Human Transit

does high-density life have a bigger ecological footprint? and why?

2010-03-20T13:24:21+11:00

Over at New Geography, Joel Kotkin has a new broadside against high-density inner city life. It's called "Forced March to the Cities," presumably to feed the right-wing talking-point that urbanism and planning are totalitarian. Here's the part that's supposed to scare you:

... [A]cross the country, and within the Obama Administration, there is a growing predilection to endorse policies that steer the bulk of new development into our already most-crowded urban areas.
One influential document called "Moving Cooler", cooked up by the Environmental Protection Agency, the Urban Land Institute, the Environmental Defense Fund, Natural Resources Defense Council, the Environmental Protection Agency and others, lays out a strategy that would essentially force the vast majority of new development into dense city cores.
Over the next 40 years this could result in something like 60 million to 80 million people being crammed into existing central cities. These policies work hard to make suburban life as miserable as possible by shifting infrastructure spending to dense areas. One proposal, "Moving Cooler," outdoes even Lowenthal by calling for charges of upwards of $400 for people to park in front of their own houses.
The ostensible justification for this policy lies in the dynamics of slowing climate change. Forcing people to live in dense cities, the reasoning goes, would make people give up all those free parking opportunities and and even their private vehicles, which would reduce their dreaded "carbon imprint."

He goes on to argue that urban development's footprint is actually higher.

Yet there are a few little problems with this "cramming" policy. Its environmental implications are far from assured. According to some recent studies in Australia, the carbon footprint of high-rise urban residents is higher than that of medium- and low-density suburban homes, due to such things as the cost of heating common areas, including parking garages, and the highly consumptive lifestyles of more affluent urbanites.

His link is to a 2007 Australian Conservation Foundation (ACF) study "Consuming Australia." on the impacts of consumption in different parts of the country. The very readable summary report (only 17 pages!) makes several important points about consumption, most of them also true of the US and Canada, but its point is more nuanced than Kotkin's, and I suspect its authors would be offended to be cited as implying that urban infill is bad for the environment. (UPDATE: Yes, ACF is definitely offended. ACF's Charles Berger replies to similar misuse of his study here. Thanks to Daniel for the link.)

The first ACF finding is this:

Indirect impacts of consumption outweigh direct household use of energy, water, and land.

Here is the report's graphic showing the eco-footprint of an average Australian household:

The point here is that most of our environmental impact is not from the land and water and power that we pay for directly, and the emissions that result. Most of our footprint is from the land, water, power, and emissions associated with the creation and transportation of things we consume. Most of our transport costs and impacts, for example, are for moving things that we buy, not for moving ourselves. This does mean that those of us who are focused on personal transportation choices are affecting a small slice of the pie.

The second key finding:

Affluent areas have higher environmental impacts.

... because, obviously, affluent people buy more stuff, go to restaurants more, etc.

So it's not surprising that when the report turns to urbanism, it finds that the ecological footprint of high-density living is mostly not because of the high density, it's because of the choices of the people who live there. Which brings us to the ACF study's next point:

Inner cities are consumption hotspots.

This point is what Kotkin wants to emphasize, but here's how the ACF report actually describes it:

" ... [D]espite the lower environmental impacts associated with less car use, inner city households outstrip the rest of Australia in every other category of consumption. Even in the area of housing, the opportunities for relatively efficient, compact living appear to be overwhelmed by the energy and water demands of modern urban living, such as air conditioning, spa baths, down lighting and luxury electronics and appliances ... "

The argument is not that inner city living implies a high footprint, but rather that both inner city living and a high footprint are common consequences of affluence. Affluent people living outside the inner city presumably still have a high footprint, and poor people in the inner city still have a small one, but because a lot of the inner city is affluent, the footprint is higher there.

So while Kotkin wants to conclude that inner-city life is intrinsically wasteful of resources, the real and quite different point of the study he cites is that resource-waste is a feature of affluent lifestyles, which are more concentrated in the inner city. This suggests that high-density housing geared to lower price points -- for example, by constructing a massive supply -- would reduce the increase the income diversity of the population and thus reduce its average consumption.

