Putting a route near every community sounds fair until the buses only arrive once an hour. Jarrett Walker, author of Human Transit and principal of the firm helping Des Moines rethink its bus network, explains why cities cannot maximize frequency, coverage, and affordability at the same time. In Des Moines, the tradeoff comes with a 10% service cut, long waits, indirect routes, and streets that make some bus stops difficult or dangerous to reach. To understand whether the system is useful enough for people to actually rely on it, Walker asks a more revealing question: how much of the city can someone reach within a reasonable amount of time?
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Jarrett Walker is the author of “Human Transit: How Clear Thinking About Public Transit Can Enrich Our Communities and Our Lives.” He is a prolific blogger on transit and how to make transit systems work. He is also the principal at Jarrett Walker + Associates, and he’s been on this podcast a couple of times. I’m so happy to have him back. He is our go-to guy when we talk about transit. Jarrett, welcome to the Strong Towns Podcast.
Thank you so much, Charles.
Thanks for being here. please, Chuck. You and I are good friends. I feel like I always have to make this disclaimer at the top: I am not a transit user, and I have not grown up or lived in a place where there’s been great transit. My transit experience has all been either as a tourist or a visitor, or it has come through my reading and my understanding from others. I approach this with a mind that transit is important and critical to making a city work, but not from a user perspective. I’m going to acknowledge my shortcomings. Is that fair?
Yes, although I don’t think you should beat yourself up too much. Most people are not transit users, and they have their own good reasons for that. I am more focused on the people who would like to be transit users but find that their transit system is useless to them. That’s where I think we can make a difference. It’s understandable that many people don’t use transit in their situation, and that’s fine. We shouldn’t beat each other up about that.
That's all fair. I feel like I have been a critic of transit systems, though, and a lot of the critique back to me is, "Well, you're not a user, and I'm I'm going to agree with that. I do feel like, and I, you and I had a little bit of discussion because I wrote in my first book, “Confessions of a Recovering Engineer,” that I felt like transit is this overlay of a dysfunctional auto-oriented system, and it's really difficult to make transit work when you have this dysfunctional auto system you're trying to append it to. A lot of people took issue with that, and I felt like you and I had a really good conversation around that fact. So yeah, maybe I'm, maybe I can skip the disclaimer next time.
No, the problem is not. It's not a question of whether you're a user or not. There are certain things about transit, the fundamental importance of frequency or the importance of the walk experience, that are obvious to users. users who endure that every day, users who cross these the nine lane state highway and then cross a quarter mile of parking to get from the bus stop to the Walmart, will feel that they're having an experience that many others aren't having, and they'll want credit for that. I want to give them credit for that for actually having that experience. But it is nevertheless experience that we can describe and study and create awareness of, even for people who aren't having it themselves, and so I wouldn't I wouldn't encourage you to worry much about that.
I think that I think that the key thing that the key challenge for transit though, and what was the what was fundamentally our dispute about what you wrote in your chapter is that I think you made some things sound easy that are not, and that was and I think that the how to navigate the local politics of transit, how to look at everyone who is interested in transit and figure out how to bring them together, and when you can't, when you really must have a conversation about trade-offs, is what I'm trying to bring to this.
Well, that just might be because you make it look easy. So let's let's do this. I wanted to talk to you today about work you've done in Des Moines, Iowa, and I really, first of all, I thought the work was brilliant. But I always think your work is brilliant. I thought the report was really good and well written, and all that. I want to get into it, but why Iowa? Because most people, when they think about transit, especially if they don't use transit, they think New York City, they think San Francisco, they think Washington D. C. They think a crappy dial-a-ride or whatever it is, Iowa is just a plain, normal, everyday U. S. City with a transit system that's that was underperforming. Is that a fair like framing for the conversation?
Des Moines is a typical state capital in a red state, well, still a red state. We'll see what it is next year. But at the moment, it's a red state.
We're all figuring that out. Yeah,
But it has the usual features of a historic city of its age, which is that it does have a relatively dense and walkable pre-war fabric, not nearly as big as in bigger cities, but there's enough there to that there's a critical mass of that. There is also very importantly a major university there, Drake, as well as the usual mix of hospitals and shopping centers and everything else. There is the usual sort of historic racial politics, redlining, all those kinds of things that have been part of the story. So it's it's very much it has a lot of what most American cities, certainly most Midwest cities, had just happens to be a little smaller.
It's important to emphasize we do this work in all kinds of places, and in places much smaller than Des Moines, we find this conversation still needs to happen because the fundamental problem we're addressing is that the media and the and most opinion writers out there who just stumble into this topic assume that the measure of success of public transit is ridership, and we have to say no. Wait, stop. Let's think about that may not be actually why people want transit.
Well, I feel like your report is this educational document that really would take someone who is like, I want to understand transit and walk them through what we're doing. So I want to start with the idea of what the product of transit is, because we, I have people come to me all the time, and they'll say, "I want a train. I want light rail. I want high-speed rail. I want a bus system. I want, I want, I want.” And it's always focusing on the device. But you make an argument in your report that when we talk about transit and we talk about what product we're delivering, we're actually talking about something fundamentally different. We're talking about access to opportunity. What is that shift, and how should we think about what we're actually delivering when we want to have a transit system?
