Human Transit

a future for very very long buses?

I've repeatedly said that if you need a high capacity vehicle with just one driver, over a sustained period of time, you probably have a good reason to build rail.  Rail's ability to expand vehicle size through multiple cars, without adding staff, is one of the ways it works well on the bottom line.

But now we're seeing some really, really long buses:

Are there limits to the length of the bus that do not apply to rail?  Yes, though it's easy to imagine cases where they wouldn't apply, such as median busways where the bus never has to weave to access a stop.  In ordinary operations with curb stops, I suspect that we won't see buses grow much longer, and there is even interest in replacing the articulated (single-bend) bus with double-deckers, in the London manner, to use urban curb space more efficiently.  

intriguing new book on jane jacobs and her transporation (email of the week)

From the book's co-author:

I was glad that you urged "lazy students" via your Human Transit blog to read The Death and Life of Great American Cities, and I enjoyed reading your thoughtful commentary for the City Builder's Book Club on Jane Jacobs and transportation!

I thought I'd let you know about a book that might have escaped your notice called Genius of Common Sense: Jane Jacobs and the Story of "The Death and Life of Great American Cities." It's just come out in paperback with a new cover featuring a heretofore unpublished 1963 photo of Jane alongside her main mode of transportation – her bicycle – on the streets of New York. 

Genius of Common Sense was originally intended for young adults but has caught the attention of the likes of Robert Caro, Jason Epstein, and Robert Campbell as a solid introduction to the life and work of Jane Jacobs for adults too. With more than 100 images, it follows her through the publication of Death and Life and her New York battles against urban renewal and expressways. 

Sounds interesting!  Anyone want to write a review as a guest post?

frequent service, mapped to your door

Vancouver's TransLink is one of several agencies who -- with some input from me -- have adopted Frequent Network brands that are designed to highlight services that are always coming soon, generally every 15 minutes or better all day and weekend.    I've always insisted that the Frequent Network can be both a short-term service branding tool (to build ridership by helping time-sensitive customers see where the network can serve them) but also a land use planning tool.

TransLink always understood it was both, and for several years has had a goal stating that half the region's population and jobs will be on the Frequent Network.  This is both a land use planning statement and a transit planning statement.  The message is not that TransLink will extend Frequent service to half the current population, but rather that it will do some of this while land use planning will also bring put residents and jobs on the existing Frequent Network.  More recently, Translink finally highlighted its Frequent Network on its maps for the public.

Ultimately, the Frequent Network, if properly mapped and promoted, should sell real estate, because the high level of all-day access should have a clear value as a city as a whole becomes more transit-oriented.  So this kind of micro-mapping should be really handy:

This map (click to enlarge and sharpen) of transit access in New Westminster, British Columbia is by Jonathan X. Cote, a City Councilor in that city and also an urban planning student at Simon Fraser Univerisity. He takes the standard walking distances of 800m to rapid transit and 400m to local transit and plots the portion of his city that has access to those networks.  I've seen these maps before, and even if they are not drawn they are what lies behind any coherent statement about what percentage of population and jobs have transit access, within a given walking distance, to service of a given standard.

Remember:  If your city wants to do really honest transit analysis, it needs very small analysis zones.  This map shows you the kind of clarity that you get when you can analyze right down to the parcel.  You don't need that much fine grain, but the zones need to be small.  And a parcel-level map like this is certainly ideal for land use planners, who need to minimize walking distances for the centroids of transit-oriented developments. 

Notice what a good tool this is for analyzing bus stop spacing as well.  You can move the stops a little apart and count how many parcels fall out of the walkshed.  Out to about 400m (1/4mi) spacing the answer is usually "fewer than you expected."

the photo that explains almost everything (updated!)

You've seen photos like this. A large group of people, with images comparing the amount of precious urban space they take depending on the mode of transport they use.  This new one is by Australia's Cycling Promotion Fund.

This photo makes at least three important points, two of them probably not intended.  In this one image you can see that:

• Bike racks on buses (and most other transit) can never be more than a niche market. 

