Human Transit

does suburban local service get cars off the road? (updated)

See new updates at the end, based on comments to May 4.

Ricky Leong in the Calgary Sun on why Calgary should spend more money serving far-flung suburbs:

Here’s the thing about providing transit to our far-flung suburban neighbourhoods. The benefits of new transit services will be felt by people everywhere in the city, not just those residents who choose to take the bus and train.

Fewer cars on the road should lead to better driving and cycling conditions for everyone, everywhere, for example.

Suburbanites choosing transit over private vehicles should also mean less wear and tear on roads, so the savings from reduced maintenance would be a net benefit to the entire city.

I'm not trying to embarrass Leung, because the error here is extremely common in journalism, as it is in public perceptions.  Last November Lisa Margonelli built a long New York Times article around the same mistake.

Buses circulating in low density suburban areas (as opposed to express to Park-and-Rides) can serve many valid purposes, but getting cars off the road generally is not one of them.

The universal fact that these people are missing is that buses circulating in low-density areas -- especially where street networks require transit to thread slow and complex labyrinths -- is a predictably low-ridership service.  Outside of a bit of rush-hour activity and sometimes a surge at school bell times, this is the fact of life about local service in low-density suburbs.  If you don't believe me, ask for your own transit agency's stop-level ridership data and compare it to the density and walkability of the area around each stop.  Apart from anomalies created by special land uses, you will find it is much higher in more urban parts of your community where these conditions are more favorable.

In 20 years of looking at  detailed transit data, I've never seen a local suburban bus route whose performance (ridership per unit of service cost) was anywhere near that of a frequent urban bus route operating in area whose layout is favorable to transit. 

("Favorable to transit" means (a) higher density, (b) gridded local streets that provide easy direct access to stops for pedestrians, (c) a safe and pleasant pedestrian environment, (d) a mix of land uses and (e) simple linear paths, usually arterials, where transit can operate efficiently and effectively.  These features tend to be found in older inner cities, but they can be replicated and in some cases even retrofitted.)

Indeed, because transit's market is mostly the area within walking distance of a stop, low density and obstructed street patterns are the very definition of a poor transit market that will yield much lower ridership on investment, and that therefore justifies a poor level of service. Poor ridership out of low density isn't an empirical fact; it comes close to being a mathematical fact, because in most cases density around a stop is the size of that stop's market.

To claim that this predictably low-ridership service will result in "fewer cars on the road" is thus a geometrically incoherent claim.  "Fewer cars on the road" is the result of people riding transit, not transit existing.  So a service that is guaranteed to generate few riders per unit of cost will is guaranteed to get fewer cars off the road per unit of cost, compared to one that is guaranteed to generate many ridership per unit of cost -- such as a line in transit-favorable geography or a rapid transit corridor.

The only high-ridership form of public transit that can serve low-density suburbs with obstructive street patterns is based on Park-and-Ride.  Where land values permit, abundant park-and-ride and fast radial services can get cars off the road  efficiently.  Radial rapid transit (bus or rail) is also good because new transit-favorable neighborhoods can often be built later around its stations.   Park-and-Ride needs to be understood broadly as also accommodating dropoffs, Bike-and-Ride, etc.  But the key thing it does not require is for a bus to actually drive around inside a labyrinth of suburban local streets.

If a transit agency's objective is to get cars off the road, then like any business you start by focusing on your competition's weaknesses.  The car is least convenient in areas of high density and good walkability, and geometrically these also provide the the highest ridership per unit of investment.  The one other area is the suburban commute corridor -- the freeway into the city -- where congestion during peak periods makes the car a weak competitor.  That's why peak commute services -- to Park-and-Ride, not to people's front doors -- is also a high-ridership prospect, and one that gets cars off the road efficiently.

Again, there's nothing wrong with running bus routes around in low-density suburbs.  But it is a low-ridership proposition and therefore can't be justified by many sustainability outcomes; it's justification has to lie in social needs and perceptions of equity among neighborhoods.  If your city really wants to get cars off the road, however, it's not a good way to serve that purpose.

This kind of confusion is why elected officials should be asked to think more clearly about how they want to balance the conflict between ridership-related goals (including lower subsidy, fewer cars on the road, and resulting sustainability outcomes) or coverage-related goals (including lifeline access and "equity" across all arts of a community.  Both goals are noble, but don't pretend to be doing one if you're really doing the other. 

Better still, ask elected boards to adopt policies about how much of the budget should be spent pursuing ridership -- which means running services where high ridership is the predictable outcome -- and how much should be spent pursuing coverage, i.e. distributing service everywhere regardless of low ridership.  The Reno area's transit board did this in 2005, as the result of work I did with them, and as a result, this whole conversation is much clearer, less personal, and more clearly tied to the community's actual values.

