Transit is Not Euclidean

A(nother) Manifesto

––– Of course it began in Switzerland –––

A lot of this came from two things. Firstly, when I visited family in Switzerland and Austria for a few weeks, I saw how incredible their rail system was, not just for urban travel and major destinations, but also for extremely rural, low-density environments in the absolute boonies. Part of why this works is because transit isn’t made viable by density, but by density *around the train stations*. So-called peri-urbanism is where otherwise rural areas cluster in walkable villages around train stations (you know, exactly like America was before the 1940s), justifying hourly or better train service to within a 15 minute walk of over 70% of all Swiss residents (but still allowing farmers to live a quick bike ride away from their fields). Furthermore, I even saw a few train (and even urban tram) stations that served 0 people; they were trailhead stations, to connect locals with nature. Instead of building trains only for major routes, then filling out the rest of the necessary network with busses, it was expected that one should be reasonably able to live an entire life by train, and that busses were instead niche gap-fillers, not lower-capacity tools otherwise completely identical to trains in quality and usefulness.

Secondly, I recently organized a highway revolt (of unsure outcome; please tell PennDOT you’ll be less likely to visit and spend money in Central PA if the SCAC highway is built), which involved collating reams of scientific data why cars are bad (it’s almost like we were scooped by Life After Cars; check out www.CentreCountyHighwayRevolt.org for a ton of citations to stipulations referenced herein). One of the things that I worked on was the cost of car infrastructure, and I found that, both by theoretical calculations and *according to Pennsylvania’s own published budget*, a mile of road is more expensive to *both build and maintain* than a mile of rail. There are a huge variety of factors to this, but, to my understanding, it’s mostly because the huge width of roads makes land acquisition more expensive and the wear-and-tear of heavyweight vehicles requires road resurfacing much more frequently than train tracks require replacing.

These two things sent me spiraling into a radical realization: trains are not just a high-expense, high-quality version of transit, but the most preferable form of any transport infrastructure. Allow me to explain how this works:

––– Transit, land-use, and sustainability are three sides of the same hyper-coin –––

Euclidean Zoning, as I’m certain many of us know, is a form of land-use regulation started in Euclid, Ohio in the 1920s, and has since taken over western planning as a way to regimentalize which land uses are allowable in each area. Specifically, it is incremental: each category starts with a base assumption – a large-lot single-family home – and then steps up each level with more stories and density as a city gets bigger (… or doesn’t, pushing sprawling, low-density development to the periphery in a low-fiber diarrhea of humanity streaked along the underpants of Mother Nature).

As I’m certain you can interpolate, this has some humongously disqualifying problems from the perspective of sustainability, but I’d instead like to make a similar point that modern transport infrastructure has fallen into much the same trap, even among urbanists. The way we approach transit at present goes thusly: for all areas, even the most rural ones, we build a road. If the road reaches a certain level of usefulness, we build a bike lane or a sidewalk. If enough people live along the road, we build a bus. If the bus is full, we build a tram. If the tram is too small, we build light rail. If the light rail lacks capacity, it’s time for a subway. If the area is too large for a subway, we build commuter rail. If the region is multi-polar, we build regional rail. If that doesn’t work, we dream up a gadgetbahn. And so on.

While this is, of course, a gross oversimplification, I think many would agree that it somewhat reflects how transportation is approached today, in a capacity-oriented stepwise pyramid. In fact, countless hoards have noted something to the effect of “busses are the core of any good transit system”. I think this is in error.

––– Sidebar on busses –––

Since the goal of urbanism is to make more sustainable, equitable transportation, and since this generally means being anti-car-dependence, I think that it should cause concern among advocates that bus infrastructure looks so suspiciously like car infrastructure, and, outside of only the rarest and highest-quality BRTs, bus infrastructure is usually used by overwhelmingly more cars than busses. As such, to build a transit from a base of busses on up means you’ve likely already lost to car dominance. Furthermore, as noted above, bus (road) infrastructure costs more to operate and maintain than equivalent rail infrastructure, hampering the construction of quality transit with higher-than-otherwise costs (not even counting the hundreds of knock-on negative externalities regarding things like carcinogenic tire dust).

Additionally, I’d also argue that busses harm the perception of transit, generally. Having initially been interested in and nostalgic for busses, I rode premier BRT and BRT-lite systems in Pittsburg, New York, Seattle, Cleveland, Indianapolis, Eugene, Houston, Los Angeles, San Diego, and probably a few others I’m forgetting. But the more I rode BRT, the more my opinions changed to disliking it. Even the best busses make uncomfortable loud crashing noises every time they roll over an amoeba, offer much less stable and comfortable acceleration than a train, and can become a truly miserable experience the moment you let the pavement quality slip (looking at you, Cleveland).

