Human Transit

los angeles: the next great transit metropolis?

Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa's campaign to accelerate the construction of rail transit in his city is deservedly in the news, not just for his own persistence but also for the excitement it's generating in the Obama administration, in Congress, and in other cities who would love to see a precedent-setting response.  But it's also very useful and inspiring to transit planners working overseas, like me.

Map (click here for fullsize version):  The Transport Politic

When I talk about North American public transit to people here in Australia or New Zealand, I don't talk much about New York or Boston or other old cities where the depth of urban history approaches that of Europe; Australians and New Zealanders already know Europe better than most Americans do.  I talk a bit about Portland, because of its land use laws, extensive light rail, and special downtown.  I talk about Vancouver, becuase of SkyTrain, and its growth management, but above all because of its dramatic densification over the last few decades. 

But when I really want to surprise them, and shift their thinking, I talk about Los Angeles.  Educated Australians, like educated Europeans, have mostly been there as tourists, and they remember it with the kind of fascinated delight that could just as well be called horror.  Even if they haven't been there, they know it as the car capital of America, the city they'd least think of as the next great transit metropolis.

Los Angeles may still seem hopelessly car-dominated today, but it's fortunate in its urban structure, in ways that make it a smart long term bet as a relatively sustainable city, at least in transport terms.   Two things in particular: (a) the presence of numerous major centres of activity scattered around the region, and (b) the regular grid of arterials, mostly spaced in a way that's ideal for transit, that covers much of the city, offering the ideal infrastucture for that most efficient of transit structures: a grid network.

Because Los Angeles is a vast constellation of dense places, rather than just a downtown and a hinterland, it's full of corridors where there is two-way all-day flow of demand, the ideal situation for cost effective, high quality transit.  In this, Los Angeles is more like Paris than it is like, say, New York.  Much of the core area between downtown and Santa Monica is covered by a braid of major boulevards, all with downtown at one end and the naturally dense coastal strip at the other, every one a potentially great transit market given appropriate protection from traffic.  Near the coast, the massive dense nodes of Westwood/UCLA and Century City (and to a lesser extent Santa Monica and Venice) offer further anchoring to the western end of these markets.  On a smaller scale, similar anchors are found throughout much of the region.  While gathering people to a transit stop will still be difficult, it will be especially easy to grow an everywhere-to-everywhere network in Los Angeles, becuase of these patterns.

The low-end but extensive network of frequent limited-stop buses, the Metro Rapid, grew from this geography, and someday, the busiest rail transit lines in the American West will prosper from it.  One of the most interesting long-term questions about Los Angeles is how to fit high-quality transit to a city of great, wide boulevards -- another crucial feature in which the city resembles Paris.  Sooner or later, most of these boulevards will need to give over two lanes to crowded and efficient transit services, which will move far more people per hour than car lanes do.  But there is much fun and quarrel to be had working out the details.  (Light rail or buses?  Side lanes or center lanes?  Stations configured how, in what relation to the streetscape?  Local or rapid stops?  The questions abound.)

Densities in many places are lower than ideal, but Los Angeles, more than any city in the world, has a virtually inexhaustable supply of infill opportunities, even if typical middle-class and wealthy suburbs are set aside.  If a divine hand prohibited the paving of one more square inch of California, the Los Angeles region would keep growing without a pause. 

Finally, of course, Los Angeles has built a strong consensus about the desperate need for transit, and this is the story that impresses foreigners.  Every television viewer in the world has seen images of Los Angeles and what life is like there.  And one thing they've all been shown, over and over, is that this is a city for cars, a place where cars mean freedom, and your car is your most important fashion statement.  When I tell them that the popular mayor of Los Angeles is spending major political capital on a campaign to accelerate transit development in his city, to the point of demanding a complete rethink of how the Federal government funds transport projects, eyebrows shoot up.  It's one of those little jolts that can change our notion of what's possible, wherever we are.

If I ended there, Los Angeles transit advocates would ask me why I don't talk about everything that's still wrong.  Do I tell people that Los Angeles still struggles with institutional tangles between the countywide MTA and the cities, especially the municipal bus companies?  Do I even make clear that Mayor Villaraigosa doesn't control the transit agency, and has nothing like the presumptive powers that Ken Livingstone wielded in London?   Do I go into the ways that the Los Angeles transit system, while deeply dependent on connections, still charges for transfers on single-trip rides (though not on same-day round trips), a petty legacy of security problems around transfer slips?  Sometimes, for audiences who want to delve, I do go into those details. 

