Just did a fun 20-minute segment on Oregon Public Broadcasting’s Think Out Loud program, talking about:
At the end, he also drew me out on a local street-naming debate. Anyway, the whole thing is here.
We’re delighted to announce two new sessions of our “inexcusably fun” two-day intensive course in public transit network design. This course, which we at Jarrett Walker + Associates have been teaching since 2011, is a chance to work intensively with me and our team to explore the challenges of designing transit networks in various geographies and situations. It’s not just for budding transit planners, but also for advocates, executives, city planners, developers — anyone who wants to better understand how transit network planning works, and how it can support their own goals for their cities. Read all about the course here.
Our 2026 offerings, both led by Jarrett Walker, will be:
AICP Credit is available. As usual, the Portland course is cheaper because we’re based there so we don’t have travel costs.
For questions about registration or to request an invoice, please contact Melissa Tverberg of our team, melissa at jarrettwalker dot com.
Please spread the word!
My book Human Transit, revised in 2024, is your friendly, readable guide to how public transit planning works, and the choices that communities have to think about. Whether you’re an advocate, a transit professional, or someone working in an adjacent field like urban development, this book will make you confident in your decisions and conversations about public transit in your community.
If you’ve been meaning to look at my book Human Transit, or know somebody who would benefit from it, now’s your chance. It’s half price at Princeton University Press website until June 6.
You can read the preface and Table of Contents here. You can also read the introduction from the first edition here. Buy it here at half price until June 6! Please spread the word!
[En 2016 visité Barcelona por primera vez. Esta es una traducción española del artículo que escribí entonces.]
Barcelona tiene el tipo de sistema de transporte público que impresiona a un norteamericano a primera vista: un metro grande, autobuses agradables con numerosos tramos de carril exclusivo, dos funiculares prácticos, trenes de cercanías y dos redes de tranvía…
Es la forma habitual en que la mayoría de la gente resume un sistema de transporte, ¿verdad? Una lista de las tecnologías en uso, que no dice nada sobre lo fácil que es moverse por la ciudad. ¿Te has fijado en que, cuando dije «dos redes de tranvía», sonó al principio como si eso fuera mejor que una sola red de tranvía? Lo contrario es cierto, por supuesto, y de hecho están trabajando para convertirlas en una sola.
Al final, lo que importa no es la diversidad de tecnologías, sino lo fácil que es llegar a los lugares, y esto requiere otro tipo de turismo de transporte. En lugar de ir a una ciudad para maravillarse con las tecnologías —prefiriendo los tranvías a los autobuses sin importar a dónde van, y subiéndose a cada funicular, góndola y curiosa barquita— yo prefiero el turismo de acceso: intento ir realmente a lugares y experimentar lo fácil o difícil que resulta. (Sigo experimentando la casualidad afortunada, claro, pero esta destaca con mayor nitidez cuando se ve contra el fondo luminoso de la intención.)
Solo viajar con intención me hizo notar la rareza del metro de Barcelona. El mapa completo de la agencia de transporte está aquí, y a continuación incluyo una sección. También puede gustarte la versión más austera de Jug Cerovic aquí. La red es complicada en parte porque muestra líneas de metro (L), líneas de tranvía (T) y líneas regionales de cercanías (R), pero para este propósito me centraré en las líneas de Metro (L).
Un poco de matemática sencilla: en una red en cuadrícula óptima, las líneas siguen más o menos rectas y se cruzan entre sí más o menos perpendicularmente. En esta red cambias de dirección haciendo un transbordo. La perpendicularidad maximiza el área de la ciudad a la que cada transbordo te puede llevar.
Las cuadrículas de transporte pueden ser estándar o polares, pero casi siempre son alguna fusión sutil de ambas. La cuadrícula polar surge cuando hay un gran centro en el que la red converge lógicamente, porque los destinos deseables se concentran allí más densamente.
Una vez que reconoces estos patrones, notas lo coherentes que son la mayoría de las redes de metro. Incluso aquellas que son apaños hasta cierto punto suelen haber sido remendadas todo lo posible para crear alguna fusión apropiada de los efectos de cuadrícula radial y estándar.
