Human Transit

can green thinking value straight lines?

As people who value the durability of human civilization celebrate Earth Day, here's a question they might think about.

Ecological thinking values localness, smallness, and natural processes.  It talks about place, community, and the Earth as a unit.  These things are all naturally circular.  Everywhere in sustainability thinking is the image of the circle: the cycles of ecological process, the cycles of generations, the natural cycles of the earth at many scales.  

So today, if you want to make any activity look durable and ecologically sound, even "cool," you draw a circular diagram of it.

US Forest Service

But the circle is much more than a diagram of natural process.  The circle is also closure, embrace, inward-lookingness.   It is the essence of all the concentric units by which we define "home": our families, our households, and our "community" at whatever scales we choose to identify it.  What all those things have in common is that we want a boundary between "inside" and "outside."  The circle -- which has the feature of enclosing the largest possible area within the smallest possible boundary -- is the natural image.  

Thus, in the lexicon of Australian Aboriginal art, famous for its extraordinary powers of emotive abstraction, a circle means place.

Yala Yala Gibbs Tjungurrayi, Kuninka (Western Quoli) Dreaming at Kaakaratintja, 1987.  Artcurial.com

...which is why Aboriginal art so often reminds us of maps, where the same is often true.  Whatever a place is in reality, our minds think of it as enclosed,  bounded in the most efficient possible way, a circle.   

So, in the absence of a strong planning ideology or natural barriers, ancient and medieval cities tend to be more or less round.

... because in addition to minimizing circumference, and hence the cost of fortification, a circle minimizes the average distance between two points within itself.

It is natural that today's green thinking, obsessed with restoring communities and cycles, thinks in circles.  The stable circular cycle is the model of success.  The successful community feels enclosing in the way that the successful family does.  It hugs you, and nothing is more circular than an embrace.

The green movement, and especially efforts at durable urbanism, knows how to talk about circles of many scales: concentric circles, overlapping circles, all kinds of circularity and enclosure.  Even the notion of downshifting technologically, to simpler systems maintanable by smaller units of organization, evokes circles.  It's intriguing that in the iconography of tech, the circle has come to mean off, while the straight line means on.

So my question is simple.

• Can those who value a civilization based on durability,  community, and harmony with natural processes achieve those goals -- at any scale -- while insisting on circularity as the core metaphor for all forms of success?

... because to do so is to define the straight line as the enemy. 

Durable urbanism, and ecological thinking in general, has many enemies that are shaped like straight lines, or at least as paths that will never close into cycles.  Climate change, peak oil, war, exploitation, and pollution are not cyclical, at least not at a scale that's relevant to human life.  We see them instead as linear processes colliding with larger limits that are themselves linear, shaped like walls: competing armies, starvation, the fixed limits of the earth. 

This is the story of my career:  Transportation planners -- including those of us who value the goal of a more durable civilization -- are in the business of trying to convince circle-lovers of the value of straight lines.  This, I've come to believe, is the core of why the conversation is difficult, and why so many people in the urbanist and placemaking professions have trouble reconciling themselves to transport needs, or even claim dominion over them.   

Because face it: Transportation is about straight lines.  It begins with the desire to be somewhere other then where you are, in order to do something you want to do, and the basic shape of that human desire is a line from where you are to where you need to be.  

So the history of transportation, since the industrial revolution, has been about circular communities and places feeling attacked by the straight lines that any useful form transportation must draw.  In the 1850s, Henry David Thoreau recognized the community-piercing and place-destroying role of railroads as clearly as Jane Jacobs did of freeways a century later.  The transportation technology didn't matter: what mattered was that something that had to be linear was piercing something that's naturally round: the place, at any scale.

And so, today, we have an urbanist discourse that is all about somehow taming the straight line, bending it into a circle.  A long strain of urbanism, epitomized by Darrin Nordahl's work, imagines that transit planning could be based on the tourist experience, even though tourist travel is unlike destination-motivated in this exact respect:  The tourist's desire really is a circle: the loop shape of the tour.  But all other transport is motivated straight-line desires, the need to be there so that we can do something.  

So is the circle always the image of goodness for the ecological way of thought?  And is the straight line always evil?

Again, becuase it encloses maximum area in a the shortest possible boundary, the circle is the logical shape of fortification.   Our subconscious need for fortification, around our households and communities, remains with us in the form of NIMBYism -- a deeply-felt revulsion at almost any change that arises from outside, whether it's urbanists rezoning your neighborhood or transport planners proposing a rail line.  NIMBYism is the walled medieval city repelling all forms of attack.  To view your community as a circle is to emphasize its separation from its context.  To view it as a point where lines converge is to emphasize its relatedness.  

Can we ever treasure a process of resonance and symbosis between the circle and the path, as Aboriginal art does?  Can we experience all circularity as deepened and made richer through its dialogue with the linear?

Uta Uta Tjangala, Untitled (Jupiter Well to Tjukula), Art Gallery of New South Wales

In other words:  Can the green movement -- in its ecological as well as urbanist dimensions -- ever welcome into its circular models the unapologetic straight line of real transportation? 

