Human Transit

portland: the grid is 30 years old ... thank a planner!

Thirty years ago next week, on Labor Day Weekend 1982, the role of public transit in Portland was utterly transformed in ways that everyone today takes for granted.  It was an epic struggle, one worth remembering and honoring. 

I'm not talking about the MAX light rail (LRT) system, whose first line opened in 1986. I'm talking about the grid of frequent bus lines, without which MAX would have been inaccessible, and without which you would still be going into downtown Portland to travel between two points on the eastside.  (Full map here.)

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What did it look like before 1982?  Here's a bit of the 1970 network (full map here).

The 1970 network consisted of bus routes radiating from downtown across the gridded eastside, which constitutes about 3/4 of Portland.  If you were anywhere on this network, you had a direct bus downtown -- a slow, circuitous, and infrequent bus.  Very few routes ran better than every 30 minutes during the day.  Only two routes ran north-south across the east side, and both were too infrequent to transfer to, so you couldn't really use them unless both ends of your trip were on them. 

How did the 1982 network transform the possibilities of mobility in the city?  

• The old network was solely about going downtown.  The new network was about going anywhere you wanted to go.
• The old network was infrequent.  The new network required easy connections, so it was designed to run at high frequency (most lines every 15 minutes or better all day).  Remember: Frequency is freedom!
• The old network was wasteful, as many overlapping lines converged on downtown.  The new network was efficient, with little overlap between lines, and with lines spaced further apart to the extent that the street network allowed.  This is how the resources were found to increase frequency so much.
• The old network was complicated, with routes often zigzagging from one street to another.  The new network was simpler, easy to keep in your head.  Many streets that were formerly served by a patchwork of overlapping routes, such as Division, now had a single route from end to end, so that you needed only remember "the Division bus."  Transit became an intrinsic part of the street.

If you're in a hurry, skip to "Thank a Planner!" below.  But if you have a couple of minutes, let's explore more deeply how the grid transformed Portland, and why it was so controversial at the time.

In both maps above, that wavy line across the middle of eastside Portland is the Banfield Freeway, where the first and backbone line of the MAX light rail system runs today.  In the 1970 image, look for the line marked "1" extending north from the Banfield in the middle of the image.  This is NE 42nd Avenue (a bit of which is labeled 41st, but don't let that distract you).

In the old network the bus line along 42nd came from the north edge of the city, once an hour.  Partway down it merged with another branch, to form 30-minute frequency.  When it approached the Banfield, it turned west and zigzagged into the city via the Lloyd district.  Once it turned west off of 42nd, it was duplicating other routes the whole way.  If you wanted to go somewhere else on the eastside, the bus was not much use.   Frequencies were poor so it was very hard to make a trip involving multiple routes.

If you lived on NE 42nd in 1982, you were confronted with massive change, the sort of change that makes people scream.  Never again would you have a direct bus to downtown Portland.  Now you would be on the new 75, which would run continuously north-south all the way across the city.  And if you wanted to go downtown, you would have to transfer (as we called it in those days). 

But on the bright side, the 75 would run every 15 minutes, so transfering wasn't hard.  And in return, you got all the other benefits of a frequent routes that would let you connect quickly to reach destinations all over the east and north sides of the city, without going downtown.  

This is always a tough sell, because many people value transit only for the commute downtown.  These people tend to complain when the network is optmized to serve many kinds of trip at once, which is exactly what the grid does.  A frequent grid is the ultimate in versatility, equity and freedom.  It does not pick favored destinations for favored markets. Instead, it delivers anywhere-to-anywhere mobility for wherever you might want to go.  Today, the non-downtown elements of the grid, especially 72 and 75, are among TriMet's most productive lines.  

