Trains, Buses, People: An Opinionated Atlas of US Transit

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INTRODUCTION

TRANSIT WHERE THE PEOPLE ARE

I live in Houston, Texas, a famously car-oriented city. I work at an urban planning practice, teach at Rice University, and serve on a transit agency board. I can do all of that on public transit. Almost every morning, I walk out my door, go three blocks down the street, and get on a train. It will take me to work, to meetings, to lunch with friends, to medical appointments, to lectures, to museums, to the park. I find it as convenient as driving, and considerably more pleasant. Transit makes my life better.

This is possible because the transit I live next to is high quality. The train runs every six minutes during the day on weekdays, so I rarely have to wait. It has its own lane, and traffic signal priority, so it’s not slowed down by congestion. My transit system has nice stations that shelter me from the rain, and good passenger information.

But, most importantly, taking the train for most of my travel is possible because the transit I live next to goes to the right places. It runs by lots of apartments and condos and houses, presenting me with options for living next to it. It runs by lots of office buildings, including the building where I work. It also runs by a lot of the other things I want to do in my life—socialize, learn, have fun. At all of those places, the train drops me off right in the middle of things, not in a giant parking lot or in the middle of a freeway.

More people ought to have the choice to live like this. I’m on the train every day with lots of different people, who live in different places and work in different kinds of jobs. This transit line works for them, too. Good transit offers access, opportunity, and freedom.

People who don’t ride transit benefit from transit, too. People who use transit—be they downtown professionals or minimum-wage service workers—are essential to the economy. Everybody on a bus or a train represents one less car on the road. Public transit significantly reduces the environmental impacts of cities, reducing energy use and preventing sprawl that eats up natural habitat. All of these benefits scale with ridership—as people use transit more, its societal benefits increase.

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. The measure of success in transit is not miles of track or ribbon cuttings, it is whether transit makes people’s lives better. It is remarkable how much of the public transit we build in the United States doesn’t go where people want to go or when they want to go there. Some cities have built transit that has transformed the experience of living there. Some have simply built a lot of transit. Some have built very little. It is worth comparing them and drawing lessons. That’s what this book is about.

DRAWING A LINE

The first, most important, act in the building of transit is drawing a line. Across hundreds of square miles, a metropolitan area has to decide which corridor is most worthy of investment because it will serve the most people or best improve access. No region has an unlimited transit budget, so prioritization is key.

That decision creates a zone of access—a line of stations or stops that each serve whatever is within half a mile. Everything in that zone should be easier to get to. If there are enough useful destinations in that area, transit becomes a viable option for many people.

On a large scale, transit planning is simple, as shown by the following six steps. inline-image

Step 1: Identify density. Some cities have a higher population density than others, but just about every city with a medium or large population in the United States has some clusters of density. Some of these cities have prewar neighborhoods with houses on small lots, some with multi-family housing mixed in, and nice walkable streets. Some have clusters of 1970s apartment buildings. Some have new infill development. Regardless of typology, these high-density areas are places where a transit stop is likely to serve many residents within walking distance.

Step 2: Identify centers. Every city has a downtown, which is generally a significant travel destination. Most cities have other centers as well. These can be other prewar downtowns where multiple cities grew together into one metropolitan area, postwar edge city employment centers, government complexes, universities, hospitals, cultural districts. New development can create new centers in old industrial neighborhoods or on greenfield sites. These places are major destinations for commuters going to school or to work, and they often drive other kinds of ridership, too, such as patients going to appointments, and people going to shop, eat, visit museums, or attend events.

Step 3: Identify bottlenecks. Many cities have natural barriers that restrict travel. The most common are bodies of water with only a few crossing points, but mountain ranges can have the same impact. Where these bottlenecks exist, they tend to funnel lots of trips through the same corridor, and these tend to be congestion points on both roadways and existing transit.

Step 4: Identify corridors. A good transit corridor is one with high density where multiple centers line up, perhaps resulting in a bottleneck. Most cities have at least one strong potential transit corridor like this. Often, it is already a transit corridor. Simply looking for a city’s busiest bus route is good way to identify a strong transit corridor. A good corridor must be reasonably straight: people do not want to move in Us or circles or zig-zags. It is critical when identifying corridors to think about land use, not existing transportation infrastructure. A congested freeway might be a sign that transit is needed, but that doesn’t mean that freeway is a strong transit corridor. We need to think about where people are going, not what path they are currently taking.

The population density of Houston, employment centers in Houston, and the Houston frequent-bus network.

Step 5: Decide what level of service, capacity, and travel time is appropriate. A transit corridor will be useful only if the transit is there when people need it. That means a reliable frequency, total travel time, and span of service (five days a week, or seven? all day, or rush hour only?). If it is a good transit corridor, it should justify service seven days a week, from early morning to late at night, at least every 15 minutes for most of the day. That is what makes the investment in tracks, busways, and stations worthwhile. More-frequent service is better, and some corridors need more capacity.

Step 6: Pick a mode. The technological decisions–light rail or heavy rail, street level or elevated—should be made last, based on what will provide the best service in that corridor. Sometimes the decision may be driven by capacity. For example, heavy rail can carry more people than light rail, which can carry more than BRT. Sometimes, it is driven by speed. Sometimes, it relates to what exists already. If an existing line can be extended, that is usually preferable to building a separate line that requires passengers to transfer, and if existing infrastructure can be repurposed, that is better than starting from scratch. Sometimes the decision to use a specific mode is driven purely by cost—either the capital cost to build it or the operating cost when it is open.

It is remarkable how many cities in the United States 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.

There are several reasons why we, as a country, haven’t been good at building transit.

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.

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 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 are both useful trips, but they alone won’t fill trains or buses all day long, every day.

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. A short line that serves many destinations is far more useful than a long one through low-density development. 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. We need to think on that scale of one-half mile around train stations.

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.

This book is full of examples of transit. 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.

To build good transit, we need to understand the shape of cities. That’s not hard. From the air, the Houston skyline is a graph of employment densities. Simply connecting the visible centers with rail or BRT will create strong transit corridors. These corridors can extend into surrounding residential areas, or link to bus routes that do.

In the 1960s, rail transit was a rarity in the United States, confined to the Northeast and a few scattered cities elsewhere. Today, it’s normal. All of the top 25 metropolitan areas have at least one rail transit line. This is the result of decades of construction. In 2018, the United States will have gone 50 years with at least a mile of new rail transit opening every year.

But this expansion is not uniform. Some cities have built more than others, and few have built steadily. We’ve also seen more rail shut down. In Boston, Chicago, and Pittsburgh, much of the new construction was actually replacements for older lines that were shut down. Philadelphia’s heavy rail, light rail, and streetcar system is actually 35% smaller in 2016 than in 1960.

PART 1

THE ROLE OF TRANSIT IN AMERICA

WHAT TRANSIT DOES WELL

Transit is not the primary mode of transportation in the United States. Seventy-seven percent of Americans commute in a single-occupant car, and only 5 percent by train, bus, or ferry (the rest carpool, walk, or bike). Improving transit options and ridership is essential for two reasons.

The first reason is that transit is available to almost anyone, regardless of age, ability, or income. We tend to consider cars as universal, but a significant portion of Americans are not able to drive because they are too young, because they have physical or mental disabilities (which get more common with age), or because they cannot afford a