You can imagine the line curving eventually, as all lines do, but locally we need lines to be straight, to get us from here to there.  Will that always feel like a violation of green principles?  Or is there a path to welcoming it into a durable world?

a leading bureaucrat on the need to take more risks

Here's a very worthwhile three minutes of Washington DC Planning Director Harriet Tregoning on risk-taking and failure.  Her discussion of Capital Bikeshare, which failed in its first incarnation and succeeded in its second, is an incisive challenge to the bureaucratic mind, and it's directly related to transit improvements.  

Whenever we try to improve transit systems, we often find -- especially in network redesign -- that a whole lot of big changes have to be made at once.  What's more, they're irreversible.  Network redesigns are so big and impactful that you can't just "try" them and undo them if they don't work.  By the time you've done them, the previous status quo is irrecoverable.

So they're big risks.  And most people -- especially most groups of people working together such as Boards and committees -- don't like to take risks.  The deliberation process in government often seems designed to shrink every initiative, so that all strong transformative moves shrivel into hesitant "demonstration projects," if they survive at all.

Tregoning's story here is basically that the first bikeshare system failed because it was too small, too hesitant, while the second one succeeded because it was far bigger, bolder, riskier.  Many of the government cultures I've known would have decided, based on the first round, never to try bikeshare again.  It took courage to say that maybe the lesson was that some things just can't be done as tiny demonstration projects.  You have to build the courage to actually do them, at the natural scale at which they start to work.

Transit network redesign is exactly like that.  It's hard to do in hesitant, reversible phases, because it's all so interconnected, and because a network doesn't start to work until it's all there.  

Thanks to Melanie Starkey of the esteemed Urban Land Institute for pointing me to this! 

for the holidays, a sentimental epilogue

For this sentimental season, I thought I'd post the first epilogue that I wrote for Human Transit.  It got mixed reviews.  Friends in architecture and urban policy loved it, while my friends from the literature world, who have a keen eye for literary truth, panned it with great affection.  Fortunately, my editor at Island was of the latter group, so the book came to have the epilogue it has, rather than this one.  (I also tried this as the basis of the epilogue, to similar reviews.)  

All that is for the best.  This thing is sentimental, as befits the season.  Read it when you want a sentimental read, as we all do now and then.  

If you don't know what I mean by "plumber," you'll figure it out from context.  (It means you haven't read the book!)

Happy holidays.  [And don't forget:  early bird registration for my Washington DC short course (1/17-18) closes 12/28.  Registration opens Wednesday for the Portland OR session on Feb 7-8.  Hope to see you there.]

What if we learned to listen to our plumber?  Suppose that every time we were confronted with a hard choice between different things that we value – a choice that’s geometrically unavoidable – we took a deep breath, and chose?  We would need to make these choices as individuals, but also as communities, urban areas, and nations.  If we did, what might be possible by the middle of this century?

*

Helen has just turned 75, but she’s lived many lives and plans to live a few more.  Raised in a mining town in the Australian tropics, she's worked all over the world as a missionary and foreign aid worker.   She married twice and raised three children, all of them as self-reliant as she is.  When she was widowed in her mid-sixties, she moved to a small island in Indonesia to start a new school.  It was a struggle to convince her to retire at 72, and come home to Australia.

She returned to a big house on a quarter-acre block in Theodore, a distant suburb of the Australian capital, Canberra.  It was the house she’d grown up in, and she assumed she’d live out her life there, just as her mother did.  But just after she turned 74, she nearly had a bad accident while driving.  Looking back on it, she realized that she couldn’t react fast enough anymore, and that it was only a matter of luck that she hadn’t killed someone.

So she sold her car, and let her license expire.  Now, her house in Theodore was a prison.  To get anywhere, she faced a 500m walk to a bus stop, and then a bus only every half hour, none in the evening.  

Back in 2015 her mother had dealt with the same problem, in the same house.  For a decade her mother wrote letters and went to meetings to complain about how far she had to walk from her cul-de-sac house to a bus stop, how infrequently the buses ran, and how unfair that was.  Whenever Helen visited her mother in those days, she heard all about this campaign, its frustrations and small victories.

As it happened, Helen had been dating a transit planner at the time.  One night, over drinks, he talked her through the geometry proving that her mother’s cause was hopeless.  He showed why very low-density suburbs with lots of pedestrian barriers could never generate enough ridership to support extensive transit service, even if the politicians were inclined to favor them.  

The problem wasn’t the bus company’s failure to innovate, as her mother claimed.  At one point he put it starkly: "If you want to know what quality of transit to expect, ask this question about your neighborhood: 'How far would transit have to go to serve 1000 people?'"  Of course, in the labyrinth of Theodore the answer was several kilometers, while in Canberra's inner city it was just a few blocks.The problem was sheer geometry.  It made sense.

