Human Transit

just bought a house ...

... in Portland, which, as you might expect, is a little all-consuming.  Back in a few days. 

It's in southeast Portland.  The "Street Smart Walkscore" is 66, though the "street-dumb" Walkscore is only 58.  Bravo for street-smarts!

request for information: busways that "cross over" at stations

The image below, of Sydney's M2 freeway at Barclay Road, shows the two directions of a median busway crossing over each other so that buses can stop on a center platform -- without the buses needing to have doors on both sides. 

Another I'm familiar with is on the Los Angeles Harbor Transitway at I-105.  The station is buried under a freeway interchange but the crossovers on the north-south busway are clearly visible.

 

Can anyone identify other examples of this design in busways anywhere in the world?  Please reply in comments if so.  Thanks!

 

can "network primers" reduce grief about network design?

Greater Vancouver's transit agency TransLink has now published something called the Managing the Network Primer [Download PDF] and has a new webpage devoted to this and similar themes.  It's a simple explanation of why effective transit networks are designed a certain way.  It pushes back on the confused and confusing notion that "buses are flexible compared to rail," by emphasising the ways that all kinds of transit work or fail along the same geometric principles.  It can also be used to explain to a reasonable person why the bus can't just deviate to serve (or avoid) her house, business, or development project.  I'm honored to have made substantial contributions to it, in the context of my ongoing work with TransLink.

Subliminally present in this document -- and more explicit, I hope, in the next version -- is that this is also a primer for transit-oriented land use planning.  If you want good transit at your home or development or senior center or business park, you need to locate it where transit can be efficient, and therefore abundant.  So by understanding what efficient transit looks like, you can get a better grasp of what truly transit-oriented development looks like.

So like my book, and like my course, this document will be interesting for transit geeks but is really meant for people in land use planning, development, architecture, and other related fields.  These are the people who are deciding how effective transit can be in the future -- every bit as much as transit planners are.

Once again, TransLink is being careful not to tell any city what it should do with its land use.  Rather, this is part of a process of explaining the transit consequences of the choices a city might make. 

If your regional transit agency is giving its city governments the impression that it's telling them what to do, it may have something to learn from documents like this.  Getting this message right is something I've worked on for a while, and it was the subject of my recent keynote at the Canadian Urban Transit Association annual conference.   Let me know if I can help.

apple maps vs google maps

One of the most disconcerting thing about being a tech customer these days is that the Apple-Google rivalry can be expected to create more grief for people who like both, as each punishes its customers for liking the products of the other.  It is already very laborious, for example, to sync the (Apple) MacBook's standard Calendar and Address Book with (Google) Android's -- a big problem for me as both a Mac and Android user.  Now we're going to see Apple smartphones that don't want us to use Google Maps.

Yes, Apple thinks it's going to improve on the most transformative automated mapping tool of all time.  By all evidence they've decided that a cool, slick look is so important that it doesn't matter whether the map gives you the information you need.  Gizmodo has an excellent comparison, including this graphic:

 

That's a slice of Lower Manhattan: Google on the left, Apple on the right.  Yes, the Apple map is pleasing on the eye, but do you turn to mapping software for serene imagery or to see the layout of your city and how to do things in it?  

While everyone can pick nits with Google Maps, Google has done an amazing job at massing large amounts of useful information in compact and legible ways.  Their maps are aesthetically cluttered, but the clutter is accurate:  Lower Manhattan is a cluttered place and we love it that way!  A great city is full of opportunites and we want to know about all of them.  I like feeling a little overwhelmed by a Google Map, especially as compared to the illusory cool -- also known as lack of content -- that Apple is trying to convey.

The official reason for a transit blog to complain, of course, is that Google has done a lot of work on integrating transit data into its maps, while Apple, to judge from its beta, thinks of this as a detail that can be added later.  It will be interesting to see whether people really give up Google Maps for a slicker but more impoverished tool.  If not, this could start driving transit users toward Google's Android, where the variety of third-party hardware designs already mean a tool much better suited to your hand, and your taste.

Christina Bonnington in Wired takes down Apple Maps here.

H/t: Daryl de la Cruz

guest post: a san franciscan on parisian street design

Following up on my praise of the bus lanes of Paris, San Francisco reader Ian Leighton logs these observations about the operation of Parisian boulevards from several points of view. Ian is a co-founder of Embark, a firm that designs mobile applications for transit systems around the US and London. 

In addition to Métro / Bus / Tram / RER, I also walked (bien sûr) and made use of the bicycle sharing system Velib', so I was able to experience the use of street space in Paris from the perspective of several modes.

