Human Transit

dissent of the week: praise for new york city's bus rapid transit

In my recent post on incomplete Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) I made a one-sentence reference to New York City's BRT services, called Select Bus Service:  " New York's supposed BRT is so compromised that many refused to call it BRT anymore."  The comment was based not just on the linked article but also on what I hear endlessly from transit advocates and professionals there, plus one experience riding the First/Second Avenue line, which has a lane on the Avenues but is in mixed traffic all the way across Lower Manhattan.

A transit professional fired back: 

Look at the numbers before you criticize NYCT!  I'd call a 15% increase in speeds on Fordham Road and First/Second Avenue pretty significant.  As I recall from talking to their schedulers, it was somewhat greater than expected on Fordham Road and somewhat less in Manhattan.  But how can you ignore these numbers in an article talking about a one-minute difference?  And to pull off the first implementation of off-board fare collection in the Bronx (I grew up about a mile away from Fordham Road) is not something to be taken for granted!  NYCT and NYCDOT did the footwork to address concerns of businesses in the Bronx. Yes, there are enforcement problems - this is New York City, after all.  And of course it's not ideal BRT in terms of separated lanes and high-level platforms (how well do these blend into an urban environment?  Don't join the cheap-shot artists!!

Fifteen percent is a good start, no question.  Advocates often hate percentage increases because they are used to validate progress from dreadful to just very bad, but for the professionals who fought this fight in the context of massive forces demanding the status quo, the percentage increase is the only way to give any validity to what they've achieved, and they deserve praise for that achievement.

Still, there is another equally valid frame, which is to ask "How fast does BRT need to be to be achieving something sufficiently transformative -- something on the scale of the actual mode share and sustainability targets of a city like New York?"  And there's often a huge disconnect between the two.

This is why, in my own work, I routinely cite those targets and encourage people to think about what it would mean to actually aim that high.  I do this not to criticize those who fought the fight with inadequate support and ended up with something that's much less though still a real improvement.  All praise on those people!  Rather, the targets are important because they can form the basis for a more widely-endorsed argument for why the status quo has to be defeated -- an argument that should be made at higher levels, in a form that transit planners can cite, so that transit planners don't feel like they're fighting alone in the cold.

For example, in the original Seattle Transit Plan that I worked on in 2005, we asked not "what interventions can we make to speed up those buses a bit?" but rather "how fast (and frequent) do the buses have to be to deliver the scale of mode shift that is essential to what Seattle wants to be as a city?"  San Francisco's Transit Effectiveness Project is a similar model.   Get influential policy people thinking about the second question, and the battlefield changes, because now each struggle to remove a parking space is part of a citywide or regionwide sustainability mission.  

So when planners fight the good fight with insufficient support, and end up with only 15% improvement over a possibly-dreadful pre-existing travel time, they have to be (a) thanked, and (b) reinforced by even more talk about the urgency of the citywide goals that they are fighting for, block by block, foot by foot, parking space by parking space.

"uncaptive rider": download my chat with colin marshall ...

If you'd be interested in the sound of my voice, ruminating broadly about transit and cities in the serenity of my own livingroom, there's now quite a good podcast by Colin Marshall in the Notebook on Cities and Culture series.  You can download an mp3 from Colin's site here, or get it from iTunes here.

Colin's a brilliant interviewer, asking great and often surprising questions.  He draws me out on my own living arrangements, my complex relationships with Portland and with Los Angeles, some notes on my global transit travels, and finally onto really substantive topics about what transit is and how it relates to the larger question of what cities are.  It's all feels very public-radio ...

Colin's whole series of downloadable podcasts looks like it's worth a look, as he's put me in some impressive company ... 

quote of the week: governor brown on etymology

In Latin, Brown said, “eco” means house. As an example, “economy” means “rules of the house.”  “Logos” means “lord, god, or the deep principles or patterns of nature.” So “ecology is more fundamental than economics. Economics sits within ecology. Not the other way around." 

