My thoughts on Ernest Callenbach's 1975 novel Ecotopia are up today at Atlantic Cities.
tweet of the month: must lose martini
When I read Jarrett Walker I feel like there is always just a light breeze and he is explaining it all with a martini in his hand. — Trip Planner Mag (@TripPlannerMag) May 15, 2013
Personally I've never gotten martinis. I'd rather people visualized a handmade ceramic mug of black coffee, or maybe chai. What in my writing style do I need to change to update this impression?
UPDATE: Yes I know it's a compliment, because James Bond drank martinis, while lots of cranks drink coffee. But if I had the necessary refinement to be a connoisseur of all the ingredients of a martini, I wonder I'd have room in my head for transit planning, languages, urbanism, natural history, philosophy, coffee, gardening and all the other things that seem more important …
In any case, if you need to visualize me with a martini, please go right ahead. Perhaps I'll do a very posed photo with one sometime.
my comments to transportation students
This March in Auckland, New Zealand, MRCagney and T2 asked me to speak to a group of transportation students, both undergrads and grad students. The question was: "what do you wish someone had told you when you were 20 years old?" The event was at the University of Auckland.
The result is here. (US viewers: Temperatures are Celsius, "patronage" means ridership etc. etc.)
Sorry about my habit of dropping my voice on important words at the end of phrases. In person, it sounds like emphasis, but those words didn't always make it through the sound system …
The whole thing was ad-libbed, so next time I do this I'll probably say something different …
The full careers evening , sponsored by MRCagney and T2, is here. It was a very fun evening!
real-time transit mapping: watch your system in motion
Many transit agencies subscribe to the idea of "Open Data", publishing bundles of information on the system. These feeds contain data on stops, routes, arrival times, fare information, headways, and other pieces of useful data. Even more interestingly, these feeds often have buried within them the ability to access vehicle GPS data, which provides the ability to find out where a transit agency's vehicles are in near-realtime (limited by the speed at which these location queries can be returned).
Developers have long used feeds published by transit agencies for trip planning applications, which are useful in the extent that they can tell you when you need to be at your stop to get to your destination. However, this information source has always contained within it the potential for much more emancipatory uses. Recall Nate Wessel's guest post here on the shortfalls of Google Transit.
Recently, an innovative new use of this technology has begun to be deployed. In Portland, Seattle, London, San Francisco, and perhaps elsewhere, developers have taken the data provided by transit agencies and done something revolutionary: drawn maps of where all the transit vehicles are at any time.
Obviously the image above is a still from a map whose utility depends upon its continual movement- I encourage you to visit the site to see for yourself. A consistent symbology seems to be emerging, where two colors represent inbound and outbound service – in this case red is going out, and blue in – with separate colors representing the different technologies present on the map.
Browniefed over at github explains how this all works:
Buses are using short wave radios to transmit there position. They currently send updates every 30 seconds, and TriMet sees the update about 3 seconds later. Each bus gets a turn sending it's position and works like a tolken ring network. Previously it took 90 – 130 seconds and if a bus missed it's turn then it would be double that time (meaning for 1-5 minutes they would not know the position of a bus)
Buses do not actually send GPS coordinates back, what they do send is distance traveled along their trip. They do use GPS but primarily they are using the odometer for tracking position. There is also a door sensor, to verify that a bus is at a stop. There are all sorts of calibration issues with the odometer and drivers have reported that the vehicle is not updating its schedule adherence until the door opens.
So this is cool, but is it useful? How does having access to the realtime position data improve the user relationship with the transit system? These maps don't give any indication of how soon a bus is coming, or how long you will have to wait for it. They don't tell you where the bus is going, beyond showing the position of the next bus up the line. Of course there is no way to determine the time interval between your stop and the position of the bus icon. As a trip planning tool, live bus maps are next to useless.