So, if to the extent that your goal is ridership, and we're going to come back to that question, the product of transit that we want to maximize is access to opportunity. By and here I'm talking, by the way, about the design of transit networks, the layout of routes and schedules. There are a whole bunch of other things that transit agencies do that affect ridership. Quality of operations, customer experience, all that; those are all important too.
But I'm talking about that sort of first question of: Is this useful at all? the way we maximize ridership is to maximize usefulness, and by and we measure usefulness through access to opportunity, by which we mean when somebody looks up a trip they want to make, What are the odds that they will find a travel time that fits into their life, a travel time that seems reasonable to them? what we are essentially doing is, we don't quite describe it this way, but we're really getting at that probability-the probability that when somebody looks up a trip, yeah, the reaction will be, yeah, I could do that fits into my life, because that's the first step. one of the things about public transit that I am most sure about, but that is most misunderstood, is that the primary reason that more people don't use transit is that they have checked it and they have found that it is useless to them.
Useless to them, not because of anything about the customer experience. Useless to them in the very specific aspect that it's that the time it requires simply does not fit into their life. so, if we and what we have found repeatedly is that we can we can produce ridership increases by designing the network to be more useful to more people, so that more people get a yes when they look that up. That's fundamentally what we're doing.
We, but the interesting thing about access to opportunity is that the very same measure gets a lot of other people interested who don't think they're interested in ridership, because what we're actually measuring is okay for every person in the city where they live, how many useful destinations, like possible jobs they could hold, places they could shop, places they could study, how many useful destinations can they get to in a reasonable amount of time, like 30 or 45 minutes? then we sum that across the whole population, and that's our measure of access to opportunity, and the cool thing about this is that you can calculate it regionally, and then you can also zoom in on any geography you want. If you want to zoom in on a particular municipality or electoral district or elected official’s district or whatever else, you can do that too.
Another cool thing is that you can actually put a tool on the web. We've done this many times where people can actually pick up, look at point to points on the map and see how the access to opportunity is and how it changes under a certain proposal. The constant focus on that basic usefulness. But the cool thing about it too is, of course, we're working with an image fundamentally. It's called an isochrone. Is the fancy word? Here's a dot, and here is everywhere you could get to from that. In this amount of time? one of the things I brought to that is the metaphor. Okay, think about this as the wall around your life. Think about this the wall around a prison.
Beyond that wall are things you can't do, places you can't go, things you can't do, people you can't meet in person, and so because I want people to understand access as a as a dimension of freedom, we're talking about your freedom to do anything that requires leaving home, and I want to invoke all of the other associations of the word freedom when I do that.
I want all that emotional resonance because that is all at stake, and if you listen to people talk about their transportation problems, you will frequently hear them talking about "I feel a prisoner in my own home, by which they mean they don't have transportation options, they can't go anywhere, they are missing a certain dimension of freedom because there are things that they cannot do that would give value to their lives. So that's that. There's a lot at stake in the and what the reason we've just fallen in love with this measure and find it so powerful is that it not only gets to the essence of how service design affects ridership, but at the same time it is easy to explain as a freedom. It is easy to explain how it contributes to economic development because connecting people to opportunities is what a city is for.
It's why we live in cities, so we're measuring how well the transit agency contributes to that. It's just it's just turned out to be a really powerful measure, and I explain it best in my book Human Transit in the new edition of 2024 with the blue cover. you can also find some things about it on my blog humantransit. Org at the Basics section. But the book has the most complete and citable explanation. In fact, it explains probably almost everything I'll say in this podcast. We'll see.
I feel this idea of freedom, geometrically, in a sense, like you're you're you're providing access to places. It's so obvious when you get to, I'll say like Washington D. C. That's maybe a place where people have visited as a tourist, because literally, if I'm in one spot and I want to go to another and it's a mile away, I can walk, I could get on the metro and go there, I could drive, which means going to a parking garage, getting my car out, paying, driving, trying to find a place to park there, transit all of a sudden becomes in a mile. Maybe I would walk, but two miles certainly now I'm. It's a, it's a, it's a, it's an easier option. It gives me more freedom. How does that translate into a place like Des Moines, where you? You're not having, high density in the way that you do in Washington D. C.
You're not having a metro system the way you do in a big city. You're actually working starting with a bus network. How does that freedom kind of mindset go there? Because the, I mean, let's face it, I love Iowa. I mean, I really do. I love Des Moines. It's a great city, but it's very easy to drive around. It's very easy to park in. It's very easy to get everywhere I want. There's no congestion. This is a pretty high bar for a transit system to create that kind of geometric freedom?
Well, you've picked up on a couple things, including a lot about how things have changed since COVID. There used to be a lot more congestion when everybody when the briefcase set, we're all going downtown at the same time every morning. But what I want to observe is this: what you're really touching on is the role of certain groups of riders as pioneers. So, in a city like Des Moines, you are you when you drive in from Minnesota, from a similar city in Minnesota, are probably going to find. Hey, it's just easy to drive anywhere. Why would I use transit? Perfectly fine. That's how the city's been built. That's how the city's been maintained. Parking is very cheap. However, in every city of that size, there are substantial populations who have some reason to want an alternative to driving?
There are these include people with lower incomes, people who physically can't drive, people who have been convicted of DUIs and should not be driving under the influence, and very important and very importantly, lots of people who are temporarily living in very dense circumstances and where cars don't make sense, such as for example students at the university, always a very important group in any transit network. So now here's your political problem. One way to look at that is we are a welfare service for those groups of people, and to define what you do entirely in terms of being a social service for those groups of people that will motivate you to allow the network to continue to deteriorate because all you're doing is taking care of this fixed group of people, and they want they need a lifeline.
