Human Transit

does high-density life have a bigger ecological footprint? and why?

Over at New Geography, Joel Kotkin has a new broadside against high-density inner city life.  It's called "Forced March to the Cities," presumably to feed the right-wing talking-point that urbanism and planning are totalitarian.  Here's the part that's supposed to scare you:

 ... [A]cross the country, and within the Obama Administration, there is a growing predilection to endorse policies that steer the bulk of new development into our already most-crowded urban areas.

One influential document called "Moving Cooler", cooked up by the Environmental Protection Agency, the Urban Land Institute, the Environmental Defense Fund, Natural Resources Defense Council, the Environmental Protection Agency and others, lays out a strategy that would essentially force the vast majority of new development into dense city cores.

Over the next 40 years this could result in something like 60 million to 80 million people being crammed into existing central cities. These policies work hard to make suburban life as miserable as possible by shifting infrastructure spending to dense areas. One proposal, "Moving Cooler," outdoes even Lowenthal by calling for charges of upwards of $400 for people to park in front of their own houses.

The ostensible justification for this policy lies in the dynamics of slowing climate change. Forcing people to live in dense cities, the reasoning goes, would make people give up all those free parking opportunities and and even their private vehicles, which would reduce their dreaded "carbon imprint."

He goes on to argue that urban development's footprint is actually higher. 

Yet there are a few little problems with this "cramming" policy. Its environmental implications are far from assured. According to some recent studies in Australia, the carbon footprint of high-rise urban residents is higher than that of medium- and low-density suburban homes, due to such things as the cost of heating common areas, including parking garages, and the highly consumptive lifestyles of more affluent urbanites.

His link is to a 2007 Australian Conservation Foundation (ACF) study "Consuming Australia." on the impacts of consumption in different parts of the country.  The very readable summary report (only 17 pages!) makes several important points about consumption, most of them also true of the US and Canada, but its point is more nuanced than Kotkin's, and I suspect its authors would be offended to be cited as implying that urban infill is bad for the environment. (UPDATE:  Yes, ACF is definitely offended.  ACF's Charles Berger replies to similar misuse of his study here.  Thanks to Daniel for the link.)

The first ACF finding is this:

• Indirect impacts of consumption outweigh direct household use of energy, water, and land.

Here is the report's graphic showing the eco-footprint of an average Australian household:

The point here is that most of our environmental impact is not from the land and water and power that we pay for directly, and the emissions that result.  Most of our footprint is from the land, water, power, and emissions associated with the creation and transportation of things we consume.  Most of our transport costs and impacts, for example, are for moving things that we buy, not for moving ourselves. This does mean that those of us who are focused on personal transportation choices are affecting a small slice of the pie.

The second key finding:

• Affluent areas have higher environmental impacts.

... because, obviously, affluent people buy more stuff, go to restaurants more, etc. 

So it's not surprising that when the report turns to urbanism, it finds that the ecological footprint of high-density living is mostly not because of the high density, it's because of the choices of the people who live there.  Which brings us to the ACF study's next point:

• Inner cities are consumption hotspots.

This point is what Kotkin wants to emphasize, but here's how the ACF report actually describes it:

" ... [D]espite the lower environmental impacts associated with less car use, inner city households outstrip the rest of Australia in every other category of consumption.  Even in the area of housing, the opportunities for relatively efficient, compact living appear to be overwhelmed by the energy and water demands of modern urban living, such as air conditioning, spa baths, down lighting and luxury electronics and appliances ... "

The argument is not that inner city living implies a high footprint, but rather that both inner city living and a high footprint are common consequences of affluence.  Affluent people living outside the inner city presumably still have a high footprint, and poor people in the inner city still have a small one, but because a lot of the inner city is affluent, the footprint is higher there.  

So while Kotkin wants to conclude that inner-city life is intrinsically wasteful of resources, the real and quite different point of the study he cites is that resource-waste is a feature of affluent lifestyles, which are more concentrated in the inner city.  This suggests that high-density housing geared to lower price points -- for example, by constructing a massive supply -- would reduce the increase the income diversity of the population and thus reduce its average consumption.

But is there no more direct way that high-density living is wasteful of resources?  Yes, there is, and the ACF report goes on to explain it:

• Bigger households have smaller per-person footprints than small ones.
• Sharing between households can reduce environmental footprint.

