Human Transit

subway car configurations: a matter of taste?

Chicago Transit Authority is asking its customers how seating should be configured in its rail rapid transit cars.  Whet Moser has a good writeup in ChicagoMag.com.  Here are the choices:

The one on the left is "Chicago-style" seating, with most seats in pairs facing along the length of the car.  The one in the middle is "New York-style" seating, with most seats facing sideways.  The third is a hybrid.

Transit agencies commonly do surveys that imply that these things are just a matter of taste, as though they'll go with whatever their riders prefer.  This question is not just a matter of taste.  The left hand image has the most seats but the least capacity.  The middle image as the fewest seats but the greatest capacity.  Seats with their backs to the wall take up much less space than seats in pairs facing forward or back.  And of course, any seat takes up more space than a standee in a crowded car.  This is why really crowded subway systems inevitably gravitate toward side-facing seats.

So the question should be not whether you like the the configuration on the left, but whether you like it so much that you don't mind being left behind at rush hour because the train is full.  

The survey asks you which configuration you prefer, and which you like better in terms of "personal space."  But it doesn't inform the reader that the more forward- and back-facing seats there are, the more people will be left behind on the platform during the peak and the less ridership the system will be able to handle.

Almost all choices are tradeoffs, so when you ask the public their opinion, you need to explain what the real consequences of the options are.  (At least that's my firm's approach to public outreach!)

portland: "opt-in" to comment on the future, despite biased questions!

If you live in the Portland metro region (Oregon side only), the regional government Metro wants you to be part of an online panel that comments on key issues facing the region.  It's called Opt-in, and you can read about it, and join it, here. 

When I tweeted about this yesterday, several people I respect commented that Opt-In sometimes asks wildly distorted and leading questions.  I can now verify that this is the case, based on a survey it asked me to take this morning which includes this appalling question (click to sharpen):

Two choices about transit and they're both about expanding rail.  Bus infrastructure and fleet are not mentioned even though buses are still the dominant mode in Portland and Bus Rapid Transit is a serious option in two rapid transit corridors now under study.   The designer of this question appears to be unfamiliar with Metro's own transit planning process, and is imposing their own biases on the survey.  That may be understandable in the early stages of a tool's develoment, when Metro's leadership may not be paying attention yet, but it should be unacceptable and if the tool thrives, it soon will be.

But is this a reason not to join?  No, it's the opposite.  Biased questions are a reason to use the little text feedback boxes to complain about biased questions, and to contact your Metro councilor if you feel strongly about them.  When Metro councilors will start getting letters about biased questions being asked in Metro's name, the problem will be righted quickly.  Just as boycotting elections is a bad way to get your views represented in government, boycotting survey tools is a bad way to get them to ask better questions!

Like all self-appointed panels, OptIn reaches a distorted sample of the population, but so does the massively inefficient and exhausting ritual that it could someday replace: the public meeting.  (The FAQs gently suggest this long-term prospect, though I'm sure we won't see the end of the public meeting soon.)  Public meetings still have value when they are organized as genuine conversations, such as interactive workshops that I'm often hired to run.  But if the purpose of a public meeting is for you to go and give a speech about why you're right and everyone else is wrong, well, we can all save carbon emissions and time out of our busy lives by doing that at home in our pyjamas. 

Need to smash the patriarchy or abolish the government?  I admit online surveys aren't very satisfying if you're massively angry and need something destroyed, and for that your options are still voting, peaceful demonstrations, and if necessary civil disobedience.  But online surveys are a great way to hear from a vast array of voters who are willing to communicate more thoughtfully and with less effort, and who tend to be shouted down or intimidated in public events.  Yes, there are issues about exclusion of low-resource groups and those with language and educational barriers, but Metro's surveys look pretty accessible to anyone with high-school literacy in English and they'd be easy enough to translate and supplement with spoken text.

Metro's currently asking its panel about its priorities for the future of transit in the region, and unlike the survey I mention above, it's a good and worthwhile survey that everyone should complete.  

Again, I wish the transit survey had the courage to ask about new funding sources.  The region's transit agency has cut over 15% of its service in the last decade, and is in ongong budget difficulty due to unfunded health and pension commitments made in wealthier times.  While it may gradually restore a basic functional network, it is nowhere close to offering the pace of service growth that would support the region's land use vision or its justify its green reputation.  But the questions the survey does ask, about your priorites for deploying what resources can be found, are mostly clear and reflect the realities of transit's geometry and costs.

