Mental Effort

For this Christmas Eve, I'm thinking about how travel takes effort. Not just physical effort, but mental: you gotta figure out how to go places, what the best places to go are, how to get there from here, all that jazz.

And superficially the car looks like an ideal tool for that: it will take me where I want to go when I want to go along signposted roads or with a GPS calling out every turn. 

Conversely, public transit puts me on someone else's schedule, with someone else's stops.

So how do we make the mental effort of taking transit go down?

1. Signposting 

Clear, good wayfinding and labeling both within transit spaces and about the relation of that transit to the larger area it serves is key.

The announcement on this bus for the stop is good, and probably helps clarify where you are to people familiar with the route. Better yet are announcements that always give both streets (this is a rare thing the Davenport CitiBus does well, though it doesn't announce all the stops because literally every intersection is a potential stop). This is because it makes it a) harder to miss your stop or misunderstand where you are and b) clearer if a bus zigzags exactly where it is intersecting a particular road.

Signposting isn't just important when you get on the transit, though. It's even more so when you're in a station, or approaching one. Where do I get that train? What routes actually depart from here? How do I even enter the station?

Make these as clear as possible or people won't (and can't!) use transit.

2. Consistency 

Run the buses every day. Run them often. Don't stop running them unless there's a clearly communicated good reason.

Same for trains, trams, ferries, gondolas, whatever you're running. 

Ideally run them on a predictable schedule too: clockface time, or so frequent that it doesn't matter.

To reduce the mental effort of taking transit, make it turn up and go.

3. Flexible Routings

The more interconnected and flexible your system--the more robust--the better. If taking one train wrong or missing one bus means I lose hours or cannot complete a trip, I will end up not taking transit for that trip sometimes, and worrying about it other times. If the train or bus doesn't even go where I want, then I'll ignore it entirely.

Make it so that if I took the "wrong" route there is some kind of alternative--even if it's "get off, turn around, the next train is in 2 minutes anyway."

If you don't, people start having to plan everything out perfectly, and that's a taxing mental load they just won't do.

Make transit easy, and people will realize it costs a lot less than a car.

Make it hard, and they won't care.

Speaking of mental effort, I'll be taking a vacation from this as well as everything else over the new year, so until then, stay safe and take whatever transit mode fits your needs and your own mental capacity at the moment.

Cold and Snow

Look, here in Iowa we've had our share and more than our share of cold and snow already this fall-winter (it's not technically winter yet!).

Thanks, I hate it.

It's been negatives temperatures even in Fahrenheit; we got a ten-inch snowstorm (25 cm for my SI-unit friends); and it's mostly stuck around, making travel unpleasant.

But guess what? I'd still rather have transit than not, even in this terrible weather.

1. Fire on the Tracks

I recall a couple winters ago being in Chicago as they burned literal fires on the El tracks to keep the trains running.

Well, guess what: cars were driving through the same weather but couldn't burn the streets to keep them clear.

Transit unifies where our effort to work to keep ourselves running has to happen. We can keep those routes running and keep things working; we don't need to do it car by car.

2. Warming Stations

Look, we do this badly in the QC, but you can also keep transit riders warm: indoor or heated waiting areas, frequent transit to reduce wait times, and so on.

Yes, each individual car is also climate controlled, but parking spots aren't. And I have to do my snow removal myself!

3. Stress

Look, when I drive in the snow, I'm responsible for the black ice, the slush, the other drivers driving like crazy.

When I'm on a train, there shouldn't be any other drivers to deal with at all; when I'm on a bus, there's a trained professional whose job it is to deal with those things.

And the more of us there are on transit, the less of us are driving our cars like maniacs off it.

I think I make (and will make) this post every year: but driving in bad weather is worse than taking transit in bad weather--and so I'll always prefer a functional transit system even in places with "real" winter.