But why should we care about more than that? That's one way to think about it. The other way to think about it is that these people are pioneers. That these people are that I live in Oregon and when I'm speaking in Oregon, the way I'll tell the story is that the reason we can drive over the Rockies and the Cascades is that other people did it in covered wagons, and before that, Lewis and Clark did it in boats, and hiking and hiking through the forest, and so the role of and pioneers are people who do something that is difficult, so that later it will be easier.
But they own, but their effect is only pioneering if we then respect them and respect the fact that they are helping to build something that will be useful to more and more of us if we cultivate it, and that's really the decision point. in a lot of cities of this size, the debate is really: Are we running a social service for a small number of vulnerable people, many of whom we know by name because some of them call us all the time? Is it that in which case spend as little as possible and do whatever they ask, or is it actually this small ridership that we have, if we cultivate it, will keep growing if we make it more useful. Over time, then what that means is that our city can grow, and our city can grow denser without choking on traffic, because that problem will come back if you if you if your city does continue to grow, and especially if it continues to grow denser.
My next question is about frequency and why frequency is so important. But I actually feel like what you just said. I feel like there should be kind of a disclaimer or a statement here at the top, which is, when you did this work in Des Moines, you were not given a bigger budget to work with. They didn't come to you and say, "Hey, we're going to double our transit capacity. We're going to add a bunch more buses. We're going to add a bunch more things. You're actually working in the constraint because when you say grow ridership, I think there is this kind of like because when we say grow traffic, we're actually talking about building more on ramps and highway lanes and all that. When you're talking about growing transit, you're actually not talking about adding more stuff like spending more money. Is that a? I can put that caveat in at the top here?
I am not aware of any transit agency in the United States that has the financial resources and the funding streams necessary to keep growing their service, even in proportion to population growth. Yeah, virtually every transit agency I know is falling behind, falling behind in objective terms as in having to cut service, and in many cases having to cut service as population is growing.
There was this extraordinary statistic in Des Moines, and I'm not going to be able to lay hand on it fast enough, probably, but the region had grown dramatically over the last 15 years without the service having grown basically at all, and so we usually start by saying, you shouldn't be surprised that your ridership isn't higher because, in per capita terms, your system has been shrinking, and you're surrounded by new horizontal growth, which is saying, hey, we've built this development out here. Where's our service? the transit agents can only say, "Take a number. We don't have the money to keep up with any of this. that is the that is the funding situation that has evolved, and that was already that before COVID. Then we got COVID.
We got the infusion of COVID relief funds from the feds, which postponed the problem for five years, and now everybody's in crisis at the same time. so, no Des Moines. Everything you see in Des Moines is about how to cut service 10%. That was the direction to us. Other clients, and I just want to underscore how bad this is. The conversation in Denver right now is about a major reduction. Staff has said that a 20% cut will be needed to balance the budget there. I'm seeing similar numbers in lots of lots of cities we're working in right now, and so there's this big question now about whether such dire service cuts will go through. But if we if where we're working on them, we're certainly trying to help them have a clear conversation about what goals they want to meet, so that they can save as much value as they can.
Just want to make sure that the people who are hearing us, because a lot of times when people talk about transit and they're transit advocates, which I'm a transit advocate, I think you're a transit advocate. They're hearing, more money and as you're describing what's going on in Des Moines, I want people to not have that default. I want them to understand that you're working within constraints. So let's go to this frequency thing. Why is waiting so burdensome to people, and why is it important for you to focus on frequency when you're thinking about the way a system functions,
There are several different variables about transit service that affect whether it's useful, because we're measuring total travel time door to door. So, of course, that also includes walking time to the stop. It also includes travel time aboard the vehicle, reliability of those things, but frequency is the thing that is hardest to explain, and so all my career I've found I have to pound the table about frequency, because it is the one aspect of a transit trip that motorists otherwise will not understand.
If you're a motorist, you understand in-vehicle travel time, and you've probably walked across a Walmart parking lot from your car, and you can get the idea of walking distance to a vehicle, but you haven't sat around and waited for an hour, not able to go anywhere because that's when the next service comes. in fact, sometimes one of my go-to images of this when I know I'm talking to people who live in suburban single-family homes is imagine there is a gate blocking your driveway that only opens once an hour on the hour, and that is the only time you can get your car out. That is the experience of low frequency.
I would even go a step further and say, I feel like with auto behavior, if I can be a stuck in congestion, going slow or not at all, but arrive earlier, or b driving on an open road but it takes me longer. People will opt for B.
They will.
Which is a crazy thing. If you’re talking about travel time, it’s so bothersome mentally to be going nowhere, right?
Right, and old-fashioned transportation modeling has always had factors that they've applied to this to capture the burdensome nature of waiting, and we account all travel time equal, all aspects of the trip equally, and just look at total travel time. But the point is, frequency really pays off. So in any of our, if you look around in much of our work, you'll probably see various charts that we draw to explain why the payoffs of frequency are actually nonlinear. You get up to a 15-minute frequency, and nonlinear benefits start to happen. The ridership payoff starts to be disproportionate, and that's why you'll find me really emphasis. You'll find us in all of our work really emphasizing the 15-minute all-day frequency.
