Human Transit

amazon extends ebook sale of my book: 86% off!

Posted on August 6, 2013 in General

Amazon has chosen to continue the sale of my e-book of my book Human Transit at US$4.74. Buy it here. No knowing when that will end, so if you're a Kindle-user, best buy now!

And if anyone cares, I get the same cute little royalty regardless of sale price.

(Conventional e-book price is at or over $20 depending on vendor, so as usual, Amazon is taking a loss in return for global dominion over rival platforms. On the bright side, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos's disinterest in conventional profit perhaps augurs well for the Washington Post, which he bought yesterday.)

san francisco: my piece in sunday’s chronicle

Posted on August 4, 2013 in Journalism

The San Francisco Chronicle commissioned me to do a "big picture" op-ed piece for their Sunday Review, which appeared yesterday. It's here. The bit with the violins:

Our current generation of leaders grew up with cheap gas, "free" freeways, and abundant land for suburbia, with a concept of security formed by the Cold War. For Millennials, the issues are economic insecurity and climate change, and they're telling us, in every way they can, that they are not as interested in cars. They are getting driver's licenses later in life, and buying cars later, if at all. They are part of why the amount of driving in America rose steadily until 2004 and has been flat or declining since then. It's easy for older people to pretend that their kids are like they were at that age, but the Millennials are not like their parents. Their formative experience is different, and so are their priorities.
In 2040, the Millennials will sit in the power-seats of government and business. Sooner or later, the world, and the Bay Area, will be governed according to their priorities. So in the end, it comes back to one of the great human questions that every ruling generation has faced: Can you listen to your adult children, and honor the ways that they differ from you? Can you see the value in smoothing the path toward the world that they will rule? Or do you want only to slam on the brakes, protecting your own habits and assumptions?
It's not an easy question, but it's the real question of all long-range planning. How Bay Area residents answer it will decide the future of their region, and possibly the world.

rebutting the “vagrancy” argument against free fares

Posted on July 30, 2013 in Fares

Jake Blumgart did a good article back in March summing up the current status of debate about free-fare transit.

Generally, transit systems without fares are either really small and often rural — situations where the fares may not even cover the costs of charging fares — or else college towns, where the university is often subsidizing most of the ridership anyway. But there's the interesting case of Tallinn, Estonia. This is a significant city and capital, population 426,000, and it's posting results:

Tallinn’s transportation department reports that traffic fell by 10 percent, meaning about 7,600 fewer cars in the city per day.

In that context, this passage from Jake's article was interesting:

Would such a scheme work in a mid-to-large American city? According to Jennifer Perone’s 2002 study, sponsored by the U.S. Department of Transportation and Florida Department of Transportation, it isn’t likely. While she wrote that free transit is manageable and worthwhile in rural regions and small towns, she cautioned against such a policy for larger systems:
All well-informed transit professionals that were contacted for their opinions spoke strongly against the concept of free fares for large systems, suggesting some minimal fare needs to be in place to discourage vagrancy, rowdiness and a degradation of service.
These experts drew on the experiences of three mid-sized American cities that briefly experimented with fare free transit. Between 1978 and 1979, both Trenton, N.J., and Denver, Colo. offered free transit during non-peak hours. In both cases, ridership increased (by 16 percent and 36 percent, respectively). The authors claim however, that these were generally not people lured from cars, but were what they call “problem riders.” In Trenton, 92 percent of transit drivers reported that their jobs were less enjoyable after the free fare program was instituted. These issues, along with revenue problems, caused both cities to discontinue their experiments after a year.

It would be interesting to see if the last 11 years have changed US expert opinion. I'm sure it wasn't true that a 16-36 percent increase in ridership consisted largely of "problem riders," though I'm sure there were enough problem riders to be an issue. The new riders were probably mostly people getting where they're going, and quite possibly triggering fewer car trips as a result. And are we sure that nobody sold a car as a result of the free service?

(A significant share of transit trips by people without cars would be "chauffeured" if transit were not available; that is, someone would have made a car trip to transport the person. This is especially true of senior/disabled riders and essential errands, which therefore count as Vehicle Miles Traveled reductions due to transit, not just social-service benefits. Is your transit agency taking due credit for these?)

