Human Transit

how to (not) sound elitist when discussing transit

Reid Ewing and Keith Bartholomew.  Pedestrian and Transit-Oriented Design. Urban Land Institute and American Planning Association, 2013.

This is not a book review, or at least not a fair and balanced one.  While I will start with some general praise of this new book, I must them focus on a few passages about transit that are both false and potentially offensive.  I do this not to humiliate the authors, but because these mistakes are so common in urbanist writing and need to be called out wherever they appear.

Reid Ewing and Keith Bartholomew, both at the University of Utah, have a new large-format paperback offering a concise overview of the basics on Pedestrian and Transit-Oriented design.  If you want a good glossary of key urbanist concepts such as imageability and coherence, or you want a good and well-cited argument for local street connectivity, this is your book.  

Very usefully, the book is organized as a series of checklists:  Here are the features that you must have to be considered transit-oriented design, here are others that are desirable.  It's designed to be handy to the time-crunched developer or policy person.  In fact, it meets one of the most important standards for an influential book in our distracted age:  You can get most of the message by just looking at the pictures and reading the section headings.  

If only I'd done that, I'd have found nothing to criticize.  

The writing is good, too, clear and with careful attention to explaining and demystefying concepts.  With one exception, I'd recommend this as a good reference guide to the key concepts of pedestrian-oriented design.  

As for its use as a guide to transit-oriented design, however, it has a fatal flaw:  The authors make recommendations about transit that make sense only from a design and development point of view, and that will sound elitist and tone-deaf if you present them to your transit agency.  As always, I emphasize sound; I've talked with enough urbanist writers to know how good their intentions are; they are mostly genuinely surprised when their comments about transit backfire.  But it's not a hard mistake to avoid.  I am going to take apart a critical passage in the book not because it's typical -- it's an unusual flaw in a good book -- but because it illustrates a lingering problem with urbanist discussions of transit in general, one that I hope we are close to moving beyond.

Ewing and Bartholomew lead off their transit discussion with this tired old chestnut:

In the question for efficiency, transit has become dull and utilitarian, part of the problem reather than the solution to today's lifeless streetscapes (Coppe 1991).  [p 82]

If this generalization is really about "today," then how is it bolstered by a 22-year old citation?  I have been hearing this line from urbanist leaders for just about that long.  Obviously it's true to a degree, more in some cities than others,  but there has been transformative progress in the last two decades.  Fleet, facilities, and technology have been upgraded across the developed world, often with the input of great designers.  Do transit agencies get no credit for the evolution in the comfort, openness and access that have happened over the last generation?  

Efficiency, as usual in high-urbanist literature, is treated as some kind of distraction.  But when working under any fixed budget as transit agencies do, efficiency is the same thing as abundance.  (When something called efficiency is genuinely destructive or unsustainable, it should be called false efficiency.  Freeways, fracking, and industrial farming may be less efficient than they look because of externalized negative impacts.  Questioning those things shouldn't be presented as questioning efficiency.)

As for the word utilitarian, it has a technical meaning in philosophy but here it sounds like a pejorative word meaning useful.  Anything that scales to a vast network that's potentially useful to thousands or millions of people can be called utilitarian.  Most great transit agencies would wear this term as a badge of honor.

But the authors dig themselves deeper.  After showing us pictures of charming, highly designed bus shelters in two wealthy communities that can afford them, they write:

In some cases, transit operators might do better by putting fewer buses on the street at times of low demand, and diverting the money they save into bus stop amenities and fleet facelifts.

This, urbanist friends, crosses a bright red line called upward redistribution of wealth.

This book appears at a time when many US transit agencies have been slashing transit service for the last five years, driving away legions of riders.  Portland, for example, has had its inner city grid network gutted -- mostly cut to 20 minute frequencies at which the connections on which it relies are almost impossible -- even though frequent transit service is a foundational element in the City of Portland's neighborhood development policies. 

Any "low-ridership" services that have survived all that carnage are serving popular and important non-ridership goals.  They are not going to be cut to build nicer bus shelters.  Doing so could also be illegal in the US if you're using Federal funds: US Title VI legislation (part of the 1964 Civil Rights Act) is designed to prevent exactly this kind of upward redistribution of the benefits resulting from public investment.  All US transit agencies that receive Federal funds must do extensive analysis to prove they are treating low-income and minority riders fairly in both service and infrastructure.

