Author's Forum:Human Transit

So welcome to On the Park Bench, a public square conversation brought to you by the Congress for the new urbanism. On the Park Bench presents interactive conversations with thought leaders in new urbanism and allied fields. Related to the built environment. So today we have an author's form on the revised edition of Human Transit with author Jared Walker. And I will be the interviewer and moderator today. My name is Robert Stuartville. So share your thoughts on hashtag on the Park Bench, WWW. Dot. Com slash OTPB feedback. Join us for upcoming webinars. We have 2 that are scheduled making the public rel, Tuesday, March fifth. From 12 to one pm eastern time and an author's form on the book city limits Tuesday April the second from 12 to one pm eastern time go to see new.org slash resources slash on the park bench. Find out more and register. And of course save the date. Registration is opening on Friday for seeing you 32 which will be in Cincinnati, Ohio on May, the fifteenth through eighteenth, 2, 24. This historic river city is rebuilt its urban core, harnessing its own diversity to overcome adversity, learn more, let's see a new.org slash seeing you 32. And I'm looking forward to our conversation today. Jared Walker is an international consultant on public transit. Network design and policy based on based in Portland, Oregon, Walker's author of the 2,011 book, Human Transit, How Clear Thinking, about public transit can enrich our communities and our lives. Okay. Which changed the way a lot of people thought about public transportation. His new edition of the book. Is officially being released today. So this is very timely. It is 3 new chapters and a lot of other changes and that's why Jared is here today to talk about that. I'm Rob Stuartville, editor of Senews Public Square. Human transit also has a new cover and here's what it looks like. At first there's going to be a presentation followed by a brief discussion between myself and Jared and then Q&A from the audience. So please use the Q&A function of Zoom to ask your questions as they occur to you. So welcome Jared Walker to on the Park Bench. I'm going to pass this along to you for a presentation. Thank you very much. I should appreciate it, Rob, and great to see everyone here. And this is the first event. Associated with the. Release of the book. So you're getting the very first thing. Can you see my screen, Rob? Yes, I can. Confirm, great. Thanks. So, I am primarily a transit planner. I mostly work on helping cities think about public transit and, we're predominantly on designing and redesigning bus systems. And, in that work. I have lots and lots of opportunities to interact with urbanism of various kinds, new urbanism, old urbanism, and of course a whole lot of car based urbanism. So, I've been interacting with the new, as an organization for probably at least 20 years has spoken at your conferences a few times. I run a little firm, 15 people. That specializes in helping cities think about public transit helping cities rearrange their public transit systems but also build but also have clear conversations about that that get leaders to the point of understanding the consequences of their choices. A lot of our work like this work in Dublin, Ireland, typical of what we do. We take historic complicated networks. Of mostly infrequent services in our mapping style, a red line means service always coming soon. The other colors mean service that is not coming soon. And we replace that usually with something that is simpler and more legible and features even bigger and more frequent. Clear corridors that are worth walking to the sorts of extremely high frequency high frequency services where the next service is always coming and you start getting a lot of opportunities. To influence urban form, regardless of whether we're talking about trains or buses. So that's most of what we do. We do it across the United States and increasingly internationally. For example, we've done all the major cities of Ireland. Human transit is a book that's designed to be something you can give to any any reasonably thoughtful person who wants to hold clear and who wants to have clear and defensible opinions about public transit. So the most important sentence in the book, my job in this book is not to make you share my values, but to give you the tools to clarify and advocate yours. There are lots of different things that people are expecting public transit to do, lots of different values that are important to different people. And, I want everyone on all sides of those conversations to understand the nuts and bolts of transit well enough so that they can recognize when the facts of transit actually reveal that they agree about something that they didn't realize they agreed about. Sometimes they would also, reveals that they disagree about something. Or that there's a tension or conflict inside of the. Of the transit planning to decision that they have to think about. So that's really what the book is for. It's a tool for anyone who wants to think through, understand just the nuts and bolts of how public transit works well enough that they can form defensible opinions and understand the consequences of their choices in their own communities. The new material in the book. Includes a lot more push back on technology. There's also a new chapter on planning for diversity. Which includes an essay that I wrote a few years ago called the dangers of elite projection. And also includes more on challenging the fallacy of the choice rider, which is a, which is a very common misperception that operates in a lot of transit planning. Happy to talk more about that. There's an expanded discussion of land use planning. In a chapter called Be on the Way, the moral consequences of location choice. And finally though, maybe one of the most important things there's a new focus on freedom. By which I really mean the freedom to do anything that requires leaving home. And I want to start talking, I want to talk a little bit about that aspect of the work. The thing that I call the wall around your life. Because it's probably the most important conceptual shift that's happened in my practice since I wrote the first edition. And so I've restructured a lot of the arguments to refer to this. We are all to verying degrees in a kind of prison. Where the walls of our prison are the limits of where we could get to in an amount of time that we have. And I want, I encourage people to see those walls as a kind of boundary on their lives. A limitation on their freedom, if you will. Because what is freedom but the presence of choices in a lot? So I'm talking about your freedom to do anything that requires leaving home. Fundamental. So the basic approach is this. Here's a person. She's in a city full of possible destinations, places she could work, places she could shop, social opportunities she could have places she could study and so on. And the transit system as it is will take her to a certain area. In an amount of time that she's likely to have in her day. And her access to opportunity is simply the number of the destinations. That the city offers that are in that area. And of course we can we can and do quantify access to jobs access to education access to all kinds of things, but we're ultimately trying to get at that fundamental sense of how available is the city. To a person who lives here. Now, some obviously the real estate industry has has used this tool for a while specifically for cars. Specifically for driving. But the tools we've needed to calculate transit access precisely are relatively recent. They've developed over the last decade. And, so we're catching up. And one of the things that we need to do is educate the the real estate industry about the importance of these kinds of tools, especially when you're selling urban real estate. Because the most important decision you make about your location will determine what you have access to in the network as it is. But of course this is also a tool for evaluating the consequences of possible changes to a network. So when we did the Dublin redesign, we imagined a person wherever they are and by the way we