Human Transit

For people here who are interested in transit, I highly recommend Jarrett Walker's book "Human Transit". He really focuses the conversation around a few ideas that almost everyone can agree on (and uses them to focus & have productive conversations in transit agencies) https://humantransit.org/ Last night I watched his talk "Transit Truths" - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k5AHJA2-lAc - which also summarizes the ideas in his book well.

This article is very broad and (probably because of this) doesnt really go in depth on many issues. If anyone is seriously interested in transportation, I highly reccommend the excellent blog http://www.humantransit.org/ I do take some issue with the title of this article however. Whilst agreeing with the general sentiment of the article (US cities need to generally focus on more accessible development), cars dont 'kill' cities. Cities couldn't survive without cars (and trucks) - this is important. Cars kill pedestrianisation, but this is a different story - only small parts of our cities (even European cities) are (and have to be) attractive and enjoyable for pedestrians....

No city simulation game properly models the real cost of parking and car-centric infrastructure: https://humantransit.org/2013/05/how-sim-city-greenwashes-parking.html >Now with kids, I understand why "Americans love their cars" In other words: I was okay with demanding change when it didn't inconvenience me, but now that I get to benefit from economic policy that heavily subsidize my lifestyle I rather keep the status quo.

One of my favorite counter-intuitive things about mass transit is that well-designed transfers tend to reduce overall travel time for everyone, even without timed transfers: https://humantransit.org/2009/04/why-transferring-is-good-for-you-and-…

Here is an interesting article about this subject, suggesting a 400m-rule for walking distance to the next stop: https://humantransit.org/2010/11/san-francisco-a-rational-stop-spacing… The city of Zurich, Switzerland recommends a tram stop every 300m-600m: https://www.stadt-zuerich.ch/content/dam/stzh/vbz/Deutsch/Ueber%20das%… (page 19)

The Toronto line failed because it basically only catered to rich business travelers. By only having two stops — downtown and airport — it significantly constrained its TAM just to shave a few minutes off of its travel time. There is a great write up of why it failed here: http://humantransit.org/2016/03/keys-to-great-airport-transit.html

Jarrett Walker, the writer of that blog post, makes actually the same point in another post. In public transit there is a trade-off between maximizing ridership by focusing on great service on a limited number of lines, or maximizing social service by multiplying lines that go everywhere but do not offer convenient service for commuters. Walker has long been an advocate of making that trade-off apparent so taxpayers know what they're getting, and of re-balancing networks in favor of maximizing ridership. It means fewer lines, serving dense parts of cities, and running frequently. Edit: the ridership/coverage tradeoff http://humantransit.org/basics/the-transit-ridership-recipe#ridershipc…

Jarrett Walker has a great rant on this topic: http://humantransit.org/2016/05/the-chinese-straddle-bus-is-back.html "…If your starting point for urban design is that single-occupant cars, despite their extreme inefficiency in using scarce urban space, should be allowed to go anywhere at all, and that the surface plane should be designed solely for their convenience to the exclusion of all other citizens and needs, then this technology makes sense. Remember, the primary cost of transit infrastructure is the cost of keeping transit out of the way of motorists, on the assumption that motorists have the prior claim to absolutely every bit of public space in our cities."

Those are called pulse points. There's some great background here: http://www.humantransit.org/2010/12/basics-finding-your-pulse.html Today, planners use some scary excel sheets to try to figure this out. They are scary enough that most don't. Definitely on our list of things to tackle.

Human Transit had a great guest post on transit Lusaka, Zambia: http://www.humantransit.org/2013/08/guest-post-on-lusaka-transportatio…

Additional excellent analysis by transit planner Jarrett Walker: http://www.humantransit.org/2014/10/access-across-america.html

As the transit planner Jarrett Walker regularly reminds readers on his blog[1] and book of the same name, the real things that make a mass transit project effective are not about the particular technology being used to do the moving. The geometry of the network, its connections, and its schedule of service are what actually make it usable. [1] http://www.humantransit.org

Nice blog post (though more transit-vs-bikes oriented)discussing this here : http://www.humantransit.org/2011/10/lamentation-bicycles-vs-transit.ht… Arguments don't differ very much from what follows your comment...

