Human Transit

journalists! network restructuring stories can be interesting, and clear

Deep inside the Atlantic magazine's Cities section, an article on restructuring a bus network!  The city is Tallahassee, and the redesign team included Samuel Scheib of StarMetro, who comments here now and then.  The redesign took an all-radial system, reduced the number of lines but increased their length, and introduced some new non-downtown connection points and even some lines that don't go downtown at all. 

Few journalists would consider the topic interesting, but the article by Emily Badger takes the lay reader through the issues, highlights the relationship to city-building concerns, and generally helps it make sense.  I wish every journalist -- or even every New York Times reporter -- took this kind of care to understand a planning issue.  Given how well Badger explains the issue, I wouldn't have minded if she'd also interviewed some riders who are personally inconvenienced by the change.  But most journalists cover only the latter, as though their goal is to maximize rage rather than understanding.

This quote from Scheib was interesting:

“If you talk to a land-use planner, typically they would want you to keep ... service focused more on the downtown because they want more people to live downtown, in that dense environment. I’m all for that, I’m all for urbanization, I’m all for denser places,” Scheib said. “But the reality is that people need to get to work. And you’ve got to go where the jobs are."

I can assure you that this change won't damage downtown.  I was hanging around Portland's TriMet in 1982 (in the indispensible role of teenage transit geek) when they totally restructured the inner city bus system, creating a grid pattern with many crosstowns that don't go downtown at all.  Several of those crosstowns are now among Portland's most productive lines.  But downtown Portland survived, to say the least.

request for information: routine closures of transit streets

Most cities that I know have one or more major downtown streets where parades and other major civic celebrations tend to occur.  San Francisco's Market Street, Chicago's State Street (pictured), and New York's Fifth Avenue are obvious examples.

These same cities, if they value transit, often want this same street to be the core of their transit system, because they want transit to deliver customers to the "front door" of the city.

So it's normal to see huge, complex reroutings of transit service when one of the civic events is happening.  The legibility problems of this shift are accepted because they happen only a few times a year.

Vancouver, however, does something different, and I want to verify how unusual it is.  Vancouver's core downtown transit street, Granville Mall, is closed to buses (and all vehicles) every weekend evening.  Specifically:

On Fridays, Saturdays, Sundays, Holidays and the day before a Holiday, buses will run along Granville each day until 9pm, then switch to the re-route, travelling northbound on Seymour and southbound on Howe. The re-routes will stay in place until the close of service.

So many of Vancouver's most important street-running transit lines (mostly trolley buses in this case) shift from one downtown street to another at 9pm on almost half of all days.  So the process of explaining and remembering where to find the bus is complicated all the time, which is quite different from finding the street closed for a very rare parade.

What North American cities do this routinely with their main transit street?  Nicollet Mall in Minneapolis is the only example that comes to my mind, but its role in the transit network is much less important than Granville's.

To be clear, I'm not interested in reopening the Granville Mall debate, where many advocated closing the street to buses entirely.  I am interested in the precedent as it might apply to other important transit streets, in Vancouver or elsewhere.

downtown networks: the oblique approach

How important is it that the transit services converging on downtown all go right to the core of downtown's demand?  In a city with a strong downtown, a reactive, demand-driven view of planning will add more and more transit into downtown as demand requires, because the loads are always highest there.  But sometimes, it can make sense to avoid the center of downtown, or to slide past downtown along one edge.

Zach Shaner's new proposal for the core area of Seattle is a nice example.   (Click to enlarge and sharpen, or see JPG here:  JPG )

You don't have to know Seattle to follow this.  The core of downtown is the little shaded box on the left, where LINK light rail will be in a subway and other frequent buses will run on the surface.  Most of the rest of the map area is also dense, so this is an area where you would expect a high-frequency grid to be possible, easily serving trips from anywhere to anywhere. 

But the map area is also ferociously hilly, so fitting the classical grid to this terrain has always been a struggle.  Still, Zach suggests that once the LINK light rail extension northward opens, ending at the University of Washington just off the north edge of the map, something remarkably gridlike might come into being. 

Several of the design principles that I often advocate are at work here.  First, Zach has focused on running on the fewest possible streets so as to provide the maximum possible frequency.  Second, he's mapped both the existing and proposed networks so that you can see this frequency difference.

