Human Transit

branding individual routes: too many colors, or the gold standard of legibility?

 

What might we learn from this bus? (click to enlarge)

 

Inner Link is one of four Auckland bus lines -- all very frequent and designed to be useful for a wide range of trips -- that have buses painted specifically for the purpose.  The other three are Outer Link (orange), City Link (red), and Northern Express (black).  In each case, the paint job is all about making it look easy to hop on.  Note that the bus assures you of the maximum fare you'll pay, and that the list of destinations along the top of the bus gives confidence about exactly where this bus will take you.  (For an Aucklander, these names are all familiar landmarks, so anyone can mentally string them together into a general sense of route.)  

It's important, too, that this is one of Auckland's newer buses.  The big, clear windows are important.  In fact, if it weren't for the maddening bus wrap, this bus would be entirely transparent, so that you could see the people on board and even make out the city beyond it.  This bus arises from European designs that are intentionally gentle on the eye, and whose transparency starts to undermine complaints about a "wall of buses."

When I first saw the branding of these buses in Auckland, I found them irritating.  These buses were announcing simple, legible, frequent routes in a way that marketed them effectively enough, but did nothing to convey that they are part of a larger network of services designed to work together.  Of course, the reality of today's network in Auckland (unlike the one Auckland Transport has in the works) is that it is a confusing tangle of infrequent and overlapping services that is almost impossible to make clear.  [PDF]  

In the context of all that chaos, you needed these strong route-level brands like Inner Link to stand out as something useful.   And now that we plan to create over 20 bus routes that are as clear and legible as this one, the question arises, should we continue to brand them this way, each one separately, perhaps in a lively diversity of colors from goldenrod to teal?

Compare this to what Los Angeles Metro did, dividing its fleet of 1000+ buses mostly into just two colors, red for Rapid and orange for Local.  This has helped everyone see the faster Metro Rapid buses, but how much more might be achieved if you could paint a bus with both icons and information that would celebrate its role as, say, the Venice Blvd. Rapid?

The marketing and legibility question, of course is:  Would the diversity of looks (perhaps in the context of shared design elements that mean "Rapid") make the system look simpler or more complicated?  In Los Angeles I'm not sure.  In Auckland, where the system as a whole could hardly look more complicated than it does today, the call seems easier.  

The issue for operations is the risk of fleet diversity.  In almost any transit agency, the operations folks will tell you they need maximum flexibility to deploy any bus on any route.  In some big-city agencies I've worked with, operating bases ("depots" in British) store buses in long stacks, where buses can be sent out only in the sequence that they came in the previous night.  Every new factor of fleet specialization becomes a new threat to getting the right bus on the right route every morning -- an admittedly heroic effort if you've toured some of the grimmer, overcrowded facilities involved.

So a separate color for every route would be a non-starter in most of North America.  Yet if we designed operating bases so that you could access any bus, or even could just have much shorter stacks, it's not obviously outrageous.  For each route, you'd paint enough buses to run just 80-100% of the midday fleet requirement.  You'd never have more painted buses than you could use.  You'd also have a supply of generic buses that could be added to any route, either as replacements for buses in the shop or as supplemental peak service.  And you'd only do this for routes with high all-day frequency seven days a week and relatively little additional service added at peaks.

In certain contexts -- especially in a case like Auckland where the whole city must learn a new story about the usefulness of buses -- it might make sense.  Even if we end up with goldenrod and teal.

auckland: how network redesign can transform a city's possibilities

When a public transport network has grown cumulatively over decades, but has never been reviewed from the ground up, it can contain an enormous amount of waste.  Careful redesign is the key to unlocking that waste and generating vast new public transport mobility.  Our new plan for Auckland, New Zealand, now open for public comment, is a dramatic example of what can be achieved.  ("Our" because I led the intensive network design work, with a great team of planners from Auckland Transport and my colleagues from MRCagney.)

If you want to get around Auckland at any time of day, on a service that's coming soon, here's where you can go on today's network (or more precisely, a "business as usual" network extended to 2016)

Under the proposed plan, which costs no more to operate than the existing one, here's where you'd be able to go, at any time of day, on service that's coming soon.

