Today's View from Your Window Contest, by Andrew Sullivan, has transit clues!
Contest explained here. It's one of the best games online for serious geography and urbanism geeks.
public input into ongoing projects
A frequent reader asks
In your experience, what are the most effective means of maintaining public input into an ongoing transit project? Assuming they are a possibility, are formal advisory committees the way to go? Informal contact with the project team? Public meetings? A project storefront? What do you do to ensure that public concerns have some weight as the concept is translated into perhaps a less-than-ideal reality? If you have citizens' committees, do you prevent the involvement of people interested in seeing the project fail? For all of these, I am interested in the perspective from both sides – the public and the professional – and in any tips you might have.
Professionals, please leave your thoughts in the comments, including links to good resources on this. It's not my core speciality.
But in my experience there are three questions here:
- What media should be used for public communication? On this, I think the best practice is "get the information out there in every possible medium, and invite comment in every possible medium." Inclusion of non-techie people is important, which is why snailmail still matters. Public meetings require so much effort from the participants that they tend to attract only people with strong views, leading to unedifying shouting matches.
- Are there inner and outer circles of "the public"? One common strategy is to appoint a "project committee" or "stakeholder committee" of interested people, with the idea that these people will get to know the project better, debate it more deeply, and engage with the larger public about it. This last bit is usually what's missing. These committees really need to reflect stakeholder communities and participants must feel obliged to represent those communities, not just their own point of view.
But the hardest and most important question is "What is the public being asked?"
I think it's very common to ask the public very general "what do you think?" questions, on the assumption that this lets everyone express their view. It does that, but the answers to such vague questions are almost impossible to use inside the study, and a good part of the public will sense that.
That's why I try to use questions that ask the public to consider the real choices facing the city or transit system. That requires a process that listens and educates at the same time, and in which project planners give the public information and a framing of the problem. This post, despite a dead link, is a pretty good overview of that mode of thought. My network design course is also based on "planning games" that allow stakeholders to experience the tradeoffs themselves. It's the same idea.
maps and aesthetics: washington’s hidden spiral
Transit maps always express a choice about how you see the city. Do you want to show the city in its geographical detail? Or do you want to be able to show the structure of the transit system, which involves expanding some areas and reducing others, often leading to distortions of scale that mislead the geographically-minded rider? Like many, the classic Washington DC Metro map does this, shrinking outer distances and exploding inner ones.
Structure can be rendered many ways, and once you're free of literal geographic scale, it's tempting to create some other visual logic. Do you want to emphasise the concentric quality of your city, or do you want it to display many equally important points? Which is bigger, the lines or the stations? Do lines meekly serve stations, or are stations mere decorations on lines?
Even more basic, what kind of structure makes you happy? The designers of the Wellington, New Zealand transit map like diagonals, rounding all routings off to the nearest 45 degree angle.
It sacrifices certain geographical information to show the system in a certain pleasing way, which is fine.
Point is, you can find any balance of geographical accuracy, systemic clarity, and sheer visual pleasure, and still be accurate. As for whether it's useful, that depends on the audience and purposes.
So there's nothing technically wrong with mapping Washington DC's metro system like this (follow link for sharper one):
… as Andrew Bossi does. As a system map, it's a strong visual choice, but it's not inaccurate!
parents worry: my boy is too interested in bus schedules!
Ever seen a human-interest news story profiling someone for doing more or less what you did?
That could have been my first reaction to the Seattle Times profile of transit planner Ted Day, but there's no time for envy. The main story is that a boy who stayed out of trouble at age 10 by collecting and memorizing bus schedules turned out to be a successful family man and transit planner. Like all such "different drummer" narratives, perhaps it will help a few parents embrace the unexpected transit-geekery of their children, and speed the coming-out of kids who hide bus schedule collections in their mattresses out of fear of parental or social disapproval.