Busses are also much harder than almost any other form of transit to navigate as a disabled person, bicyclist, or someone with luggage. Having been to all 50 states, and 15 with my folding bicycle, I always avoid busses because they’re so uncomfortable and inconvenient. If my only option to visit a place is a bus, I simply just don’t go (or take longer to bicycle along the route of the bus rather than riding it), because I’d rather not make myself miserable suffering through second-class transit.

In essence, at risk of possibly being a bit extremist, I think that busses represent the epitome of transit as an afterthought stapled to the periphery of an automotrocity. To have busses as your primary mode of transit means you’ve already lost the game and are only capable of playing catch-up.

––– Non-Euclidean Transit –––

So, taking these things together – especially that a mile of rail is cheaper to both build and maintain than a mile of road, and that high-quality rail transit is entirely viable even in rural areas – I think that a better view of transit is that everybody needs to make three types of vehicle-assisted trips: short, medium, and far. Of course placing walkability at the center of this paradigm, I think it can be depicted as a triangle with vertices each of tram, bicycle, and S-Bahn.

Bicycles are the easiest to explain, just build bike trails all over the world instead of roads (and their extreme light weight makes bike asphalt last much longer than car asphalt, addressing the wasteful cost of roads). They can be used for short trips by grandmas or insanely long trips by bikepackers, light duty trips with a scooter or heavy-duty trips with cargo bicycles or even bicycle-trucks. This would especially apply for rural areas up to a dozen or so miles from a train station. Especially with ebikes, anyone, no matter how unfit or how bad the weather, can quite easily bike a half-hour anywhere (I’ve literally done this with my severely disabled mother. If she could bike from Richmond to Oakland in the rain, anyone can bike for daily errands). And I proved this myself, living for over a year car-free and almost a decade car-light in rural central Pennsylvania, under 5 minutes away from farmers’ fields. Cars are and should *not* be needed anywhere, even in rural areas.

Trams and S-Bahnen are related. They’re both usually at-grade, cutting costs in comparison to things like light rail, subway-style regional rail (à la BART or WMATA), or, hell, even high-quality commuter rail. As aforementioned with DÖCH-style peri-urbanism, each village or neighborhood could have one (or more) S-Bahn stations for travel from sub-regional to intercity, and around each station could radiate a small network of trams (Straßenbahnen) for either local or inter-neighborhood travel. As with any good system (and to further address costs), frequencies can be boosted by interlining in main areas, with less-populated distal branches getting fractional headways based on service patterns (one of my greatest irritations at the US’ Great Society metros is that they bring downtown-sized frequencies all the way into the furthest suburbs, wasting money in the burbs on operators and vehicle maintenance, while underserving the city cores where capacity is needed most).

Importantly, both Straßenbahnen und Schnellbahnen are extremely cost-efficient, reusing existing infrastructure (streets and railroad ROWs) to bring more lines than could be done with new-build alignments, creating a network effect. I’m always quite suspicious of RMTransit-style activists who obsess over service quality, because high-capacity, high-quality transit modes usually cost 5-10 times as much as other options, but are almost never worth building 4-9 fewer lines for; just build a line with 75% of the capacity and quality, but use the leftover funds to run a second line through a different part of the neighborhood. Furthermore, the most common complaints about street-running rail alignments are, in fact, about cars. If we just ban cars, there’s almost no downside to street-running. And this even addresses the famous north american cost snake, eating transit budgets. The vast majority of transit construction expenses go into things like suburban tunnels, long and elaborate viaducts, and major road reconstructions, all intended to, you guessed it, not impact car traffic. If we just built rail transit at-grade down the middle of every stroad, and then completely ignored the needs of cars and prohibited them from crossing over, under, or through the transit line for its entire length, all of a sudden it’s no longer difficult or expensive to build rail transit (of course, though, you would allow pedestrians and bicycles through, using transit as district-wide modal filters preventing cars from being remotely useful. Who cares about the hurdles of congestion pricing when you can just imprison the cars). Oh, and don’t forget that the median parking space in a garage costs something like $80,000. No park-and-rides, no bloated budgets.

