Jarrett Walker

Jarrett Walker (born 1962) is a transit consultant and native of Portland, Oregon. His Houston bus redesign was covered in the media,[1] and he has worked in cities in North America and Oceania.

Jarrett Walker
Born1962 (age 57–58)
Alma materPomona College (BA)
Stanford University (Ph.D.)
OccupationTransit consultant and author
Years active1991–present
OrganizationJarrett Walker + Associates
Notable work
Human Transit

Walker frames discussions about public transportation in terms of geometry,[2], including the ridership coverage tradeoff[3] saying that geometry gives a kind of certainty about decision-making and predictions. For instance, the Bay Area doesn't have one center, it has at least three anchors, with an obstacle (the bay) in the middle.[4]

Early life and education

Walker was raised in Portland, Oregon in the 1970s, where he became interested in transit issues while using the TriMet bus system.[5] Trimet is still operating buses in Portland to this day. Some major changes include a new MAX Light Rail system and a bus redesign in the 1980s.

Walker lived in Southern California, receiving his bachelors degree from Pomona College in 1980. He went on to receive his Ph.D in theater arts and humanities from Stanford University in 1996, and has used this knowledge to be published in the peer-reviewed Shakespeare Quarterly.[6][7]

Walker is the President of Jarrett Walker + Associates [8], the consultancy that contracts with public transit agencies. In addition, he has a blog and a book. He has given many interviews, talks, and written for The Atlantic's Citylab.

Career
  • Nelson Nygaard, TransLink, McCormick, MRCagney[9]
  • Major redesigns: Houston, Columbus, Richmond, Salem[10]
    • Philadelphia (2017)?

Walker has written peer reviewed papers in the Journal of Public Transportation including "To Predict With Confidence"


Walker has written for New York Times, The Atlantic,[11] and appeared on WBUR-FM.[12]

Walker's philosophy

Jarrett Walker generally keeps discussions about transportation away from prediction or new technologies [13] and instead keeping focus on geometry and freedom [14] In addition, Walker's position as a consultant means that he often frames his discussions around the values of the agency contracting him for business. In other words, he is 'only stating geometric facts' [15], or presenting choices, which the agency can then choose whether they want one thing or another. This usually has to do with the ridership coverage tradeoff. As the name implies, it is a tradeoff, so there are different things to gain and lose by choosing either. In this sense, his redesigns represent the values of others.

Another staple of Walker's philosophy is the interpretation of freedom of movement as a form of liberty.[16]. In this way, by improving people's transportation access to their city, he is liberating them.

Walker advocated for an "urbanist tea party" in 2013, suggesting the rise of the city-oriented or mayor-driven development, which was highlighted by James Fallows.[17][18]

Walker has explained that the modern streetcar movement doesn't live up to the hype, as its drawbacks and costs take away from a frequent-service transit network. Walker has stated "billions are thrown at light rail while the overlooked bus is [ignored]".[12][19][20]

Walker has also dissected the promises of modern rideshare services like Lyft and Uber, which are often (incorrectly) compared to transit or hailed as a replacement for transit. The efficiency, both real and theoretical, of rideshare comes nowhere close to even a relatively low-density bus service.[11][21]

As the coronavirus pandemic lockdowns caused sharp reductions in ridership on transit, Walker reminded the New York Times that transit is "not a business. And nowhere has that been more obvious than now. The sensible fiduciary thing to do would be to shut things down as quickly as possible, furlough the entire staff and wait. They’re not doing that because they’re expected to provide an essential service."[22]

Principles of bus design

A central part of Walker's recommendation revolve around a frequent grid of buses, saying "frequency is freedom", rather than the common focus of coverage. As an analogy, he says that a bus frequency of 15 minutes is like if a car could only leave its home every 15 minutes.[11][20][23][24][12][25][26][27]

Given any arbitrary level of transit service, it can be deployed in a number of different ways. Some ways are competing goals, for example, service in the weekday versus service on the weekend.

One more advanced side-effect of a grid is that the connecting services make one another useful, like a kind of network effect.

