Human Transit

basics: finding your pulse

Quiz: When is service every 20 minutes worse than service every 30 minutes?

Answer: When it relies on a pulse, or what Americans usually call timed transfer, with routes that run every 30.

A pulse is a regularly scheduled event, usually happening at the same time each hour, in which transit vehicles from a range of routes -- usually running every 30 or 60 minutes -- are scheduled to all meet together.  A group of hourly local routes, for example, might all come to the pulse point between :22 and :25 after the hour and leave at :30. That way, nobody has to wait more than 8 minutes for a connection even though the services in question are hourly.  Here's a rough diagram of a half-hourly pulse pattern, by Ross Maxwell.¹  (The original, slightly sharper, is on p129 here.)

Often, pulses are organized around a main transit line, such as a trunk bus or rail line that takes you to a nearby larger city.  In these cases, the main line vehicle usually doesn't dwell as the local buses do, since it's the most crowded service and hence the most speed-sensitive.   Instead, the locals arrive a few minutes before the trunk passes through, and leave a couple of minutes after.

Pulses are the only way to provide connection wait times that are much, much better than the frequency of the services involved.  A pure pulse is also equally convenient for connections between any pair of lines, and thus for travel in any direction. 

For this reason they are used universally, in North America, in small-city networks where frequencies are low, and often also in suburban areas of large cities.  If you're in a North American suburb or small city and see a large number of buses hanging out together on a streetcorner, you're probably watching a pulse.  The sight can vaguely humanizing; for a moment it looks as though these big obtrusive vehicles are people too, with human needs for social interaction every hour or so.

In Australia, by contrast, the prevailing operating habit is to scrupulously separate operating time from driver break time.  Drivers often dislike having their time at a pulse point counted as their personal break time, because throughout the pulse event they are mixing with customers, being asked questions, etc.  So in Australia, it's more common for buses to arrive at the pulse point at, say, :22, drive onward to a separate layover point where the drivers can take their breaks away from customers, then drive back through the pulse point at, say, :30. 

But frankly, Australian public transport authorites, especially those responsible for small cities and outer suburbs, seem reluctant to embrace pulses for reasons I don't entirely understand.  And even in North America, agencies that rely on pulse scheduling prefer not to advertise it.  You may have to explore several timetables and compare them to each other in order to discover that pulse scheduling is in place.

I was introduced to pulse scheduling in Portland at a tender age.  I was a teenage transit geek, and then an undergraduate working part time at TriMet, the transit agency.  This happened to be the period (1979-85) when the lattice of suburban pulse networks was being constructed. 

We spent a lot of time thinking about how the pulses interact with each other.  For example, if you have a pulse of buses at Beaverton Transit Center at :05 and :35 past the hour, and one route goes from Beaverton to Sunset Transit Center in 12-14 minutes, how do you schedule the Sunset pulse?  Do you set it at :20 and :40, so that this connecting route can serve both pulses but with just a few minutes to spare?  When this route is late, a lot of connections will be missed, and a lot of people stranded.  Or do we just set the Sunset pulse at :05 and :35, so that the bus linking the two transit centers has lots of spare time but now has too much time to kill and will tend to arrive inconveniently early for one pulse or the other.  Or do we just accept that this line isn't going to hit one or the other of the pulses precisely?

To do pulse scheduling, we have to plan the pulse schedule as we're designing the network.  In the two-pulse problem I outlined above, we will think hard about the line connecting the two pulses and to ask if we can either make it a little shorter (so that it will get there more reliably in 15 minutes) or a little longer (so that it will get there in 30 minutes without so much time to spare).  I have designed some large networks with multiple pulse points, all designed to work harmoniously.  To do that, I've always designed lines between pulse points with the specific goal of making them a certain length.

Pulse scheduling can often affect the schedules of a trunk line too, especially when that trunk line isn't extremely frequent.  Even a 15-minute frequency on the trunk line (which is the all-day standard for most North American light rail, for example) may require adjusting the trunk schedule to better fit the pulse.  In particular, if a pulse that happens between :20 and :30 after the hour is partway along a trunk rather than at the end, and if the intention is all-way connectivity, that means that both directions of the trunk need to pass through the pulse point at around :25; in other words, a complete pulse requires that oncoming trunk-line vehicles be at the pulse point at or near the same time.  This is why pulsing is especially hard if the trunk line and local services are run by different agencies or operators. 

In any case, pulse scheduling requires an intimate two-way conversation between the planning and scheduling tasks.  In agencies where the drivers' union is legally entitled to sign off on scheduled running times, they have to be involved as well, because a disagreement over 4 minutes of running time can determine whether the whole structure works or fails. 

