Human Transit

we have a date: “december 5 or so”

Posted on October 28, 2011 in Meta

I just signed off on the very, very last proofs of the book. Island Press's copyeditor has advised me to expect books out by "about Dec 5 or so."

Have you read the introduction and table of contents? If not, please have a look now. I hope it will be clear that the book is unique in trying to make transit choices clear to the interested general reader, including elected officials, advocates, and professionals in related fields.

I will be based in Portland throughout Dec, Jan, Feb, Mar, but also have trips planned in that range to Auckland NZ, eastern Australia, Washington DC, Seattle, and possibly South Florida. Other trips are possible depending on honoraria etc. I'm obviously keen for opportunities to do public lectures sponsored by reasonably prominent organizations or institutions. If you know one, please let them know.

And if you've already decided you're looking forward to reading it, why not preorder? It's also on Amazon, and quite possibly your favorite book website.

the build vs. maintain problem

Posted on October 24, 2011 in US Federal Policy

A good article at Strong Towns highlights a structural problem with how the US does Federal infrastructure funding:

We can get money from Washington to build new infrastructure, but it is really difficult — if not impossible — to get money from Washington to maintain existing infrastructure.

The article explores the problem in the context of Minnesota bridges, noting that Federal funding is going forward for a bridge expected to serve 16,000 cars a day while Minnesota is unable to fund maintenance for existing bridges carrying 2.4m cars a day.

One solution has been for the Federal funder to demand evidence of a maintenance funding commitment by the state/province, but such guarantees would need to be eternal, and eternal commitments are very hard to enforce.

Canadian and Australian readers who dream of a bigger central government role in infrastructure funding, this caution is for you! Think hard about what you want to federalize. If you're going to demand federal funding for infrastructure, you might want to demand life cycle maintenance funding instead of just building things that states and provinces can't afford to maintain. Think, too, about this.

strategic minds vs physical objects

Posted on October 18, 2011 in Meta

Sunday I sliced off the very tip of my right index finger while searching for a pair of scissors in the suitcase. The doctor called it a "guillotine wound."

As a touch typist, I've been contemplating topics that might be discussed without using the letters J, H, M, N, U, and Y, but the more likely outcome is a week or two of hiatus. Send brilliant guest posts!

how do you compare to your peers? should you care?

Posted on October 11, 2011 in Auckland, Brisbane, Calgary, Edmonton, Honolulu, Melbourne, Ottawa, Portland, Seattle, Strategic Transit Planning, Sydney, Urban Structure, Vancouver, Wellington

Admit it: You've always cared, at least in secret, about how you compare to your peers: your friends, your fellow students, your graduating class, your co-workers, your generation. Well, deep down, transit authorities and city governments care too, which is why comparing a city to other similar cities always gets attention.

Sometimes peer comparisons cause complacency, especially if you choose the wrong peers. Wellington has the highest transit mode share in New Zealand, but in a country with only one other big, dense city, that obviously shouldn't imply that it's reached nirvana. Working in greater Vancouver I always have to emphasize that they are doing so well by North American standards that they have to start comparing themselves to European port cities in their size class (Glasgow, Edinburgh, Copenhagen, Helsinki, Marseilles). My general advice: If your peer comparison says you're wonderful, throw a party and revel in this for 48 hours, then look for a more motivating group of peers.

At the other extreme, nothing is more motivating than being told that you're dead last among your peers. Earlier this year I worked (through my Australian employer MRCagney under the leadership of Ian Wallis Associates) on a peer comparison study for Auckland, New Zealand, which compared Auckland's transit performance with all the five biggest Australian cities plus a selection of North American ones. Download the full report here. Remember, if you're in any of the peer cities that it uses (Wellington, Brisbane, Perth, Adelaide, Sydney, Melbourne, Edmonton, Ottawa, Calgary, Vancouver, Honolulu, Portland, Seattle) this is your peer study too! Just keep the tables and refocus the text (citing the source of course!).

