Human Transit

frequent-rider discounts to decongest the peak?

Just in from the Aspen Ideas Festival, via Alexis Madrigal at the Atlantic.  Stanford Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Professor Balaji Prabhakar thinks he has the solution to peak overcrowding.

The frequent commuter program has two goals. One is to increase people's loyalty to the public transport system. We want people to be disloyal to their cars, to cheat on their cars. And the second major goal is to decongest the peak time trains and buses. The problem is that it is unpleasant to take a trip during the peak time. If we could achieve both goals with the frequent commuter project, it would be great.

The nice thing about this project is that it is going to do exactly what the airline miles do. You take a 10 kilometer trip, you get 10 credits. And Singapore can measure the kilometers. But if you make that same trip in the off-peak time, you'll get 30 credits. This creates new bonding between you and the system. People don't think of the indignity of taking a three-stop trip on their preferred airline versus a direct cheaper flight sometimes. In fact, they see the angle as, "I'm earning more miles."

Does anyone with regular experience in transit think this is a good idea?  If so, I'd like to hear.  My first reaction:

This sounds like a very very complicated way to do discounts for off-peak riders, and to reward very regular riders.  The fact is, the transit industry already has a system for rewarding frequent riders; it's called a monthly or annual pass.

A simpler solution to the peak overcrowding problem is to provide discounts for off-peak trips, as Seattle, for example, has done for decades.  This costs very little to administer and has the desired effect much more directly. 

When the need for sheer service is so urgent, why would a transit agency take on the massive administrative cost of a frequent-rider program, when the same money could go into driving buses and trains instead? 

I'm sure transit professionals will appreciate the interest from the "big ideas" people.  But from Madrigal's summary, this idea sounds like a fun metaphor inappropriately applied, suggesting the lack of any technical understanding of the transit capacity problem.

But I'm curious what others think ...

reims: the "strong lines" of the "bus-tram network"

The opening of a new tram (streetcar) line is usually the occasion for lots of hype and celebration about trams.  But Reims, France is using the opening day of a new tram to pitch a newly integrated network, the "Réseau Bus-Tram."  The term clearly invites us to stop thinking of buses and trams as separate things, and forming attachments to one or the other.

Their description of it in their timetables [PDF] shows a focus on promoting a network of main lines (Lignes fortes), which consist of two tram lines and five bus lines, all very frequent and designed to complement each other.  The name lignes fortes suggests not just main lines but also (more literally) strong lines, strong enough to be the structure that supports all the other transit lines in the city.

(Just home from Halifax.  More on that soon, though come to think of it, this post is about Halifax too, and about a lot of other cities ...)

the car vs. personal technology (quote of the week)

"Previous generations found freedom and flexibility through the car.  But Generation Ys find their freedom and flexibility by staying connected to their friends, family and workplaces through the various information devices - like their laptops, or iphones.

"They can stay connected on a bus or a train. They can bring the office with them. They can bring their study with them. They can bring their friends with them. They can't if they're driving."

-- Peter Newman, Curtin University, Perth, Australia, quoted in the West Australian

Joshua Arbury of Auckland Transport Blog ruminates further.

information requests: the copyedit edition

I'm in the copyedit phase of my book, which I've been sternly advised is my last chance to substantially change the text.  So of course I'm stumbling on lots of odd little uncertainties, and I have a few questions for transit and transport experts out there.

Feel free to help me out on any of these!  (Try not to say anything too immortal in the comments, as this post will be deleted when it's served its purpose.)

1. Roughness.  Based on usage I've heard from traffic engineers, I use this word to mean "delay in a traffic lane adjacent to a curb or parking lane caused by events such as delivery trucks and taxis stopping for customers, cars engaged in parallel parking movements, car doors being opened into your lane, slow cyclists sharing the traffic lane, and so on."  But attempts to google a definition founder on the more common sense of "pavement roughness."  Is roughness the right word for what I mean?  What word would you use?   I have my answer on this one:  friction.
   
   
2. Relationship of Ridership to Density.  Rutherford and Spillar (1998) find that in the range of densities covering most North American urban areas, ridership's relationship to density is an upward curve.  That is, if you control for service quality, if suburb A is twice as dense as suburb B it will generate much more than twice the ridership.  Has anyone done or seen more recent research proving or disproving the same point? 



