Human Transit

durable urbanism? durable transport?

Are you tired of the word "sustainable"?  Does it seem to lecture rather than inspire?  Does it feel defensive, perhaps even conservative in its suggestion that humans should have no higher ambition than to sustain?  Doesn't sustaining sound, at times, like endless, thankless work?

Well, in French the equivalent word is durable.  So in an idle moment I wonder: what if we used "durable" in English?  Durable urbanism.  Durable transportation.  Durable energy.  Durable lifestyles.

"Durable" shares many virtues with that more popular alternative, "resilient."  There's already a Resilient Cities movement, and an excellent book on Resilience Thinking.  

What I like about both words is they imply an intrinsic strength.  Sustainability implies the endless labor of sustainers, while durability and resilience are just features of the thing itself. 

But "durable," in particular, sounds strong, even masculine.  It's a quality sought in boots, storm windows and SUVs.  Guys want to be durable, and to live in a durable world.  They certainly don't want to be sustained.  (And let's face it, a lot of the people resisting sustainability are guys.)

Not sure.  Something to try, maybe. 

 

 

 

watching our words: route or line?

(Another short selection from the draft of the book I'm writing.)

The word for the path followed by a transit vehicle is sometimes route, and sometimes line.  Whenever you have two words for the same thing, you should ask why.

Most of the words used in transit discussions also have a more common meaning outside that context.  That common meaning often forms a connotation that hangs around the word, often causing confusion, when we use the word to talk about transit.  In saying the word, we may intend only the transit meaning, but some people may be hearing the more common meaning.  Regardless of our intentions, the commonplace meaning of a word is often still there, as a connotation, when the word’s used in a transit context.  The words route and line are a good example.

A route, in its common meaning, is the path traced by some kind of person or vehicle.  When a package or message is going through a postal system, we say it’s being routed.   The person who delivers newspapers to subscribers in the morning is following a paper route.  School buses typically follow routes.

What these meanings of route have in common is that the route isn’t necessarily followed very often.  A package going through a delivery system may end up following a specific route that no package has followed before.  Paper routes and school bus routes run only once a day, and not at all on some days.  These common uses of route imply a place where some kind of transport event happens, but possibly not very often. 

The word line, on the other hand, has a clear meaning from geometry: a simple, straight, one-dimensional figure.  In common usage we often use line for something curved, like the laugh-lines and worry-lines on a face, and transit lines may be curved as well.  But in any case, the word line doesn’t imply an event, as route does.  A line is a thing that’s just there, no matter what happens along it. 

Lurking inside these two words, in short, is a profound difference in attitude about a transit service.  Do you want to think of transit as something that’s always there, that you can count on?  If so, call it a line.  We never speak of rail routes, always rail lines, and we do that because the rails are always there, suggesting a permanent and reliable thing.

If you’re selling a transportation product, you obviously want people to think they can count on it.  So it’s not surprising that in the private sector, the word is usually line:  Trucking and shipping companies often call themselves lines, as do most private bus companies and of course, the airlines.  This doesn’t mean that all these services are really line-like – some may be quite infrequent – but the company that chose the word wants you to think of it as a thing that’s reliably there, that you can count on.

So in general, when talking about transit, think about the more commonplace meaning of the word you’re choosing.  In this case:

• Use route to indicate the site of a (possibly very occasional) transportation event.  The word route reminds many of us of school transportation, newspaper deliveries, and delivery systems that may operate only infrequently.
  
  
• Use line when you want to imply something that has a continuous physical presence and availability – for example, a transit line where service is coming so often that you don’t need a schedule.

To put it even more simply, the word route lowers expectations for the frequency and reliability of a service.  The word line raises those expectations.

Often, transit agencies themselves will use these words in a way that’s not quite conscious of these connotations.  In Australia, for example, bus services are usually routes, but rail services are lines.  This usage carries a hint that we should have intrinsically lower expectations of bus service as compared to rail.  In many cases, that’s not true: many bus “routes,” for example, run frequently all day while commuter rail  “lines” may run only a few times at rush hour. 

