Tag Archives: mass transit

“Five reasons to expand Chicago transit now”

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The “vice president of policy at the Center for Neighborhood Technology in Chicago and vice chairman of the Chicago Transit Authority” gives five reasons for why mass transit needs to be expanded in the Chicago area:

Why expand transit? Why now? Five reasons: increased efficiency, improved individual and regional economies, and jobs, jobs, jobs.

Cook County’s current transit system allows hundreds of thousands of residents to get to and from their destinations in a safe, efficient and affordable way every day. Unfortunately, four out of five of the region’s biggest job centers outside of downtown Chicago are underserved by transit. People traveling to work or school in these suburbs have no choice but to drive. The resulting traffic leads to wasted time and wasted money. Expanding and improving the region’s transit system will increase commuter choice, decrease congestion, connect businesses to transit locations and reduce the number of individuals without vehicles who are, in effect, excluded from the job pool.

But it can be more than that. Transit expansion, from my perspective — which includes decades of experience in transportation and community development issues, as well as service to the Chicago Transit Authority board — must be part of a wider strategy around transit-oriented development. That is, transit expansion should be accompanied by development that integrates residential, office, retail and other amenities into walkable neighborhoods within a half-mile of quality public transportation.

This type of development tends to be more economically resilient than others, as evidenced by the Center for Neighborhood Technology’s study for the American Public Transit Association and the National Association of Realtors. Between 2006 and 2011, the report found, average sales prices for residential properties within walking distance of a transit station outperformed the region by an average of 42 percent. In Chicago, home values in transit-served areas performed 30 percent better than the region. That’s real money for local tax bases, not to mention homeowners’ wallets.

Add to this a recent analysis by the Brookings Institution that makes a clear case for transportation infrastructure investment as an economic development strategy. It’s a popular, and smart, play these days. Other countries, both developing and developed, are doubling down on investments to build and upgrade their transportation infrastructure. They see it as the path to long-term sustainable growth. We need to see, and do, the same.

One big problem the Chicago area faces in this regard is the general orientation of transit toward Chicago. If you are out in the suburbs, transit lines tend to run into Chicago. This is good for accessing jobs and other amenities in Chicago but with more jobs and residents in the suburbs, it is quite difficult to travel by transit from suburb to suburb. If the population growth is in places like Aurora, Plainfield, McHenry County, and Kendall County, how are those residents to use mass transit to get to suburban job centers like Naperville, Schaumburg, Hoffman Estates, Northbrook, etc.? Local bus service tends to run between train stations and local amenities and despite several decades worth of experimentation, there is not high sustained levels of transit between suburbs. Some things could probably be done fairly quickly, like finding the substantial funding to implement the STAR Line that would connect Joliet to O’Hare through the western suburbs on the EJ&E tracks, but on the whole, this probably requires long-term money and planning.

The money question is just that: where is the money for this going to come from? Lots of people agree with investing in infrastructure, particularly for improving quality of life issues like traffic and congestion, but are they willing to pay for it or give up other priorities?

Will a new design for Chicago’s Circle Interchange prove beneficial in the long run?

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Illinois and Chicago officials are putting the final touches on plans to reconstruct the Circle Interchange where the Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Dan Ryan expressways come together. But, will a new design lead to better outcomes?

But other urban planning experts criticized the agency’s decision, saying the claimed benefits of the Circle project were not put to a rigorous test. For instance, it’s highly unlikely that IDOT’s estimate of at least a 50 percent reduction in traffic delays on the three expressways would materialize, some independent experts said.The Circle project also scored poorly on criteria designed to determine whether ridership on public transit and access to transit would be enhanced by the work, the experts said.

“The data that CMAP made available showed that this project would not produce a significant return on investment,” said MarySue Barrett, president of the Metropolitan Planning Council, a nonprofit group that promotes sustainable transportation and land-use policies…

IDOT officials insist that Alternative 7.1C would do the best job of reducing congestion, bottlenecks and crashes, leading to faster and safer commutes, according to traffic modeling that simulated the estimated 400,000 cars and trucks that travel over the Circle Interchange each weekday.

An average of almost three accidents a day occur in the vicinity of the Circle, which is also the slowest and most congested highway freight bottleneck in the U.S., according to the Federal Highway Administration.

It sounds like there are actually two conversations going on:

1. How to improve this specific stretch of road. The primary emphasis seems to be on adding lanes, both for the Kennedy and Dan Ryan through the area as well as for the congested ramps. Of course, adding lanes it not necessarily a panacea – drivers tend to fill in the supply that new lanes provide.