If you don't enjoy public meetings, or have better things to do with your time, join Opt In, and if you're not in the Portland region, encourage your regional government to emulate it.  And if you find a biased question, comment about it!

countering the "empty buses" myth -- with video!

The Pinellas County, Florida transit agency has done this video to help counter the impressions people get from seeing empty buses around the area.  Seeing empty buses often causes people to complain that the buses are too big, are obviously not needed, should be replaced with smaller ones, etc.   

Some viewers may be irritated by the "big number" rhetoric:  We hear the systemwide annual ridership over and over without any context for understanding it.  It's certainly not true that the system's 14m annual rides mean that buses aren't empty a lot of the time, as the video has already explained and justified.

But it's a very worthwhile effort, and transit agencies need do to these things. APTA or some other pro-transit entity could be commissioning them for all transit agencies to use, but home-grown ones will always have some advantage because so many people respond only to data from their own community.

Thanks to Michael Setty for the tip!

how much should agencies explain their planning thoughts?

A reader recently asked the Whatcom Transportation Authority -- which covers the Bellingham, Washington area -- why they didn't have service to their little airport.  (Bellingham, located just below the Canadian border on Interstate 5, has been getting new nonstops to places like Las Vegas and Honolulu, as Canadian travelers demand a lower-cost alternative to their beautiful but expensive airport, Vancouver International (YVR).)

Maureen McCarthy, WTA's manager of Community Relations and Marketing, took the time to write the following email in response, which I wanted to share because it's so respectful and cogent (and also explains, once again, why transit to airports is such a difficult issue).  

Hi ____,

We’d like to offer service to the airport, as ideally all major transportation modes would be connected via transit.  A number of factors are holding us back:

• As you probably know, our routes are built to work as a system.  In order for people to go from route to route within the system, routes need to come together, or “pulse” [link added] through our stations.  Adding the airport to Route 50 wouldn’t allow Route 50 to meet the pulse.
• An alternative would be to serve the airport with its own route.  This is problematic because neither the current demand to the airport, nor demand to the industrial area that surrounds it would warrant  a dedicated route.

Why doesn’t the demand to the airport warrant its own route? 

• Canadian travelers make up a large percentage of travelers in and out of Bellingham Airport.  These would not be transit users.
• Flights before or after our regular service hours make up a significant percentage of departures/arrivals to the airport.
• Nearly everyone would require a transfer to reach the airport.  This would not only make for a long trip, but luggage would make this inconvenient.
• To be viable, service to the airport would have to be frequent.   Frequent service is expensive service.
• While airport parking or  taxi rides are expensive, neither seem cost-prohibitive enough (to the average airline passenger, that is) to cause people to seek a much less convenient alternative.  For example, I regularly ride the bus to work and for other trips.  I wouldn’t take it to the airport, however.  The bus would require a transfer and I’d be relegated to the bus schedule. Cost would be $2.  For only $8 more, I can take a taxi door-to-door, exactly when I need to go.  Many, many people would be in this same boat—requiring one or even two transfers.
• When you consider how tough it is to motivate people to take the bus for easy trips (like to their office, once per week, with no luggage, during regular hours), it feels much more daunting to get them to consider it for a trip to the airport.  Again, we perhaps solve this by offering frequent service—like every 15 minutes, from early until late, but this would be extremely costly—drawing resources away from other routes, serving people’s everyday needs.

Again, we recognize the value of linking all modes of transportation!  And perhaps now that flights from Bellingham are more affordable (it used to be more of a luxury to travel from here), there will be greater demand for this.  In the meantime, for a system of our size to be efficient, we need to focus on the everyday needs of most people.

Would be happy to discuss further if you’re still curious.  Thanks for asking!