The grid redefined the role of transit in serving Portland's livability objectives.  When you think of everything that makes Portland both livable and culturally distinctive, you're probably thinking about the historically dense and gridded part of the city.  This is where almost every cool urbanist outcome of the last 30 years -- from food carts to bike lanes to office-over-retail -- has sprouted and thrived most successfully. Rail gets all the press, but the MAX light rail line would not have worked without this grid to connect with it.  (The reverse is not true: the grid worked well for four years before the MAX line opened, though MAX was certainly an improvement that achieved further ridership payoffs.) As Gregory Thompson and Jeffrey Brown put it in a recent paper :

If the 1983 and 1986 restructurings had not happened, LRT would have been a competitor with the CBD-focused, poor quality parallel bus routes that already were there, and there would have been no high quality bus routes intersecting the LRT at right angles. Portland would have enjoyed much less patronage than it has since experienced on both its LRT and bus routes.

Where did all the money for the new high-frequency crosstown lines come from?  Removing duplication. Look again at the your ride on 1970's route 1.  Once it turned west off of 42nd, it duplicated other routes the entire way into downtown.  Now look closely at the routes approaching downtown from further south in the old map.  They ran on so many closely-spaced parallel streets that they were effectively duplicating one another as well, wasting service.  The grid plan found many resources by removing these duplications and moving to wider and more consistent spacing of lines across the whole city.  In the same process,the grid introduced the idea that it's OK to walk further to a more frequent and useful service -- the foundation for transit's link with walking (and with all of walking's public health outcomes) today.

The grid was also a radical simplification, making it easier for people to keep the network map in their heads.  Now, bus lines would often follow the same street from end-to-end, so you could remember easily that there's a Division Street bus, say, and an 82nd Avenue bus.  In the old network, if you wanted to go from 20th & Division to 82nd & Division, you had to go downtown and back, because these two parts of Division were covered by different routes.  The beauty of the grid is that your transit directions are sometimes as simply as walking or driving directions:  "Take the Division bus out to 82nd, then take the 82nd bus south."  The transit lines are just part of the street.

Imagine, in 1982, the struggle involved in implementing this.  Vast numbers of people lost their direct bus to downtown, at a time when going downtown seemed like the only purpose of transit to many existing riders.  Transit agencies tend to listen most to their existing riders, who have adapted their lives to the system as it is, so it takes real courage for them to seek new markets instead of just catering to the existing ones.   Imagine the disruption, the rage, the recriminations, not to mention the apathy from people for whom buses just don't matter, no matter what they're achieving.

Thank a planner!

If you can imagine how hard this was, consider thanking the planners who took all this abuse and persisted in pushing the plan through, because they believed in everywhere-to-everywhere networks and knew this would work if it were tried.  I'm especially thinking of:

• Ken Zatarain, who was a TriMet service planner at the time and who now manages service planning at the agency.  Thank him at:  zataraik AT trimet DOT org .
• Thomas G. Matoff, the single most important mentor in my own transit career, and probably the critical player in pushing the grid through.  Tom, who was service planning manager and thus Ken's boss, was an eloquent, passionate and persistent advocate for the grid both inside and outside the agency.  He was the first person I've met, and one of the few I've known, who could convey how essential network design is to the life, joy, and prosperity of a city.  Tom went on to be General Manager of Sacramento Regional Transit and is now working on the Sonoma-Marin rail project in California.  Thank him at:  tmatoff AT sonomamarintrain DOT org .
• His boss, Bob Post, who was Director of Service Development and who saw this redesign as crucial to the success of the Banfield MAX line, which would come along four years later.  He's at URS: bob DOT post AT urs DOT com .

I'm dead serious:  If you value being able to get around Portland in all directions, thank them.  In other words, do one of these things:

• shoot emails of appreciation to the three emails above, copied to me (jarrett AT jarrettwalker DOT net), with "Thanks for the grid" in the subject line, or 
• leave a comment here, or 
• say something on Twitter with the hashtag #PDXGrid .  

You might also ask the two mayoral candidates about how important the frequent grid is to their vision of the city, and whether they think it should be enhanced.

