Just noticed this on my Amazon listing:
Just published, and already over $50 of clean profit on resale! You should really buy boxes of them, shouldn't you? ;-)
quote of the week: snow removal priorities
“[Seattle's] snow and ice response plan is built around getting people to use public transportation. Given our geography here, we would have to have 100 trucks [to cover the whole city], and at $150,000 to $200,000 a truck, that would be a foolish waste of money because they would sit most of the time. And they would sit for five years because it doesn’t snow that often. So we go with what we have.”
– Seattle Director of Street Maintenance Steve Pratt
That's from a terrific (and funny) Atlantic article on snow removal, by Emily Badger. (Seattle has only 30 snowplows in a city that passes some winters with no snow at all, and averages only 7 inches of snow per year. It also has a traumatic memory of serious blizzards in 2008 and 2010, which I believe caused the coinage of the now-banal term snowpocalypse.)
the economist and the “redundancy” fallacy
Today's unsigned piece in the Economist "Democracy in America" blog picks up on Tom Vanderbilt's Slate item reviewing my book. I'm certainly grateful for the publicity, though for the record, I do believe in pleasure!
But the Economist's writer ends his piece with a commonplace of old-inner-city thinking that can do real harm when taken outside those bounds:
Ultimately, what makes public transit work is massive redundancy: lots of different systems layered on top of each other, all running at high frequencies, providing you clear information on when the next one arrives. The world's best cities, New York, Paris, London, Hong Kong, Berlin, all do this pretty well. For cities that aspire to greatness, the road map doesn't seem so hard to follow.
"Lots of different systems layered on top of each other" begs the question of whether these systems are working together — for example by encouraging connections from one to the other — or simply duplicating each other. That is the distinction that matters.
Yes, if you're in "New York, Paris, London, Hong Kong and Berlin" you may perceive a layering of "redundant" services, but one of two very different things is happening:
- The services are truly redundant in the sense of duplicating (or even competing) but the demand is so intense that they're all full, so the duplication isn't much of a waste. This is the case with many big-city commute markets, but often not with all-day patterns.
- The services are actually fitting together into an integrated network, through some mix of planned connectivity and complementarity. An example of complementarity is the simultaneous presence of services in one corridor that differ in the speed/access tradeoff. A major Manhattan avenue, for example, may have an "express" train stopping only every mile or less, a "local" train stopping less than every half-mile, and a bus on the surface stopping even more frequently. That isn't redundancy unless the market isn't strong enough to support all three.
Praising these super-dense cities for "massive redundancy" sends exactly the wrong message to less-dense and smaller cities. Tell them to plan for redundancy, when their markets are insufficiently developed, and they'll spread their resources out in tangles of overlapping services none of which are frequent or attractive enough to be worth waiting for. This is the lesson of inner Sydney, discussed in Chapter 12 of my book.
You need massive agglomeration for true redundancy to work. Without that, you dissipate service quality too much. This was a key failing of the privatization of the British bus industry, which gave private companies control over transit planning and prohibited them from working together to create rational connective networks, by declaring that to be collusion. The result was a generation of frustrated riders who had to let Jim's bus go by because they had a ticket for Joe's bus, even though the two bus lines together might add up to enough frequency to actually be useful. The last Labour government finally removed this prohibition on "collusion," allowing simple, obvious, and mutually beneficial plans to go forward, like this one in Oxford.
"Massive redundancy" may be fine if you're a megacity, though even there, its effectiveness may be a feature of the peak that doesn't translate to the rest of the day. Anywhere else, services need to work together as a network. Even in London, New York, Paris, Hong Kong and Berlin, that's really what's happening.
toronto: earth to mayor: subways are expensive!
