Human Transit

how to (not) sound elitist when discussing transit

Reid Ewing and Keith Bartholomew.  Pedestrian and Transit-Oriented Design. Urban Land Institute and American Planning Association, 2013.

Reid Ewing and Keith Bartholomew, both at the University of Utah, have a new large-format paperback offering a concise overview of the basics on Pedestrian and Transit-Oriented design.  If you want a good glossary of key urbanist concepts such as imageability and coherence, or you want a good and well-cited argument for local street connectivity, this is your book.  

Very usefully, the book is organized as a series of checklists:  Here are the features that you must have to be considered transit-oriented design, here are others that are desirable.  It's designed to be handy to the time-crunched developer or policy person.  In fact, it meets one of the most important standards for an influential book in our distracted age:  You can get most of the message by just looking at the pictures and reading the section headings.  

If only I'd done that, I'd have found nothing to criticize.

The writing is good, too, clear and with careful attention to explaining and demystefying concepts.  With one exception, I'd recommend this as a good reference guide to the key concepts of pedestrian-oriented design.  

As for its use as a guide to transit-oriented design, however, it has a fatal flaw:  The authors make recommendations that make sense only from a design and development point of view, and that will sound elitist and tone-deaf if you present them to your transit agency.  As always, I emphasize sound; I've talked with enough urbanist writers to know how good their intentions are; they are mostly genuinely surprised when their comments about transit backfire.  But it's not a hard mistake to avoid.  I am going to take apart a critical passage in the book not because it's typical -- it's an unusual flaw in a good book -- but because it illustrates a lingering problem with urbanist discussions of transit in general, one that I hope we are close to moving beyond.

Ewing and Bartholomew lead off their transit discussion with this tired old chestnut:

In the question for efficiency, transit has become dull and utilitarian, part of the problem reather than the solution to today's lifeless streetscapes (Coppe 1991).  [p 82]

If this generalization is really about "today," then how is it bolstered by a 22-year old citation?  I have been hearing this line from urbanist leaders for just about that long.  Obviously it's true to a degree, more in some cities than others,  but there has been transformative progress in the last two decades.  Fleet, facilities, and technology have been upgraded across the developed world, often with the input of great designers.  Do transit agencies get no credit for the evolution in the comfort, openness and access that have happened over the last generation?  

Efficiency, as usual in high-urbanist literature, is treated as some kind of distraction.  But when working under any fixed budget as transit agencies do, efficiency is the same thing as abundance.  (When something called efficiency is genuinely destructive or unsustainable, it should be called false efficiency.)

As for the word utilitarian, it has a technical meaning in philosophy but here it's just a pejorative word meaning useful.  Anything that scales to a vast network that's potentially useful to millions of people can be called utilitarian.  Most great transit agencies would wear this term as a badge of honor.

But the authors dig themselves deeper.  After showing us pictures of charming, highly designed bus shelters in two wealthy communities that can afford them, they write:

In some cases, transit operators might do better by putting fewer buses on the street at times of low demand, and diverting the money they save into bus stop amenities and fleet facelifts.

This, urbanist friends, crosses a bright red line called upward redistribution of wealth.

This book appears at a time when many US transit agencies have been slashing transit service for the last five years, driving away legions of riders.  Portland, for example, has had its inner city grid network gutted -- mostly cut to 20 minute frequencies at which the connections on which it relies are almost impossible -- even though frequent transit service is a foundational element in the City of Portland's neighborhood development policies. 

Any "low-ridership" services that have survived all that carnage are serving popular and important non-ridership goals.  They are not going to be cut to build nicer bus shelters.  Doing so could also be illegal in the US if you're using Federal funds: US Title VI legislation (part of the 1964 Civil Rights Act) is designed to prevent exactly this kind of upward redistribution of the benefits resulting from public investment.  All US transit agencies that receive Federal funds must do extensive analysis to prove they are treating low-income and minority riders fairly in both service and infrastructure.