Not every boy who studies bus schedules at age 10 turns out like Ted Day. One turned out like me. My fine collection of 1970s and 80s bus schedules from Portland and Los Angeles is still in a box somewhere. I especially recall the Portland "East Burnside" timetable (c. 1973) which predates the numbering of the lines and reveals the evasive maneuvers that this bus made for decades before the 1982 advent of Portland's frequent grid.
So congrats to Ted Day for his well-deserved rise to fame! The human-interest potential of transit planners' lives is just beginning to emerge into public consciousness. Has your newspaper profiled one lately? 😉
reading human transit in a reader or rss feed?
The last major post may have been garbled in your reader output. The ungarbled version is here.
how to post long comments
Among the moronic features of the TypePad platform is a bias against long comments. Please be clear:
I value long comments, but am in the grips of a mindless machine that doesn’t.
The problem appears to arise if you’ve been typing in the comment window for a while. TypePad somehow decides that you’re “idle,” and when you post it rejects the comment, often with a perplexing message such as “we cannot accept this data.”
The workaround appears to be: Copy your comment. Open a new browser window. Navigate back to the post and to a new comment box. Paste your comment. Submit.
I know, it’s maddening. Let me know if you find a nonmaddening blogging platform.
reading human transit by email?
The last post was garbled on email-based readers. Please see the ungarbled one here.
How urbanist visionaries can muck up transit
Architects and urban visionaries play an incredibly important role in a leadership-hungry culture. They have to know a little bit about almost everything, which is hard to do. But for some reason, certain segments of the profession have decided that the basic math and geometry of transit isn't one of those things they need to know, even when they present themselves as transit experts.
To see what I mean, I encourage you to watch this short video from Gensler Architects in Los Angeles. It's a concise summary of all the crucial mistakes that you'll need to confront in much "visionary thinking" about transit. (If Gensler takes down the video, read on. I've inserted enough screenshots from it that you can follow.)
[NETWORK_LA transit from tam thien tran on Vimeo.]
The five most common "visionary" mistakes about transit, all on display in the video, are:
- Disinterest in costs and efficiency. Visionaries do need to set aside cost and efficiency for part of their brainstorming phase, because by doing so they might come upon an idea that's efficient and affordable in a completely new way. But they don't have a coherent idea until they've brought those factors back in, at least at the level of order-of-magnitude reasonableness. Sadly, some urbanists scoff when I use the word efficiency, assuming that this means I've lost touch with human needs, aspirations, aesthetics and values. In reality, efficiency means how much of those good things you can have in a world of limited resources. Even in the arts, we speak often of the efficiency or economy with which an artist achieves an aesthetic effect. (The Gensler video, for example, is efficient in displaying all five of these fallacies in only five minutes.)
- Fixation on transit technologies as though they were the essential distinction between different mobility outcomes. For more on this, see here.
- Confusion about scale. In transit, if it doesn't scale, it doesn't matter. Because visionary thinking often focuses first on a prototype – a tiny example of the hoped-for transformation — it often goes too far without thinking about scalability. Sure, this cool idea works in one suburb or in one cool building, but that says very little about whether it would work in a whole city. Gensler's particular error about scale is …
- Confusion about "flexibility," a dangerous slippery word. Gensler imagines that a demand-responsive style of transit, in which you make a request on your phone and the transit system somehow deviates to meet your personal needs, is scalable to a vast, dense city where the transit system is already very crowded much of the time. More on this below.
- Ignorance about what's already working, leading to premature demolition fantasies. If you already hate buses, you won't have much interest in understanding why so many people use them. Like many urbanist visionaries, Gensler doesn't appreciate the very high ridership and efficiency of the existing transit system across the core of Los Angeles. This allows them to jump to the conclusion that the system should be replaced instead of incrementally improved. (Tip: Prematurely dismissing the relevance of something that so many people clearly find useful is an excellent way to sound elitist, regardless of the nobility of your intentions.)
So watch the Gensler video if you can, but you can also follow along via my screenshots and comments below. You'll see these mistakes again and again in the urban visioning business.
