Human Transit

using development charges as a transit funding mechanism

Travis Allan and Cherise Burda over at the Pembina Insitute, a Toronto-based energy think tank, have an interesting post up on the prospects of using real estate development charges as a funding mechanism for transit. Development charges are fees developers pay to municipalities meant to offset the capital costs of extending or improving services like water or sewage systems that are imposed by new construction. However, the manner in which these fees are calculated is not always conducive to the type of development a city may be trying to encourage. Moreover, transit is rarely a serious consideration in assessing the charge. This is particularly important when development occurs in a place or a pattern that is difficult or impossible to provide good transit service to, such as those that violate the "Be on the way" rule. The original post explains some of the problems the authors observe in Ontario's development charge:

The development charge, as currently implemented in most Ontario municipalities, is crudely designed. There is a strong chance that it is subsidizing less-dense, single family homes while making compact, transit-friendly development more expensive. Development charges also likely overcharge some commercial development, and this could be contributing to the flight of office space to the suburbs, in locations underserviced by transit.

In many Ontario municipalities, including Toronto, new development is charged based on who will use it. For example, many municipalities have a per-unit rate for apartment building units, and another rate for detached single-family homes, regardless of where the buildings are located within the municipality, how much land area they occupy and the cost necessary to service them.

No matter the amount of new road or sewer needed to adequately serve a place, the development charge is assessed based on the number of residents or users.  This is obviously perverse.  Actual development impacts on the public purse vary based on location and density than by the number of residents or users.  

If a city like Toronto wants to make it easier to developers to build a certain type of development, changing the fee structure is one way to create an incentive. But what does this mean for transit?

The authors propose to use a portion of this revenue to pay for infrastructure investments needed to provide transit service to new developments. At the same time, the city could make changes to the structure of the development charge to incentivize the construction of transit-supportive development. If it worked, and there were no unforeseen consequences, the effect could be self-reinforcing: development charges encourage the type of development that transit needs to work well, and pay for some of the cost of providing that service. The supply of housing and commercial buildings that are accessible and designed to work with transit increases, more people are able to live and work in them:

 Developers continue to build in sprawling greenfields because it is often cheaper and easier than building developments in walkable, transit-oriented neighbourhoods. Lack of supply means homebuyers are priced out of these locations and are literally “driven” to the urban and suburban fringes, where long and stressful auto commutes are required — and this only leads to more congestion.

Since the vast horizontal distances of greenfields require much more infrastructure person, why should this be as cheap, in development charges, as building compactly??

toronto and sydney: triumphs for network planning, not just light rail

Breakthrough news on rail battles in both Toronto and Sydney, both of which I posted on recently (Toronto, Sydney).  

• Sydney's state government has made it official.  The one-way loop of the Sydney Monorail, designed to decorate the tourism-convention playground of Darling Harbour without being very useful to anyone, is to be torn down.  While the decision is being described as a move toward light rail -- plans for which are definitely moving forward -- it's really just a decision to invest in transit lines that do useful things -- such as running in both directions, running efficiently enough to justify reasonable fares, and connecting with many other services so that people can go where they want to go, not just where you want to take them. 
• Toronto City Council has definitely scrapped Mayor Rob Ford's plans to spend all of the city's transit resources on a few expensive outer-suburban subway segments designed to serve small parts of the region.  The move opens the way to move forward on more cost-effective light rail projects that will enrich mobility across the entire city.

Toronto transit commentator Steve Munro makes an important point, which could also be said of Sydney:

This is an important day for Toronto.  We are on track for a [light rail]-based plan and for a more detailed evaluation of our transit future than we have seen for decades.  Talking about one line at once, about fundraising for one project at once, is no longer an accepted way of building the city.  

That's the key.  The Sydney Monorail failed because it was "one line at once" -- a project conceived in isolation with no interest in being part of a complete network.  And in Toronto, a city with numerous desperate rapid-transit needs, planning will no longer pit neighborhoods against each other to the degree that Mayor Ford wanted to do.  Instead, Toronto can move forward on projects that fit together into a more complete rapid-transit grid -- serving "anywhere to anywhere" trips.

