Setting for my course and New School lecture in New York in early February, Ben Fried did a nice interview of me in Streetsblog toay.
new york: 8 spaces left for my transit network design course.
Thanks for the wonderful response to the New York offering of my Interactive Course in Transit Network Design on February 6-7. You still have time to register, but act very fast. Early bird discounts end January 15, and we have only 8 spaces left.
We'll have an amazing group representing five countries, with a diverse range of professions and backgrounds.
I'll also be giving a public talk and book signing at the New School for Design the evening of February 6. RSVP for that here.
The course is designed to give you a felt understanding of the geometry of transit and the questions it requires us to think about. It's ideal for anyone in the land use and development world, as well as people in transportation policy or advocacy — anyone who needs to understand how transit can help build the city they are seeking, and how to create urban structures in which transit can succeed.
It's also, as one participant called it, "inexcusably fun."
Read all about the course here! For a tabulaton of student feedback from a recent course, see here.
Big news: Thanks to a sponsorship from the Transit Center, we're able to offer a significant discount for this session only. The two-day course, which is a $500 value, will cost only $300 if you register before January 15, and $333 if you register later. The tuition will likely never be this low again.
Still bigger news: Starting in New York, we intend to offer American Planning Association (APA) Credit (15 credit hours for the two days). APA members can earn a big chunk of your 2014 AICP Certification Management credits early in the year. We're excited about that, because the course is really for planners and city builders who need to understand how transit interacts with what they do, especially if they're not "transit geeks" themselves.
Hope to see you in New York! And if you'd like the course offered in your city, see here!
quote of the week: the decline of local journalism
From a midwestern newspaper journalist's anonymous email to Andrew Sullivan:
When you see the metrics every day, and it’s clear that quick-hit crime stories or freak-show stories generate as many clicks as an investigative piece that took weeks to report, what rationale can there possibly be for doing the investigative work, the longer-form stories that actually help explain the workings of a community to the people who live there?
If you care about the quality of journalism, consider a policy of refusing to click on crime and freak-show news, no matter how much the headline arouses your curiosity. One advantage of online journalism is that when I refuse to click on those stories, that disinterest is recorded. Obviously I'm in the minority, but the conscious behavior of consumers is the only thing that moves corporations.
Portland Mayor Charlie Hales recently said that one of his biggest problems as mayor is the lack of credible local journalism, which has made it impossible to have a public conversation about issues that matter to the city and region. Would the great achievements of consensus in the past have been possible without our newspaper of record, the Oregonian, as a universally recognized forum for discsussing the issues of the day?
It's not just that the Oregonian has ceased to publish on paper, it's also that its website looks trashy and conveys the company's low self-esteem. Big O, before your name is utterly forgotten, wake up and realize that your marketing advisors are killing you. Fire whoever suggested that your website be called "Oregon Live" instead of "The Oregonian," and that it should look like the website of a cheap fly-by-night aggregator instead of like that of a newspaper. The credibility that comes from a long and respected history is the only thing legacy newspapers have as a competitive advantage, and the Oregonian is throwing that away.
When you really start thinking about this, it's hard to face how scary it could be. Sure, there are other ways of getting news, usually news pre-digested for those who share your political views. But there's no other way for the whole city to have a conversation. How can we do planning without that?
solidarity with frozen transit staffs
A deep cold snap is affecting North America east of the Rockies today and/or tomorrow, with many cities plunging toward near-historic lows. It's been an unusual winter all around, including an epic ice storm in Toronto.
As a gesture of solidarity and appreciation toward all the heroic work that's going into keeping transit running today, I thought I'd pass on this photo taken last week by Twitter user @madhava. It's a view from Toronto's CN Tower out over the harbor to Toronto Island.
The narrow sliver of clear water is where the hard-working Toronto Island Ferry is carefully clearing a channel so that it can resume service. This photo has everything: The molecular stillness that is the definition of cold, the hugeness of the city, and the tiny but heroic the acts of diligence and problem solving by people who's job is to restore your freedom to get around.