But most great cities look better from a distance.  The compromises and hesitations built into the Metro Rapid diminish but don't erase the importance of the Rapid as a precedent for creating a lot of new mobility fast.  The unfortunate transfer penalities don't contradict the wisdom and efficiency of the grid system.  The compromised alignments of some light rail lines don't undermine the case for rapid rail investment, nor for the balance between heavy rail, light rail, and busways in the region's plans.   There are very few inspiring transit services, anywhere in the world, that don't look more problematic to the locals who deal with them every day.

The big-picture Los Angeles talking point is still an inspiring one:  The most aggressive mayoral transit advocacy in America is coming from the nation's most car-oriented big city.  And because film and television will always tell this city's story to the world, the rise of transit in Los Angeles will be a globally resonant event.  Is anyone studying how film and television images of how people travel in Los Angeles are evolving over time?  Those things really matter.

illusions of travel time in transit promotion

Whenever you hear someone cite the travel time of a proposed transit line, your first reaction should always be:  "Yes, but at what frequency?"   Often, that fact is missing from these soundbites, and often, it's really important.

There's a nice example in today's Transport Politic.  Speaking of the proposed Gold Line Foothills extension, which if built will someday extend from Los Angeles to Montclair:

The commute times from the end of the [proposed Gold] line will be a serious problem: once the second phase is built to Montclair, downtown will be a full 75 minutes away, making daily commutes difficult to envision for many people. Even in traffic, that trip takes a total of 70 minutes by car.

Nevertheless, getting people from the San Gabriel Valley into downtown may not be the major goal of the project. Metrolink Commuter Rail can cover the distance between Montclair and Los Angeles in an hour along the San Bernardino Line, though that link is near carrying capacity.

Now, if all you care about is commutes during the peak hour, then and only then do you have all the information you need.  Only during the peak commute period, and in the peak direction, can you expect anything called "commuter rail" to serve you anywhere near your desired time of travel. 

However, if you care about supporting denser and more urban redevelopment, or helping people own fewer cars, or being relevant to the lives of service workers, or serving students who travel all day, then you're missing a crucial fact: the proposed all-day frequency.

Frequency is best described by headway, the elapsed time between consecutive trips on a line.  The headway is also the maximum waiting time, and half of it is the average waiting time.  Add those to the much-advertised travel time (technically called in-vehicle travel time or IVTT) and you have a sense of how long a real-life trip will be.  And those are the realities that will ultimately drive ridership.

This makes all the difference in the comparison above.  The Gold Line can be expected to run every 15 minutes or better all day, which is pretty much the industry standard for light rail, though some agencies run less service during the late evening.  Meanwhile, the Metrolink commuter rail line in this comparison runs every 60-180 minutes midday.  

To get a quick sense of how useful a service will actually be to everyone, not just peak commuters, I always check a sample trip around 12:00 midday.  The commuter rail headway is 120 minutes at that hour, so for an average trip time I take half of that and add it to the advertised in-vehicle travel time:

Average travel time = Headway / 2 plus in-vehicle travel time

Commuter Rail:  (120 minutes)/2 + 55 minutes = 115 minutes.

Proposed LRT:  (15 minutes)/2 + 75 minutes = 83 minutes.

Big difference.  And that's just the average.  The maximum travel time is ...

Maximum travel time = Headway plus in-vehicle travel time

Commuter Rail:  120 minutes + 55 minutes = 175 minutes.

Proposed LRT:   15 minutes + 75 minutes = 90 minutes.

North American Commuter rail lines are typically very, very infrequent midday, if they run at all.  The Metrolink line in question here (the San Bernardino line) is hourly in the mid-afternoon but has a two-hour gap mid-day (which affects the above calculation) and a gap of almost three hours in the morning.  These gaps happen even on a line that is "near carrying capacity" because Metrolink shares its tracks with other uses, including freight and the occasional Amtrak train, and is also constrained by single-track segments.  So it tends to flow a lot of service one way during the peak but has trouble serving reverse-peak or midday trips.

The real lesson here, of course, is that when you hear someone cite a commute-hour in-vehicle travel time for a proposed service, you should ask: "Is the commute all that matters?"  Journalists often think so.  But if you're taking a longer view, and wanting a project to (a) be part of an integrated network and (b) be useful all day so that (c) it can trigger redevelopment and (d) enable people to own fewer cars, then the commute-hour travel time should be worthless to you.  Ask instead about the travel time around 12:00, and always remind them that in the real world, travel time includes wait time.  So what's the frequency?

streetcars vs light rail ... is there a difference?

Yonah Freemark at The Transport Politic proposes a curious definition of the difference between streetcars (trams) and light rail:

The dividing line between what Americans reference as a streetcar and what they call light rail is not nearly as defined as one might assume considering the frequent use of the two terminologies in opposition. According to popular understanding, streetcars share their rights-of-way with automobiles and light rail has its own, reserved right-of-way.

