Transit in Snow

Since it snowed overnight in the Quad Cities, this felt like a good time to talk about what makes good transit in snow--even if there isn't likely to be that much more snow this year until winter. This is similar to my points about bad weather and driving, but more related to what transit can and should do.

Basically, I think there are a few principles that can help transit thrive, or at least work, in snow; and I'll use the big snowfall a bit over a year ago in Chicago as an example, since I'm not talking about the tiny amount that actually fell here today (any transit agency should be able to deal with that).

Still only a little snow -- but important to deal with.

1. Cover things

Basic as it gets, but the easiest way to clear snow is to not have it get on things (other than roofs) in the first place. If you can make sure that your waiting areas for passengers, service areas for vehicles, routes, etc. are covered, you'll be in a better situation to ride out a storm.

Sometimes this isn't possible (L tracks are not covered) but the closer you can get the better. 

As you can see here, the tracks have snow, but the waiting areas were easier to clear. 

This means that for all I love the L and tolerate the Metra, I'm a big fan of subways in snowy climates.

2. Fixed and separated routes are your friends

Trains obviously help here, but I'd suggest a good busway can too. The key point is that if you know where your vehicles will go, and you have priority or sole access to the space, you can do a lot more prep and a lot more aggressive work to keep the snow at bay. 

Chicago sometimes burns things on the tracks of the L in snow and extreme cold; you can't do that if you don't know exactly where vehicles will be, or if private cars might be in the same space acting unpredictably.

This means that I would prioritize this kind of grade separation even where demand alone might not seem to justify it. That doesn't mean "build a subway for a thousand people," but it does mean I'm a big fan of the way some Latin American cities have prioritized BRT with separation from regular traffic for minimal cost. 

3. Walkshed matters

Who can actually get through the snow to your transit? Well, how far do they need to go to get to it? Will the sidewalks be passable? The spacing of stops and the degree of coverage will make a huge difference to the city's experience of snow and transit. 

The Sears/Willis Tower area here is going to have a lot easier time accessing transit than the area with giant empty spaces and no transit stops. 

So beyond physical design of spaces in which the vehicles operate and the people wait, the routing of the transit system and the city's urban design they're embedded in will make a huge difference. 

But it doesn't mean prioritizing coverage over frequency--because people also won't walk in the snow if they think they'll have to wait an hour or more in bad conditions. It's a balancing act, as all of these are: snow really just accentuates all the elements of transit design. You need good infrastructure and good design for any transit system to work optimally; the potential presence of snow just stresses the system and makes those things even more important.

On Not Gutting Things

It is probably obvious that a lot of transit money in the US comes from the federal government (mostly for construction, not maintenance and operations, but still). And given the current state of the government, this feels like an important time to talk about why even projects that might not be the absolute leanest price tag they ever could have been are not actually waste--and why gutting federal dollars is bad policy.

1. If You Don't Build It, They Can't Come

This isn't meant as a defense of literally any boondoggle project, but unbuilt transit can't be used by anyone. Transit takes time to find its audience, and its uses; jerking projects around causes both delays in actually getting people on transit and distrust of the transit system from people who only hear about projects cut or scaled back. If it's important to keep running a service so people can actually discover it, like the Rochester Fast Ferry, it's also important to actually build it, like the Quad Cities-Chicago link, or California HSR. Obviously there is the Charybdis of the sunk cost fallacy, but there is also the Scylla of pulling the plug too early, and in my view almost all US projects end up in the latter. This is especially likely given the current antgonism to government spending (except on Elon Musk's own contracts).

2. Highways are inefficient, actually 

Look, if we're going to spend billions to trillions on moving people from place to place, could we at least do it on things that move more marginal people than highway expansions? Rail and bus may not be perfect cures for traffic, but neither is a highway.

And if we're going to induce demand, let's do it on train tracks and bus lanes, not already-widened streets and freeways. Federal, state, and local dollars always end up flowing most to road construction, but we never seem to question that in the same way transit dollars get put under the microscope.

