Category: Vancouver
Growth and Environmentalism
I’ve been asked to write about the issue of growth versus no growth. This is in the context of planning, so broader questions of degrowth are not within this post’s main scope. Rather, it’s about whether planning for more growth is useful in combating pollution and greenhouse gas emissions. The answer is yes, though the reasoning is subtle. Smart growth is the key, and yet it’s not a straightforward question of transit construction and transit-oriented development helping the environment; it’s important to figure out what the baseline is, since a large urban apartment still emits more CO2 than the closets people end up living in in parts of San Francisco and New York.
The argument for growth specifically is that a high baseline level of growth is what enables smart growth and TOD policies. Vancouver’s secular increase in transit usage, and to a lesser extent the ongoing revival in Seattle and that of Washington in the 2000s, could not happen in a region with Midwestern population growth.
Smart growth vs. no growth
VTPI has many references to studies about smart growth here. The idea of smart growth is that through policies that encourage infill development and discourage sprawl, it’s possible to redirect the shape of urban areas in a greener direction. Here’s one specific VTPI paper making this comparison directly on PDF-p. 3.
Unfortunately, the reality is that there are at least three poles: in addition to sprawl and smart growth, there is no growth. And moreover, many of the bureaucratic rules intended to encourage smart growth, such as comprehensive zoning plans, in fact lead to no growth. The following table is a convenient summary of housing permitting rate vs. my qualitative impression of how smart the growth is.
The permitting rate is absolute, rather than relative to birth rates, immigration, and internal migration pressure as seen in average incomes. Tokyo’s permitting rate is similar to Vancouver’s – Tokyo Prefecture’s rate of 10 annual units per 1,000 people and so is Metro Vancouver’s, but Japan’s population is falling whereas Canada’s is rising. See also European rates linked here and American rates here.
The infill vs. sprawl dimension is qualitative, and combines how transit-oriented the construction is with whether the development is mostly in the city or in the suburbs. Berlin’s suburbs are shrinking due to the depopulation of East Germany, and growth in the suburbs of Tokyo and West Germany is weak as well, but city growth is going strong. Paris is building a lot of public transit and is very dense, but there’s more development per capita in the suburbs, and likewise in California most development is in exurbs rather than in central cities; Seattle is penalized for having bad transit, and Atlanta for having no transit, but in both there’s a lot more development in the city than in the suburbs. Stockholm and Vienna have growth all over and excellent public transit.
The significance of the diagram is that by the standards of European transit cities, California is not an example of smart growth, but of no growth.
Shaping growth
In the high-growth area of the diagram, the most interesting case is not Tokyo, but Vancouver and Seattle. In these cities, there is a transit revival. Metro Vancouver’s mode share went up from 13% in 1996 to 20% on the eve of the Evergreen extension’s opening. Moreover, for most of this period Vancouver saw car traffic decrease, despite high population growth. Metro Seattle’s transit revival is more recent but real, with the mode share rising from the “no transit” to “bad transit” category (it is 10% now).
Both cities invested heavily in transit, Vancouver much more so than Seattle, but it was specifically transit aimed at shaping growth. Before the Expo Line opened, Downtown had few skyscrapers, Metrotown did not yet exist, New Westminster had a low-rise city center, and the areas around Main Street-Science World, Joyce-Collingwood, and Edmonds were nonresidential and low-density. The combination of fast growth and rapid transit ensured that new development would add to transit ridership rather than to road traffic. Moreover, the strong transit spine and growing employment at transit-oriented centers meant existing residents could make use of the new network as well.
The same situation also exists in Europe, though not on the same transformative scale as in Vancouver, since the cities in question came into the new millennium with already high transit usage. Stockholm just opened a regional rail tunnel doubling cross-city capacity and is expanding its metro network in three directions. This program is not available to lower-growth cities. Berlin has grandiose plans for U-Bahn expansion and has even safeguarded routes, but it has no active plans to build anything beyond the U5-U55 connection and S21 – the city just isn’t growing enough.
Public transit without growth
By itself, growth is not necessary for the existence of a robust transit network. Vienna proper had more people on the eve of WW1 than it has today, though in the intervening generations there has been extensive housing construction, often publicly subsidized (“Red Vienna”), increasing the working class’s standard of living. However, in a modern auto-oriented city – say, anything in North America other than New York – it is essential.
This becomes clear if we look at the next tier of American cities in transit usage after New York, that is Chicago, San Francisco, Washington, and Boston. Washington is the odd one – it had a transit revival before the Metro collapse of this decade, and got there through TOD in choice locations like Arlington. The others inherited a prewar transit network and made some improvements (like the Transbay Tube replacing the Key System), but froze urban development in time. Essentially all postwar development in those cities has been sprawl. Chicago had big enough a core to maintain a strong city center, but outside the Loop the job geography is very sprawled out. Boston and the Bay Area sprouted suburban edge cities that became metonyms for their dominant industries, with a transit modal share of about 0%.
Chicago’s transportation situation is difficult. The city is losing population; some specific neighborhoods are desirable and some around them are gentrifying, but the most optimistic prognosis is that it’s akin to New York in the 1970s. If there’s no population to justify a public transit investment today, there won’t be the population to justify it tomorrow. Any investment has to rely on leveraging the city’s considerable legacy mainline network, potentially with strategic cut-and-cover tunneling to connect Metra lines to each other.
And if Chicago’s situation is difficult, that of poorer, smaller cities is most likely terminal. Detroit’s grandiose plans are for urban shrinkage, and even then they run into the problem that the most economically intact parts of the region are in low-density suburbs in Oakland County, where nobody is going to agree to abandonment; the shrinkage then intensifies sprawl by weakening the urban core. Even in European cities where the shrinkage is from the outside in, there’s no real hope for any kind of green revival. Chemnitz will never have rapid transit; its tram-train has 2.6 million annual passengers.
Idyll and environmentalism
The environmental movement has from the start had a strong sense of idyll. The conservationism that motivated John Muir and Teddy Roosevelt was about preserving exurban wilderness for rich adventurers to travel in. The green left of the 1960s dropped the explicit classism but substituted it for new prejudices, like the racism embedded in population control programs proposed by Westerners for the third world. Moreover, the romantic ideals of Roosevelt-era environmentalism transformed into small-is-beautiful romanticism. Even Jane Jacobs’ love for cities was tempered by a romanticism for old low-rise neighborhoods; she predicted the Upper West Side with its elevator buildings would never be attractive to the middle class.
But what’s idealized and what’s green are not always the same. Lord of the Rings has a strong WW1 allegory in which the hobbits (Tolkien) leave the Shire (the English Midlands) to go to war and come back to find it scoured by industrialization. But on the eve of WW1, Britain was already a coal-polluted hellscape. Per capita carbon emissions would remain the same until the 1970s and thence fall by half – and in the first three quarters of the 20th century the fuel source shifted from coal to oil, which is less polluting for the same carbon emissions. The era that Tolkien romanticized was one of periodic mass deaths from smog. The era in which he wrote was one in which public health efforts were undertaken to clean up the air.
Likewise, what passes for environmentalism in communities that openly oppose growth freezes the idyll of postwar America, where suburban roads were still uncongested and the middle class had midsize houses on large lots. But American greenhouse gas emissions per capita were the same in 1960 as today, and had been the same in good economic times going back to the eve of the Great Depression. Only centenarians remember any time in which Americans damaged the planet less than they do today, and “less” means 14 tons of CO2 per capita rather than 16.5.
The upshot is that in the developed world, environmentalism and conservation are opposing forces. Conservation means looking back to an era that had the same environmental problems as today, except often worse, and managed to be poorer on top of it all.
Growth and environmentalism
Strictly speaking, growth is not necessary to reduce emissions. The low-growth city could just as well close its road network, ban cars, and forbid people to use electricity or heating generated by fossil fuels – if they’re cold, they can put on sweaters. But in practice, low-emission developed countries got to be where they are today by channeling bouts of economic growth toward clean consumption of electricity as well as transportation. Regulatory coercion and taxes that inconvenience the middle class are both absolutely necessary to reduce emissions, and yet both are easier to swallow in areas that have new development that they can channel toward green consumption.
The environmentalist in the Parises and Stockholms has the easiest time. Those cities have functioning green economies. There are recalcitrant mostly right-wing voters who like driving and need to be forced to stop, but a lifestyle with essentially no greenhouse gas emissions except for air travel is normal across all socioeconomic classes. The Vancouvers are not there but could get there in a generation by ensuring future development reinforces high local density of jobs and residences. The pro-development policies of the Pacific Northwest are not in opposition to the region’s environmentalism but rather reinforce it, by giving green movements a future to look forward to.
The environmentalist in the Clevelands and Detroits has the hardest time. It’s even worse than in the Chemnitzes – Saxony may be a post-industrial wasteland with 10% fewer people now than it had in 1905, but it’s coming into the 21st century with German emissions rather than American ones. These are cities with American emissions and economies based substantially on producing polluting cars, propped by special government attention thanks to the American mythology of the Big Three.
But whereas the Rust Belt has genuine problems, NIMBYvilles’ low growth is entirely self-imposed. New York and Los Angeles have the same per capita metro housing growth as Detroit, but only because they choose stasis; where the price signal in Detroit screams at people to run away, that in New York and California screams to build more housing. Their political institutions decided to make it harder to build any green future not only for their current residents but also for tens of millions who’d like to move there.
Where Line 2 Should Go Depends on Where Line 1 Goes
A city that is building a rapid transit network piecemeal has to decide on priorities. There are tools for deciding where to build the first line, such as looking at the surface transit network and seeing what the busiest corridor is. These are relatively well-understood. In this post I’d like to focus on where to build the second line, because that question depends not only on the usual factors for where to build transit, but also on how the first line is expected to change the network. This is relevant not only to cities that are building a new rapid transit system, but also to cities that have such a network and are adding new lines one at a time: the usual tools can straightforwardly suggest where to build one line, but figuring out where to build a second line requires some additional work.
A toy model
Consider the following city, with its five busiest buses, labeled A-E from busiest to fifth busiest:
Let’s stipulate that there’s a wealth of arterial roads radiating in the right directions, and no motorways entering city center, so the exceptions to the rule that trains should go where the busiest buses are don’t apply. Let’s also stipulate that the other buses in the city don’t affect the internal ranking of the first five much – so if there are a bunch of north-south buses close to route C not depicted on the map, they’re not busy enough to make it busier than route A.