But is there no more direct way that high-density living is wasteful of resources? Yes, there is, and the ACF report goes on to explain it:

Bigger households have smaller per-person footprints than small ones.
Sharing between households can reduce environmental footprint.

Here, I think, is a valid critique of much of the inner-city high density housing I've seen and lived in. It is designed to serve a population of strangers, and to discourage neighbors from knowing and trusting each other. In all the places I've lived in the US, Canada, and Australia, I've found it's much easier to meet the neighbors across the fence, in a lower-density setting, than in a sterile apartment hallway or elevator.

We're not going to change the fact that smaller households, such as singles and childless couples, are more attracted to high density. Urban life is especially attractive in early adulthood, and almost everyone starts out as a one-person household. Even setting side the impact of affluence, smaller households mean more consumption per person, as the ACF study finds, and that's a big problem. Three people living in three apartments have to own three vacuum cleaners, while a family of three people owns only one. So one of the ACF's most crucial recommendations is simply: "Share more."

Efforts at creating a more communal experience of housing always seem to collide with a market where people want privacy and control. But would there really be no market for a highrise development in which each floor had a small room containing an iron, an ironing board, and a vacuum cleaner, which anyone on the floor could use briefly as needed? At some price points, would there really be no market for a return to the laundry room -- again, one on each floor, rather than in each apartment?

To end on a lighter note, let's return to Kotkin's passing claim that the high consumption from high-rise development, as found in the ACF study, is "due to such things as the cost of heating common areas, including parking garages." This idea isn't in the ACF study; it's Kotkin's interpolation.

I've lived in Australia for three years and have never seen a heated parking garage, nor even an air-conditioned one. But Kotkin's reference to the parking garage really makes an urbanist point: If we had a carsharing system under every residential tower rather than a mandatory 1-2 parking spaces for every unit, we'd reduce our footprint and make the building more affordable. It's still the case, in much of the US, Canada, and Australia, that if you want to buy a modern high-rise apartment with no parking space, it's hard to find. I've looked.

Does high density life have a bigger ecological footprint? From the ACF report, the answer seems to be "not necessarily, but affluence does." So I'll end with the ACF's advice to people with money: "Buy fewer things, enjoy life more!"

public surveying: the quicksand of hypotheticals

2010-03-19T11:14:14+11:00

A recent post looked at the challenge of surveying the public and identifying what mixture of taxes and fees they would be willing to pay to fund a widely desired infrastructure plan. In the Sydney Morning Herald 's Independent Inquiry into public transport in Sydney, we did exactly that, using a survey team from the University of Technology at Sydney's Centre for the Study of Choice. One commenter caught the crucial point about why polling is so difficult, and why its results are often hard to trust:

There's always a difference between what people say they want, what they actually want and what they actually do.

Indeed there is. In the surveying biz, "what people say they want" is called stated preference. "What people actually do" is called revealed preference. Everyone prefers revealed preference data. We try to glean what we can from our current ridership data, for example. But revealed preference data is all about the past, and conditions are different in the future for which we're planning. In fact, one common sign that a transit agency is conceptually stuck is when they think and talk only about their present riders, not new ones they intend to attract.

Infrastructure projects are all based on assumptions about how people will behave in the future. To talk about those, we can talk about revealed preference from other places. For example, we can quote ridership on one transit line as a reason to expect ridership on another.

But for a city like Sydney, which cannot dream of the kinds of Federal funding that US cities are used to, the real question is what people will tolerate paying -- in taxes, fees, fares, and road charges -- to fund a system that they support. And for that, we have to ask them. And we're asking them about a hypothetical: "What would you be willing to pay if ...?" We're stuck with stated preference data, and most of it is worthless.

You've probably done stated preference surveys. In our business, they ask questions like "Would you ride transit more if ...?" or "Would you support a tax increase of $x to fund this rail project?" Most people have no idea. The question may not accurately describe the factors that would really determine their actual response. They may not understand what the funding sources (tolls, fares, etc) would mean in their lives. So people guess. They make stuff up. They say what they think the surveyor wants to hear. They give different answers depending on the sequence in which the questions are asked. They generate mounds of meaningless data.