Maureen

Now, a big transit agency would need an enormous staff to do this kind of interactive feedback, but notice a few things:

• Well-intentioned public ignorance about the basic geometry of transit service and demand is nearly universal, so there is an intense need for people to hear cogent and reasonable replies to their complaints.  These explanations both convey useful education and also make it harder for the complainant to decide that the agency is just stonewalling.
• Not all agencies have someone like Maureen.  Note that although her title is Manager of Communications and Marketing, she clearly understands transit planning.  As a result, when she receives an intelligent question, she can give an intelligent response.  Unfortunately, I've met many people in the Communications/Marketing role in transit agencies who do not have this skill or training, and have not thought about the importance of communicating planning ideas.  In fact, mutual incomprehension between the planning and marketing worlds is a major source of frustration inside many transit agencies, though by no means all.
• Fortunately, a great deal of this kind of communication could be automated.  Giant transit agencies are unlikely to employ vast sweatshops of Maureens to knock out such emails on a big-city scale, but they could publish more extensive documents with pre-prepared explanations just like the one above.  After all, Maureen's explanation is perfectly appropriate to anyone who asks the very-common question about why transit to the airport isn't better than it is.  So put that on a FAQ list on the website, offer this explanation, and share links to that page when someone asks you that question.  It doesn't need to take much staff time.  See the TransLink (metro Vancouver) Network Planning Primer as one example.  (And yes, I can help your transit agency write exactly what's needed, in an appropriate voice.)

How would your transit agency perform when asked a question like this one?  (Remember, phrase it as a question rather than a complaint, and don't express anger as you're asking the question.)  Even if the answer is automated, ask: Did I get a coherent answer to my question?  

These days, you can quickly identify customer-hating corporations because they respond to your questions with automated emails that prove to you that nobody read your question.   They brush you off with banalities and ignore what you actually asked. When United Airlines or AT&T talk like this -- and they do it routinely -- they're saying: "We're too big to care, we know that you're stuck with us, and it's easier for us to pretend that you're a credulous moron than to take the trouble of reading what you wrote."    

Transit agencies can't afford to take this view, especially when they get an intelligent inquiry.  United and AT&T may have accurately decided that their customers are stuck with them, but despite all the confusing talk about "transit dependent" riders, transit agencies should never assume that riders are stuck with them.  Even if some are, the frontier of the battle between transit and the car lies in the hearts of people who are open to transit and have good reasons to use it, but who are very much not stuck, and won't have any patience for an agency that assumes they are.  

That's why clear explanations of how transit agencies think is so urgently needed, right there on the website, and it's why a lot of my own work, including my entire book, is about filling this void.  The forthcoming CNU Transportation Summit in Long Beach, by the way, will be working on this very question.  It might be an exciting thing to attend.  

portland's southwest corridor: get involved at the beginning!

Portland's regional government Metro has just launched a public feedback period on its Southwest Corridor Project.  This is the most important time to be involved. For details on upcoming engagement events, and online feedback opportunites, see here.  (Scroll to bottom for public meeting info.)

Most people won't pay attention to this project until a final transit project is proposed and the federal funding process is well underway.  At that point, when there's little option to revise the project, everyone will be stuck in a binary support-or-oppose debate that is often angry, boring, and frustrating to all sides.  At that point, too, some people will be saying that "the fix is in," that Metro was always going to build the project a certain way and that the whole public process was just window-dressing.

When we get to that point, people who were engaged in this process back in July 2012 will need to pipe up and say, no, actually there was quite an extensive public conversation before any hint of a transit line was drawn on map.  The public and advocacy groups had ample opportunity to shape the entire definition of the project and its priorities, before Metro had done much planning.

The study area [Download PDF] consists of all the suburbs lying generally southwest of downtown Portland, and a large swath of southwest Portland itself.  Portland's part of the corridor is shown at right.  Download the PDF to see the full extent.

Even if you're not in Portland, you might want to poke around the project website just to get a sense of how broadly Metro defines its corridor studies.  At this stage, the project is presented in such an inclusive way as to barely hint that it may lead to some kind of rapid transit line.  This is the right tone for this point in the process.  The Portland area's style with these things is to start from the question "What kind of community do you want?" -- and gradually build a case from the answers to that question toward a transportation improvement, in the most transparent way possible.  The tone of these processes is always that the transit line isn't an end in itself, but a tool for a wide range of outcomes that citizens value.

This corridor has understandably been a relatively low priority in the past three decades of rapid transit development.  Its catchment is relatively small as corridors go, density is low, topography is relatively difficult, and all the options for bringing any rail or BRT project into downtown Portland look likely to be very expensive.  Look at the map above:  The only alignment that won't involve tunnelling will approach alongside the already-level Interstate 5 and Barbur Blvd, which are right next to each other.  This alignment briefly turns due east and then makes a 90-degree turn to the north -- locally known as the "Terwilliger curves."  The east-west segment exploits a break in the continuous ridge of hills running north-south, and after you turn northward you're running laterally across the steep face of these hills all the way into downtown.  Barbur and I-5 are flat through here only because of continuous restraining walls and viaducts, all of which will be expensive to refit for rapid transit.  