The network still includes coverage to all corners of the city that are covered now, and ensures plenty of capacity for peak commuters into the city.  But meanwhile, it defines an extensive network of high frequency services around which future urban growth can organize to ensure that over time, more and more of the city finds public transport convenient.

What's the catch?  Only the geometrically inevitable one: more people will have to make connections from one service to another, and the fare system will need to encourage rather than penalise that.  

Whenever someone tells you that it's too expensive or hard to encourage people to make connections, ask them how expensive it is to run the only the first network above while spending enough money to run the second.  Networks that are designed to prevent transferring must run massive volumes of half-empty and quarter-empty buses and still have trouble delivering frequencies that make the service worth waiting for.  The waste involved can be colossal, as you can see from the amount of service we were able to redeploy in more useful ways with this redesign.

To see a bit of the structure clearer (and also because it's a cool graphic), here's the central slice of the drawing of the proposed frequent network, by my MRCagney colleague Nicolas Reid.  It's currently all over the media in Auckland, helping people assess the plan.  By streamlining it calls attention to the logic to the network -- a logic that's sometimes easy to lose track of when following the details of every right and left.  Look at the whole thing.

I'm very proud of what our team achieved working with the excellent folks at Auckland Transport, and I hope the plan will be further improved as a result of public feedback, as good plans always are.  But as Aucklanders begin discussing the plan, I hope they stay focused on the core question:  Are you willing to get off one vehicle and onto another, with a short wait at a civilised facility, if this is the key to vastly expanding your public transport network without raising its subsidy?  

That is the real question before Auckland now.  The rest is details.

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.

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?

how do you compare to your peers? should you care?

Admit it:  You've always cared, at least in secret, about how you compare to your peers: your friends, your fellow students, your graduating class, your co-workers, your generation.  Well, deep down, transit authorities and city governments care too, which is why comparing a city to other similar cities always gets attention.

Sometimes peer comparisons cause complacency, especially if you choose the wrong peers.  Wellington has the highest transit mode share in New Zealand, but in a country with only one other big, dense city, that obviously shouldn't imply that it's reached nirvana.  Working in greater Vancouver I always have to emphasize that they are doing so well by North American standards that they have to start comparing themselves to European port cities in their size class (Glasgow, Edinburgh, Copenhagen, Helsinki, Marseilles).  My general advice: If your peer comparison says you're wonderful, throw a party and revel in this for 48 hours, then look for a more motivating group of peers. 

At the other extreme, nothing is more motivating than being told that you're dead last among your peers.  Earlier this year I worked (through my Australian employer MRCagney under the leadership of Ian Wallis Associates) on a peer comparison study for Auckland, New Zealand, which compared Auckland's transit performance with all the five biggest Australian cities plus a selection of North American ones.  Download the full report here.  Remember, if you're in any of the peer cities that it uses (Wellington, Brisbane, Perth, Adelaide, Sydney, Melbourne, Edmonton, Ottawa, Calgary, Vancouver, Honolulu, Portland, Seattle) this is your peer study too!  Just keep the tables and refocus the text (citing the source of course!).

More generally, the report is a good illustration of how peer comparison can work at its best, and also of the cautions that must be shouted from the sidelines once the conclusions take fire in the media, as they certainly have in Auckland.  From yesterday's New Zealand Herald:

Consultants have ranked Auckland last out of 14 cities - in New Zealand, Australia, Canada and the United States - included in a benchmark study for the average number of public transport trips taken annually by its residents.

Aucklanders also pay the highest fares of any of the cities, amounting to 24c for every kilometre travelled on the average 44 public transport trips they take each year, compared with 17c in Wellington.

The rest of the article is further grim statistics, plus quotations from political leaders demanding that something be done. 

I'm  sympathetic to Auckland Transport in this case.  Remember, a city's transit performance is mostly about the physical layout of the city and the constraints on other modes; the quality of the transit system by itself can't overcome problems in those areas.  The nature of the economy also matters.  Wellington is much smaller but it has much more severe chokepoints in its urban structure.  In fact, all travel between the northern and southern parts of the city must go through a single chokepoint less than 1 km wide, which is also the (very dense) downtown.  Wellington's economy is dominated by government, which is generally a sector disposed to use transit heavily. All of these features are hugely important in driving Wellington's mode share above Auckland's, and yet they don't include anything about the respective quality of the transit systems. 