Of course, these connotations can be a nuisance. Sometimes you don’t want any connotation.   Sometimes you just want the meaning.

Unfortunately, words without connotations tend to sound abstract and dull.  I could insist on saying “fixed vehicle path” instead of route or line, just as I could say “nonmotorized access” when I mean walking or cycling, but you wouldn’t get through this book if I did.  Language that strikes us as evasive or bureaucratic is often the result of word choices that try to avoid all connotation.  Such language is precise but uninspiring, and long passages of it are just plain hard to read.

To keep our speech vivid and engaging, we have to use words with connotations, and do our best to choose those connotations consciously.  I’ll do that throughout this book, and note where there may be a connotation problem.  As for route and line, my broad intention is to raise expectations of transit rather than lower them, so I generally use line.  However, when I speak specifically of a service that doesn’t run very frequently, I use route.

transit's product: mobility or access?

This post is an important early section in the book I'm working on.  Longtime readers will recognize the primordial muck from which it arose.  I thought I would share it because it's a key conceptual marking-point and I know it will be controversial.  In brief, I argue that while "mobility" is problematic as a goal of a whole transportation system, we can't abandon it as a descriptor of transit's primary purpose and function, because to do so makes it impossible to understand how and why transit does what it does.  If anyone has a better word for what I'm calling mobility, I'd love to hear it. 

 

Because transit debates so often lose track of transit’s defining product – which I’ve called personal mobility – it’s worth pausing to clear some weeds around this concept.

In contemporary urbanist thinking, the world mobility is profoundly out of fashion. Todd Litman of the Victoria Transport Policy Institute defines mobility this way:

Mobility refers to the movement of people or goods. It assumes that “travel” means person- or ton-miles, “trip” means person- or freight-vehicle trip.   It assumes that any increase in travel mileage or speed benefits society. (Litman, 2008)

By this definition the output of transit that matters is passenger-miles or passenger-km.  A passenger-mile is one passenger carried for one mile.  (Ten passenger miles, for example, could mean one passenger carried for ten miles or ten passengers each carried for one mile.)

Defined this way, the concept of mobility can be misleading because it doesn’t measure how readily people got to where they were going; it just measures how far they were moved.  Most of the time, though, our travel isn’t motivated by a sheer desire for movement; it’s motivated by the need to do something – make some kind of economic or personal contact – that is too far away to walk to.

Suppose that your favorite grocery store is reachable from your house only via a circuitous bus route.  When you ride this bus to the store, you only want to go about 3 miles, but the bus takes you 5 miles in the course of getting there, and the bus company will claim to have delivered 5 passenger-miles of mobility as a result of your trip.  Obviously, that’s unfair, because you only wanted to go 3 miles. 

But really, you didn’t even want that.  What you wanted was your favorite grocery store.  You wanted access to your grocery store, not 3 miles worth of mobility.

So there are two problems with mobility, defined and measured this way.  First, it measures how far you were moved, even if some of that movement wasn’t necessary.  Second, more fundamentally, it implies that a greater good was delivered by taking you to shops three miles away than would have been delivered if the same shops were close enough to walk to. 

Transit that participates in reshaping the city, by encouraging greater density and walkability so that the basic needs of life are available with less travel, has the effect of increasing access even as it reduces our need for mobility.   From the perspective of almost all of transit’s goals, replacing long trips with short trips that achieve the same outcome is a good thing.  If shops identical to the ones you have three miles away were to open next to your house, you wouldn’t travel as far. In fact, you wouldn’t make a transit trip at all.  The bus company would lose a customer and its ridership would fall as a result.  Yet clearly, the ability to do something via a short trip rather than a long trip is better for you, better for the energy-efficiency in your city, and better for the environment. 