Pero entre los metros que he conocido, la red del metro de Barcelona parece inusualmente caótica en su estructura, dando a menudo la impresión de serpentear sin intención.
En el mapa de arriba, por ejemplo, fíjate en la línea azul intermedia que entra en el área del mapa por la izquierda en la estación de Pubilla Cases. Esta es la Línea 5. Atraviesa el mapa con resolución de izquierda a derecha, pero a dos tercios del camino a través de la ciudad, en La Sagrera, parece distraerse, girando de repente 120 grados y dirigiéndose hacia las colinas en la parte superior del mapa.
La red también está llena de líneas que se encuentran tangencialmente en lugar de cruzarse. Por ejemplo, aquí tienes un diagrama solo de las Líneas 5 y 2 (azul oscuro y morada, respectivamente) tocándose tangencialmente en la estación (no señalada) de la Sagrada Família:
Hay numerosos casos como este. En cada caso tendrías una red más coherente —más capaz de conectar a más personas con más destinos y con menos transbordos— si las líneas intercambiaran trayectos en este punto, cruzándose una sobre la otra en lugar de tocarse tangencialmente.
De nuevo, la mayoría de los metros son apaños hasta cierto punto. Es poco probable que alguien vivo hoy en Barcelona merezca culpa por los extraños patrones del flujo del metro. Siempre hay razones históricas para que las cosas hayan terminado como están. Si quieres seguir esa historia, aquí tienes un vídeo entretenido.
Pero mientras tanto: ¿tienes en la cabeza alguna idea recibida del estilo de «los metros europeos son tan fantásticos que ¿por qué iba alguien a coger el autobús?»? Recuerdo cuando muchos europeos solían creer esto, pero hoy en día la mejora de las redes de autobús es una de las tendencias europeas más importantes. La necesidad de una red de autobús racional puede ser aún más urgente si tu metro va dando tumbos como un borracho, incapaz de seguir una línea recta.
Lo estupendo de la nueva red de autobuses de Barcelona, entonces, no es solo que sea una cuadrícula, sino que de verdad quiere que sepas que es una cuadrícula, y lo rectas que son las líneas que la componen:
Las nuevas líneas tienen números precedidos por «H» o «V» para «horizontal» o «vertical». (Vertical es bastante literal: no solo arriba-abajo en mapas estándar como este, sino también hacia arriba a las colinas o hacia abajo al mar.) Estas líneas frecuentes están además numeradas en secuencia lógica a lo largo de la ciudad, de modo que, a medida que conoces la red, un número te recuerda aproximadamente dónde se sitúa cada línea dentro de la cuadrícula y, por tanto, para qué es probable que sea útil.
La idea es que la gente debería poder mantener una noción de toda la red en cuadrícula en la cabeza. Si simplemente recuerdas qué significan H y V, y la secuencia en la que están numeradas, dispones de una enorme cantidad de información sobre todo el sistema. Cuando ves cualquier autobús numerado de esta manera, tienes un sentido general de hacia dónde va, o al menos a lo largo de qué eje. Y cuando oyes el número de una ruta de autobús, puedes formarte fácilmente una idea general de dónde se encuentra.
Hay libertad en este tipo de legibilidad. Podrías medirla en términos del número de lugares útiles a los que puedes llegar dividido por los bytes de información que necesitas recordar para tener un mapa funcional de cómo llegar allí. Cualquiera que haya navegado por Manhattan conoce la diferencia entre la cuadrícula regular en la mayor parte de la isla (alta utilidad/byte) frente al laberinto sin patrón de calles en el extremo sur (baja utilidad/byte). Las ciudades europeas tienden a ser especialmente difíciles en este sentido.
Hablo mucho de la red de autobuses de Barcelona porque es uno de los mejores ejemplos de la divulgación de la legibilidad a escala de red, una idea casi inaudita en otras partes del mundo. (Quizá relacionado, también tiene un artículo en Wikipedia que la describe con el mismo respeto que cabría esperar al hablar de una red de metro.)