Optimism and Pessimism

 This excellent post on how trams and tramways can be built well or badly made me think more broadly about the significance of both optimism and pessimism for how we design, build, and think about our urban designs, especially in places like the Quad Cities. I want to propose that there is an odd mix of these two that manages to reduce our willingness to try transit, bike lanes, and other effective tools for reducing congestion, traffic, road deaths, and travel times--and that make slogans like the fifteen-minute city (as valuable as I think that concept would be in practice) counterproductive for some audiences.

1. Overly Optimistic Projections

Let's start with the point raised in the article: overly optimistic projections of tram speeds and thus travel time reductions. These occur not in the final stages, but in the planning and support-generating stages: no one in the final stages is denying that the Finch LRT in Toronto, for instance, is too darn slow. But as the first article I linked to points out, that wasn't true in the initial projections: it was supposed to reach speeds fifty-percent higher than it does on average! 

And that's where the optimism becomes destructive: when you overpromise and underdeliver. Yes, those projections may have gotten the Finch LRT built, but they now create conditions under which the average Torontonian is likely to be highly skeptical of claims for future transit projects (unless the mayor actually accomplishes the feat of speeding it up significantly, quickly). 

This is similar to some of the claims that come with vaporware transit: highly aggressive up-front assumptions about efficacy and speed, absolutely no follow-through. And as a result, there is either no transit or disappointing transit on the streets, which produces a potential for a cynical death spiral in transit.

Nor is this limited to transit: a bike lane that's promised as protected and signalized but doesn't deliver will poison-pill future bike lane building too, and the same with the shared street that isn't really shared, the bike share that doesn't work well, etc.

Don't tell me this is a bike lane and expect me to support building more bike lanes.

We could also add here overly optimistic estimates of cost and delivery timings, which then get bogged down in massive, expensive delays: both expensive in themselves and because they allow inflation to act on your costs, and delay your revenues.

2. Overly Pessimistic Projections

Of course, the flip side of this is when projections are kept low and that results in transit being delayed or never built because of an unwillingness to see a potential upside.

I would suggest this is highly often the case in the US, but because we don't build at all we never get to see that the projections were in fact pessimistic. But in the UK, they have recent evidence with the Northumberland Line and the Borders Railway that busted past expected ridership quite quickly.

Imagine if those had been built earlier! The demand was clearly there, but understated. 

These, I suggest, are cyclically behind the overly optimistic estimates above: a project comes in overly optimistic, then people reject it because it's genuinely not as good as anticipated, then future projects get lower projections. Rinse, wash, repeat.

Sort of like how people react to snowfall estimates, honestly: too many missed projections and everyone assumes it won't actually snow when the meteorologists say so.

3. Agency and Audience

But note a difference between what I'm claiming above about optimism and pessimism. Pessimism is about how the general public will respond; optimism is about things actually under the agency's and/or government's control (to some degree).

Basically, I suggest that these problems with pessimism and optimism are avoidable with proper practices.

Am I an expert who can specifically identify those practices? No.

But there are people who are. And their suggestions tend to be similar to what seems logical to me:

A. Standardize, as much as possible, designs: stations, roadways, intersections, vehicles, etc. Avoid extensive costs or delays caused by starting from scratch, and make your estimates of cost, timeline, and effects more consistent by reducing variables.

B. Establish standards for service and keep to them: a tweak to speed here, a concession to auto traffic there, and suddenly you're down to walking speed. That doesn't mean be inflexible, but it does mean standing up for the promised standard of service.

C. Build the right thing in the right place. This is the point of the initial article: don't build a tram when you want a metro, or an at-grade tram when you want a grade-separated one, or a bus when you want a tram (or vice-versa in each case). That will let you actually hit the targets you intended, or exceed pessimistic standards, by fitting the service to the use case.

But the key here is this: pessimism and optimism are a function of how we plan and what we build and how we advertise it. They're not inherent; trains don't need to be slow, costs don't need to overrun, and ridership estimates won't always be low (or high!). They're about what we do (our agency) and who we talk to about what (our audience).

We can and should build better--and I hope that isn't unearned optimism itself.