Toronto readers, today's Globe & Mail everything you need to know about Mayor Rob Ford's dream of building expensive subways under low-density suburbia, thereby spending billions that could be spent expanding actual mobility (and access) where it's most needed and demand is highest. The article is about the crucial Eglinton corridor, an obvious grid-element that could help thousands of travellers get where they're going without having to go through downtown, thus adding to capacity problems there. But the same logic applies to an underground extension of the Sheppard East line toward Scarborough, which the mayor has also mooted. Reporter Adrian Morrow has done his homework (not just by talking to me) and he carefully sets aside all the main talking points of the suburban-subway advocates.
Bottom line: Going underground is expensive, so we do it only when we really need to! Responsible planning fights hard for space on the surface — especially in space-rich low-density suburbs — before sacrificing millions just to get transit "out of the way" of cars.
new “coming events” sidebar
Upcoming lectures are now in the far right column under my photo –>
Do you have a sponsoring organization that could handle the modest cost of bringing me to your city? If so, click the email button (also under my photo) and let's talk!
the slate.com review
Today at Slate.com, Tom Vanderbilt, author of How We Drive, reviews my book Human Transit. It's a friendly review and I much appreciate it. Followup thoughts on the review in a day or two. Meanwhile, for the record, I do believe in pleasure!
portland: balance the budget yourself
Portland's Tri-Met faces another horrible funding shortfall this year, but they've come up with a good survey tool to engage the public in their decisions about what services to cut. It's one of those "balance the budget yourself" tools that's becoming increasingly necessary to bring voters into contact with reality about government budgets.
If you live in Portland, you should definitely work through the survey and send them your own balanced budget and comments. If you're not in Portland, is your transit agency communicating about its trade-offs this well?
sydney: monorail soon to be scrap metal?
The state government that rules Sydney is giving signs that it's ready to tear down the city's monorail, ostensibly for a rebuild of the convention centre but also to remove some obstacles to surface light rail, including game-changing new line down the middle of Sydney's CBD spine, George Street. Jake Saulwick has the story in today's Sydney Morning Herald.
A source from one consortium [bidding to build a new convention centre] said no decision had been made ''but the word from the government is 'don't let the monorail constrain your thinking' ''.
''Conversely they say the light rail is quite important.''
This could be read as a story about big bad developers destroying a crucial transit resource, but it's not. The Sydney Monorail, opened in 1988, is the red line in the map below: a one way loop connecting the CBD to the nearby tourism-entertainment-convention district of Darling Harbour:
Map by discoversydney.com.au
Like many transit toys, it was built cheaply on the assumption that the joy of the technology itself would transcend its lack of usefulness. Its most obvious use is for travel between the convention/exhibition area on the west side of the loop to the city centre in the east, but the key stations on the west side of the loop, serving the convention/exhibition area and Paddy's Markets, are attached to parking structures, offering an unattractive walk to the destination itself. The fare is $5.00. Meanwhile, it's less than 1.5 km (1 mile) walk from one side of the loop to the other, mostly along reasonably pleasant paths that lead to the front door of your destination, though to be fair there is one elevated waterfront freeway in the way.
I lived and worked in inner city for five years, crossing the monorail's service area on foot several times a week. Twice in that time, in very bad weather, using the monorail made sense to me.
The monorail is a barrier to light rail, indirectly, because its pillars form a bottleneck in a potential north-south traffic lane on Pitt Street, and this lane could be useful in rearranging street uses to create room for a light rail line the whole length of George Street, the largest continuous north-south street in the city's core. Light rail is being designed to be useful. It will be in an exclusive lane (which is why it's not being called a "tram") and it will form the common CBD segment for several lines branching out in several directions, serving high-demand corridors in the inner city. Its high capacity (in the sense of passengers per driver) and its two-way service in high-demand places will make it a real transit service, unlike the tiny one-way loop of the monorail.
Next time someone wants to introduce a fun new technology into your city using a one-way loop, remember:
- Very few people really want to travel in circles.
- Except for tourists and others travelling for pleasure, most people need direct service in both directions, which loops don't do well, and …
- Loops are intrinsically closed, turned inward on themselves, impossible to extend without disrupting existing travel patterns. That's why one-way loops are never a good starter project for a technology that's expected to expand its relevance in the future.
