The Perils of Light Snow

 This week in Iowa we've been getting a lot of light snow, and it made me have some thoughts about which kinds of transportation are best (or least bad) in such conditions.

Surprising no one, I don't think it's the car that's best here. And that's a shame because I kinda had to drive in these conditions a lot this week.

1. Walking Is Actually Fine

The two main differences, to me, that mark the distinction between light and heavy snow are as follows:

A. The city plows for heavy snow and not light

B. Heavy snow is thick on the ground, while light snow is only slippery, not deep

Look at those tracks: not too hard to walk through.

Both of these make walking much easier in light snow than in heavy snow, the former because it means that there aren't huge ramparts of snow at the intersections blocking the crosswalk, and the second that you don't waste huge amounts of energy shoving through deep drifts or unplowed/unscooped sidwalks.

It's really not that much different than walking a bit in the rain--except that you usually don't actually get that wet in light snow. 

Is it ideal to walk in light snow? No, but it's not actively bad, unlike heavy snow. 

2. Driving and Biking Are Worse

The above two differences between light and heavy snow actually make driving worse, though, because an unplowed street is worse to drive on, and the slippery street (combined with most drivers not driving much differently, in my experience) means that there are high potentials for crashes and other dangerous situations.

Not exactly clear, is it?

Seriously, I'd rather drive in snow that's going to be >1 inch than snow that's going to be <.25 inch, even though the snow itself is not ideal. 

Yes, blizzards are bad, but light snow is often blowing snow, which can create whiteout or near-whiteout conditions even with light snow. 

Biking is also bad, because it also has major issues with slippery roads and unplowed streets mean drivers don't understand why you have to take up more of the lane. At least when there's a rampart of plowed snow some people do seem to recognize that a bike can't magically go where that snow is. In light snow, they expect you to be in the gutter even though that gutter is both snowed in and extra slippery because of things like grates in the road.

3. Transit Helps

This is the real takeaway here: because walking is not as much worse as driving or biking, transit is also better, relatively, because you can walk to and from it. And on top of that, transit in light snow has some other advantages over other transportation in light snow (not in ideal conditions, of course). 

A. The worst part of driving or biking in light snow is being the one who has to control the vehicle--and in transit, you can hand that over to someone else, a trained professional. 

B. A difficulty in plowing or otherwise treating roads for light snow is that it's inefficient given the low volume of snow--but when you can specifically target a bus route or train tracks, you don't need to commit large amounts of effort to clear the route to get good results.

Places like this intersection with two bus routes and a hospital are easy to prioritize.

C. And the fewer people on the roads, the safer it is in light snow--so transit, by taking people off the roads, makes it better for all of us.

Sure, there are times that you might want a personal vehicle in bad weather (primarily when you're going to a destination that you do not want to or cannot walk to in those conditions) but light snow is the opposite. In light snow, we should emphasize transit and walking, so that even those of us driving can benefit.

What To Build, When

This post about ST3 (the third installment of the Sound Transit Link expansion) interested me in its own right, but I want to use it as a jumping off point to discuss general principles for how to build (or perhaps based on experience more avoiding how not to build) transit under constraints like budget and timeline.

1. Build The Good Stuff

Let's start with the article's own argument: build the good stuff first. This means prioritizing the parts of the project with the most impact and the most significance to the overall transit program. 

This sounds obvious, but it competes with other ideas, like finishing one subsection of a project before continuing on to others, or doing the hardest, longest part first (or the easiest, quickest!). 

Say, the 1 Line in Seattle, which was a success for earlier phases of Sound Transit--but you do have to follow it up with the promised expansions on time!

What it contributes, though, is the sense that the tax dollars being spent are actually having impact: that they were worth supporting, paying, and spending. And it avoids a problem like I'd suggest Sound Transit is seeing where as time goes by you end up dropping really key elements because of spiraling costs.

2. Break Ground ASAP

Now, I'm not suggesting Sound Transit specifically has dragged its feet. And in some ways this is a systemic not an individual agency issue. But we have got to stop having projects priced and approved in 20XX dollars and then having to wait to be paid in 20XX+5 or +10 or +15 dollars. We need streamlined environmental impact work (not ignored! Just work that allows things to actually go forward). We need more standardized planning processes so that station design, route choice, etc. don't end up delaying project starts.