Here, I think, is a valid critique of much of the inner-city high density housing I've seen and lived in.  It is designed to serve a population of strangers, and to discourage neighbors from knowing and trusting each other.  In all the places I've lived in the US, Canada, and Australia, I've found it's much easier to meet the neighbors across the fence, in a lower-density setting, than in a sterile apartment hallway or elevator. 

We're not going to change the fact that smaller households, such as singles and childless couples, are more attracted to high density.  Urban life is especially attractive in early adulthood, and almost everyone starts out as a one-person household.  Even setting side the impact of affluence, smaller households mean more consumption per person, as the ACF study finds, and that's a big problem.  Three people living in three apartments have to own three vacuum cleaners, while a family of three people owns only one.  So one of the ACF's most crucial recommendations is simply:  "Share more."

Efforts at creating a more communal experience of housing always seem to collide with a market where people want privacy and control.  But would there really be no market for a highrise development in which each floor had a small room containing an iron, an ironing board, and a vacuum cleaner, which anyone on the floor could use briefly as needed?  At some price points, would there really be no market for a return to the laundry room -- again, one on each floor, rather than in each apartment?

To end on a lighter note, let's return to Kotkin's passing claim that the high consumption from high-rise development, as found in the ACF study, is "due to such things as the cost of heating common areas, including parking garages."  This idea isn't in the ACF study; it's Kotkin's interpolation. 

I've lived in Australia for three years and have never seen a heated parking garage, nor even an air-conditioned one.   But Kotkin's reference to the parking garage really makes an urbanist point:  If we had a carsharing system under every residential tower rather than a mandatory 1-2 parking spaces for every unit, we'd reduce our footprint and make the building more affordable.  It's still the case, in much of the US, Canada, and Australia, that if you want to buy a modern high-rise apartment with no parking space, it's hard to find.  I've looked.

Does high density life have a bigger ecological footprint?  From the ACF report, the answer seems to be "not necessarily, but affluence does."  So I'll end with the ACF's advice to people with money:  "Buy fewer things, enjoy life more!"

the most important blog post you'll read this year ... (updated!)

... may well turn out to be this one, by Michael Druker at Psystenance.  It's about a conceptual error that lies at the root of a lot of bad transit planning decisions, an error made, at one time or another, by most citizens, many political leaders, and more than a few professionals.  It's called (not very effectively) the Fundamental Attribution Error.  It happens when we say or believe statements of the form:  "My decisions are based on my situation, but other people's choices are based on their culture, the kind of people they are." 

[Situation includes relevant factors that the person can be consciously aware of, including their location, destination, available infrastructure, available vehicles, special needs (wheelchairs, traveling with children, etc) and the relative value of time and money.]

Psychologists have observed that in general, humans tend to overestimate the rationality of their own decisions, and underestimate the rationality of other people's.  We tend to think that we make rational choices ourselves, but too often, it's easy to form stereotypes about people whose different situation has caused them to make a different choice, and before long you're hearing about categories like "the kind of people who ride the bus" as opposed to "people who ride rail" as opposed to "lycra cyclists" and "the car culture."  The mistake here is to explain people's behavior by assigning them to a cultural category, rather than by understanding their situation.

We've all heard the term "car culture" about places like Los Angeles.   I've always hated the term, but now I understand why: it's an expression of the attribution error.  When we say that Americans drive because they're a car culture, we imply that that the choice of most Americans to drive isn't a rational one, in light of each person's situation, and therefore requires a cultural explanation.  

But in the places most Americans live, given the current economics of driving, and transit options being as they are, the decision to drive is rational for most of the people making it.   If most Americans are in situations where driving is the rational choice, we don't need the "car culture" to explain their behavior, and we can see a clearer path to changing it, by helping to change people's situations. 

Conversely, car advocates who cite current car use as evidence that people want to drive cars are also making the attribution error; they're implying that everyone who rationally chooses to drive is culturally committed to driving.  That's wrong; some of the people driving cars would like to be in a situation where they didn't have to.

That's why I never talk about a need to "change the culture."  Culture does change over time, but by its nature it also resists change, because it's made up of deeply held feelings and attachments that most people don't want to recognize and critique in themselves.  Nobody likes being told that their behavior is the result of their culture.  So defining America's car dependence as cultural is not a route to changing it.  In fact, it plays right into conservative critiques of urbanism as social engineering.