So if you follow this book's advice, and tell your transit agency they should cut service and reject lower-income people so as to build nicer bus shelters, it doesn't matter how noble your intentions are.  You will sound both elitist and clueless.  You will sound especially hostile to the burgeoning environmental justice agenda that is already embodied in civil rights legislation, and that has its own strong nexus with the ultimate outcomes that we call sustainability.  If you prevail in guiding the policy of your transit agency, that agency could be exposed to civil rights lawsuits as a result.  Do you really want this many enemies?

It doesn't help that in suggesting service cuts at "times [rather than places] of low demand," the authors are just repeating a common misconception.  Ridership at different times of day is interdependent, if only for the obvious reason that most transit trips are round trips.  If you cut service and thus reject a customer at one time of day, you'll likely lose their business in the other direction as well.  The most obvious "time of low demand," the late evening, is also a "guaranteed ride home," which means it affects the overall attractiveness of the product.

More important, a consistent pattern of all-day service (including "times of low demand") is a powerful tool for fostering lower vehicle ownership.  That's is why many transit agencies are now committing to a policy "Frequent Network" that guarantees service over a certain span regardless of trip-by-trip ridership.  (These policies, important in guiding true Transit-oriented Development at regionwide scale, deserved a mention.  Policies in the Portland and Vancouver BC regions could both have been cited.  Indeed, the book is silent on the urgent question of how to recognize a suitable site for TOD.)

I love distinctive transit shelters as much as anyone, but not if they are defined as an alternative to the sheer quantities of service that cities need and that ridership would reward.  (Canadian midsized cities, for example, generally have about twice the ridership per capita of similar US cities, not becuase their shelters are cuter but becuase they run about twice as much service per capita.)

Distinctive, adorable shelters can still come about in one of three entirely reasonable ways.  Either:

1. they have been paid for by developers, or by neighboring landowners who will profit most directly from any uplift in land values, or
2. they have been paid for by city governments, or
3. they are transit agency investments that are affordable and suitable for mass production, like the San Francisco shelters with the characteristic wave roofs.  

Developer-funding (also endorsed in the book) is often the purest nexus of all, but city funding is also a healthy trend.  Cities are much better placed than regional transit agencies to make investments that express civic identity and character.  Most US cities can also do improvement districts that focus the cost on the landowners who will most benefit.  Still, it's usually wealthier communities that can afford to do this, so it's deeply misleading to present these specialized shelters as realistic examples for cities in general, let alone to suggest that cash-strapped agencies should reject existing riders in order to pay for them.

It's hard to even criticize Ewing and Bartholomew for these howlers.  As long as I've been in the business, I've heard leading urbanists lecturing transit planners about how they should abandon their obsession with abundant service and focus on aesthetics instead.  As someone with serious credentials in the arts, my response is always that I understand the aesthetic values that the urbanist is describing, but that their recommendation is pointless until they own the consequences of the cuts they are implicitly proposing to fund these things. 

To be fair, transit agencies have been slow to engage urbanists in their own language, which requires staff with appropriate expertise.  This, however, has improved dramatically over the last decade.  Working urban designers and architects are responding constructively to transit agency input, and respectful conversations between the fields are happening more than ever.  Most urban design and architecture professonals that I deal with are sensitive to real-world transit issues and open to learning about transit agency perspectives, so we can hope for a continued spread of insight on these issues.

Indeed, Ewing's and Bartholomew's book shows how far the urbanist discourse has come in respecting transit and the diversity of its riders.  They speak mostly of "transit," avoiding rail vs. bus arguments, and their photos show buses as accepted parts of the urban landscape deserving of attention.   This is real progress, still controversial in some quarters.  It was partly in the context of this larger sensitivity that the passages quoted above were so shocking.

In the long run, urbanist thinkers who discuss transit will learn to respect transit planning and policy as a genuine experise -- something that's worth learning about before you comment on it.  Again, my own experience suggests that the practice is ahead of the literature in this regard.  This book -- very useful on all subjects except transit policy -- shows how far urbanists' respect for transit agencies has come since the early days of the New Urbanism, and how much -- or perhaps how little -- remains to be done.

cynicism is consent

Now and then I think of an aphorism that's so self evident that surely some guru must have said it by now. Perhaps someone did before 1990, but Google finds nothing for "cynicism is consent."  

So I'll say it.  Cynicism is consent.

I know I've just offended millions of proud cynics, but it's true.  I deal all the time with the cynicism of activists and am sometimes accused of idealism when I complain about something.  

As a consultant with 20 years under my belt in this business, I have also seen enough of "what really goes on behind closed doors" that if I wanted to be cynical, I'd be way more qualified than most folks to back it up.

Currently I'm having a small, polite dust-up with the Cincinnati Enquirer about a false headline on a story today.  I don't link because by the time you read this, it will probably have been corrected.  I'll post on that issue and its lessons soon.  

