Peak oil, climate change and buses

Jarrett has a thought-provoking post about the age-old rail versus bus debate. But he buries what I think is the biggest advantage that trains have over buses:

Some variable cost differences. Broadly speaking, bus-based projects that use portions of existing roadway will be much cheaper than building rail for those same segments would be. Beyond that, costs for bus vs. rail projects can be hard to compare. Capital costs for rail include vehicles, while a busway is sometimes run with an existing bus fleet. Certain bus-rail comparisons in certain corridors may turn up significant differences in operating cost that may be valid in that situation, but need to be checked carefully to ensure that they assume the same factors on both sides.

Well, sure it's hard, and we need to be careful. But let's focus on ongoing maintenance and operations. Is there really any disagreement on the fact that train cars last longer than buses, that railroads last longer than asphalt roads, and that maintenance per passenger is cheaper for rail infrastructure, both vehicles and roads? Similarly, is there any disagreement that trains are cheaper to operate per passenger, in terms of energy and personnel?

As I wrote last month, some time in the next century we will get to a point where it will be difficult to build more infrastructure, and the pace of construction will drop precipitously. The infrastructure we have then will be more or less what we will have for the following hundred years. The easier it is to maintain and the less energy it requires to operate, the more energy will be available for other purposes.

This is one of the reasons why I get so frustrated with organizations like the Los Angeles Bus Riders' Union that promote buses over trains. Less extreme but still frustrating are the Pratt Institute and the Straphangers Campaign here in New York, and the Institute for Transportation Development Policy which is based here but operates worldwide. There are a few arguments they make, some more defensible than others.

The most obviously bogus argument is that we should never spend anything on capital; all the money should go to running buses as cheaply as possible. If you take that to its extreme the buses will eventually fall apart, so nobody really believes that we shouldn't spend anything on capital. What remains is to find the right balance between capital and operating costs.

Those who argue that we should be spending less on capital owe us an explanation for why we should do this while the government is not spending less on car infrastructure. After all, it's the relative value of transit that will ultimately drive the mode shifts necessary to accomplish most of our goals, and if we stop investing in transit while others continue to invest in roads, the relative value of transit will decline.

The most defensible argument is that we should be investing in transit expansion, but it should be "BRT" (something better than a regular mixed-traffic local bus, to be eternally negotiated downward) and not rail. These arguments clearly ignore the long-term cost of maintenance and operations.

Suppose we could get a network of exclusive busways in all the corridors of the Commute Plan (for instance, PDF), or for the same price we could get exclusive rail of some kind in six of the eleven corridors (I'm just pulling that number out of my ass). And then we run out of oil, and only the rich can drive. People are left using the transit system that's built. Which would you rather have: the rail one that will last for years, or the roads that will get more and more potholed as the years go on?

The chickens come home to roost

I think that's a nice evocative metaphor, even though it seems like you'd want the chickens coming home to roost. Then you get eggs! And you can cut off their fingers and fry them up. But I'll just assume that these are Chickens of Evil, because it's a bad thing when they come home to roost. Any farmers that can clarify this?

What the fuck am I talking about, you ask? Well, it's the latest round of bus service cuts announced by the MTA this morning. Ben at Second Avenue Sagas has a good summary, and also makes the point that these kinds of service cuts can lead to a death spiral, where more and more people get fed up waiting for the bus and drive to work instead, until there's nobody left to take the bus and the MTA cancels the route.

This is kind of a far-fetched scenario, but if you're worried about your bus losing funding, you should fight for bigger cuts to driving so that driving remains a worse option. That means no BQE widening, no Gowanus tunnel, no hundreds of millions to replace (and widen) the Kosciuszko Bridge or the Pulaski Skyway, no billions to replace (and widen) the Tappan Zee and Goethals bridges.

Some of the information about these cuts is a bit misleading, though. In the announcement that Ben links from his post, New York City Transit President Thomas Prendergast writes, "Forty of the 64 bus schedule changes represent reductions in service levels to more closely align service with customer demand and established guidelines for bus operation; and to concurrently improve reliability through running time modifications where needed."

Hm, more closely align service with established guidelines. That doesn't sound too bad. In comments on Ben's post, Alon Levy and BrooklynBus were very understanding of this. The problem is that these loading guidelines are not fixed. They were revised in 2004, to bring the goal up from 80% of seats full to 100%. The subway loading guidelines were increased during the last round of cuts a year ago, but the bus cuts used a different methodology. Since these guidelines aren't published anywhere, I have no idea what they're at now for buses, but they may be up over 100% of seats full.

The main problem with this dance is that it diffuses the target for opposition. If they cut the loading guidelines and cut bus service to match, then you'd be able to say, "Damn you, Marty Golden, you didn't support the Ravitch plan, and now my bus is being cut!" Instead you have to say, "Damn you, Hakeem Jeffries, you didn't support congestion pricing, and now they're raising the loading guidelines!" and then everyone gets this puzzled look and says, "so what"? And then when they cut the bus service, everyone says, "Well, they're just aligning it with established guidelines!"

The "established guidelines" are not fixed. They are a function of the transit system's funding levels, which is set by the budget. These cuts are the fault of the legislature just as much as any other cuts. The two-step dance obscures that information, and Jay Walder should end it as soon as possible. Publish the loading guidelines, and make it known when they are raised, and why. And for God's sake, find someone in the MTA headquarters who knows how to print a Word document to a PDF file!

Muddle-headed transit advocates

Every so often we get a new study that examines some aspect of transit politics and comes up with counterintuitive results. This is generally a good thing, because it's always important to reexamine your assumptions, but anti-transit forces will often inflate their conclusions in order to undermine transit advocates. Usually there's some theme of, "Oh, you muddle-headed transit advocates! You really mean well, but a bus with only two people on it is more polluting than a single-occupancy car. Don't you see that transit will never stop us from polluting the air?"

The latest such study, "Maintaining Equity in Transit-Rich Neighborhoods" (PDF), comes from Stephanie Pollack, Barry Bluestone and Chase Billingham of Northeastern University. I'm sure that Garyg or some other troll will be linking to it from the Streetsblog comments in no time: "Oh, you muddle-headed transit advocates! You really mean well, but transit lines only wind up increasing the percentage of people in the neighborhood using cars! Don't you see that transit will never be a real alternative to driving?"

Just reading through the reports on the article, I began to have some doubts, and after flipping through the PDF, I've got some real concerns. But before I get into the article, I'd just like everyone who reads it to imagine how much easier it would be to read if the authors had done a global search and replace of "TRN" with "transit-rich neighborhood." Done? Okay, let's move on.

The report is based on the Census data, and deals with a number of outcomes, including median income, racial diversity and attempts to estimate population displacement, but the outcomes we're concerned with are transit use for commuting and motor vehicle ownership. The authors studied the neighborhoods around 42 transit stations that had opened between 1990 and 2000.


So first, here are the big news findings: in 19% of these 42 transit-rich neighborhoods, the percentage of people commuting by transit increased at less than 80% of the rate for the metropolitan statistical area as a whole (and in 31% of them, the increase was more than 20% higher than the metropolis). In 26% of these neighborhoods, car ownership rose more than 20% faster than in the surrounding metropolis (and in only one neighborhood was it less than 80% of the rate for the metropolis). The authors' explanation is that transit-oriented development can lead to gentrification, bringing in wealthier suburbanites who keep their cars.

It's a prospect that's worth watching out for, and Pollack, Bluestone and Billingham recommend several possible measures to prevent it, including bundling transit passes with housing, unbundling parking, and reducing parking requirements. Those are a good idea in any area well-served by transit, whether the transit is old or new. But the effects they report are not very large, and it is important to connect them to our overall goals.

In terms of access for all, these results are largely irrelevant. The access is there, because the transit has just been built. There may be a long-term cyclical effect if the transit is not well-patronized; I will discuss that later.

In terms of increasing energy efficiency and reducing pollution, we want to see worldwide change. In terms of asthma and carnage the effects are local, but they are per area, not per capita. In terms of obesity and carnage, we are concerned not with increasing transit use but decreasing car use; walking and bicycling are as good for those as transit, if not better.