Clearly, based on the A > B > C > D > E ranking, the top priority for a first rapid transit line is A. Not only is it the busiest bus but also it is parallel to the second busiest.
But the second priority is not B, but C. The reason is that a rapid transit line on A captures east-west traffic, and then from the eastern and western neighborhoods people on route B are likely to walk south or ride a circumferential bus to get to the train. In the presence of a subway underneath the arterial carrying route A, the strongest bus corridor will almost certainly become C, and thus planners should aim to build a subway there as their second line, and begin design even before the first subway opens.
Fourth Avenue in Vancouver
Vancouver already has a rapid transit system, with three SkyTrain lines. However, the issue of the second line crops up when looking at remaining bus corridors and future subway plans. The strongest bus route is by far Broadway, which had higher ridership than the buses that became the Millennium and Canada Lines even when those lines were planned. The Millennium Line was only built first because it was easier, as it is elevated through the suburbs, and the Canada Line because Richmond demanded a SkyTrain connection.
Fortunately, Broadway is finally getting a subway, running from the Millennium Line’s current terminus at VCC-Clark to Arbutus, halfway toward the corridor’s natural end at UBC. The question is, what next? The second busiest bus corridor in Vancouver is Fourth Avenue, where the combined ridership of the 4, 44, and 84 buses and the part of the 7 that is on Fourth exceeds that of any corridor except Broadway; only Hastings, hosting the 95 and 160, comes close.
And yet, it is obviously wrong to plan any subway on Fourth Avenue. Fourth is half a kilometer away from Broadway; the 44 and 84 are relief for the 99 on Broadway. TransLink understands it and therefore there are no plans to do anything on Fourth – the next priority is extending the Expo Line farther out into Surrey or Langley, with the exact route to be determined based on political considerations.
Regional rail and subways in New York
In New York, two commonly-proposed subway extensions, down Nostrand and Utica, are closely parallel. The fact that they are so close to each other means that if one is built, the case for the other weakens. But these two corridors are so strong it is likely that if one is built, the second remains a very high priority. The only subway priority that is plausibly lower than the first of the two and higher than the second, regardless of which of Utica and Nostrand is built first, is a 125th Street crosstown extension of Second Avenue Subway.
But a more serious example of one future line weakening another occurs for regional rail. The top priority for regional rail in New York is four-tracking the tunnels to Penn Station under the Hudson; based on this priority, organizations that look beyond the next gubernatorial or congressional election have come up with farther-reaching proposals. Here, for example, is the map from the RPA’s Fourth Regional Plan:
In addition to four-tracking the North River Tunnels under the aegis of the Gateway project, the RPA calls for two additional two-track tunnels under the Hudson, in phases 2 and 3 of its proposal. Both are to feed Midtown: the phase 2 tunnel is to connect regional rail lines to be reactivated with Columbus Circle, Grand Central, and other destinations in the city, and the phase 3 tunnel is to then carry the same line out of the city and back into New Jersey via Hoboken and the existing commuter lines serving southern and southwestern suburbs.
The logic, as I understand it, is that Midtown is the core of the New York region, and so it is the most important to connect there. I don’t know if this is what the RPA was thinking, but I asked at an IRUM meeting in 2010 why all plans involve connections to Midtown rather than Lower Manhattan and was told Lower Manhattan was not as important a business district.
The toy model has one fixed city center and varying outlying areas, the opposite of the situation here. Here, my criticism is of plans that serve the dominant city center while ignoring the second most important center. The total number of jobs in Midtown is 800,000 whereas Lower Manhattan has 250,000 – but Lower Manhattan is more compact, so a single station at Fulton with several exits can plausibly serve the entire area, whereas Midtown has areas that are too far from both Penn Station and Grand Central. The next pair of tracks should serve Midtown, but the pair after them should serve Lower Manhattan, to ensure good coverage to both business districts.
When Transit Serves the Poor Better Than the Rich
In major transit cities, rich areas have better access to public transportation than poor areas – in fact, what makes them valuable is precisely the easy access to high-paying jobs. Even in cities with bad transit, this is often the case: the transit systems of cities with mode shares in the 10-15% area, like Boston and Chicago, tend to be good at serving city center and little else, and city center workers tend to be richer because professional work tends to cluster whereas low-skill work tends to disperse.
However, there are exceptions to this rule. One, the French Riviera, occurs in a city region with a transit mode share of 13%, comparable to that of American city regions where transit commuters outearn solo drivers. Two more cities are would-be exceptions, for opposite reasons: Providence has no public transit to speak of, but if it invested in creating a transit network, the natural corridors would serve the poor better than the rich; and Vancouver currently has better SkyTrain service in working-class areas than in richer ones, but its current investment is in middle-class areas, and moreover its extensive transit-oriented development has been middle-class as well.
Moreover, all three cities have patterns that generalize. The situation in the Riviera arises because of the classed nature of work there, and generalizes to other places with extensive tourism. That in Providence arises because of the city’s industrial history, and may generalize to other deindustrialized small cities with underutilized legacy rail networks. In Vancouver, part of this situation is because easy rail corridors were more readily available in poorer areas for an essentially random reason, but another part is extensive transit-oriented development concentrating working-class jobs near train stations.
The Riviera: the casinos are walkable, the tech jobs aren’t
Before I go any further, I’d like to stress something important: my observation of the Riviera is largely based on qualitative observations. I don’t know of INSEE data comparable to the Census Bureau’s Means of Transportation to Work by Selected Characteristics table, which could allow me to test the theory that transit ridership in the Riviera skews poor. All I am going by is what I have seen riding trains and occasionally buses as well as what I know of the distribution of jobs.
What I’ve seen is that transit use in the Riviera skews working class. Middle-class Parisians sometimes drive and sometimes take the trains. In contrast, the rich people who I’ve met in the Riviera have as far as I can tell never set foot on the TER. This is despite the fact that the TER is competitive with driving on the area’s main arterial road, the Moyenne Corniche, and is even competitive with the A8 freeway over short distances because the A8 has difficult access time to the relevant exits. Not for nothing, train stations in rich areas have very little ridership: per SNCF’s ridership data, stations in rich areas like Cap d’Ail and Cap Martin-Roquebrune have around 60,000 boardings plus alightings per year, so around 100 weekday boardings, whereas in working- and lower-middle-class Menton the annual total is 1.4 million, or around 2,300 weekday boardings.
The train stations, too, signal poverty. They’re not neglected, but what I’ve seen of them reminded me of working-class suburbs of Paris like Boissy much more than middle-class ones like Bures-sur-Yvette. I was even warned off of spending too much time near Nice’s train station by people echoing local middle-class prejudices. The buses look even poorer: the main east-west bus on the Moyenne Corniche is full of migrant workers.
A key clue for what is happening can be found when selecting a destination station at the fare machines in Menton. As far as I remember, the first option given is not Nice, but Monaco. SNCF’s data table doesn’t include ridership for Monaco, but Wikipedia claims 5.5 million a year without citation, and SNCF’s own blurb claims more than 6 million. Either figure is narrowly behind Nice’s 6.9 million for second in the Riviera and well ahead of third-place Cannes’s 3.2 million – and Nice also has some intercity traffic.
While Monaco’s residents are rich, its commuters are not. There are no corporate jobs in Monaco, because its tax haven status does not extend to corporations with substantial sales outside the city-state, only to local businesses like restaurants and stores. The commuters work low-pay service jobs at hotels and casinos, which they access by train, or perhaps on foot if they live in Beausoleil, as many a domestic service worker in Monaco does.
In contrast, the mass of middle-class jobs cluster in a purpose-built edge city in Antibes, called Sophia-Antipolis. While Antibes itself has a decent transit mode share for residents (10.5%, cf. Menton’s 14.8% and Nice’s 25.4%), and its train station gets 1.6 million annual boardings and alightings, the edge city is unwalkable and far from the train. There’s some traffic in the Riviera, but not enough that middle-class people, who can afford cars, clamor for transit alternatives to their suburban jobs.
The main lesson here is that while the jobs most likely to cluster are usually middle-class city center jobs, working-class tourism jobs cluster as well in regions that have plenty of them. Tourism in the Riviera is the most intense in Monaco specifically and in other coastal cities generally, which encourages travel along the linear corridor, where rail shines. It’s usually hard to see, because for the most part the top tourist destinations are enormous like London, Paris, and New York, but in specialized tourist regions the separation is clearer.
Already we see some evidence of this in Las Vegas, where working-class jobs cluster along the Strip. The city has a monorail, serving the hotels and casinos rather than city center. Were it interested in improving public transportation, it could build an elevated railroad on the Strip itself for better service.
Orlando is another potential example. I named it as a specific example of a region that would be difficult to retrofit for public transit earlier this year, but Disney World remains a major clustering of working-class jobs as well as some middle-class leisure travel. The problem there is that Disney World is far from the train and, unlike the Riviera, does not lie on any line with other potential ridership draws; nonetheless, a train connecting the Orlando CBD, the airport, and Disney World could get some traffic.
Finally, picturesque mountain resorts that happen to lie near rail could see working-class travel on the train to their tourism jobs. Many of these resorts are where they are specifically because a legacy rail trunk happened to be there and the railroad developed the area to generate demand for its services; this is the case for Jasper, Lake Louise, and Banff, all on the Alberta side of the Continental Divide. Aspen is not on a railroad, but is on a road where buses carry working-class commuters displaced by the town’s high housing costs.
Providence: once upon a time, there were factories near the railroad
When I lived in Providence seven years ago, I discussed transit improvements with local urbanists who I met through Greater City: Providence. We talked about improvements to both bus and rail; we had little appetite for the proposed city center streetcar, which has since been downgraded to a proposed frequent bus, and instead talked about improvements to the busiest buses as well as rail service along the main spine of the Northeast Corridor.
The improvements to the busiest buses were already under discussion by the state, including signal priority on key routes and investment in queue jump lanes and shelter amenities. The two routes that were by far the state’s busiest, the 99 on North Main and 11 on Broad, were permanently combined to a single through-running service branded as the R bus, for rapid, with limited-stop service. These routes serve very poor parts of the built-up area, including Pawtucket on the 99 and South Providence on the 11. This is a consequence of the fact that transit in Rhode Island is so bad that only the poor use it, and thus the preexisting busy routes serve poor areas; the best physical bus infrastructure is a bus tunnel to College Hill, the richest neighborhood in the city, but ridership there is weak and therefore the routes were never high priorities for further investment.