Transit agencies that are not set up to have this conversation, or that locate planning and scheduling too far apart organizationally, become structurally incapable of noticing and exploiting pulse opportunities.  In other cases, pulses may simply not be the prevailing habit, and there may be nobody around who is in the position to suggest them.

The organizational challenge presented by pulsing is, to me, a positive feature of the concept.  Better integration of planning, scheduling, and operations management has many benefits, and if the pulse challenge helps motivate an agency to get there, so much the better. 

But pulse scheduling does have some practical limitations.  In particular, it struggles in any environment where the running times are prone to vary a great deal. 

Pulses are about managing a low-frequency network, so they aren't generally needed in inner cities  Pulses are almost universal in small-city design in North America, because most such cities have little traffic congestion and can therefore run a pulse reliably.  The best big-city agencies also do some kind of pulse late at night, when their services are very infrequent.  For example, this map of all night service by San Francisco MTA uses little black circles to highlight points where the lines make timed connections with each other, even though they're running only every 30 minutes.  Note the complexity of the scheduling task implied by multiple timed connections along the same line; it's an impressive commtiment.

But in the suburban areas of big cities, running times vary due to traffic congestion, and pulse operations struggle.  I vividly recall the moment in about 1983 when Tri-Met decided to let its pattern of half-hourly Beaverton-area pulses slip to a 40-minute pattern during peak hours, because they simply could not guarantee travel times in peak traffic.  TriMet continues to attempt pulse operations because there is simply no other way to serve the multi-directional demand pattern of the modern suburbs, especially where many people work in widely scattered business parks.  I suspect that the difficulty of guaranteeing pulses in these settings is the main reason that big suburban agencies are reluctant to advertise their pulsing too much.  Small-city agencies, which don't deal with such severe congestion, are more likely to emphasise that at the heart of their network, they have a pulse.

A lattice of interconnected pulse points, all beating as planned in unison or alternation in a pattern that repeats each hour, is a thing of beauty if you can visualize it, especially because if the motion of pulsing suggests the movement of blood through the heart.  It's like watching the inner life a large multi-hearted organism, and this can be a nice metaphor for other kinds of thinking about your city.

Illustrators!  Can you think of how to do better black-and-white illustrations of the ideas in this post, as part of this challenge?  If so, go for it!

¹ Ross R. Maxwell, "Converting a Large Region to a Pulsed-Hub Public Transport Network."  Transportation Research Record, paper 03-4020, p 128.  Original paper here.  

melbourne: a frequent network map

Peter Parker of Melbourne on Transit recently sketched some frequent network maps for that city, the second largest in Australia.  You can find a range of efforts for various cities using the Frequent Network category.  My original post arguing for the value of frequent network maps is here.

Although Melbourne is mostly flat and its street network is mostly gridded, it's striking how few crosstown or "orbital" services they are.  Over the past few years the main government initiative in this area has been the SmartBus program, a set of new frequent orbital routes.  Yet compared to comparably dense parts of Los Angeles, say, the grid is thin. 

Downtown is right off the southern edge of this map, so much of this map's area is pre-1945 dense inner city, a mixture of apartments, terraces, and small-lot single-family.  The north-south green lines are the famous tram network, while the blue lines are the electrified commuter rail -- usually but not always at 15 minute frequencies or better.  In general, though, many destinations in this inner northern area have intense north-south service but little or no opportunity to circulate east-west. 

Melbourne is coming late to grid network planning in part because of its own planning history, but also becuase it is such an exceptionally centralized city.  Its huge commuter rail network is totally radial, and its extensive tram network also has only a few non-radial elements, all in the inner east and south.  The regional information provider, Metlink, does not attempt a frequent network map, so I'm glad that Peter did.  It helps me form an understanding of the underlying structure of how bus, rail, and tram work together on a citywide scale.

As an aside, Peter shares a bit of his struggles with the available media:

I started with scribbles on taped scraps of paper. Plain shower curtains from discount shops were then tried. Windows Paint worked but smeared badly with each alteration. Finally Power Point was found workable.

Commenter Evan suggests Visio is the right tool.  What do people think? 

In any case, it's rare to get this kind of glimpse of an artist's working process!  I too have struggled with shower curtains in the pursuit of beauty, but would be too shy to write about it here.

seattle: notes on the "snowpocalypse"

As Seattle moves into the recriminations phase on last week's snowstorm, locally known as the "snowpocalypse," let's put some things in perspective:

Seattle has a particular vulnerability to snow and ice that is unique in North America.  The uniqueness is in the intersection of four factors:

• Rarity.  Like its rainbelt colleagues Portland and Vancouver, Seattle doesn't get snow and ice often enough to justify a huge investment in infrastructure to deal with it.  Obviously, cities with regular winter snow have the necessary equipment and staff, and also a public who are largely experienced with how winter weather affects transportation.  So life goes on in those places, and if you live on Ottawa or Minneapolis you may not be able to resist gloating over how Seattle collapses in weather that looks to you like a normal November day.   Rarity also explains why Seattle absorbs these occasional unpredictable shutdowns without serious harm to the economy.  On the bottom line, trying to function normally in snow just isn't worth the investment.
  
