In this episode, I’m joined by consultant Jarrett Walker to take the pulse of US transit in a world of empty downtown office towers, surging weekend ridership, and the tech elite’s dream of transit without strangers. We unpack the myths that plague buses, reveal why Canada’s transit abundance should be our model, and map the policy battles that will determine whether US transit systems shrink or soar.
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Text transcript:
David Roberts
Hello everyone, greetings, this is Volts for May 7, 2025, "How is transit doing in the US?" I'm your host, David Roberts. The Covid crisis was, among many other things, a gut punch for US public transit. Many transit systems were built around facilitating commutes to downtowns, and downtowns emptied out overnight. Many took years to return to their pre-Covid health, and many still haven't.
The federal aid that helped local transit systems survive Covid and its aftermath is coming to an end, and many systems face a “fiscal cliff” after which their funding will plunge.
Some transit systems have coped with these changes better than others. To get a sense of how US Transit is doing in general, I'm talking today with Jarrett Walker, who has been planning and advising on transit systems since 1991. He's the author of the noted book Human Transit, which just got a new, revised edition last year, and the founder and president of Jarrett Walker + Associates, his transit consulting firm.
We are going to discuss where transit stands in the US, which systems are doing it well, what myths and misunderstandings still plague it, and the best policies to move it forward.
With no further ado, Jarrett Walker, welcome to Volts. Thank you so much for coming.
Jarrett Walker
Thank you very much, David. It's really great to be here.
David Roberts
This is a big topic to chew off. Obviously, you think about transit systems all day, every day. It's probably difficult to summarize what you've learned in one hour. But I do just want to try to, as best we can, get a snapshot of how the US is doing. And I thought maybe the place to start would be, let's just take ourselves back pre-Covid, before Covid. How's US transit doing? Like, I think, sort of like the conventional wisdom among people like me is basically that the US is a laggard on transit relative to Europe, relative to China, relative to growing Asian countries, relative to almost everyone.
But maybe you can give us a little bit more than "it's lame." How was US transit relative to other countries in the pre-Covid era?
Jarrett Walker
Well, I think you would say it was dramatically under-resourced, as it still is — has been from the beginning. And you know, I keep encountering these interesting statistics. I'm just now doing a project in Des Moines, Iowa, and one of the interesting statistics that sticks in my mind is that since 2009, the region has grown over 20% and the resources for public transit have grown by 1%. So, we have a lot of transit agencies in the US that are not resourced to keep up with growth. And that's actually a very old problem. Another dramatic example from a current client is the Chicago suburbs transit agency, Pace, which serves virtually all the suburbs of Chicago, 200 and some cities.
It has never really been resourced to grow as its service area has grown. And so, you look at its network map now, and it's still predominantly focused on the areas that were already built out 70 years ago. They've never had the resources to really keep up with all the development that has happened since then. So, the neglect of public transit in the US, the failure to grow it, even with population, has been a constant throughout much of my career. But you asked particularly about the late teens. In the late teens, we were seeing a very slow deterioration in transit ridership in a lot of cities, attributable, I think, mostly to the fact that driving was unusually cheap.
It was extremely easy to get car loans, and so lots of people who had been using public transit went and got cars. But I think that fundamentally, the most important thing to keep in mind, and this will probably come up in various ways, is that we just have very little public transit in the US.
David Roberts
Yeah, that's kind of what I was getting at. Well, I saw a statistic once — maybe you can confirm. I repeat this all the time, I've never actually looked it up to confirm whether I'm remembering it correctly — but I feel like I read somewhere that the New York City metro area represents something like 75 to 80% of total transit ridership in the US. Like, if you took New York out, it would really reveal that there's very, very little robust transit in the US.
Jarrett Walker
And so, I deal with that every day, of course, because most of the work of our consulting firm is helping transit agencies figure out how to do the best they can with the resources they have. And so, I'm constantly making, having to advise on these sort of "Do we keep the heart or do we keep the lungs" kinds of trade-offs.
David Roberts
Yes, yeah, well, we'll get to that. So, let's talk then about what Covid did to transit. I think that the sort of headline story is simple, which is just people were commuting to jobs and they stopped doing so for a year, which left transit sort of stranded. There was a ton of federal help for everyone early on. So, where do we stand with all that? What are these fiscal cliffs and like, who's facing them? What did Covid do? And have systems recovered from it?
Jarrett Walker
So, in terms of ridership — and we'll come back to the fiscal side of it — but just in terms of ridership, transit ridership has continued rising gradually ever since the bottom in late 2020. And there are many services I can point to that are above pre-Covid. Those are mostly, though not services devoted to taking people into downtown because that's the market that's disappeared. Where transit is doing well is all day, all weekend, moving people around in relatively dense places. And we have lots of routes around the country now that are above their pre-Covid ridership, especially on weekends, of course, where the pre-Covid data didn't have commuting in it.
So, we can see the growth more clearly. But I want to say a couple of things about the commute because so many journalists start with the assumption that transit is about commuting and it's never been as dominant a part of the market as you would think from the media coverage. It just has to do with who's doing the media coverage. But we have always had an important role in moving all kinds of people for all kinds of purposes at all times of day. But we have always inevitably been expected to handle, in addition, this enormous concentrated one-way commute into a downtown.
And that one-way commute, although, you know, sometimes the buses and trains were pretty full, it was really expensive and inefficient to serve because we had to own a whole bunch of vehicles that we didn't use very much. We had to pay drivers to come to work for just three or four hours.
David Roberts
Well, it's just like all these other systems I discuss on this pod. It's built around the peak. And thus, you have a bunch of unused capacity sitting around most of the time.
Jarrett Walker
Bunch of unused capacity. All those trains that go in full come out empty the other direction. There's just a whole lot of inefficiency to that huge one-way peak. So, I think that the future of American cities as they're evolving with now, you know, downtown office buildings starting to turn into housing and developing more of a jobs-housing balance, is fantastic. It's ultimately going to lead to healthier cities and better environmental outcomes. But, if you're just measuring transit ridership, of course, there's one big source of transit ridership that's gone away and that's probably never going to come back to the same degree.
