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??

for the holidays, a sentimental epilogue

For this sentimental season, I thought I'd post the first epilogue that I wrote for Human Transit.  It got mixed reviews.  Friends in architecture and urban policy loved it, while my friends from the literature world, who have a keen eye for literary truth, panned it with great affection.  Fortunately, my editor at Island was of the latter group, so the book came to have the epilogue it has, rather than this one.  (I also tried this as the basis of the epilogue, to similar reviews.)  

All that is for the best.  This thing is sentimental, as befits the season.  Read it when you want a sentimental read, as we all do now and then.  

If you don't know what I mean by "plumber," you'll figure it out from context.  (It means you haven't read the book!)

Happy holidays.  [And don't forget:  early bird registration for my Washington DC short course (1/17-18) closes 12/28.  Registration opens Wednesday for the Portland OR session on Feb 7-8.  Hope to see you there.]

What if we learned to listen to our plumber?  Suppose that every time we were confronted with a hard choice between different things that we value – a choice that’s geometrically unavoidable – we took a deep breath, and chose?  We would need to make these choices as individuals, but also as communities, urban areas, and nations.  If we did, what might be possible by the middle of this century?

*

Helen has just turned 75, but she’s lived many lives and plans to live a few more.  Raised in a mining town in the Australian tropics, she's worked all over the world as a missionary and foreign aid worker.   She married twice and raised three children, all of them as self-reliant as she is.  When she was widowed in her mid-sixties, she moved to a small island in Indonesia to start a new school.  It was a struggle to convince her to retire at 72, and come home to Australia.

She returned to a big house on a quarter-acre block in Theodore, a distant suburb of the Australian capital, Canberra.  It was the house she’d grown up in, and she assumed she’d live out her life there, just as her mother did.  But just after she turned 74, she nearly had a bad accident while driving.  Looking back on it, she realized that she couldn’t react fast enough anymore, and that it was only a matter of luck that she hadn’t killed someone.

So she sold her car, and let her license expire.  Now, her house in Theodore was a prison.  To get anywhere, she faced a 500m walk to a bus stop, and then a bus only every half hour, none in the evening.  

Back in 2015 her mother had dealt with the same problem, in the same house.  For a decade her mother wrote letters and went to meetings to complain about how far she had to walk from her cul-de-sac house to a bus stop, how infrequently the buses ran, and how unfair that was.  Whenever Helen visited her mother in those days, she heard all about this campaign, its frustrations and small victories.

As it happened, Helen had been dating a transit planner at the time.  One night, over drinks, he talked her through the geometry proving that her mother’s cause was hopeless.  He showed why very low-density suburbs with lots of pedestrian barriers could never generate enough ridership to support extensive transit service, even if the politicians were inclined to favor them.  

The problem wasn’t the bus company’s failure to innovate, as her mother claimed.  At one point he put it starkly: "If you want to know what quality of transit to expect, ask this question about your neighborhood: 'How far would transit have to go to serve 1000 people?'"  Of course, in the labyrinth of Theodore the answer was several kilometers, while in Canberra's inner city it was just a few blocks.The problem was sheer geometry.  It made sense.

So Helen looked at her options, and noticed that a place called Ainslie Village had just been redeveloped as a retirement complex.  Formerly, it had been a cluster of temporary housing for the homeless located on a hillside cul-de-sac that precluded public transport.  Now, however, it would now extend down to a nearby main street, Limestone Avenue, and would include a mixture of towers and small cabin-like units.  The towers were cleverly arranged so that people could use their elevators to climb the hillside to the upper parts of the village, though of course many seniors preferred the exercise of climbing the hill.

The frequent transit line in front of Ainslie Village was the direct link between the city and the airport.  Helen liked this feature.  She still wanted to go overseas a couple of times a year, and to welcome visits from the friends she’d made all over the world. 

But what also sold Helen on New Ainslie Village was the back side, where it faced a nature reserve.  She could walk just a few hundred meters and feel immersed in the native woodland.  At night the kangaroos would come down around the village to graze, just as they did in Theodore; Helen had always found tranquility in the patient curiosity with which kangaroos gaze at humans.

Helen seems to have achieved the dream that’s motivated so much suburban development, the desire to be in the city and the country at the same time.  But it wasn't just good fortune.  It was her own willingness to look at her choices, understand their consequences, and choose.

--

Mia, 35, lives with her two children and her mother in a mobile home on the east edge of Las Vegas.  She manages the housekeeping department for a hotel-casino, and after saving for years, she finally put back enough money to buy a mobile home. 

