Human Transit

watching our words: congestion charge or price or (shudder) tax

Posted on March 17, 2011 in Auckland, Congestion Pricing, Journalism, Language, Words, Unhelpful

There seems to be a flurry of new interest in congestion pricing, partly under the pressure of tight budgets almost everywhere. But journalists can muddy the waters by describing congestion pricing as either exploitative or punitive.

Last month, I was invited to contribute to a Sydney Morning Herald thinkpiece on the subject. My contribution, the second of four pieces here, emphasises that congestion pricing is not about paying for congestion, it's about paying to avoid congestion. The core point:

Suppose you announce that you'll give away free concert tickets to the first 500 people in a queue. You'll get a queue of 500 people. These people are paying time to save money.
Other people will just buy a ticket and avoid the queue. They're choosing to pay money to save time.
Today, we require all motorists to wait in the queue. When stuck in congestion, we are paying for the road space in time rather than in money.
Shouldn't we have a choice about this? Why are we required to save money, a renewable resource, by spending time, the least renewable resource of all?

Unfortunately, the Sydney Morning Herald framed the whole piece with the question, "Should motorists pay for the congestion they cause?" The implication is that congestion pricing is punitive, that some citizens believe that other citizens should be punished for their behavior. The question seems designed to sow misunderstanding and inflame rage. To their credit, none of the four expert responses — even the one from the auto club opposing the congestion charge — really took this bait.

So there's a problem with the terms congestion charge and congestion price. The terms sound like "paying for congestion," when the truth is the opposite, we're being invited to choose whether to spend money to avoid congestion. A more accurate term would be congestion avoidance price or even better, congestion avoidance option. But those are too many words.

Should we call it a decongestion price?

Real congestion pricing is about giving free and responsible adults a set of options that reflect the real-world geometry of cities. The core geometry problem is this:

Cities are, by definition, places where lots of people are close together.
Cities are therefore, by defintion, places with relatively little space per person.
Your car takes 50-100 times as much space as your body does.
Therefore, people in cars consume vastly more of the scarce resource, urban space, than the same people without their cars — for example, as pedestrians or public transit riders.
When people choose whether to drive, they're choosing how much scarce urban space to consume.
If urban space is to be used like any other scarce resource, its price needs to be deregulated so that it is used efficiently.

Congestion pricing is a form of deregulation. It is the most libertarian concept imaginable.

There's another way to mess this up, and that's the term "congestion tax." Here's the New Zealand Herald:

Aucklanders may be levied to drive through increasingly congested streets in the absence of Government funding of the region's "strategic aspirations".
A paper released by Local Government Minister Rodney Hide before Auckland's first spatial plan due out in 11 days suggests raising revenue by charging motorists to drive around the Super City at peak times.

Hide makes clear that this isn't a congestion price intended to reduce congestion. It's just another tax, intended to raise revenue. So just to be clear: If it's congestion pricing, there are public transit (and bike-ped, and casual carpool) alternatives that enable people to get where they're going. The congestion price cordons on the CBDs of London and Singapore work because there's abundant public transit to those places, so relatively few people absolutely have to drive into them. The San Francisco Bay Bridge tolls have a congestion-pricing value because there's both abundant transit and casual carpool options for avoiding them.

If, on the other hand, you're in a place where there's no reasonable alternative to driving — such as large parts of Auckland — then anything that suppresses driving will suppress travel, and that means it will suppress economic activity. And if you're just taxing economic activity, then this is really no different from sales taxes, Goods and Services Taxes (GST), or income taxes. By taxing economic activity, you're suppressing something that government and society should be encouraging. That's not a libertarian idea; quite the opposite.

imagining cities without mobility

Posted on March 13, 2011 in Access, Mobility, Philosophy, Urban Structure

Philips Corporation, like everyone, is running a livable cities program, in this case a set of awards for individual projects rather than big-picture rankings of cities. I just stumbled on it, and got a rude shock.

There are eight categories: Neighborhood, Mobility, Care, Education, Water, Shade, Sport, and Regeneration — all excellent things. Obviously, I'm professionally interested in mobility, so I looked to see who was winning there.

The leading candidate for the Mobility award is Plaza Movil Street Park, a proposal (for Buenos Aires, Argentina) for temporary street closures to create community park space. Its benefits are described like this:

Creating recreational spaces for local communities to relax, play, meet, and chat.

That's wonderful. It's glorious. I'm all for it. To use Philips's terms, it's great for Neighborhood, and probably also for Shade. But it's not mobility!

The only relationship that this plan has to mobility is that it takes space normally used for mobility and uses it for something else.