But everything else is doing well. Now, the other issue is financial. So, the other thing that has happened to transit agencies in a big way is that it's become harder and harder to hire staff.
David Roberts
Oh, interesting.
Jarrett Walker
Yeah. Transit agencies in the US have had real difficulties ever since the pandemic with hiring, particularly bus drivers, but also mechanics, train drivers. There are a bunch of reasons for this. Driving a city bus is a very difficult job.
David Roberts
Yeah, it's always seemed like it's miserable for the amount of money you get for it. You have to deal with the grumpiest people.
Jarrett Walker
I know. And so, we're having to pay people more to fill those positions. And so, unit operating costs are going up for transit because we have to pay drivers more in order to retain them. And I'm fine with paying drivers more, but that's an adjustment that we have to somehow pay for. And so, that combined with the problem that especially the larger agencies had of the big loss of rush hour fare revenue, has created the fiscal cliff. The fiscal cliff tends to be worst in the largest agencies that were most dependent on commuting agencies like BART in the Bay Area.
David Roberts
And the cliff is because all this federal revenue is running out, basically.
Jarrett Walker
Right. So, what the federal revenue did was basically fill the hole of the vanished fare revenue. But now, that is running out. And so, transit agencies either need to find a new funding source, which many are trying to do, or downsize. And I'm working on both kinds of projects. Louisville, without any particular funding source, is looking at downsizing the system by 50%.
David Roberts
Oh, that is tragic.
Jarrett Walker
You know, on the other extreme, you know, in Portland, we're growing. The Bay Area is working on figuring out its fiscal cliff problem, and some sort of giant funding measure is probably going to go before the voters in '26. I think we'll see a lot of measures on the November '26 ballot because that's really the drop-dead date for a lot of these agencies. And that's when voters in a lot of communities are going to decide whether they want their transit systems to collapse or whether they want them to keep improving.
David Roberts
I'm curious. When you talk to the big cities where commuting was the large chunk, you say that it's probably not coming back completely. I'm sort of curious. When you're planning these big systems, you need some sense of what the future holds. And as far as I can tell, nobody really knows what's going to happen. Like, downtowns have not recovered completely. Are they ever going to? Is some of this working from home going to be permanent? There seems like a little bit of a backlash against it. They're trying to drag people back now, but I'm just wondering what these towns are they sort of like acclimated to the notion that downtown is never going to be what it was, and they're just working around that now?
Jarrett Walker
I don't think downtown is ever going to be what it was in 2019, but I think it can be better. I think that the direction we're going clearly is that the market is telling us that what we need to have right now is housing rather than offices. And that, to the extent that we add housing to downtowns, they become more vibrant 24-hour places where transit has a larger role to move people back and forth for all kinds of purposes, not just haul all the briefcases in at 9 am and haul them out at 5. And that's really where transit can sing in an environment where there are lots of people moving around for all kinds of purposes all the time. And that's where we're seeing the best performance in transit systems right now, generally.
David Roberts
And when we talk in the US when we talk transit, are we mostly talking about buses? Like just on a per capita basis, is it mostly buses carrying people?
Jarrett Walker
Yes, and I encourage people to care less about whether they're on rails or tires. We're really trying to offer the greatest possible access to opportunity, and that requires using the right tool in each situation. I think that one of the big challenges we have in the US is an elite prejudice against, not just an elite prejudice against public transit, but an elite prejudice specifically about buses.
David Roberts
Oh, for sure.
Jarrett Walker
Which I am always working to push back on because I've spent plenty of time in other countries where the buses are every bit as nice as the trains and you can barely tell the difference from the inside. So, that all has to be worked on. Because, look, the bottom line is that we need lots of public transit quickly. We need it in lots of places.
David Roberts
Let me pause you there, because if you're trying to make the case — like to me, you know, this is one of those things where it's hard for me to project myself into someone who doesn't recognize the need for public transit. To me, the fact that we've underinvested in public transit seems just, I don't know, manifestly obvious. But if you're trying to make that case to a particular city, what do you point to? What metrics do you point to? What sort of evidence that we're underinvesting in transit in a particular place?
Jarrett Walker
So, one thing I point to is Canada. Most American cities can find a Canadian doppelganger. They can find a city north of the border that's sort of like them. So, you know, I tell Seattle to go to Vancouver, I tell Denver to go to Calgary, I tell Des Moines to go to Winnipeg, I tell Portland, Maine to go to Halifax, and so on. Chicago, look at Toronto. There's usually a Canadian doppelganger that's sort of comparable. Calgary, Winnipeg, these are sprawling car-oriented cities. These are not urbanist paradises. But the one thing that's different is that there are just a whole bunch more buses running around.
There's just a whole bunch more service per capita and you get a whole bunch of other benefits from that that you can go up there and measure and you can talk to people about it. So, you know, my line to US transit advocates is, "For God's sake, stop envying Europe and start envying Canada." Because Canada is the thing we can do in the landscape that we have. And Canada's doing it. You know, and of course you go up there and you meet the local advocates and they'll be the first to tell you about everything that's inadequate, which is true enough. But compared to the U.S., it's just a really nice comparison because the Canadian transit is not sexier, it's not cuter, there's just more of it.
David Roberts
Right, right. Is there a tidy cultural or political explanation for that other than just the general US aversion to public spending?
Jarrett Walker
Oh, I think there are elements to all of that. I think there's also the fact that car dependence was very intentionally constructed as a matter of government policy in this country in a way that I don't think it was ever quite as authoritative in Canada. Canada more muddled along. But you know, if anyone is interested in this, I would recommend Peter Norton's book, Fighting Traffic, who is really an excellent historian who tells the whole story about how car dependence happened and why it is not something we freely chose in the free market. So, I think that yes, there are some historical reasons more than anything for why Canada has more transit.
But now, I just want to point American cities to their Canadian doppelgangers and say, "Look, why can't you be like that? That city isn't that different from you."
