Human Transit

a dream job in Australia for the right transit planner

Posted on September 16, 2014 in Jobs

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!

Posted on September 10, 2014 in Frequent Networks, Indianapolis, Maps, Public Outreach

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

Posted on September 10, 2014 in Advocacy, Public Outreach, Technophilia

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, or
b. 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, or
c. 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, or
d. 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.”

Posted on September 8, 2014 in Advocacy, Frequent Networks

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?

Posted on August 29, 2014 in Bus Rapid Transit, Commuter Rail, Philosophy, Rail Transit

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

Posted on August 21, 2014 in Access, Urban Structure

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.

Frequent networks: escaping the “food desert”

Posted on August 17, 2014 in Frequent Networks, Houston, Urban Structure

For their piece on food deserts this week, National Geographic led off with this map of Houston. It shows where large numbers of people who lack cars are located more than 1/2 mile from a grocery store.

"Public transportation may not fill the gap," the article says, but sometimes it can. The article doesn't mention it, but Houston METRO's proposed System Reimagining will actually liberate many people, but not all, from the "food desert" problem.

One thing is for sure: When we're talking about errand trips like groceries, most customers don't have a lot of time. If there's a line to check out of the grocery store, and you miss an hourly bus, you'd better not have bought anything that needs refrigeration, and certainly nothing frozen. So as always, frequency is freedom.

So if you need frequency, Houston's transit system today is basically willing to take you downtown, which is not likely to be the path to your nearest grocery story. Here's the frequent network today.

It's radial, good for going downtown but not for many other purposes. If you're lucky it will take you to a grocery store, but more likely it misses the ones nearest you. And of course you may not be on this network at all.

Here's the reimagined frequent network:

Compare this to the food desert map (to see the detailed Reimagined network maps, see here) Many of the areas of concern, especially those in the southeast and southwest, get a much richer network in a grid pattern. The grid pattern means ready access to many commercial centers in your part of town, not just to the major destinations of the region. And of course, a much larger share of the "food desert" areas are on this network, so that they can make shopping trips that take an hour instead of all afternoon.

Another crucial thing about the grid is that by running in all directions, it cuts across socioeconomic divides. Low-income people can get out of their enclaves to reach both jobs and commercial services in more prosperous areas nearby. (This frightens some people on the upper side of these divides, but it's one of the basic ways that good transit that's broadly useful creates paths out of poverty.)

(Remember: Most low-income people are busy! They have to be frugal with time as well as money!)

Not all the "food deserts" can be healed with transit. Some of the highlighted areas on the food desert map are in the northwest and northeast, outside of loop 610. Low-income housing in this area takes many forms, but a lot of it is semi-rural, and the built environment is often very hostile to both pedestrians and efficient transit routing. Some of these areas also have declining population. Our plan does try to offer some options in these areas, but transit is not the primary solution to the food desert problem there.

But over a very diverse range of Houston, the way to get low-income people to decent healthy food is the way you achieve so many other benefits: environmental, economic, and social: an abundant frequent transit system, in a grid pattern, that reaches across all the parts of the city that are dense enough to support it.

Charging for connections is insane

Posted on August 12, 2014 in Connections, Transfers, Fares, Los Angeles

Congratulations to Los Angeles Metro, the latest transit agency to make connections (also called transfers) free. There are footnotes: you have to be using a smartcard, but if you're in Los Angeles for more than a day or two you should already have one. The big point is this: The core of the Los Angeles transit network is the liberating high-frequency grid, which relies on the assumption that passengers can be asked to change buses once. Until now, the agency's policy of charging passengers extra to change buses was in direct conflict with the foundational principle of its network design.

Once more with feeling; Charging passengers extra for the inconvenience of connections is insanely self-destructive. It discourages exactly the customer behavior that efficient and liberating networks depend on. It undermines the whole notion of a transit network. It also gives customers a reason to object to network redesigns that deliver both greater efficiency and greater liberty, because by imposing a connection on their trip it has also raised their fare.