We use a special, particularly bright red line to indicate that on all of the mapping we do, because we need people to see that, and you've got to understand frequency is expensive. If you don't scream about it in your mapping and in all your presentations, what people will see on a map is where the routes go, and they won't understand how important frequency is. That's why mapping styles are so important. It's why our firm insists on a particular style of mapping that screams about frequency, because it is so important, and it's why a high ridership strategy is a high frequency strategy.
Yeah, I feel like there's there's a part of what you're tapping into that is about human cognition almost. Let me put it this way: I feel the modelers of systems treat it almost like engineers treat modeling of auto-based systems. It's like, well, here's what here's what the people will do because this is what the logical model says, and everything from induced demand to the way people react to congestion to all of that creates these feedback loops that we just have a hard time modeling. I feel like I'm hearing you say these are human riders, not algorithm riders. Am I understanding you correctly?
Here's I think the key idea that you want to plug into that, most of those models are trying to predict human behavior, and they end up being both wrong and insulting, primarily because they've that is their objective. They are thinking of humans as little things moving inside moving inside their computer, yeah. What we do in our work, because we don't predict ridership, we're not predicting human behavior. What we're doing is describing degrees of human freedom. So when somebody asks me for a ridership prediction, I'm going to say, "Well, ridership is going to go up and down for a bunch of reasons that nobody can predict, like economics and gas prices and pandemics. Nobody should give you a ridership prediction, and if they do, they shouldn't believe it because nobody can nobody knows the future that way.
Nobody knows the future of human behavior. But what I can tell you is whether the network is being made more useful in a way that is that clearly generates ridership, because more people get a positive answer when they look up a trip, and I can tell you also that is the network that expands freedom of opportunity in your community, access to opportunity, and that expands the transit agency's contribution to the economic prosperity of the city because that's what cities are for: connecting people to opportunity.
So I can do all that, but I'm not going to give you a ridership prediction, and more importantly, I'm going to advise you not to believe anyone who gives you a ridership prediction. it is only because they are trying to predict the future of behavior that those traditional models end up being both wrong because they can't because that task is impossible, and also insulting because they end up they end up training planners and engineers to talk as though you, the public, are already inside of our computer and we already know everything you'll do.
My when I'm talking to a group of young people, I will always say that the foundational assumption of all of our conventional transportation modeling is that when you're the same age that your parents are now, you'll behave exactly the way they do because we are using your parents' behavior today to represent your behavior 30 years from now. So you better grow up to be an exact copy of your parents-that's what we're counting on. Nobody in their 20s wants to hear that, and they shouldn't. I want the next generation to surprise us. I want to make a world better for them, where they can do more of whatever they want to do, and I don't want to predict it, and I don't have to.
Transit agencies seem to hate the idea of transferring. They want people to be able to get on and get on at their beginning origin and end up at their destination and not have to transfer at all. I feel like you lean into the transfer as a feature, not a bug. Why is it a Why is it a feature? Why are transfers good in getting to the thing we're trying to solve here.
Well, let's start talking about why they're scary. Nobody will ever tell a transit agency that you should make them transfer. The needing to get off one vehicle and onto another is something that the network design requires in order to efficiently deliver access to opportunity to the greatest possible number of people. It is always an inconvenience. Now, when you say transit agencies are afraid of it, I think that there are two different dimensions. The transit agencies I work with all understand it; they understand why it has to work. I do think that many transit agencies in the U. S. No, not just in the U. S. Overseas as well, are aware that it demands more of them because they have to think about how their vehicles are working in coordination with each other and how those connections are being timed and what happens operationally.
There's a whole lot of work around it, and there's probably some laziness about wanting to lower expectations around transfers. But a network in which in which you can only use the bus route you're on to go only where it goes is always going to be a terrible network with terrible access to opportunity. The network that liberates the most people, and I can show this too. I can I can show you the blob of where you can get to in an hour, and then I can say, well, if you say you're not going to transfer, here's the much smaller blob of places you can get. Yeah.
That's the trade-off. once we put the trade-off that way, once we stop just saying, well, people don't like to transfer, and actually look at the trade-off, we find that people do transfer, and that they transfer a lot, and they do whatever gives them the greatest access to opportunity, and so we have to make transfers work.
I feel like we're at this point now where we should delve into the ridership versus coverage trade off because we in the report you define the opportunity, the access, all this stuff, and what we're really I feel like building up to here is that a different set of priorities reveals a different network that optimizes different things. go ahead and take us where we need to go on this tradeoff.
Okay, let's say, and this is what we did in Des Moines. Let's say we have to take the existing, already inadequate transit resources of the Des Moines area, and now you want me to actually optimize the network as though the goal were ridership. The Des Moines area has about 10 incorporated cities, and that contribute to financially to the agency, and if I optimize the whole network for ridership, I will serve two of those cities? Because about two of those cities have enough of the crucial geometric features that are conducive to efficiently providing access to opportunity by transit to large numbers of people, features like density, walkability, the linearity of development pattern, the compactness, the need to not cross big rural distances.
So, if the whole goal of the of the network were ridership, you would immediately produce something that everyone's everyone sees the map and says, "Well, that's politically impossible. All those cities will leave and take their money. Even within a because it's important to know in Des Moines you've got a structure where a transit agent the transit agency is structured as a voluntary club of cities can leave whenever they want and take their money with them. So all the cities have a lot of leverage. So that wasn't even thinkable. More generally, the issue again is that ridership is going to arise from.