0:27 Gensler states the question as "Get LA on transit HOW?" No argument with the question.
0:51 Transit is divided into a set of vehicle types, and these types (light rail, metro, bus) are confused with "methods" of transport. For more on the absurdity of treating bus/rail distinctions as primary, see here.
0:53 "We have only these methods. What if we added more?" An interesting question to which transit experts (and economists, and engineers) have a very good answer. The more competing systems you establish in the same market trying to do the same thing, the less well any of them will function, and the less investment any one of them will justify.
0:56 They now begin to analyze vehicles in terms of distance, sustainability, flexibility. What's missing? Cost! Efficiency! Some things are just wildly expensive relative to what they deliver. Darrin Nordahl has already been down this path, evaluating technologies by discussing only their supposed benefits. That's not evaluation, it's either aesthetic rumination or marketing. (Neither of those are bad things, but they have to be identified as what they are.)
1:20. They talk about distances but their graphic is talking about speeds. These are fair for personal modes but absurd generalizations for the transit modes. When your notion of "rail" conflates light rail, heavy metro rail subways, and 70 mile-long infrequent commuter rail, the word "rail" means nothing relevant about speed or travel distance, or any other transit outcome apart from capacity. (Note that the earlier claim "we have only these methods" implies that these three kinds of rail are the same thing in every way that matters.)
Likewise, if you think buses have an ideal distance, you're unclear on the role of local buses vs Bus Rapid Transit vs long-haul expresses, all of which are very successful in Los Angeles. Gensler imposes a "technology first" frame on the data, thereby concealing almost everything that matters about how transit gets people where they're going.
In transit, the real speed distinctions within transit are usually not direct results of technology. Speed is the result of how often you stop and what can get in your way. See here.
2:00. Staggering incoherence in comparing input (bus service) to an unrelated output (total ridership including rail). What's more, the numbers are misleading. Per the 2011 APTA Fact Book, Los Angeles MTA has America's 3rd highest total boardings and 2nd highest total bus boardings. In the context of its starved resources and the vagueness of public support for it, the Los Angeles bus system is working brilliantly.
2:26. Here is Gensler's biggest mistake:
Which of these two networks would you rather travel on?
Gensler has mistaken metaphor for logic. They think that "liberating" bus routes has something to do with liberating or enabling people. The idea is barely explained and totally incoherent.
Today, in our supposedly "inflexible" system, you'll find a bus going down a major boulevard with maybe 60 people on it. Some of them want to go somewhere straight ahead, some want to go to somewhere ahead and to the left, some want to to somewhere ahead and to the right. Fortunately, they are in a high frequency grid system, which will take all of them to their destination, either directly or via a connection to a north-south line, probably by a path similar to what they'd have followed if driving. So this huge number of diverse people making diverse trips are all moving toward their destinations on a reasonably direct path. This is the extraordinary power of the high-frequency grid. So instead, Gensler proposes bus lines should twist and turn just because somebody with an iPhone wants them to?
Personal technology has great opportunity to better inform us about all transit services, and it can transform the convenience of transit at low-demand places and times, by influencing the operations of low-ridership, low-capacity services, such as demand-responsive buses and taxis.
Quite possibly, personal apps will allow demand-responsive service to replace some low-demand fixed-route buses, which is fine with most transit planners. Those low-ridership buses run mostly for social-service or "equity" reasons, and if there's a more efficient way to do that, I expect many transit experts would be all for it. It would let them concentrate on the high-ridership, high-capacity services that can achieve a great deal of personal mobility and sustainability, very efficiently.
Successful high-capacity frequent transit needs to take on more of the rigidity of subways, in order to spread the benefits of subways (which we can't afford everywhere) more widely. That means it needs to be even more frequent, reliable, legible, permanent, and reinforced with infrastructure investment. Fortunately, within limited resources, many transit agencies are now trying to do that.
