Human Transit

portland: the grid is 30 years old ... thank a planner!

Thirty years ago next week, on Labor Day Weekend 1982, the role of public transit in Portland was utterly transformed in ways that everyone today takes for granted.  It was an epic struggle, one worth remembering and honoring. 

I'm not talking about the MAX light rail (LRT) system, whose first line opened in 1986. I'm talking about the grid of frequent bus lines, without which MAX would have been inaccessible, and without which you would still be going into downtown Portland to travel between two points on the eastside.  (Full map here.)

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What did it look like before 1982?  Here's a bit of the 1970 network (full map here).

The 1970 network consisted of bus routes radiating from downtown across the gridded eastside, which constitutes about 3/4 of Portland.  If you were anywhere on this network, you had a direct bus downtown -- a slow, circuitous, and infrequent bus.  Very few routes ran better than every 30 minutes during the day.  Only two routes ran north-south across the east side, and both were too infrequent to transfer to, so you couldn't really use them unless both ends of your trip were on them. 

How did the 1982 network transform the possibilities of mobility in the city?  

• The old network was solely about going downtown.  The new network was about going anywhere you wanted to go.
• The old network was infrequent.  The new network required easy connections, so it was designed to run at high frequency (most lines every 15 minutes or better all day).  Remember: Frequency is freedom!
• The old network was wasteful, as many overlapping lines converged on downtown.  The new network was efficient, with little overlap between lines, and with lines spaced further apart to the extent that the street network allowed.  This is how the resources were found to increase frequency so much.
• The old network was complicated, with routes often zigzagging from one street to another.  The new network was simpler, easy to keep in your head.  Many streets that were formerly served by a patchwork of overlapping routes, such as Division, now had a single route from end to end, so that you needed only remember "the Division bus."  Transit became an intrinsic part of the street.

If you're in a hurry, skip to "Thank a Planner!" below.  But if you have a couple of minutes, let's explore more deeply how the grid transformed Portland, and why it was so controversial at the time.

In both maps above, that wavy line across the middle of eastside Portland is the Banfield Freeway, where the first and backbone line of the MAX light rail system runs today.  In the 1970 image, look for the line marked "1" extending north from the Banfield in the middle of the image.  This is NE 42nd Avenue (a bit of which is labeled 41st, but don't let that distract you).

In the old network the bus line along 42nd came from the north edge of the city, once an hour.  Partway down it merged with another branch, to form 30-minute frequency.  When it approached the Banfield, it turned west and zigzagged into the city via the Lloyd district.  Once it turned west off of 42nd, it was duplicating other routes the whole way.  If you wanted to go somewhere else on the eastside, the bus was not much use.   Frequencies were poor so it was very hard to make a trip involving multiple routes.

If you lived on NE 42nd in 1982, you were confronted with massive change, the sort of change that makes people scream.  Never again would you have a direct bus to downtown Portland.  Now you would be on the new 75, which would run continuously north-south all the way across the city.  And if you wanted to go downtown, you would have to transfer (as we called it in those days). 

But on the bright side, the 75 would run every 15 minutes, so transfering wasn't hard.  And in return, you got all the other benefits of a frequent routes that would let you connect quickly to reach destinations all over the east and north sides of the city, without going downtown.  

This is always a tough sell, because many people value transit only for the commute downtown.  These people tend to complain when the network is optmized to serve many kinds of trip at once, which is exactly what the grid does.  A frequent grid is the ultimate in versatility, equity and freedom.  It does not pick favored destinations for favored markets. Instead, it delivers anywhere-to-anywhere mobility for wherever you might want to go.  Today, the non-downtown elements of the grid, especially 72 and 75, are among TriMet's most productive lines.  

The grid redefined the role of transit in serving Portland's livability objectives.  When you think of everything that makes Portland both livable and culturally distinctive, you're probably thinking about the historically dense and gridded part of the city.  This is where almost every cool urbanist outcome of the last 30 years -- from food carts to bike lanes to office-over-retail -- has sprouted and thrived most successfully. Rail gets all the press, but the MAX light rail line would not have worked without this grid to connect with it.  (The reverse is not true: the grid worked well for four years before the MAX line opened, though MAX was certainly an improvement that achieved further ridership payoffs.) As Gregory Thompson and Jeffrey Brown put it in a recent paper :

If the 1983 and 1986 restructurings had not happened, LRT would have been a competitor with the CBD-focused, poor quality parallel bus routes that already were there, and there would have been no high quality bus routes intersecting the LRT at right angles. Portland would have enjoyed much less patronage than it has since experienced on both its LRT and bus routes.