Finally, a warning to technophiles!!  Technophile commenters will doubtless chalk this up the Sydney decision as a defeat for monorails in general.  I disagree.  It's a defeat for one-way loops, poor connectivity, and symbolic as opposed to actual mobility.  The monorail didn't fail just because it was a monorail, but because it was a poorly designed line.  Likewise, the Toronto outcome isn't a victory for light rail or a defeat for subways, but merely a commitment to better network design.

toronto: earth to mayor: subways are expensive!

Toronto readers, today's Globe & Mail everything you need to know about Mayor Rob Ford's dream of building expensive subways under low-density suburbia, thereby spending billions that could be spent expanding actual mobility (and access) where it's most needed and demand is highest.  The article is about the crucial Eglinton corridor, an obvious grid-element that could help thousands of travellers get where they're going without having to go through downtown, thus adding to capacity problems there.  But the same logic applies to an underground extension of the Sheppard East line toward Scarborough, which the mayor has also mooted.  Reporter Adrian Morrow has done his homework (not just by talking to me) and he carefully sets aside all the main talking points of the suburban-subway advocates.

Bottom line:  Going underground is expensive, so we do it only when we really need to!  Responsible planning fights hard for space on the surface -- especially in space-rich low-density suburbs -- before sacrificing millions just to get transit "out of the way" of cars.

basics: expertise vs. activism

The planning professions work in a grey zone between expertise and activism, and managing these competing impulses is one of our hardest tasks.

As a transit planning consultant, I don't worry much about being perceived as an advocate of transit in general.  Experts in any field are expected to believe in its importance.  But I do try to keep a little distance between my knowledge about transit and the impulse to say "You should do this."  A good consultant must know how to marry his own knowledge to his client's values, which may lead him to make different recommendations than he would do as a citizen, expressing his own values.

Often, I use this blog and its comments to refine my own thinking about transit in the abstract.  This is part of how I cultivate my own expertise, but it is easy to mistake what I say for activism.  When I say, for example, that some of the widespread claims about the superiority of rail over buses are cultural feedback effects, I'm not thinking like an activist or advocate; I'm thinking theoretically, like a philosopher.  To me, this is a crucial skill for a consultant who's going to have to marry his client's values with his own expertise. 

Philosophical or scientific training attunes you to the difference between prescription (telling people what they should do) and description (describing reality as it appears to be).  In their purest form, prescription is the job of ethics, while description the job of science and metaphysics.  A great deal of human speech, especially political speech, is a mixture of description and prescription, often one pretending to be the other.

In the planning world, prescription is the job of citizens, leaders, and advocates, while description is the work of professional experts like me.  Obviously, this has to be a conversation.  The expert has to ask the community to clarify its values based on the actual tradeoffs presented by reality, and the community has to respond.  And as that goes on, both sides need to be clear about their roles, and respect the role of the other.

Partly because of my science and philosophy training, I tend to police the prescription-description boundary in my own thinking, and dwell in the space of pure description more than many people do -- certainly more than most activists do.  A lot of regular readers of HT share that training and that inclination, and some don't.

For a critique of the futility of living your whole life in this descriptive mode, watching and describing the world but never doing anything, see Shakespeare's Hamlet.  But the opposite is also futile.  An ethical system devoid of curiosity about objective reality devolves into pure egotism, such as that of the tyrants currently falling across the Middle East.  Tyrants -- whether they lead a nation or an office clique -- are people who sift reality and see only what suits their ethical narrative (which, at that point, is really an egotistical narrative) and who forge echo chambers of people who help each other do that.  At the core of the tyrant's stance is a childlike egotistical wail: "Why doesn't everyone do as I say?  I see so clearly what needs to be done!"

And yes, everyone has an inner tyrant, including me.  I try to describe that tendency in myself, so that while it will always be in the room of my mind it's not usually able to set the room on fire.  In fact, that's exactly why I'm so careful about not letting my descriptive thinking turn too quickly into prescriptions.