Peer comparisons also carry the false assumption that everyone wants to be the same kind of city, and is therefore working to the same kind of goals.  (This attitude, taken to extreme, produces the absurdity of top ten "best cities for transit" lists.)  Low mode share for transit may mean your transit system is failing, but it may mean that it's not trying for mode share, or at least that it has other objectives or constraints that prevent it from focusing on that goal.  It may just mean that your city has different values.  It may mean the city stikes a different balance between cycling, transit, and walking based on its own geography.

Still, service quality matters, and there's a lot that Auckland can do.  I hope the city's opinion leaders are listening to Auckland Transport as well as berating it, so that they understand the real choices that must be made to move Auckland forward.  If there's a real conversation, great things can be accomplished. 

watching our words: congestion charge or price or (shudder) tax

There seems to be a flurry of new interest in congestion pricing, partly under the pressure of tight budgets almost everywhere.  But journalists can muddy the waters by describing congestion pricing as either exploitative or punitive.

Last month, I was invited to contribute to a Sydney Morning Herald thinkpiece on the subject.  My contribution, the second of four pieces here, emphasises that congestion pricing is not about paying for congestion, it's about paying to avoid congestion.  The core point:

Suppose you announce that you'll give away free concert tickets to the first 500 people in a queue. You'll get a queue of 500 people. These people are paying time to save money.

Other people will just buy a ticket and avoid the queue. They're choosing to pay money to save time.

Today, we require all motorists to wait in the queue. When stuck in congestion, we are paying for the road space in time rather than in money.

Shouldn't we have a choice about this? Why are we required to save money, a renewable resource, by spending time, the least renewable resource of all?

Unfortunately, the Sydney Morning Herald framed the whole piece with the question, "Should motorists pay for the congestion they cause?"    The implication is that congestion pricing is punitive, that some citizens believe that other citizens should be punished for their behavior.  The question seems designed to sow misunderstanding and inflame rage.  To their credit, none of the four expert responses -- even the one from the auto club opposing the congestion charge -- really took this bait.

So there's a problem with the terms congestion charge and congestion price.  The terms sound like "paying for congestion," when the truth is the opposite, we're being invited to choose whether to spend money to avoid congestion.  A more accurate term would be congestion avoidance price or even better, congestion avoidance option.  But those are too many words. 

Should we call it a decongestion price? 

Real congestion pricing is about giving free and responsible adults a set of options that reflect the real-world geometry of cities.  The core geometry problem is this:

• Cities are, by definition, places where lots of people are close together.
• Cities are therefore, by defintion, places with relatively little space per person.
• Your car takes 50-100 times as much space as your body does.
• Therefore, people in cars consume vastly more of the scarce resource, urban space, than the same people without their cars -- for example, as pedestrians or public transit riders. 
• When people choose whether to drive, they're choosing how much scarce urban space to consume.
• If urban space is to be used like any other scarce resource, its price needs to be deregulated so that it is used efficiently. 

Congestion pricing is a form of deregulation.  It is the most libertarian concept imaginable.

There's another way to mess this up, and that's the term "congestion tax."  Here's the New Zealand Herald: 

Aucklanders may be levied to drive through increasingly congested streets in the absence of Government funding of the region's "strategic aspirations".

A paper released by Local Government Minister Rodney Hide before Auckland's first spatial plan due out in 11 days suggests raising revenue by charging motorists to drive around the Super City at peak times.

Hide makes clear that this isn't a congestion price intended to reduce congestion.  It's just another tax, intended to raise revenue.  So just to be clear: If it's congestion pricing, there are public transit (and bike-ped, and casual carpool) alternatives that enable people to get where they're going.  The congestion price cordons on the CBDs of London and Singapore work because there's abundant public transit to those places, so relatively few people absolutely have to drive into them.  The San Francisco Bay Bridge tolls have a congestion-pricing value because there's both abundant transit and casual carpool options for avoiding them. 

