What Counts as Transit Coverage?

I have over the last decade spent a lot of time in places that appear, on a map, to have transit coverage. That is, if you look on a transit map, you see (bus) lines. But I would also suggest that I have in fact spent most of the last decade in places that really don't have transit coverage, and today I'd like to unpack that. As a note, many of the ideas here are informed by having read Human Transit, though I certainly claim any errors as my own, and I'm sure I have garbled the transmission.

1. Coverage means having somewhere to go

It's one thing to have a bus line somewhere near you. It's another to have one that goes where you need (at different levels, of course: everywhere you need, most places you need, at least somewhere you need). There are extreme examples; I've visited towns that have only one bus that takes you down main street (or equivalent) and to the town over.

This is great as a start; it means you can get to the town over! But if you were going somewhere else in town, or to a different town over in a different direction, it's not helpful. It's purely binary; the destination is or isn't on that one bus line.

Even in places with more than one bus line, I've encountered some major gaps; one time I couldn't get to the mall, for some reason and another time I had to walk a mile without sidewalks (a different but related kind of urban accessibility issue). If you can't reasonably get where you need, the existence of a bus isn't actually helping you.

2. Coverage means being able to rely on it 

I don't necessarily mean you need to be able to never own a car (though that's nice when possible!). I mean that if you take the bus there it needs to get you back that time, since you took the bus and not the car. This means hours of service (if the bus stops running at 5 and I miss that bus, I might be out of luck for over 12 days). It means frequency of service (if I have to wait another hour if I miss a bus by a minute, that reduces my willingness to rely on it). It means visibility (do I know when and where the bus is supposed to come? Or whether it's delayed or rerouted or something else?). All of these are necessary for functional coverage.

3. Coverage means effective trips

This is related to both of the other points--and, for all the other issues the Davenport Citibus has, I think it does this fairly well. Coverage means actually being able to use those lines on the map: connections between buses that are decently timed, located, and run; no surprising routes that don't actually run at a certain time; ideally, connections that aren't all "go downtown and then transfer."

Rochester, NY, for instance, has very few suburb to suburb service options, so even though one can theoretically go from neighboring suburbs to each other, it may be an hour in to the center and an hour out for what is a fifteen minute drive. Davenport itself does better than this, with other transfer points around town, and the same is true of the Metro on the other side of the river, but of course in the QC as a whole intersections between Iowa and Illinois suffer. As always.

These are just some thoughts on why just seeing lines on a map doesn't actually mean you can (or people will) use a service. Good transit means more than a good fold-out map in a brochure or on a bus stop wall. It means a service where that coverage has meaning and use for people, not just maps.

Beg Buttons Are Bad Infrastructure Made Worse

Beg buttons, those buttons you press as a non-car entity trying to cross a road at a crosswalk or other intersection (like a trail-road intersection without a formal crosswalk), are a good-sounding idea ("responsive to demand!") that is problematic when it works and actively made worse by how it is practically implemented. Today, I want to talk about both of those elements: why beg buttons can be a problem anyway, but particularly why they're awful as typically implemented.

1. Beg buttons center cars too much

Why are beg buttons problematic? Because they contribute to the overwhelming sense that our cities and streets are truly for car traffic and everyone else is secondary at best. Think about the implications of the name: cars are the default road owners (not just users) and so everyone else must "beg" to have the right to go.

Even when highly responsive (as say on the Duck Creek Trail, where the button to cross Eastern Avenue in Davenport is almost instant) they still define all others who aren't cars as secondary: a bike can't continue on the trail without stopping and dismounting to press a button, and a jogger has to stop and jog in place. Even a pedestrian walking slowly has to pause. Cars, on the other hand, are assumed to flow through unless the button has been pressed.