The rack on the bus in pic #1 carries two bikes, which is great for those two people.  But if all the bikes in pic #2 try to get onto the bus in pic #1, we have a geometric impossibility.  Bike racks are already as large as they can be if the driver is still to be far enough forward to drive safely.  A non-folding bike inside a transit vehicle takes the space of several passengers, so could fairly be accommodated only at several times the fare.  In the ideal sustainable future, you will have to park your bike at the station, or return your rental bike, just as Europeans do.  If transit does accommodate your bike, you really should pay a fare premium that reflects the rough number of passenger spaces displaced, or the supply/demand ratio for 2-3 bike racks vs 20 people wanting to use them.

• "Personal Rapid Transit," or small demand-responsive buses, or driverless cars that work like taxis, will never, ever, ever substitute for surface transit in high-demand urban settings, such as where all these people want to travel. 

 Dreamers along these lines may well be right about many suburban areas, where demand is sparse and the land use pattern precludes efficient transit.  But when all the people in this picture want to travel, driverless cars may take less space than the cars shown here, but they will still take far more space than a bus would.  The scarcity of space per person is part of the very definition of a city, as distinct from suburbia or rural area, so the efficiency with which transport options use that space will always be the paramount issue.  

(Of course, this very thought experiment presumes that we will actually achieve, and culturally accept, driverless cars that require very little space between them, in which the prevention of ghastly accidents -- especially with pedestrians and bikes who may appear with zero warning and minimal stopping distance -- is achieved through the absolute infallibility of human-designed hardware and software.)

To make the same point more generally:

• In cities, urban space is the ultimate currency.  

We spend too much time talking about what things cost in dollars and not enough about what they cost in space.  That, of course, is because urban space is perversely priced to encourage inefficient uses of it and discourage efficient ones.  If you're going to claim to be able to visualize how technology will change the world of 2040 -- as the techno-futurists claim to do -- you should also visualize what a political system ruled by people now under 40 would look like.  These people are much less emotionally attached to cars, care about environmental outcomes much more, and value urban space much more than their parents do.  Given that the revolution in urban pricing has already begun (see the London and Singapore congestion charges, and the San Francisco and Auckland dynamic parking systems), isn't it foolish to assume that today's assumptions about how we apportion urban space will still rule your techno-utopia?

UPDATE:  A reader points out one other key point, which is that

• the photo understates the space requirements of bikes compared to the other two.  

Once you put these three systems in motion, the cars and bus will need more space in one dimension -- forward and back.  However, in motion, the mass of bikes will expand in two dimensions, it will need to be both longer and wider for all the bikes to move safely.  This could have been rectified in the photo by consciously spacing the bikes to a distance where riders would feel comfortable at a brisk cycling speed that ensures not only stopping distance but also space for passing.  Masses of cyclists on a recreational ride may all agree to ride in tight formation at the same speed, but in daily life cycling infrastructure must accommodate the the fact that people in a cycling crowd will have different desires and intentions around speed, which affects lateral spacing and stopping distance.

request for professional info: has anyone figured out how to estimate bus layover needs?

So you're designing a new rail line, which will require bus connections at many points.  These bus lines are important.  They extend the reach of the rail line, and they are fundamental to how everything fits together as a complete network that anyone can use. 

On some parts of the alignment, it appears logical that many bus lines will terminate at a rail station.  This means that they will need to lay over -- sit for a while so that drivers can have breaks -- and that takes space.  You also want your rail stations to be vibrant urban places, so redevelopment needs are likely to conflict with bus layover needs for urban space, and it's obvious which one will excite politicians and citizens more.

Yet the layover is essential.  If it's not there, buses have to drive further to get to other layover locations somewhere beyond the station, and all that time is money out of the operating budget, that comes at the expense of service that customers can actually use.

The critical problem is how to estimate long-term layover needs.  At many agencies, operational service planners who spend almost all their time working in a 1-5 year timeframe are suddenly asked how many layover bays they will need for a project that opens ten years from now and needs to function for 50 years after that.  Obviously, they have no clue.  They have a sense of how the logic of the network tends to cause lines to converge at a station or not, but they can't guess how high demand will be in 40 years, or even what the size and shape of the buses running then will be.  (One reason to expect a renaissance of double deckers is simply the intense presure to conserve curb space while maximizing capacity -- a big problem for the double-decker's competitor, the articulated bus.)