3. Deterrent Effect of Various Kinds of Delay.  The Transit Capacity and Quality of Service Manual (2nd ed) presents these figures for how much different kinds of waiting time discourage ridership, compared to 1.0 for riding time.  For example, it states that on average, a minute of walking time has the same deterrent effect as 2.2 minutes of riding time.  These numbers are sourced, however, on a wide range of studies dating back to the 1960s.  Has anyone seen anything more recent?
   
   

   Delay Type:	Walk	Initial Wait	Ride	Wait for Connection
   Minimum	0.8	0.8	1.0	1.1
   Average	2.2	2.1	1.0	2.5
   Maximum	4.4	5.1	1.0	4.4




4. Worker-Driver service.  Do any transit agencies in the developed world run worker-driver service, where a commuter bus is driven by someone actually making the commute, who is hired as a part time employee by the transit agency?  I'm aware of two outer-suburban agencies near Seattle that do this.  Is it commonplace somewhere outside my awareness?  UPDATE:  Just to be clear, I'm not talking about vanpools, which are for particular groups of people by pre-arrangement.  I'm talking about public transit vehicles running along routes, collecting fares, open to anyone.
   
   
5. Driver shift start-end locations.  It's universal, in my experience, that driver shifts must end where they began.  The need to return drivers (on the clock) to their point of origin is a large part of the hidden cost of one-way commute express services.  Are there common labor arrangements in the developed world in which a driver clocks out at a different place from where he clocked in?

chicago: living the grid

If you visit Chicago, and a local friend tells you to meet her at the Western "L" station, then either (a) she's not really your friend or (b) she isn't as local as she claims.  There are five stations called Western in the Chicago rapid transit network:

These duplicate names arise from naming stations solely after a cross street, without reference to the street or path the rail line is following.

But the secret language of Chicago transit desires is even more subtle.  If your friend tells you to meet her at Western Brown Line station, she's probably a local, but if she directs you to Western Blue Line station, you're still in trouble.  As you can see above, there are two.  This one is the more scenic, but note the absence of any signage that might distinguish it from the other one:

Although there are a small handful of duplicate station names in other New World gridded cities (one pair in Buenos Aires, four pairs in Cleveland, two pairs in Philadelphia), New York City is the only system I know of where you'll see the same naming style used in force. 

Few agencies, however, would give the same name to two stations on the same line, as Chicago does.  Toronto, one of the few big cities that's as relentlessly gridded as Chicago, is obviously at pains to avoid it.  Their U-shaped north-south subway line crosses many main streets twice, and in each case they append "West" to the name of the more westerly of the two. 

Los Angeles, like Chicago, has a long Western Avenue that has two stations where different branches of a rail line cross it.  But they didn't call both stations "Western."  They used the full co-ordinates:  "Wilshire/Western" as opposed to "Hollywood/Western."

How do Chicagoans cope with all these duplicate names, even on the same line? No big deal, says Jeff Busby, a Chicago-sourced transit planner now at Vancouver's TransLink:

In partial answer to your question, I would observe that the grid is an overriding organizing element for Chicagoans.  Everyone knows that State and Madison is 0N/S & 0E/W and coordinates are powerful for knowing where you are and how to get somewhere else.  Station platform signs give the N/S & E/W coordinates.  Station names that reinforce their location in the grid are valuable.  I know that Ashland is 1600W and Western is 2400W so that new restaurant I’ve never been to at 2200W is probably closer to the Western station.

To minimize clutter on the system map, stations are generally named for the arterial that crosses perpendicular to the rail line, but in the local language (and the on-board announcements) they are known by both cross streets. For example, the Loop stations are known as State/Lake, Clark/Lake, Randolph/Wabash, Library-State/Van Buren, etc even though they are abbreviated on maps as State, Clark, Randolph and Library.