However, as a method of communicating the shape of the entire network, live bus mapping does something very interesting. It translates frequency into a very simple unit- number of buses. A map reader can see very easily which parts of the city have a lot of buses, and which have few; which places have overlapping services or an interlocking grid, and which are provided only infrequent lifeline routes. Perhaps this technology could someday be integrated or displayed alongside isochrone visualizations as part of a map of the freedom of mobility afforded by a system, but to my eyes, for the moment this is a very technically accomplished curiosity.
google maps wants you to see all your transit options
Google Maps is slowly unveiling a major update (sign up here), including an upgrade to the transit function of the map. There's been plenty to criticize in the existing trip planner Google has offered for years, which Nate Wessel's guest post here in April summed up well. In short, trip planners tell you how to get from an origin to a destination, but they don't do much to reveal the broad scope of your transit mobility in a city.
I haven't yet had the chance to test the update myself, but it looks as though Google is at least moving in the right direction. Ask the new Google Maps for transit directions, and rather then routing a hypothetical "shortest trip" which often relies on impractical connections between low-frequency services, you'll get several alternatives based on the best frequency over the longest span of service. It also (finally) accounts for lines whose paths duplicate service over a section of a trip. Not only are the alternatives put on the map, but there are some clever trip visualizations, too.
http://maps.google.com/help/maps/helloworld/desktop/preview/
What's more, Google is also starting to understand the utility of giving users access to the universe of possible trips from a single origin. The screenshot below shows two lines available from a station in London, but its worth noting that plenty of other lines are also visible.
http://maps.google.com/help/maps/helloworld/desktop/preview/
Bruce over at Seattle Transit Blog has a smart take on this:
Guidebook routing more closely reflects the way the vast majority of people actually use transit, prioritizing frequency and span of service on generally-useful routes over infrequent one-seat rides that just happen to provide doorstep service. Its works best, of course, in transit systems full of truly high-frequency, reliable all-day routes, but to the extent that we have such service here, the same ideas apply.
Google Maps is one of the most important methods people use to learn how to make trips using transit. To date, it has offered a bare-bones trip planner which might be somewhat useful in making an individual trip, but with very little information about the system beyond what its algorithms (sometimes seemingly arbitrarily) determine is the best way to get somewhere. While this isn't quite the automatically generated frequent network map I called for here, Google is finally incorporating frequency as a critical part of travel directions.
the driving boom is over
The Driving Boom is over.
So argues the U.S. PIRG's Frontier Group think tank in a report released this week entitled "A New Direction: Our Changing Relationship with Driving and the Implications for America's Future" (follow the link for a download of the full document). From the end of the Second World War until sometime around 2004, both in terms of the total vehicle miles traveled (VMT) on US roads and in terms of VMT per capita, the distance driven by each person, increased every year by approximately 3%. The chart below displays this trend; the rapid increase beginning in 1946 peaks in 2004, and has begun to decline or level off.
US PIRG, A New Direction: Our Changing Relationship with Driving and the Implications for America's Future
The PIRG report suggests a number of reasons for this emerging trend. Most obviously, fuel costs have increased dramatically since 2002 (more than doubling), and the recession and continued lagging economy have taken their toll on the ability of people to afford to travel by car.
But perhaps even more importantly, the mobility patterns of young Americans within the Millennial generation, here classified as people born between 1983 and 2000, are also changing:
Millennials are demonstrating significantly different lifestyle and transportation preferences than older generations. They drive less on average than previous generations of young people. More of them say they wish to live in cities and walkable neighborhoods. And more of them are drawn to forms of transportation other than driving. Moreover, the Millennials are the first generation whose lifestyles are shaped by the availability of mobile, Internet-connected technologies, social media, and the innovative forms of social connection, commerce and mobility that those technologies are spawning.
Among people ages 16 to 34, VMT per capita declined some 23% between 20001 and 2009, while their transit passenger miles increased by an astounding 40%. Moreover, in 2011, fewer 16 to 24-year-olds even had a license to drive than any year since 1967.
US PIRG, A New Direction: Our Changing Relationship with Driving and the Implications for America's Future
There are complex ripple effects of this trend: declining congestion and air pollution, but also reduced funds to pay for all sorts of transportation projects normally funded by gas tax revenues. Increasing fuel costs create an incentive for consumers to purchase more fuel efficient vehicles and for manufacturers to produce them, which reduces the size of this funding stream. Likewise, the mode shift powered by the increasing share of trips on transit, carsharing and cycling also contributes to an overall diminution of the gas tax.
