Human Transit

willingness to pay for transit improvements

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

the power and pleasure of grids

Why do transit planners love grids?  Now and then you'll even hear one muttering about "grid integrity" or "completing the grid."  What are they talking about?

Suppose you're designing an ideal transit system for a fairly dense city where there are many activity centers, not just one big downtown.  In fact, you don't want to give preferential treatment to any point in the city.  Instead, you want people to be able to travel from literally anywhere to anywhere else by a reasonably direct path, at a high frequency.  Everybody would really like a frequent service from their home to everywhere they ever go, which is pretty much what a private car is.  But money isn't infinite, so the system has to deliver its outcome efficiently, with the minimum possible cost per rider. What would such a system look like?

Well, you already know that to serve a two-dimensional city with one-dimensional transit lines, your system has to be built on connections, and for that you need high frequencies.  Frequency is expensive, so it follows that you need to minimize the total route distance so that you can maximize the frequency on each.  That means you can't afford to have routes overlapping each other.

Play with this problem yourself, but it turns out that the answer is a grid.  Parallel lines, each far enough apart that everyone can walk to one of them, and another set of the same lines perpendicular to them.

 

In an ideal grid system, everyone is within walking distance of one north-south line and one east-west line.  So you can get from anywhere to anywhere, with one connection, while following a reasonably direct L-shaped path. 

If your city street network is a grid, the path is often exactly the same way you'd make the trip if you were driving.  For this trip to be attractive, all the services have to be very frequent, so that you don't have to wait long for the connection.

The spacing between parallel lines in our ideal grid is exactly twice our maximum walking distance.  So if we're thinking in terms of ordinary local stop bus lines, maximum walking distance is about 1/4 mi or 400m, so our ideal spacing between parallel lines is 1/2 mi or 800m.  But in fact, successful grid systems run really frequently, so we can afford walking distances a little larger than that, up to say 1 km or about 3/4 mile. 

(I'm assuming for the moment that these are local-stop services, so that when you've walked to a line there's a stop nearby.  You could also imagine a grid of rapid or limited-stop bus services, such as Los Angeles has, or even a grid of underground or elevated subways, as in Paris or Berlin.  People will walk still further for those, but this doesn't let you push the parallel lines further apart, because the need to walk to widely spaced stations, rather than closely spaced stops, consumes some of that extra walking distance.)

The intrinsic efficiency of grids is a huge reason to be optimistic about cities that have arterial streets or potential transit corridors laid out in a grid pattern, especially if they have many major destinations scattered all over the city.  If your city or a part of it looks like that you have a huge structural advantage in evolving into a transit metropolis.  Los Angeles and Vancouver are two of the most perfect transit cities I've seen, in their underlying geography, because they have these features.  More on this aspect of both cities shortly. 

Note that the grid works because people can walk to both a north-south and an east-west line, and for this reason, cities or districts with labyrinthine local street patterns that obstruct pedestrians (Las Vegas, most of Phoenix, much of suburban Southern California) will have a harder time becoming transit-friendly even though they do have a grid pattern of major arterial streets, because pedestrians can't get out to the grid arterials easily, or cross them safely.

Grids are so powerful that dense cities that lack a grid network of streets often still try to create a grid network of transit.  Gaze for a bit at a schematic map of the Paris Métro for a bit and its underying grid pattern will start to emerge:  Most lines flow pretty consistently either north-south or east-west across the city, and while they can't remain entirely parallel or evenly spaced as they snake through this city of obstacles, you can see that on some level, they're trying to.

Or look at San Francisco.  The basic shape of the city is a square about seven miles on a side, with downtown in the northeast corner.  Because downtown is a huge transit destination, there are many routes from all parts of the city converging on it, in a classic radial pattern.  But under the surface, there's also a grid.  San Francisco's published network map is too complicated to reveal it easily, but you can see the grid if you look at a few schematics of individual routes.  For example, Lines 23-Monterey and 48-Quintara 24th St are east-west elements.

