a technophile wants my brain, and yours

I'm not sure if I should give this oxygen, but for the record: Randal O'Toole, the infamous anti-planning writer known for his blog The Antiplanner, has falsely implied that I agree with his critique of Los Angeles rail plans.  Not so fast.  If he'd read by blog, or my book, he'd know better.

Here's what he wrote today:

Portland transit expert Jarrett Walker argues that “we should stop talking about ‘bus stigma.’” In fact, he says, transit systems are designed by elites who rarely use transit at all, but who might be able to see themselves on a train. So they design expensive rail systems for themselves rather than planning transit systems for their real market, which is mostly people who want to travel as cost-effectively as possible and don’t really care whether they are on a bus or train.

This view is reinforced by the Los Angeles Bus Riders’ Union, and particularly by a report it published written by planner Ryan Snyder. Ryan calls L.A.’s rail system “one of the greatest wastes of taxpayer money in Los Angeles County history,” while he shows that regional transit ridership has grown “only when we have kept fares low and improved bus service,” two things that proved to be incompatible with rail construction.

So because I defended buses from the notion of "bus stigma", O'Toole assumes I'm a bus advocate and therefore a rail opponent.  This is called a "false dichotomy," identical in logic to George W. Bush's claim that "either you're with us or you're with the terrorists." 

(In a related move, he insists that you can't improve rail and buses at the same time, a claim directly disproven by the last decade in which LA Metro developed the Metro Rapid buses [and Orange and Silver Line busways] concurrent with rail extensions.) 

In fact, I maintain and encourage a skeptical stance toward all technophilia — that is, all emotional attachments to transit technologies that are unrelated to their utility as efficient and attractive means of public transport.  To the extent that the Bus Riders Union is founded on the view that rail is some kind of adversary, while the bus is the unifying symbol of their cause, I view them with exactly the same skepticism that I would bring to the elite architect who implied that we don't need buses because she'd never ride one. 

Some technology-fixated minds just can't imagine what it would be like to be agnostic about technology and to care instead about whether a service actually gets people where they're going efficiently.  To put in terms that conservatives should respect — I'm very interested in transit that efficiently expands people's freedom, and whatever technology best delivers that in each situation or corridor.

I'm also interested in how all kinds of transit fit together as networks, because this is essential if we're to offer a diverse range of travel options to each customers.  Everyone who becomes emotionally invested in bus vs rail wars — on either side — closes themselves to the idea that different technologies can work together form a single network. 

Like many pairs of polarized enemies, the Bus Riders Union and certain bus-hating elites both endorse the same fallacy.  In this case, both seem to believe that the most important purpose of a transit technology is to signify class categories, and that the key feature of their favorite technology is that it serves their class and not the other's.  Both experience cognitive dissonance when one suggests that maybe bus and rail are not enemies but complementary tools for different roles in a complete network designed for everyone, or that people of many classes and situations can mix happily on one transit vehicle, as happens in big cities all the time.

The idea that a city as vast and dense as Los Angeles can do everything with buses, no matter how much it grows, is absurd.  Drivers are expensive, so rail is a logical investment where high vehicle capacity (ratio of passengers to drivers) is required.

The only way the conservative dream (shared by Gensler Architects) makes sense is if you smash the unions so that all bus drivers make minimum wage, preferably from low-overhead private operating companies.  This is how transit works in much of the developing world, and the result is chaos, inefficient use of street space, and fairly appalling safety records.  Most experts I know who've immigrated from such places were glad to trade that for the transit they find in North America, whatever its faults.

It is absurd, too, to continue claiming that the Los Angeles rail program is "elite."  Go ride the Red Line to North Hollywood or the Blue Line through Watts and tell me if those services seem packed with "elites" to you.  When I ride them, I see the same wonderful diversity that I see on the more useful bus services, weighted of course by the characteristics of the neighborhoods we're passing through.

