Human Transit

santiago: a low-tech approach to fast exits from a subway station

Posted on December 21, 2013 in Rail Transit

So you're on a crowded subway train on Santiago's Line 4, the dark blue line on this map. You're northbound, approaching the end of the line at Tobalaba station.

Everyone on the crowded train will get off at once. Most customers are changing to an intersecting line 1, which has side platforms on the level above. That, means you can't exit the platform at just any stairwell; each of the two stairwells goes to just one direction of the connecting line.

So customers tend to collide as they exit the train trying to get to the correct stairwell for their preferred direction, creating massive platform congestion that slows people's exit from the train. this increases the dwell times of the train and thus reduces the possible frequency, which in turn only makes the trains even more crowded.

Massive infrastructure solutions were proposed. My friend Juan Carlos Muñoz, a professor of engineering at the Catholic University of Chile, came up with a simpler solution (Spanish with English subtitles):

A gate blocking the platform halfway along it forces people to exit at the door nearest to them, which in turn teaches people to be in the correct part of the train for their preferred connection. People who try to exit the wrong exit are stopped at the staffed gate, and let through last only after the crowd has cleared. These people are irritated, and a few write to their elected officials, but most people just learn how it works, and work with it.

UPDATED: Shouldn't people have figured out anyway what part of the train to be in to be close to their exit? No, becuase in this case, there's an exit at the front end of the platform and another in the middle. Juan-Carlos explains:

There is one set of stairs coinciding with the middle of the train. Let´s call them A.
Only 40% of the passengers in this train wants to take these stairs.
Thus if we were to assign every passenger a position inside the train we would put all these passengers at the back half of the train. Then the front half of the train would be full of passengers taking the stairs at the front end of the station (stairs B).
However, a great place inside the train to take stairs A is in the back of the front half of the train. Indeed every train used to have around 120 (out of a total of around 1500) such passengers taking such a strategic position. You can see them in the video! These are the passengers causing the problem, not only because they cause the counterflow but because they force some passengers wanting to take the B stairs to enter the back half of the train. The gate forces to act otherwise leaving some room for more B passengers into the front half. They can now exit the station much faster.

So this was a "tragedy of the commons" problem. People optimizing for their own outcomes were in conflict with the most efficient way to get everyone out of the station before the next train arrived.

Note how Juan-Carlos refers to the "greatest good." The implication is that we can't let a few people's anger get in the way of solving the problem in a cost-effective way.

should we cut fares or increase service? an advocacy parable

Posted on December 6, 2013 in Advocacy, Portland

A dispute in Portland is bringing to light the age old question of whether fare cuts or service increases are the best way to "improve" transit. Both options improve ridership.

The high-level answer is pretty simple.

If you want transit to be mainly for low-income people who have a low value of time, cut fares, as this is an improvement targeted to benefit only the cost-sensitive. By not improving service, this choice may also lead to an increased "stigma" around transit as it is perceived, with increasing accuracy, as a low-quality experience that is of no relevance to people who have choices.
If you want transit to be useful to a broad spectrum of the population, increase service.

Cutting fares is good for lower-income people, while increasing service is good for almost everyone, including many low-income people.

But it's not as good for some low-income people, and that's the interesting nuance in this particular story.

OPAL, an environmental justice organization that claims to focus on the needs of low-income people, is demanding that Portland's transit agency, Tri-Met, institute a fare cut. The cut is specifically in the form of extending the period for which a cash fare is valid from two to three hours, an interesting issue that the Oregonian's Joseph Rose explores in a good article today. (The headline is offensive, but reporters don't write headlines.)

At the same time, Portland has a throughly inadequate level of midday service, by almost any standard. In the context of cities of Portland's size and age, Tri-Met practically invented the high-frequency grid that enables easy anywhere to anywhere travel in the city, but in 2009 it destroyed that convenience by cutting service to 17-20 minute frequencies. At those frequencies, the connections on which the grid relies are simply too time-wasting. Those cuts correlated with substantial ridership losses at the time.