3. Time is money

I don't mean this in the colloquial sense of not lollygagging on the job; I mean that transit costs increase over time, especially for unbuilt transit. Think Sound Transit around Seattle, or the NY Second Ave Subway: costs only seem to go one way. Building sooner, more, and faster now is the best way to build at a reasonable/more reasonable/maybe even a little reasonable rate.

If we were actually looking for efficiency, then, we'd build now, rather than building later, because it will cost more (even in inflation-adjusted dollars) to do it then, and we'll need it eventually.

Or as I've said here before, several times:

Just build the train.

Or bus.

Whatever it is: if it's reasonable to build ever, build now. It's the actual efficient option, as opposed to pretending to be "efficient" by delaying, gutting, or shelving transit projects that we'll just have to build more expensively later.

What Counts as Transit Coverage?

I have over the last decade spent a lot of time in places that appear, on a map, to have transit coverage. That is, if you look on a transit map, you see (bus) lines. But I would also suggest that I have in fact spent most of the last decade in places that really don't have transit coverage, and today I'd like to unpack that. As a note, many of the ideas here are informed by having read Human Transit, though I certainly claim any errors as my own, and I'm sure I have garbled the transmission.

1. Coverage means having somewhere to go

It's one thing to have a bus line somewhere near you. It's another to have one that goes where you need (at different levels, of course: everywhere you need, most places you need, at least somewhere you need). There are extreme examples; I've visited towns that have only one bus that takes you down main street (or equivalent) and to the town over.

This is great as a start; it means you can get to the town over! But if you were going somewhere else in town, or to a different town over in a different direction, it's not helpful. It's purely binary; the destination is or isn't on that one bus line.

Even in places with more than one bus line, I've encountered some major gaps; one time I couldn't get to the mall, for some reason and another time I had to walk a mile without sidewalks (a different but related kind of urban accessibility issue). If you can't reasonably get where you need, the existence of a bus isn't actually helping you.

2. Coverage means being able to rely on it 

I don't necessarily mean you need to be able to never own a car (though that's nice when possible!). I mean that if you take the bus there it needs to get you back that time, since you took the bus and not the car. This means hours of service (if the bus stops running at 5 and I miss that bus, I might be out of luck for over 12 days). It means frequency of service (if I have to wait another hour if I miss a bus by a minute, that reduces my willingness to rely on it). It means visibility (do I know when and where the bus is supposed to come? Or whether it's delayed or rerouted or something else?). All of these are necessary for functional coverage.

3. Coverage means effective trips

This is related to both of the other points--and, for all the other issues the Davenport Citibus has, I think it does this fairly well. Coverage means actually being able to use those lines on the map: connections between buses that are decently timed, located, and run; no surprising routes that don't actually run at a certain time; ideally, connections that aren't all "go downtown and then transfer."

Rochester, NY, for instance, has very few suburb to suburb service options, so even though one can theoretically go from neighboring suburbs to each other, it may be an hour in to the center and an hour out for what is a fifteen minute drive. Davenport itself does better than this, with other transfer points around town, and the same is true of the Metro on the other side of the river, but of course in the QC as a whole intersections between Iowa and Illinois suffer. As always.

These are just some thoughts on why just seeing lines on a map doesn't actually mean you can (or people will) use a service. Good transit means more than a good fold-out map in a brochure or on a bus stop wall. It means a service where that coverage has meaning and use for people, not just maps.

Vaporware Transit

There's a concept in software development called "vaporware": a product that's talked up and used to generate interest or investment but never actually exists or was never nearly capable of what was promised even if it technically existed in some form (the eternal "we'll add that feature in six months").

This concept can be applied more broadly, and today I want to discuss it in terms of mass transit and the promises we make about our cities, with three examples: two from my own experience and one famous recent example.

1. Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good

The most obvious recent example of vaporware in transit is Elon Musk's hyperloop, which promised immense speeds across long distances with untested technology and a proposed system all across the US.The article I just linked to is from 2018; it's not hard to miss that the fast supposed pace of implementation has not occurred. Instead, it appears that the idea was floated mainly to try to derail the California High Speed Rail project (a project that has had enough of its own problems that one might be tempted to add it to this list without Musk's help). 

