Human Transit

london's northern headache

Commenter David M on what rivers teach about transit:

It's interesting to note that in London the newest Underground lines have no branches (Victoria, Jubilee). In fact, when Jubilee was originally opened it took over one of the Bakerloo Lines branches, reducing the Bakerloo to a branchless line also.

For real complications, look at Camden Town [top center] on the Northern Line [black on this classic map] in London, England. Just south of this station is a complex deep underground junction that lets trains from any two of the branches south of Camden to simultaneously run on any two of the branches to the north. It is a marvel of engineering, but it is also an operational nightmare with trains run from any branch to any branch - one train runs late and it can cause problems on all of the branches.

London has wanted to simplify the operations by spliting the line into two and requiring an interchange at Camden Town. There are four platforms at Camden Town but the interchange passages are insufficient to handle the expected interchange traffic - so for now, it is cheaper to suck it up and deal with the operational issues.

There is an interesting effect of this interchange. Going south, both branches serve Euston Station before heading off to cross London on two different lines serving different areas of the core. You can get on one train at Camden, stop at Mornington Crescent and at Euston. You could get on the following train at Camden and arrive at Euston without passing through Mornington Crescent. The reason is that Mornington Crescent is on only one of the two branches, the other just bypasses the station. It makes for fun time when trying to get to Mornington Crescent.

The other night a Sydney rail expert was telling me that when the North West line is built, creating a four-way junction at Epping similar to the one at Camden Town, they will spend a number extra millions on the tunnelling to create the ability to route trains from any segment to any other.  A similar decision has already been made about a similar junction at Glenfield in Sydney's southwest.  I wonder how much could be saved if we let lines cross without connecting track, and required connections, where that pattern makes sense as part of a larger grid.  It's not the right answer everywhere, certainly, but it sounds like London transit experts aren't very appreciative of all the flexibility that their great-grandparents gave them with the design of the Northern Line.

online "map movies": useful?

Can animation help people understand their transit options?  The Rotherham Metro Borough Council in the UK has done some simple "map movies" that highlight the paths followed by buses and trains.  Here's a still:

Watch the actual animation here.

As they stand, they're limited in usefulness, as the icons move along the routes with no indication of frequency.  They certainly do advertise complexity, which is accurate; this looks like a very complicated network.

But it's easy to imagine taking this to the next step, showing by animation the scheduled paths of all the services in a transit system.  This would be especially helpful in helping citizens understand pulse systems, where the integrated scheduling pattern is an essential part of how the network gets you where your going.  Now that I think of it, I'm pretty sure this has been done, but I've never seen it on a public information website, which is the obvious next step.

the connection-count test

As I look at the new metros being built in the developing world, I'm noticing some striking connection-count problems.  Consider Delhi, a city I know a bit:

The full Delhi Metro network map is here, but this slice is the only part of the system where lines connect with one another. 

What's wrong with this picture?  Well, suppose you want to go from Shivaji Park, on the green line in the upper left of the image, to Khan Market, in the lower right.  That's right: three connections.

Developing a new metro in a crowded city is always an exercise in compromise, but I'm struck by how often one of the first compromises is network integrity, easily measured in the reasonableness of the number of connections required. 

In an idealised grid network, the maximum number of connections for almost any trip is one.  Plenty of real-world networks require two connections for a range of trips between secondary stations.  But requiring three is pretty remarkable. 

basics: some tools for small cities

Early in my career, I did a number of network designs for free-standing small cities in the American West.  These cities, say populations of 30,000-100,000, tend to have a similar set of problems and opportunities, and could probably benefit from a little more theoretical focus.  The same issues arise in most of these cities across North America, Australia, and New Zealand, including:

• Low traffic congestion, which makes it possible to offer a reliable operation built around pulses.
• A tendency for destinations important to public transit to be scattered all over the city, often in response to low land value, thus creating an "everywhere-to-everywhere" demand pattern.
• A predominantly "social service" justification for the network, as opposed to a vehicle-trip-reduction justification, though the latter can arise in cities heavily influenced by universities.

