurist, this little term — "service" — is a mere pebble in a great torrent of causation that flows from infrastructure to ridership. By contrast, service planners, and most transit riders that I've ever met, insist that service is the whole point of the infrastructure.
If you read the literature of infrastructure analysis, you encounter the infrastructurist world view all the time, mostly in ways that's unconscious on the authors' part but still a source of confusion. This afternoon I was browsing TCRP 167, "Making Effective Fixed-Guideway Transit Investments: Indicators of Success", which includes some really useful explorations of land use factors affecting the success of transit lines. But when they talked about infrastructure features as causes of ridership, the report routinely delivered weirdness like this:
The percentage of the project’s alignment that is at grade proved to be a negative indicator of project-level ridership. At-grade projects may be more prevalent in places that are lower in density, while transit is more likely to be grade-separated in places with higher density or land value. Thus, this indicator may be reflective of density. It may also be true that at-grade systems are slower than grade-separated systems. At-grade status may reflect a bundle of operational characteristics such as speed, frequency, and reliability, although the analysis did not find that these factors individually had a statistically significant effect on ridership. [TCRP 167, 1-17]
This careful talk about how a correlation "may" reflect density or "operational features" sounds vague and speculative when it's actually very easy to establish. There is no shortage of evidence that:
- High density reliably triggers ridership.
- Areas of high density are less likely to have available surface rights of way.
- Therefore, highest ridership segments tend to be grade-separated.
So this is a case where "A correlates with B" does not mean "A causes B" or "B causes A". It means "A and B are both results of common cause C". It's important to know that, because it means you won't get B simply by doing A, which is the way that claims of correlation are usually misunderstood by the media and general public.
Later in the paragraph, the authors again describe the obvious as a mystery:
At grade status may reflect a bundle of operational characteristics such as speed, frequency, and reliability …
Yes, it certainly may, but rather than lumping all the at-grade rail projects together, they could have observed whether each one actually does.
… although the analysis did not find that these factors [speed, frequency, and reliability] individually had a statistically significant effect on ridership
While this dataset of new infrastructure projects is too small and noisy to capture the relationship of speed, frequency, and reliability to ridership, the vastly larger dataset of the experience of transit service knows these factors to be overwhelming. What's more, we can describe the mechanism of the relationship, instead of just observing correlations: Speed, frequency, and reliability are the main measures of whether you reach your destination on time. Given this, the burden of proof should certainly be on those who suggest that ridership is possibly unrelated to whether a service is useful for that purpose.
Note the word choice: To the infrastructurist, speed, frequency and reliability are dismissed as operational, whereas I would call them fundamental. To the transit customer who wants to get where she's going, these "operational" variables are the ones that determine whether, or when, she'll get there. It doesn't matter whether the line is at-grade or underground; it matters whether the service achieves a certain speed and reliability, and those design features are one small element in what determines that.
I deliberately chose a TCRP example because the authors of specific passages are not identified, and I have no interest in picking on any particular author. Rather, my point is that infrastructurism so pervasive; I hear it all the time in discussions of transit projects.
I wonder, also, if infrastructurism is a motorist's error: In the world of roads, the infrastructure really is the cause of most of the outcomes; if you come from that world it's easy to miss how profoundly different transit is in this respect, and how different the mode of analysis must be to address transit fairly.
Whenever you hear someone talk about the ridership of a piece of infrastructure, remember: Transit infrastructure can't get people to their destinations. Only transit service can. So study the service, not just the infrastructure!
Expanding liberating transit in small cities
Salem, Oregon (metro pop around 200,000) is typical of a lot of small cities in America. It's a state capital and has some small universities, which help keep its downtown focused, but it's not an enviro-utopian place like Boulder or Eugene, nor is it besieged by demand for massive urban density like the bigger west coast cities all are. This is a town that much of North America could recognize as familiar.
I love working on tranist in big cities, but I also love working in small ones. Often, it's easier to get things done.
So I'm proud to announce that the local transit agency, Salem Keizer Transit has released for public comment a major reworking of their transit network, one that we helped them design. As usual, red means every 15 minutes all day, blue is every 30 and green is every 60. Here's the new network on the left, and the existing network for comparison on the right.
The themes are familiar if you've followed other work of ours, in Columbus, Houston, or Auckland, New Zealand. There's more high-frequency service (red) which means more places where transit is useful to people in a hurry. The spacing of nearby routes is more even, so that walking distances are more uniform. Sometimes service has been eliminated to extremely low density areas, such as parts of the west side of Salem in this image, where existing service is logging fewer than 10 passengers per hour of service.
This doesn't mean that you shouldn't have low-ridership services to low-demand areas, but only that the community, acting through the transit agency Board, needs to decide how to balance ridership goals with competing goals that require low-ridership service, such as perceptions of equity and lifeline access for people who are extremely dependent on transit.
Salem is interesting in that the city's geography really limits the possibilities for a high-frequency grid. The arterial pattern is a starburst, many streets going downtown in different directions but very few streets that are useful for running perpendicular those streets. Thus Salem continues to have only one frequent crosstown — along Lancaster Drive — but the plan works toward expanding that crosstown so that more non-downtown trips can be made that way. Otherwise, this remains a strongly radial plan for a strongly radial city. Salem has done better than many cities at keeping its major institutions, including its biggest university, all clumped in a small area of greater downtown, where most of the transit sytsem goes.
The bigger story, however, is that freestanding cities of Salem's size are big enough to do interesting things with transit, and to build services that are useful enough that some people will make location decisions in response to them. That's the essence of how a city's form becomes more sustainable over time.