It would be much more efficient to legalize apartments in LA than to run high speed trains to bedroom communities. Digging tunnels would blow out the cost by itself. Dropping infinite resources into stretching commutes across vast distances is not realistic. Taken to its logical extreme everyone should commute by private jet. The larger the transportion network, the more it costs, or at the same cost the less convenient it becomes because intervals between vehicles increases. The most efficient form of transportation is avoiding the trip in the first place through telecommuting. Then walking or biking. Then mass transit which works best with areas with lots of riders (dense cities). https://humantransit.org/basics/the-transit-ridership-recipe. Think of train service like a pancake. For a given amount of batter you can make a normal pancake, or you can spread it thinly over a large area, or you could make a small and thick pancake. If you want great service over a huge area you must massively increase resource expenditure.

Cars are also tremendously space inefficient. The Tesla Model 3 is nearly as big (93.8 sq ft) as 3 Queen Size beds (33.3 sq ft). There is the classic set of pictures showing how much space is needed to transport 60 people by bus, by bike, and by car. https://humantransit.org/2012/09/the-photo-that-explains-almost-everyt… On my (pre-covid) morning commute to the office, most of the cars crawling along the highway had one person in them. The slowness is the result of people trying to merge into the highway, not "bad drivers". Another way to illustrate how much space cars take up is to look at suburban office parks. There will be a small building (usually 1 or 2 stories) surrounded and dwarfed by a parking lot. https://usa.streetsblog.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/6/2014/04/Picture… https://www.google.com/maps/place/Liberty+Lake,+WA/@47.6731508,-117.08…

I drive my personal car in Los Angeles rarely enough that I should probably sell it. Bicycling, subway, light rail, the occasional bus, and Lyft satisfy 90% of my "long distance" or "carrying lots of stuff" needs, and the remaining trips could be taken care of by Zipcar or rentals. At least as a person without children, the need for and experience of using a car is simply a matter of where I live and work (and for the weekends, where my friends live). When I lived in Pasadena, commuted to Irvine 3x a week, and didn't have a personal car, yes, life was miserable. When I lived in Venice Beach and drove downtown for work, the tedious, heavily trafficked freeway commute exhausted me by mid-week. Also, for what it's worth, greater Los Angeles has the highest average density of US urban areas by a pretty healthy margin. Yes, it's denser than the New York or San Francisco urbanized areas. And LA's decentralized commercial districts make it a prime candidate for an efficient, extensive public transit network [1]; there's just heaps of toxic cultural momentum to overcome in order to restore that former feature to our metropolis. [1]: http://humantransit.org/2010/03/los-angeles-the-transit-metropolis.htm…

Transit riders see mostly see full busses & trains because they're riding the heavy-ridership routes through dense neighborhoods. People driving in spread-out neighborhoods mostly see empty busses & trains because they see the busses mandated to serve sprawling neighborhoods to serve people who can't drive or to provide service to all of the transit system's tax base, even if those neighborhoods aren't built in such a way anyone would ride transit by choice. Here's a paper & a couple excellent blog articles on the topic: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0966692308000586 http://usa.streetsblog.org/2013/08/14/jarrett-walker-empty-buses-serve… http://www.humantransit.org/2009/12/yet-another-transit-isnt-green-bec… From the paper's abstract: "Public transport faces an increasingly intense conflict between patronage goals and coverage goals. Broadly speaking, patronage goals seek to maximize patronage of all types, while coverage goals lead to the provision of service despite low patronage – to achieve social inclusion objectives for example."

Beautiful pictures. They're even more impressive once you see the illusion. Even the fake greenery and curb and gutter seams are still hard to pick out even when you know they're there. And the lighting is excellent. But the look -- aside from car styling -- isn't a matter of charm and innocence. It's a way of life that has been outlawed in America. The mix of residential and commercial land use is illegal in almost all American communities, especially at the scale pictured. A few big cities still permit residential over commercial but whatever is left in most of America is grandfathered. If it's taken down, you can't rebuild it. In fact, my whole neighborhood is like that; if an earthquake hit, not one 1920s American railroad suburb bungalow on my block would meet zoning to be rebuilt. Also, almost none of those commercial establishments has parking in front and surrounding it. The minimum requirements in almost all of America is about double as much space for parking as for all building interior space. Floor area ratios and landscape buffers usually require even more space around parking lots because they're so ugly. Today, even the shots with parking wouldn't have nearly enough and almost all the commercial buildings would be illegal. I don't see any of the residential buildings with the 2-3 independent parking spots usually required, either. Most of them -- for the sake of charm -- don't have any off street parking. Also, driveways usually can't abut the property…