You can see almost all of the issues, and the approach I usually recommend, in Great Falls, Montana.  I led a study that refined the current network in a study for Great Falls Transit in the late 1990s.  Recently, local commenter Kathy called my attention to their network map, and it was interesting to discover that it's hardly changed since I worked on it.  (As always, click graphics to enlarge.)

It's a network of routes mostly running every 30 or 60 minutes.  The central idea of the network is the pulse, a meeting of buses from each route every hour or half hour at a central point, so that you can connect from any bus to any other even though the frequency is poor.  Geometrically, there is no other solution to the problem of connections in low frequency everywhere-to-everywhere networks.  It's routine in small cities across North America.

In Great Falls, the pulse occurs at a downtown transit center which is also, very usefully, the station for intercity buses.  However, the design also provides for an outer pulse point at the far east end.  Most pulse networks create these opportunities, but not all take advantage of them. 

In Great Falls, the ideal would be that Routes 1, 2, 3 and 4, which all cross near the east edge of the city, should make a timed connection there as well.  After all, if the buses are all at the downtown end at the same time, they will tend to be at their outer end at the same time, too, so you should also be able to do a pulse there as well.  If Routes 1, 2, 3, and 4 all had exactly the same running time, this would work perfectly.

It doesn't quite work in Great Falls, because the lengths of the route are too unequal.  We tried to make it work, but ultimately, Route 1 was just too much longer for the others, so to get all the buses to downtown at the same time, Route 1 has to leave the east end before the others arrive.  Note that their map has a warning, near the east end of Route 1, that you cannot make a timed connection there.  Connections among 2, 3, and 4 are possible. 

Another trick I often use is the through-routing at the ends of lines, signified by the little boxes that say things like "5 becomes 6, 6 becomes 5."  This is both a network design strategy and a legibility strategy. 

Operationally, Route 5 and 6 buses aren't going back and forth on individual routes.  Instead, they are operating continuous two-way loops: the bus that goes out of downtown as 5 comes back as 6, then back out as 5, then back in as 6, etc.  Another bus is doing the opposite.

So why do we number the routes as we do?  Why don't we describe them as they are: a clockwise loop and a counter-clockwise loop?  Because on balance, that would be more complexity.  If most people are travelling two-way into or out of the city, why tell them that they need Route 5 to go out and Route 6 to go in, and why clutter the map with overlapping loops and piles of one-way arrows?  It's just simpler to present them as two way routes, then provide the note, for the benefit of the relatively few people who may find it useful, that you can ride through from one route onto the other.

Because of the nomenclature system, every single route segment in the Great Falls network is presented to the customer as two-way, with the trivial exception of pairs of adjacent one-way streets.  This is quite an achievement if you compare this network to many networks in similar-sized towns, which often present dizzying tangles of overlapping one-way loops.  Here, for example, is a bit of the network in Wodonga, Victoria, Australia (PDF of full map).  Compared to the Great Falls map above, how welcoming does this network look to you? 

One-way loops mean that the way you get from A to B is different from the way you get from B to A, and may be much longer or shorter.  My insistence on presenting two-way services, as much as possible, is about offering a transit system that's as legible as the street system, so that people find it welcoming not just for the trip they make every day, but for any new trip they may want to try.

I take pride in having designed the underlying structure a several small-city networks in the American west that are still running a decade or more later, including those of Chico, California (PDF, now part of Butte Regional Transit); Corvallis, Oregon (PDF); and Klamath Falls, Oregon.  You'll see some the same techniques at work in those network structures.  If your local small-city transit system needs unscrambling, send them a link to this post, and encourage them to contact me!

 

email of the week: dept. of blindingly obvious ideas

From a frequent commenter:

I was thinking about transit websites, and I had a thought that struck me with how blindingly obvious it is, and I'm surprised for some reason I don't think I've seen any transit agency do this before. On the main timetable page, they will generally have a menu to let you pick a route, and give you the timetable and map for that route. But those are leaf pages, they don't link to anything other than back to the menu. My thought is, the web is all about links, so why not make the structure of the timetable pages reflect that of the route network, and for any route to which there's a transfer, provide a link to that route's timetable right there on the page? With fancy web design, I'm sure even more elaborate things can be made, like letting you see what transfers you can make for a particular run of a route.  But in general, this seems like one of those things that can greatly enhance the public's understanding of how the transit network works, and I'm surprised that I don't recall seeing this anywhere before.