Why does this matter?  Because even today, there's disagreement in Portland about important the frequent grid is, or even whether a complete everywhere-to-everywhere network (which requires high-frequency buses as well as rail) should be a priority at all.  Some view the grid as unimportant, for example, because they view bus service as unimportant.

Purists might argue that the grid never made it to its 30th birthday, but rather perished at 27 in 2009.  That was the year that TriMet cut all-day frequencies below the 15-minute threshhold that is widely accepted as the definition of "frequent enough that you can use it spontaneously, without building your life around the timetable."  Since the grid relies on easy connections to achieve its goal of easy anywhere-to-anywhere access, the 2009 cuts began to undermine the whole idea of the grid. TriMet avoided doing this in its first round of cutting after the crash, but felt it had no alternative in the second 2009 round.  

Will the grid ever be restored to its necessary frequency?  Will it ever be expanded and enriched (as regional land use planning generally assumes it must be) with even better frequencies?  Not everyone in Portland thinks this is a priority, so you might want to express your view.  

More on the history and spectacular outcomes of the grid if you click below.  But even if you don't click, thank a planner!

adelaide: a frequent network diagram, but only if you're going downtown

Monday (in Australia) I shared a new frequent network diagram for Sydney, done not by the government but by a community transport organisation.  In Adelaide, meanwhile, the governmetn released a new frequent network diagram in July.  Here it is.  (Original PDF here.)

Locals are discussing it here.

Adelaide is a very centralised city, but still, it's extraordinary to notice that you literally can't go anywhere at high frequency without going through the CBD.  Only the stations of the O-Bahn, where routes converge from several directions to flow into the O-Bahn busway, is there any opportunity to make a frequent connection without going downtown. 

Adelaide readers and citizens should think about the question: Do we really want it to be impossible to get around spontaneously -- i.e. without much waiting -- anywhere other than to and from the CBD? Since former Portland transit general manager Fred Hansen is now in Adelaide, I hope he is pitching the virtues of grid networks -- which Portland has had since 1982.  A full grid is probably not appropriate for Adelaide's geography and resources, but radial systems with grid elements -- which I've been designing for years -- could open up vast new all-day travel markets.  

guaranteeing adequate service: developer and city roles

Daniel Feinglos asks:

Hi, Mr. Walker. Question about a way to address concerns about service cuts or reroutings: are you familiar with any examples of a transit provider entering into some kind of contractual arrangement with businesses along a route to guarantee them a certain level of service for a given period of time? If you're not familiar with anything like this, does it sound at all like a workable means of alleviating fears that a route might not be around for the long term?

Developers sometimes make deals with transit agencies to ensure transit to a new development before it would be viable for the transit agency, or even in cases where it might never be viable for the transit agency.  

The sad thing is:  The more useful a transit line is, the more diverse its ridership, and the less likely that any one or two interests will want to pay to preserve it.  The only entity who can do this, frequently, is a city government, and in gradual ways this is starting to happen.  Many of the recent North American streetcar projects, for example, involve operating funds from the city in addition to some from the transit agency.  

If you've read Chapter 10 of my book, you know why this is inevitable.  Transit demand rises exponentially against density up to a certain point, so dense core cities almost always need more service per capita than their regional transit agency is in the position to provide.  The only way this would change is if big regional transit agencies with suburban dominated boards suddenly decided that productivity was more important than each suburb getting is fair share.  Seattle's King County Metro did take a gentle step in this direction a few years ago, dissolving a rigid formula that had required less than 20% of the region's service to go to Seattle even though demand is greatest there.