For a more detailed exploration of this fundamental issue, see Chapter 10 of Human Transit.

UPDATES:  Comments on this one are often critical, but what I see in them is that:

• People have different definitions of "suburban".  It borders on being an unhelpful word but we don't have a good word for it.  What I meant was: landscapes whose geography is intrnsically hostile to transit, specifically the absence of all or most of the following:  (a) relatively high density, (b) gridded local streets that provide easy direct access to stops for pedestrians, (c) a safe and pleasant pedestrian environment, (d) a mix of land uses and (e) simple linear paths, usually arterials, where transit can operate efficiently and effectively.
  
  
• As in almost everything, we're talking about a spectrum rather than a pair of boxes.  When I talk about dividing a budget between ridership and coverage, it does sound like I'm dividing the world into two boxes.  In fact, many services are in the middle, contributing partly to a high-ridership outcome but with segments or periods that don't.  See Chapter 3 of Human Transit for more on this language problem ...
  
  
• Ridership can be good by the standards of a local subarea and bad by citywide standards, if the entire subarea is less transit-friendly in the terms outlined above.  Another way this issue is sometimes handled is to divide the region firmly into subarea, put budget walls between the services for each subarea, and then assess ridership by each subarea's standards.  This used to be how it worked in Seattle's King County Metro, and the effect was that a line in the suburbs with a certain performance could be called successful while a line with the same performance closer-in to the city would be judged a failure.  Not everyone could follow the "logic" of that and the agency has now let go of that rigidity. 
• I am making a point about geometry, not about culture or values or psychology or ethics.  I'm certainly not telling people where they should live, only about the consequences of those choices.  But concealing or ignoring the facts of geometry leads to policy based on denial, and that leads us in circles rather than forward.

This isn't an easy topic.  Many of the terms are emotive.  But there's an important fact here.  Again, see Chapters 9 and 10 of Human Transit for much more thorough discussion.

quote of the week: the reappearing desert

How little has changed since the 1830s!  From Tocqueville's Democracy in America, published in 1835:

Sometimes the progress of man is so rapid that the desert reappears behind him. The woods stoop to give him a passage, and spring up again when he has passed. It is not uncommon in crossing the new States of the West to meet with deserted dwellings in the midst of the wilds; the traveller frequently discovers the vestiges of a log house in the most solitary retreats, which bear witness to the power, and no less to the inconstancy of man. In these abandoned fields, and over these ruins of a day, the primeval forest soon scatters a fresh vegetation, the beasts resume the haunts which were once their own, and Nature covers the traces of man's path with branches and with flowers, which obliterate his evanescent track. 

Extended passage here, all equally relevant to urban planning.  Hat tip: Ta-nehisi Coates, the Atlantic.  

Photo: Tyson Jerry, NevadaCounty.com

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. 

network design for high ridership, a dense city example

How do transit network designers go about their task? Surprisingly little has been written about this.  You can pick up books that appear to cover the "network planning" process and find examples of good and bad networks but rarely a description of how to do the design thinking itself.  EMBARQ's recent manual for network planners in India, for example, provides great detail about how to analyze demand and evaluate results, but show no awareness of the really challenging task of network design, which sits in between those tasks.

I'm thinking my next book will probably be a little e-book talking through the process in more minute detail. For now, let me talk through a quick example, just to capture the outlines of how a network designer might approach a problem. 

My example is the core of Halifax, Nova Scotia, a dense peninsula built out mostly before 1945 and therefore highly conducive to transit.  It isn't the only transit-conducive place in the metro region, but it's the largest, and its peninsular location helps us isolate it as a design problem, so I can discuss it in a brief example.

The peninsula's developed area is about 6 km (4 mi) long and 3 km (2 mi) wide at its widest point. 

First, we take stock of the strategic focal points, especially major destinations and chokepoints.

Major destinations are part of why you'd focus on the Halifax peninsula as the core of any effective regional transit strategy.  The strongest transit destinations are:

• intense, in terms of number of people coming and going.
• all-day, so capable of using relatively efficient two-way, all-day service instead of just the more expensive one-way peak commuter express service.

Those are usually places with lots of people coming and going, not just employees.  What kinds of places are those?  Large scale:

• Government institutions
• Universities
• Medical facilities
• Retail

They're all on the peninsula.  Provincial government, two universities, the major medical centers serving all of Atlantic Canada, and retail centers both downtown and on the west edge.

