Human Transit

how auditors get transit wrong: a lesson from vancouver

Posted on October 23, 2012 in Education, Vancouver

Elected officials love to demand "audits." Auditing means that you hire high-prestige people who will scrutinize the books of an agency with particular genius, and deliver recommendations that resound with authority.

But many of the companies hired to audit transit agencies don't seem to understand transit. That's certainly the evidence of a recently commissioned audit of Vancouver's TransLink, which discovered $41 million in potential annual savings including $5.3 million from cutting low-ridership services. (Extensive detail and media reaction is gathered here.)

Like many audits, this one just assumes that low ridership means "without justfication."

But low-ridership services are unjustifiable only if ridership is their purpose.

If you haven't read my book, or read this blog much, you may be under the impression that the goal of all public transit is high ridership, and that low-ridership services are therefore failing, evidence of waste, and should be cut. In reality, every transit agency runs service that has a purpose other than ridership. These services, which I call "coverage" services in my own work, have purposes such as:

Equitably distributing service to all areas that contribute tax revenue to the agency.
Meeting the urgent needs of small numbers of people living in areas that are expensive to serve (seniors, disabled, isolated rural pockets of poverty etc)
Satisfying a coverage standard, which is a statement of the form "___% of the population live within ___ metres/feet of service". The specific purpose of these statements, which most agencies have, is to determine when service must be operated despite predictably low ridership.

The TransLink audit appears to be simply ignorant about the universal tension between ridership goals and coverage goals. They recommend cutting coverage services because they have (predictably) low ridership. This is exactly as logical as throwing away your microwave because it doesn't produce ice.

When an auditor' assumes that ridership or fare revenue is the only goal of transit, they are expressing a certain set of values. This is a valid philosophical position, but it is not the only justifiable one, nor the only one that is widely held in most urban populations. So auditors do citizens a great disservice when they present their values as the only possible ones. In 20 years I have never encountered a public transit agency that actually deploys service exclusively for ridership. Now and then and auditor swoops down and criticizes the agency for the low-ridership services, often implying that the agency didn't already know about them.

Transit agencies need the backbone to reply to these audits firmly, explaining that low-ridership services may exist for purposes other than ridership, such as those listed above, and that if these services reflect the voters' values, they are as legitimate as any other.

Transit agencies can also support clearer auditing processes if they identify which of their services are intended mainly for coverage, which means their low-ridership should never be counted as evidence of failure. I have worked with several agencies on forming clear statements about the percentage of resources that the agency wishes to devote to coverage service. Once those services are documented, everyone can stop complaining about the low ridership of those services, because high ridership is not their purpose.

Auditing is one of those high-prestige professions, like architecture, that is prone to form echo-chambers that resist the introduction of outside information and perspectives. Great auditors, like great architects, are suspicious of their own echo-chamber and always looking for perspectives from outside of it. If you want to be a good auditor of public transit agencies, read my book! It will help you avoid the TransLink auditor's mistake, and many others.

my book reviewed in CNU magazine

Posted on October 19, 2012 in Books

"Once in a while, a book comes along that summarizes most of what's important about a particular subject, and does so in a way that's lucid and effortless. One such book is Jarrett Walker's Human Transit."
— William Lieberman, review of Human Transit,
Better Cities & Towns, a Congress for the New Urbanism magazine.

Download the full review here:
PDF. Or here it is online.

I specifically like Bill's praise for the earliest CNU conferences, where everything happened in plenary and as a result, people had to listen to things they might not want to hear.

request for information: peak loads into downtown

Posted on October 17, 2012 in Information Requests

This question for transit agencies that run high volumes of bus service into a crowded CBD (i.e. downtown) where bus operations are difficult and space limited. If you know someone at your transit agency who probably has this information, please forward a link to them.

Do you have a policy on how full a peak bus should be in order to justify through service into the CBD, as opposed to being fed to a connection point onto a more major line?
Do you have figures on how full your buses actually are, crossing the edge of the CBD in the peak direction, over the peak one hour?