Please remember this formula: ridership is going to arise from frequency, following patterns of density, walkability, linearity, by which I mean things are in straight lines so that buses don't have to meander, and compactness-that is to say, we don't have to cross large empty gaps. There's a chapter in my book that takes you through those really carefully and explains why we use those terms rather than some other terms you'll hear in the literature.
So that's just the geometric facts of the matter, and so and I'm very careful to explain all of this geometrically because I know that we are in a danger zone where people are hearing us say that their neighborhood is bad and that other neighborhood is good, and to a lot of people that will immediately start pushing cultural buttons about what about as though we're talking about them as people, and so I'm really emphatic that this is just geometry. It's just about the spatial layout of things and how that makes transit work or not has nothing to do with the people.
But because the recipe for high ridership is that means the ridership network has, under a fixed budget, without the ability to grow, the ridership network is pulling service back to the best places for service, running very frequent service there, and not running any service anywhere else. So, when you look at if you look at any of our projects, and they've all done this, the ridership concept that we draw has more bright red lines, more frequent service, but it also has more white space areas with no service, areas where people will say, and let's let's enumerate the good arguments for coverage. We pay taxes too. Where's our service? Or I live out in this cul-de-sac. I can't drive anymore. What am I supposed to do? I really need you?
So any argument that is based on need rather than demand, and then you'll hear this wrapped in social justice or equity language too. These people out here are disadvantaged for this reason. Why aren't you serving them? As though we're not serving them because of their demographic category rather than the geometry. So all those things. Have to be worked through, and that's why when I said that in your book in the in the transit chapter of I made it sound too easy. You made it sound too easy to just say, well, clearly the goal is ridership. I sensed that you had not sat through quite as many public meetings on this topic as I had, and heard very fair that because let's be clear, coverage. So that's what I do if I'm designing for ridership. I high frequency routes only in the highest demand markets, no service anywhere else.
If I'm designing for coverage, then I start with okay, I have to go everywhere.
So I divide my resources across all those route models I have to operate, and I end up with a bunch of hourly bus routes. we design those as best we can. We take coverage very seriously. We design our coverage concepts to be the best network you can have under that constraint and under that set of goals. We're not trying to dismiss it. We really try to make it work. But inevitably, it produces lower access to opportunity overall because the waiting times are so long that most people find very quickly that the service isn't useful to them, and so you get lower ridership. But Mrs. Jones, wherever she is, who really needs the service, has service, has a lifeline, and that's important to some people. So my job is not to say that one of those is more important. My job is to say that those things are opposite, and you can't demand both.
I remember I was working for the city of Edmonton once long ago, and they had adopted a vision statement that said something like, "Compete effectively with the automobile by providing access for all. You hear that? Compete effectively with the automobile-that's ridership by providing access for all-that's coverage. I said, "This is like telling your taxi driver to turn right and left at the same time. They will not be able to do it, you will not reflect reality as long as you're not answering this question, and that's what I'm always telling elected officials: lose weight
By eating more and not exercising.
Yes, whatever. Yeah, it's it's the same sort of contradiction, and we need more people to recognize that because transit agency staffs one of the reasons why you get so frustrated, we get so frustrated with transit agency staffs, is that they are the people who have been selected because the job requires being screamed at over your inability to do impossible things. Right. so, if you want more visionary leaders in transit, you need to be prepared to answer the hard questions they're going to ask you.
Yeah, I've got a question here about what it means to favor ridership, but I feel like before we get to that, it does seem a strategy based on coverage area commits you to a declining system, where a strategy based on increasing ridership has a potential to accelerate upward over time,
I wouldn't necessarily go there because whether a system is declining is ultimately a question of whether it is financially sustainable. Yeah. if a system is financially sustainable because the people coughing up the taxes for it like what it is doing. Then, as far as I'm concerned, it's not declining. So I'm I'm going to be very careful here. There is a you can call it socialist if you want, although lots of conservatives actually like it when you ask them this question. Should there be a basic mobility service in our town, for people who can no longer drive, for people who get DUIs and shouldn't be driving, and people will say yes, and lots of people will say yes. I'm happy to pay a little in taxes for that.
I'm happy to pay a little in taxes so that when someone gets a DUI, they're not still out on the road threatening people, and so that our seniors can get around town and so on, and that's a coverage network. Its ridership is very low. The small number of people who use it really appreciate it. I would not call it declining because that is to take on a sort of capitalist set of assumptions about what a transit agency should be doing. That is not everybody's assumption.
That's fair.
That's that's the thing. So if you want to talk, because remembering too what transit agencies are doing in America, and across most of the world too, is providing something that is important enough to the community that the community does not expect it to pay for it out of the fare box, and because the system isn't all paid for out of the fare box. It's really important not to just impose a business metaphor on this and say, "Well, they're losing money; they're obviously declining, or whatever. Because no, we're their transit agencies or government services. They do things for reasons other than ridership, and ultimately, I want them to deliver whatever mix of ridership and coverage outcomes their leaders choose based on the values of the people who are paying the taxes that support it. That's ultimately all we can ask.