She grew up just a mile from here.  Her mother lost her house to foreclosure in the Crash of 2008 and had to move the family into a small apartment.  In 2010 their old car finally broke down for good, and there was no money to replace it.  So she and her mother walked to the bus stop most days, and those walks are one of the most vivid memories of her childhood.

The stop for buses into the city was right outside her bedroom window, but there was a long, high wall blocking the way, built by a well-meaning developer who thought that even though they couldn’t afford a detached home, they’d still appreciate the feeling of a “gated community.”  Thanks to the wall, she and her mother had to walk for ¼ mile through the streets of their development, then through the so-called “gate,” and then ¼ mile back along the fast boulevard to the bus stop. 

The boulevard was built for speed, so the lanes were wide and the sidewalk was narrow.  Her mother would try to talk with her as they walked, but every time a car flew past they had to pause, their lives interrupted.  Soon, Mia learned to hold her breath briefly in those moments, so she wouldn’t get a lung full of exhaust.  Even so, it was dusty and hot in the summer, while in winter rains they’d be drenched by the mud kicked up by passing cars.  On this narrow sidewalk between the traffic and the wall there was nowhere to escape it.

Of course, that got them only to the stop for buses to the city.  Coming home, the bus would drop them on the opposite side of the boulevard.  There was no safe place to cross anywhere near the bus stop, so they simply had to run for it.  Trying to dash across the fast lanes, they felt like criminals, as though simply living their lives was illegal.

So when Mia was able to buy her own mobile home, she looked hard for one that would be better than that.  Realtors still pointed her toward “gated communities” of mobile homes.  Things had improved in these communities since she was a child; some of them now had little mini-bus services that wound their way through the twisting streets, so there was an alternative to walking out to the fast boulevard.  A realtor gave her a big pitch about how great these little buses were, with pictures of the plush interior and the cute paint scheme, but she just asked to see the timetable.  Sure enough, they were too slow and infrequent to be useful to her.  She needed to be close to a frequent transit stop, and it had to be safe to cross the street right at the stop, so that she could get to the stops on both sides. 

Obviously, she also wanted places she and her children could walk to, not just the little playground of their mobile home park but also a larger park nearby and a grocery store.  She liked the location of the grocery store next to the bus stop, so that she could buy fresh food for dinner on her commute home.  That’s why she chose this mobile home park over a number of others.

She also made sure that the bus line is likely to be there for a while.  She still remembers hearing, as a child, that she couldn’t go to see her best friend on Sundays anymore, because their Sunday bus service had been cut.  Fortunately, since then, the transit agency has identified certain lines as its “core frequent network,” where they, and the city governments, want to encourage the most intensive ridership.  That’s part of why her mobile home park, and the grocery store at her bus stop, were built where they are.  The Las Vegas economy is still prone to big crashes, so the transit system has to cut service now and then, but she knows that while there are no guarantees in life, the service she relies on is likely to survive, because so many people ride it.  

Mia’s life may never be as secure as she’d like, but she’s found a place that she can afford, where her children can grow up safely getting around on bicycles, and where her mobility feels as permanent and reliable as anything can be in this fast-changing city of illusions.

--

Kurt, 45, loves his cars.  He has two, both four-wheel drive, and his wife has another.  As a realtor, he likes his hybrid jeep for getting around to the suburban homes he sells, but he also has a big, rough, high-riding thing he calls Monster.  He talks about it as though it were his dog, and he takes a rebellious pride in its dreadful fuel-efficiency and 1990s styling.  Monster is his best friend when he gets up into the Rockies, especially off-road.  

Three years ago, Kurt took a year off work to build a house with his wife and two teenage sons. It’s on an acre of pine trees on a gravel road five miles from the nearest town, 40 miles from downtown Denver.  He feels a surge of pride every time he comes home to it.  Now and then, his eye will fall on a particular joint or beam and he’ll remember the day they set it in place, and how good that felt.  Just as important, he feels that the project solidified them as a family, and helped his boys learn focus and discipline.

There’s no transit anywhere nearby, but he wouldn’t expect there to be.  It was a hassle until his boys got drivers licenses; they always needed rides to the nearest bus stop, five miles away, or even to the nearest rapid transit station, 30 miles away.  But as they turned 16, he bought hybrid motorbikes for them.  Now they’re fine on their own.