create a tool for the public where people could put down could select wherever they are and see how their access changed. There's an area she could get to in the existing network. There's an area she could get to in the proposed network and the difference between those things, red is the area lost and blue as the area gained, turns out to add up to 25% more Johnson school enrollments. So I was I was able to say on a fundamental level when you're talking about all the kinds of things that we want to access. On a commute level, the kinds of things that will probably go to most days. She's about, she has about 25% more of us. She's about 25% more free in that respect. We then do the same calculation. City wide. So if that's the calculation for this particular location done drunk, then that particular place in the city is colored according to how much its access expands and we see the change in access across all of Dublin as a result of the proposed change. And we that gets us to the bottom line sort of headline statistic that we use to win the argument. The average Dubliner can get to 16% more destinations in 45 min. The average double under is I want to say, 16% more free in the same and and By the way, we can talk about other travel time thresholds which relate to different kinds of use. 30 to 45 min is Mercedes constant. It's appropriate for a trip we'll make on most days like a commute, it's appropriate for a trip we'll make on most days like a commute, but there'll make on most days like a commute, but there are shorter travel time thresholds like a commute, but there are shorter travel time thresholds like 30 min for a trip will make, that needs to be faster. And you know we can so we often talk about various travel time thresholds but this is the core idea so why does this matter so much? Well, first of all, access is describing an expansion of freedom. That's why I call it the wall around your life. I want you to think about that as a kind of prison wall, a thing that's limiting what you can do. And it's something that I have experienced personally as somebody who has lived without a car in major cities all my life. End times at time and places and times where the transit system was quite inadequate. And I was very much aware that parts of the city were just not available to me. It access describes. The functionality of the city because of course the whole point of cities is to be is for people to be able to access lots of opportunities. That's why people move into cities at all. But access is turning out to be a remarkably good predictor of ridership. It doesn't predict ridership totally, right? Lots of things affect it, but it is capturing pretty effectively the way network design affects ridership. And when we do a network redesign that increases access to opportunity, we find that we almost always increase ridership as a result. But the other important thing to note about the image of the wall around your life is that it's a way of talking about and taking responsibility for. Both transport planning decisions and land use decisions because of course there are 2 ways to expand this person's freedom. One is to make the blog bigger. That's transport. And the other is to put more things in the blog. That's and both of those things enrich this person's life. Fundamentally in the same way. And we both have a stake. And so both the transport professions and the city building professions are creating or destroying access as they go. All the time and I want them to be aware that they are doing that and I want them want that to be visible to them as they're making those decisions. So the access frame really helps me a lot in this. In this argument that I've been having with some new urbanists for decades, which is What is the most important question about transit? And for many people I've met through the new urbanism, the most important question is, is this an attractive vehicle that stimulates development? It does this have some kind of. Of ineffable impact on the real estate market. That's how we should choose the beautiful. Well, access couldn't care less about transit technology. Access is thinking about somebody who just wants to have more opportunities in their lives. And honestly, that's most people. It may not be most new urbanists, but it's most people. Most people are not interested in transportation. Most people are not consciously interested in city planning, but they are aware that their lives are affected by the limits of what they can get to or can't get to. And most people are willing to use whatever transit technology is part of. Delivering them the access to opportunity that they need. What access cares about is the network. It is the design of the network. And of course, the land use pattern that determines where things are. Not whether we're on rails or times. Unless the fact that we're on rails or tires has something to do with speed, reliability, or frequency. And it usually doesn't. It's that it's not the real bus distinction is not the thing that matters the speed reliability frequency those things matter a lot those feed right into the access count. But access doesn't care about mode. And so when we choose technologies for purposes other than efficient access, we get less access for the dollar. And that's just how the math works. So that's the conversation I have been. Trying to have with new urbanist friends for a long time and, and that I think I'm, I'm a little clearer about in this new edition because the access frame has become so important. So what if Todd followed transit access? What if our notion of transit oriented development was simply was not development next to a rail station, but rather development in places that have good transit access. Regardless of note, then we'd see a lot more of this like what we're seeing in Portland where I live where for example the stretch of Southeast Division Street like many of our inner city arterials now. Are gradually flipping to a 3 or 3 or 4 over one structure, residential over retail. And this is happening along a frequent bus line. It's a nice bus, but frankly, it doesn't matter that the bus is green. It doesn't matter that the bus is nice. What matters is that the bus is very frequent and as reliable as it can be given that on this historic street we obviously don't have. For an exclusive link. That's what matters. And we're seeing plenty of bus oriented development. In fact, I believe there's been lots of bus oriented development going on for a long time. It's just that for some folks that some folks like to help you maintain a circular definition of Todd where if it isn't oriented around something that they recognize as a premium service they choose not to call it Todd, regardless of the fact that transit is in fact fundamental. To the operations of neighborhoods like this, even though it's just a frequent bus. Going down the street. You know, we get and I think in many ways the thing that really pulls this out. Is this idea now of trackless strands. Which has gotten going among people who are absolutely convinced. That that the bus is anathema that anything that is a bus is irrelevant to. Development and irrelevant urbanism. And that and then because rail is fantastically expensive, they start trying to come up with ways to do rail, let more cheaply without making it a bus. And they end up creating an RTG, what I would call an articulated bus. I would just call this a bus. I would call this a guided bus. But no. There's there's a set of developers who know this has to be called a tracklostram. It's not a bus. That is not a bus is the whole point. Even though it's a bus. A bus is just a public transit vehicle operating on payments instead of rain. That's all it is. And all of our other associations that any other cultural associations and you're carrying around buses are just going to get in the way of seeing the full potential of what we can do. The fact being, the unavoidable fact being. What we have in our cities is mostly payment rather than rails. Which means that the most cost-effective way to get lots of good transit out there is going to be run to run transit on payment rather than rails and that's going