David Roberts
Well, I'll tell you — this is a good segue — if I'm an American, my personal response is, "Well, for one thing, I know that if I get on a bus in Canada, I'm probably not going to get shot. You know, like there's not guns everywhere, all over Canada, like Canada is not a scary, violent place like the US seems to be." So let's talk a little bit about security. I mean, I'm sure you run into this every day. The US elite, as you say, I think obviously on the right, but really on the left too, if you scratch a little bit below the surface, just this idea that like, transit is for poor people and transit is unsafe.
And there's this idea, I think, that people have, that it's gotten more unsafe since Covid. And I know that there's certainly like — and this is true on the roads among drivers too, right? Just like, there just seems to be a rise in jerks, jerk behavior, like weird antisocial behavior since Covid. I don't know if anybody's really wrapped their heads around why exactly this is happening, but it seems to be happening on transit too. So number one, like, do the statistics support the idea that transit is notably unsafe? And number two, how do you talk people down from that?
Jarrett Walker
Well, obviously, you don't do it all with the facts. But for those people to whom the facts matter, public transit is incredibly safe. It is far, far safer. You're far, far safer on the bus than outside of the bus, and certainly, you're far, far safer than you are in a car. But what's really going on here, of course, is that using transit involves developing a level of comfort with the presence of strangers that not every American has and that car dependence allows you to just not develop. And so this is why transit is inevitably something that, although it has a role in rural areas, really co-evolves with cities.
Because the basic conjecture of transit is, "It's okay to be around strangers."
David Roberts
The basic conjecture of cities.
Jarrett Walker
Which is exactly the basic conjecture of cities. So, you listen to the right-wing hysteria around transit and it's not hard to scratch the surface and realize this is right-wing hysteria about cities being produced by and for people who live out in the suburbs or in rural areas and who want an excuse to disinvest in cities and a reason not to care about cities. So, I think the important point is that notwithstanding all of these scare campaigns and notwithstanding the fact that there is some crime on transit, and it has been an issue, and it is something that's being worked on and that there are nuisance issues on transit as there are on the sidewalk.
David Roberts
Are those on the rise though, like, I'm not crazy that there's like more of that stuff?
Jarrett Walker
Those are going down now.
David Roberts
Oh, really?
Jarrett Walker
By and large, yeah. I think we've turned the corner on a lot of that and a lot of those things are getting better. Now, crime, the latest I've seen, crime on transit is generally trending down, reported crime. Obviously, that doesn't capture all the nuisance experiences people have. But yes, there are certain risks associated with going out your front door, but once you have taken upon yourself the risk of going out the front door, you're much better off catching the bus than getting in your car.
David Roberts
Yeah, you know what you said about Americans and strangers, I think part of that is like our land use patterns, just sending people out into suburbs where they're sort of alone in their castles, but also just like the general move of everyone online. Just like something about online consumerism is every space you're in is perfectly curated for you. And like, the whole premise is like, nothing's gonna bug you or bother you or make you uncomfortable. And like, anything that does bug or bother you or poses any friction must be eliminated. People just get in that mindset. And then like, when you're in a physical space with other physical people who you don't know, you have to make certain accommodations.
Like, you have to adjust to the world rather than the world adjusting to you. And I feel like Americans are just losing that ability in general just to, like, be out in the world and cope with things that they can't just click away.
Jarrett Walker
I think over my lifetime, though, this has gotten better as much as it's gotten worse. You know, I've been doing this work for 33 years now, 34 years, and the kind of apathy and hostility toward urban life that you expected as the norm in the 1980s, when frankly, it was in many cases a coded conversation about race because everyone else had left the inner city, we're in a very different place now. You know, I can stand in front of a group of, you know, and I do, when I stand in front of a group of fairly conservative people, I always have to say, "Look, I know you hate San Francisco, but if it were such a terrible place, it wouldn't be so expensive to live there."
We have a market that is telling us to build more of the kinds of places that will only function if we have good public transit.
David Roberts
Speaking of crowds in San Francisco, there is, I know you've noticed over the last few years, the sort of rise of tech and the rise of tech bros, for lack of a better term, the rise of tech execs, the sort of tech mentality. And out of that world have come several sort of something that's not a personal vehicle but stops short of transit. You know what I mean? Sort of like, here's how to get around without exposing yourself to those icky strangers. Like, that seems to be a lot of — like, the tunnel under Las Vegas, which to this day I cannot believe is real life.
Like, instead of a subway, they dug a tunnel and are running cars through it. It's just... I don't know. It blows my mind. But what is that trend? And is that on the wane, too? Like, how do you get past this idea that, like, the point of tech, the point of progress, is to free you from those situations where you have to deal with other people?
Jarrett Walker
We've been dealing with this now for over a decade, since we first started getting the driverless car chatter. And, you know, Elon Musk made his famous comment back in 2017, you know, that public transit is painful because there's a bunch of random strangers, one of whom might be a serial killer.
David Roberts
One of whom might be Elon Musk. I mean, that's much scarier to me.
Jarrett Walker
And so, that's always out there. And so, it's interesting because I listen to a lot of tech pitches, and I've been noticing recently that there's this commonality of several different inventions have all defined the problem as, "How do we make something that feels virtuous, that we can call public transit, but that will not expose anyone to the presence of strangers?" So, you know, you have Glydways, which are these little automated vehicles moving along tracks.
David Roberts
Oh, yeah. Up in the sky. Right. The little...
Jarrett Walker
Well, no, you have Glydways, which is moving along a special roadway. Then, you also have the idea of various kinds of gondola, hanging from wire solutions. But they're all about trying to. You look at the publicity materials for these things, and everyone in the car is of the same class and seems to know each other and seems to be traveling together intentionally.
David Roberts
And usually the same color.
Jarrett Walker
No, usually there's some racial diversity now because they're sensitive to that, but there's no class diversity. So, you know, it's... Why did that get defined as the problem? Why did we define the problem with transit as being that there are other people? I would say the presence of other people is the essence of how transit succeeds. And therefore, if you try to take that out, you should stop calling it transit because it's not working the way transit works, and it's not doing what transit does. But it's interesting that at the same time that we have this constant pressure from the tech elite, the tech elite is talking to a larger elite about what the future of cities is supposed to be from their point of view.
