Who Runs the Transit?

 This article made me think about the question of how best to organize our local transit agencies here in the QCA for better service. Or, more specifically, what lessons we can take from other places about how to manage transit across multiple kinds of internal legal divisions: municipal, county, state, geographic. After all, the Quad Cities has (more than) four cities, by definition, as well as a state boundary that happens to be a major, wide river in the midst of everything.

But we are not the only place to have such boundaries, even if the Mississippi is a particularly large river. So what can we learn from others?

1. Collective Decision-making

The biggest lesson is that the more we make local decisions about a collective problem (how to move people around the area) the more problems we'll have. When Rock Island decides to make it harder to open shelters because they want to "spread services more evenly across the region," but does so unilaterally, we just end up with less services. The same goes for transit. 

Good transit services, like ThamesLink above, cut across administrative boundaries to provide service that will serve the people who live there regardless of their particularized municipal or regional government. What does that mean here in the QCA? It means not making Bettendorf Transit decisions for Bettendorf and CitiBus decisions for Davenport, or Iowa decisions for Iowa and Illinois decisions for Illinois, but making regional decisions based on populations and potential trips. If a bunch of Iowans work at the Arsenal, or John Deere, we should probably have transit that helps them get there. If a bunch of Illini work at Arconic, same deal--not to mention the two downtowns with their distinct cultural and social amenities.

2. Unify Agencies

More than collective decisions, there's also a collective action issue. You could argue that we actually have some decent collective decision-making here: there's one agency on the Illinois side, and it technically manages the Bettendorf Transit as well, and the Davenport transit connects to it. But the connections are clunky and they happen inconveniently by city boundaries rather than in logical places for a line to actually start or end. 

Just like the TTC used to end awkwardly around the boundaries of Toronto but now emerges into the Greater Toronto Area where it makes sense, it would make a lot more sense to have a single line running down Locust/Middle Road than to have to get off and transfer in a literal Burlington Coat Factory parking lot.

There is a 1-Line TTC stop right on the Vaughan/Toronto (North York) line, but it's not the end of the line or a transfer point; it's just there because there are meaningful things to go to. Similarly, there should still be a stop near I-74 and Middle Road/Locust, but it shouldn't be where the lines stop and force a transfer. 

The fix for this, ideally, is a unified agency (ala the TTC, TfL, WMATA) that runs transit with regard to where the people need to go and not where the city lines sit. 

The DC Metro would be a lot less useful if it only went to the boundaries of DC.

3. Meaningful Transit for an Integrated Community

Of course, the secret background lesson here is that all of these communities run more transit (even per capita) than we do here. And I'm not advocating for DC/London/Toronto levels of transit here in the Quad Cities! But if you want people to unite together to make a collective community, you need to make it not just possible but easy for them to get around.

In a way, the Mississippi could even be a major blessing here, paradoxically because it is so annoying to cross. We only have three main crossings (plus the I-80 Bridge out in LeClaire), which funnels traffic across them and creates major issues when one or more are shut, e.g. for a race. It's hard to put a lot of cars between the two sides of the river, and there's a reason that I meet people who (say they) never go across the river if they can help it.

But mass transit thrives in a situation where a lot of people want to get from one place to another across a narrow channel. 

If we truly integrated our transit, we could make it the easiest and best way to get from one side to the other, and knit the community together.

I'm not advocating for a Blackfriars Station-style bridge-as-transit-station (above) but wouldn't it be cool?

And more to the point, it's a good example that a river doesn't have to mean bad transit connections. In fact, it can mean that people gravitate towards transit, because it makes getting past that barrier easier.

I know this likely seems idealistic, since we haven't managed this in 190 years of having Davenport on the opposite side from Rock Island. But there's no reason we couldn't, if we take the lesson of not dividing our transit and letting it instead tie us together.

Modal Integration and the QCA

 I was looking at my transit cards from various agencies, and thinking how cool it would be if we in the Quad Cities actually had some fare integration, transit integration, or general modal integration: if you could get around the QCA consistently without friction, moving from one mode or agency to another.

And no, I don't just mean being able to stick my bike in the back of my car.

