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Hotseat: Jarrett Walker
A Portland transit expert says we shouldn’t fall in love with trains when buses will do.
Today Walker, 49, is public-transit consultant and author of HumanTransit.org, a transportation blog. His new book, Human Transit: How Clearer Thinking About Public Transit Can Enrich Our Communities and Our Lives (Island Press, 235 pages, $35), discusses what he’s learned working around the world studying and working on mass transit systems.
Walker has just moved back to Portland after living and working for five years in Australia. WW
talked to him about why emotional discussions regarding mass transit
sometimes get in the way of smart planning, and he spoke about the hard
transit choices that are facing TriMet and the region.
WW: You call yourself a transit geek from an early age.
Jarrett Walker: I was interested in how the bus system
worked. I knew the routes and the timetables. Fortunately, there were
people at TriMet who were willing to answer my questions when I called
them up. I learned it was not a big faceless machine, and I was
encouraged to keep thinking about transit issues.
You’ve written that the choice of technology in transit—bus or train—is not one of the most crucial decisions.
The most controversial suggestion I’ve ever made is that
we might want to think about public transit as though its purpose is to
help people get where they’re going.
I am interested in
transit as an instrument of freedom. If we look at transit from that
point of view, what really matters is speed, frequency, reliability and
span, which means how long a service runs, whether it’s there all day or
not. And those variables are just not related to whether we’re on rails
or tires.
Can you give an example?
The Portland Streetcar has done a lot of good for the
Pearl District, but it was introduced as a development tool, and as it
was presented, it was always very clear that the emotional attraction of
the vehicle itself was an important part of why we should build it.
Why should we build a
streetcar instead of just running a really good bus service? We’re
moving into a much leaner time. We may start having different
conversations about how important it is to have emotionally appealing
vehicles, as opposed to creating a system that maximizes people’s
personal freedom.
What city has the best mass transit system in the world?
I have an attachment to Paris because of what it is
continuing to do in the area of growth, despite everything they’ve
already achieved. In the last decade, Paris has installed bus lanes on
almost all of its boulevards. It’s continuing to evolve and improve, to
make courageous investments.
How will mass transit change in the U.S. over the next 30 years or so?
Cities are the drivers of innovation in an
information-based, creativity-based economy, which is what we
increasingly have. Cities, in turn, are not going to be sustainable
without high quality in the big, sustainable transport modes: walking,
cycling and public transit. We can expect a future where the qualities
of public transit we are now used to encountering, say, in Europe,
become more common here.
If you ride around in
Northern European cities, transit is ordinary, it’s expected, it is a
favored mode—alongside cycling and walking. It’s of high quality. When
you are using transit in Northern or Western Europe, [it’s clear] that
you are an important and valued citizen. That is obviously not always
clear in transit experiences in North America. Although I think that by
the standards of some U.S. cities, Portland is in fairly good shape on
that.
TriMet was the first system you studied. What concerns you about it now?
The design of the network is good. But TriMet faces a set
of problems almost all U.S. transit agencies are having. They include
unsustainable pension costs and very volatile funding sources. In
TriMet’s case, it relies heavily on payroll taxes, and obviously that’s
the first thing that goes down in a recession.
Where can TriMet improve?
Personally I wish TriMet could focus on
restoring what’s called the frequent transit network. That’s the set of
lines that are designed to run every 15 minutes, or better, all day so
you don’t have to use a timetable to use them. You can just show up at a
bus stop and know something’s coming soon.
That’s a very important concept particularly on the east side of Portland, where these lines are designed to fit together into a big grid so you can go more or less anywhere with a single transfer. In the last major service cut, TriMet had to step over a very important quality threshold by cutting the frequent transit network—buses that run worse than every 15 minutes. TriMet knows that, and they know they need to get those services back.
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Kris Nelson
Mr. Walker, while raising timely issues about transit's effectiveness in tight times, missed the opportunity to compare other technologies and financing options. Take personal rapid transit, or PRT. It's still improving, but we should be studying its use and cost-effectivenes. As an on-demand system, it has the potential to use one one-hundreth of the power as light rail with a mag-lev design, but it may also approach self-financing once constructed. It could be faster than using a car, too. Santa Cruz and St. Paul, among several other cities, are checking out various models.
If Mr. Walker attended Rail-Volution last year here, he might have attended a packed workshop on capturing the publicly created value along transit lines. Bus stops, sadly, just don't boost zoning and amenities to raise land values. Rail and, eventually, PRT stations often do, however. With a tool that just captures these potential windfalls in land values, like an enterprise zone does, and leaving buildings alone, the transit-friendly developments and, perhaps, some of the capital costs can be well-financed. They're called transit benefit districts...and they deserve to be tested here.
Reply
Erik H.
Bus stops, sadly, just don't boost zoning and amenities to raise land values.
The problem with Portland is that too many of the anti-bus folks look at Portland and decry what TriMet is doing as the problem with the system.
The reality is that there are excellent bus stop designs out there that can encourage transit ridership, encourage community, encourage businesses to locate near it, and increase land values.
TriMet, however, has abandoned any concept of improving bus stops. A 12 inch by 18 inch bus stop sign tacked up to a PGE pole is TriMet's best attempt at a bus stop. It's PATHETIC.
On the other hand, we bend over backwards to build Streetcar and MAX stops.
Why the discrepancy? Why can't be build the exact same style of stop for a bus, as we do a Streetcar?
Look at the BRT bus stop designs used by Eugene and Snohomish County and King County. Look at the bus stops in place in the Anaheim Resort (a.k.a. Disneyland) area. They are fully built out stops with excellent amenities. They aren't no 12x18 inch blue and white bus stop sign on the si