Human Transit

my network design course in portland: is it really worth $395?

It looks like most everyone had a great time at my Interactive Course in Transit Network Design in Washington DC last Friday and Saturday.  The feedback might help you decide if it's worth the money to sign up for my next session, in Portland, on April 4-5, or to bring the course to your own city.

Specifically:

 

how auditors get transit wrong: a lesson from vancouver

Elected officials love to demand "audits."  Auditing means that you hire high-prestige people who will scrutinize the books of an agency with particular genius, and deliver recommendations that resound with authority.

But many of the companies hired to audit transit agencies don't seem to understand transit.  That's certainly the evidence of a recently commissioned audit of Vancouver's TransLink, which discovered $41 million in potential annual savings including $5.3 million from cutting low-ridership services.  (Extensive detail and media reaction is gathered here.)

Like many audits, this one just assumes that low ridership means "without justfication."

But low-ridership services are unjustifiable only if ridership is their purpose.  

If you haven't read my book, or read this blog much, you may be under the impression that the goal of all public transit is high ridership, and that low-ridership services are therefore failing, evidence of waste, and should be cut.  In reality, every transit agency runs service that has a purpose other than ridership. These services, which I call "coverage" services in my own work, have purposes such as:

• Equitably distributing service to all areas that contribute tax revenue to the agency.
• Meeting the urgent needs of small numbers of people living in areas that are expensive to serve (seniors, disabled, isolated rural pockets of poverty etc)
• Satisfying a coverage standard, which is a statement of the form "___% of the population live within ___ metres/feet of service".  The specific purpose of these statements, which most agencies have, is to determine when service must be operated despite predictably low ridership.

The TransLink audit appears to be simply ignorant about the universal tension between ridership goals and coverage goals.  They recommend cutting coverage services because they have (predictably) low ridership.  This is exactly as logical as throwing away your microwave because it doesn't produce ice.

When an auditor' assumes that ridership or fare revenue is the only goal of transit, they are expressing a certain set of values.  This is a valid philosophical position, but it is not the only justifiable one, nor the only one that is widely held in most urban populations.   So auditors do citizens a great disservice when they present their values as the only possible ones.  In 20 years I have never encountered a public transit agency that actually deploys service exclusively for ridership.  Now and then and auditor swoops down and criticizes the agency for the low-ridership services, often implying that the agency didn't already know about them.

Transit agencies need the backbone to reply to these audits firmly, explaining that low-ridership services may exist for purposes other than ridership, such as those listed above, and that if these services reflect the voters' values, they are as legitimate as any other.  

Transit agencies can also support clearer auditing processes if they identify which of their services are intended mainly for coverage, which means their low-ridership should never be counted as evidence of failure.  I have worked with several agencies on forming clear statements about the percentage of resources that the agency wishes to devote to coverage service.  Once those services are documented, everyone can stop complaining about the low ridership of those services, because high ridership is not their purpose.

Auditing is one of those high-prestige professions, like architecture, that is prone to form echo-chambers that resist the introduction of outside information and perspectives.  Great auditors, like great architects, are suspicious of their own echo-chamber and always looking for perspectives from outside of it.  If you want to be a good auditor of public transit agencies, read my book!  It will help you avoid the TransLink auditor's mistake, and many others.  

 

network design course: the next step

Since I began offering my short course in network design, I've gotten many emails asking whether I'm going to do it again, and in what cities. The answer is that each session of the course needs a local sponsor, and as soon as I hear from one, I'm keen to help make it happen.

To help that process along, I now have a page advertising the course. Please mention it to any organizations that you think should offer it!

mapnificent breaking through?

As WalkScore's fine transit travel time tool languishes in extended beta, the alternative, Mapnificent, is getting some mainstream blog attention. 

I may still be alone in this, but I as I explored with WalkScore's Matt Lerner here, I believe this tool, whoever finally perfects it, has revolutionary potential.  It can easily be converted into a two-digit transit score which, unlike the WalkScore Transit Score, actually describes people's ability to get places.  But it's bigger potential is as an alternatives analysis tool.  When you city is facing a series of possible alternative transit projects, what if every citizen could use a tool like Mapnificent to see the exactly impact of each alternative on their mobility, and that of people and destinations they care about. 