Notice how these two lines remain largely parallel as they cross the city.  This is interesting because San Francisco's street network has a lot of small grids but no prevailing citywide grid.  In fact, a major ridgeline runs north-south through the geographic center of the city, and the arterial network is very un-gridlike as it follows the steep terrain.   As a result, these lines have to twist a bit to get over it using the available streets.  The 48 has to twist again to get over Potrero Hill on the east edge of the city, where there is no available east-west street.  Yet they keep trying. 

Notice too that both routes try to get all the way across the grid before they end, so that almost all end-of-line points are on edges of the city.  This is a common feature of good grid design, because it maximizes the range of places you can get to in just one connection.  If you look at the abstract grid diagrams earlier in the post, you can see how they'd work less well if some lines in the grid ended without intersecting every one of the perpendicular lines.  You'd have fewer options for how to complete a trip with a single connection.

Why aren't all frequent networks grids?  The competing impulse is the radial network impulse, which says: "we have one downtown, everyone is going there, so just run everything to there."  Most networks start out radial, but some later transition to more of a grid form, often with compromises in which a grid pattern of routes is distorted around downtown so that many parallel routes converge there.  You can see this pattern in many cities.  Portland for example.  Many of the lines extending north and east out of the city center form elements of a grid, but converge on the downtown.  Many other major routes (numbered in the 70s in Portland's system) do not go downtown, but instead complete the grid pattern.  This balance between grid and radial patterns was carefully constructed in 1982, replacing an old network in which almost all routes went downtown.

Another way of distorting the grid to favor downtown is suggested by Portland's two prominent diagonal boulevards, Sandy in the northeast and Foster in the southeast.  These lines, suggested if not mandated by the available arterials, follow a more direct path into downtown at the expense of being slightly less useful for other kinds of trips within the grid.

These diagonals and distortions are essentially elements of a competing type of grid: the classic "radial" or polar grid, also called a "spider web"

The spider web assumes a single point of primacy, downtown, and organizes a grid around that primacy.  If you zoom in on some part of the spider web, you may find that it works well enough as a standard grid.  For example, you may be able to make a reasonably direct trip between non-downtown points by using one of the circle lines in combination with one of the radial lines.  But it won't be as direct as it would be in a standard grid.  More important, the spider web is only efficient if downtown is so predominant that it can justify the huge amount of service converging there.  The  spider web also has problems further out, because as the radial lines get further and further apart the grid effect gets weaker and weaker. 

You can tell a lot about a city by looking at the tension between standard grid elements and radial or "spider web" elements.   I'll do some other posts about individual cities next, but first, I wanted to lay out this crucial bit of theory.

on subways to the sea

This friendly little graphic, which I found on Dan Wentzel's Pink Line blog, promotes the "Subway to the Sea," an extension of the Los Angeles Purple Line subway, largely under Wilshire Blvd., all the way to the beach at Santa Monica (map here).  I like it as a logo, but it's also serves to explain why relatively few subways in coastal cities go all the way to the beach, and why they often stay back from the ocean a bit. 

(It's not the "seawall" problem.  The graphic suggests that the subway station and the ocean would separated by a vertical seawall, an especially expensive and risky construction project.  This would not be the case in Santa Monica, which has a gently sloping beach, though there might be some related engineering issues.)

No, the real problem is the radius of demand.  The ridership potential of any station or stop depends mostly on what's within walking distance of it.  How many residents are there?  How many jobs?  How much retail and other activity, and how many people will that attract on a daily basis? 

This "area served" by a station is usually visualized as a circle of a fixed radius.  You can argue about how big the radius is, but for a subway station it's at least 0.5 mi / 800m and arguably over 1.0 m / 1600m.  In reality, it's a fuzzy circle where demand grows weaker as you get further from the station.

But it's a fixed radius, which means a fixed area.  So the amount of development in that fixed area -- in other words, density -- is the largest determinant of the size of the market.  (Connections, of course, also play a role, along with park-and-ride, bike-and-ride etc.  But the walk radius is still fundamental.)

If your station is right at the beach, this circle obviously sticks out into the ocean.  And since there's no development there, the rest of the circle -- the few blocks around the station right at the beach -- needs to be even denser than it would otherwise need to be.