Kurt’s life is not as expensive as it looks, at least not as measured in dollars.  Even with fuel at $10/gallon, the hybrid jeep is an efficient way to get around.  His workday involves many short trips in low-density suburbs (a market that transit could never serve well) so the jeep’s fuel is just part of the cost of doing business.  He spends a fortune on fuel for his weekend trips with Monster, but this is the family’s main recreational expense, and he’s budgeted for it.  As for his house, it would have been expensive to buy.  But by building it himself, he saved at least as much as he lost in salary during the year off.  So he feels he came out ahead. 

Kurt hates the city.  He drives his jeep into Denver now and then to visit his mother, who lives in a tower downtown.  She loves it there, but when they sit in the coffeeshop downstairs from her apartment, he’s always a little on edge with all the random bustle of strangers.  He also hates parking there, all that pointless circling in concrete parking structures.  His mother keeps telling him he could park at a light rail station and take the train in.  It doesn’t sound like fun to him, but his wife doesn’t mind doing it.  Maybe he’ll try it sometime. 

But really, he’d rather be driving Monster into the Rockies, with his boys, and some fishing rods, and the sky.

*

Helen, Mia, and Kurt are different people with different goals, situations, and resources -- but all are citizens of free democracies in the mid-21^st Century, societies built on the notion that adults should make free choices and accept their consequences. 

Kurt doesn’t expect the approval of transit experts like me, but I have no quarrel with him.  Like Helen and Mia, Kurt chose his living situation with a full awareness of what it would mean for transportation, as well as for other aspects of his family's life.  His choice imposes some burdens on the environment, but he pays prices – at the pump, certainly, but mostly in inconvenience – that capture the cost of those burdens.  He has no reason to feel guilty about his choices.

At times, as the 21st century unrolled, it seemed that freedom without guilt was a dying dream.  The crises bearing down on humanity seemed to be dragging everyone into embittered dependence on strangers.  So many problems needed complex solutions requiring lots of government action, while big corporations perfected the art of evading responsibility for their behavior.  Perhaps most depressing, it was becoming clear that no matter how free a citizen tried to be, how much responsibility she took for her own life, you could still run numbers that showed she was somehow subsidized, freeloading.  It made everyone suspicious.

But that last insight was the way out.  Eventually, a critical mass of people got  stopped getting angry when they were told they were being subsidized, and started asking “okay, how much?” 

The movement started in transportation, in cities.  People started figuring out that by sitting in traffic instead of getting where they were going, they were paying time to save money.  Why, they asked?  After all, money may not be abundant, but it’s a renewable resource.  Time is the least renewable resource of all.

So people started demanding the right to pay money to save time.  It started in the early 2000s with the London and Singapore congestion charges, and gradually spread to the idea that parking costs should rise and fall with demand, so that there would always be a free space, and you’d never drive in circles forever looking for one.  On the freeways, high-occupancy toll (HOT) lanes offered a faster ride at a higher price, calibrating the price carefully so that the traffic in the lane never got so heavy as to obstruct the buses using it.  Those buses were important, because they ensured that everyone had the freedom to move quickly along the highway, even if they didn’t want to pay the toll.

There was plenty of blowback.  Less wealthy people feared that they’d be left with abandoned infrastructure, much as, in the late 20^th century, they had been left with substandard schools.  Governments responded with market interventions to ensure that the housing market responded to low-income needs, not just through subsidies but also through good urban design.  For example, Las Vegas did the work of “sprawl repair” so that Mia could find a house she can afford that wouldn’t force her to depend on a car.  “Affordable housing” gave way to “affordable living.”  Governments and lenders no longer encourage poorer people to live in places where the housing is cheap because mobility is poor, and where they’ll feel trapped into owning a car that they can’t afford.  Instead, the whole mix of housing and transportation costs is considered before a home is deemed affordable.

There were fights and compromises.  But over time, enough people realized that accurate pricing was the only fair way to achieve both sustainability and freedom.  So the price of scarce things was allowed to rise.  Fuel got more expensive as oil supplies declined, which motivated the development of cleaner car technologies. 

Still, no innovation could change the scarcity of road space in cities, because that was a geometry problem.  Humanity had tried a supply-side solution, by building more sprawling cities, and had found that this just doesn't work.  By building more road space they had just motivated people to drive further.   Some still imagined that we could escape into the third dimension, via flying cars, but most people understood at once that it’s scary enough to have car accidents on the roads, without worrying about them happening over your head.

