Human Transit

updated: another weird way to measure “best cities for transit”

Posted on May 18, 2011 in Advocacy, Honolulu

UPDATE: This post in its original form happened when I had the Atlantic article article on the new Brookings report, but couldn't find the report itself. As it turned out, the Brookings report is much smarter than the Atlantic article made it sound. In particular, it appears to have been the Atlantic, not Brookings, who decided that this is a "10 best" story. I've made minor corrections to revise the attribution, but watch soon for a series of posts responding to the Brookings report more fairly. I'll have several things to say about it, some of them critical, over the next few days.

The esteemed Brookings Institution US magazine The Atlantic says that America's best city for transit is … <drumroll> … Honolulu!

Sooner or later, everyone ends up on a "10 best" list. This time around (apart from Honolulu) Brookings seems to be reaching out to southwestern cities that feature vast grids of fast car-centered arterials spreading out across any available flat land. Are those the best cities for transit? Well, maybe it's just their turn.

The Brookings top 10:

Honolulu, HI
San Jose – Silicon Valley, CA
Salt Lake City, UT
Tucson, AZ
Fresno, CA
Denver, CO
Albuquerque, NM
Las Vegas, NV
Provo-Orem, UT
Modesto, CA

As regular readers of this blog understand, "best city for transit" is a meaningless term. There are many ways to define "best," and we don't always agree with ourselves on which one matters, let alone agree with anyone else.

But the Brookings definition, as described in the Atlantic article, is especially perverse, even by "10 best" standards:

Brookings graded each city according to two criteria — coverage (the share of Americans within 3/4 miles from a transit stop) and job access (the share of city jobs accessible within 90 minutes of transit) — to determine the ten best performing cities for public transportation.

I have no idea what "within 90 minutes of transit" means, and the original report doesn't appear to be on the Brookings website. [UPDATE: Now I do. Look for a post on this soon.]

But residential coverage, as a primary indicator of transit quality, is a very loaded way of thinking about "best," especially if you care about transit sustainability outcomes that depend on ridership. Many people are within walking distance of a bus stop but not within walking distance of service that's remotely attractive in terms of frequency, speed and reliability. (Even more are within "air distance," which is what Brookings seems to refer to.)

Due to this definition, the Brookings Atlantic list comes to focus on rather low-density, car-dependent cities that happen to have good transit coverage. The cities listed have transit systems that are complete in terms of getting close to almost every home, but in low-density cities this is usually achieved by sacrificing frequency, speed, and even directness. For example, if you really want to maximise your residential coverage without spending money, and thus satisfy the Brookings criterion, just design routes like this:

This is what "residential coverage" standards encourage transit planners to do! So Brookings needs to explain how an abundance of transit routes that look like this could indicate a "best city for transit."

Then there's a pedestrian environment. Many of these cities are hard to walk in, and transit especially often delivers you to a busy arterial where you'll have difficulty walking to nearby destinations.

Finally, of course, "residential coverage" is about how many people have access to the system, which has nothing to do with who finds it useful. In fact, a transit system that's trying to maximize its relevance is always trying to push residential coverage standards down so that they can focus more service on dense areas where residents are more likely to want to build their lives around transit and other sustainable modes.

UPDATE: Having now perused the Brookings report, I stand by these last three paragraphs, but will expand on them soon. I'm relieved to know that Brookings's framing of the issue is smarter than the Atlantic made it sound.

Still, a report like this from a distinguished institution raises great opportunities to question some of the more common assumptions about how transit should be compared across cities. So I take issue with their reliance on city limits and Metropolitan Statistical Areas, among other things, not to criticize Brookings but simply to encourage more nuanced and coherent explanations of this kind of statistical work. More posts on these critiques in the future, starting here.

washington: what makes a great subway map?

Posted on May 16, 2011 in Maps, Marketing, Navigation, Washington DC

What should Washington Metro's next subway map look like? Greater Greater Washington is running a map contest where you can compare a number of designs, and choose your favorite. Can you improve on the existing one, pictured here?

Even if you're nowhere near Washington, perusing these maps will help you articulate your own views. For example:

Should a subway map be largely to scale, so that you can see the distances invovled, or distorted so that complex areas are easy to see?
How much detail about the surrounding geography should be shown?
Should it show non-subway services that also provide important links between stations? In Washington, for example, all the subway lines go downtown, so many other services (bus, future light rail) are useful for connecting between outer parts of different lines. Should the whole web of those possibilities be shown?