That’s why Litman suggests we should care more about what he calls access:

Accessibility (or just access) refers to the ability to reach desired goods, services, activities and destinations …   Access is the ultimate goal of most transportation, except a small portion of travel in which movement is an end in itself (jogging, horseback riding, pleasure drives), with no destination. This perspective assumes that there may be many ways of improving transportation, including improved mobility, improved land use accessibility (which reduce the distance between destinations), or improved mobility substitutes such as telecommunications or delivery services.  (Litman, 2008)

Mobility is how far you can go in a given time.  Access is how many useful or valuable things you can do.  If a new grocery store opens near your house, that doesn't improve your mobility but it does improve your access.  You can now get your groceries closer to home, so you don't need as much mobility as you did before.  You can also improve your access by working at home instead of commuting, downloading music instead of going to a CD store, and moving in with your romantic partner.  In other words, a lot of the work of access is simply about eliminating the need to move your body around the city in order to complete the economic and personal transactions that make up a happy life.

But before we dismiss mobility as a distraction, let’s look again at the three ways of improving access, as Litman lists them:

• “Improved mobility”
• “Improved land use accessibility (which reduces the distance between destinations)”
• “improved mobility substitutes such as telecommunications or delivery services”

When I say that transit’s product is personal mobility, I’m emphasizing the first of these three ways of improving access.  I’m not implying that the others are unimportant, only that the first of these – improving access by improving mobility – is transit’s primary job, just as firefighting is the fire company’s primary job.

Transit does have side effects, though, that affect the second kind of access, and we’ll return to these in Part II.  If an especially popular or exciting form of transit, such a streetcar or monorail, is built in an area, this may raise the land value of the area in a way that encourages denser development, and denser development often improves access by putting shops and other destinations that you value closer to your house. 

Designing transit to trigger desirable development is one of the core ideas of the New Urbanism, but like many new ideas it’s really an old one.  In 1900, when public transit was the primary form of urban transport for distances too far to walk, the public transit infrastructure determined the shape of the city’s growth.  In fact, many transit lines were created and owned by developers whose real goal was to build and sell houses along the line.

So transit can improve access two ways: (a) by providing personal mobility and (b) by influencing development to create denser communities where less mobility is required to do the same things. 

The second of these, however, is obviously an indirect impact.  Transit may lead to access-improving development, but only via several intermediate and unreliable steps.  You can build a rapid transit line and still not get more density if several other things don’t fall into place – including zoning, economic growth, cooperative neighbors, and bankers willing to lend to developers.  In that case, the new transit project doesn’t improve access at all, unless it has improved the first kind of access: mobility.

What is more, the ability of transit to stimulate development is clearly related to how well that transit seems to promise good mobility to the people who will live, work, or play there.  We don’t pay more for an apartment over a transit station because the station is a nice community amenity, like brick paving and planter boxes.  A transit station adds value to development precisely because buyers think it will make it easier for them, or their tenants, to get around.  So if transit isn’t credible in offering mobility, or at least appearing to do so, it’s unlikely to stimulate development.

In 2009, we began to see web-based tools that allow you to enter an address and see where you can go, in a fixed amount of time, from that address.  Here, for example, is the output from WalkScore.com's travel time tool, when queried by someone near the San Francisco Civic Center at 9:00 AM:

 

These tools aren’t for planning a trip, they’re for visualizing your freedom.  Not your freedom in some improved city of the future, but your freedom now.  That’s what mobility is: your freedom to move right now.

But the genius of these tools is that they let us see how choices we might make would affect that freedom.  Imagine that you’re deciding where in a city to live.  For each house or apartment you’re considering, you can check one of these sites and see quickly where you’ll be able to get to easily on transit.  And you won't get just an abstract "transit score."  You can look at this map and see how easy it will be to get to the places that matter to you.

The tool might save you a fortune.  If you’ve decided that you can only afford a house in a distant suburb, enter that address and you’ll get a clear map of just how far away things that you care about will be.  You might run the numbers on the cost of commuting and decide you’ll save money by spending more to live in a better location, closer to rapid transit and/or closer to the city, where you’ll spend less on transportation. 

In other words, you might make a decision that requires less mobility, because it has better access.  That access will consist not just in being closer to things you value, but also in having better transit options for the trips that are still too far to walk or cycle.