But the truth is that the two modes use very similar vehicles and their corridors frequently fall somewhere between the respective stereotypes of each technology. Even the prototypical U.S. light rail project — the Portland MAX — includes significant track segments downtown in which its corridor is hardly separated from that of the automobiles nearby. And that city’s similarly pioneering streetcar includes several segments completely separated from the street.

We're all prone to lash out at "popular understanding" now and then, often without citing a source for it.  I certainly know I do that.  But for the record, I don't think the dividing line between streetcars and light rail can usefully be drawn where Yonah suggests, based purely on the exclusivity of the right-of-way.

APTA's Streetcar and Heritage Trolley site, for example, defines light rail with emphasis on both exclusivity of right of way and stop spacing.  I want to suggest that the terms streetcar/tram and light rail will be most useful if we use them to refer to the prevailing stop spacing, not the exclusivity of the right-of-way. 

Light rail and streetcar technologies are, as a whole, more similar than different, but the terms as I hear them used belong to different categories of usefulness to the customer.  I use the term light rail to describe something that's at least attempting to be rapid transit, by which I mean covering long distances fast by serving fairly widely-spaced stations rather than closely-spaced local stops.  The term "light rail" was invented specifically for the contrast with "heavy rail," which is a competing alternative for the same relatively long corridors.  Light rail often makes closely-spaced stops right in downtown, and may thus serve a "streetcar" function there, but it does this mainly for the purpose of providing good access to people who want to use its higher-speed segments.    I refer to streetcars/trams only when I mean local-stop services, designed to do pretty much what local buses do.  (Such services are usually no faster or more reliable than a local bus.)

Exclusivity of right-of-way is an independent issue, but I think it's clearer to understand this as a consequence of the original usefulness distinction.  Longer trips are more sensitive to speed and reliability than short trips, partly because these trips don't have the option of walking.  If Portland's light rail line MAX doesn't show up at your suburban station, you're stranded.  If you're already downtown and the Portland Streetcar doesn't show up, you start walking.  A common complaint about transit in Melbourne is that the extensive tram system is still the main way of making some fairly long trips, such as between downtown and LaTrobe University, and it's local-stop operation makes it simply too slow to be widely attractive in such a market. 

Toronto, which already has very local-stop and slow streetcars downtown, is now proposing a "light rail" network called Transit City.  Their explanation of it begins:

Transit City is an initiative to build eight new Light Rail Transit (LRT) lines to neighbourhoods and areas currently not served by rapid public transit.

Toronto already has heavy-rail subways, so that's what locals will visualize when they hear "rapid transit."  The agency clearly wants people to think of these new lines as an extension of the subway system, not an extension of the inner-city streetcar system.   For that reason, they're insistently calling it light rail rather than streetcar.  The difference is first and foremost that the Transit City light rail will serve widely spaced stations, like the subway, not closely spaced stops, like the existing downtown streetcars.

This long distance service intention is what drives the insistence on exclusivity, which is why the long-distance intention, expressed first of all in stop spacing, is the more fundamental distinction.  If you're serious about trying to provide rapid transit service over a longer distance, such as between a city and its suburbs, you'll insist on exclusive right of way for the vast majority of the distance, sometimes with the exception of short segments downtown where the options are difficult.  Again, urban light rail services can look rather like streetcars as they run locally through downtown, but (a) their right of way is usually if not always exclusive and (b) they are mostly collecting/distributing trips that will use the fast segment, whereas on a typical streetcar/tram the local-stop service is the entire product.  Both of those features follow from the original intention: be useful for long-distance travel, at least into the downtown. 

The streetcars/trams that I know, both historic and modern -- in North America, Australia, and Europe -- are almost all local-stop.  A few may have some relatively rapid segments across parks or stretches of old rail corridor, such as Melbourne's Albert Park and Port Melbourne segments, but these are the exception.  They are usually also mixed with traffic for a large share of the distance, which means they are easily disrupted by traffic-induced delays.  It's common to see them take exclusive lanes where they're available, such as in medians of wide boulevards, but they are designed with the presumption that mixed flow is acceptable where exclusive lanes can't be found.  That's because (a) streetcars/trams are competing for short trips and (b) new streetcars especially are driven by a redevelopment agenda, where proponents are often frank that triggering the development outcome is simply more important that the usefulness of the service as transit.

Finally, when I suggest that stop spacing is the best way to distinguish light rail and streetcar -- and is already functioning this way in a great  deal of existing usage -- I'm not implying that everything is one or the other.  There are, as noted, streetcars that have short light-rail-like segments and light rail lines that have streetcar-like segments.  These terms define ends of a spectrum, in which a large share of examples are pure one or the other but there are many (especially in Europe) at various points or mixtures in between the extremes. 