So if you follow this book's advice, and tell your transit agency they should cut service and reject lower-income people so as to build nicer bus shelters, it doesn't matter how noble your intentions are.  You will sound both elitist and clueless.  You will sound especially hostile to the burgeoning environmental justice agenda that is already embodied in civil rights legislation, and that has its own strong nexus with the ultimate outcomes that we call sustainability.  If you prevail in guiding the policy of your transit agency, that agency could be exposed to civil rights lawsuits as a result.  Do you really want this many enemies?

It doesn't help that in suggesting service cuts at "times [rather than places] of low demand," the authors are just repeating a common misconception.  Ridership at different times of day is interdependent, if only for the obvious reason that most transit trips are round trips.  If you cut service and thus reject a customer at one time of day, you'll likely lose their business in the other direction as well.  The most obvious "time of low demand," the late evening, is also a "guaranteed ride home," which means it affects the overall attractiveness of the product.

More important, a consistent pattern of all-day service (including "times of low demand") is a powerful tool for fostering lower vehicle ownership.  That's is why many transit agencies are now committing to a policy "Frequent Network" that guarantees service over a certain span regardless of trip-by-trip ridership.  (These policies, important in guiding true Transit-oriented Development at regionwide scale, deserved a mention.  Policies in the Portland and Vancouver BC regions could both have been cited.  Indeed, the book is silent on the urgent question of how to recognize a suitable site for TOD.)

I love distinctive transit shelters as much as anyone, but not if they are defined as an alternative to the sheer quantities of service that cities need and that ridership would reward.  (Canadian midsized cities, for example, generally have about twice the ridership per capita of similar US cities, not becuase their shelters are cuter but becuase they run about twice as much service per capita.)

Distinctive, adorable shelters can still come about in one of three entirely reasonable ways.  Either:

1. they have been paid for by developers, or by neighboring landowners who will profit most directly from any uplift in land values, or
2. they have been paid for by city governments, or
3. they are transit agency investments that are affordable and suitable for mass production, like the San Francisco shelters with the characteristic wave roofs.  

Developer-funding (also endorsed in the book) is often the purest nexus of all, but city funding is also a healthy trend.  Cities are much better placed than regional transit agencies to make investments that express civic identity and character.  Most US cities can also do improvement districts that focus the cost on the landowners who will most benefit.  Still, it's usually wealthier communities that can afford to do this, so it's deeply misleading to present these specialized shelters as realistic examples for cities in general, let alone to suggest that cash-strapped agencies should reject existing riders in order to pay for them.

It's hard to even criticize Ewing and Bartholomew for these howlers.  As long as I've been in the business, I've heard leading urbanists lecturing transit planners about how they should abandon their obsession with abundant service and focus on aesthetics instead.  As someone with serious credentials in the arts, my response is always that I understand the aesthetic values that the urbanist is describing, but that their recommendation is pointless until they own the consequences of the cuts they are implicitly proposing to fund these things. 

To be fair, transit agencies have been slow to engage urbanists in their own language, which requires staff with appropriate expertise.  This, however, has improved dramatically over the last decade.  Working urban designers and architects are responding constructively to transit agency input, and respectful conversations between the fields are happening more than ever.  Most urban design and architecture professonals that I deal with are sensitive to real-world transit issues and open to learning about transit agency perspectives, so we can hope for a continued spread of insight on these issues.

Indeed, Ewing's and Bartholomew's book shows how far the urbanist discourse has come in respecting transit and the diversity of its riders.  They speak mostly of "transit," avoiding rail vs. bus arguments, and their photos show buses as accepted parts of the urban landscape deserving of attention.   This is real progress, still controversial in some quarters.  It was partly in the context of this larger sensitivity that the passages quoted above were so shocking.

