Human Transit

frequent service, mapped to your door

Vancouver's TransLink is one of several agencies who -- with some input from me -- have adopted Frequent Network brands that are designed to highlight services that are always coming soon, generally every 15 minutes or better all day and weekend.    I've always insisted that the Frequent Network can be both a short-term service branding tool (to build ridership by helping time-sensitive customers see where the network can serve them) but also a land use planning tool.

TransLink always understood it was both, and for several years has had a goal stating that half the region's population and jobs will be on the Frequent Network.  This is both a land use planning statement and a transit planning statement.  The message is not that TransLink will extend Frequent service to half the current population, but rather that it will do some of this while land use planning will also bring put residents and jobs on the existing Frequent Network.  More recently, Translink finally highlighted its Frequent Network on its maps for the public.

Ultimately, the Frequent Network, if properly mapped and promoted, should sell real estate, because the high level of all-day access should have a clear value as a city as a whole becomes more transit-oriented.  So this kind of micro-mapping should be really handy:

This map (click to enlarge and sharpen) of transit access in New Westminster, British Columbia is by Jonathan X. Cote, a City Councilor in that city and also an urban planning student at Simon Fraser Univerisity. He takes the standard walking distances of 800m to rapid transit and 400m to local transit and plots the portion of his city that has access to those networks.  I've seen these maps before, and even if they are not drawn they are what lies behind any coherent statement about what percentage of population and jobs have transit access, within a given walking distance, to service of a given standard.

Remember:  If your city wants to do really honest transit analysis, it needs very small analysis zones.  This map shows you the kind of clarity that you get when you can analyze right down to the parcel.  You don't need that much fine grain, but the zones need to be small.  And a parcel-level map like this is certainly ideal for land use planners, who need to minimize walking distances for the centroids of transit-oriented developments. 

Notice what a good tool this is for analyzing bus stop spacing as well.  You can move the stops a little apart and count how many parcels fall out of the walkshed.  Out to about 400m (1/4mi) spacing the answer is usually "fewer than you expected."

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.

portland: the grid is 30 years old ... thank a planner!

Thirty years ago next week, on Labor Day Weekend 1982, the role of public transit in Portland was utterly transformed in ways that everyone today takes for granted.  It was an epic struggle, one worth remembering and honoring. 

I'm not talking about the MAX light rail (LRT) system, whose first line opened in 1986. I'm talking about the grid of frequent bus lines, without which MAX would have been inaccessible, and without which you would still be going into downtown Portland to travel between two points on the eastside.  (Full map here.)

\

What did it look like before 1982?  Here's a bit of the 1970 network (full map here).

The 1970 network consisted of bus routes radiating from downtown across the gridded eastside, which constitutes about 3/4 of Portland.  If you were anywhere on this network, you had a direct bus downtown -- a slow, circuitous, and infrequent bus.  Very few routes ran better than every 30 minutes during the day.  Only two routes ran north-south across the east side, and both were too infrequent to transfer to, so you couldn't really use them unless both ends of your trip were on them. 

How did the 1982 network transform the possibilities of mobility in the city?  

• The old network was solely about going downtown.  The new network was about going anywhere you wanted to go.
• The old network was infrequent.  The new network required easy connections, so it was designed to run at high frequency (most lines every 15 minutes or better all day).  Remember: Frequency is freedom!
• The old network was wasteful, as many overlapping lines converged on downtown.  The new network was efficient, with little overlap between lines, and with lines spaced further apart to the extent that the street network allowed.  This is how the resources were found to increase frequency so much.
• The old network was complicated, with routes often zigzagging from one street to another.  The new network was simpler, easy to keep in your head.  Many streets that were formerly served by a patchwork of overlapping routes, such as Division, now had a single route from end to end, so that you needed only remember "the Division bus."  Transit became an intrinsic part of the street.

If you're in a hurry, skip to "Thank a Planner!" below.  But if you have a couple of minutes, let's explore more deeply how the grid transformed Portland, and why it was so controversial at the time.

In both maps above, that wavy line across the middle of eastside Portland is the Banfield Freeway, where the first and backbone line of the MAX light rail system runs today.  In the 1970 image, look for the line marked "1" extending north from the Banfield in the middle of the image.  This is NE 42nd Avenue (a bit of which is labeled 41st, but don't let that distract you).

In the old network the bus line along 42nd came from the north edge of the city, once an hour.  Partway down it merged with another branch, to form 30-minute frequency.  When it approached the Banfield, it turned west and zigzagged into the city via the Lloyd district.  Once it turned west off of 42nd, it was duplicating other routes the whole way.  If you wanted to go somewhere else on the eastside, the bus was not much use.   Frequencies were poor so it was very hard to make a trip involving multiple routes.