We have people out there, you know, ordinary people out there navigating our cities using public transit when it's useful and not using it when it isn't. So, that's the clearest signal that all of this is something of a distraction and that the thing to focus on is that if we have more useful transit service, more people will use it and all of the benefits of people using transit will increase.
David Roberts
Yeah, maybe the right way to think about it is just that the tech world attracts a bunch of these very similar dudes who are, say, extremely symbolically intelligent, but perhaps not super emotionally intelligent. And the public dialogue has been shaped by their particular neuroses. But like, as you say, the evidence does not support that other people share those likes.
Jarrett Walker
Exactly.
David Roberts
Other people are willing to ride transit just fine when it works for them.
Jarrett Walker
So, when I'm talking to groups of relatively fortunate people, I always caution them against elite projection. Elite projection is the very common habit among very fortunate people to refer to their own tastes as a good guide to what would work for everyone. It's just the process of constantly reminding elites that, "Congratulations, I'm sure you worked hard for this, congratulations you're an elite. But that makes you a tiny minority. And that means your tastes are not a very good guide to what is going to work in a transit system that lots and lots of people will use."
David Roberts
Yes, and if you're thinking about transit systems, like, "How can I make it nice and pipe in just the right music and some cool screens?" Other people are thinking about transit like, "How do I get to work? How do I reliably get to work on time?" Which is not something that these people have to think about a lot.
Jarrett Walker
Yeah. How do we make this functional?
David Roberts
Yeah. So, on that note, the biggest dilemma in all this, like, in some sense, transit for dense urban areas is — I don't want to say a solved problem because it's such a challenge everywhere — but like, I feel like we have a good sense of how to do that. But then one thing everybody asks, like when I threw this out on Bluesky, one question everybody has about transit is we've built all these suburbs now we've built all these low-density areas and they're not all the same. There's like, you got your dense urban core and then you got your sort of like inner ring suburbs, semi-dense quasi-dense suburbs, and then they get sort of less dense as they go out.
And I think part of what we want to do with transit is to push it out a little bit into some of those areas, some of those less dense areas. And that just gets you into a whole nest of problems, sort of like legendarily, if people are sparse, you need a lot of transit to get to them, and you get this sort of low per capita numbers that are difficult to justify economically. So, how do you wrestle with taking an inner ring — let's just start there — sort of like inner ring suburbs. What's the best way to bring them into the transit fold?
Jarrett Walker
Well, I think you're right that once we get out into the suburbs, we're presented usually with a development pattern that is just geometrically less suited to public transit. Public transit thrives on a few geometric features of development pattern. It thrives on density, walkability, which is to say the absence of barriers to walking in a reasonably straight line relies on linearity, the availability of reasonably direct paths that transit can follow. And I am always careful when I'm working with communities to describe these things purely geometrically because people obviously are primed to hear that I'm insulting their neighborhood. And that's not what I'm doing. What I'm saying is that there are facts —
David Roberts
But those are unquestionable geometric features of suburbia. That's nonlinear. You can't argue with that. There's no value judgment in it. It just simply is not linear. It's not dense.
Jarrett Walker
So, the question becomes, "No, it's not in general, but bits and pieces of it are, and you can always find promising parts of it." So, the next step really is to have the conversation about what you're trying to do with the transit system and what your measure of success is. And this is a fundamental conversation that decision makers have to have, and that I've been specializing in for a long time now, helping them have, which is they have to think about whether they're going to treat ridership as their primary goal.
David Roberts
Yeah, yeah. What I'm so curious about is this discussion. Like, what is the point of public transit? To me, it's to get people out of cars. Duh. Like, to me, that's the first, second, and third reason. But I'm assuming, like, you know, city planners do not have, let's say, my same hostility toward cars. They have not joined the war on cars. They probably drive cars, most of them. So, what do they view as the point of public transit? Like, what are the other options?
Jarrett Walker
Well, what matters is not what the staff thinks. What matters is what the politicians and the elected officials think.
David Roberts
Right, of course.
Jarrett Walker
And so, in most urban areas in North America, there is an unavoidable tension between the interests of the core city, the area largely built before World War II, which tends to be more suited to public transit, and newer cities that were built in ways that are not as suited to public transit. And I like to talk about it in terms of the trade-off between ridership and coverage goals. So, if the only goal of a transit system were ridership, and let's say it's a regional transit agency that covers the whole metro area, but if the only goal were ridership, it just wouldn't go to a lot of places. There just wouldn't be any service there.
So, the point is to recognize that and to recognize that every time you complain about the ridership of a transit system, well, one of the things they could do is cut the low ridership service.
David Roberts
Yes, just go from busy place to busy place, back and forth.
Jarrett Walker
So, what happens, of course, is that those low ridership places have their own members on the board, they have their own advocacy. And so, instead of just having a fruitless shouting match between urban and suburban, what I try to do is have a conversation about how you're going to define success for the transit system. Is it ridership or is it coverage? In other words, should a certain amount of service be set aside just to be spread out a little bit everywhere so that everyone has a little something?
David Roberts
And it's interesting when we set up our electricity system, we very deliberately chose coverage, even at considerable expense, because we viewed access to electricity as a core, something required for modern life. And clearly, we do not view transit that way, right?
Jarrett Walker
No, and I don't know that you should. We should view access to transportation as a requirement of modern life. But transit isn't the right solution everywhere. And this has, I think, been part of the problem that there's been an entitlement, you know, if you're going to think in terms of there being an entitlement to transit on the part of everyone who pays taxes into a transit agency, well, you're going to spread the resources so thin across all that suburbia that people are going to get a bus once an hour or once every two hours. And this is what happens. This is really what happens when you take the typical resources of an American transit agency, which are already very low, and then you divide it across all those square miles of sprawl. You get a bus once an hour and then that turns out not to be very useful and so not many people use it.
David Roberts
Interesting. So, do you think a lot of agencies are overweighting coverage relative to ridership?