Where did all the money for the new high-frequency crosstown lines come from?  Removing duplication. Look again at the your ride on 1970's route 1.  Once it turned west off of 42nd, it duplicated other routes the entire way into downtown.  Now look closely at the routes approaching downtown from further south in the old map.  They ran on so many closely-spaced parallel streets that they were effectively duplicating one another as well, wasting service.  The grid plan found many resources by removing these duplications and moving to wider and more consistent spacing of lines across the whole city.  In the same process,the grid introduced the idea that it's OK to walk further to a more frequent and useful service -- the foundation for transit's link with walking (and with all of walking's public health outcomes) today.

The grid was also a radical simplification, making it easier for people to keep the network map in their heads.  Now, bus lines would often follow the same street from end-to-end, so you could remember easily that there's a Division Street bus, say, and an 82nd Avenue bus.  In the old network, if you wanted to go from 20th & Division to 82nd & Division, you had to go downtown and back, because these two parts of Division were covered by different routes.  The beauty of the grid is that your transit directions are sometimes as simply as walking or driving directions:  "Take the Division bus out to 82nd, then take the 82nd bus south."  The transit lines are just part of the street.

Imagine, in 1982, the struggle involved in implementing this.  Vast numbers of people lost their direct bus to downtown, at a time when going downtown seemed like the only purpose of transit to many existing riders.  Transit agencies tend to listen most to their existing riders, who have adapted their lives to the system as it is, so it takes real courage for them to seek new markets instead of just catering to the existing ones.   Imagine the disruption, the rage, the recriminations, not to mention the apathy from people for whom buses just don't matter, no matter what they're achieving.

Thank a planner!

If you can imagine how hard this was, consider thanking the planners who took all this abuse and persisted in pushing the plan through, because they believed in everywhere-to-everywhere networks and knew this would work if it were tried.  I'm especially thinking of:

• Ken Zatarain, who was a TriMet service planner at the time and who now manages service planning at the agency.  Thank him at:  zataraik AT trimet DOT org .
• Thomas G. Matoff, the single most important mentor in my own transit career, and probably the critical player in pushing the grid through.  Tom, who was service planning manager and thus Ken's boss, was an eloquent, passionate and persistent advocate for the grid both inside and outside the agency.  He was the first person I've met, and one of the few I've known, who could convey how essential network design is to the life, joy, and prosperity of a city.  Tom went on to be General Manager of Sacramento Regional Transit and is now working on the Sonoma-Marin rail project in California.  Thank him at:  tmatoff AT sonomamarintrain DOT org .
• His boss, Bob Post, who was Director of Service Development and who saw this redesign as crucial to the success of the Banfield MAX line, which would come along four years later.  He's at URS: bob DOT post AT urs DOT com .

I'm dead serious:  If you value being able to get around Portland in all directions, thank them.  In other words, do one of these things:

• shoot emails of appreciation to the three emails above, copied to me (jarrett AT jarrettwalker DOT net), with "Thanks for the grid" in the subject line, or 
• leave a comment here, or 
• say something on Twitter with the hashtag #PDXGrid .  

You might also ask the two mayoral candidates about how important the frequent grid is to their vision of the city, and whether they think it should be enhanced.

Why does this matter?  Because even today, there's disagreement in Portland about important the frequent grid is, or even whether a complete everywhere-to-everywhere network (which requires high-frequency buses as well as rail) should be a priority at all.  Some view the grid as unimportant, for example, because they view bus service as unimportant.

Purists might argue that the grid never made it to its 30th birthday, but rather perished at 27 in 2009.  That was the year that TriMet cut all-day frequencies below the 15-minute threshhold that is widely accepted as the definition of "frequent enough that you can use it spontaneously, without building your life around the timetable."  Since the grid relies on easy connections to achieve its goal of easy anywhere-to-anywhere access, the 2009 cuts began to undermine the whole idea of the grid. TriMet avoided doing this in its first round of cutting after the crash, but felt it had no alternative in the second 2009 round.  