The fundamental attribution error has deep philosophical roots.  Jacques Lacan argued that the crucial stage in the development of a small child is the moment when he looks in the mirror for the first time and sees how he resembles the other people in his world.  At this moment, he discovers that he is the same kind of being as the people he sees.  Until that moment, a baby is a consciousness interacting with sense perceptions, attaching to some and not others, but with no ability to imagine that there are other nodes of consciousness, similar to his own, all around him.

We all get through this development stage imperfectly.  Often it's said of a very arrogant person that "other people just aren't real for him."  Categorizing others too readily is just a retreat to the pre-mirror state of the child, a state in which I am real and everyone else is just stuff happening around me.  Categorizing is completely understandable:  When we are functioning in a complex society, we need ways of identifying threats, just as our ancestors on the African savanna did, so we tend to put others in large mental categories that help us make sense of them.  Racism arises from that impulse, but so do categories like "the type of people who ride the bus."  As with racism, we only get beyond it with some hard work in taking control of our own mental processes, and remembering the lesson of the mirror stage.

(This post was updated and expanded on March 16 at 11:00 PM Sydney time, in response to early comments.)

Further update, March 17:

This may be one of the most misunderstood posts in the short history of Human Transit, and I take responsibility for that if that is the case.  At the risk of getting deeper into the mire, let me expand a little in response to some of the critical comments and commentary to date.

First, there's been much discussion of sociology in the comments, so let me clarify, as several commenters also have:   Fundamental attribution error (FAE) is psychology, not sociology.  It describes a common mistaken view of individuals, described from the perspective of their own consciousness.  For that reason, its reference to "situation" includes just the data available to the conscious mind, not including unconscious motivations such as personality or cultural conditioning.  (FAE doesn't imply that those unconscious motivations don't exist, only that we tend to overstate their influence in describing the actions of others.)

My description of it here is not an accusation toward anyone.  I'm saying only that psychology has found that a tendency toward attribution error is a feature of human minds in general.  This does not imply that anybody's motivations as totally irrational or totally rational, nor does it require us to speculate about how much irrationality is cultural -- a question that really would lead into sociology.   It observes only that average humans are likely to overestimate the rationality of their own choices and underestimate the rationality of other people's.

Racism is a much more vivid example of the same kind of phenomenon, so it may be useful as an analogy.  (To be excessively clear, I am not equating racism with attribution bias, nor am I implying that one is as bad as the other.  I'm observing that they are biases of the same kind -- different sizes but the same shape -- so that the workings of one can be understood by analogy to the workings of the other.)

Psychology finds that many people who are not racist in daily life will still make racial distinctions in quick-response tests where there is no time to think.  (Malcolm Gladwell's book Blink discusses an example of this in detail.)  The instinct to judge others based on categories of appearance such as race is understandable if you consider the needs under which the human brain evolved.  Like other mammals, primitive humans had no choice but to make quick friend-or-enemy judgments based on appearance and behavior.  Racism is one effect of that same instinct still working under the surface in modern brains.  Like aggression, racism arises from an instinct that served our evolutionary ancestors' needs but is a problem in modern society, and that has not had time to evolve away.  This suggests that those of us who see ourselves as not racist are putting a certain effort into compensating for the mind's primitive instinct to categorize other people racially.  I'm certainly aware that I'm doing that.

The FAE demands the same kind of awareness and compensation.  That's all I'm saying.  So if you have a thought of the form "those people's behavior is irrational" or "those people are behaving that way because of their culture," just notice that this is the kind of view that the human mind tends to exaggerate, so give that thought some extra scrutiny before you get too attached to it.  In our conscious management of our ideas, attribution error implies that we should try to consciously err on the side of assuming that other people's behavior is rational. 

Someone with poor hearing in one ear will often learn to turn their head slightly to compensate when listening to someone.  Attribution error implies that our brains have a similar limitation, a bit of deafness to the possible rationality of the actions of others, one for which we need to compensate. 

damascus: cars banned from the old city

The Syrian newspaper Baladna launched a new English edition in December.  The first issue is on the web, and features a story about the Damascus mayor's plan to ban cars from the narrow streets of the old city.

If Syria is an alien place to you, this article will make it feel utterly familiar.  In the interviews with restaurant owners, shopkeepers, and tourism operators, everyone says exactly what they would say if this were proposed in any other city in the world.