The improvements to rail never went beyond blogging; we didn’t have the pull of Boston’s TransitMatters, which itself is better at proposing small improvements than big ones that go up against political obstruction. What we called for was frequent local rail within the urban area: Peter Brassard wrote up the initial proposal, and I added some refinements. The Northeast Corridor, where the service would run, is primarily an intercity rail corridor, but there is room for four tracks in the right-of-way, and while there is freight traffic, it runs at the same approximate speed of a local passenger train.
As we discussed this proposal, Greater City’s Jef Nickerson noted something: what the train would do if implemented is produce better transit service in working-class areas than in more comfortable ones. Unlike the situation with the buses, this was not an intentional process. We would like Rhode Island to improve rail service using an existing right-of-way, which happens to serve Central Falls, Pawtucket, Olneyville, Hartford, Cranston, and Warwick, and miss the East Side and the middle-class suburbs. We realized that the city and inner-suburbs like Pawtucket are poorer than the proper suburbs, but that the train would serve Olneyville but not the East Side seemed like a coincidence.
But is it really a coincidence? Providence developed from east to west. The city was initially founded on the western side of what is now the East Side, sloping down to the river. What is now Downcity was only the second part of the city to develop. It became the center of the city because, as the Northeast Corridor was constructed, it was not possible to provide through-service via the hilly historic core of the city, only via the flatter areas that are now Downcity. A tunnel across College Hill opened in 1908, but by then the city’s basic urban geography was set: the university and port jobs on the East Side, industrial jobs to the west near the rail mainline.
The industrial jobs are long gone now. New England was the first part of America to industrialize and the first to deindustrialize, the mills moving to lower-wage Southern states already in the middle of the 20th century. In very large cities, declining industrial jobs can be replaced with urban renewal serving the middle class: the West India Docks became Canary Wharf, the freight railyards of Gare de Lyon became Bercy, the industrial Manhattan and Brooklyn waterfronts became sites for condos with nice views. In Providence-size cities, no such urban renewal is possible: there is no large mass of middle-class people clamoring to live or work in Olneyville, so the neighborhood became impoverished.
While factories may seem like attractive targets for transit commuting, they’re so clustered, in reality they have not been walkable ever since electrification made open-plan single-story factories viable. Factories are land-intensive and have been since around the 1910s. Moreover, whereas hotels and retail have a reason to locate in walkable areas for their consumption amenities – tourists like walking around the city – factories do not, and if anything depress an area’s desirability through noise and pollution. Working industrial districts are not attractive for transit, but post-industrial ones are, even if they are not gentrified the way so much of London, Paris, and New York have.
A large number of cities share Providence’s history as a medium-size post-industrial city. Nearly every English city except London qualifies, as do the cities of the American Northeast and Midwest below the size class of Boston and Philadelphia. Moreover, all of these cities have undergone extensive middle-class flight, with the racial dimension of white flight in the US but even without it in Britain; thus, the relatively dense neighborhoods, where transit service is more viable, are disproportionately poor. However, the feasibility of mainline rail service to post-industrial neighborhoods is uneven, and depends on local idiosyncrasies.
One positive example I’m more familiar with that’s a lot like Providence is in New Haven. Its best potential local rail route, the Farmington Canal Trail, serves lower middle-class areas like Hamden, and fortunately parallels the busiest bus route, the D-Dixwell. While Hamden is not poor, such service would still lead to the inversion we discussed for Providence, since the rich live in thoroughly auto-oriented suburbs or within walking distance of Yale. The main drawbacks are that it would require replacing an active trail with rail service, and that either street running or brief tunneling would be needed in the final few hundred meters in Downtown New Haven.
Vancouver: easy corridors and TOD for the working class
With a modal share of 21%, Vancouver is in a somewhat higher class of transit quality than the Riviera, Boston, or Chicago. However, it remains a far cry from the numbers beginning with a 3, 4, and 5 seen in New York and in European and Asian transit cities. As with the Riviera, I am somewhat speculating from my own observations, lacking a table that clearly states transit usage by socioeconomic class. However, two factors make me believe that transit in Vancouver serves the working class better than it does the middle class.
The first factor is the corridors served by SkyTrain. The first to be built, the Expo Line, runs in a preexisting interurban right-of-way, with minor greenfield elevated and underground construction; even the downtown tunnel is repurposed from a disused mainline rail branch. It passes through a mixture of working-class and lower middle-class neighborhoods on its way to Surrey, which is working-class and very negatively stereotyped. The second, the Millennium Line, branches east, to lower middle-class suburbs, running on a greenfield el. The third, the Canada Line, is a partially tunneled, partially elevated route through the middle-class West Side to working-class Richmond. Only the fourth line to be built, the Evergreen extension of the Millennium Line, finally serves a comfortable area, as will the next line, the Broadway extension of the Millennium Line deeper into the West Side.
The second factor is the job distribution within Metro Vancouver. Usually, we see concentration of professional jobs in city centers and dispersal of working-class jobs among many stores. In the Riviera this relationship between job concentration and income is only inverted because the working-class jobs are disproportionately in tourism while the professional ones are in an edge city. In Vancouver I don’t believe there is any such inversion, but there is leveling: jobs of either type are concentrated in transit-rich areas. This leveling is the result of extensive commercial transit-oriented development, most notably Metrotown, which has many office jobs on top of Canada’s third largest shopping mall.
The first factor is idiosyncratic. The easy corridors happened to serve poorer areas, on a line from East Vancouver to Surrey. The rich live in North Vancouver, which has a ferry and doesn’t have enough population density for a SkyTrain tunnel; on the West Side, which is separated from downtown by False Creek and was thus late to get a rail connection; and in Port Moody and Coquitlam, which were only connected to SkyTrain recently via the Evergreen extension.
The second factor is more systemic. While American and European cities rarely have big urban shopping malls, Canadian cities are full of them. The Metropolis at Metrotown has 27 million annual visitors, not far behind the 37 million of the Forum des Halles, at the center of a metro area five times the size of Metro Vancouver – and the Metropolis has more than twice the total commercial floor area. In this, Canada is similar to Israel and Singapore, which like Canada have harsh climates, only hot instead of cold. Moreover, Vancouver has encouraged this centralization through TOD: Burnaby built Metrotown from scratch in the 1980s, simultaneously with the Expo Line.
It is difficult to engage in concerted residential TOD for the working class, since it requires extensive housing subsidies. Vancouver’s residential TOD near SkyTrain stations is thoroughly middle-class. However, concerted commercial TOD is easier: hospitals, universities, and shopping centers all employ armies of unskilled workers (the first two also employing many professional ones), the first two while satisfying general social goals for health care and education provision and the last while making the owners a profit on the open market.
Moreover, Vancouver’s TOD within downtown, too, has made it easier to provide transit service for the working and lower middle classes. Where constraints on office towers lead to high office rents, only the most critical jobs are in city centers, and those are typically high-end ones; in the US, it’s common for big corporations to site their top jobs in the center of New York or Chicago or another large city but outsource lower-end office jobs to cheaper cities. In Vancouver, as elsewhere in Canada, extensive downtown commercialization means that even semi-skilled office jobs like tech support can stay in the center rather than at suburban office parks.
Conclusion
Based on my own observations, I believe the Riviera provides better public transportation for the working class than for the middle class, and to some extent so does Vancouver. Providence provides uniformly poor transit service, but its lowest-hanging fruit are in working-class urban neighborhoods.
The reasons vary, but the unifying theme is that, in the Riviera and Vancouver, there is none of the typical big-city pattern in which the rich work in walkable city centers more than the poor (e.g. in New York). In Vancouver it’s the result of commercial TOD as well as a Canadian culture of urban shopping centers; in the Riviera it’s the result of unique dependence on tourism. In Providence the situation is not about job concentration but about residential concentration: lower-income neighborhoods are likelier to arise near rail because historically that’s where industry arose, and all that remains is for Providence to actually run local passenger trains on the mainline.
It is not possible to replicate culture. If your city does not have the tourism dependence of Monaco, or the shopping mall culture of Vancouver, or the post-industrial history of Providence, there’s little it can do to encourage better urban geography for working-class transit use. At best, can build up more office space in the center, as Vancouver did, and hope that this encourages firms to locate their entire operations there rather than splitting them between a high-end head office and lower-end outlying ones. Fortunately, there exist many cities that do have the special factors of the Riviera, Vancouver, or Providence. In such cities, transit planners should make note of how they can use existing urban geography to help improve transit service for the population that most depends on it.
In-Motion Charging
While electric cars remain a niche technology, electric buses are surging. Some are battery-electric (this is popular in China, and some North American agencies are also buying into this technology), but in Europe what’s growing is in-motion charging, or IMC. This is a hybrid of a trolleybus and a battery-electric bus (BEB): the bus runs under wire, but has enough battery to operate off-wire for a little while, and in addition has some mechanism to let the bus recharge during the portion of its trip that is electrified.
One vendor, Kiepe, lists recent orders. Esslingen is listed as having 10 km of off-wire capability and Geneva (from 2012) as having 7. Luzern recently bought double-articulated Kiepe buses with 5 km of off-wire range, and Linz bought buses with no range specified but of the same size and battery capacity as Luzern’s. Iveco does not specify what its range is, but says its buses can run on a route that’s 25-40% unwired.
Transit planning should be sensitive to new technology in order to best integrate equipment, infrastructure, and schedule. Usually this triangle is used for rail planning, but there’s every reason to also apply it to buses as appropriate. This has a particular implication to cities that already have large trolleybus networks, like Vancouver, but also to cities that do not. IMC works better in some geographies than others; where it works, it is beneficial for cities to add wire as appropriate for the deployment of IMC buses.
Vancouver: what to do when you’re already wired
Alert reader and blog supporter Alexander Rapp made a map of all trolleybus routes in North America. They run in eight cities: Boston, Philadelphia, Dayton, San Francisco, Seattle, Vancouver, Mexico City, Guadalajara.
Vancouver’s case is the most instructive, because, like other cities in North America, it runs both local and rapid buses on its trunk routes. The locals stop every about 200 meters, the rapids every kilometer. Because conventional trolleybuses cannot overtake other trolleybuses, the rapids run on diesel even on wired routes, including Broadway (99), 4th Avenue (44, 84), and Hastings (95, 160), which are in order the three strongest bus corridors in the area. Broadway has so much ridership that TransLink is beginning to dig a subway under its eastern half; however, the opening of the Broadway subway will not obviate the need for rapid buses, as it will create extreme demand for nonstop buses from the western end of the subway at Arbutus to the western end of the corridor at UBC.