Mobility and access aren’t opposites, and mobility isn’t some tired doctrine worshipped only by blinkered traffic engineers.  If we want cities to be built in ways that require less travel, cities with better access, we will do that by ensuring that those cities still have generous transit mobility.  We need to show that if you locate in a transit-intensive place, you will be able to get to lots of places that matter to you, on transit; indeed, that you’ll have full access to all the riches of your city, or at least those that you care about. 

So in a book on transit, I’m going to insist, unfashionably, that in the transit business mobility is still our primary product.  Mobility is only one dimension of access.  The other two, as Litman defines them, are urban redevelopment and telecommunications, both of which can reduce the need for travel.  But mobility is the kind of access that most people expect transit, in particular, to deliver.

One of the major hazards of urban planning is that planners and theorists can get so excited by their visions of the future that they lose track of the present.  We can imagine futures in which transit systems help us to build denser cities, where we can have more access because things are closer.  But if we want today’s voters to support our vision, we have to care equally about what their needs are right now. 

In the short term, most of us are stuck with the current geography of our lives.  Our homes, jobs, relatives, friends, and favorite shops are wherever they are, and we’ve accepted, consciously or not, the need to travel the distances between these important things.  We can try to relocate some of these things in the months or years ahead, but we can’t relocate any of them today. 

This book will look more at urban form and all the ways we can change it, but we can’t use transit to create better cities unless we first understand how transit does its primary task of providing mobility.  Meanwhile, though, transit needs to focus on the shorter-term perspective: the perspective of someone who needs to go somewhere, and get there soon, to address a need that they have right now.  This person isn’t thinking about how better transit might help transform her city.  She’s thinking: “I just need to be there!”  We need to figure out whether transit can help her, and if so, how.

weekend distraction ii: google's word history tool

This weekend everyone's playing with Google's new Books Ngram tool, which shows you how often any word you can think of showed up in books in each year of modern history, using Google's vast archive of digitized books.  The tool can be set to look back to before 1600, but before 1800 or so the dataset is too small to mean much.

"Tram" vs "streetcar" is interesting.  It seems that in the golden age of streetcars nobody was saying "streetcar" yet:

Then there's "bus" vs. "coach."

Personally I love the word "coach," and want it back, but I'm sure that the word's 20th century run refers mostly to athletic coaches.  

You can sometimes see a change in the prevailing meaning of a word marked by a low-point in its frequency, and that may be happening to "coach" around 1920.  (For an obvious recent example of the same phenomenon, see "gay.")  Words go quiet for a while as nobody's sure what they mean anymore.  Then people get sure, and they take off. 

Few transit terms are easy to search, because the profession's vocabulary is constructed metaphorically, so almost every word we use has a more common meaning outside the transit context.  But "city" and "town" are fascinating:

"City" has lost about half of its frequency in the last century.  In the 19th Century, novels that took place in cities made sure you notice the fact, often dwelling on the confronting textures of city life.  Cities and country are in clear opposition, and as the Industrial Revolution rages everyone's worrying over the contrast between them.  The city is emerging as one of the main problems of civilization. 

Then in the 20th century we get the rise of subjectivity -- the idea that stories don't really need settings if the personalities are vivid enough -- and also the rise of specialization, which means that stuff that happens in cities is less likely to credit the city as a necessary frame.  And that, of course, sets the stage for the flight to suburbia and the possibility of no longer caring what a city is.  But starting around 1960 there's the beginning of something new.

Of course, some of the decline in "city" matches the rise of "urban," which dances closely with "rural."

"Urban" rises as "city" declines.  Before the "urban" was invented (followed not long after by "urbanism") everyone just talked about the city. 

Have fun!  Did you know that the word "interchange" has been in decline since 1963?  Me neither!

quote of the week: manhattan as "stockyard"

[T]he comforts of the [Manhattan's] rich still depend on the abundance of its poor, the municipal wealth and well-being as unevenly distributed as in the good old days of the Gilded Age. When seen at a height or a distance, from across the Hudson River or from the roof of Rockefeller Center, Manhattan meets the definitions of the sublime. At ground level Manhattan is a stockyard, the narrow streets littered with debris and laid out in the manner of cattle chutes, the tenements and storefronts uniformly fitted to fit the framework of a factory or a warehouse.

