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“shockingly neutral”: my first sort-of negative review!

Posted on July 14, 2012 in Dissents, Philosophy

WalkerCover-r06 croppedAn intriguing take on Human Transit from Josh Stephens at the California Planning and Development Report concludes with this striking thought:

Much of Walker's technical discussions aren't any more riveting than they sound. And yet, it is, on the whole, … a surprisingly un-tedious exercise in armchair planning. Walker loves and believes in public transit, but his awareness of the costs and tradeoffs render him a shockingly neutral advocate (if such a thing is possible). On the one hand, Walker is trying to encourage stakeholders to advocate for better transit systems. But if you read him closely, you might end up with mental gridlock (while actual gridlock grows all the worse).

I can accept being nonriveting — this isn't Stephen King — and am happy to settle for "un-tedious."  Otherwise, I treat this critique as a badge of honor.  To me as a consultant, few epithets are finer than 'shockingly neutral.'  Yes, my book is about helping you and your community think about the real choices that you face.  And yes, to make those choices, you in your armchair (and your community in the real transit planning process) must think about what you want, and sometimes about which of two things you want is more important. 

I'm sorry if that gives some people "mental gridlock", but functional human beings and communities do this all the time.  Everyone understands the process of budgeting when money is at stake.  Transit simply requires the similar kind of hard-tradeoff thinking in some other dimensions, including street-space, service priorities, etc.  My book also makes budgeting decisions around transit much easier, because it helps everyone understand exactly what they are buying or sacrificing.

Once, years ago, I was working with a community's elected officials to help them reach a consensus on how they want to balance the competing goals of lifeline coverage vs higher ridership.  (The former goal produces a little bit of service everywhere and the latter produces a high-intensity network only when demand is high. See Chapter 10.)  We were having a contentious public meeting on exactly this subject, with the electeds debating each other and the public inserting a range of useful testimony.  The electeds were going to have to vote. 

We took a break, I went to the men's room, and suddenly one of the electeds was at the adjacent urinal.  He whispered: "Hey Jarrett, I know you don't want to say anything out there, but really, what do you think we should do?"

As a citizen I'd have an answer based on my values, but I wasn't a citizen here.  I was here to help a community make its own decision. So my private answer was the same as a public one.  "No!  This is not a technical question. You have to balance your priorities between two things that you value, just like you do when you're budgeting.  This is a chance to express your values, so asking me to tell you what to do is like asking me to tell you who you are."

Obviously, once you've chosen what you want, your consultant will start telling you what's required to deliver that outcome, and in that mode the consultant may sound like an advocate.  But that only happens once the client — you, your community, your electeds — have stated their desires clearly in an understanding of the tradeoffs they imply.

Sorry.  Life's full of hard choices, for people and for their communities.  If it gives you mental gridlock, put down the book or step out of the meeting.  Breathe fresh air, study a flower, or look at the stars.  But sooner or later, you'll decide, or others will do it for you.

san franciso: all-door boarding on buses!

Posted on July 13, 2012 in San Francisco

In San Francisco passengers will be able to board through any door of any city bus, as they have long been able to do on light rail and streetcars.  Nate Berg has a nice piece on this at Atlantic Cities. 

This could be a very big deal.

San francisco bus boardingNo more of the silliness pictured at right, where passengers who could all board the bus in 10 seconds instead spend a minute or two outside in the rain.  No more tired exhortations to "move to the back of the bus!" because people will naturally distribute themselves evenly throughout.  No more delays due to fare payment problems and disputes.  Fewer angry and threatening signs, like the "stop" sign on the back door in this image.

Obviously this change requires Proof of Payment (POP) fare collection, which has been routine on most North American light rail and commuter rail for a generation (though it arrived in San Francisco relatively recently.)  POP means that you're responsible for having a ticket, pass, transfer slip, etc., called a "proof of payment", and a roving fare inspector can ask you to show it at any time and nail you with a big fine if you don't have it. 

If you want to dig down into why so some people hate the bus-riding experience, well, the congestion and delay of front-door fare payment has to be a big factor.  It is a major reason why buses are so slow and unreliable. It also produces inefficiency, hassle, and discomfort that everyone can see: the huge lines to board at the front, the crowding in the front of the bus while there is space of the back.  The whole experience is both unpleasant and an objective cause of delay.