Why do we care about local effects as opposed to metropolitan or global effects? Because if people get displaced, they go somewhere. If poor, transit-dependent nonwhite people are forced by gentrification to move to a less transit-oriented suburb, they will not be any more likely to afford cars there than they did in the city, so they will bring their transit-dependent ways to the suburb. This means more business for the suburban transit lines, and more political pressure for transit expansion in the suburbs, if they can organize enough to overcome the inevitable opposition. The result could very well be a net decrease in car ownership and car use across the metro area.

The effects measured by Pollack and her colleagues are only directly relevant for one of our goals, improving society. Unfortunately, that's the goal that's been the hardest to pin down. Walkable neighborhoods, more face-to-face interaction, walkable businesses are all part of it. Car ownership definitely brings these down, as do car commutes, but it's hard to know how much.


Of course, transit use is a feedback loop, and if these car-owning yuppies demand wider roads it will set back the cause of transit. However, since there were overall population increases in many of these neighborhoods, there has been an overall increase in raw numbers of transit riders, and since there is gentrification, these transit riders tend to be wealthier and more influential, and thus more effective advocates for transit expansion, and more likely to be seen by potential transit funders as "us" than as "them." A racist state legislator is more likely to vote to fund a transit project if his friend's daughter lives in the neighborhood than if there's nothing there but "those people." And you thought the Cap'n couldn't do realpolitik!

All in all, this is something to be mildly concerned about, and if the report gets more people working to bundle transit passes with leases and to eliminate parking minima and unbundle parking, that's a good thing. But the analysis is so sketchy and so distantly related to the goals of transit advocacy that at this point it's a wash. Keep that in mind, all my muddle-headed transit advocates!

P.S. Also, check out Charles Siegel's comment on the Streetsblog DC discussion of the issue. It's true: the best way to bring down the price of anything is to produce a lot of it!

Poor people with cars

In the comments on my last post, Joel writes:

I know that the image of NJ drivers are BMW driving upper middle class yuppies. However, I have put in many miles in NJ and I can tell you that many parts of NJ have residents that are treading water in 1980s vintage automobiles. Warren County and large chunks of south Jersey have poverty problems and the land usage makes demand for NJT bus service sparse. These people are finished if fuel climbs.

I am not saying that raising tolls and the gas tax would be bad. I am simply saying that most of our transit advocates have transportation myopia that causes them to misunderstand their respective markets. Christie has done his best to protect the people that don't have much and he is doing it again.

I'm glad that you're not saying that raising tolls and the gas tax would be bad, Joel. (I'd be interested to know when and how you think they should be raised.) But you raise an important point, and I'm going to use it as a springboard to discuss a persistent problem in leftist transportation discussions: compassion.

I'm a compassionate kind of guy, and like many leftists, a lot of my politics are motivated by compassion. But a lot of leftists get paralyzed by their compassion - or maybe it offers them an excuse to avoid something they didn't particularly want to do anyway. They lose perspective, lose the ability to distinguish between different levels of pain, and between short-term disruptions and long-term inequities. For some reason it happens a lot when the topic of poor people who drive cars comes up.

Let me give an example, taking Joel's argument to its extreme: I live in Queens. I just heard about this great job in Chicago. Obviously, none of you are going to suggest that the government pay for my commute; I should either move to Chicago or get a job here.

But what if my Senators and the Senators from Illinois get a great idea for economic development: ten dollar flights to Midway! The federal government covers the difference between the ticket price and the airline's cost per passenger. I take the job in Chicago and start flying back and forth every weekday.

A year goes by and it's a hugely popular program. The city is talking about building a new airport in Brooklyn to accommodate the demand. The US has occupied Iran to ensure a steady supply of jet fuel. But it's straining the federal and state budgets, and the government is looking at either raising taxes or cutting other programs to pay for it.

Suppose that someone gets bold enough to suggest that the program could pay more of its own costs if the fare were raised to twenty dollars. But that would mean paying a hundred dollars a week for me. It would add up to almost five thousand dollars over a year! My job only pays thirty thousand, so it would be a devastating blow to me. How am I going to pay for the mortgage on my house, the payments on my car, and my kids' tuition at private school?

My point, to be clear, is that any subsidy will eventually have a significant number of people who are dependent on it. Ending a subsidy like this will disrupt people's lives, causing economic suffering. But just as we currently live fine without ten-dollar flights to Chicago, we would be able to live fine if they were given and taken away. And just as people were able to live fine in Warren County without cheap gas and free highways, some day they'll be able to do that again. Maybe all the people who moved to Warren County to take advantage of the cheap gas and free highways will have to move back to the cities, but they won't necessarily move back to the slum conditions that many of them left behind.

Making the transition is important. A lot of the pain associated with eliminating subsidies is transitional. This can be mitigated with proper support: a favorable job market, a good safety net. Interestingly, when there is enough support, transitions like this are often not even perceived as painful. It's another chapter in someone's life, even an adventure.

We also need to realize that subsidies can hurt as well as help, and compare the pain of getting rid of a subsidy against the pain of keeping it. Think about the budget mess and fuel shortages that ten dollar flights to Chicago would cause, let alone the suffering that it would cause if we occupied Iran. Similarly, it would probably cause a lot more suffering over the long term to continue subsidizing sprawl in Warren County than to stop.

Note the difference between my argument and a libertarian one. I am not saying that all subsidies are evil and must be eliminated. I am saying that they must be justified, and that those that can't be justified should be eliminated. I'm not saying that they should be justified with some kind of cold monetary cost-benefit analysis, but in terms of how they fit with our priorities, and how compassionate they are. I'm also not advocating pain and suffering, I'm advocating adequate transition support.

Again, I'm not trying to make Joel the bad guy here. I don't know what he thinks should be done in Warren County. But "These people are finished if fuel climbs," sounds like an argument for letting these subsidies persist indefinitely, which is not an answer.

The bottom line is that compassion doesn't mean never doing anything that could possibly make someone suffer somewhere. It means keeping perspective, and doing what's necessary to reduce the overall suffering. And that includes measures to mitigate transitional suffering.

Why 181st Street matters

I've long argued that the concept of "BRT" attempting to mimic subway lines is an inefficient and counterproductive strategy. When you've got a lot of people who think they're too good to ride the bus, it's flashy and can get people to try it, but when you've got lots of bus riders already, what you need is just an improvement in value. 181st Street in Upper Manhattan is an example of this.

On Friday, Streetsblog reported on a presentation by the Department of Transportation about alternatives for the 181st Street corridor in Washington Heights. "Alternative 2 would create a two-way, protected transit mall along this stretch, with raised medians serving as bus stops," writes Noah Kazis. Why does that matter? Check out the Bronx bus map (PDF):

There are five bus routes that start at the Port Authority's uptown bus terminal, cross Manhattan along 181st Street, go across the Washington Bridge to the Bronx, and fan out to cover most of the western Bronx. The Bx3 goes north past Bronx Community College, Lehman College and the VA Hospital to Kingsbridge. The Bx36 goes clear across the borough, past West Farms and Parkchester to Castle Hill. The Bx11 and Bx35 cover Morrisania and the Bx13 goes south to Yankee Stadium and the courts. They have high ridership, which keeps costs down; none of them require heavy subsidies:

Route	Average weekday ridership	Operating farebox recovery ratio
Bx3	17,840	105 %
Bx11	14,860	93 %
Bx13	10,700	94 %
Bx35	15,860	109 %
Bx36	32,710	95 %
Total	91,970

The Bx36 is a long route, but I would guess that more than half the ridership crosses the bridge to Manhattan, and even more for the other routes. Many of the people who live in this part of the Bronx are Dominican, and they use these buses to connect with friends, relatives and jobs in the Dominican neighborhoods of Washington Heights and Inwood. Others use these buses to connect with the A and 1 trains in Manhattan, which provide a more direct route to many destinations than the 4 and D trains.

Significantly, these buses also allow Bronx residents to reach the George Washington Bridge bus terminal, where they can take buses run by New Jersey Transit and Red and Tan Lines to various locations in New Jersey and Rockland County. There are also private van services that run from the GWB terminal across the bridge and west to Paterson and south along Bergenline Avenue to Hudson County. These buses form a vital east-west link between communities in an area where all the train lines run north-south.