So faced with all that uncertainty, all planning staff can do is guess very high about how much space they'll need, which amplifies the conflict with other development -- and also with project construction cost.  In the worst case, the estimated layover need conflicts so dramatically with everyone else's needs that they get ignored. 

The conflict is totally understandable from everyone's point of view.

Has any agency solved this problem to everyone's satisfaction?  

I'm pretty sure the answer is no, but would love to see some inspiring stories about how you've gotten close.

the price is right: market-based parking comes to new zealand (guest post)

This guest post is by my friend and colleague Stuart Donovan, with whom I've worked on a range of excellent transit planning projects over the years.  Stuart is the head of the New Zealand office of MRCagney consultants, a credentialed engineer, and the manager of numerous successful transit and transport policy research projects around New Zealand and beyond.
 

For me parking is like sex, money, and religion – it’s one of those things you avoid bringing up in polite conversation. The reason is that most cities have an over-supply of under-priced parking, yet most inhabitants of those cities believe exactly the opposite; that there is never enough parking.

Changing this belief is tough work. A large part of it seems to reflect a common assumption that even as cities grow they will be able to continue to provide similar levels of parking as they have had in the past. Deeper analysis suggests this assumption is invalid.

It’s invalid because economic and geometric realities prevent cities from expanding their parking at the same rate as they grow. In terms of off-street parking, higher land values tend to squeeze out space-intensive activities. In terms of on-street parking, limited kerb space and a range of competing uses, such as bus stops, constrains the degree to which more on-street parking can be provided.

For these two reasons, the supply of off- and on-street parking will always struggle to keep pace with the rate that cities grow. And of course combining constrained supply with growing demand will almost inexorably lead to higher prices. This economic relationship is the main reason why larger cities tend to command higher parking prices, other factors remaining equal.

During the 1950s many cities tried to subvert this economic equation. They implemented regulations that required new developments to provide large amounts of off-street parking. But minimum parking requirements simply meant that the cost of parking was paid for by developers, instead of users. The cost of parking was quite simply subsumed elsewhere in the economy.

Minimum parking requirements had a number of unintended impacts. Their primary impact was to create an over-supply of parking and lower the direct cost of parking for drivers. In this way, minimum parking requirements actually made a difficult problem even more challenging, because – over several decades – they have reinforced people’s cultural expectation for cheap parking.

Transport planners recognise that parking is a key influence on the travel decisions that people make. Aside from access to a vehicle, the price and availability of parking is probably the single most important determinant of whether people choose to drive.

So people who are passionate advocates for more efficient passenger transit, such as most readers of this blog, should also be passionate about addressing our parking issues. It’s hard to avoid the fact that abundant parking and efficient passenger transit are mutually exclusive outcomes.

But what can we do to address parking issues?

The solution to off-street parking supply seems quite clear: Cities should remove minimum parking requirements and allow developers to determine how much off-street parking they need for their development. This will usually be less than what minimum parking requirements currently stipulate.

Progress towards the removal of minimum parking requirements has already occurred in a number of cities around the world. My home city of Auckland, New Zealand (population circa 1.5 million) removed minimum parking requirements in the city centre in 1996 and has not looked back: More people now use passenger transit to access the city centre in peak hour than use private vehicles.

Fewer cities have made progress, however, with the way they manage on-street parking. Most still rely on time-limits (e.g. one hour) overlaid with paid parking. The combination of time-limits and paid parking creates an inconvenient situation, e.g. when your visit to the dentist takes 2 hours instead of 45 minutes you may return to your car to find that in addition to having holes where you wisdom teeth used to be your wallet has been further emptied by a parking infringement.