When I tweeted about it, I got this tweet from a leading urbanist thinker whom I very much admire:  

"You expect a headline writer to understand subtlety? Hah!"

To which my response is:  Not unless I force them to.

I had the same problem with another Cincinnati publication, the website of the local ABC affiliate, a day earlier.  Several people complained about a misleading headline on an article about my visit, and they changed it, fast.

I cannot begin to describe how much better public transit would be if people who feel cynical about it would complain constructively instead of languishing in the dead-end of cynicism.  And yes, you have to do it over and over.  Patiently.  

As with many issues, public transit in America is neglected because of apathy, not opposition.  The opponents are not the problem.  The apathy of supporters is.  And cynicism is a big part of that apathy.

Cynicism often dresses itself up as wisdom and worldliness.  

But when you assume the worst instead of patiently, constructively pointing out error, you are consenting.  

boston: revealing the beauty of the useful bus

There seems to be no end to the uses creative people can find for NextBus feeds. This from Bostonography:

Screenshot of MBTA Bus Speed Map. Live version available at : http://bostonography.com/bus/

This map shows point-to-point speeds for MBTA buses across the Boston area. Like a stoplight, red lines are the slowest, green are the fastest. While the content of the map is unsurprising (freeways and tunnels make up the fastest segments, downtown streets and major intersections the slowest), this type of visualization is valuable because it takes the seemingly mundane function of a complex transit system and transforms it into a beautiful, comprehensible piece of art.

When we talk about beauty in transit, its easy to get stuck on the characteristics of the vehicles themselves: that shiny streetcar, or the sexy new buses for a branded express service. Properly displayed by someone with a sophisticated design sensibility, the mobility and access that a transit system can provide comes into focus as a dense latticework of possible trips. Local bus service might seem mundane when seen on the street, but visualized in terms of its utility as a system enabling people to get where they are going, it can be be a thing of beauty. 

toronto: come meet me june 19!

The excellent Canadian urbanism magazine Spacing -- in conjunction with the local ITE chapter and #CodeRedTO -- is sponsoring a public event of mine at the University of Toronto.  I'll talk a bit about the last book and the next one, and I'm sure we'll have a lively conversation.  

Space is limited, so register NOW here!  (130 can register, and another 60 walk-ups will be permitted.  Cost at the door will be $5.)

UPDATE:  104 of the 130 reserved seats were gone as of 11 PM Eastern on Sunday!  If you're just getting to your desk, better book now!  Again, another 60 will be admitted at the door.  

Look forward to seeing you there!  

challenging highway projects due to inadequate transit

When highway capacity expansions move ahead in corridors with inadequate transit, there may be a legal basis for challenge on environmental grounds, at least in the US under Federal environmental law.  At least, one Federal judge in Wisconsin thinks so.

UPDATE:  More on the case in an excellent piece by Kaid Benfield here at Atlantic Cities.  

 

rereading Ecotopia

My thoughts on Ernest Callenbach's 1975 novel Ecotopia are up today at Atlantic Cities.

tweet of the month: must lose martini

 

When I read Jarrett Walker I feel like there is always just a light breeze and he is explaining it all with a martini in his hand. — Trip Planner Mag (@TripPlannerMag) May 15, 2013

 

Personally I've never gotten martinis. I'd rather people visualized a handmade ceramic mug of black coffee, or maybe chai.  What in my writing style do I need to change to update this impression?

UPDATE:  Yes I know it's a compliment, because James Bond drank martinis, while lots of cranks drink coffee.   But if I had the necessary refinement to be a connoisseur of all the ingredients of a martini, I wonder I'd have room in my head for transit planning, languages, urbanism, natural history, philosophy, coffee, gardening and all the other things that seem more important ...

In any case, if you need to visualize me with a martini, please go right ahead.  Perhaps I'll do a very posed photo with one sometime.  

my comments to transportation students

This March in Auckland, New Zealand, MRCagney and T2 asked me to speak to a group of transportation students, both undergrads and grad students.  The question was: "what do you wish someone had told you when you were 20 years old?"  The event was at the University of Auckland.

The result is here.  (US viewers: Temperatures are Celsius, "patronage" means ridership etc. etc.)  

Sorry about my habit of dropping my voice on important words at the end of phrases.  In person, it sounds like emphasis, but those words didn't always make it through the sound system ...

The whole thing was ad-libbed, so next time I do this I'll probably say something different ... 

