Human Transit

comment of the week

On the phenomenology of crowding and reliability, from Alon Levy:

People's perception of utilization is always going to be skewed upward. There are always more people to witness crowding than emptiness. If half the trains run at 100% capacity, and half run at 20%, then five sixths of passengers will see 100% crowding rather than 20%; therefore, real utilization will be 60%, while perceived utilization will be 87%.

The same is true with frequency - more people are there to witness a train run late than to witness it run on time. In both cases, both the actual and the perceived numbers are important: the perceived numbers measure passenger experience, whereas the actual numbers measure system costs.

All very true of urban rapid transit.  The exception, of course is the lonely empty bus doing Coverage work in a low-density suburb.  Its emptiness is all too visible to the motorists all around it.  

As for reliability, one thing I admire about real-time information displays is that they expand the audience that can notice when the service is on time.  An electric display that says "Next bus:  17 minutes, 19 minutes, 22 minutes" can help broaden public understanding of how bad things really are beyond just the riders who'll actually wait all that time. 

if your bus is late, should the agency pay?

An engineering professor in Montréal got his transit agency to pay for his taxi fare because his bus didn't show up.  Unfortunately, it look many days of his time in small-claims litigation, so his trophy, a $40 check from the agency, should probably be framed rather than cashed.

Now and then a transit agency tries some kind of "on time or we pay" guarantee.  In the Montréal suburb of Laval, for example, the buses are equipped with Global Positioning System (GPS) technology, and the deal is that if your bus is more than five minutes late (a fact that the agency can verify via GPS), you can demand a free bus ticket, which is nice but not much of an incentive for the agency.  It seems to me the same GPS-driven approach could be used to implement a policy if "when we're more than x minutes late, we stop collecting fares."  That would actually help a late bus get back on time, because fare transactions are so time consuming.

There are excellent reasons not to do this, of course, or to do something more subtle.  For one thing, lateness has so many causes beyond the agency's control that it could cause substantial unavoidable payouts that would ultimately come at the cost of service. 

For very frequent urban routes, a better GPS-driven scheme would be based on actual headway (time between consecutive trips, i.e. maximum wait time) rather than timetable, for reasons I discussed here.  You could stop collecting fares on any bus that is more than __ minutes behind the one ahead of it.  I'd suggest x be something like 3 times the published headway or ten minutes, whichever is less.

Still, we'd have to remember that the lost revenue, if substantial, would come out of service, sooner or later.

I'm curious if any readers have encountered an effective one.  By effective I mean one that actually helps motivate good system performance, rather than just shifting scarce funds from service into claims.

(From Montréal Gazette via Montréalités Urbaines)

portland: another challenging chart

A while back I posted some City of Portland data showing that in the past 12 years, during which four new rail transit segments were opened, the percentage of Portlanders who take transit to work, called the journey-to-work mode share, didn't improve at all.

Several commenters wondered if data for the whole Portland region, as opposed to just the city, would look different.  One also raised questions about the representativeness of the City survey's sample. 

So Portland reader Nathan Banks dug into the Census for similar data.  His charts show census data for 1990 and 2000, plus American Community Survey (ACS) data for the years since 2000.

He's done charts for all three of the Portland area counties.  You can see a PDF of his charts here:

Download JourneyToWork_TM_Area-2

Meanwhile, let's just look at the chart for the all of Multnomah, Washington, and Clackamas Counties -- a not-bad approximation of the Portland metro area.

 

(Portland transit professionals: if you have insights on these numbers that you don't want to say publicly, please email me.  If there's a happier version of this story, I want to tell it.)

The ACS data used since 2000 is a bit less reliable than the census, so I would take the year-to-year jaggedness of the line after 2000 as indicating a rough sense of margin of error.  (Actual mode shares certainly didn't bounce around that much.)  Still, ACS in 2002 is close enough to Census 2000 to give some credibility to the rest of each line.  What's more, Nathan's chart for Multnomah County, which is mostly the City of Portland, matches the  City of Portland data well enough that these independent data sources have to be taken as confirming each other's message. In short:

• Transit mode share is not improving, at least for work trips.  Since at least 2000 (and since 1996 in the City of Portland data) transit mode share has languished in the 10-15% range in Portland, and 7-9% for the whole Portland region.  This happened despite the openings of the Portland Streetcar, Red Line, and Yellow Line rail expansions in that time. (The Green Line opened in 2009, too late to register here.)
• Walk commutes aren't rising much either, despite a large influx of people into inner-city high density areas that should allow some of them to walk to work.  (You would expect walk trips to be flat across the whole region, but they're also pretty flat in the Multnomah County and Portland data.)
• The only growing mode is cycling, up a tiny bit in the outer counties but up substantially in Multnomah County, from 1% in 1990 to 5% in 2008.  (This squares with the City of Portland estimate a few points higher, since Multnomah County is Portland plus a few eastern and northwestern suburbs.) 