Another phenomenon that must be understood in the same context is the advent of core city government contributions to the regional transit agency for additional service within the city.  Portland, Seattle, and some other cities contribute operating funds for their streetcars, for example, with the effect that these services don't have to be counted against a broader regionwide accounting of how much service the city "deserves."  City contributions to streetcars must be understood as a toe in the door, which will eventually set a precendent for a broader, more realistic assessment of what core cities must expect to contribute.   Either core cities will pay more, or regional agencies will decide to let core cities have more, or (as in Seattle) a bit of both.  If you have a suburb-dominated regional transit agency in your urban area, watch how this plays out, because the math is inevitable.

sydney: a new frequent network diagram

As the state government that rules Sydney begins rethinking the public transport network, a new Frequent Network diagram has appeared just in time.  (For more examples of this blog's frequent network mapping campaign, see the Frequent Network category.)

Download the whole thing, which covers all of greater Sydney inside the national park ring, here.  If you work on transport in Sydney, or just want to understand how to get around spontaneously, print it and put it on your wall!  I believe this is the only diagram in existence that can help you find your way around Sydney via frequent services, or understand their current structure.  (Yes, a geographic version would be helpful; perhaps, inspired by this, somebody will draw one.)

Below is the portion covering inner-city Sydney.  That's the largest continuously dense area of the region, and the one you are most likely to know as a tourist.  The CBD and Harbour Bridge are at the northern edge of this diagram, the airport is in the south, and the beaches are in the east.

The artist is Kevin McClain, who has just moved to Seattle to join the Accessible Services section at King County Metro.  He tells me it's to be published on the Easy Transport website -- a North Shore organisation devoted mostly to special-needs services.  It's odd that such an organisation has produced the most useful diagram of Sydney for people who just want to get around all day without waiting long, but that's exactly what this is.  

The maps published by the bus operators -- download here -- emphasise the complexity of the network by making all the routes look equally important, thus concealing patterns of frequency that would show the customer where they can move freely and easily.  In this it's like most transit maps from before the advent of frequent network mapping.  (For many great examples of frequent network mpas, see my Frequent Networks category.)  The Government deserves credit for fostering the Metrobus product, which is meant to be the future frequent backbone of the network, but there are still many frequent corridors that don't carry the Metrobus logo and M-number, so a Metrobus map is not quite a frequent network map.  The branding of Sydney services is still a work in progress.

The map reveals many issues that are hidden on the current public maps (download here).  Those maps make all the routes look equally important and thus give the impression of intimidating complexity.  

Public transport in Sydney has historically functioned in modal silos, with rail, bus, and ferry planning largely unrelated to each other and sometimes even seeing each other as competitors.  That's meant to change under the new integrated transport authority, Transport for New South Wales, which has begun thinking about all the modes together.  I hope this diagram will help them visualise the problem and conceive new solutions to it.

If you care about people who move around all day, who are inclined not to drive, but who value their freedom and won't stand for being stranded for long stretches of time, this is your public transport network.  The gaps in this network are the gaps in people's freedom.  Can Sydney do better?

hong kong metro: five transfers??

We'll be in Hong Kong Sep 9-11; remarkably, it will be my first visit.

As you'd expect, I jumped onto Google looking for hotels that would be convenient to the rail line from the airport.  Yikes!

That's the airport on the far left, on the Airport Express Line (AEL).

Hong Kong boosters, help me out here.  Is it my imagination, or am I seeing that:

• Only three stations in the city are on the Airport line.
• Only five additional stations can be reached in one transfer.
• Some parts of the system (e.g. the Ma On Shan (MOL) line in the northeast) are five transfers from the Airport.

Don't airport lines, where people are hauling luggage, need to be designed so that they plug into the network with relatively few, well-designed transfers.  As readers if this blog know, zero transfers is unrealistic and sometimes you even need two to get to remote corners of the network.  But five?

Of course the answer may be that the metro doesn't want to compete for airport trips.  Are there other options I should use if I want to stay in, say, central Kowloon (three transfers!)?

So back to my travel needs.  

• If anyone knows a fantastic quietish hotel in the <US<300/night range that is easily reached by transit, with luggage, from the airport, please let me know.  If certain transfers on this system are easier than others, so that the access is easier than it looks, let me know that too.