Stay warm everyone, and if you see a transit staffer working hard against the elements, thank them.
word wars: urbanism, urban
The Atlantic Cities staff have done a nice year-end piece on Ten Urbanist Buzzwords to Rethink in 2014. In the next few days I'll do quick posts on them all.
Amusingly, the Atlantic's title for its Ten Urbanist Buzzwords to Rethink in 2014 uses one of the ten words it's questioning, a good sign of how hard buzzwords are to unwind. But they took on that problem as #1:
Urbanism: At first glance, this word might seem utilitarian: urban is a perfectly fine word, and-ism, meaning a "distinctive practice, system, or philosophy, typically a political ideology or an artistic movement," a frequently helpful English language suffix. But this particular combination never fails to makes me cringe when I hear it spoken aloud. Not only does it imply that there exists some universally accepted ideology of the best way to construct, organize, and manage any given urban area, it's frequently misapplied as a term for the study of urban issues (shouldn't that be urbanology?) or the basic interaction of people and things within an urban environment. Deploying this word should be undertaken with extreme caution, and always with the understanding that it almost never carries real meaning. -Sommer Mathis
Like the Atlantic Cities crowd, I use urbanist routinely to mean "people who care about sustainable cities and the livability of dense cities in particular. " I haven't found another good word for this, and on reflection, I think urbanism deserves a vigorous defense.
Here are three questions to ask about a word, if you're suspicious of it:
- Is it trying too hard to please me? (Or: Is it trying to sell me something?)
- Does it say what it means?
- Is it easily misunderstood? (Ask especially, "what opposites does it suggest?")
Sometimes we have no choice but to use a word that fails on some of these points, but if we want to help people think, we should resist those that fail on most or all (see "Smart Growth".)
As Mathis concedes, Urbanism seems to approximate its meaning fairly well, and it seems to be referring more than selling or flattering us. What's more, it's a word worth fighting for because urban is a word with fighting for, and the fight is on between two definitions of that word:
- As including the suburbs, i.e. "the opposite of rural." This meaning shows up in the term urban area and in numerous social-science and statistical categories. It's also implied by the term urban sprawl. This meaning, I will suggest, is not helpful and a source of confusion. It could even be called hegemonic or imperialist in a sense I'll outline below.
- As distinct from suburban, as well as from rural. This sense of urban refers to the generally pre-war dense and walkable parts of cities. Urbanism, to the extent it's about both promoting those places and fostering similar new places, tracks this meaning, and needs to insist on this meaning.1 The history of the word suburban — whose Latin roots imply separation from the urban — is also on the side of this meaning.
Why be dogmatic on this point? Does a dull bureaucratic term like urban area really constitute threat to the thriving walkable inner cities? Yes, for this reason: It prevents people who care about dense, gridded, walkable, usually pre-war parts of big cities from saying what they mean. It prevents me, in many reports, from saying urban and forces me to find ways to say "dense, gridded, walkable, usually pre-war parts of big cities" over and over.
This is not a two-way street. Insisting on the second meaning does not make it impossible to discuss the first, "urban area" meaning. There is still a perfectly good word for that: metropolitan, metro area, etc.. Talk about metro areas, metro area mobility, and there's no problem.
As anyone who's explored the language dimension of civil rights history can tell you, dominant cultures routinely co-opt and corrupt the words that the minority needs to think about itself and its situation.
Not suprisingly, the Texas Transportation Institute, whose "Urban Mobility Report" is a study of inconvenience to motorists, uses urban in the first, imperialist sense: as referring to an entire metro area and denying us the language to talk about dense and walkable areas as something different from suburbs. But again, if we concede that meaning, what word is left to mean "dense, gridded, walkable, usually pre-war parts of cities"?
City, as you've noticed, experiences similar tension, as any patch of development, at any density, can decide to call itself a city. Ultimately, it's the same battle, because in practical language urban has become the adjectival form of the noun city. So it is the same struggle.
That's why I like urbanist. It's not just saying what it means, it's helping to fight for the word urban, without which people who care about walkable cities simply can't talk about them, and be understood.
1African-American uses of the word urban, as in "urban music" and "National Urban League," also deserve credit for holding this original sense of urban. There are likely other threads I'm not thinking of.
resolution: find more dimensions
Here's a new year's resolution that would help everyone in transit and sustainable urbanism.