OPAL's demand for a fare cut costing $2.6 million (about 2% of the agency's revenue) is, mathematically, also a demand that Tri-Met should not restore frequent service. This money (about 80 vehicle-hours of service per day) is more than enough to restore frequent all-day service on several major lines.

The rich irony of this proposal is that OPAL uses those service cuts to justify its proposed fare reduction. In Portland, the basic cash fare purchases a two-hour pass that enables the passenger to transfer one or two times. Because of the frequency cuts, transfers are now taking longer, and a few are taking too long for the two-hour pass. OPAL therefore wants the pass to be good for longer.

So OPAL's position is that because service has been cut, Tri-Met must mitigate the impact on low-income people instead of just fixing the problem.

In particular, OPAL wants a solution that benefits only people who are money-poor but time-rich, a category that tends to include the low-income retired, disabled, and underemployed. You must be both money-poor and time-rich to benefit from a system that reduces fares but wastes more and more of your time due to low frequencies and bad connections.

If, on the other hand, you are money-poor and time-poor — working two jobs and taking a class and rushing to daycare — you will benefit from a good network that saves you time as much as from one that saves you money. But that means you don't have time to go to meetings or be heard. We transit professionals see these busy low-income people on our systems and care about their needs, but we also know that we're not going to hear their voice as much from advocacy organizations, because they just don't have time to get involved.

The same is true, by the way, of the vast working middle class. In the transit business, we get lots of comments the money-poor-but-time-rich, who have time to get involved, and from the wealthy, who can hire others to represent them. We don't hear as much from the middle class or from the money-poor-and-time-poor, even though those groups dominate ridership. But hey, we understand! They're just too busy.

yet more evidence for the decline of driving in the US

Posted on December 4, 2013 in Mobility

Another report from USPIRG on the decline of driving in US cities is out today. Transportation in Transition: A Look at Changing Travel Patterns in America's Biggest Cities combs through secondary data to assess changing mobility patterns. The big picture is clear: in nearly all of America's major cities, less driving is happening, as measured by miles traveled, journey-to-work mode, or share of work done from home.

Some key statistics from the report:

The average American drives 7.6 percent fewer miles today than when per-capita driving
peaked in 2004.
From 2006 to 2011, the average number of miles driven per resident fell in almost three-quarters of America’s largest urbanized areas
The proportion of workers commuting by private vehicle – either alone or in a carpool – declined in 99 out of 100 cities studied
The proportion of residents working from home has increased in 100 out of the 100 largest urbanized areas since 2000.
The proportion of households without cars increased in 84 out of the 100 largest urbanized areas from 2006 to 2011.

A few illlustrative maps:

Of course, the canned response to data of this sort is to attribute it entirely to the 2008 recession and its knock-on effects on personal income and unemployment. USPIRG's analysis seems to refute this idea, finding that unemployment in the 15 areas with the greatest declines in VMT actually increased less from 2006-2011 than in all other cities. The same holds true for declining income and increasing poverty. The bottom line is that in the cities where mobility patterns are changing most intensely, this shift cannot be handwaved away by pointing to the recession.

Previously noted: USPIRG's report on the correlation of the market penetration of mobile communications technology and decline of driving.

by Evan Landman

auckland conversations: my presentation on how bus networks liberate

Posted on December 1, 2013 in Auckland, Video

Last Friday I gave a lunchtime talk to an impressively large audience at the Auckland Conversations series.

In 2012 I was the lead planner (with colleagues at MRCagney) on a redesign of Auckland's bus network that will dramatically expand the extent of frequent all day services. I wrote about some of the benefits a year ago.

However, the plan is encountering resistance, especially in the CBD, from certain folks who believe that buses are intrinsically unimportant, and that aesthetic objections to buses are a reason not to value the liberation they provide.