Imagine if we reversed this: cars have to pull up to press a button to turn a light green, but they can do so instantly. Do you think drivers would accept that? And yet, as we know, the throughput of a bike lane is not necessarily less than a car lane (somewhat fewer people total, but much more per space allotted because we don't actually give bikes the same space as cars). So why should we always prioritize the car lanes? Because we have urban spaces designed around cars--as the beg button itself indicates.

2. Implementation makes this worse

So even though beg buttons symbolize problematic things about car-centric designs of cities when perfectly implemented, they aren't usually perfectly implemented either. First of all, they often function not to allow bike/pedestrian traffic to demand a light, but simply to permit a pedestrian green light whenever the cars in the same direction get one.

And that means if they're not pressed at exactly the right time, you're waiting a whole light cycle to get a green -- even if the cars next to you get one.

This actively disadvantages non-car movement. Cars automatically get a green; others only get one IF cars do AND they pressed a button to beg.

Non-driving transportation is hard enough. Making it harder by not automatically giving a green (but privileging car greens) makes it worse.

3. Lying lights

But then, somehow, it gets worse. Because not all beg buttons work at all. 

That picture above? It neglects to mention that if there isn't a car next to you, you won't GET a green (crossing Kimberly at Northwest Boulevard in Davenport) even if you pressed the button. So the beg button is, in fact, doing nothing. I stood an entire two light cycles there, because only the left turn green came on (which would have crossed my walking path) for the first cycle--because there was no car outside the left lane.

In other words, the beg button is a lie. It actively impedes, rather than facilitating, pedestrian movement by telling walkers to wait for something that it doesn't trigger. 

Did I mention it was less than 10 degrees out?

Beg buttons are a sign of overly car-centered design at the best; but at the worst, they're implemented in such a way as to make non-car road users actively unsafe (either crossing the road against a light or standing frozen on the side) and/or illegal (violating signage that lies about what's coming). 

That seems like a pretty bad bargain to me.

Vaporware Transit

There's a concept in software development called "vaporware": a product that's talked up and used to generate interest or investment but never actually exists or was never nearly capable of what was promised even if it technically existed in some form (the eternal "we'll add that feature in six months").

This concept can be applied more broadly, and today I want to discuss it in terms of mass transit and the promises we make about our cities, with three examples: two from my own experience and one famous recent example.

1. Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good

The most obvious recent example of vaporware in transit is Elon Musk's hyperloop, which promised immense speeds across long distances with untested technology and a proposed system all across the US.The article I just linked to is from 2018; it's not hard to miss that the fast supposed pace of implementation has not occurred. Instead, it appears that the idea was floated mainly to try to derail the California High Speed Rail project (a project that has had enough of its own problems that one might be tempted to add it to this list without Musk's help). 

What Musk's company (The Boring Company, and admittedly decent pub) has built is a tunnel for cars under Las Vegas. But it's not exactly beating high speed rail in speed; it's for cars and doesn't do a ton of actually useful stuff. I'm not saying all hyperloop ideas will eventually resolve into the current Vegas Loop. But I am saying that trains are, by now, a pretty robustly tested technology that works. Opting for or even considering untested or undreamed-of alternatives to replace trains is both an inefficient approach (just build the trains faster!) and leads to disappointment and a sense that major transit investments are all vaporware themselves. 

We don't need to find new solutions for transit; we need to actually build the ones we already know about 

Just build the dang train.

2. Don't let entrenched interests stand across progress yelling stop

My personal current White Whale of transit is the Quad Cities to Chicago rail link that's been unable to move forward for fifteen years despite allocated federal funding. That funding has been extended again, but there's no actual progress to report. Unlike the Hyperloop, this is tested, well-known tech. There literally used to be a train in the 20th century! But Iowa Interstate owns the tracks and isn't interested in playing ball.

