Human Transit

the "cities vs suburbs" trope

We all have too much to read, so here's a tip to save time.  Whenever any article (such as this one) cites information about incorporated US cities as a basis for any claim about trends in the culture, quit reading.  US big-city boundaries are irrelevant to most people's lives, and to anything else that matters about our culture, economy, or destiny. 

Christopher Leinberger makes this point in a New Republic article recently, usefully expanded on by Sarah Goodyear at Grist.  Leinberger argues that "city" and "suburb" is no longer a useful opposition, and that what really matters are walkable urban places vs drivable suburban ones.  True enough, but replacing city with it's near-synonym urban doesn't take us far.   "City" and "suburb" are rich, evocative, and succinct words.  The word city in particular must be fought for, redefined in ways that defend its profound cultural heritage.  The word has an ancient and clear lineage from Latin, one that forms the basis for the word citizen, not to mention civic and civilization.

Greek and Roman political theory was all about the city, in a sense of that word that we can recognize today: groups of people living together in a small space for reasons of security and economy, but also the  site of humanity's cultural and intellectual development.  City is a word of enormous evocative power to capture a range of ideas that drive urbanism.  Leinberger himself can't describe what really matters without using the word urban, which evokes a similar history and resonance.

What Leinberger is really complaining about are discussions of data about incorporated US cities, which are a very narrow and specific problem.  A few of the oldest US cities (San Francisco, St. Louis) have coherent boundaries that describe real cultural and demographic units, but many are bizarre shapes of purely historical interest.

Nobody who understands the lived experience of Los Angeles would claim that the City of Los Angeles is a useful or interesting demographic unit.  While the city excludes a great deal of dense inner-city fabric close to downtown, it has long balloonlike tentacles extending north to take in the whole San Fernando Valley and also south to grab the port of San Pedro.  It also contains a good deal of near-wilderness in the Santa Monica Mountains.

The tentacular, pockmarked, pulsating blob that we call the City of Los Angeles is the map of a long-ago war over water and power.  The only people who care about it today are those who work for city government or serve as its elected officials, plus a few who've considered city taxes and services as a reason to locate in the city or out of it.

Americans should notice, too, that bizarre and misleading city boundaries are largely a US phenomenon.  Europe, Australia, and New Zealand generally allow central (state or national) governments to draw the boundaries of their local governments, so these boundaries usually (not always) end up making some kind of sense.  (With the exception of Queensland, Australian local government areas are too small to have much influence, but that's a different problem.)

As Leinberger says, we need a distinction between walkable urban communities and drivable suburban ones, and American city limits are useless for understanding that distinction.  But the word city -- whose Latin ancestor meant "walkable urban" for millennia until about 1950 -- is still worth fighting for.  Legal US "city limits" are an imperfect and aspirational approximation of what cities really are, and what they really mean for the human project.  Despite their pedantic misuse by the likes of Cox and Kotkin, city limits have no authority to tell us what a city is, and why we should want to live in a real city or not.  The deep attractions and repulsions that we feel for big cities are the key to a longer and truer cultural understanding of what cities are, and of why the civic is the root of civilization.

watching our words: congestion charge or price or (shudder) tax

There seems to be a flurry of new interest in congestion pricing, partly under the pressure of tight budgets almost everywhere.  But journalists can muddy the waters by describing congestion pricing as either exploitative or punitive.

Last month, I was invited to contribute to a Sydney Morning Herald thinkpiece on the subject.  My contribution, the second of four pieces here, emphasises that congestion pricing is not about paying for congestion, it's about paying to avoid congestion.  The core point:

Suppose you announce that you'll give away free concert tickets to the first 500 people in a queue. You'll get a queue of 500 people. These people are paying time to save money.

Other people will just buy a ticket and avoid the queue. They're choosing to pay money to save time.

Today, we require all motorists to wait in the queue. When stuck in congestion, we are paying for the road space in time rather than in money.

Shouldn't we have a choice about this? Why are we required to save money, a renewable resource, by spending time, the least renewable resource of all?

Unfortunately, the Sydney Morning Herald framed the whole piece with the question, "Should motorists pay for the congestion they cause?"    The implication is that congestion pricing is punitive, that some citizens believe that other citizens should be punished for their behavior.  The question seems designed to sow misunderstanding and inflame rage.  To their credit, none of the four expert responses -- even the one from the auto club opposing the congestion charge -- really took this bait.