If you lived on NE 42nd in 1982, you were confronted with massive change, the sort of change that makes people scream.  Never again would you have a direct bus to downtown Portland.  Now you would be on the new 75, which would run continuously north-south all the way across the city.  And if you wanted to go downtown, you would have to transfer (as we called it in those days). 

But on the bright side, the 75 would run every 15 minutes, so transfering wasn't hard.  And in return, you got all the other benefits of a frequent routes that would let you connect quickly to reach destinations all over the east and north sides of the city, without going downtown.  

This is always a tough sell, because many people value transit only for the commute downtown.  These people tend to complain when the network is optmized to serve many kinds of trip at once, which is exactly what the grid does.  A frequent grid is the ultimate in versatility, equity and freedom.  It does not pick favored destinations for favored markets. Instead, it delivers anywhere-to-anywhere mobility for wherever you might want to go.  Today, the non-downtown elements of the grid, especially 72 and 75, are among TriMet's most productive lines.  

The grid redefined the role of transit in serving Portland's livability objectives.  When you think of everything that makes Portland both livable and culturally distinctive, you're probably thinking about the historically dense and gridded part of the city.  This is where almost every cool urbanist outcome of the last 30 years -- from food carts to bike lanes to office-over-retail -- has sprouted and thrived most successfully. Rail gets all the press, but the MAX light rail line would not have worked without this grid to connect with it.  (The reverse is not true: the grid worked well for four years before the MAX line opened, though MAX was certainly an improvement that achieved further ridership payoffs.) As Gregory Thompson and Jeffrey Brown put it in a recent paper :

If the 1983 and 1986 restructurings had not happened, LRT would have been a competitor with the CBD-focused, poor quality parallel bus routes that already were there, and there would have been no high quality bus routes intersecting the LRT at right angles. Portland would have enjoyed much less patronage than it has since experienced on both its LRT and bus routes.

Where did all the money for the new high-frequency crosstown lines come from?  Removing duplication. Look again at the your ride on 1970's route 1.  Once it turned west off of 42nd, it duplicated other routes the entire way into downtown.  Now look closely at the routes approaching downtown from further south in the old map.  They ran on so many closely-spaced parallel streets that they were effectively duplicating one another as well, wasting service.  The grid plan found many resources by removing these duplications and moving to wider and more consistent spacing of lines across the whole city.  In the same process,the grid introduced the idea that it's OK to walk further to a more frequent and useful service -- the foundation for transit's link with walking (and with all of walking's public health outcomes) today.

The grid was also a radical simplification, making it easier for people to keep the network map in their heads.  Now, bus lines would often follow the same street from end-to-end, so you could remember easily that there's a Division Street bus, say, and an 82nd Avenue bus.  In the old network, if you wanted to go from 20th & Division to 82nd & Division, you had to go downtown and back, because these two parts of Division were covered by different routes.  The beauty of the grid is that your transit directions are sometimes as simply as walking or driving directions:  "Take the Division bus out to 82nd, then take the 82nd bus south."  The transit lines are just part of the street.

Imagine, in 1982, the struggle involved in implementing this.  Vast numbers of people lost their direct bus to downtown, at a time when going downtown seemed like the only purpose of transit to many existing riders.  Transit agencies tend to listen most to their existing riders, who have adapted their lives to the system as it is, so it takes real courage for them to seek new markets instead of just catering to the existing ones.   Imagine the disruption, the rage, the recriminations, not to mention the apathy from people for whom buses just don't matter, no matter what they're achieving.

Thank a planner!

If you can imagine how hard this was, consider thanking the planners who took all this abuse and persisted in pushing the plan through, because they believed in everywhere-to-everywhere networks and knew this would work if it were tried.  I'm especially thinking of:

• Ken Zatarain, who was a TriMet service planner at the time and who now manages service planning at the agency.  Thank him at:  zataraik AT trimet DOT org .
• Thomas G. Matoff, the single most important mentor in my own transit career, and probably the critical player in pushing the grid through.  Tom, who was service planning manager and thus Ken's boss, was an eloquent, passionate and persistent advocate for the grid both inside and outside the agency.  He was the first person I've met, and one of the few I've known, who could convey how essential network design is to the life, joy, and prosperity of a city.  Tom went on to be General Manager of Sacramento Regional Transit and is now working on the Sonoma-Marin rail project in California.  Thank him at:  tmatoff AT sonomamarintrain DOT org .
• His boss, Bob Post, who was Director of Service Development and who saw this redesign as crucial to the success of the Banfield MAX line, which would come along four years later.  He's at URS: bob DOT post AT urs DOT com .

