Chuck Marohn of Strong Towns invited me onto his podcast last month, to discuss my paper “To Predict with Confidence, Plan for Freedom.” It was a fun and lively conversation. I hope you enjoy it:
You can follow Chuck’s whole excellent podcast series here.
Photo: Universidad Católica de Chile
My friend Professor Juan Carlos Muñoz Abogabir is Chile’s new Minister of Transport. He is a Bus Rapid Transit expert and an eloquent advocate for sustainable and just transport planning, and is also one of the nicest people I know.
Juan Carlos has already been a leader through turbulent times. In the 2000s was a key advisor to the project that created Transantiago, a government agency managing all public transport in the capital region. The reform introduced integrated bus service planning and also changed the motivations of bus drivers. I remember riding a Santiago bus with Juan Carlos in the bad old days of 2004: Bus drivers raced down the street, cutting each other off in hopes of grabbing the passengers at each stop. And since they made money from taking passengers on but not for letting them off, people sometimes had to jump from the bus as it slowed but didn’t quite stop.
The implementation of Transantiago, however, was a disaster. When the system was turned on in January 2007, some parts of it hadn’t come together. Not enough new buses had arrived. Not all the necessary technology was ready. The incentives weren’t quite right. The result was a couple of months of chaos. Everyone who touched it, including Juan Carlos, was blamed. It even affected the President’s approval rating.
Large-scale transformations like Transantiago are to some extent always like this. They were changing an entire sector of the economy over to a new model, in a way that required many people to see their jobs differently. You can flip the switch on a designated date, but people take longer to adapt and there’s always some conflict in the meantime. In any case, the messy implementation doesn’t mean the reform wasn’t worth doing. Over time, the biggest problems were fixed, the network began functioning and the anger quieted down.
A few years later, I saw Juan Carlos give a presentation on the Transantiago implementation, and was struck by the tone: He was not defensive at all. He explained that this was a necessary reform but that Chile’s transport leaders, not excluding himself, had screwed it up. He knew that failure is a better teacher than success, and he wanted everyone in the world to benefit from their meltdown.
During my 2019 trip Juan Carlos set up a meeting with then-Minister of Transport & Telecommunications Gloria Hutt to talk about my work on access analysis. From left to right: Juan Carlos, yours truly, Minister Gloria Hutt and Vice Minister José Luis Domínguez.
Fast forward to 2019. The institute that Juan Carlos leads, CEDEUS, was planning a major global conference in Santiago when the country erupted in violent protests. All conferences were canceled, including his, because nobody could guarantee the security of visitors. I had been booked as a speaker at the conference, but Juan Carlos asked if I would come anyway, and do some events around the edges of the crisis. So I went, and lacking translation services I did a few presentations in my then-terrible Spanish. I described the experience here.
Obviously Juan Carlos grieved at the way that the social unrest began: a massive act of vandalism against the Santiago Metro. But he shared the protesters’ demand for change, and he worked to channel the energy toward revealing the injustice of the built environment and transport systems.
So I’m just delighted at this announcement. Chile is wealthy enough to do things, but its car ownership is low enough that it can still choose to avoid many of the worst mistakes of North America. And it has the perfect transport leader for the moment.
The Dallas area’s new bus network goes live on January 24, 2022! It’s the result of our three-year collaboration with the transit agency DART and its member cities. The project relied on extensive input from the community, and the Board, about what kind of transit system they want to see. But it’s still a no-growth network, which means that DART couldn’t add new operating budget. As a result, it’s full of difficult tradeoffs and not everyone will like it.
You can compare the old and new networks at this cool data viewer that we developed. Here is the existing network followed by the new network. Note the frequencies in the legend, without which these maps make no sense.
DART Existing Network (note frequencies in legend)
DART New Network (note frequencies in legend).
In general, it’s fewer routes, longer walks in some cases, but higher frequencies. We’ve also:
The result is usually faster access to more destinations. The average area resident will be able to get to 1/3 more jobs in 60 minutes, which means more access to all kinds of opportunity for all kinds of people. This benefit happens almost everywhere (blue in this image) (click to enlarge).
… and the benefit is similar for all races, ages and incomes.
Source: DART
The plan was based on the Board’s decision (not mine) to shift the focus of the service slightly toward a ridership goal and away from a coverage goal. That would have meant service to fewer places, or further away from a few people’s homes, in order to run higher frequencies that produced expanded access to opportunity for most people. Because the sad mathematical fact is: Ridership arises from how useful service is to many people, not how useful it is to absolutely everyone. When we seek to serve absolutely everyone, we’re planning for coverage, not ridership.