But he's also provided a nice example of the oblique approach to downtown, which is a way of balancing the distributive quality of a grid with the need to serve downtown's concentration of demand. 

Look at the magenta line coming from the southeast.  It's Line 7, now the single busiest bus line in Seattle.  Off the map to the south, it extends about 5.5 km (3.4 mi) onward through dense, old, and historically low-income areas of the Rainier Valley.  It touches the rail line at Mount Baker station, just inside the map, but it flows onward into the city, currently going right through downtown.

Zach proposes instead that Line 7 approach downtown but then bypass it just to the east, via Boren Avenue.  He would do this to create a new crosstown (north-south) opportunity to reach dense north parts of downtown (including the South Lake Union redevelopment area and Seattle Center, which is right where Line 7 exits the map on the west edge) without going right through downtown's heart.

What would the dense downtown ridership of Line 7 do?  Well, some of it would transfer to LINK where the two lines touch at the south edge of the map.  Others, depending on exactly where in downtown they were going, might transfer to any of several very frequent east-west services crossing the line.  But many who now seem to be going downtown would reveal that they're really going elsewhere.  This is the key.

Line 7 ridership shows massive boarding and alighting downtown, and downtown is certainly an overwhelming destination.  But you always have to ask if the concentration of downtown boardings is evidence of what people want or what the current network structure requires of them.  People going to the dense and fast-growing areas on the north edge of downtown will find Zach's revision a dramatic improvement.  Many others may be going still further north, to anywhere in the northern half of the city, in fact; they currently have to go through downtown to make their connections, because that's where their bus goes, but they could make the same connections to northward services from the revised Line 7, often with quite a savings of travel time.

Obviously, I don't have the data to validate exactly how many people are in each of these categories.  I'm not even advocating Zach's design, but I do think it illustrates an important design concept, one that you will never think of if you're focused entirely on where your current ridership patterns seem to be leading.

Many major cities are facing unmanageable volumes of buses squeezing through a tight downtown.  Sydney, where I lived for five years, has a remarkably similar predicament to Seattle's.  One solution, in Sydney as in Seattle, is to let go of the idea that radial services aimed generally for downtown need to go right through the very center of it.  If there is a sufficient diversity and richness of connection opportuntiies for reaching various parts of downtown, you can often create a better design by sliding past downtown obliquely, as Zach proposes that Line 7 should do. 

I don't advocate or oppose Zach's design, but I do think it's a nice illustration of how to fit the "everywhere to everywhere" network design principles (such as the high frequency grid) to a very difficult terrain.  It also raised some interestingly contrasting comments from different Seattle transit experts who've seen it; more on that in another post.

UPDATE:  Zach explains his proposal to the Seattle transit community here.

information request: connection-activated civic squares

Thanks to all the commenters who responded to my too-vague request in the last post.  Let me now be clearer and, I hope, more concise. 

This image ...

... shows an idea for the design of a civic square intended to be the "living room" of a suburban city east of Vancouver.  It does not exist on the ground, so I'm looking for examples that do.  The core of the idea is that:

• The square is successful as a civic heart.  It's a place people would naturally go to not just to catch transit but also (a) to eat a lunch that they've brought, (b) to meet friends or people-watch, (c) to rally for a political cause, (d) to watch a local sporting team on an enormous screen (e) to attend any of a range of festival events programmed for the space and (f) to feel, as one feels in great squares, that you're in the very centre of the community, a place that is credible as a symbol of the whole community.  I'll settle for most rather than all of those things, but the point is to define a certain kind of civic importance.  Note that the flexibility of the space to serve many purposes is part of what makes it effective as a symbolic centre.  It is, as they say of Portland's square, the community's "living room."  It may have some green landscaping but it is mostly hardscaped in the anticipation of handling large volumes of people.
• To me, this means that the place is big, let's say at least 50m in its narrower dimension.  (Smaller plaza spaces around rail stations are routine in Europe, but this thing needs to be big enough to do the symbolic and practical work outlined above.)
• The square is also an important node in the transit network, where substantial volumes of people make connections, either between mulitple surface transit lines or between those lines and a rapid transit line.  (In the last post I artlessly referred to the place as suburban.  I now realize that what I really meant was: a place where the high volume connections happen on the surface, not inside subway stations as is the case in most big European examples.  Such a place may well exist downtown in a North American city that lacks much of a subway network.)
• All, or at least most, of the surface transit stops are directly on the square.  That is, when you step off the transit vehicle, you feel that you are in the square, not across the street or down the street from it.
• These high-volume connections require walking across the square, not just along one edge of it. 
• Finally, let me rule out plazas at universities, where the community served is artificial and intentional.  I'm after places that serve as the centres of towns or cities.