A major problem in transit politics today is that negative impacts of a project are obvious but benefits are often described in terms of ridership and development outcomes -- things that don't matter to the selfish present-minded citizen.  We will always have selfish present-minded citizens, and I'd rather work with them than complain about them.  Until we help people see the way a proposed project will change their lives for the better, sensible transit projects will continue losing these debates.

deep-geeking a fictional city

In this post I invited readers to poke around in a fictional city that I'm developing for use in a transit planning course.  The city is laid out in Excel to make its features easy to analyze.  Students will work with a slightly more naturalistic map under a layer of acetate, and will draw lines on the map to attempt various types of transit networks that might address the city's needs.  More on the project and its purpose here.

I received many excellent comments, which I've used to expand and enrich the city.  The city now has more layers of detail that you might find it fun to explore and comment on. 

You're welcome to poke around in the updated version and share your views on its realism.  Download here:

Download Game Newport intro (.doc file)

Download Game data (.xls file)

Your comments are welcome, but before you comment, have a look at the previous post and its comments first, just to see what's been said!  Also, the little illustration at left is just one of many layers; to see the whole thing, open the files above.

This course is going to be fun!  I hope to be able to repeat it many times in many cities. 

planning games: "in praise of the urban sandbox"

Games may soon be the best way to build understanding of city planning and transport.  So argues an excellent article in Planning magazine by Jeff Ferzoco of New York's Regional Plan Association (my links):

At a recent talk at the American Museum of Natural History, Jane McGonigal, the Institute for the Future's director of Game Research and Design, noted that research from universities and the U.S. Army Mental Health Assessment Team show that the benefits of gaming lessen at about 21 hours in a week. ... Her point is that gaming has major benefits — stress relief, strategic thinking, goal attainment — if kept within the 21-hour limit.

She isn't the only one to see the implications. The Serious Games Initiative, founded in 2002 at the Woodrow Wilson Center for International Scholars in Washington, D.C., aims to "help usher in a new series of policy education, exploration, and management tools utilizing state of the artcomputer game designs, technologies, and development skills." One of its initiatives, Games for Change, runs an annual festival highlighting games — both electronic and physical — that encourage social change. Throughout the year, the initiative provides support for and development of new titles and helps potential developers navigate game making from concept to distribution. 

There is already a lot of interest in how we can use games for teaching. Those who design virtualworlds put a lot of emphasis on crafting the experience — and allowing others to change it...

In my work as a graphic designer for Regional Plan Association in New York City, I constantly think through concepts, illustrations, and designs. Ideas don't just come from thin air, and everything I experience influences what I make. Looking back, I can clearly identify instances when city-building games influenced my design work.  For instance, axonometric views: giant human hands placing houses on a row. These can be directly traced to a weekend I spent redesigning the suburbs of one of my virtual towns.  And I'm not alone. Many of the people around me have taken their design problems to these samearenas and come out with a slightly wider and more empathetic perspective.

Playing a simulation game is a bit like gardening. Just as air, soil, and water interact with seeds to bring a plant to life, simulated ... cities can blossom and wilt, depending on your actions. You have to tend to the needs of the citizens, joining job centers and adding transit and roads to bring circulation to a dying center.  It's instant, satisfying, and educational. In fact, it's why I work where I do in planning. I could say that my career began the moment I opened up SimCity for the first time.

Or if that's too many words, see Jane McGonigal's enjoyable video.  Her basic thesis: "If we want to save the world, we need to spend more time playing computer games."

fictional city seeks reality check

Did you draw maps of fictional cities when you were 8 years old?  If so, you and I are part of a near-invisible, uncounted minority. 

If that's you, I dare you not to be interested in this!  Even if you just enjoy maps of other cities, here's a chance to study a city you've never seen before.

For the transit planning course that I'm developing, I've created a fictional city that's designed to present a range of major transit issues, while also being an interesting place.  I considered using a real city, but in my experience, planning for a real city slides too quickly to details that obscure the big picture of how a good network works. 