Once all this became widely obvious, things changed fast.  Work continued on big, expensive rapid transit lines, but work began, urgently, on transit options that could be developed faster and could spread quickly across big cities.  The Los Angeles Metro Rapid buses had been one such experiment, and though they became overextended and had to be cut back for a while, they helped usher in an era of innovation in street-running transit options and were now considered essential features of the boulevards that they plied.

Now, with more consensus, tools could be deployed to match the scale of the problem.  Suddenly, on-street transit lanes became common – in fact, they became the most reliable way to travel in many parts of big cities.  As more people cared about the quality of transit vehicles, those vehicles got better.  Bus and light rail technologies converged on a long, sleek, high capacity vehicle that could slide efficiently along a transit lane, carrying people beyond their walking distance without ever making them felt that they’d left the street. 

All this became possible, in part, because people started measuring their own mobility, and making choices that would improve it.  With tools inspired by the WalkScore.com and Mapnificent.net travel time maps from back in 2010, people began to see where they could get to easily, and where they couldn’t, and if they couldn’t, they asked why. 

As this happened, many people lost interest in symbols of mobility, such as rails in the street that symbolize permanence and airplane-like noses on streetcars that symbolize speed.  Instead, they began insisting that cities spend transit money on creating actual mobility – projects that would reduce their travel time to their jobs, their friends, and all the riches of the city.   Others continued to prefer to focus on the style, feel, and sense of fun in a transit service.  So there was a debate about those things, and compromises that suited the culture of each community.

These clear and bracing debates transformed the housing market, but not as much as some people feared.  Density is rising along major transit lines, for people who want high mobility, but away from those lines you can still get a little bungalow, or a big house with a pool on a quarter-acre, or even a house like Kurt’s in the woods, if you’re willing to accept the costs that come with each choice.  You can also get many things in between, like the transit-friendly mobile home where Mia lives.  Mia is what some transportation textbooks would call a captive rider, but she’s shown that even if you’re poor, your choices matter.

At every stage in this process, communities had to work, through government, on understanding their real choices.  Patiently, over and over, they were asked the same kind of question: “Do you want more of this, or more of that?  You have to choose.”  Planning professionals started focusing on making these “plumber’s questions” visible, so that everyone could see they were unavoidable, instead of letting them hide inside other debates.  Elected officials began to accept that they were paid to make these hard choices, after honest conversations with their constituents. 

The conversations were hard.  People wanted to hide from them.  But they had to happen.  The choices had to be made, so they were.  As a result, Helen, Mia, and Kurt are all free to make their own choices, and to bestow that same freedom on their children.

dublin: "spaghetti with rainbow sauce"

Aris Venetekidis tried to draw a diagram of all the infrequent, overlapping, marginally useful transit services in Dublin:

Eric Jaffe has the story.  Venetikidis uses mapping to discover chaotic network design, and propose simplifications.  My work, too, often begins with drawing a network map for a transit agency client, helping them see their service in a different way.  

auckland: how network redesign can transform a city's possibilities

When a public transport network has grown cumulatively over decades, but has never been reviewed from the ground up, it can contain an enormous amount of waste.  Careful redesign is the key to unlocking that waste and generating vast new public transport mobility.  Our new plan for Auckland, New Zealand, now open for public comment, is a dramatic example of what can be achieved.  ("Our" because I led the intensive network design work, with a great team of planners from Auckland Transport and my colleagues from MRCagney.)

If you want to get around Auckland at any time of day, on a service that's coming soon, here's where you can go on today's network (or more precisely, a "business as usual" network extended to 2016)

Under the proposed plan, which costs no more to operate than the existing one, here's where you'd be able to go, at any time of day, on service that's coming soon.

The network still includes coverage to all corners of the city that are covered now, and ensures plenty of capacity for peak commuters into the city.  But meanwhile, it defines an extensive network of high frequency services around which future urban growth can organize to ensure that over time, more and more of the city finds public transport convenient.

What's the catch?  Only the geometrically inevitable one: more people will have to make connections from one service to another, and the fare system will need to encourage rather than penalise that.  

Whenever someone tells you that it's too expensive or hard to encourage people to make connections, ask them how expensive it is to run the only the first network above while spending enough money to run the second.  Networks that are designed to prevent transferring must run massive volumes of half-empty and quarter-empty buses and still have trouble delivering frequencies that make the service worth waiting for.  The waste involved can be colossal, as you can see from the amount of service we were able to redeploy in more useful ways with this redesign.