I'm asking because I want to discuss this possibility in my book, based on my experience in developing the idea sketched above.  It has particular relevance as a way to organize local bus connections at a rapid transit station that is also a local CBD.  If really successful examples exist, I want to praise them.  If they don't, I'm interested in credible theories of why not.  Is there something intrinsically wrong or unrealistic about this kind of design? 

The closest I've seen so far are as follows.  People who are familiar with these spaces are encouraged to chime in with views on whether they work on the above criteria, especially the perception of the space as a centre or "living room."  The notation C? means "I'm not sure if this really functions as a civic heart or livingroom.  T? means "I'm not sure if the transit connections are major, that is, I'm not sure if lots of people have reason to make connections here.)

• Copley Square, Boston.  (C? T?)
• Mont Royal station, Montréal. (C? T?)
• Plaza on the north side of Gare Montparnasse, Paris. (C?)
• Pershing Square, Los Angeles (T?)
• Picadilly Gardens, Manchester, UK (C?) (not hardscaped)
• Place Bellecour, Lyon, France (T?)  (very close!)
• JFK Plaza, Philadelphia (T?)  (not clear where bus stops are)
• Alexanderplatz, Berlin, specifically the area southwest of the elevated station, between there and Spandauerstr.  (C?  T?)  (Is this a major bus-rail connection path?)

Thanks for everyone who's commented so far!

edmonton: strasbourg of the prairie?

A Guest Post by David Marlor

David Marlor was raised in the UK and is currently a regional planning manager working on the coast of British Columbia, Canada in a coastal rural setting.  He holds a planning degree from the School of Community and Regional Planning at UBC, where his thesis was on an integrated approach to transportation planning in the lower mainland.

In the past couple of years, led by Bob Boutilier (general manager of transportation) the City has been planning the expansion of the LRT using low-floor technology.  Edmonton is credited with leading in transit innovation twice in the past. In the mid-1960s, transit superintendent Don MacDonald introduced an early version of a hub and spoke [or pulse] transit system. This is still widely used in Edmonton and in many other North American cities. The second was the introduction of the modern LRT to North America in 1978.

What’s different about the current LRT plans in Edmonton is that instead of fast LRT trains moving commuters from suburbs to the city, the LRT will be a European style system, still in its own right of way, but with stops closer together, smaller and more intimate with the community, low floor vehicles and replacing car lanes with LRT lanes. That last is a paradigm shift for Edmonton.  LRT up until now has been about building it without removing road capacity for private automobiles. The new LRT lines, the cost of which is currently pegged at about Cdn$3.4 billion, will see extension of the existing high-floor system to the north-west north-east and south as demand warrants, but the lines will fit the community better than before.

The approved plans includes a completely new low-floor network running on the street, even in the city centre. It is a system designed to support future TOD at the stations, to encourage higher densities. Unlike the existing system, only five stations on the proposed 29 station low floor line have bus stations attached to them and only two have park and ride facilities, both adjacent to freeways. This is about shaping the city, not moving commuters from the suburbs to the city (although that is part of it, it is not the focus).  The plan includes future low-floor line linking the downtown with the Old Strathcona business district on the Southside of the river and a line out to the eastern suburbs.

In fact, the proposed the proposed Edmonton system may remind some readers of Strasbourg. Like Strasbourg, Edmonton is envisioning completely remodeling the streets the trams run on – in many cases removing lanes of traffic, restricting turn movements, closing or redesigning intersections, and where possible, widening and improving the pedestrian infrastructure. Like Strasbourg, the stations (stops) will be located every 3-4 blocks (300-400 metres) in the city centre and further apart outside the core. The aim is around every 800 m, but in reality the stops will be placed at convenient nodes or logical locations that best fit the fabric of the city.

The City of Edmonton website has extensive information, including design details, routing, and illustrations. Unfortunately, the project is not funded yet, but City Council and the Mayor are keen to see it happen and want to get it built in the next 6-8 years. The plans are ambitious, and it's exciting to see a car-oriented oil producing city like Edmonton be thinking and supportive of this direction.