2. How this stretch of road fits in with larger traffic concerns in the Chicago area. It is one thing to reduce congestion at this particular point but another to improve mass transit on a broader scale that would help reduce demand for this traffic bottleneck. Traffic could be viewed as a region-wide issue where policymakers could try to reduce the number of highway trips through this area. Some would argue Americans have tended to privilege trying to fix roads rather than tackle the larger issues of why congestion occurs in the first place.

Four years of major construction is a long time to wait if the alterations don’t change much in the long run…

London’s iconic Tube map turns 80

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First distributed for free on a trial basis in 1933 because officials didn’t think it would be successful, London’s Tube map turns 80 this year:

Instantly recognizable the world over, the simple yet elegant diagram of the 249-mile subway network is hailed as one of the great images of the 20th century, a marvel of graphic design. Its rainbow palette, clean angles and pleasing if slightly old-fashioned font (Johnston, for typography buffs) have endured since hurried passengers first stuffed pocket versions of the map into their raincoats in 1933.

“It’s a design icon,” said Anna Renton, senior curator at the London Transport Museum. “You shouldn’t use that word too often, but it really is.”…

Inspired, some say, by electric-circuit diagrams, Beck straightened out the lines, drew only 45- and 90-degree angles, and truncated distances between outlying stations. Then he submitted his unusual schematic rendering to the London Underground’s publicity department…

The design led to imitations around the world. Within a few years, it was copied by the transit system in Sydney, Australia. The New York subway map of the 1970s also paid homage to Beck’s brainchild.

And it still inspires design efforts today.

It is interesting to read how this map became so successful even as it skewed the actual spatial relationships between lines, stations, and London itself. The map may make more conceptual and aesthetic sense but it doesn’t fit aboveground London. I don’t know if anyone has ever tried to test the mental work London residents have to do to match the map to the city.

How much do McMansions contribute to traffic congestion?

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After seeing the Washington D.C. region leads the country in traffic, one reader of the Washington Post suggests McMansions have contributed to the problem:

Regarding the Feb. 5 news article “Washington again rated worst for traffic congestion in annual study”:

I don’t understand. The entire metropolitan region builds, builds and builds, squeezing  condos onto every block and ruining old neighborhoods with ghastly McMansion and townhouse developments.

Do officials consider quality of life? Don’t they realize how these new homes have a tremendous effect on our local traffic? We have overbuilt this area to death.

It would be interesting to see a study on this. I suspect the real answer is not McMansions over other forms of housing and development but rather the issue of sprawl. McMansions may often be found as part of sprawl but not necessarily; McMansions don’t have to be built on large lots, which leads to more spread out development, and they can be built as teardowns in denser areas. But once sprawl has already happened, it is more difficult to provide effective mass transit (even as the Washington region sees an expansion of Metro service to suburban counties). In other words, McMansions are symptoms of sprawl which leads to a lot of driving and traffic.

Selling car insurance by the mile

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The idea of replacing the gas tax with a tax by miles driven is being tested so what about car insurance by the mile? One company has introduced the concept in Portland:

You wouldn’t buy an unlimited fare card if you only took a few transit rides per month, but when it comes to car insurance that’s pretty much how things work. Drivers who are similar in age, gender, and residence pay about the same premium even if some drive 5,000 miles a year and others 50,000 miles. The problem is not only that low-mileage drivers end up subsidizing high-mileage ones — it’s that everyone has an incentive to drive as much as they can.

One idea to undercut this system is pay-per-mile car insurance. Earlier this month at The Atlantic, Matthew O’Brien explained (via this 2008 Brookings report; PDF) just how much America stands to save with such a service. Driving would fall 8 percent nationally; oil usage and carbon emissions would drop 2 and 4 percent, respectively; fewer traffic and accidents could be worth upwards of $60 billion a year.

Since city residents have transportation alternatives at their disposal, they’re likely to benefit from mileage-based systems more than most. That’s the basic idea behind MetroMile, a new per-mile car insurance company that launched earlier this month in Portland, Oregon. While conventional car insurance companies dabble in mileage programs, MetroMile was created explicitly with that low-car lifestyle urban driver in mind — even down to the name…

MetroMile users receive a device called a Metronome (sadly, the “N” isn’t capitalized) that plugs into the car and tracks mileage in real-time. Drivers pay a monthly base rate that’s around $20-30, says Pretre, then pay 2 to 6 additional cents per mile. He says anyone driving fewer than 10,000 miles a year should start to save, and once you get down to 8,000 miles, the savings approach 20 to 25 percent over major car insurers…

While it makes sense to introduce this in Portland or a number of other dense cities where mass transit usage or alternatives to driving are common, would this work as well in the suburbs? Would the costs of paying car insurance be enough to prompt people to change their living patterns? Maybe it depends on how much cheaper that car insurance could be or perhaps the quest for the cheaper house that provides more bang for the buck would still win out.