There's also a subtle emotional thing here:  We're required to have a brief interaction with a (quite properly) impatient driver, which can give a subconscious feeling that we're being judged or dismissed. With all-door boarding, we feel free to move through the system by paths that feel direct to us, and we're much less likely to be waiting in line.  If an observer chose to interpret my dislike of this experience as a stigma, front-door boarding might turn out to be part of why some people think there's a  cultural stigma about riding the bus.

Front-door boarding is one of those indignities that people associate with buses but that is not an intrinsic feature of them.  The idea that POP could be done on rail but not buses is just a North American (and Australasian) industry habit.  It makes sense where loads are low, because front-door boarding doesn't involve much delay in that case, but it's never made sense at higher levels of crowding that are now routine in our transit-starved cities.  Sure you need to have an expensive fare collection crew, but you are also saving so much running time, getting people where they're going faster, and so dramatically improving the sensation of civility and freedom in bus riding, that it's definitely worth it. 

You do have to get over a hump.  Many people are very upset about fare evasion, and the public usually thinks that it's a bigger problem than it is.  With all-door boarding, you as a passenger can't tell whether others have paid their fares, and when you see a guy who looks shady to you (whatever that means to you in terms of race, class, dress or behavior cues) jumping on the back, you'll now have to assume that he's paid his fare.  It's up to a fare inspector, not you, to verify that.  The reality is that the cost of bringing fare evasion down from, say, 5% to 1% costs vastly more than the fares you'd collect, because you have to hire vast hordes of inspectors to catch those last few hardest-core offenders.  We're better of tolerating a somewhat higher fare evasion so we can spend our money on service.

So all-door boarding on buses is hard to get to, and you tend to do it when, as in San Francisco, the overcrowding and slowness of buses is perceived as real crisis. (That means two things: overcrowding and slowness are severe and lots of citizens and elected leaders are demanding a solution.)

Don't expect every transit agency to follow San Francisco's lead at once, because there's a startup cost and risk that's hard to face in the middle of a recession, not to mention the whole public education struggle about tolerable levels of fare evasion.  But I expect this to spread rapidly in the major metros if San Francisco MTA has the fortitude to keep it going.  (I suspect all-door boarding is actually irreversable in San Francisco, because all-door boarding will create more capacity that will be instantly used, to the point that going back would require adding more service that MTA can't afford.)

And once it does, the experience of riding buses will a bit more like riding rail, in a way that matters to almost everyone.  Greater speed and reliability.  Less waiting in line.  Less crush-loading  The freedom to board where you want.  Who doesn't value those things?

Photo: Tom Prete.

seeking a portland-based assistant!

Posted on July 11, 2012 in Jobs, Portland

My very little firm, Jarrett Walker & Associates, is ready to add some support.  It will be six months before I decide whether to cross the hurdle into formally becoming an employer, but meanwhile, I have a range of support tasks that can be a great learning experience for someone trying to get into the field. 

So I'm looking for someone (maybe more than one) who's comfortable with being a subcontractor without benefits for up to six months, until we get to that decision point.  I envision you working around 25-30 hours/week, with frequent visits to my Portland home office but no obligation to work onsite all the time.  (If you are available only part-time, but at least 20 hours a week, that' s also possible.)  I envision paying you something in the range of $15-40/hour, depending on your experience and skills.

You do not necessarily have a graduate degree or transit planning experience, though I'll pay you more if you do.  You probably do have a BA.  You absolutely need to have:

  • Passionate enthusiasm about public transit and its role in building a better civilization.
  • Strong organization skills — i.e. organization of documents, information, calendar etc.
  • English fluency and readable writing in English.
  • Ability to use basic software, including all parts of Microsoft Office on Macs.
  • A willingness to pitch in on whatever needs to be done at the moment.
  • Ability to work with visualizations, such as graphs and maps, and make connections between this information and other data forms.
  • Evidence of ability to learn new material and concepts rapidly.