The changes in travel behavior described in this study create both challenges and opportunities. The data now support a reconsideration of our priorities in transportation planning at all levels, but in the short term, funding to actually build the kind of infrastructure and operate the sorts of systems to capitalize on this trend is anything but secure.
streetcar in atlanta: cool, but is it useful?
I have an opinion piece in today's Atlanta Journal-Constitution. It's about the challenge of frequency for short downtown circulators such as the new 1.3-mile Atlanta Streetcar.
A rendering of the Atlanta Streetcar project: http://www.theatlantastreetcar.com/#whats-to-come
how sim city greenwashes parking
Here's a shot of an edge city from the new SimCity. Notice what's missing?
(Source: BLDGBLOG)
From Geoff Manaugh's interview of the new SimCity's designer, Stone Librande:
Geoff Manaugh: While you were making those measurements of different real-world cities, did you discover any surprising patterns or spatial relationships?
Librande: Yes, definitely. I think the biggest one was the parking lots. When I started measuring out our local grocery store, which I don’t think of as being that big, I was blown away by how much more space was parking lot rather than actual store. That was kind of a problem, because we were originally just going to model real cities, but we quickly realized there were way too many parking lots in the real world and that our game was going to be really boring if it was proportional in terms of parking lots.
Manaugh: You would be making SimParkingLot, rather than SimCity.
Librande: [laughs] Exactly. So what we do in the game is that we just imagine they are underground. We do have parking lots in the game, and we do try to scale them—so, if you have a little grocery store, we’ll put six or seven parking spots on the side, and, if you have a big convention center or a big pro stadium, they’ll have what seem like really big lots—but they’re nowhere near what a real grocery store or pro stadium would have. We had to do the best we could do and still make the game look attractive.
In other words: SimCity deliberately misleads players about parking because if they showed parking in its true dimensions, it might make dysfunctional land use patterns look (and act) dysfunctional.
And we can't have that.
Sim City contains other examples where the real math underlying how cities work is distorted to appeal to supposedly prevailing prejudices, but few are as egregious as this one. Practically any working urban planner will tell you that managing parking, without a SimCity tooth fairy that builds it for free underground, is a dominant factor in urban form and perhaps the biggest single obstacle to denser and more sustainable forms of development. Change that assumption, as SimCity does, and you're working in fairyland.
And it's refreshing to hear the designer confess that the distortion is intentional — a lie rather than a confusion.
Game makers can say it's only a game, just as movies that glorify violence are only movies. But like movies, seemingly realistic and immersive simulation games teach people to misunderstand how the world works in a way that makes them less effective in dealing with the world. Of course, SimCity has been doing this – with an explicitly anti-urban bias that belies its name — since the beginning.
using development charges as a transit funding mechanism
Travis Allan and Cherise Burda over at the Pembina Insitute, a Toronto-based energy think tank, have an interesting post up on the prospects of using real estate development charges as a funding mechanism for transit. Development charges are fees developers pay to municipalities meant to offset the capital costs of extending or improving services like water or sewage systems that are imposed by new construction. However, the manner in which these fees are calculated is not always conducive to the type of development a city may be trying to encourage. Moreover, transit is rarely a serious consideration in assessing the charge. This is particularly important when development occurs in a place or a pattern that is difficult or impossible to provide good transit service to, such as those that violate the "Be on the way" rule. The original post explains some of the problems the authors observe in Ontario's development charge:
The development charge, as currently implemented in most Ontario municipalities, is crudely designed. There is a strong chance that it is subsidizing less-dense, single family homes while making compact, transit-friendly development more expensive. Development charges also likely overcharge some commercial development, and this could be contributing to the flight of office space to the suburbs, in locations underserviced by transit.
In many Ontario municipalities, including Toronto, new development is charged based on who will use it. For example, many municipalities have a per-unit rate for apartment building units, and another rate for detached single-family homes, regardless of where the buildings are located within the municipality, how much land area they occupy and the cost necessary to service them.