On some level, every city wants to believe that its transport issues are local, special, distinctive, when in fact the same issues can be found all over the world.  Most transport issues arise from basic problems of geometry and economics.  Your city may be a unique and wonderful place, but unless you're inventing new geometry or economics, your transport problems will probably look pretty familiar to a traveling consultant like me.

Example:  Inner cities built at a pedestrian scale do not have room for everyone (or even most people) to take 12 square meters of real estate for their car, unless of course these cities are largely abandoned.  That much is just geometry.  The basic elements of urban economic activity are also more similar than different.  Every city needs a range of transport options at different time/cost tradeoffs, and also needs to handle deliveries, all within streets that are valued as places more than as transport facilities.  So it shouldn't be surprising that the debate about closing streets to cars sounds pretty much the same from one culture to another.

A later issue of Baladna (apparently available only in print) features a plan to replace microbuses with fewer larger buses -- also a common reform happening throughout the developing world.  The overpromising is also common:  The "ministry expects the capital to be ... traffic jam free by the end of next year."  Stay tuned.

UPDATE:  Commenter Alon Levy asks a good question:  Is this a translation of an Arabic article, or an article composed specifically for English readers?  I was assuming it was the former, and that the comments recorded were translations from conversations in Arabic.  But it occurs to me that the people interviewed -- mostly in tourism, restaurants, shops -- might all speak English, and that this might have been a distinct piece of journalism pitched to the British- and American-trained expectations of Anglophone readers.  If you read Arabic, please look for an Arabic equivalent of this article, from early December, and let me know.

children on transit: a personal note

A few days back, frequent commenter Engineer Scotty did a much discussed guest post on the problems of travelling with small children on transit.  He suggested, I thought, a reasonable range of accommodations that transit agencies should make (many of them good things to do anyway) and also talked through some things the parent can do to make the situation easier.

Scotty has twins, so he often drives a double-wide stroller/pram.  To people who don't like the company of small children, a double-wide pram seems to evoke the same emotions that a Hummer evokes in car-haters like myself.  It seems huge, excessive, "in your face."  As Scotty observes, it can get on a bus in pretty much the way a wheelchair does, but like a wheelchair it takes a lot of space and demands some accommodation from other passengers if the bus is crowded.

It's been interesting to watch this post's reception for several reasons.  First of all, a lot of this blog is about explaining concepts that not everyone has thought about, and on which many don't have a strongly-held view.   But when the subject is children on transit, everyone's interested and everyone has an opinion.  Scotty's post was featured by Streetsblog, and it drove my traffic to a level not seen since Portland shock-blogger Jack Bogdanski attacked me for suggesting he pay the real price of parking in downtown Portland.  

But it's also been interesting because if Scotty pushed his double-wide into a room where I was sitting -- a bus, a train, a restaurant -- I'd instinctively try to move as far away as possible.  I seem to have a condition called hyperacusis.  It means that I hear sounds as being louder they are, high pitches in particular.  A sudden high-pitched sound is literally painful, and from the reaction on my face when that happens you'd think I'd just been stabbed.  Young children make sudden high-pitched sounds all the time, so it's often painful to be around them.  I can have the same response to women who are inclined to soprano bursts of excitement.  Not surprisingly, I have no children of my own, and my closest female friends are all mellow contraltos.

Now, reading the last paragraph, you may have the same reaction that many people have when hearing of someone else's disability:  Sorry to hear that, must be tough for you, perhaps there should be organizations to help you out, but really, there's a limit to the accommodation you can expect in a public place. 

That's exactly what used to be said to people in wheelchairs, but in the 1980s they pushed back hard and got a range of legislation -- including the transformative Americans with Disabilities Act -- that guaranteed their accommodation in public space, and their right to be treated as equal citizens rather than objects of pity. 

I suppose I could start a campaign to have hyperacusis treated as a disability under those laws, but the changes I'd need to adapt public space to my disability would be too destructive to other people's equal enjoyment.  Children make sudden high-pitched noises that hurt me, but children are also a necessary part of society and need to feel welcomed if they're to grow into healthy adults.  A society in which hyperacusis was a fully accommodated disability would be a society where "children should be seen and not heard" -- a sentiment that was common in my grandparents' generation but that now seems uptight, Victorian. 