If you actually go to check out these routes sometime, well, it can try the patience of Job. Double-parking is rampant along 181st Street, and all it takes is one double-parked car to hold up three buses. It's common for a bus to take as long to get from Broadway to Amsterdam as from Amsterdam to the Grand Concourse. These delays cause bunching, which has repercussions down all five lines.

Alternative 2 could actually work as a kind of "bus network acupuncture," relieving a pressure point and thereby improving flow on a large section of the network. Putting in bus lanes on three blocks of one street could improve the commutes of 50,000 people, and through speedier and more reliable trips, attract more people to the bus who might otherwise have taken car services. Compare that to the hundred-plus blocks of the First and Second Avenue Select Bus Service (M15 average weekday ridership: 53,510), and you get a huge bang for the buck.

And this is why it was so disheartening to me to read these words from Manhattan Transportation Commissioner Forgione: "We will not proceed with anything without community support."

I know what "community support" refers to, and it has precious little to do with actual community support. We're talking about a community board that's dominated by drivers in a neighborhood where 80% of households don't own a single car. These are people who are much more likely to double-park than ride the bus, even though the real community is much more likely to be riding the bus. We're talking about a lot of self-important "community leaders" who are convinced that their small circle of friends constitutes the community. These are the people who Commissioner Sadik-Khan stood up to, and got blasted for it. These are the people that John Liu, Bill Thompson and Jimmy Vacca repeatedly insist should have veto power over any transportation project. And it looks like in this case Forgione may defer to them.

Forgione is also talking about deferring to the "community" in Washington Heights, but what about the communities across the river in Tremont, Morrisania, Morris Heights, University Heights and High Bridge? Will their support matter?

I definitely believe that people should have some say over what transportation facilities are built in their districts. It would have been nice if Vacca and Liu had been around when people's homes were being bulldozed for the Cross-Bronx Expressway. Members of every affected community should be given the opportunity to raise their concerns, and those concerns should be taken seriously. But I don't think they should have veto power.

Alternative 2 would not tear down any buildings, and it will not blight the neighborhood. It would not flood parallel streets with displaced traffic. It would make these three blocks of 181st Street more like the Fulton Mall in Brooklyn, which would be an improvement.

Fortunately, Councilmember Rodgriguez seems to get this. His comments as reported by Noah were heartening. I hope he will talk to Councilmembers Cabrera, Foster and Arroyo and get their support on this. Transit advocates in that area should reach out to community leaders in the western Bronx and get them to the meetings where this project will be discussed. But the bottom line is that DOT cannot just listen to Washington Heights on this issue. They should conduct outreach along the five bus lines, and find out how much support there is there.

A very frequent bus network for Queens

Jarrett's been posting a lot about frequent bus network maps, so he finally convinced me to spend a few hours putting one together for Queens. On one of his posts, a commenter going by "Anon256" posted a link to an attempt using frequency at stops.

I used some relatively simple tools: the MTA's published schedules, the MTA's General Transit Feed Specification data, and Google's My Maps feature.

To calculate frequency, I simply opened the PDF for each schedule, found a point where there were no branches, and counted the number of runs that passed by that point on a weekday between 12:00 and 12:59, inclusive. I did not look at how late the buses ran.


View Queens Frequent Bus Network in a larger map

Google's My Maps has an interesting limitation: if you try to display more than 250 points, it will split them into two pages. This means that I could only fit nine routes on the map. Because the network in Queens is so frequent, this meant routes with at least eight trips per hour, or headways of eight minutes or less. I also added the M60, which runs in Queens for a significant distance.

Route	Weekday noon hour trips	Average weekday noon hour headway
Q10	16	4
Q111/Q113	16	4
Q25/Q34	10	6
Q27	9	7
Q46	9	7
M60	8	8
Q60	8	8
Q17	8	8
Q58	8	8

I converted the GTFS data to KML using KML Writer from the Transit Feed tools; for the NYC Transit buses I first had to take the "stop_times.txt" file out of the zipfile, or else KML Writer would crash. Then I copied the KML data for these routes into a new file. Often there were multiple trip geometries available; I usually chose the first one. I then uploaded them to Google Maps.

Already you can see that there's pretty good coverage in Central Queens. Pretty much everyone in that area is within a ten minute walk of a bus that comes at least once every eight minutes, so in under twenty minutes they can be moving.

One particular point of interest is Kissena Boulevard in East Flushing. Because of the geography of Flushing, bus planners (with the now-defunct North Shore Bus Company) decided to run three high-frequency services along this route, meaning that it sees 27 buses on weekdays between 12 and 1PM.

Still, that leaves wide areas without frequent bus service, including Western Queens, Southeastern Queens, Northeastern Queens, the Rockaways and scattered neighborhoods in the center of the borough. But if we add the subways and the buses with nine-minute headways, which we can display thanks to a handy trick, we get pretty good coverage. Then it is only a scattered handful of neighborhoods that are not served: northern Jackson Heights, Whitestone, Bayside, Douglaston, Little Neck the southeastern neighborhoods of Saint Albans and Cambria Heights, Far Rockaway and Breezy Point. All those neighborhoods see buses at least every twenty minutes, if not fifteen.

There is another high-frequency corridor formed by the Q5 and Q85 on Merrick Boulevard. If you add in the Q4 and Q84, in the noon hour there are 24 runs along Merrick from Archer Avenue to Linden Boulevard. In this area there are also lots of dollar vans, so it's pretty well-served.

I think someone should definitely make - and maintain a map like this for Queens, or possibly some smartphone app functionality. It's definitely useful to see where the most frequent routes go, and it might get some people to try the bus. It's a lot easier for beginners than the full map (PDF). I think that even as I've laid it out, it could still be a bit denser, so I would probably add the 10-minute routes, which would round out the coverage.

Good for all and good for some

In my last post I said that large projects could be divided into things that benefit everyone and things that benefit only some people. Things that benefit everyone should ideally be paid for and controlled by everyone, but things that only benefit some should be paid for by those who benefit.

There are at least two exceptions to that ideal. Social programs are paid for by all but only provide direct benefits to some, based on the idea that helping the neediest benefits everyone. Pigovian taxes are funded by some but benefit all, based on the principle that some activities impose an indirect cost on everyone, and aiming to either compensate for that cost or discourage the activity. These subtleties are lost on many.

What makes things difficult with transportation (and a number of other fields, like medicine) is that in some ways it benefits everyone, and in some ways it only benefits some. For example, having good transportation links improves the economy, which benefits everyone indirectly. But funding for roads and parking primarily benefits car drivers, and funding for transit primarily benefits transit riders. Going further, since transportation is a common-pool resource, it can be overused by some, leaving less for others.

Many modes of transportation also have significant externalities, inviting the imposition of Pigovian taxes and fees on a group to compensate everyone. For example, congestion pricing aims to discourage congestion and fund its mitigation by taxing those who drive. It is also the subject of many social programs, where a transportation facility (such as a bus service in a car-oriented city) is subsidized by everyone for the benefit of a few.

Of course, transportation funding can also be misappropriated in a variety of ways, from the unions getting cost-of-living wage increases when the cost of living is not increasing, to the legislature using "dedicated" taxes to fund things other than transit. This is the source of much of the mistrust that surrounds Pigovian taxes and social programs. How do we know that our tax money will actually be spent on transit?

It is important to remember that consensus principles still apply to Pigovian taxes and social programs. If you're going to spend everyone's money on transit for the poor, you need to get them to empathize with the poor, and realize that they could be poor someday, and see the value of low-cost transportation. If you're going to tax people for driving you need to show everyone why that's necessary. Sadly, that's a tough challenge in this poisoned media atmosphere, and it's made even more difficult with various entities running off with chunks of transportation funding.

Anchoring the cascade

Image from Klein et al. (1997)

We know that jitney service can be profitable, as illustrated by the graph above, but that it requires a certain level of ridership (a "thick market" in terms of the authors of this graph). Below that there is a vicious cycle: jitneys run less frequently in order to allow more riders to collect at stops, but many riders will give up if they have to wait longer. In response, the jitneys run even less frequently, and eventually give up.