to mean something that I am perfectly happy to call a bus, but. If calling it a track track less time helps you feel better. We can agree to disagree on that. Finally, I want to say a couple of words about access and urban form. There's a very important chapter in the books now chapter 15. Called be on the way the moral consequences of location choice. And I call it that because I'm not just talking to architects and urbanists, I'm talking to everyone who makes location choices. Including people who decide, for example, where to locate government offices. But one of the things we do in our basic education work that happens in almost every study we do is we try to help people see. That they're transit service and their transit access is unavoidably related to the geometry of their neighborhood. And I really pound the point that I'm talking about geometry because when I'm talking to people in a community and I'm trying to explain why this neighborhood is going to get better transit than that neighborhood. It really helps to be able to say, this isn't about who you are. This isn't about your cultural identity. This is about any of that. This is about the geometry of how your neighborhood is laid out. And how that and where it is in the city and how that affects what transit can do. So we use these little simple diagrams to explain why certain features of the geometry of a neighborhood are just going to make transit more effective. For reasons that don't have to do with anybody's culture or identity. Density, for example, me is measures the number of the amount of demand for travel in a fixed area around every stop. And so if I have a little bus going down the street, this little bus route costs, these 2 bus routes cost the same to operate. They both have 2 buses on them. But the upper one just has twice as many people around every stop. So more than so before anything else, before we even think about people's individual propensity to ride. I have to focus people on the fact that there are just more of them. There are just more people around every stop and that is going to make an obvious difference in ridership. Walkability. We talk a lot about how you need to be able to walk to the stop and if a neighborhood is designed to make it hard for people to walk to stops, that makes it a less a logical place for transit to focus. So this is your classic drawing, the.in the center is a bus stop or a transit stop of any kind. The black circle is a quarter mile radius and the other black lines are the parts of the street network where you can actually walk to the stop in a quarter mile. And you see how a continuous connected grid covers, gets most of the circle into a quarter mile walk. While a typical suburban lollipop pattern can can wall off large parts of the area. So this is exactly as though this area were less dense. And this, by the way, is why parcel level density never matter stops. What matters to us is the aggregate average density across everything that's happening within walking distance of a stop. And here where you just have big chunks of the area just walled off by the lack of street connections, you simply have a smaller market. The other important thing about this, of course, is that it must be safe to cross the street at a transit stop if you can't cross the street at a stop. We can only provide you with one-way service. And that's not very useful. So again, this is a thing about the built environment that is going to determine what makes a good transit run. But this is the one I really want to focus on and why I made it the chapter. Because I don't really need to explain density and walkability to new urbanists. I don't need to explain it to architects and urban designers. But I find I do have to explain linearity. Because linearity is a thing that's specific to transit. We need to run fixed lines. Those are the high ridership lines. Figure high-rise lines are always fixed lines. And our lines are more effective if we can run the fewest possible miles of them. So that while still covering the city because by running the fewest possible miles we can afford the greatest possible frequency. We can increase, we can optimize the likelihood that service is always coming when you need it. Also, people want to travel in straight lines. People want to travel in something they perceive to be a straight line. So here are 2 ways that a town could be laid out and this town is made up of the same 4 land uses, right? There's some office towers and then there's a Walmart and then there's a college on a hill maybe and then there's some houses. It makes all the difference in the world. Whether these things are close to a path that transit can follow that is going to be perceived as reasonably straight. And the great anathema of transit in America in the early 20 first century. Is the continuing. Proclivity of developers to choose a location that is fundamentally on some scale a cul-de-sac. That is not on the way to anywhere else. I'm not talking about the little residential call to sack, little residential cul-de-sac. If you pierce it with a pedestrian or bicycle link, you can create very, very connected, permeable local neighborhoods. Even with cul de sex. That's not the problem. The problem is when larger destinations, destinations that lots of people are going to want to go to get placed Just all just far enough off of. What is the only direct path that transit can follow. So you know what I mean. I mean these towers being located on a cul-de-sac next to the freeway. I mean Walmart behind a quarter mile parking. I mean the college up on the hilltop surrounded by a green buffer. Instead of near the path where service can reach it. And you know, the same thing, of course, with residential neighborhoods built back in pockets. Here's the thing, and particularly for residential, we really don't want to be on the way. We really don't want the traffic going past. We don't want all those other people. We want we want the things just for us. There's a fundamental. Longing for that that I understand. But when we extend that, especially to non-residential destinations, we start to create huge, huge problems. And those problems are really obvious if you ever, for example, tried to do transportation planning. Around a suburban university that's built with a big green build, something like Stanford, which I had to deal with for years. Where so many of the transportation problems boil down to the fact But the campus is just outside of walking distance of the Palo Alto train station by design. To give it a certain kind of of country and Indians. Those kinds of decisions, the Walmart behind the quarter mile of parking, all I want you to recognize though all those as the same kind of geometric problem. Which is that it's preventing transit from running in a straight line while also taking people to where they're going. Now, the the first few decades of the new urbanism are full of examples of this. There are some fairly obvious examples and they're also some more subtle ones. Here's a really obvious one. This is on the, on the northwest outskirts of Missoula, Montana. Office over retail, nice park. Typical N of stuff, but it's here. Where it is in the urban structure is the problem. It's out on the northwest edge of the city. Immediately west of it is the airport. The city will not grow any further to the west. And so this thing that's trying to be the town center is actually structurally a cul-de-sac. And we need to recognize the tension and the conflict in that. Because what it means for transit is that the only bus transit line I can draw for this area is going to look like this. And while that might be fine if this is the center of the world, it's not really fine to the people further out. Because what I'm going to the only way I can build a high frequency transit line is to hook multiple deskinations together. And so that there's enough demand and to do that. I'm always at a disadvantage if the development pattern forces me to draw that sort of cake. So there I do continue to appeal to people working on greenfield neuropism to think carefully about this and to think carefully about where you are in the