This is unacceptable; we don't let private companies own the interstate highway system and prevent its use (some private companies do operate toll roads, but the government doesn't let them shut the road down). This project should under no circumstances have turned into vaporware. It's not a hard lift in terms of technology, engineering, or construction. It's expensive -- but the money has been allocated (and letting it delay only makes it more expensive both in inflationary terms and in terms of infrastructure decay). I'm not advocating for going back to blowing up whole neighborhoods for the highway, but when a specific corporation stands in the way of improving its own right-of-way to avoid having to let it be used for public good, perhaps that is a thing we should not support. 

Just build the dang train, again.

3. If you build it, be willing to operate and fund it

Finally, let us visit Rochester, NY, which ran a ferry to Toronto, ON, Canada for...generously...two years (it did not run most of that time). There were major problems with how the project was organized and implemented and, quite honestly, I am not saying that it was ever going to actually work. 

But dang, I wish it had; having lived in Rochester for four years (well after the ferry ceased operations), direct access to Toronto at a speed that (due to geography, going across rather than around a lake) was faster than driving would have been wonderful. A game changer. All those things the city was hoping for when the project was pitched.

Again, it was horribly mismanaged. But abandoning a project not expected to be actually financially sound for 2-3 during year 2 is a failure of financial planning and political will. Transit takes time to find its audience, and become part of people's lives. If you build an ambitious project, stick with it long enough to get to that stage, or any project can become vaporware.

Also, maybe write your contracts more carefully and vet your operating company if you farm it out. Just saying.

Vaporware is bad for individual projects, but it's killer for the idea of transit overall, especially in a country like the US that has seen a lot of transportation infrastructure either not built or decayed over the years. We need to avoid these pitfalls--overpromising with untested tech, letting projects linger unbuilt, and abandoning them before they find their users--in order to make sure we don't let promising ideas fall by the wayside. Or more positively, so we can have better transit for us all.

Bad Weather, Driving, and Public Transit

The last couple weeks we had some bad weather here in the Quad Cities, a real mix: some freezing temps, some slight snow, some rain, some fog. Not ridiculous amounts of any of them, but along the way it got me thinking that all too often we treat bad weather as a problem for public transit, but ignore it being a problem for private cars. Let me explain:

1. Driving in precipitation sucks

Yes, we all know that waiting for the bus/train/tram in bad weather is unpleasant. 

But once you get on the vehicle, it's so, so much better.

OK, there are exceptions, but usually it's better.

When you're driving, you're responsible for navigating, for managing the vehicle in the wet and the slick, for paying close attention the whole time to everyone else who is doing the same.

When you're on public transit, someone else does all that. And if the public transit runs in its own right-of-way, the difficulty of managing all the other vehicles on the road goes way down--to the point where some vehicles don't have to have anyone driving them at all.

It's a lot easier to move around if you don't have to actually drive yourself in those conditions.

2. Frequency matters, of course

One advantage of driving yourself in bad weather, of course, is that you can go when you want. If you have public transit like we do in the QC (hourly, heavily dependent on connections rather than direct service), that's not the case.

But if you have fast, frequent service (turn up and go service, as they call it), your wait is less; your flexibility is higher; and you can take advantage of not having to drive yourself (see #1) without a huge disadvantage in terms of wait time, especially out in the bad weather.

3. Stations and shelters matter

Of course, the transit system can work with you to make it easier (or against you to make it harder) to use transit in bad weather. As I noted about Milwaukee, heaters in the cold help a lot. More basically, shelters against wind and precipitation matter a lot.

Even more, a subway can automatically help by putting stations entirely out of the weather.

Both stations visible here protect the riders, though one does it by building up and one by digging down.

The trip to a station is of course unprotected, but a good system can help that too: with frequent service across the whole city, especially feeder buses to stations, and more expansive systems that capture more of the city themselves.

All of this is not to say that it can't ever be unpleasant to take public transit in bad weather. I lived in Chicago for years; I know what standing on an elevated platform in freezing winds is like!

But the contrast can be to transit's advantage if we frame it right--and if we plan our transit appropriately to make that contrast beneficial, rather than detrimental.