 Good evening. It's great to see everyone here. Thanks for coming out. My name is John Leopold. I'm a Santa Cruz County Supervisor. You're in the wonderful First District and if you live as a First District, you'd be home by now. I'm also Chair of the Regional Transportation Commission. And I'm very pleased that this year we're trying to take some time as part of the Transportation Commission to think thick. So often in our transportation policy phase, we think about individual projects, but we don't think about the bigger picture of all of our transportation needs, all of our transit needs. So this year we've decided to hold an Innovators in Transportation Policy series. And you probably got information when you came in. But this is our inaugural event for this series. You'll be hearing more about Jared Walker in a moment, but we're doing public sessions as well as sessions with the Regional Transportation Commission because we think this is a policy discussion that shouldn't just happen with those that are elected and on the Regional Transportation Commission but also with the community. Because we're better when we're all working together and all have a problem working from the same base of facts. So thank you for being here and thank you for taking time to think about transportation in our community. I'd like to introduce George Dandero. George is currently the Executive Director of our Regional Transportation Commission. George has been with us for 12 years. He has overseen a lot of work on the commission and in the community. And he was a main leader in the passage of Measure D back in 2016. He's a very good transportation thinker. He's someone that the community relies on. And I'm happy that that has been about leaving our Regional Transportation Commission at least through the end of the year when George will be retiring. But please join me in welcoming George Dandero. Thank you, John. Of course, I'd like to acknowledge another hard worker on the Measure D campaign that's in the audience and that's Perena Pushnik. Perena, stand up. Most of us have never worked on a campaign before. I certainly haven't and I don't think I have either. And I would say for three years prior to November of 2016, that was mostly what we were doing in some way, in some fashion, reform is getting ready for that. So, there was a lot of education involved and a lot of work in the community. And I just want to thank Perena again for everything she did. It was really a great contribution to transportation in the counties. So, as John said, this is the first in a series of speakers right now. We've got four lined up when we're working on two more. So, they're the, you know, watch our website for future announcements. The next speaker will be here. There's a fire on the table. He will be addressing our board on August 2nd. He's Farah Mansourian and he's the general manager of the Smart Community Rail in Sonoma, Marin County. He will only be coming to our board meeting. He's the only speaker right now that will not be doing a public event like this. So, a couple of housekeeping notes. Community TV crew is here to record the evening on video, which will later be posted on our website. So, worry not if you have friends that wanted to make it and couldn't. This will be available down the line. Also, Mr. Walker will be making a similar presentation tomorrow morning, although probably a bit longer, to our board as a workshop. And that meeting is open to the public and it will start at 9 a.m. in the Santa Cruz City Council chambers on Center Street. So, tonight we would like to wrap up no later than 8.30. So, I think we've got plenty of time for Mr. Walker's presentation and for your questions and concerns. A little bit about our presenter. Jared Walker is an international consultant in public transit, network design and policy based in Portland, Oregon. Since 1991, he has led numerous major planning projects in cities and towns of all sizes across North America, Australia and New Zealand. He's also the author of Human Transit, the book on the screen, how clear we're thinking about public transit can enrich our communities in our lives. He's president of Jared Walker Associates, a consulting firm that provides advice and planning services in North America. If you haven't looked at his website yet and you're really interested in what he has to say tonight, I strongly encourage you to look at his website. It's really lively and rich in content and he's got a blog and he's people comment. It's a very interactive website. And there's a video that I watched last week that was one of the really interesting presentations called Planning Transit, Can We Live Without Predictions? And if you've ever worked in planning transit, you know that the ridership projections are always the magic numbers and maybe he'll talk about that tonight, Jared, a little bit. But it's a great video and it's worth watching. He grew up in Portland during the Revolutionary 1970s. He grew up in Portland and first made his decisive commitment to be a city for people rather than cars. Jared has a unique resume and is the only transit planner I've met with a PhD in Theater Arts and Humanities that was earned at Stanford University. He's 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. So please welcome Jared Welcome. Thanks very much. Wonderful to have a chance to speak to you all this evening. Always eager to find an excuse to come down to such a beautiful place and be all of the people who get to live here all the time. I live in a pretty beautiful place due to Portland, Oregon, but you have a lot going for you here and it's really exciting to have people out trying to figure out how to crack the next big challenge, which is certainly how to get a transportation system that not just works for you and serves your prosperity, but also very importantly reflects your values. Now one of the, I've been doing transit planning now for 25 years or so and been in conversations about it. So one of the things that is so challenging about it is that people have so many different notions of what the question is or what the goal is or what the point is. And you know, I'm always being told, well, you know, transit has to be more like this to please these people or it has to be more like that to please those people. It has to start with these equity requirements and civil rights requirements, all these things and that's all great. But what's the thing we're trying to do? What's the actual point of the whole thing? It's remarkably hard often to get people onto a page about that. What are we doing when we do transportation? So what I think we're doing is freeing and I don't mean that in a sort of general warm fuzzy sense. I mean that in a very specific mathematical geometrically describable sense and I want to start with that. The wall around your life, there is a sense in which we are all imprisoned in that the walls of our prison are the limits of where we can get to in a reasonable amount of time. There is that wall around all of our lives. Several concentric walls there is the sort of wall of where you can get to in half an hour which is kind of where you can go to buy groceries or where you can go to lunch. Then there is the wall that's out sort of an hour or more which is where you can work or where you can go to school and then there are walls a little further out, maybe an hour, an hour and a half where you can do something that you do once a week. But we're all aware of those walls, we're all aware of the concept of something being just too far away or it being not something you can do. And I want you to notice if we're going to talk about freedom, this is its opposite. The opposite is the presence of that wall and the sense of that wall being close in. And that beyond that wall, beyond that wall are places you can't go, which means things you can't do, jobs you can't hold, schools you can't go to, clubs and houses of worship you can't attend, people you will never meet in person. Who knows, maybe even the person you will not marry because they were not close enough for you to meet in person, there is only so much of this that you can do. Lately we've been specializing in drawing a lot of maps of these walls and trying to help them be more visible and to help people think about it. So for example, my firm's working right now on a redesign of the bus network in Dublin, Ireland. And so here's a typical example of the kind of thing we draw. We say, okay, imagine somebody at Dublin City University and she's thinking, where can I go in 45 minutes? Notice I'm trying to make this a totally non-geeky question. If the question, where can I go in 45 minutes is too geeky, let me try to get this way. Where could I hold a job? Where could I, you know, think about something that you would only have the patients to do about 90 minutes a day of travel for. Whatever that thing is, this is the answer, you know, is it in this range of where you can get to or not, if not you can't do it, right? So there's what it is now, where she can get to in 45 minutes. The network we're proposing it looks like that. And the network we're proposing, of course, does 750 other complicated things that people can quibble about individually. It moves this bus route from here over here and it requires these people to transfer over there and these people have to walk over here and all these numbers change and everything else and the bus stop is over here instead of over there so this business is angry and that business is not. And all of that noise that is most of what we hear when we put a transit plan out or any sort of big plan out to the public, it's all great, it's all important but none of it is about what we're doing. And what we're trying to do is move the walls outward so that people have more opportunity in their lives which is equivalent to saying that they are more free. And if you want to connect this to freedom in the sense that we talk about in the declaration of independence or if we talk about it in American culture, I am simply talking about all of the aspects of freedom that require leaving home. There are aspects of freedom that you can exercise at home on the internet in your pajamas but there are still certain things that only happen if you leave home and as soon as you leave home that's the kind of freedom I'm talking about. Freedom that involves the need to go places. So the freedom that is at stake in transportation. And then I can say okay, Jane can get to 43% more jobs if she lives there. At the university I mean 68% more residents can get to there in that amount of time. But thinking about the resident standpoint, someone looking there can get to 43% more jobs. Now if