  (Having been raised in the Northwest rainbelt, I have a similar reaction whenever I happen to be in Los Angeles for the first big power-washing rainstorm of autumn, when all the drains are clogged with fallen leaves.  Again, it seems like nobody knows how to drive in partly flooded streets.  You might as well close the schools, stay home, and focus on defending your basement.)

• Temperature.  As in Portland and Vancouver, Seattle blizzard days are relatively warm as blizzards go.  In particular, it's common for the temperature to go above the freezing mark during the day but below it at night.  This causes snow to melt and refreeze as ice, which is generally the greater hazard.

• Rail transit.  Seattle doesn't have much, but the one line it has did well.  Seattle commentators are crowing about how well the Link light rail line fared in its first snowstorm.  In Vancouver, the new Canada Line didn't do so well; its bridge over the Fraser closed due to ice on the rails.  In general, though, rail systems do well in snow and ice, even on high viaducts where they're especially exposed to winter.  As I've argued at length, many of rail's advantages over buses are matters of cultural history rather than intrinisic features of the technologies.  But rail does seem to have an advantage on this point, though I welcome input from snowbelt readers who have more experience with rail-bus comparisons in other cities.
  
  
• Topography+density.  Portland and Vancouver share Seattle's basic climate, but both are  relatively flat if you think in population-adjusted terms.  Portland has steep hills, but apart from the Marquam Hill medical center they are mostly low-density, affecting only a small share of the population.  Vancouver has the scourge of major universities on remote promontories and hilltops, and the idea of a gondola to the hilltop fortress of Simon Fraser Univeristy may get a boost from the storm, but most of the city is on manageable grades.
  
  On the other hand, if you laid out a city with the specific goal of maximizing the amount of hill-climbing required for daily life, you coudn't do much worse than Seattle.  The city is full of steep hills with lots of important stuff up on top of them: dense housing and commercial as well as all the major medical centers.  (Seattle's founders knew in their bones that the medical arts simply cannot be practiced at sea level.) 
  
  This feature of Seattle, of course, is part of what makes it one of the most spectacular cities on earth, at least when the sun comes out.  In an article on cycling in Seattle, I suggested that the city needs to be understood as an archipelago: islands of pedestrian-friendly, bike-friendly, transit-friendly communities with big physical obstacles between them.  The same goes for mobility options in snow.  If you lived, say, in the flat part of Broadway in the center of Capitol Hill, you could probably slide around in your own neighborhood pretty safety, but to go anywhere else on the planet, you'd be looking at very steep hills.

So I would suggest folks go easy on the Seattle Department of Transportation, which is responsible for snow clearing, salting, etc.  (Full disclosure: SDOT is a former client of mine, and I do have friends there, but I haven't spoken with them since the storm.)  First of all, not even Minneapolis can deliver an incident-free evening rush hour when a winter storm hits at 4:00 PM, as it did in Seattle this year.  But more important, Seattle needs to relax into the futility of even attempting normal daily life in such a situation.  Adam Parast argues, intriguingly that rare snow days may be an opportunity for Seattle to rehearse life in a more resource-constrained future.  And as commenter Rob Fellows put it:

It seems that most people believe it's the city's responsibility to ensure that life goes on exactly as usual in a snow emergency. Metro has improved their snow response dramatically this year compared to two years ago, but is skewered in the press because an eighth of their fleet is sidelined and they don't have real time arrival tools that work on snow routes.

What I take away from it all isn't that it's futile to get around in snow in Seattle; it's that people here have no perspective! There are forces bigger than us on earth! There are more important things in life than our daily routine! For goodness sake, what a wonderful thing snow is - particularly because it makes us pause and take a moment to admire the wonder of nature at work.

 

attention, illustrators and mapmakers!

As some readers may know, I'll be spending the holidays hammering out a book, also called Human Transit at least for now, to fulfil a contract I have with Island Press.  The book will try to lay out some of the core ideas of transit geometry that the general public tends not to understand -- points like this, and this, and especially this -- but in a friendly and humanistic way.  I want it to be readable and enjoyable for any reasonably intelligent general reader who doesn't understand transit and knows that they need to. For that reason, I need some pictures.  And I basically can't draw.

