build your own system

One of the great strengths of Portland's regional government, Metro, is that it has always tried to engage the region's citizens in making the really hard choices that face an urban region.  The agency's largest mission, under Oregon's land use planning system, was to develop a regional plan for where new growth would occur, and how this would change a city that people already loved.  To do this, they spent years exploring how to simplify and frame the question so that every citizen could understand it, and understand why it's hard. 

A government agency's process of communicating with the public needs to listen and educate at the same time.  Citizens want to feel listened to, but they also want to understand.  Metro simplified the question down to the essential non-technical value judgment, which was: "Growth is coming.  Do we grow up or out?  Increase density or spread out over more land?"  This was the hard question that first motivated Oregon's land use laws -- laws whose purposes is not to prevent sprawl but to ensure that it's the result of such a conscious decision.  It was a tough conversation.  (Many people wanted to argue the premise that growth was coming, but the reality was that Portland's governments didn't have the tools to stop growth even if there were a consensus to do so.)

The conversation that Metro started went on for years, and the first pass at a collective decision came in the Region 2040 growth concept:  Mostly increased density, but some new horizontal growth in areas selected for low agricultural value.  It was a huge achievement, but the real achievement was not just that the question was answered but that it was so clearly asked.  A citizenry, through its elected representatives, faced a clear value judgment about their city.  It wasn't about approving a project or assessing some politician's performance; it was about raw economics and geometry: grow up or grow out?  No rational person could argue that this wasn't a real and consequential question.  Through Metro's work the question got answered, and, partly because the process was so clear and democratic, the basic answer has held despite the inevitable turbulence of shorter-term politics.

So it's great to observe that Metro is now approaching its regional transit planning job in the same spirit.  Their "build your own high capacity transit system" tool allows anyone to play around with how to prioritize the region's next transit projects, and gives real-time feedback about the costs and benefits.  You can select some lines that you like, run out of money, and have the experience of making hard decisions among them, just as the elected officials have to do.

For years, I used similar tools as part of transit planning projects.  In those days, we did the exercise in public meetings, and it's still an excellent tool when you have a room full of people who care about their community.

Citizens would be gathered in groups of 6-8 around a map of their community, with a layer of clear acetate over it.  We'd give them some tools:  the red tape is an elevated metro, the blue tape is light rail, the green tape is frequent bus service.  Here, fellow citizens:  We have 24 kilometers of green tape that we can lay out.  You can trade five km of green tape for a km of blue, or ten km of green tape for a km of red.  Design your own system, but experience the process of making hard choices as you do.

(A similar exercise can be done when doing a short-range bus service redesign.  Here, you're just dealing with frequencies of service rather than technologies, so the costs are more obvious.  Red tape is a bus every 15 minutes, blue is a bus every 30 minutes, green is a bus every 60 minutes, so a kilometer of red is worth two km of blue or four km of green.)

 At the end of the session, different groups of citizens would have come up with different networks for the same area.  So we'd put the maps on the wall and I'd lead a discussion about how they were similar or different, and get citizens talking to each other about why they approached the problem in various ways.  At the end, we understood their views, but more important, they understood each other's views.  They also understood the underlying problem, so they could form more useful and constructive ideas in the future.

(These pics are from workshops held by Vancouver's TransLink in 2006, as part of the South of Fraser Area Transit Plan.  This plan covered a huge area of mostly recent suburbs where the fastest growth was occurring, and we needed to help define both a short-term improvement to the bus system and some long term visions for where to develop rapid transit.)

So bravo for Metro's planning tool, which lets us do the same process in our pajamas.  It's still quite basic:  It just lets you select corridors for "high capacity transit" and watch the costs and benefits add up.  The next iteration will doubtless get into mode choices: you can build bus rapid transit for this much, or light rail for this much more.  As it goes, it will spin off side debates among the experts about whether the assumptions are really right.  Those arguments will be valid, but they won't detract from the basic value of the tool, which is its ability to build an average citizen's understanding of the real challenge facing her community, and her confidence to form a clear and useful opinion. 

Comments

[Aaron Antrim]

I stumbled across this recently:
http://www.nextstopdesign.com/

The goal is to get citizens designing and discussing facilities. The project does not address system design, but you could use the same model.

If citizens addressed system design in this project it would probably be useful for discussion purposes only, though, as professionals have more tools and knowledge to create good designs. By crowdsourcing bus stop designs, they are gathering ideas that otherwise might not surface.

[Nicholas Barnard]

:-( the planning tool has been pulled.. I wonder if an oregonian could do a FOIA request and get it back on the web somewhere. Or even just a nice request..