you're against the 450 other details that people are going to argue about, you're against this. You're actually advocating that someone have less freedom than they could have. So that you can have your favorite bus stop where you want her to not have your return, to not have to transfer over there, to not have to walk over here or whatever you're upset about at the micro scale. That sort of feedback that constitutes about 95% all the comments we get on the transport. And I get it to something that people care about and I've never met anybody who didn't care about freedom. So freedom, what is it? It's the ability to do what you want. And it comes with two big exceptions. You're not free to limit the freedom of others. That's actually called tiering. When you claim the freedom to harm or limit the freedom of other people. And you're also not free to deny physical rights. There's a limitation on your rights that you have to eat and breathe and all those things. There are physical facts of every reality that are just part of the context. And you're not free to deny that. That may sound really obvious, but actually a whole lot of what we deal with all the time in transportation advocacy and the feedback we get on transportation is those two problems. People wanting things that involve denying limiting freedom to others and when called on that tending to want to invent their own facts or somehow cause the change of the factual basis in such a way that the contradiction isn't so much of a contradiction. But that first principle, you know, that you're not free to limit the freedom of others is very important because it is where the concept of freedom comes back and turns out to be the same thing as the concept of equity or justice. Because there is in fact no such thing as an unequal right to freedom. It is part of the very essence of all of us being free that each other are free. And so this is where the concept of freedom is intentioned with the cultural or our culture around competition and the human impulses around competition. Because competition in the sense that divides a group of people into winners and losers of course brings us right to the threshold of dividing the world of the masters and slaves at least for a moment or an emotional moment of some sense. Dividing the world into the more free and the less free. And so it's something we're always navigating with. But in reality we know that the freedom to dominate is a contradiction in terms and that we are always having to negotiate our impulse to compete with our desire for freedom and our desire for freedom and a desire for our freedom to be respected. Okay, so transportation is just physical freedom. The process of transportation planning then under this approach would be called physical freedom plan. Okay, it's the planning that is the process of securing our freedom. Securing our liberties if we want to use the exact words in the definition of the word. Securing our freedom to do anything that requires traveling faster than walking than always leaving home. So then of course we talk about freedom planning and somebody hears a contradiction in that and I'll turn it up a little higher. Freedom prediction is a contradiction. Now why is that a contradiction? Because if I can predict your behavior you're not really free. Or if I know that you're going to do what I think you're going to do. And this is what long term transportation modeling and prediction is all about. Okay, so 20 years in the future some consultant, not me, I don't do it. I refuse to do it but lots of consultants any number of consultants will be hired to tell you to run something in a computer called a model and tell you what the ridership will be on this transit line 25 years in the future. What are they doing? They're doing everything they can to get this prediction as right as they can but fundamentally they have to assume that a whole bunch of things are not going to change for this to even be possible. They have to assume a constant background so that they can even see the thing they're supposedly studying. And so one of the things that is not going to change is one of the basic things they have to do is this. They have to make assumptions about how human beings will behave and what values will be manifested in their decisions and how they will make choices. And they have to make those assumptions about human beings 25 years from them. And you see the problem. The only data we have to ground those assumptions today is the behavior of human beings today. Which is to say the parents of those people 25 years from them. Thus we come to the conclusion that one of the fundamental principles of transportation planning, one of the foundational assumptions that we cannot live without is that when you're the same age as your parents are now you will behave exactly as they do. When I'm talking to a group of undergraduates this just goes right down their spine. It's just very, very, very fundamentally not what we want to hear about ourselves. And that's absolutely right because we want to feel free. So if your philosophers in the room will have detected the problem of determinism and free will, as philosophers talk about it I'm talking about it in a political context just to observe that there is a conflict between prediction and freedom. And you can also think about it in terms of the sort of fundamental hypocrisy of our notion about freedom. At least my notion about freedom which is that I really like feeling free but the fact that you could all do anything you want makes me a little nervous and so I would like to predict what you could do a little bit but I like the notion that I and so that's the basis of the whole endless conflict. But here's the thing if you want to predict the future predict the future of physical fact I did a paper recently if you're interested it's quite readable and you can find it in the Journal of Public Transportation online called to predict with confidence plan for freedom and what I was doing was going through everything we know about transportation and observing how much of it is actually not prediction, not generalizations about human behavior but is actually math, geometry, physics or very basic axiomatic biology stuff that we can really be sure will still be true 100 years from now and looking at what we could know if we focused on that and what it would mean to plan for the future based only on the stuff we really know what we can predict rather than trying to predict human behavior that is exactly the same as creating the space for freedom in the future rather than trying to create a space of feeling like they know what all these marionettes in my model are doing because I'm predicting the behavior. So did cars always offer freedom? It depends on where you are. A car maximizes where you can get to only if there aren't a lot of other cars in its way and of course even in that situation if you're achieving freedom by getting in the way of other people, that's not really freedom at all. So as you can see when I'm waving this picture the geometry tells us that urban transportation is a different problem for rural transportation because in rural areas, cars work fine. The problem of the city is the problem of the efficient use of space and one of the challenges of course we also have in communities on our scale here in this county is that not everybody agrees about whether they live in a city. Right? Some people are kind of okay with the fact that they live in a city and some people aren't and yet you hear you are in the same space and you have to decide whether it's a city. And some of it is and some of it isn't but you sort of have to decide this because it changes everything about how you do transportation. What is a city? A city is lots of people living close together which means a city is lots of people living in a different space. The defining feature of the city is that space is scarce and that space needs to be allocated then carefully and wisely and justly like any other scarce resource. So you have all seen this image of there is a hundred people and there is how much space they would take if they were in cars or if they were on a bus or if they were on bicycles and the point is obviously that the amount of space is the ultimate meaning argument for the for transit and for the bicycle the ability to move while taking not much space is the whole point and this is geometry this would be true and in any word in time and space at a situation of very high density. Technology then never changes geometry I won't spend too much on the technology distractions but just to observe you can use the same image to point out that that's how much space a hundred people take if they're on a bus that's how much space they take in private cars that's how much space they take when they're in Uber that's how much space they take once they're in driverless cars except actually this one's a little worse because of a biological principle a very axiomatic biological principle called induced demand induced demand is probably the single transportation planning idea that every transportation planner understands almost nobody else does and that we are just constantly banging the table around induced demand is the simple biological principle that if you make a desirable thing easier the organism will do it more and that is why if we remove from driving the appalling hassle of driving the appalling waste of time and anxiety that actually piloting the car is people will do it a lot more so like a lot of good west coast green folks I love the forest I love being out in it I would love to have my own little cabin in the forest I could afford a little cabin in the forest the reason I don't have one is that it would be a horrible ordeal to get out there on a Friday and a horrible ordeal to get back on a Sunday night so I don't but if it were easy to work on my way up to my cabin and all the way back in my driverless car I might buy that cabin in the forest and there would just be cabins and that's sort of his problem and so that's kind of what's at stake there it's called induced demand which is why I think that if we ever get to driverless technology we will have to have a driverless bus and that's in many ways an easier problem with a driverless car I'm not going to talk too much about all the technology distractions that's another presentation but if anyone happened to come from over the hill and wants to engage me on that stuff so I'll tell them about how we create freedom in transit planning fundamentally the recipe that makes those blocks as big as possible is the highest possible frequency forming a connection network thinking about all the lines and pieces