Tag: transit

Eric Jaffe shows the yearly financials on transit, and it’s ugly

Lisa Schweitzer

So people like Gen Giuliano and I have been saying this for years, but Jaffe is a man, and ostensibly a transit ally (unlike people like me, who wish to destroy it all by noting it costs money and suggesting we should plan for that problem), and since men are the only people who could ever ever understand transit, maybe the transit fanboys will listen this time out.

In either case, Jaffe from Atlantic Cities combs through this report and boils it down for his readers. I’m sort of excited about this entry into the discussion because 1) the DOT seems actually to have taken President Obama’s evidence-based decision-making to heart with things like this report, which is very good and 2) Jaffe does a terrific job of hitting the high points, so I can, in turn, be a fangirl in his general direction.

Except…the “blame labor” question is a big one because I thought the reason we were running around pouring money into trains was to take advantage of economies of scale and save on labor costs. The commenters are circling around the issue, which is higher management salaries do not translate to lower operating costs on the ground. So all those contract managers we have floating around transit agencies are probably expensive relative to what they are producing in terms of revenue.

It’s a lot more than a salary story. First, energy costs are problem for transit agencies as well as motorists (as energy costs are an issue for every industry) so the prices for fuel creeping upwards hits transit agencies right along with everybody else, even if they are using “alternative” fuels, which also probably have a petroleum base. Energy prices tend to move together.

During the time period Jaffe is talking about (00 to 10), there has been a lot of capital investment. Capital budgeting is done separately, but that’s a bad idea. Capital expenditures become debt service, and expanding the system means an increase in both operating costs and revenues in different proportions. In private management decisions, it would be clear: with operating deficits of this magnitude, you shut down. Immediately. You’re losing money every time you send a bus out of the barn. On the rail side, you don’t invest billions of dollars to lose 40 cents on every dollar you spend to operate. Public management requires a more subjective nexus. Is a 50 percent subsidy adequate? Unacceptably high? We have to think about transit a lot like we think about public schools. It’s the same debate, really.

I haven’t gone through and looked at anything rigorously yet, but it’s entirely possible that new expansions are pulling down cost recovery ratios even more because the investment decisions are poor upfront–that is, without the expansion, the existing system gets about 40 percent, but the new service gets 25 percent. And that might be common enough to pull down those numbers as well. The response is always “Those new lines take awhile to build ridership” but then…Metrolink.

There are a couple of key graphics in Jaffe’s discussion that should worry us. The one that really really worries me is this puppy:

Dot chart 3

Wuuuuuuuuuuuut? Yeah, nothing really surprises me here, except the bus and light rail entries. WUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUT? And people wonder why I am always in such a bad mood. One of the reasons we are supposedly pouring all this money in light rail is that, while it’s more costly upfront to build, it has lower operating costs. This graphic does not suggest that, at all. Now, there are other arguments for light rail (it’s jolly! It’s sweet and wonderful and provides a better ride! Woohoo!) But damn it. The fact that there are no apparent scale economies here suggest that all that public investment in trolleys could be kicking some agencies straight in the financial groin. You spend more to get the same return, and to the degree that there are amenity benefits to the investment, those go to land owners who may or (in California’s case) may not be paying in via local land taxes.

(PS I’m sorry, Atlantic Cities, for lifting your graphic but if you label your figures with numbers I could just refer it rather than lifting it.)

Finally, inevitably, somebody in the comments started in about subsidies to drivers, to which I responded:

I have never understood the transit advocates’ belief that, somehow, operating subsidies to private vehicles are germane to how much operating subsidy transit requires. Is it a fairness or public interest argument? I agree that motorists should pay their full marginal costs, but they already pay via gas taxes, they provide a good deal of their own labor and capital costs privately (owning the car (horrendously expensive), operating it, fueling it, insuring it, etc etc). Buses, bikes, streetcars, and trucks use roads, too, so acting like those are all on car owners is also a bit off. But it’s not like places that charge very high petrol taxes, which for all practical purposes serve as a green tax*, don’t also have to grapple with how much operating subsidy to provide. At some point, there is a basic public management problem here: How much of the operating deficit is a “subsidy” that goes to benefitting patrons, and how much of it is just poor public management, where we really ought to start saying “no” to various add-ons (like new buildings with marble floors, etc, ala the LA Metro building) and expansions that simply put agencies on the hook for operating service they can’t afford to operate.

*I know it’s probably third-best, but see the work of Ken Small and Ian Parry.

