Why the Rapid Transit route should not be split
As promised in the last post, I will discuss the issue of the splitting of the route in downtown Kitchener and Waterloo that was recommended by the Region of Waterloo report. I understand the motivations, but I think it is a very short-sighted move and that the region would be better served by the alternative of routing both directions along Caroline in Waterloo, and along Charles in Kitchener.
Part of the appeal of a light rail line in the first place is that it is simple. Fixed stations, trains going both directions, no schedule needed. But the recommended split route segments have stations on them, which complicates the route. Having stations on different streets for the two directions would make giving directions based on station location more difficult, and it would also create strange disparities in ease of access to transit based on the direction of one’s destination. In other transit systems where the directions go along separate one-way streets for much longer stretches than proposed here, the split is easy to understand and deal with, but here it is a very ad hoc measure. This is not a huge issue with the proposal, but it adds needless complexity and costs without the benefits to compensate.
Waterloo holds festivals that require the closing of King Street to traffic. The proposed way to deal with having one direction going along King Street is to double-up on the one Caroline track during any festivals. This will be difficult to do in practice, will require a serious amount of planning, and will include the real possibility of failure — which might not prove dangerous, but would certainly bring the entire system to a standstill. Additionally, splitting the route here is incredibly short-sighted because of the impossibility of single-tracking when (not if) trains will be running at a very high frequency.
King Street in Uptown Waterloo is already a fairly reasonably developed area and attraction, especially with the newly-opened public square. It is one street over from Caroline and no trouble to get to. On the other hand, Caroline is surrounded by parking lots that are prime for transformation. This is going to be happening very soon in the case of the Balsillie School, which will be next to CIGI. But it will take a fair number of years after trains start running before Caroline Street gets fully built up, and until then King Street will continue getting the lion’s share of visitors. People will go to King Street and the public square, and probably enjoy the lack of a transit line separating the two sides of the street. And of course, leaving trains off King would allow the future conversion of that portion of it into a pedestrian mall. Side benefits of not having any part of LRT along King in Uptown Waterloo: more parking left on King for those who swing that way, and no need to have LRT go against traffic on Erb.
One more point about Waterloo: apparently the Catalina town houses (bounded by William, Caroline, Allen, and Park) are an important part of why the proposal has only one track on Caroline. Such influence should not be accorded to a non-historic development of perhaps 20 units. For comparison, the Bauer Lofts, also on Caroline, are nearing completion and will have 89 units. This is the right scale for the area, especially noting the adjacent Sun Life building and the proposed 144 Park condos. [Update: This 143-unit high rise has been approved.]
In Kitchener, the proposal has one direction along Charles and the other along Duke. This is even more problematic from the standpoint of complexity because those streets are not even within sight of each other. The two stations would be far away, and this would present issues with directions and orienting, and with the arbitrariness of business and residential proximity to only one direction of travel. It is far simpler to have both tracks along Charles Street, which is easy walking distance to anywhere else in downtown. Of Duke, King, and Charles, Charles is the one with the most opportunity for new development. And as in Waterloo, King Street and Duke Street will hold their own in attracting visitors.
I find the idea of businesses being seriously hampered by being out of sight of the transit route to be strange. Light rail is not a streetcar — people cannot get off at will. The main thing LRT does for people is facilitation of getting from station A to station B, a trip in which people are interested due to the surroundings of station B, and not just due to what they happened to glimpse along the way. Most importantly for businesses in the downtowns, LRT will bring many more people into the downtown areas from elsewhere, resulting in more than what the current business selection can handle. Worrying about direct visibility from the LRT is silly; if it is there, worthwhile, and walking distance from a station, they will find out and they will come.
As just one example, consider the Mission District in San Francisco. All the main transit lines — subway and frequent trolleybuses — are along Mission Street, from which most visitors make their way a block or two to Valencia, which has an entirely different street feel than Mission. Considering the distance between the successive 16th St Mission and 24th St Mission BART (subway) stops which service the district, the distance to Valencia is insignificant.
Improving the Rapid Transit proposal
There have been a few weeks now to think about the Region of Waterloo’s rapid transit recommendation, and to read the discussion about it, both well- and ill-informed (the latter particularly notable in The Record). No Achilles’ heel has been exposed, but I do want to mention a few points that I believe would improve the proposal.
First, the current proposal involves a staged implementation, with the portion from Fairview in Kitchener to Cambridge using adapted bus rapid transit until ridership warrants full LRT extension. I think Cambridge is right to be concerned with this plan, as there is no strong commitment on the part of the Region to ever extend the full line to Cambridge. A split system can only be a temporary measure, because the line transfer and change of modality fundamentally disconnects the system, annulling some of the benefits of the rapid transit line. The same reasons why BRT is less usable than LRT — and more, since this is not full BRT — are the reasons why aBRT to Cambridge indefinitely into the future is unacceptable. There has to be a firm commitment by the Region to complete the line, with a guarantee that the line would be built by a certain year or a certain ridership on the aBRT, whichever comes first. Honestly, the Region should have enough faith in the economic powers of the LRT system that it would start building the Cambridge segment as soon as the first stage is operating, if not sooner. Either one of these possibilities would help assure businesses and residents of Cambridge that development focused on the aBRT line would not be too risky, as LRT extension would not be an empty promise. Of course, this assumes that stations would be preserved, which is also something to which the Region should commit.