The other reason you focus on the peninsular core is that it's already dense and walkable, because most of it was built before 1945.  So much of Halifax is here, and is so amenable to transit, that a strategy trying to optimize transit mobility must take full advantage of these opportunities.  If you care about mobility to an outer suburban community, you must care about circulation within the peninsula, because many of your citizens are going there and they may need to move about within the peninsula while there.  What's more, peninsula residents who choose not to own cars (which for many could be a viable and liberating choice) will sometimes need to travel outward, and a transit-intensive peninsula will generate outward transit demand further supporting the radial services that outer suburbs need.

So what do we have on the peninsula? 

All access is via just six chokepoints (red circles), plus ferry lines east across the harbor.  These will be ideal locations for transit connection points (yellow rectangle with T) because many lines, offering travel to many origins and destinations, must converge there anyway.  So the transit agency has done a good job here.  Except for the northernmost bridge and the northernmost exit to the west, all the chokepoints have transit connection facilities nearby.

The whole peninsula is dense and there are tall buildings here and there throughout, but the big concentrations are in the areas I've shaded.  Downtown is the blue area on the waterfront, while the parallel blue box further west is the medical zone.  The magenta zones are the major universities.  The southern one, St. Marys, is a Catholic school with about 7000 students.  The northern one, Dalhousie, is a major public university (16,000 students) that spills eastward along the green axis toward downtown, mixing with major medical facilities, office buildings, and dense, often student-oriented housing.  This green area is the core of a potential sustainable-transport paradise, because all the elements that make Halifax in general such a strong market (listed above) are mixed especially closely here, while the dominance of the universities, medical facilities, and shopping guarantees all-day two-way flow, the best situation for highly efficient transit.

I hope you've followed all this even if you don't know Halifax, because the same kind of assessment needs to be made of any city.  This doesn't mean that you have to have all of Halifax's features, but you need to be looking for those features you do have, with particular focus on density patterns and chokepoints, becuase these are the best starting point in defining a strategic outline of the network, within which you can then develop local ideas in more detail.

Now we look at the network of major transit-operable streets:

The grid pattern means that some kind of high-frequency grid is almost certainly in order, so that people can get anywhere to anywhere on the peninsula with at most one connection.  Obviously, since all trips within the peninsula are short, connections are a bigger disincentive, so we'll try also to link major destinations with direct services.  However, if we made direct service everywhere to everywhere our primary goal, we'd end up with lots of overlapping lines and would struggle to afford enough frequency on them all.

Notice, however, the way the southwest edge of the peninsula runs on a diagonal compared to the street grid.  That's an invitation to draw L-shaped lines, an east-west grid element connected to a north-south grid element.  Like this:

 

Grid lines that "bounce" off of diagonal edges, like this one, tie together more destinations without a connection while remaining complete grid lines (i.e. running all the way across the grid)  so as to maximize the number of other connections that can be made. 

But Oxford Street sort of peters out at the north end, so where do we go?  We "tie off" or "anchor" the line by going to a nearby major destination where many other connections will be available.  Fortunately, one is nearby.  The "T" just southwest of where Oxford ends is also a major shopping center. 

Meanwhile, at the other end, we notice that many connections throughout the east-of-harbour Dartmouth area are available at a "T" just over the bridge.  A single frequent line to that point, covering many of the major destinations of the peninsula, can plug into all of those connections, so that the whole catchment area has easy one-transfer access to most of these destinations.  So we have this:

And in fact, Halifax's Metro Transit has already had the same thought.  Their most frequent transit line, Line 1, looks like this:

It's on Spring Garden instead of South, but that's only about 400m difference.  The university and most medical facilities in the area are adequately served from either.  But Spring Garden is more of a continuous "mainstreet" through this area, although major institutions front on both. 

So what have we missed?  Well, the next big corridor is Robie, which (along with nearby parallel streets like South Park) is really the medical axis.  It would have been tempting to turn our first line north along Robie instead of Oxford, because while Oxford is perfectly fine lowrise density Robie has the highrise intensity of institutions.  At the south end, Robie bounces off the diagonal grid-edge as Inglis, which gets us to the smaller university, St. Mary's.  If we bounce again at the east end of Inglis we head north along Barrington into downtown.  Once we're past Spring Garden we're duplicating the first line, but we're virtually downtown by this point, so duplicative service on one street, adding up to very high frequencies, makes sense and can be useful for internal downtown demand.  (Remember, the shorter the trip, the higher the frequency you need to compete for it.)  So that suggests something like this:

This is not what existing service does.  Robie now has an overlay of several lines doing slightly different things, several of which end in a very odd one-way loop at the south end, like this one, rather than going downtown. 

Perhaps it's just trying to turn around.  One-way loops are a good idea at outer low-density ends of lines, but they introduce needless confusion and circuitousness in dense areas, where it should be possible to serve all markets two way.