So Helen looked at her options, and noticed that a place called Ainslie Village had just been redeveloped as a retirement complex.  Formerly, it had been a cluster of temporary housing for the homeless located on a hillside cul-de-sac that precluded public transport.  Now, however, it would now extend down to a nearby main street, Limestone Avenue, and would include a mixture of towers and small cabin-like units.  The towers were cleverly arranged so that people could use their elevators to climb the hillside to the upper parts of the village, though of course many seniors preferred the exercise of climbing the hill.

The frequent transit line in front of Ainslie Village was the direct link between the city and the airport.  Helen liked this feature.  She still wanted to go overseas a couple of times a year, and to welcome visits from the friends she’d made all over the world. 

But what also sold Helen on New Ainslie Village was the back side, where it faced a nature reserve.  She could walk just a few hundred meters and feel immersed in the native woodland.  At night the kangaroos would come down around the village to graze, just as they did in Theodore; Helen had always found tranquility in the patient curiosity with which kangaroos gaze at humans.

Helen seems to have achieved the dream that’s motivated so much suburban development, the desire to be in the city and the country at the same time.  But it wasn't just good fortune.  It was her own willingness to look at her choices, understand their consequences, and choose.

--

Mia, 35, lives with her two children and her mother in a mobile home on the east edge of Las Vegas.  She manages the housekeeping department for a hotel-casino, and after saving for years, she finally put back enough money to buy a mobile home. 

She grew up just a mile from here.  Her mother lost her house to foreclosure in the Crash of 2008 and had to move the family into a small apartment.  In 2010 their old car finally broke down for good, and there was no money to replace it.  So she and her mother walked to the bus stop most days, and those walks are one of the most vivid memories of her childhood.

The stop for buses into the city was right outside her bedroom window, but there was a long, high wall blocking the way, built by a well-meaning developer who thought that even though they couldn’t afford a detached home, they’d still appreciate the feeling of a “gated community.”  Thanks to the wall, she and her mother had to walk for ¼ mile through the streets of their development, then through the so-called “gate,” and then ¼ mile back along the fast boulevard to the bus stop. 

The boulevard was built for speed, so the lanes were wide and the sidewalk was narrow.  Her mother would try to talk with her as they walked, but every time a car flew past they had to pause, their lives interrupted.  Soon, Mia learned to hold her breath briefly in those moments, so she wouldn’t get a lung full of exhaust.  Even so, it was dusty and hot in the summer, while in winter rains they’d be drenched by the mud kicked up by passing cars.  On this narrow sidewalk between the traffic and the wall there was nowhere to escape it.

Of course, that got them only to the stop for buses to the city.  Coming home, the bus would drop them on the opposite side of the boulevard.  There was no safe place to cross anywhere near the bus stop, so they simply had to run for it.  Trying to dash across the fast lanes, they felt like criminals, as though simply living their lives was illegal.

So when Mia was able to buy her own mobile home, she looked hard for one that would be better than that.  Realtors still pointed her toward “gated communities” of mobile homes.  Things had improved in these communities since she was a child; some of them now had little mini-bus services that wound their way through the twisting streets, so there was an alternative to walking out to the fast boulevard.  A realtor gave her a big pitch about how great these little buses were, with pictures of the plush interior and the cute paint scheme, but she just asked to see the timetable.  Sure enough, they were too slow and infrequent to be useful to her.  She needed to be close to a frequent transit stop, and it had to be safe to cross the street right at the stop, so that she could get to the stops on both sides. 

Obviously, she also wanted places she and her children could walk to, not just the little playground of their mobile home park but also a larger park nearby and a grocery store.  She liked the location of the grocery store next to the bus stop, so that she could buy fresh food for dinner on her commute home.  That’s why she chose this mobile home park over a number of others.

She also made sure that the bus line is likely to be there for a while.  She still remembers hearing, as a child, that she couldn’t go to see her best friend on Sundays anymore, because their Sunday bus service had been cut.  Fortunately, since then, the transit agency has identified certain lines as its “core frequent network,” where they, and the city governments, want to encourage the most intensive ridership.  That’s part of why her mobile home park, and the grocery store at her bus stop, were built where they are.  The Las Vegas economy is still prone to big crashes, so the transit system has to cut service now and then, but she knows that while there are no guarantees in life, the service she relies on is likely to survive, because so many people ride it.  

Mia’s life may never be as secure as she’d like, but she’s found a place that she can afford, where her children can grow up safely getting around on bicycles, and where her mobility feels as permanent and reliable as anything can be in this fast-changing city of illusions.

--

Kurt, 45, loves his cars.  He has two, both four-wheel drive, and his wife has another.  As a realtor, he likes his hybrid jeep for getting around to the suburban homes he sells, but he also has a big, rough, high-riding thing he calls Monster.  He talks about it as though it were his dog, and he takes a rebellious pride in its dreadful fuel-efficiency and 1990s styling.  Monster is his best friend when he gets up into the Rockies, especially off-road.  

Three years ago, Kurt took a year off work to build a house with his wife and two teenage sons. It’s on an acre of pine trees on a gravel road five miles from the nearest town, 40 miles from downtown Denver.  He feels a surge of pride every time he comes home to it.  Now and then, his eye will fall on a particular joint or beam and he’ll remember the day they set it in place, and how good that felt.  Just as important, he feels that the project solidified them as a family, and helped his boys learn focus and discipline.