structure and to try to avoid creating these problems where an entire new urbanist development is effectively. So think about where you are in this curve and structure. And if your development parcel is a cul-de-sacer, not on the way to any else, it will always be more expensive. To get to get decent transit to it. And that has to be part of the calculation. Sorry, just wanna make those remarks to get us started and now I really look forward to. Just to check. Yeah. Awesome. Thank you very much, that was, Really enlightening. I'm gonna start with a, sort of a I am. Well, first I'll remind everybody to continue to ask your questions in the Q&A function of Zoom. We'll get to them pretty soon. But this is this may be a softball question but there may be urbanist and urban planners who have never read human transit who are or who read it 12 years ago but have not since. Why should urbanists read it or reread the new edition now? Well, I hope you'll read the new edition because it's substantially updated. To deal with all the things that have changed since 2011. The old edition is still a useful book. It's a much more, it's a very straightforward explanation of the fundamental principles of transit. So at the very core of the book It there's there is for example a chapter on stops chapter on what lines are and how to think about lines as a chapter on frequency there's chapter on peking There's a chapter called the obstacle course, which is about speed delay and reliability. So at the core of the book, there are those sorts of practical explanations of each of the dimensions of transit quality and how to think about them. But what's been in, but what's been added and expanded in the book are several things. First of all, there's a much more thorough of the technology. Around coming from people from well funded folks who think they are going to transform or disrupt. Public transit in some way. There is a very robust insistence on the permanence of the fixed transit line as one of the best ideas in the history of transportation and for purely geometric reasons will always be a great idea. There's a discussion about. Diversity and I'm much more explicit about taking on the social perspectives that people project onto transit. And particularly challenging the way that relatively fortunate people often talk about transit. So there's a there's a confrontation. In the book with the idea of the choice writer. The choice writer is this imaginary figure. That we are often told to plan for. This is someone who has a car in their driveway and who if we provide a service of a certain quality will use transit instead of using. This is a largely illusory figure. But this figure does resemble many of the powerful people who like to refer to choice writers and it becomes it's a kind of pseudo scientific way of ultimately talking about what. You as a what a relatively elite person would like to have for themselves. It's it's an example of what I call lead projection. So I take that on, we really need to demolish the choice writer and recognize that We are succeeding, but transit succeeds when it appeals to a huge diversity of people, what I like to call the middle 90%. And that elites who are thinking about their personal tastes are often going to make bad calls about what is right for the middle 90%. In terms of like the level of luxury or whatever we should appeal to. Particularly when we start, s, measurably sacrificing access for those things. So there's that whole discussion. And then finally there's this much expanded and much I think much more urgent. A discussion that I've meant made much more urgent about location choice. Not just about the choices that developers make, but more fundamentally the choices that everybody makes when they decide whether to locate their home, where to locate their home, their business. And I am particularly critical and this is something I really we need to get some more attention to. I'm particularly critical of where government offices are being located in the United States. Offices that, particularly people living on lower incomes are going to need to get to. It's something I'm encountering constantly as I do developments as I do transit plans in suburban areas. And I'm constantly being told, well, you know, the the new Amazon fulfillment center is out here in the wilderness and way out there in the wilderness is the new election.'s office and way out here far away from anything in a business park is the Social Security office. Got to go there. And the decisions about where to locate these things are producing. A geography of of tyranny toward low income people. Because it's a geography that forces people to own cars and or forces public transit to do wildly expensive things that amount to just confiscating large amounts of the transit. Because of these location choices. The the company that saves money on real estate by locating in an inaccessible place. Is transferring that cost to its employees. Out or to the people who have to visit it. And so that's something I've become much angrier about over the last 10 years. And so the book is much more forceful and clear on open. It seems like a similar thing can be said about healthcare and maybe even more. Exactly. Yeah, it's terrible the way we're suburban hospitals are, how suburban hospitals are way down. Check out the VA Hospital in Los Angeles, by the way, which is the best example I found of a truly anti pedestrian fortress. It's the best example I found of a truly anti pedestrian fortress. It really does look like the, feel like the death. So you focus a lot on buses and in most American cities public transit is buses. I was just looking at some figures this morning. And ridership public transit ridership is 50% bus ridership. Heavy rail is second at 38% and most of that is in New York City. Light rail is distant third at 5%. So buses are essentially an order of magnitude greater than light rail, but yet buses don't seem to get a lot of attention from urbanists and I'm talking about people who are urban designers, urban planners trying to make walkable mixed-use places. So why do you think that is and what is the opportunity there? I think there's an entirely circular argument going on. Where if planning is done by people who think that buses are inferior, they will of course design an urban environment in which the buses are inferior. They can make that happen through how they design them. But you don't have to do it that way. We've had, we've had Portland, Oregon where I live is a really interesting example, but it's also not that unusual of it compared to a lot of cities in that size class. That built light rail systems in the eighty's and nineties. When, Portland was one of the, the first major librarian system in the US, but then a whole bunch of cities built them in the ninetys. What, what, and of course we have separate conversation about street cars and traffic, which are an even different thing. Light rail was constantly being promoted as a land use strategy. As something that would trigger a new kind of. That was a big part of the original selling. Was a big part of why it was happening. What has actually happened? Is that light reel helped to support the continued intensification of downtown as an office court. And developed and the development of additional office and residential cores mostly adjacent to that. But the long suburban extent of the light rail network. Have generally not been rewarded with anything more than about 3 stories and often not even. And we have many, suburban light rail stations. That are largely underdeveloped. Much of this, of course, was about zoning. Some of that is changing fairly recently. But, meanwhile. We're building 4 stories going down every frequent bus route. And building enormous amounts of transitory density around the bus system. The great thing about the bus system is that it goes down the historic streets. Or as light rail because of the space it takes. Tends to end up avoiding the historic streets and going next to the freeway or next to the old rail, the old freight rail alignment or whatever. Light rail has ended up in those kinds of environments and as a result the