For more on those principles, see Chapter 4 of Human Transit.
Finally, monorails are fun to ride, but most people experienced this one from being underneath it. This was just a single beam for one-way loop service, causing all the problems above, but it was still much-disliked, especially in the narrow streets of the highrise core where it added to the sense of overhead weight above the pedestrian.
To be fair, it's less oppressive than, say, the Chicago "L" or many other downtown viaducts. A transit advocate might fight hard for exactly this kind of visual impact if it was the only way to get useful two-way service through a high-demand area. In fact, one of the best uses of monorail is in historic and very crowded areas where the combination of archeological and ground-plane impacts of any transit service simply mandates elevated as the least bad solution — parts of New Delhi, for example. But the Sydney monorail had few of these benefits. Perhaps it was just a toy, and Sydney has outgrown it.
my first encounter with populist talk-radio in sydney
I doubt Sydney's notorious talk-radio host Alan Jones would have asked me such polite questions, but he was away that day. Here's the interview of me on Sydney's 2GB drive-time, by Andrew Moore. Download MP3.
redistorting maps: the virtue of cartograms
M. V. Jantzen has designed a fun tool that let's you rearrange a subway map to show actual travel times from where you are. It's featured today at Greater Greater Washington. Here's Washington DC Metro viewed from Ballston station in Virginia:
Jantzen calls this a "distortion," and with that I would disagree. It's a redistortion, because as Mark Monmonier explains in his classic book, all useful maps are distorted. Here's a whole page of Washington Metro maps, including the classic diagram …
and a spatial one …
Spatial maps are about spatial distance, and that's often, but not always, what matters. The classic London Tube map is useful as a diagram, for example, but it can also undermine people's actual mental understanding of the geography of London.
Source: Transport for London
Of the above image, Kerwin Datu writes:
Bayswater and Queensway are 190 metres apart on the same street, Regent's Park and Great Portland Street 230 metres apart on the same street. But anyone going from Oxford Circus to either Bayswater or Great Portland Street would be persuaded that they had to take two trains to complete their trip. … This is unacceptable in a low-carbon age, and with trains packed to the gills in peak hour …
Back to the biggest picture point:
Maps that show one useful geography correctly seem so naturally authoritative that we can easily overvalue them when we really care about something else.
Consider the way spatial geography is misused — by almost all media — to represent population. If you think this is a useful map of the recent Iowa Republican caucuses …
… then you're misreading space as population. The visual impression of dominating such a map arises from appealing to sparse rural voters who influence large spaces on the map. Winning an election is something else. The guy who won the orange counties did as well as the guy who won the purple ones, because the orange counties are where most people live.
(Updated) Back in the 2004 election, some smarter cartographers attempted maps (technically cartograms) in which each bit of area represented a fixed number of voters. (Thanks to Niralisse for finding them for me!) The US was reshaped into something looking like an angry cat wearing a corset, the mountain states reduced to almost nothing while the West and Northeast were enormous blobs.
It took a while to get into, but it was an accurate visualization of what voters did. It was a useful redistortion, arguably a net reduction in distortion, because when describing population-based data, a spatial map like the Iowa caucus map above is a distortion too.
Inevitably, as technology customizes everything around our individual narcissism perspectives and preferences, we'll get more used to "just for me" maps, maps that show how the universe really does revolve around ourselves. These are crucial for their purpose. I've especially praised this one, which shows where you can get to on transit, in a given time, from a point that you select.
Ultimately, a clear vision of your city, your transit system, and your place in the world can only come from being able to move quickly between different kinds of maps, so that you're reminded at each moment that no map tells the whole story. We must be able to redistort for ourselves, in real time. If everyone had the tools to toggle quickly among different kinds of diagrams, they might even get over the notion that a spatial map tells you anything about an election.