Will the grid ever be restored to its necessary frequency?  Will it ever be expanded and enriched (as regional land use planning generally assumes it must be) with even better frequencies?  Not everyone in Portland thinks this is a priority, so you might want to express your view.  

More on the history and spectacular outcomes of the grid if you click below.  But even if you don't click, thank a planner!

portland: balance the budget yourself

Portland's Tri-Met faces another horrible funding shortfall this year, but they've come up with a good survey tool to engage the public in their decisions about what services to cut.  It's one of those "balance the budget yourself" tools that's becoming increasingly necessary to bring voters into contact with reality about government budgets.  

If you live in Portland, you should definitely work through the survey and send them your own balanced budget and comments.  If you're not in Portland, is your transit agency communicating about its trade-offs this well?

los angeles: deleting some lines can be fair

The New York Times today bewails the loss of Los Angeles bus line 305, which soon will stop running diagonally across the city's grid, from Watts to Beverly Hills and Westwood. 

NYT reporter Jennifer Medina assumes this is purely a victimization-of-the-poor story, starting with this observation:

The 305 was one of several lines created under the consent decree, and it is the only direct route from the city’s impoverished southern neighborhoods to its affluent West Side, where legions of janitors, nannies and maids work each day.

Sounds sad, and it's easy to fill an article with interviews with 305 riders who will experience the deletion as a hardship.  But as that paragraph should warn us, 305 was a symbolic service.  It cannot have been relevant to very many people, not even to many people in the targeted demographic ("janitors, nannies, maids" according to the NYT).  Why?  If you explore the route and schedule [ Download PDF ] and look at how the route fits into the larger network ("System map overview" here), you'll notice:

• Line 305 is a diagonal shortcut across a high-frequency grid, where trips between anywhere and anywhere can usually be made on lines running every 15 minutes or better with some are far more frequent than that.  Meanwhile, the Line 305 frequency is every 40-60 minutes.  [PDF]  That means that the 305 is the fastest path between two points on the line only if it happens to be coming soon.  If you just miss one, there's another way to get there faster, via the much more frequent lines that flow north-south and east-west across this entire area. 
   
  
• The 305's low frequency exposes its riders to the risks of waiting for a single bus: you're basically making an appointment with one driver who may not show up for a variety of reasons.  Routing the same trips via the high-frequency grid means much higher reliability, because the abundance of buses along a line means you are less dependent on any one of them.
   
  
• Most important, the alleged target demographic -- trips from the "poor south" to the "affluent west" for domestic workers -- was mostly not served by the 305.  Both the "poor south" and the "affluent west" are enormous areas.  So no one bus line was ever going to connect all or even most of the "poor south" with all or even most of the "affluent west." 

These points, but especially the last, identify a public transit service as symbolic.  Symbolically, the 305 links the "poor south" and the "affluent west," and thus helps everyone feel good about having served domestic workers.  In fact, the 305 runs through a small part of the vast "poor south" and a small part of the vast "affluent west," but it's still useless for most of the people making that kind of trip, because both areas are so large that no one bus line, or even five, could link all of the likely origin-destination pairs between them.

(You could take other buses in each area and transfer to the 305, but the low frequency of the 305 makes this very risky.  Once you've accepted the need to connect, you might as well ride along the main grid and connect with a high-frequency line to take you where you're going.)

This problem is why frequency and connections were invented.  The governing principle of transit in these core parts of Los Angeles is the high-frequency grid, which allows everywhere-to-everywhere travel at high frequencies with at most one connection.  Yes, it may be sad that some domestic workers who are used to zero-transfer trips are now going to have a one-transfer trip, but that only means that 305 riders will have the same level of transit mobility that everyone else has, including most domestic workers.  It also means that Los Angeles transit will be treating all of this demographic equally, rather than arbitrarily preferring people whose path happens to lie along Line 305.

The other moral of this story is even simpler: If your mission is to serve a whole city or region, designing transit routes around any self-identified group of people is almost always a bad idea.  Most successful and attractive transit seeks maximum versatility, by serving the most diverse possible range of demographics, trip purposes, and origin-destination pairs.  You can make exceptions where a single demographic group produces sufficiently massive ridership, as in some commute markets.  But in general, the way people self-organize and self-identify politically is a bad guide to how to meet their transit needs efficiently.  Everyone can draw the perfect transit line just for their interest group, but such proposals tell you nothing about what a good transit system would look like.