Both numbers would be helpful to me in establishing baseline expectations for what degree of loading is reasonable to assume, for the purposes of sizing a long-term radial bus need into a big CBD.

Thanks!

auckland: how network redesign can transform a city’s possibilities

Posted on October 10, 2012 in Auckland, Connections, Transfers, Urban Structure

When a public transport network has grown cumulatively over decades, but has never been reviewed from the ground up, it can contain an enormous amount of waste. Careful redesign is the key to unlocking that waste and generating vast new public transport mobility. Our new plan for Auckland, New Zealand, now open for public comment, is a dramatic example of what can be achieved. ("Our" because I led the intensive network design work, with a great team of planners from Auckland Transport and my colleagues from MRCagney.)

If you want to get around Auckland at any time of day, on a service that's coming soon, here's where you can go on today's network (or more precisely, a "business as usual" network extended to 2016)

Under the proposed plan, which costs no more to operate than the existing one, here's where you'd be able to go, at any time of day, on service that's coming soon.

The network still includes coverage to all corners of the city that are covered now, and ensures plenty of capacity for peak commuters into the city. But meanwhile, it defines an extensive network of high frequency services around which future urban growth can organize to ensure that over time, more and more of the city finds public transport convenient.

What's the catch? Only the geometrically inevitable one: more people will have to make connections from one service to another, and the fare system will need to encourage rather than penalise that.

Whenever someone tells you that it's too expensive or hard to encourage people to make connections, ask them how expensive it is to run the only the first network above while spending enough money to run the second. Networks that are designed to prevent transferring must run massive volumes of half-empty and quarter-empty buses and still have trouble delivering frequencies that make the service worth waiting for. The waste involved can be colossal, as you can see from the amount of service we were able to redeploy in more useful ways with this redesign.

To see a bit of the structure clearer (and also because it's a cool graphic), here's the central slice of the drawing of the proposed frequent network, by my MRCagney colleague Nicolas Reid. It's currently all over the media in Auckland, helping people assess the plan. By streamlining it calls attention to the logic to the network — a logic that's sometimes easy to lose track of when following the details of every right and left. Look at the whole thing.

I'm very proud of what our team achieved working with the excellent folks at Auckland Transport, and I hope the plan will be further improved as a result of public feedback, as good plans always are. But as Aucklanders begin discussing the plan, I hope they stay focused on the core question: Are you willing to get off one vehicle and onto another, with a short wait at a civilised facility, if this is the key to vastly expanding your public transport network without raising its subsidy?

That is the real question before Auckland now. The rest is details.

hong kong: quick transit reactions

Posted on October 8, 2012 in Hong Kong, Streetcars (Trams), Technophilia, Tourism

Finally, I am no longer the only international transit expert who hasn't been to Hong Kong.

Surprises:

Everyone who talks about transit in Hong Kong seems to talk about the MTR subway system. Yes, it's sleek, and clean, and massive in its capacity, and beautiful in many other respects. But as someone who looks to actual network outcomes, I remain struck by its lack of self-connectedness. The difficulty of plotting a logical path between logical pairs of stations, even some major ones, makes the MTR subway quite different from many of its world-class peers. Look again (click pic to enlarge and sharpen)

We stayed at Causeway Bay, on the east-west Island Line at the bottom of the diagram. What if we had wanted to get to Hung Hom, more or less directly north of there across the harbour? This is not a minor station; it's the main access point for the light-blue line that extends out of the city, up to the Mainland Chinese border. It appeared that the answer was the old one: "If that's where you're going, don't start from here." In many major subway systems of the world, you just wouldn't encounter this difficulty traveling between any pair of stations, certainly not in the dense urban core.

I did enjoy the double-decker trams that ply the main east-west trunk across the Island (mostly right on top of the MTR Island Line). They have an exclusive lane and in stopping every 500m or so they clearly complement both the faster subway and some of the buses alongside them — the latter tending to branch off in more complex paths. The trams are certainly stately, almost surreal in their height and narrowness. I can't speak for their efficiency, but they're not stuck in traffic.