So there's a problem with the terms congestion charge and congestion price.  The terms sound like "paying for congestion," when the truth is the opposite, we're being invited to choose whether to spend money to avoid congestion.  A more accurate term would be congestion avoidance price or even better, congestion avoidance option.  But those are too many words. 

Should we call it a decongestion price? 

Real congestion pricing is about giving free and responsible adults a set of options that reflect the real-world geometry of cities.  The core geometry problem is this:

• Cities are, by definition, places where lots of people are close together.
• Cities are therefore, by defintion, places with relatively little space per person.
• Your car takes 50-100 times as much space as your body does.
• Therefore, people in cars consume vastly more of the scarce resource, urban space, than the same people without their cars -- for example, as pedestrians or public transit riders. 
• When people choose whether to drive, they're choosing how much scarce urban space to consume.
• If urban space is to be used like any other scarce resource, its price needs to be deregulated so that it is used efficiently. 

Congestion pricing is a form of deregulation.  It is the most libertarian concept imaginable.

There's another way to mess this up, and that's the term "congestion tax."  Here's the New Zealand Herald: 

Aucklanders may be levied to drive through increasingly congested streets in the absence of Government funding of the region's "strategic aspirations".

A paper released by Local Government Minister Rodney Hide before Auckland's first spatial plan due out in 11 days suggests raising revenue by charging motorists to drive around the Super City at peak times.

Hide makes clear that this isn't a congestion price intended to reduce congestion.  It's just another tax, intended to raise revenue.  So just to be clear: If it's congestion pricing, there are public transit (and bike-ped, and casual carpool) alternatives that enable people to get where they're going.  The congestion price cordons on the CBDs of London and Singapore work because there's abundant public transit to those places, so relatively few people absolutely have to drive into them.  The San Francisco Bay Bridge tolls have a congestion-pricing value because there's both abundant transit and casual carpool options for avoiding them. 

If, on the other hand, you're in a place where there's no reasonable alternative to driving -- such as large parts of Auckland -- then anything  that suppresses driving will suppress travel, and that means it will suppress economic activity.  And if you're just taxing economic activity, then this is really no different from sales taxes, Goods and Services Taxes (GST), or income taxes. By taxing economic activity, you're suppressing something that government and society should be encouraging.  That's not a libertarian idea; quite the opposite.

new year's resolution: no more coercion

If you want to find vigorous attacks on urbanism and sustainable transport by car-and-highway advocates, just Google for forms of the verb to coerce.  The most recent one you'll find is from the reliable Fred Barnes of the Weekly Standard.  Called "Coercing people out of their cars," it exploits an unfortunate comment by Secretary of Transportation Ray LaHood.  As Barnes puts it:

Last year, George Will zinged LaHood as the “Secretary of Behavior Modification” for his fervent opposition to cars. LaHood all but pleaded guilty. Steering funds from highways to bike and walking paths and streetcars, he said, “is a way to coerce people out of their cars.” His word, coerce.

Here's the source, reported on conservative blogs but not much elsewhere.  CNS News:

On May 21, [2009?] LaHood told reporters at the National Press Club that the “Partnership for Sustainable Communities’ his department had formed with the Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of Housing—sometimes known as the “livability initiative”--was designed to “coerce” people out of their cars.

If LaHood did describe the sustainable transportation project as coercion, even in jest, he should be more careful. Just as one doesn't joke about terrorism at airport security checkpoints, we shouldn't even joke about coercion in urban and transportation policy.  The word is a primitive grenade that can blow up any and all parties present.

The idea that urbanists and transit advocates are trying to coerce people to give up cars is one of the most treasured bits of pro-car rhetoric, because it feeds the association of cars with liberty.  Because so much urbanist work necessarily happens through government, the image of coercion also helps people think of government as intrinsically an oppressor, always a convenient refuge for the lazier kind of libertarian.

Google assembles a convenient list of definitions of to coerce.  Wikipedia's is typical of the range:

Coercion (pronounced /koʊˈɜrʃən/) is the practice of forcing another party to behave in an involuntary manner (whether through action or inaction) by use of threats, intimidation or some other form of pressure or force.