I suggest that the most useful categories are those that refer to different kinds of usefulness to the customer.  Stop spacing -- wide stops for rapid operation -- makes light rail useful for longer trips, and that's the most critical usefulness distinction.  This is why you rarely hear about "light rail" vs "streetcar" debates for a specific designated corridor.  The two terms refer to broadly the same technology, but the length of the corridor, and the speed it requires, usually determine whether we're talking about rapid transit, in which case this technology's offering is called light rail, or more local-stop service, in which case this technology's offering is called a "streetcar." 

los angeles times columnist slams transfer penalties

Los Angeles Times columnist David Lazarus tried using transit recently, and what drove him crazy was not the waiting, the crowding, the delays.  What drove him crazy were the fares:

For example, transfers. Switching from one transit provider to another is often a necessity in an area this vast. Some, such as Santa Monica's Big Blue Bus, make it relatively easy. Others do not.

The L.A. County Metropolitan Transportation Authority, the leading provider of bus and rail service in Southern California, charges $1.25 per trip (it'll go up to $1.50 in July). You can pay an extra 30 cents to transfer to another provider.

But you can't get a transfer to switch from one Metro route to another, or from a bus to a subway. Switching from a Metro rapid bus line, say, to a Metro local line will require you to pay the full fare twice.

You can buy a daily Metro pass for $5 or a weekly pass for $17, but that won't let you switch providers. Nor will you be allowed to use the Commuter Express buses that are often the quickest way to get across town during rush hour.

I've always been adamant about the crucial role of connections (or transfers, as Americans depressingly call them) in any multi-destinational transit system.  Traditionally, these were provided using paper transfer slips, which were issued by one driver and accepted by the next one.  Unfortunately, many cities found these slips to be easy tools for fare evasion.  People who didn't need them sold them to other riders, and drivers got tired of having to guard their transfer books as though they were cash. 

So a couple of decades ago the idea began spreading in the American industry that we should get rid of transfers, and instead sell a cheap day pass, priced at around twice the base fare.  The idea was that people who were transferring, and making a round trip, would come out ahead with the day pass.  People who were making a one way trip, or just spontaneously trying to move around their city -- they were out of luck.  This idea seemed to spread around the southwest, reaching San Jose but not San Francisco.  Fortunately it never became the industry standard.  Some agencies do charge a nominal fee for transfers, to try to limit the abuse. 

(I do recall an uninformed San Francisco Board of Supervisors decision that abolished transfers in the early 1990s.  "Fiasco" is too mild a word, and transfers were back within a couple of weeks.)

Once smartcards become standard, the last justification for charging for transfers will be gone.  Good smartcards can identify, when you board, that you've gotten off another service within a specified interval, so free transfers will be easy to identify and provide.  Transit in the business of selling compete passenger trips, not individual rides.  It can make sense to charge more for long trips, or for longer blocks of time.  But the need to get off one vehicle and onto another is not a deluxe feature that the customer should pay extra for; it's an inconvenience imposed by the design of the system.   Charging for transfers has never made sense.

quote of the week

There is nothing inherently convenient about cars, or about any vehicle. It is the system that makes them convenient, and that system includes both the vehicle and the infrastructure. Provide unlimited, subsidized "free" car infrastructure, and cars will be convenient. Run buses often, everywhere, all the time, and buses will be convenient. Put everything in a giant skyscraper with computer-controlled elevators, and elevators will be convenient. Trains, walking, bayou boats, swinging from vines, conveyor belts, scuba diving: whatever it is, if you throw enough money at the infrastructure you can make it convenient.

      -- Cap'n Transit, "On the Supposed Convenience of Cars"

UPDATE:  I should add that while I am quoting this approvingly, I do have issues with the word convenient, which I explained here.

stop spacing: the endless, thankless, and essential struggle

When I first started working in San Francisco around 1990, a proposal to consolidate bus stops that are too close together would have been a battle between well-meaning transit staff in favor and angry senior citizens opposed.  And in the grievance-loving world of San Francisco politics, the angrier side usually wins.  So it's sign of how far transit advocacy has come in San Francisco that the continued efforts of the San Francisco Transit Effectiveness Project is getting such balanced feedback, seniors still opposed, understandably, but with transit and pedestrian activists cited in favor, politely and accurately explaining (as I explained here) that too-close stop spacing really slows down service.

“Taking out stops means Muni runs faster, which means more people take Muni, which means less cars, which means less potential for pedestrian fatalities,” Champsee said.  (Examiner)

Sure enough.  Fewer stops also means more people at each stop, which improves personal security and also justifies better infrastructure. 