So I took that on, including extensive discussion of the contrasting examples of Paris and Portland. The video is here!

dangerous word watch: integrated, integration

Posted on December 1, 2013 in Words, Unhelpful

Whenever someone in a planning or transport field tells you they work on "integration" or "integrated x", ask them: "Integration of what with what, exactly?"

Integrated and integration carry a root meaning of things that are normally separate being combined or dealt with together. Thus we speak of integrating transport and land use, integrating two adjacent transit networks, or integrating functions within an organization (as in the term vertical integration).

Because we've all been taught to fear silos, which are areas of activity dealt with in isolation, we are supposed to love the word integrated, which implies somehow that this problem has been overcome.

But communities have to choose between different integrations.

For example, recently, I was dealing with a city that controls its own transit system, and that was wondering if its service should be integrated with its suburban transit agencies. This would have required giving up city control of the agency to a regional authority.

But this idea would also disintegrate. Specifically, it would prevent the integration of the city's transit thinking with the city's thinking about traffic, parking, and land use. Whereas a city government can plan all these interdependent things together, they often find it easier to deliver great transit outcomes than a city that must rely on a regional transit agency can. It is too easy, in a city's politics, for a regional transit agency to be seen as Other, not part of the city in a bureaucratic sense and thus prone to neglect or exclusion when the city sets its own priorities. After all, we all prefer to think about things we control rather than things we don't.

I'm not expressing an abstract view about whether city control or regional agencies is the right way to organize transit. The answer is different in different places.

But I am warning about the word integrated, when used without clear reference to which specific silo walls are being broken down. If you're not clear about that, and you don't demand clarity from others who use the word, integration may not give you the specific integration that matters most to you.

Even integration can be a silo.

auckland postcard (speaking here thursday!)

Posted on November 22, 2013 in Auckland, Postcards

I'm back in New Zealand for the next two weeks, which is always a pleasure. I'll be teaching three sessions of my course (all booked out, alas, but there can always be more) and doing a series of private briefings.

But I'll also be doing a lunchtime talk in downtown Auckland this Friday, as part of the Auckland Conversations series. My topic is How will an integrated public transport network create a city for people? RSVP here!

The "integrated public transport network" in question is more or less this one. My biggest project for 2012 was a complete redesign of Auckland's confusing tangle of infrequent bus routes, working with Stuart Donovan and my other excellent New Zealand colleagues at MRCagney. This project is now being rolled out, starting with the southern part of Auckland next year.

Auckland is a very exciting city for public transit right now. An antiquated and infrequent commuter rail system is being converted to useful rapid transit, first by running more trains but more durably through an electrification project. The bus redesign will bring useful all-day frequent service to a huge share of the population, as these striking maps demonstrate.

Finally, if you're not in Auckland, my most important post from here is this one, about expanding our notions of why you might paint a bus.

quote of the week: ursula le guin on technical writing

Posted on November 18, 2013 in Language, Words, Unhelpful

In poetry, by and large, one syllable out of every two or three has a beat on it: Tum ta Tum ta ta Tum Tum ta, and so on. . . .
In narrative prose, that ratio goes down to one beat in two to four: ta Tum tatty Tum ta Tum tatatty, and so on. . . .
In discursive and technical writing the ratio of unstressed syllables goes higher; textbook prose tends to hobble along clogged by a superfluity of egregiously unnecessary and understressed polysyllables.
Ursula K. Le Guin,
"Rhythmic Pattern in The Lord of the Rings"
The Wave of the Mind (Boston: Shambhala 2004)
[ellipses sic. paragraph breaks added]

Yet another reason to hire literature students!

meta: comments now require sign-in

Posted on November 9, 2013 in Meta

This blog's comments have always been hugely valuable, and some magnificent conversations have occurred in comment strings. I hate having to restrict them in any way (apart from the comment policy).

Sadly, this blog is now experiencing a comment-spam attack, and the "captcha" tool for verifying commenters appears to be useless. Our host, TypePad, can offer little assistance, and now and then makes things worse.