If you know of a transit agency that does this, please comment with a link to a sample timetable page!

basics: finding your pulse

Quiz: When is service every 20 minutes worse than service every 30 minutes?

Answer: When it relies on a pulse, or what Americans usually call timed transfer, with routes that run every 30.

A pulse is a regularly scheduled event, usually happening at the same time each hour, in which transit vehicles from a range of routes -- usually running every 30 or 60 minutes -- are scheduled to all meet together.  A group of hourly local routes, for example, might all come to the pulse point between :22 and :25 after the hour and leave at :30. That way, nobody has to wait more than 8 minutes for a connection even though the services in question are hourly.  Here's a rough diagram of a half-hourly pulse pattern, by Ross Maxwell.¹  (The original, slightly sharper, is on p129 here.)

Often, pulses are organized around a main transit line, such as a trunk bus or rail line that takes you to a nearby larger city.  In these cases, the main line vehicle usually doesn't dwell as the local buses do, since it's the most crowded service and hence the most speed-sensitive.   Instead, the locals arrive a few minutes before the trunk passes through, and leave a couple of minutes after.

Pulses are the only way to provide connection wait times that are much, much better than the frequency of the services involved.  A pure pulse is also equally convenient for connections between any pair of lines, and thus for travel in any direction. 

For this reason they are used universally, in North America, in small-city networks where frequencies are low, and often also in suburban areas of large cities.  If you're in a North American suburb or small city and see a large number of buses hanging out together on a streetcorner, you're probably watching a pulse.  The sight can vaguely humanizing; for a moment it looks as though these big obtrusive vehicles are people too, with human needs for social interaction every hour or so.

In Australia, by contrast, the prevailing operating habit is to scrupulously separate operating time from driver break time.  Drivers often dislike having their time at a pulse point counted as their personal break time, because throughout the pulse event they are mixing with customers, being asked questions, etc.  So in Australia, it's more common for buses to arrive at the pulse point at, say, :22, drive onward to a separate layover point where the drivers can take their breaks away from customers, then drive back through the pulse point at, say, :30. 

But frankly, Australian public transport authorites, especially those responsible for small cities and outer suburbs, seem reluctant to embrace pulses for reasons I don't entirely understand.  And even in North America, agencies that rely on pulse scheduling prefer not to advertise it.  You may have to explore several timetables and compare them to each other in order to discover that pulse scheduling is in place.

I was introduced to pulse scheduling in Portland at a tender age.  I was a teenage transit geek, and then an undergraduate working part time at TriMet, the transit agency.  This happened to be the period (1979-85) when the lattice of suburban pulse networks was being constructed. 

We spent a lot of time thinking about how the pulses interact with each other.  For example, if you have a pulse of buses at Beaverton Transit Center at :05 and :35 past the hour, and one route goes from Beaverton to Sunset Transit Center in 12-14 minutes, how do you schedule the Sunset pulse?  Do you set it at :20 and :40, so that this connecting route can serve both pulses but with just a few minutes to spare?  When this route is late, a lot of connections will be missed, and a lot of people stranded.  Or do we just set the Sunset pulse at :05 and :35, so that the bus linking the two transit centers has lots of spare time but now has too much time to kill and will tend to arrive inconveniently early for one pulse or the other.  Or do we just accept that this line isn't going to hit one or the other of the pulses precisely?

To do pulse scheduling, we have to plan the pulse schedule as we're designing the network.  In the two-pulse problem I outlined above, we will think hard about the line connecting the two pulses and to ask if we can either make it a little shorter (so that it will get there more reliably in 15 minutes) or a little longer (so that it will get there in 30 minutes without so much time to spare).  I have designed some large networks with multiple pulse points, all designed to work harmoniously.  To do that, I've always designed lines between pulse points with the specific goal of making them a certain length.