Almost all of the definitions refer to actual or threatened force.  

By those definitions, I can't think of anything that I have done, in 20 years in this business, that would qualify as coercion.  Certainly, I've never threatened any motorist with force, or advised anyone else to do so.  No, Barnes would respond, but I have advised governments to adopt policies that are coercive toward motorists.  For example, I advised the City of Minneapolis to restrict traffic on certain streets to create a functional transit mall, which they did in 2009.  They even changed the direction of certain lanes.  Something that used to be legal is now prohibited.  If someone drives his private car through the bus lanes (especially in their pre-2009 direction!) police might show up and, if all else fails, might even shoot at him.  Force!  Coercion!  Rhetorically, the coercion-victim wins.  Of course, the vehicle he was driving was also a deadly weapon, so he too was threatening force, but he's already declared victory, paid his citation with an air of martyrdom, written his angry article, and gone home.

In the new year, let us all resolve not to be coerced by the rhetoric of coercion, and never to use the term, even in jest, to describe our own project. 

In its impact on motorists, sustainable urbanism is all about accurate pricing.  We care about pricing in two separate and non-convertible currencies: money, and the limited road space of our cities. 

We experience urban congestion, and parking shortages, when road-space is inaccurately priced.  As I explored here, it's as though we were giving out free tickets to a concert; when you do that, you get lots of people waiting in line, spending time to save money.  Today's approach to pricing forces everyone to act like those frugal concertgoers, when in fact many could easily afford to spend some money to save time, and would prefer to do so if asked.  High Occupancy Toll (HOT) lanes are one experiment in that direction, while the downtown congestion charges of London, Stockholm, and Singapore are another.  On the pricing front, San Francisco's free-market approach, which may finally liberate motorists from endlessly circling the block seeking a space, is another breakthrough. 

The absurdity of underpricing scarce urban road space, and thus causing congestion and parking shortages, is simply this: It forces us all to save money, a renewable resource, by wasting time, the least renewable resource of all.

Of course, when a price goes up, some who could afford it now can't, and may blame the government.  This happens when the price of anything goes up; it will always happen as long as people hold exaggerated notions about the power of government over the economy.  To meet the needs of people who are dissuaded from driving by price, and ensure that they continue participating in the economy, road-pricing and parking-pricing strategies work only in the context of abundant and attractive travel alternatives, including transit.  This is part of the free-market justification for transit subsidies, in a big-city context, so long as there continue to be equal or greater subsidies for the motorist.

Reduction of government subsidies is not coercion.  Fred Barnes is the socialist in this debate, demanding government subsidy for his own chosen lifestyle but not for that of others.  As for those of us who support more accurate pricing -- of road space, parking, and all the other incremental costs of transport, including transit fares -- we are the libertarians!

should i call myself a "transit rider"?

Is there anything wrong with calling a group of people "transit users" or "riders"?  Is there anything wrong with calling yourself such a thing?

Michael Druker at Psystenance has been thinking about how we should talk about "people who travel by a certain mode." 

The fundamental attribution error leads us to interpret the behavior of others as reflecting something inherent about those people, more than is warranted. However, the language we use plays a role in that judgment as well. Our labels often describe who people are instead of what they’re doing, e.g. pedestrians, cyclists, transit users, or drivers. Each one of those terms gives us a category to which those people belong, making it easier to attribute their actions as reflecting some property of members of that category. That, in turn, makes it more difficult to progress towards a multimodal and sustainable transportation system.

I propose a different and deliberate use of language to mitigate this:

• Old: pedestrians. New: people on foot, or people walking.
• Old: cyclists. New: people on bikes, or people cycling.
• Old: transit users. New: people on transit.
• Old: drivers or motorists. New: people in cars, or people driving.

Sometimes we’re in cars, sometimes we’re on transit, sometimes we’re on bikes, and sometimes we’re on foot. But we’re all people, and our perspectives are much more similar than the facile modal categories lead us to believe.

Some people reading that are going to be reminded of the term "people of color," which rose in part from the ease with which, say, "black" as an adjective ("black people") tended to deteriorate into "black" as a noun ("the blacks").  "People of color" put the category term back where it belonged, in an adjective phrase, while also extending across all the non-white ethnicities.  Other "people who" and "people with" terms began to appear around the same time -- "people with AIDS" for example -- each addressing a situation where describing with a noun -- "AIDS victims," "AIDS sufferers," -- seemed to crush individuality and personhood. 

