01 June, 2011

Buses, Trains, and Personal Mobility: A Lecture by Jarrett Walker

Madison is no stranger to debates about buses and rail. But as the Dane Transit Coalition chair Fred Bartol noted last night, those debates are a thing of the past. With the collapse of the economy and an anti-public transit right-winger regnant in the Governor's Mansion, Madison now finds itself engaged in a much narrower discussion: how to maintain bus service in the face of scarcer resources.

Bartol's remarks were part of his introduction to a talk last night by Jarrett Walker, a public transit planning consultant and proprietor of the Human Transit blog. Walker is in Madison to attend the annual conference of the Congress for the New Urbanism and he gave a lecture last night that was open to the public entitled "Beyond Bus vs. Rail Debates: Techniques for Clarifying Public Transit Decisions".

Walker started by noting that conversations about any given public transit project are frustrating because of polarization, people talking past one another, and the big picture being overwhelmed by details. By the time communities have to shit or get off the pot, the conversation is often overrun by people essentially talking out of their asses, ignorant of the all the issues at play. His goal was to help communities "create spaces for conversation and understanding before getting to big decisions".

The opening section of his talk was entitled "A (Short) Field Guide to Transit Quarrels" which began with ways of sorting out the pandemonium that results when everyone and their mother pretends to be a transit expert. People should ask themselves what they know to be true and what kind of truth is it. He presented a Spectrum of Authority with geometry/math on one end being the most certain and most widely applicable through time and people's feelings on the other, they being the most ephemeral and most potent. In between were physics, biology, psychology, and culture.

The idea here was for transit planning to strike a balance between the purely practical on one end and the dream or vision desired on the other. Doing so was the best way to maximize what Walker thought to be the heart of public transit, a notion he called "Personal Mobility" which can be defined as the freedom to move beyond walking range without a personal vehicle. It's about going where you want to go, when you want and at a reasonable speed & cost with the ability to change your plans spontaneously. Walker lamented that Personal Mobility was ignored by many transit experts who look at other elements of public transit such as economic development along rail corridors.

In addition to his idea of Personal Mobility, Walker trumpeted the Transit Time Map up at walkscore.com. While only in beta, he thought that it could become a great tool for helping people visualize mobility. It's a map that shows where in a metro area you can get to within 45 minutes using public transportation. You can modify your starting point and select at what time of day your trip would begin. Throughout the lecture, Walker emphasized viewing and promoting transit to the individual. "What can transit do for me?" I noticed how he referred to "libertarians" frequently. This wasn't about members of a political party but a catch-all word to describe not only extreme individualists but the strain of individualism that runs through American society generally. Although he is pro-urban, his work is more ecumenical and involves addressing the needs of people in cities as well as those in suburbs. Pro-transit people need to sell their ideas in a way that appeals to selfishness. (You can see this attitude at play in a quote from Nancy Mistele in an article today up the The Cap Times: "New Urbanism is just another euphemism for telling people where and how they should live. It’s about socially engineered housing choices.")

This was probably the biggest piece of advice Walker had to offer. The gentleman sitting in front of me asked a question which was similar to the one I was going to ask. Basically he complained that the preferences of suburbanites dominate those of city dwellers. By way of example, he noted that people in wheelchairs don't generally live in low density areas so their needs tend to get short-changed in transit debates.

Walker was sympathetic to the man's view but he said that he didn't know of any region where transit arguments were won by appealing to fairness and avoiding an appeal to selfish elements. To me, this should be a huge lesson for Madison area transit advocates. Pointing out that disabled people can't drive or that many poor people don't have cars and need to get around will not win any points unless it is accompanied by explicit appeals to selfishness. Next, Walker pointed to the ultimate selfish appeal – to the wallet. He said that, in the end, fuel prices will win the argument. I was surprised that this wasn't brought up sooner. The final part of his answer here is also another lesson for Madison. "Core cities have to do things for themselves." This harkened back to an answer to a previous question about RTAs. In addressing how to address sprawl, Walker admitted to some nervousness about the idea that RTAs are the way to deal with it. By default, communities that care the least dominate.

He made these remarks and then gave Minneapolis as an example of a city that stood up for itself but I am not a big enough transit geek to know the context. I guess I'll have to email Walker.

This reminded me of a conversation I overheard before the lecture began. Two gentlemen were chatting and one said that he'd applied for a position on some kind of regional planning board – not sure which one as the acronym was unfamiliar – but that he was rejected despite his qualifications and experience. He put it down to representatives of communities surrounding Madison not wanting to bring a pro-transit person aboard.

Walker ended his talk by listing some categories to help people sort the differences between rail and bus. He pointed out that frequency, span, and exclusive vs. mixed right of way were the essence of personal mobility while capacity was the "mother of all" for building rail. Speaking from a selfish perspective, I have to say that Madison Metro often lacks in frequency and span with the former probably being my biggest pet peeve. Unfortunately, Metro tends to run buses every 30-60 minutes outside of rush hour.

Getting away from my selfishness, I'll end with a couple quotes of Walker's which illustrate the need to think differently and more clearly about transit issues. I wrote these down in my notebook without context. The first is "We rely on the way rail symbolizes mobility" and the second goes "Are ridership projections at the core of the city we want?"

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