Portland has already built one long tunnel to cross these hills -- the dashed red line that you see heading west from downtown.  That tunnel, though, is part of the westside line, which has a much larger catchment including all of Beaverton, Hillsboro, and the so-called "Silicon Forest".  A tunnel for the smaller southwest corridor will probably be difficult to pencil.

All Portland rapid transit studies are land use studies, and are ultimately about what kind of community citizens want.  Still, this one will call for some spectacularly clever engineering options -- more than enough drama to engage infrastructure geeks across the continent.  Stay tuned, and if you're local, get involved.

tweet-analysis for transit agencies, and more on positive feedback

A group of researchers studied tweets emerging from Chicago rail transit passengers, plotting them by time of day and correlating them with disruption events on the network.  Emily Badger at The Atlantic has the story.  A key insight:

Bus and train agencies generally gauge how riders feel about them the old-fashioned way, with surveys and focus groups. What if, instead of politely asking people if they find their morning commutes safe, sanitary and efficient, agencies tapped into the raw and unscripted assessments we all love to broadcast from our smart phones? (Case in point: I may have tweet-whined this morning from inside the Washington Metro system: "Why will it take 8 1/2 months to replace the escalators at the Dupont Metro?")

A group of researchers at Purdue suspected agencies could learn a lot about rider satisfaction by doing this (oh yeah, and all this data is free!).

Unfortunately, the results also picked up on my theme from last week:

[Samuil] Hasan, a Ph.D. candidate at Purdue, presented these findings Tuesday to a riveted room at the annual Transportation Research Board conference in Washington. Noticeably absent from his charts were the moments when everyone seemed to be tweeting wild praise for the Chicago Transit Authority.

"The most interesting thing we found is that transit riders do not give any positive sentiment at a particular time. They only give negative sentiment," he said. Now, this may seem depressing if you work for one of these agencies. "But that’s not very disappointing," Hasan said, "because we found that the lack of negative sentiment is basically what transit authorities should look for. If there’s no negative sentiment at any given time, that means that things are running smoothly."

That may be partly true of operational disruptions, but Hasan seems unaware of the role of positive feedback in encouraging good work by operations employees.

In many other areas of transit agency activity, the absence of positive feedback is unequivocally a problem.  In operations, "smooth running" is the goal, which menas that change is usually the enemy.  But network planning, for example, is about creative change that solves problems and improves the relevance of the service.  Almost everybody, deep down, feels some entitlement to the status quo, so negative feedback on a change proposal is inevitable no matter how good the plan is.  

When a transit agency is trying to do something new, and good -- whether in network planning, infrastructure, wayfinding, marketing, communications, or whatever -- you should assume they're getting lots of negative feedback from people who just want nothing to change.  That means your positive feedback really matters.

"awesome driver!": the power of positive feedback

Now and then Twitter pops up something like this, from someone called @wmataplusside.

@wmataplusside:  @wmata awesome driver! Very clear & announced everything! orange line car 5053. Tell him to keep up the good work :)

 In a local ecosystem dominated by colorful critical voices (including @FixWMATA, @dcmetrosucks, @unsuckdcmetro, and my personal favorite moniker, @MedievalMetro), @wmataplusside's niche is to offer all good news:

‏ @wmataplusside  Cell service at Anacostia, Navy Yard, and Waterfront is real! Its really there! #wmata

WMATA, the regional transit agency of the Washington DC region, has a problem that afflicts almost all transit agencies: Negative feedback is constant, positive feedback is rare.  Transit is an incredibly visible service; when something goes wrong -- whether in management or operations -- there's no concealing it.  Media feed on negativity, so that's what spreads, and what returns amplified to the agency staff.

Experienced transit staff learn to "control" for the negativity.  I often tell client agencies that if the feedback on a service proposal is only 75% negative, as opposed to, say, 95%, then that's actually pretty positive.  Negatively-impacted customers respond in much greater numbers, and usually much more belligerently, than positively-impacted customers, so it's unfair to count comments as though they were votes.  The same is generally true of operations; commendations of good work from customers are rare, because few bother to comment in that situation. while lacerating feedback from angry customers is routine.