In theory, then, the route is completely unprofitable, and thus a candidate for subsidized "coverage" service. But with only coverage service, buses are infrequent, schedules are inflexible, and routes may be bent to serve low-ridership but politically expedient destinations. This can make the service less valuable to potential riders, which in turn can lead to "empty bus" accusations and make budget cuts more likely than they already are for coverage service.

If there is even minimal scheduled service, however, this changes. Economist Dan Klein, his student Binyam Reja, and the generally anti-transit Reason Foundation vice-president Adrian Moore have written an entire book about this, based on a fairly wide-ranging study of private bus transportation. They summarize their argument in an article for something called The Independent Review (PDF). I think that it should be read by every transit advocate, at the very least to get a sense of what is possible outside the box of regional authorities and "bus rapid transit."

Klein, Reja and Moore call this scheduled service an "anchor": if riders know that even if the jitney doesn't show up there will be a bus every fifteen minutes or so, they are more likely to wait. This means more passengers for the jitneys, so the jitneys will run more frequently. The presence of minimal scheduled service can make jitney service profitable - even profitable enough that the jitneys could cross-subsidize it.

Image from Klein et al. (1997)

This scheduled service could be run by a public agency. Klein and friends, being libertarians, come up with the novel solution of auctioning "curb rights": in exchange for providing scheduled anchor service, a company gets a separate bus stop where by law only it has the right to pick up passengers.

It seems to me that a similar minimum service could be achieved by simply paying a driver to make one unprofitable run every fifteen minutes, or even with a kind of insurance plan where drivers contribute a certain amount per week/month/year and are guaranteed a minimum amount per hour. This does nor have to be done by the government; it can be arranged by the jitney syndicate.

Let me reiterate that I am not a fan of libertarian ideology. I regard a small-government solution to an economic problem the way I would a ship in a bottle: an example of working within constraints that shows off the cleverness of the problem-solver. Practically speaking, though, we're being forced to build our ship in a bottle forged by the likes of Richard Brodsky and Pedro Espada. We need small-government solutions, because the amount of service we actually get from our current government is small.

We need higher-frequency, more flexible bus service, and Dan Klein and his friends have shown us how we can have it without depending too much on our corrupt, unrepresentative government. Let's use what they've given us, and if we ever manage to claw back some decent transit funding, we can decide what to do with it then.

Competition is about relative value

I find Yonah Freemark's blog The Transport Politic to be very informative, and his more thoughtful pieces at sites like Next American City to be frequently insightful. I feel similarly about Aaron Renn's Urbanophile blog. That's why it pains me to say that one of Yonah's recent columns, while intriguing, was seriously flawed, based on a limited view of transit in the world. In it, he linked to a recent post by Aaron Renn, which was flawed in its own way.

I should point out that the Urbanophile post was about whether density is necessary for a city to be competitive. Briefly, businesses depend on access, and they will go where access is cheap. I honestly don't give a shit about whether my city is competitive, because that just means that someone else's city is losing out. My priorities are up at the top of the page: pollution, efficiency, carnage, society, equity - and competitiveness works against equity. (I'm aware of the value of healthy competition, but it's got limits, that's all.) But in essence, he's arguing the following:


In physics, you can increase mass while holding volume constant by increasing density, or you can increase volume while holding mass constant by decreasing density. In urbanism you can increase access while holding mobility constant by increasing density, or you can increase mobility while holding access constant by decreasing density. So Columbus might be less dense than Indianapolis, but there's just as much access because the roads are less congested. Similarly for Houston and New York, to quote a commenter.

Well yay, equitable access! But uh - pollution, efficiency and carnage? Not so great. By relying more on driving, and on longer distance trips, less dense cities promote pollution, waste money and resources, and put more people at risk of being killed or injured by cars. If all you care about is your city's competitiveness, well, how competitive can you be if your air quality sucks, you're spending a huge chunk of your budget fixing roads, and your residents are being killed?

Yonah rightly observes that this equitable access may be great for businesspeople with private cars, but it leaves out "everyone else - the young, the old, the poor, the sick," so it's not very equitable after all. Those who can't use cars need walkable neighborhoods with transit. But if people with cars can do just fine without walkability and transit, they won't support them, and everybody else will suffer. Density acts as an equalizer here, forcing walkability and transit patronage, and ensuring that walkable stores and transit providers will have enough business to stay afloat.

That's where Yonah goes off course, following the illustrious trail of Simpson, Curtin and Olsen. Like them, he treats car use as a force of nature:

Unlike inner-city districts with their medium and high-rise buildings, streetcar suburbs are characterized by low densities, little neighborhood retail within walking distance, and very few accessible jobs, three significant factors that make them difficult to adapt to transit. In other words, while they may have been built with streetcars in mind, they transitioned to the automobile age naturally.

The fact of the matter is that the absolute access afforded by streetcar suburbs is irrelevant. As Michael Kemp wrote back in 1973, when we're talking about people switching from one mode to another, what matters is their relative access, and that means comparing the access afforded by transit to that afforded by cars.

Surprisingly, Yonah talks about "failure" without discussing what failure actually means for an enterprise: people get what they want from the competition. There is no mention of how the roads got to be such stiff competition for the streetcars. It's left to Stephen Smith of Market Urbanism in the first comment to point out "the widespread subsidization of the roads, which were at that time not mostly funded by user [f]ees, but rather out of general revenues (which, perhaps not coincidentally, were in large part paid by 'traction magnates')."

People in streetcar suburbs didn't abandon the streetcars because the density was too low. They switched to driving because they could get where they wanted quicker by road, and they could do that because the government built a bunch of big new roads for them to drive on. If there had been no cars, people in those suburbs would still be taking streetcars - or they would have moved back to the cities, if the streetcar suburbs were really as inefficient as Yonah claims.

It required a massive government intervention to build all those roads, and that intervention is proving unsustainable. The roads are crumbling, the bridges are falling down, and there's no money in the budget to repair them. Despite the hugely expensive oil wars, the price of oil rose a few years ago and popped the housing bubble. Everyone who knows what's going on expects the price of oil to rise again and stay high. Eventually it will become difficult for all but the richest to own cars, and that's the main reason we should live in walkable neighborhoods with transit.

But as it becomes more expensive to own a car, transit and walking become more attractive. Transit providers and local shops will flourish, and they will return to the streetcar suburbs. In other words, the viability of streetcar suburbs is inversely related to the expense of driving.

Above, I argued that even though you could function pretty well driving around Columbus, it was not so good for pollution, efficiency and carnage. You could make a similar counterargument to my own argument about streetcar suburbs. Walking to the streetcar and the local grocery may give you good access, and it doesn't generate a significant amount of pollution or carnage, but it's not that efficient. Much more efficient to have people living above the grocery store, etc. But won't that kind of efficiency sort itself out?

The supposed independence of cars

In the comments to my last post, Streetsblog commenter Ian Bicking stopped by to play the role of apologist for Joel Kotkin. I'd like to focus on one particular thing that Ian said in Kotkin's defense:

There are real desires (for home ownership, for the independence of a car) that are widely expressed in our country.

"The independence of a car" is as much an illusion as "the convenience of a car." Let me start by saying that there are very few people who are able to travel completely independently. It's possible that some lone sailor, kayaker or desert trekker may be independent of any current infrastructure, but they're probably at least relying on some map or lore that was put together by others before.

I have to say that when I've driven, I don't feel particularly independent crawling along in crosstown traffic. I'm hemmed in, I can't go anywhere, I can't even park! The same thing with actually parking the damn thing once I get wherever I'm going. How independent am I if I can't even get out of the vehicle until I find a free space to leave it? And once I get out, what if I feel tired or somebody offers me a ride home? Sorry, I've got this two-ton thing and I can't leave it here overnight. How is that independent?

Drivers bitch and moan if the government takes too long to fix a pothole. What would they do if the government had never laid out, graded and paved the road in the first place? If there were no police to deter bandits or enforce some rules of safety, however minimal? No subsidies to vehicle manufacturers or energy producers? They are completely dependent on the system.

So when they say "independence," independence from what? People will usually say transit routes and schedules, or else from the confines of what's available within walking distance. And if they feel confined by their location or by the structure of the transit system, then I don't blame them for wanting to be independent of it.