Jarrett Walker
"It's not my job to say that. It's my job to help each agency get to its own decision. And so, for example, VTA in San Jose decided that they wanted to devote 85% of their resources to ridership, 15% to coverage. The network reflects that. We had the experience there of a San Jose city councilman who was on the board, who represented the Almaden Valley, which was going to have no service under the plan, voting for the plan and saying, "Yes, I understand what the Almaden Valley is and you shouldn't be serving us if the goal is ridership."
But that's rare, obviously. And lots of other people in those positions will be saying, "You know, well, where's ours? I can't vote for this. There's nothing for me." So that's the conversation you have to have. And the point is, this is what elected officials are for. This is what boards are for. I try to encourage staff to stay out of the way and let the electeds wrestle with this because this is just a question about what your definition of success is, and that's what the elected officials are for. I think it's important then to notice how much journalism in the United States about transit is just unconsciously assuming that ridership is the measure of success.
And whenever I get a call from a journalist and they want me to comment on the latest ridership figures, I have to back up and say, "Excuse me, why are you assuming that ridership is the goal? It's not the only goal. It's one of the primary goals. But it is not what transit managers are being told to focus on every day. They're being told to focus on multiple things."
David Roberts
You could make reasonable decisions that increase coverage but reduce ridership averages, let's say, per mile.
Jarrett Walker
So, the point is, I want a board to tell me, "Do you want more coverage? Do you want more riders?" So, in the Chicago suburbs, we just did this exercise. The board told us, "We want more coverage." And I said, "Okay, we're going to get a lower ridership network." And they nodded. Okay, so great. It's not my place to make that judgment. What I want is for board members, for people governing transit agencies to make this decision consciously and not be surprised by the consequences.
David Roberts
Right. Do you find that they're often not making it or not facing the trade-offs?
Jarrett Walker
Oh, yeah. There are all kinds of ways to fake your way through this. You know, I have encountered transit agencies adopting statements such as "compete effectively with the automobile by providing access for all." Which is a great example of... Which is just like you're telling your taxi driver to turn left and right at the same time and you can't. He's not going to be able to do that. And your staff is not able to do that. And you know, what I want for transit agency staffs is to not be that taxi driver. I want them to have clear directions so they're not being yelled at for no matter what they do.
David Roberts
Is there any sort of difference in kind when you're advising a big city, like million plus versus like a mid-sized city or like a 250k city, something like that? Like, are there different considerations for sort of your smaller and mid-sized cities?
Jarrett Walker
I don't think they're different in kind. I think the politics are always different from one place to the next. There are interesting red state, blue state differences. So, for example, one of the things that's common in red states is for cities to have the power to secede from transit agencies, which can be very disruptive because it gives them the leverage to demand all kinds of things. There's a crisis going on right now at the Dallas Transit Agency where the state legislature is trying to change some rules to allow some wealthy cities to secede from DART in a way that would just destroy the finances of the agency.
And, you know, I'm working in Des Moines right now where each one of the cities in the metro area has a right to secede, and that's defining some of the dynamics among them. But overall, no, I don't think so. I think it's much more of a continuum.
David Roberts
I mean, this is to get at one of the sort of primordial conflicts in this area. How do you weigh frequency versus coverage? That's a bit of a trade-off too, right? Because I remember going to Barcelona back in 2015 and talking with Salvador Rueda, who redid their bus system, redesigned their bus system, and his whole goal was, "There is no bus stop where you have to wait more than five minutes in the city." Which to me is like, in terms of the subjective experience of transit, that is like number one; is it there when I want it, or am I standing around awkwardly? How do transit planners weigh frequency relative to other goals?
Jarrett Walker
So, this is huge. Frequency has a nonlinear payoff. And if you stop and think for a minute, you can understand why that would be. Frequency means less waiting, but it also means easier connections from one service to the next.
David Roberts
Right.
Jarrett Walker
And it also means if a bus breaks down, the next one will be along soon. And that's sort of my kind of back-of-the-envelope way of explaining why when we get up to frequencies of 15 or better yet, 10 minutes, we start seeing a nonlinear ridership payoff. We start seeing it paying off above the level of investment. And so generally speaking, when somebody asks me to design a high ridership network, I will generally identify the high demand corridors and put frequent service there and take frequency up to usually about 10. In the US, we usually can't get much better than that.
But obviously, if you have the resources, then it's great to go up to about seven or six. And then beyond that, you're just adding capacity. Beyond that, it doesn't make much difference. But we can measure, you know, when we do analyses of access to opportunity. When we calculate how a transit agency, how effective a transit agency is at connecting people to opportunity, we're always counting all three parts of the trip: the walk, the wait, and the ride. And the wait is very often a dominant part.
David Roberts
People hate waiting in a way that is beyond rational, let's say.
Jarrett Walker
I think you don't need a psychological explanation. It's just that in the US, the wait is a big part of the travel time and it's often the most effective part to reduce. And so, you don't need the psychology of it. I mean, obviously, it was much worse in the old days when we didn't have real-time information and you stood out there in the rain wondering when the bus would come. But the point is that even now that we mostly do have real-time information, you sit in the cafe and go out there two minutes before the bus comes.
Still, a low frequency represents time you are spending, not where you want to be. And we count that against access to opportunity in terms of calculating the effectiveness of what we're doing. That reflects the fact, I think, it sort of explains why frequency is such a strong ridership predictor. But the challenge of frequency is it's hard to explain to a motorist. Motorists do not have this experience apart from a traffic signal. They don't have the experience of just being stuck somewhere until something happens. So, you know, I have to use images like "Imagine there were a gate in front of your driveway that only opened once an hour," in order to make that clear.
Because it is the invisibility of frequency. You know, it is not the thing most journalists think to ask me about right away. I usually have to explain it to them.
David Roberts
Even though, to a transit user, it's the first thing they notice.
Jarrett Walker
Exactly.
David Roberts
The main thing they notice. But I'm not wrong, though, that if you are like all things being equal from a set level of resources, if you turn up the frequency dial, you have to turn down the coverage dial, do you not?
Jarrett Walker
That tends to be what happens. Those things are in tension if we have a fixed budget. If we have more money, we don't have to make such painful choices. But in fact, you know, those tend to be the choices again, you know, "Do you want your heart or do you want your lungs?"