The 2008 Brookings report cited above titled “Pay-As-You-Drive Auto Insurance: A Simple Way to Reduce Driving-Related Harms and Increase Equity” makes an interesting point: increased driving is related to increased income (see page 10 and 40). In other words, Americans who have the money to do so drive more. This helps explain the reluctance of higher-income Americans to use buses.

Adapting the genre of transit maps to other kinds of data

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Check out this collection of 6 transit-style maps based on different kinds of information: the best movies of all time, the National Parks system, web trends, the Mississippi River, the US Interstate system, and the world’s transit systems.

Within the sociology of culture, this could lead to an interesting discussion regarding genres. The average city-dweller likely has some idea of what transit maps look like: they involve color coding and also possibly symbols to denote different lines as well as marking stops and important junctions. These maps aren’t necessarily about geography but about a coherent traffic map that showcases the lines and the broad outlines of a city. Some maps, particularly London’s, are quite famous for their design.

So what happens if people are presented with transit maps that convey other bits of information? Could they easily understand them? Looking at all six, the one that might be the most difficult is the best movies map as it would take a little time to figure out how the movies are all connected and the map also implies the movies are derived or connected to each other in significant ways (is the genre of movie enough?).

Flipping the question around, could transit system data be easily “translated” into another genre of maps or data presentation?

Children and mass transit

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As a new father who uses public transportation almost exclusively, two recent items re: public transportation and children caught my eye. First, a Rockville, MD “Principal Calls CPS After Mom Lets Daughter, 10, Ride City Bus to School” [h/t Adam Holland]

It had been brought to her attention, the principal said, by some “concerned parents,” that my daughter had been riding the city bus to and from school. I said, yes, we had just moved outside of the neighborhood, and felt that this was the most convenient way for our 5th grader to get there and back. The principal asked was I not concerned for her safety? “Safety from what?” I inquired. “Kidnapping,” she said reluctantly. I said that I would not bore her by talking statistics that, being in the business of taking care of young children, she surely knew better than I did….

It was raining hard the next day so I offered to drive L. [my daughter] to the bus stop. I thought she’d want to wait in the car with me, but she said, “It’s okay mom, you go work. I want to say hi to my friends.” “Your friends?” “Well, they are not my kid friends. They are just, you know, my people friends.” There was the Chinese lady, the lady with the baby who cried a lot (but it’s not his fault, he can’t help it), and the grandma who always got on at the next stop. In a few short weeks, my daughter had surrounded herself with a community of people who recognized her, who were happy to see her, and who surely would step in if someone tried to hurt her.

My son is only five months old–years away from travelling solo. But I can attest that a community springs up around him whenever I take him on a bus or train. Our fellow riders are generally friendly when he is happy and understanding when he is not.  Either way, they definitely notice him, and I have little doubt that they would step in if something were wrong.

Moreover, even at his young age, my son seems to enjoy making friends through these public interactions, often going out of his way to stare at someone seated nearby until he catches their eye and can start smiling and babbling at them. As Carla Saulter explains in a second post, “Why Public Transportation Is Good for Kids“:

It’s become part of the collective American belief system that cars are the preferred (if not the only acceptable) mode of transportation for our children. Cars are now viewed as an essential tool of good middle-class parenting — both as a means of keeping our children safe from the evils of the outside world and of providing convenient access to the myriad destinations to which we are required to deliver them….

As they grow up riding buses and trains, kids master the skills required to get around. They start small, like my daughter, who recently began carrying her own bag (a pink backpack with a train, per her request) and move on to stop recognition, schedule reading, and trip planning. Long before their peers are old enough to drive, junior transit riders have the skills to ride solo. The confidence that comes from these abilities will help them when they face problems mom and dad can’t help with.

And speaking of facing things … Kids who spend most of their time in controlled spaces — from home to car to school/mall/lesson/play date — have very limited contact with the people they share the world with. Kids who ride transit, on the other hand, have plenty of opportunity to interact with their fellow humans. They learn to accept differences, interact politely with strangers, and set and respect boundaries.

Riding mass transit can be inconvenient, and it certainly isn’t a parenting panacea. However, it can also be a safe, wonderful option for exposing children to other people and the wider world.

I think my son and I will be riding the bus for years to come.

Unscientific survey results of the day: CTA riders supposedly split on new seating arrangement

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The Chicago Tribune had a story on the front page of its website a day ago that says Chicago residents are split on the new seating arrangements in new CTA cars. Unfortunately, the story has a fatal flaw: it is based on an unscientific poll.

The aisle-facing, bucket-style seats on the new CTA rail cars have prompted strong reactions among riders — though evenly split pro and con, an unscientific survey suggests.