Shared Streets (Autoluw) and Space

This post made me want to talk about how we conceive of space. It's about Seattle (and really, Washington State) getting a legal space for shared streets: streets where cars are allowed but must yield to bikes and pedestrians (and bikes must yield to pedestrians as well). This is a situation that's a legal reality already in a number of places (as the post does a good job of illustrating, with images from around the world).

It feels like a logical continuation from talking about competing modes to consider how we think about space in the first place.

1. Shared By Who?

Now, a "shared street" can be conceived of as shared in general: everyone is sharing in this street no matter what mode of transportation they use. 

But that isn't really how we usually think of sharing, even if it might seem ideal. When my two children share, they remain very aware of who the toy belongs to. Even if it's supposed to be a family toy, they know who picked it up first this time, and thus who is "sharing with" and who is "being shared with." That doesn't mean they don't share--but it means there's more to the act of sharing than just communality. It can have a direction.

Are shared streets shared from cars to people or from people to cars (setting bikes aside for a moment)?

Pedestrians get priority here in Canary Wharf, but that's an easy case: it's actually hard to get to this spot by anything other than foot or public transportation.

I expect that here in the US we will think of these as graciously shared by the car, to whom the streets belong as by right. Perhaps it might be more helpful to think of these as pedestrianized spaces that are temporarily shared with cars, though. After all, in the first framing I have to ask a big question: 

2. Who Will Follow The Rules?

Car advocates tend to blame bikes in particular (though also at times pedestrians) for not following the rules. Those crazy bikes, am I right? Always pulling through stop signs.

But by far the most common failure to follow the laws of the road is cars, speeding. 

Good luck with that speed limit, Islington.

I routinely drive over Centennial Bridge, here in the Quad Cities, faster than the posted speed limit, but also much slower than the prevailing speed: it's signed at 30 mph and you still get passed if you go as high as 45 mph. That's a 50% margin. And that's not unusual; apparently traditional practice is to set speed limits based on the idea that 20% of drivers will still be speeding. That's not a recipe for safe streets. 

Our big four-lane streets here in Davenport aren't any better; good luck getting someone to go the speed limit, even near a school (I've been guilty of this myself, so I'm not throwing stones at glass houses here).

And it's worse when we consider the shared streets: a posted speed limit of 10 mph is great in theory but I have my doubts about it being followed in practice. And if cars are going 15, 20, 25 mph, that sharing is going to revert pretty quickly, just like when my eldest asserts that a toy is actually hers. We need to emphasize the idea that this is a pedestrian space first.

3. Consequences and Culture Shifts

Frankly, without real consequences for speeding and other dangerous driving, or really aggressive street redesigns, cars are still going to dominate these spaces in the US because the consequences for going too fast mostly accrue to the pedestrians and bikes, and the benefits to the cars.

Once a space becomes sufficiently pedestrianized, as here in Central London, this flips: someone driving through this crowd is going to get in serious trouble, even if the car isn't hurt the way the people are. 

So shared streets are a great idea--once they come into effect and become normalized.

This street in Haarlem was a lovely place to walk! One lane of cars, only, with people walking across the street as needed, and the post office truck (pictured) holding everyone up because it needed to deliver mail. And the businesses were thriving! But that's post-culture-shift. How do we get here? We have to take first steps, so I think the Seattle initiative is a good one. But as we do, we need to stick to our guns: cars and their drivers need to experience frequent and obvious consequences as they violate the shared space, and we need to build them out very publicly so that everyone knows who is sharing space with who.

Bare Ruin'd Choirs (or Missing the Trolleybus)

 This article about Seattle's trolleybuses made me feel some feelings, since I grew up in Seattle taking trolleybuses fairly frequently.

Ah, to sit upon the throne of the seat in the middle of a Seattle articulated trolleybus. 

There were, as the article mentions, some severe political headwinds against these buses in the earlier part of this century, which led to the issue obliquely referenced by this title: that the trolleybus is seen as a declining technology when it ought to be in its prime.