The buses work pretty well, and seem to be well-ridden. They connect quartiers that the metro doesn't and (in my case) allow for enjoyment of the city at street level, for better geographical education of how things are connected in the non-gridded city. I found I took buses much more often when the weather was beautiful.

About bus boarding: The normal length buses seem to still insist that you board at the front, which is still relatively quick, as I also observed in London, since most people have Navigo smart cards. They even have two "lanes" for boarding through the front door, with a divider and Navigo reader on each side. You can still pay in cash/coin with a hefty surcharge. The articulated buses allow all-door boarding as you observed, which is how the trams operate, convergently. Buses, in general, feel very modern and welcoming. As far as I could tell, there was no "old bus" vs "new bus" as we have [in North America] often, and all the buses treated riders like citizens. Low floor, line maps inside, upcoming stop displays, clean interiors, consistent branding and appearance.

Paris has seemingly done a good job of managing its street space, and it is dynamic both in daily use and over time.  The city seems to constantly make small modifications to its streets.  In daily use, the (wide, separated) bus lane also serves bikes and sometimes deliveries. Depending on the width of the bus lane, these are sometimes clever parking/delivery spaces cut halfway into the sidewalk that still let the buses squeeze by, sometimes not. Sometimes deliveries are prohibited during peak hours, when traffic isn't free-flowing enough for the bus to use a travel lane. On less wide streets, a non-separated bus lane is narrower and really mostly used by bikes, and by buses when the other lanes are truly blocked up with traffic.

The bus lanes are a great addition to the bike network. Bike lanes can get a little creative, transitioning from sidewalk to street to bus lane to across the street to disappearing. But even around giant intersections like Place d'Italie (13th), they guide you decently well around the craziness with sharrows and bike traffic lights. And you always have the option (and in some places, like Bastille and Concorde, it's the only option) to just, well have at it with the scooters, cars, trucks and buses in the fray — which isn't nearly as bad as it seems, since Parisian drivers are pretty considerate and aware of people on bikes.

On a longer-term basis, the city seems willing to make changes: converting its "payant" parking spaces into auto'lib stations, livrasion spaces, and dedicated bike lanes as well. It definitely feels like if you come back to the same street in a few years, there will undoubtedly be some slight modifications.

One thing that struck me was there there is still a ton of parking on Parisian streets! It seems that if you give a Parisian car-owner (or politician, planner, decision-maker?) the choice between removing a parking lane or a travel lane, they'll prefer the latter, and preserve their parking.

Caveat: traffic is still a problem. During rush hour, taxis and right turns can clog a bus lane pretty quickly. There doesn't seem to be the same gridlock law as we have in California. The effective lanes during the afternoon rush hour, in the 9th, 10th, and 18th (N / NW) end of Paris at least, where I observed them, suddenly have a line of taxis and buses. This is usually okay for bikes, but occasionally it gets bad enough that bikes have to do some weaving through the lines of taxis. A little improvement is still needed, as always.

These photos were taken during rush hour on rue Lafayette in the 10th. There was so much gridlock, and so many taxis in the bus lane, that 5 or 6 buses were stuck in line with the taxis, between two bus stops. I don't recall whether any were bunched on the same route.

Coming back to San Francisco, I bike a lot more, since it's so much faster than transit. Being in Paris has made me realize the potential to have a great bus system (barring the full-scale metro, or even Parisian style tramway, we doubtless need in a few corridors and can't pay for). Removing stops, contraflow and separated (or at least colored) bus lanes to signal to drivers that they're not supposed to be there, and signal priority would doubtless do a lot to speed up MUNI. It even seems, to me at least, that the Muni Metro T line doesn't even have signal priority, even with its own right-of-way… or if it is, it's pretty ineffective. Oh well, I'll have to wait for the San Francsico Transit Effectiveness Project, someday.  

book review: grescoe's straphanger

Taras Grescoe. Straphanger: Saving Our Cities and Ourselves from the Automobile. Macmillan, 2012.

When the publisher of Taras Grescoe’s Straphanger asked me to review the book, I felt the usual apprehension.  Shelves are full of books that discuss transit from a journalist’s perspective.  They often get crucial things wrong, as do many journalists’ articles on the topic.  I wondered I was going to endure another four hours of watching readers being innocently misled on issues that matter.