Streetcars, for example.  Nowhere in this blog have I said that cities shouldn't build streetcars if they are sure that they want streetcars.  Some streetcar advocates hear me saying that because they are dividing the world into pro-streetcar and anti-streetcar camps, and I've said things about streetcars that don't sound like enthusiastic advocacy.  I've made some descriptive observations about problems raised by the American streetcar revival movement, and I've also noticed situations in which streetcars are inferior to buses in their ability to actually get you where you're going, like this one:

I would like people to know about these issues so that they make better decisions about what to advocate and why.  That doesn't mean I want them to decide not to build streetcars, but it may mean, for example, that in deciding whether to support a streetcar, you might need to care about whether it will be in mixed traffic.  It may also mean being very clear, when you're advocating a streetcar, that you're not getting anything faster or more reliable than a bus can be.  Again, I say this not because I think cities should or shouldn't be building streetcars, but because you shouldn't be deluded about what you're buying, and what purposes it will really serve.

I have vivid memories of San Francisco Transportation Authority meetings in the early 1990s when the Third Street light rail was under debate.  Activists from the neighborhood had turned out in droves to support the line, but when you actually listened to their testimony, some were talking about "we need rapid transit," while others were saying "we need rail to stop in every block where it will strengthen our businesses."  I knew, as an expert, that while this whole crowd appeared to be on the same side of the issue at hand, half of them were not going to get what they thought they were advocating.  They were not going to get a project that served their values.

I may also point out that if you think purely about "extending your rail network" as though your bus network is irrelevant, you can do serious damage to your existing transit system.  For example, in a high-frequency grid, if you break one line of the grid into three consecutive pieces because you want rail in the middle but buses on the extremeties, you may suddenly force many new connections to a degree that could quite possibly will reduce the overall level of mobility in the city.   That thought is relevant, for example, to several cities' streetcar plans, and to the Crenshaw light rail line in Los Angeles, and to the Gold Coast light rail line (at least its first phase) in Australia.

And yet, sometimes I do sound like an advocate -- about transit in general, about protecting transit from traffic, and about congestion pricing.  Am I just falling off the wagon when I say those things?

Well, all scientists (by which I mean broadly "people who try to describe without prescribing") have this problem.  Sometimes the scientific work of description discovers that something needs to be done if we want to survive and prosper:  Banning DDT, addressing carbon emissions, correcting perverse pricing signals, even building a transit line.  If you've followed any of the conversation around climate change, you know how uncomfortable trained scientists can be when they're required to speak prescriptively.  Their credibility (not just to their profession but also to themselves) has depended precisely on not doing that.  It's like telling a recovering alcoholic that after all the disciplined work of recovery he's done, the future of humanity now requires that he start drinking again, just a little.

All I can say is that I feel that discomfort and try to manage it, by marking, as clearly as I can, when I'm prescribing and when I'm describing.  And there are also issues (like climate change) where, quite frankly, practically all experts seem to know what needs to be done to achieve the outcomes that everyone seems to want.  I feel that way about congestion pricing.  It's just not that hard to explain, to a reasonable person who's familiar with the idea of supply and demand, that as a motorist you are going to pay for scarce road space in either time or money, and that it's not unreasonable for some people to choose to spend money to save time. 

I do what I can to distinguish between description and prescription when I'm writing.  But frankly, we all need to do the same work when listening.  If your first contact with transit politics is in the context of a fight about whether or not to build a particular rail line, you're going to hear prescriptive voices on both sides, citing data that's been selected to match their point of view.  You're also going to hear descriptive voices treated as prescriptive -- which is how some streetcar advocates perceive my comments about streetcars.  One of the most basic disciplines that you can cultivate, as an advocate or leader, is to try to hear descriptive information as descriptive.  This may require you to consciously suppress or bracket the emotional reaction you have, as an advocate, when you first hear it.

Really, none of what I've written about streetcars is about streetcars, except insofar as the American streetcar revival movement is a excellent example of a descriptive point that seems important to me.  The point is that "it's possible to spend a lot of money on transit lines that don't improve anyone's mobility."  I'm not saying you shouldn't do that.  I am saying that before you that, you should understand this point, so that you're sure that the line you support does what you want it to do. 

That's what responsible experts do: they help you implement your values.

happy canadian thanksgiving

This post is sentimental and off-topic, apart from its obvious link to the triumphs of Canadian transit and of Vancouver in particular.  But hey, it's my blog.