In the long run, urbanist thinkers who discuss transit will learn to respect transit planning and policy as a genuine experise -- something that's worth learning about before you comment on it.  Again, my own experience suggests that the practice is ahead of the literature in this regard.  This book -- very useful on all subjects except transit policy -- shows how far urbanists' respect for transit agencies has come since the early days of the New Urbanism, and how much -- or perhaps how little -- remains to be done.

portland: "opt-in" to comment on the future, despite biased questions!

If you live in the Portland metro region (Oregon side only), the regional government Metro wants you to be part of an online panel that comments on key issues facing the region.  It's called Opt-in, and you can read about it, and join it, here. 

When I tweeted about this yesterday, several people I respect commented that Opt-In sometimes asks wildly distorted and leading questions.  I can now verify that this is the case, based on a survey it asked me to take this morning which includes this appalling question (click to sharpen):

Two choices about transit and they're both about expanding rail.  Bus infrastructure and fleet are not mentioned even though buses are still the dominant mode in Portland and Bus Rapid Transit is a serious option in two rapid transit corridors now under study.   The designer of this question appears to be unfamiliar with Metro's own transit planning process, and is imposing their own biases on the survey.  That may be understandable in the early stages of a tool's develoment, when Metro's leadership may not be paying attention yet, but it should be unacceptable and if the tool thrives, it soon will be.

But is this a reason not to join?  No, it's the opposite.  Biased questions are a reason to use the little text feedback boxes to complain about biased questions, and to contact your Metro councilor if you feel strongly about them.  When Metro councilors will start getting letters about biased questions being asked in Metro's name, the problem will be righted quickly.  Just as boycotting elections is a bad way to get your views represented in government, boycotting survey tools is a bad way to get them to ask better questions!

Like all self-appointed panels, OptIn reaches a distorted sample of the population, but so does the massively inefficient and exhausting ritual that it could someday replace: the public meeting.  (The FAQs gently suggest this long-term prospect, though I'm sure we won't see the end of the public meeting soon.)  Public meetings still have value when they are organized as genuine conversations, such as interactive workshops that I'm often hired to run.  But if the purpose of a public meeting is for you to go and give a speech about why you're right and everyone else is wrong, well, we can all save carbon emissions and time out of our busy lives by doing that at home in our pyjamas. 

Need to smash the patriarchy or abolish the government?  I admit online surveys aren't very satisfying if you're massively angry and need something destroyed, and for that your options are still voting, peaceful demonstrations, and if necessary civil disobedience.  But online surveys are a great way to hear from a vast array of voters who are willing to communicate more thoughtfully and with less effort, and who tend to be shouted down or intimidated in public events.  Yes, there are issues about exclusion of low-resource groups and those with language and educational barriers, but Metro's surveys look pretty accessible to anyone with high-school literacy in English and they'd be easy enough to translate and supplement with spoken text.

Metro's currently asking its panel about its priorities for the future of transit in the region, and unlike the survey I mention above, it's a good and worthwhile survey that everyone should complete.  

Again, I wish the transit survey had the courage to ask about new funding sources.  The region's transit agency has cut over 15% of its service in the last decade, and is in ongong budget difficulty due to unfunded health and pension commitments made in wealthier times.  While it may gradually restore a basic functional network, it is nowhere close to offering the pace of service growth that would support the region's land use vision or its justify its green reputation.  But the questions the survey does ask, about your priorites for deploying what resources can be found, are mostly clear and reflect the realities of transit's geometry and costs.

If you don't enjoy public meetings, or have better things to do with your time, join Opt In, and if you're not in the Portland region, encourage your regional government to emulate it.  And if you find a biased question, comment about it!

countering the "empty buses" myth -- with video!

The Pinellas County, Florida transit agency has done this video to help counter the impressions people get from seeing empty buses around the area.  Seeing empty buses often causes people to complain that the buses are too big, are obviously not needed, should be replaced with smaller ones, etc.   