In this non-Euclidean transit, a triangle of tram, S-Bahn, and bicycle trails, can, with proper zoning and walkability, cover nearly all possible transportation needs, even in rural areas. Much like planes and gadgetbahns are considered now, so too should subways, cars, and even busses be considered edge cases for use in only extremely rare and unique situations.

––– We’re in the midst of a culture war; we should act like it –––

An important corollary of this is that I believe urbanism should mean the near-eradication of cars. Scientifically, cars are a negative-sum game, making any possible project worse by their inclusion, costing more for the environment and economy than the sum of any benefit brought to individuals. And yet, cars have infested absolutely everywhere like cockroaches, even bastions of urbanism like the Netherlands (48% of Dutch people own cars, meaning their work is only half-done). A humongous sea change in how the world does business is absolutely necessary to survive the impending climate apocalypse, and, given that cars and trucks are *the* leading cause of carbon emissions, the first and foremost change which must occur is not a wimpy minor reduction in car usage, but a complete and unconditional dethroning of its dominance.

Let me say that compromise is inevitable, bipartisanship can (occasionally) be useful, and it’s a very tall order to ban cars completely everywhere forever. However, I would argue that there is a humongous difference between a movement built around “ban cars” and one built around “perhaps could we maybe sorta have a few more options for getting around, but you’re totally allowed to keep killing us in your pedestrian-crushing battle wagon, we’re just about giving people choices, and it’s totally fine if the choice you want to make is a bad one which will harm us all.” Importantly, the opposition *already believes* that we’re trying to take away their cars, despite that nearly every publicly-quoted urbanist so far has yet to go that far and instead tries to spin the issue as bipartisan, saying things like “we’re just trying to make communities more resilient” and “there’s no such thing as a Democrat bridge or a Republican bridge” (which is incorrect. A Democrat bridge is one built for trains and bicycles, like the Tillamook Crossing in Portland. A Republican bridge is one built for cars).

If such moderate positions are *already* being treated with absolutely unhinged, conspiratorial responses by suburban shitforbrains and rural chuckle-fascists completely decoupled from reality, logic, and common sense, appealing to bipartisanship and centrist racism will only serve to let the Overton Window be dragged even further afield of the unavoidably necessary top-to-bottom reorientation of priorities needed to prevent america [*derogatory*] from sliding any further behind the Human Development Index of Slovenia. Cars, carbrain, (and the ‘Murikkkan way of life) are almost epistemologically an exercise in selfishness and lizard-brain emotionality; approaching this conundrum with neutral facts and dry economic arguments is bringing a knife to a gunfight. We need a better approach. I believe that setting the goal of completely eradicating cars, and falling short of it, will result in much more progress than could ever be brought about by fully achieving a goal made bland enough to appeal to everyone.

––– Completely unhinged TLDR –––

Cars are like guns: they should be banned immediately everywhere.

It is entirely feasible to eradicate cars in rural areas as well as dense cities. It’s called Central Europe, and also all of America before the 1920s.

Car infrastructure is unwoke. Bus infrastructure looks suspiciously like car infrastructure. Thus, by the transitive principle, busses are unwoke.

According to published state budgets, a mile of road costs more to both build and maintain than a mile of rail (even at hyper-inflated american transit prices). As such, cars are the wrong answer to every transportation question.

The absurdly high cost of north american transit can easily be addressed by just ignoring the needs of cars. At-grade rail lines down the middle of stroads are made both cheaper and more reliable by simply prohibiting cars from crossing the rail line with over- or underpasses or mixed traffic.

A movement whose end-goal is already a neutral bipartisan compromise is only ever slated to get watered down further. Big changes require big goals, and if we’re to ever see any meaningful progress within our lifetimes, the stated goal of urbanism should be a complete and unconditional eradication of the automobile.

Be vegan for transit: just say no to cars.

 College Town Cycling Infrastructure Analysis

For my urbanism efforts, I was appointed as a Transportation Commissioner for State College Borough. During my tenure, I made several reports for the Borough engineers, including this one on how State College stacks up to other college towns in bicycle infrastructure investment.

 Centre County Highway Revolt

Using my knowledge of modern transit and local railroad history, I started a highway revolt to prohibit the expansion of automobile infrastructure, and proposed an alternative, Euro-style DMU regional rail system, illustrated by a friend. The full project website is at www.CentreCountyHighwayRevolt.org

 Riding Every CATA Route

As part of my efforts as a Borough Transportation Commissioner, I rode every route of the local bus agency and wrote a 12-page report on my findings, accessible here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1kqRBdrqoNO3WDnB6qvoj98sUuyh8H5wJ/view?usp=sharing