In this sense, having five "Western" stations is not as confusing at it might seem.  First, it immediately orients you to where they are -- on Western Avenue, accessible by the 49-Western bus that travels from Berwyn (5300N) south to 79th (7900S), and a local suggesting that you meet at the “Western L station” would probably use a different term (from North to South):

• Western (Brown Line) – Lincoln Square (after the neighborhood)
• Western (O’Hare Blue Line) – Western/Milwaukee
• Western (Forest Park Blue Line) – Western/Congress (or Eisenhower)
• Western (Pink Line) – Western/Cermak
• Western (Orange Line) – Probably Western - Orange Line as it’s not on a major E/W arterial

Indeed, the near universal repetition of grid number coordinates is a striking thing in Chicago.  You'll find them on every streetsign and every platform station name sign.

So it really is possible to ignore all the street names and navigate a city of co-ordinates, much as you would do in Utah cities where you'll encounter street names like "7200 South Street". 

Unique features of a transit system are often keys to the spirit of the city.  Grids were fundamental to the rapid settlement of the midwest and west, so for Chicago -- a city built on commerce to and from those regions -- the strong grid is an expression of the city's economic might.  All cities have street networks, but few cities attach such strong symbolic value to the nature of their street network, or celebrate it so explicitly. 

And its certainly true that if you ignore the street names and embrace Chicago's numerical grid, there's never any doubt where you are, but of course that implies a sense of "where" that is itself grid-defined.  I'm sure Parisians take pride in the complete gridlessness of their city, and would say that "Place de la Bastille" is a much more satisfying answer to the question "where?" than any grid coordinates would be.  But then, Paris wasn't built to conquer a frontier.

 

can transit-only streets work in small cities?

Yes, says Wellington, New Zealand (pop. 389,000)!

In North American debates about pedestrian and transit malls, we're usually told that such things only work in Europe, with the implication that age, historic density, and cultural history of European cities makes them unrealistic mentors for the young North American city.  Well, as an urban culture, New Zealand is even younger than North America.  In fact, the urbanization of both Australia and New Zealand happened around the same time as that of the North American west, and the level of attachment to cars is also comparable.  So North America needs a better excuse!

Wellington's "Golden Mile," long the core business strip and highrise office district, is now a two-lane, largely bus-only facility, the last bit of which was finished last November.  It features generous sidewalks, near-continuous awnings for shelter (a city requirement) and hardly any commercial vacancies.   In fact, the whole thing appeared to be bustling throughout my stay the past week, with plenty of pedestrians and plenty of activity around the abundant street-level retail that lines the entire thing. 

The pic above, of course, was taken by the City on a perfect sunny day.  Having spent most of the last week in a conference room, I can offer only pics taken early in the morning:

 

Note the green paint.  In Australia and New Zealand there is never any question about where bus lanes are, and zero excuse for not noticing them.  Note also that the red bus is about to turn right from one green lane into another; the Golden Mile isn't entirely straight, but the green lines (and abundant buses) make it perfectly clear where it is, and how it works.

I'll come back to some of the interesting details of the Golden Mile, but meanwhile, next time someone tells you that North American cities can't emulate Europe, ask why they can't emulate New Zealand!

First photo:  City of Wellington

new zealand's san francisco

Greetings from Wellington, New Zealand, where I'm working with the regional government on some transit planning.  There are limits to how much blogging I can do while working 1.5 fulltime jobs and copyediting a book.  More soon on Wellington's remarkable downtown transit spine and pedestrian malls, but for now, well, tourist pictures basically, with some interesting stuff encoded:

Not bad for the verge of Winter Solstice!  But no, the weather's not always like this ...

that influential texas "urban mobility report"

You know you're a transport geek when you find yourself at a 9 PM debate about how governments should measure "urban mobility."

The opportunity arose one night at the Congress for the New Urbanism conference in Madison last week.  Long after most urbanists had adjourned to the bars and restaurants, a small but sharp audience gathered to hear Tim Lomax of the Texas Transportation Institute (TTI) debate Joe Cortwright of CEOs for Cities.  Tim was there to defend TTI's influential Urban Mobility Report (UMR), an annual compendium of statistics that are widely used to define how US cities think about mobility problems and to benchmark these cities against each other.  Joe was there to attack TTI's methodology as biased against compact, sustainable cities. 

The technical core of the argument is simple.  TTI's Travel Time Index, one of their more quoted products, is a ratio of peak congested travel times by car against uncongested travel times by car.  In other words, travel times are said to be "worse" only if they get much longer in peak commute hours than they are midday. 