What this means for me is that people with children -- and groups of excited young women -- often cause me to move away.  I adapt, defer, and if possible, avoid.  When I enter a cafe or bus, I immediately scan the space for children and groups of young women, and identify the spot most distant from them.  If I'm already there and they sit near me, I may move; in a worst case, I may feel I'm being chased around the space, or even chased out.  The other day in a cafe in Sydney, one such woman saw me moving away from her and asked if she and her friends had been too loud.  So I actually had the opportunity to explain all this:  No, you're not too loud; you're a young woman making sounds that young women make; I'm just unusually sensitive to loud, high sounds.  I'm grateful to her for making me articulate this.  Most of the time, when moving to avoid painful sounds, I just have to accept being perceived as an angry, uptight killjoy.

What does this mean for public spaces like transit?  Transit is the consummate public space, but it's enclosed and constrained by its transport function; more like a cafe than a public square.  It's likely to put us in direct contact with difference, including differences we find painful.  This is why transit was a major battlefield in struggles over segregation and apartheid.  Transit remains a site of anxiety about being near people who are different, and who behave differently. 

Every society finds an ethical line between differences we can object to (certain levels of rudeness, hygiene, noise) and those differences that we are expected to welcome (not just race, class, age and gender but language, body type, styles of dress, styles of behavior, and of course a range of disabilities, not including mine).  There are a lot of subtler lines that are hard to draw, because they're matters of social convention that properly shift over time and space.  Does people's right to speak their own language extend to profanity, for example?  I've seen people thrown off of buses in Texas simply for saying f**k, while in most big cities, that word is just normal urban noise.

Everyone who gets on a transit vehicle is already consenting to substantial accommodation and compromise.  Some of us are even consenting to a high risk of pain.  Successful transit is crowded, so it puts us in confrontation with difference, and sometimes, for some of us, the results can be physically painful.  Yet I see no alternative to transit, and no alternative to children, so I'll also advocate for Scotty's right to bring his young kids onto a bus with me, even though I'll try to move away if he does.

(Photo: lauratitian via Flickr)

the power and pleasure of grids

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

how do i become a transit planner?

Every week or two, I get an email asking me how to get into the transit planning business.  I'm aware of four fairly common paths, none of which I took myself:

1. Become a bus or train driver, and rise up through the ranks of operations management.  Have good ideas about service design and express them enthusiastically but very, very patiently.  If you're smart, practical, personable and patient, this may be your best path, especially if you lack the grades or inclination to do graduate work.
2. Get a graduate degree in transport engineering, where you'll learn a lot about networks, modelling, traffic, roads, etc.  Success in that degree can lead to entry-level jobs, either in consultancies or governments, and there are many opportunities to move into transit planning from there.
3. Get a management or public administration credential, become a bureaucrat, someone who manages processes inside governments or large organizations.  Sell yourself as a process manager.  You can easily end up managing a public transit planning process.  This, I think, is an especially common path in Australia or New Zealand, where there is a particular reverence for management in general and a belief that managing doesn't require a professional background in the thing being managed.
4. Get a graduate degree in urban planning with an emphasis in transport if available.  You'll learn a lot about land planning, development economics, urban structure, and a range of other useful things about how cities work in general.  There are plenty of opportunities to explore public transit in this context.

What, you ask?  Isn't there a standard training path that all transit planners take, and exams they all pass?  Not really.  Different universities will have programs with more or less focus on transit.  (Tip:  At graduate level, what matters is not the courses offered but the specific expertise and interests of the faculty.)  But there really isn't a standard curriculum, or set of qualifications, or certification exam, that all transit planning professionals have done. 

The diversity of backgrounds among transit professionals is, on balance, a good thing.   Transit is intimately connected to a lot of other disciplines, and the best way to stay aware of those connections is to have each of those disciplines inside your team or organization.  When I put together "core planning teams" to work intensively on a particular project, I try to make sure that I have a mixture of types of education and qualification.  (It also keeps us from lapsing into professional jargon.)

So is there a "best" path to take?  It depends on your goals and skills, but I do have an idea of what's most needed.  We need more people to come at transit through path #4, the study of urban planning in general, because the sustainability agenda of the next few decades is about building cities a certain way. Remember: Urban form dictates a city's transit outcomes much more than transit planning does!  That, for example, is why I belong to the Planning Institute of Australia, the professional body for land use planners, even though many of my colleagues belong to engineering groups.  