Barcelona pudo dar con su red de autobuses en cuadrícula, en parte, porque las cuadrículas legibles y orgullosas ya eran su idea de planificación urbana más célebre. La mayoría de los trazados de calles europeas carecen en gran medida de cuadrícula y son irregulares. Pero en una visión sistematizadora rival de la de Haussmann en París, la Barcelona del siglo XIX adoptó un único patrón en cuadrícula para su rápida expansión alrededor del núcleo medieval.
Foto de Alhzeiia vía Wikipedia
A este plan se le suele llamar el distrito del Eixample, pero es realmente un principio más que un lugar. (La palabra catalana eixample significa «extensión» o «área ampliada».) La nueva cuadrícula recorre la ciudad a lo largo de unos 7 km (4,5 mi). Por tanto cubre muchos barrios, uniéndolos no solo con un trazado de calles perfectamente regular, sino también con el detalle más distintivo de la cuadrícula: las esquinas «achaflanadas» que crean pequeños espacios cuadrados en cada gran intersección.
Ahora que Barcelona está empezando a cerrar muchas de estas calles al tráfico rápido de coches, estos pequeños rombos serán los próximos grandes espacios públicos en una ciudad ya rica en ellos. Y una gran red de autobuses, cuyo patrón en cuadrícula a escala de toda la ciudad puedes recordar, y que para justo a la vuelta de la esquina, te llevará allí.
Gracias a mi amigo barcelonés Andreu Orte por el contexto, incluido el diagrama de las Líneas 5/2.
You can’t go far in transit conversations without hearing the terms “choice rider” and “captive rider.” The first refers to someone who has a car available and chooses transit instead, while the second refers to someone who has no choice but to use transit.
Anytime you hear someone using these terms, please point them to this post. For more detail, please see the full argument in my book Human Transit (revised edition of 2024). It’s at the end of Chapter 4. But briefly:
These terms are legacies of 1970s modeling, which required many simplifying assumptions to fit the limited computing power of the time. They reflect the class prejudices of the time, but they have never had any scientific basis. The underlying idea is that “captive” riders will use the service no matter how bad it gets, and that the path to growth is to attract the “choice rider.” This has been disproven over and over.
Transit succeeds or fails by recognizing that most people are in the middle, with some choices and some constraints. That means almost most people can be gained or lost as a rider depending on whether the service is useful to them. Some of the late 2010s ridership loss in the US was among riders who’d be categorized as “captive.” Service was too useless for them so they bought cars. Is this a surprise? If you call people captives, and reflect that view of them in your services, it makes them try to escape!
These terms also do political harm: “Captive rider” is insulting to those who live good lives without cars, while “choice rider” is misleadingly flattering to the most fortunate. The latter term also encourages elite projection, the tendency of very fortunate people to assume that they are the customer for whom transit should be designed, even though there are not enough of them to matter.
When I talk about this, people often suggest other terms for these categories. But the problem is the binarism itself. When you try to define a spectrum by its extremes — especially when talking about something as emotive as social class — you tend to exaggerate differences and encourage polarization, because these terms suggest that everyone is in one of two categories instead of scattered along a spectrum. Using different words can make it less offensive but no less polarizing. So when I have to talk about this, I tend to speak of lower-income riders without cars as somewhat dependent but I would never say captive or refer to transit dependents as a noun. For the other end of the spectrum I often use the word fortunate or to soften and emphasize the spectrum, relatively fortunate.
“Choice” and “captive” sound scientific but they actually serve to insinuate that some people are just more important than others. I will continue to work to strip these terms from the language. Every potential transit rider has some choices, and every one of them matters.
(Read in English here.)
Mi reciente artículo sobre el sistema de Bus Rápido de Bogotá, TransMilenio, terminó con un texto sobre la extrema complejidad de los patrones de servicio, y el papel que esta complejidad juega en los muchos problemas de los que la gente se queja. Resulta que existe un diagrama elaborado con mucho cariño y detalle de todos los patrones de servicio de TransMilenio. (Es obra de alguien que se hace llamar el Clarion Project, pero supongo que no se trata de la fundación estadounidense del mismo nombre.) Prepárate:
El mapa completo en todo su esplendor está aquí. (Haz clic para que aparezca la imágen, y otra vez en la imágen para toda la detalle.)