What Musk's company (The Boring Company, and admittedly decent pub) has built is a tunnel for cars under Las Vegas. But it's not exactly beating high speed rail in speed; it's for cars and doesn't do a ton of actually useful stuff. I'm not saying all hyperloop ideas will eventually resolve into the current Vegas Loop. But I am saying that trains are, by now, a pretty robustly tested technology that works. Opting for or even considering untested or undreamed-of alternatives to replace trains is both an inefficient approach (just build the trains faster!) and leads to disappointment and a sense that major transit investments are all vaporware themselves. 

We don't need to find new solutions for transit; we need to actually build the ones we already know about 

Just build the dang train.

2. Don't let entrenched interests stand across progress yelling stop

My personal current White Whale of transit is the Quad Cities to Chicago rail link that's been unable to move forward for fifteen years despite allocated federal funding. That funding has been extended again, but there's no actual progress to report. Unlike the Hyperloop, this is tested, well-known tech. There literally used to be a train in the 20th century! But Iowa Interstate owns the tracks and isn't interested in playing ball.

This is unacceptable; we don't let private companies own the interstate highway system and prevent its use (some private companies do operate toll roads, but the government doesn't let them shut the road down). This project should under no circumstances have turned into vaporware. It's not a hard lift in terms of technology, engineering, or construction. It's expensive -- but the money has been allocated (and letting it delay only makes it more expensive both in inflationary terms and in terms of infrastructure decay). I'm not advocating for going back to blowing up whole neighborhoods for the highway, but when a specific corporation stands in the way of improving its own right-of-way to avoid having to let it be used for public good, perhaps that is a thing we should not support. 

Just build the dang train, again.

3. If you build it, be willing to operate and fund it

Finally, let us visit Rochester, NY, which ran a ferry to Toronto, ON, Canada for...generously...two years (it did not run most of that time). There were major problems with how the project was organized and implemented and, quite honestly, I am not saying that it was ever going to actually work. 

But dang, I wish it had; having lived in Rochester for four years (well after the ferry ceased operations), direct access to Toronto at a speed that (due to geography, going across rather than around a lake) was faster than driving would have been wonderful. A game changer. All those things the city was hoping for when the project was pitched.

Again, it was horribly mismanaged. But abandoning a project not expected to be actually financially sound for 2-3 during year 2 is a failure of financial planning and political will. Transit takes time to find its audience, and become part of people's lives. If you build an ambitious project, stick with it long enough to get to that stage, or any project can become vaporware.

Also, maybe write your contracts more carefully and vet your operating company if you farm it out. Just saying.

Vaporware is bad for individual projects, but it's killer for the idea of transit overall, especially in a country like the US that has seen a lot of transportation infrastructure either not built or decayed over the years. We need to avoid these pitfalls--overpromising with untested tech, letting projects linger unbuilt, and abandoning them before they find their users--in order to make sure we don't let promising ideas fall by the wayside. Or more positively, so we can have better transit for us all.

Bad Weather, Driving, and Public Transit

The last couple weeks we had some bad weather here in the Quad Cities, a real mix: some freezing temps, some slight snow, some rain, some fog. Not ridiculous amounts of any of them, but along the way it got me thinking that all too often we treat bad weather as a problem for public transit, but ignore it being a problem for private cars. Let me explain:

1. Driving in precipitation sucks

Yes, we all know that waiting for the bus/train/tram in bad weather is unpleasant. 

But once you get on the vehicle, it's so, so much better.

OK, there are exceptions, but usually it's better.

When you're driving, you're responsible for navigating, for managing the vehicle in the wet and the slick, for paying close attention the whole time to everyone else who is doing the same.

When you're on public transit, someone else does all that. And if the public transit runs in its own right-of-way, the difficulty of managing all the other vehicles on the road goes way down--to the point where some vehicles don't have to have anyone driving them at all.

It's a lot easier to move around if you don't have to actually drive yourself in those conditions.

2. Frequency matters, of course

One advantage of driving yourself in bad weather, of course, is that you can go when you want. If you have public transit like we do in the QC (hourly, heavily dependent on connections rather than direct service), that's not the case.