Why? Because the trolleybus is, in my humble opinion, the best option available for a city that wants to improve its transit outcomes on the cheap, without investing in full-scale rail. That's because trolleybuses provide three things I think of as ideal in transit, all without requiring nearly as much investment in either infrastructure or vehicle costs as trains: visible infrastructure, high volume (or the potential for it), and pleasurable trips (or the potential for them as well).

1. Visible Infrastructure

I love trains because you can see where they're going and know that you're on a transit corridor without having to actually see the bus. It creates an awareness that there is service, and an expectation that you can use the service, which I think is a critical element often missed by bus-only service.

But with a trolleybus you can do that without paying train prices. Yes, you need to install the overhead lines for the electric system, but that's a lot less expensive and disruptive than train tracks, an elevated rail corridor, or god forbid tunneling or cut-and-cover. 

And yet the lines above still show the transit exists, and guide you to knowing that you're in a transit corridor.

Sort of like the top of this tram picture, without the bottom part. They both trace the route, but only one of them alters the street--and it's much cheaper not to alter the street.

2. High Volume Potential

There's a reason I referenced the articulated trolleybus above: artics (or double-artics!) are big. They're higher-capacity (generally) than even the doubledeckers that London is known for. 

Sorry buddy, you know I love you, but you're no artic.

They're not as high-capacity as a tram, but a lot of that is that places that run trolleybuses tend to just not run them as high-frequency as a tram would, and trams are often made up of more vehicles linked together (as in that Paris tram above, with its six sections). An articulated trolleybus is roughly two-thirds higher capacity than a regular bus, and there's no reason they can't be run highly frequently (especially if run as bus lanes or fully separated BRT) even if Seattle historically didn't really do that. 

So while the volume is nowhere near a metro, these aren't really competing with a metro or even true light rail. They're competing with low-volume tramways or regular buses, and they're cheaper than the former and higher-volume than the latter.

Don't worry, Link Light Rail, this isn't coming for you. Rather, the trolleybus is ideal for a high-volume route that isn't ready for (or doesn't have the political will for or the money for) a tram, light rail, metro, etc. It's a great way to boost capacity without costing an arm and a leg.

3. Pleasurable Trips

By this I mean a callback to my first thought about trolleybuses: I like riding a trolleybus. The artics can be distinctive, attractive, and comfortable to ride on.

Basically like the HOP in Milwaukee, except much easier to expand.

The regular bus is a workhorse that we should not disrespect. 

Pictured: a bus that calls itself a trolley bus but isn't.

But it also has a justified reputation as kinda basic, not particularly comfortable, and, well, generic: most US cities run pretty similar buses.

And even buses like the above Chicago artic that isn't a trolleybus don't have some of the trolleybus's advantages: like a consistent route with relatively little variation that means that you can actually make the ride smoother and easier. 

Trolleybuses have the potential to be well-branded, well-organized, and consistent in a way that can make them a distinctive service with a service and a reputation that both go beyond the traditional bus.

I like riding them; you might too. And that makes them a real potential tool for cities looking to expand their portfolio of transit beyond the bus/rail duality in so many US cities.

I wish Seattle had expanded them, rather than cutting them back, and I'm glad they seem to have turned back towards them in recent planning.

What do you think? Does your city have trolleybuses? Do you wish it did?

Competing Modes

 In response to this article about how Brussels' pedestrianized zone is now needing to (or at least choosing to) restrict bikes, because of pedestrian-bicyclist conflict, I wanted to think a bit more about how different modes do and do not compete for space.

Because I totally get where Brussels is coming from! But it takes a very specific mix of traffic to make that problematic, whereas, well, there are other modes that don't play quite as nice together.

1. Trams play better with people than cars

There is, of course, nothing wrong with a tram sharing space with a car.

But it does create some conflict, hence the above Toronto streetcars are notoriously slow. 

Trams play better on their own, of course (as, to be fair, do most transit modes, including cars): 

Or (as above in Amsterdam) shared with buses only.

But (as Berlin knows) trams and pedestrians can share pretty well, because the tracks are nice and visible, the trams are also nice and visible, and when there isn't a tram you can just...walk (as long as you don't use third-rail power I suppose). 