More generally, the report is a good illustration of how peer comparison can work at its best, and also of the cautions that must be shouted from the sidelines once the conclusions take fire in the media, as they certainly have in Auckland. From yesterday's New Zealand Herald:

Consultants have ranked Auckland last out of 14 cities – in New Zealand, Australia, Canada and the United States – included in a benchmark study for the average number of public transport trips taken annually by its residents.
Aucklanders also pay the highest fares of any of the cities, amounting to 24c for every kilometre travelled on the average 44 public transport trips they take each year, compared with 17c in Wellington.

The rest of the article is further grim statistics, plus quotations from political leaders demanding that something be done.

I'm sympathetic to Auckland Transport in this case. Remember, a city's transit performance is mostly about the physical layout of the city and the constraints on other modes; the quality of the transit system by itself can't overcome problems in those areas. The nature of the economy also matters. Wellington is much smaller but it has much more severe chokepoints in its urban structure. In fact, all travel between the northern and southern parts of the city must go through a single chokepoint less than 1 km wide, which is also the (very dense) downtown. Wellington's economy is dominated by government, which is generally a sector disposed to use transit heavily. All of these features are hugely important in driving Wellington's mode share above Auckland's, and yet they don't include anything about the respective quality of the transit systems.

Peer comparisons also carry the false assumption that everyone wants to be the same kind of city, and is therefore working to the same kind of goals. (This attitude, taken to extreme, produces the absurdity of top ten "best cities for transit" lists.) Low mode share for transit may mean your transit system is failing, but it may mean that it's not trying for mode share, or at least that it has other objectives or constraints that prevent it from focusing on that goal. It may just mean that your city has different values. It may mean the city stikes a different balance between cycling, transit, and walking based on its own geography.

Still, service quality matters, and there's a lot that Auckland can do. I hope the city's opinion leaders are listening to Auckland Transport as well as berating it, so that they understand the real choices that must be made to move Auckland forward. If there's a real conversation, great things can be accomplished.

sydney: new perils of privatisation

Posted on October 10, 2011 in Amusing, Ferries, Sydney

From today's Sydney Morning Herald:

The company that runs Australia's immigration detention centres has made the short list to operate Sydney's ferries. Harbour City Ferries and Transit Systems are the other two bidders on the list. Security company Serco has a contract with the federal government to run Australia's detention centres, which are the subject of a parliamentary inquiry after recent protests and unrest among detainees.

Insert your own quip here.

seeking the steve jobs of transit

Posted on October 8, 2011 in General

From Rob, who appears to have long experience in the transit business:

I've often wished for a Steve Jobs of transit. Someone with a vision of how it would work if "it just worked", and the dedication to make it so. Most transit is a huge compromise in service design, operating performance and customer communications, and its biggest challenge often is the willingness of its users and fans to overlook those compromises uncritically. We accept too much that we shouldn't.
I've known people I think are like Steve Jobs; maybe not as confident or charismatic, but systems-oriented with a keen awareness of how customers experience is affected by how transit works – and I find they are rarely in charge. We put people in charge who know about management and organizations, not the ones who have a laser focus on how to produce a product that delights the customer, or at worst works as expected without [the customer] thinking too hard about it.

This is not a critique of the organizational and management expertise that transit also needs. Steve Jobs had great managers without whom his work would have been impossible. The real challenge is to form mutually respectful partnerships — and ideally friendships — between great organization managers and creative, strategic thinkers like Jobs. The key to building these winning partnerships is to accept that almost nobody is a really great manager and a really great creative strategist. The two skills can fit together like lock and key, but only if they choose not to be intimidated by each other. You have to have the confidence that your partner, by exercising his skills, isn't diminishing your very different skills. In fact, he's implicitly praising them.