The Los Angeles "Subway to the Sea" is envisioned ending at Santa Monica's 4th Street, about 1/4 mile back from the beach, but the radius of demand is larger than that, so this will still be an issue.

This is a particular issue when we're talking about ending the line at the beach -- as opposed to just running along the beach as, say, New York's Rockaway branches do.  That's because the end of the line needs to be an especially high ridership generator, or what transit planners call an anchor. 

As you get near the end of a transit line, the vehicle tends to empty out because it's going fewer places and therefore attracts fewer boardings.  This can lead to permanent wasted capacity near the end of the line, what we call a weak anchor.  A strong anchor is a big destination right at the end of the line that compensates for this problem by giving lots of people a reason to use the line all the way to its endpoint.  

The anchoring principle is why I suspect that the Wilshire subway may well end at or near Westwood/UCLA, 4-5 miles back from the beach, at least in its initial segment.  Westwood/UCLA is a massively strong anchor, defined by highrise employment, highrise housing, and a huge university.  Nothing in Santa Monica is (or wants to be) anywhere near that dense.  The "Subway to the Sea" graphic does suggest a Santa Monica beachfront with far more tall buildings than are there today, but I have trouble imagining the massing of buildings against the ocean that you'd need to generate a strong anchor for something as expensive and high-capacity as the terminus of a rapid transit subway.

This is a good reason to design subways so that they have room to turn as they approach the ocean, so that they are potentially extendable parallel to the beach.  In the case of Santa Monica, I could certainly imagine designing a line ending far enough back from the beach that it could turn southward someday, extending south through Venice perhaps along Lincoln Blvd.  Such a line would match the design of New York Subway's Rockaway and Coney Island services, which both turn and run along the beach -- usually 1/4 mile or so back from it.  The Far Rockaway branch actually swings further from the beach at its endpoint in Far Rockaway, thus ending in a location where the entire circle around the station is developed, yielding a stronger anchor.

Ultimately, lots of people  love the idea of a subway to the sea for the same reason they like the idea of a subway to the airport -- because they can imagine using it occasionally.  This can yield a disconnect between the political popularity of a service and its actual ridership potential.  Just something to watch out for as the subway rolls toward the sea.

(Nothing in this post is meant to express a fixed opinion about the ultimate shape of the Los Angeles Purple Line.)

bus-rail debates in a beautiful abstract city, and in los angeles

On a recent post, commenter Pantheon laid out the core idea that explains why I cannot be a full-time rail booster, even though I love riding trains as much as anyone:

The problem can be posed in the abstract in the following way. Let's say we have a city with 20 neighbourhoods, A-T. Our city has a big deficit in transit infrastructure, and limited resources for redressing it. We have X dollars to build infrastructure, which is enough to do one of the following things:

1. High-speed, premium rail serving neighbourhoods A-F.

2. Really good busways (a la Brisbane) serving neighbourhoods A-L.

3. Busway network with ROW on city streets and traffic priortization, a huge improvement over what exists currently, but with some compromises and thus not a 'perfect' system that emulates rail. Nonetheless, serves all neighbourhoods A-T.

I don't know if my assumptions on the financials are perfectly accurate, so feel free to correct them. But as you can see, this is really a political question. What represents the most just approach for the citizens of our city? Is it fair to ask the residents of neighbourhoods G-T to make due without transit so we can build a premium rail network in A-F? And what about the poor residents in neighbourhoods M-T? They don't get any transit unless we go with the cheapest option.

(UPDATE:  Important clarification thanks to commenter Des:  Let's assume that all these neighborhoods, A-T, are more or less equally deserving of transit in terms of their density and demographics and development potential.  We're not talking about a case where neighborhoods M-T aren't dense enough to justify service.  We're talking about a case where they are, but where a high-end technology choice means we can only serve a few neighborhoods any time soon, and they're last in the queue only because somebody has to be.)

This isn't a hypothetical, of course.  In fact, it's a pretty good scheme for understanding the last two decades of transit development in North America.  And like so many American stories, the most vivid, Technicolor example happened in Los Angeles.