I'm dead serious:  If you value being able to get around Portland in all directions, thank them.  In other words, do one of these things:

• shoot emails of appreciation to the three emails above, copied to me (jarrett AT jarrettwalker DOT net), with "Thanks for the grid" in the subject line, or 
• leave a comment here, or 
• say something on Twitter with the hashtag #PDXGrid .  

You might also ask the two mayoral candidates about how important the frequent grid is to their vision of the city, and whether they think it should be enhanced.

Why does this matter?  Because even today, there's disagreement in Portland about important the frequent grid is, or even whether a complete everywhere-to-everywhere network (which requires high-frequency buses as well as rail) should be a priority at all.  Some view the grid as unimportant, for example, because they view bus service as unimportant.

Purists might argue that the grid never made it to its 30th birthday, but rather perished at 27 in 2009.  That was the year that TriMet cut all-day frequencies below the 15-minute threshhold that is widely accepted as the definition of "frequent enough that you can use it spontaneously, without building your life around the timetable."  Since the grid relies on easy connections to achieve its goal of easy anywhere-to-anywhere access, the 2009 cuts began to undermine the whole idea of the grid. TriMet avoided doing this in its first round of cutting after the crash, but felt it had no alternative in the second 2009 round.  

Will the grid ever be restored to its necessary frequency?  Will it ever be expanded and enriched (as regional land use planning generally assumes it must be) with even better frequencies?  Not everyone in Portland thinks this is a priority, so you might want to express your view.  

More on the history and spectacular outcomes of the grid if you click below.  But even if you don't click, thank a planner!

san francisco: cable cars and green lights

A traumatic memory from my old neighborhood, still exactly as I remember it:

The California Street cable car still doesn't influence traffic signals, even in the era of GPS.  Here at California & Hyde, the car stops in the median of the street, requiring passengers to cross a traffic lane to board or alight.  Note the green traffic signal to the right, which tells motorists it's ok to speed past the cable car as people get on and off.  The man in the black coat and cap, waiting to board, must stand in a traffic lane that has the green signal.  To the motorist, he appears to be crossing illegally, yet it's the only way to get to the cable car.

This is not a high-traffic intersection.  Surely all lights should turn red when the cable car is present.

I lived a block from this point for seven years (1987-94) yet almost never used the California St. cable car.  This was why.

san francisco: the freeway spirit lives?

About 18 years ago, when I was chairing the Citizens Advisory Committee of the San Francisco County Transporation Authority, I remember a day when staff effusively advised that they'd gotten budget to put up green signs around the city to help motorists better identify the streets.  The green sign in this picture, for example.  

This is on Jones St. northbound approaching Sacramento St., but there are many similar cases.  (Trivia note: One of these signs appears in Gus Van Sant's fine film Milk, which is set in the 1970s.  It was the film's most glaring anachronism.)

Nobody asked my committee's opinion when these signs went up.  And today, briefly touring my old neighborhood, I find that these signs are still there.  Has nobody questioned them in all this time?

Most readers will see the issue at once, but if you don't, here we go:

The motorist faces a stopsign.  That means they should be looking at the crosswalk in front of them, and the other traffic approaching.  What's more, they should be stopped, or stopping, which means that their focal length should be short; they don't need a sign that's meant to be read at high speeds.   Yet high speed is implied by the green sign's large typesize, high position, and "freeway font"; the green sign has the same color, font, and typesize typically used on California freeways.

San Francisco's standard black and white streetsigns are the most legible I've encountered anywhere in the world.  They are a global model for simplicity, clarity, and grace.  There's one right below the green sign in this pic, in front of the tree.  The text on these signs is over 1.5 inches high.  If you can't read that black-on-white sign while stopped at a stopsign, or decelerating to it, your vision is so poor that you shouldn't have a drivers license.  Only seriously dangerous drivers need the green sign.

Then there's the question of focal height.  A sign placed very high, like the green sign here, is pulling the driver's eye away from the ground plane, which is where the squishable pedestrians and cyclists are.  Extreme type size also encourages reading the sign from further away, which means focusing further away, which means a greater risk of not seeing the pedestrian in front of you.

In short, the message of the green sign ("read me from a distance, like you're on a freeway, driving fast") contradicts the message of the stopsign and crosswalks.

Motorists choose their speed and focal length based on a range of signals, not just explicit commands and prohibitions.  These signs may be appropriate on high speed multi-lane streets, where you may need to change lanes to turn once you've recognized a cross-street.  But what are they doing at stopsigns?