More than 2,500 people participated in the online poll conducted this month by the Active Transportation Alliance, a Chicago-area group that promotes safe transportation, bicycle use and other alternatives to automobiles.

Forty-nine percent said they would prefer New York-style benches with no defined separation between passengers instead of the individual “scoop” seats that are on the CTA’s new 5000 Series rail cars, the Active Transportation Alliance reported.

Forty-eight percent of respondents said they prefer the scoop, or bucket-style, seats, and 3 percent said they had no preference, the poll found.

“While the poll results are unscientific and it was nearly a draw, one clear conclusion is that transit riders have strong opinions when it comes to issues of comfort and convenience,” said Lee Crandell, director of campaigns for the Active Transportation Alliance. “We’ve shared the results with the CTA and encouraged the agency to always seek input from the transit riders about significant changes to the system.”

While the newspaper perhaps should get some credit for acknowledging in the first paragraph that this was an unscientific poll, it then makes no sense to base the story on this information. One could talk about some divergent opinions on the seats without having to rely on an unscientific poll. Why not interview a few riders in the “man-on-the-street” style newspapers like? Should the CTA listen to those poll results provided by the Active Transportation Alliance? No – they suggest at least a few people don’t like the new seats but they aren’t necessarily a large number or a majority. In the end, I find this to be irresponsible. This poll tells us little about anything and even with the early disclaimer, is likely to confuse some readers.

I also think this story will blow over soon enough. New York riders seem to have done just fine with these seating arrangements and Chicago riders will get used to them as well.

View from across the pond: Americans don’t interact with people unlike themselves because of the automobile

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Here a sociological take on American social interactions and our love of the car:

A while ago a friend of mine, a leading sociologist, told me that the reason people in the United States seem so conservative and set in their ways, their politics so polarised and full of hate, is that they never meet anybody who disagrees with them, they never encounter a single other person who offers a different way of seeing the world, and so their attitudes become overly rigid.

The reason for this is that their lives are so governed by the private automobile. The average citizen of America lives not in a city where you have to rub along with others, but in a suburb where everybody is ethnically and socially indistinguishable, then they get in their car to drive to work and tune their radio to a station that exactly mirrors their own views and when they arrive at work all the people there share the same opinions.

Three thoughts:

1. This sounds like The Big Sort kind of world where people live with people like them, chalk it up to taste and preferences, and don’t think about the structural factors, like class and race and settlement patterns, that influence these decisions.

2. Mass transit is implicated here: Americans don’t want to ride buses and be that close to others. Instead, we would rather hop into our personal cars – think about all of those single-occupant cars in rush hour traffic.

3. But, we can’t think about mass transit without also thinking about how settlement patterns, generally more spread out in the idealized American suburbs, influences the feasibility of  mass transit.

Put this all together and perhaps there is some merit to these arguments. This doesn’t necessarily mean that Americans dislike other people. However, it could mean that Americans tend to privilege the lives and actions of individuals before considering community life.

The fight over transit money between Chicago and its suburbs

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A fight over funding is brewing between the Regional Transit Authority (RTA) and Chicago Transit Authority (CTA), Pace, and Metra about how to divvy up sales tax revenues and discretionary money:

Twelve votes are needed to approve budgets, yet five out of the 16 directors on the board are Chicagoans who have the CTA’s back, conventional wisdom says.

And this isn’t just an RTA fight. It also involves the region’s political heavyweights like Mayor Rahm Emanuel and [DuPage County Board Chairman Dan] Cronin, who appoint RTA directors to their $25,000-a-year positions.

Cronin says he recognizes [CTA President Forrest] Claypool and Emanuel didn’t create the problem. But he describes the standoff as “bullying.”

“The money is collected from all the taxpayers in the region, the majority of whom reside in the suburbs. Why should we subsidize the CTA more than we already are?” he asked. “They seem to care little for their neighbors in the suburbs.”

This is tied up with two larger issues:

1. The Chicago area is infamous for its many governmental bodies. This is another example of the broader issues associated with metropolitanization: multiple transit agencies are fighting for revenues and surplus funds that are controlled by an umbrella organization. All three agencies could really use the money so how is it to be decided outside of what will end up being a very politicized process?

2. In the larger public discussion about taxes, a growing theme is illustrated here: why should funds/taxes raised in one area be spent in another area? This is what Cronin is arguing: the revenues raised from relatively wealthy DuPage County (#57 in the country according to 2011 figures) are being used to fund mismanaged services in the nearby big city that many DuPage residents and shoppers do not use on a regular basis. This, too, is tied to metropolitanization: how can communities, agencies, and governments across a region come together to address common problems if everyone is only looking out for their self-interests?