Category Archives: Transit

The Need for Speed

A streetcar speeds by in Toronto. CC image from Matthew Burpee.

A streetcar speeds by in Toronto. CC image from Matthew Burpee.

Jarrett Walker has a wrap-up post on his debate with Patrick Condon on the need for speed in urban transit.   Condon is a professor of sustainability, not a transportation planner or engineer, and his view is that we need to improve the experience of sustainable transit and not enable the sprawling lifestyles of yesterday, no matter what mode we use to get to and fro.  Jarrett sums up Condon’s thesis in an earlier post:

Condon heads the Design Centre for Sustainability inside UBC’s Department of Architecture and Landscape Architecture, and is the author of the very useful book Design Charrettes for Sustainable Communities. In his 2008 paper “The Case for the Tram: Learning from Portland,” he explicitly states a radical idea that many urban planners are thinking about, but that not many of them say in public.  He suggests that the whole idea of moving large volumes of people relatively quickly across an urban region, as “rapid transit” systems do, is problematic or obsolete:

The question of operational speed conjures up a larger issue: who exactly are the intended beneficiaries of enhanced mobility? A high speed system is best if the main intention is to move riders quickly from one side of the region to the other.  Lower operational speeds are better if your intention is to best serve city districts with easy access within them and to support a long term objective to create more complete communities, less dependent on twice-daily cross-region trips.

It’s an interesting question, and it’s having a significant if not always visible impact on transport planning.  Darrin Nordahl’s 2009 book My Kind of Transit, reviewed here, also praises slow transit; he makes that case in the same way you’d advocate for “slow food,” by pointing to the richness of experience that comes only from slowing down.

The implication is clear, as Jarrett states in the title of his posts – “is speed obsolete?”  Jarrett’s counter-point, however, is that speed matters, and it matters a great deal:

So here’s my main point:

Rapid transit is a far more viable “augmenter” of pedestrian trips because its travel speeds, and thus the trip-lengths for which it’s suited, lie entirely outside the pedestrian’s range, whereas the streetcar overlaps the pedestrian range substantially.

The rapid transit and pedestrian modes play entirely complementary roles, while streetcar and pedestrian modes have partly overlapping roles — a less efficient arrangement.  You’ll walk further to a rapid transit station, but once you’re there you can move at a high speed that makes that extra walk worthwhile […]

Rapid transit’s speed also exceeds typical cycling speed, by a large enough factor that it makes sense to cycle to the station.  So rapid transit works with cycling to a degree that local stop transit, such as the Portland Streetcar, just doesn’t.

Obviously, the usefulness of rapid transit requires a longer trip length, so rapid transit should be considered only for relatively long corridors.  As several commenters have mentioned, the problem with Condon’s view may be in the corridors to which he’s applied it, including Vancouver’s Broadway corridor, where he’s presented it as an alternative to a SkyTrain extension.

Streetcars and rapid transit are different tools, each suited for different jobs.  I’d argue that some of the value in streetcars is precisely because they can fill in the gaps of a hub-and-spoke system like Metro, while the aforementioned Broadway corridor in Vancouver probably should be one of the spokes. The question is then one of how you use that tool.  One thing to remember about Portland’s streetcar is that the station spacing is very close, especially when you consider Portland’s short blocks. Small adjustments, such as wider station spacing and some signal priority treatments could greatly improve performance and reliability.

DC’s proposed streetcar system can take better advantages of the streetcar’s strengths as a mode.  Yonah Freemark’s excellent graphics on DC’s network show how streetcars can fill in some of the crosstown gaps that exist in the current Metro network. However, streetcars certainly are not and cannot be a substitute for Metro’s utility to the city and the region.  Yonah also chimes in on the subject over at The Next American City:

By advocating streetcars, Condon is implicitly arguing that people should stay in their neighborhoods for most of their trips; that they should find work, go shopping, and be entertained in their near surroundings. If people have to rely on slow transit, they simply won’t have the time to be making trips across the region. (Or, of course, they might switch to driving their private automobiles, which would defeat the point of the transit investment entirely.)Though this approach would likely produce better ecological outcomes (less energy consumption per person as a result of reduced transport mileage), it would exacerbate spatial inequalities. Because jobs (especially well-paid ones) tend to be concentrated in the favored quarter, poorer inhabitants living far away from that zone would be isolated from employment opportunities and thus be deprived of chances for income growth. Or they would face devastatingly long commutes.