David King, Mike Manville, and Mike Smart tell the truth about transit in the WashPo

Lisa Schweitzer

I’m in a grouchy mood this morning because of a (really wonderful) piece in the WashPo from David King (Columbia), Mike Manville (Cornell) and Mike Smart (Rutgers.) It talks about the how the transit ridership numbers from last week are not particularly good news because they demonstrate the same trend we’ve had for years: declining productivity even as rider numbers limp upwards.

Federal policy change that we should enact right this second: You don’t get a penny of transit money until you have upzoned around station areas and have development approvals in place. Period. Not a penny.

GRRRRRRRRR.

Noble lies and transit

Lisa Schweitzer

Attention Conservation Notice: I may have just come up with a rationale for overly optimistic ridership and cost forecasts, and having sprouted horns and a tail, may need to go bathe in holy water or visit an exorcist. Crimony.

In the how-on-earth-did-the-argument-wind-up-here department, I am beavering away on Chapter 3 on public transit. It’s a tricky chapter because it doesn’t quite fit in with the rest of the book. The major thrust of the book concerns the virtues that urbanists should embrace in order to foster Jane Jacobs’ style urbanism. The transit chapter digresses a bit from that theme, as most of the chapter develops an argument for why cities as a political community have the duty to supply transit (I am then going on to write about whether people have a duty to take transit.) Through many twists and turns, I have come to the topic of bad transit forecasting and whether these might be covered under the rubric of the ‘noble lie’ in politics.

Plato, in Book III of the Republic, has Socrates verbally sparring with Glaucon, Plato’s brother. Glaucon, as we discover, is no slouch when it comes to debate. He also has the will to power, and Socrates often toys with Glaucon, talking about what extremes a society would have to go in order to achieve social harmony. The noble lie is no exception. There are two parts of the lie: the first lie concerns the idea that a society can be, somehow, autochthonous, without politics, or history, or established systems of relationships. That is the pseudoi. The second part is described as a myth, one that would need to be believed by all classes of workers in a utopian political community. Socrates’ myth consists of convincing the members of the polis that each is born with different metals at his core: the rulers infused with gold, their experts and helpers have silver, and the common men made of brass or iron. Leo Strauss noted that Socrates’ description of the ‘noble lie’ captures the idea that leadership is selective, and that society requires these types of myths about social order in order to achieve social cohesion.

Political theorist Kateri Carmola made a somewhat different argument I favor, largely because it ties into its interpretation the positions that Glaucon has taken in favor of seizing power and imposing justice, the context, and the dramatic gestures Socrates makes. It also ties in all those long digressions about genealogy that many take as simple eugenics, though they don’t hold together as simple eugenics because of the way Socrates keeps pointing out that fine breeding only leads to exceptional specimens every so often, and in some cases, leads to some real duds. Carmola’s approach also explains Plato’s focus on cosmogony: the focus on making and breeding is a metaphor for making society, from one generation to the next. Carmola also links the idea of the noble lie to Socrates’ reference to Cadmus and the House of Thebes, one of the most violent intergenerational myths available to him. In the case of the cosmogony, the tales of the origins contained in Hesiod contain a great deal of intergenerational violence and familial abuse. The preconditions of political and social life are bloody and unjust.

Carmola suggests that Plato uses the noble lie to smooth over, and yet highlight, the “incompatibility between historical reality and absolute justice.” (p. 51). The lie is a children’s story, in Socrates’ manner of educating children, that helps them transition to the necessity of a politically established conception of justice, and away from an individual, idealized right order of justice. It concerns the political act of founding, or transforming, a political community. The dialogue in Book III is a means for helping Glaucon, and those like him, to see the problems inherent in believing that justice may be imposed, even as one stretches out and seeks to influence the course of human affairs. Carmola’s paper is delightful, and I highly recommend it.

Applied to transit politics, the idea that public agencies like transit companies might engage in myth making in their future visioning comes out most strongly in Jonathan Richmond’s Transport of Delight: The Mythical Conception of Rail Transit in Los Angeles . Richmond traces the development of Los Angeles’s new rail construction, highlighting the manner of myth making that occurred between the region’s transit providers and the public it serves. Richmond is critical, not unlike Glaucon when he tells Socrates that he should be ashamed of such lies within a political community, deluding people with promises of something that isn’t simply because of the outcomes the vision offers. Plans and visions are in many ways, lies; leaders and the forecasters they employ can not guarantee all the outcomes. They can offer visions and paths, through a glass darkly as Paul warned us. What rail advocates throughout the 1980s, 1990s,2000s and today offered to Los Angeles is a vision of what isn’t–yet. Actualities may or may not follow; shouldn’t adult citizens be capable of understanding that in the dialogic, deliberative venue that is contemporary democracy? As Socrates helps Glaucon see in Book III to Book VII, there are no bright lines and transparent, easy-to-read boundaries in leading for justice. Is it really so wrong for mission-oriented public agencies, founded because somebody had a vision for what they might do, describe their visions in dream states on the one hand, and nightmare states on the other? The rest of us are not bound to subscribe unless we see ourselves as enthralled by ‘what the experts say’ about what cities should build and how–hardly true in planning now, if it ever was true (which I doubt; I think it was more to do with lack of constitutional protections for individuals vis-a-vis state decisions). If most of us know forecasts are diddled, and I think it’s fair to say that secret is out, and yet voters continue to vote for projects, anyway, it is probably fair to say that voters are voter for the grand vision and not the details.