Though I lived in Canada for only a year, I hope my fondness for the country comes through in this sentimental meditation on Canadian thanksgiving.  I wrote it five years ago around this time, when I was based in Vancouver, but it all feels true enough today.

Thanksgiving Day in Canada is Monday, October 11.  May it be a day of joy and gratitude for all of HT's Canadian readers, and for anyone who's ever admired their remarkable nation.

 

the perils of average density

In his 2010 book Transport for Suburbia, Paul Mees notices a fallacy that seems to be shared by sustainable transport advocates and car advocates.  Both sides of this great debate agree that effective transit requires high density. 

Sustainability advocates want higher urban densities for a range of reasons, but viability of public transit is certainly one of them.  Meanwhile, advocates of car-dominance want to argue that existing low densities are a fact of life; since transit needs high density, they say, there’s just no point in investing in transit for those areas, so it’s best to go on planning for the dominance of cars. 

Mees calls on his fellow transit advocates to let go of the idea that good transit requires high densities:

The central argument of this book is that density is not destiny.  Transport policy itself has a bigger impact on transport patterns than urban planners have realized, and suburbs don’t have to be totally reliant on the car.  Planners who insist that car dominance can only be addressed by impossibly large increases in density may actually be entrenching the problem they are trying to solve.

Transit does depend on density, but there are three problems with saying that “transit requires high density.”   

• First, it offers no hope to places that are already built at low densities and unlikely to change. 
• Second, it gives public transit in low-density areas an excuse for descending into a cycle of underinvestment, official neglect, and lazy operations, because after all, nobody expects public transit in low density areas to be any good anyway.  
• Third, it invites sweeping claims about transit’s viability based on the overall average density of a city, claims that, as we’ll see, make no sense at all.

Mees is right that “density is not destiny.”  Cities of any density can make better or worse transit choices and achieve significantly different outcomes as a result.  But density is still an overwhelming force in determining the possibilities and outcomes of transit, and we can’t begin to make good transit decisions until we understand it.

Density is hard to talk about for two reasons:  It’s very emotional and it’s hard to define and measure. 

The emotions are inevitable: Whenever we talk about urban form, people hear us making judgments about their homes.  I can stand in front of a group of citizens and talk about how a certain kind of development pattern implies certain consequences for transit, and thus for sustainability, and thus for civilization.  As we talk, it may appear that we’re having a thoughtful and educational discussion about good and bad design.  But some people in the audience have chosen to make their homes in the very development pattern that I’m describing, and to those people, I’m saying that their home is good or bad. 

Once you hear that, you’re likely to have a strong emotional reaction that makes you deaf to rational argument.  On some level, consciously or unconsciously, you’re going to feel as though I’d walked into your own livingroom and told you that your decor is not just ugly but a threat to civilization.   We all feel defensive about home.

But emotions often hide inside things that look like facts, and density "facts" are a great example.  In transit arguments, people say things like “the net density of Toronto is ###/hectare,” because this sounds like a fact and therefore conveys some authority to their argument.  In reality, though, there are several possible meanings of “density” in that sentence, as well as several possible definitions of “net” and ”Toronto.”   Briefly:

• “Density” in an urban planning context is always some kind of quantified human presence divided by some kind of land area, but it can be residential density (residents or homes per acre) or it can be total development density -- including homes, businesses, schools etc – or it can be an economic density such as the number of jobs in an area. 
• “Net,” as opposed to “gross,” means that the human presence is being divided by a smaller unit of area instead of a larger one.  In calculating the area, for example, you might take out undevelopable land, and bodies of water, and the land taken up by streets and highways -- or you might not.  There are arguments for or against excluding each of these things from “net density,” and an opinion about each of them is hiding inside the word “net.”
• “Toronto,” of course, can be the City of Toronto, or the Toronto Transit Commission area, or the whole urban mass of greater Toronto.  These obviously have utterly different average densities.

So the statement “the net density of Toronto is ###/hectare” is really as subjective as the statement “I think that cities should have more open space, narrower streets, and should have single governments covering the entire urban area.”  Because each of those opinions can affect how you choose to define “net,” “density,” and “Toronto,” which in turn determines the number that you declare, with cold factual authority, to be the net density of Toronto. 