But if you have fast, frequent service (turn up and go service, as they call it), your wait is less; your flexibility is higher; and you can take advantage of not having to drive yourself (see #1) without a huge disadvantage in terms of wait time, especially out in the bad weather.

3. Stations and shelters matter

Of course, the transit system can work with you to make it easier (or against you to make it harder) to use transit in bad weather. As I noted about Milwaukee, heaters in the cold help a lot. More basically, shelters against wind and precipitation matter a lot.

Even more, a subway can automatically help by putting stations entirely out of the weather.

Both stations visible here protect the riders, though one does it by building up and one by digging down.

The trip to a station is of course unprotected, but a good system can help that too: with frequent service across the whole city, especially feeder buses to stations, and more expansive systems that capture more of the city themselves.

All of this is not to say that it can't ever be unpleasant to take public transit in bad weather. I lived in Chicago for years; I know what standing on an elevated platform in freezing winds is like!

But the contrast can be to transit's advantage if we frame it right--and if we plan our transit appropriately to make that contrast beneficial, rather than detrimental.

Sloterdijk, and the Value of Visiting Just Outside the City Center

When I visited Amsterdam last year, I had no real restrictions on where I stayed. I wasn't visiting anyone, or going to any scheduled events, and I was traveling alone. I ended up staying not in the historic city center, or the eastern end of the city, where the majority of tourist spots are. Instead, I stayed here near Sloterdijk station in the northwest of the city.

As you may be able to see from the photo, Sloterdijk has some advantages: a bike lane (front), bus and tram connections (below), mainline rail and metro connections (above), and, not coincidentally, a fairly cheap fairly nice hotel close by:

(proof you can see the station and metro line from my hotel)

Certainly this was not the only choice I could have made. But I want to spend this post talking a little about why I made it, and generally why I think it's a good model for visiting a city you want to explore in an urbanist manner.

1. Transit (and Human-Powered Transportation) Rules

I just mentioned all those transit connections. There are also a host of bikes, which I didn't use but most Amsterdammers do.

And while I didn't bike, I did walk a lot. Basically, it's easy to get places from Sloterdijk, even though Sloterdijk itself might not be considered a major destination or a central place. Choosing a place like this, from which you can access places you might want to get to, but which isn't itself so crowded with others because it is not itself a main destination, is in my opinion a cheat code to visiting busy cities like Amsterdam. Using transit, bikes, and feet to go places is fun, fairly easy, and (for me at least) fairly relaxing--and it frees you to stay somewhere just an inch or so off the beaten path (though not the bike path, which goes right there).

2. Experience More Normal Life

I didn't take a bunch of photos of Amsterdammers doing normal things because that would have felt weird and creepy. But staying in Sloterdijk meant that the places I was walking to near my hotel--the grocery store I went to, the businesses I strolled past, the little lanes the pedestrian paths wound their way between--were filled with pretty much normal Dutch life (at least for Amsterdam) and not just things geared to tourists. 

For some, this may not be a draw. But if you're hoping to see not just "Amsterdam(TM)" but what it might be like to be someone living in Amsterdam, to understand not just the tourist model of urbanism but how it might help people in the actual city, this is helpful--and fun.

3. Proximity to Other Places

I didn't just go to Amsterdam on that trip to the Netherlands. I went to Haarlem too!

And well, one plus of staying outside the city center proper is that you are, or at least can be, close to another city! Sloterdijk is one stop closer to Haarlem on most lines than Amsterdam Centraal, so by staying a bit outside of the Amsterdam center, I actually had an easier time getting to Haarlem.

Generalizing and drawing on other trips I've done: staying just a bit to one side can make it easy and fun to go see what's further to that side! 

Obviously Sloterdijk is not rural; it's still Amsterdam, and those very transit connections that I valued mean that it's tied into Amsterdam pretty well. The point here isn't to avoid the city entirely (how urbanist would that be?) but to try something a little outside the most obvious urban center and, by doing so, unlock some additional benefits. I enjoyed it, and I recommend a similar approach to any other visit to a major city.