I'm sure there are manuals that say this is compliant to standards.  But many bad ideas are endorsed by manuals.  Does the green sign make sense?  Argue with me.

PS:  "Wait, Jarrett didn't say he'd be in San Francisco, and he didn't call!"  Sorry, it was just two days, and I'll be back soon.

bicycle vs transit problems

Bicycles have always had an anxious relationship with local-stop street-running transit, both bus and streetcar.  On a street without separate bike lanes, bikes and local-stop transit tend to end up sharing the "slow" traffic lane -- typically a lane that's either next to the curb or next to a row of parked cars.  The difficulty lies not just in the obvious ability of rail tracks to throw a cyclist, but more generally in the fact that many cyclists like to move at something close to the average speed of local-stop transit -- generally 10-20 mph.  With buses at least, the pattern is often for a local bus and a cyclist to "leapfrog," passing each other over and over, an uncomfortable and mildly risky move for both parties. 

Streetcars are much less likely to pass a cyclist than a bus is, and this, come to think of it, may be one of the many little reasons that streetcars often end up being slower than buses when you control for other differences (in right of way, fare handling, signaling, enforcement, etc).  Cyclist friends have often told me that they prefer cycling alongside streetcars rather than buses becuase streetcars don't make surprising lateral moves.  This is true, though of course the lateral motion of buses is a normal part of how they get through traffic, and how they often keep moving in situations where a streetcar would get stuck.

Mia Birk has a good article today arguing that bicycles and streetcars can be friends.  So far, though, the only examples she cites of really successful bicycle-transit integration are from streets where there's plenty of space to separate the two modes, such as Portland's King/Grand couplet.  She's involved now in a consulting team looking at how streetcars will interact with cyclists along a proposed line on Seattle's Broadway, and I look forward to seeing what they come up with. 

Birk is clear that the basic design of the starter streetcar lines in Portland in Seattle -- operation in the right-hand (slow) lane next to a row of parked cars -- didn't provide good options for cyclists needing to avoid the hazard of the streetcar tracks.  She wants to see better separation, but when looking at a dense urban street like Seattle's Broadway, it's hard to see how they'll deliver that without undermining either on-street parking or pedestrian circulation.  She notes one situation in Portland (14th & Lovejoy) where the streetcar-cyclist conflict was arguably resolved at the pedestrian's expense:

... and she's clear that this isn't the outcome she's after.  (This idea of a bike lane that passes between a transit stop and the sidewalk is common in the Netherlands.  It can work well as long as there's ample sidewalk width.  It's less nice in situations like this one where the remaining sidewalk is constrained.)

If I sound a little cynical about the prospects for harmony between local-stop transit and cyclists, it's because this is a geometry problem, and geometry tends to endure in the face of even the most brilliant innovation.  The examples in Mia's post seem to confirm that if the street is wide enough, it's easy to separate cycles and transit, but that if it isn't, it isn't. 

When the problem is this simple, it's not hard to reach a point where you're sure you've exhausted all the geometric possibilities.  At that point, you to make hard choices about competing goods, producing something that all sides will see as a compromise.  Hoping for new innovative solutions can become a distraction at that point, since no innovation in human history has ever changed a fact of geometry. 

Finally, if a streetcar ever does go down Seattle's Broadway, it had better be compatible with buses as well.  Broadway is an important link in the frequent transit network, with lines that extend far beyond the local area and thus make direct links that a starter streetcar line cannot replace.  What will happen to these buses?  If they share the streetcar lane, what will their role be in the streetcar-bicycle dance?

_{Photo: Mia Birk}

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.

transit's role in "sprawl repair"

Duany Plater-Zyberk, one of the leading planning firms associated with New Urbanism, is thinking about "sprawl repair," a process by which utterly car-dependent landscapes could be transformed into something more walkable, and thus more resilient.  Galina Tachieva of DPZ has an article explaining the concept at Planetizen. 

The only valid option is to repair sprawl – to deal with it straight on, by finding ways to reuse and reorganize as much of it as possible into complete, livable, robust communities. Pragmatism calls for the repair of sprawl through redevelopment that creates viable human settlements, places that are walkable, with mixed uses and transportation options.

As examples, Tachieva suggests turning a shopping mall into a complete mixed use town center, or dropping townhouses into the spaces between McMansions.

The ideas she presents are exclusively about the development parcel, not the street.  Clearly, though, such urbanized places will have dramatically different transport needs, which will also require re-thinking the standard suburban arterial.  And since government has much more direct control over the street than over the development parcels, we might move faster on sprawl repair if we focused on the arterial first, or at least at the same time.  Last month, on a speaking tour that took me to Portland, Fresno and Los Angeles, I spent some time thinking about this issue.