St. Augustine observed that we are always either being or becoming. In urbanism, "being" corresponds to placehood, and "becoming" corresponds to movement or mobility. The late 20th Century car-centered model led to the massive conversion of land area from placehood functions to mobility functions. Transit's great virtue is that it provides a lot of mobility using relatively little space, so that more area can be devoted to places, both public and private.

And yes, a great street provides an experience that integrates placehood and mobility to a degree. And yes, good urban redevelopment also reduces our need for mobility up to a point.

Bravo for well-designed street closures. But to give a street closure a mobility award seems to imply that mobility — our ability to get to places we want to go to — just no longer matters.

There is a strong current in New Urbanism, not without detractors, that does seem interested in abolishing mobility. Patrick Condon's idea for Vancouver, for example, would cancel a single proposed subway line and instead replace all of the city's electric trolleybuses with streetcars that go the same speed as the buses do. He would cancel a mobility-improving project and instead spend money in way that that may do great urban things but doesn't increase mobility at all. Once his network was complete, nobody could get anywhere any faster than they can now.

This makes sense only in a context where going places (even under renewable elecric power) is an objective evil. Streetcars, in this vision, supposedly cause greater urban density to be built at livable neighborhood scales, so that people meet more of their needs close to home. People spend most of their time in their own "villages" and others nearby. They simply do not travel far across the city, and had better not be in a hurry when they do.

It's understandable that "urban village" is a winning concept right now. We do need to increase the self-reliance of each part of a city, so that travel demand for many of life's needs can met closer to home. The pendulum swung far the other way in the late 20th century, toward surrendering placehood to movement. I support and eagerly participate in efforts to help it swing back.

But I think we can see what it might look like to swing too far in the new direction. We stay close to home, and thus evolve transport systems that are useful for going short distances and useless for going long ones. And the obvious retort to this is: In that case, why live in a city? Why not just live in a country village, or in a small city?

The whole point of living in a city is to have access to unusual things that are only possible at a large scale. If you want major league sports or a good symphony orchestra or a world-class major university, you need to be in some kind of urban area. If you have a very unusual interest, only a place with lots of people will have a few people who share that interest. If you want choices, you need redundancy, also known as competition. You need there to be two or more sources for whatever service or product or experience you're looking for, readily available from where you live. For those things, you need a certain amount of urban mass, and some options for moving around within it.

The great irony of anti-mobility village-first thinking is that it inevitably leads to monotony — less choice and therefore less opportunity for people to form specalized communities where unusual thought and creativity can flourish. More disturbingly, it leads to a world where only the internet offers those things, which leads in turn to nightmare images of a world of plugged-in couch potatoes, people who never go outside anymore because their social and intellectual needs simply aren't met by the 500 people who happen to be within walking distance.

The antidote to conformity and monotony is the city. For a city to function as a city, you need mobility. Streetcars are fun to ride, but not if you're in a hurry. Closing a street on Sundays so people can dance is a great thing. But you can't run an economy that way, nor can your citizens feel free.

next move

Posted on March 11, 2011 in Meta, Vancouver

I've just accepted a six-month part-time assignment at Vancouver's transit agency TransLink, to help them with a range of policy and planning issues. So I'm getting ready to relocate from Sydney to Vancouver. (As always, you can track my movements under the photo in the next column.)

My assignment at TransLink will be only 60% of fulltime, so I will continue to work part-time through MRCagney, including several projects for clients in Australia/New Zealand.

As always I'm available to provide services on any of the range of issues that this blog covers, including both consulting services and speaking engagements (such as this one). If I can be useful to your transit agency or consultancy, let's talk. From April to at least October 2011, travel costs can be figured from a Vancouver base, so North American clients will no longer need to bear costs of bringing me from Australia.

Australia is very hard to leave, but I look forward to being back in Vancouver, working on one of North America's most livable urban areas.

At this stage, I have no clear plan beyond October 2011. I might return to Australia, or I might settle back in the Northwest or California. It depends on where it seems I can be most useful. One clear possibility is to establish a small west coast consulting firm (or join an existing one while it's still small). But for now, I'm open, and enjoying that.

on casual carpools, or “slugging”

Posted on March 9, 2011 in Oakland, San Francisco, Washington DC

Emily Badger has a useful article on casual carpools, though it would be a little more useful if she — or her editors at Miller McCune — didn't keep implying that public transit is somehow the enemy.

Casual carpooling — or "slugging" as some of its partisans like to call it — is a perfectly rational response to very congested freeways with High Occupancy Vehicle (HOV) lanes. At informal queues, usually located near an onramp, motorists who want to use the HOV lanes meet up with other commuters who want to ride the lanes as passengers. These passengers fill the empty seats in the motorist's car so that they can all travel in the HOV lane. The phenomenon appears to happen where and when an HOV lane offers quite dramatic travel time savings, as it does on certain Washington DC freeways and on the San Francisco Bay Bridge. It happens only in intensive commute periods, because that's when the HOV lane's advantage is substantial.