This ratio inevitably gives "better" scores to cities where normal uncongested travel times are pretty long -- in other words, spread-out cities.  Here's the CEOs' critique of how the TTI compares Charlotte and Chicago:

This index certainly looks hard to defend as any useful measure of travel time, even by car.  Two cities that expose the average motorist to near-identical amounts of congestion delay are being scored entirely based on how far people have to drive there, where "further" means "better" on the travel time index score.

In his rebuttal, Lomax emphasized that Institute doesn't stress its Travel Time Index as much as it used to.  He even offered a table showing the number of times his report mentioned the index in each successive year (plenty in the 90s, but way down in the late 00s.)  We were to conclude that critiquing the Travel Time Index is a 20th century battle.

The real problem, of course, is TTI's title, "Urban Mobility Report," for a document that's really mostly about congestion.  Only if you live in a very car-dependent city, or care only about car-dependent citizens, can you reduce mobility to congestion in that way.  A more truthfully titled "Urban Congestion Report" would raise no objection.

Lomax argued that his insititute is interested in the other modes and wants to be able to talk about them more effectively, and I'm sure that's true.  It's also true that nobody can be responsible for what journalists and editors choose to emphasize in reporting about their work.  It may well be that journalists continue to fixate on the Travel Time Index more than the Institute itself wants them to. 

But look at how the TTI's own website introduces its most recent study:

The 2010 Urban Mobility Report builds on previous Urban Mobility Reports with an improved methodology and expanded coverage of the nation's urban congestion problem and solutions. The links below provide information on long-term congestion trends, the most recent congestion comparisons and a description of many congestion improvement strategies. All of the statistics have been recalculated with the new method to provide a consistent picture of the congestion challenge. As with previous methodology improvements, readers, writers and analysts are cautioned against using congestion data from the 2009 Report. All of the measures, plus a few more, have been updated and included in this report.

Mobility is in the report title, but this entire leading paragraph is about congestion.  If you dig into TTI's full press release about its 2010 report, you also find that it's all about congestion except for this curious paragraph:

The congestion reduction benefits of two significant solutions are discussed—public transportation and roadway operations. Without public transportation services, travelers would have suffered an additional 785 million hours of delay and consumed 640 million more gallons of fuel—a savings of $19 billion in congestion costs. Roadway operational treatments save travelers 320 million hours of delay and 265 million gallons of fuel for a congestion cost savings of $8 billion.

The journalistic spin that TTI itself recommends is that non-car modes matter only if they reduce congestion, and that congestion remains the primary measure of urban mobility.

What's more, TTI's suggestion that public transit directly reduces congestion is actually quite fraught, and many transit experts, including myself, steer away from it.  Transit certainly creates alternatives to congestion for individuals, and the resulting benefit to individuals can be aggregated to describe society-wide improvements in both productive time and personal/family time.  But those calculations are much more clear and direct than any "transit benefit to congestion" overall.  That's because newly freed, high demand road space tends to induce new car trips. 

Most transit projects are not trying to reduce congestion, or not all by themselves.  If congestion reduction is your goal, you need a combination of transit and market-rate "decongestion" pricing for motorists.  For most advocates of transit in the context of compact sustainable cities, the goal is not to reduce congestion but to give citizens options to liberate themselves from it.

Could a real "Urban Mobility Report" have value?  Yes, but it would look totally different from TTI's, and it wouldn't be easy.  Creating mobility measures that work across all the modes -- cars, walking, cycling, transit etc -- is fiendlishly difficult.  I have some notions about how it might be done, but it would have to start with the right question.  If you're going to talk about true urban mobility, then surely you have to ask questions like:

• How much of people's lives is lost to travel, where that travel has no positive value to them as personal time or recreation?  

Or perhaps even more powerfully:

• What degree of freedom do people have to move about their city at will? 

Any methodology that focuses on the performance of a single mode -- whether congestion on freeways, continuity of cycle networks, or reliability of transit -- is not going to lead us that way.

