Guideways

WHY WE GET IT WRONG

To build good public transit, which is transit that is useful to lots of people, we need to have the right conversations about transit. We need to talk about what matters—to focus on the quality of service, not the technology that delivers it; to talk about all kinds of transit riders, not just about a narrow target market; to understand that the transit experience depends on buildings and streets and sidewalks as much as it does on stations and trains; and, above all, to talk about getting transit in the right places. We also need to be willing to talk about where transit is falling short.

It is remarkable how much of the public transit we build in the United States and Canada doesn’t go where people want to go or when they want to go there. Many cities have invested in transit that doesn’t maximize the zone of access—rail or bus-rapid-transit lines that miss the city’s densest residential areas, ignore major employment centers, or don’t serve major hospitals or universities.

When we get transit wrong, it’s usually not because transit planners don’t know what they’re doing; it’s because of the larger political context within which transit agencies are operating. Each transit line represents a decision made by elected officials, agency staff, and the public. Some were good decisions, and some were bad decisions. All are lessons we can learn from.

The measure of success in transit is not miles of track or ribbon cuttings, it is whether transit makes people’s lives better. Transit isn’t really about trains and buses; it’s about people. n

We tend to talk too much about modes of transit and not enough about where we build that transit.

Statements such as “This city needs light rail” are not useful. Statements that identify the specific goal, such as “We need better transit connecting downtown, the hospitals, and the university,” are much more helpful. One example of where this went wrong is Cincinnati, where a plan to connect five employment centers became a plan to build a streetcar. When politics and funding constrained the project, the “streetcar” part of the project was kept but the “connect centers” part was dropped.

We hurry through system planning. Once a transit agency decides to build a transit project in a specific corridor, it does detailed analysis, following federal guidelines, of the exact alignment, the station locations, and what parts of the line will be elevated or at grade. But the earlier, and more important, decision to focus on that corridor often gets much less analysis.

We don’t think about networks. No rail transit or BRT line exists in isolation; it is part of a network of multiple routes, both bus and rail. Many riders will use more than one of those lines. An effective line makes the whole network more useful. A good rail corridor will add ridership to connecting bus routes, and vice versa.

We talk about infrastructure, not service. Tracks, bus lanes, and stations are easy to see and easy for elec ted officials to get excited about. But what transit riders actually need is service. It’s notable how much frequency and span is an afterthought in transit planning discussions.

We plan single-purpose transit. Transit that does only one thing will never be as useful—or draw as many riders—as transit that meets multiple needs. Yet we tend to talk about really specific types of trips, such as 9-to-5 commutes to downtown or trips to the airport. Those alone won’t fill trains or buses all day long, every day. In places like New Jersey (below), for example, commuter rail has

frequent service only at peak hours, and neither schedules nor fares are coordinated with local busses. Those tracks could be carrying people all day long, but single-purpose thinking means they’re underused except at rush hour.

We focus on “choice riders.” Many transit projects are aimed specifically at attracting new riders. Many of the highest ridership transit projects, though, succeeded because they also made trips better for existing transit riders. Moreover, the idea of “choice riders” often gets decision makers thinking about very specific target audiences, and caught up in false perceptions of what riders want, leading to a focus on “sexiness” rather than usefulness.

We don’t use data. Often transit is planned based on people’s mental image of the city. Assumptions are made that everyone works downtown and lives in the suburbs, that close-in neighborhoods are dense and suburban neighborhoods are not, and that low-income residents all live in certain places. The people—whether agency staff or elected officials—who are drawing lines are rarely looking at population or employment data. When public meetings are held, the people who show up are usually not representative of the population as a whole. Some of the people who need transit most—like low-income families juggling multiple jobs—do not have time to come to an open house. But they do show up in the data.

We think at too large a scale. Regional planning exercises draw regional maps. On those maps, long lines look impressive. But that is not what determines usefulness. At a large scale, a regional system can appear to cover everything, but a rider getting off a train is likely willing to walk no more than half a mile. Anything that is farther away is essentially out of reach. A short line that serves many destinations is far more useful than a long one through low-density development. In San Francisco, for example, the Geary bus (left) carries more people than SMART, eBART, and the Pleasanton BART line combined (right). We think about right of way, not destinations. Many, perhaps most, of US rail lines were conceived because some sort of right of way already existed. It is easy to look at a freight rail line and imagine running trains there. But the purpose of transit isn’t to run trains; it is to get people to destinations. If an existing corridor happens to do that, it is useful. If it doesn’t, how easy it is to acquire or construct is irrelevant.

We avoid opposition. When we build transit through areas that have lots of transit demand, there are many “stakeholders”—residents, businesses owners, and property owners. Many will welcome better transportation options, but many will have concerns about the impacts of a transit project. Some will be very angry. That opposition is an inevitable part of building a transit project. A good project has to take the concerns seriously, and will be designed to minimize the impact and maximize the benefits. Neighbors understand their neighborhood, and their concerns are usually valid. But the fact that somebody opposes a project should not be reason enough to stop it. In fact, if nobody opposes a project, that is a sign that it is a bad project, since it doesn’t go anywhere crowded enough to justify good transit. The fear of opposition often leads to bad projects. New York’s Port Authority, for example, is planning an airport train (solid line, below) that requires a transfer and will actually take riders in the wrong direction rather than a subway expansion (dashed line) or dedicated bus lane that would be more useful but might draw neighborhood opposition.

We build on past injustice and add to it. Transit agencies are still managing and operating systems that have racism embedded in them. They have inherited past decisions, entrenched systems and ways of thinking. They have operated in a world full of racist policy — such as deed restrictions, zoning, and mortgage-lending policies designed to keep the suburbs white. Planning processes that are based on what we already have, and policies that take past policy decisions for granted, only perpetuate that injustice.

We don’t share power. Transit will always reflect the priority of the people who make decisions on what to build and what service to operate. Those decision makers often don’t reflect the regions that represent or the people who ride transit. Across the United States and Canada, transit boards still tend to be disproportionately white and male, and include few transit riders. Moreover, decisionmaking structures are often inequitable, over-representing suburban interests, and some people (like business leaders) are invited into discussions while others are not. This often leads to transit that serves fewer people.