A friend of mine suggested to look into Cinque Terre, a car inaccessible city on Italy’s western coast. The hillside village consists of terraced homes created over the centuries on rugged terrain overlooking the Ligurian Sea. There are no roads leading there, only a train brings you close enough. For Americans, it’s strange today to think of modern humans settling in the middle of nowhere, but in reality most of America began as grids laid out next to agricultural train stops. Some of these towns prospered only because of railroads ferrying the locals to work in industrial centers, and vacationers back on the weekends. When I think of current housing preferences, I wonder why isolated cities no longer work for Americans. We are strange creatures, for we seemingly despise close proximity and yet yearn for community. All bets are placed in the old downtowns of boom and bust, and yet people move in droves to Garreau’s edge city. You can’t live in the city neighborhoods, but you must choose the far-flung suburb with the best schools.
In my head, Barb from Minnesota waxes and wanes about Red Wing and it’s beautiful (rust-belt) downtown overlooking the Mississippi. The hilly streets of picturesque homes sit tidy and neat. But practicality trumps these notions of town living. How close is the nearest Target (outside of town), where’s the shopping mall (a Minnesota pastime), can I get to the Twin Cities in less than an hour (good luck). Overtime, isolation is also a problem, and many small town friends will admit the charm of living in a beautiful place where everyone knows your name and business wears quickly.
Isolated living in low-resource low-asset cities may seem perfect for retirees and high-income households where they can mastermind their own lives. Middle America isn’t going to rely on this lifestyle pattern in order to have a fulfilling life. Access to amenities and its car-dependent infrastructure both rejects urban living and country living.
The carless city can’t happen under the current planning and societal paradigm. Even Masdar City scaled back its ambitious PRT. The best model we have are university cities which emphasize highly connected pedestrian-bicycle activity centers, periphery parking, and transit linkages. The Iowa Cities and Ithacas of America’s hinterland provides a lens into carless isolation. For major cities, we eagerly wait European tests in Paris and Stockholm and domestically the Open Streets Project to see if carlessness will take hold.
Caltrain is the traditional intercity transport method.
Shaun Abrahamson of Urban.us detailed a list of “Pop-up Mass Transit” startups operating now. From a VC perspective, he’s concerned about how game theory will make or break their mobility promises. Can shuttle startup A beat out carshare startup B on price and retain users when the true cost of providing these services becomes reality.
I couldn’t help but think maybe transit-like startups should be concerned about their actual role in transportation and urban planning. What niche do they serve in the transit ecosystem, not necessarily that one can get from point A to B. A city is inherently multi-modal, with different ways of getting places and the messy synergy between these paths.
Transportation startup’s should aim to merge into the existing transit fabric, not simply create an overlay or new “platform.” Lyft boldly pushed it’s “Friend’s with Transit” stats out there to show that between 20-33% of all rides start or begin at a transit station in DC, Chicago, San Francisco, Boston, and New York. If a third of your business is generated by other transit, that’s not just economics, it’s good urban planning.
Here’s Part 1 of my take on Shaun’s list:
Intercity Travel
Greyhound was the original startup in this category, providing low cost bus service between cities especially as Amtrak dismantled itself through the ’80s-’90s. Megabus jumped in before iPhones were even a thing and now we have plenty of similar “coach” services especially in Midwest and Northeast corridors. Tech startups of course want to give you the power to provide or at least discover these services instead of running the buses themselves.
Skedaddle ) is taking the age-old Craigslist (shady) rideshare age and putting it on steroids. Instead of just “hey please get into my car cuz I wanna split gas cost kthxbai” they’re encouraging fun trips to festivals and Tiesto, although it’s role as commuter A to B is the majority of routes. It gamifies the process by only offering the ride when a minimum number of people sign up (like Kickstarter), and increasing the per head price as the number of users sign up (like Ticketmaster). It appears to me that most offered rides were existing trips that would have happened anyway, so hopefully Skedaddle may improve the efficiency of vehicle usage, especially for leisure trips which accounts for a quarter of our driving.