The geometry I'm explaining is pretty simple, as you'll see from the links above.  What I need are two kinds of image:

First, I need illustrations that humanize these ideas.  I need images of people, and transit vehicles, and buildings, and whatever else it takes to convey that while a point about geometry is being made, the point governs the lives of real people in a real city.  One obvious idea is that instead of looking at a geography directly from above, as my own sketches usually do, you might view the ground plane from an angle so that the geometry on the land surface is clear but you can also convey that there are people and vehicles and buildings moving around in the space.  That's just one possibility.

Second, I will also need a few specialized maps that are more precisely detailed.  For example, I'll need a much-simplified map of part of the San Francisco transit system with only certain lines shown, and drawn in a way that illustrates a particular point about how the system functions as a grid (I did what I could with the available images here.)   I may need some similar focused drawings of other bits of geography.

(UPDATE:  Sorry for forgetting to mention this, but I need the book to be inexpensive, so I'm currently visualising black-and-white illustrations!  If you can make a black line sing, you're in.)

You don't need to be in Canberra, Australia, where I currently am.  If you were in eastern Australia it would make it easier for us to meet in person, but I'm happy to do that part by Skype as needed.

Alas, I cannot afford to pay you.  You would need to want to do it for the same reason I'm doing it, namely to have it on your resume or CV, and as part of your professional reputation.  If the book does well, it will be a credit to the illustrator(s) as well as to me.  If you are a university student and would like to configure the task as something that earns academic credit for you, I'm happy to talk about that.

The work needs to happen mostly in December and January.

I am open to the possibility that this task could be divided among several people, who may be good at different aspects of it or at different kinds of drawings.

If you're interested, especially in the "humanizing drawings" task, please do this.  Go look at this post and at the rough drawings in it.  Read the post carefully to be sure you understand the point being made.  Then send me a quick sketch that gives some idea of how you'd convey the same information in a way that's more compelling and interesting.  (If you think of this as a tiresome "audition," you're probably not right for the job.  On the other hand, if this kind of challenge is fun for you, you may well be perfect for it.)   One thing to think about, especially, is how to help people grasp, visually, the role of frequency -- which may well be the single hardest visualization problem confronting the whole book.  The artist of my drawings did it with width of lines.  Is there a better way?

Finally, if you've seen professional illustrations that strike you as the kind of thing I might be after, please send them along so that I can select the best and post them as future guidance. 

Please reply by email (link under my photo at right) rather than in comments.  This is a temporary post and it will vanish when it has served its purpose.

weekend reading

• Lisa Taddeo in Esquire profiles New York Transportation Commissioner and global sustainable-cities rockstar Janette Sadik-Khan, who still hasn't answered my question. 
  
  
• Yet another traffic engineer goes into recovery, renouncing the fundamental tenets of his profession.  (A good link to send, if anonymously, to the traffic engineers in your life.)
  
  
• Cap'n Transit digs deeper on road funding.
• Portland poet Dale Favier rides a bus in the rain.

 

thanksgiving english quiz: grammar in the new york times

Can this sentence, from the New York Times article on the DeLay conviction, be read as anything other than evidence of the collapse of journalism, and hence of language, and hence of civilization?

To be guilty of money laundering, the prosecution had to show the money had been obtained through an illegal activity before it was laundered.

They succeeded in showing that, so I guess that means the prosecution is guilty of money laundering. 

This is the frigging NYTimes!  Are there no editors sharp-eyed enough to change "To be guilty of ..." to "To prove ..." ?  Predicates need subjects!  Otherwise they run wild and incriminate innocent people.

Update: Commenter GD provides the necessary transit angle on this story:

William Safire is rotating in his grave. The question now is how to harness that energy and power rail transit with it ;)

Happy Thanksgiving to American readers.  And if you had to fly in the USA yesterday, I hope it was stimulating.

los angeles: some thoughts on the challenge, for "the source"

The blog of the main Los Angeles transit agency, The Source, interviewed me recently on the challenges and opportunites of Los Angeles as a transit metropolis.  It was a chance to pull some of the main themes of this blog together as applied to that fascinating city.  They've published it in two parts, but here is the whole thing:

Question:  Compared to other places where you have done transit network consulting, what makes greater Los Angeles unique in terms of its challenges and opportunities for improving its public transportation network?

You have tremendous opportunities in Los Angeles because you have a population that’s eager to see public transit succeed, and leadership that understands that only public transit can provide comprehensive alternatives to traffic congestion.  The challenge now is to take the enthusiasm that went into Measure R and direct it toward other kinds of political investment.  We know that voters will raise their taxes to fund a long-term rail plan.  Now we have to ask for another kind of commitment: the apportionment of scarce space on your streets.  The streets won’t get any wider, so what’s the fairest way to use them?  Street width is the new currency. 