For that reason, actual businesses don't do it. When supposedly business minded bureaucrats tell us we should charge for connections, they are revealing that they have never stopped to think about how the transit product is different from soap or restaurants. The difference is that your success relies on products working together, the so-called network effect. So tell them to think about airlines: Fares that require a connection are frequently cheaper than nonstops. That's because the connection is something you endure for the sake of an efficient and broadly useful airline network, not an added service that you should pay extra for.

There was, for a while, an argument against free transfers that arose from the ease of abusing paper transfer slips. These slips, issued in return for a cash fare and to be presented on your second bus or train, were easy to give away or sell. Many US systems eliminated transfers and offered day passes instead, which improved security but at the high cost of discouraging spontaneous trips.

In any case, as soon as a transit agency has a working smartcard, there's no excuse for connection charges. They sometimes linger because managers and elected officials are desperate for revenue but are afraid to raise the base cash fare. In some cities, local journalists are too lazy to understand fare structures and just write quick scare stories whenever the base fare goes up. This motivates transit agencies to do desperate and devious-looking things to raise other charges, just as a simplistic obsession with low fares has caused airlines to invent endless fees.

But what matters is not just that the fare be low. It needs to be fair, and it needs to encourage people to use the system in more efficient ways. An efficient and liberating network requires connections, so penalizing connections is an attack on your network's efficiency.

Spokane: two events on friday!

Posted on August 4, 2014 in General

This Friday 8/8 I'll be back in Spokane, Washington for two public events, among other things.

"Back" because once I've led a transit network design for a city, as I did in Spokane in 2000-01, it means I've been all over it in detail, so it feels like home in a way. And once the design has been implemented, and has become the foundation for how the city gets around on transit, it's like having an offspring to visit there.

I'll be doing two public events. Here's the one at lunchtime, which is likely to touch on downtown issues:

Here's the evening one:

Neither seems to require an RSVP, so feel free to surprise us with the turnout!

If a carpenter can’t be a hammer opponent, then I can’t be a streetcar opponent

Posted on August 1, 2014 in Journalism, Language, Philosophy, Streetcars (Trams), Toronto

I’ll be leery of Toronto Star interviews in the future, because I explained my view carefully and that’s not how it came out:

Jarrett Walker and Rob Ford (see Rob Ford’s policard) don’t have much in common. One is an Oregon-based transit consultant, the other Toronto’s chief magistrate. One blogs avidly, the other disdains the media. Whereas Ford rails against the “war on the car,” Walker touts the virtues of buses.
But on one issue, at least, the policy wonk and the conservative politician agree: streetcars are overrated. Walker is decisively on one side of a new debate in the U.S., over whether the trendy form of rail transport springing up in American cities makes practical sense.

My actual view is too long for a soundbite but should not have been too long for an article. My view is that streetcars mixed with private car traffic are overrated. I was very clear with the reporter that all of my critiques of the US streetcar revival movement are about streetcars in mixed traffic. In the Toronto context, I specifically distinguished between the old downtown Toronto mixed traffic streetcars, which are nearly inoperable due to traffic impacts, and Toronto’s exclusive-lane light rail segments such as Spadina and St. Clair. None of my concerns about streetcars apply to the latter.

Here’s the bottom line. Streetcars are just a tool. They can be used in smart ways and in stupid ways. Asking a transit planner for an opinion about a transit technology is like asking a carpenter what his favorite tool is. A good carpenter sees his tools as tools and chooses the right one for the task at hand. He doesn’t use his screwdriver to pound nails just because he is a “screwdriver advocate” or “hammer opponent”. Yet the Toronto Star assumes that nobody involved in transit debates is as smart as your average competent carpenter.

To call me a streetcar advocate or opponent, you are imposing on me your own assumption that the bus-rail debate is the most important conversation about transit. This is the Toronto Star’s assumption, but it’s not mine. In fact, my work is about blowing up that assumption, and suggesting that instead of falling in love with vehicles, wires, and propulsion systems, we might consider falling in love with the freedom to get where you’re going.

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