Nobody should be happy about the severe cuts being imposed on many US transit agencies that urgently need to move in the opposite direction.  But as in San Francisco in 2009, cuts are sometimes an opportunity to delete services that have passionate, well-connected defenders, but that simply don't make sense if your goal is a complete network that people can use to go wherever they're going.

san francisco: may 2010 service cuts mostly restored

As I said at the time, the first round of service cuts in San Francisco, implemented in 2009, actually did some good, by deleting some segments that for geometric reasons were always going to be ineffective.  But the second round implemented in May 2010 were mostly just painful.  Now, after a long struggle, that destructive second round is being reversed, mostly on September 4 with the remainder to come in December.  I often criticize journalists for featuring bad news but missing the corresponding good news, so it's only fair to do the same myself. 

willingness to pay for transit improvements

Do your city's political leaders understand what funding sources people would support if they knew what they were buying?  A few weeks ago, the Source (a blog by the Los Angeles transit agency Metro) reported on a survey showing that current riders would pay 50c more in fares for a doubling of their frequency of service.  This isn't as encouraging as it sounds, because a doubling of frequency, even with significant ridership increases as a result, will cost a lot more than 50 cents per new rider.  But it's a useful soundbite.  These questions, broadly called "willingness to pay" questions, need to be asked more, and more probingly.

In the recent Sydney Morning Herald Inquiry into Sydney public transport, we did some deep probing of public opinion on willingness to pay.  Our survey experts at the University of Sydney's Centre for the Study of Choice took 2400 randomly selected people through a series of questions designed to observe the value they attach to different kinds of public transit improvements, and what taxes or fees could be higher, and by how much, if the money were clearly going to those improvements.  The methodology, called a discrete choice experiment, is designed to avoid some of the usual biases in these questions.  The method and its results explained toward the end of Chapter 1, here.

Ultimately, these findings determined the shape of our recommended 30-year investment plan.  The most fundamental recommendations are (a) that Sydney needs  a major transit investment program, funded largely by a range of increased state taxes and user fees, and (b) the plan must be dominated by transit, not roads. 

We made these recommendations not just because of our own analysis and desires, but because that's the overwhelming preference of the public.  Throughout the project, we recommended only things that could be funded using sources that, according to the survey, would get majority support, if the funding was clearly tied to the improvements.  We concluded that if voters could vote up or down on that package of fees and taxes, to be used exclusively to build the specified transit lines, a majority would say yes.

For better or worse, Australians are not used to voting on specific initiatives.  There have been national referenda on major national issues, including famous ones such as the granting of full rights to Aboriginals (passed in 1967) and the creation of a republic in place of the British crown (defeated in 1999).  But there is no precedent for voting on state and local issues like how to fund the construction and operations of transit.  Most Australian transit agencies are not separate governments entitled to certain funding, as they typically are in North America.  Instead, transit is managed by state government direction.  It's just one of many things funded out of the state's general revenues, and the elected government decides how that revenue is spent.

During the last year, watching the state and local budget crises across the United States, I've come to appreciate the stability of the Australian approach.  Popular votes on specific taxes and spending have tied the state of California in knots, to the point where the task of government is almost impossible.  American transit agencies that rely on a specific tax, usually some form of sales or payroll tax, experience huge swings in revenue, so at least once a decade they find themselves slashing service.  This doesn't happen in Australia, or at least not as visibly.  Service doesn't improve dramatically in better times, and isn't slashed as badly when times are bad.

But the Australian system is not so good at expressing a public consensus to raise taxes and fees for a specific purpose.  Such a consensus clearly exists in Sydney to move forward on major transit investment.  If the voters could set up a funding stream to do this and an agency tasked with doing it, as would happen in many American states, then we would be on our way.  Instead, we have to wait for one of the competing major parties to embrace such an investment plan.  The parties, however, aren't focused on the whole of public opinion; they're focused quite narrowly on marginal seats, the relatively small number of voters whose judgments will turn the election, and this is a very different polity than the city as a whole.

Sooner or later, I suspect Sydney will need to have some sort of referendum to put the funding sources in place to fund a decent transit expansion program.  Based on our work in the Inquiry, which assessed the public's willingness to pay and then crafted an infrastructure plan to fit it, such a referendum could pass.   But I certainly don't see the way to that in the Australian political system, nor does either of the major parties seem ready to take the lead.

seattle suburbs: the silence of sundays

Community Transit, which serves most of the northern suburbs of Seattle, is shutting down completely on Sundays.  This wouldn't be unusual in a small-city transit system, but CT's service area (most of Snohomish County) is a big suburban expanse with about half a million people.  It has enough transit demand to support a low-end Bus Rapid Transit line, called Swift, which will presumably not run on Sundays either.