Some viewers may be irritated by the "big number" rhetoric:  We hear the systemwide annual ridership over and over without any context for understanding it.  It's certainly not true that the system's 14m annual rides mean that buses aren't empty a lot of the time, as the video has already explained and justified.

But it's a very worthwhile effort, and transit agencies need do to these things. APTA or some other pro-transit entity could be commissioning them for all transit agencies to use, but home-grown ones will always have some advantage because so many people respond only to data from their own community.

Thanks to Michael Setty for the tip!

quote of the week: the mayor on those portland powerpoints

 

No planner from the city of Portland should be going to national conferences and bragging about how smart we are about urban planning in Portland until we have an actionable plan to make 122nd & Division a great  place. ... We have a lot of work to do to make the hype about how livable Portland is true citywide.

-- Newly inaugurated Portland Mayor Charlie Hales,
in an interview with Willamette Week.

 

Here's the intersection the Mayor is referring to:

Strong words.  I've sometimes felt exasperated by the some of "Perfect Portland PowerPoints" that I've seen at conferences all over the world.  Many of them show you pictures solely from downtown and the innermost neighborhoods, and give you the impression that every place worth going to is right on the Portland Streetcar.  They don't usually mention that repeated cuts to the city's once-excellent bus network are calling into question the viability of a no-car lifestyle over large parts of the city, and that much of the official wonderfulness of Portland isn't that evident in daily life in some of the outer parts of the city.  

But of course, planning PowerPoints about lots of cities are distorted in those ways.  And in fact, many cities have fairly ordinary looking suburban fabric like you see in this picture, and conflicts between the needs of such areas and those of a more glamorous and expensive inner city.  So I would be gentler than the Mayor on this point.  

Portland is far more flawed, contingent, lovable, ordinary, and fascinating than the some of the PowerPoint warriors will let on, but after all you've heard, you'll probably have to see it to believe it, or at least spend some time on Google.

for the holidays, a sentimental epilogue

For this sentimental season, I thought I'd post the first epilogue that I wrote for Human Transit.  It got mixed reviews.  Friends in architecture and urban policy loved it, while my friends from the literature world, who have a keen eye for literary truth, panned it with great affection.  Fortunately, my editor at Island was of the latter group, so the book came to have the epilogue it has, rather than this one.  (I also tried this as the basis of the epilogue, to similar reviews.)  

All that is for the best.  This thing is sentimental, as befits the season.  Read it when you want a sentimental read, as we all do now and then.  

If you don't know what I mean by "plumber," you'll figure it out from context.  (It means you haven't read the book!)

Happy holidays.  [And don't forget:  early bird registration for my Washington DC short course (1/17-18) closes 12/28.  Registration opens Wednesday for the Portland OR session on Feb 7-8.  Hope to see you there.]

What if we learned to listen to our plumber?  Suppose that every time we were confronted with a hard choice between different things that we value – a choice that’s geometrically unavoidable – we took a deep breath, and chose?  We would need to make these choices as individuals, but also as communities, urban areas, and nations.  If we did, what might be possible by the middle of this century?

*

Helen has just turned 75, but she’s lived many lives and plans to live a few more.  Raised in a mining town in the Australian tropics, she's worked all over the world as a missionary and foreign aid worker.   She married twice and raised three children, all of them as self-reliant as she is.  When she was widowed in her mid-sixties, she moved to a small island in Indonesia to start a new school.  It was a struggle to convince her to retire at 72, and come home to Australia.

She returned to a big house on a quarter-acre block in Theodore, a distant suburb of the Australian capital, Canberra.  It was the house she’d grown up in, and she assumed she’d live out her life there, just as her mother did.  But just after she turned 74, she nearly had a bad accident while driving.  Looking back on it, she realized that she couldn’t react fast enough anymore, and that it was only a matter of luck that she hadn’t killed someone.

So she sold her car, and let her license expire.  Now, her house in Theodore was a prison.  To get anywhere, she faced a 500m walk to a bus stop, and then a bus only every half hour, none in the evening.  