Go vote! GGW has done a great job cultivating public interest in transit details, and steering the public debate toward clearer thought about these practicalities. Help them out!

livability vs dynamism (quote of the week)

Posted on May 15, 2011 in Meditations, Vancouver

On livable cities lists (like this one):

Ricky Burdett, who founded the London School of Economics’ Cities Programme, says: “These surveys always come up with a list where no one would want to live. One wants to live in places which are large and complex, where you don’t know everyone and you don’t always know what’s going to happen next. Cities are places of opportunity but also of conflict, but where you can find safety in a crowd. “We also have to acknowledge that these cities that come top of the polls also don’t have any poor people,” he adds.
And that, it seems to me, touches on the big issue. Richard G Wilkinson and Kate Pickett’s hugely influential book The Spirit Level: Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better (2009) seems to present an obvious truth – that places where the differential in income between the wealthiest and the poorest is smallest tend to engender a sense of satisfaction and well-being. But while it may be socially desirable, that kind of comfort doesn’t necessarily make for vibrancy or dynamism. If everybody is where they want to be, no one is going anywhere.
Edwin Heathcote, Financial Times

Heathcote’s whole article is superb. (Small caution: anyone who loves Vancouver will need to stifle some outrage at the sweeping and sometimes false generalities about the city. But the larger point is worth taking in.)

downtown networks: the oblique approach

Posted on May 13, 2011 in Downtowns, Seattle, Sydney, Urban Structure

How important is it that the transit services converging on downtown all go right to the core of downtown's demand? In a city with a strong downtown, a reactive, demand-driven view of planning will add more and more transit into downtown as demand requires, because the loads are always highest there. But sometimes, it can make sense to avoid the center of downtown, or to slide past downtown along one edge.

Zach Shaner's new proposal for the core area of Seattle is a nice example. (Click to enlarge and sharpen, or see JPG here: JPG )

You don't have to know Seattle to follow this. The core of downtown is the little shaded box on the left, where LINK light rail will be in a subway and other frequent buses will run on the surface. Most of the rest of the map area is also dense, so this is an area where you would expect a high-frequency grid to be possible, easily serving trips from anywhere to anywhere.

But the map area is also ferociously hilly, so fitting the classical grid to this terrain has always been a struggle. Still, Zach suggests that once the LINK light rail extension northward opens, ending at the University of Washington just off the north edge of the map, something remarkably gridlike might come into being.

Several of the design principles that I often advocate are at work here. First, Zach has focused on running on the fewest possible streets so as to provide the maximum possible frequency. Second, he's mapped both the existing and proposed networks so that you can see this frequency difference.

But he's also provided a nice example of the oblique approach to downtown, which is a way of balancing the distributive quality of a grid with the need to serve downtown's concentration of demand.

Look at the magenta line coming from the southeast. It's Line 7, now the single busiest bus line in Seattle. Off the map to the south, it extends about 5.5 km (3.4 mi) onward through dense, old, and historically low-income areas of the Rainier Valley. It touches the rail line at Mount Baker station, just inside the map, but it flows onward into the city, currently going right through downtown.

Zach proposes instead that Line 7 approach downtown but then bypass it just to the east, via Boren Avenue. He would do this to create a new crosstown (north-south) opportunity to reach dense north parts of downtown (including the South Lake Union redevelopment area and Seattle Center, which is right where Line 7 exits the map on the west edge) without going right through downtown's heart.

What would the dense downtown ridership of Line 7 do? Well, some of it would transfer to LINK where the two lines touch at the south edge of the map. Others, depending on exactly where in downtown they were going, might transfer to any of several very frequent east-west services crossing the line. But many who now seem to be going downtown would reveal that they're really going elsewhere. This is the key.

Line 7 ridership shows massive boarding and alighting downtown, and downtown is certainly an overwhelming destination. But you always have to ask if the concentration of downtown boardings is evidence of what people want or what the current network structure requires of them. People going to the dense and fast-growing areas on the north edge of downtown will find Zach's revision a dramatic improvement. Many others may be going still further north, to anywhere in the northern half of the city, in fact; they currently have to go through downtown to make their connections, because that's where their bus goes, but they could make the same connections to northward services from the revised Line 7, often with quite a savings of travel time.

Obviously, I don't have the data to validate exactly how many people are in each of these categories. I'm not even advocating Zach's design, but I do think it illustrates an important design concept, one that you will never think of if you're focused entirely on where your current ridership patterns seem to be leading.