So we (or rather our survey experts at the University of Technology, Sydney) tried something a little more subtle, called a discrete choice experiment. It turns out that if you aggregate a lot of stated preferences from the same person, they can add up to something like a revealed preference.

We wanted to find a combination of funding sources that would attract majority support and be adequate to fund the investment program. Rather than just ask people single hypothetical questions, we asked each person about a whole series of scenarios, each with different combinations of funding sources. We compared a "high investment in public transport" scenario, which we already knew to be the most popular, with a "high investment in roads" scenario and a "low investment in both" scenario. Respondents went through about 10 of these, and were asked to identify which scenario they preferred, but each time the specific funding sources and levels were different. Here's what just one of the questions looked like.

(Obviously, this has to be done on the web rather than over a phone. Our survey "panel" was 2400 people who are used to doing surveys on the web but who are, in all other respects, strictly representative of the entire population in terms of age, gender, income and all the other usual demographics.)

By asking a person to think about a range of different scenarios, the survey could observe the funding levels that were the end of each person's tolerance. If one respondent tended to support the high-public-transport scenario except in cases where the fare increase required was more than $1, we could conclude that this repondent was saying, in effect "I support fare increases up to but not beyond $1 to fund the high-public-transport program.

The key idea of a discrete choice experiment is that instead of asking people what their highest tolerable rate would be, it observed them making the choice. Essentially, discrete choices experiments create an environment in which a stated preference can emerge as a revealed preference, something we see in a person's choices but not something we need them to be able to explain.

The results were pretty cool. We did find a mix of funding sources that got bare majority support, and that were sufficient to fund the infrastructure program. We actually found a range of them, each supported by a slightly different majority group. I'll talk more about them in another post, or if you're really curious, you can download Chapter 1 of our report here.

the most important blog post you'll read this year ... (updated!)

2010-03-16T10:09:08+11:00

... may well turn out to be this one, by Michael Druker at Psystenance. It's about a conceptual error that lies at the root of a lot of bad transit planning decisions, an error made, at one time or another, by most citizens, many political leaders, and more than a few professionals. It's called (not very effectively) the Fundamental Attribution Error. It happens when we say or believe statements of the form: "My decisions are based on my situation, but other people's choices are based on their culture, the kind of people they are."

[Situation includes relevant factors that the person can be consciously aware of, including their location, destination, available infrastructure, available vehicles, special needs (wheelchairs, traveling with children, etc) and the relative value of time and money.]

Psychologists have observed that in general, humans tend to overestimate the rationality of their own decisions, and underestimate the rationality of other people's. We tend to think that we make rational choices ourselves, but too often, it's easy to form stereotypes about people whose different situation has caused them to make a different choice, and before long you're hearing about categories like "the kind of people who ride the bus" as opposed to "people who ride rail" as opposed to "lycra cyclists" and "the car culture." The mistake here is to explain people's behavior by assigning them to a cultural category, rather than by understanding their situation.

We've all heard the term "car culture" about places like Los Angeles. I've always hated the term, but now I understand why: it's an expression of the attribution error. When we say that Americans drive because they're a car culture, we imply that that the choice of most Americans to drive isn't a rational one, in light of each person's situation, and therefore requires a cultural explanation.

But in the places most Americans live, given the current economics of driving, and transit options being as they are, the decision to drive is rational for most of the people making it. If most Americans are in situations where driving is the rational choice, we don't need the "car culture" to explain their behavior, and we can see a clearer path to changing it, by helping to change people's situations.

Conversely, car advocates who cite current car use as evidence that people want to drive cars are also making the attribution error; they're implying that everyone who rationally chooses to drive is culturally committed to driving. That's wrong; some of the people driving cars would like to be in a situation where they didn't have to.