IMC is a promising technology for Vancouver, then, because TransLink can buy such buses and then use their off-wire capability to overtake locals. Moreover, on 4th Avenue the locals and rapids take slightly different routes from the western margin of the city proper to campus center, so IMC can be used to let the 44 and 84 reach UBC on their current route off-wire. UBC has two separate bus loops, one for trolleys and one for diesel buses, and depending on capacity IMC buses could use either.
On Hastings the situation is more delicate. The 95 is not 25-40% unwired, but about 60% unwired – and, moreover, the unwired segment includes a steep mountain climb toward SFU campus. The climb is an attractive target for electrification because of the heavy energy consumption involved in going uphill: at 4 km, not electrifying it would brush up against the limit of Kiepe’s off-wire range, and may well exceed it given the terrain. In contrast, the 5 km in between the existing wire and the hill are mostly flat, affording the bus a good opportunity to use its battery.
Where to add wire
In a city without wires, IMC is the most useful when relatively small electrification projects can impact a large swath of bus routes. This, in turn, is most useful when one trunk splits into many branches. Iveco’s requirement that 60-75% of the route run under wire throws a snag, since it’s much more common to find trunks consisting of a short proportion of each bus route than ones consisting of a majority of route-length. Nonetheless, several instructive examples exist.
In Boston, the buses serving Dorchester, Mattapan, and Roxbury have the opportunity to converge to a single trunk on Washington Street, currently hosting the Silver Line. Some of these buses furthermore run on Warren Street farther south, including the 14, 19, 23, and 28, the latter two ranking among the MBTA’s top bus routes. The area has poor air quality and high rates of asthma, making electrification especially attractive.
Setting up wire on Washington and Warren Streets and running the Silver Live as open BRT, branching to the south, would create a perfect opportunity for IMC. On the 28 the off-wire length would be about 4.5 km each way, at the limit of Kiepe’s capability, and on the 19 and 23 it would be shorter; the 14 would be too long, but is a weaker, less frequent route. If the present-day service pattern is desired, the MBTA could still electrify to the northern terminus of these routes at Ruggles, but it would miss an opportunity to run smoother bus service.
In New York, there are examples of trunk-and-branch bus routes in Brooklyn and Queens. The present-day Brooklyn bus network has a long interlined segment on lower Fulton, carrying not just the B25 on Fulton but also the B26 on Halsey and B52 on Gates, and while Eric Goldwyn’s and my plan eliminates the B25, it keeps the other two. The snag is that the proportion of the system under wire is too short, and the B26 has too long of a tail (but the B52 and B25 don’t). The B26 could get wire near its outer terminal, purposely extended to the bus depot; as bus depots tend to be polluted, wire there is especially useful.
More New York examples are in Queens. Main Street and the Kissena-Parsons corridor, both connecting Flushing with Jamaica, are extremely strong, interlining multiple buses. Electrifying these two routes and letting buses run off-wire on tails to the north, reaching College Point and perhaps the Bronx on the Q44 with additional wiring, would improve service connecting two of Queens’ job centers. Moreover, beyond Jamaica, we see another strong trunk on Brewer Boulevard, and perhaps another on Merrick (interlining with Long Island’s NICE bus).
Finally, Providence has an example of extensive interlining to the north, on North Main and Charles, including various 5x routes (the map is hard to read, but there are several routes just west of the Rapid to the north).
IMC and grids
The examples in New York, Providence, and Boston are, not coincidentally, ungridded. This is because IMC interacts poorly with grids, and it is perhaps not a coincidence that the part of the world where it’s being adopted the most has ungridded street networks. A bus grid involves little to no interlining: there are north-south and east-west arterials, each carrying a bus. The bus networks of Toronto, Chicago, and Los Angeles have too little interlining for IMC to be as cost-effective as in New York or Boston.
In gridded cities, IMC is a solution mainly if there are problematic segments, in either direction. If there’s a historic core where wires would have adverse visual impact, it can be left unwired. If there’s a steep segment with high electricity consumption, it should be wired preferentially, since the cost of electrification does not depend on the street’s gradient.
Overall, this technology can be incorporated into cities’ bus design. Grids are still solid when appropriate, but in ungridded cities, trunks with branches are especially attractive, since a small amount of wire can convert an entire swath of the city into pollution-free bus operation.
Sometimes, Bus Stop Consolidation is Inappropriate
For the most part, the optimal average spacing between bus stops is 400-500 meters. North American transit agencies have standardized on a bus stop every 200-250 meters, so stop consolidation is usually a very good idea. But this is based on a model with specific inputs regarding travel behavior. In some circumstances, travel behavior is different, leading to different inputs, and then the model’s output will suggest a different optimum. In contrast with my and Eric’s proposal for harsh stop consolidation in Brooklyn, I would not recommend stop consolidation on the crosstown buses in Manhattan, and am skeptical of the utility of stop consolidation in Paris. In Vancouver I would recommend stop consolidation, but not on every route, not do we recommend equally sweeping changes on every single Brooklyn route.
The model for the optimal stop spacing
If demand along a line is isotropic, and the benefits of running buses more frequently due to higher in-vehicle speed are negligible, then the following formula holds:
The most important complicating assumption is that if demand is not isotropic, but instead every trip begins or ends at a distinguished location where there is certainly a stop, such as a subway connection, then the formula changes to,
The choice of which factor to use, 2 or 4, is not exogenous to the bus network. If the network encourages transferring, then connection points will become more prominent, making the higher factor more appropriate. Whether the network encourages interchanges depends on separate policies such as fare integration but also on the shape of the network, including bus frequency. Higher average bus speed permits higher frequency, which makes transferring easier. The model does not take the granularity of transfer ease into account, which would require a factor somewhere between 2 and 4 (and, really, additional factors for the impact of higher bus speed on frequency).
After the choice of factor, the most contentious variable is the walk speed and penalty. Models vary on both, and often they vary in directions that reinforce each other rather than canceling out (for example, certain disabilities reduce both walk speed and willingness to walk a minute longer to save a minute on a bus). In Carlos Daganzo’s textbook, the walk speed net of penalty is 1 m/s. For an able-bodied adult, the walk speed can exceed 1.5 m/s; penalties in models range from 1.75 (MTA) to 2 (a Dutch study) to 2.25 (MBTA). The lower end is probably more appropriate, since the penalty includes a wait penalty, and stop consolidation reduces waits even as it lengthens walk time.
Update 10/31: alert reader Colin Parker notes on social media that you can shoehorn the impact of walk time into the model relatively easily. The formula remains the same with one modification: the average trip distance is replaced with
The factor of 2 in the formula comes from computing average wait time; for worst-case wait time, remove the 2 (but then the wait penalty would need to be adjusted, since the wait penalty is partly an uncertainty penalty).
The average distance between buses is proportional to the number of service-hours, or fleet size: it obeys the formula
The factor of 2 in the formula comes from the fact that route-length is measured one-way whereas revenue hours are for a roundtrip.
If we incorporate wait time into the model this way, then the walk and wait penalties used should be higher, since we’re taking them into account; the Dutch study’s factor of 2 is more reasonable. The conclusions below are not really changed – the optima barely increase, and are unchanged even in the cases where stop consolidation is not recommended.
The situation in New York
The average unlinked New York City Transit bus trip is 3.35 km: compare passenger-miles and passenger trips as of 2016. In theory this number is endogenous to the transit network – longer interstations encourage passengers to take the bus more for long trips than for short trips – but in practice the SBS routes, denoted as bus rapid transit in the link, actually have slightly shorter average trip length than the rest. For all intents and purposes, this figure can be regarded as exogenous to stop spacing.
The stop penalty, judging by the difference between local and limited routes, is different for different routes. The range among the routes I have checked looks like 20-40 seconds. However, Eric tells me that in practice the B41, which on paper has a fairly large stop penalty, has little difference in trip times between the local and limited versions. The local-SBS schedule difference is consistent with a stop penalty of about 25 seconds, at least on the B44 and B46.
As a sanity check, in Vancouver the scheduled stop penalty on 4th Avenue is 22 seconds – the 84 makes 19 fewer stops than the 4 between Burrard and UBC and is 7 minutes faster – and the buses generally run on schedule. The actual penalty is a little higher, since the 4 has a lot of pro forma stops on the University Endowment Lands that almost never get any riders (and thus the bus doesn’t stop there). This is consistent with 25 seconds at a stop that the bus actually makes, or even a little more.
Plugging the numbers into the formula yields
if we assume everyone connects to the subway (or otherwise takes the bus to a distinguished stop), or
if we assume perfectly isotropic travel demand. In reality, a large share of bus riders are connecting to the subway, which can be seen in fare revenue, just $1.16 per unlinked bus trip compared with $1.91 per subway trip (linked or unlinked, only one swipe is needed). In Brooklyn, it appears that passengers not connecting to the subway disproportionately go to specific distinguished destinations, such as the hospitals, universities, and shopping centers, or Downtown Brooklyn, making the higher figure more justified. Thus, our proposed stop spacing, excluding the long nonstop segments across the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel and between borough line and JFK, is 490 meters.
Update 10/31: if we incorporate wait time, then we need to figure out the average distance between buses. This, in turn, depends on network shape. Brooklyn today has 550 km of bus route in each direction, which we propose to cut to 350. With around 600 service hours per hour – more at the peak, less off-peak – we get an average distance between buses of 1,830 meters today or 1,180 under our proposal. Using our proposed network, and a wait and walk penalty of 2, we get
or
Short bus routes imply short stop spacing
Our analysis recommending 490 meter interstations in Brooklyn depends on the average features of New York’s bus network. The same analysis ports to most of the city. But in Manhattan, the situation is different in a key way: the crosstown buses are so short that the average trip length cannot possibly match city average.
Manhattan is not much wider than 3 km. Between First and West End Avenues the distance is 2.8 km. The likely average trip length is more than half the maximum, since the typical use case for the crosstown buses is travel between the Upper East Side and Upper West Side, but the dominant destinations are not at the ends of the line, but close to the middle. With Second Avenue Subway offering an attractive two-seat ride, there is less reason to take the crosstown buses to connect to the 1/2/3 (and indeed, the opening of the new line led to prominent drops in ridership on the M66, M72, M79, M86, and M96); the best subway connection point is now at Lexington Avenue, followed by Central Park West. On a long route, the location of the dominant stop is not too relevant, but on a short one, the average trip length is bounded by the distance between the dominant stop and the end of the line.