The full careers evening , sponsored by  MRCagney and T2, is here.  It was a very fun evening!

real-time transit mapping: watch your system in motion

Many transit agencies subscribe to the idea of "Open Data", publishing bundles of information on the system. These feeds contain data on stops, routes, arrival times, fare information, headways, and other pieces of useful data. Even more interestingly, these feeds often have buried within them the ability to access vehicle GPS data, which provides the ability to find out where a transit agency's vehicles are in near-realtime (limited by the speed at which these location queries can be returned).

Developers have long used feeds published by transit agencies for trip planning applications, which are useful in the extent that they can tell you when you need to be at your stop to get to your destination. However, this information source has always contained within it the potential for much more emancipatory uses. Recall Nate Wessel's guest post here on the shortfalls of Google Transit.

Recently, an innovative new use of this technology has begun to be deployed. In Portland, Seattle, London, San Francisco, and perhaps elsewhere, developers have taken the data provided by transit agencies and done something revolutionary: drawn maps of where all the transit vehicles are at any time.

http://www.pdxlivebus.com/

Obviously the image above is a still from a map whose utility depends upon its continual movement- I encourage you to visit the site to see for yourself. A consistent symbology seems to be emerging, where two colors represent inbound and outbound service - in this case red is going out, and blue in - with separate colors representing the different technologies present on the map. 

Browniefed over at github explains how this all works:

Buses are using short wave radios to transmit there position. They currently send updates every 30 seconds, and TriMet sees the update about 3 seconds later. Each bus gets a turn sending it's position and works like a tolken ring network. Previously it took 90 - 130 seconds and if a bus missed it's turn then it would be double that time (meaning for 1-5 minutes they would not know the position of a bus)

Buses do not actually send GPS coordinates back, what they do send is distance traveled along their trip. They do use GPS but primarily they are using the odometer for tracking position. There is also a door sensor, to verify that a bus is at a stop. There are all sorts of calibration issues with the odometer and drivers have reported that the vehicle is not updating its schedule adherence until the door opens.

So this is cool, but is it useful? How does having access to the realtime position data improve the user relationship with the transit system? These maps don't give any indication of how soon a bus is coming, or how long you will have to wait for it. They don't tell you where the bus is going, beyond showing the position of the next bus up the line. Of course there is no way to determine the time interval between your stop and the position of the bus icon. As a trip planning tool, live bus maps are next to useless.

However, as a method of communicating the shape of the entire network, live bus mapping does something very interesting. It translates frequency into a very simple unit- number of buses. A map reader can see very easily which parts of the city have a lot of buses, and which have few; which places have overlapping services or an interlocking grid, and which are provided only infrequent lifeline routes. Perhaps this technology could someday be integrated or displayed alongside isochrone visualizations as part of a map of the freedom of mobility afforded by a system, but to my eyes, for the moment this is a very technically accomplished curiosity. 

 

google maps wants you to see all your transit options

Google Maps is slowly unveiling a major update (sign up here), including an upgrade to the transit function of the map. There's been plenty to criticize in the existing trip planner Google has offered for years, which Nate Wessel's guest post here in April summed up well. In short, trip planners tell you how to get from an origin to a destination, but they don't do much to reveal the broad scope of your transit mobility in a city. 

I haven't yet had the chance to test the update myself, but it looks as though Google is at least moving in the right direction. Ask the new Google Maps for transit directions, and rather then routing a hypothetical "shortest trip" which often relies on impractical connections between low-frequency services, you'll get several alternatives based on the best frequency over the longest span of service. It also (finally) accounts for lines whose paths duplicate service over a section of a trip. Not only are the alternatives put on the map, but there are some clever trip visualizations, too.

http://maps.google.com/help/maps/helloworld/desktop/preview/

What's more, Google is also starting to understand the utility of giving users access to the universe of possible trips from a single origin. The screenshot below shows two lines available from a station in London, but its worth noting that plenty of other lines are also visible. 

http://maps.google.com/help/maps/helloworld/desktop/preview/

 Bruce over at Seattle Transit Blog has a smart take on this:

Guidebook routing more closely reflects the way the vast majority of people actually use transit, prioritizing frequency and span of service on generally-useful routes over infrequent one-seat rides that just happen to provide doorstep service. Its works best, of course, in transit systems full of truly high-frequency, reliable all-day routes, but to the extent that we have such service here, the same ideas apply.

Google Maps is one of the most important methods people use to learn how to make trips using transit. To date, it has offered a bare-bones trip planner which might be somewhat useful in making an individual trip, but with very little information about the system beyond what its algorithms (sometimes seemingly arbitrarily) determine is the best way to get somewhere. While this isn't quite the automatically generated frequent network map I called for here, Google is finally incorporating frequency as a critical part of travel directions.