For most of the 1980s and 1990s, Los Angeles was pursuing Pantheon's method #1:  Huge investments in a few high-quality rail lines.  I recall vividly the debates in the press around 1983-85 about the emerging heavy-rail subway project that eventually became the Red Line.  A key idea in the discourse was:  "Los Angeles is a world class city, every bit as wonderful in our own way as Paris or London.  And world class cities have subways."  A strong driving sentiment was that Los Angeles needed not just rail, but the model of rail being modelled by London and Paris, the underground third-rail metro.

To be fair, it was never that clear-cut.  Two light rail lines also opened in the 1990s, the Blue Line to Long Beach and the peculiar Green Line in the median of the Century Freeway, which some would argue was really about getting the freeway built.  But rail was definitely the focus, and for the densest part of the city, the plan was for underground rail transit.  There was no major investment in bus infrastructure in this period.  The El Monte Transitway already existed, but it dates from the 1970s.

Because underground rapid transit is so expensive, they could only build it very slowly, so a only a few neighborhoods were going to be benefit in the early years.  That was the key tradeoff. 

(When people in young New World cities ask why we can't build rapid transit as fast and cheaply as Paris or New York did a century ago, I remind them that a century ago there were no environmental laws and labor was treated like dirt.  That made construction orders of magnitude cheaper than it is now.)

Then came the Bus Riders Union, representing some the vast range of neighborhoods that weren't going to get rail for decades under the plan, and the consent decree that required MTA to give more attention to the bus network.  This was followed by the revolt against underground rail in 1998, right as the Red Line was opening.

So focus shifted to cheaper things that could be done on the surface, and that could therefore cover more neighborhoods with the same dollars.  Since then, we've seen an explosion in the diversity of transit modes, including not just light rail but also three different degrees of Bus Rapid Transit:

• Exclusive and grade separated like Brisbane.  (Harbor Transitway, though the aesthetic standard is far below Brisbane's)
• Exclusive but at-grade with signals.  (Orange Line)
• Non-exclusive, at-grade, in traffic, but with wide stop spacing and signal priority (Metro Rapid)

The Metro Rapid is similar to strategy #3 in Pantheon's scheme, or actually one step further down, because it doesn't have exclusive right-of-way but does influence signals.  One way to think about the Metro Rapid is that it answered the question:  "What is the best level of rapid transit that we can afford to offer all over the city, now?"  When anyone complains that the Metro Rapid isn't everything rapid transit should be, I agree, but in the same breath I point out that 700 route-miles of it came into existence in less than a decade, and it's rather precision-designed to be the best rapid transit that could be delivered at that pace.

That's always the core of these debates for me.  I like riding trains more than riding buses, but I like a big network that covers the whole city even more than I like riding trains.  If you compare the Metro Rapid to the citywide rail network of your dreams, sure, it's inferior.  But Metro Rapid exists, you can use it right now, and while I disagree with some of the compromises made, I give MTA a lot of credit for getting it done.

Returning to Pantheon's schema, there's no denying that there's a tradeoff between expensive and wonderful service to a few places vs. less pleasant but functional service that covers most of your city.  There's also a tradeoff between expensive and wonderful service for your grandchildren vs. less wonderful but functional service that can be there next year, for you.  The Metro Rapid is especially useful as a model of the latter extreme, which is one reason so many North American cities are now working with the concept.  Los Angeles wants it all, but if you feel MTA should focus most of its energy on getting subways built, remember that they tried that approach in the 1980s, and it caused a massive backlash from both bus riders and taxpayers.  Given the history, the politics, and the incredible technical challenges of building transit in Los Angeles, I think MTA is doing a good job.  The Metro Rapid is an especially important model that deserves to be understood, and appreciated, for what it is.  Sure, it's inferior.  Sure, it's compromised.  But it exists!