suburban parts of our light rail networks to make a big generalization across the United States tend not to deliver you right into a nice urban place. In Portland, most of our many of our suburban light rail stations are in ravines next to freeways. And they deliver you to a overpass over the field. And you're still a little ways away from anywhere you'd actually wanna be. And so. And so it's. So then COVID comes along. And what Kova does is wipe out the overwhelmingly intense Russian or commuted into that office court. That was the thing that only, the thing that really needed light risk. And what's left now is a much more diverse everywhere to everywhere travel pattern. And so what we're seeing in cities after cities. There are many cities where now where the most productive transit line in the city is not one of the rail lines, it's one of the bus. And there are many cities where bus ridership has recovered faster than rail ridership because so much of rail ridership was that huge peak flow into downtown that is just not there at the same scale. And may never be there. So what what are the great and in the post COVID planning work we've been doing for cities like San Francisco and a big project we did here in Portland. We've been looking at, okay, how do we adjust the trend? The bus system for the post COVID world and the key steps to that are Make the investment in evening and weekend if you haven't done that already. Build up the all all direction all day intersecting high frequency grid that helps people get all over the city all the time. Connect the neighborhoods not to downtown, but to each other, recognizing this healthy neighborhoods are already mixtures of jobs and residential and activities and that people are going all the way back and forth everywhere. And what we're finding as we do that and as we do those retoolings. Is that now the greatest COVID recovery we've got bus routes that we've got bus routes in in several cities that are back up to their pre COVID levels. But you know what? It's not the bus routes going downtown. It's the cross towns. It's the cross towns. It's the things that are connecting the city to the neighborhoods to each other. And I think in the long run. You know, the future of downtown is probably a lot of conversions of office to residential such that downtown becomes more like another neighborhood but just denser. And we move away from these massive single concentrations of, employment in one place. All of which is going to continue to make the case for high-capacity rail. Not so strong, but to make the case for robust. appropriately skilled services that are really, really attractive to get all over the city. Those, the case for that is still going to be very strong, but a lot of those services are logically going to be bus services. So if if you're a developer or a planner and you're just not taking buses seriously or not recognizing the access value that buses create, you're just going to miss out on a lot of great opportunities that are coming up in our cities. We're gonna get to questions in just a minute. because there are a lot of them but I have a lot of questions I'd like to ask, but I won't, but it seems to me that you have seized upon something that has been a weakness of many transit systems for a long time. When cities are laying down tracks, they have to think very carefully about where they go and what they connect to the network, but bus systems have evolved over, you know, you know, based on a political whim often and they and it could have been 30 or 40 years ago the decision was made to to to go somewhere. You liken some of these cities to spaghetti and where there's a weakness there's an opportunity. Can you talk about the potential, how the potential to redesign bus systems may align with the mission of urbanism to create mixed use walkable places. Sure, one of the key things we're doing when we do a bus network, is we're trying to find and bring out. The new strong high demand corridors that we think are permanent. And that permanence lies not in whether there are rails in the street as you may sometimes hear the permanence lies in the permanence of the land of the market that's there in the land you spend. Lots of people are always going to be going up and down this history or going in this path. And we try to assign to those places the highest order public transit that we can. In the work I do with bus network redesign, that's mostly a matter of just creating high frequency bus lines. But that is a very important first step toward whatever higher order transit you later want to talk about. And so. One of the things that is really would really be a good thing for new urbanists to do is to pay attention when there's a bus network design going on in your city. We very, very rarely here in the outreach processes around bus network designs, I'm always disappointed by how little we hear. From the development and design community. Even as we are demonstrably. Making changes that transform access to opportunity from various locations. And we're making consequential decisions about where access to opportunity in the city will be better or worse by how we lay out the network. And but the fact that it's being done mostly with buses just makes it not important, unfortunately, to a lot of people coming from an urbanist perspective. And I think they're missing a really important opportunity because Frequent buses are where transit is succeeding now. They're well suited to what to the form of the post COVID city as it is likely to continue to evolve according to all the signals we had. And. And so getting involved in those conversations when you, when bus networks are being talked, talked about. Is a really, it's a, it would be a really powerful thing for, to do. We had a question. has, your thinking on micro transit evolved since the earlier book. I chair the transit committee on the small city that is dipping a toe into micro transit. Thus far, been skeptic based on what I learned from the earlier book. I talked a lot more about it in this book. It barely existed in 2011 when I wrote the first book, but what did exist and what has existed for years is demand responsive transit. We used to call it dialogue. And what that meant was that within a particular zone, typically a very low density area with very sparse demand, sometimes even a rural area. You could call up and request a vehicle to come pick you up and it would come pick you up and take you where you were going within that sound although it might share the ride with other vehicles. Shared taxi at night. Usually operated with fans. Well, what happened in the 20 teams is that a whole bunch of venture capital can along. And attached itself to the fact that there was now great new software being developed to run Violoride more efficiently. And so that and with that higher level of efficiency. You could potentially, respond to calls on shorter notice, maybe on an hour's notice instead of calling the previous day. And you could potentially, you know, get a little more efficiency out of the service. All that has done is to raise the productivity of this kind of service from about one passenger per hour to maybe if you're lucky 5. Which is a appalling performance compared to Fixed rounds, you know, fixed routes are 2030, 40 and in big cities 70, 80. Passenger boardings per hour for bus hour of service. Now you have to remember that in public transit operating cost is dominated by the cost of labor. So transit agencies are making decisions about whether to pay someone to drive a vehicle that could be carrying 50 people or paying them to drive a vehicle that can carry 2 people. And there's no getting around the difficulty of that math. So, what the, so let me be very clear. Micro transit has a role. When and where the transit agency has decided already that it needs to provide service for a nonwritership reason. Micro transit has a role where ridership is not the goal where where lifeline access to an area is the goal. And that's how we use it in our planes and we use it a lot in the plans that we do. I'm not against it. But, I, so I don't have any problem with micro transit. I do have a