There’s no transit anywhere nearby, but he wouldn’t expect there to be.  It was a hassle until his boys got drivers licenses; they always needed rides to the nearest bus stop, five miles away, or even to the nearest rapid transit station, 30 miles away.  But as they turned 16, he bought hybrid motorbikes for them.  Now they’re fine on their own.

Kurt’s life is not as expensive as it looks, at least not as measured in dollars.  Even with fuel at $10/gallon, the hybrid jeep is an efficient way to get around.  His workday involves many short trips in low-density suburbs (a market that transit could never serve well) so the jeep’s fuel is just part of the cost of doing business.  He spends a fortune on fuel for his weekend trips with Monster, but this is the family’s main recreational expense, and he’s budgeted for it.  As for his house, it would have been expensive to buy.  But by building it himself, he saved at least as much as he lost in salary during the year off.  So he feels he came out ahead. 

Kurt hates the city.  He drives his jeep into Denver now and then to visit his mother, who lives in a tower downtown.  She loves it there, but when they sit in the coffeeshop downstairs from her apartment, he’s always a little on edge with all the random bustle of strangers.  He also hates parking there, all that pointless circling in concrete parking structures.  His mother keeps telling him he could park at a light rail station and take the train in.  It doesn’t sound like fun to him, but his wife doesn’t mind doing it.  Maybe he’ll try it sometime. 

But really, he’d rather be driving Monster into the Rockies, with his boys, and some fishing rods, and the sky.

*

Helen, Mia, and Kurt are different people with different goals, situations, and resources -- but all are citizens of free democracies in the mid-21^st Century, societies built on the notion that adults should make free choices and accept their consequences. 

Kurt doesn’t expect the approval of transit experts like me, but I have no quarrel with him.  Like Helen and Mia, Kurt chose his living situation with a full awareness of what it would mean for transportation, as well as for other aspects of his family's life.  His choice imposes some burdens on the environment, but he pays prices – at the pump, certainly, but mostly in inconvenience – that capture the cost of those burdens.  He has no reason to feel guilty about his choices.

At times, as the 21st century unrolled, it seemed that freedom without guilt was a dying dream.  The crises bearing down on humanity seemed to be dragging everyone into embittered dependence on strangers.  So many problems needed complex solutions requiring lots of government action, while big corporations perfected the art of evading responsibility for their behavior.  Perhaps most depressing, it was becoming clear that no matter how free a citizen tried to be, how much responsibility she took for her own life, you could still run numbers that showed she was somehow subsidized, freeloading.  It made everyone suspicious.

But that last insight was the way out.  Eventually, a critical mass of people got  stopped getting angry when they were told they were being subsidized, and started asking “okay, how much?” 

The movement started in transportation, in cities.  People started figuring out that by sitting in traffic instead of getting where they were going, they were paying time to save money.  Why, they asked?  After all, money may not be abundant, but it’s a renewable resource.  Time is the least renewable resource of all.

So people started demanding the right to pay money to save time.  It started in the early 2000s with the London and Singapore congestion charges, and gradually spread to the idea that parking costs should rise and fall with demand, so that there would always be a free space, and you’d never drive in circles forever looking for one.  On the freeways, high-occupancy toll (HOT) lanes offered a faster ride at a higher price, calibrating the price carefully so that the traffic in the lane never got so heavy as to obstruct the buses using it.  Those buses were important, because they ensured that everyone had the freedom to move quickly along the highway, even if they didn’t want to pay the toll.

There was plenty of blowback.  Less wealthy people feared that they’d be left with abandoned infrastructure, much as, in the late 20^th century, they had been left with substandard schools.  Governments responded with market interventions to ensure that the housing market responded to low-income needs, not just through subsidies but also through good urban design.  For example, Las Vegas did the work of “sprawl repair” so that Mia could find a house she can afford that wouldn’t force her to depend on a car.  “Affordable housing” gave way to “affordable living.”  Governments and lenders no longer encourage poorer people to live in places where the housing is cheap because mobility is poor, and where they’ll feel trapped into owning a car that they can’t afford.  Instead, the whole mix of housing and transportation costs is considered before a home is deemed affordable.

There were fights and compromises.  But over time, enough people realized that accurate pricing was the only fair way to achieve both sustainability and freedom.  So the price of scarce things was allowed to rise.  Fuel got more expensive as oil supplies declined, which motivated the development of cleaner car technologies. 

Still, no innovation could change the scarcity of road space in cities, because that was a geometry problem.  Humanity had tried a supply-side solution, by building more sprawling cities, and had found that this just doesn't work.  By building more road space they had just motivated people to drive further.   Some still imagined that we could escape into the third dimension, via flying cars, but most people understood at once that it’s scary enough to have car accidents on the roads, without worrying about them happening over your head.

