Comfort Underground

Sometimes on this blog I will treat metros as one thing: the existence or absence of one standing in for a certain kind of urban infrastructure and planning.

But of course we know that's not true. And while there are myriad distinctions, small and large, between the physical systems as a transit design, I want today to talk about a slightly different feature: the comfort for the riders on a system, both aesthetic and physical.

1. Platforms

A platform is a necessary function even for the most frequent subway system, since people need somewhere to walk in and out of the train and to wait for the train before it comes.

But these can vary widely in how pleasant they are to be on.

I love the NYC system, but the platforms are usually pretty unpleasant, for instance. I actually like an island platform, so that's not an issue here, but they're crowded, smelly, and rarely have any seating or other amenities.

Amsterdam's platforms are much less dirty and smelly, but that's a function of lack of use: they don't bring a lot (or anything) to the table in terms of actual benefits or positives.

The TTC in Toronto, in my experience, does a slightly better job, though more so outside the downtown core. There are some places to sit, and the smell and noise are not as extreme.

Overall, this is a hard thing to work on, because the more use a system gets the more crowded stations get, and the harder it is to find time, space, and general opportunity to clean them effectively--especially on a 24-hour system.

2. Decor

One way to make a station less unpleasant even if it is crowded, noisy, or smelly, is to appeal to other senses. Now,  I don't have pictures of the Stockholm metro, which is famously gorgeous. But I do have pictures of how other stations I have actually been to make this work. Start with the Toronto station above: those little geometric patterns aren't much, but they break up the monotony of the station.

This public art in Chicago's Midway station is a little further from the trains, so it does less to brighten the mood actually down at the platform level, but it's a nice flourish when you're hustling to the train.

The Montreal metro does, I think, an even better job of a similar approach, and I love the above piece very much.

And of course I'd be remiss if I didn't mention WMATA, where the DC Metro makes the overall station design its own aesthetic feature that makes waiting much more pleasant (also note all those seats!).

3. Trains

And of course, another major element of "comfort" and "ease" in and around a metro/subway/underground/El/etc. system is the actual trains themselves.

Open gangways, like Amsterdam's trains have, make a big difference to me: the feeling that you're able to move around the train if you need to (whether that's for efficiency reasons of getting off where you want at the next stop or comfort reasons like finding a seat or even finding a friend) creates a sense of comfort and relaxation that a more cramped traditional car can't equal.

The Elizabeth Line in London isn't technically a metro, but it was the picture that I had of the moquette on the seats: this kind of branding (different on different lines) combined with comfort (much better than hard plastic seats) can contribute significantly to a sense of place and a sense of ease.

I have fewer pictures of interiors because I tend to avoid taking pictures with recognizable people in them, so even though I don't actually mind the DC Metro's interiors this will have to do as a picture of a less pleasant interior. The lighting is less strong, the car feels less open, and the seats are less comfortable.

Sorry DC. As I said, I actually quite like the riding experience, but it's not Amsterdam or the Elizabeth Line (there are certainly London Underground lines that would also be lower on this kind of ranking though).

What makes you feel comfortable on a metro? How does a subway catch your eye? 

The View Down the Tracks

 A perhaps somewhat strange thing that I like to do when I go to a new city--or even a new stop on a train line--or even an old city that I'm just visiting again--is to look around the city by peering down the railroad tracks and seeing what appears.

Most of the time, of course, this means that what I'm looking at is mostly more train tracks, but you can still get a vibe for a city and its transit by seeing just how the train tracks do--or don't--meld into their surroundings.

Sometimes you get tracks that disappear into the distance, giving you the impression that they go on forever.

Here in London, for instance, I don't really see much besides the tracks themselves (and that oncoming train) and it gives me the sense of a city where the train are arteries, connecting everything together in their own independent map of the city. There's a reason that non-geographic, systems-style maps work so well for trains, after all, and owe their prevalence at least in part to the Harry Beck London Underground map: London is that kind of city, with different connections popping up as you transit the city in different ways.

Other times, you get a different view.

This too is the UK, but here the trees and nature stand out to me; you get the sense of a place that can be accessed by train and not as much by car (false as that impression likely is) and thus the sense, again, that the train has different affordances, opens up different possibilities, than other forms of transit. 

