Human Transit

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.)

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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!

fort lauderdale: yet another triumph for multi-destinational networks

If your city is producing lousy outcomes with its bus services, are you sure it's because of the buses, or the drivers, or the sidewalks, or the degree of "transit oriented development", or that they're not streetcars?  Maybe it's because the network structure is obsolete.  A study team led by Gregory Thompson of Florida State looked at the success of Broward County Transit, which serves greater Fort Lauderdale.  Apart from a few special enclaves, Fort Lauderdale is unlikely to be high on anyone's list of urbanist paradises.  It has plenty of gridlock, plenty of pedestrian-hostile environments, and the usual abundance of oversized roads that seem only to generate more congestion.

Yet the hard-working if unappreciated Broward County Transit system is producing excellent outcomes through multidestinational design.  Instead of running a radial system into a single downtown, they decentralized to serve many destinations, through a network of routes making easy connections with one another. Eric Jaffe tells the story today in Atlantic Cities.

The whole case for this kind of design is in my book Human Transit, esp Chapter 12 and 13, but Thompson has been making it for years.  I'm impressed at how well it's working in not-especially-transit-friendly Florida metros.  Tallahassee took the plunge last year.

Obviously this is an issue close to my heart.  I came to consciousness as a transit planner during the decentralization of Portland's network in 1979-82, which created local pulse networks in each suburban area and culminated in the high-frequency grid that today covers most of the city.  Almost every network design I've ever done has helped to improve the multi-destinational utility of transit networks of all sizes.  Huge amounts of resistance have to be overcome.  But if they're designed well, they work. 

Finally, kudos to the folks at Atlantic Cities for coming back to this issue with one great story after another.  I'm not sure I've ever seen a major media outlet build up this degree of internal understanding about the fundamentals of transit network design -- a topic that's easily forgotten while obsessing about how cool technologies are.   Is any other American media outlet dealing with network planning issues so clearly?  Certainly not the New York Times, which publishes one story after another in which well-meaning platitudes about social needs are proposed as ways to change the facts of geometry.

how do you compare to your peers? should you care?

Admit it:  You've always cared, at least in secret, about how you compare to your peers: your friends, your fellow students, your graduating class, your co-workers, your generation.  Well, deep down, transit authorities and city governments care too, which is why comparing a city to other similar cities always gets attention.

Sometimes peer comparisons cause complacency, especially if you choose the wrong peers.  Wellington has the highest transit mode share in New Zealand, but in a country with only one other big, dense city, that obviously shouldn't imply that it's reached nirvana.  Working in greater Vancouver I always have to emphasize that they are doing so well by North American standards that they have to start comparing themselves to European port cities in their size class (Glasgow, Edinburgh, Copenhagen, Helsinki, Marseilles).  My general advice: If your peer comparison says you're wonderful, throw a party and revel in this for 48 hours, then look for a more motivating group of peers. 

At the other extreme, nothing is more motivating than being told that you're dead last among your peers.  Earlier this year I worked (through my Australian employer MRCagney under the leadership of Ian Wallis Associates) on a peer comparison study for Auckland, New Zealand, which compared Auckland's transit performance with all the five biggest Australian cities plus a selection of North American ones.  Download the full report here.  Remember, if you're in any of the peer cities that it uses (Wellington, Brisbane, Perth, Adelaide, Sydney, Melbourne, Edmonton, Ottawa, Calgary, Vancouver, Honolulu, Portland, Seattle) this is your peer study too!  Just keep the tables and refocus the text (citing the source of course!).

More generally, the report is a good illustration of how peer comparison can work at its best, and also of the cautions that must be shouted from the sidelines once the conclusions take fire in the media, as they certainly have in Auckland.  From yesterday's New Zealand Herald:

Consultants have ranked Auckland last out of 14 cities - in New Zealand, Australia, Canada and the United States - included in a benchmark study for the average number of public transport trips taken annually by its residents.

Aucklanders also pay the highest fares of any of the cities, amounting to 24c for every kilometre travelled on the average 44 public transport trips they take each year, compared with 17c in Wellington.

The rest of the article is further grim statistics, plus quotations from political leaders demanding that something be done. 

