Explaining Transit's Secret Language

[M II A II R II K]

Explaining Transit's Secret Language


Mar 08, 2012

By Eric Jaffe



Read More: http://www.theatlanticcities.com/com...-transit/1438/

Human Transit: http://www.amazon.com/Human-Transit-...1210252&sr=8-1

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Walker, a consultant known for his Human Transit blog, sees his audience as "a curious and thoughtful person who cares about whether we find our way to more rational forms of urban mobility." To that end he clarifies many misguided perceptions held by those concerned with better transit development. Instead of focusing on speed, we should elevate frequency; instead of debating technology (e.g. light rail v. bus) we should consider geometry; instead of glorifying direct service we should build more connections; instead of linking transit with restraint we should associate it with the "freedom to move." Walker recently offered a few more transit insights to the humans who read Atlantic Cities.

- Most influential people in our society are motorists, which means they instinctually understand how roads work. If that’s your reality, you may unconsciously try to think about transit in those terms. But transit is just not like roads, and if you haven’t stopped to think about the differences, you can make innocent but consequential mistakes. The most obvious “motorist’s error” is confusion about frequency. In urban transit, frequency is freedom. Frequency is how transit approximates the freedom that’s inherent in your car or bike. Frequency also governs waiting, which is everyone’s least favourite part of using transit. Finally, frequency determines how well lines can fit together into a network, so that you can go anywhere easily, not just to points in one line. Motorists rarely have to wait long periods before they can go anywhere, as you do on an infrequent transit service, so they often don’t “get” how crucial frequency is, even if they understand it in the abstract.

- In a low-density outer suburban area, most people consider transit only for the peak commute into a city, because driving a car is the rational thing to do for most other trips. So they care about peak-only service. There’s nothing wrong with that. But inside denser cities, and anywhere that you want to encourage more sustainable transport choices, transit needs to be there all day, for all of life’s purposes. Neither of these perspectives is wrong, but they imply utterly different kinds of service. Futile arguments arise when one person has a peak-commute focus while the other has an all-day focus, and they’re not aware that this is the essence of their disagreement. The balance between a peak focus and an all-day focus is one of several questions that arise unavoidably from the geometry of transit, and that communities should be urged to think about.

- Ask yourself: What would my transit system look like if ridership (and cost recovery) were its only goal? I’ve been staring at ridership statistics for over 20 years, and the pattern is the same everywhere. Top performing services are usually either commuter express routes that run only when they’re crowded or a network of all-day high-frequency services covering areas of medium to high density. So like any business, a network whose sole goal was ridership would focus on those successful products. They would run little or no all-day service to low-density suburbs, because ridership on that product is predictably low. So when transit agencies do run that low-ridership service, as most do, it doesn’t mean they’re failing, as anti-transit conservatives often assume. It just means they have a goal other than ridership.

- Efficient (and therefore abundant) transit systems focus on the five elements of useful service: frequency, duration, speed, reliability, and capacity. They choose technologies not just for emotional appeal but for the ability to deliver those outcomes. When they do this, the results are often very emotionally appealing, because people love to get where they’re going, and to move freely and spontaneously around their city. For example, you may not think of Paris as a bus city, but in the last decade Paris has created bus lanes on virtually every boulevard, all over the city. Imagine how many decades it would take for an American city to do that. They didn’t just do one incomplete and compromised demonstration project in anxious hopes of public approval, because they realised the public wouldn’t see the benefit unless they delivered speed and reliability across a large network. So they did it, creating bus lanes (and bike lanes) at the expense of cars. Suddenly the bus system is a rational and obvious choice for getting around Paris, so people use it.

- Riding a Paris bus I feel I’m still on the street, able to enjoy everything that’s going on around me. Fare collection is off-board, so you don’t have that awkward and time-wasting process of paying the driver. Everything about these buses conveys a sense of freedom while using them. So all kinds of people use them. I’m also optimistic about Los Angeles, not just because its geography is superb for transit but because there’s a widely shared understanding of what must be done to move forward. Its bus system gets too little respect, but it’s tremendously effective at what it does and has been a leader in the “Rapid bus” revolution of the last decade. So great things are happening in many cities, and many more great revolutions are on the cusp of happening. But to make them happen, more people need to understand the essence of how transit works, the choices it presents, and how it can serve our freedom.

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[vid]

So like any business, a network whose sole goal was ridership would focus on those successful products. They would run little or no all-day service to low-density suburbs, because ridership on that product is predictably low. So when transit agencies do run that low-ridership service, as most do, it doesn’t mean they’re failing, as anti-transit conservatives often assume. It just means they have a goal other than ridership.

This is kind of ignoring the fact that while those suburban routes might only carry 5 to 10 people per run, that adds up to a few dozen once they get to the central part of the city and dump all their passengers onto the main bus routes.

I live in a bi-nodal city with a bus system that pulses out from the cores, and three main routes connecting the two main cores and the mall located exactly between them. The routes that pulse outward are, for the most part, under-used by their passengers. But once some of those routes get to a core, they become one of the routes that goes from one core to another, keeping most of their passengers and picking up any passengers from the other routes.

While the bus routes between the cores are actually profitable and busy at all times, they wouldn't be that way if the 6 or 7 feeder routes in each end of the city weren't supplying them with handfuls of people at a time. Lose the suburban routes, and ridership on the mainlines get cut in half, and the whole system becomes less profitable.

[Swede]

^hear, hear!

If it weren't for the low-use lines, far fewer would be able to use transit for most of their journeys and thus far, far fewer would use it at all. If a city is all high density, multi-use neighborhoods then one would see a more even distribution of lines. No city is that, that's why we have commuter rail, subways, LRT, suburban rail, trams, busses and ferries. Different needs call for different solutions, which also applies to the differing lines within a transit system.

Feeder lines are needed, best option IMO is if you can combine 2 or 3 feeder lines into a longer line, thus creating new connections without transfers. Also makes for having fewer lines, which makes the whole system easier to understand - which leads to more use.

[vid]

That's basically what my city is doing. The whole network will be a series of loops that will connect the cores and major destinations while reducing the need for transfers. The current system already accomplishes something similar, but the new design will cut travel times by about 50% for people living in the further reaches of the city, thus making transit more appealing.