The video is full of entirely laudable and familiar green ideas, but then we get to this …
- 3:23 In Gensler's Los Angeles, every transit trip must be reserved. Do you really want to have to make an appointment with a single vehicle and driver, because that's the only way to make any use of all the buses swarming around you on unpredictable paths? Or might you prefer a simple frequent transit corridor where so many buses are coming all the time, in such a predictable pattern, that you can take any of them, and are thus almost guaranteed a vehicle soon even if one breaks down?
- 4:20 "What if we had PERSONAL service?" they ask? Well, the extreme of personal service would be low-ridership system in a tiny town, where the driver has time to learn everyone's name. Is that what Los Angeles wants to be? Or would you rather live in a city where you can get anywhere you want to go easily, starting right now, without making a reservation, and even with the option of spontaneously changing your path or destination, just like motorists do?
To me as someone who values my 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.
We've blown up transit networks before, of course, and Gensler's vision should remind us of what was thought about cars vs. transit in the 1940s. Like personal technology today, cars were just so wonderful for the individual that we just assumed the world could be made in their image. (The technical term for this idea — that the world will bend to reflect my emotional needs and enthusiasms — is narcissism.) So we made a deep investment in a car-and-highway technology that could not possibly scale to big cities. Gensler proposes the same mistake: Because our iPhones are so cool, they assume that the city, at every scale, can be reinvented around them.
For a more positive vision of the future of Los Angeles, one that begins by noticing the city's strengths and looking at how to build on them, see here and especially toward the end of an interview here.
who’s leading the non-car renaissance?
In the Atlantic today, Richard Florida announces that:
- the non-car renaissance is being led by relatively dense metro areas and university towns and
- that the strongest correlation with non-car use is belonging to his trademark Creative Class.
This will not be breaking news to anyone who's worked in transit for more than 15 minutes.
Before we make policy based on regression analyses like this, we need to think about which of these factors are durable, and which are ephemeral. As a transit network planner I feel much more confident basing my designs on long-term stable things like density, rather than ephemeral things like what the current generation seems to want.
It is also important to caution against any suggestion that "class," creative or otherwise, should guide transit planning decisions. Such thinking tends to result in "symbolic transit." See my recent article on a textbook example of this:
More importantly: if "creative class" simply means "relatively educated and open-minded people who are more adaptable than average," then of course they are best suited to non-car modes. Any growing trend relies on early adoption, which by definition is done by more open-minded and adaptable people. So a claim that a transit renaissance is led by the "creative class" is almost a tautology.
permanent weather and the civic image
Rain in Seattle. Sun in Los Angeles. Fog in San Francisco. Wind in Chicago. The endless summer nights of Helsinki or Edinburgh. How could we navigate without our stereotypes of the urban air and sky?
(Yes, this is one of those personal and literary ruminations about urbanism, almost free of transit content, cross-posted from the personal blog Creature of the Shade.)
In his odd novel Voyage to Pagany, the great modernist poet (but not novelist) William Carlos Williams tells of a self-absorbed man riding through Europe by train. At one point (adequate fragments here) he's delayed in the middle of the night in Genoa.
Genoa. The name sounded hollow, depressing as the coldly sulphurous gallery through which he was passing, baggage in hand …
The placename is a sponge for first impressions, and never quite shakes them off. For Williams's hero, "Genoa" means "night, don't know anybody, don't speak the language, poor me." Or to reduce this (literally) benighted city to one sentence:
I will never see the sun in Genoa.
But here's what's odd. When I read this chapter in graduate school, the only experience I'd ever had of Genoa was of passing through it at night on the train. Today, that remains my only experience of Genoa, so even now, when someone says "Genoa" I imagine a city at night. Northwest Italy isn't high on my list of urgent travel destinations, so it's quite likely that I too will never see the sun in Genoa, and hence never dissociate the city from this absurdly accidental recollection.
Professional thinkers-about-cities would never reduce their impression of a city to a story of something that happened to them there. But everyone else does this quite naturally; when I ask a person on the street what she thinks of a city, she'll often mention some joyous or traumatic recollection, presenting that as her lasting definition of the place. We urbanists are supposed to take pride in having a larger, grander view. But I bet most of us carry these silly but useful attitudes, at least when we get far down our personal list of Cities We Want to Think About.