Milwaukee's Connect BRT: The Good, the Bad, the Ugly

I recently had a chance to ride Milwaukee's bus rapid transit system (BRT), branded Connect (buses bearing CN and a numeral) for the first time, and I wanted to share a few thoughts on what I liked, what I didn't like, and one thing that I think they've done very, very wrong.

I do want to specify here that I didn't do a full system review or ride every line (or even all of one line). Rather, these are impressions based on using the line just to travel for ordinary purposes, in this case between downtown and the waterfront, which ought to be a fairly heavily trafficked area (and indeed, even on an absolutely freezing January day, there was a fair amount of ridership both on the CN-1 and on the other buses its route overlapped). Thus this is not conclusory about everything about the Milwaukee BRT, but merely observations that might help us think about how a similar BRT might be best implemented.

1. The Good

I always prefer to start out positive, and so I'll begin with this: the BRT stops are well-indicated, have off-bus ticket purchase and validation options, and a good visual presence on the street without blocking pedestrian access around them. 

Also, the ticketing is very straightforward: all of Milwaukee buses, BRT included, are a single fare for 90 minutes including transfers, and tickets (and the app you can also load money in) have a QR code that you simply scan (off--bus for BRT, on-bus for regular buses). 

These are good elements of a useable system even for visitors: clear, well-comnunicated, easy to use.

2. The Bad

There are some flaws, however. The shelters are unheated (unlike some of Chicago's El stops and bus shelters, where in winter months you can press a button to trigger heat lamps), and that's a bigger issue than you might think until you remember what winter can be like in Wisconsin. The BRT is frequent, almost turn up and go, but not quite -- and that means that sometimes, either in a dead zone on the schedule or when a bus is delayed (see below), you can be waiting in very chilly weather with a canopy but no other protection. That discourages use, especially for vulnerable users like the elderly and children.

Also, the BRT runs, at least in the section I rode, in a shared bus lane with other buses. That's not a deal breaker, but it does remove the speed benefits (or most of them) from the BRT skipping stops. We got caught behind a 30 bus, which meant the "rapid" of bus rapid transit wasn't actually happening.  Sure, it was no worse than the regular bus, but it meant the bus was more likely to get delayed (see above) and the line is less attractive in terms of speed than it could be. Also, that same bus lane is only partly bus-only (it's not separated from general traffic throughout) and so again the system is slower than it could be, reducing the advantages of a supposedly rapid system.

3. The Ugly

I did not get a picture of this because I was swinging a child over it, and needed both hands, but the BRT doesn't always end up level with the stations. As such, there was a good foot of gap that I jumped over and had to swing my kid over in order to exit. This is because Milwaukee hasn't cleared the parking spaces next to BRT stations/stops, so the bus doesn't necessarily have direct access to the zone it needs to be in to line up with the high-floor stop level evenly. Instead, because it had to go around a parked car, it ends up at an angle, creating this gap.

This is a massive issue for accessibility and for the feel of the system; nothing says "we don't really care about transit users" than a gap that gapes between the bus and the actual sidewalk, with a drop in between. It's ugly, it's dangerous, and it should not be that hard to eliminate.

Overall, I would take this system again, and I'm sure I will since I visit Milwaukee often (only 3-3.5 hours from the QC!). I'm eager to see how it performs in better weather, and maybe outside the downtown core. But for now, it is a decent idea let down by some bad implementation steps, and Milwaukee could definitely Connect better.

Rail Service, Interrupted

So ever since I moved to the Quad Cities, and actually rather a long time before, there have been reports that Amtrak was in negotiations and planning to bring passenger rail service back to the Quad Cities: a direct line to Chicago (well, as direct as local Amtrak service gets).

It has not yet happened. It looks unlikely now to ever happen. Some of the blame here goes to Iowa Interstate, the company that owns the rails (but discussing rail nationalization is a different discussion). Some probably goes to local leaders and Amtrak and national leaders as well. But beyond apportioning blame, I want to talk here about why I think this kind of rail service should be doable, and is valuable, even if it's proving difficult in the moment.