Because frankly it sucks when projects get a vote, get approved, and then don't get built (or discontinued) because they take too long and the money isn't there anymore. 

The Montreal REM and its relatively quick builds with fairly standardized built forms is a good example of what to do here: break ground, don't get too fancy with it, and make it work.

3. Repurposing Is King

Many major, successful transit projects exist because they didn't try to produce the optimal system: they built a functional system on top of repurposing what was already there. Link itself did this with the Downtown Transit Tunnel, and the piece recommends doing it to produce a maintenance facility for a Ballard stub in the system. 

Not everything can be repurposed rather than fresh built of course. But it helps a lot to accelerate growth if you emphasize the areas where you have less new stuff to do.

These are all common sense, but they also end up by the wayside in some planning because they lead to systems that are not optimized, but rather effective; that is, they don't produce the best theoretical system, but a more practical, buildable system that may still have flaws.

But while there are white elephant systems, by and large the biggest problem in US transit is un- and underbuilt systems, not overbuilt or suboptimally expanded ones.

We should build better, faster--not by magically uncorking a new money tree, but by making sound (pun intended) decisions and acting on them, rather than dragging our feet and making the perfect or the fancy the enemy of the good and effective. 

Costs and Cars

 This study from Forbes suggests that car ownership costs a lot of money, relative to using bikes in particular. I think this is correct, but also more correct in large cities like London (which it focuses on) and less true in places like the Quad Cities. And I want to talk a bit about why.

1. Increased Car Costs

Big cities tend to have big car costs: higher insurance costs (for many reasons), higher gas costs (often due to taxes), higher parking costs, even higher license costs (Singapore being the extreme example). 

Smaller cities and rural areas have correspondingly lower costs, so the gap is less extreme.

This guy costs less in the Quad Cities than he would in a city like London--to get, keep up, and use.

2. Increased Bike Access

Conversely, the bike has much greater utility in cities that actually support it. I got my local temple to install a bike rack (thanks, folks!) but it isn't standard for houses of worship, grocery stores, or pretty much anywhere else you go in places like the Quad Cities to have bike parking--much less general public bike parking like you'll see general public car parking.

This is unusual.

This is unheard of (well, obviously it's heard of in Amsterdam, where I took this photo, but you know what I mean).

And that's just talking about what you do with the bike once you get there: the bike access to places is much harder in places like the QCA as well. 

My kingdom for a separated bike lane!

That makes the lower costs of bike use much more accessible, since it means that someone who wants to use a bike instead of a car actually can.

3. Social Expectation

And of course, part of why there isn't the bike infrastructure in places in the QCA that there is in bigger cities is that a car is just expected here, and a bike isn't. London may be struggling to get as many bike commuters as it would benefit from, but it's also doing a lot to improve that (hence the CityBracket win after all).

The QCA has implemented improvements, and the recreational biking around is definitely good and getting better, with long bike lanes on both sides of the river and along Duck Creek in Davenport. But for true bike replacement, it's not even really in the realm of possibility. 

Trust me, I'm trying.

I often bike to work, bike to get groceries, bike my kids to school, bike to services--but I can't bike everywhere, every day, safely, and do what I need to do without a car pretty frequently, because the social expectation is that everyone has a car, so everything is built around that.

This is one of the ways in which mass transit and bike infrastructure are mutually advantageous: both shift the baseline expectation of car to one of not necessarily having a car, which means that the world bends more freely to allow life without that particular kind of vehicle.

London's excellent transit creates space for better biking; similarly, Amsterdam's better biking creates mental space for better transit. They're co-constitutive.

That creates the great puzzle of a cityscape like the QCA: how do we go from neither to either, or both?

Well, the main thing I'm trying is just actually using what's here--biking where I can, using the bus when I can, and so on.

But community organizing--bending social expectations by actually talking to each other--is a key component as well.

And if you can get the local government on board like London has, well, that really kickstarts the process.