Buster (https://www.buster.com/) matches groups to rides instead of individuals. I imagine they approach coach companies and say, “Give us an idea of where you’d be willing to serve, how many people you can serve (vehicles), your rates and we’ll plug you into Buster.” I asked it to take 15 people from Penn Station to Woodstock, New York, and it gave me a bunch of options from school buses to limos. From an efficiency point of view, it better utilizes existing fleets that only have occasional use. For example the local church’s Sunday school bus sit idle most of the week. And for planners, we’d prefer one vehicle than 15 people splitting up into many vehicles and needing to park them everywhere on a single weekend.
Rallybus (https://rallybus.net/) combines Buster (hiring local providers) and Skedaddle (crowd sourcing events). It differs in looking at long-distance intercity travel by having a provider offer multiple “rally” pick-up spots along pre-selected routes to a particular destination. The website is rather confusing, but appears to be focused on special events. I selected a Fallout Boy concert in New York and I’m presented a map of routes from various cities around New York getting to the event in March. I picked a marker in Philadelphia for $55 and it indicated it needed 25 more people to actually confirm this ride. Fortunately another ride to a Dixie Chicks concert from Dupont Circle had the minimum. It’s like Buster but instead of customized trips, it’s offering pre-planned trips based on potential special-event demand (sounds like an airline!). To me, Rallybus exemplifies trip efficiency by both placing minimums on what the trip is, and how many people are going. It knows people are going to a concert or conference already so it wants to encourage them to group ride.
The true difference between these tech startups and a typical coach service is that the coach services are focused on capturing riders in specific transportation corridors. Rallybus and Buster require complex itineraries, compared to BestBus or Wanderu. These itinerary costs are also a little opaque and it’s hard to quickly search a route or the routes are customized. So they succeed in very unique travel situations while Skedaddle lets one discover and compare costs more quickly. Contrary to that, apps that are essentially rideshare boards have a hard road ahead because coach services are already fairly low cost, guaranteed rides with more amenities than someone’s car. And even luxury car drivers will be hard to compete with the highly booked Royal Sprinter.
Intercity travelers must inherently spend more time to plan and consequently more time to compare, that is something startups will need to address.
More in Planning: The Chaddick Institute for Metropolitan Development studies Intercity Bus Travel.
Interior of a Muni Orion VII, the workhorse for lower density routes. Spartan, austere, practical.
During my Masters program, I pondered the life of a transit user, specifically someone who uses transit as an exclusive mode of transportation. If cities are on this push to reimagine themselves as transit-oriented communities, then why is it so much of its eventual design and implementation never concerns people.
We know the demographics of the current transit “community” has users that are mostly poor, below median earnings. (see Governing’s Public Transportation’s Demographic Divide by @mmaciag). A point missed is that transit users are actually working, they’re employed, and so it seems under-emphasized that transit users use transit to get somewhere.
Transit as Utility
Transit design is typically utilitarian and lowest-bidder, yet the systems themselves lack utilitas or expediency, and add unnecessary costs. A great example is Metro Transit METRO Green Line. The current running time between Downtown Minneapolis and Saint Paul is 46 minutes, but typically more, given badly timed stop lights. The concept of the line succeeding the former streetcar line was bizarre, because the streetcar’s actual successor is the 16 bus. Streetcars are meant to stop frequently, maneuver with traffic, and are subject to obstacles. Light rail, the low-cost subway alternative for underfunded metropolitan transit agencies, is better categorized as “medium” rail for its ability to provide capacity movement on long distances. It shouldn’t be running with traffic and yet Green Line not only constantly pits it against traffic for most of its travel length, but succumbed to community (lawsuit) pressure to add unnecessary stations (cost in time and money).
On the other hand, the route 94 bus (named for I-94) brings one from 6th and Hennepin to Union Station in less than 30 minutes. My colleagues who (force themselves) to ride Green Line love it but hate it. It’s still very eerily empty all hours, when in the past, the 16 bus was known to be full throughout the day. Mode shift has shifted people away.
To consider the life of a transit user then is to imagine someone who is subjected to constant struggle to move about in a timely and efficient manner. And at times, to have one’s needs ignored by policymakers.
Transit as Hauler
Another element of using transit is the ability to carry possessions around. I imagine backpack and bag makers crunch each day how to design bags to be sturdy yet light weight, and what environmental issues will luggers encounter. So when one is faced with filthy transit stations and vehicles, one wonders what risk to health if they place their bag on the ground. The alternative is to place the bag upon one’s lap, sometimes taking up maneuverable space for others. And standing in a packed car with a hefty load, it’s only polite to place it on the ground. In some cities with “dirty” climates, this is unavoidable like in Chicago (Gripes about dirty rail cars rise as mercury drops by @jhilkevitch).