They stop at platforms in the middle of the street, some rather awkward in their access. This one is meant to be accessed only from an overhead walkway, but obviously many people jaywalk to follow the natural desire line.

Indeed, for a city so densely pedestrianized, I noticed a number of pedestrian challenges in the infrastructure.

Note that in discussing the trams in particular I am being careful to avoid the fallacy of technology-focused transit tourism. While I enjoyed the trams and folks seemed to be riding them, I don't immediately tell you that these things are so cool that your city should have one. I don't know enough about how these function in the context of the larger Hong Kong network to be able to tell you that, nor do I know enough about your city.

The real muscle of transit in Hong Kong was clearly the buses. Double-deckers, massive in both size and quantity. These, it seems, are what really moves the city beyond the limited range of the MTR subway.

I'm coming to view the double-decker as the logical end-state of bus development in dense urban environments. They use curb space so much more efficiently than their alternative, the articulated bus. The sheer volumes of people I saw being moved on these things was unimaginable on long single-deck buses. There simply wouldn't have been room at the stops.

By the way, I noted bus lanes wherever there was a lane to spare, as in Paris and a number of other world-cities where transit is essential to urban life.

On the downside, I could have wished — as in many cities — that the buses were more organized, and that there were a map showing how at least the frequent ones fit together as a network. Instead, I saw many signs that the buses weren't being presented as a cohesive system, but rather as a pile of overlapping products, as if from different vendors.

In fact, I nearly missed a desired bus because I couldn't find its sign among so many others.

Finally, and most important, I noted a key bit of infrastructure that identifies cities that really value buses as an essential part of the mobility system. Adequate bus facilities right where they're needed. This one is at Wan Chai ferry terminal.

There's a similar one across the harbor at Tsim Sha Tsui, right where ferries converge, and towers step down to the water, and tourists gather every evening to watch the skyline sparkle. In short, these bus terminal facilities are on unimaginably expensive real estate, but they are viewed as essential infrastructure for a network that's essential for the life of the city, just like streets themselves, so they're there. Many American and Australasian cities don't quite have this commitment; there, many still long to treat bus facilities as things that can be shoved out of the way.

Finally, before you attack me for having missed the richness and inner logic of public transit in Hong Kong, or for having noticed only things that connect with my own preoccupations, note that I was there for 48 hours — enough time to be confronted and delighted but not enough to absorb and understand. I look forward to the chance to return to the city for a more thorough exploration.

fantastic job opportunity in san francisco

Posted on October 4, 2012 in Jobs, San Francisco

San Francisco MTA is hiring a manager of service planning. It looks like a great job for a seasoned transit planner and pays enough that you can actually live comfortably in wonderful but super-expensive San Francisco. Spread the word!

perils of “fare revenue by route”

Posted on October 3, 2012 in General

A transit agency staffer emails:

I always keep up to date with your blog, and I was wondering if you have any information on revenue/cost ratio calculations on an individual route basis?

I am hoping to conduct revenue/cost calculations on individual routes at [our agency], however we have never embarked on such an exercise on a route by route basis, and I have a general idea of how such calculations are done. But I still have some lingering questions.

Also, what is your opinion on such calculations? Do you feel they are a helpful tool? Coming from [City x], I have had them drilled into me from when I first got interested in transit, as cost recovery is a big topic [there]. But I notice other areas don't seem to be as interested in it.
I was hoping it would be a good tool to show which routes have high recovery ratios and therefore may not only a small amount if any government funding for improved services.

My response:

In interconnected urban networks I strongly recommend against emphasizing fare revenue by route, as it creates the illusion that the revenue of each route is an independent result of that route's service. In other words, it conceals the crucial network effect — how routes achieve their outcomes only by working together. If you have financial managers who don't have transit in their bones, they can easily fall into the illusion that the routes are like independent products — different cans on a grocery shelf — and this can lead to some poor decisions.

If the managers really understand interconnectedness in transport networks, then they may find the info useful, but I am still reluctant to prepare data outputs that are likely to be published without their explanations, and this one can be very misleading if you dont' bring that element along.