In addition, it's highly advantageous if you have:

  • Some transit planning or policy experience.  (Intelligent volunteer advocacy counts.)
  • IT troubleshooting skills and confidence.  (Macs with Microsoft Office, plus online tools including Google Apps, TypePad, and key social media.  This is especially valuable because I'm very bad at this myself.)
  • Strong ability to write, and to customize writing style to different audiences.
  • Ability to design compelling visuals, including document formats, PowerPoint presentations, and graphs and diagrams that tell a story clearly.
  • Advanced data analysis skills, which could include advanced uses of Excel, database programs, and GIS.

Again, I do not recommend that you move to Portland just for this opportunity, though I won't discriminate against out-of-town applicants if you're sure you want to take that risk.  In six months, if I'm ready to build a larger staff, I will be more enthusastically seeking staff interested in coming to Portland to work with us.

If interested, please hit the email button under my photo, over on the far right of this page –>

Email me your questions about this opportunity, and if you are interested, send me:

  • A resume
  • At least three references I can call who have some experience with you in the skill areas I've described above.
  • Optionally: the hourly rate, without benefits, that you think best matches your skills, supported by a history of past compensation if relevant.  If you have a bottom line minimum hourly rate, state it.  If not, we'll figure this out if we're a match.
  • Preferably: A sample of some past project you've done that displays both your ability to write and your ability to interpret data, ideally including visualisations (graphs, maps, diagrams) that you've designed.

If this sounds vague it's because I'm intentionally casting a wide net here.  It is the nature of working in a very small firm that you have to do many kinds of tasks — both professional and clerical — so there are several possible backgrounds that could be good qualification.  I may also add more than one person to get the complete skillset I need.

The application deadline is July 20, but if you've missed that go ahead and send me something.  I am likely to make decisions based on what I have on July 20, but I may not meet all of my needs then.

Please spread the word, especially in Portland!

the atlantic wonders if transit is failing white people

Posted on July 10, 2012 in Journalism, Los Angeles

How do you react when you read the following sentence?

In Los Angeles, 92 percent of bus riders are people of color. 

This supposedly shocking fact is the starting point for Amanda Hess's confused and aggravating piece in the Atlantic today, which argues that somehow transit is failing because it's not attracting enough white people.  "As minority ridership rises, the racial stigma against [buses] compounds," Hess writes.  Sounds alarming!  But who exactly is feeling this "stigma," apart from Ms. Hess, and how many of those people are there? 

Read it again:

In Los Angeles, 92 percent of bus riders are people of color.

Now, how does your reaction change when I point out that in the 2010 census, just under 28% of the population of Los Angeles County is "non-Hispanic white," so over 70% can be called "people of color."  Now what if I tell you that as always, transit is most concentrated in the denser parts of the county, where the demand and ridership are higher, and these areas happen to be even less "non-Hispanic white" than the county at large?  (Exact figures can't be cited as this area corresponds to no government boundary.)  So the bus system, weighted by where the service is concentrated, serves a population of whom much, much more than 70% could be described as "people of color".

Please don't treat these figures as too precise.  The claim that "92% of Los Angeles bus riders are people of color" is impossible to fact-check because two of its key terms are ambiguous. 

  • Does "Los Angeles" mean the City of Los Angeles or Los Angeles County?  They're both big but very different.  Remarkably, though, both are over 70% "people of color."
  • Likewise there are many definitions of "Los Angeles bus rider" depending on which transit agencies you include.  I suspect Hess got her figure by looking just at LA Metro, rather than the many suburban operators who are also part of the total Los Angeles bus network, but it's hard to know. 
  • And by the way, I'm assuming that "people of color" include what the Census calls "Hispanic whites," as it has every time I've heard the term. (To the Census, anyone of European ancestry, including from Spain centuries ago, is "white.")

So to the extent we can track Hess's statistics here's what they say:  Los Angeles bus ridership is mostly people of color because Los Angeles is mostly people of color. 

But Hess wants the nonwhiteness of Los Angeles bus riders to be a problem, evidence that the transit agency — at least on the bus side — is somehow failing to reach out to white people. 