-- Lewis Lapham, "City Light", Lapham's Quarterly, 7 October 2010

It's so easy to project the past onto the present.  Is Lapham really describing Manhattan today?  Or did he just stop noticing change a decade or two ago?

 

Lapham's image of the Manhattan street as stockyard is something I could recognize from visits there as recently as 1985, when the scouring rush of traffic on the wide avenues could indeed recall thundering herds of cattle racing down narrowing channels toward their doom.  You'll certainly find this street-level dystopia in many great New York novels of the 19th and 20th centuries.  But is this really the Manhattan of 2010 where major streets and elevated freeways are turning into cycleways and parks? 

And if the dystopian 20th Century Manhattan is gone, or going, what will social theorists do without it?  The vertical city as a metaphor for wealth differential -- rich above, poor below -- is so easy that it's hardly a metaphor at all.  What happens as the rich-poor divide grows more horizontal again -- as the poor are priced of even the humblest Manhattan apartments?  Will we have to let go of the altitude=power equation?  Or is "altitude=power" so ingrained in our nature that commentators of Lapham's ilk will always stamp it upon Manhattan, so that when they see a well-dressed woman chatting with friends over coffee in the middle of the parkland called Broadway, they'll still see some kind of stockyard in her soul?

should i call myself a "transit rider"?

Is there anything wrong with calling a group of people "transit users" or "riders"?  Is there anything wrong with calling yourself such a thing?

Michael Druker at Psystenance has been thinking about how we should talk about "people who travel by a certain mode." 

The fundamental attribution error leads us to interpret the behavior of others as reflecting something inherent about those people, more than is warranted. However, the language we use plays a role in that judgment as well. Our labels often describe who people are instead of what they’re doing, e.g. pedestrians, cyclists, transit users, or drivers. Each one of those terms gives us a category to which those people belong, making it easier to attribute their actions as reflecting some property of members of that category. That, in turn, makes it more difficult to progress towards a multimodal and sustainable transportation system.

I propose a different and deliberate use of language to mitigate this:

• Old: pedestrians. New: people on foot, or people walking.
• Old: cyclists. New: people on bikes, or people cycling.
• Old: transit users. New: people on transit.
• Old: drivers or motorists. New: people in cars, or people driving.

Sometimes we’re in cars, sometimes we’re on transit, sometimes we’re on bikes, and sometimes we’re on foot. But we’re all people, and our perspectives are much more similar than the facile modal categories lead us to believe.

Some people reading that are going to be reminded of the term "people of color," which rose in part from the ease with which, say, "black" as an adjective ("black people") tended to deteriorate into "black" as a noun ("the blacks").  "People of color" put the category term back where it belonged, in an adjective phrase, while also extending across all the non-white ethnicities.  Other "people who" and "people with" terms began to appear around the same time -- "people with AIDS" for example -- each addressing a situation where describing with a noun -- "AIDS victims," "AIDS sufferers," -- seemed to crush individuality and personhood. 

Of course, these terms were always easy to ridicule as "politically correct," partly because they were cumbersome.  The need for sheer brevity makes me doubt I will fully embrace "people cycling" as a fully satisfactory synonym for "cyclist," though when speaking I do look for ways to keep the focus back on "people" rather than on the technology of transport they're using. 

Still, Michael is basically right.  Reducing mode choice categories to nouns -- cyclists, motorists, riders, etc -- is potentially divisive.  These categories seem to give us the clarity we need to do any thinking at all, but clinging to them can blind us of all the ways that two cyclists can be different, and all the ways that this cyclist and that motorist may agree on far more than two cyclists do.  Ultimately, the only way to combat this is to notice it, and point out alternate ways of categorizing that can help open minds.  For example, you might think of "people who, in their ideal world, would like to get around on transit."  Some but not all existing transit riders are in that group.  But so are some motorists.

It's also worth noting that we don't just apply these reductive categories when describing others, we may also apply them to ourselves.  (The comments on Michael's post explore this in some detail.)  A "transit users group" may sound like a good political strategy, but if you identify yourself too much as a "transit user," and build your understanding of politics around that identity, you risk excluding the views of current non-transit users and thus prematurely narrowing your potential community of interest.  (The San Francisco Transit Riders Union, for example, embraces "current and future riders.")  Lots of people care about transit, and they want to be counted, too. 

the resonance of city names: what is "san francisco?"