But in fact, even though the priorities shifted away from coverage, the final network hardly cuts coverage at all.
None of this means that everyone will be happy. Network changes are always disruptive to some people’s lives. We make sure every decision-maker to know that before they decide to proceed.
Finally, this is not our plan. It’s DART’s plan based on their conversation with the public, and the decision of their Board. We facilitated the design conversations and did the analysis, but we didn’t set the policy that led to the network looking as it does. That’s not an evasion of responsibility. It’s the key to our whole approach to these projects, which is to defer entirely to the community on questions of priorities, and to never make those decisions ourselves.
We hope your new network takes you to good places. Meanwhile, we’ll soon be starting work on a happier project to envision an expanded bus network, a little bit closer to what the community actually needs. So if you’re in the Dallas area, stay involved!
Figuring out the relationship between this tweet and this article is left as an exercise for the reader.
Induced demand is the observed fact that if you make something easier to do, people will do it more. For example, if you create new capacity for cars in a place where travel demand is high, the result is more cars. If you build more capacity to “fix congestion”, you end up back near the same level of congestion you had before.
After decades of observing this pattern, most people are still reluctant to face what this means. Part of the problem is that we’re presenting induced demand as an observed discovery, which allows us to quarrel over data, research methods etc.
But induced demand isn’t just an observed fact. It’s also an axiom of biology. We are as sure about it as we are of the facts of math. This means we don’t really need to be doing this experiment over and over, just as we don’t need to keep measuring circles to be sure of the value of pi.
In this context an axiom is a statement that can be taken as true because it is part of the definition of a concept you are using, or follows logically from that definition. The value of pi is axiomatic because it follows from the definition of a circle, in standard Euclidean space that describes our everyday world.
Now consider the concept of an organism. It implies that:
We humans are organisms, so we do what they do. In particular:
We are mobile creatures, rather than barnacles or oysters, so this pursuit of resources often requires traveling. This means that time is also part of this basic calculation that determines survival. The time spent pursuing a resource can’t be spent pursuing other resources, or doing other necessary things like sleeping. So we must minimize our costs in both energy (which includes money) and time, while gaining as much energy (money) as possible.
From this it follows that people will tend to travel in ways that maximize their access to resources while minimizing energy cost (time and money) and danger. People don’t always do this exactly, but the underlying biological imperative is unavoidable.
This means that:
The organisms in this story are all trying to harvest more energy than they spend in the act of harvesting. Even unimaginable aliens on distant planets would do this in the same situation. So it’s axiomatic that, in the absence of other pressures, road widening in a high-demand area will induce more traffic and more sprawl.
So although road-building departments keep doing the induced demand experiment many times every year, and getting the same results, you don’t need to do more experiments, just as you don’t need to keep measuring circles to be sure of the value of pi. You can add complexity by taking this into the human sciences and trying to model subtleties of human behavior, but all the resulting insights will be marginal compared to the axiomatic fact that above all, we’re organisms, so we’ll do what organisms do.
Here in Oregon a new law mandates that all public meetings must have a virtual component. It is no longer acceptable to do only an in-person meeting.
This is great news, especially for people who want to have diverse and inclusive conversations about public transit.
In the old world, pre-2020, the default public meeting was in person. If you wanted to express your view, you had to clear your schedule at the appointed time and travel to a meeting site — which was especially onerous for people who don’t drive. The result was a process that is biased against people who are busy. Most people don’t have the time that in-person meetings require.
When it comes to public transit, there is a direct tension between the interests of busy people — who tend to care about getting places quickly — and those of many people who have spare time. To take one example, retired people often tell me that they need a bus right at their door, but that it’s fine if it comes once an hour, because they can plan around that. That’s great for them, but that kind of service is useless to anyone whose day is full of deadlines they don’t control: punching a time clock, getting to class, picking up the kid at daycare.
The only way we get functional, just, and inclusive transit is for people with different needs to listen to each other. That only happens if everyone has the opportunity to contribute, as they do in virtual events.
The other issue, of course, is that virtual meetings can be civil, because the moderator has tools to cut people off if they are rude, profane, or off-topic[1] or speaking too long. All forms of physical intimidation, however subtle, are also off the table [2]. Those behaviors have become another good reason to avoid public meetings.