That's why I never talk about a need to "change the culture." Culture does change over time, but by its nature it also resists change, because it's made up of deeply held feelings and attachments that most people don't want to recognize and critique in themselves. Nobody likes being told that their behavior is the result of their culture. So defining America's car dependence as cultural is not a route to changing it. In fact, it plays right into conservative critiques of urbanism as social engineering.

The fundamental attribution error has deep philosophical roots. Jacques Lacan argued that the crucial stage in the development of a small child is the moment when he looks in the mirror for the first time and sees how he resembles the other people in his world. At this moment, he discovers that he is the same kind of being as the people he sees. Until that moment, a baby is a consciousness interacting with sense perceptions, attaching to some and not others, but with no ability to imagine that there are other nodes of consciousness, similar to his own, all around him.

We all get through this development stage imperfectly. Often it's said of a very arrogant person that "other people just aren't real for him." Categorizing others too readily is just a retreat to the pre-mirror state of the child, a state in which I am real and everyone else is just stuff happening around me. Categorizing is completely understandable: When we are functioning in a complex society, we need ways of identifying threats, just as our ancestors on the African savanna did, so we tend to put others in large mental categories that help us make sense of them. Racism arises from that impulse, but so do categories like "the type of people who ride the bus." As with racism, we only get beyond it with some hard work in taking control of our own mental processes, and remembering the lesson of the mirror stage.

(This post was updated and expanded on March 16 at 11:00 PM Sydney time, in response to early comments.)

Further update, March 17:

This may be one of the most misunderstood posts in the short history of Human Transit, and I take responsibility for that if that is the case. At the risk of getting deeper into the mire, let me expand a little in response to some of the critical comments and commentary to date.

First, there's been much discussion of sociology in the comments, so let me clarify, as several commenters also have: Fundamental attribution error (FAE) is psychology, not sociology. It describes a common mistaken view of individuals, described from the perspective of their own consciousness. For that reason, its reference to "situation" includes just the data available to the conscious mind, not including unconscious motivations such as personality or cultural conditioning. (FAE doesn't imply that those unconscious motivations don't exist, only that we tend to overstate their influence in describing the actions of others.)

My description of it here is not an accusation toward anyone. I'm saying only that psychology has found that a tendency toward attribution error is a feature of human minds in general. This does not imply that anybody's motivations as totally irrational or totally rational, nor does it require us to speculate about how much irrationality is cultural -- a question that really would lead into sociology. It observes only that average humans are likely to overestimate the rationality of their own choices and underestimate the rationality of other people's.

Racism is a much more vivid example of the same kind of phenomenon, so it may be useful as an analogy. (To be excessively clear, I am not equating racism with attribution bias, nor am I implying that one is as bad as the other. I'm observing that they are biases of the same kind -- different sizes but the same shape -- so that the workings of one can be understood by analogy to the workings of the other.)

Psychology finds that many people who are not racist in daily life will still make racial distinctions in quick-response tests where there is no time to think. (Malcolm Gladwell's book Blink discusses an example of this in detail.) The instinct to judge others based on categories of appearance such as race is understandable if you consider the needs under which the human brain evolved. Like other mammals, primitive humans had no choice but to make quick friend-or-enemy judgments based on appearance and behavior. Racism is one effect of that same instinct still working under the surface in modern brains. Like aggression, racism arises from an instinct that served our evolutionary ancestors' needs but is a problem in modern society, and that has not had time to evolve away. This suggests that those of us who see ourselves as not racist are putting a certain effort into compensating for the mind's primitive instinct to categorize other people racially. I'm certainly aware that I'm doing that.

The FAE demands the same kind of awareness and compensation. That's all I'm saying. So if you have a thought of the form "those people's behavior is irrational" or "those people are behaving that way because of their culture," just notice that this is the kind of view that the human mind tends to exaggerate, so give that thought some extra scrutiny before you get too attached to it. In our conscious management of our ideas, attribution error implies that we should try to consciously err on the side of assuming that other people's behavior is rational.