Comment moderation is off.  Feel free to chat among yourselves about this.

how much should agencies explain their planning thoughts?

A reader recently asked the Whatcom Transportation Authority -- which covers the Bellingham, Washington area -- why they didn't have service to their little airport.  (Bellingham, located just below the Canadian border on Interstate 5, has been getting new nonstops to places like Las Vegas and Honolulu, as Canadian travelers demand a lower-cost alternative to their beautiful but expensive airport, Vancouver International (YVR).)

Maureen McCarthy, WTA's manager of Community Relations and Marketing, took the time to write the following email in response, which I wanted to share because it's so respectful and cogent (and also explains, once again, why transit to airports is such a difficult issue).  

Hi ____,

We’d like to offer service to the airport, as ideally all major transportation modes would be connected via transit.  A number of factors are holding us back:

• As you probably know, our routes are built to work as a system.  In order for people to go from route to route within the system, routes need to come together, or “pulse” [link added] through our stations.  Adding the airport to Route 50 wouldn’t allow Route 50 to meet the pulse.
• An alternative would be to serve the airport with its own route.  This is problematic because neither the current demand to the airport, nor demand to the industrial area that surrounds it would warrant  a dedicated route.

Why doesn’t the demand to the airport warrant its own route? 

• Canadian travelers make up a large percentage of travelers in and out of Bellingham Airport.  These would not be transit users.
• Flights before or after our regular service hours make up a significant percentage of departures/arrivals to the airport.
• Nearly everyone would require a transfer to reach the airport.  This would not only make for a long trip, but luggage would make this inconvenient.
• To be viable, service to the airport would have to be frequent.   Frequent service is expensive service.
• While airport parking or  taxi rides are expensive, neither seem cost-prohibitive enough (to the average airline passenger, that is) to cause people to seek a much less convenient alternative.  For example, I regularly ride the bus to work and for other trips.  I wouldn’t take it to the airport, however.  The bus would require a transfer and I’d be relegated to the bus schedule. Cost would be $2.  For only $8 more, I can take a taxi door-to-door, exactly when I need to go.  Many, many people would be in this same boat—requiring one or even two transfers.
• When you consider how tough it is to motivate people to take the bus for easy trips (like to their office, once per week, with no luggage, during regular hours), it feels much more daunting to get them to consider it for a trip to the airport.  Again, we perhaps solve this by offering frequent service—like every 15 minutes, from early until late, but this would be extremely costly—drawing resources away from other routes, serving people’s everyday needs.

Again, we recognize the value of linking all modes of transportation!  And perhaps now that flights from Bellingham are more affordable (it used to be more of a luxury to travel from here), there will be greater demand for this.  In the meantime, for a system of our size to be efficient, we need to focus on the everyday needs of most people.

Would be happy to discuss further if you’re still curious.  Thanks for asking!

Maureen

Now, a big transit agency would need an enormous staff to do this kind of interactive feedback, but notice a few things:

• Well-intentioned public ignorance about the basic geometry of transit service and demand is nearly universal, so there is an intense need for people to hear cogent and reasonable replies to their complaints.  These explanations both convey useful education and also make it harder for the complainant to decide that the agency is just stonewalling.
• Not all agencies have someone like Maureen.  Note that although her title is Manager of Communications and Marketing, she clearly understands transit planning.  As a result, when she receives an intelligent question, she can give an intelligent response.  Unfortunately, I've met many people in the Communications/Marketing role in transit agencies who do not have this skill or training, and have not thought about the importance of communicating planning ideas.  In fact, mutual incomprehension between the planning and marketing worlds is a major source of frustration inside many transit agencies, though by no means all.
• Fortunately, a great deal of this kind of communication could be automated.  Giant transit agencies are unlikely to employ vast sweatshops of Maureens to knock out such emails on a big-city scale, but they could publish more extensive documents with pre-prepared explanations just like the one above.  After all, Maureen's explanation is perfectly appropriate to anyone who asks the very-common question about why transit to the airport isn't better than it is.  So put that on a FAQ list on the website, offer this explanation, and share links to that page when someone asks you that question.  It doesn't need to take much staff time.  See the TransLink (metro Vancouver) Network Planning Primer as one example.  (And yes, I can help your transit agency write exactly what's needed, in an appropriate voice.)