The in-person event shouldn’t disappear until we’ve fully replaced it for everyone who really needs it, but the exigences of the pandemic have made far more people comfortable with virtual meetings, and there are a range of ways to reach those who still aren’t. Oregon’s law doesn’t ban in-person meetings, of course. It just says that a process that’s only in-person is no longer acceptable, because it just excludes too many people. I hope we’ll see this spread far and wide.
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NOTES
[1] At a Cleveland meeting a few years ago, where I was presenting about our bus network design project, one lady devoted her three minutes to probing whether I was married, and if not, what I was doing about that.
[2] Then there was the meeting in a Western US city, years ago, where one belligerent gentleman testified while keeping one hand in his pocket, holding a clearly gun-shaped object.
Each year I’m interested to see which posts have gotten the most attention. Note: This list shows the most popular post in 2021, not the most popular posts written then. As you can see, many of my older posts remain useful and popular for years. And if you are just starting to explore this blog, the place to start is the Basics posts!)
And a few important ones that are just outside the top ten:
A very sensible selection, readers, by you and the publications that linked here! Honored to have such a thoughtful audience.
Happy New Year.
A slice of our system map for AC Transit.
As transit information tools have gotten better, some transit agencies have stopped offering a system map to the public. Often, a website offers me trip planning software and route by route timetables, but not a map. If it’s there, it’s often difficult to find.
We think system maps are essential. They’re not just for everyday navigation. They’re for exploration and understanding. Some people prefer narrative directions, but many people are spatial navigators, and they need maps. They’ll understand details only if they can see the big picture.
Another way to think about system maps is that they show you where they could go, and how. They give you a sense of possibility. (It’s the informational dimension of access to opportunity.) Maps also show visually how different services work together. Finally, good system maps help people make better decisions about where to locate, or even where to build things.
One of our most fun projects this year was a new system map for AC Transit in greater Oakland, California. You can see the whole thing, including its legend, here. (To be fair, we’re not the only people who do these. Our friends at CHK America do them, and I also love the work of the European designer Jug Cerovic.)
The style of this map is very similar to that of the maps that we’ve always used in our planning studies. The key is the visual hierarchy that makes frequent lines more prominent than other lines, and makes all-day lines more prominent than peak-only lines. (In older standard mapping styles in this region, peak-only express lines were often the brightest red, even though they don’t exist the vast majority of the time. It was very confusing.)
As transit planners, we use this style for all of the maps that appear in our studies. In fact, red=frequent in absolutely everything we do, whether it’s a map, a chart, a planning game toy, or a pen used to draw routes inside a course or workshop.
We take pride in having been among the first to bang this drum. I was making the case back the 2000s (really, in the 90s) and there’s a chapter on it in my book.
We’re excited to be in the business of public-facing system maps. They don’t have to be this precise; they can be done at various levels of design at various costs.
But if a system map doesn’t exist, people can’t understand all that your transit system can do.
The architect Jug Cerovic is one of Europe’s most prolific and distinctive transit map designers. Anyone who loves transit maps will love his book One Metro World, which contains 40 of his most gorgeous maps for cities all over the world, and also presents a clear explanation of his design process. (Unfortunately it doesn’t ship until January.) You can look at the whole thing on his site, but the physical book is much more satisfying.
Cerovic’s style is to recognize geometric forms in the geography, and to highlight these to create not just a clear diagram of network structure, but one with a certain minimalist beauty:
Cerovic’s new book, Middle Constellation, is about just one map, an infrastructure map of China. Here, the whole book is about the process. Page by page, he steps through the design choices, showing how he builds up the final map. This one is available as an ebook, which gives you an animated effect for some of the process. You can get a sense here.
If you like beautiful books, both are highly recommended.
I know we’re having a lot of emergencies and it’s hard to keep track, but many US transit agencies are looking at devastating service cuts due to a shortage of bus drivers. Drivers are quitting or retiring early much faster than agencies can replace them. One friend told me their agency is losing 10 drivers for every one they hire.
Here in Portland, TriMet is cutting 9% of its service, bigger even than the cuts in the Great Recession. I’m seeing similar cuts all over the US.
Can you blame the bus drivers? The job was always hard, and now it’s more dangerous in two ways: People breathe on drivers a lot, not always masked, and the mental health epidemic is showing up in more rudeness and bad behavior. Worst of all, some US cities are seeing a rise in assaults on drivers.