David Roberts
Right, let me ask a big question that I was very eager to ask you because this is very much a subject of discussion these days in politics. So, you're probably familiar with this whole abundance movement/push/idea. Just the idea that, like the US, especially in blue areas, especially in blue-run areas, the sort of liberal governance has become sclerotic, slow, and expensive. And nowhere is that more evident than in transit. You know, there's all these examples, like you're trying to build one subway station in New York City, it's $30 billion or whatever, and then you go over to France and they, you know, have transformed half their city for that much money.
Why does it cost so much to build transit in the US and how, like, for someone like you, like, that's got to be so constraining, isn't it?
Jarrett Walker
It is very constraining to the point that I spend most of my time trying to help communities solve problems without major infrastructure. And I often wish that a few more of the table scraps that are rounding errors of major infrastructure projects could fall off the table where we could grab them and provide actual service with them.
David Roberts
Because you mean just like boosting frequency of existing buses or something like that?
Jarrett Walker
Exactly. You know, you look at the billions of dollars that have been spent and some of it clearly misspent, as we all know. And you know, imagine what could have been done with that in terms of actually just providing service with the infrastructure we have or also doing the inexpensive infrastructure. You know, in San Francisco, you can go there and you can compare the very nice bus lane down the middle of Van Ness Avenue, which has nice little stations and which is officially a federally funded BRT project (Bus Rapid Transit project), and just the red bus lanes on the streets which the city just went out and painted. And you know, the latter, what we call tactical infrastructure, is the kind of thing that gets done.
I mean, the Van Ness BRT took decades.
David Roberts
Whereas painting a lane, you can do that in a weekend.
Jarrett Walker
So, I'm very much a "paint a lane" guy at this point, and I'm very much a, you know, "what can we do with buses?" And so, I'm also very frustrated as I work in blue states with some of the regulatory contexts which are coming down on transit agencies and again, demanding they spend a lot of money on something other than serving people. And David, I don't know if you were going to get to this, but I'm going to go ahead and poke the California Air Resources Board here because, I think what we've seen in California with the mandate that transit agencies acquire zero-emission vehicles, and what we're seeing in mandates in other blue states, is exactly an illustration of the anti-abundance sentiment.
David Roberts
This is so funny. The same structure of conversation I have with practitioners in so many areas where they're like, "We know what we're doing, just give us the broad goal —"
Jarrett Walker
Yes, exactly.
David Roberts
"And let us figure out how to do it. Quit nickel and diming us. Quit telling us, 'You have to buy five of these and five of those.' You know, this kind of work contract and this kind of —" it's everything bagel liberalism. Very familiar. So, you've experienced that firsthand then.
Jarrett Walker
Oh, yes. And there's so much frustration right at the time of the fiscal cliff, right at the time that transit agencies are trying to figure out how they're going to just hold themselves together existentially and create a new financial basis for them to be able to keep growing as their communities grow and to be able to meet all of these unserved needs that are going unmet. What do they get? They get another giant mandate to spend money and staff time and attention on something else. And I want to share an interesting statistic that came out of TransLink in Vancouver, Canada.
They did an analysis about how many people need to be on an internal combustion bus instead of driving in order for that internal combustion bus to be better for the environment than an electric bus. And the answer is less than 5. So, you think about that and you think about just how much is being achieved by just providing services that enable people not to drive. And so, what is California achieving by telling the transit agencies to not do that, to not expand service, but instead to mandate what kinds of vehicles they can buy?
David Roberts
So, they mandated that these California agencies buy electric buses, but did not provide commensurately more funding. They did that out of their existing —
Jarrett Walker
It's interesting, the regulation actually says, "It is not the intention of this regulation to cause reductions in service," which is interesting in itself because —
David Roberts
Well, I mean, you could say that.
Jarrett Walker
You can say that. And what's actually happening, by the way, is that CARB sometimes just gives exemptions. I mean, the policy is sitting there, it's not functioning, it's clearly not realistic. And people are going to CARB for exemptions. But I think there's just this larger craziness of saying that your intention is not to cause service cuts. Well, that's nice, but actually transit agencies need to be growing. And everything that you tell them to do instead of that, you're telling them to not grow, you're telling them to not serve more people. And so, I think that this is especially frustrating when anyone ever comes at me and talks about transit ridership as though it were the outcome of a business.
And I have to say, "Transit is not a business. It is not regulated like a business. It is far, far, far more regulated than that." Transit agencies have enormous amounts of staff time going into compliance with all of the requirements.
David Roberts
Do you think that mostly explains the higher costs in the US is just political? I mean is that mostly a political source of that?
Jarrett Walker
I think that's one of the causes. I also just think that the lack of a sufficient scale here, "Buy America" requirements, the things that cut us off from European and Asian innovation, are all part of the picture.
David Roberts
Yeah. Of all the areas or industries where a Buy America regulation makes sense, how about the one area where literally everyone else in the world is doing it better than us? Let's cut off our access to all other countries and just buy our own crappy — like of all the places where you'd want to go buy something right from Europe or something or from France, you know.
Jarrett Walker
And so, this is partly why the electric bus thing is not going well. There are only a couple of manufacturers. One of them just went bankrupt and stopped returning calls. There are lemons sitting around, early useless bricked electric buses sitting around in the yards of various transit agencies from this company that went under. You know, I am always frustrating my tech bro friends by saying that I always advise transit agencies not to buy version one of anything because, understandably, you know, inventors need to have their demonstration projects and transit agencies are often easy to influence because they're governed by politicians.
But it puts an enormous burden on them to expect them to take all of these risks with the same limited funding.
David Roberts
And if it were run like a business, they would not be making those decisions. Has anyone done the math on specifically the pollution savings of greater frequency versus electric buses? Like, is it possible to do that math in any sort of precise way to just help make the case to agencies? Even if you're just wanting to reduce emissions, often better service is better.
Jarrett Walker
Right. And the calculation I just shared with you that TransLink did was of that kind. It was specifically addressing the emissions consequences of all these people driving instead of having this bus so that people are doing that kind of work. I would also call out the work of Todd Litman, Victoria Transport Policy Institute, who does lots of good work in this area. Everyone should be following him.