It sounds as though the authors were operating on the old binary model of choice-vs-captive ridership, under which additional ridership by people who don't own cars is assigned zero value to environmental or traffic outcomes. In fact, the overall transit service offering (including its cost) is an important in many people's choice not to own cars. The choice to not own a car is one of many complex possibilities that fries the circuits of algorithms (and experts) that rely on dividing all riders into boxes called choice (car owners who left the car at home) and captive or transit dependent. In fact, we're all on a spectrum between choice and captive, and we are each in different situations that may make us responsive to small improvements in transit service or, in this case, cost. If that weren't true, small changes in frequency or fare wouldn't cause small changes in ridership, as they almost always do.

It is likely that in the US experiments, there were enough "problem riders" to be a problem, but the obvious solution to this is Tallinn's solution, which is to require each free rider to use a smartcard, one that takes some effort to get and that can be revoked for bad behavior.

The problem with free-fare systems in big cities is not the "problem rider." The problem is that free fares cause such a huge ridership increase that no big-city US transit agency could possibly fund enough service to handle it. It would not just require the purchase and operations funds for hundreds if not thousands of new buses (and new facilities for them to be housed and maintained). It would also quickly require whole new rapid transit lines. Most of our current modelling of rapid transit in the US assumes that fares will continue to hold ridership down.

So yes, free fares would be a big deal in big cities (though not as much for small ones). They are a huge barrier to cross, especially for impoverished US transit systems in major cities. They would require a transformative degree of new public investment. All that must be debated.

But don't let the "vagrants" scare you.

“running transit like a business”: digging under the slogan

Posted on July 19, 2013 in Advocacy, Language, Values, Words, Unhelpful

Now and then, the media (New York Times, Atlantic Cities) rediscovers Mark Aesch, the executive who turned around the performance of Rochester, New York's transit system, and even succeeded in lowering fares. (Aesch now has his own firm promoting his consulting services, to the transit industry and beyond.) Here's a sample of what Aesch did:

[The Rochester authority] has, for instance, reached agreements with the local public school district, colleges and private businesses to help subsidize its operations, warning in some cases that certain routes might be cut if ridership did not increase or a local business did not help cover the cost. In recent years, income from these agreements has equaled or exceeded the income from regular passenger fares.

On the one hand, bravo. Aesch was ready to push back against the near-universal tendency of government agencies to save money by dumping the costs of their own choices onto the transit authority.

But at it's core, Aesch's work in Rochester expresses a value judgment that shouldn't be hidden behind puff-words like "creative" or wrapped in the mantra of "business": Fundamentally, Aesch was willing to cut low-ridership services — or what I call coverage services. And so, it seems, was his elected board.

That's very unusual in North America, for democratic reasons.

Demands for coverage service — defined as service that is unjustifiable if ridership is the main goal — are powerful forces at most transit agencies. Practically any American transit system could drastically improve its ridership by abandoning service to low-ridership areas and concentrating its service where ridership potential is high — which is what "running transit like a business" would mean. Ridership goals also meet other goals important to many people, including maximum impact on reducing vehicle miles travelled, and maximum support (through high-intensity service) for the dense, walkable and attractive inner-urban redevelopment.

But coverage goals have powerful constituencies too, including outer-suburban areas that get little or no service when agencies pursue ridership goals, as well as people with severe needs — seniors, disabled, low-income, whose travel needs happen in places where high-ridership service is impossible.

My approach to these issues as a consultant is never to brush aside coverage goals through a mantra like "run transit like a business," but rather to start by being clear exactly why most transit is not run like a business, and coverage goals, enforced by elected officials, are one major reason. I then encourage communities and ultimately transit boards to form clear policies on how much of their budget they want to devote to coverage, so that the rest can be devoted to chasing ridership unequivocally.

Like many slogans, "running transit like a business" can sound like just good management, but it is actually a strongly ideological stance that values some transit outcomes (low subsidy, environmental benefits) over others (social service needs, equity for all parts of the region that pay taxes to it).

If an elected board chooses that path, and understands what it's sacrificing, then fantastic: I'm ready to help "run transit like a business." But if an elected board decides that transit needs to be pursuing goals other than ridership — as practically all of them in the US and Canada do — I'm equally ready to help with that. Most of all, I recommend having a clear conversation about what goal the agency is pursuing with each part of its budget. The key is to notice that these are different goals, that both reflect valid government purposes, and elected officials have to choose how to divide their resources, and staff effort, between these competing goals.