Grescoe does a little of that, but he also shows why spectacular writing compensates for many problems of detail.  Straphanger is a tour de force of compelling journalism and “travel writing” – friendly, entertaining, funny, pointed, and (almost always) compelling.  Like any good explainer, he announces his prejudice at once:

I admit it: I ride the bus.  What’s more, I frequently find myself on subways, streetcars, light rail, metros and high-speed trains.  Though I have a driver’s license, I’ve never owned an automobile, and apart from the occasional car rental, I’ve reached my mid forties by relying on bicycles, my feet, and public transportation for my day-to-day travel … I am a straphanger, and I intend to remain one as long as my legs will carry me to the corner bus stop.

Grescoe and I have almost all of this in common, but I felt a pang of regret at this posture.  To the mainstream, car-dependent people who most need this book’s message, Grescoe has just announced that he’s a space alien with three arms and a penchant for eating rocks.  But there’s a positive side: once you decide you’re not in danger, eccentric tourguides can be fun.  Perhaps I have a poor dataset from living in “officially weird” Portland, and before that in San Francisco, but in a culture that seems increasingly welcoming of eccentricity and difference, there may be an audience for Grescoe among the motoring set.

Because this is what Grescoe is at heart:  A great tourguide, in this case a travel writer, showing you around some fascinating cities, exploring intriguing transit systems, and introducing us to vivid and engaging characters, all while having fun and sometimes dangerous adventures.  These last are important; Grescoe has had enough traumatic and confronting experiences that he can describe straphanging as a form of endorphin-rich adventure analogous to mountain climbing or skydiving.  I look forward to the movie.

Statistics are cited lightly but to great (and usually accurate) effect.  Effective and quotable jabs are everywhere: 

“The personal automobile has, dramatically and enduringly, broadened our horizons.  In the process, however, it has completely paved them over.

Grescoe has a great eye for characters, too.  Who can fail to be charmed, for example, by this portrait of a character I hadn’t known:  Bogotà mayor Antanas Mockus, alter-ego of his successor, the aggressive and practical Enrique Peñalosa:

Working with a tiny budget and no support from district councillors, Mockus focused on … undermining cycles of violence through jester-like interventions in daily life.  He dismissed the notoriously corrupt traffic police and hired four hundred mimes to shame drivers into stopping at crosswalks.  ...  Taxis drivers were encouraged to become “Gentlemen of the Crosswalks,” and every new traffic fatality was marked with a black star prominently painted on the pavement.  To discourage road rage and honking, he distributed World Cup-style penalty cards to pedestrians and motorists, a red thumb’s down to signify disapproval, a green thumbs up to express thanks for a kind act … Seeing tangible evidence of municipal progress, citizens once again began to pay their property taxes … and the once-bankrupt city’s finances began to recover.

What’s wrong with this book?  Well, if it’s travel writing, nothing; travel writing is about the adventure, and while you learn things from it, you expect to learn subjective, unquantifiable things that may be inseparable from the character of your guide.  Journalism, on the other hand, has to get its facts right, or at least state its biases.  Grescoe gets a pass on his largest biases, mostly because he’s entirely aware of them and happy to point them out.

But there are a few mistakes.  Like many commentators, Grescoe throws around meaningless or misleading data about urban densities.  Here’s a typical slip:

Thanks largely to the RER, the metropolitan area of Paris, with over 10.2 million residents, takes up no more space on the Earth’s surface than Jacksonville, Florida, a freeway-formed city with fewer than 800,000 residents.

This doesn’t seem to check out, unless some subtle and uncited definition of metro area is being used.  (Wikipedia tells me that the City of Jacksonville is 882 sq mi in area while the Paris with 10.3 million residents is 1098 sq mi.)  But even if it did, this is the classic “city limits problem.”  Jacksonville is a consolidated city-county whose “city limits” encompass vast rural area outside the city, whereas “metro Paris” is by definition a contiguous area that is entirely urbanized.  An accurate comparison with metro Paris would look only at the built-up area of Jacksonville, which is tiny compared to Paris.   The point is that any talk about metro areas or cities is prone to so many different definitions, including some really unhelpful ones, that it’s wrong to cite any urban density without footnoting to clarify exactly what you mean, and how it’s measured. Grescoe is far from alone in sliding into these quicksands.

As with many journalists, Grescoe’s sense of what would be a good transit network is strongly governed by his emotional response to transit vehicles and technologies.  Grescoe is very enamored with rapid transit or “metro” service to the point that he sometimes misses how technologies work together for an optimal and liberating network. 