The densified sprawl that DPZ envisions will clearly be a place that needs much more effective transit.  Parking will be more scarce, and density will be higher, so there will need to be more transport options.  While cycling will take up some of that need, transit is still the most versatile sustainable transport mode for longer trips, the only one capable of delivering you from one place to another as a pedestrian, unencumbered by a vehicle.  And the only place to put that transit, in a classic sprawl landscape, is on that huge, government-controlled arterial.

As I first discussed here, the ideal geography for transit is to have a series of transit destinations (dense housing, mixed use, jobs, activities, etc) located in what feels like a straight line, so that a transit line can connect all these points in a way that feels like a direct route between any two points.  The key challenge is to avoid slowing down or deviating too much to serve the intermediate points, as this makes the intermediate points feel like obstacles to anyone whose trip requires riding through them.

The classic suburban commercial arterial already does that, up to a point.  It gathers development around it without letting that development slow it down.  So we should be looking for ways to capture this virtue for transit.  A process of "sprawl repair" should start, perhaps, with a series of steps aimed at repairing the arterial, starting with the realisation that the arterial's straightness and speed become an asset if transit can operate reliably. 

Fresno is an interesting example because it's at a stage where it could look at what's happened to bigger sprawl-cities and choose another path.  There's not much congestion yet, partly because the city has a truly massive road network.  For a metro area of about 1m people, Fresno has three north-south freeways, one east-west freeway, and a complete grid of very wide arterials spaced about 800m apart (the ideal spacing for transit).  There is no shortage of road space for introducing new approaches to transport, and as anyone involved in struggles over bus lanes in big cities will tell you, the time to create transit priority, bike lanes, and other reassignments of road space is before the street is badly congested.

If and when California High Speed Rail opens, Fresno is going to boom.  With the Bay Area and Los Angeles suddenly less than two hours away, Fresno will be a perfect base for any kind of business that aims for a statewide market, and it will attract good employees who value affordable housing and outdoor recreation (Yosemite and Kings Canyon National Parks are both within an hour's drive.)   If HSR were there today, and I were considering setting up a consultancy aimed at a statewide market, I'd consider living there myself.

What if the city prepared for that now, by planning for the inevitable future of its abundant wide arterials?  What if Fresno's leaders went to the people and said:  "Look, HSR is coming, and our city is going to grow and change, mostly for the better.  We can resist the change, or we can get out in front of it." 

Well, you wouldn't start by proposing to build townhouses in people's back yards.  You'd start by saying: "Look, even if we boom horizontally, tearing up orchards to build more subdivisions, we'll still become more and more congested; just look at Sacramento or Las Vegas.  Eventually, we'd end up like Los Angeles, struggling with congestion that chokes the economy and constrains people's lives.  And then, we'd be desperate to get people on transit, as Los Angeles is now.  But by then, we'll have filled up our arterials with congestion, so the remaining options for building transit will be really expensive."

"What if we learned from Los Angeles's path?  Instead of waiting until it's really expensive, as Los Angeles did, what if we take early, gradual, inexpensive steps to make our arterials safe and attractive for transit?  That doesn't mean ripping up our single-family neighborhoods, but it does mean rethinking our arterials so that they're safe and attractive places for pedestrians, and so that they provide appropriate levels of priority to transit.  We don't need transit to be attractive to everyone, we're not 'forcing' people to use it, but it could attract people who already want alternatives to driving.  Let's face it, a lot of our citizens are struggling on low incomes, and cars are expensive.  Many families would experience sudden improvements in wealth if they could get rid of one or more of their cars."

"So we need to gradually repair our sprawl.  That doesn't have to mean big increases in density.  We'd build some denser centers for people who want a more urban life, but we're not going to build townhouses in your back yard -- or at least not until you and your neighbors want us to.  Mostly, we just need to stitch things together so that people can walk and cycle more safely, both to complete local trips and to get to transit stops.  It means making sure that at every transit stop, there's a protected way to cross the street, because you can't use transit for a round trip unless you can use stops on both sides of the street.  It means adding pedestrian links to cul-de-sac neighborhoods, so that they are through-routes for bicycles and pedestrians while remaining cul-de-sacs for cars.  And it means making sure that the design of bus stops and transit priority conveys a clear message that transit riders are valued as citizens, and appreciated for the contribution they make to a sustainable and functional city."