Meanwhile, back in our ideal grid, our Robie-Inglis route encountes a perplexity at its northwest corner.  At Chebucto Road, Robie seems to branch into the continuation of Robie and the larger Windsor Road, which takes on a more car-oriented character as it heads for the chokepoint at the far northwest corner of the peninsula, near Clayton Park.

This situation is tricky, and I wouldn't make a recommendation at the high-level scale of this exercise; much deeper knowledge of existing travel patterns and land uses would be needed.  For now, let's assume that the smart thing to do is follow Windsor, because it completes the grid, serves a chokepoint, and thus is useful both as an internal corridor on the peninsula and a gateway path to the larger region.

Now, you can see how some east-west frequent lines would largely complete the grid.  To work best they'd have to aim for the chokepoints too, so that while offering intense local circulation within the city they'd also provide access to much of the peninsula from the surrounding suburbs.  Metro Transit has already drawn most of these lines, and they seem to work pretty well except that many aren't frequent enough to really function in a high-frequency grid, or even to compete for the very short east-west trips that they would serve within the dense peninsula.

The dark blue line, existing lines 2 and 4 combined, is already every 15 minutes, but the other two key grid lines here, orange Line 6 on Quinpool and and green Line 9 via the far north, are still every 30, not enough to really function as elements of a grid. Notice too how 6 and 9 bounce off edges of the grid, completing linear corridors before turning to find a major destination and connection point at which to terminate.  (Lines always want to terminate at big destinations, called anchors in the business, because otherwise they tend to empty out near the end, leaving permanent wasted capacity.)

Yes, there are still gaps, but we've hit all the major denstinations and most of the peninsula's density.  As we turn to those gaps, network design starts to get fun and subtle, as we have to dig into more detailed data to find the clues for how we should patch routes together.  And here I'll stop, as I've reached the end of what I can do in such a "high level" view.

But here's my point:  I'm almost certain that the lines drawn here, or something very, very like them, would be part of a successful network for Halifax, because they are big-picture responses to issues that are obvious at this big-picture scale.  Network designers sometimes fail to take this high-level sketch planning step, and instead wade too quickly into the million possibly interesting details.  If you focus on too much detailed data too soon, though, you end up wandering around inside the data, unable to get any big picture "structure" that you can hang onto while you consider the subtler questions. 

Also, while it's very important for many people to be able to follow this kind of thinking, designing optimized networks, especially in difficult geography, is a bit of an art.  Like any inductive thought, it involves deeply understanding the data but then being open to ideas that come in unpredictable bursts of inspiration, much the way scientific theories come about.  The "having ideas" part isn't in many manuals because it's not really teachable; it's to some extent an innate talent.

Consultants like me can help with the subtler thinking of network design, and of course many professional transit planners are adept at it.  But you don't have to have those skills, or want them, you can be a more effective advocate if you understand the kind of thinking I've been demonstrating here.  If you want to influence transit in your city, you have to understand the basics of the network design problem, as it arises from facts of geometry, facts of transit, and the unique geography of each city.  That way, even if you're not ready to do network design yourself, you can assess whether the designers of your own network have done a competent job, and make suggestions that they could actually use.

grids and the short diagonal (comment of the week)

Eric identifies an important issue for high-frequency grids, like those of Vancouver, Los Angeles, Chicago, Portland's eastside, etc ... The short diagonal trip may be not much faster than walking.  Here's how he describes it, complete with clever 1980s-style computer graphics:

When discussing grids, it is important to think about trips like the following:

Start
|
| (1/4 mile)
|
|********(1 mile)************
A----------------------------B
*****************************|
*****************************|
*****************************| (1 mile)
*****************************|
*****************************|
*****************************|
*****************************|
*****************************C-----Finish
*****************************(1/4 mile)***

(please ignore the '*' - they exist only to make the vertical lines go in the proper place).

The grid's approach to this trip would be to walk to A, then take a bus to B, then take another bus to C, then walk to the end. However, since each bus segment is so short, even with frequent service, the waiting time still becomes a huge deal.

For example, if we assume that the buses each run every 15 minutes the expected travel time might look something like this:

Time =
5 minutes (walk to A)
+ (0-15) minutes (wait)
+ (5-10) minutes (ride bus to B)
+ (0-15) minutes (wait)
+ (5-10) minutes (ride bus C)
+ 5 minutes (walk to destination)
= (20-60) minutes

The average 40 minute travel time is just 3.75 miles per hour, equivalent to a brisk walk, while the worst-case travel time is a mere 2.5 miles per hour, equivalent to a slow walk.