These partnerships happen now and then in city planning, and often in consulting on the planning side. But is your transit agency even looking for them? Some are.

steve jobs vs. market research

Posted on October 6, 2011 in Marketing, Public Outreach

From the NYT obituary of Steve Jobs:

Mr. Jobs’s own research and intuition, not focus groups, were his guide. When asked what market research went into the iPad, Mr. Jobs replied: “None. It’s not the consumers’ job to know what they want.”

This may sound blunt and arrogant, as fast-moving minds often do, but Matt Bai expands:

In other words, while Mr. Jobs tried to understand the problems that technology could solve for his buyer, he wasn’t going to rely on the buyer to demand specific solutions, just so he could avoid ever having to take a risk. This is what’s commonly known as leading.

This point has great relevance to transit and urban planning generally. Citizens express their desires lots of ways, but few of those expressions tell planners exactly what to do. "Research," as Jobs uses the term, probably means a very broad process of perceiving what customers are actually doing, how they're responding to existing products — many other sources apart from asking them what they want. It also means relating those desires to the some sense of what's mathematically and physically possible. The synthesis of these inputs requires a certain amount of science but also a certain amount of inspiration or instinct.

You can ask a citizen anything, but the trick is to figure out if the frame of reference you're using is the one that actually matters to their decisions, and even you get only part of your answer. Often we ask questions that express the questioner's interest rather than the citizen's. (In the extreme form, this becomes push-polling.) For example, suppose we ask: "Should we build light rail or a busway here?" Well, not everyone is interested in technology-choice questions, and from those people we'll get low-commitment answers that don't mean much. Some people are happy to say "no opinion," while others feel compelled to state a view no matter how faintly they may feel about it. These vagaries of mood or temperament make a huge difference to research outcomes, especially when the question isn't stated in a way that engages what the citizen actually cares about. (In focus groups, peer pressure makes "no opinion" less of an option, but that doesn't give me any more confidence that the right question has been asked, if indeed there even is a right question.)

So I would rather ask the public big questions about what they think transit is for, and what it should be trying to do. "Do you see transit in your community as primarily a social service for people who can't drive? If so do you think it should remain in that role?" "Should transit serve every bit of the city, or focus on areas where it can carry high ridership?" "Here are five possible goals that transit could focus on; what do you think should be the prioirty among them?"

But most importantly, we in the transit business have to think, not just analytically but in a more humanistic way that's open to inspiration and flashes of insight.

Because we have to take risks, and while you can analyze risks forever, only inspiration gives you the confidence to take one.

information request: fare revenue impact of free transfers

Posted on October 5, 2011 in Connections, Transfers, Fares, Information Requests

We're looking for case studies in which:

A transit agency that had been charging for transfers (changing from one transit vehicle to another) eliminated that charge.
No other major changes happened at the same time.
A result could be measured in fare revenue, and also ridership.

If anyone's familiar with cases, or with studies of this issue, please let me know. Thanks!

lamentation: bicycles vs transit?

Posted on October 3, 2011 in Advocacy, Cycling, Portland, Technophilia

From a correspondent in Portland:

Among my peer group [educated people in their 20s-30s] I see a "mono-modal" fixation on cycling, very similar to the attitude many drivers have that their primary mode should be everyone's primary mode. It really is remarkable how many young, affluent, educated folks living in inner Portland see cycling as the only legitimate travel mode for all people everywhere. My [peers] basically scoff at the idea that I might prefer to take the bus to and from school when it is rainy or dark out. I see walking, biking, and transit as three completely complementary modes that support a car-free or car-light lifestyle, but I'm realizing that in Portland at least there is a large group of people in the cycling community who see both cars and buses as the enemy, or at least not an option worth considering or supporting. This might help explain TriMet's underinvestment in the bus network, since politically active young people do not support transit.

I've been away from Portland too long to have my own impression, but if this is true it's certainly unfortunate. While there are some conflicts between bicycles and transit in road design, I have always tried to accommodate both. I don't necessarily believe bike lanes can be accommodated on every street, any more than transit is, but I do think both cycling and transit deserve and can have complete and functional networks.