For many, it's fun to think of casual carpooling as some sort of revolt against conventional transit. The term slugging, Badger explains, arose as an insult uttered by "bitter bus drivers" who saw their waiting passengers disappearing into private cars. Miller McCune's headline describes slugging as "the people's transit," as though conventional transit is something else.

In fact, casual carpooling or "slugging" is largely compatible with conventional transit. Really, the two are mutually beneficial. The casual carpool markets in San Francisco and Washington are both parallel to rapid transit lines, but the trains are still full. As for competition with peak bus services, the long one-way commuter bus run is one of the most expensive services a transit agency can operate. Often, each bus can be used for only one run during each peak, so all the costs of owning and maintaining the bus must be justified by a single trip. Drivers for these peak buses are also expensive, because there are costs associated with the short shifts that peak-only service requires, and because drivers must usually be paid to get back to where the shift began before clocking out.

Long commuter bus runs can still make sense, but they are very expensive compared to conventional two-way, all-day transit. If casual carpooling reduces the demand for them, the effect on transit is to flatten the overall peak that transit has to serve, increasing its potential cost-effectiveness and improving the utilization of fleet. It's especially helpful on the AM peak, which is usually the sharper of the two.

So slug away, if you need to feel that you're attacking something. I prefer to call it a casual carpool, because that term describes what it really is. And I see no reason not to welcome them. In fact, when new HOV lanes are developed, the casual carpool phenomenon should be planned for, both by ensuring that there are safe and logical pickup points and also by counting casual carpool trips in the mobility benefits of the lane.

Of course, such planning would contradict the libertarian fantasy — heavily stressed in the Miller McCune piece — that casual carpooling is a "government-free" form of spontaneous social organization, a kind of Tahrir Square for the cul-de-sac set. In fact, "slugging" is a freely chosen response to the design of the government-funded transport infrastructure — just like everybody else's commute.

seoul: buses that tell you where they go?

Posted on March 7, 2011 in Branding, Bus Rapid Transit, Legibility

Regarding Place has a good article on the recent reform of bus services in Seoul, South Korea.

Seoul has done something that I often hear people ask for, a simple citywide color scheme that helps make the structure of the bus system obvious. The four colors of bus correspond to four types of service:

Blue buses run in reserved median busways on major arterials, and appear to be mostly radial (into and out of the urban core.)
Green buses are feeders that tend to run locally within a particular area.
Red buses are "express" to and from outer suburbs. It's not completely clear if this is peak commuter express or frequent all-day service (which I usually call "Rapid"). Express is a slippery word.
Yellow buses are orbital lines, thus tend to be perpendicular to the blue and red ones.

I have mixed feelings about this sorting. Usually I prefer to make distinctions about frequency and service span, but if overall frequencies are high I can certainly see the value in this system. In a city with a clear distinction between radial and orbital directions, which Seoul seems to have, the distinctions can probably help people orient about which direction is which at various points, and to discern the general directions that each bus might go.

The same thinking extends to numbering system. Traditionally, most big urban areas have had a sub-area based numbering, where in fact it may make more sense to number lines in ways that heighten the distinction between different service types.

Most big cities, of course, simply don't have the centralized control to do this. Los Angeles Metro has made an effort with its Rapid vs Local branding, but most color schemes are tied to the brands of municipal operators whose service is entangled with Metro's. Cities with a single consolidated transit agency could do it. In Australia, any state government could do it, though it would need to gain ownership of fleets that are currently owned by private operating companies.

Obviously, you're sacrificing "operational flexiblity" in terms of being able to deploy any bus on any line. Now and then in Los Angeles you'll see a Local bus on a Rapid line and vice versa. I think Seoul deals with this by running all buses of one color out of one operating base, often with a separate contract operator, so the systems are functionally separate.

If you've been to Seoul and seen this system in action, please share your impressions.

guest post: scott johnson on “over-constrained projects”

Posted on March 6, 2011 in Advocacy, Guest Posts, Portland, Rail Transit, Streetcars (Trams)

This is a guest post from EngineerScotty, who blogs at Portland Transport and the Dead Horse Times. It is a follow-up to the recent series of articles on the issue of expertise vs activism, and it further explores the theme of the second article: projects which are over-constrained–those with excessive and sometimes contradictory requirements imposed on them by stakeholders. This post originally appeared at Portland Transport here; the version which appears at Human Transit has been edited and revised for a more global audience. As always, views expressed in guest posts are interesting to me but not necessarily mine.