UPDATE:  Nothing in this post should be read as implying that the current or recent levels of funding for transit in the US are adequate, or that the US should not be aiming to build transit at a more European or East Asian pace.  A sudden dramatic expansion in the money available for transit would obviously change many corridor-level debates, shifting many current recommendations in the direction of higher-quality options.  On the other hand, even such a renaissance would not eliminate the crucial role of Bus Rapid Transit at least as interim solution, because in such a scenario, corridors that current do not justify any project would rise to the level where at least a Metro Rapid would make sense.

bus rapid transit followup

I'll pull together a response to feedback on the controversial Brisbane busway post in the next few days, but meanwhile, Engineer Scotty asks a good clarifying question:

Part of the problem with BRT [Bus Rapid Transit] acceptance in the US, is [that] most visible BRT systems ... tend to look and act like rail-based metros. In the US, we speak of BRT lines--the Silver Line in Boston, the Orange Line in LA, EmX in Eugene, OR--and so forth.  The busses which run on BRT are different than the local busses (different branding, different route nomenclature, different fare structures, rapid boarding, longer station spacing, nicer stations, proof-of-payment or turnstiles rather than pay-the-driver-as-you-board)--

Everything about the service is made to look like a rail-based metro service, except for the tires. I think that therein lies the problem--trains are better than busses at being trains, and this sort of distinct corridor service tends to be better served by rail, all else being equal.

There are exceptions, of course--low volume small-city lines like EmX again--but such services ignore the fundamental strength of busses, which is that they aren't tied to the physical infrastructure. Other than the capital cost--something which it is usually not wise to optimize for, as governments can generally get capital funding more easily than operating revenue--if you limit the BRT vehicles to the BRT infrastructure, you're generally getting something that costs more and not less to operate. BRT, to be most useful, needs to be disconnected from the notion of "lines", where the line refers to the physical infrastructure. Would you agree with this, or am I barking up the wrong tree?

Scotty is onto an important distinction.  In the BRT business, the systems Scotty cites (Eugene, Los Angeles Orange Line, Boston Silver Line) are called 'closed' systems, in that all buses operate only within the specified infrastructure, with a separate brand.  Each is just one route or in a few cases, like the Silver Line, there may be two or three patterns. 

Brisbane is an 'open' system, like Ottawa and Pittsburgh, and like the El Monte Transitway in Los Angeles.  The busway infrastructure is branded, and there are bus routes that remain entirely within it, but there are many others that branch off of it into the regular street network.  The Busway brand applies to the infrastructure, not the routes.  The buses running in the busway are ordinary Brisbane Transport buses like you'd see on any route in the city.  

However, the distinction between open and closed is not the same as the distinction between "emulating light rail" and "emulating heavy rail."  That distinction is about grade separation, i.e. separation from cross traffic.  Typical recent American applications such as the Los Angeles Orange Line or Eugene's EmX are emulating light rail in their ability to run onstreet and cross streets at signals, which heavy rail generally doesn't do.  As I've said, I think Brisbane's busway segment is a fairer imitation of heavy-rail speed and reliability than anything in North America, apart from fragmentary busways in Ottawa, Pittsburgh, Los Angeles etc.  Of those, only Ottawa's is anything close to a complete system, and it's compromised, of course, by the lack of a downtown segment.

The two distinctions are quite separate.  Here in Sydney, for example, there are two busways (Liverpool Parramatta T-way and North West T-way) that are entirely at grade with lots of signalised intersections.  The first is currently 'closed' -- operated by a single line running the whole length -- but there are plans to make it 'open.'  The second has always been open, i.e. served by a range of routes that branch off of it at various points. 

los angeles: reader feedback on the gold line

My attempt at a feel-good post on the opening of the East Los Angeles Gold Line light rail extension attracted a lot of comment from locals who don't feel so good about it. 

There are three big objections: 

• It's slow: 24 minutes to go about six miles, which is 15 mph (25 km/h).  No question that's slow even for light rail.


• It doesn't go downtown, but only to Union Station, on the near side of downtown.  This will be a problem until the Regional Connector project is built connecting the two light rail networks through or under downtown, probably later this decade.  That project would probably break up the Gold Line into the East LA segment, which would run through to the Expo Line to Santa Monica, and the Pasadena segment, which would run through to the Blue Line to Long Beach.