Someone with poor hearing in one ear will often learn to turn their head slightly to compensate when listening to someone. Attribution error implies that our brains have a similar limitation, a bit of deafness to the possible rationality of the actions of others, one for which we need to compensate.

tyson's corner: the "last mile" problem

2010-03-15T23:07:44+11:00

Tyson's Corner, Virginia west of Washington DC is one of America's classic "Edge City" commercial centers. It looks like the result of a global design competition based on the question: "How can we build an urban center of shopping and employment that will attract 100,000 people per day, concentrated in a 5 square mile area, while ensuring that almost all of them come by car?"

You know the look. Lots of big office buildings with big parking structures, served by car-oriented arterial streets that are neither safe nor pleasant to walk on, all focused around a freeway interchange.

Rapid transit is finally coming in 2013 via the WMATA Silver Line. The Silver Line will have four stations in Tyson's Corner, but still many destinations there will be too far to walk. So Tyson's will be an excellent case study of rapid transit's "last mile problem." When retrofitting rapid transit into a car-oriented suburban area, access from the station to the activity destination is often the problem that drives potential riders away.

Fortunately, sharp minds at Greater Greater Washington are on the case. They've done a series of posts looking at the Tyson's problem, including:

An introduction to the problem.
A busway solution, in which shuttle buses linking the major buildings would run in exclusive lanes.
An overview of "Personal Rapid Transit" as it might apply to Tyson's.
A review of limitations of the "PRT" solution.

If you haven't encountered "PRT," their last posts, and the abundant links in the posts and comments, will give you everything you need to form your own view.

some great weekend reads

2010-03-13T23:35:00+11:00

Julia Turner at Slate did a nice piece on the challenge of helping people find their way through large and complex stations, especially through-stations like New York's Penn Station. It contains a good introduction to the key concepts of wayfinding.
Aaron Renn at the Urbanophile looks at how Detroit can make tourist attractions out of its great abandoned buildings, such as the haunting ruin of Michigan Central Terminal.
Daniel of Discovering Urbanism expands on the crucial role of jaywalking in the life of a healthy city, also the topic of a Tom Vanderbilt essay in Slate a while back. Everyone who values both livable cities and Western notions of personal freedom and responsibility needs to understand how to argue against anti-jaywalking laws.

damascus: cars banned from the old city

2010-03-12T22:35:49+11:00

The Syrian newspaper Baladna launched a new English edition in December. The first issue is on the web, and features a story about the Damascus mayor's plan to ban cars from the narrow streets of the old city.

If Syria is an alien place to you, this article will make it feel utterly familiar. In the interviews with restaurant owners, shopkeepers, and tourism operators, everyone says exactly what they would say if this were proposed in any other city in the world.

On some level, every city wants to believe that its transport issues are local, special, distinctive, when in fact the same issues can be found all over the world. Most transport issues arise from basic problems of geometry and economics. Your city may be a unique and wonderful place, but unless you're inventing new geometry or economics, your transport problems will probably look pretty familiar to a traveling consultant like me.

Example: Inner cities built at a pedestrian scale do not have room for everyone (or even most people) to take 12 square meters of real estate for their car, unless of course these cities are largely abandoned. That much is just geometry. The basic elements of urban economic activity are also more similar than different. Every city needs a range of transport options at different time/cost tradeoffs, and also needs to handle deliveries, all within streets that are valued as places more than as transport facilities. So it shouldn't be surprising that the debate about closing streets to cars sounds pretty much the same from one culture to another.

A later issue of Baladna (apparently available only in print) features a plan to replace microbuses with fewer larger buses -- also a common reform happening throughout the developing world. The overpromising is also common: The "ministry expects the capital to be ... traffic jam free by the end of next year." Stay tuned.