Jarrett has been investigating the proper role of the transit planner. Is (s)he a dispassionate expert, much like an engineer is expected to be? Or should planners and other professionals serve a more activist role–essentially serving as advocates of the transit-riding public, and defending their interests? Jarrett, who has made numerous remarks about the limits of mixed-traffic streetcar (and has been accused, unfairly in my opinion, of being a "bus fanatic"), noted that his job has elements of both: He does prefer to optimize for mobility outcomes, and streetcar frequently fares poorly as a mobility measure; but when he takes on a project he needs to live within the project's constraints: If a project which hires Jarrett as a consultant is chartered with building streetcars, then he will help the agency design the best streetcar network that they can afford.

But then, an obnoxious commentor (OK, yours truly) threw a wrench into the gears, asking the essential question. What if the project requirements are nonsensical to begin with? Jarrett's answer focused on the role of transit planners in addressing all of this; and I defer to his expertise on such matters. Instead, this article looks at the more fundamental problem: projects with fundamentally conflicting requirements.

Too many cooks

Many public works projects, especially those in a multi-layer democracy like the United States and other countries with federalist systems, have many, many stakeholders. And not all of those stakeholders have the interest of the general public at heart, let's be honest. Politicians love to show up at ribbon-cuttings, and may have ideological axes to grind. Agencies frequently seek to expand their scope, power, and influence. Developers, vendors, unions, and other parties often want to cash in, and frequently aren't shy at trying to influence decision-makers (often in ways which are perfectly legal). NIMBYs frequently show up who want it somewhere else.

Even among those stakeholders who actively support a project's goals, one can frequently find many demands on a project. Institutions can fall into the "golden hammer" trap, where their job involves swinging hammers and thus view every problem as a nail. Professional societies frequently have standards and practices which they view as sacrosanct, regardless of whether appropriate for a given context. Diverse communities of users may impose conflicting requirements. If grants are part of the funding package, the granting agency will often impose conditions of their own. And spools of bureaucratic red tape will surround the project, particularly if the United States government is involved.

All too often, public works projects collect so many differing requirements and constraints, both legitimate and not, that running the project is like squaring the circle. (For the non-mathematically inclined, constructing a square with the same area as a given circle using only straightedge and compass, was proven impossible in the 19th century). And this is without taking into account financial and schedule constraints. Yet projects which attempt to square the circle–which attempt to satisfy simultaneously many conflicting requirements, often dictated by stakeholders with de facto veto power over the project–still happen way too often, often times with disappointing results.

At least two prominent projects in the Portland, Oregon metropolitan area — one primarily highway, one exclusively transit — exhibit signs of being over-constrained. One of them is the Columbia River Crossing (CRC), a project to replace the Interstate Bridge crossing the Columbia River, between Portland, Oregon and Vancouver, Washington. The other is the Lake Oswego-Portland Transit Project, a project which seeks to build a "rapid streetcar" line connecting the city of Portland with its inner suburb of Lake Oswego, using an abandoned rail right-of-way.

The Swiss Army Bridge

The fundamental goal of the CRC ought to be conceptually simple. Modernize (structurally and functionally) the primary crossing of the Columbia, providing multi-modal crossing support, while eliminating the draw span. Straightening out the shipping channel on the river is a bonus. But what has actually happened has been a mess. The first problem is governance. Given that it's a bi-state effort, there isn't any single entity which is an obvious candidate to run the project. So management was given jointly to the Oregon and Washington State departments of transportation (ODOT, WSDOT), with the participation of the cities of Portland, Oregon and Vancouver, Washington; the counties of Clark and Multnomah; Metro [the Portland regional planning authority]; the Southwest Washington Regional Transportation Council; and the two transit agencies, TriMet and C-Tran. ODOT and WSDOT drafted purpose-and-need statements that pretty much excluded any solution other than a new freeway bridge. Throw in a pile of rules from various highway manuals and "poof": rather than simply building a bridge, the project now involves rebuilding about five miles of Interstate 5. On Hayden Island, a small island south of the river's primary channel, a new proposed network of ramps and interchanges cuts a swath through the island, nearly as wide as a football pitch is long.

The city of Portland and Metro have their own requirements for the project. It must contain light rail (an extension of the MAX Yellow Line), and other "green" features. Many in Portland's civic leadership have insisted on an "iconic design" rather than a simple truss bridge. With all of these design elements, the total proposed cost reached US$4 billion.

Financing for such a price tag will require that the bridge be tolled. Residents on the Washington side would allegedly bear the brunt of tolls, because many of them commute to jobs in Oregon. The mayor of Vancouver was recently unseated when his challenger ran on the issue of bridge tolls. Many on the Oregon side have little sympathy for those in Vancouver, whom are accused of wanting the benefits of a large, dynamic city, but of not wanting to contribute to its upkeep. And so on.