How would your transit agency perform when asked a question like this one?  (Remember, phrase it as a question rather than a complaint, and don't express anger as you're asking the question.)  Even if the answer is automated, ask: Did I get a coherent answer to my question?  

These days, you can quickly identify customer-hating corporations because they respond to your questions with automated emails that prove to you that nobody read your question.   They brush you off with banalities and ignore what you actually asked. When United Airlines or AT&T talk like this -- and they do it routinely -- they're saying: "We're too big to care, we know that you're stuck with us, and it's easier for us to pretend that you're a credulous moron than to take the trouble of reading what you wrote."    

Transit agencies can't afford to take this view, especially when they get an intelligent inquiry.  United and AT&T may have accurately decided that their customers are stuck with them, but despite all the confusing talk about "transit dependent" riders, transit agencies should never assume that riders are stuck with them.  Even if some are, the frontier of the battle between transit and the car lies in the hearts of people who are open to transit and have good reasons to use it, but who are very much not stuck, and won't have any patience for an agency that assumes they are.  

That's why clear explanations of how transit agencies think is so urgently needed, right there on the website, and it's why a lot of my own work, including my entire book, is about filling this void.  The forthcoming CNU Transportation Summit in Long Beach, by the way, will be working on this very question.  It might be an exciting thing to attend.  

where was this picture taken?

Once again, Andrew Sullivan's View from Your Window contest has a transit theme, but this one looks pretty difficult:

Are you an expert on tropical developing-world bus facilities?  If so, take your best guess here, right down to identifying the address of the photo source and the window it was taken from, if you can.  

logo: what do you think?

I'll leave comments unpublished on this one, but will definitely read them ... Remember, consulting logos are about seeming cool, rational, reliable ...

will driverless cars abolish buses? (email of the month)

An emailer who wishes to remain anonymous tries to put it all together:

Your recent [Atlantic article] regarding “bus stigma”, along with the concurrent proliferation of various autonomous car posts that I’ve seen all over the web, got me thinking: I am starting to believe that a certain “technophilia” (as you put it so well) not only applies to the “rail-in-any-and-all-situations” proponents, but also to the increasing number of urbanists who have come to view the impending autonomous car future as one in which buses are replaced by Self-Driving Vehicles (SDVs), as they’ve started to regularly call them).

Case in point, this blog post [at Grush Hour].

[Grush's] opinions appear to be very similar to those of the various urban planners and urban designers I’ve met and spoken with over the past year or so.  Now keep in mind that these folks view themselves as “progressives” on the issue of the need for public transportation.  In this case, the author thinks the recent Wall Street Journal Op-Ed which espouses that rapidly developing autonomous car technology means we don’t have to build high speed rail is flawed and incorrect, and that the trip purposes of the modes and their associated distances, et cetera, are sufficiently different to mean that high speed rail will still have a place, even with SDV’s.

However, as I was reading this, the kicker came in the last part of the post (I highlighted the most pertinent portions):

The frontier benefits of the SDV will accrue during 2022-2042 as special, restricted applications such as replacing mostly-empty and oversized urban buses, expensive and poorly driven taxis and shared cars. Here is where I would like to see Winston’s call for private funding focused: urban fleets of self-driving jitneys to replace every form of motorized shared vehicle (bus, taxi, street car, shared car, vanpool) from the front door of your home or work right up to the light-rail and heavy-rail transit station and vice versa. Replace them all. Then by 2045, maybe the US Congress will be able to pass another Surface Transportation Reauthorization Bill in plenty of time to eulogize the last of the personally-operated SOVs and fix the last of the traffic signals in time to remove them all, because they will no longer be needed.