Even if the lines are not bright, there is still a line, as Socrates’ use of the word “lie” indicates, between the poetic license of agencies and advocates seeking to lead through rainbows-and-sunshine visions and the propaganda and overreach of despots, not to mention the political penalties that ensue from such such disastrous-if-one-gets-caught misinformation as Obama’s reassurances about keeping your plan (no matter how crappy), reading lips about “no new taxes, and California’s High Speed Rail Agency strategic distortions of their cost estimates early on.

Carmola, Kateri. “Noble Lying: Justice and Intergenerational Tension in Plato’s “Republic”.” Political Theory 31, no. 1 (2003): doi:10.2307/3595658. http://www.jstor.org/stable/3595658

Richmond, Jonathan. Transport of Delight : The Mythical Conception of Rail Transit in Los Angeles. Akron, Ohio: University of Akron Press, 2005

If transit is a right, are transit strikes unethical?

Lisa Schweitzer

That’s the question that was lurking about my brain yesterday while I pottered in the garden. Progressives do have a problem here; I think that many of us buy into the notion that access is a right. But most also support labor in their quest to secure good wages and job benefits, and to maintain those over time. I have trouble with rights to the city as a concept. Positive rights strike me as difficult to forge and sustain a consensus around, and without a social and political consensus about rights, and/or a legal basis for them.

It’s a puzzle.

Eric Eidlin blogging on HSR and land use in Europe

Lisa Schweitzer

Eric Eidlin is a friend of mine from back in the day at UCLA; he’s currently a community planner with FTA up in San Francisco. He is currently on a fellowship in Germany and France and he is writing his observations at The Urban Current. Here is one of my favorite entries so far, on Train Stations and the Tension between “place” and “node.”:

An issue that has come up frequently in my discussions with my French project contacts is how to balance the conflicting roles of train stations: how, on one hand, to design stations that serve as places through which large numbers of travelers can move through efficiently, while at the same time creating memorable and pleasant urban places where people want to spend their time. This is what planner geeks like me call the ‘tension between place and node.’

Go read.

More shadowboxing with the Hyperloop

Lisa Schweitzer1 Comment

Eric Jaffe has a column up over at the Atlantic Cities that is making my brain squirm a bit. It’s called Another Reason Not to Build the Hyperloop. The reason is, I guess, this quote from Sir Edward Lister who is the deputy mayor for planning in London:

“The trouble we always have, especially when dealing with government and trying to negotiate funding packages, is you always get this argument: you don’t want that scheme because this next scheme is going to be more modern, much faster, much cheaper,” he said. “Therefore you kill off the current scheme but you never quite get to the next scheme because another few years have rolled by. That is a danger. I’ve come to the conclusion that it almost doesn’t matter what you build, just build it. It always gets used and it gets used very quickly and fast becomes overcrowded. In any kind of mass transit operation, get moving with whatever you’ve got, which is current technology.”

The whole piece just strikes me as wrong-headed, and normally I agree with pretty much everything Jaffe writes about. It’s a short piece so maybe I don’t understand what he’s saying, but with what’s there, I have some grumps.

Ok, first of all, to the title: nobody is really proposing to build the Hyperloop. HSR’s enemies might have jumped on the idea to flog HSR with, but I haven’t seen any state reps sponsoring any bills to divert HSR money to the Hyperloop. Plenty of people just want the HSR to go away because the public management of the project has been less than stellar so far, but that’s largely independent of the Hyperloop.

Second: speculative designs about transportation are to designers what food is to your tummy. We see these things constantly in transportation. They’re fun, and necessary, and nobody usually takes them all that seriously until they are dug up for retrospective shows years later.