Back in 2015 her mother had dealt with the same problem, in the same house.  For a decade her mother wrote letters and went to meetings to complain about how far she had to walk from her cul-de-sac house to a bus stop, how infrequently the buses ran, and how unfair that was.  Whenever Helen visited her mother in those days, she heard all about this campaign, its frustrations and small victories.

As it happened, Helen had been dating a transit planner at the time.  One night, over drinks, he talked her through the geometry proving that her mother’s cause was hopeless.  He showed why very low-density suburbs with lots of pedestrian barriers could never generate enough ridership to support extensive transit service, even if the politicians were inclined to favor them.  

The problem wasn’t the bus company’s failure to innovate, as her mother claimed.  At one point he put it starkly: "If you want to know what quality of transit to expect, ask this question about your neighborhood: 'How far would transit have to go to serve 1000 people?'"  Of course, in the labyrinth of Theodore the answer was several kilometers, while in Canberra's inner city it was just a few blocks.The problem was sheer geometry.  It made sense.

So Helen looked at her options, and noticed that a place called Ainslie Village had just been redeveloped as a retirement complex.  Formerly, it had been a cluster of temporary housing for the homeless located on a hillside cul-de-sac that precluded public transport.  Now, however, it would now extend down to a nearby main street, Limestone Avenue, and would include a mixture of towers and small cabin-like units.  The towers were cleverly arranged so that people could use their elevators to climb the hillside to the upper parts of the village, though of course many seniors preferred the exercise of climbing the hill.

The frequent transit line in front of Ainslie Village was the direct link between the city and the airport.  Helen liked this feature.  She still wanted to go overseas a couple of times a year, and to welcome visits from the friends she’d made all over the world. 

But what also sold Helen on New Ainslie Village was the back side, where it faced a nature reserve.  She could walk just a few hundred meters and feel immersed in the native woodland.  At night the kangaroos would come down around the village to graze, just as they did in Theodore; Helen had always found tranquility in the patient curiosity with which kangaroos gaze at humans.

Helen seems to have achieved the dream that’s motivated so much suburban development, the desire to be in the city and the country at the same time.  But it wasn't just good fortune.  It was her own willingness to look at her choices, understand their consequences, and choose.

--

Mia, 35, lives with her two children and her mother in a mobile home on the east edge of Las Vegas.  She manages the housekeeping department for a hotel-casino, and after saving for years, she finally put back enough money to buy a mobile home. 

She grew up just a mile from here.  Her mother lost her house to foreclosure in the Crash of 2008 and had to move the family into a small apartment.  In 2010 their old car finally broke down for good, and there was no money to replace it.  So she and her mother walked to the bus stop most days, and those walks are one of the most vivid memories of her childhood.

The stop for buses into the city was right outside her bedroom window, but there was a long, high wall blocking the way, built by a well-meaning developer who thought that even though they couldn’t afford a detached home, they’d still appreciate the feeling of a “gated community.”  Thanks to the wall, she and her mother had to walk for ¼ mile through the streets of their development, then through the so-called “gate,” and then ¼ mile back along the fast boulevard to the bus stop. 

The boulevard was built for speed, so the lanes were wide and the sidewalk was narrow.  Her mother would try to talk with her as they walked, but every time a car flew past they had to pause, their lives interrupted.  Soon, Mia learned to hold her breath briefly in those moments, so she wouldn’t get a lung full of exhaust.  Even so, it was dusty and hot in the summer, while in winter rains they’d be drenched by the mud kicked up by passing cars.  On this narrow sidewalk between the traffic and the wall there was nowhere to escape it.

Of course, that got them only to the stop for buses to the city.  Coming home, the bus would drop them on the opposite side of the boulevard.  There was no safe place to cross anywhere near the bus stop, so they simply had to run for it.  Trying to dash across the fast lanes, they felt like criminals, as though simply living their lives was illegal.