UPDATE: Commenter Alon Levy asks a good question: Is this a translation of an Arabic article, or an article composed specifically for English readers? I was assuming it was the former, and that the comments recorded were translations from conversations in Arabic. But it occurs to me that the people interviewed -- mostly in tourism, restaurants, shops -- might all speak English, and that this might have been a distinct piece of journalism pitched to the British- and American-trained expectations of Anglophone readers. If you read Arabic, please look for an Arabic equivalent of this article, from early December, and let me know.

willingness to pay for transit improvements

2010-03-12T12:00:57+11:00

Do your city's political leaders understand what funding sources people would support if they knew what they were buying? A few weeks ago, the Source (a blog by the Los Angeles transit agency Metro) reported on a survey showing that current riders would pay 50c more in fares for a doubling of their frequency of service. This isn't as encouraging as it sounds, because a doubling of frequency, even with significant ridership increases as a result, will cost a lot more than 50 cents per new rider. But it's a useful soundbite. These questions, broadly called "willingness to pay" questions, need to be asked more, and more probingly.

In the recent Sydney Morning Herald Inquiry into Sydney public transport, we did some deep probing of public opinion on willingness to pay. Our survey experts at the University of Sydney's Centre for the Study of Choice took 2400 randomly selected people through a series of questions designed to observe the value they attach to different kinds of public transit improvements, and what taxes or fees could be higher, and by how much, if the money were clearly going to those improvements. The methodology, called a discrete choice experiment, is designed to avoid some of the usual biases in these questions. The method and its results explained toward the end of Chapter 1, here.

Ultimately, these findings determined the shape of our recommended 30-year investment plan. The most fundamental recommendations are (a) that Sydney needs a major transit investment program, funded largely by a range of increased state taxes and user fees, and (b) the plan must be dominated by transit, not roads.

We made these recommendations not just because of our own analysis and desires, but because that's the overwhelming preference of the public. Throughout the project, we recommended only things that could be funded using sources that, according to the survey, would get majority support, if the funding was clearly tied to the improvements. We concluded that if voters could vote up or down on that package of fees and taxes, to be used exclusively to build the specified transit lines, a majority would say yes.

For better or worse, Australians are not used to voting on specific initiatives. There have been national referenda on major national issues, including famous ones such as the granting of full rights to Aboriginals (passed in 1967) and the creation of a republic in place of the British crown (defeated in 1999). But there is no precedent for voting on state and local issues like how to fund the construction and operations of transit. Most Australian transit agencies are not separate governments entitled to certain funding, as they typically are in North America. Instead, transit is managed by state government direction. It's just one of many things funded out of the state's general revenues, and the elected government decides how that revenue is spent.

During the last year, watching the state and local budget crises across the United States, I've come to appreciate the stability of the Australian approach. Popular votes on specific taxes and spending have tied the state of California in knots, to the point where the task of government is almost impossible. American transit agencies that rely on a specific tax, usually some form of sales or payroll tax, experience huge swings in revenue, so at least once a decade they find themselves slashing service. This doesn't happen in Australia, or at least not as visibly. Service doesn't improve dramatically in better times, and isn't slashed as badly when times are bad.

But the Australian system is not so good at expressing a public consensus to raise taxes and fees for a specific purpose. Such a consensus clearly exists in Sydney to move forward on major transit investment. If the voters could set up a funding stream to do this and an agency tasked with doing it, as would happen in many American states, then we would be on our way. Instead, we have to wait for one of the competing major parties to embrace such an investment plan. The parties, however, aren't focused on the whole of public opinion; they're focused quite narrowly on marginal seats, the relatively small number of voters whose judgments will turn the election, and this is a very different polity than the city as a whole.

Sooner or later, I suspect Sydney will need to have some sort of referendum to put the funding sources in place to fund a decent transit expansion program. Based on our work in the Inquiry, which assessed the public's willingness to pay and then crafted an infrastructure plan to fit it, such a referendum could pass. But I certainly don't see the way to that in the Australian political system, nor does either of the major parties seem ready to take the lead.

new media and transit complaints

2010-03-11T01:09:59+11:00

So you just had a bad transit experience. A driver was rude to you. Your bus was early so you missed it. Your bus was late and missed the train connection. Or even worse: your bus is scheduled to miss the train connection.

Over at Planning Pool, (via Streetsblog) they're suggesting a new way to express your frustration in real time, on Twitter.