-- from an interview with California Governor Jerry Brown
in the American Society for Landscape Architects blog, "The Dirt". 

 

We need more elected officials conversant in etymology. If you don't know what's going on inside your words, you can't predict what they'll do behind your back.

 

 

the opportunities and dangers of incomplete bus rapid transit

One of Bus Rapid Transit's great virtues is that unlike rail, you don't have to build a complete, continuous piece of infrastructure if you really only need segments of one.  

Here in Portland, for example, the Barbur corridor -- now being studied for BRT or rail -- features a series of congested chokepoints with generally free-running traffic in between them.  Here, a BRT facility that got transit through the chokepoints reliably probably wouldn't need an exclusive lane in the free-flowing segments, because traffic in those segments would continue to be metered by the chokepoints and thus remain uncongested.  (Congested chokepoints meter traffic just as ramp meters do: they limit the rate at which cars can enter a road segment and thus reduce its chance of becoming congested.)

Unfortunately, Bus Rapid Transit can also be implemented in exactly the opposite way.  Severely congested chokepoints are generally expensive places to design transit priority for, especially if you're unwilling to simply take a lane for transit.  So we often see BRT projects that are missing where they are most needed.  The Boston Silver Line 4-5, like the Los Angeles Silver Line, can get stuck in traffic downtown.  New York's supposed BRT is so compromised that many refused to call it BRT anymore.  Even the world-class Auckland North Shore Busway disappears as it approaches the Harbour Bridge. 

Now we have the example of Seattle's RapidRide D, highlighted today by Mike Lindblom in the Seattle Times:

While the new RapidRide bus mostly lives up to its name in West Seattle, passengers on its sister route to Ballard are routinely stuck in traffic.

The service to Ballard, called the D Line, is d

elayed 10 to 15 minutes by late-afternoon car congestion leaving Belltown and winding through the crowded Uptown neighborhood, near Seattle Center.

That bottleneck is aggravated by traffic signals that haven't yet been re-timed by King County Metro Transit and the city of Seattle, to give the buses a longer or quicker green light. Metro acknowledges the D Line is just one minute faster than the local bus it replaced Sept. 29; the advantage is supposed to be six to eight minutes.

Transit managers hope to make gains by early 2013 after signal and road-lane changes are finished.

"We have a ways to go based on our early experience, but it is still too early to know whether the projection will be achieved," said Metro spokesman Jeff Switzer.

Just one minute faster than the bus it replaced?  Then the question arises: Why was it called Rapid Ride prior to the improvements that would make it Rapid?  There are some plausible if grim answers to this question.  Getting multiple big bureaucracies to move on the same timetable to the same deadline is hard.  The transit agency has to commit to a date months in advance, without being entirely sure whether its partners (typically in the City and the state Dept of Transportation) will be done with the improvements that are their responsibility.  So sometimes, the brand appears before the product does, causing this understandable blowback and also, more critically, tarnishing the brand.

RapidRide D raises a larger problem though.  Even when planned priority is completed further south there is still the problem of the congested Ballard Bridge.  Like Barbur's chokepoints in Portland, the Ballard Bridge is a familiar chokepoint that affects speed and reliability for all transit services forced to use it.  You can imagine the difficulty of demanding that RapidRide have an exclusive lane over the bridge, when that would leave only one for other cars.  (But what about a lane for buses + carpools + carshare cars + electric cars + etc. until you get a reasonable but uncongested lane volume?)

Sometimes, too, bridges can be metered, much the way the San Francisco Bay Bridge toll plaza meters traffic on that bridge.  At the approach point pictured above, a signal could have been placed at the bus merge point which meters traffic so that northbound congestion piles up south of the bridge rather than on it, and enters the bridge only at an uncongested rate.  That would have allowed buses uncongested operation without really slowing down cars much.  I'm not an engineer; there may be valid reasons why this wasn't possible, but it's the sort of solution that comes up when congested traffic is the reality anyway and the goal is to protect transit from it.