Pulse scheduling can often affect the schedules of a trunk line too, especially when that trunk line isn't extremely frequent.  Even a 15-minute frequency on the trunk line (which is the all-day standard for most North American light rail, for example) may require adjusting the trunk schedule to better fit the pulse.  In particular, if a pulse that happens between :20 and :30 after the hour is partway along a trunk rather than at the end, and if the intention is all-way connectivity, that means that both directions of the trunk need to pass through the pulse point at around :25; in other words, a complete pulse requires that oncoming trunk-line vehicles be at the pulse point at or near the same time.  This is why pulsing is especially hard if the trunk line and local services are run by different agencies or operators. 

In any case, pulse scheduling requires an intimate two-way conversation between the planning and scheduling tasks.  In agencies where the drivers' union is legally entitled to sign off on scheduled running times, they have to be involved as well, because a disagreement over 4 minutes of running time can determine whether the whole structure works or fails. 

Transit agencies that are not set up to have this conversation, or that locate planning and scheduling too far apart organizationally, become structurally incapable of noticing and exploiting pulse opportunities.  In other cases, pulses may simply not be the prevailing habit, and there may be nobody around who is in the position to suggest them.

The organizational challenge presented by pulsing is, to me, a positive feature of the concept.  Better integration of planning, scheduling, and operations management has many benefits, and if the pulse challenge helps motivate an agency to get there, so much the better. 

But pulse scheduling does have some practical limitations.  In particular, it struggles in any environment where the running times are prone to vary a great deal. 

Pulses are about managing a low-frequency network, so they aren't generally needed in inner cities  Pulses are almost universal in small-city design in North America, because most such cities have little traffic congestion and can therefore run a pulse reliably.  The best big-city agencies also do some kind of pulse late at night, when their services are very infrequent.  For example, this map of all night service by San Francisco MTA uses little black circles to highlight points where the lines make timed connections with each other, even though they're running only every 30 minutes.  Note the complexity of the scheduling task implied by multiple timed connections along the same line; it's an impressive commtiment.

But in the suburban areas of big cities, running times vary due to traffic congestion, and pulse operations struggle.  I vividly recall the moment in about 1983 when Tri-Met decided to let its pattern of half-hourly Beaverton-area pulses slip to a 40-minute pattern during peak hours, because they simply could not guarantee travel times in peak traffic.  TriMet continues to attempt pulse operations because there is simply no other way to serve the multi-directional demand pattern of the modern suburbs, especially where many people work in widely scattered business parks.  I suspect that the difficulty of guaranteeing pulses in these settings is the main reason that big suburban agencies are reluctant to advertise their pulsing too much.  Small-city agencies, which don't deal with such severe congestion, are more likely to emphasise that at the heart of their network, they have a pulse.

A lattice of interconnected pulse points, all beating as planned in unison or alternation in a pattern that repeats each hour, is a thing of beauty if you can visualize it, especially because if the motion of pulsing suggests the movement of blood through the heart.  It's like watching the inner life a large multi-hearted organism, and this can be a nice metaphor for other kinds of thinking about your city.

Illustrators!  Can you think of how to do better black-and-white illustrations of the ideas in this post, as part of this challenge?  If so, go for it!

¹ Ross R. Maxwell, "Converting a Large Region to a Pulsed-Hub Public Transport Network."  Transportation Research Record, paper 03-4020, p 128.  Original paper here.  

connections vs complexity

In my first "basics" post on connections, I explained why a network that requires connections (or as North Americans call them, "transfers") can actually get people where they're going faster than a network that tries to avoid them.

But there's another important reason to plan for connections rather than direct service, one that should be important to anyone who wants transit to be broadly relevant to urban life: Unless you welcome and encourage connections, your network will become very, very complex.

If a transit system is too complex for people to learn, it can't be used spontaneously, and if you can't use transit spontaneously, then transit is reduced to a very limited role in urban life, serving only trips that people make regularly and can therefore learn how to make even in a complex system.