Given the resources and credibility that TTI has, I really hope they move in this direction.  But it won't be easy.  If the TTI report continues to be about congestion, that's another choice, but in that case their "Urban Mobility Report" will be a report of declining relevance (and increasingly offensive title) as this urban century unrolls.

basics: dead running

The British/Australian term "dead running" means "running out of service, unavailable for passengers."  I like the term because it could be the title of a zombie movie.  I look forward to seeing if it attracts hits.

The North American term is "deadheading," which may remind you of rock fans of a certain era.  In both cases, the word "dead" is apt.  It's a waste, a loss.  It's unavoidable up to the point, but transit agencies are always trying to turn dead time into live, useful time.

The Brisbane Times has a piece by Marissa Calligeros announcing that '28 per cent of bus services are "dead running", where passengers are unable to board.'  That's a confusing way of putting it.  The reporter must mean that Brisbane buses are dead running 28% of the time. 

That sounds like a lot, but "dead running" is the result of two different issues that need to be kept separate.

• All transit vehicles must travel between their operating bases, where they are stored and maintained, and the beginning and endpoints of service.  Rail services usually have bases directly on the rail line, but may still have to dead-run through the rail system to reach their trip's starting point.  Bus bases can be anywhere.  The location of bases (called depots in Britain/Australia, often divisions in the US) is a major issue.  It's often worth spending capital money to save operating money, and careful investments in bases, reducing dead running, can do that.

• Transit agencies that run extensive one-way express incur massive amounts of dead running.  Brisbane, for example, is a very, very centralized city, with a downtown far out of scale to anything else.  That means a huge demand for one-way trips into downtown in the morning and out in the evening.  All those services that are needed in only one direction usually have to get back in the other direction so that the driver's shift can end where it began.  (The other alternative is to pay the driver to hang around downtown all day, which is even more expensive.)

There's no way to understand Brisbane's "dead running" issue, or that of any other city, without separating these two causes.  The Brisbane Times article talks only about the first, but the Brisbane bus system has a massive one-way peak due to its single dominant downtown and relatively lack of direct rail paths for much of the city.  Can dead running be better addressed by a rigorous review of whether these one-way peak services can be combined, replaced by links to rail, or otherwise made more efficient?  GIven the higher cost of dead running for one-way peaked service, could some of it be converted into two-way, all-day service at less expense than it would first appear?

That's an important question for any city.  Details of driver costs vary, but in general, dead running is one of the main reasons that one-way express service (bus or rail) can be more expensive than it looks.

light rail "for dummies?"

A polarizing summary of "facts" about a light rail debate in Waterloo, Ontario has popped up in an Atlantic item by Nicholas Jackson.  After an introduction in which Jackson seems to confuse intercity high-speed rail and intra-city light rail, he invites us to admire a graphically rich presentation Waterloo light rail advocates.  It's at the bottom of this post. 

I cite this not to take a position on light rail transit (LRT) in Waterloo.  (I'm certainly open to it, and am following with interest a similar project in similar-sized Victoria, BC.)  I mean only to offer a useful illustration of the dangers of almost all "pro vs con" or "this vs that" or "with us or against us" framings of a question, in which all distinctions are reduced or distorted to fit the quarrel at hand.

Commenters are encouraged to nominate their favourite absurdities out of this piece, or to defend them.  Mine are mostly (but not all) in the table partway down.  Did you know light rail lines seem to cause high-tech companies to sprout decades before the line opens?  Did you know that regionwide populations of Ottawa and Waterloo can be compared to city limits populations of other cities, as convenient?  And what exactly can we learn from knowing the population of San Francisco in 1904, when they opened their first light rail line?  Might the absence of cars in that year make the cases hard to compare?

Snapsort's LRT for Dummies Infographic

This is well-intentioned, and perhaps in late stages of debate it's unavoidable.  Again, my response to it is not a view about light rail but rather about the style of argument, which assumes (contrary to this) that rail-bus distinctions overwhelm all others, and explain so much of the arc of history.

UPDATE:  This post isn't about the Waterloo light rail debate itself, but here are some sources on the subject:

BACKGROUND

Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rapid_transit_in_Waterloo_Region

The Region's Plan:

http://rapidtransit.region.waterloo.on.ca/

Opponents:

http://www.t4st.com/index.php?title=Main_Page