Transit agencies sometimes compromise BRT for their own reasons of budget.  Issues of boarding time associated with the lack of on-street ticket machines are coming up on RapidRide, as are concerns about reliability arising from the fact that two RapidRide lines are through-routed, transmitting delay from one to the other.  These are familiar struggles within transit agencies who are under pressure to spread a product over many corridors and can't afford to deliver every aspect of the product in all those places.  The result runs the risk of becoming symbolic transit; a bright red line appears on the map, but without the investment needed to make good on the promise that the red line implies.

I've received emails from Seattle friends on several sides of this issue, and sympathize with all of them.  I don't mean to criticize either the City or the State DOT or the transit agency, because what was done here is fairly typical historic American practice and the pressures involved are so routine.

But if there is a desire to aim higher than historic American practice, the question remains.  How much can we compromise BRT -- tolerating its absence precisely in the congested chokepoint where it's most needed -- and still call it BRT?  Might be better for transit agencies to refuse to implement BRT until the relevant traffic authorities have delivered the facilities it requires?  

toronto: a frequent network map

From Eric Sehr, here's a very clear schematic of the Frequent Network in Toronto -- covering the Toronto Transit Commission Area but not adjacent regions.  If I were TTC, I'd just publish this as it is.  Note how clearly you can assess where you can get to without much delay, and also note how well-connected the Frequent Network is.  

For the full-size zoomable version, see here.

About this series:  While a few agencies led the way with Frequent Network maps and brands, much of the Frequent Network branding "movement" seems to have followed from this post, later expanded as Chapter 7 of my book Human Transit.  Agencies that now market Frequent Networks include those in Montreal, Salt Lake City, Minneapolis, Vancouver, Spokane, and Seattle.  Portland was once a leader until its Frequent Network was destroyed by budget cuts in 2009.  For more -- including both advocate-made and a few agency-made Frequent Network maps -- explore the "Frequent Networks" category on this blog.  As a consultant I provide advice on Frequent Network branding worldwide.

hope this saves lives, because it's messing with my head

If after watching this you really want the iTunes track, then you are truly a masochist.  Here's the now-viral Metro Trains Melbourne rail safety video "Dumb Ways to Die," with infernal-tune-that-you'll-never-ever-get-out-of-your-head by Tangerine Kitty.

You were warned.

seattle reveals its frequent network

Bravo to Seattle's King County Metro for their new system maps, which finally reveal their Frequent Network.  All can be viewed and downloaded here.  

The wide blue line is light rail and the red lines are the new Rapid Bus product (both frequent and relatively fast).  The rest of the bus network is clearly presented in ways that advertise its frequency and span, so that (a) the Frequent Network jumps out at you and (b) services that run only at rush hour recede from attention so that you can clearly see the network that runs all day.  They do this by using black (numbers and lines ) for the Frequent Network, then solid blue for the other all-day service, then paler blue with blue-outlined white number bullets for the peak-only services.

Works for me.  What do you think?  If your transit agency hasn't figured out Frequent Network mapping yet, show them this map, and tell them to read Chapter 7 of my book, or this!

melbourne: updated frequent network map reveals grid gaps

Here's a new Frequent Network Map for Melbourne, by Campbell Wright, showing where you can get around easily all day if you aren't willing to wait long for public transport.  Download and explore it here: PNG.  The image below is obviously illegible but the zoomed-out look shows us important things.  

What I notice:

1.  The inner north of Melbourne, immediate north of the CBD, should be a public transport paradise.  It's historic, very dense and has a grid street pattern for easy walking to transit.  It has frequent north-south trams on all the major streets, but it lacks the frequent crosstown services that would make a complete east-west grid for everywhere-to-everywhere travel.  The routes are there, as you can see here and here , but except for the one Mr Wright draws, none are frequent enough to make adequate connections, so their role is largely symbolic. This is probably because there are too many overlapping infrequent routes, and they need to be considated into fewer stronger routes.  

