Human Transit

quote of the week II: illusions of walkability

We are stuck in a narrative of a city being great and fabulous and walkable because it appears so (i.e. those sidewalks look pretty and nice, and I would walk down them if I felt like it and wasn’t driving to the store right now), not because it actually is.

-- An unsigned but must-read post by PRAIRIEFORM

 The city of reference in the post is Minneapolis, but the point is a much broader and more nuanced one.

Pic: PRAIRIEFORM

 

request for information: routine closures of transit streets

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

minneapolis-st. paul: let's name our network!

The Metropolitan Council in the Twin Cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul is taking customer suggestions on how to name their rapid transit network, which until now has consisted only of a single rail line, the Hiawatha between Minneapolis and Bloomington via MSP airport.  They are now adding Bus Rapid Transit and, in 2014, the Central light rail line.  So they're starting to think about the whole system, and what to call it.

This is one of those moments when two competing impulses tend to diverge.

• The longing for something that says "new and exciting and transformative!"
• The desire to convey exactly the opposite, that although it's new, this thing is a permanent, reliable, and an intrinsic part of the city.  This message actually benefits from a branding that's a bit, well, boring. 

I lean toward the latter message.  I've seen plenty of systems with sexy marketing but incoherent information, so I tend to say that clear information is the best marketing. 

If you want "new and exciting and transformative," check out Boulder, Colorado, which has excellent transit, and where most of the bus lines have names like Hop, Jump, and Bound.  They seem to be happy with it, and that's great.  But I'm relieved to see that this impulse isn't becoming the norm.  To me, things that like to hop, jump, and bound don't seem especially reliable; these names are asking me to entrust my commute to a bunch of hyperactive rabbits.  They're trying to get my attention, which basic infrastructure doesn't do.  And transit's role is really established only when people think of it as basic infrastructure.

Obviously, there are early stages in transit development where you do need to get people's attention.  So cute names can have a place -- on new shuttle buses, for example, that are trying to get a foothold in car-dependent suburbs.  But in the Twin Cities we're talking about naming the basic rapid transit infrastructure that will be the backbone of the entire system.  By the time such expensive projects get built, you usually already have people's attention.

So I hope that after an excellent outreach process, with lots of great suggestions, they pick a name like "Twin Cities Rapid" or "the Metro."  Even Los Angeles -- a city built on industries that sell excitement, enchantment, and novelty -- calls its transit system Metro, and its elements Metro Rail, Metro Rapid etc.  Boring.  But you can count on it.

email of the week: thinking pedestrian thoughts

Is it useful to talk about "pedestrians" as a group the way we often talk about cyclists or transit riders?  All these category terms are problematic, as I discussed here.  Riordan Frost of Minnesota 2020 asks:

A recent article in a local paper and its connection to one of your previous blog posts has inspired me to write to you. The article is “Thinking Pedestrian Thoughts”, and it covers the recent adoption of a ‘pedestrian plan’ by Edina, which is an inner-ring suburb of the Twin Cities [of Minneapolis and St. Paul]. One of the points made in the article is that people don’t really advocate for themselves as pedestrians. This made me think of a post that you wrote back in October, which was entitled “should I call myself a ‘transit-rider’?” and discussed labels given to people using certain modes of transportation. In the post, you quote Michael Druker, who advocates for switching from ‘cyclist’ to ‘people cycling’ and from ‘pedestrian’ to ‘people walking’.

You agreed with him, but pointed out that these new terms were cumbersome, and you would probably still opt for the shorter terms in your writing. I write blogs and articles for MN2020, and I feel the same way. I understand the importance of what language we choose, and I try to be conscious of it in my writing, but I have a need for brevity and I have an editor. There is a more significant question apart from brevity, however: how do we avoid labels (which may carry negative connotations and/or stereotypes) while advocating for improvements of certain modes? ...

Is it possible to cut down on lumping people into categories and still have effective advocacy for certain modes, like better crosswalks or more bike lanes? The cycling community is pretty well established in the blogosphere, which sometimes contributes to their ["cyclist"] label and its connotations, but pedestrians have no blogs or personalities specifically tailored to them – mostly because we are ... all pedestrians at some point in the day, and there is nothing terribly distinctive about walking. I n a perfect world, we would just design our environments for all modes of transportation that people use, with people (not cyclists vs. motorists vs. pedestrians) in mind.   This doesn’t seem terribly viable, however.  What are your thoughts on this?

I think that the potential for organized activism and fellow-feeling is easier among a group of people who all wield the same tool, because tools are such powerful symbols.  Think about the role of the hammer and sickle -- archetypal tools of manufacturing and agriculture, respectively -- in the imagery of Soviet communism, for example.

The possession of the tool, and the knowledge of how to use it, becomes a feature by which a group defines itself and sets itself in opposition to other interests.

If you don't think this still happens, look at all the clubs and forums for people who own and cherish a particular tool -- a Linux-powered computer, say, or a certain musical instrument.  If you read an online forum about such possessions, you'll see the practical work of exchanging troubleshooting tips also builds a community in which people love hearing each other's stories about life with the cherished tool.

So this is another thing that's going on behind the obsessive attachment to transit technologies.  People who love aerial gondolas or whatever can now network worldwide with every city that runs one, compare notes about each other's problems and achievements, and thus form a global community based on love of that particular tool.  Psychologically, it's just like a club of guys who all own a particular kind of car, or computer, or electric guitar, or whatever.

Pedestrians don't have that.  So I doubt we'll ever see a pedestrians-rights movement that has anything like the shape and force of the cycling movement.  Nor do we need to, really, because the best urban planning thought today is all about the primacy of the pedestrian. 

Ultimately, the strongest case for "pedestrian rights" is that we are all pedestrians.  Even the guy who loves his Porsche has to walk across parking lots, and can thus see the value of having protected paths between rows of cars instead of having to walk in the lot's roadways where a car can back into you.  Even he has a sense of what makes a shopping center or major downtown pleasant or unpleasant to walk in.  Maybe he's even broken down on the freeway and thus experienced what those places are like when you're out of your car.  So it's not hard to make anyone understand a pedestrian issue on analogy to the walking that everyone has to do.  That's how you win these arguments, I think.

bus vs rail, an "oversimplified comparison"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

minneapolis: unlocking downtown with transit malls

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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