Human Transit

next week: san francisco and san jose!

While we wait for our house purchase to close, we're piling in the car for a road trip south to California.  Next Monday and Tuesday I'll do public presentations, discussions, and book signing in my old haunts the Bay Area, all sponsored by that great good-government institute, SPUR. 

For details on the San Jose event on June 4 click here! 

For San Francisco's event on June 5 click here!

If you're not a member of SPUR, they'll charge $10 at the door, but if you live in the Bay Area and are not a member of SPUR, well, what's wrong with you?  This is one of those rare civic organisations that thinks hard about current issues, provides reasonable analysis and courageous recommendations, and has achieved tremendous influence as a result.  Think of it as the calm, wise center around which the craziness of Bay Area politics revolves.

Hope you can come!

richard florida's supersized-airport theory

Richard Florida has discovered that as cities get bigger, airport traffic goes up even faster than population.  Here's his interpretation:

As with other features of metropolitan life, such as productivity or invention, airport passenger traffic increases disproportionately with population size. This is yet another manifestation of the overall acceleration of social and economic life that occurs in urban population centers—a phenomenon that has been dubbed “superlinear scaling.”

OK, but how much of this is what transport planners call the network effect?  Just as transit planners try to locate connection points at already-active locations, airlines are motivated to locate their hubs in major cities, so that the city and the hub support each other in creating the largest possible market for flights in and out.

For example, ask: what's the biggest US metro area that is NOT an airline hub?  Using this table  (and setting aside greater Riverside because its airport is run by Los Angeles) I get all the way down to San Diego, the 17th largest, before I encounter one where hub effects have little role in the airport's function.  So it doesn't surprise me that the scaling of big city airports is "superlinear" (a fancy word for "curving upward") compared to population, for the same reason that boardings at major transfer points in a transit network are superlinear compared to their immediate surroundings.

I could interpret this as a nice example of the very common tendency of people with social science training to overread demographics and economic indicators, while underreading the effects of network structure and how it determines the actual utility of transport service.  This issue comes up in transit all the time. 

But another interpretation, more to Mr. Florida's liking, would be that the connection in a transport network is not really all that different from the social connections that occur in urban life.  Florida is famous for documenting how all these connections rise in non-linear ways as there are more people around to connect, thus leading to hotspots of creativity and innovation. 

When I suggest that transit agencies use the word connection, instead of the dreary word transfer, it is to invoke exactly this association.  A transport connection isn't just an analogy with the social, cultural, and intellectual connections that drive innovation.  In its multiplying power it's almost the same thing.

a great new resource on european buses and bus rapid transit

In case you've missed the headlines, Europe's economy is even more shaky than that of the US, with the consequences of the global crisis overlaid with the crisis of the Euro.  So as in the US, it's time to do more with less. But they're doing a lot more with less, as you can see by browsing this great online resource, www.bhls.eu.

 

BHLS stands for "Bus at a High Level of Service" and it refers not just to Bus Rapid Transit but to a range of other high-frequency, branded bus products.  The site features case studies from all over Europe, and provides numerous PDF downloads where you can read about individual cases in more detail -- not just sexy photos but (Gotheburg above, Nantes at right) but also an explanation of the decision process that led to choosing a bus project over rail.

I'm trying to buy a house and pack up my office today, and will be at the Canadian Urban Transit Association conference in Victoria the next few days, so posting may be slow.  Fortunately, there's enough at www.bhls.eu to entertain anyone who cares about urban transit for days.

 

 

 

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

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

fort lauderdale: yet another triumph for multi-destinational networks

If your city is producing lousy outcomes with its bus services, are you sure it's because of the buses, or the drivers, or the sidewalks, or the degree of "transit oriented development", or that they're not streetcars?  Maybe it's because the network structure is obsolete.  A study team led by Gregory Thompson of Florida State looked at the success of Broward County Transit, which serves greater Fort Lauderdale.  Apart from a few special enclaves, Fort Lauderdale is unlikely to be high on anyone's list of urbanist paradises.  It has plenty of gridlock, plenty of pedestrian-hostile environments, and the usual abundance of oversized roads that seem only to generate more congestion.

Yet the hard-working if unappreciated Broward County Transit system is producing excellent outcomes through multidestinational design.  Instead of running a radial system into a single downtown, they decentralized to serve many destinations, through a network of routes making easy connections with one another. Eric Jaffe tells the story today in Atlantic Cities.