• It doesn't serve the core commercial districts, which are along parallel streets: Whitter Blvd (0.7 mi to the south) and Cesar Chavez Ave. (0.25 to 0.5 mi to the north).  As Damien Goodman puts it in his comment:  "This line has all of the drawbacks of modern Los Angeles rail planning as we know it: laying tracks where right-of-way where tracks exist or lane drops can fit, instead of where most people are/want to go."  To this I can only respond that I hope the Gold Line alignment along East 1st and 3rd Streets is tied to a redevelopment strategy that would create new points of focus that build demand on the line in the long term.  When building rail on the surface, or a subway with the "cut and cover" method, it's always incredibly hard to thread through existing business districts, especially those dominated by small businesses, because these merchants tend to be extremely hostile to the prospect of disruption and loss of on-street parking.  Often, small businesses judge that they would not survive the construction period, and so have no interest in how great things will be once the project is done.

Meanwhile, for travel from East LA to downtown and points west, the Metro Rapid bus line 720 on Whittier Blvd (parallelling the Gold Line about 0.7 mi / 1.1 km to the south) is much more direct, flowing right through downtown and all the way out Wilshire Blvd. to Santa Monica.  What's more,  the Metro Rapid is faster than light rail for a similar trip:  By my rough calculation, the 720 averages 17 mph (27 km/h) inbound from Commerce Center (Gerhard & Whittier) to downtown (6th & Main)  It will be interesting to see if the Gold Line draws at all from south of the line where the 720 is also in walking distance to most customers.  Some people will walk well over 0.5 mi to get to a fast service that flows through to their destination, and for much of this area that fast service may continue to be the Metro Rapid, not the Gold Line, at least until the Regional Connector is completed.

The other common theme in the comments was Measure A, which prohibited underground rail construction in Los Angeles County.  The measure was a reaction to significant problems that plagued the construction of the Red Line subway.  Ironically, some of its proponents at the time also backed its repeal, as they have become supporters of the Westside rapid transit project that would extend the Red Line all the way out Wilshire Blvd. to Westwood and Santa Monica.

In the end, I completely understand the frustrations surrounding this project, and agree that it probably will not really begin to show results until it's flows through downtown as part of the Regional Connector plan.  It may be that the political pressure to put some kind of rail transit into East Los Angeles led to a project that will turn out to be premature and inadequate.  I wouldn't be surprised to see a rapid transit subway extension proposed into this same area, perhaps under Chavez, in the next few decades.  

Still, understanding how difficult rail transit development is in Los Angeles, I do think MTA and their partners in city and county government deserve a few days of good feeling for having gotten something done.  So I'll end on that note for now.

los angeles: gold line opens; "planners" blamed

Congratulations to Los Angeles on today's opening of the Gold Line light rail extension, which runs from Union Station through several historically neglected suburbs to East Los Angeles, and will probably someday go further.

More precisely, congratulations to every Angeleno except Ari B.Bloomekatz of the Los Angeles Times, who wrote this:

Why is the Gold Line not a subway?

From the beginning, residents and politicians on the Eastside pushed for the Gold Line extension to be built completely underground. In the end, transportation planners decided to make a roughly 1.7-mile portion of the Gold Line a subway -- the part that runs underneath Boyle Heights. The majority of the route runs above ground.

Ah, those nasty cruel "transportation planners"!  Sorry, but the answer to "why" is not "the planners decided ..." unless your main goal as a journalist is to instill feelings of ignorant helplessness in your readers. Planners and political leaders made these decisions for a reason, and that reason is the real answer to the question. Mr. Bloomekatz missed an opportunity to educate his readers about the real choices that transit planning requires. We all need citizens to be smarter about those choices.

Yes, there was once a plan to extend the Red Line heavy-rail subway east from Union Station to cover a similar area, all underground. There is no way this would have cost less than $2 billion at today's prices, probably much more. The Gold Line extension came in just under $0.9 billon, and that's high largely because of the one underground section they still had to build, to get through a segment of Boyle Heights where there was no good surface option.