1. We don't need more cars in Chicago

We also don't need more in the QC, but that is a much bigger ask. Chicago has real mass transit, as I've discussed in other posts, from the CTA trains and buses to Pace to, yes, even Metra. Not only that, but downtown Chicago and several of its neighborhoods are very walkable. 

But cars are like the proverbial hammer: if you have one, everything looks like a nail (or in this case, a drive). Once you drive into Chicago, each of the sub-trips you might make in Chicago is more likely to be taken by car, because, well, you have the car already. And parking longterm in Chicago is expensive, so you're also disincentivized to just leave the car in a garage (although you certainly can, as my family has proven). Instead, you'll drive within Chicago as well as to it. 

A train fixes this, because a train is city center to city center, and delivers you without a car to a place you don't need a car. It's a win-win.

2. It can be price competitive 

Now, this required actual consideration and communication, because the up-front cost of a train ticket (especially on Amtrak, which doesn't do the world's best pricing, or even international standard) is likely to be high. Also, a lot of people disregard car costs, including gas (especially if you can get to and from Chicago without filling up, even though you still spend the gas), insurance, chance of accident, etc. 

But parking in Chicago really is expensive, as noted above, in a way that can make a train ticket look a lot better. And getting a parking ticket in Chicago is worse. And you don't have to pay that if you don't have a car. Getting people to realize this can be difficult because, again, people discount car costs. But it actually can be cheaper, or at least competitive, to take even an Amtrak train.

3. Trains go two ways

The QC is on I-80, so we're no strangers to people coming in because the transportation is convenient. But it's worth remembering that trains go both ways, so a train to Chicago is also a train to here: and it's not just going to produce one-way flow. At ideal levels of service frequency and speed someone like my friend who does a weekly commute from Chicago (weekends in one, weeks in the other) could use the train to see their family more often. But even at minimal levels the existence of the train would promise additional tourism, shopping, and just general visitors, not just from and to Chicago but from and to the stops on the way (like Rockford). 

And tying the region together more would be good for social cohesion and mutual understanding, something Chicago and the rest of Illinois have often struggled with. 

Overall, I have more thoughts that will probably make it to another post, but this is a basic primer for why we should be pushing for that Quad Cities rail link actively, and not just letting it become another disappointment.

Traveling with Transit

One of my favorite activities in traveling is to visit cities with some level (ideally a high level) of transit and spend my time not just going to the traditional tourist destinations, but all over town on that transit.

For this post, I want to talk about a few best practices for making this a fun, joyful practice that you might adopt for yourself.

1. Choose a city with a transit pass, and buy it for the right length

Transit is usually actually cheaper than driving as a lifestyle, but it feels different: usually you pay for a car upfront (rentals, purchase price) or in the background (depreciation, gas, etc.) and you pay for transit ride by ride. But a transit pass flips this around, making marginal trips free. Obviously this only really applies if you've got the right timeline available for a pass: buying a monthly or annual pass for a 3 day visit isn't cost effective! 

But if you can get a daily, weekend, or weekly pass, or whatever is similar to your visit time, it can unlock the whole city for a (usually) reasonable fee.

I did this in Paris and Amsterdam last year, and it made things infinitely easier. I particularly appreciated how these cities have passes that cover multiple modes of transit, so I could take for example an Amsterdam tram and the metro on the same pass, or a Paris tram and RER. 

Two modes, one card.

Some systems work this differently: London does sell day travelcards, but for Oyster and contactless you can also just tap until you hit a daily cap without pre-purchasing a pass, and once you hit the cap marginal travel is free like with a pass.

Just tap, baby. 

Either way, finding a place you can not be concerned about how much each trip will add to your cost is a good start. I'm looking at you, San Francisco: BART doesn't offer passes.

2. Choose a well-connected city

I mentioned above that I like to use the transit to visit places that aren't just traditional tourist areas. But to do that, transit has to go to places that aren't just tourist areas in a useful way: no Detroit People Mover that's just downtown (though in Detroit that might not even be a tourist area) or Seattle Monorail that only has two, very touristy, stations. 

To do this, ideally, you want a city where the transit is used by actual residents, so tha you know it'll take you to a wide variety of places. Big cities aren't the only ones that do this, but it does help. Fortunately, a good system often means a good travel pass system, though not always, which is why I put these separately.