To see a bit of the structure clearer (and also because it's a cool graphic), here's the central slice of the drawing of the proposed frequent network, by my MRCagney colleague Nicolas Reid.  It's currently all over the media in Auckland, helping people assess the plan.  By streamlining it calls attention to the logic to the network -- a logic that's sometimes easy to lose track of when following the details of every right and left.  Look at the whole thing.

I'm very proud of what our team achieved working with the excellent folks at Auckland Transport, and I hope the plan will be further improved as a result of public feedback, as good plans always are.  But as Aucklanders begin discussing the plan, I hope they stay focused on the core question:  Are you willing to get off one vehicle and onto another, with a short wait at a civilised facility, if this is the key to vastly expanding your public transport network without raising its subsidy?  

That is the real question before Auckland now.  The rest is details.

urban designers are from mars, transit planners are from venus

Just got home from the Congress for the New Urbanism Transportation Summit, which is trying to formulate transportation policy and advice from a New Urbanist point of view.

Over the last decade, the CNU has made great efforts to form a coherent view on transportation.  The organization's core has always been an architecture and urban design perspective that is very much about placemaking, and only secondarily about movement.  Much New Urbanism is about slowing everything down in urban environments, and while the goal of increased urban density means that ultimately travel distances are shorter, slower movement can also mean reducing people's ability to get where they're going.  For example, much of the idea that transit should be slower (e.g. Patrick Condon, Darrin Nordahl) has roots in early CNU thinking.  This in turn can feed the perception (unfair but not totally unfounded) that the pastel people in a New Urbanist rendering are more a hermetic cult of utopians than free actors in a complex society who need to get to meetings on time.

Initially, transportation -- specifically highway engineering -- was CNU's number one enemy, and this conflict still generates some of the best drama.  The summit this year featured a conversation between an AASHTO representative -- representing the view of State Departments of Transportation -- and a New Urbanist transport consultant, in which common ground was sought but lines in the sand were clearly drawn on both sides.  

So the CNU's efforts at leadership in transportation policy are a very important move.  Groups at the conference worked on issues such as cycling, functional street classification (sexier than it sounds), and the conversation of highways to boulevards.  I was in the group dealing with transit networks.

We spent much of our time thinking about the mutual incomprehension that plagues the relationship between urban designers and transit planners.  This issue is at the climax of my book Human Transit, where I look at famous examples of cases where supposedly transit-oriented developments were located in places where efficient and attractive public transit was geometrically impossible.  

Phil Erickson, of Community Design + Architecture, made two of the best points:

• Both sides of this incomprehension engage the other too late in the process.  As a transit consultant, I can certainly attest that I'm always hired too late to fix a development's transit problems, which were usually locked in at the stage of site selection or conceptual design.  I suppose you could say that transit agencies engage development too late, though ultimately it's the responsibility of a planning process to decide when to invite input from whom.
• Both sides assume that the other is more flexible than it is.  As a transit planner, I often suggest some adjustment to a development that would make transit vastly more effective, and am told that's not possible.  On the other hand, it's routine for a developer to assume that this bus line can just make a deviation to serve a development, without considering either operating cost or the effect on other customers trying to ride through that point.  Placemakers' demands that transit be slowed down on a certain segment raise the same issues: operating cost and reduction of a transit line's usefulness for through travel.

In the same "Mars/Venus" spirit, here are a couple of other reasons that this relationship is so hard:

• We are literally working in different dimensions:  Urban design is mostly about places.  Transit planning is about corridors and networks.  Transit planning can do little at a single site; transit functions only when you think of a whole long corridor -- made up of many places and situations -- as a unit, and even better when you think of networks comprised of corridors and interchanges.  One place where urban design and placemaking can work together with transit planning is at the level of the whole-city network, which is why integrated regional planning of land use and major transit corridors is such a crucial task, one that few North American urban areas even try to do.
  
  
• We live in different timescales.  Urban design is about something that will be built and completed.  Transit planning is about eternal operations. Transit planners may seem distracted by the love of building something too, but ultimately, it's all about service, which means operations. So the two sides tend to talk past each other about costs in particular.  The urban designer and developer are watching one-time capital cost, but the transit planner cares about eternal operating cost.  Developers often throw a little one-time money at a transit service, e.g offering to subsidize the first five years of operation, but the wise transit agency knows that sooner or later, the developer will be gone and this service will become their financial problem, especially if it's a service that they can see is unlikely to perform well.  

It was fascinating to watch this discussion, and to be a part of it.  Many more useful things were said, and I may pick up on a few of them in future posts.  Meanwhile, the first step toward overcoming a divide is to really understand why it is so pervasive, and that requires both sides to think about their deep assumptions, and why different assumptions follow from the nature of the other party's work.