This is a fairly dramatic step by North American standards.  Local transit in suburban areas generally appeals to people with few choices, but many, many of these people work in low-wage jobs in the service sector, such as restaurants and big-box retail.  These business are open seven days a week and often are often busiest on weekends, so most of their employees have to do some weekend shifts.  A transit system that doesn't run on Sundays will no longer be useful to these people.  Based on what I've seen elsewhere, most of them will find other arrangements, and CT is likely to lose them on all five days a week that they travel, not just Sunday.  Some, those without any good transport options, may lose their jobs. 

I hope CT or some other local government researches what happens to these riders when Sunday service ends.  The best approach might be to survey the Sunday riders before the service stops, asking them for follow-up contacts so that they can be interviewed again a few months in the future.  This would not only provide good data for other agencies facing the need to cut service, but would also be a nice way for the agency to convey some concern for the well-being of these customers.

new york: free student fares and the budget crisis

Today's New York Times editorial on New York's transit funding crisis goes beyond general warnings about the need to fund transit, and digs into specifics: Raise bridge tolls, resist election year tax-cutting, hold the line on pay raises, and this:

What it should not mean is doing away with free passes for needy students. Both the state and city will have to contribute more to help pay $214 million a year to help keep these students in school.

Perhaps they read this.

portland: 2010 service cuts announced

Ouch.  Here is TriMet's proposal for the next round of service cuts, due to take effect on September 2010.  As the agency says on its budget: the big picture page:

A recent reassessment of our income projections compared to actual income shows that payroll receipts are down $15 million and passenger revenues down $8 million. To maintain fiscal stability, we again need to reduce expenses—this time to the tune of $27 million. The cuts we've already made ($50 million since 2001) have reduced our options for future cuts—we've already cut the easy things. Our remaining expenses are largely determined by factors beyond our control, including contract commitments, fuel prices and Portland's rate of economic recovery.

The 21% share paid by fares (called farebox return or Farebox Recovery Ratio [FRR]) is not bad for a city of Portland's size and density.  More critically, by the agency's numbers the decline in fares received is 30% of the total shortfall to be covered.  That suggests a real danger of cuts continuing to drive down ridership, leading to a downward spiral of cuts and ridership losses that would gradually destroy the agency's relevance.

This risk may have given some impetus to the proposal to cut low-ridership "Coverage" services even where the few riders have no alternative.  Four routes are to be eliminated completely, and three of these (27, 154, and 157) are outer-suburban feeders into Gateway, Oregon City, and Clackamas, respectively.  (See Tri-Met system map here.)  All serve relatively low density areas but not especially affluent ones, a reminder that density determines ridership much more than wealth does.  There's not much of an alternative for residents of the areas served, especially Willamette and Happy Valley, but if good transit service were really important to you, you wouldn't live there.

They're also taking the opportunity to eliminate some awkward deviations caused by transit-hostile development design.  A dramatic example is the Cornell Oaks employment area on Line 67.  It's on the south side of the US 26 freeway on the east side of 158th Avenue.  Have a look:

The north-south street on the far left is 158th Avenue.  The core street of the development, Greenbrier Parkway, comes off of 158th, does a few S-curves that we're supposed to find sensuous or relaxing, and then ends in a landscaped turnaround loop, a violation of the "Be on the Way" rule.  (Actually the cul-de-sac has a connection to a parking lot, which connects to another street, all of which looks like it's designed to permit fire trucks but obstruct buses.) 

Currently, some Line 67 trips, which are running past on 158th, actually turn down this street, drive all the way down, and then, having no alternative, turn around and drive all the way back.  They do this while carrying through-passengers who just want to ride along 158th.  This is called a "backtracking deviation," and psychologically it's the very worst kind because the through-riders can't even pretend they're going in roughly their desired direction.  It's especially bad here because we're at a point where the bus is relatively full (by the low standards of suburban local routes.)  There's a MAX station just to the south off the map, and a lot more suburbia to the north, so everyone wanting travel between MAX and that suburbia gets hauled through the Cornell Oaks detour.