(My professional approach to this issue is explained in Chapter 10 of my book Human Transit, and here).

Again, what's most impressive about Aesch is that even in a city where transit plays a minor role, he refused to let the transit agency be forced to subsidize the needs of other agencies without their financial participation. Crucial, this required credibly threatening not to serve these agencies' needs. Many transit agencies I've known in similar cities simply have not had the management culture — or elected board — that was ready to be that forceful.

But simply cutting low-ridership services is a value judgment, not a technical decision. It reflects a community's about the community's view about why it runs transit. In an ideal democracy, making those decisions is not the task of managers or consultants. It's what we pay elected officials for.

slippery word watch: commute

Posted on July 17, 2013 in Journalism, Language, Words, Unhelpful

When journalists reach for a word meaning "transit riders" or "constituents of transit" they often seize on the word commuter.

Definitions of to commute (in its transportation sense) vary a bit. Webster says it means "to travel back and forth regularly (as between a suburb and a city)." Some other definitions (e.g. Google) suggest that commuting is specifically about travel to work or (sometimes) school. The core meaning seems to be a trip made repeatedly, day after day.

But in practice, this meaning tends to slip into two other meanings. As with most slippery words, confusion between these meanings can exclude important possibilities from our thinking.

One the one hand, the meaning is often narrowed to "travel back and forth during the peak period or 'rush hour.'" This narrowing arises from the inevitable fact that most people engaged in policy conversations — especially in government, business, and some academia — have jobs that lead them to commute at these times. What's more, many people who are happy to be motorists often care about transit only during the peak period, when it might help with the problem of congestion. Reducing the meaning of commute to "rush hour commute" narrows the transportation problem to match these people's experience of it.

Of course, cities, and especially transit systems, are full of people traveling to and from work/school at other times, most obviously in the service sector (retail, restaurants) but also in complex lives that mix work, school, and other commitments. But these trips, even if made regularly, are quietly and subconsciously excluded from the category of commutes, when the term is used to mean only "rush hour commuter."

There's nothing wrong with talking about rush hour commute trips, of course. They're an important category that must be discussed, but I am always careful to call them peak commutes. The problem arises when commute can mean either the narrow category of peak trips or the larger category of all regularly repeated travel. That's the essence of a slippery word, and the danger is higher because this slip is exclusionary. When the word is used in a sense that is narrower than its definition, large numbers of people are being unconsciously excluded from the category it defines, and thus from our thinking about that category.

The word commute can also slip in the other direction, becoming broader than its literal meaning. It's common to see the word commute used as a one-word marker meaning "movement within cities." The excellent Atlantic Cities website, for example, uses "Commute" as the name of its section on urban movement in general. This, presumably, is also what the New York Times means when it refers to San Francisco's BART system as a "commuter train." BART runs frequently all day, all evening, and all weekend, serving many purposes other than the journey to work or school, so its effect on urban life is much broader than just its commuting role. When a word's meaning slips to a broader one, it can falsely signal that the broad category is actually no bigger than the narrow one — in this case that all urban travel is just regular trips to work or school. This takes our eye off the remarkable diversity of urban travel demands, and the much more complex ways that movement is imbedded in all aspects of urban life.

So commute – and the category word commuter — refers technically to a regularly repeated trip, usually for work or school. But in journalism, and in the public conversation, it's constantly being either broadened to mean urban movement in general, or narrowed to mean "rush-hour commuter."

What can you do? Be careful. When you mean "regularly repeated trips," say commutes. When you mean "regularly repeated trips at rush hour", say peak commutes or rush hour commutes. When you mean "all travel at rush hour, regardless of purpose or regularity," say the peak or rush hour. When you mean "all urban mobility or access," speak of urban access or mobility.

Any linguist will tell you that the slippage in word meanings — especially their tendency to slide to broader meanings or narrower ones — is a normal feature of the evolution of language. I have no illusions that this process can be stopped. But when we're having public conversations, slippery word usages are the most common way that strong claims to hegemony or exclusion can hide inside reasonable-sounding statements — often hiding even from the person speaking them. Learn to recognize slippery words (see my category Words, Unhelpful) and look for them, especially in journalism.