Transit as Your Home
A colleague of mine who works transit operations indicates most agencies, at minimum, do one cleaning a day with only emergency mid-day cleanups. The quality of this clean is most definitely not sufficient — to save costs, it was one mop bucket for the entire bus. This is even if they mop at all, the FTA has a report Transit Bus Service Line and Cleaning Functions that indicates 64 percent of responding agencies still use hand sweeping to clean buses for dust. Light rail systems tend to fare better, being given larger operational budgets since stations must also be maintained. But with old school light rail agencies like Muni, its almost impossible to keep up with the grime embedded into its 1997 Breda LRV floors.
Yet we see systems like New York’s subway, Hong Kong’s MTR, and London’s underground which carry substantially more passengers, able to keep up. People often say underfunded agencies simply cannot fund cleaning budgets, but cleanliness didn’t happen with a mop, it happens on a multi-level organizational level which builds these costs into the lifetime of the cars.
Still the lonely transit user doesn’t have much a say, other than some days to think if they had a mop or spray bottle, they’d simply wipe up that bit of grime missed by the cleaners.
The feeling is, if we are to embark on this transit first initiative, we have to consider riders as ordinary people who have needs. We also have to consider that current paradigms failing transit planning and operation are still there and will be there in the future. Now’s the time to break them to make people first.
First thing I saw upon landing in DCA and Ubering into the city, was a guy riding a bikeshare against the Washington Monument.
In 2008, Minnesota Public Radio interviewed me about bicycling when the idea of being a full-time bicyclist was just starting to gain traction. At the time, bike lanes were only in the planning stage, and bicyclists comprised a hardcore group of locals who lurked in the angsty MPLSBikeLove forum.
I was always curious about how people interpreted the article, whether it had any resonance or impact. Now, Minneapolis is America’s most bike-friendly city and the only world-listed bike city. MPR still has the post up, so I imagine it has some SEO relevance at least. I hope telling my story about this article highlights relevant issues on millennials and urban life.
When T-Paw was Around
It’s been 8 years and my life during that article seems like a distant memory but it’s a time I will never forget. We were riding the economic bubble to it’s greatest heights. Cranes filled the sky and real estate values soared. Minneapolis took this opportunity to pour the investment back into an ambitious bicycling master plan.
Light Rail was in doubt because of a South St. Paul hockey dad turned 5-second Republican Presidential hopeful, former Governor Tim Pawlenty (“T-Paw”). He vetoed the Green Line funding the same month of the article, though it was restored later. Cities could only do their part for sustainable transportation with such a polarized state government, and that meant bicycling.
Fat Kid
I’m very plump in the article, probably 230 lbs. I was working very hard because jobs were scarce and I was given a fantastic opportunity by a real estate firm to do planning analysis on new residential development. My Bachelors degree in Urban Studies clearly did not go far. Bicycling was the only thing that kept my health and sanity somewhat in check.
It was a two mile commute from Prospect Park to Downtown Northeast everyday that took about 20 minutes because roads on University were created for cars, not people. Kids today would be blown away by what kind of hellish carscape Stadium Village was prior to TCF Bank Stadium.
Bike Dumb
In the article I’m very oblivious to my bicycle which was a cheap $300 Raleigh Hybrid from local chain-store Erik’s Bike Shop in Dinkytown. It was criminally slow with cheap parts. I’m confident no bike shop today would ever sell such a poor bicycle, even for light recreational purposes. I wish the seller had steered me to something better, but more on that later.
Fast forward about a year from this article, I put the bike through the wringer including an entire winter where I, in a puffy green parka, traversed snowy icy roads. I learned to be even more “hardened” and also to carry myself in a way I would want others to see. I watched videos of Copenhagen’s magical flow where people stopped at red lights on a dime. I wanted the same and wanted to communicate that through my actions.
Then the hammer hit, the economy disastrously collapsed. I lost my job.
Bike Smart
I decided planning graduate school was my calling instead of the deeply embedded wars my generation was fighting. My bike somehow made it to fall of 2009 as I put off any maintenance on it. Then I walked into The Hub Bike Shop in East Bank and everything changed.