In presentations on this point, I often compare a network based on connections -- such as that of Los Angeles -- with a network based on fear of them -- such as the inner network in Sydney. Here are more or less comparable slices of the two networks, each image about 8 km wide and 3 km high. Both lie just south of the CBD of each city, so you can see routes converging toward the CBD on the north edge of the map.

Los Angeles:

Sydney:

Network maps drawn by transit agencies are often hard to compare, because each is full of details and conventions that make sense only locally.  To make sense of the Los Angeles map, you must know that line numbers in the 300s and 700s are limited-stop or "Rapid" services that almost always appear on top of a local-stop service on the same street.  So for example on Vernon Avenue, the big east-west corridor across the center of the Los Angeles image, 105 and 705 are local-stop and rapid versions of the same line.  These two services are not duplicating each other; in fact, they are designed to complement each other.  So you should think of 105 and 705 as a single composite line.

Once you account for that, the striking thing about the Los Angeles map is that most streets have only a single line on them, even though we are immediately south of downtown and you would expect many lines to be converging.

By contrast, in a similar sized slice of Sydney, most streets have several lines on them, and in most cases these lines are not designed together. In Los Angeles, if you see two buses right next to each other for many miles along the street, they are probably on the same line and one of them is probably late (a phenomenon called bunching.)  In Sydney, if you see the same thing, the two buses may well be scheduled to do that, usually because they're on different lines that run on top of each other on the same street, and no attempt has been made to co-ordinate their schedules.  For example, Sydney's Oxford Street, for the entire 3.4 km between Taylor Square and Bondi Junction, has four local bus lines and one limited-stop line, ranging in frequency from 10 minutes to 30 minutes, with no particular co-ordination of their schedules.   On this street, bunches of buses are a common sight because in many cases, they're scheduled that way.

Sydney-style networks happen where the prevailing assumption is that people will resist connections at all costs, which means that there is a strong motivation to run direct services between every possible origin and destination.  Even where planners would like to introduce connection-based design, they are frustrated by a fare structure, out of their control, which penalizes connections.  So Sydney ends up with lots of overlapping lines, a high degree of complexity.

This problem is also the cause of others, such as the excessive volume of buses, most of them not full, choking the narrow streets of the CBD.  Obviously, if you didn't feel constrained to run direct service from everywhere to the CBD, you'd organize some buses to feed others (or to feed trains).  This would give you fewer buses in the CBD, with heavier loads on those buses, and thus a stronger moral claim to transit priorities, such as exclusive lanes.

Just for fun, here's an 8x3km slice of an even simpler network, also just south of downtown, though admittedly in a smaller city.  Portland:

I often show this map in Australia because the pattern is even more clear than in Los Angeles.  The simplicity is extreme.  Every arterial has exactly one bus line on it, with a simple 1-2 digit number.  The only exceptions are very close to downtown, where radial lines inevitably have to converge, and a few ghostly line numbers that appear on a white background, which signifies a handful of trips that run only on the peak.  (Note, by the way how this notation helps the viewer see the all-day network on which she might rely,.  This clarity is quite unavailable on the Sydney map.  The Los Angeles map also doesn't distinguish peak-only services, though across much of the city there are very few of them.)

The Portland map also makes clear that even in a city with an exceptionally strong downtown, many frequent lines don't go there, including 70, 71, 72, and 75 on the map above.  The focus, as in Los Angeles, is on anywhere-to-anywhere travel using connections.  Because these "crosstown" lines rely on connections more than the radial lines do, they all run as frequently as possible, and as late into the night as possible.  Sydney, too, has non-downtown lines, but with one exception, the 400, they are too infrequent for fast connections to be possible, and often shut down earlier than the rest of the network.  Again, the frequency is hard to afford in Sydney because resources are divided over so many lines, even those these lines are often overlapping.  Portland and Los Angeles, by contrast, are running the minimum possible number and length of lines, so that they can run each one as frequently, and as late, as possible.

Sydney planners will sometimes argue that Los Angeles and Portland are simpler because they already have street grids, while Sydney is an unplanned accretion with no large-scale order to its street network.  This is partly true; grids are certainly easier to remember, in both cities and transit systems. But you can take a structure like Sydney's and design a more gridlike system, featuring fewer and therefore more frequent lines, all designed to work together to serve any origin-destination pair, rather than picking a few major destinations as today's network tends to do.  I did a sketch of one here.

