Human Transit

vancouver: my tangle with a columnist over the broadway line

If you're interested in Vancouver and missed my "debate"* with Bob Ransford about Broadway rapid transit at Gordon Price's blog Price Tags, well, it's not to late to pile on.  It refers back to one of grand debates on this blog, the question of "Is speed obsolete?" raised by Patrick Condon.  Gordon says our debate* the most commented piece in the history of his blog, and it's generated fierce Twitter traffic.  Apparently, Bob and I will be on CKNW News Talk 980, "The Bill Good Show" on Monday (or maybe we're just taping it Monday).

The occasion appears to have been the Vancouver City Council's decision to endorse a complete subway under Broadway, which is not much of a surprise to those who've been following this for a while.  Bob criticized the project on development potential grounds, and as usual, I tried to broaden the question a bit beyond that.

* an often self-glorifying term that readers should view with suspicion.  In this case it refers to a published Vancouver Sun opinion piece periodically interrupted by my heckling.  It all happened very fast when Gord forwarded me Bob's article, knowing exactly how it would provoke me ...

transit as a city's bloodstream: the video

Watch this video, and maybe you'll grasp the beauty of a great transit network, a beauty that has nothing to do with the technology it runs, but everything to do with the real life of a city and the feedom of its people.  Public transit vehicles moving around Greater Vancouver, an entire day compressed into 2.5 minutes.

The original is here.  It's by STLTransit, who has done a number of other cities.

Long ago I posted another of these, for Auckland, New Zealand.  It uses endearing tadpoles instead of white dots.  It's also interesting because Auckland's is not a single unified network, as Vancouver's is, (although we're working on it!).  You can see the difference if you watch closely, using the tips below.

So many people see public transit only as a vehicle on the street, or a thing they're waiting for.  But when you watch this video of a well-designed unified transit network, you can see that it's a gigantic interconnected organism.  And like all organisms, it's made up of complex but rhythmic motion.

Like your heart and lungs, the network effect of transit is quiet, ignorable, and yet the foundation of everything.   The network is one being, moving to a beat.  It's made of connections,  little sparks of energy that you must imagine whenever two dots touch, as the dots hand off to one another like relay runners.  For example, as you watch the video, watch this spot, especially toward the middle of the day:

That's Phibbs Exchange, an example of strong pulse scheduling. At a langorous pace (representing a pulse every half hour or even every hour) you'll see many white dots gather themselves into a single bright dot, shine brightly for a moment, then "pulse" outward again.  What's happening is that many buses that run infrequently are converging on a point and sitting together briefly, so that people can transfer from any bus to any other.

I'm not sure I'll ever convey to my non-transit friends that regardless of what you think of buses, a pulse is a beautiful thing to watch.  Phibbs is more spread out than I like, and I photographed it at a quiet time of day, but in an ideal one, like the ones in downtown Eugene, you see this gradual gathering of energy to a climax, then a release.  Gradually the buses arrive, until finally they're all there.  You see signs on the buses announcing different parts of the city, all the places you could go right now, from here.  The drivers get off the bus briefly, chat with customers, point them to the right service.  People meet by chance.  It happens many times a day and yet there's always this sense of event: here, at this moment, you have service to all these different places, ready to go right now.  Enjoy the banquet of choices, select your bus, and let's go.  In a moment it's over, the buses all gone, the place quiet or even deserted, like a field after a storm has passed.  And in half an hour or an hour it will happen again.

And it's not a random thing, like a storm, but part of a huge intentional network that (in Vancouver's case) is designed.  This pulse is one of the network's many continuous, reliable heartbeats.  It's one big organism, made of unconscious rhythmic motion and circulation as all organisms are.  It's inseparable from the life of the city it serves.  And you're part of it.

how auditors get transit wrong: a lesson from vancouver

Elected officials love to demand "audits."  Auditing means that you hire high-prestige people who will scrutinize the books of an agency with particular genius, and deliver recommendations that resound with authority.

But many of the companies hired to audit transit agencies don't seem to understand transit.  That's certainly the evidence of a recently commissioned audit of Vancouver's TransLink, which discovered $41 million in potential annual savings including $5.3 million from cutting low-ridership services.  (Extensive detail and media reaction is gathered here.)

Like many audits, this one just assumes that low ridership means "without justfication."

But low-ridership services are unjustifiable only if ridership is their purpose.  

