A great interview with Jarrett Walker, author of Human Transit
With Jeff Wood from the Talking Headways podcast
If there’s one thing you should listen to this weekend it’s Jeff Wood’s interview with Jarrett Walker on Talking Headways.
Walker just released a revised edition of his excellent book Human Transit. I’ve read the original (published in 2011) three of four times and bought a copy for all my Transit Commission colleagues at City Hall.
The book is about transit planning and how to balance competing values and goals when we’re designing urban bus and train service. Walker brings the reader into the mind of a professional transit planner and explains what makes transit work – or not work.
Some interview highlights:
Hype around new technology (like self-driving cars, on-demand transit). (“Self-driving cars… are already directly affecting your commute by virtue of undermining investments in transit.”)
Expanding and anaylzing access to opportunity as a planning metric (“…whereas ridership is a prediction, access is a fact about the present… So I think that we in general in the profession tend to overvalue prediction...”)
Public consultation and reaction to change. (“The level of anger will be proportional to how much we are changing. It won’t be proportional to the quality of the plan.”)
How post-pandemic travel patterns are changing transit systems. (“The one-way peak express service is just about the most inefficient thing transit can do.”)
The fare-free movement. (“The concept of prices needs no explaining, everyone understands, but the concept of service takes quite a bit of explaining… We have seen over and over both studies, surveys, [and] revealed evidence that ridership responds much more to service than it does to fares.”)
One section that stood out for me was about public feedback. I’ve seen this happen so many times in meetings – I’ve probably done it myself. It’s a good reminder about why everyone should have a chance to weigh in about transit, whether they use it or not.
“You need to be encouraging people who don’t use transit to nevertheless care about it. So when I go into a meeting and somebody stands up and say, ‘I just want a show of hands how many people got here on transit,’ I always cringe because the people who didn’t get here on transit are welcome here. And what I hear always is a subtle implication that they’re not, or that they have in some sense less authority. What is true is that people who don’t use transit don’t understand it as well and will make certain understandable mistakes, as they bring their own frame of reference to it and expect it to work like whatever the thing is that they’re an expert in. And that’s really what the book is trying to do to a large extent, is engage and help people understand…”
Missing links along pathways is a fact that reduces access to users. “Expanding and anaylzing access to opportunity as a planning metric (“…whereas ridership is a prediction, access is a fact about the present… So I think that we in general in the profession tend to overvalue prediction...”)”