Racism has sometimes had a role in the history of U.S. transit planning, and there's a Federal regulatory system, called Title VI, devoted to ensuring it doesn't happen again.  But racist planning — discriminatory service provision aimed to advantage or disadvantage any ethnic group — is not only immoral but also a stupid business practice.  Diversity is the very essence of successful transit services — not just ethnic diversity but diversity of income, age, and trip purpose.  Great transit lines succeed to the extent that many different kinds of people with different situations and purposes find them useful.  As a planner, I want every line I design to be useful to the greatest possible range of people and purposes, because that ensures a resilient market that will continue even if parts of it drop out for some reason.

So why is it a problem that in massively diverse international cities we don't have "enough" white people on the bus? 

I happen to be in Los Angeles at the moment, on a brief and busy trip.  Tonight, after dark, I took a pleasant walk across downtown — from Union Station to 7th & Flower — pausing to note how safe I felt on streets and squares that were synonymous with crime and violence when I was a child.  Few of the people I saw were white like me, but the folks relaxing and listening to music in Pershing Square seemed like citizens of a decent city capable of joy.  (In a mean moment, I wanted to call my late grandmother and say: "Hi, Gramma! It's 10 PM and I'm in the middle of Pershing Square!"  I wanted to see the look on her face, back in 1980 or so.  She would probably have called the police and demanded they rescue me.)

Then I took the bus back to my Chinatown hotel, Metro Line 78, well after dark, and marveled at all the dimensions of the diversity.  Some people looked poor, others seemed prosperous and confident, but a strong social contract was obvious.  I read clues suggesting a huge range of professions, situations, life choices, and intentions.  And if Amanda Hess hadn't been so insistent about it, the fact that I was the only white person on the bus wouldn't have occurred to me, and certainly not occurred to me as any kind of problem.

Yes, there are plenty of people, still, who feel more comfortable riding with people who look like them, in a vague way that encompasses both race and class signals. But how much does this desire influence service planning?  How long should it?  Questions worth debating, I suppose.

Among young people out in downtown Los Angeles at night I see mostly interracial groups of friends.  I have no illusion that the whole city is like this, but it's striking nonetheless.  About 18 years ago in the New Republic — too old to be linkable — I read a story about how "post-racial" young people in Los Angeles are, how they are used to cultural diversity and uninterested in racial divides.  If any cultural observer could discern that then, how much truer it must be now.

Go ahead.  Try riding one of the well-lit, air-conditioned buses of inner Los Angeles.  It's not full of people just like you.  But neither is the city, and that's the glory of it.

portland’s southwest corridor: get involved at the beginning!

Posted on July 2, 2012 in Portland, Public Outreach, Rail Transit

Portland Inner SW CorrPortland's regional government Metro has just launched a public feedback period on its Southwest Corridor Project.  This is the most important time to be involved. For details on upcoming engagement events, and online feedback opportunites, see here.  (Scroll to bottom for public meeting info.)

Most people won't pay attention to this project until a final transit project is proposed and the federal funding process is well underway.  At that point, when there's little option to revise the project, everyone will be stuck in a binary support-or-oppose debate that is often angry, boring, and frustrating to all sides.  At that point, too, some people will be saying that "the fix is in," that Metro was always going to build the project a certain way and that the whole public process was just window-dressing.

When we get to that point, people who were engaged in this process back in July 2012 will need to pipe up and say, no, actually there was quite an extensive public conversation before any hint of a transit line was drawn on map.  The public and advocacy groups had ample opportunity to shape the entire definition of the project and its priorities, before Metro had done much planning.

The study area [Download PDF] consists of all the suburbs lying generally southwest of downtown Portland, and a large swath of southwest Portland itself.  Portland's part of the corridor is shown at right.  Download the PDF to see the full extent.

Even if you're not in Portland, you might want to poke around the project website just to get a sense of how broadly Metro defines its corridor studies.  At this stage, the project is presented in such an inclusive way as to barely hint that it may lead to some kind of rapid transit line.  This is the right tone for this point in the process.  The Portland area's style with these things is to start from the question "What kind of community do you want?" — and gradually build a case from the answers to that question toward a transportation improvement, in the most transparent way possible.  The tone of these processes is always that the transit line isn't an end in itself, but a tool for a wide range of outcomes that citizens value.