So when Mia was able to buy her own mobile home, she looked hard for one that would be better than that.  Realtors still pointed her toward “gated communities” of mobile homes.  Things had improved in these communities since she was a child; some of them now had little mini-bus services that wound their way through the twisting streets, so there was an alternative to walking out to the fast boulevard.  A realtor gave her a big pitch about how great these little buses were, with pictures of the plush interior and the cute paint scheme, but she just asked to see the timetable.  Sure enough, they were too slow and infrequent to be useful to her.  She needed to be close to a frequent transit stop, and it had to be safe to cross the street right at the stop, so that she could get to the stops on both sides. 

Obviously, she also wanted places she and her children could walk to, not just the little playground of their mobile home park but also a larger park nearby and a grocery store.  She liked the location of the grocery store next to the bus stop, so that she could buy fresh food for dinner on her commute home.  That’s why she chose this mobile home park over a number of others.

She also made sure that the bus line is likely to be there for a while.  She still remembers hearing, as a child, that she couldn’t go to see her best friend on Sundays anymore, because their Sunday bus service had been cut.  Fortunately, since then, the transit agency has identified certain lines as its “core frequent network,” where they, and the city governments, want to encourage the most intensive ridership.  That’s part of why her mobile home park, and the grocery store at her bus stop, were built where they are.  The Las Vegas economy is still prone to big crashes, so the transit system has to cut service now and then, but she knows that while there are no guarantees in life, the service she relies on is likely to survive, because so many people ride it.  

Mia’s life may never be as secure as she’d like, but she’s found a place that she can afford, where her children can grow up safely getting around on bicycles, and where her mobility feels as permanent and reliable as anything can be in this fast-changing city of illusions.

--

Kurt, 45, loves his cars.  He has two, both four-wheel drive, and his wife has another.  As a realtor, he likes his hybrid jeep for getting around to the suburban homes he sells, but he also has a big, rough, high-riding thing he calls Monster.  He talks about it as though it were his dog, and he takes a rebellious pride in its dreadful fuel-efficiency and 1990s styling.  Monster is his best friend when he gets up into the Rockies, especially off-road.  

Three years ago, Kurt took a year off work to build a house with his wife and two teenage sons. It’s on an acre of pine trees on a gravel road five miles from the nearest town, 40 miles from downtown Denver.  He feels a surge of pride every time he comes home to it.  Now and then, his eye will fall on a particular joint or beam and he’ll remember the day they set it in place, and how good that felt.  Just as important, he feels that the project solidified them as a family, and helped his boys learn focus and discipline.

There’s no transit anywhere nearby, but he wouldn’t expect there to be.  It was a hassle until his boys got drivers licenses; they always needed rides to the nearest bus stop, five miles away, or even to the nearest rapid transit station, 30 miles away.  But as they turned 16, he bought hybrid motorbikes for them.  Now they’re fine on their own.

Kurt’s life is not as expensive as it looks, at least not as measured in dollars.  Even with fuel at $10/gallon, the hybrid jeep is an efficient way to get around.  His workday involves many short trips in low-density suburbs (a market that transit could never serve well) so the jeep’s fuel is just part of the cost of doing business.  He spends a fortune on fuel for his weekend trips with Monster, but this is the family’s main recreational expense, and he’s budgeted for it.  As for his house, it would have been expensive to buy.  But by building it himself, he saved at least as much as he lost in salary during the year off.  So he feels he came out ahead. 

Kurt hates the city.  He drives his jeep into Denver now and then to visit his mother, who lives in a tower downtown.  She loves it there, but when they sit in the coffeeshop downstairs from her apartment, he’s always a little on edge with all the random bustle of strangers.  He also hates parking there, all that pointless circling in concrete parking structures.  His mother keeps telling him he could park at a light rail station and take the train in.  It doesn’t sound like fun to him, but his wife doesn’t mind doing it.  Maybe he’ll try it sometime. 

