#jarrett walker

Graphics from transit consultant Jarrett Walker, about the basics of transit planning.

The more places you can reach within a set period of time, the freer you are to do things you want, find jobs you like, and live your best life.

At the boundaries of where you can go comfortably by walking, transit extends them to put even more places within reach.

If there aren’t a lot of places near you, and you have to travel very far to do things, effectively the “wall” around your life is a lot smaller.

Elon Musk’s apparent distaste for public transit and random strangers prompted a Twitter battle last week. Though for the record, Musk later clarified that he loves trains, most subways and London buses.

Transit planner Jarrett Walker retorted that Elon’s views are the “essence of elite projection”. What’s good for Elon Musk may not, in fact, be good for the broader society. Elon responded by calling him an idiot.

All of this prompted Brent Toderian -- city planner and former chief planner of Vancouver -- to initiate the hashtag: #GreatThingsThatHappenedOnTransit. It then took off and the transit stories started pouring in.

Not surprisingly, this has been getting a lot of attention. It’s Elon Musk after all. But billionaire celebrities aside, it does serve as a good example of the two sides of this debate.

Some people seem to think that I am anti-car. I can see why some people might think that, but I am not anti-car. I love nice cars. And I love nice trains. What I value first and foremost is the city. 

The kind of city you can build on the backbone of transit is very different than the kind of city that gets built around the car. And as a rule of thumb, I prefer the former over the latter.

But this is not to say that the public transit model is perfect. It’s far from perfect for many reasons. And it can get even more imperfect when we don’t pair it with the right land use policies.

Deploying heavy rail through low density areas -- that are by design inhospitable to car-less humans -- will not magically flip the modal split. Public transport alone cannot solve that problem.

At the same time, if you’re a regular reader of this blog you’ll know that I am enamoured by the possibilities of autonomous electric vehicles. I am not assuming that the “car” of tomorrow will look and perform anything like the car of today.

Renown transit planner Jarrett Walker writing on a common point of contention in planning. Do you increase service in the core, or expand service along the edges. The story goes like this:

Edge: “The core area has so much transit, and we have little or nothing, but we pay taxes too, so why does so much of the money go to the core? Also, we’re trying to build denser development in more transit-oriented ways, to start moving beyond car-dependence, but how can we do that without good transit? We’re desperate out here!”

Core: “It’s great that you want to be denser, but we’re already very dense. That means a much bigger share of our residents need or want transit, and our ability to grow and thrive depends on it. Car-dependence just isn’t an option at our density, so if transit doesn’t work, our city doesn’t work. We’re desperate in here!”

Both are reasonable points of view, but they are not mutually exclusive.

Outward expansion isn’t a bad thing. Transit oriented development around stations will help tackle the housing crisis, but it means adding even more riders and trains being funneled into already congested downtown subways. The edge and core are part of an interconnected network.

You cannot think about it the way you think about libraries or fire stations, where putting one in a certain place mainly benefits the people there, because the whole network affects everyone’s ability to get everywhere. So when folks argue that the another part of the network should be weaker so that theirs can be stronger, they’re actually undermining their own transit service.

In North America, the edge tends to have the votes to win edge-core debates, so it’s not surprising that many North American transit networks are weak at the core. When you look at North American rapid transit systems, you often notice pieces missing in the middle.

Jarrett Walker: Why We Should Stop Talking About 'Bus Stigma' - Commute - The Atlantic Cities

I found myself thinking many of the things Walker describes here when I was reading a TCRP paper on public participation that talked about "traditional transit riders" and "choice riders". To me, the framing of traditional really felt like they were saying, "those people who are transit dependent, therefore we can give them any level of service and they'll put up with it because that's all they've got" and I found that framing extremely problematic.