I feel that's a I feel that's a very fair framing. Let me say it in a different way and see if we're on the same page. I do feel when you make, as I as I wrote in confessions, when you when you make transit an appendage, I think I actually said a charitable overlay of the auto-based dysfunctional auto-based system. It becomes this thing that gets treated a charity, and when my when I lose my job when my budget's tight whatever I cut the charitable giving before I cut my own meal at the table right, but if it's something where ridership is going up and more people are using it, I'll even go to the word like depending on it, or their opportunity, or their sense of freedom is tied to the transit system. Now, when you hit hard times, you hit difficult times. It has a more elevated place in our social consciousness and our public sphere. It is more critical, more central, more important to what we do. Am I making stuff up, or am I perceiving something that is actually real?
I think the question of how important transit is to a community is not entirely a matter of ridership.
Okay. That’s fair. I get you.
So I have seen transit agencies and systems. I remember in Salem, Oregon, which is another state capital, even smaller than Des Moines. Yeah, it's like Des Moines without the university. I remember them running a reauthorization campaign for their tax source, and their message was just someone needs the bus. Someone needs the bus. Now that would be insulting in Portland, but in Salem, that was the right message because it was, as you say, a place where it's easy to drive everywhere, where most people are not going to think of using transit, but where the people who do use transit really depend on it. But also where there is a way to connect with a majority of voters through the notion that we are all part of a society and are connected to people who benefit from this thing in ways that benefit us indirectly, and so that's fine.
It didn't really matter what ridership did for that argument. What mattered was that there was a value that taxpayers were willing to pay for, and that is really the fundamentals. Now, I don't want to be now I don't want to be framed as arguing that it doesn't matter what ridership is. I will constantly point, and I hope you will too, especially from your vantage point in the Upper Midwest, to all the things you can learn by going up to Canada and finding the Canadian city town that most resembles your town, and because you will find that there are just more buses running around, you will find that the buses are not cuter or sexier. You will not find that there's anything different about them except that there's just more of them. Are there
Friendlier friendly Canadians on them? Oh, you're friendly
Enough in Minnesota. Let's not go there. No, there's just more of it, and because there's more of it, there's more ridership, and because there's more ridership, when I go to talk to the city council, they're starting at a higher level of awareness, and I'm not. I'm not starting them from the point of maybe this is more than a charity. I'm starting them from if I if I've recently did a set of city council workshops in Saskatoon, and Saskatoon big city on the Prairie, a little bigger than Des Moines, quite a bit smaller than Minneapolis, just a few hundred thousand people. They're doing bus rapid transit, and they're doing a bus network redesign with considerably more resources than we're talking about. Talking about lots of frequent routes everywhere. It's Saskatoon. It's it's it's Saskatchewan.
This is not this is not anything big, but it's Canada, and the starting point in Canada is just a higher level of investment, and that does pay off on itself. The higher level of investment pays off directly, both through ridership, because the ridership, as you say, generates more people a very demonstrable benefit. But it's paying off through the coverage too, because more people's elderly parents are not stranded because those coverage services are there and are adequate, and that turns into more political support, and that's fine too.
Yeah, I feel like we're saying the same thing. You're just saying it more sophisticated than I. Well, no, I no,
I just, I'm, I'm just really careful, especially yeah, no, I appreciate especially now that in the society we're supposed to be we're supposed to be polarizing on whether we're capitalist or socialist, and I just want to say there's a capitalist way to look at this, which leads you to ridership, and there's a more kind of social way to look at this, which explains why we have coverage. what? You get down into the trenches, and it's not like all the Democrats are on one side and all the Republicans on the other. This is completely orthogonal to that, it's completely perpendicular to that, and the point is there is a but there are a bunch of things we value government doing to make our communities good places and to help us feel good about how are the experience that our most vulnerable citizens are having, and.
Lots of lots of people who identify as conservative Republicans will vote for a for a good senior service in their own city that they will never use, and that's how it works. so it's it's really important to not jump to the conclusion that the ridership coverage trade-off can be mapped, and that's one of the reasons I feel like it's so powerful to work with because it's not. It is sort of like capitalism versus socialism, except that many of the people who will vote for coverage would recoil at the thought that they're voting for socialism if you called it that. But yes, you're voting for a government service that is not evaluated based on usage. It's evaluated based on providing something so that everyone has something that so everyone has some kind of basic access.
Okay, one of the trade-offs that is made when you start to emphasize ridership over coverage area is that some people need to walk further to get to this more frequent, more robust service. That's right. You also talk a little bit in the Des Moines report about microtransit and the role of microtransit. Can you dig into those two things? Because I feel that is part of it. I mean, I say all the time that the best investment we can make transportation wise in our cities is to make our neighborhoods more walkable, make them more bikeable. That is a that is a acceleration strategy for building wealth and prosperity in a community. Talk about how that conversation ties into what a reimagined Des Moines system looks like.
Well, yes, because to run the highest ridership network, I want to run the fewest possible transit route miles that the most possible people can get to. That's what I'm trying to do. I'm trying to. I've got this expensive thing, high frequency service. It's expensive to have a bus come every 15 minutes, so I need to put it where lots of people will find every stop useful. That means density first of all. How many people are around the stop? the second thing is walkability. Can the people around the stop actually get to the stop given the barriers?