Are your city's stops too close together?  If so, does your city have activists saying this?  San Francisco's standard is that stops should be around 800-1000 feet (250-300m), but 14% are still closer than this.  Most North American cities have much closer spacing, sometimes as little as 300 feet (100m).  Now and then there's a good reason: transfer points and senior-disabled facilities have to have stops.  But in most places I've worked stop spacing is cultural, a matter of agency or industry habit.  There's much to critique about bus service here in Sydney, but they are merciless about stop spacing on their major routes.  It's rarely less than 300m / 1000 ft.

Of course, there's one nagging virtue to excessively close stops.  They make it easy to walk down the bus route, so that you get somewhere even if the bus doesn't come, but can still catch it if it does come.  Sydney's the first city I've lived in where that's really hard; the bus catches me between stops that are too far apart to run to when I see the bus.  But then:  Do we want a policy to be predicated on making it easy to mistrust the service?  Or do we want one that will help make the service more trustworthy? 

a personal note on today's news ....

My decision in 2005 to leave the USA had many motives.  But whenever I've contemplated returning permanently, the single strongest reason not to has been the nation's barbaric, anti-competitive, and stupendously inefficient approach to health care. 

The plight of the uninsured and underinsured was bad enough; more than one relative has told me that the great thing about turning 65 in America is that you can finally go to the doctor.  I couldn't contemplate living in a place where I could be trapped in a toxic job for fear of losing my health care, or where the appalling burden the system places on employers would prevent me from starting a small business, should I want to do that.  I have always been amazed that Americans tell themselves they value entrepreneurship.  Taking on your first employees is a much easier decision in Canada or Australia, where you're not taking on their health care needs as well.

I have few illusions about health care in Australia, where I live now.  Here, the central government is considering seizing control of public hospitals from the states, in order to address long-term problems of underfunding and incompetence that have made years of lurid news.  Health care is an emotional issue everywhere, an issue that has us all by the throat, much like the issue of "home" that lies at the heart of NIMBYism.   People will never be entirely rational about health care, any more than they are about "home."

I also have few illusions about the complex and compromised bill that President Obama is about to sign, but I do know this is about more than health care.  Apart from the election day of 2008, no other day in recent history has made me feel as hopeful about the US's ability to reform despite its toxic politics and archaic systems of governance.  If a reform of this magnitude can survive all the fear-mongering and confusion and somehow get to the president's desk, reforming transportation policy may not be such a crazy dream.  When I'm feeling really dreamy, I can almost imagine a world where California could put together a constitutional convention to fix its dysfunctional budget system, so that it wouldn't have to continue wrecking its great universities, or its magnificent and diverse experiments in urbanism.

I hope, wherever you live and whatever your views on the issue, that you too feel a sense of a release and opportunity, in the fact that reform on this scale can still get done.

does high-density life have a bigger ecological footprint? and why?

Over at New Geography, Joel Kotkin has a new broadside against high-density inner city life.  It's called "Forced March to the Cities," presumably to feed the right-wing talking-point that urbanism and planning are totalitarian.  Here's the part that's supposed to scare you:

 ... [A]cross the country, and within the Obama Administration, there is a growing predilection to endorse policies that steer the bulk of new development into our already most-crowded urban areas.

One influential document called "Moving Cooler", cooked up by the Environmental Protection Agency, the Urban Land Institute, the Environmental Defense Fund, Natural Resources Defense Council, the Environmental Protection Agency and others, lays out a strategy that would essentially force the vast majority of new development into dense city cores.

Over the next 40 years this could result in something like 60 million to 80 million people being crammed into existing central cities. These policies work hard to make suburban life as miserable as possible by shifting infrastructure spending to dense areas. One proposal, "Moving Cooler," outdoes even Lowenthal by calling for charges of upwards of $400 for people to park in front of their own houses.

The ostensible justification for this policy lies in the dynamics of slowing climate change. Forcing people to live in dense cities, the reasoning goes, would make people give up all those free parking opportunities and and even their private vehicles, which would reduce their dreaded "carbon imprint."

He goes on to argue that urban development's footprint is actually higher. 

Yet there are a few little problems with this "cramming" policy. Its environmental implications are far from assured. According to some recent studies in Australia, the carbon footprint of high-rise urban residents is higher than that of medium- and low-density suburban homes, due to such things as the cost of heating common areas, including parking garages, and the highly consumptive lifestyles of more affluent urbanites.

His link is to a 2007 Australian Conservation Foundation (ACF) study "Consuming Australia." on the impacts of consumption in different parts of the country.  The very readable summary report (only 17 pages!) makes several important points about consumption, most of them also true of the US and Canada, but its point is more nuanced than Kotkin's, and I suspect its authors would be offended to be cited as implying that urban infill is bad for the environment. (UPDATE:  Yes, ACF is definitely offended.  ACF's Charles Berger replies to similar misuse of his study here.  Thanks to Daniel for the link.)