Yet another reason, by the way, to hire literature students!

the new look at humantransit.org

Posted on July 12, 2013 in Meta

We're pleased to introduce the new "look" for Human Transit, including a more readable serif font (Georgia) and I hope a cleaner, more legible feel. Big thanks to my associate Evan Landman for building and sculpting the design.

As with any change to a transit system, most comments are from existing users disoriented by change of any kind. So: Calm down, everything you love is still here. It's just moved around like this:

Most content that was in the right-hand columns of the old design is now in the new menu bar above.
The Links menu has subcategories, which will open to the right when you click on a menu item.
Categories referring to cities have now been separated from other categories.

One note: If you browse the category menu by just clicking and pulling your mouse down, the menu will seem to extend beyond the screen. Instead, hold the menu by leaving your cursor on it, then use your arrow keys to move the scroll down in the window. We're working on a better way to handle that.

Some older posts are likely to look messy for a while. It will take Evan a few days to go through all 942 past posts and clean up anything that didn't translate cleanly. Be patient and we'll get to them.

I'm sure I don't need to tell you to share your feedback, and any bugs, in the comments! Please be constructive!

Here's one question that you can answer in comments. Historically, this blog has used all-lower-case post titles, even for proper names. Is this (a) a nicely distinguishing bit of "design" or (b) an irritating affectation or (c) you've never noticed or cared one way or the other. Now everyone can make a one-letter comment!

is walkability a right? how would this work in india?

Posted on July 8, 2013 in Cycling, Developing World, Pedestrians

Sarah Goodyear in Atlantic Cities asks today if walkability should be conceived as a right. She's talking, though, about India:

To call attention to the appalling situation faced by pedestrians in the city of Chennai, the newspaper The Hindu has launched a campaign called “Right to Walk,” which aims to "reclaim our city’s footpaths" and "goad local officials to act."
So far, dozens of readers using the Twitter hashtag #righttowalk have sent in photos and detailed accounts of sidewalks completely blocked by trash, parked cars and motorbikes, vendors, road signs, and construction.

All good. In the US, which is much more accustomed to the language of rights, the argument should be even more effective.

As for India: obviously I sympathize with the pedestrians there, having been one myself. It's typically a brutal urban environment, and arguably even worse for cyclists, who are legion.

But one fact of life about the Indian city is that it's very difficult to keep any public space empty enough to offer unimpeded transport by any mode. Just as any unfenced patch of urban land is quickly claimed as somebody's home, an empty patch of street tends to be seen as available for either transport or business purposes, and naturally evolves a locally best use that may not be transportation at all.

Even the car lanes of Indian streets can be gradually reduced, in width and number, though a purely natural and unregulated process. The process goes like this: (1) so many people walk and bike in the curb lanes that motorists start avoiding them, (2) people set up tables in the curb lanes and sell things to the people walking there, and cars begin stopping to make purchases, (3) eventually the whole lane fills up with a mix of peds and commercial activity and the occasional random patch of customer parking, even to the point that durable private structures get built in the public right-of-way. In Visakhapatnam, Andhra Pradesh, I once toured a former 4-lane street that had gradually turned into a narrow 2-lane street through this gradual process that Indian planners call "encroachment."

Key take-away: Developing-world infrastructure has to be self-enforcing of its assignment of space, and this is a tough design problem that runs contrary to the instincts of developed-world urbanists. Otherwise, the natural jostling process by which uses compete for available vacant space tends to prevail over all but the most vigorous demarcations. This is why developing-world Bus Rapid Transit, and any other single-mode transport infrastructure, must have hard physical barriers to its right-of-way in order to function at all. Otherwise, space is gradually lost to the sheer pressure from other uses.

(The problem is especially severe for transit lanes because these only function of they are literally empty most of the time, thus allowing each bus to move through rapidly. And in the Indian city, empty space looks like available space.)

The process by which available space gets used is comparable in some ways to the self-organization of public space that characterizes the famous developed-world shared spaces, but in India the process tends to be much more responsive to immediate physical and economic forces, including the urgency of commercial activity and the danger presented by the motor vehicle. Cars do retreat in the face of a sufficiently large volume of pedestrians, bicycles, and informal commerce, but the struggle along this ever-moving frontier is certainly not safe, or pleasant.