The Hub is an employee owned collective which focused on making bicycling a real form of transportation for people. They hosted classes on bike etiquette and even focused on developing women riders. They sold Giant Bicycles from Taiwan, who was one of the few manufacturers really closing in on this emerging need for modern American bicycling. I believe Giant saw how their $2,000 carbon road bikes were taken seriously by lycranauts, and realized the same could be of normal citizens.
I purchased a Giant Rapid hybrid. It was a sleek, sexy, with higher end Shimano shifters. Yes it cost $700 after tax, but it was light years ahead of the Raleigh. It was a real bike for a real commuter. With a slim rack, semi-racing stance, and rapid-fire shifting assembly, I could keep pace with other cyclists, make it on-time to my destinations, and haul some groceries.
In short, the bike made it easier to bike, but I biked more because it was so easy.
I learned how to fix my own bike too. I took apart the rear cogs often and washed off the miles of accumulated gunk. I strung wires when they broke and replaced tubes when they popped. In the long haul I probably spent up-front $1200 including lights and locks, and $500 a year on maintenance (1 tune up, adjustments, and parts).
Biking Bandwagon
Nice Ride bike-sharing was introduced in 2010 and as a snooty self-described Urban Planner Candidate, I snubbed it initially. How could people on these low-geared upright bikes manage to get anywhere on time and haul dinner. It was at best a tourism gag and for suburbanites to get a safe feel of the gritty city. The Bixi utility bikes evoked nightmares of my Raleigh, trying to bust it through fast-moving traffic.
But I was wrong. I saw how the bikes allowed groups of people to traverse nearby destinations that were unthinkable by walking or even car. For people living in inner neighborhoods, they could get Downtown reasonably. Combined with the city’s emerging bike lane system, Nice Rides actually seemed easier than my hybrid road bike. I was constantly paranoid my bike would be stolen (as is a common problem) and was ever more worried when I had to leave a bike overnight in an unknown area. Nice Ride you use once and done, even if it’s a few minutes slower.
Walking is Cool
After graduate school, I took a 3 year chance at San Francisco and lost quite a bit of weight (phew). There, I learned more about what transportation really is about. In Minneapolis, I spurned the chaos of buses and vehicles crowding my way, why shouldn’t everyone ride a (fancy) bike. But I realized at the end of the day, humans just need to get around.
San Francisco’s bike rush hour was a choatic nightmare. Nobody obeyed red lights, even at the busiest intersections. People did not orderly line up on the bike lane, they constantly and dangerously bumped shoulders. “Downtown” Market Street is only a 2 mile trip at most, but it felt like a 20 mile marathon. High-speed passing on Valencia was compounded by ride-sharing blocking the lane. I actually ended up preferring to take transit and walk. Actually, there was a lot of walking. The synergy of the two was relaxing and energizing. I didn’t want to bother with a bicycle in San Francisco, the city was just too beautiful to pass by.
I bought an older Giant OCR, the predecessor to the Rapid for just $300. But I rarely used it, in fact I mostly lent it out.
The District of Bicycling
My Felt Fixie (set to Single Speed) in front of the Washington Monument
Today in DC, I actually don’t have a personal bicycle, yet. (Update: I bought one off Craigslist from a cool dude!) My company TransitScreen provides memberships to Capital Bikeshare to promote sustainable choices by our employees. I’ve taken so many convenient trips between stations that it hasn’t been an urgent matter to obtain my own bike.
Since this article, my feelings on being a full-time bicyclist or bike warrior have waned to an idea that we all have to get around in our own ways, and should have options toward that. But we also have to be mindful of the impact our mobility affects fellow citizens and the planet.
I usually walk 20 minutes to work on spacious Massachusetts Avenue. I regularly carry my groceries about 4 blocks from a Safeway. I often take Metro to go to Union Station. I like bikeshare for cross-town movement. I prefer local carshare startup Split to take me north of Columbia Heights. Zipcar vans help me move furniture. Buses are great after a long day from Farragut to Dupont.
It seems I’ve traded my four wheels for one, my role as a member of society.
It’s clear that ride-sharing’s reputation has been rather tarnished by public policy backlashes this year, but this hasn’t diminished its popularity.
In my view, I see Uber and Lyft as technology companies in the same vein as freeways, railroads, steamships, and jumbo jets that heralded new eras of transportation.