The first ACF finding is this:

• Indirect impacts of consumption outweigh direct household use of energy, water, and land.

Here is the report's graphic showing the eco-footprint of an average Australian household:

The point here is that most of our environmental impact is not from the land and water and power that we pay for directly, and the emissions that result.  Most of our footprint is from the land, water, power, and emissions associated with the creation and transportation of things we consume.  Most of our transport costs and impacts, for example, are for moving things that we buy, not for moving ourselves. This does mean that those of us who are focused on personal transportation choices are affecting a small slice of the pie.

The second key finding:

• Affluent areas have higher environmental impacts.

... because, obviously, affluent people buy more stuff, go to restaurants more, etc. 

So it's not surprising that when the report turns to urbanism, it finds that the ecological footprint of high-density living is mostly not because of the high density, it's because of the choices of the people who live there.  Which brings us to the ACF study's next point:

• Inner cities are consumption hotspots.

This point is what Kotkin wants to emphasize, but here's how the ACF report actually describes it:

" ... [D]espite the lower environmental impacts associated with less car use, inner city households outstrip the rest of Australia in every other category of consumption.  Even in the area of housing, the opportunities for relatively efficient, compact living appear to be overwhelmed by the energy and water demands of modern urban living, such as air conditioning, spa baths, down lighting and luxury electronics and appliances ... "

The argument is not that inner city living implies a high footprint, but rather that both inner city living and a high footprint are common consequences of affluence.  Affluent people living outside the inner city presumably still have a high footprint, and poor people in the inner city still have a small one, but because a lot of the inner city is affluent, the footprint is higher there.  

So while Kotkin wants to conclude that inner-city life is intrinsically wasteful of resources, the real and quite different point of the study he cites is that resource-waste is a feature of affluent lifestyles, which are more concentrated in the inner city.  This suggests that high-density housing geared to lower price points -- for example, by constructing a massive supply -- would reduce the increase the income diversity of the population and thus reduce its average consumption.

But is there no more direct way that high-density living is wasteful of resources?  Yes, there is, and the ACF report goes on to explain it:

• Bigger households have smaller per-person footprints than small ones.
• Sharing between households can reduce environmental footprint.

Here, I think, is a valid critique of much of the inner-city high density housing I've seen and lived in.  It is designed to serve a population of strangers, and to discourage neighbors from knowing and trusting each other.  In all the places I've lived in the US, Canada, and Australia, I've found it's much easier to meet the neighbors across the fence, in a lower-density setting, than in a sterile apartment hallway or elevator. 

We're not going to change the fact that smaller households, such as singles and childless couples, are more attracted to high density.  Urban life is especially attractive in early adulthood, and almost everyone starts out as a one-person household.  Even setting side the impact of affluence, smaller households mean more consumption per person, as the ACF study finds, and that's a big problem.  Three people living in three apartments have to own three vacuum cleaners, while a family of three people owns only one.  So one of the ACF's most crucial recommendations is simply:  "Share more."

Efforts at creating a more communal experience of housing always seem to collide with a market where people want privacy and control.  But would there really be no market for a highrise development in which each floor had a small room containing an iron, an ironing board, and a vacuum cleaner, which anyone on the floor could use briefly as needed?  At some price points, would there really be no market for a return to the laundry room -- again, one on each floor, rather than in each apartment?

To end on a lighter note, let's return to Kotkin's passing claim that the high consumption from high-rise development, as found in the ACF study, is "due to such things as the cost of heating common areas, including parking garages."  This idea isn't in the ACF study; it's Kotkin's interpolation. 

I've lived in Australia for three years and have never seen a heated parking garage, nor even an air-conditioned one.   But Kotkin's reference to the parking garage really makes an urbanist point:  If we had a carsharing system under every residential tower rather than a mandatory 1-2 parking spaces for every unit, we'd reduce our footprint and make the building more affordable.  It's still the case, in much of the US, Canada, and Australia, that if you want to buy a modern high-rise apartment with no parking space, it's hard to find.  I've looked.

Does high density life have a bigger ecological footprint?  From the ACF report, the answer seems to be "not necessarily, but affluence does."  So I'll end with the ACF's advice to people with money:  "Buy fewer things, enjoy life more!"

public surveying: the quicksand of hypotheticals

A recent post looked at the challenge of surveying the public and identifying what mixture of taxes and fees they would be willing to pay to fund a widely desired infrastructure plan.  In the Sydney Morning Herald's Independent Inquiry into public transport in Sydney, we did exactly that, using a survey team from the University of Technology at Sydney's Centre for the Study of Choice.   One commenter caught the crucial point about why polling is so difficult, and why its results are often hard to trust:

There's always a difference between what people say they want, what they actually want and what they actually do.