The general principles of Walker's style of bus redesign have garnered attention not just for the ideas they underscore, but for how fast it can be implemented[28]

Cities which Walker helped redesign their bus networkTime implementedWeekday Ridership IncreaseWeekend Ridership Increase
Houston [29]201511%30%
Anchorage2017-1%-3% Saturday, +20% Sunday
San Jose/Silicon Valley2019N/AN/A
Columbus20171.6-3.6%6% Saturday, 24% Sunday[30]
Richmond [31]201817%?

The Houston METRO system saw an 11% increase in ridership on weekdays a year after the redesign went into effect, and 30% growth on weekends[32]

In Anchorage, much of the focus was on how the existing decrease in ridership year over year slowed down and eventually turned into ridership gains two years after the redesign.[33]

Twitter feud with Elon Musk

Walker gained a significant amount of media attention as a result of a dispute he had with Elon Musk.[34][35] In December 2017, Musk expressed his disdain for public transit and reiterated his preference for individual transportation in response to an audience question during the Neural Information Processing Systems Conference.[36] Walker criticized him on Twitter, stating that "Musk's hatred of sharing space with strangers is a luxury (or pathology) that only the rich can afford," referring to the theory that planning a city around the preferences of a minority yields an outcome that usually does not work for the majority.[37][36][38] Musk responded with "You're an idiot," later saying "Sorry [...] Meant to say 'sanctimonious idiot.'"[39][40][41][42] This dispute led to a broader debate about Musk's opinions on transit, including during a segment on Fox Business Network in which Walker spoke with Stuart Varney,[43] and prompted an outpouring of people sharing their stories of the connections and community formed on transit, using the hashtag #GreatThingsThatHappenedonTransit.[42]

Backlash

Some of the bus operators which Walker has been involved with directed service changes towards ridership or connecting services, or even just change. Increased public involvement in the redesign process has resulted in unfavorability among members of the public and news outlets who call the redesigns service cuts, often disagreeing that they are a good idea [44] Part of this stems from the ridership-coverage tradeoff, where some residents of areas with low demand feel that they should keep their buses.

In addition, Randal O'Toole, a noted transit skeptic, has been a vocal skeptic of the implications of Jarrett Walker's work.[45][46]

Bibliography
  • Walker, Jarrett (2011). Human Transit: How Clearer Thinking About Public Transit Can Enrich Our Communities and Our Lives. Island Press. ISBN 9781597269728. OCLC 1023266302.
  • "In urban America, transit consensus is stronger than ever", 10 November 2016, Public Square, Congress for New Urbanism