A few years ago I had a memorable ride on the Ventura Blvd Metro Rapid from Warner Center to Sherman Oaks.  The service flowed smoothly through Tarzana and Encino but then got stuck in two miles of gridlock leading up to I-405, as it often does, and the crowded bus spent 20 minutes going almost nowhere.  It made no sense.  Cars can only fit onto 405 at a certain rate, especially if they’re going over Sepulveda Pass.  So in the current arrangement, the surplus traffic is stored blocking Ventura Blvd.  Why do you give over the entire width of Ventura Blvd, and effectively shut down the street, just for the purpose of storing waiting cars?  Why don’t you set aside a through lane for transit (and perhaps also for taxis, HOVs, and certainly for emergency vehicles) so that efficient use of the street can continue even as the cars pile up?  What would be the effect on traffic?  Simple: the pile of stored cars would be narrower and longer.  But meanwhile, people could get where they were going, and emergency vehicles could get through to save lives and property.

Chokepoints in a network are huge opportunities for transit, but only if transit can get past them.  This bit of Ventura Blvd is one example.  Another is the Sepulveda Pass itself.  Caltrans is widening the freeway to add HOV lanes, which will finally give buses a clear path around gridlock, so that from the Valley to Westwood they can start offering the only truly reliable means of getting through the Pass.  If it works reliably you may see a range of services extended through the Pass to broaden the reach of that advantage. 

But Los Angeles is almost done widening roadways.  It’s time to make hard choices about how to apportion the space that you have.  The great boulevards of Los Angeles can be, in their own way, as magnificent as the boulevards of Paris.  In the last decade Paris has added bus lanes on virtually every one of its boulevards, mostly at the expense of traffic lanes.   Traffic isn’t any worse than it was, because once people see that transit is getting through reliably, some of them choose to use it.

Question:  Los Angeles has somewhat of a unique geography.  Instead of having one central downtown, like say New York or Chicago, LA has a number of activity centers, from Westwood to Warner Center to Burbank to LAX.  How can public transit effectively serve all these disparate areas?  How would you design a network to serve this kind of city?  What would be some of its key features?

While a lot of effort has gone into downtown Los Angeles in the last few decades, LA is still a constellation of many dense centers, and that is one of its great strengths.  Sometimes you hear people say that the key to great transit is to have a single, dense downtown that everyone’s commuting to, like Manhattan or Chicago’s Loop.  Actually, that’s a recipe for very inefficient transit, lots of trains and buses flowing full one direction, but then flowing almost empty the other direction. 

As a constellation of centers, Los Angeles has many corridors where demand flows both directions all day.  That’s what makes Wilshire such a superb rapid transit market: it isn’t a big destination at one end and residences at the other, like Chicago.  It’s lots of destinations and lots of residents all along the way.  That means people are going both ways all the time, so the trains and buses can be full both directions, not just one.  Many of the great transit corridors of Los Angeles have that feature to some degree. 

But that means, too, that in Los Angeles people are going from everywhere to everywhere, and you can’t run a direct transit line from everywhere to everywhere.  It’s been tried.  It’s still being tried in Sydney, Australia, for example, and it’s a mess.  Hundreds of bus routes overlapping each other, each doing something slightly different, most of them not frequent enough to be worth waiting for.  The Los Angeles RTD of 30 years ago was more like that, but Metro has done great work in simplifying the system over the years. 

So connections are absolutely crucial.  You have to be able to get off one bus or train and onto another.  That has to be attractive.  It has to be normal.  Fare penalties for transferring, for example, are a problem.  The cost of a trip from A to B should be based on where A and B are, not on whether you have to change at C to get there.  Metro’s fare penalties have historical and legal explanations, but that doesn’t mean they make sense for the future.  There’s a need to rethink that, in the context of your smartcard system, so that the fare system serves the same strategy that the network design is serving.  Right now, the two seem headed in different directions.

Question:  In several posts on Human Transit, you’ve discussed the Metro Rapid Bus network, describing it as the best service that could have been implemented city-wide, given time and resource constraints.  Yet, to this day, only the initial lines on Ventura Blvd. and Wilshire Blvd. have received the “full treatment,” (i.e. shelters, information signage, etc.) leading some to see the project as having failed to live up to its billing.  Going forward, what needs to happen to fully realize the promise of the Rapid Bus system?  What initial compromises should be reexamined?

The Metro Rapid brand followed a predictable arc that you see with a lot of great ideas.  First you do a demonstration project in the strongest possible market – which for the Rapid was Wilshire and Ventura.  So it succeeds.  Now, everybody wants one.  So you start replicating it in lots of corridors.  But you started with the strongest markets of all, so as you expand it to other markets the payoff diminishes, just as you would expect.   Eventually, you hit a downturn and you start cutting them back.