Costs can also be interdependent if you have a lot of through-routing or complicated operational interlining.

If costs feel reasonably interdependent by route, cost/rider is a better metric to focus people on. This metric values all riders equally, whereas fare revenue by route undervalues transferring passengers and therefore undervalues the interdependence on which great transit networks and their cities thrive.

the silicon valley shuttles, revealed

Posted on October 2, 2012 in Elite Projection, Privatization, San Francisco

Is this kind of network the future of transit?

This map by Stamen Design shows the paths of the various Silicon Valley bus services that flood San Francisco each morning and evening peak. (Linewidth is proportional to frequency.) All these lines running around San Francisco extend south off the map, duplicating each other for more than 30 miles until they diverge to serve different employers in Silicon Valley. The colors indicate which employer. In general, these private buses are open only to the employees of the company in question.

These buses carry some of world’s smartest geeks between the manicured suburban headquarters of Google, Apple, Facebook, Yahoo, EBay and Electronic Arts and the diverse, interesting, crowded, messy city that these geeks insist on living in — a distance of 30-40 miles.

(Here is a great page showing the process Stamen went through to get to this map. As you’d expect from a design firm, it’s officially a work of art, called The City from the Valley.)

There is a public transit option in the same corridor, the Caltrain commuter rail line, but it can’t begin to compete with these buses for speed, directness, and certainly the number of transfers required.

How should we feel about these privately operated services, which are effectively employee benefits at these companies?

Here is Alexis Madrigal’s response, in the Atlantic:

My favorite data design firm, Stamen, released a map showing all the private buses that run from San Francisco to Silicon Valley, the elite’s mass transit. Work in one of those places, and you have a wonderful travel experience. Everyone else gets the bus or an underfunded Caltrain. One way for our country’s elites. The car and a crowded highway for everybody else.

“The elite’s mass transit” versus “underfunded Caltrain.” Is this really a class divide, with all the perils that class-based thinking implies? These buses have to drive to San Francisco because the geeks on board aren’t willing to buy a big house in the suburbs of Silicon Valley. They want to live in a city, where they step over homeless people and deal with crowds but also have access to all that a city offers. So they’re an unusual elite.

If you love inner-city living so much that you’re willing to commute almost two hours a day, then I expect you’re someone who’s happy with the basic proposition of city life. That means that you’re used to being in close proximity to strangers, so I’d guess you’d be a willing passenger on a public transit system if that transit system were useful.

So the real story here is not the upscale demands of “elites” but the story of “underfunded Caltrain” and and more generally the way that infrequent, slow and poorly connected transit systems are forcing these big employers to run so much expensive service of their own.

The inadequacy of transit between San Francisco and Silicon Valley lies in several things. First, neither the employers nor most San Francisco homes are anywhere near the Caltrain commuter rail line, so using that line requires multiple transfers — often two at the San Francisco end. Second, the line is infrequent, designed for speed rather than frequency, which means that using shuttles between business parks and rail stations always involves the slight anxiety of the bus being late and missing the train.

Politically, the problem with this commute is that it crosses two county lines, and in California, where almost all transport decision-making happens at county-level agencies, a multi-county transit problem is orders of magnitude harder to solve. There is little doubt that if Caltrain were all in one County — maybe one the size of Los Angeles County — it would be a vastly better service by now: more frequent, probably electrified, probably extended to make better connections in San Francisco. But split between three counties it has always seemed peripheral to many county-level decision makers, so when its needs have conflicted with another pet project, Caltrain has been consistently shoved aside.

Most recently, Caltrain’s future has been made dependent on the California High Speed Rail Project, which will help improve and extend Caltrain only in the context of needing to share its track. It does appear that Caltrain will finally be extended to a downtown San Francisco terminal where most of the city will be one transfer away instead of two. Caltrain may also become a little faster if, as contemplated, some minor stations are closed. But Caltrain will probably never be frequent given the new constraints of track sharing.