This corridor has understandably been a relatively low priority in the past three decades of rapid transit development.  Its catchment is relatively small as corridors go, density is low, topography is relatively difficult, and all the options for bringing any rail or BRT project into downtown Portland look likely to be very expensive.  Look at the map above:  The only alignment that won't involve tunnelling will approach alongside the already-level Interstate 5 and Barbur Blvd, which are right next to each other.  This alignment briefly turns due east and then makes a 90-degree turn to the north — locally known as the "Terwilliger curves."  The east-west segment exploits a break in the continuous ridge of hills running north-south, and after you turn northward you're running laterally across the steep face of these hills all the way into downtown.  Barbur and I-5 are flat through here only because of continuous restraining walls and viaducts, all of which will be expensive to refit for rapid transit.  

Portland has already built one long tunnel to cross these hills — the dashed red line that you see heading west from downtown.  That tunnel, though, is part of the westside line, which has a much larger catchment including all of Beaverton, Hillsboro, and the so-called "Silicon Forest".  A tunnel for the smaller southwest corridor will probably be difficult to pencil.

All Portland rapid transit studies are land use studies, and are ultimately about what kind of community citizens want.  Still, this one will call for some spectacularly clever engineering options — more than enough drama to engage infrastructure geeks across the continent.  Stay tuned, and if you're local, get involved.

request for information: busways that “cross over” at stations

Posted on June 20, 2012 in Bus Rapid Transit, Information Requests

The image below, of Sydney's M2 freeway at Barclay Road, shows the two directions of a median busway crossing over each other so that buses can stop on a center platform — without the buses needing to have doors on both sides. 

Busway crossover M2

Another I'm familiar with is on the Los Angeles Harbor Transitway at I-105.  The station is buried under a freeway interchange but the crossovers on the north-south busway are clearly visible.

Los Angeles 110 at 105

 

Can anyone identify other examples of this design in busways anywhere in the world?  Please reply in comments if so.  Thanks!

 

apple maps vs google maps

Posted on June 17, 2012 in Maps

One of the most disconcerting thing about being a tech customer these days is that the Apple-Google rivalry can be expected to create more grief for people who like both, as each punishes its customers for liking the products of the other.  It is already very laborious, for example, to sync the (Apple) MacBook's standard Calendar and Address Book with (Google) Android's — a big problem for me as both a Mac and Android user.  Now we're going to see Apple smartphones that don't want us to use Google Maps.

Yes, Apple thinks it's going to improve on the most transformative automated mapping tool of all time.  By all evidence they've decided that a cool, slick look is so important that it doesn't matter whether the map gives you the information you need.  Gizmodo has an excellent comparison, including this graphic:

Apple vs google

 

That's a slice of Lower Manhattan: Google on the left, Apple on the right.  Yes, the Apple map is pleasing on the eye, but do you turn to mapping software for serene imagery or to see the layout of your city and how to do things in it?  

While everyone can pick nits with Google Maps, Google has done an amazing job at massing large amounts of useful information in compact and legible ways.  Their maps are aesthetically cluttered, but the clutter is accurate:  Lower Manhattan is a cluttered place and we love it that way!  A great city is full of opportunites and we want to know about all of them.  I like feeling a little overwhelmed by a Google Map, especially as compared to the illusory cool — also known as lack of content — that Apple is trying to convey.

The official reason for a transit blog to complain, of course, is that Google has done a lot of work on integrating transit data into its maps, while Apple, to judge from its beta, thinks of this as a detail that can be added later.  It will be interesting to see whether people really give up Google Maps for a slicker but more impoverished tool.  If not, this could start driving transit users toward Google's Android, where the variety of third-party hardware designs already mean a tool much better suited to your hand, and your taste.

Christina Bonnington in Wired takes down Apple Maps here.

H/t: Daryl de la Cruz

guest post: a san franciscan on parisian street design

Posted on June 14, 2012 in Paris, San Francisco
Following up on my praise of the bus lanes of Paris, San Francisco reader Ian Leighton logs these observations about the operation of Parisian boulevards from several points of view. Ian is a co-founder of Embark, a firm that designs mobile applications for transit systems around the US and London. 