But hold on you say, it’s just an app that tells someone to pick you up. The car already exists. The app is just an on-demand ride board. You need a cell phone. It’s VC smoke and mirrors! It all seems like a fad until we look at history.
Old Man River
Before railroads, people floated a wooden barge down a river or drove horses down dirt roads. Then someone invented a steam engine and a better steel track. Before cars, people walked, biked or galloped on a horse. Then a series of inventors fiddled with putting an engine in a carriage. Before freeways, people drove hours on whatever road led to the city center. Then engineers envisioned massive segregated speeding roadways.
Prior to the advent of these transportation eras, it must have seemed bizarre to ask if people thought of a faster more ingenious way to get around. For example, trying to explain riding in a flying aluminum shell powered by windmills taking you half-way across the world in less than day.
But what seem like overnight revolutions are actually incremental enhancements or combinations of existing ideas, not very unlike a little app that connects drivers and riders together.
Users Drive Demand
These tech companies are not the ultimate pioneers though, we are. We think of transportation as being “created” by someone but in reality the adoption of any tool or vehicle into a main mode of human transportation requires users. Uber’s explosion and disruption results from millions using the service en masse, filling travel gaps and trip demands most planners would not know existed.
Take a curious analogy of transportation technology that has experienced great waxes and wanes in popularity, the bicycle. It was invented to replace horses in Europe, quickly dismissed as a toy, became a ubiquitous transportation mode in the United States, and then was left behind in urban renewal.
Bicyclists on the Golden Gate Bridge before opening in 1932. Via SAN FRANCISCO HISTORY CENTER, SAN FRANCISCO PUBLIC LIBRARY
The Bicycle isn’t an app so why does it receive so much opposition. It too is seen as a passing fad and disruptive to existing modes of transport. NIMBYs fill City Council meetings in opposition to bike lanes. Supporters push back on helmet and licensing regulations. Sound familiar?
People Need to Get Around
Our public policy discourse treats Uber and Lyft like segueway tour companies to the annoyance of some locals. But the discussion forgets that real people of all types and ages use the service. If we can talk about transportation in this context, I think we’ll have more meaningful.
People need to get around and are searching for better ways of doing so.
It’s not rocket science that we need fast, convenient and reliable alternative transportation. On-demand bus service has been a difficult effort by transit agencies for a long time now. Uber not only meets all these metrics but makes it easy, accessible and most of all palatable to the masses. What lessons can we learn from empowering local citizens to serve each other.
Transportation is trending to radically change due to the internet.
The internet has always promised a merger of the real and digital world. In Steve Case’s “internet of everything” we will see even more instantaneous interaction across distances. Doesn’t matter if it’s self-driving cars or remote locking bike share, policy makers need to anticipate this forthcoming era, not simply react. Lead officials and staff on roundtables and educational outings. Forging partnerships and understandings will underwrite good policy decisions.
Ride-sharing is introducing potential users to transit.
As someone who use to be very car-oriented, detaching oneself from their personal vehicle is sadly a precarious feat. It is a huge step to put ones mobility into the hands of a stranger, and plan out your movements well in advance. It encourages people to mull about urban spaces, not being tied to their car, and potentially look at other options. This gets suburbs off their car diet.
Let’s Move
In the words of Marc Andreessen, “software is eating the world,” and we are looking at technology networks heavily influencing or even merging with transportation networks. Ride sharing apps are getting people around, games like Pokemon are getting people outside, let’s leverage these for the public good.
While Americans are still entrenched in this idea of make the car great again with autonomous systems, there’s another urban transport mode people have overlooked, the scooter. The scooter or motor bike is ubiquitous in Asia because of historically narrow and uneven roads. Match that with limited parking and hilly terrain and you have a good argument for scooters as practical mobility.
Bikeshare of Scooters
My first exposure to scootershare as urbantech was with Scoot Networks in San Francisco. Launched in October 2012, they offer on-demand electric scooters at designated parking areas throughout the City. Your phone app unlocks the bike key and off you go. TechCrunch called it “Zipcar for Scooters” but it’s more like bikeshare for scooters since you can take it to your destination and park it for the next person.