Now and then, I will step outside of the binarisms that energize me.
Or perhaps more simply,
I will find and explore more dimensions.
This is not vague spiritualist babble. Here's what I mean.
A binary conflict (or binarism, or dualism) is simply a pair of opposites that engender strong feels of attraction or repulsion toward one end or the other: Capitalism vs socialism. Competitive vs collaborative. The underclass vs the overlords. Labor vs. management. Car-centered thinking vs. sustainable transport options. Buses vs. trains.
If you have a strong attraction to one of these poles over the other, then whatever the conflict is, it's really "us vs them". And that engenders excitement. If the "us vs them" binarism did not fundamentally animate us to action and joy and devotion, nobody would care about sports.
Here's why I'm thinking about this:
This blog normally putters along around 2000 pageviews per day, more when I post more often, lower in the holidays. Now and then, though, I take on some piece of journalism that expresses ignorance about the whole project of creating viable alternatives to the private car. I did that on December 29, making an example of Brian Lee Crowley's anti-transit rant, and of the Globe and Mail for publishing it without fact-checking and without marking it as opinion.
(As I wrote that last sentence, my pulse went up a bit. That's part of my point. Bear with me.)
I didn't promote this post more than any other, but Twitter exploded with retweets and and favoriting, driving traffic to be blog. Troops briefly rallied to my side. Why? I had stepped into a known position in an already-mapped binary conflict between people who believe in sustainable transportation options and people who advocate car-centered thinking.1 So it was easy. It drove traffic. It was fun watching all that approval pile up.
But remember when George W. Bush said "you're either with us or you're with the terrorists"? If you think of that spatially, he was saying: "the universe consists of only one dimension, and along that dimension there are two poles with nothing in the middle." These are the two foundational assertions of the polarizer who invests in binary conflict as a way of life:
- All meaningful points of view are on the line between A and B.
… and then, as it heats up …
- There is not even a spectrum of options between A and B. There are only the extremes.
Polarization is both claustrophobic and deafening. If you're stuck in the binarism of "sustainable transport vs car-dependence" to the point that you can't hear someone who's thinking "liberty vs control," you're trapped. It's no better than being stuck in "labor vs management" or "poor vs rich". Critical thinking, the kind that makes us smarter, is multi-dimensional. It may try on a binarism, see how it works, even advocate it as practically useful for certain purposes. But it knows how to consider other binarisms, try them on, and it knows that they're all approximations of what really matters.
The catch, of course, is that action requires some loss of awareness.
Watch a cat. Cats have an awake and scanning state where they are aware of a three dimensional environment. But then they get interested in something: food, prey. As the cat's pulse rises, its focus narrows, and at the end, when it's ready to pounce, its world is virtually one-dimensional and polarized: me and the thing I want.
Briefly losing awareness of multiple dimensions seems almost inseparable from action. (I explored this idea more here, when I argued that considers every possible perspective in detail is never an action plan.)
Binary conflict rallies the troops. Binary conflict raises hell. But it's the opposite of critical thinking; it's one-dimensional, claustrophobic. There's nothing wrong with it, but we have to be able to move back and forth between binary conflict and broader, more open thinking. Ultimately, we have to be able to choose to do it, consciously.
In the moments between the bouts of us vs. them conflict, step into another dimension. It's still hard for me too, so it's my resolution for 2014. Feel free to join me.
1 although the absence of widely accepted terms for either of these positions suggests a certain space inside the binarism, perhaps other dimensions waiting to be released. You could also argue that my specific suggestions in that post were in the spirit of this one, though I'm not sure that's why it was so popular.
my letter to the globe and mail (update 1)
Sent just now to the Globe and Mail Public Editor, Sylvia Stead. Beneath this I will post any reply I receive.
Ms Stead
Thank you so much for your followup re the Crowley article [see yesterday's post, and Ms Stead's comment at the end]. As a professional consultant and author on public transit, I have one more thought.