With the slow speeds and huge travel-time uncertainty in the above calculations, before you even consider the possibility of bunching leading to 20-30 minute waits, if the goal is simply to get to the destination quickly and reliably, transit can't even compete with walking, let along with driving.

This relegates the use of transit for these trips to people can't walk or bike and also can't afford to drive or spend $10 on a taxi ride.

Trips like these are not edge cases. I make trips like this quite frequently. Usually, I end up either biking or jogging the entire way or walking half way and taking a one-seat ride for the other half.

My personal opinion is not that the poor handling of such trips is a failure of transit, but rather that there are certain types of trips that transit is optimized for and short L-shaped trips isn't one of them. Short L-shaped trips are simply better accomplished by some other means, such as walking, jogging, skateboarding, bicycling, or even riding a taxi, while longer trips, especially trips in a straight line, allow transit to work more efficiently.

If anybody else has opinions on the matter, I look forward to hearing them!

Eric's point connects to a bunch of intersting issues:

• What other solution is there?   Look at the overall mobility outcome from straight, fast, frequent lines in a grid pattern, and ask:  OK, yes, this is not so convenient for the short diagonal, but what exactly can or should we do about that?  In some cities, notably Los Angeles, you'll often find little circulators that serve some of these diagonals where there is a specific market for them, such as a link between two key local activity centers.  But these are always going to be specialized because they are so much less efficient than the main grid lines.
  
  
• Note how much this outcome depends on the overall quality of the straight grid lines.  Eric assumes they're pretty poor.  In fact, the diagonal grid trip usually has a choice of two L-shaped paths ("over and down", or "down and over") so there's an opportunity to choose the better of these two, which will the the one that uses more frequent or faster services.
• Eric's assumptions are for a standard local-stop grid.  Frequencies are assumed to be never better than 15 minutes, and travel speed, for example, is 5-10 min to go a mile, an average speed of only 6-12 mi/hr.  Some urban lines are down in this range, but such performance should be considered a problem in urgent need of attention.  Stop spacing and a range of minor infrastructure can have large impacts, and will yield benefits that are much greater than you'll get by dissipating your service over countless little diagonal shuttles.  So there's much that can be done to improve the short-diagonal problem simply by focusing improvements on the grid lines. 

In short, I agree with Eric's conclusion. Because I tend to live in urban places where most of my trips are short, I encounter the short diagonal problem all the time.  It's a drag, but I deal with it because I'm pretty sure that it's geometrically impossible to "solve," except by undermining far larger benefits of a network that serves the whole city, and that moves fast enough to compete with cars, not with walking. 

value capture as a tool for tying land use to transit

Yonah Freemark of the Transport Politic has an interesting post today on Toronto Mayor Rob Ford’s effort to build a subway line entirely through value capture – a process that captures, as revenue for the project, some of the profits that will arise from dense development around stations. Mayor Ford's initiative is not going well, partly because neighbors are objecting to the level of density that would be needed to support the subway.

Value capture has several connections to urbanist outcomes. A rail expansion program driven by value capture would:

• Tie completion of the line to zoning and development choices that allow major density around stations. For anyone who values compact and sustainable development, this is a feature, not a bug. It means a line cannot proceed unless communities on the line have agreed to significant density increases.  Many urban regions are trying to make this linkage through policy, but tying it to the project's funding is obviously a far more effective way to keep land use planning tied firmly to the transit.
  
  
• Fail to serve existing high-density areas, such as SF’s Chinatown or Van Broadway. If you believe that existing density deserves as much service as new density, value capture won’t get you there.
• Fail to serve “social justice” outcomes, such as far SE Chicago Red Line extension to the extent that value capture requires displacement of populations.

I don't endorse or opposite value capture in the abstract, and I'm suspicious of public-private partnership in general, but there's no denying that first point, that when you want to ensure that the land use will be there to support your rail line, value capture keeps everyone much more focused on that outcome.

shared housing and shared transportation (guest post by alfred twu)

Alfred Twu lives in the Bay Area and is a long time transit rider.  He has studied architecture and business and is also an active participant of the cooperative movement, having worked in artist, food, and housing co-ops. He is also an illustrator for my forthcoming book Human Transit.

Also known as cooperative living, co-ops, communes, intentional communities, or living with roommates, shared housing creates challenges and opportunities for transit service.  It can increase density without zoning changes or construction.  However, good transit service needs to already exist for this to happen.  As such, shared housing's greatest potential is in increasing utilization of under-zoned but well served neighborhoods. 

What is shared housing?