The division between LRT and aBRT in the recommendation occurs at Fairview in Kitchener. However, I think it may make more sense to extend the initial LRT to Sportsworld for a few reasons. Sportsworld is currently undergoing a fair amount of development, and it is also more natural to group it with Kitchener than with Cambridge. A division placed there would allow coherent transit lines for both Kitchener-Waterloo and Cambridge. The primary benefit, however, would be easy access from the 401. Space for a park-and-ride is likely easy to find, and the location allows reasonable access to both cities. It would also allow for a decent connection to inter-city buses, which are going to remain important for at least the near future. But I will say that I’m not entirely sold on this, and if initial LRT to Sportsworld is difficult to justify economically, it is probably not worthwhile.
The major issue I find with the alignment itself is the recommendation to split the route in downtown Kitchener and Waterloo, and I will address that in a separate entry.
Countering Rapid Transit disinformation
Yesterday The Record ran a column by Peter Shawn Taylor commenting on the latest Region of Waterloo Rapid Transit report. It contains blatant falsehoods about the Environmental Assessment process, and thus I just sent the following complaint to The Record:
I believe the May 14 article “All aboard? Light rail transit plan is leaving the station way too early” by Peter Shawn Taylor was written in bad faith. It deliberately distorts the data in order to support its viewpoint. To see this, please take a look at page 6 of the Region of Waterloo’s latest Rapid Transit report: http://rapidtransit.region.waterloo.on.ca/pdfs/E-09-056_PREFERRED_RAPID_TRANSIT_SYSTEM2.pdf
Paragraph 4 of the article cites specific numbers about what seem like general meetings, when in fact they were meetings solely for “property owners and tenants living and/or working directly adjacent to the short-listed rapid transit routes”. It is abundantly clear from the information on the report that outreach to businesses was actually very good.
Regarding the general public, that report page states:
-“Rapid Transit newsletters have been sent to more than 250,000 residential and business addresses on four different occasions;”
-“Approximately 3,500 people have attended 33 Public Consultation Centres (PCCs), Workshops and Focused Consultation events and provided 1,039 official formal comments;”
-“Information about the Rapid Transit Initiative has also been provided at an additional 63 different public outreach events such as community stakeholder meetings, public events, presentations to groups, and educational displays where attendance was not recorded.”
The central premise that Peter Shawn Taylor uses in that article to advance his ideological position is in direct opposition to the data he ostensibly cites. This kind of blatant disregard for the truth is unacceptable, but especially so in a newspaper.
[Update, 2009/06/01: It’s been over two weeks, and I’ve received no response from The Record, so I must assume they condone the printing of falsehoods.]
Regional transit developments
The Region of Waterloo has finally produced its recommended proposal for Rapid Transit in the region. And that recommendation is to run a light rail (LRT) line between Conestoga Mall in Waterloo, Fairview Park Mall in Kitchener, and the Ainslie Street Terminal in Cambridge. However, they propose the first stage to use LRT only between Conestoga Mall and Fairview Park Mall, with the second portion to be at first an adapted Bus Rapid Transit system due to the high cost and low initial utility of that segment. The report for this “Phase 2, Step 3b” of the Environmental Assessment can be found at the newly-redesigned website for the Region of Waterloo Rapid Transit. That website also houses various other information, including information on upcoming Public Consulation Centres within the next two weeks as well as a discussion forum, on which I have made a few comments. I encourage anyone living in the Region to investigate the direction of this project and to voice concerns and especially support (if that applies).
My feeling is that the recommended plan is fairly good, however I will leave specific concerns and details for subsequent posts.
Additionally, in advance of GO Transit’s anticipated successful Environmental Assessment and consequent rail upgrades for a service extension from Georgetown to Kitchener, GO will be starting bus service to Kitchener in the fall. This is good news, particularly as it indicates that GO is serious about getting rail service to Kitchener.
What’s wrong with buses
I’ve now had two posts about bus systems and their issues. This time I want to talk about buses themselves. It is rare, at least in my experience, for there to be frank discussion about why people do not use them. But it is worth discussing why buses have such a negative connotation for most people, and what can perhaps be done about the causes.
Buses stink. With the notable exception of trolleybuses, this has up to now always been true. The exhaust fumes of diesel buses are quite bad. It’s particularly bad when these fumes make their way inside the bus. Newer buses are generally not as bad, but the older ones are still large parts of most systems. Regardless, it is an issue that remains relevant for rider experience and health.