References
  1. Daniel, Vock. "Buses, Yes Buses, Are 'the Hottest Trend in Transit'". Governing. Retrieved 20 February 2020.
  2. "Here's what happens when Jarrett Walker takes over your Twitter account".
  3. Higashide, Steven (2019). Better Buses, Better Cities. Washington DC: Island Press. p. 24. ISBN 978-1-64283-014-9.
  4. Patricia Leigh Brown (2 August 2015). "Bay Area's Disjointed Public Transit Network Inspires a Call for Harmony". nytimes.com. Retrieved 4 June 2020. Part of the problem is geography. At the Bay Area’s heart “is an obstacle — the bay,” said Jarrett Walker, a transportation planning and policy consultant who edits the blog HumanTransit.org and has written a book of the same title (Island Press, 2011). “There are three cities that with some justification regard themselves as important centers in their own right,” he said, referring to San Francisco itself, Oakland, and San Jose. “People live ‘over the hill’ or ‘across the water.’ There’s a weaker sense of region.”
  5. Green, Emily (December 6, 2011). "Hotseat: Jarrett Walker". Willamette Week.
  6. "Guest Lecture: Jarrett Walker presents "Transit: Freedom through Geometry" - UCLA Luskin". UCLA Luskin. Retrieved 5 June 2020. Born in 1962, he grew up in Portland, Oregon during the revolutionary 1970s, the era when Portland first made its decisive commitment to be a city for people rather than cars. He went on to complete a BA at Pomona College (Claremont, California) and a Ph.D. in theatre arts and humanities at Stanford University. Passionately interested in an impractical number of fields, he is probably the only person with peer-reviewed publications in both the Journal of Transport Geography and Shakespeare Quarterly.
  7. "Jarrett Walker on why transit advocates should study literature".
  8. "JWA Team".
  9. http://triangle.uli.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/54/2014/03/Jarrett-Walker-Bio.pdf
  10. http://jarrettwalker.com/consulting-services/planning/
  11. Walker, Jarrett (31 October 2018). "The Bus Is Still Best". The Atlantic. Retrieved 4 June 2020. Visualize a low-density suburb, with requests scattered over a wide area. How many people’s doors can a driver get to in an hour, including the minute or two that the customer spends grabbing their things and boarding? The intuitively obvious answer is the right one: not very many. An Eno Foundation report promoting microtransit could not cite a case study doing better than four boardings an hour of service. John Urgo, the planner of demand-responsive service for AC Transit in Oakland, California, has said that seven boardings an hour is “the best we hope to achieve.” Few fixed-route buses perform that poorly. Across sprawling Silicon Valley, for example, fixed-route buses carried 12 to 45 people an hour in 2015. In a dense city such as Philadelphia, the number can exceed 80. I’ve found similar figures in all of the 50 or so transit agencies that I’ve studied over the years.
  12. "Get Onboard: It's Time To Stop Hating The Bus". wbur.org. 29 March 2012. Retrieved 4 June 2020. There's a transit consultant named Jarrett Walker who likes to tell drivers about the importance of frequency by saying imagine if you had a gate at the end of your driveway that only open every 15 minutes.
  13. "Jarrett Walker: Planning Transit: Can We Live Without Predictions?".
  14. "Jarrett Walker's philosophy of public transit as means to freedom".
  15. "Facts and Values".
  16. "Freedom and Liberty through Public Transit".
  17. Fallows, James (2 December 2014). "On the Politics of American Resilience". The Atlantic. Retrieved 4 June 2020.
  18. Jarrett Walker (14 October 2013). "time for an urbanist "tea party"? the citylab conversations — Human Transit". Human Transit. Retrieved 4 June 2020. When I asked sociologist Richard Florida about this in the North American context, he pointed me to an article proposing that the US create a Department of Cities. He has good ideas about how to keep this from being just another bureaucracy, but if income inequality is the big issue that only national policy can address, it's not clear that it should be tagged as an urban issue at all. Cities are not where the problems are. Cities are just where people see their society's problems most intensely in daily life, because they get out of their cars.
  19. Joel Rose (23 February 2016). "Revived Streetcars May Be On Track For Disappointment". wbur.org. Retrieved 4 June 2020. "Streetcar is one of those really problematic words because the real estate industry loves it. But more and more, transit advocates are looking at what's been built in the name of streetcar revival and saying no, this isn't durable, long-term, great public transit," he says.
  20. Will Doig (3 March 2012). "It's time to love the bus". Salon. Retrieved 4 June 2020. And yet we rarely do. Streetcars are replacing bus routes in cities across the country, and billions are thrown at light rail while the overlooked bus is left to scream "Marsha, Marsha, Marsha!" "If you decide that buses don't merit investment, you're going to miss a lot of opportunities to help people get where they're going, and to expand their sense of freedom of movement, just because you don't like the vehicle they're riding," says transit consultant Jarrett Walker.