In a fine think-piece on "golden ages" of urban creativity, Aaron Renn of the Urbanophile mentions San Francisco as a place that isn't having one:

If you want to enjoy the best a contemporary American city can offer, then San Francisco is your place. I’ll admit, it’s my favorite city in the US. But I don’t imagine that if I moved there (as opposed to Silicon Valley) that I’d get to witness any great historical happenings, or play any role in defining even that city’s urban future, much less creating America’s next great metropolis.

What does it mean to say that San Francisco "(as opposed to Silicon Valley)" is not likely to be a site of "great historical happenings"?  I don't want to argue the truth of this statement, because I'm not sure of it's meaning. What exactly do you mean by "San Francisco"?

In my recent post on the perils of average density, I noted how multiple meanings of a city name can undermine the apparent objectivity of facts.  If the Mayor of Toronto says "Toronto" he probably means the City of Toronto, but when Toronto's airport authority uses the same word they clearly mean the "Toronto" that they serve, namely the entire urban area. 

This is a fairly simple ambiguity, common to most big cities.  But California is much trickier, and the Bay Area is trickiest of all.  The name "San Francisco" is hard to apply to the entire Bay Area, because (a) the city is small compared to the region and (b) the city's isolated peninsular position within the region means that it is at some distance from the cities around it, so "San Francsiconess" can't just flow across the city limits and into the surrounding suburbs, as "Torontoness" and "Chicagoness" so easily do.

Yet if you say that "San Francisco" is strictly the small and distinctive City of San Francisco, you have deprived the name of much of its possible resonance.  This tightly bounded San Francisco is still a wonderful city, but it won't bear comparison to "Chicago" or "Los Angeles," because those names unfurl over large and amorphous space, both vertical and horizontal, without hard boundaries, and this unfurling is what gives these names their power, or more literally, their resonance.

Great city names are powerful, exciting, and motivating because they resonate: they set off an echo between different meanings of the name, especially the larger and smaller areas that it can connote.  The emotive power of the word "Chicago" lies in the way it can mean the entire metroplex, or the city of Chicago, or just the dramatic highrise skyline of the Loop.  Indeed, what is a downtown skyline but a symbol of the entire city, a symbolism that's only possible because the skyline and the entire urban region can both be called  "Chicago"?  The relationship between the downtown skyline and the whole city is a resonance between these two possible meanings of the name.  And resonance conveys an impresson of power and depth.

San Francisco is denied this kind of resonance, because it's so hard to identify the city's name with a larger metro area, and nobody within 100 miles would try to.  Instead, locals refer to the Bay Area, a term that warns us not to expect a central symbolic city, since water bodies are naturally settled around their edges and not in the center.

So if you're going to talk about San Francisco "as opposed to" Silicon Valley or Berkeley or Skywalker Ranch any of the other centres of innovation nearby, you're slipping on a language problem arising from the local geography -- a pattern of settlement that prevents us from thinking of those nearby places as part of a greater, resonant, globally recognized "San Francisco."  And if you do this, you're missing a lot of information about how the whole Bay Area operates as a place, a culture, an engine of innovation.

You could also say that if you use "San Francsico" to refer only to the fairly small legal city, you're applying a tourist's reduction, like the one we routinely apply to Venice.  You're imagining a charming, historic, museumlike city conceived in isolation from its economic web.  And yes, once you define a city that way, it's easy to tell yourself that the next great urban revolution won't happen there.

In reality, San Francisco's qualities are intrinsic to the success of Silicon Valley, Berkeley, and all the other centres of excellence nearby.  Why do so many of the leading creative tech firms run huge fleets of commuter buses from San Francisco to their suburban campuses?  Because they need to attract the smartest and most creative young employees, and many of these people insist on living in San Francisco!  