Indeed there is.  In the surveying biz, "what people say they want" is called stated preference.  "What people actually do" is called revealed preference.  Everyone prefers revealed preference data.  We try to glean what we can from our current ridership data, for example.  But revealed preference data is all about the past, and conditions are different in the future for which we're planning.  In fact, one common sign that a transit agency is conceptually stuck is when they think and talk only about their present riders, not new ones they intend to attract.

Infrastructure projects are all based on assumptions about how people will behave in the future.  To talk about those, we can talk about revealed preference from other places.  For example, we can quote ridership on one transit line as a reason to expect ridership on another. 

But for a city like Sydney, which cannot dream of the kinds of Federal funding that US cities are used to, the real question is what people will tolerate paying -- in taxes, fees, fares, and road charges -- to fund a system that they support.  And for that, we have to ask them.  And we're asking them about a hypothetical:  "What would you be willing to pay if ...?"   We're stuck with stated preference data, and most of it is worthless.

You've probably done stated preference surveys.  In our business, they ask questions like "Would you ride transit more if ...?"  or "Would you support a tax increase of $x to fund this rail project?"   Most people have no idea.  The question may not accurately describe the factors that would really determine their actual response.  They may not understand what the funding sources (tolls, fares, etc) would mean in their lives.  So people guess.  They make stuff up.  They say what they think the surveyor wants to hear.  They give different answers depending on the sequence in which the questions are asked.  They generate mounds of meaningless data.

So we (or rather our survey experts at the University of Technology, Sydney) tried something a little more subtle, called a discrete choice experiment.  It turns out that if you aggregate a lot of stated preferences from the same person, they can add up to something like a revealed preference.  

We wanted to find a combination of funding sources that would attract majority support and be adequate to fund the investment program.  Rather than just ask people single hypothetical questions, we asked each person about a whole series of scenarios, each with different combinations of funding sources.  We compared a "high investment in public transport" scenario, which we already knew to be the most popular, with a "high investment in roads" scenario and a "low investment in both" scenario.  Respondents went through about 10 of these, and were asked to identify which scenario they preferred, but each time the specific funding sources and levels were different.  Here's what just one of the questions looked like.

(Obviously, this has to be done on the web rather than over a phone.  Our survey "panel" was 2400 people who are used to doing surveys on the web but who are, in all other respects, strictly representative of the entire population in terms of age, gender, income and all the other usual demographics.)

By asking a person to think about a range of different scenarios, the survey could observe the funding  levels that were the end of each person's tolerance.  If one respondent tended to support the high-public-transport scenario except in cases where the fare increase required was more than $1, we could conclude that this repondent was saying, in effect "I support fare increases up to but not beyond $1 to fund the high-public-transport program. 

The key idea of a discrete choice experiment is that instead of asking people what their highest tolerable rate would be, it observed them making the choice.  Essentially, discrete choices experiments create an environment in which a stated preference can emerge as a revealed preference, something we see in a person's choices but not something we need them to be able to explain.

The results were pretty cool. We did find a mix of funding sources that got bare majority support, and that were sufficient to fund the infrastructure program.  We actually found a range of them, each supported by a slightly different majority group.  I'll talk more about them in another post, or if you're really curious, you can download Chapter 1 of our report here.

the most important blog post you'll read this year ... (updated!)

... may well turn out to be this one, by Michael Druker at Psystenance.  It's about a conceptual error that lies at the root of a lot of bad transit planning decisions, an error made, at one time or another, by most citizens, many political leaders, and more than a few professionals.  It's called (not very effectively) the Fundamental Attribution Error.  It happens when we say or believe statements of the form:  "My decisions are based on my situation, but other people's choices are based on their culture, the kind of people they are." 

[Situation includes relevant factors that the person can be consciously aware of, including their location, destination, available infrastructure, available vehicles, special needs (wheelchairs, traveling with children, etc) and the relative value of time and money.]

Psychologists have observed that in general, humans tend to overestimate the rationality of their own decisions, and underestimate the rationality of other people's.  We tend to think that we make rational choices ourselves, but too often, it's easy to form stereotypes about people whose different situation has caused them to make a different choice, and before long you're hearing about categories like "the kind of people who ride the bus" as opposed to "people who ride rail" as opposed to "lycra cyclists" and "the car culture."  The mistake here is to explain people's behavior by assigning them to a cultural category, rather than by understanding their situation.

We've all heard the term "car culture" about places like Los Angeles.   I've always hated the term, but now I understand why: it's an expression of the attribution error.  When we say that Americans drive because they're a car culture, we imply that that the choice of most Americans to drive isn't a rational one, in light of each person's situation, and therefore requires a cultural explanation.  