Illustration: Simulated image by City of Edmonton

 

canberra: a new circulator network for the national core

Washington DC has its downtown circulator, and now the Washington DC of Australia, Canberra, has one too. What's more, my clients in Canberra created their circulator for almost zero in new operating costs, using one of my favorite planning tricks. Starting next week, four color-coded lines will provide frequent links among all the major tourist attractions, government buildings, universities, commercial districts, and interchange points in the dense core areas of the Australian capital.

For the whole brochure on the circulator, click here: PDF

Where did all this new service come from? Most of it was already there, but was presented as a tangle of several infrequent lines.  These were just too hard to figure out for someone making quick trips around the core.  Short trips are very time-sensitive, and that includes the time it takes to figure them out.  So circulators have to be frequent and simple.

For several years, Canberra has been discussing options for creating a shuttle system to link these core destinations, but they could never find the money.  Instead, I suggested that we look at whether bus service that's already there could be branded to form legible and frequent circulator lines.  It turned out to be possible, with only slight service additions and some careful revision of timetables.

The Gold Line and Green Line are each created out of two existing routes that are every 20-30 minutes when separate but that combine to provide high frequency when running together.  When they're separate, they're just Routes 2, 3, 4, and 5, each doing its own business. But when Route 2 and 3 are together, that common segment is branded as the Gold Line. Likewise, the segment where 4 and 5 are on top of each other will be called the Green Line.

Signage and new marketing will highlight that you can use these colored lines to circulate around the core, and you don't have to care what the line numbers are. People don't have to remember that to get from the City station to the National Library they need the 2 or the 3. Instead, they can just remember the Gold Line.

Obviously, a combined frequency of 15-20 minutes is not enough for a true circulator, and the goal is to get to 10 or better as demand grows.  Now that Canberra has the color-based brands, future planners can easily decide to design other lines to flow through the branded segments, thus contributing to the combined frequency.  In many cities, there are situations where six more more half-hourly lines are effectively right on top of each other for a long distance; those are ideal candidates for a color-based brand that combines them into a (possibly very frequent) shuttle.

At the same time, Canberra is re-branding the two existing Rapid bus corridors as the Blue Rapid and Red Rapid. The Red Rapid happens to be one frequent line with no variants, but the Blue Rapid is formed of many overlaid lines, all numbered in the 300s, that do different things on outer branches but all run along the same Rapid segment linking several major town centers.  Together, the Red and Blue Rapids will form the frequent rapid-transit backbone of Canberra's all-bus network. As it happens, they also link some useful dots within the core area, so they're on the core map as well. 

This branding technique is often useful in relatively small cities that have a few strong frequent corridors.  I first suggested it in Bellingham, Washington, a university town north of Seattle, and this shelter displays one of the results.   Again, the Blue Line consists of a big pile of three-digit route numbers, but now nobody has to remember those numbers to navigate this high-demand corridor that runs through the university and into downtown.

Often in small cities, these frequent segments are served by several different routes overlaid, but the pile of route numbers makes the service seem complex.  The color brands let people ignore that complexity and see the frequency clearly instead.  And since frequency is the foundation of freedom for transit riders, transit agencies that want to be instruments of freedom should make it as visible as possible!

further cause for canadian triumphalism

Yesterday I posted some data we were playing with, suggesting that Canadian cities have consistently higher transit ridership than similar US ones.  Commenter Matt pointed me to his own charts on the subject, which are based on Paul Mees's database.  One of Matt's charts makes use of citywide average density, a stat to which I'm allergic for reasons explained here and here.  But here's the other one.  

The y-axis here is "Journey to Work" (JTW) mode share, the percentage of commutes to work that go by transit.  It's striking how completely the three countries' cities are sorted out.  Only Edmonton lags from the Canadian pace and ends up right on the Australian trendline, while Sydney does the opposite.

Why are US cities so much weaker on this score?  Lots of factors, but a big one has to be the decentralization of employment.  The classic suburban business park, which is pretty much impossible for transit to serve effectively, is far more prevalent in the US than in Canada or Australia.  From what I know of Vancouver and Australian cities, most business park development has some nexus with industry, whose space needs justify the low density.  Recently we've seem some more American-inspired versions, but nothing on the scale and extent that's common around US cities.