Stepping outside of the fiscally constrained world, the obvious answer is that both rapid and circulator systems serve different and complimentary needs.  The economic implications (for a city’s economy, rather than just real estate development) are the really interesting – Walker’s commenter ‘micasa’ highlights Jane Jacobs and the very nature of cities:

What does the venerable Jane Jacobs have to say about the notion of a “city of neighbourhoods”?

“Whatever city neighborhoods may be, or may not be, and whatever usefulness they may have, or may be coaxed into having, their qualities cannot work at cross-purposes to thoroughgoing city mobility and fluidity of use, without economically weakening the city of which they are a part. The lack of either economic or social self-containment is natural and necessary to city neighborhoods – simply because they are parts of cities.”

Jacobs is describing what does, and always has, made cities “tick”.  To be against intra-urban mobility is to be against the very proposition of the city.  I don’t think we can afford to let the threat of climate change, peak oil, or whatever, destroy that. We may need radically different, more sustainable cities in the future if we are going to survive, but rest assured, we will still need cities. Not agglomerations of inward focused neighbourhoods, but cities.

I’m not suggesting that the debate over transit technologies in this particular case ought to be closed. But I am suggesting that Condon’s particular argument for surface rail – that it encourages local living in a neighbourhood setting – is fundamentally anti-urban.  A better argument, and one that actually addresses the urban mobility issue, is that perhaps surface rail is a cheaper solution that can be designed “fast enough” to allow those neighbourhoods on the West Side (including UBC) to cohere with the rest of the region without the necessity of cars (and vice-versa). But that’s not the argument as presented.

Is speed obsolete?  I’d say no.  To micasa’s last point, surface rail can indeed be designed to be ‘fast enough’ to address urban mobility, particularly when paired with an existing rapid transit system (such as DC’s Metro).

Value capture & private transit financing

NoMA Development. CC image from bankbryan.

NoMA Development. CC image from bankbryan.

Jarrett Walker’s weekend links post directed me to this article in The Atlantic by Chris Leinberger, asking if we might return to the days when private interests invested in transit as a means to facilitate real estate development.  Our own urban history is one of linked transportation and land use planning, accomplished through the market and real estate development:

How did the country afford that extensive rail system? Real-estate developers, sometimes aided by electric utilities, not only built the systems but paid rent to the cities for the rights-of-way.

These developers included Henry Huntington, who built the Pacific Electric in Los Angeles; Minnesota’s Thomas Lowry, who built Twin City Rapid Transit; and Senator Francis Newlands from Nevada, who built Washington, D.C.’s Rock Creek Railway up Connecticut Avenue from Dupont Circle in the 1890s. When Newlands got into the rail-transit business, he wasn’t drawn by the profit potential of streetcars. He was a real-estate developer, and he owned 1,700 acres between Dupont Circle and suburban Chevy Chase in Maryland, land served by his streetcar line. The Rock Creek Railway did not make any money, but it was essential to attracting buyers to Newlands’s housing developments. In essence, Newlands subsidized the railway with the profits from his land development. He and other developers of the time understood that transportation drives development—and that development has to subsidize transportation.

The result of these transportation and real estate investments were the now ubiquitous streetcar suburbs.  Leinberger proposes to return to that model, where the value added to a given area of land from transit can be re-captured through some means and invested in the transportation network.

When the streetcar/real estate barons controlled the entire system, such value capture was merely an exercise in accounting.  Additionally, the ease of developing greenfield sites on the rapidly expanding fringe of the city (Leinberger’s DC example of growth along Newlands’ Connecticut Ave rail line represents the first real urbanization of that space) makes things much simpler than dealing with already established urban environments.

With those key differences in mind, Jarrett throws a wet blanket over Leinberger’s nostalgia for the way things used to be. Rightly, Jarrett notes that we won’t be able to re-create the environment of those private real estate and transportation investments.

Nevertheless, Leinberger is talking about a broader concept – one of leveraging the value transit has and capturing that value as a means to finance the infrastructure itself.  Jarrett’s follow-up on the subject concurs – the same basic concept of capturing that value is the core of the issue.