2. Bikes work best with pedestrians

Brussels aside, bikes tend to work OK with pedestrians, both working at fairly human speeds, though there's definitely a reason that the Netherlands has bike highways that are not walkways.

Note that for this picture I am not standing on the red.

What they really don't play nice with is the other forms of transit. Don't make me ride over train tracks, please! And please bar the cars from driving in the bike spaces!

Thanks for this protected bike lane, Toronto! 

All that paint is only so useful, Chicago. It doesn't actually separate the modes!

The tendency towards shared paths here in the Quad Cities (above) does tend to make it easier to get bike-type infrastructure built, but also means that you do produce some additional conflicts between peds and bikes by forcing them onto one path.

3. Trains (and pedestrians) are best alone

Look, I like trains. I love trains. Trains are my jam.

But they really work best when they don't share right of way.

Don't try to drive a car or ride a bike by these mainline trains in the UK!

Let alone getting something else down into the Tube!

But at the same time, let these people in Camden Town just walk without having to deal with cars and bikes and trains.

Basically, the two extremes (big fast thing that needs tracks and individual people who aren't in a vehicle at all) both do their best when you let them actually do their thing.

The TGV can't OuiGo if there's someone in the way!

Revisiting Milwaukee

I recently had the opportunity to go back to Milwaukee without my family in tow, which slightly expanded the scope of how much of it I could see. I still love Milwaukee as a place to visit with a family, don't get me wrong! But I wanted to take the chance to speak a bit more about the city as an urbanist destination, with an emphasis still on downtown, and with a focus on the positive (rather than, say, on comparing it to New York).

A very pretty city on a very nice river (with giant parking garages).

1. Punching Above Its Weight

My main impression of Milwaukee urbanism is that, for a city in the US, it punches above its weight in terms of transportation and general urban principles. It's still a city in the US, so it still has our typical American issues: major downtown space used for freeways, an aversion to deeply meaningful rail transit despite opportunities, and car-centric street design. But what it makes of those would be a wonderful pattern for other US cities that share the same issues but don't manage to work around them as well as Milwaukee does.

In other words, my ideal city is not Milwaukee, but if the Quad Cities could be more like Milwaukee I would be over the dang moon.

Just look at how they make urban space underneath a giant freeway work:

Would it be better not to have the freeway? Yes. The exhaust fumes stink, the sound is oppressive at times, and the sight of the sky would be a bonus.

But compared to most urban freeway underpasses, this is Edenic.

2. Standout Attractions

I think Milwaukee's cultural amenities also stand above where you might expect a city of its size and location to be: despite proximity to Chicago, for instance, there's very little need to go to somewhere else for major attractions like the art museum, sports arenas, top-notch libraries, or (especially) a public market. 

Look, I'm from Seattle originally, so it's a major compliment when I say that the Milwaukee Public Market reminds me strongly of a smaller Pike Place Market. It's easily accessible but also justifiably packed. Should the parking lot be as large or larger than the market itself? Ideally not. But that's not the point: the point is that it rocks.

So do the art museum and children's museum. The reason having kids with me meant that I didn't get out as much isn't the kids: it's the awesome experience they were having in a small space of downtown and didn't want to leave it.

3. Good Transit Integration 

The flip side of my grumpiness about Milwaukee's transit app not working when I first used it is that when it does work it's great. Everything is well-integrated, the buses are clean, frequent, and predictable, and the bus stops are well-lit, visible, and basically everything I'd want bus stops to be.

Kudos on an effective system, Milwaukee.

And the free downtown tram, while small, is again frequent, well-integrated, and convenient where it does run.

Plus all of this integrates with Amtrak's downtown Milwaukee Intermodal Station.

I don't think I misrepresented Milwaukee in CityBracket, but I do think that the comparison it ended up in wasn't totally fair to what the city is doing. It's a thriving Midwest hub, and I am always glad to go to it.

In other words, much like these pink birds, I love it even though it's right next to a freeway.