Of course, these terms were always easy to ridicule as "politically correct," partly because they were cumbersome.  The need for sheer brevity makes me doubt I will fully embrace "people cycling" as a fully satisfactory synonym for "cyclist," though when speaking I do look for ways to keep the focus back on "people" rather than on the technology of transport they're using. 

Still, Michael is basically right.  Reducing mode choice categories to nouns -- cyclists, motorists, riders, etc -- is potentially divisive.  These categories seem to give us the clarity we need to do any thinking at all, but clinging to them can blind us of all the ways that two cyclists can be different, and all the ways that this cyclist and that motorist may agree on far more than two cyclists do.  Ultimately, the only way to combat this is to notice it, and point out alternate ways of categorizing that can help open minds.  For example, you might think of "people who, in their ideal world, would like to get around on transit."  Some but not all existing transit riders are in that group.  But so are some motorists.

It's also worth noting that we don't just apply these reductive categories when describing others, we may also apply them to ourselves.  (The comments on Michael's post explore this in some detail.)  A "transit users group" may sound like a good political strategy, but if you identify yourself too much as a "transit user," and build your understanding of politics around that identity, you risk excluding the views of current non-transit users and thus prematurely narrowing your potential community of interest.  (The San Francisco Transit Riders Union, for example, embraces "current and future riders.")  Lots of people care about transit, and they want to be counted, too. 

the resonance of city names: what is "san francisco?"

In a fine think-piece on "golden ages" of urban creativity, Aaron Renn of the Urbanophile mentions San Francisco as a place that isn't having one:

If you want to enjoy the best a contemporary American city can offer, then San Francisco is your place. I’ll admit, it’s my favorite city in the US. But I don’t imagine that if I moved there (as opposed to Silicon Valley) that I’d get to witness any great historical happenings, or play any role in defining even that city’s urban future, much less creating America’s next great metropolis.

What does it mean to say that San Francisco "(as opposed to Silicon Valley)" is not likely to be a site of "great historical happenings"?  I don't want to argue the truth of this statement, because I'm not sure of it's meaning. What exactly do you mean by "San Francisco"?

In my recent post on the perils of average density, I noted how multiple meanings of a city name can undermine the apparent objectivity of facts.  If the Mayor of Toronto says "Toronto" he probably means the City of Toronto, but when Toronto's airport authority uses the same word they clearly mean the "Toronto" that they serve, namely the entire urban area. 

This is a fairly simple ambiguity, common to most big cities.  But California is much trickier, and the Bay Area is trickiest of all.  The name "San Francisco" is hard to apply to the entire Bay Area, because (a) the city is small compared to the region and (b) the city's isolated peninsular position within the region means that it is at some distance from the cities around it, so "San Francsiconess" can't just flow across the city limits and into the surrounding suburbs, as "Torontoness" and "Chicagoness" so easily do.

Yet if you say that "San Francisco" is strictly the small and distinctive City of San Francisco, you have deprived the name of much of its possible resonance.  This tightly bounded San Francisco is still a wonderful city, but it won't bear comparison to "Chicago" or "Los Angeles," because those names unfurl over large and amorphous space, both vertical and horizontal, without hard boundaries, and this unfurling is what gives these names their power, or more literally, their resonance.

Great city names are powerful, exciting, and motivating because they resonate: they set off an echo between different meanings of the name, especially the larger and smaller areas that it can connote.  The emotive power of the word "Chicago" lies in the way it can mean the entire metroplex, or the city of Chicago, or just the dramatic highrise skyline of the Loop.  Indeed, what is a downtown skyline but a symbol of the entire city, a symbolism that's only possible because the skyline and the entire urban region can both be called  "Chicago"?  The relationship between the downtown skyline and the whole city is a resonance between these two possible meanings of the name.  And resonance conveys an impresson of power and depth.

San Francisco is denied this kind of resonance, because it's so hard to identify the city's name with a larger metro area, and nobody within 100 miles would try to.  Instead, locals refer to the Bay Area, a term that warns us not to expect a central symbolic city, since water bodies are naturally settled around their edges and not in the center.