Sometimes the view is more urban. Here the train station and its tracks blend not into nature, but into the urban environment, reminding you that the purpose of a train station is to bring you into the city, and to provide a portal between the space of transit and the space of life.

Sometimes the train gives you more of a sense of other trains than anything else: the endless width of a railyard is a sign of the coming together of so many other potential journeys and potential paths.

And sometimes, of course, what you really see is a parking lot.

Conversely, sometimes the tracks themselves are the road--used here by buses and trams--and so what you see is really the city, not a train station at all. These are very different views of the road from a station--and they tell you something about the difference between the way the trains and the cities operate.

I don't have much more of a point than that: sometimes my favorite kind of tourism is just staring down the tracks and seeing what this particular city has to show me.

Why Autonomous Cars Won't Save Us

We hear a lot that autonomous cars are the future. And there are distinct ways in which autonomous cars would improve the current car situation: in theory they won't violate traffic laws (like speeding), they can safely follow each other more closely than human-driven cars can, and they can have reaction times to things like pedestrians that are significantly better than humans, for example. These aren't true yet, but you can see the potential.

Yet autonomous cars have real disadvantages as well, and in light of their growing deployment in US cities, I wanted to touch on some of them.

1. No Fix for Congestion

The trigger for this post was reporting that companies like Uber and Waymo are projecting autonomous vehicles to increase, not decrease, the number of cars on the road. That means that autonomous cars won't fix the problems with traffic, because they won't be reducing car trips. Sure, they might go faster or more smoothly, but there's still a throughput issue, especially on city streets that have slow speed limits for safety reasons. And of course, stoplights still cause backups for any car.

These cars are stopped, whether they're autonomous or not.

There might be fewer crashes and cars might potentially move less jerkily through bad traffic, but cars on the road are still cars on the road--and the projections of increasing vehicle hours would make that worse, not better.

That's because autonomous cars, unlike regular cars, are not usually conceived of as stopping in a parking space (or parking lot) when they're empty. Instead, Uber and Waymo conceive of them as constantly cycling, looking for more people to drive. And that means that a not-insignificant quantity of those autonomous trips will be empty of people--a problem that unsurprisingly does not exist for human-driven cars, and which can create a massive uptick in traffic.

2. Not Scalable

A related issue is that autonomous cars, just like regular cars, don't really scale as population grows, especially if (as Uber and Waymo typically project) we're still looking at a model that is car-like, rather than bus-like, with individual people calling their own car for their own destination rather than carpooling or driving fixed routes. 

Making this autonomous does not increase its capacity. The driver is just...not driving now. 

It's true that it might have a major benefit for people who cannot drive themselves (youth, the disabled, the elderly, etc.) who can now get a car. But that would run us into problem #1, as it just increases trips and thus congestion. There's no efficiency gain here. 

Note that this does not apply to all autonomous vehicles: autonomous buses, and especially autonomous trains, do provide an efficiency gain, as bus and train operation is often bottlenecked by the ability to find trained operators, and autonomous operation allows more trains per hour on tracks or even the expansion of tracks to increase a system itself. 

But of course, that's older technology, since Vancouver SkyTrain has been autonomous for longer than I've been alive.

No driver, no problem, but also nothing new.

Should we expand driverless train operations? Of course. But that's not the sort of autonomous vehicles that people are excited about right now, and it's a different conversation. 

The car version simply doesn't scale the same way--or it if does, it basically turns into inefficient versions of the trains by putting a separate engine/tires/doors/drivetrain/etc. into every 4 or so seats, compared to having a vehicle like a train with a lot more seats per unit volume.

3. Pollution

And both of the above points contribute to the problem that cars are a polluting form of transportation, especially as compared to other options for moving lots of people.

In theory, I suppose, there's a big benefit to switching to autonomous cars, which is that they'd be newer cars and often electric cars and thus much more fuel-efficient and less polluting than the average of the actual car fleet, which is older and less efficient.

But...this car is an efficient car, but it's not a non-polluting car.

My Nissan Leaf may not produce tailpipe emissions, and in some places it may even not produce much emissions to produce its electricity (say, if I live near a hydroelectric dam). But cars produce other pollution too.