Once all this became widely obvious, things changed fast.  Work continued on big, expensive rapid transit lines, but work began, urgently, on transit options that could be developed faster and could spread quickly across big cities.  The Los Angeles Metro Rapid buses had been one such experiment, and though they became overextended and had to be cut back for a while, they helped usher in an era of innovation in street-running transit options and were now considered essential features of the boulevards that they plied.

Now, with more consensus, tools could be deployed to match the scale of the problem.  Suddenly, on-street transit lanes became common – in fact, they became the most reliable way to travel in many parts of big cities.  As more people cared about the quality of transit vehicles, those vehicles got better.  Bus and light rail technologies converged on a long, sleek, high capacity vehicle that could slide efficiently along a transit lane, carrying people beyond their walking distance without ever making them felt that they’d left the street. 

All this became possible, in part, because people started measuring their own mobility, and making choices that would improve it.  With tools inspired by the WalkScore.com and Mapnificent.net travel time maps from back in 2010, people began to see where they could get to easily, and where they couldn’t, and if they couldn’t, they asked why. 

As this happened, many people lost interest in symbols of mobility, such as rails in the street that symbolize permanence and airplane-like noses on streetcars that symbolize speed.  Instead, they began insisting that cities spend transit money on creating actual mobility – projects that would reduce their travel time to their jobs, their friends, and all the riches of the city.   Others continued to prefer to focus on the style, feel, and sense of fun in a transit service.  So there was a debate about those things, and compromises that suited the culture of each community.

These clear and bracing debates transformed the housing market, but not as much as some people feared.  Density is rising along major transit lines, for people who want high mobility, but away from those lines you can still get a little bungalow, or a big house with a pool on a quarter-acre, or even a house like Kurt’s in the woods, if you’re willing to accept the costs that come with each choice.  You can also get many things in between, like the transit-friendly mobile home where Mia lives.  Mia is what some transportation textbooks would call a captive rider, but she’s shown that even if you’re poor, your choices matter.

At every stage in this process, communities had to work, through government, on understanding their real choices.  Patiently, over and over, they were asked the same kind of question: “Do you want more of this, or more of that?  You have to choose.”  Planning professionals started focusing on making these “plumber’s questions” visible, so that everyone could see they were unavoidable, instead of letting them hide inside other debates.  Elected officials began to accept that they were paid to make these hard choices, after honest conversations with their constituents. 

The conversations were hard.  People wanted to hide from them.  But they had to happen.  The choices had to be made, so they were.  As a result, Helen, Mia, and Kurt are all free to make their own choices, and to bestow that same freedom on their children.

"uncaptive rider": download my chat with colin marshall ...

If you'd be interested in the sound of my voice, ruminating broadly about transit and cities in the serenity of my own livingroom, there's now quite a good podcast by Colin Marshall in the Notebook on Cities and Culture series.  You can download an mp3 from Colin's site here, or get it from iTunes here.

Colin's a brilliant interviewer, asking great and often surprising questions.  He draws me out on my own living arrangements, my complex relationships with Portland and with Los Angeles, some notes on my global transit travels, and finally onto really substantive topics about what transit is and how it relates to the larger question of what cities are.  It's all feels very public-radio ...

Colin's whole series of downloadable podcasts looks like it's worth a look, as he's put me in some impressive company ... 

quote of the week: the quiet ones

From Tim Kreider's New York Times piece on the Amtrak quiet car, and the challenge of advocating quiet.

It’s impossible to be heard when your whole position is quiet now that all public discourse has become a shouting match. Being an advocate of quiet in our society is as quixotic and ridiculous as being an advocate of beauty or human life or any other unmonetizable commodity.

Read the whole thing.

Personal note:  I have a slight hearing problem called hyperacusis which means that I hear some high-pitched sounds, especially sudden ones, as louder and more painful than others perceive.  Kreider helps me understand why this little "disability", which prevents me from enjoying noisy social environments and thus has a self-isolating effect, will never carry any "rights" in the Americans with Disabilites Act sense. Nor am I sure that it should.

transit as a city's bloodstream: the video

Watch this video, and maybe you'll grasp the beauty of a great transit network, a beauty that has nothing to do with the technology it runs, but everything to do with the real life of a city and the feedom of its people.  Public transit vehicles moving around Greater Vancouver, an entire day compressed into 2.5 minutes.

The original is here.  It's by STLTransit, who has done a number of other cities.

Long ago I posted another of these, for Auckland, New Zealand.  It uses endearing tadpoles instead of white dots.  It's also interesting because Auckland's is not a single unified network, as Vancouver's is, (although we're working on it!).  You can see the difference if you watch closely, using the tips below.

So many people see public transit only as a vehicle on the street, or a thing they're waiting for.  But when you watch this video of a well-designed unified transit network, you can see that it's a gigantic interconnected organism.  And like all organisms, it's made up of complex but rhythmic motion.