3. Choose a city with good transit timing 

See my last post on the Metra for what bad transit timing can do. You don't want to explore somewhere only to get stuck an extra hour or two because they don't have a train back--especially if you only have 24 or 48 hours in a city!

This doesn't always or at least only mean purely good frequency, though turn-up-and-go service levels are ideal for this. It means reliability, both in terms of on-time performance and not cancelling trains or buses. And it means timings that fit your schedule, whatever that is: frequent service that starts after you need to be somewhere or ends before you want to leave doesn't help all that much, but a less frequent but better-timed service might help more.

The actual implementation of this kind of tourism isn't too hard: get on a bus or a train or a tram and find a place to get off and explore--or find a place and then figure out the transit to it. But in order to do it enjoyably and without too much worry and expense, I recommend these three priorities for picking a place to do transit-based tourism.

Metra is Fun, but Mediocre

 Visiting Chicago, I took the opportunity to do something I'd only done a few times in my entire life, despite living in Hyde Park for five years: taking the Metra north to downtown Chicago.

Now, I've actually done that a lot of times now that I live outside of Chicago (though not on the same line--the closest one to the Quad Cities is in Joliet, not the South Side of Chicago). But I did it very rarely when I lived in Chicago. And today I want to talk a bit about why.

Now, some of why is that I didn't take advantage of opportunities when I lived in Chicago. But while some of this can be placed on my shoulders, a lot of it is systemic, and not personal. And that is what I want to talk about today.

1. Lack of Fare Integration

The Metra Electric is, in theory, one of the best ways to get up to downtown Chicago from Hyde Park. It's relatively fast, because it's grade-separated, unlike the #6 bus that runs a similar route. It stops a lot less. And it's direct, basically just zipping up the lakeshore and dropping you off downtown (via McCormick Place, which is the rare place better served by Metra than other services).

But you can't use Ventra on it, even though Ventra is supposed to be the Chicago single card like London's Oyster or Seattle's ORCA. 

Well, you sort of can. You can buy Metra tickets in the Ventra app. But if you have a Ventra card, or a contactless card, you can't just tap your way into or onto the train. If you don't have a smartphone app, the two are fundamentally distinct. And that means CTA and Pace, the two regional systems that do use Ventra, are distinct from Metra. They are anyway, in terms of fares: the Metra fares are not part of any fare capping with either CTA or Pace, and so for anyone (like me when I lived in Hyde Park) using Ventra to use the CTA, the Metra is both an added expense and an added difficulty. 

It's fast and convenient, but not cost effective, and financially awkward.

2. Timing is Not Great

I said there that it's convenient, but that's partly a lie. It's convenient if you're going at certain times, on certain days. If there's a train, it's great.

But...there often isn't a train.

The reason I took the train this time from Hyde Park was that I couldn't actually manage to do the trip I wanted without driving all the way into Hyde Park from the Quad Cities. I couldn't stop in Joliet because if I did, then the train I wanted to take would actually not get me back in anything like a timely fashion--because it runs every two hours on the weekend. Well, on Saturday. Good luck on Sundays.

The Metra Electric was also running a reduced schedule, but not as much, so it was actually usable.

But the Metra as a whole is very much set up as a commuter set of lines, not an actual network. And because of the lack of fare integration (and its friend, schedule integration), it's not really made up for by the rest of Chicago's network of buses and subways. So I didn't use Metra because it wasn't actually as useful as it could be, because of when and how the trains run.

3. Stations Suck

The Metra also suffers from poor station design and management. They got rid of the ticket sellers in the stations (the human staff) and replaced them with additional ticket vending machines, but even so there is, for example, only a ticket vending machine at one end of the two end 51st/53rd St station. If you happen to enter at the busier end (53rd St) you have to walk the whole station to actually buy a ticket.

The stations themselves haven't had the best cleaning or maintenance over the years and are frequently dank, dark, and wet. 

And there isn't much cover (though there are some covered waiting areas) or many heaters (for cold Chicago winters) on the exposed, windy platforms.