One of my favorite planning-related hashtags is #transitFAIL. The purpose of #transitFAIL is to publicize where public transportation fails its customers and users. It’s a particularly effective tool, because you can use SMS messaging or use a web-enabled smartphone to instantaneously tell the world about how transit just let you down. Some smartphones can even take photos or videos and upload them to Twitter, too.

Smart transit providers will use this feedback to improve their service and see where the problems are. I’d like to see transit providers use Twitter to notify people about service changes or delays, too.

Sounds great if your goal is to express your frustration with an illusion of impact. If thinking that you have "told the world" helps you get on with your day, then fine. But who in the world will care, and what do you expect them to do about it?

Planning Pool provides this sample of the tag's output, most of it completely useless to a transit agency that wants to do better.

Thanks, Scott Bradford, but what bus stop, and at what time? And thanks, "stevevirtue", but what are TTC and GO Transit supposed to do when you tell them, without details, that they've screwed up? Feel bad so you can feel better?

Your transit provider probably does care, but here's the hard truth:

Useful feedback often takes more than 140 characters, so maybe Twitter's not the right tool.

For example, comments about a specific transit experience are useless, and therefore utterly without impact, unless you've noted the line number and a way to identify the specific trip on the line. This can be either a reference to the schedule ("the scheduled 7:05 trip from 1st & Elm") or the vehicle number (the unique number painted on the bus, ferry or railcar).

All this is especially important if your complaint is about unacceptable behavior by a driver. It's frustrating for a transit agency to get a serious complaint without the information they need to identify the driver in question. Your transit agency can use your complaint as evidence if it wants to discipline the driver, but only if you've given them the information they need.

So decide what you want. If you want your comment to matter, provide the information that the agency needs to act on it, including contact details so they can follow up with you if needed. Your transit agency certainly has an email address for these comments, and may even have a number to receive texts from your phone. If you want to spew something useful on @transitFAIL, spew those addresses and tell people to send their stories there.

On the other hand, if you just want to get rid of your anger, by all means tweet it into space with #transitFAIL. But you've done nothing to improve your transit system.

seattle suburbs: the silence of sundays

2010-03-09T10:44:20+11:00

Community Transit, which serves most of the northern suburbs of Seattle, is shutting down completely on Sundays. This wouldn't be unusual in a small-city transit system, but CT's service area (most of Snohomish County) is a big suburban expanse with about half a million people. It has enough transit demand to support a low-end Bus Rapid Transit line, called Swift, which will presumably not run on Sundays either.

This is a fairly dramatic step by North American standards. Local transit in suburban areas generally appeals to people with few choices, but many, many of these people work in low-wage jobs in the service sector, such as restaurants and big-box retail. These business are open seven days a week and often are often busiest on weekends, so most of their employees have to do some weekend shifts. A transit system that doesn't run on Sundays will no longer be useful to these people. Based on what I've seen elsewhere, most of them will find other arrangements, and CT is likely to lose them on all five days a week that they travel, not just Sunday. Some, those without any good transport options, may lose their jobs.

I hope CT or some other local government researches what happens to these riders when Sunday service ends. The best approach might be to survey the Sunday riders before the service stops, asking them for follow-up contacts so that they can be interviewed again a few months in the future. This would not only provide good data for other agencies facing the need to cut service, but would also be a nice way for the agency to convey some concern for the well-being of these customers.

children on transit: a personal note

2010-03-06T12:17:40+11:00

A few days back, frequent commenter Engineer Scotty did a much discussed guest post on the problems of travelling with small children on transit. He suggested, I thought, a reasonable range of accommodations that transit agencies should make (many of them good things to do anyway) and also talked through some things the parent can do to make the situation easier.

Scotty has twins, so he often drives a double-wide stroller/pram. To people who don't like the company of small children, a double-wide pram seems to evoke the same emotions that a Hummer evokes in car-haters like myself. It seems huge, excessive, "in your face." As Scotty observes, it can get on a bus in pretty much the way a wheelchair does, but like a wheelchair it takes a lot of space and demands some accommodation from other passengers if the bus is crowded.