Shared housing denotes a group of unrelated people live in a single dwelling unit.  Kitchens, bathrooms, and other living areas are shared, bedrooms may be shared or single occupancy.  In the Bay Area, this model is known as a co-op or cooperative.  Note that the word co-op has an entirely different meaning on the East Coast.

Shared housing has a long history in the Bay Area, dating back to boarding houses.  The modern Bay Area cooperative housing movement began in 1933 with the founding of the Berkeley Student Cooperative. 

Although some structures are built with shared housing in mind, usually the building is simply a repurposed large house.  For example, Ridge House, a 38 person student co-op, used to be a mansion, while Cooperative Roots, pictured below, houses around 20 people in two adjacent single family houses.




What does this have to do with transit?

Let's look at two neighborhoods: one dense, and one sprawling.  The denser neighborhood will usually have better transit service.

Now, if zoning ordinances prevent additional housing from being built in Sprawlville, that does not mean it's the end of the story.  While zoning typically concerns itself with units per acre, the density that matters for transit service is population per acre, or more specifically, commuters per acre.

This is where shared housing comes in.  When a neighborhood of single family houses goes from having one or two working adults per house, to having 4 to 8 working adults, as far as transit is concerned, it's a high density neighborhood.




The catch to this though, is that this can only happen where there is already good transit service.  When a group of people share a house, they'll all want easy access to their jobs, which may be in different directions.  Not all of them will take transit either - some of them will need to drive to their jobs, some people prefer to bike.  This is why shared housing works so well with college students - everyone is going to the same place for their "job", so only one frequent route is necessary.

Case Study: Ashby BART  (San Francisco Bay Area)

A number of my friends who used to live in shared housing as students have formed their own communities after graduation.  Most are now in their mid 20s to early 30s.  Some work office jobs with traditional 9-5 hours, others work retail jobs with varying hours.  Over the last few years, about 30 communities of 4 to 18 people have been formed.  Most cluster around the Ashby rail rapid transit station.  Let's examine why.

• It is about halfway between the two big job centers in the area: UC Berkeley and Downtown Oakland.
• It is 20 minutes on rapid transit to the region's largest job center, downtown San Francisco.
• It is close to freeway on-ramps.
• It is on flat ground and within biking distance of a large number of commercial districts.  Bike access is important since transit service in the evenings and on weekends is limited.
• It is not in itself a downtown district.  This means there are a lot of large houses with lots of bedrooms and yards - the preferred housing type.
• There are already other co-ops in the area.

The one co-op not near a BART station -- an outlier near the bay -- is an artists' warehouse.



Ashby Station: Excellent transit service but low density

The Ashby station neighborhood, which currently consists of mostly single family houses, had long been targeted by planners for transit oriented development.  It has an underground rapid transit station with train frequency of every 7 minutes on weekdays and 20 minutes at night and on weekends.

Ashby station neighborhood.  Station is blue, parking lot is black.


However, the official plan to build 300 units of housing on the station parking lots met significant neighborhood opposition.  Existing residents were concerned about losing the flea market that currently operates on weekends in the parking lot, increased traffic, and future upzoning of the area.  The project was put on hold in 2006. 

Shared housing, however, has achieved something similar with no official intervention.

Can the Ashby model be replicated elsewhere?

Using shared housing to increase neighborhood density offers a solution for low density areas where economic constraints or zoning limits the ability to build new housing units.  The following factors are needed for its success:

Multimodal Job Access

Members of a shared house with long commutes tend to move out.  Therefore a location needs good access to members' existing jobs, and potential future ones.  Transit is just one part of the equation - those working 9 to 5 hours downtown.  For the other members, good car and bike access to nearby commercial areas is needed for those working retail and service jobs on evenings and weekends. 

Catalyst community and clustering effect

The Ashby area community began with just a couple of houses.  However, the community grew rapidly as the original residents' friends also wanted to live nearby.  UC Berkeley provided a feeder system with many members having already familiarized themselves with shared housing through living in the Berkeley student co-ops.  In places far from colleges, immigrant neighborhoods can also benefit from the feeder effect.

One of the side benefits of shared housing is a group of residents will have a lot of purchasing power with their combined incomes, and will seek out the area that meets their needs best.  Until most people live in shared housing, this means that a region will likely have only a small number of preferred neighborhoods.

Why not MacArthur?  Station placement matters.

The next station down the line, MacArthur, is even better positioned in terms of access to transit and jobs.  However, this station is located in a freeway median.  As a result, a lot of the land walkable to the station is either paved over, or so close to a freeway that it is an unpleasant place to live.  As a result, even though this area has been zoned for multistory apartments, few have been built.