In comments or emails, I'd welcome feedback from transit professionals on whether I've described the main paths correctly, and what I've missed.  Again, I took none of these paths myself, and I'm not the only one.  Transit is, ultimately, a remarkably open and permeable field, receptive to many kinds of expertise, and on balance, I think that's for the best.

(More on Vancouver soon!)

email of the week: should ridership data be online?

A contact at Portland's TriMet (not anyone I've named on the blog) writes with an interesting point:

There is an internal TriMet web site, accessible to all TriMet employees, including drivers and mechanics, that has a wealth of information, such as budgets, ridership, etc. While all of this could potentially be misinterpreted, it seems to me that it should all be available to the public in a section of the public web site. I shouldn't have to feel sneaky when I provide you with extracts from this material.

It appears Tri-Met's internal directions to staff do not prohibit releasing data from the internal website unless it's clearly marked there as confidential.  Yet the information is still not available to the public directly.  So, for example, if I want to query the productivity trends of Line 14 on Saturday mornings in the summer, the information is not secret, but I have to ask a TriMet employee to look it up for me. 

TriMet is, in contrast, a leader in making schedule data and real-time bus arrival information available over the Internet, for free, and actively encourages people to develop applications based on web services that present this information in novel ways.

Why release information about real-time location -- which anyone can use to create databases about on-time performance -- and not provide equally easy access to detailed data about ridership? 

I think what we're seeing in the Internet age is that a system that satisfies public curiosity about what it's achieving gains more goodwill than it loses by letting unfavorable data get out.  After all, the most unfavorable messages are often clear enough in the big-picture data, things like mode share, which have to be reported anyway.  In the US, overall trends in ridership and efficiency are also public via the National Transit Database, regardless of a local agency's preference.

In any case, the contact asks me:

You might have some perspective on how widely such information is made available by other transit agencies.

I can say that in Australia, where many transit operators are either private companies or "state-owned corporations" designed to act like private companies, a lot of information is shrouded by notions of trade secrecy.  When I need ridership data for my own projects, I sometimes have to sign non-disclosure agreements.  I've always felt that the public subsidy that goes into these operations should purchase some public access to information about the resulting benefits, but not everyone sees it that way.

I'd be interested in hearing about how this works in your city.  If I wanted to find out a detail about ridership - say the ridership of a single route in a certain period of day - could I look it up myself on the web?  If not, is it secret?  And why?

transit advertising and transit self-esteem

This Air New Zealand ad, on a bus shelter in Sydney, raises the issue of transit self-esteem.   "$100 says the bus won't be late," it says, then, in much smaller print: "Looks like you win."  

Should transit agencies accept advertising that demeans their service? 

Advertisers are often tempted to do exactly that, especially when selling vacations or other forms of escape from the everyday.  The bus is both a profitable site of advertising and an irresistible metaphor for the tedious life.  If you imagine your transport mode as a romantic partner, the bus in mixed traffic is the worst of both worlds: neither sexy nor capable of commitment.  When advertising on a bus, it's not surprising that advertisers find ways to play on that.

But why should a transit agency conspire in putting out this message?  When was the last time you opened an airline magazine and saw an advertisement referring to hijackings or plane crashes, or even to chronic delays?  It doesn't happen.  Private companies who advertise other companies don't accept advertising that's demeaning to themselves, or that counters their own marketing message.  Why should transit agencies do it?

There are of course many legal and procedural reasons why these ads exist.  Often, the decisions about what ads to accept are outsourced.  In the case of shelters, the transit agency may not control the advertising contract.  And there are often laws about discrimination in accepting advertising that make it hard to make these calls.  Yet these can certainly look like an expression of low self-esteem on the part of the transit system.  What would it really cost, in advertising revenue, for transit systems to show the same self-respect that airlines do?

UPDATE:  Todd Edelman has a Flickr page devoted to similar "self-harming" transit advertisements from around the world.

on incompleteness (of networks, of life ...)

Reader Russell Bozian thinks he spies a theme coursing through recent posts.

Will partially built houses ever be energy efficient? Ones where the walls are up, but the roof has not been put on yet? If you don't qualify for a full home loan, will banks even lend you half the money you need to build a house? Will the banks figure that you can at least have half a good life, living in a house with walls but no roof? ...