Like your heart and lungs, the network effect of transit is quiet, ignorable, and yet the foundation of everything.   The network is one being, moving to a beat.  It's made of connections,  little sparks of energy that you must imagine whenever two dots touch, as the dots hand off to one another like relay runners.  For example, as you watch the video, watch this spot, especially toward the middle of the day:

That's Phibbs Exchange, an example of strong pulse scheduling. At a langorous pace (representing a pulse every half hour or even every hour) you'll see many white dots gather themselves into a single bright dot, shine brightly for a moment, then "pulse" outward again.  What's happening is that many buses that run infrequently are converging on a point and sitting together briefly, so that people can transfer from any bus to any other.

I'm not sure I'll ever convey to my non-transit friends that regardless of what you think of buses, a pulse is a beautiful thing to watch.  Phibbs is more spread out than I like, and I photographed it at a quiet time of day, but in an ideal one, like the ones in downtown Eugene, you see this gradual gathering of energy to a climax, then a release.  Gradually the buses arrive, until finally they're all there.  You see signs on the buses announcing different parts of the city, all the places you could go right now, from here.  The drivers get off the bus briefly, chat with customers, point them to the right service.  People meet by chance.  It happens many times a day and yet there's always this sense of event: here, at this moment, you have service to all these different places, ready to go right now.  Enjoy the banquet of choices, select your bus, and let's go.  In a moment it's over, the buses all gone, the place quiet or even deserted, like a field after a storm has passed.  And in half an hour or an hour it will happen again.

And it's not a random thing, like a storm, but part of a huge intentional network that (in Vancouver's case) is designed.  This pulse is one of the network's many continuous, reliable heartbeats.  It's one big organism, made of unconscious rhythmic motion and circulation as all organisms are.  It's inseparable from the life of the city it serves.  And you're part of it.

on cities, conservatives, and getting past the boredom

The Atlantic's Sommer Mathis argues that a major party cannot win again in the US without competing in the cities.  Vindicated New York Times statistician Nate Silver (@fivethirtyeight) puts it even more baldly in a tweet:  "If a place has sidewalks, it votes Democratic. Otherwise, it votes Republican."  

And that's a problem.

Only in the US has the conservative party so totally abandoned the cities.  In the UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, conservative parties compete for inner city seats and sometimes win there.  That's because these national parties understand the need for cities to function and that this requires a government role.  

Conservative parties in those countries are also careful about managing elements of their base that thrive on the demonization and exclusion of some kind of demographic Other, such as racial, religous, or sexual categories.  Messages that disparage these groups are now so unacceptable in major cities that they cut off voters who might otherwise support a conservative message.  The daily experience of city life is all about sharing small spaces with people who are different from you, and prospering from creativity that arises from that mixture of perspectives and experiences, so demonizing diversity amounts to demonizing the very idea of the city.

All this is very related to public transit, this blog's core concern.  I've argued in the Atlantic that transit thrives on thinking that embraces diversity instead of presuming fixed divides. To me, that embrace of diversity must include the richness of views, passions and human experience that are currently trapped and concealed inside the word "conservative."

Conservatives can help make good transit policy, once they are engaged in conversation about it. Conservative-dominated places like Alberta and Utah have made remarkably aggressive transit investments, justifed in part on sensible bipartisan understanding of what cities are, and what they need to thrive as engines of prosperity and innovation.  When I've worked with elected boards or officials on difficult choices facing public transit in a city, I've noticed that self-identified conservatives are as least as likely as self-identified liberals to lead on the hard choices, by which I mean angering a core constituency or risking public complaint in order to meet some urgent large goal such as balancing the budget or establishing a clear policy.

The conservative-liberal or Republican-Democrat divide, as the media has constructed it, is not a real story.  Delusional narratives are supposed to be entertaining, but this one is both delusional and boring. We will leave this story behind only when we start pointing out how searingly boring it is.  The media are desperate to entertain, so only that message will get through to them.  

Here is the real story:  There is a polarization-vs-consensus divide, with large forces arrayed on the side of those who are terrified that people might begin listening to each other.  There is an information-vs-ignorance divide, with large forces arrayed on the side of stopping the flow of information and rational argument.  

Cities are places where, over time, the power of listening and information is most likely to prevail. They're not the only places; thanks to the internet, you can stay informed and immersed in conversation even if you're surrounded by 100 acres of sheep.  But cities make the process involuntary; it happens to everyone to some degree.  You cannot walk down the street (here's where sidewalks matter!) without encountering diversity and seeing how essential it is to city life.  You cannot help meeting people of different races, religions, and sexual identities.  That's what a city is.  It's why polarizers and will always hate cities, and why tyrants will always find them hard to control.  But it's also why they are such engines of growth and creativity in a world where information is power.

the photo that explains almost everything (updated!)

You've seen photos like this. A large group of people, with images comparing the amount of precious urban space they take depending on the mode of transport they use.  This new one is by Australia's Cycling Promotion Fund.

This photo makes at least three important points, two of them probably not intended.  In this one image you can see that:

• Bike racks on buses (and most other transit) can never be more than a niche market. 