I'm  sympathetic to Auckland Transport in this case.  Remember, a city's transit performance is mostly about the physical layout of the city and the constraints on other modes; the quality of the transit system by itself can't overcome problems in those areas.  The nature of the economy also matters.  Wellington is much smaller but it has much more severe chokepoints in its urban structure.  In fact, all travel between the northern and southern parts of the city must go through a single chokepoint less than 1 km wide, which is also the (very dense) downtown.  Wellington's economy is dominated by government, which is generally a sector disposed to use transit heavily. All of these features are hugely important in driving Wellington's mode share above Auckland's, and yet they don't include anything about the respective quality of the transit systems. 

Peer comparisons also carry the false assumption that everyone wants to be the same kind of city, and is therefore working to the same kind of goals.  (This attitude, taken to extreme, produces the absurdity of top ten "best cities for transit" lists.)  Low mode share for transit may mean your transit system is failing, but it may mean that it's not trying for mode share, or at least that it has other objectives or constraints that prevent it from focusing on that goal.  It may just mean that your city has different values.  It may mean the city stikes a different balance between cycling, transit, and walking based on its own geography.

Still, service quality matters, and there's a lot that Auckland can do.  I hope the city's opinion leaders are listening to Auckland Transport as well as berating it, so that they understand the real choices that must be made to move Auckland forward.  If there's a real conversation, great things can be accomplished. 

transit acceleration campaign goes national

For over a year now, Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa has been spearheading a "30/10" initiative, designed to accelerate the construction a range of urgently needed transit projects (mostly rail transit lines).  The key word is accelerate, not fund.  The projects are already funded, but on a 30-year timeline.  The 30/10 proposal would deliver the projects in 10 years.

The idea begins with Measure R, a 30-year sales tax increment approved by Los Angeles County voters in 2008 to fund a large package of rail transit improvements, including the Wilshire subway to the westside.  Villairagosa wants the Federal government to create a mechanism to bond this revenue so that it can be spent in one decade instead of three. 

Well, you can only get Congress interested if the same idea can be applied in many places, so predictably the Mayor and Metro are now presenting America Fast Forward, a national campaign to create a similar mechanism for any urban region that has already put funded projects in place.  Los Angeles Metro's blog Source covers it here, the Los Angeles Times's Tim Rutten opines here.  Here's a puffy PDF.

Because it relies on Federal financing rather than spending, and because the funding sources are local tax streams that are relatively stable, it's an approach that could potentially succeed even in lean times.

In a tweet, Cap'n Transit asked me:  Could it be used to build highways?  Yes, it looks like the same mechanism could be used, in theory, to fund any locally supported infrastructure.  I hope it will be constrained to transportation, and if it were constrained to voter-approved funding streams like Los Angeles's Measure R it could well usher in a new era of these measures, in which most voters could vote up or down on a set of plans knowing that if passed, all of them would be built and running in just ten years, soon enough to affect most voters' lives.

 

palestine: time to think about transit?

Can good planning help address the grievous problems of the Palestinian territories, including the challenge of conceiving its patchwork of lands as a viable state? My friend Doug Suisman, a Los Angeles architect in private practice, has been working on the problem for years, through a remarkable project called the Arc. The New York Times profiled it five years ago, and despite all the bad news from Israel and Palestine since then, the work has continued.  The idea is to have a plan for the urban structure and transport infrastructure of a Palestinian state, something that's ready to go when an independent state is created, and that can even be part of the run-up to independence.

As often in the developing world, a type of Bus Rapid Transit is a key early move, with rail further in the future.  The Arc's planners understand the need for a "Quick Impact" project that will show a transport benefit fast, and an intercity form of Bus Rapid Transit linking the West Bank's major centers makes sense if that's the objective.  Compared to the transport options today, even a compromised BRT would be a striking improvement.  

Doug recently updated me on this via email:

[W]e’re trying to keep awareness of the project high in hopes that the Obama administration’s negotiating team will see fit to incorporate the Arc into its diplomatic strategy ... . The 8-minute video is a quick refresher. You may be particularly interested in the short- to medium-term transit projects we have proposed: http://friendsofthearc.org/storage/arcdemoproj.pdf

Five years ago, proposing swift regional inter-city rail with connecting BRT service at each major Palestinian city – combined with medium density development along the BRT lines - may have seemed somewhat foreign for the region, but as you know in the interim Istanbul has opened 2 BRT lines, Amman is moving ahead pretty quickly with its own BRT system and impressive master plan, and Dubai opened its Metro with plenty of bus connections. Maybe transit and design can, after all, be part of the peace equation!