Jarrett, your original post wonders out loud why Portland can spend tens of millions on transit and not, in 2010, see a much higher percentage of people commuting to work on public transport. But at the present build rate, won't it take at least until 2050 before Portland has a comprehensive and ubiquitous public transport network, such as we see in Manhattan? Why do we starve public transport of the money it needs to finish a decent network of routes, and then pause to criticize its incomplete performance statistics? Would we ponder why the waterworks is not delivering much water to our faucets, if we only gave them enough money and right of way for each water line to stop 100 feet short of our houses?

There are some kinds of public projects, like building air traffic control towers, that you just need to buckle down and spend money on to finish--without pausing and looking at the half-finished tower and pointing out that not many planes are being guided yet. Public transport networks to replace automobiles is one of those kind of big, expensive projects that (a) many other cities in many other countries have completed successfully and (b) do not lend themselves to meaningful performance analysis in their incomplete condition.

Russell is talking, of course, about the power of network effects.  Every addition to a network makes all parts of the network more useful, so there should be a multiplying effect as a network expands. But unlike a house, it's hard to decide when a network is complete.  Even if you do, people will still think of things you might add, just as you might add things to houses.

Few rallying-cries are as satisfying as "Complete the Network!"  But history's cruel joke is that we never know a network is complete until we notice we've stopped building. 

The road network looks very complete to me, as it does to Russell, but many road engineers don't think it's complete at all.  Look at San Francisco:  A freeway from the north coast extends for over a hundred miles, climaxes at the Golden Gate Bridge and -- ends!  With no connection to the freeway on the other side of the city!  The very same thing happens if you follow Interstate 5 across the Canadian border and into Vancouver.  It just ends!  If you want to get from the freeway on one side of Vancouver to the freeway on the other, you have to use city streets.  If you're used to the American model of continuous-welded Interstates, these places are like some kind of eternal construction detour, and generations of well-meaning freeway-trained motorists have asked: "When are they going to complete it?"

They're not.  Or rather, it's complete now, in its fragmentary state, whatever that is.

None of this disputes Russell's fundamental point, which is that network effects matter.  The more places a network goes, the more useful each part of it is.  We have to keep saying that.  It's an important point and one of the few transit-related insights that motorists can instinctively understand, because it has a direct equivalent in the motorist's world.

The goal of completeness can be rhetorically useful, but don't get too attached to it.  It's death, in more ways than one.

three paths to a low-car city

If you want to live in a city with fewer cars, how do you get there?  What do low-car cities have in common?  Anything?  Or are there in fact different ways to reach low car-dependence, demonstrated by very different cities achieving the same high scores?

All these questions came to mind as I perused Wikipedia's helpful list of the US cities over 100,000 population with the most zero-car households (thanks to commenter Alon Levy).  I find the list so interesting I'm just going to copy all of it here, then add some thoughts at the end.   The figure given for each city is the percentage of households that do not own a car.    

1. New York City, New York 55.7%
2. Newark, New Jersey 44.17%
3. Jersey City, New Jersey 40.67%
4. Washington, D.C. 36.93%
5. Hartford, Connecticut 36.14%
6. Baltimore, Maryland 35.89%
7. Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 35.74%
8. Boston, Massachusetts 34.91%
9. Buffalo, New York 31.42%
10. New Haven, Connecticut 29.74%
11. Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania 29.45%
12. Paterson, New Jersey 29.32%
13. Chicago, Illinois 28.85%
14. San Francisco, California 28.56%
15. Cambridge, Massachusetts 27.72%
16. New Orleans, Louisiana 27.32%
17. Yonkers, New York 27.05%
18. Miami, Florida 26.71%
19. Syracuse, New York 26.56%
20. Rochester, New York 25.32%
21. Elizabeth, New Jersey 25.21%
22. St. Louis, Missouri 25.17%
23. Cleveland, Ohio 24.57%
24. Bridgeport, Connecticut 23.77%
25. Atlanta, Georgia 23.58%
26. Cincinnati, Ohio 23.37%
27. Providence, Rhode Island 22.92%
28. Springfield, Massachusetts 22.52%
29. Detroit, Michigan 21.9%
30. Richmond, Virginia 21.63%
31. Milwaukee, Wisconsin 21.36%
32. East Los Angeles, California 21.24%
33. Louisville, Kentucky 20.47%
34. Dayton, Ohio 19.97%
35. Minneapolis, Minnesota 19.7%
36. Oakland, California 19.62%
37. Waterbury, Connecticut 19.46%
38. Gary, Indiana 19.37
39. Honolulu, Hawaii 19.36%
40. Allentown, Pennsylvania 18.84%
41. Erie, Pennsylvania 18.2%
42. Worcester, Massachusetts 18.11%
43. Savannah, Georgia 17.64%
44. Lowell, Massachusetts 17.05%
45. Berkeley, California 17.01%
46. Norfolk, Virginia 17.01%
47. St. Paul, Minnesota 16.83%
48. Birmingham, Alabama 16.77%
49. Los Angeles, California 16.53%
50. Seattle, Washington 16.32%