The concentration of employment is part of why Sydney looks so good.  Sydney is Australia's most multi-polar city, with many secondary mixed-use highrise activity centres.  These centres are dense enough to have significant parking costs, and are almost always right on the rail system.  The result is a multi-directional pattern of demand that's relatively easy to serve well.

Still, Sydney's place on this chart, surging up onto the Canadian trendline, is also a reminder of the essential role of negative incentives -- sticks rather than just carrots.  Sydney shows 22% of all journey-to-work trips on transit, citywide, but this is driven mostly by the massive and constrained CBD, where over 70% of all commutes are on transit.  If you surveyed the riders on a crush-loaded non-air-conditioned train in midsummer, I doubt many would say that they're on the train because it's a wonderful service.  They're on the train because parking in the Sydney CBD can cost more than $60/day.

In any case, we're on the leadup to Canadian Thanksgiving, so I thought this little occasion for Canadian triumphalism would be apt. 

UPDATE:  Just to clarify, the dots here represent entire metro areas, not just incorporated central cities.

portland: is parking the problem?

In the last post I pointed to a set of data out of the City of Portland showing that in a 12-year period when the city added four new rail transit lines, including the globally marketed Portland Streetcar, the percentage of Portland residents who take transit to work (called transit's "journey-to-work mode share") seems not to have changed at all.

Commenter Pantheon dug into Canadian statistics and found that in the period 1996-2006, when Portland's transit journey-to-work mode share was idling in the 12-15% range, Canadian cities posted these gains:

Ottawa up 2.2% to 19.4%
Montreal up 1.2% to 21.4%
Calgary up 3% to 15.6%
Vancouver up 2.2% to 16.5%

To be fair, these aren't that much higher than Portland's 12-15%, but it would be nice to think that Portland would show better outcomes than Calgary. 

I suspect that parking costs are a big issue, especially since Portland is still a relatively easy city to drive in.  My colleague Stuart Donovan offered this comment:

I suspect Portland's lack of headway on mode shift reflects subsidies for parking, rather than any failing of transit investment or urban land use policies.

Colliers study of international parking rates found Portland ranked near cheapest in the U.S. - at just $9/day. This is comparable with Louisville, KY - a city which is half as dense.

Investment in transit is likely to be futile in an environment of subsidised parking. Removing minimum parking requirements and applying a parking levy would be a good start.

Parking is one of the major costs associated with a private vehicle based transport system, yet many cities around the world persist with ill-considered regulations which force developers to provide excessive amounts of parking.

Instead of futile debates on the merits of BRT versus LRT, we would be better off advocating for parking reforms, especially abandoning minimum parking requirements, as a way of achieving better transport outcomes.

So I went and looked at parking costs in Portland's downtown.  Stuart's right.  At the 10th & Yamhill garage, which is right on two rail lines and a streetcar line, and just a few blocks from the very center of downtown, you can still park all day for $10.  The highest SmartPark rate anywhere in Portland is $15/day at 1st & Jefferson.  Meanwhile, in Calgary, a day's parking can cost up to C$22 (US$21.28) in the City Centre and Convention Centre parking structures.

Stuart goes on:

Given that the average car-park takes up about 380 sq ft a "market" price for parking is closer to $20/day, rather than $10/day. I smell parking subsidies.

Not to say that they should immediately double the cost of parking, but there's obviously room to drive considerable mode shift from parking policies alone.

In other recent work we've been doing, we've repeatedly seen that parking price is the most powerful locally-controlled lever for shifting people out of single-occupant cars, in the absence of more direct congestion charges.  Increases in parking costs drive big shifts to transit or other options.

During the heady early years of Portland's urban revolution, in the 1970s-80s, Portland had a cap on the supply of parking downtown.  Short-term parking was always available, but all-day parking was supposed to get expensive, so that commuters would have a motive to use the transit system or other sustainable modes.  The cap was lifted in the 1990s, and if 10th & Yamhill is any indication, it looks like there has been no price pressure since then; the price today isn't much higher than it was when my office was near there 15 years ago. 

Since 10th & Yamhill is a city-operated garage, the city may be subsidizing parking (by charging a below-market price) in conflict with its own sustainable transport goals.  If that's true, it wouldn't be unusual.  In fact, most cities subsidize parking more than they would like to, but politically it's very hard for a city to let parking costs rise to a true market rate. 