together thinking about them in isolation with reasonable speed and reliability and we'll come back to that one and also responding to certain facts about the land use pattern responding to certain facts about the city in particular focused on patterns that are dense and walkable and linear and I'll come back to that frequency is the cued value frequency does three different wonderful things independent of each other which is why we often find a non-linear payoff to it's less time spent where you don't want to be now 20 years ago I just said less time spent waiting now it's more complicated than that maybe your bus maybe you have to punch the time clock at 8am and your hourly bus gets there at 7.02 or 8am and so you'll wait 58 minutes of your destination so I'm really talking about time that you spent not where you don't want to be and that also clarifies that even though I now may have this cool app in lots of places I'm not sure Metro have that support this yet but lots of places where there's this cool app from Tunday where the bus is and when it's coming the app will tell me that the bus isn't coming for 40 minutes but that's still 40 minutes that I'm going to be not where I want to be so it's less time spending waiting it's easier connections to reach more destinations quickly it is the frequency that joins routes and makes them a technology because otherwise they just miss each other like two freeways crossing and it's better recovery from disruption so we look at all day frequency as a pretty fundamental indicator of whether you have a transit system that is seriously competing in high demand places for a kind of diversity of trips and here's what I find quickly plotting the system here red is your frequent network service every 15 minutes or better all day and as you see the only red lines in your county are just going up the hill to the university dark blue is every 30 all day I find it striking that this is your basic regional structure going out all the way to Watsonville but then actually your inner your inner city, Santa Cruz capital are actually more like hourly which is not very useful at all especially over those kinds of short distances so this is striking to me usually a closer inner city system in a place this dance is more frequent than this it's also surprising to me to see a relatively high frequency heading for scott's valley even heading up towards Felton so interesting mix you look at Watsonville also internal to Watsonville mixture of frequencies quite a big mixture of frequencies but not anywhere near what you would need think about that frequency that means a bus is going more or less whenever you need it that's the thing that basically says ok we're not this is not plan your life around the bus schedule services available more or less when you need it but everything that's blue here is plan your life around the bus so one of the things I want to leave you with very clearly is that and this is not the fault of anybody at Santa Cruz metro transit who are doing what they can with what they have but you do not have very much transit for accounting or something and the debate before you is not just the exciting debate about what your infrastructure should be and what you should do with various pieces of infrastructure you have a very real immediate debate about whether you want to begin providing competitive transit service over much of the city because we know that simply a higher level of service than this would be useful to a lot more people and would be having a lot more benefits I think particularly on the Santa Cruz Watsonville quarter but also internal to both Santa Cruz and Watsonville where does transit succeed now here's the thing when we're trying to create liberty this number of people we have to think in a moment because transit isn't the right solution for everybody there are other you know those blobs I drew for where I could get to on transit there's of course another block for where you could get to by car and another block for where you could get to on a bike and those are going to be different and the logical mix of modes to use is going to be different in different places transit if transit is to succeed in serving a lot of people transit has to be allowed to focus and where transit focuses on if it wants to serve a lot of people it's density, bulkability and linearity and again I want you to notice I explain these things geometrically when I say when I say I'm giving you a geometric explanation what I want to do is inoculate you against all future noisy confusing statistics that someone may recite because geometry trumps statistics right somebody who did a social science study that discovered a new value of Pi we would understand that no we're going to stick with the value of Pi because there must be something wrong with that because that Pi is not a social science fact right it's a geometry fact that's what this is there are two bus routes they have the same cost to operate because they have the same number of buses on them but the one on the top is serving twice as many people there are twice as many people around every bus stop twice the size of the market around every bus stop of course we're going to have twice the right of shift how could we not and of course we do that's why transit has to focus on density take all the emotion out of density we're not having an argument about SBA 27 we're not having an argument about what your community should be like we're saying your transit is going to vary based on this and if you tell your transit agency to pursue ridership it's going to vary a lot based on this because that's how this works there's your population density here Watsonville is not only extremely dense but has a lot of room to densify I'm also struck by how many pockets of density in Santa Cruz Capitola are toward the south, closer to the ocean where all the bus services every hour rather than up on the Soquel Drive which is the place that has people most of job density a little more concentrated as it always is much more unevenly balanced towards Santa Cruz in the way from Watsonville walkability is the next one so if density is how many people are around every stop walkability is whether those people can get to the stop so it's the nature of the local street network and whether that creates barriers or opportunities to get to the stop directly it also contains all sorts of aspects of the street design a very simple example what happens when you put stops on opposite sides of a busy street at a place where it is not safe to cross that street you've provided one way service because you're going to leave from this stop, you're going to be brought back to that stop but if you can't cross the street those are not the same place so that sort of thing and so when I'm doing transit planning and I look at a giant expressway style street that has development smeared along it but you can't cross it if you only cross it every half mile I'm going to say well just put a stop every half mile it's the only place where it's safe to run but you see how that has an enormous impact on whether transit can be attractive linearity can transit right in straight lines that are useful to providers so those are two ways to arrange exactly the same city those are the four same land uses everything is the same except for the configuration right and so that one on the top I can run a single line that serves all four of those things and connects them to each other right paths between any two of them which means I have the fewest possible lines so I can run the greatest possible frequency so I get the biggest possible benefit that's called the linearity benefit on the other hand when I have let's say a major recreational center situated a few hundred feet away from the road which is itself kind of a long way from anywhere that a bus might stop a swim center perhaps or you know or you know the Walmart behind a quarter mile parking or you know the university up on its hilltop behind a huge buffer so that everything has to be no particular university I'm not the only particular university and obviously your university is big enough and dominant enough that everybody drives up there anyway but it's not but the same university in a different configuration like UC Davis for example where it's on the way to other things like it's in the town you get a lot better outcomes Davis, Berkeley, that's all so this is also one of those geometrically unavoidable things so if you're going to have a conversation about transit and I want to encourage you to have more of a conversation about transit and to have a conversation not just about your big infrastructure question but also about what you're going to do right now with transit about whether the minimal what you should have given your values and priorities as a community that's really the question you need to think about this question transit has these two competing purposes and if folks like if the folks at Santa Cruz Metro sometimes seem a little beaten down it's often because people in those professions spend their life being told to turn Michael up at the same time being told to do opposite things at the same time and we have that problem in transit and it's called the ridership coverage tradeoff it works like this so there's a fictional urban area where the dots are residents or jobs so the dots close together mean higher density and there's a couple streets that most of the dots are along and then there's a lot of low density around it and let's say I have 18 buses and it's only one suite to a design of us having this suite this is not how my career started my career started going around to small towns and cities in California 10, 20,000 and they wanted me to come in and design a bus network and I'd say what's your goal and they'd say ridership ridership ridership and so I would design that because if the goal were ridership the payoff I'll have a high payoff from frequency and so what I will do is put all my resources into focusing frequency on density into running the highest frequency service where I have the highest density it'll look like this and so I draw that and then they'll say but you forgot Mrs. Jones who lives in the law right hand corner of the map and I would say you didn't say you wanted your criteria did not mention Mrs. Jones your criteria said you wanted ridership this is the maximum ridership system now I infer from your comment that you have a competing and opposite goal called coverage which is to say make sure everybody gets a little something that's fine there's nothing wrong with that it's just the opposite of this so you cannot tell your transit system to do ridership and coverage at the same time if