Such a pitch would need to be aimed at the practical concerns of life in a car-dependent city.  It will sound compromised and wimpy to a big-city transit advocate, but that's not who it's talking to. 

As part of my presentation for Fresno Council of Governments, I picked an arterial intersection pretty much at random and quickly pointed out all the obvious, inexpensive opportunities for sprawl repair -- not just repair of the land use, but of the streets.  Here's the intersection of Kings Canyon Road and Peach Avenue.



There's a lot to work with there.  There are already quite a few apartments, but they tend to open out onto arterials far from places where you can cross those arterials safely.  But that could be fixed over time.  With the existing development in mind, you'd identify permanent bus stop locations each of which must have a safe street crossing opportunity.  That could mean new pedestrian crossings, signalised as necessary, which could also be combined with other accesses. 

Look, for example, at the southwest corner of the image.  South of the arterial there's a patch of apartments with several possible points of pedestrian access to the arterial.  Across the street to the north is a WalMart behind a huge parking lot.   When WalMart redevelops, of course, you'd want the building brought out to the street with parking behind it, but for now I'm thinking shorter term. 

So I'd start by observing that if I signalize the WalMart entrance at the far west edge of the image, I've also signalzed a pedestrian access point to the apartments on the other side of the street.  I'm about 400m west of the main arterial intersection, so if there's a bus stop at that intersection (as there must be, because it's a connection point) then I can put another bus stop right here.  So a signal there will have three uses: (a) controlling the car access to WalMart, for safer egress, (2) providing safe pedestrian access to the apartments, and (3) providing the safe pedestrian crossing that the bus stops require. 

Once you notice this, you notice that in general, Fresno is a grid of arterials spaced 800m apart.  That means that for local service, where 400m spacing is about right, you'll have stops at the arterial intersections and then one more stop midway in between them.  Although 400m stop spacing is ideal, we can slide this intermediate stop 100m one way or the other to find the best site for a pedestrian crossing, based on the development and access points that are already there.  We can then use this crossing as a focal point when redevelopment opportunities arise on the surrounding parcels.  Over time, we'll build a more connected network for walking, cycling, and transit, without seriously obstructing road traffic.

So some principles of arterial "repair" would include:

• Put transit stops at an ideal spacing, 400m for locals, and make them permanent. 
• Require a safe way to cross the arterial at every bus stop, as a necessary condition for a stop, because you can't use a stop to make a round trip on transit unless you can cross the street there. 
• Look for a way to meet other pedestrian access needs with the same signals or crossing protections that the previous point requires.

I could also add more subjective values, such as ...

• Ensure that sidewalks along the arterial are adequate, including appropriate buffering if the arterial is fast.

... but we should pause before we go too far in this direction.  If we add too many design requirements that are derived from urbanist ideals, we can quickly lose focus on the reality of what the street is today, and the level of improvement that's needed to achieve basic safety and functionality for alternative modes.  We also risk spending so much money in one place that we can't scale our improvements to the vastness of the sprawl that needs repairing.  So when I look at a typical street intersection in typical sprawl fabric like Fresno's, I see first of all a need to create a basic pedestrian+transit infrastructure that will provide a safe and functional transit option for getting around the city.  

Once, long ago, when I was presenting a transit plan to an outer-suburban council, a council-member said: "So if we spend all this money on transit, is that going to make me leave my BMW at home?" 

The answer, from a "sprawl repair" standpoint, should be:  "No, and it doesn't need to.  Most people don't have BMWs, and many of them struggle to afford a car at all.  These improvements are focused on people who are near a decision point where transit could be a rational choice for them.  That's why our priority is basic safety, functionality, and civility.  We'll incorporate quality design wherever we can do so affordably.  But our first focus is on improvements that will scale to the size of the problem.  And there's a whole lot of sprawl to repair."

new york's broadway: why do the cab drivers hate it?

New York City Transportation Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan is here in Sydney, and spoke last night at the City of Sydney's CityTalks series, hosted as always by Sydney Lord Mayor Clover Moore.  Sadik-Khan gave her standard presentation on her work in New York, with emphasis on the conversion of traffic and parking space to pedestrian and park spaces.  She also highlighted the new Bus Rapid Transit project, called Select Bus Service, clearly distinguishing between SBS projects that are still compromised, such as First/Second Avenue and Fordham Road, and those that really will be fully exclusive-lane and thus highly reliable, such as the 34th Street line now under development.

Sadik-Khan was as eloquent as usual, but she was asked one question that seemed to deserve a better answer.  The question was "Why don't the cab drivers like the removal of traffic lanes on Broadway?"