If, on the other hand, you're in a place where there's no reasonable alternative to driving -- such as large parts of Auckland -- then anything  that suppresses driving will suppress travel, and that means it will suppress economic activity.  And if you're just taxing economic activity, then this is really no different from sales taxes, Goods and Services Taxes (GST), or income taxes. By taxing economic activity, you're suppressing something that government and society should be encouraging.  That's not a libertarian idea; quite the opposite.

tadpoles of new zealand: an auckland transit animation

There's a lot of potential for animation of Google Transit data, and we're just starting to see it explored.  Some results will be rich with information, differentiating various kinds of service so that you can see how they dance together.  Chris McDowall's animation of a day's transit in Auckland is less informative but correspondingly more meditative.  Buses, trains and ferries are all rendered as earnest little tadpoles (or comets, or sperm, or viruses, depending on your sense of scale).

(An animated map of Auckland's public transport network from Chris McDowall on Vimeo.)

It nicely illustrates the point that frequency is what makes a route into a line.  The line that goes really solid during the peak is the Northern Busway, which is far more frequent than any of Auckland's rail lines. 

UPDATE:  Commenter "numbat" points out that on the island at the east edge of the image (Waiheke Island) you can see local island buses pulsing with ferries that link the island to Auckland's CBD.

auckland: high-end median busway proposed for eastern suburbs

Auckland Transport is recommending the higher-end median busway solution for a difficult suburban arterial corridor that we studied for them last year.  (The corridor extends from Panmure rail station through Pakuranga to Botany via Pakuranga and Ti Rakau Roads.)  It would be the main radial rapid transit corridor for Auckland's far eastern suburbs.

When you're looking at fitting some sort of "Bus Rapid Transit" (BRT) into a suburban arterial, the question of median vs side lanes is bigger than it sounds.  It largely determines the scale, prominence, and apparent permanence of the project. 

Putting BRT in the median is the high-risk, high-benefit, high-impact choice.  A median BRT solution looks and feels like a separated busway, and its dedicated median station infrastructure makes the service look both prominent and permanent.  It obstructs a lot of turning movements that motorists are used to, and is generally harder to compromise. 

On the other hand, putting a bus lane on the side, as Seattle's new Rapid Ride Line A does, delivers a more compromised outcome that has much less impact on car circulation.  Stops on the side risk looking like any bus stop, so unless you make a very strong statement with the station architecture, the service may not look like permanent infrastructure.  A side lane is also generally shared with cars turning into and out of the street on that side, which is often a source of roughness and can mean significant delay at major intersections.

That's not to critique the Seattle-area examples, which are designed to a different scale.  But I  congratuate Auckland Transport for going out to the public with the more ambitious option, and thus triggering a real and enlightening debate. 

(Commenters:  Note that I'm speaking to both left-hand-drive and right-hand-drive countries with this post, and thus avoiding all references to left and right!  I challenge you to maintain similar neutrality.) 

Photo: Rendering of median bus lane option, presumably by Auckland Transport, via New Zealand Herald.

request for information: canadian ridership (updated)

Some colleagues and I have lately had occasion to compare public transit performance in young metro areas of 1-3 million, across North America and Australasia, and we've been turning up draft charts like this one (click to enlarge):

The x-axis is population, the y-axis is public transit trips per capita, per annum.  The red triangles are the Australian cities: Adelaide, Perth, Brisbane, Melbourne, and Sydney.  The purple circles are US cities: Honolulu, Portland, and Seattle.  The blue dots are Wellington and Auckland in New Zealand. 

But we're especially struck by the green dots, which represent Canada.  The four dots are Ottawa, Edmonton, Calgary and Vancouver, and all are at the top of this heap despite relatively low populations.  Even tiny Edmonton and Calgary are outperforming all the other cities studied, including Sydney and Melbourne. 

I've been asked to write a few paragraphs about why Canada's cities do so much better than very similar cities in the US or Australia/NZ.  I have my own speculations, but anyone with references or insights on this, please comment! 

UPDATE:  The consultant in charge of this project has reviewed the comments so far (Oct 8 0900 Sydney time) and observes:

 

Some rapid comments, having skimmed through the blog responses:

• Area boundaries. Always a problem. We have tried to cover the whole metro service areas in each case.  For SYD, this has meant including Newcastle and Wollongong etc, given the CityRail services extend to these areas. Similarly we have included Gold Coast and Sunshine Coast in the Brisbane figures.
  