you're going to judge them on ridership you have to tell them to run high ridership service which looks like this if you're going to judge them on coverage as in does Mrs. Jones wherever she lives has a bus around then you have to have low ridership expectations because you're going to draw this and what this means is that I've taken my 18 buses I've spread them all over town I have 10 routes instead of 2 I've spread my resource over all those route miles and as a result these buses cover 47 minutes or every 72 minutes and because of that not very many people use them because they're just not very useful because they're never coming when you need them so ridership is really low but Mrs. Jones wherever she lives has a bus going like this so Mrs. Jones having a bus going by her house and high ridership are opposite things and that's one of the reasons why transit's hard and it's one of the things that I always have when I'm training electric officials I'm always saying hey electric officials okay this is what you're for electric officials are for making these hard choices like hard budgetary questions and that's what this is normally what I'll do with the transit agency is I'll work them through to a decision that's like spend x percent of our budget pursuing ridership and that percent of our budget pursuing coverage and then I know what to do do as much of that as I can do but then I have this much of budget set aside to do a little bit of that and we all know what we're doing and we have a clear accounting of why these services are what they are why those services are what they are what you should expect from these services what you'd expect from those services and everyone can be clear for the first time just bypasses a whole lot of endless discriminations about who's being treated here the interesting thing about these two goals too is that there isn't like a local and conservative answer to this question or anything like that it's much more interesting the ridership goal is when people when successful businessmen come and tell me that transit ought to run more like a business okay you mean you should get more customers at the same cost yeah okay we'll cut all the transit services because thinking like a business what a business does is chooses which markets to enter right and a business does not the balance doesn't feel an obligation to put up a store where there aren't going to be enough customers so it's thinking like a business focusing more on potential as high as it's appointing dense and walkable development urban redevelopment naturally goes well with this because it's going to focus on it anyway for its own reasons and all of the green benefits of transit all of the the environmental benefits of transit arrives from transit being ridden rather than from transit existing and that's really important because I'm constantly hearing somebody's request for an empty bus to drive once an hour down for Colisec being described as an environmental imperative and it is not because we're only meeting environmental goals and we're putting buses in places where lots of people use it but the coverage goal has all of its own great history and its great purposes both can be against access for all I got into this too because I kept discovering municipal policies and regional transportation policies that said compete effectively through access for all compete effectively with the car by providing access for all you basically like you're yelling at your taxi driver turn right, turn left, turn right, turn left, turn right, turn left and he's not able to do that so everybody gets frustrated so this is my way of working, I'm trying to get around coverage goal is of course the only goal that causes service into suburban low density development but it's also lifeline access for everyone if you think the transit agency is the social service provider that makes sure nobody is stranded then yeah and you give them that task and they run lots of very low ridership service for a non ridership reason and finally of course service to every neighborhood political equity political geography plays out here what's in my council district, what's in my civil society also causes that sort of design we just by the way went through this process and anyone who's interested in this process can look up the reports that we wrote about, we took them through the whole process different alternatives for what the whole network might look like depending on what your goals are just two more things I want to talk about quickly the diversity challenge one of the other big challenges we have in transit is that of course many of us get together with people like us and talk about what would be good for people like us and that causes us to start to advocate certain things that are specialized around our particular taste or needs and so one of the things I always have to say is transit thrives on diversity and high ridership transit has a diverse ridership and what that means too is that no is that a successful transit system for the whole city will not look like what any one interest group would draw for itself it's always it's always more it's always less specialized more strategically designed to be useful for lots of people, for lots of people and this thing comes up a lot too and it's interesting to me how often societal prejudices get dressed up as technical language and this is an interesting example we're often told I'm often told that transit riders can be divided into two categories and that one of them is the so called choice rider for which we are to imagine well I'll tell you the story I'm sending a transit plan to that I've done to it but the board of a transit agency in suburban Southern California and a board member who was a city counselor from the wealthiest city in the area said now Mr. Walker if we exhaust this plan would that make me be my BMW? to which I thought of course we'll know if you have a BMW and if you're feelings about your BMW and you're going to and you're going to drive your BMW but you know what there aren't very many of you you're a millionaire not a billionaire congratulations I'm sure you work hard for if you're in the top 10 percent but that means you're a minority that means it is foolish to design a transportation system for everyone around the tastes of such a small minority as you are sir the image of the choice rider though is generally this person who has a car likes his car and is supposed to make this person leave their car and then opposite to this we have this stereotype of the dependent or captive brand and you know you go down the street and you think you know who these people are and you'll see the people who are addressed for a factory job waiting at the bus stop and you think okay they're dependent has to use transit no matter how bad it is I think that we're captives especially funny you know that actually we transportation planners off in our own kiki space when we think no one else is listening we've talked about some of our writers as captives captive like we have been in the dungeon the reality is that nobody is totally captive and practically nobody is totally choice practically nobody is totally dependent everything interesting happens in the middle everything interesting happens because people are have a car but don't really like driving have a car but don't really want to trust and have a car but you know whatever or don't have a car but have a bunch of options don't have a car and use Uber a lot of the time Uber is getting expensive and would like something you know better options they didn't have to use Uber so much there are all kinds of ways to be in the middle and most of us are in some sense in the middle on this spectrum and that's why incremental improvement is so important that's why it's not just about the big spectacular project that transforms everything like a bar extension it's about fixing your bus network and it's about making the bus system incrementally more useful so that more and more people find it to be expanding their liberty in a way that makes a logical choice okay so all that was very general unlike most of the presentations I gave I was warned that in this particular community there is a certain amount of anxiety around a east-west rail corridor and a number and how it ties to a bunch of other issues for east-west transportation it made me think of Jonathan Swift's novel satirical novel Gulliver's Travels which is about an explorer who finds himself in a country visiting a country where absolutely everyone in this country is completely polarized over the question of whether you should break your boiled eggs starting at the big end with a little egg and they've come to blows on this and they're having a civil war but the only thing both sides can agree on is that this man who is not interested in their debate is clearly the enemy of the Bishop Gang up on me so I thought about that I was warned that there's this kind of polarizing question in your community so I want to see if I can just talk around a little bit in a constructive way you have a massive massive show point problem this is a geometric fact about your county it's in the geography it's not about anyone's attitude what is a choke point a choke point is a place where very high travel demand must fit through a very narrow space like a bridge or a mountain pass the Bay Bridge is a choke point Highway 17 in San Jose is a choke point choke points create a problem of sharing space even if density isn't that high in other words we encounter those problems the traffic congestion or whatever it is or the need to fit multiple things through a space even if it's not a particularly urban place in itself just because such a huge number of places are connected only by going with them so you have the mother of all choke points in this county in the big picture of this county's future economic geography I could say in broad terms that it's like this here are a lot of people seeking opportunity there's a lot of opportunity so especially if we're going to talk about the future in equity terms and in terms of freedom to be something that is inclusively provided instead of gained by some of the expense of others we have to talk about the larger economic balance of the county and the fact that you have this structural balance in terms of where the predominance of where there are relatively more people seeking opportunity and where there are relatively more opportunities whether it's jobs or education or anything like that and in between it if you wanted to make this a great film you could call it the active strainer one two lane road one four lane freeway and one rail line and or path all in that little space