Leinberger cites a of local example, the New York Avenue Metro station and the subsequent development of the NoMA area:

How would the private funding of public transit work? Most states already have laws in place that allow local groups of voters to create “special-assessment districts,” in which neighborhood property owners can vote to fund an upgrade to infrastructure by charging themselves, say, a onetime assessment, or a higher property-tax rate for some number of years. If a majority of the property owners believe they would benefit from the improvement, all property owners in that district are obligated to help pay for it. These districts can vote to fund new transit as well (potentially, the transportation-financing agency could even receive a minority-ownership stake in the district’s private property in return for building new transit). In the late 1990s, property owners paid for a quarter of the cost of a new Metrorail station in D.C. using this approach; after the station opened, an office developer told me he believed his investment was being returned manyfold.

The idea of a transit or government agency owning a stake in real estate development is another interesting idea – Hong Kong’s MTR Corporation both operates the rail system and develops/manages real estate around stations.   However, vesting this kind of authority in the government can be problematic, as mixing of eminent domain capabilities and the desire for private, transit-oriented real estate development can be a touchy subject, as some experience from Colorado shows.

Existing mechanisms for value capture, such as tax-increment financing (again, as Jarret notes) do work, but are limited.  As one of the commenters at The Atlantic notes, Leinberger’s example of an infill Metro station only works because the value of such a station is that it provides a link to an existing, robust transit network.  Such a mechanism wouldn’t work for starting a system from scratch.

The current battle over how to re-shape Tysons Corner is illustrative of many of the issues.  In Tysons, many land owners have agreed to tax themselves in order to add transit.  This works because they’ll be adding a linkage to Metro’s already robust and successful network.  At the same time, the initial plans aimed to maximize the return on the transit investment by substantially upzoning the area and increasing density – but now some parties are getting cold feet.

The other piece that Leinberger raises (as well as several commenters on Jarrett’s post) is reforming the federal piece of transit financing to be more responsive and agile in partnership with private capital:

We could hasten the process by making a much-needed change in federal transportation law. The federal government typically provides 20 to 80 percent of the money for local transportation projects (with local and state governments paying the rest). Yet federal funding of projects that involve private partners is extremely rare—in large part because federally funded projects typically take years to approve, and private developers usually can’t tie up their capital waiting for the government wheels to turn. Over the past few years, private corporations and foundations in Detroit raised $125 million to help build a light-rail line, and have been working for some time to secure federal funds to complete the project. Fixing federal transportation law to expedite transit projects would allow faster development at lower public cost.

None of these mechanisms is perfect, but each will likely be a part of future transit financing discussions – value capture, tax-increment financing, public-private partnerships, upzoning, etc.

Enjoy the journey

Metro-North Bar Car

The New York Times has a couple interesting pieces on transportation, one dealing with volcanoes and the other with booze.

First, the obligatory volcano story: Seth Stevenson thinks the eruption of Iceland’s Eyjafjallajökull and the subsequent shutdown of air travel across the continent offers an opportunity to really enjoy travel, rather than just flying over the landscape (and all the interesting stuff) at 35,000 feet.

In the five decades or so since jets became the dominant means of long-haul travel, the world has benefited immeasurably from the speed and convenience of air travel. But as Orson Welles intoned in “The Magnificent Ambersons,” “The faster we’re carried, the less time we have to spare.” Indeed, airplanes’ accelerated pace has infected nearly every corner of our lives. Our truncated vacation days and our crammed work schedules are predicated on the assumption that everyone will fly wherever they’re going, that anyone can go great distances and back in a very short period of time.

So we are condemned to keep riding on airplanes. Which is not really traveling. Airplanes are a means of ignoring the spaces in between your point of origin and your destination. By contrast, a surface journey allows you to look out on those spaces — at eye level and on a human scale, not peering down through breaks in the clouds from 35,000 feet above — from the observation car of a rolling train or the deck of a gently bobbing ship. Surface transport can be contemplative, picturesque and even enchanting in a way that air travel never will be.

Stevenson is so dedicated to this idea that he and his girlfriend successfully circumnavigated the globe without leaving the surface of the earth.

Stevenson’s admonishment of the jet age also stands in contrast to a piece in Sunday’s Washington Post, instructing us to ignore nostalgia for the golden years of airline travel.  Brett Snyder defends airline deregulation and the seemingly inevitable fees for carry on luggage as a further step into the purity of free markets.