So if you're going to talk about San Francisco "as opposed to" Silicon Valley or Berkeley or Skywalker Ranch any of the other centres of innovation nearby, you're slipping on a language problem arising from the local geography -- a pattern of settlement that prevents us from thinking of those nearby places as part of a greater, resonant, globally recognized "San Francisco."  And if you do this, you're missing a lot of information about how the whole Bay Area operates as a place, a culture, an engine of innovation.

You could also say that if you use "San Francsico" to refer only to the fairly small legal city, you're applying a tourist's reduction, like the one we routinely apply to Venice.  You're imagining a charming, historic, museumlike city conceived in isolation from its economic web.  And yes, once you define a city that way, it's easy to tell yourself that the next great urban revolution won't happen there.

In reality, San Francisco's qualities are intrinsic to the success of Silicon Valley, Berkeley, and all the other centres of excellence nearby.  Why do so many of the leading creative tech firms run huge fleets of commuter buses from San Francisco to their suburban campuses?  Because they need to attract the smartest and most creative young employees, and many of these people insist on living in San Francisco!  

It's easy to imagine that you're being generous when you lay out a manicured corporate campus with jogging trails and libraries and meditative wetlands where nobody will ever see a homeless person, but in fact, many of your most valuable employees would rather be stepping over homeless people to get to their urban lofts, and have more brilliant ideas amid live jazz in a seedy club than they do in the most well-designed campus offices.  That means, too, that a lot of Google's great thinking actually happens inside San Francsico, feeding off of all that it offers, and further blurring the lines between the city and its surrounds. 

Of course, I don't buy the assumption that even if San Francisco were an island it would be bereft of creativity.  But fortunately, San Francisco is not an island, and even if the name "San Francisco" can't unfurl over the whole Bay Area, the whole region still relies on San Francisco and can't be separated from it. Which is a very good thing.

avoiding car-centered language: a directive

In 1996, the City Administrator of West Palm Beach, Florida, Michael J. Wright, issued a directive to his staff on how to avoid biased language in the descriptions of transportation investments and policies.  It's four pages, sharply written, and may well be the smartest bureaucratic directive you'll ever read.  Here it is in PDF.  (Thanks to Peter Bilton at the Vorhees Transportation Center at Rutgers for pointing it out.)

It pulls no punches:

Much of the current transportation language was developed in the 1950's and 1960's. This was the golden age of automobiles and accommodating them was a major priority in society. Times have changed, especially in urban areas where creating a balanced, equitable, and sustainable transportation system is the new priority. The transportation language has not evolved at the same pace as the changing priorities; much of it still carries a pro-automobile bias. Continued use of biased language is not in keeping with the goal of addressing transportation issues in an objective way in the City.

Biased words, as identifed in the directive, include improvement, upgrade, enhancement, deterioration.  The problem with these words is that they imply an idea of good or bad that may not be universally shared.  So for example:

Upgrade is a term that is currently used to describe what happens when a local street is reconstructed as a collector, or when a two-lane street is expanded to four lanes. Upgrade implies a change for the better. Though this may be the case for one constituent, others may disagree. Again, using upgrade in this way indicates that the City has a bias that favors one group over other groups. Objective language includes expansion, reconstruction, widened, or changed.

And in the spirit of my last post:

Traffic is often used synonymously with motor vehicle traffic. However, there are several types of traffic in the City: pedestrian traffic, cycle traffic, and train traffic. To be objective, if you mean motor vehicle traffic, then say motor vehicle traffic. If you mean all the types of traffic, then say traffic.

The directive even nails the widespread misleading use of the word accident. 

Accidents are events during which something harmful or unlucky happens unexpectedly or by chance.  Accident implies no fault.  It is well known that the vast majority of [vehicular traffic] accidents are preventable and that fault can be assigned.  The use of accident also reduces the degree of responsibility and severity associated with the situation and invokes a inherent degree of sympathy for the person responsible.  Objective language includes collision and crash.

(Yes, crash sounds emotive while accident sounds cool, so it's easy to assume that accident is more objective or factual.  But sometimes the facts are emotive, and only an emotive word will accurately describe them.  The directive even notices that avoiding the emotive word can constitute an emotional bias in the other direction:   "Sheila was in a car accident!"  "Oh no, I hope she's OK!"  "Well, she killed three cyclists, so she's pretty upset!"  "How terrible!  I'll send her some flowers.")