There's no question that some LA rail projects can be criticized for having been built where right-of-way was available rather than where they were needed, though the more you understand the political process the more you sympathize with the difficulty of those decisions.  But when self-identified bus-people attack rail, and self-identified rail people attack buses, they both sound like the lungs arguing with the heart.  There's a larger purpose to transit, one that we achieve only by refusing to be drawn into technology wars, and demanding, instead, that everything work together.

22 Responses to a technophile wants my brain, and yours

  1. Michael D. Setty July 22, 2012 at 12:06 pm #

    I know Randal and like him. But on the topic of transit, we have “agreed to disagree;” I can assure you this is “par for the course” in his arguments. He does seem to have a knee-jerk reaction against any form of rail transit. Why I cannot tell you, particularly in comparison with other libertarian types such as Wendell Cox, who at least admits the New York subway makes sense.

  2. Nick Wright July 22, 2012 at 12:39 pm #

    Its good to know that somebody gets it. A large modern city should be using a mix of buses (including bus rapid transit), streetcars, metro, and commuter trains.

  3. JohnW July 22, 2012 at 12:56 pm #

    Bravo

  4. Stephen Smith July 22, 2012 at 1:04 pm #

    The only way the conservative dream (shared by Gensler Architects) makes sense is if you smash the unions so that all bus drivers make minimum wage, preferably from low-overhead private operating companies. This is how transit works in much of the developing world, and the result is chaos, inefficient use of street space, and fairly appalling safety records. Most experts I know who’ve immigrated from such places were glad to trade that for the transit they find in North America, whatever its faults.
    I live on Flatbush Ave. in Brooklyn, which is perhaps home to the largest concentration of illegal transit in the US – tons of “dollar vans” and livery cabs ply the avenue, while the cops turn a blind eye. I can’t speak to the safety record since I don’t have any numbers, but I can assure that there’s no chaos or inefficient use of space. (In fact, the dollar vans on the whole seem to fill far more of their seat space than the city buses, and the ride is muuuuch quicker, which is why some people even with monthly transit passes are willing to pay the $2.)
    I agree that such services are a kludge – that rapid transit is what the corridor really needs – but compared to the ridiculously inefficient US style of bus operation epitomized by the slow MTA buses, it’s clearly an improvement.

  5. zefwagner July 22, 2012 at 1:21 pm #

    When I was in LA recently I made a point of riding several modes: Local bus, Rapid Bus, the Orange Line BRT, the Red Line metro, and the Blue Line light rail. In all these modes I was one of the few white, middle-class looking people on the train. It seemed clear to me that both rail and bus in LA are primarily serving the needs of people who either can’t afford a car or don’t want to pay to own or use one. I’m sure there are some lines that serve a more affluent commuter market, but I have to agree with Jarrett that in the case of LA, most rail investments have served existing demand effectively (although I found the Rapid Bus to Venice Beach distressingly non-rapid). Even the subway to Beverly Hills will most likely be very useful to lower-income people who need to commute to service jobs in that area, but I’m sure people will argue it is just going to serve rich people (as if rich people in Beverly Hills are dying to ride transit).

  6. anonymouse July 22, 2012 at 4:04 pm #

    I think some of the pro-rail argument against “buses” is not against buses per se, but against wasting money trying to make buses do something they’re clearly not capable of. It’s not an anti-bus argument per se, though it can often end up being an argument against using buses anywhere that their role overlaps with that of rail. Some of this might also come from a mismatch of time horizons: one side will be talking about the Ideal Network of the Future, while the other is talking about how to best use the resources available right now. Of course, in this case, neither side is quite right, and both can benefit by taking a step back and looking at the transit network not just as it is, or at it may be, but at the steps in between, and how one can get from the one to the other. And it’s important to realize that the network will never reach perfection: as it’s being built, the city will change, and it will turn out that now it needs something slightly (or sometimes not so slightly) different.

  7. Bradley Wentworth July 22, 2012 at 8:17 pm #

    zefwanger, don’t know where you’re from but in LA and many other cities white people are in the minority. A quick search returns: “non-Hispanic whites were 28.7% of the population in 2010.” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Los_Angeles#2010_Census
    It’s difficult to draw conclusions based on your observations until you know the context. When you wrote “I was one of the few white, middle-class looking people on the train” you ought to have continued, “so it seems all segments of the population are well represented.”