A followup, based on comments on this post, is here.

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

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

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

\

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thank a planner!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

email of the month: grids on the brain

An intriguing email from Kenny Easwaran:

I was very struck by this post in which you try to generalize the geometric issues to show that some of these features of transit are really universal.  [JW: I also wrote this on the underlying power of grids in public transit.]

At the time, I was thinking of the various transportation systems we know of that aren't designed by humans.  The main examples I could think of were things within the human body, and I noticed that things like the circulatory systems of animals and plants, and the digestive system of animals, seem to follow somewhat different trajectories from grids.  In particular, they either have a branching tree structure, or something more like an extended linear structure.  

Of course, in these cases, it may have more to do with the drive system - the circulatory system is driven by a single central pump, and I don't know if it has any sort of intelligent routing, which may make a grid system hard to operate.  It also seems to primarily ferry resources from two centers (the lungs and digestive tract) to all the rest of the body, so a tree structure may be the most efficient way to do this (like an old hub and spoke rail network centered on downtown).  

At any rate, the reason I'm writing this e-mail now is that I just saw an article suggesting that the human body *does* actually use a grid system!

From the article:

It’s rather weird: If you’ve ever seen a computer ribbon cable — a flat, 2D ribbon of wires stuck together, such as an IDE hard drive cable — the brain is basically just a huge collection of these ribbons, traveling parallel or perpendicular to each other. There are almost zero diagonals, nor single neurons that stray from the neuronal highways. The human brain is just one big grid of neurons — a lot like the streets of Manhattan, minus Broadway, and then projected into three dimensions.

Kenny goes on:

It seems plausible that the information transport network of the brain is a better comparison for human transportation needs than the resource transport network of the bloodstream ... !

Looking at the diagram in that article a little more closely, it seems that there's a two dimensional grid structure, even though the brain is three dimensional.  There appear to be axes going from front toback, and other axes going radially from the "suburbs" through the central axis through to the "suburbs" on the other side, but no grid elements going around the periphery from left to right.  I guess there's an interesting sense in which a three dimensional transport structure can be gridlike in two dimensions but not the third?

At any rate, I'd be very interested to hear your thoughts on any of these analogies!  (It might also be interesting to look at structures in ant colonies and prairie dog towns, to see how they approximate thevarious geometries of transportation that you think might be worth looking at, though they are probably more analogous to purely pedestrian cities, rather than ones with long transport tubes.)

I'd be interested in hearing everyone's thoughts on this!  (Apologies for the new comment monitoring; it's purely to combat spam!)

Image from the article.

can "network primers" reduce grief about network design?

Greater Vancouver's transit agency TransLink has now published something called the Managing the Network Primer [Download PDF] and has a new webpage devoted to this and similar themes.  It's a simple explanation of why effective transit networks are designed a certain way.  It pushes back on the confused and confusing notion that "buses are flexible compared to rail," by emphasising the ways that all kinds of transit work or fail along the same geometric principles.  It can also be used to explain to a reasonable person why the bus can't just deviate to serve (or avoid) her house, business, or development project.  I'm honored to have made substantial contributions to it, in the context of my ongoing work with TransLink.

Subliminally present in this document -- and more explicit, I hope, in the next version -- is that this is also a primer for transit-oriented land use planning.  If you want good transit at your home or development or senior center or business park, you need to locate it where transit can be efficient, and therefore abundant.  So by understanding what efficient transit looks like, you can get a better grasp of what truly transit-oriented development looks like.

So like my book, and like my course, this document will be interesting for transit geeks but is really meant for people in land use planning, development, architecture, and other related fields.  These are the people who are deciding how effective transit can be in the future -- every bit as much as transit planners are.

Once again, TransLink is being careful not to tell any city what it should do with its land use.  Rather, this is part of a process of explaining the transit consequences of the choices a city might make. 

If your regional transit agency is giving its city governments the impression that it's telling them what to do, it may have something to learn from documents like this.  Getting this message right is something I've worked on for a while, and it was the subject of my recent keynote at the Canadian Urban Transit Association annual conference.   Let me know if I can help.

congress for the new urbanism: my spark of fire and brimstone

Erin Chantry, of Tindale Oliver urban designers, wrote a nice little piece about the Congress for the New Urbanism panel where I spoke alongside G.B. Arrington of Parsons Brinckeroff.  I promised a little fire and brimstone, but apparently I came off as way too reasonable. 

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.