I'm very much a believer that transit can work with minimal stations, but these are very much the absolute minimum. In terms of ticketing, they might be less than that. And in terms of accessibility for those who don't love stairs and long walks, even less.

The Metra is a great idea, and a great resource. But if Chicagoland wanted to get actually serious about using it as real public transportation, it would take a real overhaul--and some actual funding--to get it there.

Physical Infrastructure Is Good

This post is perhaps a bit obvious, but it speaks to one of the tensions I sometimes see between different waves of transit advocacy and different priorities placed on how transit dollars are spent. The key concept here is in the title: physical infrastructure is good. Flexibility is also valuable, but in seeking flexibility, transit cannot afford to forego the presence and visibility of physical infrastructure on the street. And this has implications for how cities and regions should invest in transit.

This is often phrased in terms of trains vs buses: trains (including here pretty much all variants thereof, from heavy rail or metro on the one hand to trams and light rail on the other) require a lot of visible physical infrastructure on the ground, from tracks to stations, while buses do not. A bus can run on any street. A bus can stop anywhere that there's safe space on that street for someone to board or alight. A bus, therefore, can run without physical infrastructure of any kind except the bus itself.

Except, my friends...except...

1. Where does it go from here?

Physical infrastructure gives key information about where the transit goes. The most obvious example is a train track:

It goes thataway.

Tunnels are even more obvious, as they constrain where the tracks could go in the future. And if the Cloud Car has (only) one advantage, it's that it's the most visible of all. 

This can be done with a good bus stop too, of course: there can be timetables, route maps, area maps, etc. But what it requires is somewhere to look and see where the bus goes, or the train goes, or something, without having to use an app or a website, because if you can't see it from just showing up, you only get people who were planning to take transit, and not people for whom it might be convenient but didn't plan ahead like the transit junkies (like me) do. Speaking of which...

2. How do you even know there's a bus?

Here is a bus approaching a stop in Davenport. 

I know a bus is going to stop here because...there is a bus stopping here. And because I trust my maps (and my reading of them, and where I am, and that the bus is not on diversion). And because I've actually taken this bus several times before.

But if I'm in the city for the first time, or taking the bus for the first time, or the bus doesn't happen to be there right now (and it runs once an hour, so that's more likely than not), I'm not going to know that. It's just a stretch of street. And this is true in most of Davenport. Actually, this particular stop is more marked than most: the other side of the street has a shelter, for the other direction of service, and this side has a small "no parking, bus only," sign, though it doesn't actually say it's a bus stop or what lines run there. 

So in most of Davenport (and the Iowa Quad Cities in general; the Illinois side is a bit better but still highly imperfect outside of downtowns), I will have no idea where the bus goes or stops except if I take active steps to look it up. And assume that it isn't in a diversion. Speaking of which...

3. How do I know if something is running off-route or off-schedule?

Where I grew up, in Seattle, there are a lot of bus stops marked just by a single pole or sign--but that physical infrastructure is where crucial information is posted about detours, delays, and diversions.

When there is not even that physical infrastructure, how do you communicate that? One way is via app or website--but then again, only those already actively seeking transit will find and use it. Another is this:

This is better than nothing, I guess. But it's also...not great. There is one small, text-filled sign at one intersection covering a multi-block area and a major diversion for several weeks, with no timing indicated. It's not at a stop, because there are no signed stops, so a rider would have to be here (and not, say, a block away) and looking at a generic Public Works sign (not anything inherently related to Citibus) to see it.

If there isn't predictable, visible physical infrastructure, you don't have a clear way to tell potential passengers about things like this. 

Now, none of these fundamentally say you need something other than a bus. A bus line with clear stops and signage can do this. A bus rapid transit line with stations, dedicated lanes (or even a busway!), and clearly visible presence on the street does basically all of this! Trains do it too, of course.

But what does not do it is the Davenport Citibus, or any similar service that relies on the "show up and hope it's a bus stop" model.

Physical Infrastructure Is Good, because it lets people use transit without being transit junkies. And much as I enjoy being one of those, I prefer a system where other people use it too.