Tires are bad for the environment, and all cars run on tires. 

Sure, there are rubber-tired subways and of course buses also run on tires. But see above about scale: those move a lot more people per tire.

And of course not all autonomous cars are electric or even all that fuel-efficient. 

So increasing the number of cars on the roads is going to massively increase pollution.

And that's physical pollution; I haven't even mentioned other kinds like noise and light pollution.

So AVs may have benefits; I'm not pretending they don't. But they also won't actually save us from some of the bigger issues that cars produce, and they might actually increase some of the problems (like increasing traffic). So maybe we should stop treating them like an urban panacea and consider investing a bit more in some older technology--like our good friend the train.

Coaches and Buses

In the UK they don't call intercity buses buses, they call them coaches, which is a really useful term of distinction I'm going to adopt here. And in the US, coaches (most famously Greyhound) are still the main way to get from city to city without a car, because our train infrastructure has regressed to second childishness and mere oblivion.

Our intercity coaches aren't that great either, but they're a lot more extensive.

Now, I usually talk here about city-by-city issues, but I have had times in my life where coach service between cities was vital to my ability to move around, and I have some thoughts on what it means to have good coach service between two cities or in a region. 

1. More Than One Carrier or Option

I realize that many of the lines highlighted in the link above are state-sponsored routes that exist because the state pays or subsidizes a carrier to provide service. And that's a vital lifeline for many communities, don't get me wrong! But good service almost inherently has to come from some competition. I say this not necessarily in a capitalist way, but in the sense that if there is no pressure of competing schedules, prices, or amenities, in my experience service gets cut back to the absolute minimum for, well, capitalist reasons. Hence the need for state subsidy in so many cases.

This doesn't have to be super-robust: the picture above is from the bus depot where I caught a Burlington Trailways route, and Greyhound serves the same route, but they each sell tickets on the other's service. That means it's really more coopetition, where two services combine to make one effective service without either of them having to fully commit. But it still improves the service relative to a single carrier doing the least they can.

2. Variety in Times

Related to the above, a key element in a good coach service is that you need variety of times: if you have what is fundamentally a commuter service, or worse yet (but commonly) a morning-only or evening-only service, you don't have a real connection, because you don't have the flexibility to allow people to travel when they want.

On the other hand of course are those coach services that might as well be buses: some like the Chinatown buses between NYC and Boston are just high-frequency intercity routes, and others, like the below bus in Indiana, are kind of somewhere between bus and coach by connecting smaller cities that are close together (but still notably distinct) in a time-consuming but bus-frequency manner.

This guy is a technically connecting two cities! You might call him a bus because of his frequency and the shorter distance compared to say QC-Chicago, but he's still out there doing it! And an ideal coach service should be so frequent that you can assume it'll be available roughly when you want it.

3. Integration

A good intercity coach route should integrate with more local transit on either side (which of course is where the above Indianian bus falls down because it is the only local transit). I used to take the coach between Oxford and London often, and while I didn't really take the bus after on the Oxford side because it was so walkable, in London we came into Victoria, a major rail and bus hub, so everything was easy to get to from there.

When intercity coaches come into the Milwaukee Intermodal Station, they get the local bus, the Amtrak station, and the streetcar all in one. That's good integration. The coaches in Davenport share the station with local buses. And then you have Chicago, where the Greyhound station sits in a terribly-integrated area of near-downtown, which you'd really have to work hard to make as close in with as bad transit connections as it has.

Oh well.

So yes, intercity coach routes matter a lot for a lot of people--and just like other transit, connecting them to other things, making them run frequently, and having multiple routes to get somewhere in a robust network make them better. It's almost like there are consistent principles for good transit, or something...

Better Buses

 Vancouver is improving their bus network. The key elements are these: more frequent services across more of the city, and particularly filling in the pattern so that there is frequent service pretty evenly spread out across major arteries all across the city (and indeed much of the Metro area). Not all of this (indeed, not even most of this) is Bus Rapid Transit, but it is bus frequent transit in a way that matters a lot to making a city's transit operate more effectively.