I have a copy of TWA’s flight schedule from June 1, 1959. The first jets were being introduced into the fleet, but the vast majority of flights were still on propeller-driven aircraft. There’s an ad in the timetable for TWA’s low coast-to-coast “excursion fares.” Los Angeles to New York was only $168.40 roundtrip, if you traveled Monday through Thursday in Sky Club Coach class. That bargain is roughly equivalent to $1,225 today, before tax.

These fares weren’t valid on the fastest aircraft, so you had only two options, neither of which went nonstop. There was the 10:10 a.m. departure from Los Angeles that arrived in New York at 11:41 p.m. that night or the 7:55 p.m. departure that arrived at 10:56 a.m. the next day — more than 12 hours in the air. This was on a Lockheed Constellation, which, while beautiful, bounced you around in the weather at about 20,000 feet, far below the 35,000 to 40,000 feet you’d cruise at today. Even when the weather was good, that trademark prop vibration left you feeling like you were sitting on a washing machine for hours after you landed.

It is curious that Snyder chose to contrast today’s deregulated jet age with the age of turboprops – he could have easily picked a schedule from 1973 instead of 1959 – flying on a brand-new Boeing 747, rather than a dusty old Constellation – and at least been comparing jet-age apples to apples.

Still, the contrast between Stevenson’s nostalgia and Snyder’s rejection of is interesting, even if both are speaking toward different ends. Snyder writes about the benefits of market efficiency and competition for passengers, while Stevenson writes of enjoying the journey.

Perhaps there’s no greater way to enjoy the journey than to enjoy happy hour at the same time.  With that in mind, the New York Times writes about the endangered bar cars on Metro-North trains from Grand Central to Connecticut.

A new fleet of cars will soon replace the 1970s-era models now used by commuters on the Metro-North Railroad line heading to Connecticut. But with money tight, railroad officials said they could not yet commit themselves to a fresh set of bar cars, citing higher costs for the cars’ custom design.

“They’re being contemplated,” said Joseph F. Marie, Connecticut’s commissioner of transportation. “But we have not made any final decisions.”

Defenders of the boozy commute say it helps raise revenue: After expenses, bar cars and platform vendors made $1.5 million last year, up from $1.3 million in 2008. (Officials would not say if a bar car makes more money than a car with the normal number of seats.)

The Times note that fellow bar cars in Chicago, New Jersey, Westchester County, and the Long Island Railroad have all gone the way of the Dodo – though LIRR trains still occasionally have bar carts that make it on trains.

Modeled after the private club cars of the early 20th century, the Grand Central bar car sought to bring a perk of high society to the everyday commuting class. Still, the car’s current incarnation is more bar-around-the-corner than Tavern on the Green.

The cars tend to break down, air-conditioning is creaky, and commuters have been known to sneak duct tape aboard for impromptu repairs.

The article’s accompanying slide show has great historical images of the bar cars in action.

Street spaces over 100 years

For a nice Saturday morning post, David over at Greater Greater Washington points to a great video from San Francisco, circa 1905.  The video is shot from a cable car traveling down Market Street, San Francisco’s great axial street.  The clock tower of the Ferry Building terminates the view, all while pedestrians, horses, cars, streetcars, and just about every other mode of transport share in the controlled chaos of a street where all modes share space.

Our streets weren’t always so compartmentalized, with segregated spaces for cars, pedestrians, bikes, and so on.  David gives a hat tip to the Ludwig von Mises Institute for the video, where the free-market libertarians posting the comments attribute the resulting order to the power of markets to organize themselves.

Several, however, note the limitations of such an example as a case for removing all traffic restrictions and separations – changes in technology, mass, speed, and so on – as well as the fact that managed and planned order can indeed be more efficient than this type of organic order.  Another notes that some of the chaos may not have been completely authentic:

I saw this video before, with a commentator talking alongside it. The car that crosses the tracks and is barely missed by the streetcar is actually part of the filming team, asked to do that to keep things interesting. If you pay attention, you see him cutting accross [sic] many times, actually crisscrossing in front of the streetcar.

Yet another commenter points to an almost exact re-creation of the same video from 2005, this time making use of travel along the F-Market streetcar line.