In some form it will have to be, so it's smart to be thinking about it now.

u.s. transit capital funding: a big picture?

An email asks a seemingly eternal question, from reader Aaron Brown:

I ... wanted to reach out to see if you'd be willing to provide any thoughts on the massive capital funding backlogs that major transit systems face here in the US. The latest reports I've seen throw around numbers above $50bn just to bring systems into a state of good repair, excluding any expansion. Given the current condition of local, state, and federal budgets, this number seems extremely daunting to me.

Here in Chicago, for instance, we have a pretty solid transit system (relative to most US cities), but one that is old and badly in need of repairs. Again, however, the amount need just to bring the system to a state of good repair ($7bn for the CTA alone) seems overwhelming. We have aging buses and railcars, tracks and ties in need of replacement, and an L system with structures over 100 years old that are all competing for limited funds. And this is in a city and transit system that is seeing record ridership and will need to expand over the next few decades to serve one of the largest (and growing) metro areas in the country.

I know you typically focus on the technical and design aspects of transit systems, but have you given any thought to the funding issues they face? Are we US city-dwellers doomed to face continuing deterioration of our mass transit systems because of a lack of government funding? Or are we doomed to fight the losing battle to raise taxes to pay for these capital needs? And - finally - are there non-traditional ways to raise revenues that might be worth exploring in your mind?

The question makes me want to distinguish not just between strategy and tactics, but also between strategy and a thing that hangs above the level of strategy, which we might call principle.

• Tactics are means of getting things done, in the short term, in the existing situation.  If the existing situation is messy, the tactics will be pretty messy.  A typical tactic, in the legislative context, is something like: "Hide the transit funding inside a highway bill and add a million for the Pork Rind Museum in the Speaker's district."
• Strategy is a longer-term or bigger-picture sense of direction or objective, the larger thing you're trying to accomplish.  Strategies look a little purer than tactics, but they also aim for the longer term.  A strategy is something like "build consensus on the link between transit and urban economic development, by engaging key development lobbies to construct a larger trasit advocacy coalition."
• Principles, in my mind, are descriptions of what state of affairs would be just or appropriate or civilized or sustainable.  Principles can also be boundaries on what will be considered ethical or reasonable.  Strategies that are worth anything have principles behind them. 

So a principle might be:  "Aim to break down the boundaries between Federal Transit, Highway, and Railroad administrations for the purposes of funding streams.  Aim for a simplified transport funding structure in which all areas receive comparable per-capita spending over long cycles -- say an entire decade.  Make this funding entirely fungible between transit and highways so that each jurisdiction can focus on whatever balance of modes reflects its local consensus."   (When you see your way to dropping the "Aim to" from those principles, you're ready to turn the principles into strategies.)

But another might be:  "Several urgent matters of national security directly benefit from more sustainable and compact urbanism -- notably climate change, petroleum dependence, and food security.  For these reasons, national policy should tilt funding priorities in that direction, beyond what would be dictated by strictly per capita funding shares."

Principles may be completely vague about how to move forward; that's the work of strategy in the medium term and tactics in the short term.  On the other hand, principles can be quite prescriptive about placing boundaries on short term behavior.  One such principle might be: "Do not under any circumstances permit a net shift in funding from transit to highways."  You could argue that this is too rigid.  In soccer,  for example, it sometimes makes sense to kick the ball back to your own goalkeeper.  But your principle can embrace that possibility by saying that a net shift toward highways shouldn't remain a net shift for more than x number of years.  After all, when you kick the ball back to your own goalkeeper, it's specifically for the purpose of getting it moved in the opposite direction, and soon.

Aaron's question helps me better articulate an important feature of this blog's brand or niche.  I'm really not very interested in political tactics, and am happy to defer to people who are, such as Yonah Freemark for example.  Many great political bloggers cover nothing but tactics; when did you last read about a principle on Talking Points Memo, for example? 