The barriers including the walk across the quarter mile walk across the Walmart parking lot because of their building orientation, the barriers presented by freeways or rail lines, and the terrible barriers we have on state highways of not having enough safe crossings and not having enough safe places to cross. So all of all of those barriers, to the extent that we've accepted them from convention from the consequences of conventional traffic engineering, have created environments that are worse for transit. so yes, walk that walkability is absolutely fundamental. When I was working in Albuquerque, the state-it turned out the state DOT had a policy that we will not put signals on a state highway more than every half mile. I remember thinking, well, congratulations-you've just essentially mandated BRT, haven't you?
You've mandated that the transit agency can't stop more than every half mile, and that's going to be a long walk from some of the apartments you've built on this street. So all of those traffic engineering kinds of things that fall out of the traffic engineering manuals and models that are just fundamentally hostile to non-motorized life. Yeah, you have to take on all that. You mentioned microtransit. Let's go back to that for a second.
Yeah,
Microtransit, formerly called dial-a-ride and also called on-demand transit or flexible transit, and the diversity of names should also make you a little suspicious, is a very old technology. It simply means that instead of the bus driving down the street in the same pattern on every trip, the bus does something different on every trip according to who calls it, and may come to your house or close to your house a taxi cab if you request it is a tool for getting coverage to very low demand, unwalkable, and otherwise hard to serve areas.
During the late 20 teens, there was an enormous, well-funded hype campaign devoted to confusing every transit executive and every elected official in the country, and convincing them that microtransit was some sort of spectacular new invention that was going to transform transit planning, and all those rigid and that fixed routes are just evidence of rigid minds, and we need to sweep away all those fixed route planners, and this is going to be the new thing. honestly, the professional planners inside the microtransit companies didn't believe that, but that was the scam. That was the pitch, and I will never forget actually a 2018 Railvolution conference in Pittsburgh.
This was a conference that is supposedly about the transformative capabilities of high-intensity rapid transit? it was completely taken over by the microtransit companies because that was when the peak of the hype cycle, and there were suddenly all these panels about microtransit. I was thinking, what does this have to do with anything that this conversation conference ever used to be about? so that's just how crazy it got. a lot now and then, you'll hear, you'll still hear, a transit manager say that the ridership coverage trade-off is a thing about fixed routes, and microtransit takes us to a different place. If you hear that, just run. That's wrong. Micro transit is a coverage tool. You still have to have the ridership coverage conversation.
Micro transit is one, and you'll see if you look at our Des Moines report, our coverage concept has lots of microtransit zones in the suburbs, all of which will be terribly unproductive. Micro transit can almost never carry more than five passengers per hour, which is a terrible performance for a fixed route. But it's a very efficient way of saying that you've gotten close to lots of people, and so that's why we use it. We use it when we are when the goal is coverage, not when the goal is ridership.
Gotcha. This wasn't in the Des Moines report, but I want I want to ask you this because I feel like it's a question that elected officials should struggle with. We're calling you in and saying, "Hey, here's the system we've got. Here's the budget we've got. Help us reimagine this. Help us optimize this. you look and you say, "Well, here's where this will work, and here's where this won't work. there's a trade-off. It feels like cities that want to commit to transit can't commit to transit in a silo. That whoever you've got working on transit ultimately has to be having a conversation with whoever's working on land use planning and whoever's working on highway planning and street and highway maintenance and what is wrong with the way we do local government today, that puts transit over here as this thing to bring in separate from everything else that we do.
I think you have to start by thinking about all the things we ask a transit agency to do. We ask them in the United States for the most part. We ask them to directly hire the operating staff, and so in most American transit agencies, about 95% of the employees are bus drivers and mechanics, and so you have an agency culture that is dominated by operations, and it naturally comes to feel that operations is the thing we really do, and all these other things like planning and finance are yeah, there are some eggheads over in the building there, who do that, but we also have put on them the expectation of being regional, and we have in most cities set them up as separate institutions from city governments.
Now there are some very powerful exceptions, like San Francisco and Chicago, where the transit agency is more or less coextensive with the city and better integrated with the city government, there are lots of other ways to organize transit, but that's the way we've organized it. The other thing we've said is transit agencies are just freestanding government entities that need to balance their own books somehow, and so that makes them dependent on some sort of tax source.
But the problem that I see over and over is that inside of city governments, when city governments make their own plans, they tend to put more emphasis on the things they control, which is understandable, and so a typical city government will say, "Hey, we can do bike lanes, we can do parks, we can do street trees, but transit is something that the transit agency does to us, and that relationship means they don't own it. if you really want success with transit, you have to own it. That doesn't mean you need a municipal transit agency. What you need to do is study Seattle. Now, of course, Seattle is a big, dense blue city, not like your city in a lot of ways.
But I just want you to study it in this way: that back in the aughts, 20 years ago now, Seattle did a groundbreaking document, which I was privileged to work on, called the Seattle Transit Plan, which effectively said we do not control our bus network formally. It's controlled by a larger agency.
However, we have strong expectations for public transit needs to succeed in order to deliver on these things that we are accountable to our voters on, and that includes, of course, the ability to support a denser and more walkable land use form than would be possible if everyone were in cars, and so we are going to draw our policy transit network, which is mostly sort of 90% similar to what the transit agency had drawn, but differs in some crucial ways. then they said, "This is our policy for where we are going to support transit priority and do whatever we can with our control of the streets to enable transit to succeed in those places, what that means is that in Seattle, when the transit agency needs something that is on the policy network that the city has adopted, they call up a traffic engineer, and they are not just another stakeholder asking for something; they are asking the traffic engineer to help implement the city's policy because the city has adopted the policy and it is the city telling the traffic engineer to work with the transit agency to solve this problem.