The arrangement of street space, obviously, has changed.  So has San Francisco’s urban fabric, now complete with skyscrapers.  The older video just predates the devastating 1906 earthquake and fire, a major factor in re-shaping San Francisco’s urban form.  The comparison between the two is stark, both for the things that have changed, as well as for the things that have not.

Back at GGW, commenter Lance throws a few barbs about overhead wires obstructing vistas.  It’s worth noting that DC’s current streetcar plan does not have any long stretches of track along the main vista avenues, such as Pennsylvania Ave.  Under the idea of a hybrid solution and careful routing, we might not even need wires to cross those main vistas, yet alone run along them. It’s also worth noting that San Francisco’s wires in the 2005 video are not just for streetcars, but also electric trolley buses – a few of them are seen in the video itself.  Since trolley buses do not run on steel rails, they require two wires to act as a ground.

A day in the life of Metro

Metro’s definitely seen better days.  The Washington Post had a lengthy piece in Sunday’s edition documenting the massive problems facing the system: aging infrastructure, missing leadership, a broken safety culture, amongst others.  Metro’s been trimming the fat to balance budgets for a while, and it now looks like they’ve been cutting into the bone and impeding the system’s ability to function.  WTOP notes that several internal and external candidates for the soon-to-be vacant General Manager position have turned it down.

At the same time, the Post managed to document the role the system plays in the daily lives of those living and working in DC.

At the same time, one of WMATA’s new Federally-appointed board members, Marcel Acosta, is asking for input from riders over at Greater Greater Washington.  In looking at some of the responses in the comments, you can’t help but notice people speaking out about how Metro enables car-free lifestyles; how crucial good transit service is to urban life.

On profitability and privatization

CC image from AMagill on Flickr

CC image from AMagill on Flickr

Given Metro’s current and future budgetary issues (and the plethora of ideas to fix them amongst various comment threads at GGW and other places), discussions of profits and priorities are certainly topical.  With that in mind, Jarrett Walker has an excellent post up on the fundamental goals of transit service – the public good we planners try to achieve.

In fact, high-ridership transit services are almost always the result of aggressive government investment and policies, including the pricing of car travel, the planning of dense centers around stations, and a huge range of other actions.  A democratic government must care not just about the bottom line of the transit but also about the quality of the community it serves.  In this role, it may advocate low-ridership services to serve other sustainability goals.  For example, when opening a new “transit oriented development,” the long-term health of the community may require a lot of public transit service just as the first people are moving in, to help them establish transit habits, own fewer cars, etc.  This service will be “unprofitable” but can be a rational part of a long-term sustainability strategy.

Thatcher’s formulation, swallowed whole by Judt, is that service is either “profitable” or “social.”  Judt will go on to make “social inclusion” arguments for why service to low-ridership markets, such as rural towns, should be retained.  Fine, but he’s already given away the revenue that could pay for much of that service — the “profits” gained by the private operating company running the “profitable” services.  He’s also given away funds that could be used to fund new infrastructure investments for the next generation of profitable services — investments that should be government-funded not because they’ll be profitable, but because they’ll be intrinsic parts of a humane, sustainable, and livable city — all valid criteria for government attention.

Walker describes the definition of profitability (and the relentless focus on cost effectiveness to the exclusion of other considerations) as a “conceptual trap” that does not truly capture the reality of transit benefits or the complexity of how cities and urban places function.   Defining the debate in these terms automatically puts transit on poor footing.

“Social” and “economic” are just two legs of the three-legged stool that has come to be known the “triple bottom line,” a useful scheme for thinking about all of the possible valid outcomes of public policy.  The missing third term is “environmental.”  Judt is so attached to the “social” dimension of the question that the other two terms, “economic” and “environmental,” have collapsed in his mind into a single opponent, the “economic.”  We are all used to thinking in binary (us/them, this/that) terms, but the triple bottom line requires us to hold three points of view in the mind at once — which, to be fair, is much harder than it sounds.

Indeed.

Walker’s piece is excellent food for thought, particularly as our transit agencies and other municipal entities are facing huge budget problems and often turning towards privatization (see Chicago’s parking meters) – we must make sure we consider all of the potential outcomes, as well as all three legs of the stool.

Dogs and Cats living together…

Mass hysteria!