Acknowledging the value of this kind of work has actually been somewhat difficult for me, personally, in the past, because for me it has always formed a kind of assumed baseline in a major city's transit mix. I grew up in Seattle, visited Vancouver often, and have particularly distinct memories of visiting Toronto in the early 2000s and feeling like all these cities did this well: wherever you wanted to go in the city, you could take a fairly easy to figure out set of bus routes (or in Toronto's case, also trams in some areas) to use the general city grid to find your way around.

As the above link indicates, I wasn't actually right about that: Vancouver is only filling in that grid now, and Greater Toronto and Metro Seattle both have serious gaps in such systems as well. But it always seemed just like what a city does, to me--which has made it hard to acknowledge how important actually doing it well is.

So today I want to talk very briefly about why this is important, and what it brings to the table.

1. Clarity 

As I said above, I have distinct memories of visiting Toronto and noticing that my family could get around very effectively, even without knowing the city well, because of how clear it was to move from place to place. Yes, you could use the subway, and we did, but if the subway didn't go where you wanted or you didn't want to (or couldn't efficiently) get to it, you could just take a bus up and a bus over (or a bus over and a bus down, or whatever combination) to get where you wanted to be.

Or, as mentioned above, on some of those streets you could take streetcars/trams. I think that the trams are probably why it stuck in my mind so much more than Seattle, where I still had the same assumptions. This kind of system provides clarity for those who may not learn a system well or want to memorize or consult maps. If you know you just need to go up one street until you hit the right cross-street and then over that street to the place you want to be, your path is clear. It may not be optimal, but it doesn't have to be: it will get you there and it frees up mental space for considering other factors rather than trying to compute how to get from point to point.

2. Equity

When this system is extended as fully as Vancouver is doing it now, it also provides real improvements in equity. Yes, there are still areas where there is better or worse service: frequency matters, quality and age of vehicles matter, speed matters, the existence of other transit modes like rail matters. But when you have a baseline provision of quality, clearly intelligible transit options everywhere, it means that nowhere gets completely left behind. Yes, parts of Vancouver have SkyTrain. And it's awesome!

But buses feed SkyTrain stations, and even if SkyTrain doesn't come anywhere near you an effective bus system nevertheless means you still have mobility even if it's not identical.

I lived for a summer at the University of British Columbia, and it's not on SkyTrain but let me tell you that we still got out and around the city. And did I mention I wasn't even an adult yet? That's another key kind of equity that a good bus network provides: not only does it create equity between people who live in different areas, it provides equity between those who can drive and those who can't, whether the reason for that is age, cost, or something else.

3. Virtuous Cycles

You knew this was coming, right? I mentioned that buses feed trains. Good baseline bus systems across a whole city provide a matrix in which all kinds of good transit, density, and general urbanist outcomes can grow like crystals. 

I believe firmly that Seattle's Sound Transit Link light rail is only as effective as it is (especially since in a lot of places it really should be heavy rail) because it is embedded in a good bus system. Similarly, the TTC has gotten away with a relatively small metro in Toronto because of good bus coverage, though thank goodness they're expanding it finally.

And this is bus coverage which of course usually interacts with the subway.

A solid bus system is unexciting in the way that pasta is unexciting. We talk about sauces a lot more than noodles because the same noodles can work with a lot of sauces--but you don't want to be eating straight alfredo sauce no matter how much you like fettucine alfredo.

I love a subway but it needs to be part of a whole system--and a better bus network like Vancouver is putting in is perhaps the key element in that.

Ideals

I was recently watching the National Theatre production of The Importance of Being Earnest (on YouTube) and was reminded of one of my favorite lines: "we live, as I hope you know Mr. Worthing, in an age of ideals; the fact is constantly mentioned in the more expensive monthly magazines, and has reached the provincial pulpits." Now, Gwendolyn Fairfax is telling us that she has always wanted to marry someone named Ernest, which I think of as a somewhat silly ideal. But it got me to thinking of my ideals about cities, and what I would take from different cities if I could.

Now, it would be easy to do that by taking stereotypically acknowledged excellent bits of cities--Amsterdam's bike paths, for instance--and just imagining a city that somehow combines all of the best parts of everything. I might enjoy doing that at some point. But today, I want to think about some less-appreciated ideal elements in cities that I'd like to have in my ideal city (though since these are ideals, I know others will have observed them before--originality is only so possible).