My introduction to the fictional city is here:  Download Game Newport intro (.doc)

A rich set of map layers, created in Excel, is here:   Download Game data backsave  (.xls)

Both documents are covered by the assertion of copyright that covers all of this blog's material. 

I'd love feedback, especially about these questions:

• Is the city realistic?  Does it contravene what you perceive to be "facts" of geology, hydrology, urban economics, bird psychology, or post-1800 urban history?
• Have I omitted information that seems relevant to the basic task of designing a transit network?  Note that I'm not asking "have I omitted anything that might be interesting?"  The austere novelist and dominatrix who sells rare Asian herbs out of her Craftsman basement at 3315 W 43rd St while also being the invisible brains behind a top eco-fashion label is extremely interesting, but I only had a day to put this together.

Have fun!  The premiere of the transit planning course is in Surrey, British Columbia near Vancouver on June 9-10.  Last I checked there were a few places left.  Details here.

UPDATES:

• Please do not try to comment based only on the illustration above.  I'm getting many comments that indicate you've only looked at that image.  You would need to download the files and look at the whole thing.
• Apologies to those who had trouble with the .docx and .xlsx versions; these old formats should be more widely compatible and convertible.
• The newest version now has layers for income and existing rail infrastructure.

Finally, I'm surprised at early comments that I don't have enough freeways!  It's not a freeway dependent city, by choice.  (See the .doc file above for more on the freeway wars.)   But freeways that run only on the periphery and don't connect into the core are common enough in cities of this size class.  See:

• Victoria, British Columbia, metro pop 330k.  Two small shreds of freeway, created only as traffic required.
• Halifax, Nova Scotia, metro pop 372k.  Fragments of an outer ring freeway, nothing into the city.
• Christchurch, New Zealand, metro pop 390k at least before February's earthquake.  One 5-km shred of freeway approaching from the north (Kaiapoi to Belfast), but it's really just an extended bridge.
• Palm Springs-Indio, California, metro pop 365k.  The area is bypassed on the north by Interstate 10, far from most of the urban cores.
• Gold Coast, Queensland, metro pop 591k.  A massive highrise hotel/retail core (30-60 storeys) at Surfers Paradise, a highrise business core in adjacent Southport, but the only freeway bypasses 7 km to the west.

The last two of these are not, by any stretch, leftist car-hating enclaves.  In fact, they're exceptionally car-dependent.  Still, no freeways near the core.  It's possible!

for any 6-12 year olds out there ...

If you're still too young to be a transit geek, you might enjoy this news, emailed by a frequent reader:

Lego has recently released an excellent new Public Transport set (see pictures attached), which my sons and I had lots of fun building and playing with this last weekend.

Urban public transport toys are not common, and they tend to be either caricatured buses and trains for younger infants or expensive, detailed models for adults.  That's why I think this set for 6-12 year olds is remarkable for allowing children a more realistic, hands-on opportunity to play with transit vehicles, infrastructure and concepts, reflecting what they see on the streets in real life.

What is also remarkable about this set (besides the articulated low-floor tram and the bike rack at one of the stops), is the seriously cool and modern design of the vehicles and transit stops.  I can't say if toys as attractive and interesting as these might dignify and elevate the perception of public transport in children's minds (they certainly do for me) but if nothing else, they would allow children at an impressionable age to engage and explore the idea of urban living with transit as a normal part of life, alongside the usual cars, trucks and fire engines.

Interesting.  Certainly, a lot of our assumptions about the world are encoded through childhood play.  It's a great way for one generation to embed its values in the next, for better or worse.

did sim city make us stupid?

My post on the lack of good simulation games triggered this reverie from Peter, regarding the city-planning simulation game, Sim City:

Ah, SimCity.  ... As a youngster I spent many hours building fields of residential tract housing, industrial parks, huge blighted and substantially vacant commercial districts, mega-highways connecting them all, and Godzilla.

When I recently discovered that the original SimCity was released as open source, I had to download it and try it out. I knew that it was inaccurate, but it was nostalgia. Then I discovered exactly how inaccurate it was. "No mixed residential and commercial areas?!? WTF!" I did play it long enough to also notice that transportation was pretty much a capital expenditure with no operating costs. Sigh.

Yes, those are the two of the worst fallacies built into the original Sim City: