Predictability

 A topic I keep coming back to is the idea that good transit is not merely extensive, frequent, or fast--it is, specifically, predictable.

That is: the benefit of car travel is considered by most advocates to be some element of freedom to go where you want when you want. The way to create this freedom for transit users obviously includes extensiveness (get where you want) and frequency (you can go whenever you want), as well as speed (you don't give up a lot more of your time). But it also includes predictability: the legibility to the user of that intersection of extension, frequency, and speed. If I can't tell how to get the transit, where to get the transit, or how to use it to go where I want, I won't use it. I need to be able to predict how my transit experience will go (in a positive sense--if my prediction is that it's gonna suck, being right won't encourage me to take it again).

1. Visible Stops

Now, most major transit agencies in the world have done a pretty good job of making it clear where the transit goes. 

Maps help, especially ones posted publicly near where the transit is.

Visible stations and stops help too (even if no one is coming for these statues anytime soon). A line on a map is great, but not if I can't tell how to get on it.

This goes for bus stops too: a visible shelter or at least a good sized sign helps identify the transit's availability.

I emphasize this because, well, Davenport does a really bad job of it.

This is, in fact, a bus stop--in that it's a corner on a street a bus serves, and in Davenport that means I can get on or off here. But there's literally no signage for it.

Not great for being able to predict if I can use transit here!

2. Visible Lines

You know what's on that transit map besides the stops, though? The lines!

And the lines may not be printed on the ground, just like the first-down line on an NFL broadcast isn't on the field. But there are ways to make it more visible and predictable anyway--just like the markers on the sidelines still tell you where a first down is.

This is, of course, the great advantage of rails: they make the continuity and directions of transit predictable just by looking down.

 But as these lanes in Amsterdam prove, a transit lane can do this without the transit being tracked: buses run on them as well, and they're still predictable lines on the street because of the dedicated lane, even if the vehicle is a bus.

A tunnel can also do this, though only if you're underground to see it--the whole point is that it's not visible aboveground.

We don't use these tracks in Davenport for passengers, but if we did--we'd get that benefit too. Or we could do as the old trams did and slap rails down on River Dr, Mound St, Brady, Harrison, etc.

3. Obvious Interchanges

But it's not enough to know that there's transit: we also need it to be predictable how you'd use that transit to get places. This is one of the things I've mentioned that I think Montréal generally does well:

Note both the predicted times to each station and the well-marked interchanges at Bonaventure, Berri-UQAM, etc. 

Chicago's Loop is a great example of a very obvious interchange point in the system (even if Chicago would, in fact, benefit from more non-downtown transfer points).

And Paris does quite well by running a tramline directly by the front door of a RER station.

Ah, for a world where Davenport's Ground Transportation Center had more ground transportation options...

You could build a great system, and if no one can predict how the pieces work together, it won't function the way you want, no matter how quality an individual piece of it might be. So make your transit more predictable, and let the pieces operate in concert. 

But don't forget that this works best if it's also extensive, frequent, and fast. All of that works together to make a great system go.

Traffic, Timing, and Clockfaces

One of the most common reasons I hear (both in person and in writing) for preferring using a car over public transit is control: the idea that with a car, I have control over when I go somewhere, how fast I get there, etc.

And superficially, this is true.

But I was thinking last week as I was stuck in traffic again (and that is becoming more common in the Quad Cities than it used to be--and of course has been common for a long time in some cities that I know well, *cough* Seattle *cough*) that this is not really as true as we want it to be. 

It's certainly easy to claim that a car allows me to control and predict when I'll get places, because it's jibes with everything we've been told all our lives in the USA about self-determination and individualism: no one knows my needs like me, I need to do it myself, I can do it best alone. And it may be that no one else on the street is going exactly where I'm going from where I'm going at the time I'm going. But that doesn't actually mean that good public transit (to be fair, something most US cities don't have) isn't more useful than a car for actually getting where you want when you want predictably and controllably.

1. Accurate Transit Schedules Are Predictable

This is perhaps obvious, but the main tool for this is that, unlike my car (no matter how much Google Maps tries to), public transit has a schedule. If that schedule is accurate--whether consistent by the hour like clockface scheduling in Switzerland or just never late to an extreme degree like the Jet Lag boys found in Japan--it actually gives me more power to determine when I'll be where than a car does.

Now, UK trains might not be the best example for this, but consider this board: it tells me when the trains are coming (should come) and where they'll call. Every single stop has its own designated time as well, which I can see on a schedule. If these trains run on time (which is largely a matter of design and investment, rather than the whims of fate) I can decide to take one and get to a place at a predictable time.

This relies on a few factors, of course. Right of way is the biggest. 

Not to be too on the nose, but there's a reason that this Amtrak timetable only shows the current time, not the scheduled one. Amtrak is notoriously late because while it legally should have priority on its tracks, in practice it doesn't. And the same is true of many bus systems, on the more local level:

There's a bus up there, but it's just in the same traffic as everyone else, because Toronto (like most cities) doesn't have separate right of way for its buses. 

Tragically, the same is true of their trams as well.

But once you get other traffic, whether trains or cars, off the transit's right of way, you create a more effective system--one in which it is actually more predictable to use transit than a car.

2. Virtuous Cycles

There's a reason my CityBracket competition was dominated by cities with extensive and growing transit systems. It's not just because I like them; it's because more transit tends to be more effective transit, and there's virtuous cycle of having more connections, more transit-only or at least transit-preferred rights of way, and more of the city area covered directly by transit--as well as more people living near each other.

Density and transit-oriented development lend themselves to people being able to and willing to use transit, and that in turns produces more demand for density and transit for development to orient itself on--witness Vancouver, above.

The system map, like Boston's here, is a good guide to this (though note that not all maps show the same levels of transit--as with these two maps of London). Bigger and more extensive systems allow for more use of transit, and less of cars. This much is obvious. But they do it not just by having more areas literally served, but by a near-exponential increase in the ability to predict how a trip will go: the more transit-oriented a city, the more (generally) you can assume that the trip will actually proceed as scheduled and planned, and the more options you have if something goes wrong (just like with a slowdown or a street closure in a car--freedom isn't just about being the one in charge of each vehicle). 

And of course, the ability to interchange makes a big difference--to the point where some transit advocates think that proposed free buses in NYC are an issue because they make transfers between modes more difficult.

The convergence of multiple forms of transit is a force multiplier, as here in Amsterdam.

3. Who Gets Grace

The real distinction, I think, comes down to what we blame for problems--or rather, what we don't. When people drive this, they don't place the blame on the car itself if something goes wrong.

I might blame other drivers, or traffic, or the road design, but not the fact that I'm in a car. That's the default!

But if I take this instead, I'm more likely to blame the bus for being late than the same factors that delayed the car.

Literally the same traffic--these pictures are from the same trip.

And while this is from Boston, not Indiana, the same is true if people take the train: delays get blamed on the mode, not on the day, on chance, or any other factor. We give grace to the car because it is transparent: it is for so many of us the absolute default mode of getting anywhere, and so blaming the car would be like blaming the fact that we chose to go anywhere at all. Transit, by contrast, is treated as a choice, and therefore as a potential factor in a delay in a way that the car is not. With transit the problem is seen as a problem of the transit mode; with cars, it's a problem of that trip. 

If we extended like grace to transit, we'd see that in many places it's at least as predictable and effective as a car (at least if it exists--too many US places just literally don't have it, or more than hourly at any rate). 

Giving that grace in turn provides transit a chance to build up to those virtuous cycles, and to be extensive and predictable enough to make trips much, much more predictable and controllable than any single vehicle can be.

Why Suburbs Should Love Urbanism

We often see transit planning and urbanist design cast as a fight between suburban and urban interests: spending money on transit in urban areas, for instance, as an attack on suburban drivers, as in Ontario politics, or congestion pricing as an attack on suburbanists, as was widely suggested around New Jersey opposition to NYC's recent implementation of a congestion zone in lower Manhattan. But as this article reminds us, it's never that simple: suburbs are part of their urban design, and what benefits the latter often also benefits the former, no matter how much they complain beforehand.

Here I want to highlight a few ways in which urban development is good, actually, for surburban interests. These may seem obvious, but somehow they often get missed in the contrived binary between the two.

1. Suburbs Use Urban Amenities

Look, I'm not saying there's no one who primarily remains within their suburb. In fact, if we really built quality fifteen-minute city design into our suburbs, there could perhaps be many--and if we count people with limited mobility and car access, there undoubtedly are.

But by and large, suburban areas exist because they are "outside the walls" of urban areas, and they draw on the benefits of those cities in larger conurbations and metropolitan areas. The Patriots may play in Foxboro, but the Red Sox are in Boston proper; NYC congestion pricing operates precisely because so many people come across from New Jersey (and down from Connecticut and upstate New York, and over from Long Island); London has grown again and again up from the single square mile "City of London" out to what we know as Greater London today and still manages to have massive entanglement with the suburbs even beyond that. Imagining that what's good for the city is bad for the suburbs is like pretending that killing an oak tree would be good for the fungi growing on its roots. It's a mutualistic relationship: the city benefits too, of course. But it often makes more sense to concentrate building and development in the city itself, which allows every suburb to benefit, rather than focusing building in each suburb to make them equal.

There's a reason most of Sound Transit's first stage of building (and the second, and in theory the third) is focused in Seattle, even if the Board of Directors has required representation from the suburbs as well.

The expansion has taken these guys out of Seattle, and there was always an airport line, but service is still concentrated in the urban core--for good reason! 

This goes even for suburbanites who don't directly use the urban transit themselves, as in the NYC example linked above: suburban drivers in the city get to go faster if there are fewer others using the roads.

2. Virtuous Cycles

As we've discussed before in terms of Paris and London, extensive transit (and other urban development) builds on itself to something greater than the sum of its parts.

I love the Milwaukee HOP tram, but its downtown-only, limited functionality makes it less effective as transit. It implies a potential without delivering on it fully. I say that with love; I really enjoy using the HOP. But it's not a full-scale system.

Free her!

Also not a full system on its own? The Paris tramways.

But the Paris trams, unlike the HOP, are not the only intra-city rail service. They can be partial (albeit significantly more extensive than the HOP) because they are part of something greater. This particular tram pictured above is pulling into a stop at a station for the RER, which looks like this:

The integration between them makes both of them more effective: a heavy-rail can't go everywhere, and neither can a tram, but they can work together in a virtuous cycle to make the whole city easier to transit.

And before anyone points out that the HOP also goes to a train station, I know. Here's a sign about it, in fact:

But Amtrak at Milwaukee Intermodal Station isn't the RER. It's an intercity rail station, like this one in Paris too: Gare du Nord.

The tram doesn't go here, but the RER line does (in fact, I took line B between them on the trip where I took this picture). So Milwaukee has two but not three of these links in the Paris system (both stripped down to have fewer connections and less track as well), and thus has less access to the cumulative benefits of that kind of urban infrastructure.

What does this have to do with urban vs suburban? Well, the RER and the tram in Paris actually go primarily to suburban areas, because the virtuous cycle is so powerful that it enables transit outside of the urban core. Milwaukee's HOP is purely downtown. Heavier investment in the urban space allows suburban connections to that urban center become more viable, and thus benefits the suburbs as well.

I'm not dissing Milwaukee here. It punches well above its weight in US terms. I'm saying that the more we allow this kind of virtuous cycle anywhere, the more powerful it becomes.

3. City Borders Are Semi-Arbitrary

OK, quick quiz: what city is this photo from?

What about this one?

They're from the same metro area, but different legal entities. And neither is the city that most people actually associate with this metro area. The first is Cambridge, MA; the second, Somerville, MA. Both are part of the Boston Metro Area--there's a reason that Harvard graduates, who went to school in Cambridge, stereotypically say they went to school in "Boston," and its not just weirdness about saying they went to Harvard.

It's because the city-suburb division is a continuum, not a binary, and the lines are sometimes almost as arbitrary as some diplomats carving up the Middle East along straight lines. Inner suburbs of New York in New Jersey can be just as or more urbanist than the city proper. 

Yes, there are suburbs that differ widely from their city in terms of transit use and density. But there are also ones that are fundamentally part of the same place. And while politicians might have incentives to emphasize the latter, and I'm not advocating for wanton, willy-nilly absorption of suburbs into cities, we all benefit when we realize that "suburban" and "urban" investment in transit, development, and urbanist infrastructure is not a zero-sum game.

Lagging Behind

This week, I have a more somber point of view to pass along. The US already lags behind the world both in construction of transit and in costs for transit construction (which are no doubt linked). The tariffs that have recently been yo-yoing about (but always to a higher rate than prior years) are not going to help. The cancellation and attempted recission of transit approvals will make things actively worse. So today I want to talk a bit about the ways we're already behind and why that matters.

I don't mean to be all doom and gloom, so I'm also going to point out how we could totally do this here--if we change course.

1. Don't Be Afraid of Overlaps

US transit agencies seem all too often to focus on the bare question of whether there is any arguable form of transit available in a given place or corridor, and not on quality of provision; indeed, coverage of a given area appears at times to preclude additional coverage or additional modes. Something like the density of transit in central Paris, London, or Amsterdam seems impossible; and lest we think this is purely a legacy in those cities (as it is in American cities like New York), all of these cities have built major improvements to their central city transit in relatively recent years, in each case substantially overlapping with prior transit but also unlocking major new advantages in connectivity and capacity.

Welcome, the line formerly known as Crossrail.

What could this look like here in America? Imagine an actual expansion to the Chicago L, or a "Grand New York Express" that truly interconnects the boroughs that currently have less robust connections. LA and Seattle are making some steps in this direction (albeit from much lower transit baselines), but imagine those coming faster, connecting already-served areas with faster transit, and using less light rail and more high capacity lines.

2. Rethink Where Transit Belongs

Worldwide, major transit projects happen in a lot more kinds of cities than they tend to in the US. Just look at France's trams (which have just kept growing since that link from 13 years ago). We tend to think that trams, trains, metros, etc. can only exist in very large cities but the international models show that we could do so much better. Imagine the Quad Cities with a tram; smaller cities have them. 

Well, we don't necessarily have to imagine; we can remember. Because this isn't so much ridiculous as historical. We know it's possible because it used to be true, and while we do have a more car-centric world now, so do those other cities. Their streets have cars too!

Quite a lot of them in fact.

3. Ask why things cost so much

There are some legitimate reasons for transit projects to be so expensive. There are some...less compelling ones. For this, I'm indebted to the work of the Transit Costs Project. We probably can't do much about labor costs sometimes being higher without exploiting workers. But we can certainly try more default designs and fewer bespoke ones so that design and build costs go down, from station layout to engine/car design. We could stop contracting out everything and develop in-house solutions that reduce overruns and build design expertise. And we could stop pretending it inherently costs more to tunnel here than in places with deep archaeological pasts and active vulcanism--or if it does, we could at least ask what is making that true.

Tariffs probably won't help with that, given the costs of things like steel and aluminum go up, but yah know...

If we can control costs a bit, it will help us build in more places and stop fearing overlapping modes. Those in turn can make transit something we have in more places and that is more convenient to use--and that can help us catch up.