Bravo for the cycling advocates, who've made great strides during this period. 

Still, for all the investment in transit, it's hard to feel good about these transit numbers.  Yes, this is only journey-to-work, which is not the whole measure of a city's transport system.  It certainly feels as though the Streetcar, at least, is attracting happy riders, maybe errand and shopping and school trips rather than work trips. 

But I'm not sure how to make a happy story out of this data from a transit perspective, and would welcome your thoughts.  Is Portland on the wrong track?  Or is it just trying to do something else, something more important, that these data don't measure?

unemployment and the transit imperative

As American leaders suddenly pivot to focus on unemployment, Emily Garr at The Avenue picked up on a line of President Obama's recent speech in Lorain County, Ohio.

You can't get to work or go buy groceries like you used to because of cuts in the county transit system.

She goes on to describe cuts in the transit services to this suburban county that are definitely not "trimming the fat" but more like multiple amputations.

Transit advocates need to be picking up this line.  Back in the mid-90s, when welfare reform was timely, I routinely ran passenger surveys on various transit systems as part of planning projects.  The surveys had many other purposes, but I made a point to ask both "what is your trip purpose?" and "if transit had not been available, how would you have made your trip?"  A common answer to the second question was that the person would not have been able to make the trip.  Cross-tabulate that with a trip purposes of "work" and you get a count of people who could not hold their jobs without public transit.  It's an easy thing to do in any customer survey, and every transit agency and advocate should know this number. 

It's also important to notice that the people who are on the verge of not being able to hold their jobs are mostly in relatively low-wage jobs in the service sector -- restaurants, fast food, big box retail, etc -- and these people are commuting all day and much of the night.  Transit that supports high employment is all-day service, not just peak service aimed at the generally better-off 9-to-5 commuter.

transit's zoom-whoosh problem

My friend Dale, a Portland poet and essayist, recently shifted his commute to downtown from car-and-sometimes-bus to usually-bicycle.  He's posted "ten things I've learned after six months of riding a bicycle" (here, preceded by three interesting paragraphs on Jefferson and Adams.)  My favorite of the ten:

9) It's just as fun as when you were a kid. You go zoom! and whoosh! You're a sky creature, not a miserable earth-crawler. And you get to the end of your commute feeling invigorated and intensely alive.

And I thought: Yes, transit has a zoom-whoosh problem.  Nobody today will describe the riders of the 14-Hawthorne bus (Dale's other option) as "sky creatures."  Indeed the 20th century bus operations model -- lots of stops, one-by-one fare transactions, getting stuck in turnouts or behind parallel-parking cars -- is the closest thing to "earth-crawling" that modern technology can offer at scale.

The most complete and authentic zoom-whoosh experience I've had on transit was the very first time I rode the Bay Area's BART system, in 1976.  I was 14 years old and on my first trip to California from Portland, where I grew up.  It was also my first major trip alone.  I took the overnight Amtrak Coast Starlight train, and will never forget awakening at dawn somewhere near Davis and seeing (a) the flattest land I had ever seen and (b) my first signature California palm tree (Washingtonia robusta).  The palm was crucial; it signaled that I was arriving in a world that I had only seen on television, so I was prepared for everything to be bigger and more vivid, with lots of zoom and whoosh. 

So of course I was a complete sucker for BART.  The phallic nose cones of the then-new BART trains were right out of The Jetsons.  The hexagonal-grid walls of the downtown stations recalled 2001: A Space Odyssey.  The ride was supernaturally smooth and quiet.  Did BART emit a deafening squeal on curves then, as it does now?  Either it did not, or more likely, my emotional memory of the zoom-whoosh experience edited out that detail.

Probably the highlight of the zoom-whoosh experience on BART -- still available today -- comes if you sit at the very front of the train, so that you enter stations at high speed -- whoosh!  Arrival feels light, effortless, powerful.

Zoom and whoosh, of course, are a matter of scale and expectations.  To me as a boy, Portland's Tri-Met buses seemed to whoosh, at least, if not zoom.  At major bus stops downtown, they flowed past in great numbers, groaning on departure but still whooshing a bit on arrival.  (Importantly, too, their signs announced destinations all over the city, as though offering me choices.  This childhood conditioning may be part of why I've never feared connections, because great connection points are sites of choice, and thus can convey a sensation of freedom.)  Watching the Portland transit mall as an adult, I still see that advertising-of-choice as a crucial feature of the experience, but I admit that I no longer sense much whoosh.