and oh by the way in the middle of this incredibly constrained situation some people are trying to have a community and a business and a bunch of other things all in that little tight constrained space that's everything right so if you all drive the freeway there's the rail line that's older there's no other way between the two parts of your country so in that geography a city this is a problem of sharing space and we know that the bus the transit in general and the bicycle are both and other bicycle like things like scooters or whatever but basically things that accelerate your body without changing much more space than your body are both brilliantly efficient users of space and that they both have to be accommodated as part of this story and that it still has to hold through so after thinking about this for a long time this is what I'm prepared to say about this and I hope it's useful to you but let's not forget about it when you're going to share a space you everyone who's going to share has to get has to sort of sit down and figure out what everyone needs and start to think about how it might hold and the way that works well is when people get at the table and figure that out the way it doesn't work is when one group gets a bunch of energy behind it and goes out and wants to go ahead and do something and claim a certain space before other key things that need to fit through that space have been figured out and that I think is the concern I'm having with the idea of moving forward rapidly on making a decision about the rail line before we have a clear picture about what transit looks like with that and I've looked at new documents and I have not seen that quick picture I have looked at the options and you know they're pretty terrifying I know what Sokelbride looks like we're talking about a two lane road and you can say we'll have bus ride the transit on Sokelbride but we're talking about a two lane road and bridges and culverts and all sorts of narrow spots and hills and hills and or we're talking about widening the freeway or we're talking about after the revolution that completely destroys the highway capacity manual someone says okay there's only one lane of car traffic on the freeway that would also need a solution but it's they're all that sort of thing at that scale they're all really hot so in this situation and I just there are very few places that have such an incredibly tight geography problem as this this is the mother of all show points and you can think about something like the Bay Bridge or the Trans Bay problem you realize how we struggled for years with the fact that this incredibly precious space had already been allocated 100% to cars you can ride back over the bridge before we had Bard a period after the key line was torn out before Bard was built where it was just cars and buses stuck in traffic and this wasn't working the several subsequent decades of history now have been about gradually evolving a fairer use of this incredibly limited space and yes they dug a tunnel just as you can dig a tunnel on the Raptus if you want but that was really expensive you're not that big you don't want to be that big you probably have to solve it on the surface but it's the same thing it was a long long process of actually figuring how it all works and understanding that it has to work for everyone before it works it has to work for transit it has to work for bicycles and pets and it has to make driving at least possible and it has to be possible to still have a community and a business station so that's the problem and often I have to end at the point of saying look I can't tell the answer but I can point you toward the sort of beautiful simple geometric perfection of the problem which is simple enough when you look at it this way that you're going to have a revolution somewhere somehow in order to break through this I mean there's going to someone's going to go way out of their comfort zone and in my experience and a lot of this is my experience now having watched Portland evolve and how Portland was functioning and what in a lot of other cities a good solution is one where transit and bike head because they are capable of using space efficiently they have enough space to succeed driving is also possible but not necessarily an approach and as I get around Portland by various modes and I frequently take the bus I frequently ride my bike and I frequently ride one of the things I can observe is that all of those modes getting around our city are about 25% across the country so none of them is 100% frustrating and none of them is 100% clean and easy and I've finally realized that means we've got it right that means we're sharing that means we're actually sharing space that we're all about 25% frustrated and again also we're not tribes because people like me are all the different modes at various times and we experience that as different kinds of frustration but it's all about and the other thing I can tell you about this is that I have been through lots of disasters real awful transit situations where I have been hired to come and solve a transit problem after the bike people have come and taken their space and the car people have come and taken their space and the public space people have come and taken their space so we're going to close this nice street and make a plaza and now we all did this all the time I am hired to do that and sometimes the answer is there's no space left you took from so that's what I feel about this point that if someone who is going to advocate ultimately the use of the rail line for the active modes removing the rail line has to be an advocate for the transit solution that makes that possible because only the existence of a transit solution makes that possible in the right kind of process where we are really sharing so in terms of that question can you expand your freedom without limiting the freedom of weather everyone loves the drawings of bikes and the bike path and the pet path next to each other it's beautiful, it's wonderful it would be fantastic who's left out of that is anyone's freedom being reduced by expanding people's freedom in this fight well that's why you have to pause a little longer than I promised to it's 7.30 but you know I'm happy to chat and take questions for a while or do you have arguments going whatever you want first one is most difficult there we go sir yeah I just want to propose that one possible solution for the choke point is to put transit overhead cyber-trand cyber-trand you can always there is always a very large amount of money that can be spent to solve a choke point problem with new infrastructure and I'm familiar with PRT I think I'd rather not get into the PRT debate but one of the things PRT definitely is is big elevated infrastructure and you can do elevated infrastructure you can do underground infrastructure if you're San Francisco and Oakland you have a magnitude of demand and a magnitude of problem that motivates you to do that if you are at your scale I think you'll find it hard to justify any sort of significant infrastructure expansion even the freeway widening if it were politically possible it's still just a stagnant point so I think we have to keep coming back to we've got to be absolutely sure that there's no way to solve this problem on the surface I know our metro transit planners have done the best they can to balance equity coverage with ridership so how do they make an improvement within the budget that's constrained right now the biggest cost is the drivers so if they have the frequency the cost if they have to cut something so I want to be clear there's several different transit questions here and we have to have them all visible San Francisco metro transit has only so much money they're doing what they can with what they have it looks like not very much because they don't have very much they're also operating on at least a de facto assumption about the ridership coverage straight off which is we have to have some amount of coverage everywhere we have to go up into every single amount and so one of the things you could do which is very very politically difficult but I've taken a lot of elected boards through it is do a process where you actually think about the ridership coverage straight off and think about whether you want to turn the knob within the existing budget and whether you want to have people who currently ride buses with three people all alone and their families and their Facebook friends and they're all their personal networks down to the board because you take their bus out so that you can put it on soquel ride where it will carry 20 people that's why I don't tell you that you should do that I just say yes you could do that and this would be the consequence yes it would be the ridership thing to do and the elected officials it's their job it's their job to take over there figure out what they want to do it's a budgeting question budgeting is always about choosing between who you are so that's one thing I don't know if you might know who you are but I also say you just don't have very much transit service for a city of for communities of your size and your density let alone the degree of progressive values that operate in this community you don't have very much credit and I'm just talking about the plain old ordinary bus system where you start expanding people's liberty and it's also where you start changing people's reality in the middle of the choice character spectrum where most people actually go when you make transit make a trip 10% faster or more reliable in such a way that now it becomes logical for someone to use it that's just in the funding of the ordinary bus system one of the things I talked to a couple of people casually and I was starting to go okay everybody's very focused on this capital program right but that's what the MPO deals with and that's what the RTC deals with but there's also just a basic question of just how much transit do you want how much of a bus system do you want because you clearly have far less than you could use you clearly all have low hanging crew of more markets you can compete for with a more effective bus system I can see that the funding for the metro here can bear with funding I haven't gotten into the details of the funding what I can say is I mean I can look at but I can look at the frequency map and say look that's not very much for a city of this size and this density of help and and so then you know there are lots of ways to do funding you know I think you're pretty much tapped out on sales taxes and also we're getting more and more revolts against sales taxes because they're so aggressive we aren't getting low income people to vote