Placeholder for discussion of the to-via problem.
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Placeholder for discussion of operating cost.
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Placeholder for discussion of personal mobility.
8
Test page for Chapter 8 detail.
los angeles: deleting some lines can be fair
The New York Times today bewails the loss of Los Angeles bus line 305, which soon will stop running diagonally across the city's grid, from Watts to Beverly Hills and Westwood.
NYT reporter Jennifer Medina assumes this is purely a victimization-of-the-poor story, starting with this observation:
The 305 was one of several lines created under the consent decree, and it is the only direct route from the city’s impoverished southern neighborhoods to its affluent West Side, where legions of janitors, nannies and maids work each day.
Sounds sad, and it's easy to fill an article with interviews with 305 riders who will experience the deletion as a hardship. But as that paragraph should warn us, 305 was a symbolic service. It cannot have been relevant to very many people, not even to many people in the targeted demographic ("janitors, nannies, maids" according to the NYT). Why? If you explore the route and schedule [ Download PDF ] and look at how the route fits into the larger network ("System map overview" here), you'll notice:
- Line 305 is a diagonal shortcut across a high-frequency grid, where trips between anywhere and anywhere can usually be made on lines running every 15 minutes or better with some are far more frequent than that. Meanwhile, the Line 305 frequency is every 40-60 minutes. [PDF] That means that the 305 is the fastest path between two points on the line only if it happens to be coming soon. If you just miss one, there's another way to get there faster, via the much more frequent lines that flow north-south and east-west across this entire area.
- The 305's low frequency exposes its riders to the risks of waiting for a single bus: you're basically making an appointment with one driver who may not show up for a variety of reasons. Routing the same trips via the high-frequency grid means much higher reliability, because the abundance of buses along a line means you are less dependent on any one of them.
- Most important, the alleged target demographic — trips from the "poor south" to the "affluent west" for domestic workers — was mostly not served by the 305. Both the "poor south" and the "affluent west" are enormous areas. So no one bus line was ever going to connect all or even most of the "poor south" with all or even most of the "affluent west."
These points, but especially the last, identify a public transit service as symbolic. Symbolically, the 305 links the "poor south" and the "affluent west," and thus helps everyone feel good about having served domestic workers. In fact, the 305 runs through a small part of the vast "poor south" and a small part of the vast "affluent west," but it's still useless for most of the people making that kind of trip, because both areas are so large that no one bus line, or even five, could link all of the likely origin-destination pairs between them.
(You could take other buses in each area and transfer to the 305, but the low frequency of the 305 makes this very risky. Once you've accepted the need to connect, you might as well ride along the main grid and connect with a high-frequency line to take you where you're going.)
This problem is why frequency and connections were invented. The governing principle of transit in these core parts of Los Angeles is the high-frequency grid, which allows everywhere-to-everywhere travel at high frequencies with at most one connection. Yes, it may be sad that some domestic workers who are used to zero-transfer trips are now going to have a one-transfer trip, but that only means that 305 riders will have the same level of transit mobility that everyone else has, including most domestic workers. It also means that Los Angeles transit will be treating all of this demographic equally, rather than arbitrarily preferring people whose path happens to lie along Line 305.
The other moral of this story is even simpler: If your mission is to serve a whole city or region, designing transit routes around any self-identified group of people is almost always a bad idea. Most successful and attractive transit seeks maximum versatility, by serving the most diverse possible range of demographics, trip purposes, and origin-destination pairs. You can make exceptions where a single demographic group produces sufficiently massive ridership, as in some commute markets. But in general, the way people self-organize and self-identify politically is a bad guide to how to meet their transit needs efficiently. Everyone can draw the perfect transit line just for their interest group, but such proposals tell you nothing about what a good transit system would look like.
Nobody should be happy about the severe cuts being imposed on many US transit agencies that urgently need to move in the opposite direction. But as in San Francisco in 2009, cuts are sometimes an opportunity to delete services that have passionate, well-connected defenders, but that simply don't make sense if your goal is a complete network that people can use to go wherever they're going.
vancouver: loving the city, on plywood
This isn't about transit, but it's about loving the city. For the holiday weekend, some selections from the plywood that still covers storefronts broken in Vancouver's 2011 Stanley Cup Riot. These are from the Chapters bookstore at Robson & Howe.
frequent-rider discounts to decongest the peak?
Just in from the Aspen Ideas Festival, via Alexis Madrigal at the Atlantic. Stanford Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Professor Balaji Prabhakar thinks he has the solution to peak overcrowding.
The frequent commuter program has two goals. One is to increase people's loyalty to the public transport system. We want people to be disloyal to their cars, to cheat on their cars. And the second major goal is to decongest the peak time trains and buses. The problem is that it is unpleasant to take a trip during the peak time. If we could achieve both goals with the frequent commuter project, it would be great.
