A web site called You Are Here has put together an intriguing series of maps showing the best mode of transportation from any point in various cites to any other part of those cities. So far, the maps cover Manhattan, Brooklyn, Chicago, Philadelphia, San Francisco, Portland, Salt Lake City, Cambridge, Boulder, and Santa Monica.
Click image to go to the “Best Mode” Portland map.
Select any of the above cities (or click here to see if more cities have been added), wait for the map to load, then click anywhere on the map. Instantly, the map is color coded to show the fastest mode of transportation from the point you selected to anywhere else in the city. Modes include walking, cycling, public transit, and driving.
What you will get, in most cities, is a small area of green (for walking), a larger area of yellow (for cycling), while most of the city will be red (for driving). Except for Manhattan, only a small share of any city will be blue (transit), and in many cases there will be no blue at all. This is even true for such transit-friendly cities as Brooklyn, San Francisco, and Chicago, and is certainly true for Portland, Salt Lake, and other cities that have spent heavily on their transit systems.
Although the maps supposedly identify the “best mode,” what they actually purport to show is the fastest mode. (Even in this, I think they are optimistic when it comes to cycling.) Speed is an important factor, if not the only factor, in people’s mode choices, so the real point of the maps, at least with regard to transit, is that it is uncompetitive with other modes.
A recent article on The Atlantic “citylab” web site offers a clue of why this might be true: too many transit agencies “favor suburban commuters over inner-city riders.” The article accuses such agencies of “not living up to their social contracts.”
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This is a refreshing article, coming as it does from the left-leaning Atlantic. (Another refreshing article on the citylab site debunks the “streetcar conspiracy” myth.) The Antiplanner has long argued that transit agencies that build new rail lines are too focused on getting suburbanites out of their cars while they abandon inner-city low-income people who have no cars.
At the same time, I have to wonder what makes David King, the author of the citylab article, think there was ever a “social contract” for transit. He obviously isn’t aware that Congress started supporting transit to help, not low-income people, but downtown property owners in New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, and Boston whose property values were threatened when private commuter-train operators proposed to discontinue those trains in the early 1960s. To protect those property owners, Congress agreed in 1964 to subsidize commuter trains, whose patrons were almost solely suburban.
Politically, of course, Congress can’t subsidize something in just four cities, so it ended up offering to subsidize public transit agencies everywhere. To take advantage of these federal subsidies, the transit industry flipped from being mostly private in 1964 to mostly public by 1970.
Beyond this, people who imagine that government bureaucrats will do whatever those people imagine is “the greater good” are living in a fantasy world. Public agencies are best understood as budget maximizers. Inner-city poor are not going to maximize a transit agency’s budget: they don’t have a lot of money and the aren’t as likely to vote as suburbanites. So naturally, the transit agencies follow the money, which means serving the middle class rather than the poor.
Budget maximization also means rail transit both because rail is more expensive and because rail contractors are more likely to contribute to political campaigns than bus manufacturers. Having decided to build trains to middle-class suburbs, the transit agencies then come up with excuses to justify their budget-maximizing policy (“get people out of their cars,” “reduce pollution,” “stop global warming”).
If the “best mode” maps for Chicago, Philadelphia, San Francisco, and Washington–cities that have relatively rapid heavy-rail transit as well as commuter trains–were expanded to include their suburbs, it is possible that the blue areas would be much larger. This wouldn’t help Portland or Salt Lake City, whose light-rail trains are simply uncompetitive by almost any comparison. (In Portland, at least, when blue appears on the maps, it usually represents bus transit, not rail.)
If Congress had wanted transit systems to serve people who really needed them, it would have found funding mechanisms that rewarded transit agencies for doing so. That means letting the transit agencies rely on user fees rather than tax dollars, as the tax dollars tend to come mainly from wealthier people who expect something back from their taxes. So the very act of having public agencies take over transit in the late 1960s doomed transit to focus on suburbs instead of the inner cities. Those who want to improve transit need to understand how institutions work or their efforts will be forever doomed to failure.
I expect planners to take great umbrage with today’s post. How ironic that in portland, the most walkable area is not downtown, but instead part of NE Portland. It goes to show you that no matter how much spending money, planning, manipulation, and lying planners do, the areas they extol develop organically, not as a result of planners’ wisdom or foresight, as they would have you believe.
Another great example of the burbs subsidizing the best transit in downtown.