The rack on the bus in pic #1 carries two bikes, which is great for those two people.  But if all the bikes in pic #2 try to get onto the bus in pic #1, we have a geometric impossibility.  Bike racks are already as large as they can be if the driver is still to be far enough forward to drive safely.  A non-folding bike inside a transit vehicle takes the space of several passengers, so could fairly be accommodated only at several times the fare.  In the ideal sustainable future, you will have to park your bike at the station, or return your rental bike, just as Europeans do.  If transit does accommodate your bike, you really should pay a fare premium that reflects the rough number of passenger spaces displaced, or the supply/demand ratio for 2-3 bike racks vs 20 people wanting to use them.

• "Personal Rapid Transit," or small demand-responsive buses, or driverless cars that work like taxis, will never, ever, ever substitute for surface transit in high-demand urban settings, such as where all these people want to travel. 

 Dreamers along these lines may well be right about many suburban areas, where demand is sparse and the land use pattern precludes efficient transit.  But when all the people in this picture want to travel, driverless cars may take less space than the cars shown here, but they will still take far more space than a bus would.  The scarcity of space per person is part of the very definition of a city, as distinct from suburbia or rural area, so the efficiency with which transport options use that space will always be the paramount issue.  

(Of course, this very thought experiment presumes that we will actually achieve, and culturally accept, driverless cars that require very little space between them, in which the prevention of ghastly accidents -- especially with pedestrians and bikes who may appear with zero warning and minimal stopping distance -- is achieved through the absolute infallibility of human-designed hardware and software.)

To make the same point more generally:

• In cities, urban space is the ultimate currency.  

We spend too much time talking about what things cost in dollars and not enough about what they cost in space.  That, of course, is because urban space is perversely priced to encourage inefficient uses of it and discourage efficient ones.  If you're going to claim to be able to visualize how technology will change the world of 2040 -- as the techno-futurists claim to do -- you should also visualize what a political system ruled by people now under 40 would look like.  These people are much less emotionally attached to cars, care about environmental outcomes much more, and value urban space much more than their parents do.  Given that the revolution in urban pricing has already begun (see the London and Singapore congestion charges, and the San Francisco and Auckland dynamic parking systems), isn't it foolish to assume that today's assumptions about how we apportion urban space will still rule your techno-utopia?

UPDATE:  A reader points out one other key point, which is that

• the photo understates the space requirements of bikes compared to the other two.  

Once you put these three systems in motion, the cars and bus will need more space in one dimension -- forward and back.  However, in motion, the mass of bikes will expand in two dimensions, it will need to be both longer and wider for all the bikes to move safely.  This could have been rectified in the photo by consciously spacing the bikes to a distance where riders would feel comfortable at a brisk cycling speed that ensures not only stopping distance but also space for passing.  Masses of cyclists on a recreational ride may all agree to ride in tight formation at the same speed, but in daily life cycling infrastructure must accommodate the the fact that people in a cycling crowd will have different desires and intentions around speed, which affects lateral spacing and stopping distance.

the metro as metaphor

Now and then, advertising seizes on the image of a classic subway map, using it to organise some other set of ideas.  From the Metro Wine Map of France:

The Metro station stands for some distinct thing that we should learn to distinguish from other things nearby -- fine-grained appellations in this case.  The brightly colored subway lines are categories that we should also understand -- in this case, the wine regions of France. Somehow this metaphor seems to satisfy, over and over, as a way to bring a certain je ne sais quoi to a topic. 

(Absentmindedly, I begin to sketch a radial metro network converging on a central station complex called "Plants in my garden."  A bright blue line called "Heather Family" departs from the Cassiope platform and heads outward via stations called Vaccinium (blueberries/cranberries) and Gaultheria before swerving toward a terminal loop of scenic Rhododendron stations.  A bright red line called  "Rose Family" departs from a platform called "Rosa" and heads outward via stations called Rubus (alight here for blackberries and raspberries), Fragaria (strawberries), Pyrus (pear) and Malus (apple) [those last two stations too closely spaced, really] before reaching its terminus: Prunus, the cherries, plums, apricots and peaches.)

Why does the metro line serve as  such an excellent selling or organizing metaphor?  Conjecture: it suggests speed, order, power, reliability, a larger design that gives meaning to experience, and an urban(e) sense of excitement (as opposed to the rural excitement of the "open road").

Of course, a true transit network functions only through the interdependence of its lines, like the lines of Daniel Huffman's transit-map of the Mississippi River system. 

 

 But the metro-as-metaphor doesn't seem to need that.  The "wine-metro" map at the top of this post is all disconnected but still seems to sing, at least to its intended crowd.

What is it about the rail transit as a metaphor?  How could we corral this metaphorical power to get some of the real thing built?

permanent weather and the civic image

Rain in Seattle.  Sun in Los Angeles.  Fog in San Francisco.  Wind in Chicago.  The endless summer nights of Helsinki or Edinburgh.  How could we navigate without our stereotypes of the urban air and sky? 

(Yes, this is one of those personal and literary ruminations about urbanism, almost free of transit content, cross-posted from the personal blog Creature of the Shade.)

In his odd novel Voyage to Pagany, the great modernist poet (but not novelist) William Carlos Williams tells of a self-absorbed man riding through Europe by train.  At one point (adequate fragments here) he's delayed in the middle of the night in Genoa.