Resulta abrumador, pero sigue siendo realmente útil, al menos para los amantes de los mapas como yo. Ojalá lo hubiera tenido cuando estuve en Bogotá a principios de este año. De hecho, ojalá TransMilenio lo publicara, aunque solo fuera para quienes encuentran útil este tipo de representación.
Pero aun si no eres una persona de mapas, necesitamos estas imágenes para ilustrar el problema. Al identificar cuidadosamente cada patrón de recorrido y cada parada, el mapa representa honestamente lo complicado que realmente es TransMilenio, y no es posible arreglar un problema si no se tiene una buena imagen de él.
¿Por qué es TransMilenio tan complicado? ¿Qué problemas podrían resolverse al simplificarlo? Mi artículo sobre eso está aquí.
My recent writing on Bogotá’s Bus Rapid Transit system, TransMilenio, ended with an article on the extreme complexity of the service patterns, and the role this complexity plays in the many problems that people complain about. It turns out that there is a lovingly detailed diagram of all of TransMilenio’s service patterns. (It’s by someone calling themselves the Clarion Project, but I’m guessing this is not the US-based foundation of the same name.) Brace yourself:
The whole map in all its glory is here.
It’s overwhelming, but it’s still really useful, at least to map people like me. I wish I had had this when I was in Bogotá earlier this year. In fact, I wish TransMilenio published it, just for those who find this kind of representation useful.
But even if you’re not a map person, we need this images to illustrate the problem. By carefully identifying every routing pattern and every stop, the map honestly represents how complicated TransMilenio truly is, and it’s not possible to fix a problem if you don’t have a good picture of it.
Why is TransMilenio so complicated? What problems could be solved by making it simpler? My piece on that is here.
Have you heard about our “inexcusably fun” two-day courses in transit network design? We have two sessions coming up this year:
1. July 30-31 in Portland, Oregon
2. October 1-2 in Chicago, Illinois (just before the APTA Transform conference)
You can read about the courses here.
Keep an eye on this blog (you can subscribe using the button at right)for registration and cost info, which will be coming in the next week or two. Meanwhile, save the dates, and please share!
Vancouver, Canada is a great transit city not just because it pioneered driverless rapid transit, or because of its commitment (somewhat enforced by geography) to a dense and walkable urban form. It’s also a great transit city because of great bus service planning.
Vancouver area transit agency TransLink is out with a new plan for the next 15 years of bus service growth in the densest and most transit oriented part of the region, including all of the City of Vancouver itself. They call it the Burrard Peninsula Area Transit Plan. It’s worth perusing, but here, I just want to flag one image that may be of global interest:
The black lines are SkyTrain, the driverless rapid transit system, including its newest extension. The grey and blue lines are existing bus routes. The purple are new bus routes they propose to add over the next 15 years.
By the time this plan is implemented, most of the blue and grey lines on this map will be frequent: every 15 minutes or better all day. Many of them already are. This map shows the current Frequent Transit Network.
Why is frequency in a grid pattern so valuable? Every time two frequent lines meet, especially at a right angle, the result is an explosion of usefulness, because each line becomes useful to get to all the points on both lines. In an ideal frequent grid network, you can go from anywhere to anywhere with a single transfer on an L-shaped path. It’s such a powerful concept that many cities whose street networks are not especially gridlike still try to achieve that effect. I discuss the example of San Francisco in Chapter 13 of my book Human Transit.
A grid works best when everyone can walk to either a north-south frequent line or an east-west frequent line. For that reason, Vancouver transit planners have always ruminated over the gaps in their grid, mostly cases where east-west lines are too far apart. The new purple lines fill ALL of these gaps. Across all of Vancouver and western Burnaby, there will finally be service both north-south and east-west near everyone.
Of course, what makes this possible is not just the grid of streets, but the rising density across so much of this area. Vancouver housing is not just the famous 40+ story towers, which are mostly clustered downtown and around rail stations, but many small apartment buildings or large homes that are being divided into smaller units. Vancouver-based experts such as Brent Toderian are promoting “gentle density” or the “missing middle”, encouraging more development of 3-7 stories or so that fits better with the historic character of neighborhoods. This transit grid helps expand the range of places where that density is livable.