If we take the average trip length to be 1.6 km and plug it into the formula, we get
or
A crosstown bus stopping at First, Second, Third, Lex, Madison, Fifth, Central Park West, Columbus, Amsterdam, Broadway, and West End makes 10 stops in 2.8 km, for an average of 280 meters. There isn’t much room for stop consolidation. If the bus continues to Riverside, lengthening the trip to 3 km at the latitude of 96th Street, then it’s possible to drop West End. If the buses running up Third and down Lex are converted to two-way running, presumably on Lex for the subway connections, then Third could be dropped, but this would still leave the interstation at 330 meters, much tighter than anything we’re proposing in Brooklyn.
The only other places where avenues are too closely spaced are poor locations for stop removal. Amsterdam and Broadway are very close, but Amsterdam carries a northbound bus, and if the Columbus/Amsterdam one-way pair is turned into two two-way avenues, then Amsterdam is a better location for the bus than Columbus because it provides better service to the Far West Side. Fifth and Madison are very close as well, but the buses using them, the M1 through M4, are so busy (a total of 32 buses per hour at the peak) that if the two avenues are converted to two-way running then both should host frequent bus trunks. It’s not possible to skip either.
Within Brooklyn, there is one location in which the same issue of short bus routes applies: Coney Island. The B74 and B36 act as short-hop connectors from Coney Island the neighborhood to Coney Island the subway station. The routes we propose replacing them have 7 stops each from the subway connection west, over distances of 2.5 and 2.7 km respectively, for interstations of 360 and 390 meters.
Vancouver supplies two more examples of routes similar to the B74 and B36: the 5 and 6 buses, both connecting the West End with Downtown. The 6 is only 2 km between its western end and the Yaletown SkyTrain station, and the 5 is 2.3 km from the end to the Burrard station and 2.8 km to city center at Granville Street. The average trip length on these buses is necessarily short, which means that stop consolidation is not beneficial, unlike on the main grid routes outside Downtown.
Update 10/31: incorporating wait time into this calculation leads to the same general conclusion. The short routes in question – the Manhattan crosstowns, the B36 and B74, and the 5 and 6 in Vancouver – have high frequency, or in other words short distance between buses. For example, the M96 runs every 4 minutes peak, 6 off-peak, and takes 22-24 minutes one-way, for a total of 6 circulating buses per direction peak (which is 500 meters), or 4 off-peak (which is 750 meters). This yields
A network that discourages transferring should have more stops as well
In Paris the average interstation on buses in the city looks like 300 meters; this is not based on a citywide average but on looking at the few buses for which Wikipedia has data plus a few trunks on the map, which range from 250 to 370 meters between stations.
The short stop spacing in Paris is justified. First of all, the average bus trip in Paris is short: 2.33 km as of 2009 (source, PDF-p. 24). Parisian Metro coverage is so complete that the buses are not useful for long trips – Metro station access time is short enough that the trains overtake the buses on total trip time very quickly.
Second, there is little reason to transfer between buses here, or to transfer between buses and the Metro. The completeness of Metro coverage is such that buses are just not competitive unless they offer a one-seat ride where the Metro doesn’t. Another advantage of buses is that they are wheelchair-accessible, whereas the Metro is the single least accessible major urban rail network in the world, with nothing accessible to wheelchair users except Line 14 and the RER A and B. It goes without saying that people in wheelchairs are not transferring between the bus and the Metro (and even if they could, they’d have hefty transfer penalties). The New York City Subway has poor accessibility, but nearly all of the major stations are accessible, including the main bus transfer points, such as Brooklyn College and the Utica Avenue stop on the 3/4.
With little interchange and a mostly isotropic city density, the correct formula for the optimal bus stop spacing within Paris is
which is close to the midpoint of the range of interstations I have found looking at various routes.
Conclusion
The half-kilometer (or quarter-to-a-third-of-a-mile) rule for bus stop spacing is an empirical guideline. It is meant to describe average behavior in the average city. It is scale-invariant – the density of the city does not matter, only relative density does, and the size of the city only matters insofar as it may affect the average trip length. However, while scale itself does not lead to major changes from the guideline, special circumstances might.
If the geography of the city is such that bus trips are very short, then it’s correct to have closer stop spacing. This is the case for east-west travel in Manhattan. It is also common on buses that offer short-hop connections to the subway from a neighborhood just outside walking range, such as the B36 and B74 in Coney Island and the 5 and 6 in Vancouver’s West End.
Note that even in New York, with its 3.3 km average trip length, stop consolidation is still beneficial and necessary on most routes. North American transit agencies should not use this article as an excuse not to remove extraneous stops. But nor should they stick to a rigid stop spacing come what may; on some routes, encouraging very short trips (often 1.5 km or even less), closely spaced stations are correct, since passengers wouldn’t be riding for long enough for the gains from stop consolidation to accumulate.
Is Missing Middle Really Missing?
There’s en emerging concept within North American urbanism and planning called missing middle. This refers to housing density that’s higher than suburban single-family housing but lower than urban mid- and high-rise buildings. The context is that in some cities with rapid housing construction, especially Toronto, the zoning code is either single-family or high-density, with nothing in between. The idea of allowing more missing middle housing has become a mainstay of New Urbanism as well as most North American YIMBY movements, underpinning demands such as the abolition of single-family zoning in California and Seattle.
Unfortunately, it’s an overrated concept. It applies to Toronto, but not Vancouver or the most expensive American cities, which are replete with missing middle density. The most in-demand neighborhoods have far too many people who want to move in to make do with this density level. Moreover, missing middle density in its New Urbanist form is not even really transit-oriented: low-rise construction spread over a large area is unlikely to lead middle-class workers to take transit when cars are available. The density required to encourage transit ridership and reduce housing costs is much higher, including mid- and high-rise residences.
What’s missing middle density?
A website created by Opticos Design, an architecture firm specializing in this kind of housing, has a helpful graphical definition:
Many of the missing middle housing forms are part of the vernacular architecture of American cities. In New England, this is the triple-decker, a three-story building with an apartment per floor. In Chicago, this is the fourplex, a two-story building with two apartments per floor. In Los Angeles this is the dingbat, with two or three inhabited floors on top of ground floor parking. In Baltimore and Philadelphia (and in London) this is the rowhouse. This history makes it easier to accept such buildings as both part of the local culture and as affordable to the lower middle class.
The triple-deckers in the parts of Providence and Cambridge I am most familiar with have a floor area ratio of about 1-1.5: they have 2.5 to 3 floors (counting sloped roofs as half a floor) and build on one third to one half the lot. A quick look at some Philadelphia rowhouses suggests they, too, have a floor area ratio in that range. Somerville has a population density just short of 7,000 people per km^2, with little non-residential land and some mid-rise and single-family areas canceling out to missing middle density. Kew Gardens Hills has about 12,000 people per km^2, and has a mixture of missing middle and mid-rise housing.
In Continental Europe, the vernacular architecture is instead mid-rise. In Scandinavia and Central Europe the euroblock has 4-7 floors and a floor area ratio of 2.5-4; Urban Kchoze shows many examples with photos, mostly from Prague, and Old Urbanist finds a euroblock in Berlin with a floor area ratio of 4.3. Central Stockholm’s residential buildings are almost entirely euroblocks, and residential density is 17,000/km^2 in Södermalm, 21,000/km^2 in Vasastan, and 28,000/km^2 in Östermalm. Parisian density is even higher – the floor area ratio of the traditional buildings looks like 4-5, with about 30,000-40,000 people per km^2.
Is missing middle really missing?
In Europe the answer is obviously no: lower-density cities like London are largely missing middle in their inner areas, and higher-density ones like Paris have missing middle density in their outer areas. But even in North America, where the term is popular, the expensive cities where people call for abolishing single-family zoning have missing middle housing. In addition to the above-listed vernacular examples, New York has brownstones all over Brooklyn (the term Brownstone Brooklyn refers to the gentrified inner neighborhoods, but this density is also seen in outer neighborhoods like Bay Ridge and Sheepshead Bay).
Vancouver is an especially instructive example. English Canada’s big cities are fast-growing, and a zoning regime that’s historically been friendlier to developers than to local NIMBYs has encouraged high-rise growth. Moreover, the high-rises are built in the modern boxy style (earning the ire of people who hate modern architecture) and tend to target middle-class and high-skill immigrant buyers (earning the ire of people who blame high housing costs on new construction). In contrast, vast swaths of Toronto and Vancouver are zoned for single-family housing.
And yet, Vancouver has considerable missing middle housing, too. The population density in Mount Pleasant, Fairview, Kitsilano, and West Point Grey is similar to that of Somerville and Eastern Queens. Buildings there are in modern style, but the housing typologies are not modernist towers in a park, but rather mostly buildings with 2-4 floors with the medium lot coverage typical of missing middle. I lived in an eight-unit, three-story building. Across from me there was a high-rise, but it was atypical; for the most part, that part of Vancouver is low-rise.
Shaughnessy offends people in its extravagance and wealth. In one Twitter conversation, an interlocutor who blamed absent landlords and foreigners (read: Chinese people) for Vancouver’s high housing costs still agreed with me that Shaughnessy, a white Canadian-born single-family area, shares the blame with its low-density zoning and very high residential space per person. Legalizing accessory dwelling units (“granny flats”) and townhouses in such a neighborhood faces local political headwind from the neighbors (who are still nowhere near as empowered to block rezoning as they would south of the border), but not from citywide social movements.
And yet, the density in the inner Westside neighborhoods near Broadway and Fourth Avenue is insufficient, too. It’s of course much higher than in Shaughnessy – I never really missed not owning a car living in Kitsilano – but the price signal screams “build more housing in Kits and Point Grey.”
Is missing middle transit-oriented?
Not really. In Providence the answer is absolutely not: car ownership is expected of every person who can afford it. The nearby supermarket, East Side Market, has an enormous parking lot; I’d walk, but it was obvious to me that my mode choice was not the intended use case. Even some Brown grad students owned cars (though most didn’t); at Columbia, car ownership among people below tenure-track faculty rank approaches zero. Once they own cars, people use them to take trips they wouldn’t otherwise have made, reorienting their travel patterns accordingly.
In Cambridge, car use is lower, but still substantial. The same is true of Vancouver (where outside Downtown and the West End the entire region’s density is at most missing middle, even if the typology is towers in a park and not uniformly low-rise). In Kew Gardens Hills, people seem to mostly drive as well.
This is not a universal feature of the urban middle class. In Stockholm, my postdoc advisor as far as I can tell does not own a car, and commutes to work by bike. Both there and in Basel, biking and using transit are normal and expected even among people who earn tenured academic salaries. At 7,000 people per km^2, people can forgo driving if they really want to, but most people will not do so. Only at the higher mid-rise density will they do so.
Fare Payment Without the Stasi
Last year, I saw a tip by the Metropolitan Police: if you witness any crime on a London bus and wish to report it later, you should tell the police the number on your Oyster card and then they’ll already be able to use the number to track which bus you rode and then get the names and bank accounts of all other passengers on that bus. Londoners seem to accept this surveillance as a fact of life; closed-circuit TV cameras are everywhere, even in front of the house where Orwell lived and wrote. Across the Pond, transit agencies salivate over the ability to track passenger movements through smartcards and contactless credit cards, which is framed either as the need for data or as a nebulous anti-crime measure. Fortunately, free countries have some alternative models.
In Germany, the population is more concerned about privacy. Despite being targeted by a string of communist terrorist attacks in the 1970s and 80s, it maintained an open system, without any faregates at any train station (including subways); fare enforcement in German cities relies on proof of payment with roving inspectors. Ultimately, this indicates the first step in a transit fare payment system that ensures people pay their fares without turning the payment cards into tracking devices. While Germany resists contactless payment, there are ways to achieve its positive features even with the use of more modern technology than paper tickets.
The desired features
A transit fare payment system should have all of the following features:
- Integration: free transfers between different transit vehicles and different modes should be built into the system, including buses, urban rail, and regional rail.
- Scalability: the system should scale to large metro areas with variable fares, and not just to compact cities with flat fares, which are easier to implement. It should also permit peak surcharges if the transit agency wishes to implement them.
- No vendor lock: switching to a different equipment manufacturer should be easy, without locking to favored contractors.
- Security: it should be difficult to forge a ticket.
- Privacy: it should not be possible to use the tickets to track passengers in most circumstances.
- Hospitality: visitors and occasional riders should be able to use the system with ease, with flexible options for stored value (including easy top-up options) and daily, weekly, and monthly passes, and no excessive surcharges.
Smartcard and magnetic card systems are very easy to integrate across operators; all that it takes is political will, or else there may be integrated fare media without integrated fares themselves, as in the Bay Area (Clipper can store value but there are no free transfers between agencies). Scalability is easy on the level of software; the hardest part about it is that if there are faregates then every station must have entry and exit gates, and those may be hard to retrofit. Existing smartcard technologies vary in vendor lock, but the system the US and Britain are standardizing on, contactless credit cards, is open. The real problem is in protecting privacy, which is simply not a goal in tracking-obsessed Anglo-American agencies.
The need for hospitality
Hospitality may seem like a trivial concern, but it is important in places with many visitors, which large transit cities are. Moreover, universal design for hospitality, such as easily recognizable locations for topping up stored value, is also of use to regular riders who run out of money and need to top up. Making it easy to buy tickets without a local bank account is of use to both visitors and low-income locals without full-service bank accounts. In the US, 7% of households are unbanked and another 20% are underbanked; I have no statistics for other countries, but in Sweden banks will not even give debit cards to people with outstanding debts, which suggests to me that some low-income Swedes may not have active banking cards.
New York’s MetroCard has many faults, but it succeeds on hospitality better than any other farecard system I know of: it is easy to get the cards from machines, there is only a $1 surcharge per card, and season tickets are for 7 or 30 days from activation rather than a calendar week or month. At the other end of the hospitality scale, Navigo requires users to bring a passport photo and can only load weekly and monthly passes (both on the calendar); flexible 5-day passes cost more than a calendar weekly pass.
In fact, the main reason not to use paper tickets is that hospitality is difficult with monthly passes printed on paper. Before the Compass Card debacle, Vancouver had paper tickets with calendar monthly passes, each in a different color to make it easy for the driver to see if a passenger was flashing a current or expired pass. The tickets could be purchased at pharmacies and convenience stores but not at SkyTrain stations, which only sold single-ride tickets.
ID cards and privacy
The Anglosphere resists ID cards. The Blair cabinet’s attempt to introduce national ID cards was a flop, and the Britons I was reading at the time (such as the Yorkshire Ranter) were livid. And yet, ID cards provide security and privacy. Passports are extremely difficult to forge. Israel’s internal ID cards are quite difficult to forge as well; there are occasional concerns about voter fraud, but nothing like the routine use of fake drivers’ licenses to buy drinks so common in American college culture.
At the same time, in countries that are not ruled by people who think 1984 was an uplifting look at the future, ID cards protect privacy. The Yorkshire Ranter is talking about the evils of biometric databases, and Israeli civil liberties advocates have mounted the same attack against the government’s attempt at a database. But German passports, while biometric, store data exclusively on the passport, not in any centralized database. ID cards designed around proving that you paid your fare don’t even have to use biometrics; the security level is lower than with biometrics, but the failure mode is that the occasional forger can ride without paying $100 a month (which is much less than the cost of the forgery), not that a ring of terrorists can enter the country.
Navigo’s ID cards are not hospitable, but allowing passengers to ride with any valid state-issued ID would be. Visitors either came in from another country and therefore have passports, drove in and therefore have drivers’ licenses, or flew in domestically and therefore still have ID cards. Traveling between cities without ID is still possible here and in other free European countries, but everyone has national ID cards anyway; the ID problem is mainly in the US with its low passport penetration (and secondarily Canada and Australia), and the US has no intercity public transit network to speak of outside the Northeast Corridor.
What this means is that the best way to prevent duplication of transit passes is to require ID cards. Any ID card must be acceptable, including a passport (best option), a national ID card (second best), or an American driver’s license (worst).
Getting rid of the faregates
There are approximately three first-world Western cities that have any business having faregates on their urban rail networks: London, Paris, New York. Even there, I am skeptical that the faregates are truly necessary. The Metro’s crowd control during the World Cup victory celebration was not great. New York’s faregates sometimes cause backups to the point that passengers just push the emergency doors open to exit, and then rely on an informal honor system so that passengers don’t use the open emergency doors to sneak in without payment.
Evidently, the Munich S-Bahn funnels all traffic through a single two-track city center tunnel and has 840,000 weekday users, without faregates. Only one or two trunk lines are busier in Paris, the RER A with about a million, and possibly the RER B and D if one considers them part of the same trunk (they share a tunnel but no platforms); in London, only the Central, Victoria, and Jubilee lines are busier, none by very much; in New York, none of the two-track trunks is as busy. Only the overcrowded lines in Tokyo (and a handful in Osaka, Beijing, and Shanghai) are clearly so busy that barrier-free proof-of-payment fare enforcement is infeasible.
The main reason not to use faregates is that they are maintenance-intensive and interfere with free passenger flow. But they also require passengers to insert fare media, such as a paper ticket or a contactless card, at every station. With contactless cards the system goes well beyond exact numbers of users by station, which can be obtained with good accuracy even on barrier-free systems like Transilien using occasional counts, and can track individual users’ movements. This is especially bad on systems that do not have flat fares (because then passengers tag on and off) and on systems that involve transferring with buses or regional trains and not just the subway (because then passengers have to tag on and off at the transfer points too).
Best industry practice here is then barrier-free systems. To discourage fare evasion, the agency should set up regular inspections (on moving vehicles, with unarmed civilian inspectors), but at the same time incentivize season passes. Season passes are also good for individual privacy, since all the system registers is that the passenger loaded up a monthly pass at a certain point, but beyond that can’t track where the passenger goes. All cities that have faregates except for the largest few should get rid of them and institute POP, no matter the politics.
Tickets and ID cards
In theory, the ID card can literally be the ticket. The system can store in a central database that Alon Levy, passport number [redacted], loaded a monthly pass valid for all of Ile-de-France on 2018-08-16, and the inspector can verify it by swiping my machine-readable passport. But in practice, this requires making sure the ticket machine or validator can instantly communicate this to all roving fare inspectors.
An alternative approach is to combine paper tickets with ID cards. The paper ticket would just say “I am Alon Levy, passport number [redacted], and I have a pass valid for all of Ile-de-France until 2018-09-14,” digitally signed with the code of the machine where I validated the ticket. This machine could even be a home printer, via online purchase, or a QR code displayed on a phone. Designing such a system to be cryptographically secure is easy; the real problem is preventing duplication, which is where the ID card comes into play. Without an ID card, it’s still possible to prevent duplication, but only via a cumbersome system requiring the passenger to validate the ticket again on every vehicle (perhaps even every rail car) when getting on or off.
The same system could handle stored value. However, without printing a new ticket every time a passenger validates, which would be cumbersome, it would have to fall back on communication between the validator and the handheld readers used by the inspectors. But fortunately, such communication need not be instant. Since passengers prepay with stored value, the ticket itself, saying “I am Alon Levy, passport number [redacted], and I loaded 10 trips,” is already valid, and the only communication required is when passengers run out of money; moreover, single-use tickets have a validity period of 1-2 hours, so any validator-to-inspector communication lag time of less than the validity period will be enough to ensure not to validate expired tickets. The same system can also be used to have a daily cap as in Oyster, peak surcharges, and even generally-undesirable station-to-station rather than zonal fares.
It’s even possible to design a system without single-use tickets at all. Zurich comes close, in that a 24-hour pass costs twice as much as a single-use ticket (valid for just an hour), so passengers never have any reason to get a single-use ticket. In this system there would not be any stored value, just passes for a day or more, valid in prescribed zones, with printable tickets if regular riders in one zone occasionally travel elsewhere.
The upshot here is that advanced technology is only required for printing and reading QR codes. The machines do not need to be any more complicated than ATMs or Bitcoin ATMs (insert money, receive a Bitcoin slip of paper); I don’t know how much Bitcoin ATMs cost, but regular ATMs are typically $2,000-3,000, and the most expensive are $8,000, unlike the $75,000 ticket machines used at New York SBS stations. The moving parts are software and not hardware, and can use multi-vendor cryptographic protocols. In effect, the difficult part of verifying that there is no duplication or forgery is offloaded to the state ID system.
Why Are Canadian Construction Costs So High?
When I lived in Vancouver, I was enthusiastic about SkyTrain, which combined high service levels with relatively low construction costs. At the time, the budget for the 12-kilometer Broadway subway from VCC-Clark to UBC was $3 billion (all figures are in Canadian dollars, so subtract 20% for US PPP equivalents). The cost per km was average for a non-English-speaking country, and very low for an English-speaking one, and the corridor has high population and job density. With a ridership projection of 350,000, it was by a large margin North America’s most cost-effective rail extension.
Since then, costs have sharply risen. TransLink lost its referendum and had to scramble for funding, which it got from the new Trudeau administration – but the money was only sufficient to build half the line, between VCC-Clark and Arbutus. With the latest cost overrun, the budget is now $2.83 billion for 5.6 km: C$500 million per kilometer. This is barely below average for a North American subway, and very high for a Continental European one. I tried reaching out to TransLink before the overrun was announced, trying to understand how it was building subways for less money than the rest of North America, but while the agency knew who I am and what I was querying, it didn’t respond; now I know why.
Outside Vancouver, costs are high as well. In Toronto, there are several subway projects recently built or proposed, all expensive.
The least expensive is the Vaughan extension of the Yonge-University-Spadina Line. It opened last year, after a two-year delay, at the cost of $3.2 billion for 8.6 km, or C$370 million per kilometer. Andy Byford, then the chair of the Toronto Transit Commission, now New York City Transit chief, was credited with limiting the cost overruns after problems began. The line is an outward extension into low-density suburbia, and construction has no reason to be difficult. The source also cites the expected ridership: 24 million per year by 2020, or about 80,000 per weekday, for a total of $40,000 per rider, a high though not outrageous figure.
More expensive is the Scarborough subway. Toronto has an above-ground rapid transit line connecting Scarborough with Kennedy on the Bloor-Danforth Line, using the same technology as SkyTrain but with a driver. But unlike Vancouver, Toronto is unhappy with the technology and has wanted to replace the entire line. Originally the plan was to replace it with light rail, but subsequently the plans have changed to a subway. The current plan is to build a 6.4-km nonstop extension of the Bloor-Danforth Line, which would cost $3.35 billion, or C$520 million per kilometer. While this is still slightly below average by American standards, the dominant factor for construction costs in New York is the stations, which means a long subway tunnel with just one new station should be cheap. At the per-item costs of Paris, the line should cost US$1.07 billion, or about C$1.35 billion. At those of Second Avenue Subway, it should cost US$3.3 billion, or about C$4.1 billion. In other words, Toronto is building a subway for almost the same costs as New York, taking station spacing into account, through much lower-density areas than the Upper East Side.
Finally, Toronto has long-term plans for a Downtown Relief Line, providing service to the CBD without using the Yonge-University-Spadina Line. The estimated cost in 2016 dollars is $4-4.4 billion (source, PDF-p. 31), but this assumes faster-than-inflation cost escalation already, and adjusted only for inflation this is higher, about $5-5.5 billion. Per PDF-p. 15 the line would have 6.25-6.7 km of tunnel, for a total cost of about C$800 million per kilometer. The DRL is planned to go under older subways and serve Downtown Toronto, contributing to its higher cost, but the stations are to be constructed cut-and-cover. Despite using cheap construction methods, Toronto is thus about to build an extremely expensive subway.
While I’ve drawn a distinction between costs in English- and non-English-speaking countries, or between common and civil law countries Montreal’s costs are solidly common law Anglophone even though Quebec is Francophone and uses civil law. A 5.8 km extension of the Blue Line is budgeted at $3.9 billion, a total of C$670 million per kilometer. The Blue Line is circumferential, and the extension would extend it further out, but the residential areas served are fairly dense, around 10,000 people per square kilometer on adjacent census tracts.
The last case is Ottawa, where costs are less clear. Ottawa is replacing its BRT line with light rail, which includes a short city center tunnel, called the Confederation Line. The cost is $2.1 billion and the length of the line is 12.5 km, of which 2.5 is in tunnel and the rest is on the surface. The overall project is more expensive, at $3.6 billion, but that includes related works on other lines. I don’t know the portion of the Confederation Line’s cost that’s attributed to the tunnel, so any estimate for tunneling cost has to rely on estimates for the underground premium over surface transit. In Vancouver the original estimate for Broadway rail had a 2.5:1 premium, which would make the cost of the tunnel $320 million per km; however, a more common premium is 6:1, which would raise the cost of the tunnel to $500 million per km.
I don’t know why Canada is so expensive; I’m less familiar with the details of its subway extensions than I am with those of either the US or the UK. The fact that Toronto manages to have very high construction costs even while using cheap methods (cut-and-cover stations, or long nonstop segments) is worrying, since it casts doubt on the ability of high-cost cities to rein in expenses by using cut-and-cover stations rather than mining.
Moreover, the social reasons leading to degradation of civil service in the US are less relevant to Canada. There is less hyperlocal empowerment than in the US and stronger provinces relative to both the federal government and municipalities. Anecdotally I have also found Canadians less geographically solipsistic than Americans. If I had to guess I would say that Canadians look to the US as a best practices model, just as Americans in various cities do to other American (and sometimes Canadian) cities, and if they look at foreign models they look at the UK. Montreal used Paris as a model when it first built its Metro, but more recently its ideas about using France as a model have devolved into no-bid contracts.
Gentrifier Stereotypes
The American discourse about gentrification is full of stereotypes that the participants don’t recognize as such. For example, a widely-shared Buzzfeed article created an entire theory out of a single busybody who was responsible for half of the police complaints on their West Harlem block. The main check on stereotypes – “that’s racist” – only works when the stereotypes resemble the forms of racism society is most familiar with. The history of white racism against black people in the US is so different that it colors what Americans perceive as racial stereotypes and what they don’t. So as public service, I’d like to give some examples to draw commonalities between stereotypes in other cities I’ve lived in (Tel Aviv, Vancouver, Paris) and familiar anti-gentrification rhetoric.
Tel Aviv
Last decade, there was an influx of black refugees into working-class areas of South Tel Aviv, centered on Levinsky Park. The area is underpriced relative to its job access, courtesy of Central Bus Station, a failed urban renewal project that attracted crime; already in the 1990s it was nicknamed Central Stench (tsaḥana merkazit; Central Station is taḥana merkazit) and lampooned in a popular comic as a literal gateway to hell. The neighborhood’s response was violent, and the discourse within Israel is divided into people who wish the refugees imprisoned and deported from the country and people who wish them forcibly dispersed around the country.
Other parts of South Tel Aviv have been gentrifying since the 1990s, centered on Florentin. South Tel Aviv’s right-wing Jewish working class began connecting the two trends. A few years ago I saw a widely-shared Facebook post claiming that the influx of black refugees is deliberately engineered by developers as a ploy to gentrify the neighborhood. The theory, as I recall, is that black people are so odious that developers are using them to engineer white flight, after which they’ll evict the refugees, demolish the neighborhood’s mid-rise housing stock, and erect luxury towers.
Vancouver
In the last decade or so Vancouver has seen rising rents and even faster-rising housing prices, and the region’s white population is blaming Chinese people. In 2016, British Columbia passed a 15% tax on residential buyers who are not Canadian citizens or permanent residents; the tax was phrased neutrally, but the target was predominantly Chinese, and 21% of correspondence from citizens to the government on the issue was explicitly Sinophobic. In a city with rapid immigration, it should not be a surprise that new buyers tend to be immigrants, often on work or investor visas, but the region has a moral panic about Chinese people buying condos and houses as investments and leaving them empty.
The specific stereotypes of Chinese people in Vancouver vary. When I lived in Vancouver I encountered some light generic stereotyping (“people in Richmond are aggressive drivers”), but nothing connoting poverty, even though Richmond is poorer than Surrey, which some people I met compared with Camden, New Jersey. The language I see in the media concerning housing goes the other way: Chinese immigrants are stereotyped as oligarchs laundering ill-begotten wealth.
Paris
Like people in every other highly-toured region, Parisians hate the tourists. Seeing small declines in city population over the 2009-14 period, city electeds decided to blame Airbnb, and not, say, low housing construction rates (raising rents), a falling birth rate, or commercialization in city center. The mayor of the 1st arrondissement, Jean-Francois Legaret, called Airbnb “a true catastrophe for Central Paris.” The 1st arrondissement has high residential incomes; the lower-income parts of the city are the 10th, 11th, 13th, 18th, 19th, and 20th.
Rich and poor stereotypes
An ethnic or national group can stereotype another group as rich, poor, or both. White stereotypes of black people in the US and Europe are, within each ethnic group, associated with poverty: crime, aggressive physicality, laziness, indifference to education, proclivity for certain kinds of music and sport. Anti-Semitism today invokes stereotypes of the rich: greed, political subversion, disloyalty to the nation, corruption, success with money. Islamophobic stereotypes tend toward stereotypes of poverty, but are sometimes also bundled with stereotypes of Gulf money. In the last few decades Sinophobic stereotypes transitioned from ones of poverty (treating the Chinese as a faceless horde) to ones of wealth, similar to anti-Semitic stereotypes, to the point that people in Vancouver forget Richmond’s low incomes and people in New York forget the high poverty rates of Asian-New Yorkers and the overcrowding in Chinatown.
But as in the case of South Tel Aviv, the stereotypes can merge. The racists in South Tel Aviv blend two groups they hate – middle-class leftists and poor non-Jews – into one mass, blaming them for a trend that is usually blamed on the rich and the middle class. Historically, anti-Semitism was fully blended: the Jew was simultaneously poor and rich, wretched and exploitative, communist and capitalist, overly studious and overly physical. This blending of stereotypes was overt in Nazi propaganda, but also in the softer anti-Semitism directed against immigrants to the US.
The urban as a foreigner
Nationalists and populists stereotype cities like prewar anti-Semites stereotype Jews. The urban poor are lazy criminals, the rural poor are honest workers; the urban rich are exploitative capitalists sucking life out of the country, the rural rich are successful small business leaders; the urban middle class are bo-bo globalists, the rural middle class is the very definition of normality. This mentality is hard to miss in anti-urbanist writers like Joel Kotkin, and more recently in articles trying to portray an opposition between the Real Country (in the US but also in Israel and France) and the Urban Elites.