BART also suggested that zoom and whoosh could come apart.  The phallic nose cones were meant to suggest airplanes and rockets and sports cars, things that zoom.  But the word zoom clearly comes from the sound of internal combustion.  We may soon have to give up zoom, let it fall away like the first stage of a rocket, and learn to appreciate the quieter pleasure of whoosh.

For now, though, the zoomy phallic noses are still with us, popping up wherever a transit technology is trying to look modern.  In the US concept of Bus Rapid Transit, such as the Las Vegas MAX pictured here, it often seems that we are to tolerate a lot of compromises in service as long as the bus itself is sexy, and that usually means a sleek ("whoosh") paint-job and the same rounded, protuberant front end.  

Even some modern streetcars have embraced the look, even though they never go fast enough to whoosh, let alone zoom.  In fact, when a mixed-traffic streetcar is stuck behind a car trying to parallel-park (thus making the motorist anxious, so that she is even worse at parallel-parking than usual), you might even call it an "earth crawler."

Photo of BART A-car by Dennis Mojado via Wikipedia

new york: cutting service without cutting mobility

The U.S. service cut epidemic -- the result of transit agencies relying on recession-sensitive funding sources -- is about to touch New York again.  But as in the first round of San Francisco cuts, the New York MTA planners are doing their best to reduce service but not mobility.

As with everything in New York, the details are complicated, but here's a simple example.  The G subway line is the only line running directly between Queens (the top of this map) and Brooklyn (the bottom).  It has long included a segment from Court Square to Forest Hills where G trains run alongside two other subway lines, the E and V which connect Queens directly to Manhattan.  (Full subway map here.)

In happier times, a transit agency could indulge the preferences of people from Forest Hills who want to get to Brooklyn without having to change trains.  But when service needs to be cut, it's far better to cut this duplicative segment than to cut a segment that is somebody's only service.  And that's usually the real-world choice.

So in future, the G will run only as far as Court Square, and passengers who want to get to/from Forest Hills and Brooklyn will need to use the E or V between Court Square and Forest Hills, then change.  But as a result, frequencies and unique services will not be cut as much as they would have been otherwise.  That's the only way to get through a service cut without reducing mobility.

Full coverage of the service cuts is at Second Avenue Sagas, which often features thoughtful and detailed commentary on New York transit issues.  Thanks to Alon Levy for the tip.

unhelpful word watch: captive rider

Just now, in a LinkedIn Public Transit Professionals thread, someone asked how to describe a "demographic" that has a choice about how to travel, as opposed to "someone whose only mode of transportation other than foot is public transport."  An engineer came back promptly with the common industry terms, choice rider and captive rider.  The second of those terms has always sent me through the roof. 

Dense cities, as we know, have people who have chosen not to own a car, including me. These people may not have the option of driving for a particular trip, but their mode of travel is nevertheless based on their choice, not their "captivity."

Even people who are too poor to own cars often have a range of travel choices other than transit, or may simply choose not to travel to certain places if the transit service is unacceptable.  In my own consulting work around Los Angeles, for example, I've sometimes seen indications that certain immigrant communities seem less dependent on public transport, and have heard speculation that this is because they tend to have large extended families who can help one another with transportation.

To call any of these people "captive riders" is not just insulting, it can breed a false complacency on the part of the transit agency. There are very few riders that you absolutely cannot lose no matter how terrible your service is.  I've always felt that the best discipline for a transit agency is to treat all of their customers as though they've made a free choice.

I'd really welcome the views of other professionals on this point.

guest post: u.s. transit needs an "emergency operations fund"

This guest post is by Ron Kilcoyne, General Manager/CEO of Greater Bridgeport Transit in Bridgeport, Connecticut.  Ron's previous posts include CEO of Santa Clarita Transit near Los Angeles and manager of research and planning for AC Transit in Oakland, California.  The views expressed are his own and not those of his agency.

What will it take to restore all the transit service cuts over the past two years and prevent additional service reductions? I haven’t found an exact number but 10% of the total cost of providing transit service nationally would be good rough estimate.  For example, at least two suburban transit systems - one in Cleveland OH, another in Atlanta -- have or will shut down completely this year. The Chicago Transit Authority anticipates eliminating 14% of it service on February 7. Colorado Springs CO reduced service by 53% on January 1. Between late 2008 and this spring Orange County Transit reduced service by 22%.

I suggest that Congress appropriate $9 billion over a 2 ½ year period in an emergency operations fund (in addition to the $8.2 billion for capital in the House Bill) that can only be used to add service or prevent service reductions.  This would be apportioned as $1.7 b for the balance of FY 2010; $3.6 b in FY 2011 and $3.7 b in FY 2012.

