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.

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?