Reforming on-street parking policies often become bogged down in comments from residents and businesses about parking being “too expensive.” And when confronted with such questions many parking reform proposals die an unnatural death. But most discussions of cost focus only on the hourly rate, rather than the cost of infringements. I would argue that the latter needs to be included in discussions of cost, because it drastically changes the nature of the conversation.

Until recently San Francisco was the only city that had really forged ahead with major on-street parking reforms, under the measured encouragement of Donald Shoup and aided by a federal transport research grant. San Francisco’s approach to on-street parking reforms is brilliant in its simplicity: They recognised that time-limits were a relatively inefficient way of managing demand, especially in areas where pay parking also applied.

In most locations with pay parking, San Francisco has sought to remove time-limits. In these areas they now rely almost solely on prices to manage demand: If demand goes up then hourly rates also go up, and vice versa. If you’re interested you can (and should!) read more about San Francisco’s trail-blazing approach to on-street parking policy on the SFpark website. The most interesting result is that revenue from meters went up, but revenue from infringements went down.

So San Francisco had effectively substituted meter revenue for infringement revenue; and while many people hate paying for parking, in my experience they have an even deeper hatred towards parking tickets, primarily because it makes them feel “unlucky”. Until recently SFpark was a lone super nova in an otherwise cold and dark parking universe.

Until yesterday when my home city of Auckland, New Zealand announced that it was applying to join San Francisco’s elite parking club. Auckland has followed a similar line to San Francisco, by removing all time-limits from on-street car-parks the city centre and instead relying on prices to manage demand. They point to the following advantages of this approach:

• Easier to understand – so long as you’re paid up you’re good to go. No need to search for a car-park that allows you to park for as long as you need.
• Simpler to enforce – parking wardens only have to check that the ticket is valid, which greatly expedites the enforcement process.
• Reduced street clutter – a consistent approach to on-street parking means that only a few “Pay and display” signs are required, rather than a forest of confusing restrictions.

One of Auckland’s interesting tweaks is the implementation of a free 15 minute grace period, which is intended to replace the need for so many dedicated taxi and loading zones (drop off/pick up). Basically, with this grace period every space in the city becomes a potential drop off / pick up space, so long as you don’t park for longer than 15 minutes, which results in more efficient utilisation.

Overall, Auckland expects that the changes will be broadly revenue neutral. But this hides a very significant shift in where revenue comes from. Whereas in the current situation a large proportion of revenue is derived from those unlucky people visiting the dentist (i.e. through infringements), in the future revenue from parking infringements is expect to decline, whereas meter revenue increases.

One of the less obvious benefits of the approach taken by Auckland and San Francisco, however, is that they’ve set out an agreed policy process for setting parking prices. That is, they have developed a transparent formula through which parking prices are adjusted in response to demand. This greatly reduces opportunities for public/political interference in the setting of parking prices.

It’s now not so easy for individual residents or businesses to demand lower prices on their particular street, because the prices are determined by the policy. While people can seek to change the policy itself (indeed that is their democratic right) in doing so they are at least required to engage with broader questions such as: How would this impact parking across the entire city centre?

The most telling sign of the broad-based stakeholder support for Auckland’s proposed changes is the comes from the Chief Executive of Heart of the City (business association) Alex Swney, who said:

“For many years parking has been seen as a major reason not to come into the city. We see today’s announcement as a significant change in approach to parking in the city.  It recognises the ‘moving feast’ of parking demands of our businesses and their customers. It’s a major step forward and we are sure we will be looking back in a year and see significant improvement as a result.”

As one of the people that contributed to the development of this policy I’m quite biased in its favour. I can’t help but sense that this represents a big step in the direction of more transparent and sustainable on-street parking policy in Auckland.

As someone who regularly visits cities overseas it also makes me ask: Which city will be next?

washington dc: new network maps, with frequency!

The Washington DC transit agency WMATA has now released drafts of its new network map, which highlight the frequent network very dramatically with wide red lines:

Finally, it's possible to quickly see where the next bus is coming soon, rather than getting lost in a confusing tangle in which all routes look equally important.  The map is by the excellent firm CHK America.  Get the full story, with many more samples, at Greater Greater Washington, and remember, if you like these, don't take it for granted.  Transit agencies need to hear positive feedback where it's deserved.