David Roberts
As you said, it's not your place to tell politicians what to do. They're sort of telling you what to do. But if you were advising politicians just on general principles of how to manage a transit agency in a transit service, is the advice just to "Set goals and let the professionals do what they do?" Like, is that what you basically tell them?
Jarrett Walker
You know, I like to say that I'm like a plumber. In that, say you hire a man to fix your plumbing and he goes to work under your sink. He comes back and he says, "Look, I could just do this like this, I could tape this together and it would last for another year or two. Or, I could rip out the whole assembly and it would be just like new, but it would cost a lot more." And that's the sort of moment where you recognize that you have to make a decision between two different things you want?
And the plumber, you don't want the plumber's opinion. The plumber just stands there with his wrench and waits for you. And, you know, you can go pick up a design magazine and start talking in vague, flowery terms about how you'd like your kitchen to look, and the plumber will just stand there with his wrench until you answer his question exactly the way he framed it. And I use that analogy to explain why I need your board to answer the ridership coverage question exactly the way I framed it. Because that is the actual question that arises from the work.
That is the actual question that arises about goals from the work. And you can adopt all the policy statements you want and all the flowery language you want, and it won't affect reality at all until you answer that question.
David Roberts
Well, then, what if I asked it in an anthropological way, having had interactions now with many, many different transit systems across the country, what do the ones that are doing well have in common?
Jarrett Walker
I think the ones that are doing well have, first of all, clear direction in some form or another, but a clear direction about what they're trying to do that they can explain.
David Roberts
Like clear political leadership.
Jarrett Walker
Clear political leadership that has established clear goals and that has empowered staff to pursue those goals. I think that's one thing. A lot depends then on the degree to which the elected leaders in charge of the agency — and there are many different forms that can take — the elected leaders are supportive of and not interfering with the agency doing its work.
David Roberts
A low bar there. Non-hostile politicians.
Jarrett Walker
Well, I mean, if you're on the board of a private company, you've signed an oath that you're going to act in the company's financial interest. But you don't really have to do that to be on the board of a transit agency. You know, I've seen lobbyists for Uber be assigned to be appointed to transit agency boards. You know, there are lots of people on transit agency boards with goals other than the good of the transit agency. And you know, that's how the system evolves.
You've got to have local political representation and if not many people care in the community, then the board's going to reflect that. But you know, the US has a lot of great transit agencies where there is good political support, where good things are happening. I would say the other thing that the great transit agencies have in common is really intimate, good working relationships with their city governments. And I would really hold out your city, Seattle, as one of the leading examples of that. And I was involved in this effort something like 20 years ago when the first Seattle transit plan was done.
Because it's so easy for a city government to take the view that, "Oh, our regional transit agency does transit, we don't have to think about that." And Seattle took it upon itself in the early 2000s to say, "No, wait a minute. Everything we want to be, all of our vision for ourselves is about having a great transit system. So we have to have our own municipal transit policy that gives direction to our staff about how to work with King County Metro and Sound Transit to make a great transit system." And you can really see the results around Seattle today.
David Roberts
Well, now, Jarrett, here you're talking to a native — nothing but the gripes. Let me just ask you one question about Seattle because I did want to ask this and this is something that drives me insane and I've never really gotten a good answer about it. And maybe this is a little bit too specific, but I'm curious. So in Seattle, we voted to build a light rail system. I say that in one sentence. Decades, decades were spent voting and revoting on various things. We finally voted for a light rail system. And to me, the central decision that was made about the light rail system which has colored all future decisions, is they decided it will save money if we just run it along the interstate and just put the stops along the interstate.
Which means that the multi-billion-dollar light rail system is basically a commuter rail. It is a substitute for getting along the interstate route, not on the interstate, sacrificing all the potential benefits of moving those stops out into neighborhoods where they could serve as anchors for density and transit-oriented development, et cetera, et cetera. We sacrificed all of that and put our stops on the interstate to save a few bucks. But like, to me, that's just so shortsighted. Tell me why that happened. Why was that decision made? And it's not only Seattle who's done that, right? Why do that? And can you explain to me how that happened?
Jarrett Walker
You're talking about the line going north out of Seattle. The line going south out of Seattle is mostly not by the freeway. It's mostly either underground or in a street median on MLK. But the line going north out of Seattle, yes, there's a long, long stretch right next to the freeway.
David Roberts
I live on that stretch, which is why it's so...
Jarrett Walker
You'll see the same thing in many other cities. Look, when this system was being conceived, they had to bring together everyone from Everett to Tacoma, right? All of these huge, vast suburban areas. And they had to have something that would credibly get all the way to Everett and Tacoma someday. And if you don't know the geography of the region, these are two small old cities that are both, oh, I'm going to guess about 30 miles out of Seattle in each direction.
David Roberts
Yeah, yeah. Everett's like 30 minutes north. Tacoma is like 30 minutes south-ish.
Jarrett Walker
So, those were always going to be kind of the ultimate anchors. They had to begin with this vision of ultimately a very long line. A line that long had to be fast. So, you wouldn't have the patience to ride all the way from Seattle to Everett on Aurora Avenue. On an arterial light rail, you wouldn't be able to go fast enough there. And, you know, there would be so many stations. It wouldn't work for Seattle to Everett if you're trying to do that. It's really a different thing. So, they made the decision to go fast along the freeway with very widely spaced stations.
Given that the ultimate goal is to get to Everett, I think that probably makes sense. But it's definitely not everything that you could have gotten out of a more locally oriented service that was not trying to be as long. It's really just the way that the regional geography was just pulling everything apart and creating these expectations for these extremely long trips. So, that's kind of what happened then. The other thing, of course, is the availability of right-of-way.
David Roberts
Yes. Well, every one of those neighborhoods obviously will fight tooth and nail, to the death, to avoid the curse of a subway stop. Despite this, every neighborhood around an existing subway stop in the friggin' world loves it and would never give up their subway stop.
Jarrett Walker
Absolutely.
David Roberts
You can't talk a new neighborhood into accepting one, right?