Many major cities are facing unmanageable volumes of buses squeezing through a tight downtown. Sydney, where I lived for five years, has a remarkably similar predicament to Seattle's. One solution, in Sydney as in Seattle, is to let go of the idea that radial services aimed generally for downtown need to go right through the very center of it. If there is a sufficient diversity and richness of connection opportuntiies for reaching various parts of downtown, you can often create a better design by sliding past downtown obliquely, as Zach proposes that Line 7 should do.

I don't advocate or oppose Zach's design, but I do think it's a nice illustration of how to fit the "everywhere to everywhere" network design principles (such as the high frequency grid) to a very difficult terrain. It also raised some interestingly contrasting comments from different Seattle transit experts who've seen it; more on that in another post.

UPDATE: Zach explains his proposal to the Seattle transit community here.

vancouver cartographers and map geeks!

Posted on May 12, 2011 in Maps, Vancouver

I have a fast, fun project for a cartographer or map-geek adept at making maps that are both beautiful and accurate. The project is to help me create a map of a fictional city, for use in my transit planning short course. The final product will be a map about 1×1.5m, showing arterials, landforms, and shadings to indicate density. There’s lots of opportunity to interact with me in refining the ideas and helping me make choices that speed up the process while improving the product.

If interested, please hit the email button under my photo in the next column, and send me a quick note about your experience, relevant samples, and some sense of rates. If desired, free registration for the course could be part of the package.

Tough part: Fast turnaround. Final final needed by June 9, which means complete draft needed by June 1, which means we need to get started next week. Probably not fulltime, but certainly some focused work.

stuff you need to know

Posted on May 9, 2011 in Basics, Meta

If you want to do things with transit, you need to understand some basics about its geometry and costs, facts that may raise interesting questions about your own goals. Continue Reading →

bus signage: a literary view

Posted on May 7, 2011 in Amusing, Art, Language, Marketing, Navigation, Washington DC

A great exterior sign on a transit vehicle conveys empowering information with just a few words. In the last post, I suggested we could learn a lot from the way San Francisco does it.

Among the many excellent comments, Matt Johnson shared an example of a Prince George's County (Maryland) sign that's typical of what many other transit agencies do. To me, it overflows the bounds of wayfinding and can only really be appreciated as poetry, so on a rainy Saturday morning, I'm going to let myself riff on it a bit. The text:

17 MOUNT
RAINIER/IKEA
(NORTHBOUND)
HAVE A
NICE DAY
DRIVE SAFELY
(repeats)

That's six pages of one-line text. Matt says each line displays for 10 seconds. That would mean it takes a minute to see the whole sign, which must be an exaggeration. Matt probably means "each line displays for what feels like forever," and usually 2-3 seconds are enough to create that effect.

Obviously this is a limited sign, apparently not able to hold more than 12 characters, but as we all know, formal constraints like length limits are often liberating. Much of the joy of art lies in watching creativity press against some kind of limitation. If you didn't learn this from reading sonnets or writing haiku, you've probably learned it from Twitter.

In the literature world, it's common to see great poetry published with some kind of annotation that helps pry the piece open for the reader. So just for fun, I thought I'd do one on this. As literary critics like to say, there's a lot here.

17 MOUNT

The poem begins with a burst of masculine energy, ambitious, thrusting upward, perhaps with a tinge of hope?

RAINIER/IKEA

In one line, the poem explodes into many dimensions of significance. Indeed, we could say that this is the line where the sign reveals itself as a poem.

First of all, the artificial separation of "Mount Rainier" into two lines, technically called enjambment, recalls some of the great suspenseful line-breaks of modernist poetry. William Carlos Williams, say:

So much depends
upon
a red wheel
barrow
glazed with rain
water
beside the white
chickens

In "RAINIER/IKEA" the slash (/) could be a meta-poetic reference. When we quote poems in the middle of a paragraph, we use the slash to indicate the line breaks ("So much depends / upon / a red wheel / barrow …") So the slash used mid-line in poetry signals a winking inversion of that convention. As in many arts, postmodern consumers know they're looking at an artifice, so the artwork gains credibility by saying "I know I'm just a poem," or whatever. The mid-line slash could be a clever way of doing that.

Has any punctuation mark become as meaningless as the slash? In signage it can mean 'or' (as when it separates two alternative destinations served by branches), or it can separate two descriptions of the same thing, or it can mean "between" as in "from one of these to the other." Here, the poem doesn't let on what it means. Only patient contextual research has established that the relevant meaning here is "between." This bus runs from Mount Rainier to Ikea, or from Ikea to Mount Rainier.