If you have seen either (a) a better explanation of these principles or (b) a coherent refutation of them by a transportation authority, please post a link.  I'm aware of Todd Litman's comments on this (here, page 5) and I know it's come up in other academic literature.  Still, the West Palm Beach document is important because it's a directive.  Many people in transport bureaucracies are not comfortable with academic thought -- especially about linguistics, which is usually outside their training. But they are very accustomed to directives; they may find that the commanding tone of the West Palm Beach directive makes it easier for them to think about and react to. 

Read this document, discuss it, and forward it!  Yes, I know you've thought about this before, and maybe even written about it.  But remember: language evolves only through relentless repeitition!  Today, repetition is a matter of quoting, forwarding and linking.  So quote, forward, and link!

if you mean "car," say "car"

Here's a simple thing that anyone can do to improve the prospects of sustainable transportation.  When you hear a phrase that makes sense only from behind the wheel of a car, notice it, point it out, and don't get drawn into saying it yourself.

I could grab an example from anywhere, so here's one from an unsigned piece from the New Urban Network, a web publication of the New Urban News:

New York's Broadway, after giving up 3.5 miles of traffic lanes to pedestrians, bicyclists, and gathering spaces, is seeing its automotive traffic significantly decline.

Some say that Broadway should never have been allowed to cut its diagonal path across the Manhattan street grid to begin with. "The resulting three-way intersections can slow down cars and tie up the broader system," The New York Times observed Sept. 6 in an article available here.

New Urban News is a New Urbanist publication, so I'm sure the author isn't biased in favor of cars.  But still, the second paragraph is suggesting that the traffic problems caused by Broadway's three-way intersections could be an intrinisic problem with the very shape of the street.  That's true only if you're behind the wheel of the car, or in the back seat of a taxi.  If you make Broadway a great pedestrian street, presto, no more nasty three-way traffic intersections.  Problem solved.  And any urbanist will tell you that diagonal interruptions in a regular grid can be important sources of visual delight.

The New York Times article cited, by Michael M. Grynbaum, is a bit more careful:

Traffic planners at the city’s Department of Transportation say that less automobile traffic on Broadway is, in fact, a symbol of success, noting that the street’s awkward three-way intersections with other avenues created gridlock. “The mayor asked us to take a look at what we could to untangle the Gordian knot of traffic in Midtown,” Ms. Sadik-Khan said. “We’re making the network work like it was supposed to.”

But even here,  a "streets are for cars" bias slips in via the phrase "the street’s awkward three-way intersections with other avenues created gridlock" -- which is presented as a paraphrase of what the officials said.  If I'd been Grynbaum's editor I'd have insisted on something more precise like: "Using Broadway for heavy car traffic required awkward three-way signals that caused cascading delays."  Again, the problem isn't the shape of Broadway, but the use of Broadway as a heavy car street. 

Why pick on these New York examples when much more egregious cases can be found in any newspaper?  Because they show how easily a "streets are for cars" bias can hide in the language, even in the writing of people who hold the opposite view.    This, by the way, is yet another reason to hire literature students!  They'll notice how unwanted attitudes hide inside our language, especially in phrases that we write quickly as journalists under deadlines do. 

How to deal with this?  When I'm speaking or writing, I try to be aware of the dangers of quick and easy phrases that may contain values I don't want to convey.  It's hard to do as a journalist under a deadline, so let's put it as a slogan that simple enough to remember even then:

If you mean "car," say "car."

If you're describing a situation from the point of view of a car, say so explicitly.  Otherwise, you're implying -- whether you mean to or not -- that the car's point of view is so universal that it's just how real people see the world. 

 

 

the perils of succeeding "on average"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So remember:

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

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

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

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

unhelpful word watch: mass transit

A reader writes with my favorite kind of question: one that contains its own answer.  It's about the term mass transit:

unhelpful word watch: convenient

A Transport Politic post on US high-speed rail today contains this quotation from Amtrak CEO Joseph Boardman:

With high-speed rail, speed is not the issue.  Convenience and trip times are.

What does he mean by convenience?  For that matter, what do you mean by convenience?  I've been hearing this word in conversations about transit for more than 20 years, and in this context, I'm pretty sure it doesn't mean anything.