  21. E. Tammy Kim (30 May 2019). "Opinion | How Uber Hopes to Profit From Public Transit". nytimes.com. Retrieved 4 June 2020. Jarrett Walker, a transit-design consultant, recently noted on the “Rideshare Guy” podcast that when Uber and Lyft divert relatively affluent riders from public transit, there’s a damaging effect on “elite opinion.” He added: “The notion among elites that, ‘Well, Uber is the thing, because it’s so convenient to me. Therefore, public transit should somehow become more like Uber.’”
  22. Emily Badger (9 April 2020). "Transit Has Been Battered by Coronavirus. What's Ahead May Be Worse". nytimes.com. Retrieved 4 June 2020. “It’s not a business,” said Jarrett Walker, a transit consultant. “And nowhere has that been more obvious than now. The sensible fiduciary thing to do would be to shut things down as quickly as possible, furlough the entire staff and wait. They’re not doing that because they’re expected to provide an essential service.”
  23. "Here's how Houston boosted mass transit ridership by improving service without spending a dime".
  24. Jeremy Hobson (23 February 2015). "Redesigning Houston's METRO System Without Breaking The Bank". wbur.org. Retrieved 4 June 2020. Here & Now's Jeremy Hobson speaks with one of the lead designers, Jarrett Walker, about what goes into redesigning a city's transit system.
  25. Semuels, Alana (28 October 2015). "Why People Don't Ride Public Transit in Small Cities". The Atlantic. Retrieved 4 June 2020. In the 1970s, Portland was much like Nashville, Walker said, with parking lots and cars everywhere. But after the region introduced new laws preserving existing land, which limited road construction, Portland had to reassess. In the 1980s, the city redesigned its bus system, establishing lines along a grid that made service more frequent and widespread. After bus ridership increased, the region was able to muster the political will to put in light rail.
  26. Yonah Freemark (20 August 2014). "A Call for Minimum Service Standards". The Transport Politic. Retrieved 4 June 2020. As Jarrett Walker has noted many times, frequency of service can be just as important as speed, since the frequency at which a vehicle on a line arrives determines how long most people have to wait — especially when they’re transferring between services, an essential element of any big-city transit network and one that cannot be significantly improved with real-time data.
  27. Yonah Freemark (11 July 2011). "Reorganizing the Bus System within the Network Hierarchy". The Transport Politic. Retrieved 4 June 2020. As Jarrett Walker noted, the poor frequencies offered by bus service on the cancelled route meant it was only quicker if the bus was there exactly when you needed it; more frequent services built on transfers will bring better transit for more people at all times of the day. And they mean better access to parts of the city not directly along the route of the local bus.
  28. "The Man Who Makes Transit Systems Better Overnight".
  29. "Metro Bus Network Redesign, Houston".
  30. "The Columbus Bus Network Redesign Boosted Ridership".
  31. "A Year Ago, Richmond Debuted A New Bus System. Transit Ridership Is Up 17%".
  32. "Metro Bus Network Redesign, Houston".
  33. "People Mover New Bus System Report Card".
  34. Morris, David Z. (December 16, 2017). "Elon Musk Calls Transit Expert "An Idiot," Says Public Transport "Sucks"". Fortune. Retrieved June 10, 2018.
  35. Saffron, Inga (December 26, 2017). "SEPTA consultant and Elon Musk trade punches over future of mass transit". Philly.com.
  36. Marshall, Aarian (December 14, 2017). "Elon Musk Really Doesn't Like Mass Transit Systems He's Trying to Build". Wired. Retrieved 2018-06-10.
  37. Jarrett Walker [@humantransit] (December 14, 2017). "In cities, @elonmusk's hatred of sharing space with strangers is a luxury (or pathology) that only the rich can afford. Letting him design cities is the essence of elite projection" (Tweet) – via Twitter.
  38. Walker, Jarrett (July 31, 2017). "The Dangers of Elite Projection — Human Transit". Human Transit. Retrieved December 23, 2017.
  39. Elon Musk [@elonmusk] (December 14, 2017). "You're an idiot" (Tweet) – via Twitter.
  40. Elon Musk [@elonmusk] (December 14, 2017). "Sorry" (Tweet) – via Twitter.
  41. Elon Musk [@elonmusk] (December 14, 2017). "Meant to say "sanctimonious idiot"" (Tweet) – via Twitter.
  42. Hunt, Elle (December 21, 2017). "'I met my wife on a train platform': Twitter responds to Elon Musk with positive public transport stories". The Guardian. Retrieved June 10, 2018.
  43. Tesla’s Elon Musk in twitter fight over public transportation. Fox Business Network. December 21, 2017. Retrieved June 10, 2018.
  44. "NTA rows back on cuts to direct Dublin city bus routes".
  45. "Redesigned Bus Routes Won't Save Transit".
  46. "Is Transit Doomed in the U.S.? Discuss".
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