There’s no need to have a special driver’s license but you will have to attend mandatory driver training. This makes sense since few Americans are familiar with these bikes. It was a breeze to use these in the hilly terrain of San Francisco, jetting up steep streets with ease. These were particularly useful for traversing north-south corridors which are brain-numbingly slow on Muni or rideshare. The Scoots stow a helmet and have surprisingly nimble maneuvering.
Scoot launched with Chinese manufactured bikes as the bulk of their fleet (I suspect they are made by Luyuan). They were smart to go with a Vespa inspired model and a red color scheme (instead of the originally proposed black). Munich-based Govecs provides the recent Scoot “cargo” fleet. These German Go T1.4s are very BMW in design. They recently announced a partnership with GenZe for the next generation of Scoots.
Tesla of Scooters
On the other side of the Pacific, Gogoro launched in 2014 in Taipei. As the “Tesla of electric bikes,” Gogoro designs, manufactures, and sells sleek electric bikes that run exclusively on their own battery swapping network. Instead of gas stations, you go to recharging kiosks where you swap batteries like exchanging water jugs. You can charge at home too.
Gogoro’s bikes may look like traditional Vespas but the details are futuristic, with smoothed molded panels and a Star Trek-like command center. Following Tesla’s model, they own the vehicle production and the recharging network, so it makes it easy to innovative and scale up fast. Gogoro bikes have become practical transport on a regional level.
Will the U.S. Scoot
It’s unclear whether residents of an equally dense U.S. city will prefer sharing or owning electric bikes. Gogoro’s plug and play battery eliminates a lot of the logistical issues Scoot users face. For charging, scoot relies on users bringing low-energy bikes to charging garages throughout San Francisco, and leaving it there to slowly recharge. For travel, users have to be aware of the current battery level of the Scoot which equates to available travel distance.
On the flip side, curiously Gogoro has does not include 3G in its bikes, so you can’t rent out your bike in an easy way. Tesla software has always been intimately reliant on internet connection. Elon imagines a world where people will leverage their idle Model 3s as on-demand self-driving Ubers in his latest master plan. But I imagine Gogoro’s founder is following Elon’s plan of building an expensive product to gain money to build a less expensive product and so forth. Sharing bikes would definitely eat into sales. The starting price in Taipei is US $4,000 which is twice an entry-level Vespa at any local moto shop.
Scoot’s pricing is very affordable. Without a $20/monthly plan, it’s usually $4 for one trip. It’s about what you would expect between the choice of a bikeshare (time) and transit (cost and maybe time too). But in San Francisco, everything is cheaper and faster than a car. Uber is always surging and often gets stuck in the same traffic. In other sprawl cities, an electric bike fits a narrower portion of residents, and weather of course plays a role. So it will be interesting to see where Scoot expands.
In Minneapolis, I once worked with a young father who Vespa’d from the city to an adjacent inner ring suburb. His direct path was mostly residential and tree-lined, the travel time equated a car, and he saved on gas. For typical U.S. cities with lower densities, these short-medium distances (< 10 miles) may prove in-demand for electric bikes.
Gazing longingly back at San Francisco from West Oakland Station. The pinch point of death.
In the past year a renewed push to build a second Transbay Tube across the San Francisco Bay floor has heated up. BART has been plagued with it’s own maintenance problems and to some reports, is steadily worsening with a half-funded backlog through the next decade. But plenty of transit systems have backlogs, so why is there emphasis on new infrastructure in a time of waning tax money. I see several factors driving this:
Community “consensus” is cited as reason at all levels which seems to be defined as simply people are using BART and agree that more capacity is needed.
Bay Area population is exploding at something like a million people each decade. For perspective, that’s like 90,000 people a month.
Not only has BART been barely able to keep up with crush loads, but Bay Area highways are essentially at maximum capacity. Especially for a highly dense and urbanized area, there is no more room to expand them.
The Bay is also geographically not really capable of expansion or bypassing. There are clearly defined corridors of travel. Only increasing capacity within existing paths makes sense.
SPUR has been spearheading the effort to get it on the agenda. Their white paper has a lovely breakdown of all the transportation solutions and contingencies the second tube will serve.
BART Reported Average Weekday Exits from 2001 to 2016 (November). Trendline goes up at a clip of 10k riders a year.
Make BART Great Again (for People)
I think it’s more important to ultimately see what is the rider’s perspective. Bay Area residents (yes both property owners and renters) already taxed out of their minds and might want something but vote a different way when it comes to it.