How common is a monomodal fixation on bicycles? If so, why does it occur?

There's nothing wrong with cycling advocacy, or advocacy of any mode, until it becomes hostile toward other aspects of the full sustainable transport package. Wouldn't advocacy for the suite of sustainable transport options (walking, cycling and transit, supplemented by carsharing etc.) be more effective than endless conflicts among these modes?

wellington: a sensible tourist on the cable car

Posted on October 1, 2011 in Architecture, Technophilia, Wellington

This blog rarely goes on about interesting transit vehicles, since my main interest is in getting people where they're going in whatever vehicle makes sense for the purpose. But while working in Wellington last month, I made early morning ritual of climbing to the Botanic Gardens summit just west of downtown, and on one such walk I took some time to admire the cable car.

"Cable car" generally means any vehicle attached to a cable that provides the locomotion. The car has no engine, but an engine of some kind is moving the cable. The cable can be aerial (gondolas, aerial trams) or underground (San Francisco cable cars) or it can just lie on the surface in a special guideway, as in most funiculars. Wellington's is essentially a funicular: it runs in a dead-straight track up the side of a steep hill. The two cars are fixed to the ends of a single cable, connected at the top, so that they move in counterweight fashion, one car rising as the other descends.

Unlike most funiculars, though, it has more than two stations — five in fact. At Talavera station in the exact middle, tracks widen out so that the cars can pass. Everywhere else the cars share one track, but with two separate rollers for the two cables:

(In this case, the presence of just one cable means that one car is below us, the other above.)

The spacing of the other stations is limited by the design or the system, because when a car is at the station one up from the bottom, the other is stuck the same distance below the top. In Wellington, even spacing of stations — not always ideal for local geography — ensures that both cars are at stations whenever they stop.

But enough with technology fetishes. Why is this thing useful?

Easy: it's a straight line, running at high frequency, through high density, where competitors are at a disadvantage.

Cable cars (aerial or surface) can make sense in settings where you want a straight line up the side of a steep hill — especially if there's no straight road that a bus could follow. That's exactly what the Wellington line (marked by the five yellow pins) is:

The terminal stations are Lambton Quay in the heart of downtown and the Botanic Gardens summit. There's demand everywhere on this dense hillside. Botanic Gardens station offers a level walk into the fairly dense Kelburn district to the southwest, while Lambton Quay is right on the Golden Mile, where buses come every minute or less to take you north or south through downtown, and beyond.

The other stations are Victoria University, one down from the top, Talavera in the middle, and Clifton, one up from the bottom. Victoria University's campus is visible on the south side of the above image. It has its own bus services, but it's a short level walk along a terrace to its station.

And while climbing this hill is something I might do as early morning exercise, it's understandable that you might want an alternative to that. The climb is 120m of elevation gain in only 612m of horizontal length, a grade of nearly 20%.

But the real reason I thought to write about it is the interesting feature observable at the top.

The vehicles themselves are designed for their constant slope. The floor is always parallel to sea level while the car's structure is tilted 20% from the floor, to match the grade.

As a result, it's possible to open the car on both sides and produce a level boarding from the surrounding ground. Where the car dwells at the top, as in this image, you can even walk right through the car as though it were part of the sidewalk.

I'm always interested in ways to make transit feel more continuous with the pedestrian realm. I long for buses with precise docking for absolute level boarding — not just to eliminate the delay of wheelchair ramps but also to create a feeling that the bus is a moving piece of sidewalk, that you are not leaving the street to crawl into an oppressive enclosure. Local transit won't really feel effortless to use until we have this effect.

So that's why this image appealed to me, so much that I even indulged some uncharacteristic technology-fetishism. Because the effect in this picture in important, and if I need a cable car to get it, I'll take a cable car.

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