 

portland: a local alternative to the columbia river crossing

Many cities have eternal debates about a Massive Transportation Project, debates that can go on for so long that the debate itself feels like a piece of infrastructure.   In Portland, it's the Columbia River Crossing, a $4b proposal to build a massive new bridge and freeway expansion to replace the old, narrow and congested I-5 bridge at the state line.  Most sustainable transport advocates that I know hate the plan with a passion, and it's increasingly an issue in the current mayoral race.  A number of small-government types are equally unhappy about the $4b pricetag.

The issue with the CRC is that the interstate freeway is really the only way of getting across the river, for any mode except freight rail, for miles around.  Since both sides of the river are urbanized, that's obviously a recipe for congestion.  If you define the problem as freeway congestion, of course you'll think of a freeway solution.  But what if you focus on the challenge of providing alternatives so that local traffic doesn't need to use the bridge, and so that transit competes effectively with cars to reduce future traffic growth?

That's the premise of a "Common Sense Alternative":

The basic idea of getting local traffic (including local freight) out of the bridge congestion, and creating transit alternatives, makes all kinds of sense. It's also a set of small projects that can happen in phases instead of one massive one.   Smaller budgets are demanding incremental solutions, not massive do-or-die projects.  Given the opposition to the CRC from both ends of the spectrum, I wouldn't be surprised if the answer doesn't end up being something like this. 

the new urbanism's problem with transit (comments of the week)

An excellent comment debate has arisen on my recent post "New Urbanists are from Mars, Transit Planners are from Venus," which addresses the mutual incomprehension between many transit agencies and many urban designers who think they're building transit friendly communities.  Read the whole thing and its comments, but I want to highlight three comments from professionals in particular:

From Alex Block:

Jarrett writes: "I think many New Urbanists have no idea how much conflict they have with transit planning, because in many cases transit planners are excluded so completely from the conversation that the New Urbanist never realizes what a mess has been made for transit."

I also think this fits into a broader critique of New Urbanism in general - in that it originally sought to engage with developers where the action was - in the suburbs - and thus often did so on suburban terms. The signature work products of many New Urbanist firms are often just changes on what remains essentially a drive-able suburban model - albeit one that at least provides for walkability, placemaking, and many other important elements.

In short, it's a evolution of suburban development - an incremental change.

I do think the New Urbanists have done some very good work for core cities insofar as the suburban standards developed by engineers have often been grafted onto existing cities after the fact (and in many cases are now being corrected), but that doesn't get around the fact that the movement's most successful elements are essentially still suburban models.

On the one hand, that's great! As many of the American suburbs are the places that need the most fixing. Providing a walkable environment at least helps mitigate some of the problems.

However, since this model is development-based, therefore the client is the developer and the to the extent that the underlying development model hasn't changed, so too the transportation model of the New Urbanists has not.

Perhaps the growing revival of urban places of all stripes (whether urban, suburban, developed or redeveloped, etc) can help shift the balance a bit - instead of New Urbanism we'll just look at urbansim, which I think would open the doors to transit planning and regional planning in a more fruitful way.

Architect Eric Orozco, also an illustrator on my book, hits a key point about the role of some transit agencies in perpetuating the confusion:

If the "cult of New Urbanism" is as hermetic as it is characterized, it has not done such a good job crafting a unified social theory or keeping its members much aligned to any such thing, much less one. ...

The predilection to design pod-like development with self-contained "town centers" stems more from a design vision than a social one. What is to blame is simply poor contextual sensitivity in locating the town center. Not knowing enough about the geometry of supportable transit service and mistaken assumptions about its flexibility. That's an innocent lack of cognizance of the necessities of transit routes, not so much Moses-like hubris.

To be fair to urban designers, this mistaken assumption sometimes stems from the collaboration with the transit agency, which is also studying "optional alignments" on maps, not mentioning the "eternal" costs involved. In fact, some problems stem from the fact that some transit agencies - themselves! - seem not to be prioritizing effective transit service in their planning and are repeating the early mistakes of Calthorpe and folks by conceding more optimal alignments to better serve development. Transit planners, maybe your Venusian priorities need to be communicated forcefully. Martians think you are too easy.