The result, at this stage, seems to be a design that nobody really likes, that has a murky funding picture, that has cost eight figures to produce nothing but paper so far, and which has no end date in sight.

Did it have to be this way? That's a hard question. One fundamental issue is that the City of Portland objects to a key design goal of the highway departments on both sides of the river–"modernization" of the freeway (a catchall term which includes widening, ramp reconfiguration, and all sorts of other stuff designed to reduce congestion). While some of Portland's objections spring from ideological or environmental concerns that other stakeholders don't share to the same extent, the city does have a legitimate concern that redesigning the bridge simply will move the existing traffic bottleneck south into Portland's city center. The state departments of transportation, for their part, seem more than willing to hold Portland's transit expansion plans hostage (an ODOT staffer once reportedly suggested that the agency would block any attempt to extend MAX across the Columbia, unless as part of a larger project to widen I-5). And Vancouver doesn't want to be stuck with an ever-escalating bill. Part of the present dynamic seems to involve both sides wishing that someone (Governor Kitzhaber, the feds) would "see the light" and kick the other side to the curb.

The Lake Oswego Quit Calling It Streetcar (At Least For Now) Project

Compared to the CRC, the Lake Oswego transit project (LOTP) is a model of piece and harmony. The "what" of the project was largely fixed: a streetcar line, running from the current south end of the Portland Streetcar, along the old Jefferson Branch line to Lake Oswego. The project goals make sense: Use an existing asset (the rail right-of-way) to leverage federal funds, and build a transit service running in exclusive right-of-way which ought to be faster than local bus service on Highway 43, a frequently-congested 3-5 lane surface route. Demonstrate the potential of "rapid streetcar" as a budget alternative to light rail for shorter corridors. A no-brainer, right? Unlike the CRC, where leadership was distributed among a handful of agencies with contrary goals and a decided lack of trust, the involved government agencies (TriMet, Metro, and the cities of Portland and Lake Oswego) aren't fighting over the project requirements. But the devil, as is often the case, is in the details.

The most fundamental issue is that the project is promoted as rapid transit–as an upgrade over the existing bus service (TriMet's 35 and 36 lines, which the streetcar would replace between Portland and Lake Oswego). But this premise is undermined by the proposed implementation. The project is currently planned to be an extension of the existing Portland Streetcar system, which offers local-stop service along is present route, and which bypasses the main transit corridor downtown (the Portland Transit Mall). Portland Streetcar's current rolling stock (Skoda 10T streetcars and a clone produced by Oregon Iron Works), are optimized for mixed-traffic application, not for rapid transit use. In addition, many local merchants on Highway 43 in the Johns Landing neighborhood want streetcar service at their front door; whereas many condo owners along the existing right-of-way don't want trains past their front door. (Never mind that the rail line has been there far longer than the condos). Thus, the streetcar line is likely to make an expensive detour onto Highway 43–the same highway which is predicted to turn into a parking lot in the near future, justifying the mobility need for the project in the first place.

Unlike the new Milwaukie MAX line directly across the river, which is designed to function well as rapid transit until hitting downtown, the streetcar is not so designed. It's likely to be slower than the existing bus between Lake Oswego and downtown, and that's without considering the need for riders travelling from/to beyond Lake Oswego to transfer. Bus lines 35 and 36 from beyond Lake Oswego, which now flow through Lake Oswego into Portland, will have to be truncated, forcing a connection to the new streetcar. This is necessary both to avoid duplication and to provide operating funds for the streetcar line.

The streetcar does offer modest capacity improvements over the bus, and has the cachet of being rail. (That cachet is a source of debate in transit circles, but will likely have an impact given the demographics along the line). But the mobility improvements of the project are close to nil; and for longer-distance commuters on the 35 and 36, probably a net negative. Perhaps land-use improvements alleged to flow from the project will be worth the local investment, though much of the area along the line is already developed or not suitable for development. Perhaps the ability to get a big check from the US Government for a minimal local cash contribution–given that the federal government is willing to consider the value of the right-of-way in calculating their match–makes the project worth doing. This is a difficult case to make, however, to the transit-riding public, who tend to care more about headways and trip times than they do about property values.

Signs of an over-constrained project

Here at Human Transit, another commenter posed an interesting question: How do you know if a project has requirements or constraints that make it difficult to do a good job? The question was posed in the context of bad-faith requirements (such as developers engaging in rent-seeking), but the answers also apply to good faith attempts to square the circle. My response is here; the answers are also reproduced below, edited for brevity. (In particular, observations about the CRC and Lake Oswego streetcar projects which are redundant with the criticisms above are excised; if you want to see the original answers, click the link).