I'm interested in strategy to the extent that it can manifest principle and turn principles into tactics.  I'm very interested in principles, because they highlight the real disagreements, and therefore define the real game.  My experience is that some purely tactical-minded transit managers often sacrifice important principles for the tactical needs of the moment -- in other words, they are prone to make Faustian bargains. 

So I mostly do principles here, and principle-based critiques.  Sometimes I lay out, on the level of principle, how we go about getting something very immediate and tactical done -- here, for example.  (All good tactical manuals are based on principles.)  But when it comes to how to get a particular short term proposal through a particular messy situation, I generally defer to the tacticians, while reminding them to keep one eye on the principles.

How's that for evading a question?  Is this why people sometimes tell me I should run for office?  In fact, it's exactly why I won't!

seattle: rail-bus tradeoffs on the 520 bridge

A post on the Seattle blog Orphan Road recently suggested that driverless metro, which I've praised in Vancouver, might be the right technology for the Highway 520 bridge, the more northerly of the two bridges that connect Seattle to its vast eastern suburbs.  It's an interesting type of problem that might interest readers in similar chokepoint-rich cities.  I commented on the Orphan Road post on why driverless metro isn't appropriate there, but let's explore why any rail project will face challenges in this corridor.  Seattle Mayor Mike McGinn has been promoting light rail on the bridge.  (Seattle Transit Blog is covering in detail.)  It's a live issue because a redesign of the bridge in being planned now.

Here's the basic geography.  The orange line is a very very rough sketch of the currently planned Sound Transit light rail network, including the existing line from downtown south, and the North Link and East Link projects.

A basic fact of life about rail transit lines is that they're lines, well suited for connecting a series of destinations that are more or less in a straight line already.  Reasonable straightness is a key feature of good rail transit because for these lines to be as strong as possible, they need to be the direct path between any two stations on the line.  Light rail extending south and north out of Seattle is relatively straightforward because there is a string of destinations extending in these directions, and the resulting lines will pass that test. 

By contrast, fitting rail transit to Seattle's eastern suburbs has always been difficult becuase the geography just doesn't work that way.

The light rail on the southerly bridge (Interstate 90) will work, if it does, only by linking up downtown Seattle to the major nodes of Bellevue and Overlake, and making the service attractive enough that people will ride it from Overlake to Seattle even though the line goes much further south than you would go if you were driving.  In short, the line relies on the notion that light rail's intrinsic attractiveness will compensate for a somewhat circuitous route.  We'll see if that really works.

On the other hand, for a trip between the University and Downtown Bellevue, the planned light rail, as sketched above, will serve both ends but probably won't be competitive, as the path it follows is more than twice as long as the path as the most direct path that a bus and car can take.

So should there be light rail on the northerly bridge (Highway 520) as well?  This bridge is an even harder problem, because right at each end of the bridge, the major lines of demand immediately fan out in several directions.  At the west end of the bridge, you have to turn north to go to the university, or south to go to downtown Seattle.  Not far beyond the east end of the bridge, major paths of demand split three ways: south to Bellevue, east to Overlake/Microsoft, and north to Kirkland.  As a result, there are several different high-demand transit links that all need to use the 520 bridge, including:

• Downtown Seattle to Kirkland
• University to Bellevue
• University to Overlake
• University to Kirkland

and possibly also, depending on how access to the growing South Lake Union employment area develops ...

• South Lake Union to Overlake
• South Lake Union to Kirkland

What's more, while the currently planned line is probably tolerable for trips between Downtown Seattle and Overlake, these trips would certainly insist on going via the more direct 520 bridge if light rail were built there, so you'd have to accommodate them as well.

So here's the challenge for any Highway 520 light rail scheme:  Light rail will only serve this market well only if it serves all these major branches.  Even if we assume that the already-planned light rail gets built more or less as drawn above, so that it can be used to distribute some of the hypothetical trains on a 520 bridge, you would still need to add a branch north to Kirkland.  You'd also be building a four-way light rail interchange east of the bridge (much like a freeway interchange, with direct links from every track to every other). 