Los Angeles has the worst deficit in transit infrastructure of any city in North America. No other city on the continent grew so large without retaining and expanding its rapid transit. Today, most of the region's leaders understand this was a mistake, and are trying to build rapid transit as fast as they can. But underground construction is massively more expensive, so if you insist on undergrounding everywhere, you'll get a much smaller network. 

When you're trying to build as much of a network as you can, as fast as you can, there are just three technically compelling reasons to bear the huge cost of going underground:

• to get past a specific surface obstacle that can't be bridged over more cheaply, such as the Hollywood Hills, or San Francisco Bay, or more commonly a segment where there's no credible surface alignment, such as through Boyle Heights on the Gold Line.  (This is, admittedly, a grey area, as the credibility of a surface alignment often turns on the politics of how much you can impact current traffic and parking on the street.)
• to get to a crucial station site -- usually a connection point with other lines -- where there's no surface or elevated option.
• to serve a very dense corridor where highrise development is or will be the norm, and which can therefore generate the very high ridership to justify a subway.  (e.g. Wilshire Blvd. in Los Angeles, Second Avenue in New York).  Even here, we're talking about streets that are already so built out that elevated structure would be unacceptable.  If you're just talking about future highrise corridors, elevated may still be the answer, as it was in Vancouver.

(BART in San Francisco used to have a good reason:  The original network offered to go underground for any city that wanted to pay the difference in cost itself.  Only Berkeley accepted this offer, which is why BART is underground within its city limits.  This elegant approach had the virtue of insisting on local funding to manage a local impact, where this impact was broadly viewed as acceptable by most of the other cities involved.)

Remember, too, that even if your current heavy rail subway is underground, it's extensions don't have to be.  Most "subways" are heavy rail which take power from a third rail.  Unlike light rail, these lines usually don't intersect streets, but they can be elevated and often are, sometimes with not-bad visual impacts.

So congratulations to all but one of the people of Los Angeles.  This is a good start for a long-neglected part of the city. 

UPDATE:  See follow-up post here.

Graphic:  Los Angless County MTA

how paris is like los angeles (via new york)

Alon Levy, guest-writing at The Transport Politic, recently did a great piece proposing that the New York region's commuter rail lines, which currently all terminate in Manhattan, should be connected to each other so that trains would flow through, for example, from Long Island to New Jersey and back.  The inspiration, of course, is the Paris RER, a system in which commuter rail lines on opposite sides of Paris flow across the city into each other.  Because all these commuter trains, merged into a common city segment, add up to reasonably high frequency, the RER also serves as an "extra-rapid metro" connecting major centres across the city with trips making just a few stops.  Alon's plan  (part one, part two) is a great read, as is Cap'n Transit's response to it. 

Such a system would be wonderful if it existed today.  Commutes from Long Island to New Jersey would certainly be much easier, and it would also be great to get the space-consuming and time-consuming end-of-line functions out of the core.  

when expansion is dilution

My post on crowdsourcing bus stop design included a pitch for the importance of branding in making a particular quality of service visible.  I cited the obvious example of the Los Angeles Metro Rapid, the region's network of frequent and relatively fast buses.   Integral to the Rapid product was a distinctive logo, colour scheme, and on the first lines at least, shelter design.

But Los Angeles commenters such as Wad pounced, reminding me that as the Rapid brand expanded, bits of it started falling off:

rail rapid transit maps, to scale

Neil Freeman recently posted a great collection of rail rapid transit maps, all drawn to scale, and all at the same scale.  The image at right, of course, is New York City,

He calls them subway maps, but of course that term suggests that the service is all underground, which few "subway" systems are.  What matters is that they're rapid transit.  In this case, they're specifically rail rapid transit, which is why Staten Island's rail line in the lower left appears disconnected from the rest.  In reality, it's just connected by rapid transit of a different mode: the Staten Island Ferry. 

(By "rapid transit" this blog always means transit services that run frequently all day in an exclusive right of way with widely spaced stations -- linking centers to each other, for example, rather than providing coverage to every point on the line as local-stop services do.)