But really, he’d rather be driving Monster into the Rockies, with his boys, and some fishing rods, and the sky.

*

Helen, Mia, and Kurt are different people with different goals, situations, and resources -- but all are citizens of free democracies in the mid-21^st Century, societies built on the notion that adults should make free choices and accept their consequences. 

Kurt doesn’t expect the approval of transit experts like me, but I have no quarrel with him.  Like Helen and Mia, Kurt chose his living situation with a full awareness of what it would mean for transportation, as well as for other aspects of his family's life.  His choice imposes some burdens on the environment, but he pays prices – at the pump, certainly, but mostly in inconvenience – that capture the cost of those burdens.  He has no reason to feel guilty about his choices.

At times, as the 21st century unrolled, it seemed that freedom without guilt was a dying dream.  The crises bearing down on humanity seemed to be dragging everyone into embittered dependence on strangers.  So many problems needed complex solutions requiring lots of government action, while big corporations perfected the art of evading responsibility for their behavior.  Perhaps most depressing, it was becoming clear that no matter how free a citizen tried to be, how much responsibility she took for her own life, you could still run numbers that showed she was somehow subsidized, freeloading.  It made everyone suspicious.

But that last insight was the way out.  Eventually, a critical mass of people got  stopped getting angry when they were told they were being subsidized, and started asking “okay, how much?” 

The movement started in transportation, in cities.  People started figuring out that by sitting in traffic instead of getting where they were going, they were paying time to save money.  Why, they asked?  After all, money may not be abundant, but it’s a renewable resource.  Time is the least renewable resource of all.

So people started demanding the right to pay money to save time.  It started in the early 2000s with the London and Singapore congestion charges, and gradually spread to the idea that parking costs should rise and fall with demand, so that there would always be a free space, and you’d never drive in circles forever looking for one.  On the freeways, high-occupancy toll (HOT) lanes offered a faster ride at a higher price, calibrating the price carefully so that the traffic in the lane never got so heavy as to obstruct the buses using it.  Those buses were important, because they ensured that everyone had the freedom to move quickly along the highway, even if they didn’t want to pay the toll.

There was plenty of blowback.  Less wealthy people feared that they’d be left with abandoned infrastructure, much as, in the late 20^th century, they had been left with substandard schools.  Governments responded with market interventions to ensure that the housing market responded to low-income needs, not just through subsidies but also through good urban design.  For example, Las Vegas did the work of “sprawl repair” so that Mia could find a house she can afford that wouldn’t force her to depend on a car.  “Affordable housing” gave way to “affordable living.”  Governments and lenders no longer encourage poorer people to live in places where the housing is cheap because mobility is poor, and where they’ll feel trapped into owning a car that they can’t afford.  Instead, the whole mix of housing and transportation costs is considered before a home is deemed affordable.

There were fights and compromises.  But over time, enough people realized that accurate pricing was the only fair way to achieve both sustainability and freedom.  So the price of scarce things was allowed to rise.  Fuel got more expensive as oil supplies declined, which motivated the development of cleaner car technologies. 

Still, no innovation could change the scarcity of road space in cities, because that was a geometry problem.  Humanity had tried a supply-side solution, by building more sprawling cities, and had found that this just doesn't work.  By building more road space they had just motivated people to drive further.   Some still imagined that we could escape into the third dimension, via flying cars, but most people understood at once that it’s scary enough to have car accidents on the roads, without worrying about them happening over your head.

Once all this became widely obvious, things changed fast.  Work continued on big, expensive rapid transit lines, but work began, urgently, on transit options that could be developed faster and could spread quickly across big cities.  The Los Angeles Metro Rapid buses had been one such experiment, and though they became overextended and had to be cut back for a while, they helped usher in an era of innovation in street-running transit options and were now considered essential features of the boulevards that they plied.