At the west end, you'd either need to build new light rail from the 520 bridge all the way to both the university and downtown Seattle, or else you'd have to design an interchange to feed bridge trains into the already-planned north-south line through the university.  That's very tricky because the planned north-south line is underground but a line coming off the bridge would be on the surface, and you're in the middle of sensitive wetlands right there. 

The Seattle region may choose to plan light rail on this grand scale, as Phoenix is thinking of doing.  But such expensive infrastructure will probably only make sense if tremendous density is built around stations, such as we see around Skytrain in Vancouver.  Unfortunately, suburbs at the immediate east end of the 520 bridge, Medina and Clyde Hill, are low-density affluent places that are likely to resist adding forests of towers around their stations, if they have stations at all.

As always, I emphasize that the Seattle region should build what it wants based on its own values, which includes tradeoffs between pure mobility and intrinsic values attached to rail.  I'm not saying that there aren't environmental and urbanist reasons to prefer rail; clearly there are. 

But if the region decides that cost-effective mobility -- getting people where they're going as fast as possible -- is an important objective, Highway 520 is a case where this goal is going to argue for a busway, because busway services can branch in several directions at each end of the bridge without needing dedicated infrastructure all the way to each destination.  At the west end, for example, busway services heading for the University could branch off into university streets, whereas light rail would need either direct tracks into the heart of the university or some way to transition into the north-south underground rail line that will already be there.  At the same time, busway services heading for downtown Seattle would be able to flow into downtown directly via appropriate bus lanes on existing highways.

No transit solution is going to be easy on the 520 bridge, but if you advocate light rail, it's important to be clear on how much light rail you'll need to build in order to have really served the market.  A busway solution will almost certainly require less infrastructure for the same mobility.  And given the pressure to spread scarce transit dollars over this enormous urban region, that's probably going to matter.

willingness to pay for transit improvements

Do your city's political leaders understand what funding sources people would support if they knew what they were buying?  A few weeks ago, the Source (a blog by the Los Angeles transit agency Metro) reported on a survey showing that current riders would pay 50c more in fares for a doubling of their frequency of service.  This isn't as encouraging as it sounds, because a doubling of frequency, even with significant ridership increases as a result, will cost a lot more than 50 cents per new rider.  But it's a useful soundbite.  These questions, broadly called "willingness to pay" questions, need to be asked more, and more probingly.

In the recent Sydney Morning Herald Inquiry into Sydney public transport, we did some deep probing of public opinion on willingness to pay.  Our survey experts at the University of Sydney's Centre for the Study of Choice took 2400 randomly selected people through a series of questions designed to observe the value they attach to different kinds of public transit improvements, and what taxes or fees could be higher, and by how much, if the money were clearly going to those improvements.  The methodology, called a discrete choice experiment, is designed to avoid some of the usual biases in these questions.  The method and its results explained toward the end of Chapter 1, here.

Ultimately, these findings determined the shape of our recommended 30-year investment plan.  The most fundamental recommendations are (a) that Sydney needs  a major transit investment program, funded largely by a range of increased state taxes and user fees, and (b) the plan must be dominated by transit, not roads. 

We made these recommendations not just because of our own analysis and desires, but because that's the overwhelming preference of the public.  Throughout the project, we recommended only things that could be funded using sources that, according to the survey, would get majority support, if the funding was clearly tied to the improvements.  We concluded that if voters could vote up or down on that package of fees and taxes, to be used exclusively to build the specified transit lines, a majority would say yes.

For better or worse, Australians are not used to voting on specific initiatives.  There have been national referenda on major national issues, including famous ones such as the granting of full rights to Aboriginals (passed in 1967) and the creation of a republic in place of the British crown (defeated in 1999).  But there is no precedent for voting on state and local issues like how to fund the construction and operations of transit.  Most Australian transit agencies are not separate governments entitled to certain funding, as they typically are in North America.  Instead, transit is managed by state government direction.  It's just one of many things funded out of the state's general revenues, and the elected government decides how that revenue is spent.

During the last year, watching the state and local budget crises across the United States, I've come to appreciate the stability of the Australian approach.  Popular votes on specific taxes and spending have tied the state of California in knots, to the point where the task of government is almost impossible.  American transit agencies that rely on a specific tax, usually some form of sales or payroll tax, experience huge swings in revenue, so at least once a decade they find themselves slashing service.  This doesn't happen in Australia, or at least not as visibly.  Service doesn't improve dramatically in better times, and isn't slashed as badly when times are bad.