Buses are loud. They’re loud outside, they’re ridiculously loud inside. The newer NovaBuses here are less loud, but that’s only by comparison.
Transit agencies view buses as billboards. This may be okay to an extent, but it is not okay when the ads block most of the view out the window. Not only does that make the ride even less pleasant, but it’s also difficult to see whether the bus is near your stop.
The ride is nauseating and headache-inducing, due to jumpiness of the bus and the sudden stops and starts. Here there is a partial fault of roads, and of the nature of buses. But what I find interesting is the huge difference that the bus driver can make. In my experience, some deliberately make gradual starts and stops, while others will make them very quickly, to the extent that riders get thrown about. A bad bus ride can easily ruin my day. Judging by the huge variance I’ve experienced in Grand River Transit buses, drivers have gone through either little or no training with regards to quality of ride for passengers. I can’t imagine this kind of training cost to be comparable to the money that gets spent on buses themselves. If GRT spent the effort on training, I’m sure it could market it so people took notice.
In transit, less is more
Following up my previous post on the role of perception in transit, I want to discuss the importance of simplicity of routes. In that post I mentioned the relative ease of using a bus that runs frequently. What that omits is the need to know where the bus actually goes. The purpose of most regular bus routes is to provide extensive service for an area, which generally means a winding route with many stops. What immediately follows from this is that it is difficult to be very familiar with more than just the routes you use routinely. This in turn makes it likely that you will simply not use the bus system for getting to somewhere unusual.
I must note that this is not always a predicament in bus systems. In cities with predictable street grids there can be bus routes that go straight along a particular street, or there can be bus routes that follow some important avenue. But inevitably there are common trips that do not follow the obvious streets, and so bus routes evolve to serve those trips.
The complexity of bus routes is a huge part of what makes bus transit a poor way to get people out of cars. A barrier to entry, if you will. If someone is reliant on buses entirely, they have no choice but to take the time to learn the route system, though they might still learn only the part that is relevant to them. Don’t expect people to willingly subject themselves to something difficult and esoteric if they can avoid it.
Though I won’t address it here, some complexity can be mitigated by properly designed information and maps.
The answer is probably some version of Bus Rapid Transit, a term that generally refers to individual lines with separate rights-of-way and express service. I believe bus systems should be holistically planned with BRT ideas in mind, in a way similar to subway systems. This entails simplified routes, limited stops as a matter of course, and maps that make it easy to understand both the overall route system as well as stop locations. Such a system could be parallel to the more comprehensive system. But it would be vastly more usable for most people.
This formulation exposes, however, a serious limitation of even a simplified bus system: the lack of permanent routes. BRT has little infrastructure and its vehicles can travel off route, so it still has this limitation, albeit to a lesser extent. The right way to think about the importance of unchanging routes is probably in terms of temporal simplicity and complexity. A simple bus system that changes over time becomes complex temporally. The effect is that people will still be wary of using the system to inform long-term decisions such as where to live and where to set up a business, as the bus routes could easily change and leave them out in the cold. Here the right sort of Bus Rapid Transit does offer a partial solution, but light rail and subways are and feel more permanent.
On the tipping point of buses
No, we’re not going to go around tipping over buses. Though it would make a great urban legend to counter that rural legend of cow tipping.
There are plenty of bus routes in Kitchener-Waterloo — and in most cities that are not New York, I would imagine — that run every half-hour or less frequently. On the other hand, the “mainline” 7 buses run every 7-8 minutes along their common spine. I claim that the difference between a 30 minute and a 8 minute headway is not just in quantity, but also in quality. This might be obvious.
The difference is in how one may use such routes. For 30-minute buses, on average you’ll wait 15 minutes; but sometimes you have bad luck and the bus is running late, so a worst case is something like 40 minutes. These are 40 minutes that you could have used to walk to your destination. Which is pretty bad, so you get yourself a bus schedule and plan your time around the bus stop time. If you don’t get there sufficiently ahead of time, you still run the risk of the bus arriving early and screwing you over. The obvious way out is to avoid all this hassle with some other means of getting from point A to point B, such as driving.
Why is an 8-minute headway different? The answer should be clear: if you need to take the bus, you go to the bus stop and wait. On average, that’s a 4 minute wait. Worst case, 8 minutes, which is manageable. You don’t need the bus schedule! If you know where the bus goes, then you can just go to a stop and expect the bus to ferry you to your destination. It’s easy, requires no access to schedules or the Internet, and especially requires no advance planning. (With a short headway, the schedule might actually give you a false confidence due to inherent variability in the route.)
The bus headway tipping point is probably somewhere in between 5 and 30 minutes, and is some kind of average of individual patience curves. Around that tipping point, more buses will lead to disproportionately more riders and a more user-friendly bus route. The greater point is that there is a serious qualitative difference between low- and high-frequency service, and this deserves more prominence in discussion of transit.
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