Two animal/transit notes:

Russian dogs riding the trains: There have long been packs of stray dogs in Moscow’s Metro, but a couple of them have learned to ride the trains – and do so for fun, apparently. (hat tip – Human Transit, Andrew Sullivan)

Neuronov says there are some 500 strays that live in the metro stations, especially during the colder months, but only about 20 have learned how to ride the trains. This happened gradually, first as a way to broaden their territory. Later, it became a way of life. “Why should they go by foot if they can move around by public transport?” he asks.

“They orient themselves in a number of ways,” Neuronov adds. “They figure out where they are by smell, by recognising the name of the station from the recorded announcer’s voice and by time intervals. If, for example, you come every Monday and feed a dog, that dog will know when it’s Monday and the hour to expect you, based on their sense of time intervals from their ­biological clocks.”

The metro dog also has uncannily good instincts about people, happily greeting kindly passers by, but slinking down the furthest escalator to avoid the intolerant older women who oversee the metro’s electronic turnstiles. “Right outside this metro,” says Neuronov, gesturing toward Frunzenskaya station, a short distance from the park where we were speaking, “a black dog sleeps on a mat. He’s called Malish. And this is what I saw one day: a bowl of freshly ground beef set before him, and slowly, and ever so lazily, he scooped it up with his tongue while lying down.”

Much more over at English Russia:

The commercial revolution of Moscow made their usual feeding places like trash bins out of direct reach, so they had to get to know new ways of getting their piece of food. That’s how appeared those “Shawarma hunts”. Sometimes though they use more gentle methods. Young girl sits on the bench to eat her hot dog – a big cute looking dog appears from the surrounding bushes and puts her head on her knees. The girl can’t help herself sharing the hotdog with a dog.

Among some more amazing skill those Moscow dogs are the ability not to miss their stop while going on the subway train. Biologists say dogs have very nice sense of time which helps them not to miss their destination. Another skill they have is to cross the road on the green traffic light. “They don’t react on color, but on the picture they see on the traffic light”,Moscow scientist tells. Also they choose often the last or the first metro car – those are less crowded usually.

And they’re savvy subway travelers, at that.

Dog in Moscows Metro - pic from English Russia

Dog in Moscow's Metro - pic from English Russia

Dog on a Moscow Metro train - pic from English Russia

Dog on a Moscow Metro train - pic from English Russia

Sadly, Casper the bus-riding Cat was killed in a hit-and-run incident in Plymouth. Casper liked to ride the bus, commuting with all the regular folks and even waiting politely in line to hop on. (hat tip – GGW)

The adventurous cat politely queues behind other passengers at the bus stop outside his Barne Barton home, then quietly trots on board and curls up on a seat for the ride.

…

Susan found out about Casper’s regular 11-mile round trips when he followed her to the bus stop one morning, avoiding passing vehicles by a whisker.

“The driver told me he gets on all the time,” she said. “I couldn’t believe it.

“He queues up in line with people and just sits patiently in the queue good as gold – it’ll be ‘Person, person, person, cat, person, person.’

Casper. Image from the Telegraph.

Casper. Image from the Telegraph.

Precisely.

Minneapolis LRV, a project built with New Starts before the total focus on the CEI. CC image from joelplutchak on flickr.

Minneapolis LRV, a project built with New Starts before the total focus on the CEI. CC image from joelplutchak on flickr.

Following up from previous discussions of precision and accuracy, Elana Schor at Streetsblog delves deeper into the subject.

While addressing the U.S. Conference of Mayors, assistant transport secretary for policy Polly Trottenberg was asked by the mayor of Clearwater, Florida, to outline how the agency might “quantify livability” in its upcoming rulemaking.

“Not everything can be measured,” Trottenberg said, adding that her colleagues wanted to avoid making the “mistake of false precision.”

She also addressed the pitfalls of relying on in-house economic predictions to assess transit projects. Several local rail lines have quickly exceeded initial federal ridership projections, casting doubt on the models used for the so-called New Starts program.

“Sometimes we’ve gotten so tangled up in the perfect mathematical science — we did it in New Starts,” Trottenberg said.

Data is good.  But we cannot limit our information inputs to just quantitative measures.  And when we do use them, we need to understand their limits.  I’m eager to see how the FTA decides to evaluate the livability criteria, but the acknowledgment that the numbers have limits is a big step forward.