The creators SimCity itself were aware of the problems you mention. Ever notice how there's no parking lots? https://humantransit.org/2013/05/how-sim-city-greenwashes-parking.html

you made too many false assumptions if you came up with those routes. Experts have run real numbers including looking at what happens in the real world. https://humantransit.org/category/microtransit - (as I write this you need to scroll to the second article to find the useful rebuttal of your idea)

That's sort of the popular wisdom, but rails don't guarantee it will be there for the long run. DC recently announced that they're replacing their light rail with buses: https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2025/05/27/steetcar-replaced-b… Jarrett Walker has a good piece about it: https://humantransit.org/2025/05/what-was-wrong-with-the-washington-dc… I agree with him that in order to endure and justify a permanent operating subsidy a transit service needs to be useful and used by many people. Most American light rail doesn't meet that bar.

Flocking may well be an improvement over the status quo, but it fundamentally can’t be nearly as efficient as busses due to simple geometry: cars physically take up a space. https://humantransit.org/2012/09/the-photo-that-explains-almost-everyt…

Bus coverage isn’t the only metric that matters. Frequency is also terrible. It is entirely a symptom of investment. Bus ridership was found to decline in large part because the actual amount of service hours had declined as well. https://humantransit.org/2015/06/pity-the-poor-city-bus-writes-jacob-a… Canada has significantly higher bus ridership than the US despite having pretty similar urban forms and it is entirely due to the difference in services provided. Seattle has seen noticeable increases in bus service hours and ridership from across income ranges, and the new rail extensions are performing similarly well.

Flagging won't change the facts. High density housing is bad for the environment, especially high rises. (Discussing pros and cons, with links to the research.) https://humantransit.org/2010/03/does-highdensity-life-have-a-bigger-e… High density destroys plant life, increases traffic delays for delivery of goods, and increases the number of goods that are delivered. Transporting humans to their jobs is a very small fraction of our carbon footprint overall. And there are more pressing environmental concerns than just carbon emissions. Larger homes promote sharing. One vacuum cleaner for example. Stop parroting high density marketing. Stop destroying the environment to enrich investors.

I don't think the problem is that we can't identify routes that would get a lot of use. It's that people running public transit have been charged with balancing those high-usage routes with service that's meant to serve as a social safety net, so that people aren't left completely without any transit. These are very different goals, and because transit agencies are not typically funded well enough to do both well, they are often in tension. Jarett Walker writes well about this coverage vs. ridership tradeoff: https://humantransit.org/2018/02/basics-the-ridership-coverage-tradeof…

It's a common phrase/point in anti-car activist circles; it's already background knowledge for the guest, the host, and the audience. Hence the "I mean, I don’t have to tell The War on Cars this" that Doctorow prefaces it with. For example: https://humantransit.org/2016/07/elon-musk-doesnt-understand-geometry.…

The issue is that a lot of transit planning is politically motivated and done to maximize "coverage" rather than more meaningful metrics like ridership, usefulness, and profitability. Planning for coverage allows you to tell individual taxpayers that they're "served" by the transit they help fund, but most will never use it because it's infrequent and the routes take forever to get anywhere. Optimizing for ridership means you focus on a smaller number of straight-line routes that are highly useful and run them at high frequency so that a smaller pool of people come to rely on them and use them regularly, instead of as a last resort. A primer from transit consultant Jarrett Walker: https://humantransit.org/basics/the-transit-ridership-recipe

This is where I heard it, from a transit consultant: https://humantransit.org/2011/07/02box.html

The issue you describe is Elite Projection. Musk has it bad. Eg. He has a problem with traffic congestion when he drives his car, and he thinks solving that problem for him will address real, broad transportation problems. It won't. https://humantransit.org/2017/07/the-dangers-of-elite-projection.html

This. I'll even supply an actual illustration: https://humantransit.org/2012/09/the-photo-that-explains-almost-everyt…