This is why folks like @wmataplusside are doing someting important.  When not offering his/her own positive feedback, @wmataplusside is harvesting good news from all over the local Twitterverse, and retweeting it, amplified.  If you want one feed of all the good news about WMATA (and I'm sure the agency does), this is it:

‏ @dcmetrosucks:  I have to say that #wmata has stepped it up this past month and a half...haven't had any significant delays on the OR during peak hours.

‏ @jamdizzle  So pressed with @wmata! Didn't really believe they'd put the money the bus ate on my SmarTrip and certainly not within a few hours!

@jeditrainee:  Love the new bus bays at Seven Corners. Going through there used to be a nightmare. #wmata

@HS1979: On a shuttle. Watched WMATA employee explain to driver how 2 help one confused young passenger. "Take care of her, ok?" IMMD 

@mindymoretti:  $13 cab ride vs. $1.50 bus ride. Snarly cab driver vs. uber friendly bus driver. Well played @wmata well played.

‏ @csimpson82:  My orange line train driver would have an AMAZING career in radio! Excellent job today with the stations!

@zebrafinch:  Cheers, kudos to DC Metro staff Ms. Taylor (Woodley/Zoo) & Gregory (White Flint) for ALWAYS BEING HELPFUL & on task! TY! @wmata #WMATA

@zebrafinch:  New and cheery lighting at formerly dark Metro station. Good! #WMATA http://twitpic.com/9e1yv5

@chrispulaski:  With all my negative #wmata tweets, I have to say that more often than not, the metro workers I encounter are wonderful people.

They don't have to be specific complimnents.  Expressions of sheer passion are also passed on:

‏@Adam_Ulbricht:  Have I confessed my love for the #DCMetro lately? Ya, it's amazing

@Wmataplusside also supports by being useful, extending the agency's eyes:

@wmataplusside: @wmata there are hornets building a nest inside of bus bay H at Naylor Road

The user @wmataplusside took a while to track down, but here's his or her self-description.

Unrelated with WMATA, just a Marylander who grew up with the Green Line. Not really much about me. A suburbanite, born in Virginia, raised in Maryland. Ride Monday through Friday and weekends when I need to go into the city. Been riding all my life, and it's really not as sorry a state of affairs as others make it out to be.

It moves people back and forth without serious incidents being commonplace. Sure, incidents may occur from time to time, but it's not nearly as bad as the Beltway. If riding Metro sounded like listening to a bad traffic report, I could understand relentlessly hating on it.

Started the feed because I couldn't understand why so many were dedicated to being negative about it, and none positive. Goal was an outlet for compliments and comments as a means of hopefully encouraging more positive behavior by wmata employees. Answer rider questions and tweet about my experiences on rails and bus, pass along information about delays when I'm in them. Just want to provide a contrast to all of the pessimism, and another side to the #wmata conversation.

Or as he put it in a tweet:

@wmataplusside: I may look like the eternal optimist, but I'm more normal than it seems. And after reading twitter daily, more lucky than most.

If nobody is aggregating positive feedback for your city's transit system, maybe you should start!  Positive feedback can guide an agency at least as well as the negative can.  Probably better.

what's wrong with the "transit score"?

Carter Rubin, on Los Angeles Metro's blog The Source, says exactly what needs to be said about WalkScore.com's Transit Score product.  The product is in the news today because of their new ranking of US cities by Transit Score.

Everyone’s favorite mapping tool, Walk Score, has launched a new service called Transit Score and used it to determine what it believes are the best American cities for public transit. The Switchboard blog has a recap and analysis. Los Angeles clocks in at 11, just behind Portland, Ore., and ahead of Denver, Colo. — respectable enough company, I suppose. That said, I do have some constructive criticisms of Transit Score’s methodology.

Excerpt:

To calculate a raw Transit Score, we sum the value of all of the nearby routes. The value of a route is defined as the service level (frequency per week) multiplied by the mode weight (heavy/light rail is weighted 2X, ferry/cable car/other are 1.5X, and bus is 1X) multiplied by a distance penalty. The distance penalty calculates the distance to the nearest stop on a route and then uses the same distance decay function as the Walk Score algorithm.