It's been interesting to watch this post's reception for several reasons. First of all, a lot of this blog is about explaining concepts that not everyone has thought about, and on which many don't have a strongly-held view. But when the subject is children on transit, everyone's interested and everyone has an opinion. Scotty's post was featured by Streetsblog, and it drove my traffic to a level not seen since Portland shock-blogger Jack Bogdanski attacked me for suggesting he pay the real price of parking in downtown Portland.

But it's also been interesting because if Scotty pushed his double-wide into a room where I was sitting -- a bus, a train, a restaurant -- I'd instinctively try to move as far away as possible. I seem to have a condition called hyperacusis. It means that I hear sounds as being louder they are, high pitches in particular. A sudden high-pitched sound is literally painful, and from the reaction on my face when that happens you'd think I'd just been stabbed. Young children make sudden high-pitched sounds all the time, so it's often painful to be around them. I can have the same response to women who are inclined to soprano bursts of excitement. Not surprisingly, I have no children of my own, and my closest female friends are all mellow contraltos.

Now, reading the last paragraph, you may have the same reaction that many people have when hearing of someone else's disability: Sorry to hear that, must be tough for you, perhaps there should be organizations to help you out, but really, there's a limit to the accommodation you can expect in a public place.

That's exactly what used to be said to people in wheelchairs, but in the 1980s they pushed back hard and got a range of legislation -- including the transformative Americans with Disabilities Act -- that guaranteed their accommodation in public space, and their right to be treated as equal citizens rather than objects of pity.

I suppose I could start a campaign to have hyperacusis treated as a disability under those laws, but the changes I'd need to adapt public space to my disability would be too destructive to other people's equal enjoyment. Children make sudden high-pitched noises that hurt me, but children are also a necessary part of society and need to feel welcomed if they're to grow into healthy adults. A society in which hyperacusis was a fully accommodated disability would be a society where "children should be seen and not heard" -- a sentiment that was common in my grandparents' generation but that now seems uptight, Victorian.

What this means for me is that people with children -- and groups of excited young women -- often cause me to move away. I adapt, defer, and if possible, avoid. When I enter a cafe or bus, I immediately scan the space for children and groups of young women, and identify the spot most distant from them. If I'm already there and they sit near me, I may move; in a worst case, I may feel I'm being chased around the space, or even chased out. The other day in a cafe in Sydney, one such woman saw me moving away from her and asked if she and her friends had been too loud. So I actually had the opportunity to explain all this: No, you're not too loud; you're a young woman making sounds that young women make; I'm just unusually sensitive to loud, high sounds. I'm grateful to her for making me articulate this. Most of the time, when moving to avoid painful sounds, I just have to accept being perceived as an angry, uptight killjoy.

What does this mean for public spaces like transit? Transit is the consummate public space, but it's enclosed and constrained by its transport function; more like a cafe than a public square. It's likely to put us in direct contact with difference, including differences we find painful. This is why transit was a major battlefield in struggles over segregation and apartheid. Transit remains a site of anxiety about being near people who are different, and who behave differently.

Every society finds an ethical line between differences we can object to (certain levels of rudeness, hygiene, noise) and those differences that we are expected to welcome (not just race, class, age and gender but language, body type, styles of dress, styles of behavior, and of course a range of disabilities, not including mine). There are a lot of subtler lines that are hard to draw, because they're matters of social convention that properly shift over time and space. Does people's right to speak their own language extend to profanity, for example? I've seen people thrown off of buses in Texas simply for saying f**k, while in most big cities, that word is just normal urban noise.

Everyone who gets on a transit vehicle is already consenting to substantial accommodation and compromise. Some of us are even consenting to a high risk of pain. Successful transit is crowded, so it puts us in confrontation with difference, and sometimes, for some of us, the results can be physically painful. Yet I see no alternative to transit, and no alternative to children, so I'll also advocate for Scotty's right to bring his young kids onto a bus with me, even though I'll try to move away if he does.

(Photo: lauratitian via Flickr)