Broadway, a diagonal street across the otherwise regular midtown Manhattan grid, is gradually being converted from a through-traffic street to a low-traffic local street with a generous pedestrian and outdoor seating area, like this:

The remarkable thing about this project is that it not only created a lot of pedestrian space but also improved overall traffic flow on other streets of the Manhattan grid, or at least on the long north-south avenues.   Vehicular flows on these avenues actually improved, as measured by GPS transmitters located in all of the city's taxis.

That outcome is credible because the diagonal intrusion of Broadway had always interrupted what were otherwise consistent flows of green-time along Manhattan's parallel avenues.  At times when the rest of the grid flowed fairly well, intersections involving Broadway tended to be particular knots because Broadway required an extra signal phase.  De-emphasizing Broadway as a traffic street has apparently had the effect of removing some of these knots.

So as Sadik-Khan reports it, the taxis themselves measured an improvement but the drivers of those same taxis still declared the change a failure.  Sydney is contemplating a street-repurposing project on George Street (coverting traffic lanes to pedstrian, bike, and light rail) that will be at least as impactful as the Broadway changes in New York, so Sydney listeners needed some useful advice on this point.  Taxi drivers, like hairdressers, get many opportunities to share their opinions with customers.  (This is especially true in Australia where solo customers usually sit in the front seat, so that chatting with the driver feels like a natural thing to do.)  Becuase taxi drivers are often intensely knowledgeable about the city and its traffic, it's easy for the average citizen to assume that they're experts about urban transport issues generally.

All Sadik-Khan offered on this was the usual "change is always difficult" line, or as she put it: "Everyone wants change so long as everything stays the same."  Yes, taxi drivers may be thinking like NIMBYs, with feelings of entitlement about all the street space in the city, but many of them are also -- as Sadik-Khan herself mentioned -- very smart and practical.  Among such smart and practical people, why is there such disapproval of the changes to Broadway?   Does the taxi industry see no benefit in having more pedestrians on the streets of Manhattan?  After all, only pedestrians hail cabs ...

basics: the spacing of stops and stations

I've written before about the unglamorous but essential struggle over the spacing of consecutive stops or stations on a transit line.  It's an area where there's a huge difference in practice between North American and Australian agencies, for reasons that have never been explained to me as anything other than a difference in bureaucratic habit.  In Australia, and in most parts of Europe that I've observed, local-stop services generally stop every 400m (1/4 mile, 1320 feet).  Some North American agencies stop as frequently as every 100m (about 330 ft).

(Already I can hear someone asking "but how many blocks is that?"  Well, it depends on how long your city's blocks are.  Even in San Francisco, where block length is wildly variable, I've heard people insist on asking for a standard in blocks, which is complete nonsense.  Living on a short block doesn't make you more entitled to a bus stop near your house.)

San Francisco is at it again, trying to rationalize its stop spacing on some of its most frequent lines.  So I thought I'd take the occasion to lay out some stop spacing basics.

The geometry of stop spacing works like this.  Every stop or station has a walk radius, the area from which most people would be willing to walk to a stop.  In the most idealized world, which is where some planning happens, this radius defines a circle around each stop.

How big is the walk radius?  Actually, different people are comfortable walking different distances, so a truer view of these circles would be very fuzzy, gradually dissapating further out from the stop. You don't want to look at that, though, and it's hard to do geometry with it, so transit planners generally observe that the walking distance that most people seem to tolerate -- the one beyond which ridership falls off drastically -- is about 400m (around 1/4 mi) for a local-stop service, and about 1000m (around 3/5 mi) for a very fast, frequent, and reliable rapid transit service.  (I, personally, will walk further than this.  You may not be willing to walk even this far, but as an approximation the 400m rule for local service seens to work pretty well.)

But of course, the circle is what the walk radius would be if you could walk absolutely anywhere in the area, including diagonally, through buildings, etc.  In the real world, we walk along some kind of network of streets and paths.  The design of that network is therefore a crucial element of walking distance, which means that it's also relevant to stop spacing.  Consider these two drawings, from this post:

These happen to both be in the Seattle area, but your city probably contains examples of both of these network types.  The car-oriented network on the left is full of obstacles to the pedestrian, so the actual area you can walk to (the blue network) is less than a third of the ideal radius (red).  On the other hand, in a dense grid (of streets and other pedestrian links), like the one on the right, maximizes the possible walking distance.  The actual area within walking distance is diamond shape, i.e. a square rotated 45 degrees from the transit line.  Almost two thirds of the ideal radius is in walking distance in such a network. 

Note how these things are connected in chains.  Street network determines walking distance.  Walking distance determines, in part, how far apart the stops can be.  Stop spacing determines operating speed.  So yes, the nature of the local street network actually affects how fast the transit line can run!