Now, with more consensus, tools could be deployed to match the scale of the problem.  Suddenly, on-street transit lanes became common – in fact, they became the most reliable way to travel in many parts of big cities.  As more people cared about the quality of transit vehicles, those vehicles got better.  Bus and light rail technologies converged on a long, sleek, high capacity vehicle that could slide efficiently along a transit lane, carrying people beyond their walking distance without ever making them felt that they’d left the street. 

All this became possible, in part, because people started measuring their own mobility, and making choices that would improve it.  With tools inspired by the WalkScore.com and Mapnificent.net travel time maps from back in 2010, people began to see where they could get to easily, and where they couldn’t, and if they couldn’t, they asked why. 

As this happened, many people lost interest in symbols of mobility, such as rails in the street that symbolize permanence and airplane-like noses on streetcars that symbolize speed.  Instead, they began insisting that cities spend transit money on creating actual mobility – projects that would reduce their travel time to their jobs, their friends, and all the riches of the city.   Others continued to prefer to focus on the style, feel, and sense of fun in a transit service.  So there was a debate about those things, and compromises that suited the culture of each community.

These clear and bracing debates transformed the housing market, but not as much as some people feared.  Density is rising along major transit lines, for people who want high mobility, but away from those lines you can still get a little bungalow, or a big house with a pool on a quarter-acre, or even a house like Kurt’s in the woods, if you’re willing to accept the costs that come with each choice.  You can also get many things in between, like the transit-friendly mobile home where Mia lives.  Mia is what some transportation textbooks would call a captive rider, but she’s shown that even if you’re poor, your choices matter.

At every stage in this process, communities had to work, through government, on understanding their real choices.  Patiently, over and over, they were asked the same kind of question: “Do you want more of this, or more of that?  You have to choose.”  Planning professionals started focusing on making these “plumber’s questions” visible, so that everyone could see they were unavoidable, instead of letting them hide inside other debates.  Elected officials began to accept that they were paid to make these hard choices, after honest conversations with their constituents. 

The conversations were hard.  People wanted to hide from them.  But they had to happen.  The choices had to be made, so they were.  As a result, Helen, Mia, and Kurt are all free to make their own choices, and to bestow that same freedom on their children.

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.

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.  

 

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. 

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.

richard florida's supersized-airport theory

Richard Florida has discovered that as cities get bigger, airport traffic goes up even faster than population.  Here's his interpretation:

As with other features of metropolitan life, such as productivity or invention, airport passenger traffic increases disproportionately with population size. This is yet another manifestation of the overall acceleration of social and economic life that occurs in urban population centers—a phenomenon that has been dubbed “superlinear scaling.”

OK, but how much of this is what transport planners call the network effect?  Just as transit planners try to locate connection points at already-active locations, airlines are motivated to locate their hubs in major cities, so that the city and the hub support each other in creating the largest possible market for flights in and out.

For example, ask: what's the biggest US metro area that is NOT an airline hub?  Using this table  (and setting aside greater Riverside because its airport is run by Los Angeles) I get all the way down to San Diego, the 17th largest, before I encounter one where hub effects have little role in the airport's function.  So it doesn't surprise me that the scaling of big city airports is "superlinear" (a fancy word for "curving upward") compared to population, for the same reason that boardings at major transfer points in a transit network are superlinear compared to their immediate surroundings.

I could interpret this as a nice example of the very common tendency of people with social science training to overread demographics and economic indicators, while underreading the effects of network structure and how it determines the actual utility of transport service.  This issue comes up in transit all the time. 

But another interpretation, more to Mr. Florida's liking, would be that the connection in a transport network is not really all that different from the social connections that occur in urban life.  Florida is famous for documenting how all these connections rise in non-linear ways as there are more people around to connect, thus leading to hotspots of creativity and innovation. 

When I suggest that transit agencies use the word connection, instead of the dreary word transfer, it is to invoke exactly this association.  A transport connection isn't just an analogy with the social, cultural, and intellectual connections that drive innovation.  In its multiplying power it's almost the same thing.