So two changes:

Comments have been closed on some older posts that were attracting heavy spam.
As of now you will have to register via any of a range of online identities, including Twitter, Facebook, and so on to comment.

If that doesn't work, we will probably begin (with regret) closing comments on all but the most recent posts.

Please keep commenting! Your comments have always been at least half the value of this blog.

should transit maps be geographical or abstract?

Posted on November 7, 2013 in Frequent Networks, Maps, San Francisco, Washington DC

In some agencies, it goes without saying that transit maps should be geographically accurate. Many agencies follow San Francisco Muni in superimposing transit lines on a detailed map of the city:

But research out of MIT suggests that we really need to see network structure, and that requires a degree of abstraction:

By putting alternate versions of the New York and Boston subway maps through the computer model, the researchers showed that abstract versions of the maps (as opposed to geographically accurate versions) were more likely to be easily understood in a single, passing glance.

Here's their example:

Geographical accuracy obscures network structure. Purely geographic maps show where service is but not how it works.

This is why a number of best practice agencies publish both kinds of maps, sometimes even presenting them side by side. The geographic map helps you locate yourself and points of interest in the city, but you need the structure map to understand how the system works.

All this is even more urgently true for bus network maps, where complexity can be crushing to the user. When we streamline maps to highlight key distinctions of usefulness such as frequency, we often have to compromise on geographic detail. Obviously the best maps fuse elements of the two, but you can always find the tradeoff in action. The new Washington DC transit maps, for example, highlight frequency (and show all operators' services together) but there's a limit to the number of points of interst you can highlight when keeping the structure clear:

postcard: al ain

Posted on November 5, 2013 in Advocacy, Postcards, Public Outreach

A couple of weeks ago, I had the honor of joining a consulting team working on Bus Rapid Transit in Al Ain, United Arab Emirates. Al Ain, pop. around 500k, is straight south of Dubai, inland, and it could not be more different. While Dubai is a performance for the world, Al Ain is calm, satisfied and a bit inscrutable. Expat workers abound, including plenty of professionals hired from the West, but this feels like a city for Emiratis.

Built around a series of oases, Al Ain has been a crossroads and watering place for millennia. Like most such places, it's a bit of a chokepoint, defined by the Omani border and the massif of Jebel Hafeet rising to the south.

What's here for a transit blog? This:

"Grow a vision with public transport," with the obligatory child photo. (Another shows an Emirati man in agal and ghutra gazing thoughtfully into the distance.) Al Ain recently started up a bus system, and has a nice downtown station under construction. As you'd expect in the Emirates, it's mostly used by low-income guest workers from surrounding countries. Emiratis, who are a minority of the workforce, are mostly relatively wealthy and generally drive.

But why, if that's today's reality, would a public transit system be unveiled with such modern and air-conditioned buses? And why did they undertake this kind of marketing and imagery, designed to get Emiratis thinking about public transport and why it might be important for the city's and country's future?

Often, in the US, I encounter the attitude that buses are just for the poor and that therefore there's no point in spending more than the minimum on them. Plenty of US cities have bus systems whose service and infrastructure still convey that attitude. In these situations I'm always pointing out that transit dependence, like income, is a spectrum, that there are people everywhere along the spectrum, and that transit can therefore grow incrementally in relevance in response to modest, incremental investments. Even poor people make choices, and those choices have consequen This is, among other things, a reason to care about the quality of bus services, rather than just longing for trains.

That line should be a harder sell in the Emirates, a wealthy country where (a) decision-making is concentrated in an elite, (b) the middle class is far smaller and newer than in the US, and (c) the underclass consists of foreign "guest workers" who have little political influence. But the Al Ain bus system, and its vision-heavy marketing and investment in look and feel, suggests they may grasp the idea better than many Americans do. They are envisioning a future when a more diverse range of people will be motivated to use transit, as the car becomes less attractive or affordable for a host of converging reasons.

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