Jarrett Walker
I still remember back in the early '80s when I was getting started. TriMet here in Portland, the transit agency here in Portland, had produced a video imagining going along outer Burnside Street where the very first light rail line was going to run. The purpose of this video was to show that the light rail was going down the street and none of the single-family homes had turned into apartments. This was supposed to make everyone in that neighborhood comfortable that, you know, we could build this light rail line and it wouldn't cause any change, of course.
David Roberts
Yes, but why would we do that? Why would we do that? It's funny. I mean, I know you probably deal with the political class and boards more than just with citizens, but just the whole NIMBY thing, I don't know. It is very mysterious to me that it seems specifically on city stuff and land use stuff, people always enjoy it once they've got it. Always people fight it. And neither of those two ever changes. Like, nobody learns. Nobody learns from all the previous people that got it and liked it, right? Everybody thinks, "We're gonna hate it." It's like, how has this been going on so long? And those dynamics never seem to change. I don't know. There's no answer to this. But like, I don't know if you have any insight...
Jarrett Walker
More people need to listen to your podcast.
David Roberts
That's the answer to all my questions, Jarrett. Okay, a final question, because this comes up a gajillion times when you talk about transit. There is endless warfare over fares. The right way to structure fares, the right way to structure gates, like fare gates, the right way to enforce fare collection. There's a school of thought that wants to make transit free. There's another school of thought that says, "That's a dumb idea and it won't work." So, like, what kind of revenue models do you find work best just on a purely pragmatic basis?
Jarrett Walker
Oh, this is a very difficult issue, and I'm glad I don't work in fare policy all the time because there's a chapter in my book on it. But I found it very difficult to write, and I found it very difficult to arrive at a strong opinion about it. Look, we need some revenue from fares. The reality is that if you eliminated fares from most big city transit systems, you would eliminate a huge chunk of the service immediately.
David Roberts
Right. Because the rest of it is just taxes.
Jarrett Walker
And nobody knows how to get over that hump. The agencies that have eliminated fares, mostly temporarily, places like Albuquerque and Kansas City, have done so in the context of very low ridership transit systems where there wasn't much money in it anyway. But even so, that's also been associated with a whole bunch of other behavior problems and so on getting worse on transit. The other problem is that we don't really have a good way to force everyone to pay their fare. And so, you know, fare evasion is always going to happen to a degree and you can spend a fortune on gates and so on.
And that may be necessary in New York, where enormous amounts of money are at stake. But I also, frankly, counsel just not getting too obsessed about fare evasion because making sure you collect every last fare is extremely expensive and not really that cost-effective.
David Roberts
Yeah, I saw some numbers out of New York City. They did a big push on this and like spent $8 billion or whatever on fare enforcement and recovered like a buck fifty of fares for their efforts.
Jarrett Walker
Yeah. And so, it's something that a lot of people fixate on as something that they see as a measure of why everything's going to hell. But there's just not that much in it. And you know, we need to make a reasonable effort to get people to pay their fares. We need, you know, honest people are going to pay their fares and we need to move on with providing good service.
David Roberts
Yeah. So, I mean, it would be best, it seems to me, if most funding came from taxes. But, like my sense, maybe this comes from living in Seattle where when we want to fund or do anything, we have to have a ballot measure for some special revenue-raising mechanism because we have no friggin' income tax, have no stable sources of government revenue. So, every new thing we want to do, we have to come and shake the cup and raise money specifically for it. And that's been transit over the years in Seattle. It's just like, "We're back, we need a little bit more."
There's no stable — so who's got the most stable...? Because I just imagine as a planner, just knowing how much funding you have and that it is safe and stable is a huge thing in planning.
Jarrett Walker
So, in many other countries where I work, including Australia and Ireland, transit is sitting in a central government budget just along with everything else. And the parliament figures out how much it's going to spend on it and things are very stable.
David Roberts
Federal funding?
Jarrett Walker
Yeah, federal or state or whatever, or a provincial government in Canada. And there's a relatively high level of stability. On the other hand, one value of having to go to the voters is that the voters are, in fact, engaged and thinking about it and not taking it for granted. And that has some benefit, too.
You know, in Illinois, where I'm working right now in the Chicago suburbs, they don't have a mechanism for going to their voters. They have to go to their legislature. And so, they're having the conversation that you might wish you could have about just setting up a stable funding source in the legislature. But, I actually think in many ways it's good that we have to vote on this, because first of all, as long as we don't need two-thirds like you do in California, as long as you have a reasonable 50% threshold and you're working on the right geography, we can usually win these things.
And, you know, transit ballot measures do pretty well. That's an important thing to remember, by the way. Just a message I want to leave people with. If anybody has led you to believe that America is a car culture, pay attention to how many people vote for transit in places like Los Angeles, even though they're mostly in cars, and you really get a clear message of how much enthusiasm there is for transit, if only we could fund it enough to provide it in enough abundance.
David Roberts
Yeah, you have a graph on your site somewhere. I forget where I saw it. But there's the negative cycle of ridership falls, fares fall, resources fall, service declines.
Jarrett Walker
The death spiral.
David Roberts
The death spiral. But there's also, hopefully, a life spiral where you invest, service gets better, more people ride, more money. Getting on that positive feedback loop, it seems to me, is like the main trick.
Jarrett Walker
Right, and the feedback loop, of course, is never going to be that fares pay for everything, but the feedback loop is going to be that you're part of building a great city that people want to be in and want to invest in.
David Roberts
Yeah. All right. Well, that's a good note to end on. This has been fascinating. Thank you so much, Jarrett, for walking us through this. I've been so curious about this for a long time. It's great to get a little snapshot.
Jarrett Walker
Well, thanks very much, David. Really enjoyed it.
David Roberts
Thank you for listening to Volts. It takes a village to make this podcast work. Shout out, especially, to my super producer, Kyle McDonald, who makes me and my guests sound smart every week. And it is all supported entirely by listeners like you. So, if you value conversations like this, please consider joining our community of paid subscribers at volts.wtf. Or, leaving a nice review, or telling a friend about Volts. Or all three. Thanks so much, and I'll see you next time.
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