2.  The inner east and inner north grids are poorly stitched together.  There are frequent crosstown routes in both but it's hard to get from one grid to the other, except by coming almost downtown, to Hoddle Street, or going way out, to Bulleen where the blue 903 crosses.

3.  Melbourne has lavished great attention for years on the four orbital Smarbuses, inverted U-shaped routes that are obvious as north-south bands across the far right of the map.  What Melbourne really needed was a high-frequency grid, with crosstown (perpendicular to radial) lines concentrated in areas of high demand so that you could go from everywhere to everywhere with a simple L-shaped trip.  The Smartbuses oversimplified the grid concept by insisting, for no reason I can discern and at great cost, that these services all had to be complete U shapes wrapped all the way around the city. regardless of the markets through which they pass.   

You can see the effect.  Parts of Melbourne that could support high frequency crosstown service, like the inner north, or the Port Melbourne-St Kilda corridor, don't have much of it, while a fortune is spent on a vast outermost U (the grey line) which creates no grid effect because it lies far beyond the end of most frequent radials.  It's also far, far to long to be operated reliably, as are many of the Smarbuses.  The reliability can be assured only by inserting substantial break time along the way for schedule recovery, which would mean that they don't really flow continuously in the way that the route number and brand would suggest.  

4.  Only with a Frequent Network map like Mr. Wright's can you see Melbourne's network in a way that would help you understand it as an instrument of freedom, something that you might use for many purposes as part of am empowered life.  While the State of Victoria has recently taken over public transport information, their published maps still make it very hard to see the network this way.  If you arrive at the website wanting to see a real map of your transit system, and you figure out that you need to click Maps / Metropolitan Maps, you're asked to choose between train, tram, and bus.  Again, the assumption is that you must be looking for a particular transit technology, and that nobody would ever be interested in simply understanding how all public transport -- with the technologies working together to form a network -- might be useful their lives.  

What's more, maps of local buses are chopped up by Local Government Area, arbitrary boundaries that slice up the map in ways that further conceal patterns of usefulness.  And of course, there is no Frequent Network map, like you'll find in Brisbane, and like Mr Wright as sketched above, to help you figure out which services are coming soon and which require you to build your life around them.

So if you know how to get around Melbourne freely and easily all day, bookmark Mr Wright's map.  For now, it's one of Melbourne's most important bits of public transport info.

among the young, decline in driving is not about poverty

From Jake Blumgart at GOOD, an important factoid about the decline in driving among young adults:

An April study by the U.S. Public Interest Research Group found that between 2001 and 2009 the average annual vehicle miles traveled by Americans ages 16 to 34 fell by close to a quarter, from 10,300 to 7,900 per capita (four times greater than the drop among all adults), and from 12,800 to 10,700 among those with jobs. At the same time, the amount of bicycling, walking, and public transit ridership increased. And these trends aren’t just among broke millennials. There was an 100 percent increase in public transit usage among young people with incomes over $70,000.

Would love to see some stats on what Millennials do when they start families, compared to those a generation ago.  

 

quote of the week: the quiet ones

From Tim Kreider's New York Times piece on the Amtrak quiet car, and the challenge of advocating quiet.

It’s impossible to be heard when your whole position is quiet now that all public discourse has become a shouting match. Being an advocate of quiet in our society is as quixotic and ridiculous as being an advocate of beauty or human life or any other unmonetizable commodity.

Read the whole thing.

Personal note:  I have a slight hearing problem called hyperacusis which means that I hear some high-pitched sounds, especially sudden ones, as louder and more painful than others perceive.  Kreider helps me understand why this little "disability", which prevents me from enjoying noisy social environments and thus has a self-isolating effect, will never carry any "rights" in the Americans with Disabilites Act sense. Nor am I sure that it should.