The list is populated from the excellent Carfree Census Database, which also covers much smaller cities and a range of similar metrics.

An obvious caution: These are incorporated cities, which are things of very unequal size and shape bearing little relation to the organic form of urban regions.  For example, Los Angeles at #49 would score much higher if the vast low-density San Fernando Valley were not part of the incorporated city, and high-density innermost suburbs like East Los Angeles (#39) were included instead.

If I then look across the whole list and try to identify factors that seem to explain, in different mixtures, each city's presence on the list, it seems there are three:  age, poverty, and dominant universities (i.e. universities that are large relative to the size of the city).  We might posit that these are the three most reliable paths low car ownership at the scale of an American city of 100,000 or more.  Other things matter too -- obviously, it helps to be part of a larger urban agglomeration that delivers more transit service and adjacent activity.  But every city's presence in the top 50 has an obvious explanation in one or more of these three factors.

Most cities on this list display two or more of these factors, but a few are models for just one of them.  San Francisco on the list because of age -- a rare western city largely laid out before the car-dominated era, and thus by far the densest big city in the west.  Berkeley is there because it's small city with a big university.  And many cities are there because of relative poverty, including most of the cities that would be on everyone's list of America's toughest urban reinvention challenges.

It looks like the most common path to low car ownership is to be an old city.  Many big cities on this list seem to be ranked by the sequence of urban settlement: northeast first, then midwest and south, then west coast, with just the oldest cities of each region rising onto the list.  An American city that reached its present shape by 1940 is going to be similar in form to a lot of European cities of the same age, both in the range of urban ideas expressed in the city's design and in the transport modes for which it was optimized.  Urban form determines whether owning a car is essential, or just helpful, or a nuisance.  Obviously, urban forms that make car-free life easy are found most reliably in cities built when nobody owned cars.

Age, here, gives us what we would now call "density plus design," to use Robert Cervero's term.   Thanks to the New Urbanists and their progeny, we (arguably) know how to design new cities that work like old ones, but we don't quite know how to make them happen economically.  

So here's the question:  How long will it take for a city that lacks age, poverty, or dominant universities to achieve the kind of low car ownership that these 50 demonstrate?  How soon, for example, will a city be able to create a combination of density, design, and mixture of uses that yields the same performance as an old city that naturally has those features?

Portland is probably the most promising such city in the US, and it's not on the list.  Only 14% of households there don't have a car, so it's probably well down in the second 50.  Like many cities, Portland has been doing everything it can to build a dense mixed-use urban environment.  It's the sort of city that convinces the Safeway supermarket chain to rebuild their store with townhouses and residential towers on top.  But while people are moving into the inner city, they don't seem to be selling their cars when they do, nor do they seem to be going to work by transit.  (I wish I could find the zero-car-household rate of Vancouver, Canada, because I suspect may be the only new North American city in the league of the US top-50 on this metric, as it's the only one to have built great masses of urban mixed-use density entirely in the last few decades.)

As always, this is just one metric.  Very few cities would say publicly that they want to increase the number of no-car households, because the concept still sounds radical to too much of the population.  Usually, when I talk about the benefits of mixed use and density, I say that car ownership can decline, but I usually emphasize households being able to share one car (not counted in the above metric) rather than households embracing a zero-car life. 

But zero-car households remain an interesting metric, at least for the idealists out there. 

How much are zero-car households constrained by overly abundant residential parking?  It's still hard to sell a modern tower unit without a parking space included, even though there are many such units in pre-car cities like Manhattan and San Francisco, and many are quite desirable.  What would it take to replicate that desirability in new inner cities like Portland's?  Couldn't it be done at least in the name of affordable housing? 

Fortunately, that's an urban development question, and I'm a mere transit planner.