Bingo.  A few transit agencies are very sophisticated about interacting with land use planning, but others are entirely passive and accommodating.  The latter, in my experience, are agencies where staff has internalized the message that what they do isn't very important -- a message that local politicians may well be reinforcing. In multimodal agencies, politicians may also be signaling that while rail is important, the access and freedom provided by buses is of no interest to them, so a development's geometry problems for bus service can be ignored.

These agency staffs will respond to transit-hostile development proposals in purely detailed terms.  They will focus on minor adjustments needed to accommodate bus geometry, etc., but are silent on the development's effects on the prospects for transit overall.  Once transit agencies have chosen that submissive role, nobody is in the position to identify the development as transit-hostile -- certainly not early enough in the process for the critique to be taken on board.

If your transit agency responds to development proposals in this way, make sure that this is really what the political leadership wants them to do.  Often, the political leadership wants more active engagement from its transit agency but the agency hasn't acquired staff or consultants who know enough about development to engage in that conversation.  If the transit agency won't take on this role, city planning departments need to develop their own expertise in this area.

Finally, commenter Marc reminds us that it's all about education:

Maybe I should elaborate on how much a lack of education may be contributing to this problem: as a former architecture student, I had NO classes on transportation, planning, or even urban design. The program had almost completely devolved into insular, solipsistic endeavors, almost to the point where architecture was little more than fine art. Save for a handful of exceptions, most non-engineering design schools are at least partially trapped in this approach (and the more "avant garde" the worse they are).

Lots of the earliest new urbanists describe how they had to laboriously self-educate themselves on matters of urbanism which their schools completely ignored. Even today you probably will find many NU architects, urban designers, and planners who will say that whatever they learned about transit and urbanism they picked up informally or after graduation, because the architecture-as-art schools simply don't teach these things. You design objects in splendid isolation (never mind the rhetoric about "biophilia" and "connectivity"), and I suspect that isolationist approach might still be carrying over when we see "town centers" or TODs that are strangely disconnected from their surroundings, even if their designers mean well. So injecting some transportation courses into the schools, as well as reducing the preoccupation with isolated art objects, might do a lot for molding designers who can keep transit in the back of their minds when they draw up development ideas.

I'll also concede that sometimes there seems to be a callous disregard for transit modes that are beneath a certain ideal - "streetcars or nothing." But I'm not sure if this is concentrated among new urbanists or even among architects and other designers in general, or whether it's just a widespread upper-class attitude. (Like the situation with buses that Jarrett noted: "I don't take buses and don't see them as all that important, so I don't really care about how well they function.")

Whenever I've lectured in graduate programs -- including the one time I taught an entire graduate transit planning course (Berkeley, 2002) -- it's been clear that the practical, geometry-based approach to transit that I present in my book is completely unlike what urban planning students are used to getting in school.  They seem to get empirical material about what transit achieves and how it relates to society, but nothing of the geometry of how transit works.  I know people who completed Masters of Urban and Regional Planning degrees with a transportation emphasis and never learned the essentials of transit.  Architecture students, as Marc indicates, are likely to be even more remote from these realities.  So urban designers and planners who want to understand transit have to notice the problem and choose to teach themselves (tip: that's what my book is for!), just as the early New Urbanist architects had to learn urbanism on their own.

What will it take to build respect for transit into our curricula?

 

 

 

that danish bus commercial making the rounds

Buzzfeed calls it "the sexiest, coolest, most EPIC bus commercial ever," and adds: "If you don't like this, you don't like anything."  The commercial for Danish bus company Midttrafik brings all the cinematic cliches of our historical moment to bear on the problem of making the bus sexy.  If you're not fluent in Danish, hit the CC button at the bottom for English subtitles:

Over the top?  It may seem like a parody of a bus commercial, but it's at least as effective as a parody of contemporary cinematography.