1. Cross-state Integration

I would love to live in a world where there were more real connections between the Citibus in Davenport and the Metro system in the Illinois side. The same company even operates the (inadequate) Bettendorf transit as does the Illinois system! We could do better! 

Look, they do fine for their scale at a US level: they do have buses across the river despite the differing state and municipal authorities. The timing is even OK for transfers, mostly. But holy moly is the opportunity there for more.

Imagine if we could be like WMATA, even though we obviously aren't the DC area, and just have one transit organization that plans and schedules and so on--and that includes multiple river crossings instead of one bus for each of two bridges.

I don't expect a Metro, just decent interstate work.

2. Last Mile Issues

QCA transit has a big last mile problem. You can take a bus a lot of places--sort of. Imagine if we had either more buses or real bike integration with the existing routes! Or even functional sidewalks near major streets! So much could actually work!

I hear protected bike lanes allow people to actually safely bike on the street, not just in Vancouver.

Rumor has it that sidewalks work in Louisville, and could perhaps here, on Kimberly Road even.

Or on Eastern Avenue...except not. 

3. Don't Forget the Ferry!

The Channel Cat is not like the world's most ideal transit mode, but it does provide valuable service shuttling humans across a very wide and inconvenient (in this sense) river. 

It's also not integrated at all with anything else.

Vancouver, like us, has a giant bridge--but they also have the SeaBus across that same body of water.

Toronto will also put you on a ferry as part of your public transportation. And that's not even mentioning that I grew up in Seattle...

I just miss having consistent, connected ferry service that actually feeds into other consistent transit as well.

Consider the possibilities! We could actually have an integrated system and you could get around smoothly and efficiently.

Or we could keep what we have I suppose.

Immigration and Chicago

 Look, I can't help it if just when I'm starting talking about cities and immigration, I happen to go to a city where ICE is actively raiding people's homes. 

And when I do, I can't help but talk about Chicago and immigration--even if the series is supposed to be about where Americans could go.

For the record, every one of these pics is from this weekend--that is, no older pics, no pics from a time when the Trump administration wasn't claiming this city was a chaotic hell on earth that needs the national guard and ICE to keep it in line. Judge for yourself.

1. Chicago is a good place for immigrants (ICE excepted)

Look, Chicago right now is a vibrant, urbanist city with large immigrant populations and a culture that welcomes a wide range of people. Sure, it had the bad fortune of coming up against what is probably my favorite American city in the CityBracket challenge, but it's a damn good place, and only getting better. 

This particular Lady Liberty may be in the parking garage of Midway Airport, but the idea of welcoming the tired, the poor, the huddled masses yearning to breathe free is not alien to Chicago outside its airports either.

It's a city with vibrant and international cultural influences, as in this public art on the Belmont station, and a city where this weekend I heard at least three different non-English languages being spoken on the street. It's a city where my biggest problem this weekend was figuring out which diverse cuisines and grocery stores I was going to visit, and a city where despite historical issues of redlining and ghettoization, you do genuinely walk past people who are different from you every block on the street.

2. Chicago is a good place for people, period

The city really has made strides in urbanism in recent years. Since I left a decade ago, there are new bike lanes:

(even if they do sometimes randomly end)

And the El remains one of the most iconic pieces of transit architecture in the US:

It's a city that maybe does sometimes sleep (it's not literally New York, which has that phrase on lockdown) but that is up and buzzing pretty much whenever you need it to be.

This was at 11pm. It's pretty active (and remember that I try not to get people in my photos, so this isn't representative of how many people were on the street at night).

I randomly ran across a farmer's market that shut down Division Street for several blocks, with excellent pastries (and the produce looked good too, but I ate the pastries).

It's a city that has less affordability problems than most major US cities, and that frankly I'd recommend to anyone moving here--which is probably why ICE decided to make it a target.

3. Chicago is cultured

Being the biggest city in a whole component part of the US (the Midwest) pays some dividends.

There's a lot of public art (this is also in Midway train station).

They decorate the streets for Halloween.

And I would be remiss not to mention traditional cultural amenities, like the Art Institute of Chicago (above), the symphony (literally behind me as I took this photo), or the active theatre scene.