But in the places most Americans live, given the current economics of driving, and transit options being as they are, the decision to drive is rational for most of the people making it.   If most Americans are in situations where driving is the rational choice, we don't need the "car culture" to explain their behavior, and we can see a clearer path to changing it, by helping to change people's situations. 

Conversely, car advocates who cite current car use as evidence that people want to drive cars are also making the attribution error; they're implying that everyone who rationally chooses to drive is culturally committed to driving.  That's wrong; some of the people driving cars would like to be in a situation where they didn't have to.

That's why I never talk about a need to "change the culture."  Culture does change over time, but by its nature it also resists change, because it's made up of deeply held feelings and attachments that most people don't want to recognize and critique in themselves.  Nobody likes being told that their behavior is the result of their culture.  So defining America's car dependence as cultural is not a route to changing it.  In fact, it plays right into conservative critiques of urbanism as social engineering.

The fundamental attribution error has deep philosophical roots.  Jacques Lacan argued that the crucial stage in the development of a small child is the moment when he looks in the mirror for the first time and sees how he resembles the other people in his world.  At this moment, he discovers that he is the same kind of being as the people he sees.  Until that moment, a baby is a consciousness interacting with sense perceptions, attaching to some and not others, but with no ability to imagine that there are other nodes of consciousness, similar to his own, all around him.

We all get through this development stage imperfectly.  Often it's said of a very arrogant person that "other people just aren't real for him."  Categorizing others too readily is just a retreat to the pre-mirror state of the child, a state in which I am real and everyone else is just stuff happening around me.  Categorizing is completely understandable:  When we are functioning in a complex society, we need ways of identifying threats, just as our ancestors on the African savanna did, so we tend to put others in large mental categories that help us make sense of them.  Racism arises from that impulse, but so do categories like "the type of people who ride the bus."  As with racism, we only get beyond it with some hard work in taking control of our own mental processes, and remembering the lesson of the mirror stage.

(This post was updated and expanded on March 16 at 11:00 PM Sydney time, in response to early comments.)

Further update, March 17:

This may be one of the most misunderstood posts in the short history of Human Transit, and I take responsibility for that if that is the case.  At the risk of getting deeper into the mire, let me expand a little in response to some of the critical comments and commentary to date.

First, there's been much discussion of sociology in the comments, so let me clarify, as several commenters also have:   Fundamental attribution error (FAE) is psychology, not sociology.  It describes a common mistaken view of individuals, described from the perspective of their own consciousness.  For that reason, its reference to "situation" includes just the data available to the conscious mind, not including unconscious motivations such as personality or cultural conditioning.  (FAE doesn't imply that those unconscious motivations don't exist, only that we tend to overstate their influence in describing the actions of others.)

My description of it here is not an accusation toward anyone.  I'm saying only that psychology has found that a tendency toward attribution error is a feature of human minds in general.  This does not imply that anybody's motivations as totally irrational or totally rational, nor does it require us to speculate about how much irrationality is cultural -- a question that really would lead into sociology.   It observes only that average humans are likely to overestimate the rationality of their own choices and underestimate the rationality of other people's.

Racism is a much more vivid example of the same kind of phenomenon, so it may be useful as an analogy.  (To be excessively clear, I am not equating racism with attribution bias, nor am I implying that one is as bad as the other.  I'm observing that they are biases of the same kind -- different sizes but the same shape -- so that the workings of one can be understood by analogy to the workings of the other.)

Psychology finds that many people who are not racist in daily life will still make racial distinctions in quick-response tests where there is no time to think.  (Malcolm Gladwell's book Blink discusses an example of this in detail.)  The instinct to judge others based on categories of appearance such as race is understandable if you consider the needs under which the human brain evolved.  Like other mammals, primitive humans had no choice but to make quick friend-or-enemy judgments based on appearance and behavior.  Racism is one effect of that same instinct still working under the surface in modern brains.  Like aggression, racism arises from an instinct that served our evolutionary ancestors' needs but is a problem in modern society, and that has not had time to evolve away.  This suggests that those of us who see ourselves as not racist are putting a certain effort into compensating for the mind's primitive instinct to categorize other people racially.  I'm certainly aware that I'm doing that.

The FAE demands the same kind of awareness and compensation.  That's all I'm saying.  So if you have a thought of the form "those people's behavior is irrational" or "those people are behaving that way because of their culture," just notice that this is the kind of view that the human mind tends to exaggerate, so give that thought some extra scrutiny before you get too attached to it.  In our conscious management of our ideas, attribution error implies that we should try to consciously err on the side of assuming that other people's behavior is rational. 

Someone with poor hearing in one ear will often learn to turn their head slightly to compensate when listening to someone.  Attribution error implies that our brains have a similar limitation, a bit of deafness to the possible rationality of the actions of others, one for which we need to compensate.