In addition to Métro / Bus / Tram / RER, I also walked (bien sûr) and made use of the bicycle sharing system Velib', so I was able to experience the use of street space in Paris from the perspective of several modes.

The buses work pretty well, and seem to be well-ridden. They connect quartiers that the metro doesn't and (in my case) allow for enjoyment of the city at street level, for better geographical education of how things are connected in the non-gridded city. I found I took buses much more often when the weather was beautiful.

About bus boarding: The normal length buses seem to still insist that you board at the front, which is still relatively quick, as I also observed in London, since most people have Navigo smart cards. They even have two "lanes" for boarding through the front door, with a divider and Navigo reader on each side. You can still pay in cash/coin with a hefty surcharge. The articulated buses allow all-door boarding as you observed, which is how the trams operate, convergently. Buses, in general, feel very modern and welcoming. As far as I could tell, there was no "old bus" vs "new bus" as we have [in North America] often, and all the buses treated riders like citizens. Low floor, line maps inside, upcoming stop displays, clean interiors, consistent branding and appearance.

Paris has seemingly done a good job of managing its street space, and it is dynamic both in daily use and over time.  The city seems to constantly make small modifications to its streets.  In daily use, the (wide, separated) bus lane also serves bikes and sometimes deliveries. Depending on the width of the bus lane, these are sometimes clever parking/delivery spaces cut halfway into the sidewalk that still let the buses squeeze by, sometimes not. Sometimes deliveries are prohibited during peak hours, when traffic isn't free-flowing enough for the bus to use a travel lane. On less wide streets, a non-separated bus lane is narrower and really mostly used by bikes, and by buses when the other lanes are truly blocked up with traffic.
Bus lane livraison Ian Leighton
The bus lanes are a great addition to the bike network. Bike lanes can get a little creative, transitioning from sidewalk to street to bus lane to across the street to disappearing. But even around giant intersections like Place d'Italie (13th), they guide you decently well around the craziness with sharrows and bike traffic lights. And you always have the option (and in some places, like Bastille and Concorde, it's the only option) to just, well have at it with the scooters, cars, trucks and buses in the fray — which isn't nearly as bad as it seems, since Parisian drivers are pretty considerate and aware of people on bikes.

On a longer-term basis, the city seems willing to make changes: converting its "payant" parking spaces into auto'lib stations, livrasion spaces, and dedicated bike lanes as well. It definitely feels like if you come back to the same street in a few years, there will undoubtedly be some slight modifications.

One thing that struck me was there there is still a ton of parking on Parisian streets! It seems that if you give a Parisian car-owner (or politician, planner, decision-maker?) the choice between removing a parking lane or a travel lane, they'll prefer the latter, and preserve their parking.

Caveat: traffic is still a problem. During rush hour, taxis and right turns can clog a bus lane pretty quickly. There doesn't seem to be the same gridlock law as we have in California. The effective lanes during the afternoon rush hour, in the 9th, 10th, and 18th (N / NW) end of Paris at least, where I observed them, suddenly have a line of taxis and buses. This is usually okay for bikes, but occasionally it gets bad enough that bikes have to do some weaving through the lines of taxis. A little improvement is still needed, as always.

These photos were taken during rush hour on rue Lafayette in the 10th. There was so much gridlock, and so many taxis in the bus lane, that 5 or 6 buses were stuck in line with the taxis, between two bus stops. I don't recall whether any were bunched on the same route.
Weaving Taxis2
Bus lane traffic
Coming back to San Francisco, I bike a lot more, since it's so much faster than transit. Being in Paris has made me realize the potential to have a great bus system (barring the full-scale metro, or even Parisian style tramway, we doubtless need in a few corridors and can't pay for). Removing stops, contraflow and separated (or at least colored) bus lanes to signal to drivers that they're not supposed to be there, and signal priority would doubtless do a lot to speed up MUNI. It even seems, to me at least, that the Muni Metro T line doesn't even have signal priority, even with its own right-of-way… or if it is, it's pretty ineffective. Oh well, I'll have to wait for the San Francsico Transit Effectiveness Project, someday.  
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