All in all, if you wanted to move to an American city (and right now I'm not sure you should, but let's put that aside), I would highly recommend Chicago.

A city that's patriotic despite the fact that its government is literally trying to put troops on its streets, because it knows what America can be at its best--because it is America at its best. So yes: visas may be hard to get right now, and ICE may have a vendetta against the city, and US approval internationally is at a low point for obvious reasons. So people may not want to come at all. 

But if they do, Chicago is a great place to choose. 

And it knows where it stands on those other issues, anyway.

Election Day Free Transit: Worth Trying Otherwise?

The Quad Cities will have free public transit on Election Day, November 5, to help people get to the polls. This includes the two transit systems in the QC: CitiBus in Davenport and MetroLink in the rest (technically MetroLink is the name on the Illinois side and Bettendorf Transit runs in Iowa, but with the apparent exception of the drivers, MetroLink has run Bettendorf Transit operations for a while).

Is this a good idea? Well, everything that might help people get to the polls is good, because representative government relies on participatory democracy. But is it a good idea for more than election day?

Well, the data we have suggests that free transit isn't the best use of transit money. That is to say, when you eliminate fares the money comes out of the system, and it's better to use it instead improve service rather than to cut fares beyond a certain point. 

And boy could the Quad Cities use better service (more on that on a later post). So free transit wouldn't be the best tradeoff: the dollar fare isn't likely barring most ridership. Instead, it's issues like coverage, frequency, speed, and connectivity, all of which would be harder to fix without even the small amount of cash a fare generates.

But if it were a different pot of money? After all, it might be easier to get larger political entities to fund 'free transit' than 'a small increase in service' with the same cost.

In that case, I will merely note anecdotally that students at the local universities already get free transit -- and that in my observation informing them of this and getting them on the bus makes them much more likely to use the system at cost 0 than they were when they thought cost was higher.

Traveling With Transit: Quad Cities to Chicago (and beyond!)

 So with all due respect to the Quad Cities International Airport (MLI), which is, as so many things in the Quad Cities are, a perfectly good if very small version of what it is--in this case, an airport--it has relatively few connections and most of them are through Chicago.

Chicago is less than 200 miles away, and although we have not yet received our long-discussed actual passenger service there, it is still often more efficient and much cheaper to fly out of the Chicago airports, ORD and MDW, rather than connecting from MLI.

However, this is very difficult if you don't have a car. The Metrolink route 20 on the Illinois side of the Quad Cities will run to MLI, so you can get to that without a car, but it's much more difficult to get to the Chicago airports that way--at least until that train shows up (someday...).

But difficult doesn't mean impossible. Here is my account of doing just that: a no-car trip from my home in Davenport to Chicago O'Hare.

Hopeful Signs in Rock Island

Because Illinois is simply more willing to fund transit and other urbanist initiatives than Iowa right now, the best urbanist improvements in the Quad Cities right now tend to be on the Illinois side.

The upcoming changes on 7th Ave (the main drag of downtown Rock Island, though not the main commercial street because the traffic is going too fast) are a good example of this.

7th Ave (which twists and turns into 5th Ave as it winds its way into Moline) is very wide right now, and it doesn't need to be. The key change appears to be that Illinois DOT recognizes this, and is going to not only narrow it but (wonder of wonders) add a bike lane to it. 

That would be a major help to bike commuters in particular, because 7th Ave is a very useful thoroughfare in this area:

The arrow here is 7th Avenue; there is bike path on the riverfront to the north, but it winds and doesn't always interact with the street grid in useful ways. Adding a bike lane on 7th means making it infinitely easier to traverse this area on a bike, especially if you're actually going somewhere in or around downtown Rock Island (like, say, the courthouse, library, city hall, or any of the restaurants or shopping). 

Will this make a big difference for me personally? Probably not immediately, since biking across the bridges that lead towards 7th Ave from Davenport is not particularly easy. But it certainly makes it more likely that now that the Government Bridge to the Arsenal is back open, I'll make my way across it once this additional work is done, and down to 7th instead of across the riverfront.