Notice how the DASH shuttles went through exactly the same arc:  First, a huge success downtown, where the market is ideal for them.  Then every neighborhood wanted one.  So now you have them all over the city, but of course most of them don’t perform like downtown’s, so you end up running less frequency, and gradually the brand loses some of its meaning.

This arc is so common that there’s no point complaining about it.  It’s just what happens to great new ideas.

So as you expanded the Rapid, a lot of the features that were so cool in the original version just couldn’t be afforded.  I’m sure the debates came down to questions like this: Should we extend this great mobility product to just two corridors so we can afford all these cool shelters and signs?  Or should we forget about the shelters and just extend this great product everywhere we can? 

I think the Metro Rapid was a great achievement.  The same idea is spreading all over North America now, and I’ve done my best to promote it overseas, citing Los Angeles as the most fully developed model.  Even some European cities can learn from it.

But it does take some fortitude to protect the meaning of the brand in the face of both financial limits and the demand that every new idea be extended everywhere.  It’s good to see some of the weakest Rapids being eliminated, so that the brand can be focused where it will succeed, because that helps you maintain the entire Metro Rapid brand at a higher standard of service and amenity.  It’s not so good to see some Rapids being cut to weekday only, or to see frequencies and service duration cut back, because that means that the Metro Rapid brand means less, and that’s bad for all of the Rapids and for the whole strategy that they serve.

Question:  With Measure R projects ramping up, public transit is getting more attention in the media and Angelenos are engaging in the planning process more than ever.  What are some of the best ways for planners to engage the public in these discussions?  Are there ways to avoid getting bogged down in planning jargon so that everyone can join the discussion, regardless of background?

Government agencies have to ask themselves:  What’s the hard value judgment inside whatever issue we’re debating?  What’s the basic choice between competing values that the city is facing? Journalists should be thinking this way too, of course.  Where a public conversation really works, it’s because everyone, no matter their education or background, can understand that the city is dealing with a hard choice between two things that are both desirable, or both undesirable.    

In Portland, for example, the regional government in the 1980s and early 90s managed a really successful conversation about urban form by coming back over and over to a simple question:  More people are coming: do we expand vertically or horizontally, density or sprawl?   It was messy.  A lot of people wanted to change the subject.  But in the end they had the conversation, and reached a clear decision about where they’d allow new horizontal growth and where they’d aim for density, and that consensus has been remarkably resilient in the decade and a half since.  

The government couldn’t have created that conversation on their own.  Journalists, in particular, played a big role in keeping the basic question visible through all the inevitable side-debates and ego-dramas that raged in the process. 

Not all questions are that simple, but the point is to frame the issue so that people understand that there really is a hard choice to be made between different things they value.  Do you want lower taxes or do you want rapid transit?  Should we move bus stops closer together so that you don’t have to walk as far, or further apart so that the service runs faster? Do you want parking in front of this strip of businesses, or is it more important to have a transit lane there?  The questions are hard, but any reasonably conscious person can understand the question, and understand why it’s hard, if it’s presented to them respectfully and clearly.  

If you do that well, you can deny people the crutch of saying “the big bad government is doing this to me.”  Individuals will still say that, but you won’t get that attitude raging out of control.   In a democracy the government’s place is to ask the question, help people understand and debate the question, arrive at a decision, and then act on it.  But every step of that reasoning needs to be visible to the public.

I see your governments trying to do this, and sometimes succeeding, but it’s hard to do in an era when many journalists would rather just do stories about what the government did today and why somebody’s mad about it.  That’s why good journalism is just essential.  Everyone is a customer of journalism, so everyone has a role in demanding that, through their own choices about what media to follow. 

Question:  And finally, given that this summer was the 20^th anniversary of LA’s first modern light rail line, the Blue Line, how do you predict Los Angeles’ transit system -- and built environment generally – will look in another 20 years?

In 2030 the whole Measure R rail program is done, and a bit more.  Rail links most of the largest centers in the region, at least to downtown if not to each other.  Thanks to the Regional Connector, the Blue and Gold Lines each extend all the way across the region, from the ocean to the foothills.  The Wilshire subway has reached Brentwood if not the ocean.   The Orange Line has been upgraded to light rail and extended east to Burbank, with plans to push on to Glendale and Pasadena where it will connect with the Blue Line.  The Crenshaw Line is pushing south toward Torrance and north toward Hollywood.   Similar growth in rail is happening all over the network.

Sensible, well-scaled dense communities are growing around these new rail stations, and some new highrise centers have developed.  More than ever, Los Angeles is a city of cities, with many skylines, many downtowns, many kinds of center, all linked by rapid transit.