Overly constrained initial project requirements. It's useful to distinguish here bona-fide requirements from design/implementation details, the latter of which ought to flow from the former. But sometimes, elements which ought to be details are set forth in the requirements without adequate explanation of why this should be so. Sometimes these requirements aren't stated explicitly, but still are constrained enough that only the solution preferred by the powerbroker can meet them. [CRC used as example]
Decision criteria which may not match the stated goals of the project. For example, publicly identifying a project as "rapid transit" but then de-emphasizing speed and reliability, or basing decisions on highly speculative future estimates. [LOTP used as example]
Thee presence of strawman alternatives in the DEIS (Draft Environmental Impact Statement) or equivalent planning/analysis document. By "strawman alternatives", I mean proposed alternatives which are obviously bad, and included only to satisfy process requirements that multiple alternatives be studied in depth. [LOTP "enhanced bus" used as example; in this case, a more robust BRT solution was excluded from analysis early in the project..which lead us to the next item…]
Viable project alternatives rejected early in the planning phase, often due to being "out of scope" (see the first item concerning overly restrictive requirements), or on the basis of vague or overly-picky technical factors. Look for signs that point to "this might work, but we really don't want to (or aren't allowed to) consider it, so we'll dispose of it as quickly as we can". [Many have alleged that the proposed "supplemental bridge" alternative to the CRC is another example].
Projects that appear "out of the blue", rather than the result of organic planning activities, or which are done "out of sequence" compared to their apparent priority. May represent a unique opportunity (such a project eligible for funding that isn't available for other projects) or it may be a sign that someone has his thumb on the scale.
"Economic development" being touted as an advantage is a frequent red flag. This is always touted, of course, but if "economic development" is the main reason for doing a project (and especially if the "development" in question refers mainly to the project's construction effort itself and not to post-project activities the work will enable) a good response is to ask if there are any places to deploy the "economic development" that will have better post-project outcomes. Paying someone to dig ditches and refill them can be considered "economic development" in that it does create jobs, but it's better to pay people to build useful things.
And one other, not in the HT article: The use of unproven or untested designs or methodologies in the project, or anything dubbed "experimental". Until recently, the CRC was considering an experimental bridge design, until cooler heads prevailed.

Of course, not all over-constrained projects are failures. Westside MAX had some annoying constraints placed on it, but is overall a successful project. Still, had ten extraneous stops been sprinkled along the line between Portland and Hillsboro, would the line be as successful?

Dealing with over-constrained projects

What to do about all of this? The hard fact about overconstrained projects is that often, we have to live with them. It's easy to fantasize about driving bad actors out of the process, and about having strong visionary leaders who have the foresight and the clout to sweep conflicting requirements out of the way, without losing support for the project. But such individuals are rare, and in many of these projects — notably the CRC — nobody in the process, not even the governors, are in the position to act unilaterally. Still, a few suggestions come to mind:

Governance matters. It's hard with multiple stakeholders. In the case of the CRC, the first step to fixing the project would be for the stakeholders to jointly hire an outside project leader; one who has no particular ties to either Oregon or Washington, or to the various modal factions, to lead the project. Of course, for such a leader to be effective, the various agencies will need to cede a fair bit of authority to said leader; I'm not sure any of them are willing to do so at this point.
Sunlight is the best disinfectant. A transparent process, one where decisions can be easily traced to inputs and planning work products are available for inspection, may help cut down on (or at least expose) some of the pettier forms of backroom dealing. Bad actors don't like being subject to public scrutiny. Transparency also helps good-faith projects avoid accusations of backroom dealing; virtually every large capital project gets accused of being done in order to grease someone's palm; an accusation which is frequently not true.
Be prepared to say no. The City of Portland has won some concessions on the CRC with this tactic, but if a project is really going off the rails, cancellation should always be an option.
Bifurcation and phasing may work. A controversial and difficult project can sometimes be split up into two or more separate projects. Often, though, the political impetus is in the opposite direction, creating more linkages between projects so as to create a package containing something that everyone wants.
Better advocacy for users. One of the unfortunate parts of transit advocacy in the Portland area is a lack of effective organization of transit users. Freight users of the highway system are well-organized, and often asking government for better freight mobility. The auto lobby is likewise strong and forceful. Even the cycling community in Portland is relatively-well organized. Transit users in the city do have some organized advocates, but many of these activists represent subset of the overall transit community (such as lower-income inner city bus riders), not transit users as a whole. Beleaguered transit agencies, especially ones looking to grow their ridership base, can't always represent the interests of their existing ridership.