If we look at it that way, "independence" is merely a means to an end. What they want is access, and their neighborhood and their transit system are not giving them enough of it. Having a car connects them to a parallel system that gives them that access they want.

On the other hand, it's possible, through development, to give people that same access by putting the things they need within walking distance. Through proper transit infrastructure funding and development, it's possible to give them access. For example, you could extend the hours, frequency and reach of the transit system. That's pretty much what we have here in New York, and it works very well. Most people get by just fine without a car.

In sum, there is no such thing as "the independence of a car." There's just the expanded access that can sometimes be achieved through cars, but it can often be achieved in other ways as well.

What's driving Joel Kotkin?

A common reaction that transit advocates have to Joel Kotkin - and also to the arguments by Wendell Cox and friends that use liberal language - is bewilderment. How can you call me elitist? I'm fighting for transit, which helps poor people! I'm not part of the elite, I take the subway and ride a bicycle!

It's really tricky to figure out what people's real motives are, and certainly Kotkin benefits from his name-calling in classic troll fashion. Liberals buy his books and link to his blog posts as they howl in protest. Conservatives love him for turning liberal arguments against their creators. He gets funding and attention. As long as you can put up with the hate, what's not to like?

So I could be completely wrong, but Kotkin's outrage feels real to me somehow. I think at some point he came up with this idea that it was really liberals who were oppressing the poor with their urbanism, and it felt like some giant insight into the human condition. I, Joel Kotkin, will save the poor and the middle class! I will speak truth to power! I will show everyone who the real villains are! So he stuck with it, and now it's his life. Even if he ever figures out it's a load of horseshit, what's he going to do? Nope, he'll die happy knowing that he spent his life fighting for the little guy.

Despite the torrent of words that Kotkin has unleashed over the years, his argument is fairly simple: the American poor and middle class want houses and cars, and they want wealth and status. This will make them happy. Houses and cars mmhmmm wealth and status. Urbanists want to keep them from getting houses and cars. Therefore, urbanists are keeping the poor and middle class from their wealth and status! They're standing between the people and their happiness!

The main weak point in Kotkin's argument is the part where I wrote "mmhmmm." What is the relationship between houses and cars, wealth and status, and happiness? Well, houses and cars can act as symbols of wealth and status. They can be obtained using some combination of wealth and status, and in turn they can be used to obtain greater wealth and status. Houses and cars can make people happy, and so can wealth and prosperity.

Note that all those sentences contain the word "can." "Can" isn't the same as "always," and it isn't the same as "need." A dumpy house is not a status symbol, and a crappy car isn't a symbol of wealth. You don't have to spend your money on a house, and not everyone uses their status to obtain a car. You can get wealthy without a car, and many people achieve high status living in apartments. Most importantly, you can be happy without having a house or a car, or even being wealthy or important. Many people are.

In Kotkin's worldview, cars, houses, status, wealth and happiness are all more or less the same thing. He really seems to be incapable of distinguishing between a thing and a symbol of that thing. He acknowledges that some "elites" voluntarily give up their cars and houses and live in cities, but that is always after they've achieved status, wealth and happiness through cars and houses. The idea that you could ever become wealthy or influential while living in an apartment and taking the subway is beyond his comprehension. Because of this, anything which makes it harder for people to buy houses or drive amounts to blocking their route to prosperity. We've gotten out of the cellar, and we're pulling the ladder up with us. That perfectly good set of stairs over there? It doesn't exist.

If you try to explain that to Kotkin and friends, the response is that you, the elitist, think you know what's best for these people. But they want houses and cars, and who are you to tell them they can't have them? Of course, if you asked people whether they would prefer to be rich and riding the subway, or poor and driving a '92 Civic, they would probably choose to be rich. Same thing if you gave them the choice to be famous and powerful and live in a condo or be lonely and downtrodden in Valley Stream. By the way, if anyone's done a poll like this, please let me know!

And of course, if you try to tell them that the world can't support ten billion people living in McMansions and shopping at Target, even if they all drive Nissan Leafs, the response is a torrent of bad science, amounting to arguments that it would be so much worse for the environment if everyone rode in empty buses to condo towers with heated garages. That it would be bad for the environment if everyone took transit because nobody would take transit. I can't even imagine what kind of dreck Kotkin would come up with if you forced him to consider the fact that status is relative, or that material goods don't buy happiness.

Whatever the content, the tone borders on infantile rage, and this is really what lies at the heart of the arguments made by Kotkin and Cox, and Randal O'Toole and Sam Staley: I want it all, I want it now, and I'm going to have it, and by god, anybody who tries to tell me I can't is just a big ... Euro-American! Ooo!

Infantile rage is only one ingredient in the mix, though. A large part of Kotkin's success comes from playing to other people's infantile rage. Do you know there are people who want to keep you from moving to the suburbs? They even want to keep your kids from driving. That's right, they want to keep you down! Why? Because they're elitists, of course. They got theirs, and they want it all for themselves. None for you! But we won't let them win, will we? We'll stop their evil plans to confine us to the cities! We'll yank the money from their toy trains! And then there'll be big houses and cars for everyone!

The best bang for the subsidy buck

In a recent post, I wrote that we would expect transit patronage to expand if:

(a) transit is more efficient at providing access for subsidies than roads are
(b) people patronize systems depending on the access that they provide
(c) subsidies are distributed based on usage

Here's an example from another domain. The Wii, with its rotation-sensing technology, is more efficient at providing entertainment than the XBox 360 (and the Sony Playstations 2 and 3). People buy game consoles based on the entertainment they provide. (c) is not necessary because we're talking about the private sector. The result is an increase in the market share of the Wii at the expense of the other consoles (NPD data adapted from the Video Game Sales Wiki):

In transportation, with regard to (a), there are a number of factors. In a spread-out rural area with 90% car ownership, a million dollars spent on a new road might well get more people to work/shopping/soccer practice/school than spending that same million on buses and people to run them. But I think in New York City, a dense city where drivers are in the minority, a million dollars spent on transit will go a lot further than a million spent on roads.

So I think assumption (a) is sound. Do people patronize transportation systems based solely on access? Are subsidies based solely on patronage ... of transit systems?

Transit riders shouldn't have to sacrifice

All around the country it's a time of budget cuts. Some, like the New York State Legislature and Governor, are unwilling to prioritize any spending category, and cut everything across the board. Others, like the President, initiate spending caps but reallocate the spending. We need more leaders who are willing to do this.

If your personal income drops by half, do you just spend half as much at the supermarket and half as much at fancy restaurants? No, because feeding yourself is a higher priority than feeling pampered, and groceries are a more efficient way of feeding yourself. If instead you cut the grocery budget by a quarter and the restaurant budget by three-quarters, you can be just as well-nourished.

It's the same with transit. Government funding for transit doesn't just stimulate the economy by moving people around. It furthers social justice through access for all. It helps make our world safer, healthier and more sustainable by getting people out of their cars. These should be the priorities of government, whether the economy is good or bad, and no matter how much the government has to spend.

But where will the money come from? Let me tell you, it really pisses me off to see people holding rallies against the transit cuts in their district, without acknowledging that the MTA simply has a lot less money to spend than they've had in previous years. You may say you want transit to keep running, but if you can't find the money for it, what does that say about your priorities?

I want to make it clear that I'm willing to sacrifice. I'm not a liberal who clamors for spending but won't support tax increases to pay for it. Tax me! Tax my income, tax my apartment, tax me when I buy computers and fancy clothes. But don't cut my transit service. More importantly, don't cut the service of my neighbor, who might drive if transit is no longer convenient.

Sadly, there's a lot of stupid anti-tax rhetoric out there, and many politicians have sworn not to raise taxes. Even though it might be the best thing to do, it probably won't happen, which leaves us with a shrinking pot of money.

The government should spend more on transit, but it's not willing to raise more in taxes. The money should come from other things, like roads. Spending priorities should reflect overall priorities, and paying billions for free highways and bridges for cars should be a low priority.

It's as simple as that: free bridges for drivers=low priority. Low-cost transit=high priority. Time to get our priorities in order.

Separating transit from charity

In the past I've talked about the consumer surplus: the fact that there are plenty of people who would be willing to pay a lot more than $2.25 (or $1.84 or whatever it comes out to) for a subway ride. If you ride the #6 train downtown in the morning, you'll be riding with bankers, executives, all kinds of people who make more than $100,000 a year. I don't know how many millionaires there are, but there are plenty who would be happy to pay $5 for a quick ride downtown. If we could get enough people to pay enough money, then the government wouldn't have to spend as much to subsidize the subway system.

The problem, of course, is that along with those bankers and executives are plenty of people who live below the poverty line and are heading downtown to make a very small amount of money. Tripling what they pay for the subway would cut into their income at a time when lots of people are struggling to make ends meet.

This is not a unique problem. We have a similar one for food. Food can be very expensive, especially here in New York, but there are lots of people who can't afford to buy enough food to live. For them, we have food stamps. They get a plastic debit card with a certain amount deposited to it every month, and they can use it to buy food. Grocers can charge what they want, and the government helps people buy it.

So let's do that for transit. The MTA is planning to implement some kind of new payment system. What if we make it at least partially compatible with the EBT cards? We could give everyone with one of those cards two rides a day. Same thing for anyone receiving unemployment benefits.

This has been done in the past. In Curitiba, the municipal government accepted recyclables from residents and paid them in bus tokens. The poorest people had the time to scavenge for recyclables and bring them to the collection centers, so they benefited the most from this policy.

Since these are for the poorest New Yorkers, who can't afford enough food for a healthy diet, the fare should probably be free. With more than a million food stamp recipients in the city, if everyone used the benefit it would come to $2 million a day, or $730 million per year.

But what about those who are not unemployed or poor enough to get food stamps, but who would still have a hard time paying $180 a month to ride the train? For them, I think an expanded TransitChek program would work. The government currently exempts TransitChek purchases from taxes, but it could go beyond that and contribute a percentage.

Of course, with the poorest taken care of, the MTA could raise fares to the market rate for the rest of the population. I don't know what market rate would be for the non-poor, but if it's $1.50 over the current rate, that's an extra $3.75 billion a year, more than enough to pay for the free rides for students, the unemployed and the poor, and probably senior citizens too.

That wouldn't mean that the city and state governments would have no responsibility to the MTA. They should be required to pay back the $34 billion that the MTA has borrowed because of the state aid cuts. Once that's taken care of, then maybe they can see if it would work to stop subsidizing things.

The bottom line is that transit should not be charity. Charity should be charity. If we want the government to offer cheap rides for the poor or the working class, we should subsidize it for just those groups, not hold down fares across the board.

The anti-transit shell game

Jarrett Walker brings this to our attention: Rupert MurdochLeonard Asper's National Post is trying to bring in the pageviews with a new "rethinking green" series. Recycling hurts the environment! Feed the world by growing fish in the desert! At first I thought it was just being contrarian to attract attention, like the Freakonomics guys, but then I realized that there's something more sinister at work.

Reversing climate change and cleaning up the mess we've made will require tremendous sacrifices, and for a democratic society to commit to sacrifices on that scale there has to be a clear understanding of the danger at hand, and a strong consensus about the best action to take. People like Leonard Asper and Wendell Cox are bent on preserving the advantages that their class has appropriated over the years, and they are willing to sacrifice the welfare of their grandchildren for this.

They are also willing to lie and cheat to do it, and they've realized that you don't need clarity or consensus to maintain the status quo. All you need is fear, uncertainty and doubt. If enough people say, "but I heard that recycling doesn't actually accomplish all that much," and "hydrogen-powered fish farms in Alberta will save us," then the consensus breaks down and Asper's buddies get to continue blasting the air conditioning as they drive their Escalades to the golf course in Scottsdale.

To break the pro-transit coalition among environmentalists, social justice activists, livable streets proponents and train buffs, Kevin Libin has a simple message, courtesy of Wendell Cox and Randal O'Toole: transit is less efficient than cars and pollutes more. Transit advocates like to tell you how much energy a full bus saves, and how much less carbon it spews into the atmosphere, but really they're living in a fantasy world. Nobody actually rides transit, so the buses pollute more per passenger than cars. Libin brings in some guy named Tom Rubin to deliver the solution: just relax and let the March of Technology make more fuel-efficient cars, and everything will be fine.

Nobody seems to disagree with O'Toole's numbers on the average efficiencies of transit systems, and I think every transit advocate should have a response to them. Commenters in the Streetsblog thread have made a number of important points: one near-empty bus can attract passengers who will also fill another bus (Hilary Kitasei, Jeff, Eric B and Librarian); it's important to look at the lifecycle energy use and pollution of each vehicle, not just while transporting people (Ben); and late night service gets drunk drivers off the road (Zach).

Jarrett's response is to point out that there are other reasons for transit: what he calls coverage services exist to "provide a little bit of service everywhere regardless of ridership, both to meet demands for 'equity' and to serve the needs of transit-dependent persons." His point, as I understand it, is that these coverage services account for the discrepancy between the potential efficiency of transit and its actual efficiency.

Libin actually addresses that in his article:

More roads, and more efficient roads, still won't address public transit's original, non-environmental purpose: providing mobility for citizens who lack their own. But where public transit is absent, or impractical, solutions for the small minority totally lacking other means have readily sprung up. Ridesharing applications for smart phones -- users enter their location and desired destination and a cost-conscious carpooler responds -- are already in wide use, Mr. Rubin says. Self-sustaining, small-scale private jitney systems have successfully operated for years in Atlantic City and Puerto Rico (all North America's early public transit systems were privately operated until they were nationalized). And with billions freed up from public transit funds, it appears entirely feasible to simply offer subsidized Prius taxis, or even car subsidies, to the small portion of the public entirely reliant on public mobility.

While taking exception to Libin's condescending frame - I don't "lack my own mobility" any more than some jerk who can't go farther than two blocks without being propelled by government-sponsored oil on government-sponsored roads - I agree with some of his potential strategies. Ridesharing and jitneys have a lot of potential, but as a supplement for transit, not a replacement. The subsidized taxis and cars are complete bullshit, just a way for Libin to gloat at the end, and not worth wasting electrons over.

In addition to Jarrett's response, I have another issue with Libin's argument, which is the matter of land use. It has been amply documented that city dwellers just use less energy than sprawled-out suburbanites. Libin pays lip service to this, but shows that he really doesn't get it:

But the thousands of delivery trucks, taxi drivers, emergency vehicles, service trucks, car-bound workers and buses mean even high-density cities will keep needing highways, ring roads, bridges and flyovers. Meanwhile the massive cost of overhauling cities is just more billions to address an automobile environmental problem that is already on the way to resolving itself -- money that might be better, and more effectively deployed toward other earth-friendly measures, such as reducing traffic congestion.

Well, it's not actually on the way to resolving itself, the overhaul will be done anyway, and transit-oriented lifestyles actually decrease the need for so many of the vehicles that Libin mentions. In addition, it's a feedback loop, one that works in both directions: if transit is better than cars, that encourages more people to use transit, and it becomes that much better.

But I've saved the main against Libin's (and Cox's, and O'Toole's, and Rubin's) argument for last. And that's the fact that this is just a shell game. These people are out to win at any cost, and if you start to win the climate change argument, they'll switch to efficiency. If you make headway in the efficiency argument they'll start talking about how we nasty elitists are trying to take away the True American Dream of living in a home so big you can't clean it by yourself. If you gain ground in the popular opinion argument, they switch back to emissions.

The only way you can win this is by keeping all the advantages of transit in mind:

Providing quality transit isn't just a matter of fairness to the poor, the young, the elderly and the disabled. Shifting people to transit isn't just a matter of clean air, energy efficiency and working towards a better society. It's also about making our streets safe for people of all ages to walk and play, about ending the carnage that kills thousands every year. Randal O'Toole may be able to show that transit is not living up to its potential in one or two of these goals, but he's just not going to be able to make the case that private cars are superior on all five counts.

Why we have government funding

Under Koch, Cuomo and Reagan we saw a reduction in public investment in infrastructure and services: our deteriorating parks, streets and subways allowed Reagan to deliver his famous tax cuts. Under Giuliani and Pataki we got private organizations taking up the slack: business improvement districts cleaned up the streets, and organizations like the Central Park Conservancy maintained the parks.

Of course, this is on a much more local scale: the BIDs and the foundations only pay for individual business districts and parks. If your neighborhood doesn't have enough rich donors, you don't even get a cheapo park conservancy, you just have to deal with inadequate city services. If your business district can't afford to tax its members, you get infrequent garbage collection and rarely seen NYPD patrols. In terms of transportation, we get oil wars and Cash for Clunkers for the rich, while the subway service is being cut.

Since the city, state and feds won't pay to maintain the existing facilities, they won't allow any new ones to be built unless they come with maintenance plans. Thus, the campaign for the Brooklyn Bridge Park rested not on convincing the city to build and maintain it, but convincing the neighbors to allow enough condo and recreational development to be built there so as to pay for the maintenance. The DOT's public plaza program has accomplished what it did only with local partner organizations who pledged to keep the plazas clean and functional.

Now Curbed links to a Post story about one of those plans that's coming apart. The new Hudson River Park was apparently built with the understanding that maintenance would be financed through allowing cars to cross the greenway and park at Pier 40, and eventually through some kind of recreational development on that pier. The neighbors didn't want to see that kind of development, though, and the pier has been deteriorating so that not as many cars can park there. The result is that the park is running out of funds.

Often we don't get a decent perspective on these things, so nobody explains why, for example, Brooklyn Bridge Park advocates were promoting condo construction. This Post article was an exception, though, thanks to one quote:

Geoffrey Croft, president of New York City Park Advocates, said Hudson River Park is falling victim to government refusal to pay for essential services (parks, among them), instead putting the cost on to risky development schemes.

"The problems at Hudson River Park are a perfect example of why these deals aren't in the best interest of the public," Croft said.

I'm so glad that Croft and New York City Park Advocates have come along. Instead of having two sets of parks, one for the rich and one for the poor, they want the government to fund them all. And it sounds like they don't treat it like a welfare system, but as a matter of basic fairness.

They've got an uphill battle in this economic climate, but park maintenance would be a great stimulus program. I've only just heard of them, but they sound like a great organization. We have plenty of organizations arguing for decent transit from a welfare point of view, and others from an environmental standpoint, but I don't know how often I hear it being advocated from a fairness perspective. And of course it'd be nice if we had someone doing this for business districts.

Rob Hopkins's Urban Challenge

Last month I discussed my suspicions that the transition movement may be just the same old back-to-the-land movement with renewed energy from the peak oil and climate crises. I'm not prepared to dismiss it completely out of hand, but I do think that it needs to let go of its contempt of cities and tone down its agriculture fetish to be truly effective.

I think it's worth quoting in depth the paragraph on page 37 of the Transition Handbook where Rob Hopkins dismisses New York:

If we see climate change as a separate and distinct issue from peak oil, we risk creating a world of lower emissions but one which is, in terms of oil vulnerability, just as fragile as today’s – if not more so – as energy prices rise.

A good example of this is New York, which recently emerged in a study as having one of the lowest per capita CO2 emissions of any large Western city, less than a third of the per capita US average. This is due to the density of living, the walkability, good public transport and the low heating requirements of apartment living. So, from a climate change perspective we can argue that New York is a good model of low carbon living we would all do well to emulate. Now let’s weave peak oil into that mix. What happens to New York in the event of a power shortage, or when the price of importing food starts to rise sharply? New York experienced such a power cut in August 2003, and although it only lasted for a day, its impact was keenly felt. While New York may have a small carbon footprint, it has little or no resilience to declining oil supplies (a concept explored in depth in Chapter 3).

You can read more of that section on the publisher's website.

When I read this, I immediately disagreed with Hopkins's conclusion (which seems to be that cities are doomed and we should all be living in small towns where we can use horsecarts to get our produce to market) but I had trouble defending New York against his specific accusation. The 2003 blackout did point to a particular vulnerability that the city has.

At 4:15 on August 14, I was working in Lower Manhattan in an enterprise that was essentially dependent on the Internet to function, so the boss told us to go home. The subways were non-functional, there was gridlock on the streets, and we didn't even think of taking a bus or a cab. I found a co-worker who lived near me and we walked six miles back to Queens. It took us a couple of hours. At least two car lanes on the Williamsburg Bridge were allocated to pedestrians. My wife had brought our infant son with her to work in the Bronx, and was not prepared to carry him ten miles home. One of her co-workers drove them to her apartment in Harlem, where they spent the night. The next morning they took three buses to get home. Power was restored the following evening.

Our resilience was tested in a less dramatic way three years later, when mismanagement by Con Edison resulted in sections of Queens losing power. At first there were two days of low power (our air conditioner and desktop computers wouldn't work, but the fans and laptops would), followed by a day of no power. At that point, Con Ed brought in several diesel generators in trailers and parked them next to large apartment buildings. Switching the apartment buildings to the generators freed up some electricity for smaller customers, but it took over a month before our generator was disconnected and driven away. In the meantime it was spewing diesel fumes around the clock under our bedroom window, which didn't help our son's asthma any. It was kind of a surreal experience, because in this case the subways were running normally and other neighborhoods had power. We could go work or shop in Manhattan or Forest Hills and it would be just another day with lights and air conditioning, but then we would get off the train and see stores with the lights off and the doors open.

There are two main questions that Hopkins's challenge raises. In both cases we made it through with minimal loss of life and property, but both cases were relatively temporary. What Hopkins is saying is that when peak oil finally catches up with us we will have to make do indefinitely with a much lower energy level. Is it possible to power a metropolitan area of nineteen million at roughly a thousand people per square kilometer without fossil fuels? What is a truly sustainable size and density?

In both cases we had a certain amount of redundancy between electrical, liquid and muscle energy that allowed the city to function at a reduced level while the problem was fixed. When the subways weren't running, there were gasoline and diesel powered buses, taxis and cars to transport those who couldn't walk or bike. When the cables couldn't bring enough power to work our lights, computers and air conditioners, we had diesel powered generators to supplement them.

In some visions of the future of cities, most transportation is powered by electricity, using energy ultimately supplied by sustainable sources. We already have electric subways and elevators, and in the past we've had electric streetcars and trolleybuses. Ultimately, I would like to see most car and truck trips replaced by electric rail and bus, and of course walking and bicycling.

But isn't that putting all our eggs in one transmission basket? What happens if we get another blackout like in 2003, and we don't have any cars or diesel buses to travel in? What if we get a brown-out like in 2006, and we don't have any diesel fuel to generate more electricity with?

Some of the answer is generating power locally, and in fact there are buildings in the neighborhood that have installed solar generators on the roofs and natural gas co-generation systems in the basements, but these only provide a fraction of the electricity needed, and the co-generation requires a supply of natural gas. I suppose we could have a completely redundant system of generators and buses powered by natural gas, but that presumes that we will have enough natural gas available then.

If any of you out there have information or insights, I'd love to hear them. Maybe you think Hopkins is right, and we should all move back to the land? In any case, please assume that we will reach peak oil, and that climate change will make other fossil fuels like "clean coal" and natural gas unsustainable. Feel free to disagree with those assumptions, but they are the premise of this discussion.

Spatial, narrative and habit navigation

I may be covering things that have already been discussed, but this is something I haven't seen elsewhere before, so if you have, please point me to it.

Jarrett's recent post about spatial vs. narrative navigation, and Angus's reaction, got me thinking about something I've been trying to put into words for a long time. When some transit advocates talk about navigation tools, sometimes it seems like they think there's only one kind of user for any given transit facility. Meanwhile, I can think of four: old-time regular users, new regulars, occasional users and tourists. Each group has its own wayfinding needs, and what helps one group may be useless to another.

Tourists and occasional users are the most likely to use spatial navigation. They have an origin, a destination and a set of landmarks. They can consult the map on the wall, or the map in their heads, and plot out a good route. Of course, plenty of them get narrative directions from a regular user or from a trip planning program, which they can then memorize, write down or print out.

I would argue that regular, long-time users go beyond narrative navigation to something else, especially if they have a set routine. They walk the same way from their home to the station or stop, maybe picking up coffee or a newspaper along the way. They prewalk to the spot that will put them in the best place when the train stops. They often know the conductor and the other regular passengers. They know the best route to transfer, and their routine at the work end is similarly predictable.