He claims, for example, that there should be circular metro lines around Los Angeles, Chicago, and Toronto.  In fact, circular or “orbital” services (regardless of technology) rely not just on network effects but also on being radial services into major secondary centers.  This is why the Chicago Circle Line made no sense: Chicago is so massively single-centered that there are few major secondary centres sufficient to anchor a metro line until you get way out into the suburbs, at which point concentrations of jobs are laid out in such transit-unfriendly ways that no one line could serve them anyway. Chicago is going the right direction by improving the speed and usefulness of its urban grid pattern of service – a mathematically ideal network form that fits well with the shape of the city.  Toronto has similar geography and issues.  As for Los Angeles, this is a place with so many “centers” that the concepts of radial vs orbital service are meaningless.  Especially here, where travel is going so many directions and downtown’s role is so small, the strong grid, not the circle, is the key to great transit. 

Grescoe is clear enough about his strongest bias:

“I don’t like buses. … Actually, I hate them.”

Despite his opening statement that “I ride the bus,” Grescoe repeatedly associates buses with losers, and with unpleasant experiences.  In correspondence with me, he wrote:  “The anti-bus bias you perceive was a concession to North American readers whose experience of buses tends to be negative.”  Again, this is understandable as travel writing, but it’s tricky as journalism and very tricky if the purpose is advocacy.  When you presume a bias on the part of your reader, with the intent of later countering it, you can’t really control whether you’ve dislodged the bias or reinforced it.  I felt the bias being reinforced; other readers may have different responses.

Again, the problem with anti-bus bias is not that I don’t share it.  The problem is that if you set transit technologies in competition with one another, the effect is to undermine the notion that technologies should work together as part of a complete network.  If you want a network that will give you access to all the riches of your city, buses are almost certain to be part of it – even if, as in inner Paris, you have the densest subway system in the world.  Hating buses – if that becomes your primary focus -- means hating complete networks. 

When it comes to Bus Rapid Transit, Grescoe accepts the common North American assumption that the place to see BRT is Bogotà or Curitíba.  So he comes back from Bogotà with the near-universal reaction of North American junketers there:  The massive structuring BRT is really impressive in the numbers it carries, but hey, this is the developing world. Not only is car ownership low but it’s more authoritarian in its politics, giving mayors the power to effect massive transformation fast without much consultation.  What’s more, these massive busways are effective but really unpleasant as urban design – not something I’d want in my city.  Respecting the effectiveness and utility of the Bogotà busways, Grescoe does endorse Bus Rapid Transit in secondary corridors, but he has not seen busways done completely for a developed-world audience.

North Americans who want to experience successful Bus Rapid Transit in a developed-world context should skip South America and visit Brisbane, Australia, where a wealthy modern city moves, in part, on a complete network of beautifully designed, landscaped, and highly functional busways that flow into an underground segment right through the heart of downtown, and that are designed to provide an extremely frequent rapid-transit experience.  There are some European pieces of good busway, such as Amsterdam’s Zuidtangent.  But you have to go to Brisbane to see an uncompromised developed-world busway network, one that provides reliable operations end to end.

While Straphanger’s flirtation with anti-bus stereotypes was troubling to me, there’s a limit to how much Grescoe can be criticized for this.  This is journalism of its time, and the bus=loser stereotype is still of our time in some cities.  It’s up to each of us to decide whether to seek experiences that confirm our stereotypes or those that might contradict them, but nobody can challenge all of their stereotypes at once.   Grescoe does eagerly challenge many other destructive attitudes throughout the book, and the brilliance of a book lies in the way it brings delight and confidence to the experience of both using and advocating transit and great urbanism. I heartily recommend this fun, enlightening, and inspiring read.

Tweet

los angeles cuts bus line that was useful parable

Almost a year ago, I told the story of Los Angeles line 305, a diagonal line that ran every 40 minutes zigzagging across the city's high frequency grid, between Watts and Beverly Hills.  The line was so infrequent, and the surrounding grid service so frequent, that if you just missed the 305 it was faster to take the frequent grid routes and transfer than to wait for the next 305. 

The 305 comes up often in my presentations because it's such a useful example of symbolic transit.  The purpose of the line was not to be useful to very many people, but rather to announce, as a matter of symbolism, that "we run from Watts to Beverly Hills"!  That's certainly how Jennifer Medina of the New York times described it, when it was first proposed to be cut in 2011.  The Times's graphic:

 

The NYT headline of the time even claimed that cutting this line would "make a long bus commute longer," which was factually untrue if you count waiting time as part of travel time.

Well, a year later, LA Metro is finally cutting the 305.  Very few people will experience any loss of travel time as a result, but the system will be simpler, more frequent, and ultimately, more liberating for anyone who wants to get where they're going.  Of course, like such worthily deleted lines as San Francisco's 26-Valencia, the 305 will still be useful as a parable!