At the core of Mees’s book, for example, is a table[1] that compares the gross residential density of a bunch of urban areas with the transit performance in each area.  The point of the table is to show that there’s really no relationship between the two.  Before we look at some fun facts from this table, remember that definitions are everything.  So in this case:

• “Metro Area” (my term for what Mees’s table calls “City”) is the entire urbanized area around a city, regardless of government boundaries.[2]  Think of it as the continuous patch of lights that you can see from an airplane at night.
• “Density (pop/ha)” is residential density – the entire population divided by the entire area. 
• “Transit work mode share” is the percentage of trips to work that go by transit, as opposed to car, walk, bike, etc.  Trips to work are not the only ones that matter, but they are the only ones that are measured in a consistent way.

So with those cautions, here’s a taste of Mees’s scandalous numbers:

Metro Area	Density (pop/ha)	Transit mode share for work trips.
Los Angeles	27.3	4.7
New York	20.5	24.8
Las Vegas	17.7	4.1
Vancouver	17.0	16.5

The density figures are calculated to shock.  Los Angeles is denser than New York?  Yes, that’s what happens when you average over a huge contiguous metro area.  Your own impression of “New York” is probably formed by the massed and soaring towers of Manhattan, but New York is a dense city surrounded by a lot of very low-density suburbs that are all included in this concept of “metro New York.”  Likewise, your stereotype of Los Angeles may be a ranch-style house with a big pool on a cul-de-sac, which implies a very low density, but in fact much of greater Los Angeles is four-story apartment buildings lined up for mile after mile.  Obviously, our impression of the density of a city is based on the part of it we choose to remember, or that we tend to see on television.  The average density of the whole urban area may be entirely different.

To me, Mees’s table proves that average density over a whole urban area is the wrong kind of density for understanding transit.   The impression you probably have of the densities of these cities is actually closer to the kind of density that matters. 

Transit reacts mainly with the density right around its stations.  It is in the nature of transit to serve an area very unevenly, providing a concentrated value around its stops and stations and less value elsewhere.  So what matters for transit is the density right where the transit is, not the aggregate density of the whole urban area. 

Of course, what matters even more precisely is how much stuff is within walking distance of a station, so it's not just density (the amount of stuff in a fixed radius) but the completeness of the pedestrian network.  A poorly connected pedestrian network can ensure that much of the stuff that's within a 400m radius is not in a 400m walk. 

Consider Las Vegas, which Mees finds to be denser than highrise Vancouver.  The Las Vegas economy is based on hospitality and entertainment, labor-intensive industries with low average wages.  So the city needs a lot of housing suited for lower incomes.  The Las Vegas way is to build utterly car-dependent apartment buildings on a vast scale, achieving all of the disadvantages of density with none of its benefits.  Consider:

For scale, the width of this entire image is about 0.55 miles, or 0.9 km.  The arterials along the south and west edges of the image are the only streets straight and fast enough for efficient transit.  Note how these large apartment developments are soundwalled from most direct access to these arterials, and how the accesses they have tend to come out at points where there's no controlled intersection, so the arterial is dangerous to cross.  (Two-way transit trips always require stops on both sides of the street, so if you can't cross the street, you don't really have access.)

So yes, Las Vegas has massive quantities of apartment buildings, which yield a high average density.  But at two levels of scale, these are deployed in patterns that make effective transit difficult.  On a macro level, Las Vegas is mostly midrise apartments spread over a large area, requiring transit to cover more distance to serve them; this is the most obvious explanation for Las Vegas's low transit performance compared to highrise Vancouver.  But the micro explanation is important too.  In the details of street pattern and pedestrian circulation, typical Las Vegas urban fabric is designed for motorists and hostile to pedestrians.  Average urban density says nothing about either of these factors, even though they are what really determine the transit experience in each city.

It's inevitable that in comparisons between cities, we're going to hear average density figures.  These figures are better than nothing when it comes to making global comparisons.  The famous databases created by Jeffrey Kenworthy and Peter Newman, for example, are useful in showing how a range of sustainability outcomes vary with density. 