1. Seattle's Whimsy

Perhaps it's because I know it so well, but I love the way Seattle pops out public art that feels whimsical and placebound. Some of it is probably the 1% for art requirement for major works, but a lot if it isn't, too. 

The Fremont district does a particularly good job with it, with the Fremont Troll above (viewed from Troll Avenue, naturally) and the Waiting for the Interurban statue below.

There's also a big statue of Lenin bought from a former Soviet town and a giant rocket, which I believe has similar provenance.

It's all highly noticeable at the street level, and gives a real sense of place. You couldn't be anywhere but Fremont (and Seattle) with this stuff, and my ideal city would have a similarly distinctive vibe of whimsy (though of course not a copy, since that's the point of whimsy).

2. Paris's Commitment to the Bit

This is cheating perhaps, since many of the things I'm going to mention are considered iconically excellent about Paris. But they all come from something that I'm not sure is, which is Paris's commitment to seeing things through fully--to the bit, in comedy parlance.

Some of this is the legacy of Haussmann's Parisian renovations, which were of course massively classist and problematic. But they also produced a city that has a consistent feel on the street through much of its urban core, and a distinctive look.

This isn't the only expression of this commitment though. Paris is also one of the few major cities that have a legacy metro and yet are doing large-scale expansion of their system. The Grand Paris Express is another version of this same commitment to the bit: if the city (and the region) is to have a metro, it shall have a metro. 

The same goes for other urbanist elements: the transformations of Anne Hidalgo around bikes and cars, which were carried through with a full commitment to doing the thing are a classic example as well.

My ideal city, therefore, is not just interested in being a city, but committed to following through on the principles it sees as valuable in that connection, consistently and in a thorough-going manner.

3. Vancouver's Embrace of Its Natural Setting

Vancouver is known for its natural setting, and its probably unfair to ask another city to have the same setting. But I admire its willingness to accept--no, to embrace--that setting as a part of the city. Too many cities overtame their natural surroundings, or obliterate them, making them a homogenous whole (this is most common in the US in my experience). Vancouver certainly hasn't avoided making a mark on the surrounding land, but it has certainly accepted and embraced more parts of its natural setting than some cities do.

How many cities would have the end of the downtown peninsula terminate in a big park with old growth, rather than more houses?

How many cities would have taken on the existence of the sea and rivers around it as an integral part of the transportation of the city, rather than covering them with innumerable bridges?

And while there are bridges (hello Lion's Gate!) I would also note the willingness to let the mountains behind the city remain mountains and a key part of the city's physical setting, rather than either turning one's back on them entirely or trying to level them or build beyond them.

And heck, it has beaches too--and again, they are developed but not overwhelmed.

This, too, is Vancouver: and while I don't think a city has to be in this kind of physical setting, the fact that the natural landscape is this present within and around the city is something to celebrate, whatever the natural setting might be.

What Cities Look Like

What does a city look like? OK, the obvious answer to that question is descriptivist, not prescriptivist: a city looks like whatever a city looks like. Anywhere that people have gathered in sufficient quantities and political organization that we can call it a city, that is what a city looks like, from Çatalhuyuk to the shores of the Great Salt Lake. 

So the actual question I'm asking here is: what does it matter what a city looks like? Why should we care how a city has chosen to express itself?

There are infinite answers to this as well, but I want to highlight three of them.

1. Urban Canyons: Dense, but Too Dense?

One urban form we might be quite familiar with in urbanist spaces is the canyon: the city that's made up (or at least whose core is made up) of super-high-rise office buildings and condos, creating a deep valley effect in the streets between.

This kind of effect.

Now, there are cities where this is more true, and cities that might be described this way that are less so in practice. New York is the canonical classic example, especially downtown Manhattan, and there's a reason for that: it's because you can get effects like Manhattanhenge, where the sun has to peek through the buildings (for in this case a beautiful effect). But lots of downtowns get described this way, even if they don't have the full canyon on display. 

Is this, for example, an urban canyon?

Seen from above, there's a case for Michigan Avenue in Chicago as one, isn't there? But you can see lots of lower density peeking through, and that's true even at street level. 