But why should people have to commute such distances at all? In this case, it happened because a whole mass of companies decided that they all had to have vast corporate campuses that are too big to be in walking distance to anything. The critical mass of Silicon Valley congealed in the high-car age, as early icons like Hewlett and Packard outgrew their garage. Stanford University has always sat in Silicon Valley’s midst like a queen bee, happy to seem the indispensable center of the burbling mass of innovation. Since then every new breakthrough firm, from Google to Facebook, has felt they had to be there.

But now, that critical mass is in the wrong place for the needs of the next generation. A few of the area’s suburbs are trying to build downtowns that will give a bit of the urban vibe that younger geeks seem to value, but many of these suburbs are dominated by people who want nothing to change. So it comes down to how the next generation of internet employers choose think about how to attract top employees. Twitter made a courageous choice, moving its headquarters right into San Francisco, but Apple is digging itself deeper, building an even larger and more car-dependent fortress in its corner of the Valley.

Finally, this joke is on the lords of Silicon Valley itself. The industry that liberated millions from the tyranny of distance remains mired in its own desperately car-dependent world of corporate campuses, where being too-far-to-walk from a Caltrain station — and from anything else of interest — is almost a point of pride. But meanwhile, top employees are rejecting the lifestyle that that location implies.

Geeks whose brilliance lightens the weight of our lives have bodies that must be hauled 70 or more miles every day, at a colossal waste of energy and time. Is this really the future?

los angeles: a nightmarish fantasy that refuses to die

Posted on October 1, 2012 in Los Angeles

An article in Fast Company, by Li Wen and Shawn Gayle, has unfortunately give more oxygen to the so-called NETWORK_LA proposal, which is founded on the delusion — especially common among designers and "futurists" — that Sufficiently Sexy Technology Will Change the Facts of Mathematics.

The idea is that somehow, flexible small-vehicle services responding to your personal requests will efficiently replace crowded fixed route transit services that routinely board upwards of one passenger per minute. Many Los Angeles bus lines are already incredibly successful, even if you personally don't identify as someone who would use them, and they are going to get even better very rapidly.

My reasonably humorous if exasperated rebuttal to NETWORK_LA, written when the idea first came out, is here. Quotable line: To … someone who values personal freedom, flexibility, spontaneity, human dignity, and travel time, Gensler's Los Angeles would be a hell-world worse than Blade Runner. Fortunately, it's also mathematically impossible."

For a more general discussion of the limits of flexible services (in the context of human-driven vehicles) is here. If you are of the school that thinks driverless cars (and buses) are just around the corner and bound to mow down all public resistance, then you've solved the operating cost problem with the NETWORK_LA idea. But you still haven't addressed the real problem, which is not the scarcity of money but the scarcity of urban space, as explained pretty simply here.

As I have said repeatedly, if driverless cars (or competition) can improve the cost-effectiveness of flexible services, they have great potential to be a better solution than fixed route buses for low-demand markets. But the grandiosity of the NETWORK_LA proposal is simply an expression of ignorance about how transit actually works, and what the real opportunities are.

intriguing new book on jane jacobs and her transporation (email of the week)

Posted on September 26, 2012 in Books

From the book's co-author:

I was glad that you urged "lazy students" via your Human Transit blog to read The Death and Life of Great American Cities, and I enjoyed reading your thoughtful commentary for the City Builder's Book Club on Jane Jacobs and transportation!
I thought I'd let you know about a book that might have escaped your notice called Genius of Common Sense: Jane Jacobs and the Story of "The Death and Life of Great American Cities." It's just come out in paperback with a new cover featuring a heretofore unpublished 1963 photo of Jane alongside her main mode of transportation – her bicycle – on the streets of New York.
Genius of Common Sense was originally intended for young adults but has caught the attention of the likes of Robert Caro, Jason Epstein, and Robert Campbell as a solid introduction to the life and work of Jane Jacobs for adults too. With more than 100 images, it follows her through the publication of Death and Life and her New York battles against urban renewal and expressways.

Sounds interesting! Anyone want to write a review as a guest post?

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