on them anymore you've got parcel tax options there are options once you decide to have the conversation about this one of these two things that happens is that often I would be hired to run a no growth network we decide to study don't add any don't add any more money do more of what we have and so it's actually sort of just happens that we're getting and so we design these absolutely no growth alternatives here's a more ridership the alternative there's a more coverage alternative oh ridership alternative look at those high frequency lines and high density places cool coverage alternative oh good we've got a bus for even for my grandmother who lives in the hills great but I have to choose between you know you said no growth so yeah well often it turns out that when growing the budget is the solution to the elected officials political problem which is having to choose between these things having to choose between either we can have a great either we can have a great bus in the city or we can take care of my grandmother in the hills sometimes it turns out that finding more money actually becomes more urgent once we clear what problem it starts by being clear that if you have a problem with your transit system I mean I'm not to say but generally if you have a problem with the overall nature of your transit system first of all you shouldn't be assuming that that's what transit is it's just what you've chosen to invest and you also shouldn't assume that the empty buses are evidence of metro failing to deliver ridership because many of the empty buses are trying to deliver ridership their coverage services you should kick the tires on and don't turn the dials and understand there are some choices there and you could choose to look at that more closely as a community and make other choices ma'am thank you for the RTC bringing in here this really helped me get rid of a lot of the noise I hear politically and focus in on like you say geometry what do you have to say about one of the main problems I see I'm retired now but I used to drive what we call over the hill I went from riding my bicycle to work for my second pension I then went to driving 70 miles around the trip what can we do that makes sense money wise and ridership knowing that ultimately we're going to have to figure something a connection on how people get over the hill where the big bucks are where the consistent jobs are do you have any comments on that well I think that a good county transit plan process would include a conversation about the hill because although you obviously have an agreement with Santa Clara County about your Highway 17 bus services it's one of those asymmetrical agreements because you all care more about getting the Santa Zea than they care about getting you Santa is kind of the problem ultimately this has to be Highway 17 has to be part of your conversation about your own transit plan you can run a lot more frequency on Highway 17 I don't know what you can do I mean again it's a perfect choke point I can't imagine any but a fantastically expensive interest rate that would get you out of that traffic unless again we just agreed to take the highway now to one traffic line but I certainly think it's a thing to have a broader conversation about it to understand really too that that's really part of your transit system you know it's being run mostly for its benefits to you and it's something that you as a community get to make choices about what you want to invest in thank you and I really got to the point about efficient use of space and then in the analyses that your firm does that's like a driving factor and actually I think there are a lot of people in this county who haven't seen those photos you showed of a different demand on space of different modes of travel I'm wondering to what degree do you put in another consideration of efficient use of energy understanding that something on a rail car with a hundred people in it has a lot less energy demand than the other end of the spectrum an individual passenger would be able to weigh less than much comparing one individual person and then projecting forward talking about physics is kind of invaluable while we're headed towards a climate crisis problem in society at some point deciding to put a price on carbon so what about that efficient use of energy yeah I agree there's a whole conversation about the physics of energy and the physics of emissions and really energy and emissions that go together in many ways too and it's in such an area of technological permit and I'll tell you that I'm not an expert in that stuff I know there's physics to know there I know this stuff but when I read about that stuff what I most want to find are people who will help me separate the physics from the technology the physics from the marketing and the boosterism and the visioning and all that stuff that is ultimately trying to get somebody to invest in something and that therefore muddies the waters about just what's the physical reality and I think the reason you hear me talking about geometry in this world and talking about space in this world is that I find it to be is that I got all of you over the line to understand the geometry of physical space much faster than I could get you all over the line to understand the physics of energy so to some extent I was probably just doing what's easy because ultimately it is about convening people in the presence of reality and bringing reality a shared reality back into our conversation but I completely agree a question on the cover of the word leadership can Santa Cruz County openly make that decision or are some of it driven by federal dollars coming in this season there are some and you know Barry I was the one who was hiding in the back could probably answer you can go into the details if you want there are some federal funding sources that do key off the right leadership and thus push you a little bit in a particular direction but most of it doesn't most of it is yours to spend as you like and you know so I think you should move forward on the assumption that it is within this county to power to decide where to go ma'am and when you use the term choke point is that the same as bottleneck bottleneck, choke point, strangler whatever that is it's this sorry I have a lot of naps thinking towards funding sources for increased frequency out there in the communities that you're aware of that can't be in some way considered comparable to Santa Cruz County where you have opportunity seekers as you term them in one area and then you have the area of opportunity of having those who offer the opportunity of thinking the employers and perhaps the large educational institution actually assess a certain fee of the frequency I'm just looking for money here totally and of course we have the useful edifice of community production law in California many places don't although you don't have many employers who are large enough to be brought in under that the spirit of that law is that employer you made a location choice that had certain consequences for people and had certain consequences for the community that should help out with the consequences of that choice that's the moral argument and just in terms of the to make clear that I'm not particularly showing for Santa Cruz but I'll mention Davis there are all kinds of ways you can do this and one of them is you can let the university run the bus system and have undergraduates start the bus so there are all kinds of options they have a lot more transit than you do they don't have very many entrances but different situations and including we have situations now where some universities are so completely integrated with the transit system the huge university in a small town where the university is driving 70-80% of the transit system's ridership and at some point people look at each other and say well wait a minute if the university is funding all of these passes anyway and if the operating budget for transit agency is 60 or 70 percent coming if the fair money of the transit agency is basically a giant university subsidy why don't we just give it an effect and so you have examples of that fair free systems that they just have stopped charging fairs because it just wasn't worth the trouble so there are all kinds of things that you can talk about there are all kinds of great ferment happening and by the way living in a much bigger city I really envy cities of your size and counties of your size where you're still at a size where people can pick up the phone and do something and cause something to happen and where you can get a reasonable number of people together so let me see sir do you consider zoning codes and land use policy walls around people's opportunity to access free and so can you talk more about SPA 2797 I have talked about SPA 2797 because I think I've been controversial enough as it is but the principle is look we don't want to get to space we want to get to things and people and opportunities so there's that blob around your life of where you can get to in a given amount of time there are two ways to expand those walls one is that the transportation planning does which is to move the walls over and the other is to put more useful things inside the wall and that's so many things planning so there's no question that I think one of the great things about a place like Santa Cruz is that everyone's mind is concentrated by the sheer absence of sprawl opportunity and it's full of what you can in terms of what you can do horizontally and you have to decide whether you're going to allow your city to go very quickly because there is no other way to go out but I think when we're talking about housing when we're talking for example about is part of that solution I mean this is right part of the solution to the whole people seeing opportunity, opportunity problem is to let more people live over here it may very well be that the more time you spend dwelling on the Aptus Chugpoint the more that actually comes to seem like the easiest solution maybe it is but the thing is to keep everyone present in the same conversation I bring you back to the Aptus Chugpoint because it's there you're not going to get around it or under it or over it for any reasonable amount of money and it really does concentrate the mind about what is actually constantly if that means it's not going to work to have this strong commute in that direction in the future then you know that is a that is a reality for a new conversation between the cities and the county about what development is for yeah sure Taking the consideration of the transit rail for about over 50% of people live within about a mile of that course what do you see as the