So it’s telling to see that 70% of voters approved Measure RR which was the most unsexy $3.5 billion transportation funding proposition I’ve ever seen. Via the Chron:
Measure RR, unlike most transportation tax measures, lacked marquee projects like a new extension, a new station or a second Transbay Tube. Instead, it featured a collection of decidedly unsexy projects, including replacing 90 miles of original rail, waterproofing San Francisco subway stations, rebuilding the electrical equipment that delivers power to the tracks and trains, and replacing the original train control system.
Most riders and even BART maintenance crew alike are not even sure how rail technology affects them. The only promise is that replacement of these fundamental systems will ensure BART is reliable. On-time reliability is perhaps always the most important concern. As reliability dipped toward the low 90% for BART, riders definitely took notice.
Stop Bleeding at the Edges
As we move towards a Two Tube Future, BART needs to absolutely stop looking at expansion, and focus on the system’s current strengths. Maybe some residents want BART to go to San Jose, but as a frequent rider, I almost never saw people riding beyond 6 or so stations. In fact Amtrak’s Capitol Corridor already goes all the way to Diridon Station, so why were such precious dollars wasted when the BART maintenance backlog was about to mount into public outcry.
Spoiler alert, the South Bay extension project is already delayed. Warm Springs was suppose to open in 2014. There was talk of opening it this year (“achingly close”). Now nobody knows when!
The Second Transbay Tube is projected to be $12 billion in today’s dollars. The extension to San Jose will likely reach if not exceed that number. The public would be wise to keep any future major expansion projects in line of sight of the power makers overlooking the Bay than hidden at the system edges.
A short lived failed attempt to do off-set parking as a faux bike lane barrier. Via Richard Masoner
Coming from Minneapolis, once crowned by Bicycle magazine as America’s forward-thinking bicycle city, I am a little bit biased when it comes to bicycling infrastructure. In fact my Master’s capstone team thesis (co-wrote with some lovely planners including @AmbroseManor) was critical on Minneapolis’ testing of bicycle turning boxes–at the time some of the nations’ first federal funding pilot efforts with Portland. So when I do my typical rounds of the San Francisco bike lanes to see how they progress over time, I continually come to one conclusion:
It’s whack.
In high school we’d use whack to describe people, things, and situations. I think this describes everything about the current system. It’s badly designed for people, it has bizarre patterns, and it constantly places you in dangerous situations with other traffic. The problem is, the issues are not isolated, rather they are systemic to the design as a whole.
Here are my critical points in regards to the bicycle system as designed for Market Street to FiDi and then throughout SOMA:
Constant shuffling of bike lane to accommodate vehicle turn lanes creates unpredictable behavior, and transition choke points.
Unpredictable lane shifting also makes faster one-way roads more dangerous by forcing user to continually shift left and right to follow the lane while car traffic is all in a straight line.
Inconsistent spacing of road marking to facilitate bike lanes across long intersections. One intersection may get a very regular pattern while others one must strain to look for where the bike lane re-enters.
Constantly changing and inconsistent lane widths, creates chaos during bicycle rush hour.
All these road marking pattern problems make passing fellow bicyclists dangerous.
Lack of clear, consistent, and readable signage. Currently only features AASHTO’s old white bike lane sign (not helpful) and a green navigation bike highway sign with the smallest font size imaginable.
Difficult to ascertain if a cross intersection also contains a bike lane — an issue for novice users.
So this is just a general start to formalize what I’ve been telling people. Even taking 1-2 hours out of your day to riding the system in and out will reveal all these shortcomings. Of course I haven’t even touched on all the double parked vehicles or confused drivers, but in my opinion all of those issues are just parts of eventual adaptation of all road users to the new system.
My beef with the bike lanes is that the entire system is setup badly. If you start with a bicycle system foundation like this and tell all the public works engineers, police enforcers, infrastructure contractors, concrete pavers, government officials, non-profit advocates, and regular Joe users, that this is what we got. Well then it’ll be hard down the road to say, actually, we need to tear it all up and redo it. Minneapolis went the route of piloting all projects, calling them tests, that was smart, so that they could eventually adapt the best uses at the best locations. And then duplicate them elsewhere in similar situations so that we’d end up with a very consistent system.