Still, the ambivalence invites us to imagine other possible relationships between Rainier and Ikea. For example, we can notice the strangeness of conjoining a permanent-sounding placename with the name of a business. What would happen to this sign, and this route, if the Ikea moved or merged? Mountains don't move, we note, which is why we name neighborhoods after them.

As if that all weren't enough, "RAINIER" in all caps can't signal that it's a proper name, as "Rainier" would do. Is the bus promising to take us somewhere where it rains more than it does here?

(NORTHBOUND)

Parentheses are unusual on electric bus signs, and they're not too common in poetry either. Literally, parentheses mean "this might be interesting but don't let it distract you." So to use a parenthesis on an entire line of text, which forces itself on your attention for a few seconds, contradicts the basic meaning of a parenthesis. As always, that's how we know to look beyond the basic meaning, to look at the sign as a poem.

Yet the visual look of parentheses also suggests a kind of protective enclosure, like two hands cupping a fragile little idea. Is this bus insecure about being northbound? Is it afraid that "northbound" is not what everyone wants to hear?

Compass directions are tricky, of course, because not everyone knows them. I'm told that on the North American prairies, where all roads are north-south or east-west, some people develop such a compass-based sense of space that they'll refer to the southeast burner on their stove. This bus isn't in such a place, though; suburban Maryland has lots of diagonal and curving roads at various angles, so perhaps the parentheses are apologetic in the sense of "we're actually going north, but if you can't think about that, it's ok. We're not trying to seem that we're smarter than you. Like Mister Rogers, we like you just the way you are."

All this nuance and richness would have been lost if the sign had tried to tell people what the bus does. In that case, it would say either MOUNT RAINIER or IKEA, but not both, depending on which way it's going. That would be Zen in its transparency, but this poet has already signaled that Zen is not his genre.

HAVE A

A what? Again, the line break creates suspense. Am I going to like this? Should I be hopeful or scared?

NICE DAY

Comforting, unpretentious closure to the suspense. Yet even here, we can wonder. "NICE DAY" displays all by itself for a few seconds, so if you see the sign then, it seems to say "It's a nice day!" If the bus says "NICE DAY" as it comes at you through a blizzard, you might get a deeply spiritual message: "Whatever's happening, this is a nice day, because it's the present and that's the only thing we have." (The saccharine level in this sentiment is easily turned up or down to suit your taste; that's the liberating quality of the simple "NICE DAY.")

DRIVE SAFELY

Here we thought the sign was just for us transit customers! In fact, it's talking to motorists! Poems often take dramatic turns by suddenly enlarging or shifting the audience. It's as though we thought we were in an intimate space walled with warm curtains, listening to a poetry reading, when suddenly the curtains drop and we're in the middle of a stadium. T. S. Eliot was a master at keeping us wondering where we are and who's watching, and playing with our desire to be sure about that. Who is the audience, really? How big and diverse is it? For that matter, is anyone paying attention? Great postmodern questions, all, and in the poem's climactic moment, we finally confront them.

The sentiment is finely tuned. Like "HAVE A / NICE DAY," "DRIVE SAFELY" is strategically commonplace, as though the bus company is trying to assure us that it shares our values. Still, "DRIVE SAFELY" refers to the possibility of danger. You can read it as plaintive ("Please don't run into us or our customers!") or as confident, maybe even with the necessary toughness of the policeman ("We've looked danger and tragedy in the eye, and we're trying to protect you from it, so don't mess with us.")

This, of course, is the basic ambivalence of every bus's stance in the modern city, especially the noisy diesel bus. As a bus operator, you know that your mass, noise, and vibration aren't entirely welcome on most streets, yet you're trying to perform an essential service. Firefighters are in that situation too, but you can't command the deference that fire trucks do, because it's your job to be routine and predictable even though that almost implies being unappreciated. How can you get some appreciation? Say what people on the street want to hear. "HAVE A / NICE DAY / DRIVE SAFELY." Who can argue with that?

And who cares if, while that message is playing, nobody can tell which bus this is? That's how you know this is poetry.

bus signage can be beautiful

Posted on May 5, 2011 in Information Requests, Marketing, Navigation, San Francisco

… so long as you find beauty in anything that conveys a vast amount of content in the least possible space, or with the least possible complexity.

Perhaps this is a distinctly Zen sense of beauty, but it's also close to what mathematicians and scientists often mean by elegance.