mode of answer to get that last mile result to use that do you have any suggestions and we meant to be a part of that situation or to solve that okay let me go out on a limb I think the last mile problem is much overblown the whole thing is only two miles away what's the last mile you're going to have a good transit service there you want to have something good there you're going to be able to you're going to be able to live within a half a mile whatever you think frankly what's the last mile the last mile is a it's a deeply suburban idea and it's a way of saying that yes there are suburban development patterns in which large numbers of people have chosen to locate in ways that maroon them making it impossible for them to walk reasonable distances in a walkable place and therefore they have this problem called the last mile problem you know frankly as an urbanist I don't consider it my problem you chose to live in that situation right and you know because fundamentally you've got the geography here to have a perfectly good frequent bus network for the whole area of green sectors and capital inclusive that you know gets plenty close and then everyone can walk out so what are you thinking about that well no I mean the money to have to have a good enough transit system so that people walk but also I notice your existing density pattern I could go back to that map there's a lot more density there than there too it's actually I'll try to go back someone wants to go back to that there's a and I don't know your history enough to know if this is actually a relic of things that happened around the original line but yeah there it is yeah quite a lot there quite a lot in here so I can't tell that's the what we are can you talk more about the density sorry can you talk a little bit more about our density pattern sure what I love to see as a transit liner is not just density but continuous density like it will happen all the time I mean maybe someone built something up there and thought they were holding density and it's dense and therefore I'll have to bus service right now it's not because it's not on the way to anywhere you're not on the way to anywhere therefore I can't combine your market with other markets and fill a bus with a diversity of people doing different things as I can when I go down some hill right all kinds of different overlapping things that people are doing that cause them to all be on the same bus which is the genius of really successful transit and that's why there's this principle of continuity and linearity so this jumps out at me as a very interesting part of the real line story right is that I've got quite some strong patches of density that of course is an excellent reason for transit there and an excellent reason for a good bike and fat there it doesn't begin to resolve that debate but it does say whoa transit really ought to be here that regardless of what it says regardless of what the ultimate Watsonville solution is there is a strong transit corridor there if it is on street what does that look like because presumably if there's a bike path that transit you know if that's what it is then the transit is there what does that look like some other part of the intersection ma'am so to get away from this binary thing we need to be talking about and getting to the middle ground when you consider all kinds of options how do you facilitate that do you have a methodology for doing that and because it seems to me that we just attempted to do that but the methodology itself has constrained us so that's my question that's a big hairy question of like sort of about 90% of everything I've learned in my life recite as an answer to that question I guess the key I can talk more easily about where I think it goes wrong the thing that I think most often goes wrong about major publicly sponsored studies of a problem is that happens at the level of scoping scoping that's the point where you decide here's what we're going to study and here's what we're not going to study so we're going to define the problem that already leaves something important behind now and another thing that happens often is that studies that are ultimately meant to lead to the funding of capital projects which is a lot of what's going on ultimately in these studies if a study is driving toward a capital project then the study will all be about satisfying the requirements of whatever funding source you're pursuing and you end up something that is written to a bureaucrat instead of written to your citizens and you're constantly telling your citizens oh we can't have a clear conversation with you because we have to satisfy this regulation I see this moment and so that's why what we're always trying to do is first of all create that sort of regulation free space like we're in here tonight we're not here to comply with any regulations tonight we're having helping you have a conversation about the future of your community and about what your community is going to be like and when I'm running a study like this we're really putting we put a lot of work in protecting that space you know we'll take care of the compliance over here and the words will get written that the funding source wants to see but they're not going to tell us how to have a conversation the federal transit administration should not be telling you what conversation you could have in your community and that is often what I get in these big transit capital projects and the way that it's going and the way that it starts going so then it's just you know I would say our slogan is we convene people in the presence of reality and reality is not just bringing people around the table around the facts which is why we so often do balance the budget yourself games or we do a little transit planning games see if you can figure out how to lay out a transit system do it together with these fellow citizens touch it yourself I'm trying to put the citizen in the position that the government agency is in so that they understand the problem that the agency is trying to solve and can understand it from their perspective right the other thing of course is maximizing the diversity of the table you know what happens if you're ever in a conference everybody from a single city or a single agency goes and flies across the country to a conference and then always sits together with people like that so you have to always make people up very manipulatively you know maximize the opportunities for people at a table you know between the different parts of the table oh that's part of it I think I know better what not to do than what to do but and there's a lot that can be achieved by just not doing the common mistakes another interesting challenge about for example is you have to accept that there's going to be spheres of influence and that there's going to be an inner sphere of influence called a stakeholder which is somebody who's motivated to like come out here on an evening and talk about transportation when you could be you know about the lodge about the pool or something people are motivated to do that then you have the problem those are already kind of weird people those people are already you know not very representative of the diversity of the society so how do we this is why we have invitational stakeholder groups if you get upset about they weren't invited but we have to have that process of talking the table so that the right people are at the table right so that even though no you know Spanish-speaking Latino rights advocates from Watsonville chose to come out and join us tonight they are in fact there at the table and arrangements are made to make sure they are and to make sure that they're represented by people who have the education and engagement necessary to to engage with us oh wait one more, I'm sorry I'm sorry I forgot you, thank you first thank you so much for coming thank you so much for coming I apologize, even more important now okay just so Jenny's not alone I can get to Watsonville great thank you all so yeah I'm sorry I don't have an easy answer to that question there's a lot of easy answers yeah the most important thing I'd say is don't let any government agency tell you what conversations you can because that's often what goes wrong set the conversation free outside, separate from whatever process that you're going through I was wondering do you have a city or area that's maybe your favorite that as you feel has gotten this sharing thing right um I I think that a lot of, I think that every process I've been in through has had its rough spots and its difficulties I have been through I think I don't want to point to any particular city I start to think about the individual cities I've worked in I think about all the ways that are incredibly different I think about you know how great and uniquely the politics played out um things were easy or wrong for different reasons I think we know them I'm a sort of false awful temperament I want to sort of stay at the principle rather than focus too much on one of the cities you know the principle you get to have more conversations and the key though is to have the conversation that includes the diversity of the community and um and there's some expertise about that structure uh who else Mark you're the best going way back you would you know I completely agree with your idea that frequency is king and that's what we were trying to achieve and in our community the idea of improving the frequency of transits if we were able to have buses running every 10 minutes or 15 minutes it's in my mind they're still stuck in the same traffic lines and it still takes an hour and a half to get from Watson to all the Santa Cruz so you know how do we get from the place where frequency begins to dramatically improve congestion so that people will get on that bus and use it to affect the change the reduction in traffic I'm never going to tell you that a certain amount of transit ridership will fix the congestion and I'm not going to promise you that we'll fix congestion in a way that anyone will notice and certainly not in a way that will make the buses come faster the reason I'm not going to promise that is in fact the principle of induced demand the principle of induced demand says that if something gets easy people do it more so if the roads became less congested people would drive more and the roads would become congested again this is why the roads don't become less congested the only time the point where the roads really become less congested is where there is no longer demand so what transit does is it does several things first of all good enough transit even stuck in traffic is enough better than what people's options are now that they will