And I'm not sure how defining a "right" would change that. Perhaps it would.

quote of the week: on modeling

Posted on June 27, 2013 in Modeling

There is a popular illusion that confronting a computer with one’s ideas enforces rigor and discipline, thereby encouraging the researcher to reject or clarify fuzzy ideas. In the very narrow sense that the human must behave exactly like a machine in order to communicate with it this is true. But in a more useful sense, the effect is the opposite; it is all too easy to become immersed in the trivial details of working with a problem on the computer, rather than think through it rationally. The effort of making the computer understand is then mistaken for intellectual activity and creative problem solving.
Douglass B. Lee, Jr., “Requiem for Large Scale Models“
Journal of the American Institute of Planners
May 1973, Vol. 38, No. 3 (emphasis added)

end of the loop for sydney’s transit toy

Posted on June 27, 2013 in Monorail, Rail Transit, Sydney, Technophilia

This weekend, Sydney will complete a long and predictable narrative that cautions us yet again about the danger of relying on tourist experiences as a basis for transit planning.

The Sydney Monorail, built in imitation of Seattle's, has now been through the predictable phases of exuberance, delight, irritation, and boredom, and has finally arrived at the point of being more of an obstacle than a service. The Sydney Morning Herald interviews longtime monorail fan Michael Sweeney who says what little can be said in the thing's defense. He even uses the word groovy, reminding us (and the interviewer) that he's expressing a definition of coolness that prevailed in one historical moment. There was never any reason to assume the monorail would be cool forever.

Why? The usual things. It was conceived as part of a redevelopment, designed to be part of the excitement that would sell expensive real estate. Like many new North American streetcars, the point was solely to achieve a development outcome and nobody much cared whether it would be useful as transit, especially decades into the future.

It was a tiny one-way loop, only about 1 km in diameter, connecting some key tourist destinations into downtown. Even for tourists it had limited use because — like most North American streetcars again — the route was so short that you might as well walk, as most people do in this area.

As urban design, the monorail wasn't that bothersome when it sailed over the open spaces of Darling Harbour, but when it snaked through the narrow streets of the CBD, it was a heavy weight in the air on narrow streets that were already oppressive to the pedestrian.

It's not surprising that it took a new redevelopment plan to sweep away the toys of the old. Still, the calculus came down to this: It's not very useful. If you want to get somewhere on the loop, and back, you might as well walk. And there are far fewer people riding it than walking under it, perceiving it as an oppressive weight.

So it's coming down. Last ride is this Sunday.

please forward! a quick job for a small web developer

Posted on June 24, 2013 in Jobs

UPDATE: FIRST FOUR QUESTIONS ANSWERED IN COMMENTS BELOW.

My firm Jarrett Walker + Associates is looking for quick assistance in designing a web-based tool, designed to sit on a transit agency or project website, that will help citizens think through some transit planning choices and suggest priorities. It requires the user to select different types of network for different parts of a city, and cover the whole city within a fixed budget of service.

We need the product in a month. Our absolute maximum budget $9000 but we will be very interested in proposals that come in substantially lower.

This job is likely to be suited to a small, low-overhead web programmer who can do it quickly, efficiently, and yet creatively. It could lead to a future relationship assisting us with more tools of this type, as the need arises often in our planning projects.

Everything is explained in our simple Request for Proposals, along with two attachments referenced in it. (All materials are copyright Jarrett Walker+Associates and should not be reproduced for other purposes.) All you need to do is reply with a quick letter.

Download Service Allocation Exercise RFP

Download Service Allocation Game

Download Population and Employment Data

If you have a question:

Look at the comments below.
If your question hasn't been answered, add a comment beginning with the words "Question __:" where the space is the number of your question (the last number you see, plus 1). I will then reference these numbers in my responses, which will also appear as comments. (Alas, TypePad does not support threaded comments.)
Come back in a day or so to check for your answer.

Note: To keep the flow of critical information clear on this procurement, I am reading but then unpublishing comments that are extraneous to the question-and-answer process.

Thanks!

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