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.