And this is the question that urban canyons raise: on the one hand, they seem to be the confirmation of those who decry too much density, shutting out the sun and enclosing humanity in something like a prototype version of The Caves of Steel. But on the other, they don't actually usually do that. And they allow lots of people to work and live in small areas, because one key thing about high-rise density is that it is high and dense. So are they worth it? 

It will probably surprise no one who reads anything on this blog that I think they are. 

It helps when there is something interesting to look at in the canyon, or when there are distinctive buildings within it, as the above and below London examples show.

Urban canyons are like other urban forms, in that they can be better or worse: a flat undifferentiated block fifteen stories high is one thing; a vibrant cityscape that happens to be very tall is another. 

Fortunately, in my experience, a lot of cities that get criticized for this are the latter, and not the former. So a city that looks like an urban canyon is, to me, a positive rather than a negative. 

2. The Midrise: Is It Enough?

Stepping down a size, there are many cities that are iconic for midrise height: from Paris and Montréal in the Francophone world to, for example, Amsterdam in the Netherlands). This is of course questioned by some in the same way that urban canyons are, in terms of it feeling monotonous, or imposing, or inhuman on the street level. But if I don't think that about canyons you probably can guess I don't think it about the midrise. The more interesting question is whether it can be enough: can a city really have midrise density and still fit all the people who want to live there?

The obvious answer is "not entirely, but it's better than nothing." After all, all those cities I just mentioned are experiencing huge housing crunches.

Amsterdam is lovely, but there literally isn't enough housing here.

Paris is iconic, but again: prices rise and people are pushed to the margins of the urban area.

You'll never believe what I'm about to say about Montréal...oh yeah, it also has a housing crisis, though not as bad as the other two. And since the housing crisis in its province has its own Wikipedia page, that should tell you something.

Of course, the counter to this is that not all of the city has been allowed to be this kind of height; it's iconic and typical, but not actually consistent. 

It does have major advantages: it tends to feel much less overwhelming on the street level than higher-rise development, and it often lends itself well to active streets and Jane Jacobs-style eyes on the street. 

It's also beautiful, I think. 

It's a key part of effective city-building; there's a reason that cities that lack this kind of development are referred to as having a "missing middle." The middle is a sweet spot for density without huge skyscrapers (which are both expensive and have their own other issues). It's not enough, but it's a dang sight better than our third category.

3. Single Houses: Automatically Car-Dependent?

The last we will look at is the classic American development: single family houses. 

That's most of what you see in this picture. Now, to be fair, not all single family zoning is cul-de-sacs like you see here. But a lot of it is, in the US especially, and that has a distinctive look. Even in more close-set settings, single-family homes, like the one I grew up in, have a very different street-level view than the other two we've looked at.

I like this house's urban setting. It's on a major bus route or two; it's walking distance to multiple grocery stores, a library, multiple parks, and other amenities. 

It's a good urbanist example of a single family home, is what I'm saying. And I think the answer to the question above has to be that it's not automatically car-dependent: after all, I grew up in this neighborhood with my parents both commuting by bus and bike and myself taking the bus to school and walking around after getting home. There were certainly places we went by car, but it wasn't required; and when it was, it was because of the place we were going to, not coming from, or a function of bad connectivity in the transit network.

As a larger matter, there has to be a space for single family homes in any vision of the city, because there is a clear and marked demand for such housing in the lived behavior of human beings all over the world.

But it doesn't have to be as much as it is. Seattle (or at least its county) is 70% housing like this. That's a lot, and not all of it (not even most of it) is as urbanist as this one is.

To go back to our original view (or rather, another angle from the same photoshoot from the same vantage point), Chicago is also heavily made up of this housing, and you can see it stretching out away from the urban canyon into the distance. 

A city needs all of these, but the mix is key: a city should look like all these things, but if it looks too much like the house I grew up in it's going to have a hard time getting a lot of people into it, because there just won't be space. It needs some midsize housing, and even some urban canyon-like elements, in order to accommodate the sheer number of people who make it up. 

And when we design and plan our cities, we should perhaps nudge it a bit further up this particular page whenever we can--even as we keep a space for single family homes.