That said, not all gloom and doom is justified. Over-constrained projects do end up successful, despite warts. This is especially true when the bulk of the constraints come from actual community needs that happen to be in conflict (such as simultaneous demands for access and mobility). Portland's MAX system, overall, threads the access/mobility needle reasonably well, although not perfectly. Some critics of the system complain about too many highway-running segments without development potential; others complain that it's too slow downtown, and uncompetitive for crosstown trips. However, were MAX to offer streetcar-like performance over its entire length, it probably would not attract the ridership that it does (especially the large number of suburban commuters using the system); conversely, were it required to be built to "class A" levels of mobility throughout the system, it probably could not have been built at all. The flip-side of the overconstrained project is one which has too many degrees of freedom–and which may not be taking as many community needs into account as it should–or in the worst cases, such as the destruction wrought by urban freeway-building, result from the neglect of a particular community's concerns altogether.

rail-bus differences: premise or conclusion?

Posted on March 3, 2011 in Bus Rapid Transit, Meditations, Rail Transit, Streetcars (Trams), Technophilia

When you think about transit technologies, how do you categorize them? And why?

Have a look at this first table, which sorts services according to the exclusivity of their right of way. The terms Class A, B, and C are from Vukan Vuchic, describing the basic categories of "what can get in the way" of a transit service.

Is this table two rows, each divided into three columns? Or three columns, each with two rows? Which distinction is more fundamental, and which is secondary?

Right-of-Way Class vs Rail-Bus Distinction

Class A

Exclusive right-of-way and separated from cross traffic

Class B

Exclusive right-of-way, NOT separated from cross traffic.

Class C

Mixed with traffic, including mixed with pedestrians.

Rail

Most rail rapid transit, using “third rail” power sources. Most classic “subway” and “metro” systems.

Most “light rail” in surface operations. Parts of some European and Australian tram networks.

Most North American streetcars. Many European and Australian trams.

Bus

Separated busways: (Brisbane, Ottawa, Bogotá, and segments in Los Angeles, Pittsburgh) Freeway bus/HOT lanes.

At-grade busways: Los Angeles Orange Line, Western Sydney busways, etc.

Buses in mixed traffic.

Well, if your objective is to get where you're going fast and reliably, the Right-of-Way Class tells you a lot about a services's potential to do that, while the rail-bus distinction, in isolation, tells you nothing. The fact is, both rail and bus technologies are capable of the complete spectrum of possibilities. Both can average 6 mph (10 km/h) in Class C situations, and both can run Class A at 60 mph (100 km/h) or more.

RIght-of-way isn't the only thing that matters for getting you where you're going. There's also stop spacing, with its inevitable tradeoff between speed and local access.

Stop Spacing vs Rail-Bus Distinction

Rapid, Limited

(faster = fewer stops)

Local-stop

(slower = more stops)

Express

(one long nonstop segment)

Rail

“Subway”, “Metro”, some commuter rail.

Tram / Streetcar

Some commuter rail.

Bus

Bus Rapid Transit,
“Rapid Bus”, “limited-stop” bus

Local bus

Commuter express bus (often on freeway)

… and of course there are other essential distinctions like frequency, which are also entirely separable from rail and bus technologies.

UPDATE: Please note, yet again, that contrary to early comments I am NOT claiming that these are the only distinctions that matter. As I laid out in some detail here, there are several distinctions that matter. In fact, one of the reasons that people cling so hard to the rail-bus distinction is that the other crucial distinctions are a little more complicated and require some thought, and it's hard to think about this stuff in the political space where decisions get made.

Rail services do tend to be presented in ways that "package" the various crucial dimensions of usefulness. Typical metro systems, for example, are guaranteed to be frequent, with rapid stop spacing, and Class A right of way, because all three are intrinsic to the metro technology, so there's a psychological "packaging" effect when you see a metro map; you can be confident that this means a certain level of service.

I think these tables are interesting because now and then I meet someone who divides the world rigidly into rail and bus, often aligning these categories with a rigid class distinction (William Lind, say) or simply claiming that rail does beautiful things and buses don't. In that view, the different columns of these tables are secondary and interchangeable, while the rows express something absolute.

Patrick Condon, for example, proposes that instead of building one rapid transit line (Class A, rapid stops) we could just build lots of streetcars (mostly Class C, local stops). That can make sense if you judge technologies entirely on their influence on urban form, and prefer the kind of form that seems to arise from streetcars. But it will be just incoherent to a transit planner who's been trained to help people get places, and wonders if he's being told that nobody cares about that anymore. Because if you do care about personal mobility — people getting where they're going, now, today — you have to care about the columns.

I hope to leave this topic for a while, but I do think it's worth coming back to tables like this to ask yourself: Do I tend to divide the world according to the rows first, or the columns? If so, why? Is my way of slicing this table something I've discovered about the world, or something my mind is imposing on it?

how universal is transit’s geometry?