Cities that have no control over their parking supply, ironically, may have an advantage on this crucial sustainability-driver, because their private providers can let all-day rates rise to the true market level (also causing transit ridership to rise) and the city government can rightly claim that there's nothing they can do about it.  It's just that beautiful free market, doing it's thing.

bus vs rail, an "oversimplified comparison"

Planetizen points out a new paper by Jeffrey R. Brown and Gregory R. Thompson of Florida State University, called "Bus vs. Rail: an Oversimplified Comparison."  From the abstract:

There is debate about the relative merits of investing in rail or express bus modes to improve regional transit performance. The debate largely assumes that both modes serve a single function of providing higher speed service to the central business district (CBD) over relatively long travel distances. The debate generally overlooks other functions that might be served by express bus and rail transit modes and thus ignores that the two modes may perform differently depending on the service mission they are assigned. Performance of the two modes is examined in four metropolitan areas with different strategies for providing high-quality, regional transit service: a CBD-focused strategy, a hybrid strategy that serves the CBD and a few other destinations, and a multidestination strategy that serves a widely dispersed set of destinations. ... It was found that the combination of a rail transit backbone and a multidestination service strategy leads to better performance than any other marriage of mode and mission.

In other words, (a) rail and bus technologies are tools, and no tool is right for every job, and (b) multi-destinational networks based on connections are more productive than radial systems that narrowly focus on a single downtown.  Regular readers of this blog will find these conclusions obvious, but it's interesting to see that this argument still needs to be made in the literature. 

UPDATE:  Let me tease this apart a little further.  I don't mean to imply that the work is redundant, but it does apply to a narrow range of cases, and it conflates "multi-destinational" with "rail" a little more than I'm comfortable with.

The authors' focus is on four cities which they locate on a spectrum from "CBD-oriented" to "multi-destinational."   

• Pittsburgh, which they identify as the most "CBD-oriented."
• Minneapolis, which they identify as transitional or hybrid.
• Atlanta and San Diego, which they identify as "multi-destinational."

These cities are all comparable in size, all have a mix of rail and bus, and all have some facilities for getting express buses out of traffic at least some of the time, ranging from the full busways of Pittsburgh to the freeway-shoulder operations of Minneapolis.

A CBD-oriented system (more commonly called a radial system) is one that views downtown as the sole destination of importance.  In such a system, people who aren't going downtown usually have to go via downtown, whether or not this is on the way.  A multi-destinational system is one that tries to serve trips to many destinations all over the city.  If you live in Los Angeles or Manhattan or Paris or Berlin, this distinction will seem silly to you, because your city has been multi-destinational for decades if not centuries and your transit system adapted to that reality long ago.  But most American (and Australasian) cities had a period, generally ending around 1945, when they had a single extremely concentrated downtown -- fueled, in many cases, by streetcar/tram networks that converged on it.  And at one time, it made perfect sense that this downtown would be the sole focal point of the transit network.

Since 1945, most cities have been becoming more multi-destinational, with more important destinations (employment, retail, leisure, etc) scattered all over the city.  Transit agencies were generally slow to adjust, especially since downtown tended to be where they were most appreciated and where the pre-car development pattern made it easy for pedestrians to get to them.  But over time, it's been necessary to adjust to a multi-destinational pattern in order to remain relevant to the life of the city as it is now.  The paper suggests that of the four cities studied, Atlanta and San Diego are relatively far along on that path, Pittsburgh least so.  (This seems to match Alan Hoffman's observation (here, page 67) that despite the introduction of busways, the Pittsburgh network has changed relatively little for a long time.) 

Note that the important distinction here is not that the network infrastructure is more or less CBD-oriented, but that the thinking of the transit agency is.  All four of the cities studied have CBD-oriented transit infrastructure that suits their CBD-oriented history, but they have thought about their networks in different ways. 

By comparing the experience of these four cities, the authors find that the most effective system is not the CBD-oriented but the multi-destinational.  Needless to say, your mileage may vary; it depends on how CBD-oriented your city still is, but even a city as CBD-oriented as Portland had great success with a multi-destinational network.  Most of the major network redesigns I've done have been about helping CBD-oriented systems still meet their CBD need while also being relevant to a wider range of destinations. 