But the Australian system is not so good at expressing a public consensus to raise taxes and fees for a specific purpose.  Such a consensus clearly exists in Sydney to move forward on major transit investment.  If the voters could set up a funding stream to do this and an agency tasked with doing it, as would happen in many American states, then we would be on our way.  Instead, we have to wait for one of the competing major parties to embrace such an investment plan.  The parties, however, aren't focused on the whole of public opinion; they're focused quite narrowly on marginal seats, the relatively small number of voters whose judgments will turn the election, and this is a very different polity than the city as a whole.

Sooner or later, I suspect Sydney will need to have some sort of referendum to put the funding sources in place to fund a decent transit expansion program.  Based on our work in the Inquiry, which assessed the public's willingness to pay and then crafted an infrastructure plan to fit it, such a referendum could pass.   But I certainly don't see the way to that in the Australian political system, nor does either of the major parties seem ready to take the lead.

sydney: grid networks for gridless cities

Whenever I talk about the value of grid networks, as I did here, someone always says: But my city isn't a grid.  For example, Sydney, where I live now, is about as ungridlike a city as you'll encounter.  In fact, there's no large system of order in Sydney's road network at all.  Some roads follow what were once Aboriginal tracks, but mostly it just grew, one bit at a time, an accretion of millions of short-term decisions.

One of Sydney's biggest problems is that the road network is so focused on the CBD (top-centre in this image) that traffic is forced into the CBD that doesn't want to be there.  But the problem is much, much worse if you're a transit passenger.  As part of the Sydney Morning Herald's Independent Public Inquiry, discussed here, I did a quick review of the inner-city bus network looking for the pattern of frequent service -- service that runs every 15 minutes or better all day.  The frequent network is the portion of the network where you don't have to worry about a timetable, and where transit can therefore be used with some sense of spontaneity and freedom.  To my knowledge, nobody had drawn a map of inner Sydney's frequent network before.  It turned out to look like this:

If you want to get around with any spontaneity in the inner part of Sydney -- where densities are highest, obstacles to driving are greatest, and car-free lifestyles should be most attractive -- the network forces you to go through the CBD (the yellow wedge on the north edge of the drawing). In the whole inner city of Sydney there is only one frequent crosstown or orbital service -- one that runs perpendicular to the radial lines, like the circular element of a spider web.  It's highlighted in yellow.  By contrast, most major North American and European cities have a whole grid of these orbital services, and they are often the most productive routes in the network, in terms of ridership per unit of operating cost.

As part of the inquiry, I sketched a map to give just a taste of what an inner city frequent grid network might look like for Sydney.  It's not a proposal, just a possible starting point for thinking about one.  But if you can't imagine doing a grid network in a gridless city, you might find it interesting to stare at for a bit.  (All this is in the Preliminary Report of the Inquiry, in Section 4.2, and readers interested in the local detail are encouraged to dig there.) 

Sydney's road network is so radial, and the CBD is such a large destination, that the grid takes more of a spider-web form (as defined here).  I highlighted this in the diagram by using black and red for radial lines and all the other colours for orbitals, so that people could see how orbital services might work and how they could all fit together, with each other and with commuter rail and light rail, to form a complete inner city network. 

But in the middle part of the map you'll notice some lines that do try to run straight east-west, even though the lacerated street network requires you to make many turns to keep going the same direction.  As I explored in more detail here, most grid networks involve a fusion of standard rectangular grid lines and spider-web (or polar grid) lines.  The rectangular lines express a "serve everywhere" impulse, while the spider-web lines express a "focus on the centre" impulse, and network design is a process of finding the balance and making them work together. 

There are many ways to design such a pattern for Sydney.  A detailed planning effort would feature months of work exploring various options, but what I sketched here, based on three years' observation of the inner city and about three hours of focused thought, is at least a step toward visualizing the future.