The nice thing about this project is that it is going to do exactly what the airline miles do. You take a 10 kilometer trip, you get 10 credits. And Singapore can measure the kilometers. But if you make that same trip in the off-peak time, you'll get 30 credits. This creates new bonding between you and the system. People don't think of the indignity of taking a three-stop trip on their preferred airline versus a direct cheaper flight sometimes. In fact, they see the angle as, "I'm earning more miles."
Does anyone with regular experience in transit think this is a good idea? If so, I'd like to hear. My first reaction:
This sounds like a very very complicated way to do discounts for off-peak riders, and to reward very regular riders. The fact is, the transit industry already has a system for rewarding frequent riders; it's called a monthly or annual pass.
A simpler solution to the peak overcrowding problem is to provide discounts for off-peak trips, as Seattle, for example, has done for decades. This costs very little to administer and has the desired effect much more directly.
When the need for sheer service is so urgent, why would a transit agency take on the massive administrative cost of a frequent-rider program, when the same money could go into driving buses and trains instead?
I'm sure transit professionals will appreciate the interest from the "big ideas" people. But from Madrigal's summary, this idea sounds like a fun metaphor inappropriately applied, suggesting the lack of any technical understanding of the transit capacity problem.
But I'm curious what others think …
reims: the “strong lines” of the “bus-tram network”
The opening of a new tram (streetcar) line is usually the occasion for lots of hype and celebration about trams. But Reims, France is using the opening day of a new tram to pitch a newly integrated network, the "Réseau Bus-Tram." The term clearly invites us to stop thinking of buses and trams as separate things, and forming attachments to one or the other.
Their description of it in their timetables [PDF] shows a focus on promoting a network of main lines (Lignes fortes), which consist of two tram lines and five bus lines, all very frequent and designed to complement each other. The name lignes fortes suggests not just main lines but also (more literally) strong lines, strong enough to be the structure that supports all the other transit lines in the city.
(Just home from Halifax. More on that soon, though come to think of it, this post is about Halifax too, and about a lot of other cities …)
the car vs. personal technology (quote of the week)
"Previous generations found freedom and flexibility through the car. But Generation Ys find their freedom and flexibility by staying connected to their friends, family and workplaces through the various information devices – like their laptops, or iphones.
"They can stay connected on a bus or a train. They can bring the office with them. They can bring their study with them. They can bring their friends with them. They can't if they're driving."
— Peter Newman, Curtin University, Perth, Australia, quoted in the West Australian
Joshua Arbury of Auckland Transport Blog ruminates further.
information requests: the copyedit edition
I'm in the copyedit phase of my book, which I've been sternly advised is my last chance to substantially change the text. So of course I'm stumbling on lots of odd little uncertainties, and I have a few questions for transit and transport experts out there.
Feel free to help me out on any of these! (Try not to say anything too immortal in the comments, as this post will be deleted when it's served its purpose.)
- Roughness. Based on usage I've heard from traffic engineers, I use this word to mean "delay in a traffic lane adjacent to a curb or parking lane caused by events such as delivery trucks and taxis stopping for customers, cars engaged in parallel parking movements, car doors being opened into your lane, slow cyclists sharing the traffic lane, and so on." But attempts to google a definition founder on the more common sense of "pavement roughness." Is roughness the right word for what I mean? What word would you use? I have my answer on this one: friction.
- Relationship of Ridership to Density. Rutherford and Spillar (1998) find that in the range of densities covering most North American urban areas, ridership's relationship to density is an upward curve. That is, if you control for service quality, if suburb A is twice as dense as suburb B it will generate much more than twice the ridership. Has anyone done or seen more recent research proving or disproving the same point?
- Deterrent Effect of Various Kinds of Delay. The Transit Capacity and Quality of Service Manual (2nd ed) presents these figures for how much different kinds of waiting time discourage ridership, compared to 1.0 for riding time. For example, it states that on average, a minute of walking time has the same deterrent effect as 2.2 minutes of riding time. These numbers are sourced, however, on a wide range of studies dating back to the 1960s. Has anyone seen anything more recent?
Delay Type: Walk Initial Wait Ride Wait for Connection Minimum 0.8 0.8 1.0 1.1 Average 2.2 2.1 1.0 2.5 Maximum 4.4 5.1 1.0 4.4 - Worker-Driver service. Do any transit agencies in the developed world run worker-driver service, where a commuter bus is driven by someone actually making the commute, who is hired as a part time employee by the transit agency? I'm aware of two outer-suburban agencies near Seattle that do this. Is it commonplace somewhere outside my awareness? UPDATE: Just to be clear, I'm not talking about vanpools, which are for particular groups of people by pre-arrangement. I'm talking about public transit vehicles running along routes, collecting fares, open to anyone.
- Driver shift start-end locations. It's universal, in my experience, that driver shifts must end where they began. The need to return drivers (on the clock) to their point of origin is a large part of the hidden cost of one-way commute express services. Are there common labor arrangements in the developed world in which a driver clocks out at a different place from where he clocked in?