No matter the amount of new road or sewer needed to adequately serve a place, the development charge is assessed based on the number of residents or users. This is obviously perverse. Actual development impacts on the public purse vary based on location and density than by the number of residents or users.
If a city like Toronto wants to make it easier to developers to build a certain type of development, changing the fee structure is one way to create an incentive. But what does this mean for transit?
The authors propose to use a portion of this revenue to pay for infrastructure investments needed to provide transit service to new developments. At the same time, the city could make changes to the structure of the development charge to incentivize the construction of transit-supportive development. If it worked, and there were no unforeseen consequences, the effect could be self-reinforcing: development charges encourage the type of development that transit needs to work well, and pay for some of the cost of providing that service. The supply of housing and commercial buildings that are accessible and designed to work with transit increases, more people are able to live and work in them:
Developers continue to build in sprawling greenfields because it is often cheaper and easier than building developments in walkable, transit-oriented neighbourhoods. Lack of supply means homebuyers are priced out of these locations and are literally “driven” to the urban and suburban fringes, where long and stressful auto commutes are required — and this only leads to more congestion.
Since the vast horizontal distances of greenfields require much more infrastructure person, why should this be as cheap, in development charges, as building compactly??
guest post: solving the mystery of portland’s missing ‘faire’
Evan Landman is the new fulltime associate at my firm, Jarrett Walker & Associates. He holds a BA in Human Geography from University of British Columbia and was formerly a planning intern for the Portland area regional government, Metro. He tweets on transit and other Portland topics at @evanlandman.
On a recent weekend, I had the opportunity to participate in a transit scavenger hunt and race hosted by Portland Afoot, a low-car lifestyle citizen journalism outfit. Players traversed the city using TriMet to solve the mystery of "Who Whacked Ms. Faire LeSquare?", a pun on the free fare zone that until September 2012 covered Portland's downtown core and a portion of its inner eastside.
The crowd prior to the start of the race.
The event kicked off at Velocult, a bike shop and bar in Portland's Hollywood neighborhoood, near to a transit center and light rail station. Around 60 teams of 3-5 players took part; by my estimate, something like 250 people came out to spend one of the nicest days of the year so far riding transit. At times, it felt like everyone in town who writes, blogs or tweets on transit or mobility had turned up to play. One group even had members who came down on the train from Seattle to participate!
In addition to solving the murder mystery, each team could score points by visiting distant transit centers, using different modes to travel, riding multiple transit lines, spotting public art, or meeting TriMet employees. Amusingly, there were also points available for anyone who was able to get a photo of themselves being grilled by a fare inspector. The entire game was smoothly run through the clever use of unique Twitter hashtags to track everyone's progress.
I found out about the game the day before, so I didn't have time to register a team, but some folks short a player were kind enough to let me tag along. We used light rail, a number of bus lines, the Portland Streetcar, our feet, and a dragonboat to visit destinations across the Metro area, from the eastern transit center at Parkrose to the far western suburb of Hillsboro. Portland Afoot stationed volunteer actors (including one member of the city council) at different points around town to continue the story, and to provide clues and directions.
At the end of the day, the entire contingent met back at Velocult, where it was revealed that LeSquare had skipped town to Calgary (which has retained its downtown free fare zone). The organizers lined up several generous prize packages for the top three finishers, with freebies from Car2Go, Zipcar, and a long list of local retailers and restaurants. Best of all, one lucky finisher won a free one-year TriMet pass!
In the spirit of play, Portland Afoot brought hundreds of people onto Portland's transit system for trips very different than the home-work commute. This sort of event serves as a wonderful tool to get people to use transit in an unfamiliar way, and shows that riding the bus or light rail can be both functional and fun. If I can use transit to have fun on a sunny Saturday, maybe I can start to imagine other new ways I could be using the system? If nothing else, this serves as a reminder that people in Portland, including young, politically engaged people, can still get excited about TriMet despite its recent cutbacks and continual pillorying in the media.
JW postscript: I recall playing a similar game in around 1978, with a team including David Bragdon — later the elected CEO of Portland's regional government. Just imagine how much more fun Evan would have had without a phone, computer, or realtime information, on an infrequent, confusing transit network that only went downtown!