Of course I’ve seen San Francisco prior to bike lanes, I didn’t ride it, but it was certainly car dominated. In fact San Francisco use to have a campaign of signs to tell people to stop running red lights (which they did in the multiples). This is still reflected in the recent campaign “What’s the Rush?” So perhaps waving my arms around about a rather scary bike lane system is not productive since sans any kind of bike lane, San Francisco streets would just be downright dangerous for everyone. Still I was taught to be critical about the investments we make since the Public pays for it in the end, and we should be even holding the “nice things” accountable.
A Minneapolis-St. Paul Twin City Lines historic streetcar on Market Street. This era is often fondly recalled by planners and policymakers.
I had the distinct pleasure of taking one of John S. Adams final course on American Cities in 2002. He is one of the pioneer urban planners in academia who in 1970 proposed four distinct eras of transportation which shaped and defined American housing, infrastructure, and life. His energetic and sometimes enigmatic lessons left me empowered on understanding and perhaps influencing the course of American cities.
First Era: Walking-Horsecar Era 1800-1890 – When cities established on railways and river landings, people only moved as far as they could walk. The horsecar, a re-appropriation of a typical horse buggy was the most the commoner could dream of for public transit.
Second Era: Recreational Automobile Era 1925-1950 – Cars were just coming into fashion but like Lord Grantham remarked, soon every Tom, Dick, and Harry would soon have one. Any freeway that seems especially beautiful, windy, or picturesque in your city came from this era. It probably took an hour to go a few miles due to congestion on city/county roads.
Third Era: Electric Streetcar Era 1890-1920 – This was the golden age of public transit, when those tracks started moving people at fast and efficient clip. Planners and officials today who yearn for a transit-orientated culture typically are referencing this period.
Fourth and Present Era: Freeway Era 1950-present – Urban renewal criss-crossed our cities and created the suburban development patterns we see today. This era marked a major expanse into the “hinterlands” around formerly dense built cities.
The four eras remind me of other scales like the human civilization type that astronomer’s use. It’s an exponential curve and we barely rate a Type I because we have absolutely no harnessing technological power when it comes to the galaxy. In a way I feel the same could be said of the Freeway Era which he lamented we are sadly still stuck in. Even the advent of the jet airplane has exacerbated reliance on freeways, forcing us to build out and around servicing airports. It was originally thought that airplanes would allow us to be globe trotters, less reliant on home bases. The opposite is true, airplanes deliver thousands of people to settle in attractive cities.
ARTIC – Anaheim Regional Transportation Intermodal Center – Designed by HOK, this is a sports stadium for transit centers, serving Amtrak and regional buses. The interior resembles an airport in delivering information seamlessly to users.
If we are to look into the future, it’s my hope the Freeway Era can give way to a fifth era. Perhaps this new era is the Technological Transportation Era. Adams’ uses housing development patterns as evidence for his eras. For this new era, we see early evidence that suburban housing demand has slowed and urban redevelopment has increased. I say these are attributed to technological improvements, hence the name.
Changing Land Use Patterns. Technology is continuing to blur the need for location-based live, work, and play. In turn cultural preferences are being influenced by lifting of this picket-fence illusion. It’s clear the next generation of Americans will halt sprawl.
New Infrastructure. Technology in regards to transit infrastructure is also accelerating, with offering of multiple attractive transit modes and methods not present before. Modern streetcar, light rail, and bus rapid transit make fixed transit seamless to implement and use. Bicycling facilities are also evolving with protected bikeways, regional bike freeways, and bike sharing systems.
Improved Access to Information. Technology on the user side enables all information all the time. In addition to a plethora of public transit apps, users can now instantly hail for private taxis (“rideshare”), find private transit, rent hourly cars, rent scooters, and arrange for carpools.
The soon to be reality driverless cars may likely represent the final and lasting impact of this Technological Transportation Era. In a way I feel the driverless car could not have happened without the prior advents above, because for example without ubiquitous smartphones providing us hand-held information, it would be difficult to access such services.
However I will say knowing Adams and his current work on regional governance and policy, this fifth era cannot happen in a void. It requires cooperation both on public and private interests to further infrastructure and policy that allows for these new technologies to flourish and adapt. I’m sure he wouldn’t throw in the towel yet over the current era.