The whole case for this kind of design is in my book Human Transit, esp Chapter 12 and 13, but Thompson has been making it for years.  I'm impressed at how well it's working in not-especially-transit-friendly Florida metros.  Tallahassee took the plunge last year.

Obviously this is an issue close to my heart.  I came to consciousness as a transit planner during the decentralization of Portland's network in 1979-82, which created local pulse networks in each suburban area and culminated in the high-frequency grid that today covers most of the city.  Almost every network design I've ever done has helped to improve the multi-destinational utility of transit networks of all sizes.  Huge amounts of resistance have to be overcome.  But if they're designed well, they work. 

Finally, kudos to the folks at Atlantic Cities for coming back to this issue with one great story after another.  I'm not sure I've ever seen a major media outlet build up this degree of internal understanding about the fundamentals of transit network design -- a topic that's easily forgotten while obsessing about how cool technologies are.   Is any other American media outlet dealing with network planning issues so clearly?  Certainly not the New York Times, which publishes one story after another in which well-meaning platitudes about social needs are proposed as ways to change the facts of geometry.

paris: "the bus stop of the future"

Now that Paris has bus lanes on almost every boulevard, we can expect their transit agencies to continue investing and innovating around their frequent and popular bus services.  Today we get "the bus stop of the future," where designer Marc Aurel has packed in every convenience that will fit in the space, plus a few more.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Yes, it's still a bus shelter, but the idea is to make it both more useful and more of a social space.  People may come here for a range of things other than catching the bus, so that social interaction and the life of the street intermix with waiting to produce a more vibrant, interesting, and safe environment.  It's the same principle by which transferring passengers can help activate civic squares.  From Bati-journal (my rough translation):

This experimental station at boulevard Diderot is not just a place to wait for a bus. Covering an area of ​​80 m2, it was designed as a multi-purpose public space ... .  Here you can buy a bus ticket, get information about the neighborhood, have a coffee, borrow a book, play music, recharge a phone, buy a meal to take away, rent an electric bike, stay warm while eating a sandwich, or set up a bag on a shelf to do your makeup.  Variable light adjusts for day and night conditions. This project will also be the first urban test of materials and technological innovations ... such as ceramic furniture invented by Marc Aurel, and a sound design integrated into the fabric of furniture ...

I'm disappointed they didn't include an art gallery with some durable lendings from the Louvre, on the model of Louvre-Rivoli station. 

But seriously:  This is what a major bus stop or station might look like if you really, really valued buses, and also value the principle that uses of the street should be intermixed so that they contribute activation, interest, and safety to one another. 

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.

shock-shifting to transit, but not back

When some disruption or unusual event causes people to shift from driving to transit, many never shift back.  Ezra Klein  Brad Plumer reviews the evidence in the Washington Post. 

He's talking mostly about shifts caused by gas price shocks, but something similar happens in response to major disruptive events.  For example, the 2010 Olympic Winter Games in Vancouver caused a major burst in ridership -- obviously a mix of Olympic visitors and residents who were trying to avoid Olympic traffic.  But ridership never dropped to pre-games levels, and in fact, 2011 ridership was higher than 2010, despite the huge influx of Olympic visitors in 2010.

Klein goes on to lament that the very fuel price volatility that affects transit ridership also affects transit's funding, since federal funding is based on fuel taxes so they drop when fuel use drops.  Unfortunately, US local operating funding (which is the real crux of the matter) is even more volatile, depending typically on payroll or sales taxes.  Loss of a job equals a drop in payroll taxes, and causes drops in spending shortly afterward.  

I wonder if we'll eventually create something like a property tax surcharge that captures some of the benefits of transit to a location -- possibly based on some future, vastly more objective Transit Score or index of transit access.  Road funding could work the same way, but tending to fall more on the properties that benefit least from transit, since higher road use correlates to lower transit use.  Property taxes (inevitably passed through to renters) are the least volatile funding source around, and if you want your transit agency to work on real service improvement, instead of endless cycles of cuts, adds, and cuts, we'll have to find our way to a more stable funding solution.

one of my favorite book reviews so far ...

Here's a very thoughtful review of my book, from Colin Marshall of Los Angeles -- admittedly a city I've flattered a fair bit!

ever wanted to be that sexy voice on the train?

I certainly did, maybe still do.  Last week, the Washington Post's "Dr Gridlock" asked readers to call in to record their rendering of the following sentence:

“Next station L’Enfant Plaza. Transfer to the Orange and Blue lines. Doors open on the right.”

An odd choice for an audition text, since it raises all these American anxieties about Frenchness, manifested in the endless question of how frenchly to pronounce French names ...