Creating community: the station as social hub

Shared housing in the Ashby area occurred without any official planning - an existing community (recent UC Berkeley graduates) simply moved in.  Where no existing community exists, social hubs such as coffee shops or community centers, located inside or directly next to the station, can aid the formation of the close relationships that shared housing requires.

fictional city seeks reality check

Did you draw maps of fictional cities when you were 8 years old?  If so, you and I are part of a near-invisible, uncounted minority. 

If that's you, I dare you not to be interested in this!  Even if you just enjoy maps of other cities, here's a chance to study a city you've never seen before.

For the transit planning course that I'm developing, I've created a fictional city that's designed to present a range of major transit issues, while also being an interesting place.  I considered using a real city, but in my experience, planning for a real city slides too quickly to details that obscure the big picture of how a good network works. 

My introduction to the fictional city is here:  Download Game Newport intro (.doc)

A rich set of map layers, created in Excel, is here:   Download Game data backsave  (.xls)

Both documents are covered by the assertion of copyright that covers all of this blog's material. 

I'd love feedback, especially about these questions:

• Is the city realistic?  Does it contravene what you perceive to be "facts" of geology, hydrology, urban economics, bird psychology, or post-1800 urban history?
• Have I omitted information that seems relevant to the basic task of designing a transit network?  Note that I'm not asking "have I omitted anything that might be interesting?"  The austere novelist and dominatrix who sells rare Asian herbs out of her Craftsman basement at 3315 W 43rd St while also being the invisible brains behind a top eco-fashion label is extremely interesting, but I only had a day to put this together.

Have fun!  The premiere of the transit planning course is in Surrey, British Columbia near Vancouver on June 9-10.  Last I checked there were a few places left.  Details here.

UPDATES:

• Please do not try to comment based only on the illustration above.  I'm getting many comments that indicate you've only looked at that image.  You would need to download the files and look at the whole thing.
• Apologies to those who had trouble with the .docx and .xlsx versions; these old formats should be more widely compatible and convertible.
• The newest version now has layers for income and existing rail infrastructure.

Finally, I'm surprised at early comments that I don't have enough freeways!  It's not a freeway dependent city, by choice.  (See the .doc file above for more on the freeway wars.)   But freeways that run only on the periphery and don't connect into the core are common enough in cities of this size class.  See:

• Victoria, British Columbia, metro pop 330k.  Two small shreds of freeway, created only as traffic required.
• Halifax, Nova Scotia, metro pop 372k.  Fragments of an outer ring freeway, nothing into the city.
• Christchurch, New Zealand, metro pop 390k at least before February's earthquake.  One 5-km shred of freeway approaching from the north (Kaiapoi to Belfast), but it's really just an extended bridge.
• Palm Springs-Indio, California, metro pop 365k.  The area is bypassed on the north by Interstate 10, far from most of the urban cores.
• Gold Coast, Queensland, metro pop 591k.  A massive highrise hotel/retail core (30-60 storeys) at Surfers Paradise, a highrise business core in adjacent Southport, but the only freeway bypasses 7 km to the west.

The last two of these are not, by any stretch, leftist car-hating enclaves.  In fact, they're exceptionally car-dependent.  Still, no freeways near the core.  It's possible!

downtown networks: the oblique approach

How important is it that the transit services converging on downtown all go right to the core of downtown's demand?  In a city with a strong downtown, a reactive, demand-driven view of planning will add more and more transit into downtown as demand requires, because the loads are always highest there.  But sometimes, it can make sense to avoid the center of downtown, or to slide past downtown along one edge.

Zach Shaner's new proposal for the core area of Seattle is a nice example.   (Click to enlarge and sharpen, or see JPG here:  JPG )

You don't have to know Seattle to follow this.  The core of downtown is the little shaded box on the left, where LINK light rail will be in a subway and other frequent buses will run on the surface.  Most of the rest of the map area is also dense, so this is an area where you would expect a high-frequency grid to be possible, easily serving trips from anywhere to anywhere. 

But the map area is also ferociously hilly, so fitting the classical grid to this terrain has always been a struggle.  Still, Zach suggests that once the LINK light rail extension northward opens, ending at the University of Washington just off the north edge of the map, something remarkably gridlike might come into being. 

Several of the design principles that I often advocate are at work here.  First, Zach has focused on running on the fewest possible streets so as to provide the maximum possible frequency.  Second, he's mapped both the existing and proposed networks so that you can see this frequency difference.

But he's also provided a nice example of the oblique approach to downtown, which is a way of balancing the distributive quality of a grid with the need to serve downtown's concentration of demand. 

Look at the magenta line coming from the southeast.  It's Line 7, now the single busiest bus line in Seattle.  Off the map to the south, it extends about 5.5 km (3.4 mi) onward through dense, old, and historically low-income areas of the Rainier Valley.  It touches the rail line at Mount Baker station, just inside the map, but it flows onward into the city, currently going right through downtown.