I have never once, not in nearly 25 years of working in infrastructure, ever seen a speculative design ‘kill’ a proposed project by distracting project supporters. Yes, there is usually kvetching that the project is ‘too expensive for what we are getting’, but I have never seen a project go down because somebody came in with a speculative design that distracted us from building the actual project on the table or that stole the project’s thunder. Why? Because infrastructure IS actually breathtakingly expensive, and people always ask: shouldn’t we be getting more given what we are spending?

And then whatever it is usually gets built anyway, except for some projects that deserved to die from the get-go. (Rick Perry’s SuperHighway comes to mind, but even that one appears to be getting new life.)

Anyway, I wish Lister would give me a list of projects that actually died because of an alternative speculative proposal. Anybody got a story of how pod cars snuffed a light rail proposal? Anybody? If California HSR dies, it won’t be the Hyperloop’s fault. Hyperloop might not be helping, but there are plenty of good reasons why the HSR might go down at this point, and none of them have to do with people being too starry-eyed over the Hyperloop.

The attitude of just build whatever you have and it will all be crowded strikes me as awfully complacent. Plenty of systems that aren’t London build and operate under capacity for decades, and with negative marginal revenues, the idea that we should just build and build strikes me as just as wrong as dismissing every project as too expensive. The public is not an endless source of money, and major systems that can charge what London does for fares strike me as uniquely privileged in the transit world.

And how do you ever innovate if your answer is always: just build what we have?

Death driving the bus in Guatemala

Lisa Schweitzer

I just finished up writing a chapter where I argued that unionized labor in transportation, though a favorite whipping boy, has some pretty good reasons to be unionized, in that operating transit vehicles is a pretty difficult job. My claim was greeted with incredulity, largely by a reviewer whom I’m pretty sure has never had a job in his entire life that didn’t involve sitting on his butt in front of a computer. Driving a commercial vehicle is difficult ergonomically, making the route’s time points can be difficult and stressful in mixed traffic, and then you have to deal with clueless and jerk face customers on top of that. It’s a hard job, and transit advocates seldom stop to think about how crucial operators and their morale is to overall level of service.

Anyway, I’m sticking to my guns on the point in the chapter, and this recent write up of the dangers of bus driving in Guatemala from The New Republic reinforced the point. No rule of law means no rule of law, and everywhere becomes dangerous, but the whole story is both amazing in the bravery of the operators and in the horrible conditions that govern their work:

There, in the crowded office, the phone lit up. A man’s voice came on the line. It was calm, almost pleasant. You’re going to pay us taxes now, the voice said: 8,000 quetzales a week—about $1,000. If you don’t, we’re going to start killing your bus drivers.

“Unlinked” versus “Unliked” transit trips

Lisa Schweitzer

I was writing this morning (a textbook chapter, as a favor for a friend) about the difference between unlinked and linked passenger trip measures. This distinction is important:  unlinked trips measure a trip as every time a person boards and alights a vehicle.   Linked trips capture the entire journey as one trip, even if there is a transfer in the middle.  For unlinked trips, a person making a single journey with a transfer in the middle counts as two unlinked trips.

You can see how much uncertainty unlinked trips add to measuring service use, particularly in large regions where transfers are frequent: counting one trip as two is a fairly big measurement error; if transfers are timed well, the problem can actually get worse as more patrons are likely to be more willing to undertake trips with multiple transfers.  And, of course, because we live in a world where nothing is easy, it’s far easier for transit agencies to count unlinked trips than linked trips.

Imagine how difficult it is to do performance evaluation on service changes using unlinked trips.  If you reconfigure routes, alter schedules, or open a new line, you are hard pressed to figure out how much increase in service use might be due to lower trip times (ie service improvement) and how much might be due to simply introducing transfers on the one hand, or  increasing demand amongst journeys that require transfer on top of basic demand.

For some reason this morning I am typing “unliked” transit trips instead of “unlinked” trips. It’s feeling very Freudian.

Transit, we love you, but you bring us down: service problems from a patron’s perspective

Lisa Schweitzer

Peter Gordon and I were chatting at party yesterday about my difficulties writing an introductory chapter about public transit. Why the trouble? The topic has become so politicized that no matter what you say, somebody assumes something about your ideology before you are able to finish your thought. My goal in an introductory chapter, I think, is to help newcomers to the field get enough background to evaluate the debates on their own, not feed them my conclusions. It’s proved a tough chapter to structure.