Money would be distributed by existing formulas (where funds are distributed based on population and miles of service operated) or to agencies on a hardship basis. While hardship would make sure the most extreme service reductions are restored or prevented, a formula would probably receive more political support because all transit agencies would receive some funds.

To receive funds, a transit system would have to operate, within 120 days of the bill becoming law, no less than the number of service hours* (annualized) that they operated at the end of 2009, plus additional service hours equal to the amount of funding (annualized) they receive under this program divided by the incremental cost of an hour of service. (Transit agencies with multiple modes operating at different costs per hour may allocate hours among the different services as they see fit.)

Provisions would be needed to ensure the funds are all spent on service.  If, prior to January 1, 2010, a transit agency’s policy board had approved service hour reductions to be implemented in 2010, or had specified a number of service hours to be cut in 2010 and 2011, then these hours may be counted in lieu of additional hours. Transit agencies that have not cut service or proposed to cut service could increase service hours.

The bottom line is that state or local governments cannot shift these funds away from transit, nor can transit agencies shift them from service hours to other expenses. To this end, each transit agency must demonstrate that it is adding or preserving the maximum number of service hours that the funding they receive will fund, and that they cannot announce new service hour reductions.

From a jobs perspective a compelling case can be made for this proposal.

• A recent TCRP report indicated that each billion invested in transit operations yield almost twice as many jobs as a similar investment in capital (41K compared to 23K) A PIRG analysis of ARRA funds showed that investments in transit capital generated more jobs than similar investments in highway capital.
• The jobs created/preserved by this proposal will be immediate and in place months before the November 2010 midterm elections.
• From a jobs perspective an even larger impact will be on the number of jobs that will gain transit access. Unlike other job stimulus investments, more transit service hours will provide more opportunities for individuals to access employment and training. (Transit agencies are encouraged to quantify this impact, which may be possible by analyzing recent cuts in terms of loss of coverage to jobs -- especially where late evening and weekend services have been reduced and shift workers are affected.)
• Fuel prices are increasing again. If this continues until another tipping point is reached as in 2008, transit agencies that struggled to meet demand then will be even less able to meet demand in 2010.

I think this proposal addresses concerns that funds will not be spent wisely or have a direct impact on jobs. Another concern will be what happens after 2012.  Will there be pressure to add more federal operation funding?  This is where the incentives and conditions that should be included in the authorization bill are important. By then states and local government will be in better position to increase local support for transit and these provisions will provide powerful carrots and sticks to see that it happens. Due to the suddenness of the Crash of '08, most agencies did not have time to seek new funding sources to forestall the big cuts of 2009-10.  The expiration of the emergency funds in 2012, by contrast, would be predictable, so there would be time to secure voter approval, if needed, for local funds to replace them.

Contact your senators and ask for $9 Billion for emergency operations support and urge others to do so also.  Please feel free to post this message anywhere there may be a receptive audience.

* A service hour is one bus or train operating for one hour.  It is the basic unit of measurement for quantities of transit service.  Because transit's costs are mostly labor, service hours track closely with overall operating cost.

quote of the week

When everyone was "driving" horses, and nobody had cars, and there were no gas stations, every isolated new stretch of road built in 1902 could not possibly have passed FTA cost benefit analysis criteria.  -- Russell Bozian, in an email.

dogs on the metro

From a Financial Times article by Susanne Sternthal on the stray dogs of Moscow.

There is one special sub-group of strays that stands apart from the rest: Moscow’s metro dogs. “The metro dog appeared for the simple reason that it was permitted to enter,” says Andrei Neuronov, an author and specialist in animal behaviour and psychology, who has worked with Vladimir Putin’s black female Labrador retriever, Connie (“a very nice pup”). “This began in the late 1980s during perestroika,” he says. “When more food appeared, people began to live better and feed strays.” The dogs started by riding on overground trams and buses, where supervisors were becoming increasingly thin on the ground. 

 Neuronov says there are some 500 strays that live in the metro stations, especially during the colder months, but only about 20 have learned how to ride the trains. This happened gradually, first as a way to broaden their territory. Later, it became a way of life. “Why should they go by foot if they can move around by public transport?” he asks.

“They orient themselves in a number of ways,” Neuronov adds. “They figure out where they are by smell, by recognising the name of the station from the recorded announcer’s voice and by time intervals. If, for example, you come every Monday and feed a dog, that dog will know when it’s Monday and the hour to expect you, based on their sense of time intervals from their ­biological clocks.”

More on these dogs at English Russia.

(via Andrew Sullivan.  Pic from English Russia.)