So yes, your city may not be a grid.  But still, if you want a transit network that's useful for going at high frequencies from anywhere to anywhere, the answer will be some kind of grid, built on connections, with some mix of rectangular and spider-web elements, all fitted with more or less struggle to the unique shape of your city.

vancouver: the almost perfect grid

In the last post, which explains why grids are such an efficient structure for transit, I mentioned that Vancouver has one of the best transit geographies I've ever encountered. Here's what I mean.

A grid pattern of arterial streets covers almost all of Vancouver. Most of the time, parallel major streets are spaced about every 800-1000m apart, and since a comfortable walking distance is about half that, this spacing is perfect for efficient transit.

But what's really great about Vancouver from a transit perspective is the position of its major destinations.  They're positioned in a way that solves another transit planning problem: anchoring.

If a transit line is operating through an area of uniform density, about 50% of its capacity goes to waste. That's because the vehicle will leave the end of the line empty, fill only gradually with passengers, and reach its maximum load at the midpoint of the line.  After that, more people get off than get on, and as you near the far end of the line, the vehicle is nearly empty again.  If you plot the load of the vehicle against the position on the line, you get a bell curve:  zero at the ends of the line, and at its maximum level right in the middle.  If you scale your capacity to the maximum level, you end up with a lot of wasted capacity near the ends of the line, and no way to make use of that capacity.

So transit planners are always looking to anchor their lines.  Anchoring means designing a line so that it ends at a major destination, so that there will be lots of people on the vehicle all the way to the end of the line.  A line with strong anchors at each end will have more uniform high ridership over the whole length of the line, and a much more efficient use of capacity overall.

So look at the network map again.  Downtown is the peninsula sticking up on the north side of the city.  If you look closely at the system map, you'll see that most of the north-south lines extend to the north edge of the grid and then bend east or west as needed to flow into downtown.  There's a bit of inefficiency in the resulting duplication, but it's not too bad, and it means downtown's major attractions and connections anchor the north end of most of the north-south lines.

But the spectacular anchoring happens on east-west lines.  At the west end of the city is the University of British Columbia, a major university that offers a spectacular deal on transit to its students.  (Your student ID is a transit pass, at no extra charge.)  UBC depends on intense transit service, and gets it: most of the east-west lines in the grid converge on UBC at their west end, and enjoy relatively high ridership all the way to the end of the line as a result.

The east end of these lines is a little more various, but many of them end at SkyTrain stations on the original Expo line, the blue-and-yellow line that runs southeast out of the city.  This SkyTrain line extends well out into the suburbs of Burnaby, New Westminster, and Surrey, and most of its stations are forests of residential towers, or major commercial centers, or are trying to be.  So there's plenty of demand for access to SkyTrain, and this keeps the east-west lines busy to the east end.

The orange line on the map is the limited stop 99, which runs between UBC and SkyTrain along Broadway.  It runs limited stops between a SkyTrain station on the east end and UBC on the west end, and it passes through a major highrise office core, including City Hall, in the middle.  It runs as frequently as it can physically run, generally every 5 minutes or better all day.  And it's crowded, all the way to the last stop on each end.  As a result, it is by far TransLink's most productive bus line and last I checked it was one of the highest performing bus lines in western North America.  (It would do even better with some signal priority!)  Sooner or later, a rail transit line will replace the 99, and the region is arguing about that now.  More on that in another post.

So what's makes transit so efficient in Vancouver? 

1. It's a grid, ...
2. ... with an ideal spacing between arterials, about 800-100m, and
3. it's big destinations (what planners call anchors) are at the edges, not in the middle. 

The last point is the key.  If you're a grid city with a big downtown in the middle and no comparably major centers anywhere else (like Melbourne, or Portland, or many Rust Belt American cities) you're always going to be running a lot of empty seats on outer parts of your network, because demand just keeps falling as you move away from downtown.  The key to a super-frequent grid is to have the strong demand centers on the outer edge, so that lines are full all the way to the end. 

That's what Vancouver provides, via UBC in the west, downtown in the north, and the various SkyTrain stations (opening to a large suburban area with density around many stations) in the east.  Only in the south, along the Fraser River, does Vancouver just peter out into nothingness without a major destination at the edge.  Major north-south routes end at points along Marine Drive, which defines the city's southern edge, but by Vancouver standards there's just not much happening there.  From a transit efficiency standpoint, it would be a good place for some towers.