Meanwhile, there’s been huge growth in delivery jobs, some of which pay decently and don’t involve dealing with people.
Transit agencies are doing what they can, offering one-time bonuses for signing up. But the real problem is retention, and it’s hard to imagine how that will be solved without some increase in compensation, also known as operating cost. It means less service for the same operating dollar. And of course when compensation goes up it doesn’t come back down.
Before you jump on me: I believe that drivers should be paid well and held to high standards. I believe that a bus driver, with an employed partner, should be able to own a home and raise children. Most US bus drivers are unionized and tend to have relatively good pay and benefits, certainly compared to non-union driving jobs. (One friend of mine is a freelance software consultant but still drives a bus part-time just for the health insurance.) I wish all transportation jobs paid as well.
But in any case, these service cuts are an emergency. They are not minor. They are not necessarily temporary, because right now it’s not clear how the problem will get better. We could be looking at a lasting shrinkage in our transit services, right when people are crying out for expanded service and many agencies had been on track to deliver it.
What can you do? Advocate for funding, but also:
This advice may sound simplistic, but it’s actually practical. Kindness is a powerful form of activism. A lot of it can add up to big change.
Alex Schafran, Matthew Noah Smith, Stephen Hall. The Spatial Contract. Manchester University Press, 2020
In Western political philosophy, physical space is a fairly recent discovery. Early thinkers about socialism and capitalism tended to focus on wealth as the primary thing to be generated or distributed. Only in recent decades, in the work of Edward Soja for example, have we seen serious consideration to how space — including the ability to move — is distributed. Freedom, too, started out as an abstraction, often defined negatively as the absence of constraint. But real freedom only happens in a system of infrastructure and services:
What does it mean to be free to walk down a road? Most people would agree that this requires being free legally and socially … But to truly understand what makes someone free to walk down a road, we need to be paying a lot more attention to the road.
Or as you’ve heard me say elsewhere: Transportation planning is freedom planning. Every decision about infrastructure or services (where they should be? how they should work? what they should cost to use? how well they should be maintained?) is a decision about who will be free and how free they will be.
This little book explores what it means to be free in a world where freedom relies on systems. It’s fun to think of “throwing off your chains” and “hitting the open road.” That’s negative freedom, the freedom from constraint. In fact, you can only “hit the open road” because somebody built the road, put it here rather than there, and is maintaining it or not. What’s more, those decisions define your options about where you can really go, what you can really do, who you can meet, and so on. We are always inside spatial systems — transportation, water, sanitation, power, etc — and our freedom lies entirely in what options and opportunities those systems offer us. The authors call these reliance systems. [1]
From this insight, the book builds the idea of a spatial contract. It’s an analogy to the social contract — the idea that citizens and their governments have an implicit deal where the citizen accepts constraints imposed by the government in return for security, stability and other things that only government can provide. A spatial contract is the same idea applied to space but especially to infrastructure and services. In the narrow sense, a spatial contract between resident and government would specify that the citizen pays taxes and the government provides infrastructure and services. But spatial contracts are more diverse than that, because reliance systems are not all produced by government, nor should they be. There are private actors, informal sectors such as the taxicab industry, and so on.
The authors’ focus on establishing a moral framework for talking about reliance systems, one that (unlike many established frameworks of moral and political philosophy) deals with the physical and spatial reality of these systems. The chapters “Seeing like a system” and “Seeing like a settlement” describe this framework from important but different spatial points of view. Each system operates in physical space with its own logic, and needs to be seen from that point of view. Each settlement, where people live and work together, is a point where many systems interact and must collaborate, and needs to be seen from that point of view.
Obviously I don’t recommend this book to every reader. This is a scholarly conversation. But unlike most academic writing, the book is friendly and readable for anyone who has a basic level of comfort with political and philosophical thinking. Freedom is at the center of my work these days, and this book has helped me think about it more clearly.
[1] The term reliance systems strikes me as confusing, because the word “system” is normally preceded by what it provides (water system, transit system) rather than the user’s relationship to it (reliance system). If you prefer, you can just use infrastructure in the broad sense that is being proposed on the left in the US infrastructure funding debate, one that includes childcare and education as well as bridges and broadband. But we could also call them liberation systems, since they go beyond providing basic needs to providing the possibilities for freedom.