The definition of what is rural and what is urban is fractal. In the South, Long Island is part of New York; on Long Island, Long Island is Real America, distinct from the city that Long Island’s residents fled in the 1950s and 60s. Within cities the Real Country vs. Urban Elite opposition can involve the outer city vs. the inner city, as in Toronto, where Rob Ford won the mayoral election by appealing to outer-urban resentment of David Miller’s attempt to redistribute street space from cars to public transit. But it is in many cases demographic rather than geographic: the newcomer is the new rootless cosmopolitan.
In this mentality, the newcomer can be a rich gentrifier displacing honest salt-of-the-earth third-generation residents by paying higher rents or a refugee doing the same through living multiple people to a bedroom (or even both, in the case of some San Francisco programmers). In either case, the newcomer is a foreigner who doesn’t belong to the city’s culture and does not deserve the same access to city resources. People who build housing for this foreigner are inherently suspect, as are businesses that cater to the foreigner’s tastes. The demands – removal of access to housing – are the same regardless of whether the foreigners so stereotyped are poor or rich, and the stereotypes of wealth and poverty mix easily. That anti-gentrification activism looks so similar regardless of which social class it targets suggests that ultimately, any argument made is an excuse justifying not liking outsiders very much.
Anti-Infill on Surface Transit
I wrote about infill stops on commuter rail two weeks ago, and said I cannot think of any example of anti-infill on that mode. But looking at Muni Metro reminded me that there is need for anti-infill on surface transit. This is called stop consolidation normally, and I only use the term anti-infill to contrast with the strategy of adding more stops on commuter trains.
The root of the problem is that in North America, transit agencies have standardized on 200-250 meters as the typical spacing between bus stops. In Europe, Australasia, and East Asia, the standard is instead 400-500 meters. Even without off-board fare collection, the difference in speed is noticeable. In Vancouver, the difference between the local 4 and the express 84 is substantial: on the shared segment between Burrard and Tolmie, a distance of 4.8 km, the 84 makes 5 stops and takes 10 minutes, the 4 makes 18 stops and takes 16 minutes. A bus with the normal first-world stop spacing would make 10-12 stops and take, linearly, 12-13 minutes. 23 km/h versus 18 km/h.
With off-board fare collection, the impact of stop spacing on speed grows. The reason is that a bus’s stop penalty consists of the time taken to stop and open its doors, plus the time it takes each passenger to board. The former time is independent of the fare collection method but depends on stop spacing. The latter time is the exact opposite: if the stop spacing widens, then there are more passengers per bus stop, and unless the change in stop spacing triggers changes in ridership, overall passenger boarding and alighting time remains the same. Another way to think about it is that judging by Vancouver data, there appears to be a 30-second stop penalty, independent of ridership. Off-board fare collection increases bus speed, so the 30-second stop penalty becomes more important relative to overall travel time; the same is true of other treatments that increase bus speed, such as dedicated lanes and signal priority.
In New York, there aren’t a lot of places with local and limited-stop buses side by side in which the limited-stop bus has on-board fare collection. One such example is the M4, meandering from Washington Heights down the 5th/Madison one-way-pair, over 15.3 km. At rush hour, the local takes 1:45, the limited-stop takes 1:30: 9 vs. 10 km/h. But the limited-stop bus runs local for 6 km, and over the other 9.3 km it skips 26 local stops if I’ve counted right. The B41 has a limited-stop version over 8.3 km (the rest is local), skipping about 17 stops; the time difference is 10 minutes.
One possible explanation for why the stop penalty in New York seems a little higher than in Vancouver is that the M4 and B41 routes are busier than the 4/84 in Vancouver, so every stop has at least one passenger, whereas the 4 in Vancouver often skips a few stops if there are no passengers waiting. Conversely, the higher passenger traffic on buses in New York comes from higher density and more traffic in general, which slows down the buses independently of stopping distance.
On subways, there’s reason to have more densely-spaced stops in denser areas, chief of which is the CBD. On surface transit, it’s less relevant. The reason is that absolute density doesn’t matter for stop spacing, except when expected ridership at once station is so high it would stress the egress points. What really matters is relative density. Putting more stops in an area means slowing down everyone riding through it in order to offer shorter station access times to people within it. On surface transit, relative density gradients aren’t likely to lead to variations in stop spacing, for the following reasons:
- Historically, surface transit stop spacing was always shorter than rapid transit stop spacing because of its lower top speed and the faster braking capabilities of horses vs. steam trains; often people could get off at any street corner they chose. So it induced linear development, of roughly constant density along the corridor, rather than clusters of high density near stations.
- If there is considerable variation in density along a surface transit line, then either density is medium with a few pockets of high density, which would probably make the line a good candidate for a subway, or density is low with a few pockets of higher density, and the bus would probably skip a lot of the low-density stops anyway.
Most importantly, the 400-meter standard is almost Pareto-faster than the 200-meter standard. In the worst case, it adds about 4 minutes of combined walking time at both the start and the end of the trip, for an able-bodied, healthy person not carrying obscene amounts of luggage. The breakeven time on 4 minutes is 8 skipped stops, so 3.2 km compared with the 200-meter standard. Bus trips tend to be longer than this, except in a few edge cases. In New York the average unlinked bus trip is 3.4 km (compare boardings and passenger-km on the NTD), but many trips involve a transfer to another bus or the subway, probably half judging by fare revenue, and transfer stations would never be deleted. If the destination is a subway station, guaranteed to have a stop, then the breakeven distance is 1.6 km.
This also suggests that different routes may have different stop spacing. Very short routes should have shorter stop spacing, for example the 5 and 6 buses in Vancouver. Those routes compete with walking anyway. This may create a spurious relationship with density: the 5 and 6 buses serve the very dense West End, but the real reason to keep stop spacing on them short is that they are short routes, about 2 km each. Of course, West End density over a longer stretch would justify a subway, so in a way there’s a reason short optimal stop spacing correlates with high bus stop density.
The situation on subways is murkier. The stop penalty is slightly higher, maybe 45 seconds away from CBD stations with long dwell times. But the range of stop distances is such that more people lose out from having fewer stops. Paris has a Metro stop every 600 meters, give or take. Some of the busiest systems in countries that were never communist, such as Tokyo, Mexico City, and London, average 1.2 km; in former communist bloc countries, including Russia and China, the average is higher, 1.7 km in Moscow. The difference between 600 meters and 1.2 km is, in the worst case, another 1.2 km of walking, about 12 minutes; breakeven is 16 deleted stops, or 20 km, on the long side for subway commutes.
One mitigating factor is that subway-oriented development clusters more, so the worst case is less likely to be realized, especially since stops are usually closer together in the CBD. But on the other hand, at 1.2 km between stations it’s easy for transfers to be awkward or for lines to cross without a transfer. London and Tokyo both have many locations where this happens, if not so many as New York; Mexico City doesn’t (it’s the biggest subway network in which every pair of intersecting lines has a transfer), but it has a less dense network in its center. Paris only has three such intersections, two of them involving the express Metro Line 14. Even when transfers do exist, they may be awkward in ways they wouldn’t have been if stop spacing had been closer (then again, Paris is notorious for long transfers at Chatelet and Montparnasse).
In all discussions of subway stop spacing, New York is sui generis since the lines have four tracks. On paper its subway lines stop every 600-700 meters when not crossing water, but many trains run express and stop every 2 km or even more. Average speed is almost the same as in Tokyo and London, which have very little express service, and it used to be on a par until recent subway slowdowns. This distinction, between longer stop spacing and shorter stop spacing with express runs, also ports to buses. Buses outside the US and Canada stop every 400-500 meters and have no need for limited-stop runs – they really split the difference between local and limited buses in North America.
On a subway, the main advantage of the international system over the New York system is obvious: only two tracks are required rather than four, reducing construction costs. On a bus line, the advantages are really the same, provided the city gives the buses enough space. A physically separated bus lane cannot easily accommodate buses of different speeds. In New York, this is the excuse I’ve heard in comments for why the bus lanes are only painted, not physically separated as in Paris. Mixing buses of different speeds also makes it hard to give buses signal priority: it is easy for buses to conflict, since the same intersection might see two buses spaced a minute apart.
Buses also benefit from having a single speed class because of the importance of frequency. In Vancouver, the off-peak weekday frequency on 4th Avenue is an 84 rapid bus every 12 minutes, a 44 rapid bus every 20 minutes, and a local 4 every 15 minutes. The 84 keeps going on 4th Avenue whereas the 4 and 44 divert to Downtown, but the 4 and 44 could still be consolidated into a bus coming every 10 minutes. If there were enough savings to boost the 84 to 10 minutes the three routes could vaguely be scheduled to come every 5 minutes on the common section, but without dedicated lanes it’s probably impossible to run a scheduled service at that frequency (pure headway management and branching don’t mix).
The example of 4th Avenue gets back to my original impetus for this post, Muni Metro. Only diesel buses can really run in regular surface mode mixing different speed classes. Trolleys can’t. Vancouver runs trolleys on the local routes and diesels on the limited routes. At UBC, it has different bus loops for diesels and trolleys, so people leaving campus have to choose which type of bus to take – they can’t stand at one stop and take whatever comes first.
On rail, this is of course completely impossible. As a result, American subway-surface trolleys – the Boston Green Line, SEPTA’s Subway-Surface Lines, and Muni Metro – all run at glacial speed on the surface, even when they have dedicated lanes as in Boston. In Boston there has been some effort toward stop consolidation on the Green Line’s busiest branch, the B, serving Boston University. This is bundled with accessibility – it costs money to make a trolley stop wheelchair-accessible and it’s cheaper to have fewer stops. Muni Metro instead makes one stop every 3-5 accessible (on paper), but keeps stopping at all the other stops. It would be better to just prune the surface stops down to one every 400-500 meters, which should be accessible.
If you view rail as inherently better than bus, which I do, then it fits into the general framework: anti-infill on surface transit has the highest impact on the routes with the best service quality. Higher speed makes the speed gain of stop consolidation more important relative to travel time; trolleywire makes it impossible to compensate for the low speed of routes with 200-meter interstations by running limited-stop service. Even on local buses, there is never a reason for such short stop spacing, and it’s important for North American cities to adopt best industry practice on this issue. But it’s the most important on the highest-end routes, where the gains are especially large.
Pedestrian Observations 