The issue is clearest in this paragraph of Crowley, which I believe warrants a correction:
Portland, Ore., has pursued road-skeptical policies similar to many major Canadian cities. The result is markedly worsened commuting times. According to the TTI, over the past 30 years Portland has gone from having the 47th worst congestion in the U.S. to the sixth worst.
The second sentence not only untrue but the opposite of the truth. Portland has among the best commuting times in the US. As the third sentence reveals, when Crowley talks about "commuting times" he means "motorists' commuting times". Portland's commuting times are relatively fast not just because lots of people walk, cycle, or take transit. They're faster because people here tend to live closer to their jobs, the result of decades of careful land use planning that began with Oregon's 1972 laws limiting horizontal sprawl.
Crowley's omission of that crucial word "motorists'" not only makes the sentence false, it reveals that a large part of the population simply does not exist to him. People who do not commute by car do not count as commuters at all in this calculation.
Does denying the existence of a large group of readers constitute a reasonable distortion for an opinion column? Or is it just a falsehood?
(You can find my rebuttal of Crowley here.)
Regards, Jarrett Walker
UPDATE 1: Globe and Mail's Sylvia Stead replies:
Yes thank you Mr. Walker. An opinion piece must be based on the facts so that a reader can come up with his/her own opinion. I will look into the points below and get back to you later this week.
More when I have it.
a glimpse into the road lobby’s echo chamber, and how to respond
Canada's leading newspaper has published an anti-transit rant, by Brian Lee Crowley of the "non-partisan" MacDonald-Laurier Institute. It's based on the work of the Texas Transportation Institute, a leading source of studies that view cities from behind the wheel of a single-occupant car. It's filtered via Wendell Cox, who's made a career of car-centered advocacy.
I analyzed TTI's work more patiently here, so I'll cut to the chase now. TTI believes that traffic congestion is a valid measure of people's ability to access the resources of their city. They do not measure actual travel times for all people, or the liberty and economic opportunity that a good urban transporation system offers. They apply these things as factors to a degree, but their bottom line is road congestion.
Specifically, their metric is the difference in travel times, by car, between travel time on congested roads and the same roads in a free-flow condition. In other words, their baseline utopian condition is abundant free-flowing roads at all times of day. (That condition is actually an economic impossibility in a city above a certain size with a healthy economy and no road pricing.)
Once you insist on measuring congestion, and against that fantasy baseline, you can get absolutely everything backwards.
Portland, Ore., has pursued road-skeptical policies similar to many major Canadian cities. The result is markedly worsened commuting times. According to the TTI, over the past 30 years Portland has gone from having the 47th worst congestion in the U.S. to the sixth worst.
"Markedly worse commuting times" is false. If you count everybody's commuting time, Portland is ahead of most US metros. As the next sentence reveals, it is only congestion that is worse. Yes, like all dense cities, Portland has exactly as much congestion as it makes room for, but it has low overall commute times, mostly because its carefully mixed density allows many people to commute very short distances. Remember, if you are measuring car congestion, Portland's transit riders and cyclists and the many people who can walk to work simply do not exist. Crowley disses "congested" Vancouver for the same reason, even though Vancouver is the only Canadian metro where the long-term trend is toward shorter commute times, due to continued consolidation of housing and business around transit.
So how should an activist respond to this kind of talk from the asphalt-and-petroleum echo chamber?
Everyone should know how to respond to articles like this, because we'll keep seeing them. The comments on the article ("Wendell Cox is an idiot") are not encouraging. Wendell Cox is not an idiot. He is part of a reactionary process that accompanies every revolution, one that we'll hear more from. He's a smart man who knows exactly what he's doing.
Take time to understand the point of view. Many people's brains are so fused with their cars that to them, congestion really is the same thing as urban mobility or urban liberty. To them, the TTI is right.
So first you have to object by shining light on that premise. TTI, and by extension Canada's leading newspaper, believes that certain people do not exist or do not matter — namely everyone who already travels by transit, bike, or foot, and everyone who can imagine choosing not to drive in the face of real and attractive choices.