If you haven't read my book, or read this blog much, you may be under the impression that the goal of all public transit is high ridership, and that low-ridership services are therefore failing, evidence of waste, and should be cut.  In reality, every transit agency runs service that has a purpose other than ridership. These services, which I call "coverage" services in my own work, have purposes such as:

• Equitably distributing service to all areas that contribute tax revenue to the agency.
• Meeting the urgent needs of small numbers of people living in areas that are expensive to serve (seniors, disabled, isolated rural pockets of poverty etc)
• Satisfying a coverage standard, which is a statement of the form "___% of the population live within ___ metres/feet of service".  The specific purpose of these statements, which most agencies have, is to determine when service must be operated despite predictably low ridership.

The TransLink audit appears to be simply ignorant about the universal tension between ridership goals and coverage goals.  They recommend cutting coverage services because they have (predictably) low ridership.  This is exactly as logical as throwing away your microwave because it doesn't produce ice.

When an auditor' assumes that ridership or fare revenue is the only goal of transit, they are expressing a certain set of values.  This is a valid philosophical position, but it is not the only justifiable one, nor the only one that is widely held in most urban populations.   So auditors do citizens a great disservice when they present their values as the only possible ones.  In 20 years I have never encountered a public transit agency that actually deploys service exclusively for ridership.  Now and then and auditor swoops down and criticizes the agency for the low-ridership services, often implying that the agency didn't already know about them.

Transit agencies need the backbone to reply to these audits firmly, explaining that low-ridership services may exist for purposes other than ridership, such as those listed above, and that if these services reflect the voters' values, they are as legitimate as any other.  

Transit agencies can also support clearer auditing processes if they identify which of their services are intended mainly for coverage, which means their low-ridership should never be counted as evidence of failure.  I have worked with several agencies on forming clear statements about the percentage of resources that the agency wishes to devote to coverage service.  Once those services are documented, everyone can stop complaining about the low ridership of those services, because high ridership is not their purpose.

Auditing is one of those high-prestige professions, like architecture, that is prone to form echo-chambers that resist the introduction of outside information and perspectives.  Great auditors, like great architects, are suspicious of their own echo-chamber and always looking for perspectives from outside of it.  If you want to be a good auditor of public transit agencies, read my book!  It will help you avoid the TransLink auditor's mistake, and many others.  

 

frequent service, mapped to your door

Vancouver's TransLink is one of several agencies who -- with some input from me -- have adopted Frequent Network brands that are designed to highlight services that are always coming soon, generally every 15 minutes or better all day and weekend.    I've always insisted that the Frequent Network can be both a short-term service branding tool (to build ridership by helping time-sensitive customers see where the network can serve them) but also a land use planning tool.

TransLink always understood it was both, and for several years has had a goal stating that half the region's population and jobs will be on the Frequent Network.  This is both a land use planning statement and a transit planning statement.  The message is not that TransLink will extend Frequent service to half the current population, but rather that it will do some of this while land use planning will also bring put residents and jobs on the existing Frequent Network.  More recently, Translink finally highlighted its Frequent Network on its maps for the public.

Ultimately, the Frequent Network, if properly mapped and promoted, should sell real estate, because the high level of all-day access should have a clear value as a city as a whole becomes more transit-oriented.  So this kind of micro-mapping should be really handy:

This map (click to enlarge and sharpen) of transit access in New Westminster, British Columbia is by Jonathan X. Cote, a City Councilor in that city and also an urban planning student at Simon Fraser Univerisity. He takes the standard walking distances of 800m to rapid transit and 400m to local transit and plots the portion of his city that has access to those networks.  I've seen these maps before, and even if they are not drawn they are what lies behind any coherent statement about what percentage of population and jobs have transit access, within a given walking distance, to service of a given standard.

Remember:  If your city wants to do really honest transit analysis, it needs very small analysis zones.  This map shows you the kind of clarity that you get when you can analyze right down to the parcel.  You don't need that much fine grain, but the zones need to be small.  And a parcel-level map like this is certainly ideal for land use planners, who need to minimize walking distances for the centroids of transit-oriented developments. 

Notice what a good tool this is for analyzing bus stop spacing as well.  You can move the stops a little apart and count how many parcels fall out of the walkshed.  Out to about 400m (1/4mi) spacing the answer is usually "fewer than you expected."

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.

vancouver publishes frequent network map

The Wayfinding team at Vancouver's TransLink has finally unveiled their new network map, with Frequent Network designations.  In this case ... orange:

Download the whole thing here: regional transit map

The term "FTN" (Frequent Transit Network) also appears on the map here and there.  This term has already been used for several years in TransLink policymaking.  In fact, four years ago in Transport 2040 TransLink committed to this goal:

The majority of jobs and housing in the region are located along the Frequent Transit Network (frequent, reliable services on designated corridors throughout the day, every day).