problem with micro transit marketing. Because the way. Is that it is a thing your transit agency should do in order to seem cool. When order to seem innovative. And that's it, of course, a terrible reason to do anything. And it's particularly bad in this case because micro transit is so spectacularly inefficient. That it carries so few people at such a cost. That it's something that will fall over if it succeeds. This is the problem. Writership is the death of micro transit if right if ridership gets too high you can't serve enough people for every hour of driver time. The service either becomes much to expensive to operate and starts to consume the transit agencies budget. Or else it has to be turned back into a fixture. Everybody on every actual micro transit plan I know and I collaborate with several of them understands this map perfectly well. The problem isn't with the planners. The problem is with the high level marketing that has been done. Which has been very effective at appealing to a kind of suburban elected official who does not want to hear that there's anything wrong with the design of their community. And who wants to hear that transit can somehow do something. For their community. Which has already been built. In a way that makes it very difficult. And the answer to them is yes it can. At very high cost and it may be that that's the right thing to do for a non ridership reason but don't deceive yourself. This is not transformative. It is certainly not transformed if your goal is to get lots of people onto public transit. Micro transit is just too inefficient to do that. We have an assumption that areas with less density people remain so cities change and density could increase. Transit could have a play factor in that. So that could be a pushback on the idea of planning for transit for development. because if you do get that developments very successful, then you increase the access. What I say in the book about this, the last chapter in the book is about this issue. The important thing is not just the density we end up with but the shape it's in and particularly whether it ends up in linear shapes. That or whether it ends up in called assigned. And so yes, of course, density does increase. Density does sometimes also dig decrease cities, cities like Detroit die and you know lose density and end up with empty holes. But. What needs to be happening is a process of thinking in the long term about where density is going to happen in the context of thinking about a future frequent bus network. Because what we have happening now too many places, even in many jurisdictions that think they're progressive. Is that I find departments just being sort of curled out across the prairie. Oh, there's a patch of apartments out here in our new suburban development. It's 3 miles from anything else, but we have to go there because it's department. So I have to run through 3 miles of nothing. Very expensively in order to get to one patch of apartments. It, it, work, it may work from certain perspectives of development economics, but the costs are being dumped on the transit agency and the community is paying for it in lower quality of service. So that's the sort of thing. Now this your analysis incorporated review of individuals with physical disabilities or or the older adult population, are there any key considerations that planners need to be aware of when including these specific populations in our planning efforts. Very good question. We're very aware of the diversity of people who use transit. And we have to, the challenge and, and, just be frank with us, we have to be doing all we can. For people with mobility limitations. And certainly respecting their rights under the ADA, which are very under the Americans of Disney, which are fundamental in this country. At the same time that we're also recognizing and planning around the way that the vast majority of people who are relatively able-bodied and working full-time. How they make decision. So access analysis is we use it mostly to try to capture. How transit is serving. Busy working people who are mostly on an on average average not disabled and mostly not elderly. Mostly not older. Because there are so many of them and because they don't show up very clearly in public outreach. They tend not to come to meetings because they're too busy. We hear a lot from seniors. We hear a lot from the disabled community and that's great. I'm not saying we shouldn't and I'm not saying we shouldn't accommodate them. There but we but we are in transit planning always having to balance that and we have to recognize it is a balance. So older people in particular people who are retired. Tend to come to us asking for exactly the opposite kind of transit from what working people want. They tend to come to us and say, I don't want to walk very far. The thing has to pull up right in front of my building because I can't walk very far. But I don't mind if it only comes once again. Because they're retired. They have some time in their day. They can plan around the basket. Working people can't do that. And so we have to recognize that it's not the either these positions are right or wrong, but they're asking for opposite kinds of service and there are compromises that are going to happen in the course of figuring that. The compromise may be that there's a special little hourly bus that just does what the seniors want to do that nobody but them would ever have the patience to ride. So that everyone and then there's a there's a straight frequent line on the main street that everyone else walks out to there but those have to be worked through. But, we, we have to be aware that without anyone being right or wrong with without anyone being more important than anyone else, there are cases and this is one of them. Where, where particularly people with mobility implications are just asking us and particularly people who are not working, particularly people who are retired. Just ask us for the opposite of what everyone else is rewarding. And we have and there is a conflict there that has to be managed and has to be thought of. Taking these questions kind of one at a time. Do you consider buses a long-term solution to transit access or a short-term solution or both. I think I don't I think you can do the right thing in the short term with buses while while agreeing to disagree about what the long term is. I think that's one of the great things about them. Yeah, they do sometimes get turned into something else when they reach a certain level of intensity, but you don't have to have that argument. To get a good service on the street now. Well, they are 50% of transit ridership. I don't think that they're going away any time in the near future. How do we begin to undo the socio-ecultural perceptions of buses? I don't worry about that very much because I find that In fact, people use buses if buses are useful. And that much of the social and cultural perceptions around buses are a result of people's daily experience of the buses being useless. And that if you live in a city where the buses are useful, if you live in a city where rail has been lovingly tended and is clearly giving just a higher order of experience than the buses. You're going to have a set of attitudes as being reinforced by that but that's nothing intrinsic to whether you're on rails are tired. If we make buses useful, people use them. That's just that simple. And we see that in Europe. You see that even in Canada. You know, you go you go to a place like Vancouver in Canada, which is probably sort of the most sophisticated, highly developed new transit city in North and the buses are just so useful. To so many people that. I'm sure you can carry around prejudices against best writers if you want, but it just doesn't matter because they're obviously just really valuable. Hey. When, you were asked, how does access to nature green space parks fit into the calculus of residential density is the key metric and I mean, that's a good point. Okay. You want people to be able to get to these beautiful public spaces, but then you're going to a police without a lot of houses around it often times maybe on one side. How do