It's easy to imagine that you're being generous when you lay out a manicured corporate campus with jogging trails and libraries and meditative wetlands where nobody will ever see a homeless person, but in fact, many of your most valuable employees would rather be stepping over homeless people to get to their urban lofts, and have more brilliant ideas amid live jazz in a seedy club than they do in the most well-designed campus offices.  That means, too, that a lot of Google's great thinking actually happens inside San Francsico, feeding off of all that it offers, and further blurring the lines between the city and its surrounds. 

Of course, I don't buy the assumption that even if San Francisco were an island it would be bereft of creativity.  But fortunately, San Francisco is not an island, and even if the name "San Francisco" can't unfurl over the whole Bay Area, the whole region still relies on San Francisco and can't be separated from it. Which is a very good thing.

avoiding car-centered language: a directive

In 1996, the City Administrator of West Palm Beach, Florida, Michael J. Wright, issued a directive to his staff on how to avoid biased language in the descriptions of transportation investments and policies.  It's four pages, sharply written, and may well be the smartest bureaucratic directive you'll ever read.  Here it is in PDF.  (Thanks to Peter Bilton at the Vorhees Transportation Center at Rutgers for pointing it out.)

It pulls no punches:

Much of the current transportation language was developed in the 1950's and 1960's. This was the golden age of automobiles and accommodating them was a major priority in society. Times have changed, especially in urban areas where creating a balanced, equitable, and sustainable transportation system is the new priority. The transportation language has not evolved at the same pace as the changing priorities; much of it still carries a pro-automobile bias. Continued use of biased language is not in keeping with the goal of addressing transportation issues in an objective way in the City.

Biased words, as identifed in the directive, include improvement, upgrade, enhancement, deterioration.  The problem with these words is that they imply an idea of good or bad that may not be universally shared.  So for example:

Upgrade is a term that is currently used to describe what happens when a local street is reconstructed as a collector, or when a two-lane street is expanded to four lanes. Upgrade implies a change for the better. Though this may be the case for one constituent, others may disagree. Again, using upgrade in this way indicates that the City has a bias that favors one group over other groups. Objective language includes expansion, reconstruction, widened, or changed.

And in the spirit of my last post:

Traffic is often used synonymously with motor vehicle traffic. However, there are several types of traffic in the City: pedestrian traffic, cycle traffic, and train traffic. To be objective, if you mean motor vehicle traffic, then say motor vehicle traffic. If you mean all the types of traffic, then say traffic.

The directive even nails the widespread misleading use of the word accident. 

Accidents are events during which something harmful or unlucky happens unexpectedly or by chance.  Accident implies no fault.  It is well known that the vast majority of [vehicular traffic] accidents are preventable and that fault can be assigned.  The use of accident also reduces the degree of responsibility and severity associated with the situation and invokes a inherent degree of sympathy for the person responsible.  Objective language includes collision and crash.

(Yes, crash sounds emotive while accident sounds cool, so it's easy to assume that accident is more objective or factual.  But sometimes the facts are emotive, and only an emotive word will accurately describe them.  The directive even notices that avoiding the emotive word can constitute an emotional bias in the other direction:   "Sheila was in a car accident!"  "Oh no, I hope she's OK!"  "Well, she killed three cyclists, so she's pretty upset!"  "How terrible!  I'll send her some flowers.")

If you have seen either (a) a better explanation of these principles or (b) a coherent refutation of them by a transportation authority, please post a link.  I'm aware of Todd Litman's comments on this (here, page 5) and I know it's come up in other academic literature.  Still, the West Palm Beach document is important because it's a directive.  Many people in transport bureaucracies are not comfortable with academic thought -- especially about linguistics, which is usually outside their training. But they are very accustomed to directives; they may find that the commanding tone of the West Palm Beach directive makes it easier for them to think about and react to. 

Read this document, discuss it, and forward it!  Yes, I know you've thought about this before, and maybe even written about it.  But remember: language evolves only through relentless repeitition!  Today, repetition is a matter of quoting, forwarding and linking.  So quote, forward, and link!

if you mean "car," say "car"

Here's a simple thing that anyone can do to improve the prospects of sustainable transportation.  When you hear a phrase that makes sense only from behind the wheel of a car, notice it, point it out, and don't get drawn into saying it yourself.