  8. Kathy July 22, 2012 at 9:05 pm #

    Thank you for being a voice of reason Jarrett. I am no transit planner, just an interested reader but whenever my husband and I have been to LA and have driven in that insane traffic we always are incredulous that they are not using many more buses and trains of every sort and have them working together to facilitate transportation there. If even a Montana farmer and his wife can see this I can’t see how intelligent transit savvy people can set bus and train against one another.

  9. calwatch July 23, 2012 at 12:52 am #

    You should probably respond at Randal’s site, I think he would welcome the discussion. What is more salient, in my mind, was the Ryan Snyder paper. Sure Snyder is a hired gun, and some of the ideas, like freeway buses with doglegs for transit connections, don’t work especially since LA freeways are notoriously reliable. But LA’s transit system, pre-rail, had good bones.
    What was needed was faster service, which could be done by both bus and rail. Bus lanes are cheaper but are readily able to be paved over due to political implications. However, dedicated bus lanes could have been just as reliable as rail (especially since rail’s reliability has gone done, witness the Blue Line problems). Stop elimination, rapid buses, and implementation of a full grid system, 15 minute frequencies on core routes on the mile square from 5 am to 11 pm at night, 7 days a week, was important. LA’s transit system, in terms of night bus service, is still back in the 60’s. They’ve now upped rail to 10 minute frequencies until midnight and trains until 2 am Friday and Saturday night, but you have many bus routes which might have 10 to 15 minute peak and midday service fall off the cliff to hourly after 7 or 8 pm. This is really hard for service workers, people who want to have a night out, and long distance commuters, and is one of the reasons why rail does so well. At least rail never goes below 20 minutes, while the Silver Lie (as some call it) drops to hourly after 8 pm.

  10. Susan De Vos July 23, 2012 at 6:42 am #

    I am a proud Bus Advocate who does not see an incompatibility between buses and rail either. Nor am I in favor of stop elimination. Just have express buses skip them. Don’t take it out on pedestrians who may have mobility issues. Change your state’s right-of-way law instead! Dedicated lanes? Yes. Mixed traffic lanes? Yes. Signal pre-emption? Yes.
    Similar to Mr. Walker, I see a place and time to favor buses, and a place and time to favor rail. The L.A. Bus Riders Union is correct for instance. Here in the Madison Area of Wisconsin, there is an important role for buses that should not be dismissed or distorted by pro-rail advocates. The idea is to make TRANSIT a safe, acceptable, convenient and affordable way of moving around. Visit our website at http://www.busadvocates.org.

  11. Beta Magellan July 23, 2012 at 7:54 am #

    The problem with running expresses and all-stop locals is that most cities don’t have unlimited funds for bus operations. It also complicates having separate bus lanes—if traffic’s bad enough that an express bus can’t pass a local, it’s going to be stuck behind a local, negating any advantage to having an express.
    I think that the ~quarter-mile intervals between stops used in many European cities is a good compromise—it speeds up bus travel (and therefore reduces operating costs as well) while still keeping stop spacing relatively short.

  12. Phantom Commuter July 23, 2012 at 9:56 am #

    Calwatch makes excellent points. There is no city that has such a drop off in frequency. Metro’s 15-minute map sohould mean 15 minutes, day and night ! Maybe that’s an issue we could get BRU working on, or is that too “techinal” for them ?

  13. anonymouse July 23, 2012 at 4:02 pm #

    The BRU seems more interested in Marxism and class war than in actual improvements to transit service. They’re also far more on the side of bus drivers than bus riders, as evidenced by their support of the former at the expense of the latter. This also explains their strong anti-rail stance and also their very emphatic emphasis on buying hundreds of new buses: that last one is the best way to maximize bus driver employment.