The first issue that jumps out at me is how Transit Score weights different modes to give a bonus to “better” modes: “heavy/light rail is weighted 2X, ferry/cable car/other are 1.5X, and bus is 1X.” There’s such an incredible diversity of service quality within each mode that this strikes me as an oversimplification. Is the Metro Los Angeles Orange Line really half as “good” as the Boston Green Line — a nice enough line, but it plods along 100-year-old tracks — just because the former runs on rubber tires?

There are arguments either way, and reasonable people can disagree. Those differences, however, are simply glazed over with a simple multiplier. And, I don’t even pretend to understand the 1.5X weighting for ferries and cable cars.

Early last year, when Transit Score first rolled out, I discussed it with WalkScore's Matt Lerner, expanded on this very critique, and suggested a better (though computationally intense) approach.  It involves aggregating the content of their travel time maps -- effectively "maps of your freedom" -- over all likely destinations from any residence, so the two digit score is actually a percentage, a composite of answers to the question "What percentage of jobs, retail, etc can you get to in __ minutes, on transit, from here?"   It needs refinement, but that's the only truly factual measure of access that could be reduced to a two digit number.

I understand why Walk Score folks settled on this methodology; it's more about the limits of compultational power than any modal bias on their part.  Still, Transit Score is the only WalkScore.com product that I can't recommend.  I love everything else that WalkScore does, but Transit Score assumes that a slow streetcar is better for you than an express bus, and people need to make that decision for themselves.  

portland: balance the budget yourself

Portland's Tri-Met faces another horrible funding shortfall this year, but they've come up with a good survey tool to engage the public in their decisions about what services to cut.  It's one of those "balance the budget yourself" tools that's becoming increasingly necessary to bring voters into contact with reality about government budgets.  

If you live in Portland, you should definitely work through the survey and send them your own balanced budget and comments.  If you're not in Portland, is your transit agency communicating about its trade-offs this well?

steve jobs vs. market research

From the NYT obituary of Steve Jobs:

Mr. Jobs’s own research and intuition, not focus groups, were his guide. When asked what market research went into the iPad, Mr. Jobs replied: “None. It’s not the consumers’ job to know what they want.”

This may sound blunt and arrogant, as fast-moving minds often do, but Matt Bai expands:

In other words, while Mr. Jobs tried to understand the problems that technology could solve for his buyer, he wasn’t going to rely on the buyer to demand specific solutions, just so he could avoid ever having to take a risk. This is what’s commonly known as leading.

This point has great relevance to transit and urban planning generally.  Citizens express their desires lots of ways, but few of those expressions tell planners exactly what to do.  "Research," as Jobs uses the term, probably means a very broad process of perceiving what customers are actually doing, how they're responding to existing products -- many other sources apart from asking them what they want.  It also means relating those desires to the some sense of what's mathematically and physically possible.  The synthesis of these inputs requires a certain amount of science but also a certain amount of inspiration or instinct. 

You can ask a citizen anything, but the trick is to figure out if the frame of reference you're using is the one that actually matters to their decisions, and even you get only part of your answer.  Often we ask questions that express the questioner's interest rather than the citizen's.  (In the extreme form, this becomes push-polling.)    For example, suppose we ask: "Should we build light rail or a busway here?"  Well, not everyone is interested in technology-choice questions, and from those people we'll get low-commitment answers that don't mean much.  Some people are happy to say "no opinion," while others feel compelled to state a view no matter how faintly they may feel about it.  These vagaries of mood or temperament make a huge difference to research outcomes, especially when the question isn't stated in a way that engages what the citizen actually cares about.  (In focus groups, peer pressure makes "no opinion" less of an option, but that doesn't give me any more confidence that the right question has been asked, if indeed there even is a right question.)

So I would rather ask the public big questions about what they think transit is for, and what it should be trying to do.  "Do you see transit in your community as primarily a social service for people who can't drive?  If so do you think it should remain in that role?"  "Should transit serve every bit of the city, or focus on areas where it can carry high ridership?"  "Here are five possible goals that transit could focus on; what do you think should be the prioirty among them?"

But most importantly, we in the transit business have to think, not just analytically but in a more humanistic way that's open to inspiration and flashes of insight. 

Because we have to take risks, and while you can analyze risks forever, only inspiration gives you the confidence to take one.