How do we decide about spacing?    Consider the diamond-shaped catchment that's made possible by a fine street grid. 

Ideal stop spacing is as far apart as possible for the sake of speed.  But of course people around the line have to be able to get to it. In particular, we're watching two areas of impact:

• The duplicate coverage area is the area that has more than one stop within walking distance.  In most situations, on flat terrain, you need to be able to walk to one stop, but not two, so duplicate coverage is a waste.   Moving stops further apart reduces the dupicate coverage area, which means that more unique poeple and areas are served by the stops.
  
  
• The coverage gap is the area that is withing walking distance of the line but not of a stop.  As we move stops further apart, the coverage gap grows.

We would like to minimize both of these things, but in fact we have to choose between them.  Close stop spacing means smaller coverage gaps but larger duplicate coverage area.  Wide stop spacing means the opposite.

If we are doing a local-stop service, and we assume that people will walk 400m, then the diamonds are 800m wide.  If we then set the stop spacing at 400m, the diamond on the left will touch the one on the right.  In other words, every point on the line will be in a duplicate coverage area.  The coverage gap, meanwhile, gets smaller.  In fact, if the stop spacing is the same as the walking distance standard, the coverage gap's area and the duplicate coverage area are the same.  Play with this yourself until you believe it. 

So does that make this the right answer?  Not necessarily for two reasons: 

1. Which is worse, creating duplicate coverage area or leaving a coverage gap?  It depends on what you're trying to do.  In fact, this is arguably connected to the tension between designing for ridership and designing to meet social service needs.  If you care mostly about the latter, you want to minimize the coverage gap so that everyone has access, and you don't care that much if the resulting line is slower and therefore less attractive to other riders.  On the other hand, if you want to maximize ridership, you'll worry more about the duplicate coverage gap, because in addition to representing wasted coverage, closer stop spacing means slower operations, which are both more expensive to operate and less attractive riders; so you'll tend to want to push stops further apart.
2. If this is like most urban fabric, there's more stuff (residents, jobs, activities) close to the transit line than far from it, which means that there's more stuff in the duplicate coverage area than in the coverage gaps.  So if that's true, then we're facing again the eternal danger of maps: they invite us to misread pure area as though it represents the stuff that matters.  If we set the stop spacing at 400m, the duplicate coverage area is the same as the coverage gap area, but if there are more residents, jobs, and activities in the duplicate coverage area, the two aren't really in balance.  If you valued duplicate coverage and coverage gaps equally, you'd ideally plot the actual locations of residents, jobs, and activities, and then push the stops just far enough apart so that the amount of this stuff in the duplicate coverage area was the same as that in the coverage gap (though again, as per point #1, there's no particular reason that these two things should be the same; you can strike a balance anywhere based on your goals in running the service).

So that's the geometric tradeoff that governs stop spacing in flat terrain with well-connected street networks. You can see how variations in terrain would shift the calculation.  If the transit line is climbing a steep hill, you can make a case for stops closer together:  Walking downhill is usually easier than walking uphill, so some people will value having two stops so that they walk walk downhill to one to depart, and walk downhill from the other one as they're returning.  That's why stop spacing is often a bit closer when going uphill or downhill. 

In general, though, we always want to push stops as far apart as possible while still providing enough access, both for speed and also because the fewer stops we have, the more infrastructure we can afford to provide at each.  But the limits of our ability to widen stop spacing is defined by the geometry I've outlined.

Finally, while I've been talking about local stop service with a walk distance of about 400m, the entire calculation is exactly the same for any distance.  For example, if we are placing rapid transit stops, and we think that the maximum walk distance to them is about 1000m, we can set the stops 1000m apart and end up with the duplicate coverage area that's the same size as the coverage gap.  Then we can argue about whether, in the given situation, we should push wider or narrower.

And of course there are all the other kinds of access: Park-and-Ride, Kiss-and-Ride, cycling, etc.  Still, the walk is the dominant factor in transit access potential, because even if you use a vehicle for access you're likely to be a pedestrian at the other end of your trip, and of course many people are pedestrians at both ends.  (The exception is when you take your bicycle on board, which will always be a problem at crowded times.)  Sooner or later, we are all pedestrians.

Finally here's a fun question to think about:  If you had two parallel transit lines, how might the stop locations on one of them affect the logical locations of stops on the other?  And what's the furthest apart that the lines can be (in terms of multiples of the maximum walking distance) for this consideration to matter?  Think about it before you look at the comments, because someone's probably written the answer there!