Posted on March 1, 2011 in Amusing, Basics, Be on the Way, Meditations, Philosophy

Suppose that somewhere else in our universe, there’s another planet with intelligent life. We don’t know what they look like, or what gases they breathe, or what they eat, or whether they’re inches or miles tall. We don’t know whether they move by hopping, drifting, or slithering. We don’t even know if their lived environment is largely two-dimensional, like the surface of the earth, or freely three dimensional, perhaps a cloud-city full of cloud-beings who drift up and down as easily as they drift left or right. We don’t know what they call themselves, so let’s call them borts. Continue Reading →

sydney, call los angeles

Posted on February 28, 2011 in Los Angeles, Sydney

In the Sydney Morning Herald today, I wonder out loud if Australian cities can move forward on public transport given the lack of a mechanism for local initiatives or referenda. Based on our work last year on Sydney's Independent Public Inquiry, I compare Sydney's stasis with the aggressive building program in Los Angeles, and note that for better or worse, California's tradition of direct popular votes on spending plans makes it possible to lock those plans in for decades, providing the security that the private sector needs to do its part. In Australia, where spending on big infrastructure happens through regular state budgets, nobody can make a commitment beyond the next election cycle, and nobody dares ask the public for a major new funding source. So the Australian debate always seems to be about which one or two projects will be built in the current generation, and which will be left for our grandchildren to build. My article is here.

political motivations, and the consultant’s task

Posted on February 25, 2011 in Advocacy, Consulting

We were having a nice conversation about expertise vs. activism in a beautiful, abstract space, and then Engineer Scotty brought us back to earth:

Unfortunately, in many cases the constraints [on the options being considered in a study] … are not imposed by the decision-maker (especially in political systems where much of the authority is distributed), but imposed by outside actors, who may be engaging in self-aggrandizement or rent-seeking at the expense of transit outcomes, but whose participation is needed for the project to get done.
And in many cases, such folks don't want their fingerprints on the planning documents–you won't ever see an Environmental Impact Statement [EIS] explicitly stating that [bus options weren't] considered for project X because developer Y would withdraw his support for the project causing his ally councilman Z to vote no; or conversely that governor W is a teabagger who considers rail transit to be a Soviet plot and thus BRT [Bus Rapid Transit] was the only rapid transit option to advance out of the [Draft EIS] phase in order to avoid a veto. These sorts of political decisions are made in the backroom, off the record, and then often justified on an ex post facto basis when the stench gets too bad. …
Reputable consultants ought not take work that involves declaring that night is day, in an attempt to paper over a blatantly bad political decision. However, in situations like just described, there is plenty of work for reputable consultants to help transit agencies to make the best of a bad situation–if the political realities of a situation require that agency A implement a transit network using only mixed-traffic streetcar, and that other modes are off the table, a good consultant will help them design the best streetcar system that lies within their budget.
At the risk of misquoting Jarrett …, sometimes this is what "help[ing] you implement your values" really means. Often times the "values" in question aren't the values of the riders, the community, or the sponsoring agency, but those of the powerbrokers who ultimately control the fate of the project in question, and who may have little actual interest in improving mobility.

As a consultant, I really like working in situations where the key players really do want to explore the options and reflect the community's values. Having said that, I don't think there's a experienced transit planning consultant on the planet who hasn't been in situations like the one Scotty describes.

Especially in big, complex urban areas, you work for your client agency, and your client agency answers, sooner or later, to elected officials, and if those elected officials aren't happy, the consultant is likely to be blamed. So yes, in an ideal world, the elected officials are conduits for the aspirations and values of the people. But if the elected officials decide to reflect somebody else's values, well, they still get to decide, so yes, it's about their values.

Some purists decide that whenever someone talks about high ideals such as reflecting the values of the community, but then works in real situations where other objectives are taking precedence, that person's being hypocritical. There's some validity to that. At the same time, we all have to move between idealistic and practical modes of thought. You may feel that what company X is doing is ethically wrong, but while you fight that you still have to live in a world where company X is doing that. It's one of the harder things that humans are asked to do, actually, because we do want, in varying degrees, to feel pure and consistent, so we feel awkward about working inside a situation that we know, in larger terms, is somehow wrong.

I've thought about this a lot, because one common critique of me as a consultant, at least in my errant youth, was that I often talked about ideals at moments when everyone in the room needed a practical focus on the current political situation. In middle age, I'm better at working in whatever situation I'm in, but I still feel the awkwardness, and in fact I value it. So long as I feel uncomfortable about the real-world situation, I know that my adaptation to the situation isn't undermining my ability to hold, and act on, clear ideals. Only if it felt easy would I start worrying.

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