In all the dense parts of the city, the population has the an option of a sustainable-transport lifestyle, in which you don’t own a car and instead rely on a mixture of transit, cycling, car-sharing, and the occasional taxi.   Driving costs a lot more.  Gas prices are over $10/gallon, and parking costs and congestion prices have been rising toward free-market levels as well, so even an electric car is expensive to drive and park.  It’s cool not to own a car, and the imagery of popular culture is shifting in response.  In one of the most popular 3D music videos of 2029, two teenage stars (both currently in the womb) dance and sing on top of a sleek Metro Rapid as it glides past stopped traffic in its exclusive lane, between the fashionable shops and hangouts of Venice Boulevard.   The dramatic Culver City skyline glitters in the background.

Yes, there are still buses, lots of them.  Despite all the new rail lines, most of the city still rides on tires.  But the Los Angeles boulevard of 2030 feels more like a Parisian boulevard in many ways, including generous sidewalks, lush shade trees, and of course a transit lane.  The long Metro Rapid buses have many doors that open wide at every stop, so that people can flow on and off as easily as they do on a subway. 

Indeed, the Rapid has come to feel like a subway on the surface.  Nothing gets in its way, so it glides smoothly from one stop to the next past all the frustrations of other traffic.  In fact, the Rapid is the only reliable way to travel down most of the great boulevards of LA, if you’re going further than you can cycle.  And because it works, all kinds of people ride it.

The physical design of the Rapid of 2030 also helps it feel like an intrinsic part of the street.  Guided by optical technology, the vehicle lines up exactly with the curb, at the same level and with a very small gap.   When the wide doors open, wheelchairs just roll on and off, just as they would on a rail line.   More importantly, the spacious and mostly transparent Rapid vehicle feels like a continuation of the sidewalk.  The Rapid has become a pedestrian accelerator: it carries pedestrians further than they can walk while leaving them feeling, at every step, that they are still on the street – rather than on a vehicle that’s using the street.  You may have to stand, but you’re not standing on a bus; you’re just hanging out in an interesting street, while moving faster than your feet can take you.

Because of that, the language has changed too.  Nobody talks about “Line 754” anymore.  You might call it the Vermont Rapid, but really it’s just a basic part of Vermont Avenue.  If you want to go from Vermont & Adams to Olympic & La Brea, you just go north on Vermont and west on Olympic; in 2030, those simple directions for cars and taxis and bicycles and pedestrians are also the directions for transit.  Vermont and Olympic aren’t streets that a Rapid bus happens to run on.  They are complete streets, welcoming and serving everyone, so of course they must have Rapids, just as they must have wide and attractive sidewalks.

After all, you wouldn’t have a major boulevard without a Rapid in its own lane, because then there’d be no way for people to get through quickly and reliably without getting stuck in traffic.   You’d be storing cars where they obstruct not just the transit system but also the economy, and people’s happiness, and the life-saving work of emergency services.  And that just wouldn’t make sense. 

seattle + snow = futility

Dear Seattle readers, if you still haven't figured out that you need to stay home, watch this.  Its a slice of life on John Street, Capitol Hill, Seattle, yesterday evening.

 

The transit angle on the story appears at 2:43.  Good thing nobody used the bike rack.

Stay home!

washington dc: agency seeks comment on frequent network map

Washington DC's transit agency WMATA is preparing to publish a frequent network map, and wants your comments.  To start, they're taking the approach of showing frequency as a highlight on the main network map, as this makes it easier to show how multiple overlaid routes combine to form a frequent line. 

For over a decade now as a consultant I've been emphasising the need for transit maps to provide clear visual signals about frequency.  I laid out the case on the blog here.

I have one comment:  WMATA is defining "frequent" as every 15 minutes all day, but on the draft map their legend refers to "buses/hour," which is implicitly an average rather than worst case frequency.  Nobody cares about average freqeuncy!  Frequency maps are about a guaranteed worst case, so they should show only corridors where the longest scheduled gap between trips is 15 minutes.  Four buses an hour may not guarantee 15 minute service if they're not scheduled with exactly even spacing.  In fact, you can meet a standard of "four buses an hour" with four buses that all arrive in a bunch at the top of the hour, but in reality, that's a 60 minute frequency, not 15!

connections vs complexity

In my first "basics" post on connections, I explained why a network that requires connections (or as North Americans call them, "transfers") can actually get people where they're going faster than a network that tries to avoid them.

But there's another important reason to plan for connections rather than direct service, one that should be important to anyone who wants transit to be broadly relevant to urban life: Unless you welcome and encourage connections, your network will become very, very complex.

If a transit system is too complex for people to learn, it can't be used spontaneously, and if you can't use transit spontaneously, then transit is reduced to a very limited role in urban life, serving only trips that people make regularly and can therefore learn how to make even in a complex system.