I don’t honestly know what to make of this ...; it seems that people have such a “stigma” against buses that they view SDV’s as being able to replace them completely and instead we would then have an on-demand or subscription-based autonomous jitney/“Johnny Cab” system which takes you (of course) to the rail line – if it doesn’t provide for your whole trip.  To be clear, this author is not the only one I’ve read or person I’ve spoken with who believes this – rather, this rationale is what I am increasingly seeing being espoused everywhere I look.

So, as far as I can tell from reading these materials over the past couple of years, it would appear that the most “anti-urban” (and perhaps least progressive) sort of folks see SDV’s as replacing the need for any public transit whatsoever – including the rail modes right up to true High Speed Rail – while the most progressive and pro-urban folks see SDV’s as at least replacing almost any and all buses (but not necessarily rail), and that “traditional, fixed route transit will only be needed in the densest cores of our cities”. 

Now – and here there are some shades of gray – some posts and articles I’ve read say the highest volume corridors may still justify some form of “traditional” bus service, but then – I kid you not – most of these folks go right on to say that such a corridor (i.e., one where the fundamentals of an enhanced bus or bus rapid transit regime may work) should just likely be rail (or “tram”) lines in any event.  (I saw this theme especially crop up in the comments to your Atlantic Cities post.)

Again, there are many assumptions about the economics of SDV’s, their energy sources, the legal ability to have them operate without a licensed driver behind the wheel, et cetera – but the fundamentals are still there in their arguments, and I think you get the picture.  In any event, I have three inter-related questions for you stemming from this theme:    

1.       Is this another form of “bus stigma”?  Or rather are buses simply most suited to an urban transit speed/capacity niche whose days are numbered, so to speak, as being the domain of the bus?  I find it interesting that most urbanists (but not all – there are actually a few out there who think a robust and subsidized SDV system can even replace rail and other fixed guideway high speed/capacity modes) seem to salivate at the thought of getting rid of the “lowly” bus, but that SDV’s can’t, won’t or shouldn’t replace rail.  Or they at least say that bus service will be relegated to the densest corridors where (eventually) it would be replaced by a rail line in any event.

2.       The follow-on question I have for you is this: is there a future – in a world where SDV’s have been fully developed – for the “regular” transit bus service that operates along a corridor where service is only provided every 15 minutes, or every 30 minutes, or even every 60 minutes on weekends (i.e., the vast majority of North American public transit service)?  Or will SDV’s eliminate the need for such bus service? 

The argument I was told this weekend by a city planner while discussing your “bus stigma” posts and the latest “Google-car” advances goes something like this: a very significant portion of riders today – of whatever income group – use buses just because they don’t have to drive or look for parking, and the fare is reasonable.  If an SDV service can take you door-to-door, without you needing to drive, park or fuel it yourself, for a fare similar to the bus, and for a total trip time at least as fast as the bus (yet likely shorter) but just slightly longer than a purely private car, then in the vast majority of North America where densities are not all that high “the big ole’ regular bus running every 10 to 15 minutes is history, along with the horse-drawn omnibus, and transit agencies will find themselves in the same territory as buggy whip manufacturers…”  This lady even quoted you back at me: she pointed out that if “frequency is freedom”, then “think of the immense freedom and mobility the public sector-subsidized SDV can provide, while saving us the costs of big buses and their unions...”  Sheesh.  So, what’s your take on the future of the regular, non-heavy-corridor bus service that runs every 10 to 15 minutes?   

3.       Finally, my last question: the Gensler fantasy which you took down so effectively seems to always re-appear in some form or another; does it become more (or even less) viable with the assumption that the vehicles are autonomous? 

 

Jarrett here.  My answer to all of these questions is the same.  It's in my book, and it should be on the screen-saver or refrigerator of every well-intentioned urban visionary:

Technology never changes facts of geometry!