you think about this as a whole? And I personally am a hiker. I'm a an amateur botanist. I spend lots of time on trails looking closely at plants. I really want people to get to green space. It's very important. I want people to get not just to social green space like city parks, but I also want them to get to wild green space if they can have it near their city. I want them to get to trail heads. And that's one of many kinds of destination. That is hard to quantify analytically the way it's easy to quantify jobs. Every job is the destination of one person. Every school in R is the destination. One person it's easy to measure. But we do access analysis to all kinds of destinations, grocery stores, various kinds of shopping. And access to green space is another thing. Is another thing we can and do talk about. It's very important. And I mean, yeah, I suppose thinking about the 15 min city. I don't know how much you have thought about the 15 min city that's become so popular in planning circles and how your philosophy fits into that. But obviously you want green spaces and everything else in the 15 min city. So here's the thing about the 15 min. In fact, There's a very simple obvious point. I hope this isn't belaboring something too obvious, but it's worth stopping and thinking about. This note, it's, it, the 50, it's against, it's another access reference. It's a reference to a travel time budget. And what does it mean to have a travel time budget and what can you do inside that budget? The thing to remember is that our sense of a reasonable travel time budget is related to how often we make the trip and how long we're going to spend at the destination. So for example, if you're going to make this trip every day and you're going to spend all day there, We generally find Marcheties constant. People are tolerating a travel time of 30 to 45 min to those places. The average is generally about 30 min. But for a trip you're going to make. For a trip to a place where you're not going to spend as much time you can't spend as much time going there is the general rule. So I, there's a whole world of errand kind of activity that is ideally achievable within 15 min. And in very frequent transit systems, transit can be part of that. Now when I'm calculating transit travel time, I'm always adding up the walk, the weight on the ride. So, you can't do a lot in it's very hard to get to a total, 15 min travel time unless your bus free in your transit frequencies are like 5 min. Which is not usual in the United States. It's not something most American agencies can afford. But I think it's I think it is it is the 50, city is an interesting example of the rhetorical power of the idea of the wall around your life. Just being aware that we have to complicate that idea by recognizing that we're actually in a series of concentric walls. Or different kinds of trips depending largely on how long we'll spend at the destination. Have you found the city planners and transit authorities have become more responsive to your ideas over the last 10 years? Well, somehow, I mean, when I wrote the book, I, I was just, I was in the process of moving back from Australia. I didn't know what I was going to do next and I founded a consulting firm and now here we are. We're doing okay. So yes, clearly there has been a market for a lot of these ideas and We've, in the last 10 years done, I think more redesigns of bus networks in the US than any other firm. And you know lots of lots of big places Houston, Dallas, Silicon Valley working in Atlanta now, Cleveland. Miami. Richmond, Virginia. So. So yes, on that level. I think I have been. Disappointed at the degree of disconnect with the development and urban design community. I think the uptake of the ideas hasn't been as evident there. But, But, yes, I, I think in, transit agencies and particularly among planning steps and transit agencies. I think what we're doing. The book has been very well received and again many transit agency snaps. I've bought this and given it to their boards, given it to their decision. Encourage them to help them make better decisions. So we're coming up on the hour and. For those who are gonna be leaving, we're gonna continue talking because there are many more questions for, you know, at least a few more minutes. For those of us who live in cities with low ridership, what can we do to improve our transit systems besides hiring Jarrett Walker? Well, you have to make a decision about whether about what kind of city you want to be. And that's going to probably require a bit of the, choosing some other cities to be inspired by. One of the most common mistakes that I think American transit advocates make is they talk all the time about Europe. And it's really obvious if you're in Sacramento that you're not in Europe and that you're not in something that's about to become. You're in Sacramento or Wichita or wherever. That's not what you had. I think it's very useful. I encourage Americans to study Canada very closely. I encourage Americans to look very closely and find the Canadian city that is no similar to where they live and look at what's happening in transit there. Because one of the things you'll see if you make that comparison, we're doing this wonderful natural experiment. We have 2 different countries and basically the same landscape. With basically the same diversity of of of. Economic types and different kinds of economy and but similar kinds of urban history, cities of about the same age. And we have 2 different countries that are sort of dealing with the same reality and they're dealing with a very different one. You go up to Canada. And there's and it isn't the transit is any cuter or sexier it isn't that even that there's more rail. There just more transit everywhere. The buses are coming more often. The trains are coming more often. There's just more of it. And that makes a big difference. And even you know so i if someone asked me this question and i can see they're from there from Albuquerque or Denver i tell them to go to Calgary or Edmonton Go look at a sprawling city. If you're in Texas, go look at Calgary and Edmonton. They look like cities in Texas. They're big and sprawling. We've got big white freeways. And yet, the transit rider shifts really high. And that's a bunch of all bunch of things. It's not just the quantity of the transit system. It's different policies about parking. And so Canada is really great for showing you what a good next step is. And for helping you develop next steps that are likely to be credible to your fellow citizens in your city as it is. Got a question. I live next to Alexandria, Virginia. Apparently, you must have worked because he asked what were the problems you faced in restructuring your bus routes, which they are hailing is very effective. Well, I'm glad to hear that people feel that was very effective. Alexandra, it's an example, it's an example where the municipal geography that we're working with is not really very ideal for thinking about the municipal geography that we're working with is not really very ideal for thinking about the transit network because city of Alexandria is donut shaped and has basically a low density, extremely low density area in the middle and then high density around all the edges. And the high density around the edges is adjacent to other high density that's in adjacent cities. The hardest part of that problem was that the political boundary around the project did not really meant which matches the municipal boundary, matches the cultural identity. Sliced up a bunch of things that would have been better thought about continuously. You know, we needed if we had been able to think more continuously across the municipal border. That would have been more effective. I, have an article on, the blog on seamlessness. About that whole issue about political boundaries and how they make transit planning easier. We have a question, how do gender differences in transit needs and experiences factor into your recommendations for planning for diversity? I think that There's no question that, there are gender differences. My, what I have heard listening to, listen to women talk about their experience. Is that they're mostly not about network design or land use planning. They're mostly about other aspects of the design of the transit experience. But, not having to do with what it is like to navigate transit. With children, what does it like to navigate transit in the context of having concerns about personal security that, you know, the average, man may not have. So if I haven't dealt very much with those issues personally, it's mostly just because I work in the space of network planning. And, and there we're thinking about large numbers of people and inevitably as you think about large numbers of people you can't quite think as much about. All of their individuality, you have to respond to that, you have to look at how they respond to. To the overall availability of service but not as all of that is very important and pretty important at the level of experience design, design of infrastructure and so on. Question about geography or geometry rather. Concept of linearity. Important for roots and network design to be linear in a literal geometric sense or can root designs like loops, circles also be conceptualized as linear. You know, if abundant origins and destination can be found the circular route. The returns to a set starting point without doubling back on the same road doesn't this serve a similar function. Sometimes you end up with networks that logically have circular routes and it's usually because you have a very spider web kind of urban geography. Moscow is the classic example of an extremely spider-oriented system where everyone thinks in terms of radios and circles. And where I've dealt with cities like this, we sometimes have created have ended up finding it logical to create continuous loop lines. The caution others there's a very obvious thing I have to say about those which is that very few people want to travel in circles. So on balance, linearity, continuing to go in roughly the same direction, is more likely to be useful on balance on average in general. Then curving all the but in fact there may be many logical reasons to curve. And sometimes we do end up with loop frown circle lines, of course, they're not meant to be written all the way around or even halfway around. We had a question about your take on how data inflation to the conversation, measure of access are getting is getting easier and easier to compute but it still seems like moving towards these more sophisticated measures instead of just proximity to higher and higher order transit. And that's his struggle. They're usually not written more than a third of the way around the loop. They're really just a series of overlapping markets that end up logically being connected into one thing even though you wouldn't want to ride for one end to the other with any Very important to get beyond just proximity to transit. Because proximity to transit is not a good very very good measure of where you can go on for instance. This is why we use access analysis all the time is that the starting point of your typical city counselor. Or local elected official in in a multi regions they're looking at their little piece of the network they're looking at their area and they want to see what's in that. What am I getting? And I have to say, what you're getting is not just what's in your district. What you're getting is the whole network and your place in it. And so if I show you your access to opportunity, Now I'm showing you something that is not just the result of the service you have. But the result of the whole network and how you relate to it. So it's very important to convey to elected officials who will often understandably start by assuming that transit is like libraries. It's an amenity and I need to fight to get one in my district and and and that'll be good for my people. Transit doesn't necessarily work that way because everybody is benefiting from my people. Transit doesn't necessarily work that way because everybody is benefiting from the network that way because everybody is benefiting from the network from the whole network. So, so that's, a really, that's a really common challenge in the work. And one of the reasons why access and why we have to talk about access and why we have to talk about access and what we have to talk about access and not just about the presence of service because I can design access and not just about the presence of service because I can design, you know, a bus and I can point to places of service because I can design, you know, a bus and I can point to places where this has been done. You know, some, city council is really like having a bus that drives around and around in a loop just inside their district and never leaves their district. And they can take credit for that. And you can you can rack up really nice proximity to service figures with that, but it doesn't go very many places and it's not life would be useful to very many people. Well, I think we can have one more question. I didn't mention before, but the this is going to be posted, onto the senior website in a day. And so folks can be posted on to the senior website in a day and so folks can take a look at the the new website in a day and so folks can take a look at the the video again or take you know, those obviously who didn't attend live. But, we have a question that's, I'm, I'm interested in how Jarrett sees the ideas and thesis. He lays out in his book a line with the nose of Christophe Spieler. If you're familiar with him as well as the criteria that FTA used to validate and fund new transit services. Well, that's all. That's a huge, question. I think that FTA is is in on a journey in the direction of access oriented planning. They've been asking a lot more questions about it recently. They've been putting out requests for, professional input and guidance. About how to do more of their evaluations in terms of access. I think we are in the early stages of starting to rethink how Title 6, the the evaluation of transit equity in the United States works. It is currently almost all based on proximity to service and is not really capturing access to opportunity. And I think there's a there are great opportunities there. But in terms of, of federal I think, I think that the FTA within the extraordinary straitjacket of all the laws that it is obliged to implement. I see them. Understanding that the world has changed and that the criteria that justified major infrastructure even a decade ago. No longer necessarily do. I don't think we should be building major infrastructure right now, but is justified based on pre COVID ridership estimates or pre COVID. Assumptions about how commuting works. And that's a major challenge for major infrastructure. Because of course understandably we don't have enough postcode experience. You have to know what the new reality is and people understandably need something. It's a difficult question. But. But I've been, I've been, optimistic. Based on the questions that I see FDA asking the profession. About how to rethink about how do we think these investments are. Well, thank you very much. Jared for this discussion and everybody who attended. I don't know if you have any final thing to say to anybody before we sign off. No, I just really appreciate it. I hope you will buy the, new book, even if you read the old book, and because it's sufficiently new and different, you can also go on to my blog and on my blog right at the top is the preface to the new addition. So to get a sense of what's different of what that in the. Champ 2, you can go there and it'll give you a little, explanation of that. I'll help you decide whether you want to buy the new book. And you can also subscribe to my blog if you go to human transit. Dot org. There's a black bar at the top and a little envelope icon. You click on that. So I really hope to continue to hear from people as all as I say at the end of every webinar, I apologize that we didn't have time to get to everyone's question. Bye, if you have more questions or want to have more discussion, I certainly love to hear from people. Hereard Walker, Human Transit, the new edition, the new the revised edition and thank you very much. Have a great day, everybody.