In presentations on this point, I often compare a network based on connections -- such as that of Los Angeles -- with a network based on fear of them -- such as the inner network in Sydney. Here are more or less comparable slices of the two networks, each image about 8 km wide and 3 km high. Both lie just south of the CBD of each city, so you can see routes converging toward the CBD on the north edge of the map.

Los Angeles:

Sydney:

Network maps drawn by transit agencies are often hard to compare, because each is full of details and conventions that make sense only locally.  To make sense of the Los Angeles map, you must know that line numbers in the 300s and 700s are limited-stop or "Rapid" services that almost always appear on top of a local-stop service on the same street.  So for example on Vernon Avenue, the big east-west corridor across the center of the Los Angeles image, 105 and 705 are local-stop and rapid versions of the same line.  These two services are not duplicating each other; in fact, they are designed to complement each other.  So you should think of 105 and 705 as a single composite line.

Once you account for that, the striking thing about the Los Angeles map is that most streets have only a single line on them, even though we are immediately south of downtown and you would expect many lines to be converging.

By contrast, in a similar sized slice of Sydney, most streets have several lines on them, and in most cases these lines are not designed together. In Los Angeles, if you see two buses right next to each other for many miles along the street, they are probably on the same line and one of them is probably late (a phenomenon called bunching.)  In Sydney, if you see the same thing, the two buses may well be scheduled to do that, usually because they're on different lines that run on top of each other on the same street, and no attempt has been made to co-ordinate their schedules.  For example, Sydney's Oxford Street, for the entire 3.4 km between Taylor Square and Bondi Junction, has four local bus lines and one limited-stop line, ranging in frequency from 10 minutes to 30 minutes, with no particular co-ordination of their schedules.   On this street, bunches of buses are a common sight because in many cases, they're scheduled that way.

Sydney-style networks happen where the prevailing assumption is that people will resist connections at all costs, which means that there is a strong motivation to run direct services between every possible origin and destination.  Even where planners would like to introduce connection-based design, they are frustrated by a fare structure, out of their control, which penalizes connections.  So Sydney ends up with lots of overlapping lines, a high degree of complexity.

This problem is also the cause of others, such as the excessive volume of buses, most of them not full, choking the narrow streets of the CBD.  Obviously, if you didn't feel constrained to run direct service from everywhere to the CBD, you'd organize some buses to feed others (or to feed trains).  This would give you fewer buses in the CBD, with heavier loads on those buses, and thus a stronger moral claim to transit priorities, such as exclusive lanes.

Just for fun, here's an 8x3km slice of an even simpler network, also just south of downtown, though admittedly in a smaller city.  Portland:

I often show this map in Australia because the pattern is even more clear than in Los Angeles.  The simplicity is extreme.  Every arterial has exactly one bus line on it, with a simple 1-2 digit number.  The only exceptions are very close to downtown, where radial lines inevitably have to converge, and a few ghostly line numbers that appear on a white background, which signifies a handful of trips that run only on the peak.  (Note, by the way how this notation helps the viewer see the all-day network on which she might rely,.  This clarity is quite unavailable on the Sydney map.  The Los Angeles map also doesn't distinguish peak-only services, though across much of the city there are very few of them.)

The Portland map also makes clear that even in a city with an exceptionally strong downtown, many frequent lines don't go there, including 70, 71, 72, and 75 on the map above.  The focus, as in Los Angeles, is on anywhere-to-anywhere travel using connections.  Because these "crosstown" lines rely on connections more than the radial lines do, they all run as frequently as possible, and as late into the night as possible.  Sydney, too, has non-downtown lines, but with one exception, the 400, they are too infrequent for fast connections to be possible, and often shut down earlier than the rest of the network.  Again, the frequency is hard to afford in Sydney because resources are divided over so many lines, even those these lines are often overlapping.  Portland and Los Angeles, by contrast, are running the minimum possible number and length of lines, so that they can run each one as frequently, and as late, as possible.

Sydney planners will sometimes argue that Los Angeles and Portland are simpler because they already have street grids, while Sydney is an unplanned accretion with no large-scale order to its street network.  This is partly true; grids are certainly easier to remember, in both cities and transit systems. But you can take a structure like Sydney's and design a more gridlike system, featuring fewer and therefore more frequent lines, all designed to work together to serve any origin-destination pair, rather than picking a few major destinations as today's network tends to do.  I did a sketch of one here.

UPDATE:  An interesting series of comments, starting here, is applying this thinking to equally gridless London, including a very, very frequent grid bus network sketch by commenter Zoltan, which is here.  Remember that polar or "spiderweb" grid, consisting of radials and circles, can also achieve good connectivity while still focusing on a center.  Most workable grid networks, including my sketch for Sydney here, are a hybrid of polar grids and standard rectangular grids.