Zach proposes instead that Line 7 approach downtown but then bypass it just to the east, via Boren Avenue.  He would do this to create a new crosstown (north-south) opportunity to reach dense north parts of downtown (including the South Lake Union redevelopment area and Seattle Center, which is right where Line 7 exits the map on the west edge) without going right through downtown's heart.

What would the dense downtown ridership of Line 7 do?  Well, some of it would transfer to LINK where the two lines touch at the south edge of the map.  Others, depending on exactly where in downtown they were going, might transfer to any of several very frequent east-west services crossing the line.  But many who now seem to be going downtown would reveal that they're really going elsewhere.  This is the key.

Line 7 ridership shows massive boarding and alighting downtown, and downtown is certainly an overwhelming destination.  But you always have to ask if the concentration of downtown boardings is evidence of what people want or what the current network structure requires of them.  People going to the dense and fast-growing areas on the north edge of downtown will find Zach's revision a dramatic improvement.  Many others may be going still further north, to anywhere in the northern half of the city, in fact; they currently have to go through downtown to make their connections, because that's where their bus goes, but they could make the same connections to northward services from the revised Line 7, often with quite a savings of travel time.

Obviously, I don't have the data to validate exactly how many people are in each of these categories.  I'm not even advocating Zach's design, but I do think it illustrates an important design concept, one that you will never think of if you're focused entirely on where your current ridership patterns seem to be leading.

Many major cities are facing unmanageable volumes of buses squeezing through a tight downtown.  Sydney, where I lived for five years, has a remarkably similar predicament to Seattle's.  One solution, in Sydney as in Seattle, is to let go of the idea that radial services aimed generally for downtown need to go right through the very center of it.  If there is a sufficient diversity and richness of connection opportuntiies for reaching various parts of downtown, you can often create a better design by sliding past downtown obliquely, as Zach proposes that Line 7 should do. 

I don't advocate or oppose Zach's design, but I do think it's a nice illustration of how to fit the "everywhere to everywhere" network design principles (such as the high frequency grid) to a very difficult terrain.  It also raised some interestingly contrasting comments from different Seattle transit experts who've seen it; more on that in another post.

UPDATE:  Zach explains his proposal to the Seattle transit community here.

can we define "livable and lovable" cities?

That's the nice slogan from a new Phillips Corporation initiative praised today in the Atlantic by NRDC's Kaid Benfield.  The Phillips think tank suggests that we can gather all the qualities of a "livable and lovable" city into three virtues: 

• Resilience, which replaces the more bureaucratic and depressing word sustainability, but means roughly the same thing.  Some great work has already been done on the concept of resilience.  There's already a Resilient Cities movement, and an excellent book on Resilience Thinking. 
  
  
• Inclusiveness, which is about "social integration and cohesion," demonstrated for example in the lack of discrimination or social exclusion based on race, religion, age, and all the other usual categories.
  
  
• Authenticity, which means "the ability to maintain the local character of the city," including "heritage, culture, and environment." 

Below is their graphic summary.  (The PDF [Download] is much sharper!)  Below that is a bit of affectionate heckling from me.

Personally, I have some practical discomfort with the framing of the Inclusiveness category because it is easily exaggerated into visions of a socialist paradise in which we have abolished competition.  When Philips says that "inhabitants should have equal opportunities to participate in the activities of the city," does that mean that when our city's team in the playoffs, we'll give out tickets by lottery rather than selling them, in order to avoid discriminating against the poor?  If we're talking only about nondiscrimination by extraneous demographic categories, fine.  But when you imply that you can neutralize the impact of differences in wealth, you lose so much of the politicial audience -- at least in North America, Australia, and the UK -- that you've probably lost the game.  This issue comes up often in transit, of course, notably whenever anyone suggests that in a capitalist economy, it's foolish not to use pricing to help citizens understand the intrinsic cost of things that they take for granted.  It's a tough one.

Note, also, the lingering contradictory message in their framing of resilience.  On the one hand, the train station signifies that resilient cities acknowledge their "interdependence" with other cities.  On the other hand, the emphasis on local farms and local energy generation suggests the opposite, that resilient cities aspire to greater and greater self-reliance.  This is philosophically interesting, especially because high volumes of international trade -- including in food, which is the opposite of local self-reliance -- are the most reliable mechanism that human society has found to prevent large-scale wars. 

I make both of these comments in the spirit of meditation.  I am not claiming to know how better to define inclusiveness or resilience.  Rather, I'm just marvelling at how difficult it is.