  
• ** Linked v unlinked v return trips.  I doubt if this is a problem—we have aimed for unlinked trips (boardings) in all cases.
• ** Densities may well be one of the explanators of the differences, and we have estimates of these for the  North American metro areas (but not the Aus/NZ areas. I am reluctant to pursue these in more detail—as you well know, this is a minefield.

The whole topic would be good for a PhD—why has no done it already??

Good question!  More on this topic here!

postcard: auckland

Greetings from New Zealand's largest city, the focal point of an agrarian nation's ambivalence about urban life.  If you're a young North American who wonders what Seattle was like 40 years ago when I was a tyke -- before Microsoft, Amazon, and Starbucks -- Auckland's your answer.   To a visitor accustomed to North American or European levels of civic vanity, it often seems that Auckland still doesn't know how beautiful it is.  That's always an attractive feature, in cities as in people, even though (or perhaps because) it can't possibly last.

Like Seattle, Auckland occupies a spectacular hilly ithsmus, a landscape that constantly reveals surprising water views.  But unlike Seattle or San Francisco, Auckland has resisted the temptation to build on its hilltops, so the barriers to cycling and walking are relatively moderate given such scenic terrain. 

The bright green hills that dot the city, almost all protected as parks, are volcanic cones, remnants of various eruptions from the active lava fields below.  On most of the Pacific's ring of fire, we are advised to worry about specific, well-identified mountains that might erupt.  Auckland, by contrast, could erupt pretty much anywhere.  Rangitoto Island (pictured), a dramatically symmetrical cone rising out of the harbour, is less than 1000 years old, and there's no predicting where the volcanic field will punch the next Rangitoto, or when.

Perhaps because the landscape is so unpredictable, New Zealand political and economic life seems often to err on the side of serenity.  There is noticeably less turbulence and rage in political debates than you'll find in North America or even in Australia, as New Zealand parties compete mostly for a broad and pragmatic centre of opinion. 

The economy is never spectacular but never devastated either; the relative absence of huge boom-and-bust cycles has spared Auckland the ravages of what Jane Jacobs called "cataclysmic money," historical moments (such as the 1950-60s in America) when there is so much money to build things that a city is transformed too fast, too heedlessly, without time to notice the side-effects.  So you can still find the complex layering of different periods, and different levels and types of prosperity, that are essential to an interesting urban environment.

Transit?  Primitive if you compare it directly to Seattle or Vancouver or Brisbane or Perth, let alone to a European peer.  UK-style privatisation means that a tangle of private bus companies charge incompatible fares.  A historic commuter train network still runs diesel trains at poor off-peak frequencies.  But at dinner last night with some Auckland transport friends -- including Joshua Arbury, who manages the very thoughtful Auckland Transport Blog -- the consensus seemed to be that the basic ideological battle in favor of public transit has been won, even if many of its fruits are not yet visible on the ground.

But there have certainly been some triumphs:  The Northern Busway, designed in emulation of Brisbane's high-end busway network, is helping to organize land use and transit planning on the North Shore, and extensions of it are planned.  Electrication of the rail network, which will modernise the trains and make more frequent service viable, is funded and moving ahead.  Planning of the bus network is gradually being centralized.

The most remarkable transformation now underway -- about which all the Aucklanders I know are a bit ambivalent -- is the consolidation of the entire urban area, and its inner ring of surrounding rural districts -- into a single enormous City of Auckland.  Such a step is barely imaginable in Australia and inconceivable in most North American contexts.  The Royal Commission that designed the scheme studied many cities worldwide, and finally resolved that the single, strong mayor and council -- modelled most effectively by London -- was the thing Auckland needed.   This means that a range of existing regional agencies are about to turn into city departments.  Auckland Regional Transport Authority, for example, will be submerged into the transport bureaucracy of the new city, while Auckland Regional Council will disappear into the city's (land use) planning department.  Nobody is quite sure whether it will work, but the die is cast, and the results will be an important study for similar consolidation efforts anywhere else in the developed world.

So anyway.  Hello from Auckland.  Like Seattle and Vancouver, it's often chilly, gloomy and wet, but if you peer under the low cloud cover, there's a lot going on.