The Cornell Oaks deviation is a typical example of how transit agencies are forced to wear the costs of poor design, so bravo to TriMet for refusing to do it anymore.  While some people who work in these business parks probably want service, their developer did everything possible to prevent bus service from working.  One solution you'll hear proposed for places like this is for the businesses to run their own employee shuttle to the nearby MAX station (not far south off of this image).  Doing so would reflect the fair costs of their decision to locate in a place where efficient public transit is impossible.  

Still, these cuts are a small part of the damage.  The main damage is further loss of frequency on the former "Frequent Network," now including midday MAX light rail frequencies as well as buses.  This is really where the downward spiral of cuts and ridership could play out.  I have one strong suggestion about these cuts: Given that you've already given up on the 15-minute frequency standard, try to hold the line at 20 -- exactly 20.  TriMet is currently being vague about what the exact post-cut frequencies would be, saying, for example, that on certain routes the elapsed time between buses "would increase by 2-10 minutes at various times throughout the day."  It's impossible to know what this means, but it could mean that we'll see lots of important lines running every 17, 18, or 19 minutes.  My view is that 20-minute frequency is actually better than many of these compromises, because it yields a schedule that you can remember because it repeats the same way every hour.

The cuts will also undermine the historic usefulness of transit for intra-downtown travel, which was at one time an important feature of downtown Portland as a place to work, shop, and play.  While the old transit mall and fare system made it easy to grab just any bus that came along, the new transit mall has very widely spaced stops, so you can no longer easily walk to the stop of whichever bus you see coming if you want to travel a short distance along the mall.  More critically, the downtown free fare zone now applies only to rail, and you're expected to use light-rail for these short trips.  Midday frequency of light rail will have an impact on this.  More on the peculiar mall shuttle situation in another post.

unemployment and the transit imperative

As American leaders suddenly pivot to focus on unemployment, Emily Garr at The Avenue picked up on a line of President Obama's recent speech in Lorain County, Ohio.

You can't get to work or go buy groceries like you used to because of cuts in the county transit system.

She goes on to describe cuts in the transit services to this suburban county that are definitely not "trimming the fat" but more like multiple amputations.

Transit advocates need to be picking up this line.  Back in the mid-90s, when welfare reform was timely, I routinely ran passenger surveys on various transit systems as part of planning projects.  The surveys had many other purposes, but I made a point to ask both "what is your trip purpose?" and "if transit had not been available, how would you have made your trip?"  A common answer to the second question was that the person would not have been able to make the trip.  Cross-tabulate that with a trip purposes of "work" and you get a count of people who could not hold their jobs without public transit.  It's an easy thing to do in any customer survey, and every transit agency and advocate should know this number. 

It's also important to notice that the people who are on the verge of not being able to hold their jobs are mostly in relatively low-wage jobs in the service sector -- restaurants, fast food, big box retail, etc -- and these people are commuting all day and much of the night.  Transit that supports high employment is all-day service, not just peak service aimed at the generally better-off 9-to-5 commuter.

new york: cutting service without cutting mobility

The U.S. service cut epidemic -- the result of transit agencies relying on recession-sensitive funding sources -- is about to touch New York again.  But as in the first round of San Francisco cuts, the New York MTA planners are doing their best to reduce service but not mobility.

As with everything in New York, the details are complicated, but here's a simple example.  The G subway line is the only line running directly between Queens (the top of this map) and Brooklyn (the bottom).  It has long included a segment from Court Square to Forest Hills where G trains run alongside two other subway lines, the E and V which connect Queens directly to Manhattan.  (Full subway map here.)

In happier times, a transit agency could indulge the preferences of people from Forest Hills who want to get to Brooklyn without having to change trains.  But when service needs to be cut, it's far better to cut this duplicative segment than to cut a segment that is somebody's only service.  And that's usually the real-world choice.

So in future, the G will run only as far as Court Square, and passengers who want to get to/from Forest Hills and Brooklyn will need to use the E or V between Court Square and Forest Hills, then change.  But as a result, frequencies and unique services will not be cut as much as they would have been otherwise.  That's the only way to get through a service cut without reducing mobility.

Full coverage of the service cuts is at Second Avenue Sagas, which often features thoughtful and detailed commentary on New York transit issues.  Thanks to Alon Levy for the tip.