Genoa.  The name sounded hollow, depressing as the coldly sulphurous gallery through which he was passing, baggage in hand ...

The placename is a sponge for first impressions, and never quite shakes them off.  For Williams's hero, "Genoa" means "night, don't know anybody, don't speak the language, poor me."  Or to reduce this (literally) benighted city to one sentence:

I will never see the sun in Genoa.

But here's what's odd.  When I read this chapter in graduate school, the only experience I'd ever had of Genoa was of passing through it at night on the train.  Today, that remains my only experience of Genoa, so even now, when someone says "Genoa" I imagine a city at night.  Northwest Italy isn't high on my list of urgent travel destinations, so it's quite likely that I too will never see the sun in Genoa, and hence never dissociate the city from this absurdly accidental recollection.

Professional thinkers-about-cities would never reduce their impression of a city to a story of something that happened to them there.  But everyone else does this quite naturally; when I ask a person on the street what she thinks of a city, she'll often mention some joyous or traumatic recollection, presenting that as her lasting definition of the place.  We urbanists are supposed to take pride in having a larger, grander view.  But I bet most of us carry these silly but useful attitudes, at least when we get far down our personal list of Cities We Want to Think About.

Right now, you see, I don't feel a specific need to expand my awareness of Genoa, except to the extent that I want to expand my awareness generally.  I wouldn't pass up an expense-paid visit to Genoa in the daytime, and would surrender my prejudice happily if I did.  But failing that, the prejudice is working for me.  It's painting a relatively unfamiliar part of Italy with a few touchstones of mood.  Thanks to these quick associations, my near-total ignorance of northwest Italy, while still near-total, is packaged and marked with a couple of personal baggage tags, so I can haul it around as a familiar without having to look inside.

The baggage tags are personal, but they're also authorized by the Greater Truth of Literature.  Anyone can pass through a city at night, but I passed through Genoa at night just as William Carlos Williams's hero did decades ago.  I have a similar tag stuck on Bologna, where I once had a scare of thinking I had missed a late night train connection and would be spending the night on a station bench.  I'd have forgotten the episode by now had Robert Dessaix's hero not had exactly the same experience, in his fine novel Night Letters.  Nonfiction lies all the time, but fiction makes no truth claims and therefore can never be disproven, so it can sell itself as a Gateway to Deeper Truth even when it's just the whining of a man stuck in a train station.  Williams and Dessaix tell me that I wasn't alone in my nocturnal and unwanted visits to Genoa and Bologna, that these experiences actually Resonate with the Human Experience.  So I remember them.

Thus authorized, it feels good, at least to me, to permanently associate cities with atmospheric conditions and their related moods.  Even dealing with cities I know well (Seattle, San Francisco, Los Angeles) I find a pleasure in wrapping each in the stereotypical weather condition (rain, fog, sun, respectively) and experiencing all variations from that as an engaging nuance.  For cities I don't know it's much easier: for me it's always night in Genoa.   These simplifications are silly but seem useful in maintaining a mental structure of reality on which more interesting and reality-based thoughts can sometimes sprout.

Now and then I notice myself consciously choosing a new atmospheric prejudice.  I was in Chicago over Memorial Day weekend 2011, and have chosen, for now, to think of Chicago as a city where towers loom in ominous chilly fog and thunderstorms. 

On my stay there I had two days of that, followed by two days of hot sun.  The fog and storms, I decided, are the Chicago I want, because they allowed me to experience the downtown skyscrapers as overpowering, exactly as they were intended. Structures vanishing into the clouds are not just tall, but unknowably, maybe infinitely tall.

Chicago was built to turn a vast frontier into commodities and profit.  The many rail lines emanating from it look like force-lines of a blast, so to be at the center of the blast is, well, like the end of a science fiction film when we finally get inside the Center of Ominous Power.  I wanted it to be grand but in mysterious, overpowering, intimidating way.

My ideal Chicago, in short, is a meteorological projection of a conventional story about what makes Chicago unique.  So I feel briefly wise, though actually just prejudiced, when I look at my images of Chicago in such conditions, as though the city is telling me a story I want to hear ...

In such a perfectly symbolic city, a photo that might otherwise be a joke, "Christ the Steakhouse," isn't funny at all.

Nor can "Time" be just the name of a media corporation.

Then the sun came out, and it was all flatter, more like a city anywhere in the midwest.  On a long hike north from the loop, Michigan Avenue looked like Singapore's Orchard Road, Lincoln Park looked like a number of great midwestern city parks, the Clark Road business districts looked nice or not-nice in familiar ways, and the only glorious uniqueness was that my hike ended at a well-known religous site for green urbanists: Wrigley Field, a Major League Baseball Stadium with Practically No Parking.

By then, it was too dark to photograph, so as I sorted photographs in an about-to-close Starbucks in what would have been the shadow of the stadium walls, I thought "this is nice, Wrigley Field at night," which is perilously close to "Wrigley Field is night."   And indeed, not being much of a baseball fan, It's quite possible I'll never see the sun there.