But averages are dangerous, especially in transit.  Averaging sounds like a credible way to draw a simple fact out of a huge and diverse reality, but often, averages are just not the fact that matters.  In a recent post on the perils of average success, I pointed out that no transit customer really cares about average frequency, or average lateness, or average crowding.  By the same token, transit advocates need to be suspicious of average density.  What matters is the density around the transit system.  How can we best measure that?

---

[1]   Fig 4.1 p 60

[2]   In the US, “an ‘urbanized area’ is defined for each metropolitan region, made up by combining adjacent ‘census blocks’ (the smallest units for which data are collected) with more than 1000 residents per square mile, or 386 per square kilometre. …  Canada defines “urban area” on an almost identical basis to the US, using a density threshold of 400 [residents] per square kilometre.”  The data is from 2006 census in Canada, 2000 in the US.

on privatization scares

A new television commercial in Toronto calls on voters to "vote for candidates who will keep the [Toronto Transit Commission] public." 

 

If I were one of the experts quoted I'd be a little insulted by it, though we understand that this is the nature of TV commercials. 

There are many different ways to involve private enterprise in funding providing transit services, and these are so different that vague talk of "privatization" simply doesn't illuminate what's going on. 

At one extreme, you can privatise operations, planning, fleet, public information, branding and almost everything else.   In this model, prominent in Britain (but not London) and in British-influenced countries like Australia and New Zealand, government merely subsidises services that wouldn't make a profit, but doesn't try to control the overall planning of the network.  This approach sometimes "works," in a political sense, in areas where you have low expectations for transit overall, such as rural areas.  It's been very problematic in urban areas, because it deprives government of the control that its subsidies should be buying, and makes it impossible to plan rational networks that would meet the shared goal of a city and its people, and that would use limited street space efficiently.  Sydney, Brisbane, and Auckland all went far down this path and are trying, at various speeds, to pull back from it and re-assert government control over most aspects of planning and marketing. 

At the other extreme, you can privatise operations only.  This is the model used in a number of lean North American operators such as Southern California's Foothill Transit.  In Australia, only Perth takes this approach, but it's very successful there.  A public agency answerable to voters keeps full control of planning, and also owns the fleet and facilities.  Private operating companies are hired only to provide operations and maintenance, under contracts to the agency that are periodically re-opened to competitive procurement.  This is a targeted kind of privatisation aimed at the functions that are the biggest budget-killers for all-public agencies: labor costs, labor relations, and liability related to operations and maintenance.   You can make a good case that the private sector is in a better position to handle all of these than government agencies are, and while I won't argue the whole case here, many  agencies -- especially newer agencies that don't have legacy labor commitments -- are finding this a very good model.  In Australia, Perth works this way, and other cities are moving this direction.

You can find examples anywhere on the spectrum between these extremes.  Finally, briefly, there's a whole third kind of privatisation that's about the development of major infrastructure, typically called a public-private partnership.  This seems to be what Yonah Freemark is referring to in the ad's scare-quote about Vancouver.  While the PPP that built the recent Canada Line has been deservedly controversial, Vancouver's operations aren't privatized at all; they're run mostly by subsidiary companies owned by the transit agency, Translink, and that agency is very much in control of presenting a single unified system to the public.

the perils of succeeding "on average"

Two recent comments on different topics got me thinking about averages, and why people like to talk about them more than they like hearing about them.

Toronto transit expert Steve Munro made this comment on the familiar perils of transit operations in that city:

In Toronto, the TTC reports that routes have average loads on vehicles, and that these fit within standards, without disclosing the range of values, or even attempting any estimate of the latent demand the route is not handling because of undependable service.  Service actually has been cut on routes where the "averages" look just fine, but the quality of service on the street is terrible.  Some of the planning staff understand that extra capacity can be provided by running properly spaced and managed service, but a cultural divide between planning and operations gets in the way.

When it comes to on-time performance, everyone understands that the average isn't a useful concept.  If your buses are ten minutes early half the time and ten minutes late the other half, then you could say that on average they're right on time.  We're all smart enough not to fall for that.