These old-time regulars don't need maps or even timetables. They show up in the same place at the same time every day, and either the train comes or it's late. They usually know the times of the trains before and after, in case they're a little early or late.

New regulars often get shown the trip by the old regulars, but they may also find their way through spatial or narrative navigation methods. After they've taken the trip enough times, though, they become old regulars and everything is done by habit.

Some transit agencies go out of their ways to help tourists, like the ones in New York, London, etc. They not only have maps on the walls, but have free system maps and timetables in every station. Others may post a map or have a timetable available, but leave out critical information. In some places, the system maps are only available in a central location. Many jitney systems have no published information at all, and rely entirely on word of mouth. Just about every travel book involving transit has a scene or two where the traveler is confronted with a complicated system and absolutely no documentation.

For a transit geek, a lack of information can be positive or negative. It definitely makes learning the system more challenging. This can be fun if we don't have to get anywhere soon, and if the system doesn't wind up marooning us in some suburb when rush hour ends. But if we actually want to learn the system in a reasonable amount of time it can be maddening.

Many transit customer service people don't know how to deal with an explorer. I can't tell you the number of times I've asked about a route and been asked in response, "where do you want to go?" It's hard to explain that I don't want to go anywhere right now, but am wondering if I'll find out someplace interesting to visit along this route. I usually just mumble something and excuse myself, since there's a line of people behind me who actually have to go somewhere in particular.

I've also had the experience of finding the person who has access to the cabinet in the central office where the map booklets have been sitting, and they're quite pleased that someone actually wants the schedule for the elusive #10Y bus. I think these two experiences point to something that is worth stressing: that in the vast majority of transit systems, most passengers are old-time regulars. In other words, if you took away all the maps, timetables and brochures, only a small number of people would notice.

Now I'm going to ask a difficult question: do these people matter? Clearly not, to some of the transit systems, or else they would have made more of an effort to develop good materials and put them out there where people can see them. The dollar vans in New Jersey make plenty of money without published maps and schedules, so why go to that extra expense?

Do they matter to us? Well, only as far as they fulfill our goals of access for all and getting people out of their cars. First of all, if there's a class of people that wants to use the transit service but is being systematically excluded through insufficient information, then that's bad. For example, a Mexican living in Sunset Park who spends an hour on the train to Corona to visit relatives but could get there in half an hour if he knew about the Chinatown vans. Any community with a high level of illiteracy can also be a challenge for outreach.

As far as getting people out of their cars, we need to look again at which people need more information: tourists, occasional users and new regulars. There are plenty of cities with perfectly functional transit systems that are shunned by tourists - but there are also possible class issues involved as well. There are people who will use the train or bus for their regular commute but drive or take taxis to all other destinations, even though they may be more convenient by transit. Finally, there are people who make a trip by car every day and never learn that they could be taking transit. Remember all the stories from last year's oil price spike with people who said, "I never realized that the bus was so easy; I'm not going back to driving!"

I think the proportions are different in each town, but each transit agency should sit down and look at the number of potential customers they could be getting from tourists, occasional users and regulars, and then survey those populations to see what it would take to get them to use the system. One agency may discover that they could capture a big chunk of the tourist market that currently gets stuck in traffic driving to XYZLand. Another may realize that their commuter passengers could be converted into nightlife passengers. A third could find that there are frustrated commuter drivers that just need to know about the 28X express service.

On the other hand, it may just be that everyone who needs to know about the system finds out by word of mouth, and nobody needs to waste time. That transit geek who wants to find out where the G33 goes? He can stop by the central office and pick up a wad of timetables.

Sticks, carrots and sugarlumps

Today, Streetsblog.net featured a post that relates to what I've been writing recently about the Magic Formula for Profitable Transit. The post is by Ann Arbor transportation promoter Nancy Shore, on the Get Downtown Blog. Shore discusses incentives to use transit, employing the "carrot and stick" metaphor. She's particularly insightful in this comment:

We have a huge carrot known as the go!pass, that gives employees unlimited rides on the buses, including to park and ride lots in addition to other incentives. But those carrots only work if there isn’t also a chocolate cupcake (such as employer paid parking) on the plate.

Let me refine Shore's metaphor for a minute, to make it even more apt. The "carrot and stick" metaphor is actually from the field of transportation, discussing the best way to get a donkey to move a load. You can put a carrot in front of it, and it will move forward to get the carrot, or you can hit it with a stick and it'll go forward to try to get away from you.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/audreyjm529/ / CC BY 2.0

In fact, your Cap'n has actually had the privilege of traveling by donkey cart, and let me tell you, it was all stick. There were no carrots or other positive incentives in sight. But my experience is just one data point, so let's assume that it's not completely representative and that sometimes it's possible to motivate a donkey with rewards.

Imagine that you're getting downtown in your donkey cart, and you get stuck in the mud. You walk around in front of the donkey and hold out a carrot, and lo and behold, she starts moving forward. But then a thief comes along and offers the donkey a sugar lump. Although it's well-documented that donkeys like carrots, I've been told that they like sugar lumps even better. All of a sudden, the donkey starts following the thief as he backs away. And she's pulling your cart with its load of plasma televisions and Kindle DXes away from downtown, towards the office park!

For whatever reason, Shore seemed to end her article as though removing the free parking passes were a stick, instead of simply chasing away the thief with the sugarlumps. And really, that's what entitlement is, right? You get so used to the reward that when it's taken away it feels like a punishment.

So now let's get away from the culture of entitlement for a little while, and travel with Dave Olsen to the town of Hasselt in Belgium, where the buses have been fare-free since 1997. The crux of Olsen's argument is here:

Hasselt City Council's principal aim in introducing free public transport was to promote the new bus system to such a degree that it would catch on and become the natural option for getting around. And it did -- immediately. On the first day, bus ridership increased 783 per cent! The first full year of free-fare transit saw an increase of 900 per cent over the previous year; by 2001, the increase was up to 1,223 per cent and ridership continues to go up every day.

Olsen's entire article is definitely worth reading, because he makes it clear that the planners and government officials really did an amazing job in this town. But critically, they didn't just make transit free. Olsen kind of slips this one in there:

The "Green Boulevard," formerly the inner ring road, was a traffic nightmare in the 1960s. Starting in 1997 and finishing in 2000, it has been transformed into a multi-use transportation dream: a nine-metre wide pedestrian area (Vancouver's standard sidewalk width is less than two metres), separate bike paths, separate lanes for transit, and roads that are engineered to ensure that cars drive at a maximum of 30 kilometres an hour. Although there are only two lanes for cars, there is rarely any congestion.

Okay, now wait a minute. They took a congested four-lane ring road and turned it into a two-lane, traffic-calmed street with a parallel greenway and separate lanes for transit. And you're telling me that this had nothing to do with the way that people flocked to transit?

It looks like the people of Hasselt followed at least part of our Magic Formula for Transit Profitability:

1. Give transit its own right-of-way and good terminals
2. Make it hard to use cars
3. Make it expensive to use cars
4. Profit!

More details of the Groene Boulevard can be found in this PDF report from Sust. I actually haven't been able to find pictures of this transit right-of-way, or any sign of road pricing, but they have clearly made it harder to drive in the town. They even made drivers travel in a loop, and we know that very few people actually want to travel in circles! Since Hasselt, like Curitiba, seems to be a popular destination on the Bus Boosters' World Tour, some of our readers may have been there; please fill us in.

What seems to have been the deciding factor is that the people of the area created a consensus Mobility Plan together, and seem to have really taken ownership of it; Olsen writes, "Now, people in Hasselt often speak of "their" bus system, and with good reason." The Sust report confirms this: "The stimulus for such a radical approach was multi-faceted: the city centre population had declined significantly over time, which lead to reduced levels of activity within the area. In addition, there was also a high rate of traffic accidents within the central boundary. These were some of the facts that indicated that city was in decline and needed a new focus and direction. Against this backdrop, the decision was taken to revitalise Hasselt by redefining mobility and the supporting infrastructure, making it more sustainable."

Apparently that's what it takes to turn a stick into a carrot: a shared sense of responsibility that outweighs feelings of entitlement. Not likely while the city looks to "leaders" like Bill Thompson and Pedro Espada.