My only quibble is that multi-destinational systems don't have to mean "rail and bus working together" because you can do the same thing in smaller or pre-rail cities by designing an all-bus system to work just the way a good bus+rail system would work.  I was the lead planner on a redesign for San Antonio around 2001-2, shortly after their voters had rejected light rail.  We did what we could to create a connective frequent network given that they only had buses to work with.  Following Portland's model, we did this with a mixture of high frequency grids in the denser inner city and trunk-and-feeder systems in the outer suburbs.  As a side effect, that project helped to intensify and simplify services in a concentrated corridor (Fredericksburg Road) where they're now planning Bus Rapid Transit, and light rail is being talked about again. 

Portland, too, did it with buses first.  Their multi-destinational route network (including the frequent grid covering the inner city and the trunk-and feeder structures for major outer suburbs) all were put in place by 1982, four years before the first light rail line opened.  Rail sometimes leads, but sometimes the result of good multi-destinational network planning, not its cause or starting point.

minneapolis: unlocking downtown with transit malls

Are the streets of your downtown all too similar to each other, all full of lots of cars and maybe a few trucks and buses?  Do the differences between parallel streets, in commercial character and pedestrian life, seem feeble compared to the mass of identical traffic lanes that dominate the visual impression?   Often, the most efficient downtown network designs, and the best urban design outcomes, result from making parallel streets more different from each other, more specialized around different functions.  Streetcars (trams) used to drive such specialization, and sometimes still do, but elsewhere cities need to find their way back to that logic, with or without streetcars.  One of the first big American successes in this direction was the Portland transit mall, which opened in 1977.  There, two of the most central streets in downtown were given over primarily to transit, while parallel streets one block over were devoted mainly to cars. 

Now, partly inspired by that example, the City of Minneapolis is about to implement a major change to its downtown street patterns that will much improve the flow for transit across the city.  It comes from my last major consulting project in the US, the Access Minneapolis study.  The client was the City of Minneapolis, and the lead firms were Meyer Mohaddes and Nelson\Nygaard.

In the old arrangement, the major volumes of buses that needed to get through downtown Minneapolis mostly ran in single-lane bus lanes with no passing capability, where every bus was as slow as the slowest bus.  Buses were also spread all over downtown, with a few running on almost every street, creating an arrangement that was illegible for passengers.  The spread-out pattern also meant relatively few buses at any stop, hence relatively few passengers waiting, hence poor shelter from the city's harsh climate and often personal safety concerns. 

After years of study, meetings, and spirited discussions, we recommended a new arrangement.  North-south buses (the largest volume) would mostly be consolidated on just two north-south streets right through the center of downtown -- Marquette Avenue and Second Avenue South.  Each street would have a double-width bus lane in one direction (similar to the Portland transit mall minus light rail) with car traffic in the other direction.  I'm always surprised there aren't more two-lane bus lane arrangements, because although they're a big commitment, they use space really well: A single-width lane with no passing capability starts getting seriously gummed up around 60 buses/hour, but double-width lanes handle 180 buses/hour.  Doubling the width triples the capacity.   It can also dramatically increase speed and reliability.

(Again, this is compared with a single lane with no passing capability, because in Minneapolis the old single bus lanes were contraflow; i.e. the next lane of traffic was in the opposite direction.  Single bus lanes where buses can also pass via the adjacent lane can do somewhat better than 60 buses/hr, depending on how congested the next lane is.)

Double-width lanes generally run best in a skip-stop configuration, in which 2-4 groups of routes serve different stops, in a pattern that repeats every few blocks as you go down the street.  This also makes the service more legible, because each stop represents a particular part of the city or product type.

To get to this outcome, of course, we had to think about whole bands of parallel streets together.  Focusing buses on these two streets meant buses were removed from other streets, allowing them to be specialized around other uses.  We had to consider the accesses to the parking structures.  We had to deal with a range of options for Nicollet Mall, a famous "transit mall" that had become a great pedestrian space but had never worked very well for transit, because it had only one lane in each direction.  Hennepin Avenue, an entertainment and nightlife district, was restored to two-way operation as part of the plan, undoing a one-way couplet that had always strained against the older structure of the city.

For the consultant, planning projects end when we write a final report, send a final invoice, and leave town.  It's hard to describe the pleasure of seeing our work, filtered through the excellent work of many others, finally appearing on the street, where it will unlock potential both for downtown development and also for the whole transit network that depends on it.  If you're in Minneapolis, let me know how it goes!