Portland Metro is planning a project called Powell-Division Transit and Development project, which aspires to run “high capacity” transit from downtown Portland, out Powell to 82d, across 82d to Division (Portland Community College), and then out to Gresham. One of the stated constraints is to not cause inequity. I have two questions for the anti-planner: (1) If Powell Blvd is reduced to one lane in major segments to accommodate this project (which Metro admits might happen), won’t those working poor with cars in outer east from 82d south of Division get hammered with longer rush hour commutes what with Foster and Powell getting put on road diets? (2) What is it with these plans to connect colleges throughout the Metro area? I would think colleges want some disconnect to retain their separate identities. Then too PCC already has a commuter bus going between its various Portland campuses, and it works relatively inexpensively and effectively. p.s This project is also planned to connect to Mount Hood College in Gresham.
“Public agencies are best understood as budget maximizers. Inner-city poor are not going to maximize a transit agency’s budget: they don’t have a lot of money and the aren’t as likely to vote as suburbanites. So naturally, the transit agencies follow the money, which means serving the middle class rather than the poor.”
I think it’s important to distinguish transit modes here. While Antiplanner hatred of rail transit projects is often justified, intracity bus service that primarily serves transit dependent cohorts, most of which are poor is often ignored in argumentation. Yes light rail, streetcar and BRT services are not generally geared toward service of poor areas in a city, but transit agencies are charged with serving these populations through FTA grant requirements, and yes, a social contract. Every city I’ve ever lived in (Denver, Austin, Dallas, NYC, Atlanta) has a high level of bus service serving poor areas. It’s not shinny. It’s not new. It’s not costly (relative to other modes despised here). To me that is the lesson in Anti-budgetmaximazation. The transit service serving the poor works relatively well, costs less and sees fewer complaints. I argue that transit should focus on serving these groups and lets those with means figure it out on there own.
Portland planners are moving the poor out of the inner poor areas, to new poor areas out farther, where transit service is not as good.
“The transit service serving the poor works relatively well, costs less and sees fewer complaints.” – Bennet
I’d say it’s quite the opposite. The majority of jobs, especially those requiring few skills, are not in the inner cities but the suburbs. Yet in 2014 transit system after transit system does little other than run giant buses on fixed routes that nearly exclusively serve downtown.
Worse, often times the suburban routes that serve where the jobs are only run into downtown. Live in Powerdhorn Park in MPLStown and need to get to a job at a hotel in the Golden Triangle? It’s 12 miles. Taking the bus will be slower than riding a bicycle at a casual pace ( 12 MPH ) and take an hour 15 min to hour 30 min + some walking on the end of it. Driving would take 15 minutes.
The Golden Triangle is one of the larger concentrations of employment in the Twin Cities. It’s not just that. A simple bus trip from Powderhorn to Southdale – 9 miles, another concentration of jobs especially low skilled ones, will take 45 min to an hour on the bus. Again, no more quickly than a low-key bike ride.
Transit’s inability to getting people to where a lot of jobs are is, IMHO, a failure. The system exists to serve the routes, not serve the working poor. The result? Even the poor put money together for a jalopy just to be able to have a job. It’s sad since it’s the poor who would benefit the most from subsidized transportation.
But that’s a good thing – the poor are thereby “incentivized” to buy cars and drive everywhere. If they can’t afford a car, well, they should have thought of that before they became poor.
If doctors acted the way planners did, they would wish their patients dead if their first diagnosis wasn’t successful.
Planners are petulant sociopaths who are stuck on the whole “coffee shop and pub” meme as if that’s the only thing successful communities are composed of.
Metrosucks says, “the most walkable area is not downtown, but instead part of NE Portland.” Sorry, maybe I wasn’t clear, but I happened to click on NE Portland before copying that map. You can click anywhere on the original map to find the fastest mode from that spot.
Bob Clark: I agree with you that the Powell project is harmful to working-class residents of outer Southeast. I commented on the similar Foster Road project a few days ago.
Ah, thanks Randal. I wasn’t able to open the linked maps on my phone.
Regardless, it seems that transit isn’t really time competitive anywhere in Portland, or most anywhere else, which is what you have been saying in the first place, for years.
I am sure planners will poo poo this study and call for more TOD to supposedly remove transit’s shortcomings.
Bob Clark: I agree with you that the Powell project is harmful to working-class residents of outer Southeast. I commented on the similar Foster Road project a few days ago.
As the other poster mentioned above, this is another brilliant maneuver to drive them out while appearing to ‘help’ them. How Portland.