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.

Congestion Pricing

 This little article, concisely summing up that congestion pricing looks like it has really really worked in New York, and suggesting that perhaps, just maybe, it might be worth trying in other US cities (like, as the title of that blog suggests, San Francisco), sparked a couple of points in my mind.

1. Congestion Pricing Is Good

OK, let me start with the obvious: congestion pricing does seem to work, and I like the results. For those who might think it is overly aggressive, there are still enough cars in NYC (and London, and other cities that use congestion pricing) that you can't really say that people aren't driving; they're just only driving when they actually need to, and a lot of those trips are going non-car modes. But there are still cars!

See? It's not a no-car-zone, just a congestion pricing zone because there were so many cars there before. 

That means congestion pricing works on both its axes: reducing car use and raising funds, which in NYC are being used for transit investment. This ensures both that people can use non-car modes when they need to, and that fewer cars are on the roads--a win-win, frankly.

2. Good Downtowns Are Better With Fewer Cars

Note that in neither London nor NYC are congestion zones covering the whole metro area, or even the whole legal entity of the city (well, other than the tiny, square-mile "City of London"). Rather, they cover the most downtown portions--technically, the car in the above picture isn't even in the congestion zone (it will be if it goes straight through the intersection past the British Library though, as the zone starts south of Euston Road). NYC's is only Manhattan, not the Bronx, Queens, Brooklyn, or Staten Island (let alone the very dense suburbs). 

So when we're talking congestion charges right now, we're talking the most downtown-y parts of these big cities. These cities already have great downtowns. They're already spaces you can walk, bike, transit, etc. to and through, without a car. The congestion charge just makes it more likely that people will do that. 

Pictured: a non-car way to transit Manhattan.

The reduction in cars in these spaces is a positive, but we can't just throw a congestion charge at every downtown because not all downtowns are set up to allow this. Doing this to downtown Davenport would just piss people off and make them park one block outside the congestion area. In NYC and London, they can leave the car at home in the first place, in many cases. 

In New York, at least during decent weather, you can expect a whole host of people walking around anyway--that's a good sign of a place where this kind of charge might work.

(It certainly could be expanded in London, as this Camden Town picture might suggest).

So congestion charging is the sort of thing that can make a good space better--which makes it a good candidate for places like SF, Boston, Toronto, etc., even if not for all cities.

3. It's A Virtuous Cycle

All of this means that congestion charging is part of a virtuous cycle of encouraging non-car modes of transportation, rather than a panacea itself. 

Build transit, bike lanes, and walkable spaces->reduce car use->improve other options->further reduce car use.

Amsterdam, for instance, doesn't have this--those cars above don't pay to be in downtown. It has a low emissions zone (as London also does, which is much, much bigger than the congestion zone) but it doesn't need a congestion charge specifically because it's done other things to cycle down car usage in the inner city.

Bikes, local trains, metro, trams, walking: they don't need a congestion charge to work. They can be supercharged by one, but they can function to reduce driving on their own.

So while I love congestion charging, I think in the US cities that aren't NYC could mostly benefit from working on the earlier part of that virtuous cycle--with a few exceptions (SF and Boston perhaps most significant of those). I'm not opposed to it in big cities--I like it!--but outside of a few cities we're not there yet.

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.