If you know San Francisco, you know where Geary Blvd. is and you probably have a sense that the VA Hospital is out toward the west end of it somewhere. So this sign tells you a surprisingly complete story about what this bus does. This makes it useful not just as information but also as gentle passive advertising. Anyone can notice this sign out of the corner of their eye, and pick up a bit of information about the transit system ("there's a bus heading out Geary from here … good to know …")

For decades, San Francisco and Portland have used this simple style for all of their signage. I discussed how it works in Portland here. Even back in transit's "age of vinyl," San Francisco used separate roller signs for name and destination, so that they could present the same information in the same pattern consistently. (Photos were also blurrier back then!)

Many other cities, including Sydney and Seattle, habitually turn it upside down, so on the 38 above they might have said "38 VA HOSPITAL via Geary." A Sydney sign might read "380 DOVER BCH via Oxford St." I find that less intuitive, because the path the bus follows is usually more useful than the final destination in determining if the service is useful to you. Still, it's understandable in Sydney where street names change so frequently that it's hard to associate bus routes with them, as "38 GEARY" does.

But this post is actually an information request. Have you seen bus exterior signs that convey a lot of information briefly in an interesting way, either examples of the above or of other ideas? If so, please link or send them to me. I'm collecting them for a project.

Meanwhile, for a more literary perspective on bus signage, see here!

“ten best” rankings: the #1 way to confuse and disempower

Posted on May 2, 2011 in Advocacy, Journalism

When an article promises to reveal the "ten best" transit systems or colleges or corporations, why do we care? Why do we even think such a list could be meaningful?

Well, how would you react if a major news magazine published definitive research on the "ten best fruits"?

Imagine it. The timeless standards (apple, orange, grape) are in the #3-5 positions. This confirms just enough of our long-standing assumptions to give the ranking system credibility. But the fast-surging pomegranate is now #1, the bratty little blueberry is #2, and more scandalous, some long-trusted fruits have crashed out of the top 10. Where did the banana (#21) go wrong?

The list would also contain some entries meant to surprise you. You're supposed to think: "Wow, the mushy little kiwifruit is now one of the ten best fruits? When did that happen? I'd better buy this magazine and get the details! Maybe the kiwifruit deserves another look!"

No, that would be silly, because almost anyone can see that "best fruit" is a meaningless term. You could do a list of the most popular fruits, the sweetest fruits, the most sustainably cultivated fruits, the best fruits for various kinds of nutrition, or the most important fruits for the Solomon Islands economy. But a list of the "ten best fruits" would be nonsense. We each have many different demands of a fruit, but those demands aren't all important in the same way at the same time. Most of us couldn't even form our own absolute definition of "best fruit," let alone try to get anyone to agree with it. In fact, we woudn't even try. The whole idea is obviously silly.

So why do we look twice at a list of top ten US transit systems? Why would a major magazine think we would care?

Well, the fruit analogy suggests that when it come to transit systems (or colleges) people either (a) assume that everyone's idea of a "good" transit system is the same or (b) just don't want to think about what they want from their transit system.

As in any business, journalists may think they're responding to their readers' desires, but they're also helping to forge those desires.

If ten-best lists are about something that's reasonably factual ("ten most reliable transit systems," "ten safest transit systems", "top ten in ridership per capita") then they can be useful. They can encourage excellence and help people reward that excellence with ridership and investment.

But when you tell your readers that certain transit systems are the "best," and don't explain your criteria very well, you signal that everyone must have the same sense of what's good. That encourages people to go into transit debates as bullies, assuming that if a transit agency doesn't deliver on their notion of the good, the agency must be incompetent or failing, so the only valid response is abuse. It encourages people not to notice that "failing to do what I want" is often a result of "doing what someone else wants."

In short, it encourages people to think like three-year-old children, for whom "my needs" are rich and glorious and self-evident to any reasonable person while "other people's needs" are vague and tedious abstractions. That, in turn, forces officials to act like parents managing their childrens' tantrums. And then we're offended when those officials can seem paternalistic?

Photo: Luc Viator, from Wikipedia

comment 10,000

Posted on May 2, 2011 in Meta

This morning, I found that this blog had logged 9999 valid comments. (That's on 594 posts, in just over two years.) So as I've been working today, I've been keeping an eye out for comment 10,000.

I thought, hey, maybe I should give the 10,000th commenter a prize. An annual pass for their transit system. Ten advance copies of my book. A deluxe vacation for two to the Brisbane busway.

But it's been a couple of hours. So I think I'll just write the 10,000th comment myself, and save a bundle on prize money!

Really, the great comment strings on this blog keep me going, so keep them coming!

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