But then, avoid the trap of casting these excluded people as an underclass. Too many activists fall into that Marxist reading, and issue a call to arms on behalf of "ordinary people." They get through to people who already agree with them, but to the dominant business culture they look like an easily-dismissed-or-manipulated rabble. Instead, read Edward Glaeser or Bruce Katz and understand that people who are investing in low-car "congested" cities are the leaders of the new information economy.
A good retort to road-lobby claims that life is really better in Houston than in Vancouver is to check the cost of comparable housing. If it were has hard to get around in Vancouver as TTI suggests, people wouldn't pay a fortune to live there. Transit-rich cities are expensive, in part, because many people there can get around without being stuck in congestion. High costs of living, in turn, are the market telling us to create more places just like that. This is the free-market argument. It is the only one that will break through to the business mind and start conveying that maybe there's something to all this transit-oriented investment.
The TTI will last at least as long as the Tobacco Institute, and it will sound just as scientific in praise of its product-centered world view — in this case, a world in which only motorists count. So you have to question the world view. If an argument is based on a false remise, don't engage the argument, because in doing so you're accepting the premise. Attack the premise.
vancouver: interactive public outreach on network design
Here's another example of a transit agency trying to interact with the public in a way that presents people with real choices. It's from TransLink (greater Vancouver) and it deals with the northeastern suburbs of greater Coquitlam. They invite you first to state your priorities about matters of prinicple ("fewer transfers", "service to more places" etc) and then look at some network scenarios that might illustrate those principles. You then get to rank the scenarios, which invites you to notice whether your principles have shifted once you see their consequences. Check it out. And on an ethical note: Play with it, but don't actually submit your views if you don't live or work or travel there!
holiday map immersion
If you're hiding with your laptop in the laundry closet because an ancient family argument has broken out over holiday dinner, it's a great time to geek out on how fast mapping is changing. Go over to Atlantic Cities and explore Emily Badger's great overview of 10 ways that mapping has evolved over the past year.
My favorite: I usually try to be race-blind in my thinking about transit and cities, but I have to admit I was absorbed by Duncan Cable's Dot Map of Everyone in the US, which is color coded by ethnicity. Not really everyone: You can't zoom in to find your personal dot, but it's still a magnificent rendering of how dot-crowding conveys density on a map more naturally than shaded zones. Chicago, for example, displays pie-slices of single-ethnicity neighborhoods (blue is white, red is Asian, green is African-American, orange is Latino/Hispanic), but you can also see where the borders are soft, where they're hard, and where highly mixed areas exist or are emerging:
Houston, where I'm working now, is also made of pie slices, but the colors are more muted, indicating more mixture almost everywhere. Near the center of this image, the greater Montrose and Heights districts are rainbow pointillism. The Asian node in the south is student areas near Texas Medical Center.
And my home town, Portland, with downtown on the far left (as it is), showing the new concentric-circle pattern, as lower income minorities (because of income, rather than race) are forced to settle on the fringes of the old city (top edge and far right) or what we'd now call "inner ring suburbs." The bike-and-transit-friendly city you've seen pictures of is mostly white with small dashes of color. The exception is downtown, which still has a mix of housing types tending to both income extremes, and the continuing black presence in the neighborhoods straight north of downtown even as these gentrify. (As a small child in 1970 I remember seeing a cover of the local free weekly that showed a hand drawn line around this district with the title "Red-lining the Ghetto," about the impossibility of getting loans to buy or improve homes in that area. Now, it's on fire with higher-end redevelopment.)
Of course these are also fascinating simply as density maps. Did you know that Oregon cities have had Urban Growth Boundaries since 1972? The hard edges show around many Oregon cities … Here's the north edge of Portland's western suburbs (the "Silicon Forest"):
For contrast, here's a same-scale image of the north edge of Clark County suburbs, just over the river in Washington:
Washington loses farmland to development much more rapidly than Oregon does. It makes a difference.
In the end, what I love most about these maps is that they're beautiful. As in art, patches of a bright color are beautiful, but so are intense mixtures of color. So I look at these maps and feel good about both single-ethnic communities and mixed-ethnic communities, and my eye enjoys the patterns of density, hard edges here, soft there, even more. These maps take an emotive kind of diversity and render it as serene. The perfect geek-out for serene holidays.