We can be quite confident that nobody (on this world or any other) is going to discover a technology that changes the value of pi or that suddenly causes large, uncompressable objects to fit into boxes smaller than they are.  We know that because we understand the special status of mathematical and geometrical facts.  Indeed, they are so much more certain than any other "fact" that we should have a different word for them.  

And this, friends, is a geometric fact:

If you define a "car" as "a separate enclosed vehicle for every passenger or party", then the geometric fact about all cars, self-driving or not, miniaturized or not, is that they take vastly more space per passenger than effective public transit.  This will not be a problem in low-density suburbs, but cities, by definition, are places with relatively little space per person.  Self-driving cars will certainly improve the efficiency with which cars use space, so they will shift the calculus somewhat.  But the bottom line will still be that if you want two crash-safe metal walls between every two strangers going down the same street, you will need a lot more space than if those two people can sit next to each other on civilized public transit.

You will also need vastly more metal and equipment, which means that the self-driving-car-replaces-transit fantasy involves massive industrial production with severe consequences for energy security and greenhouse-gas emissions. 

As for the idea that somehow these cars will replace buses but not rail, this may be true around the margins.  Grush's reference to "replacing mostly-empty and oversized urban buses" is a crude approximation of the issue and misses the point about why these sights occur.  The real problem is that most "legacy" labor agreements don't allow transit agencies to pay drivers less to do the easier job of driving a small bus in a low-demand area, and given that it's cheaper (due to high maintenance costs of fleet diversity) to run a standard modular bus everywhere. (Vancouver's TransLink is a spectacular exception.)  Most transit agencies run low-ridership service that is a drag on their budget, but that meets social inclusion or equity needs.  Most agencies I have worked with would be delighted to see those predictably low-ridership "coverage" services transitioned to a more decentralized or low-cost model, or moved off their books entirely, so that they could focus their big buses in places where they'll be full.

So to sum up, the technophile urbanists who believe that self-driving cars will eliminate the need for public transit are making several mistakes:

• They are assuming that technology will change the facts of geometry, in this case the facts of urban space.
• They are assuming that the costs of having every passenger encased in a metal sphere (in terms of production energy and emissions) are readily absorbable by the planet.  (To be fair, the SDV discussed here is one that you don't own but just grab when you want it, so if it replaced the car there would be far fewer cars.  But that's different from replacing a bus.)
• If they think that self-driving cars will replace buses but not rail, then they haven't informed themselves about the vast diversity of different markets that buses are used to serve.  Self-driving cars many logically replace some of these markets but not others.
• They believe that public transit is incapable of improving in ways that make it more positively attractive to a wider range of people, despite the fact that it is doing so almost continually.

Again, the whole bus vs rail confusion here arises from the fact that technophile urbanists classify transit services according to how they look and feel, whereas transit experts care more about the functions they perform.

So yes, buses are currently doing some things that other tools could do better, especially in sparser markets.  Some agencies, like Vancouver's, already have the tools to solve that problem.  But when a huge mass of people wants to go in the same direction at the same time, you need a rail if you have tracks and an exclusive lane for them, or a bus if you don't.  I don't care whether it's rail or bus, but the need for a high-capacity vehicle running high quality service that encourages people to use space efficiently -- that's a fact of geometry!

washington, dc: a subway-style frequent bus map

Dan Malouff at Greater Greater Washington has sketched a schematic (not geographic) Frequent Bus Network map for the city, and separate maps for each suburban county.  See the original to enlarge and sharpen.

Obviously I recommend Frequent Network maps that show all the modes that run frequently, in some legible way.  In this case that would include the subway.  Otherwise, you seem to imply that there is a huge audience of bus people who want to travel only by bus.  Of course, such a map would need to be at a much larger scale and would have required a lot more work (and tough design choices) to draw.  This bus network is obviously discontinuous because the missing links are in the rail system.