But it's still common to hear reporting of average load, as Steve mentions.  Average load is the total number of passengers through a point divided by the number of buses/trains that carried them.  It has some uses in transit planning as a way of talking about ridership patterns, but it's not a good way of describing the customer experience.  To do that, you'd have to look at how often you have incidents that the customer will hate, such as crush-loading and worse yet, passing customers at stops for lack of room.  That's how we talk about on-time performance: percentage of trips that are more than 5 minutes late.  So you should also be reporting the percentage of trips that are crush-loaded or begin passing up customers.  (How do you count passed-up customers?  A good question for another post.)

Now obviously, if you want to describe how your system looks to your customers, you should also weigh those measurements of overloading by the number of people who experience them, just as one might expect agencies to do for lateness. If your statistics aren't weighted that way, then again: you may be describing your operations but you're not describing your customer experience. 

Recently, commenter Calwatch mentioned a similar scourge, the bizarre but commonplace notion of "average frequency," which sometimes undermines the urgent work of frequent network mapping:

[Los Angeles County MTA]'s "12 minute map" is better described as a "5 buses an hour on this street" map, as the current map now has a disclaimer stating that Rapid and local service frequencies are combined to show frequencies. So you may have a Rapid bus running every 20 minutes and a local bus running every half hour, but since it's five buses an hour, it can be shown on the 12 minute map.

I'm not sure Calwatch is right about this.  Here's the exact disclaimer from the Los Angeles MTA map:

The bus routes on this map run at least every 12 minutes on weekdays throughout the day.  Where Metro Rapid and Metro Local lines run together, service is available every 12 minutes or better at Metro Rapid stops. At intermediate local stops, service may operate less frequently.

I can understand that as meaning "The Metro Rapid really does run every 12 minutes, and if there are underlying locals, those locals may be less frequent."  That would be fair, though it raises the question: So why are the less-frequent locals shown on the map?

But Calwatch claims that when they say "every 12 minutes" they merely mean "five buses per hour."  If that's true, and I haven't verified it, then they would be guilty of implicit averaging.  Five buses an hour could mean five buses bunched at the same time each hour, with hour-long gaps between them.  And yes, you could say that on average, that's a bus every 12 minutes! 

So remember:

Nobody cares about average frequency, any more than they care about average lateness or average crowding!

The question customers ask is "what is the worst case I'll typically experience?"  And when an agency says the buses come "every 12 minutes" this customer is going to hear "OK.  I'll never wait longer than 12 minutes."  Is that customer going to get burned by trusting the 12-minute map?  I'm sure Los Angeles commenters will fill us in.  A comment from someone at the agency would be even more helpful.

I've had this conversation with transit agency staffs when doing jobs that required me to map the frequency of the existing system.  More than once, I've asked for frequency data and been given data on "scheduled trips per hour."  I've had to go back and say:  Frequency is about maximum waiting time.  By its very nature, it's a maximum, not an average!  So tell me the maximum, worst-case scheduled gap between consecutive trips!  

So when you hear the word "average" in an agency's statements, or even if you see an implicit average like "five trips per hour," ask yourself:  Is the average what I care about as a customer?

toronto: a new frequent network plan

In the midst of all the frequent-network-mapping fervor, here comes the Toronto Transit Commission (TTC) with a proposal for consistent all-day 10-minute frequency on a network of critical lines covering high-density parts of the city.  A frequent network map is already in the newspaper, but it remains to be seen if this brand will make it onto their system map, along the lines of similar brands in  Portland,  Los Angeles, Minneapolis-St.Paul (here and click right tab), and Salt Lake City among other North American peers.  Anyway, here's the map:

I like how they've shaded in the Transit City Light Rail plan in the background, to emphasise that the two proposals are compatible. 

In the it-sounds-geeky-but-these-things-really-matter department, I also like the emphasis on naming the lines after the streets they run on.  If your city is fortunate to have long streets with a single streetname, this kind of naming helps people think of the transit line as an intrinsic part of the street itself -- exactly the kind of simplification that we need if people are ever going to rely on their transit networks the way they rely on their street networks -- not just as mobility tools, but as ways of organizing their idea of their city.  Several agencies I could name have street networks that make this possible but haven't yet caught on to this idea (nor rationally refuted it, which would be fine too).