I could grab an example from anywhere, so here's one from an unsigned piece from the New Urban Network, a web publication of the New Urban News:

New York's Broadway, after giving up 3.5 miles of traffic lanes to pedestrians, bicyclists, and gathering spaces, is seeing its automotive traffic significantly decline.

Some say that Broadway should never have been allowed to cut its diagonal path across the Manhattan street grid to begin with. "The resulting three-way intersections can slow down cars and tie up the broader system," The New York Times observed Sept. 6 in an article available here.

New Urban News is a New Urbanist publication, so I'm sure the author isn't biased in favor of cars.  But still, the second paragraph is suggesting that the traffic problems caused by Broadway's three-way intersections could be an intrinisic problem with the very shape of the street.  That's true only if you're behind the wheel of the car, or in the back seat of a taxi.  If you make Broadway a great pedestrian street, presto, no more nasty three-way traffic intersections.  Problem solved.  And any urbanist will tell you that diagonal interruptions in a regular grid can be important sources of visual delight.

The New York Times article cited, by Michael M. Grynbaum, is a bit more careful:

Traffic planners at the city’s Department of Transportation say that less automobile traffic on Broadway is, in fact, a symbol of success, noting that the street’s awkward three-way intersections with other avenues created gridlock. “The mayor asked us to take a look at what we could to untangle the Gordian knot of traffic in Midtown,” Ms. Sadik-Khan said. “We’re making the network work like it was supposed to.”

But even here,  a "streets are for cars" bias slips in via the phrase "the street’s awkward three-way intersections with other avenues created gridlock" -- which is presented as a paraphrase of what the officials said.  If I'd been Grynbaum's editor I'd have insisted on something more precise like: "Using Broadway for heavy car traffic required awkward three-way signals that caused cascading delays."  Again, the problem isn't the shape of Broadway, but the use of Broadway as a heavy car street. 

Why pick on these New York examples when much more egregious cases can be found in any newspaper?  Because they show how easily a "streets are for cars" bias can hide in the language, even in the writing of people who hold the opposite view.    This, by the way, is yet another reason to hire literature students!  They'll notice how unwanted attitudes hide inside our language, especially in phrases that we write quickly as journalists under deadlines do. 

How to deal with this?  When I'm speaking or writing, I try to be aware of the dangers of quick and easy phrases that may contain values I don't want to convey.  It's hard to do as a journalist under a deadline, so let's put it as a slogan that simple enough to remember even then:

If you mean "car," say "car."

If you're describing a situation from the point of view of a car, say so explicitly.  Otherwise, you're implying -- whether you mean to or not -- that the car's point of view is so universal that it's just how real people see the world. 

 

 

the chinese tunnel-bus, or train, or whatever

Old news, I know. 

Chinese designers have come up with an innovative cost-effective public transport system: the tunnel bus.

The remarkable bus straddles two lanes of traffic, allowing cars to drive underneath while it carries up to 1,200 passengers.

It's environmentally sound too because it runs on electricity, using a state-of-the-art charging system. Called relay charging, the roof of the bus conducts electricity and contacts special charging posts as it moves along.

Engadget links to a video in Chinese explaining the concept, which is pretty clear even if you don't know Chinese.  A trial line is planned in Beijing, so we won't have to debate it in theory for much longer. 

But this is interesting:

It's cost-effective because there are two ways it could operate: first off, special tracks could be laid into each side of the road, like a tram. 

Or secondly, simple coloured lines could be painted onto the road for it to follow automatically on conventional tyres. There'll be a driver on the bus at all times, though.

I'm not sure how that makes it cost-effective, but it does have the effect of reducing the bus-rail distinction an almost academic quibble.  

Either way, this is going to be a large structure resting on narrow wheels.  It could be on rubber tires but linked to an optical-guidance system (sensors on the vehicle responding to a painted line on the pavement) and the effect would be the same as if it were on rails:  a controlled path with little or no lateral motion. 

So is it a train or a bus?  Who cares?