  14. EngineerScotty July 23, 2012 at 4:39 pm #

    You’re being too nice to O’Toole, Jarrett. He’s ideologically opposed to public transit altogether. Like many other self-described libertarians (though not ALL of them, fortunately), he seems to view markets as a panacea, and thinks that if it can’t be profitably provided by the private sector, it ought not exist–social impacts be damned. Unlike many of his more principled ideological brethren, he doesn’t hold roads and road funding to the same standard–like many on the US political right, he’s managed to marry liberal (in the old sense of the term) political thought with anti-urban attitudes; though most who do engage in that intellectual game of Twister only have a veneer of libertarianism that runs skin deep, if at all.
    But O’Toole is opposed to public transit, and will willingly say whatever he thinks will undermine it, consistency be damned. He especially dislikes rail because it generally costs more. You note that he fans the flames of the bus-rail debate–I’d go further and suggest that much of the existence of that debate (and much of the BRT-skepticism among US transit advocates) is precisely because of O’Toole and his ilk using BRT as a wedge against rail projects. Even the term “BRT” seems to be poisoned–unfortunately, because quality bus service is important and should be valued.

  15. Andrewjc July 23, 2012 at 5:25 pm #

    Bravo!

  16. EN57 July 23, 2012 at 6:03 pm #

    Probably better not to have given this oxygen. Just getting drawn into another endless game of Plants vs Zombies. …b r a i n s…

  17. Nathanael July 24, 2012 at 1:31 pm #

    “Drivers are expensive,”
    So’s diesel fuel. So’s road repair.
    “so rail is a logical investment where high vehicle capacity…”
    Or high route capacity.
    Yeah. If you need volume, you want rail. Buses are good for volumes too low to support rail, but too high to remain uncongested with cars, over distances too long to use bicyles and walking.
    This makes buses a very useful but *niche* technology.

  18. Nathanael July 24, 2012 at 1:33 pm #

    “Bus lanes are cheaper”
    Only upfront. They have to be rebuilt substantially more frequently than rail lines.

  19. anonymouse July 24, 2012 at 2:57 pm #

    @Nathanael, bus lanes are roads and roads are something that just happens in the middle of the night, as far as the transit agency is concerned anyway. It’s not like buses have to pay for their use of roads. The road repair budget is not only separate from the bus budget, it’s often in a whole different agency in a whole different level of government (city streets vs. county or state buses).

  20. Scott July 25, 2012 at 12:10 pm #

    “…maybe bus and rail are not enemies but complementary tools for different roles in a complete network designed for everyone…”
    Right on! In the same vein, I liked this item (from http://thetyee.ca/Opinion/2012/07/12/Bicycle-Capitalists/ )
    “I’m a mean capitalist,” confesses a blonde suit with a Scandinavian accent, setting the tone for the session. I match his nametag to the list of keynote speakers in the conference program and find he’s one Aske Wieth-Knudsen, head of strategy for Denmark’s DSB S-Train, the commuter rail system in and around Copenhagen.
    “Customers demand door-to-door train support. We cannot offer than in our system,” he continues. “So we have to work together with other means of transport, including the bikes. And in our case, bikes seem to be the most cost-effective way to increase our market share around the station.”

  21. Alon Levy July 25, 2012 at 11:13 pm #

    All I’m going to say about local and express buses is that on Broadway in Vancouver, the 99-B runs diesels while the lesser used local routes run trolleybuses. This way the diesels can pass the trolleybuses.

  22. Nathanael August 20, 2012 at 6:52 am #

    “@Nathanael, bus lanes are roads and roads are something that just happens in the middle of the night, as far as the transit agency is concerned anyway. It’s not like buses have to pay for their use of roads. The road repair budget is not only separate from the bus budget, it’s often in a whole different agency in a whole different level of government (city streets vs. county or state buses).”
    Thanks for saying this, anonymouse. And *this* is what creates the illusion that buses are “cheaper”.
    Though in fact, in Seattle, buses are only allowed to go on roads pre-approved for bus traffic by SDOT (the Seattle roads department)…. so this isn’t strictly true everywhere. Note that buses are also prohibited on “parkways” in parts of New York and New Jersey. I wonder how many other cities have similar arrangements.