Again, the regular grid pattern of arterials makes the transit grid easier, but you can get grid effects in any city of reasonable density and walkability. Just maximize the number of situations where frequent lines cross at right angles, expanding the usefulness of both lines. Then build stuff at those intersections!
Vancouver’s agency TransLink has been a big part of my career. I was an on-site consultant there for a year in 2005-6 and also for the summer of 2011, and our firm continues to work for them now and then. During my on-site time I did a lot of work on helping them formalize and strengthen the frequent transit network concept, and also build the grid. It’s great to see this idea continuing to prosper.
I enjoy Europe as much as the next urbanist, but years of living and traveling there never uprooted one of my most unpopular opinions: Streets numbered in sequential order are a wonderful thing for the cities that have them. I was recently in Bogotá, Colombia and found that, while the city is as overwhelming as you’d expect a Latin American megacity to be, and the transit system is deeply confusing, there is a deep, comforting legibility beneath it all. Most streets are numbered, either as carreras (north-south) or calles (east-west). So most addresses are a simple pair of coordinates that give you a good idea of where a place is in the city. Wherever you are in Bogotá, you have a good sense of where everything else is, and how far away it is. They do this even though their local street networks aren’t always very gridded. The numbers create a larger web of legibility that always orients you, even if your immediate surroundings are confusing.
Salt Lake City and Manhattan are two other famous examples. What New Yorker hasn’t appreciated how you can quickly figure how far it is from 100th St 1st Avenue to 14th St & 9th Ave?
Here in the US, the scandal around César Chávez’s grave sexual offenses in the 1960s will require the rapid renaming of many streets names for the United Farm Workers leader. Here in Portland, our 39th Avenue was renamed César E. Chávez Blvd in 2009, so many people remember the old name.
Now that the name will almost certainly change again, I ventured a letter to the editor to the Oregonian advocating for returning to “39th Avenue.” They had me cut about half of it, so I thought I’d share the full thing here. I hope it’s relevant to you if numbered streets are part of your city’s heritage.
Call it 39th Avenue
Jarrett Walker
What should Portland do about César E. Chávez Blvd, which was 39th Avenue until 2009? The understandable first reaction is to rename the street for Dolores Huerta, Chávez’s partner in the United Farm Workers (UFW) who has now accused him of raping her in 1966. It feels like a simple way to continue honoring the history of the UFW now that Chavez’s name is toxic, by centering a female leader who was probably as important to the UFW’s achievements as he was.
But before we do that, we should think for a moment about what streetnames are for. They are for helping people navigate the city. And while Portland is used to a mix of names and numbers, numbered streets do that job especially well, because they tell you where the street is. They reduce the amount of information a person has to know to get on with their lives.
Nobody will go into the streets chanting in defense of numbered avenues, but our city would be much harder to navigate if every avenue had a name instead. Not impossible, bur harder. These costs tend to fall on people we don’t think about or hear from: recent immigrants and other newcomers, as well as visitors.
Naming a street for Chávez was obviously a mistake, based on what we know now, but renaming 39th Avenue was a different and equally important mistake, because the existing name was so useful. When we changed it, we made the city measurably less legible, which is to say, less welcoming. Maybe just by a little, but it made a difference.
There’s another good reason to hesitate before naming things for people, and it also applies to putting up statues of people. We can never know when a human hero will disappoint us. Historians dig up new things all the time, changing our view of past heroes we thought we knew. It would be folly to assume that in this moment when everyone is recoiling in horror at the revelations about Chávez, we know everything we will ever need to know to decide who deserves to be honored by a street name.
We should always be reluctant to change street names, not just because it’s expensive but because it adds to the work that ordinary people must do to go about their lives. Then there’s the specific burden on the people living or running businesses on the street. In this case, there’s no way to protect them now from a second change of name. Chávez has to go. But out of respect for people on the street who have gone through two name changes, we should at least choose a name that we know won’t have to change again, no matter what we learn about history in the decades to come.
Numbered avenues are a good thing, and so are streets named for plants or animals or landscapes. Human heroes may disappoint us, but math and nature never will.