So I was surfing around the webs to see what other people think the big debates are in public transit, and I happened upon this wonderful, refreshingly honest piece from a commuter over at the Size. As a fellow transit commuter, the writer over at the Size pretty much nailed the problems from a commuter’s vantage point–and it has nothing whatsoever to do with the normal advocacy about how transit saves the universe and is clean, convenient, and quick. In my experience, transit is seldom any of those things—but it is still often better than driving even from the standpoint of the individual decision-maker and her utility, without worrying about fighting climate change or obesity or any other social ill we’d like transit to fix for us (while we mostly ignore and underfund it).

Taken together, the sum total of her problems with transit make a go-to guide for what, if we could clean up our act as transit providers, would take transit from being useful but annoying to being useful and often pleasant. I’ll go point by point.

10. The bus didn’t see you and tried to (or did) just drive right past you. You’re wearing a long bright red coat, but somehow you’ve turned invisible momentarily. These things happen.

Passbys. RRRRrrr. Sometimes they are your fault–when you are embarking on a non routine trip, and you accidentally stand in the wrong spot (which wouldn’t happen if transit information were better, but even then, I routinely screw up), or sometimes they are the driver’s fault–i.e., she’s driving an express bus that doesn’t stop at that stop, but she doesn’t have her express number up, or she’s running cold and shortchanges a single patron waiting so that she can skip a stop and get back on time. Those things do happen; if drivers didn’t do stuff like that every so often, they’d get pretty far off schedule, and then everybody on the bus and everybody coming up is ill-served rather than just you.

In my ideal world, when a driver has to skip a stop to deal with the schedule, they should be able to blast that info so that the tripper behind him or her can give a dollar coupon or some such from the transit store or some sponsor to give to the standees at the stop. It’s small comfort, but it is an acknowledgement that the bus operator didn’t meet a service expectation. Also in my ideal world, that message from the operator would prompt a tweet or a text to passengers who subscribe to that line when the next bus is coming so that you can make an informed decision about whether to wait or whether to give up and cab it.

9. There is a delay due to slippery rail, mechanical failure, residual mechanical failure, disabled train, disabled bus, signal problem, medical emergency, weather related problem, residual delay, switch problem, heavy ridership, police investigation, traffic, weather related slip, heavy ridership, etc. My favorite of these delay reasons is “late train”. How can you describe the reason as the problem? Why is the train late? The train is late due to a late train. Okay, that clears things up.

Transit companies work pretty hard to stay on time, but failures do happen. Telling people that the train is late because it’s late isn’t helpful, and it feels like an insult to your intelligence to have this said in explanation. Transit workers should be better at saying “I’m sorry–I have no idea why it’s late, but I will check to see if I can find out when it’s coming.” Some transit providers tweet the information, which is marginally helpful. But in cases of very late service, transit companies should try to make it right by sending bus shuttles and offering next-month pass discount codes to people waiting past a certain threshold. I know it would decrease revenue, but when you are recovering as little from the farebox as transit providers generally do, losing a bit of revenue in favor of passenger goodwill might be worth the trade.

8. Someone has BO, too much perfume, permanent cigarette scent, and any other funk that you must now deal with.

Nothing to be done about that. Hell is other people.

7. You can’t get in the train. You’ve been waiting what feels like forever and need to get to your destination soon (or just would really like to). Oh, good. Here’s the next train. It opens. It’s full.

From a provider’s perspective, crush loads are sort of awesome. All that revenue, all those passengers, being served by one driver at a time. Super! But from a passenger’s perspective, this is nasty. Not much to do in the short term but try to run higher frequencies or larger trains, but you probably can’t do either because you’ve maxed out on platform space already (train size), or your roster isn’t big enough to support more peak hour operators, or you can’t add from your existing roster because you can’t split drivers’ shifts according to union rules, or paying split shifts is prohibitively expensive.

Another possibility is adding a private contractor to try to redirect some passengers to professional vanpool or bus services who will take agency passes during the peak. That’s expensive, too, and your unions don’t appreciate it.

6. People won’t wait for you to leave to train before they try to get on. They somehow are always surprised to see you there trying to exit. It’s not the second coming of Jesus, folks. You should expect every time a train comes that at least one person is going to be walking through the opening and off the train.

OMG–my biggest pet peeve, right along with the people at the airport in Zones 4-100 who feel the need to clutter up the space for boarding and make it hard for the rest of us in zones 1-3 to get on the airplane. Seriously people, the plane/train/bus leaves when it leaves, we’re all leaving at the same time. Stop it, would you?

I’m not sure there is a solution to this one, except in my ideal world the people who do that are poked with a cattle prod and made to wait until EVERY SINGLE PERSON HAS ALIGHTED HOW DO YOU LIKE THEM APPLES, MR IMPATIENTPANTS?

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