Now, finally, the public can see it too!  Disclosure: I had a review-and-comment role in a few stages of this process, but it's definitely TransLink's work, led by their excellent Wayfinding team.

vancouver: the frequent network revealed

One of North America's most advanced transit agencies, TransLink in Vancouver, has finally published a Frequent Network Map as well as a page explaining why that map is important:

This 15 minute or better service runs until 9 p.m. every day, and starts at 6 a.m. on weekdays, 7 a.m. on Saturdays and 8 a.m. on Sundays. This level of service might be provided by one or more types of transit, such as buses or SkyTrain.

People traveling along FTN corridors can expect convenient, reliable, easy-to-use services that are frequent enough that they do not need to refer to a schedule. For municipalities and the development community, the FTN provides a strong organizing framework around which to focus growth and development.

As longtime readers know, I've long advised that high frequency services must stand out from the complexity of a transit map, and be promoted separately, so that people can see the network that's available to people whose time is highly valuable.  Many individuals, and a few agencies, have drawn Frequent Network maps as a result.  For more, see the Frequent Network category.

Meanwhile, this is a hugely important moment for Vancouver, especially because of the way the Frequent Network can organise future land use, and help everyone make better decisions about location.  This map should immediately go up on the wall in every city planner's office, and in the office of every realtor or agent who deals in apartments.  It's far more useful than, say, WalkScore's Transit Score in showing you the actual mobility that will arise from your choice of location, in the terms that matter to you.

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. 

job: manager of service planning for vancouver's translink

TransLink in Vancouver has a great opportunity for a manager of service planning (10+ years planning experience, including some in management). They do more junior hiring as well, so keep an eye on their careers site.  This one, though, is especially critical for the agency, so I wanted to feature it.

I'm under a long-term contract with TransLink doing work on their Regional Transit Strategy and similar planning tasks, so I hope to be working a bit with this person.

To apply see the "Manager of Transit Planning" item here.  Full job description is attached.  Move fast; it closes on Oct 14.

TransLink, and Vancouver in general, is a great place to work on transit and sustainable urbanism.  Even more remarkable, their colleagues in city governments mostly share that vision, though the usual tensions arise as you'd expect anywhere.  The agency's position as a single regionwide authority makes it relatively easy to think across boundaries.  Few metro areas in North America have such a strong pro-transit consensus as metro Vancouver. 

Their regional long-term plan, Transport 2040, is also the only one I've seen whose fundamental goals refer to the extent of a Frequent Transit Network.  It's Goal #3.  To me this is especially strong evidence that despite all the thrills of their extensive driverless rapid transit, the agency's thinking is focused on mobility outcomes, and their urban livability consequences, but not on technology for its own sake.

If you'd like to work in a region where suburban cities compete over who can build the most vibrant high-density centers around transit stations, but where you can still, as they say, ski in the morning and sail in the afternoon, Vancouver's the spot. 

Fine print:  If my experience in 05-06 is any indication, the days when you can ski in the morning and sail in the afternoon will be heavily overcast and drizzling, but you will still be enjoying the warmest winter weather in all of Canada.  Think of it as the Canadian Riviera!

request for information: routine closures of transit streets

Most cities that I know have one or more major downtown streets where parades and other major civic celebrations tend to occur.  San Francisco's Market Street, Chicago's State Street (pictured), and New York's Fifth Avenue are obvious examples.

These same cities, if they value transit, often want this same street to be the core of their transit system, because they want transit to deliver customers to the "front door" of the city.

So it's normal to see huge, complex reroutings of transit service when one of the civic events is happening.  The legibility problems of this shift are accepted because they happen only a few times a year.

Vancouver, however, does something different, and I want to verify how unusual it is.  Vancouver's core downtown transit street, Granville Mall, is closed to buses (and all vehicles) every weekend evening.  Specifically:

On Fridays, Saturdays, Sundays, Holidays and the day before a Holiday, buses will run along Granville each day until 9pm, then switch to the re-route, travelling northbound on Seymour and southbound on Howe. The re-routes will stay in place until the close of service.

So many of Vancouver's most important street-running transit lines (mostly trolley buses in this case) shift from one downtown street to another at 9pm on almost half of all days.  So the process of explaining and remembering where to find the bus is complicated all the time, which is quite different from finding the street closed for a very rare parade.

What North American cities do this routinely with their main transit street?  Nicollet Mall in Minneapolis is the only example that comes to my mind, but its role in the transit network is much less important than Granville's.

To be clear, I'm not interested in reopening the Granville Mall debate, where many advocated closing the street to buses entirely.  I am interested in the precedent as it might apply to other important transit streets, in Vancouver or elsewhere.