UPDATE:  An interesting series of comments, starting here, is applying this thinking to equally gridless London, including a very, very frequent grid bus network sketch by commenter Zoltan, which is here.  Remember that polar or "spiderweb" grid, consisting of radials and circles, can also achieve good connectivity while still focusing on a center.  Most workable grid networks, including my sketch for Sydney here, are a hybrid of polar grids and standard rectangular grids. 

connection fare penalties: why they happen

Is it fair to have to pay more if your trip requires a transfer or connection?  I've argued that it isn't, but I also have an appreciation of the difficulty of eliminating these penalties.  So when complaining about a fare penalty, try to understand the situation from the transit agency's point of view.  Not because they're right and you're wrong, but because you many need to help them solve the problem that it presents for them. 

Definitions first.  A connection penalty is any element of a fare policy whose effect is to charge people more for a trip that requires two or more transit vehicles than for a trip using only one, even when the trip is of exactly the same distance and when there's no evident difference in class, amenity, or inefficiency to justify a surcharge.

For example, in the Sydney Morning Herald's inquiry on Sydney's public transit, I prepared this table showing the difference between rail fares and rail+bus fares for trips of exactly the same distance:

My basic view of connection penalities has always been this:  The connection is not an added convenience for which the customer should pay extra.  It's an inconvenience required by the geometry of any efficient, legible, and frequent transit system.  Transit systems must therefore do what they can to minimize this inconvenience and encourage people to make connections.  Connection fare penalties are exactly contrary to this imperative.

As near as I can tell, most fare penalties for connecting arise from some mixture of four basic issues:

• Practical security problems around the physical tools used to record connections, such as the opportunities for fare evasion created by abundant transfer slips.  If this is the primary reason for a connection penalty, smartcard systems will eliminate the problem and should lead to removal of the connection penalty.
• Laws and funding arrangements that refer explicitly to the cash single-ride fare.   A key funding formula that governs Los Angeles County transit agencies gives these agencies more subsidy if they push their base fare downward.  The formula is actually trying to reward ridership, but because ridership is hard to measure across multiple agencies, it estimates ridership as the fare revenue divided by cash single-ride fare.  This penalizes agencies for raising their cash single-ride fares, and encourages them to invent other fees and fare penalties instead, for reasons that have nothing to do with the real intentions of the formula.  Again, smartcards, which will provide a more accurate and direct measure of ridership, should eliminate the need for such approximations and the perverse incentives that follow from them.
  
  
• A journalistic obsession with single-ride cash fare as the key measure of fare cost.  The single-ride cash fare is easy to talk about, and journalists and other non-transit-experts tend to focus on it, producing soundbites such as "Los Angeles fares are cheaper than San Francisco's."  Prevalence of these soundbites motivates agencies to try, for reasons of appearance, to keep their cash single-ride fares down.  Again, this is just like airlines: If you become obsessed with reducing your base ticket price at all costs, you'll have to invent more and more fees, and connection penalties are one fee of that type.
  
  
• Conflicts between the self-interests of geographically entangled agencies or operators.  In multi-agency or multi-operator environments, the introduction of a free connection can come at the expense of the bottom lines of multiple operators, and tends to affect different operators differently.  These problems are sometimes overcome through heroic negotiation, in which the operators agree to shift money among themselves in complex ways in order to present a simple integrated fare system to the customer.  In other cases (as in Brisbane) the solution is to create a new meta-agency that sits over all the operators, pays them for operations, receives their fare revenue, and takes responsibility for a single region-wide or city-wide bottom line.

So it's hard.  It's important, and good transit agencies are at least thinking about the problem, but it's still hard.  In multi-agency cases, for example, the problem may impossible to solve without creating a meta-agency, with all the attendant anxiety about "adding another layer of government."   