start to use it you see this very commonly the Watsonville distance is a very good example that's 20 miles if my option is to sit in my car for an hour rolling forward never being able to look at my phone because I was about to roll forward I can spend an hour doing that I can spend an hour and a half all of us reading and working the bus is still stuck in traffic but already I've got a good proposition as long as the bus is coming closer so you see I'm emphasizing all those incremental wins before you have the rail line before you have the BRT line before we've built elevated structure over at this or whatever it is that we might ultimately do you're always looking for the incremental wins you never ever just one of the worst things I see a transit debate will just be oh my god everyone's just talking about what we're going to do in 10 years and nobody's talking about what we're going to do or what we can do now and that's always something you're going to talk about what we can do now what's your opinion on slashing coverage to low swivels and doing a public-private partnership with TNC or any other company and using that to sort of pick up the slap where coverage can't reach right now creating like a traffic shift like that okay the point of sure it's a universal question sorry I'm not going to question your originality but I've asked something like this almost all the time in the context of the ridership coverage straight off we'd like more of this could we not do this and instead say we'll have a partnership with Uber or something else to get people out into this area well it has to be a partnership that is much cheaper for the transit agency than what they are doing now which is running this bus and that turns out to be pretty hard because please remember operated cost is mostly the neighbor that's why a little vehicle driving around is not that much cheaper to operate than the big bus driving that's why all those empty seats on the bus are not evidence of inefficiency because there's not much marginal cost to have those extra seats because the cost is in the client I have been at South by Southwest in Boston surrounded by the leading lights of the tech industry and had people come up to me and explain this concept and and a pause in their in their excited presentation I've said you know operating cost is mostly labor it's amazing what people don't know it's amazing what people haven't stopped to think about operating cost is mostly labor so anything else that's going to remind somebody else driving any sort of vehicle out there is also going to have an operating cost and so it all depends on what the deal is whether that turns out to be cheaper than what the transit agency is already doing this is all very hot right now and I'm fascinated by why this is so hot why the sort of microtransit movement you can go on my blog why this whole notion of miniaturization somehow feels efficient to people and people are talking about as though it's efficient it's a couple of things one is many people just don't understand that operating cost is labor and therefore see empty seats as waste which it is not because that's not what the cost is the other thing is that I think it's a form of NIMBY I think that people want to believe that their communities are small and intimate and that the bigness of the bus I know this from my years in public dealing with public comment that I've been told all my career can't we just miniaturize this somehow can't we chop a big bus in half and have two small buses can't we and I tie it very much to a basic version the big bus tells you that you're in an actual city and not everyone wants to use this is a lot of the point and the service to your dormitory that's a way of also rejecting the suburban small situation you live on a cul-de-sac and a walkable neighborhood because it's five different square meals to walk out of your neighborhood to get to a road that you can't then of course you can service to your dormitory but I refuse to accept that we should all take that problem on ourselves once we actually live in that situation so those are some of the things that we can do service have you seen governments change land use sometimes it's always going both ways one of the great early experience and of course we've been doing this in Portland since the 1970s when Oregon passed its land use laws that put in the stronger and growth values around our city we had a marvelous study that was done back in the 80s which was the last serious proposal for a giant, a new giant in the west side of the city and a brilliant group of people got some funding together and basically created a new alternative outside of the alternatives analysis process that the DOT was doing but complying with the same sort of processes that basically looked at a land use alternative to this freeway in other words let us change our land use assumptions let us put more density here and here in logical ways and whoa suddenly we no longer need it and then how much money have we saved from not building this freeway oh okay that means we have rail lines and stuff like that so yeah that's we're always trying to put transit land use together and you know I've been going to conferences for 25 years listening to people talking about how we need to put transportation land use together if it were easy we would have done it it's we always have to remind ourselves because the professions are so different and they have so much rhetoric designed to protect their citadel against you know, against outside forces you go to a professional conference if you go to a professional conference and you're not part of the profession you really hear that all the way is that the profession is just starting to fight but land use and transportation it's like the same action in different it's like the same idea expressed in different languages it's not even different actions it's the same thing happening in different languages because all development is transportation demand and all transportation demand is creating the opportunity yeah sir you talked about the major challenge that we're facing being the ATCAS choke point in your book you talked about how a choke point can actually be a benefit to transit I was wondering if you could explain that concept for the audience and then also do you see any way that we could use that choke point as a benefit for transit here in this book so the way choke points work well for transit is that if you have lots of people from lots of different directions who are being brought by any mode they're traveling to one point that they have to go through together then it makes it easy for me as a transit planner to draw lots of different services that come to a point connect with each other and connect with a service that's going across the choke point and people and that seems less of a hassle than it would appear to be if the choke point weren't there because if you're driving you have to go this way as opposed to what it often is like which we're taking people over here to this transit center when they could drive over there because we need to organize them over here to get them distributed so there is a value in putting transit centers right near choke points to distribute on either side I don't think that's as much use in Aptos I think the Aptos problem first of all it doesn't solve the ultimate choke point capacity problem I mean it's great for example that you're able in the Santa Cruz bus network to bring lots of people together to put them on the 17 bus over the hill right and if they're just only getting people from where they run but it doesn't solve the problem so it's still that kind of the what I'm all for them what's the what are my thoughts on the employer commuter program I'm not an expert on those programs but I'm very much a supporter of the principle of employers being involved in the cost of their employees and of schools being involved in the cost of their students I'm a very small employer I attend employees but I pay for a bus pass for all employees absolutely talk tonight about travel I mean transit in fairly generic terms I want to get into technology and things like that but there are differences in operational costs and travel time and those kinds of things do you want to touch on any variation in transit I think that here's the fundamental thing what's going to govern thank you for asking this what is going to govern your what is going to govern the size of that block in the government where you can get to and give an amount of time is the speed, frequency and reliability of the transit service and its capacity to be able to get on and how it fits together the transit technology is not one of those things transit technology rail versus bus is is different is a choice you make can affect some of those things but because of bus rapid transit when we do bus rapid transit really well there are now both bus and rail ways of delivering most service patterns that go into creating a maximum efficient network there are lots of local reasons why you choose one or the other a couple of reasons to choose rail one is because you have a rail line which is sort of the situation here another is because you need the capacity and also the labor so in high demand the ratio of passenger space to drivers is critical so this is the success of part a thousand people want to drive and of course now we have driverless systems so those are some of the things that play into those choices but I am always encouraging people to steer away from becoming advocates for particular transportation technology because if you do that you start telling us not to care about this as much as you do Anything else? Yes sir? You mentioned financing from the employer side Is it true that in Portland there is an employee tax that is devoted to transit and that part of what goes on in Portland I don't want you to end the Oregon we have no sales tax as a result we have apocalyptic income taxes and payroll taxes our transit agency runs on payroll taxes if you want a funding source that is even more volatile than sales taxes you want payroll taxes they are just awful sorry about that but as you already mentioned we are stuck on sales tax look you are going to have to go with I don't want to sound like Bernie Sanders here but you are going to have to go where the money is the money is in property the money is in land property well in one way or another in some form or another you are going to have to go where the money is the money is not in adding another half cent to the cost of some form versus trip to Washington there is not well thanks very much I hear people getting ready so let's wrap it up hey John these bubbles well