Right now, you see, I don't feel a specific need to expand my awareness of Genoa, except to the extent that I want to expand my awareness generally. I wouldn't pass up an expense-paid visit to Genoa in the daytime, and would surrender my prejudice happily if I did. But failing that, the prejudice is working for me. It's painting a relatively unfamiliar part of Italy with a few touchstones of mood. Thanks to these quick associations, my near-total ignorance of northwest Italy, while still near-total, is packaged and marked with a couple of personal baggage tags, so I can haul it around as a familiar without having to look inside.
The baggage tags are personal, but they're also authorized by the Greater Truth of Literature. Anyone can pass through a city at night, but I passed through Genoa at night just as William Carlos Williams's hero did decades ago. I have a similar tag stuck on Bologna, where I once had a scare of thinking I had missed a late night train connection and would be spending the night on a station bench. I'd have forgotten the episode by now had Robert Dessaix's hero not had exactly the same experience, in his fine novel Night Letters. Nonfiction lies all the time, but fiction makes no truth claims and therefore can never be disproven, so it can sell itself as a Gateway to Deeper Truth even when it's just the whining of a man stuck in a train station. Williams and Dessaix tell me that I wasn't alone in my nocturnal and unwanted visits to Genoa and Bologna, that these experiences actually Resonate with the Human Experience. So I remember them.
Thus authorized, it feels good, at least to me, to permanently associate cities with atmospheric conditions and their related moods. Even dealing with cities I know well (Seattle, San Francisco, Los Angeles) I find a pleasure in wrapping each in the stereotypical weather condition (rain, fog, sun, respectively) and experiencing all variations from that as an engaging nuance. For cities I don't know it's much easier: for me it's always night in Genoa. These simplifications are silly but seem useful in maintaining a mental structure of reality on which more interesting and reality-based thoughts can sometimes sprout.
Now and then I notice myself consciously choosing a new atmospheric prejudice. I was in Chicago over Memorial Day weekend 2011, and have chosen, for now, to think of Chicago as a city where towers loom in ominous chilly fog and thunderstorms.
On my stay there I had two days of that, followed by two days of hot sun. The fog and storms, I decided, are the Chicago I want, because they allowed me to experience the downtown skyscrapers as overpowering, exactly as they were intended. Structures vanishing into the clouds are not just tall, but unknowably, maybe infinitely tall.
Chicago was built to turn a vast frontier into commodities and profit. The many rail lines emanating from it look like force-lines of a blast, so to be at the center of the blast is, well, like the end of a science fiction film when we finally get inside the Center of Ominous Power. I wanted it to be grand but in mysterious, overpowering, intimidating way.
My ideal Chicago, in short, is a meteorological projection of a conventional story about what makes Chicago unique. So I feel briefly wise, though actually just prejudiced, when I look at my images of Chicago in such conditions, as though the city is telling me a story I want to hear …
In such a perfectly symbolic city, a photo that might otherwise be a joke, "Christ the Steakhouse," isn't funny at all.
Nor can "Time" be just the name of a media corporation.
Then the sun came out, and it was all flatter, more like a city anywhere in the midwest. On a long hike north from the loop, Michigan Avenue looked like Singapore's Orchard Road, Lincoln Park looked like a number of great midwestern city parks, the Clark Road business districts looked nice or not-nice in familiar ways, and the only glorious uniqueness was that my hike ended at a well-known religous site for green urbanists: Wrigley Field, a Major League Baseball Stadium with Practically No Parking.
By then, it was too dark to photograph, so as I sorted photographs in an about-to-close Starbucks in what would have been the shadow of the stadium walls, I thought "this is nice, Wrigley Field at night," which is perilously close to "Wrigley Field is night." And indeed, not being much of a baseball fan, It's quite possible I'll never see the sun there.