What can a citizen do?  One thing is to confront journalists and others who try to make simplistic comparisons based on cash single-ride fares.  Journalists: if you want to do quick pieces about fares, look for average fares (fare revenue divided by ridership) rather than published base fares.  Yes, this is harder because not all agencies can calculate ridership reliably, or (as in Los Angeles) they may actually be relying on fare revenue to get to a ridership estimate.  Again, though, smartcards should eliminate that problem.

Finally, since I've now referred twice to smartcards solving the problem, let me be clear:  Technology can solve information problems, but not ethical ones.  Connection penalties based on the inadequacy of information-tracking tools should fade away once smartcards provide the necessary tool.  But technology won't change the poltical problem: to eliminate fare penalties without losing revenue, you will probably have to raise the single-ride cash fare to compensate.  Effectively you'll be admitting that you've been subsidizing some riders at the expense of others, and you should expect all the blowback that we see anywhere when we tell people that we're removing a subsidy on which they've come to rely.

That's the real problem, and courageous leadership is the only solution for it.

connection penalties as "de facto redlining"?

Sometimes a comment is so representative of a common point of view that I want to share it even though I neither agree or disagree exactly.  Sometimes too, a comment raises a language point that's worth noticing.  From David Vartanoff:

From my [point of view] lack of free transfers and distance based fares are de facto redlining of neighborhoods. The [Washington DC] WMATA and [San Francisco area] BART [rail transit] systems compound this by making feeder bus usage a further charge. Given that fares have almost no relation to the actual cost of the trip in question, high fares and transfer surcharges are simply disincentives to use. In the[San Francisco]  Bay Area, each agency has different fare policies making longer trips confusing and unnecessarily expensive compared to similar mileages in say Chicago or New York.

"De facto redlining" is almost but not quite a contradiction, as "redlining" is generally intentional while "de facto" can refer to a pattern that's observable in outcomes but was never anyone's intention.  Still, we often have to take responsibility for "de facto" outcomes of what we do, so an accusation of redlining is a good way to raise the stress level of transit managers and the elected officials that they report to.  However, stressing out your leadership is not always the key to solving a problem, if the leaders may perceive the problem to be out of their control.

I don't believe that many transit agency managers and boards are motivated by animus toward particular neighborhoods.  But accusations of de facto disfavor toward certain neighborhoods are very emotive, especially to people with experience in racial politics and to older people who remember much more explicit kinds of redlining practiced in the not-too-distant past.   And of course, they're also emotive becuase they're about home, which is always an emotional topic. 

So before you go too far with "redlining" accusations, tempting as they are, try to understand why connection penalities happen.  That's the subject of the very next post.

the peril of low base fares

Are transit fares in Los Angeles cheaper than in San Francisco?  That's the impression you'll get from a direct comparison of the base adult cash fare.  The travel blog Price of Travel just compared the base fares of 80 major tourist cities around the world, and noted that while San Francisco Muni's base fare is $2.00, that of the Los Angeles County MTA is $1.50.

Yes, but San Francisco offers a free transfer, so that a $2.00 fare takes you anywhere in the city.  In Los Angeles, you can travel along one line for $1.50, but many trips require a connection, and in that case you'll pay $3.00.

The journalistic temptation to cite and compare base fares is one reason that transit agencies feel pressed to keep that number low, which in turn pressures them to raise revenue other ways, such as by charging for transfers.  It's a bit the way budget airlines work, offering huge discounts but then charging fees for all kinds of things.

Los Angeles County transit agencies also labor under a peculiar funding arrangement in which a certain countywide funding source is allocated according to fare revenue divided by base fare.  So if you keep your base fare down (by charging for "extras," such as connections) you get more money from the county!  This formula was intended to be a proxy for ridership, which is hard to measure, so one hopes that once smartcards become a reliable way to count riders, the formula and its perverse consequences can be left behind.  Of course, the real challenge will be to count complete passenger trips rather than boardings.  (The latter are easier to count, but double-count trips requiring a connection.)

Even Southwest Airlines will sell you a ticket from your origin to your destination, rather than making you buy each segment separately.  In fact, the ticket from A to B via a connection at C usually doesn't cost more than the ticket from A to B nonstop, because the airline recognizes that you're changing at C for their convenience, not yours.