I'll give you a very concrete example that came up in Des Moines. I don't think this is unusual. We had a situation where I was saying, if we could put a four-way stop here. This bus route could be way shorter and less circuitous because we really have to turn left here, and we can't do it without a four-way stop. This comes up all the time, and the traffic engineer's first response was, "Well, that's too close to a curve, and people come around that curve too fast, and they wouldn't stop for a stop sign. You've been through this, Chuck. You've been that basic assumption of yeah,. I mean, I would put it as a basic assumption of criminality on the part of the population.
That we have to really ask ourselves if we want to be surrendering to that everywhere. But that is the sort of thing where if the city had a policy that said this is our transit network, it is our network. We have adopted these routes. We will make these routes work. Then that policy would have told him to go ahead and put a four-way stop in there, and he wouldn't have done it.
The question would have been, “How do you slow traffic down so this stop is safe?” as opposed to—
“It can’t be done.”
Right.
Yes. You put in some bumps or whatever you need to do to make that safe.
Yes.
Yes.
Exactly. I want to ask you this last question. You and I talked about Houston before, and we’ve talked about Des Moines now. These are variations on a theme—obviously different-sized places, but with a very similar intellectual approach. I feel like there is a conversation going on in this country around transit that is shifting from, “What is the next grant we can get from the federal government to let us do some big thing here or there?” to, “All right, I’m not sure this is the most reliable partner. We’re kind of on our own here, to a degree. How do we make this system work better?” If I’m asking that question, I’m calling you. That’s the thing I’m doing. Is this the vibe that you are picking up on as well? Do you see that changing?
Yeah, and it's I have to say it's a great time to focus on service design because what the because what we're clearly not getting help for is infrastructure. But what? We need a lot less infrastructure than we thought we did 10 years ago, because so much infrastructure was based on those transportation models that were based on moving all those briefcases into downtown at nine a. M. we're not doing that anymore. That's right. We're doing something much more interesting, but less centralized in providing a degree of access across the entire city. This is what I've always been trying to do, and I feel a little bit liberated now that we're in this moment, because the other thing we can do is look at the old world, the world before 2020.
It's left us with a lot of stranded infrastructure, where Infrastructure that our grandparents built, wanting the best for us, was infrastructure for their world and not for ours. Park and rides, for example, there are stranded park-and-rides all over the place next to rail stations in almost every city. We need to build housing on all of them because we'll never need that much parking again. All of those kinds of things. So I think it's a good time, with the exception.
I want to make clear, I'm not questioning important megaprojects like Gateway in New York, but for a lot of mid-sized cities, and certainly for Des Moines-sized places, if you're going to do infrastructure, I would do bus stops and crosswalks, lots of crosswalks, a safe place to cross the street every quarter mile is my motto, even on state highways, and then invest properly in service and be amazed what we can achieve just with that.
We had a piece I wrote a couple of years ago called “We Need a Billion Bollards.”
A billion bollards? No, a million crosswalks.
Absolutely. If people want to reach you, HumanTransit.org is your website. People should be reading it anyway. Every time you publish something, it’s gold. I’m going to put a link to the Des Moines report on our website so people can see that with the show notes. Jarrett, if people want to get ahold of you directly, I know you’re on Twitter because you tag me every now and then, even though I’m not hanging out there as much. Where can people get ahold of you? I get a ping when you tag me.
Oh, okay. A couple of a couple of other links. Jarrettwalker. Com and my first name spelled J A R E T. JarrettWalker. Com is the actual website of the firm where you'll see kind of the diversity of what we do. Because I mean, you picked on Des Moines, but we do this 10 or 15 times a year in some. I
Know you do,
so we're doing this all the time. humantransit. Org. I would mention there is a section of that website. There's a menu you can find it easily called Basics, and that's a good place to start because that's where I've collected sort of the most generally applicable things I've written. So those are all the tools. But again, buy the book, Human Transit, the 2024 edition, and lots of people have said it's a really good read. Lots of transit agencies give it to members of their boards.
You said “lots of people” as some abstract thing. I’m going to say Chuck Marohn has called it an essential read, so let’s put that on the back of the book. You’ve got to read this book. I think everybody who is serious about wanting to understand transit needs to read it.
Well, thank you. Yeah,
Yeah, man.
I did my. That's that's it's it's done pretty well. I mean, I wrote it initially, published the first edition in 2011, and it did a lot of work, and I hope it's going to keep doing work for people in helping them think through these issues and make sure they understand the consequences of their choices. That's all I ever want to do.
Well, I appreciate you being patient with me and teaching me so much about transit. I'm just going to say, the more you keep making it look easy, the more I'm going to keep saying it's easy.
No, I my job, as I will say, my job is not to make it easy. My job is to make it clear. It's I think I think if you read my book, you'll find that the issue is clearer, but you will find that the choices are indeed difficult. But they are stark moral choices of the kind that you don't need an engineer to advise you on. They're the kinds of choices that we all have to think about as humans.
Those are the best kind. Jarrett Walker, thanks for being here. Thanks, everybody, for listening. Keep doing what you can to build a strong town. Take care.
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